"That speech puts Cory Booker as one of the leaders for the Democratic Party for 2028."

Said "Frank Luntz: Booker marathon speech 'may have changed the course of political history'" (The Hill).

Everyone's talking like Trump now. Just get rid of the weasel word "may" and you have Trump-style rhetoric: Booker's speech changed the course of political history.

And then there was Elon Musk the other day, saying that the Wisconsin Supreme Court election would affect the entire destiny of humanity. No, he wasn't that Trumpian. He had weasel words. He said "I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will."

Speaking of speaking bluntly, here's Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley talking about that election:

I looked up the Celtic Sea, because it came up in my readings... and I was entranced....

.... by the reviews people had given it in Google Maps. To quote 4:

1. "It was wetter than I expected. Lots of fish swimming about under the surface, if you like that sort of thing."

2. "Very good sea. Compared to other seas, lakes and natural reservoirs it is undoubtedly superior. However, looking at the oceans, we need to admit that Celtic sea is slightly inferior. Nevertheless, it is a great representative of a sea.

3. "Against all the odds it does appear to be a genuine sea! I can confirm the presence of both waves and sky, with the correct one being above the other. Very tricky to get around if you don't have a boat. Minus 1 star."

4. "Lovely spot of water."

***

I was reading "Colonel Roosevelt" (commission earned). This part:

"Americans have long admired the raucous debate in the British Parliament."

"John McCain even ran for president promising to bring Prime Minister’s Questions to the United States. On Tuesday, at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, America got a window into what that would be like. During an 80-minute-long speech, Biden was repeatedly heckled by House Republicans and even went back and forth with the hecklers at various points. It was a vast departure from American tradition, which views the State of the Union far more like the monarch’s speech in the U.K.... This wasn’t that.... It seems pretty clear that the traditions are changing. After all, until a century ago, presidents wouldn’t appear in person to give their State of the Union address. It was considered too monarchial.... Presidents only started regularly appearing before Congress when Woodrow Wilson, an admirer of parliamentary politics, showed up to deliver his annual address in person.... It’s unclear how the State of the Union will evolve in the future, but the formality of the recent past is gone. If this latest version speaks to what’s ahead, the State of the Union has become more of an interactive experience...."

From "The Hecklers Have Won: The Polite State of the Union Is Dead" (NY Magazine).

President Biden: "Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I'm not saying it's the majority."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: "Liar!" pic.twitter.com/OFUglFuBxC

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 8, 2023

"[T]he framers believed that a republic— a thing of the people—would be more likely to enact just laws than a regime administered by a ruling class of largely unaccountable 'ministers.'"

Writes Neil Gorsuch, citing Federalist No. 11, concurring in yesterday's case, West Virginia v. EPA.

He continues:

From time to time, some have questioned that assessment.¹ 

That footnote goes to an attack on Woodrow Wilson (I've replaced the citiation with a hot link and added boldface):

For example, Woodrow Wilson famously argued that “popular sovereignty” “embarrasse[d]” the Nation because it made it harder to achieve “executive expertness.” The Study of Administration. In Wilson’s eyes, the mass of the people were “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” He expressed even greater disdain for particular groups, defending “[t]he white men of the South” for “rid[ding] themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant [African-Americans].” He likewise denounced immigrants “from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland,” who possessed “neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.” To Wilson, our Republic “tr[ied] to do too much by vote.” 

Sometimes the Critical Race Theory comes from the right!

That's at page 4 of his opinion. At page 16, attack the dissent, he brings back Woodrow Wilson:

"Crippled by a spinal cord injury, Grandmother Bolling was confined to bed. Edith had the responsibility to wash her clothing, turn her in bed at night, and look after her 26 canaries."

"In turn, Grandmother Bolling oversaw Edith's education, teaching her how to read, write, speak a hybrid language of French and English, make dresses, and instilled in her a tendency to make quick judgments and hold strong opinions, personality traits Edith would exhibit her entire life....  When Edith was 15, her father enrolled her at Martha Washington College (a precursor of Emory and Henry College), a finishing school for girls in Abingdon, Virginia.... Edith proved to be an undisciplined, ill-prepared student. She was miserable there, complaining of the school's austerity: the food was poorly prepared, the rooms too cold, and the daily curriculum excessively rigorous, intimidating, and too strictly regimented. Edith left after only one semester. Two years later, Edith's father enrolled her in Powell's School for Girls in Richmond, Virginia.... Unfortunately for Edith, the school closed at the end of the year after the headmaster suffered an accident that cost him his leg. Concerned about the cost of Edith's education, William Bolling refused to pay for any additional schooling, choosing instead to focus on educating her three brothers. While visiting her married sister in Washington, D.C., Edith met Norman Galt (1864–1908), a prominent jeweler of Galt & Bro. The couple married on April 30, 1896... In 1903, she bore a son who lived only for a few days. The difficult birth left her unable to have more children. In January 1908, Norman Galt died unexpectedly at the age of 43. Edith hired a manager to oversee his business, paid off his debts, and with the income left to her by her late husband, toured Europe. In March 1915, the widow Galt was introduced to recently widowed U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the White House by Helen Woodrow Bones (1874–1951)... the president's first cousin....Wilson took an instant liking to Galt and proposed soon after meeting her...."

From the Wikipedia article on Edith Wilson (née Bolling, formerly Edith Bolling Galt).

Edith Wilson died 60 years ago today.

Some people say she was President of the United States!

Here's an announcement — in the NYT, October 7, 1915 — of the marriage engagement:

The NCAA "seeks immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws" — and loses.

In the new Supreme Court case, NCAA v. Alston. It's unanimous. Gorsuch writes the opinion. A snippet:

From the start, American colleges and universities have had a complicated relationship with sports and money. In 1852, students from Harvard and Yale participated in what many regard as the Nation’s first intercollegiate competition—a boat race at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. But this was no pickup match. A railroad executive sponsored the event to promote train travel to the picturesque lake..... He offered the competitors an all-expenses-paid vacation with lavish prizes—along with unlimited alcohol. The event filled the resort with “life and excitement,” N. Y. Herald, Aug. 10, 1852... and one student-athlete described the “‘junket’” as an experience “‘as unique and irreproducible as the Rhodian colossus’ ”...

Life might be no “less than a boat race,” Holmes, On Receiving the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Yale University Commencement, June 30, 1886... but it was football that really caused  college sports to take off....

"The Princeton University Board of Trustees voted on Friday to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from the university’s School of Public and International Affairs."

"It acted because Wilson’s racist opinions and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school whose scholars, students and alumni must stand firmly against racism and for equality and justice.... Wilson... discouraged black applicants from applying to Princeton. While president of the United States, Wilson segregated the previously integrated federal civil service.... Wilson helped to create the university that I love. I do not pretend to know how to evaluate his life or his staggering combination of achievement and failure. I do know, however, that we cannot disregard or ignore racism when deciding whom we hold up to our students as heroes or role models. This is not the only step our university will be taking to confront the realities and legacies of racism, but it is an important one. Our commitment to eliminate racism must be unequivocal, and that is why we removed the name of Princeton’s modern-day founder from its School of Public and International Affairs."

From "I opposed taking Woodrow Wilson’s name off our school. Here’s why I changed my mind" by Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton (in WaPo).

"I used to love to watch her dance the Grizzly Bear/I guess she's gone to Frisco, to dance it there..."

There really is a dance called the Grizzly Bear, which I didn't know until yesterday, though I've heard the lyric quoted in the post title hundreds of times. "Grizzly Bear" by The Youngbloods was in the stack of singles next to my record player in the 1960s. I happened to play this video of it:



Before they play the song, Dick Clark interviews Jesse Colin Young about it, and he says: "I'm a ragtime freak, and... this is about a dance in the 1890s called the Grizzly Bear where people used to hug each other and jump." Dick Clark is amazed: "An actual dance?" Yes, there was "a club in San Francisco called The Grizzly Bear."

Here's an NPR article from 2015, "Dirty Dancing In The Early 1900s":

[T]he Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear and other so-called "animal dances" of the early 1900s... shocked America and had polite society crying shame, shame, shame....

"Wilson Banned Ball Fearing Turkey Trot," was the New York Times headline on Jan. 13, 1913. According to the report, the Inaugural Committee was told that the president-elect wanted to cancel the usual Inaugural Ball because he "feared there would be indulgence in the turkey trot, the bunny hug and other ragtime dances and thus provoke what might amount to a National scandal."... Later in the month, Wilson characterized such reports as "ridiculous," but the ball was canceled....

[According to the] 1924 book The Social Dance... "The 'Boll Weevil Wiggle' and the 'Texas Tommy Wiggle' are danced in close personal contact intended to arouse sex feeling. The 'Grizzly Bear' encourages the closest and most violent physical contact for the same purpose... The 'Turkey Trot, 'Fox Trot,' 'Horse Trot, 'Fish Walk,' 'Dog Walk,' 'Tiger Dance,' and the 'Buzzard Lope,' are all imitative of the lower animals in their sex life, sex desire, sex excitement and sex satisfaction; and these things are in the minds of the dancers who understand the meaning of the animal dances."

Oh, don't just about all dances represent sex?  Sex isn't a special "lower animals" activity. But it made me wonder whether there were "animal" dances in the 1960s when I was listening to "Grizzly Bear." Answer: Yes. There was The Monkey, demonstrated by the great Smokey Robinson (and possibly requiring censorship in the modern age):



And here's "Monkey Time" — as performed by Major Lance on "Shindig" (in perhaps 1964). Keep your eye on the dancers way in the background. I found this disturbing enough to begin to question whether it was intentionally racist at the time, but I see the song was written and produced by Curtis Mayfield, so that's the end of the inquiry for me.

Anyway, the subject of this post is dances named after animals, and the possible objections to them.

"The president of the United States has many faults, but let’s not ignore this one: He cannot write sentences."

"If a tree falls in a forrest and no one is there to hear it … wait: Pretty much all of you noticed that mistake, right? Yet Wednesday morning, the president did not; he released a tweet referring to 'forrest fires' twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump. Trump’s serial misuse of public language is one of many shortcomings that betray his lack of fitness for the presidency. Trump’s writing suggests not just inadequate manners or polish—not all of us need be dainty—but inadequate thought. Nearly every time he puts thumb to keypad, he exposes that he has never progressed beyond the mentality of the precollegiate, trash-talking teen."

Writes John McWhorter in "Trump’s Typos Reveal His Lack of Fitness for the Presidency/They suggest not just inadequate manners or polish, but inadequate thought."

I got there via "A Letter to Professor John McWhorter" by Seth Barrett Tillman, who writes:

We (Americans) have had many talented wordsmiths in the White House. I see no connection between such talents, and adopting & putting into effect substantively sound policies. Woodrow Wilson—a university academic—comes to mind. But very few can explain precisely why the U.S. entered WWI or offer any justification for Wilson's allowing the federal civil service to be (re)segregated by race. He was good with words.

Your article amounts to a non-instrumental claim that elites who share your specific skill set should have power and those who do not share that skill set should not.... It is certainly better for the President to spell "forest" with a single R rather than two Rs. But ... it is probably more important that better policies be put in place to stop similar future disasters....

That was linked by Glenn Reynolds, who writes:

Good writing, like good shooting, is a valuable skill. Neither has a moral component. The Supreme Court’s best writer was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who told us — eloquently — that it was okay to sterilize people society didn’t like.

Let me add that there's a big difference between good writing and good spelling! Some great writers have had bad spelling — notably William Faulkner:

One of Faulkner's editors at Random House, Albert Erskine, said, "I know that he did not wish to have carried through from typescript to printed book his typing mistakes, misspellings (as opposed to coinages), faulty punctuation and accidental repetition. He depended on my predecessors, and later on me, to point out such errors and correct them; and though we never achieved anything like a perfect performance, we tried."...

And Ernest Hemingway:

Whenever his newspaper editors complained about it, he'd retort, "Well, that's what you're hired to correct!"

And John Keats:

In a letter to his great love Fanny Brawne, Keats spelled the color purple, purplue. This generated a longer conversation between the two, as Keats tried to save face by suggesting he'd meant to coin a new portmanteaux [sic] - a cross between purple and blue.

And Jane Austen:

She once misspelled one of her teenage works as "Love and Freindship" and is infamously known to have spelt scissors as scissars.

And F. Scott Fitzgerald:

The original draft of The Great Gatsby contained literally hundreds of spelling mistakes, some of which are still confounding editors. These include “yatch” (instead of “yacht”) and “apon” (instead of “upon”). One of his most famous gaffes, which occurs toward the end of the novel, inspires debate to this day.

Here's that gaffe:

After Fitzgerald’s death, Edmund Wilson changed the spelling from “orgastic” to “orgiastic” in the famous closing line: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

So many great writers were bad spellers that I've got to wonder whether bad spelling goes along with great writing. Maybe there's something about the brain of a bad speller. Have many Spelling Bee winners gone on to write great books?

John McWhorter thinks bad spelling is evidence of "inadequate thought," but — ironically — he needs to give that thought a little more thought.

ADDED: John Irving, the author of "The World According to Garp," was called "stupid" and "lazy" when he was a child and later found out he had dyslexia. I'm reading his "How to Spell." Excerpt:

You must remember that it is permissible for spelling to drive you crazy. Spelling had this effect on Andrew Jackson, who once blew his stack while trying to write a Presidential paper. “It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!” the President cried.

When you have trouble, think of poor Andrew Jackson and know that you’re not alone.

And remember what’s really important about good writing is not good spelling. If you spell badly but write well, you should hold your head up. As the poet T.S. Eliot recommended, “Write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible”--and don’t be overly concerned if you can’t spell “miscellaneous.” Also remember that you can spell correctly and write well and still be misunderstood. Hold your head up about that, too.

Is President Trump going to adhere to the presidential tradition of press conferences?

Here's a transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Sean Spicer, who will be the new White House Press Secretary. They're talking about whether President Trump will have the same kind of press conferences we've seen from past presidents, which Hewitt characterized as "regular" and "energetic."

I had to stop and check to see what the tradition of press conferences really is. Has it been distinct and consistent? Here's a piece from the White House Historical Association. Woodrow Wilson started the practice of press conferences, and all of his successors (so far) have used it.

Calvin Coolidge considered it "rather necessary to the carrying on of our republican institution that the people should have a fairly accurate report of what the president is trying to do." Fairly accurate. Trying to do.

JFK — who's right in the middle of the line of men that begins with Wilson and ends with Obama — gave the first live, televised press conferences. Up until Eisenhower, the sessions were not even on the record, and the President retained the power to rewrite his quotes. When Truman said "I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy," the reporters helped him see that the quote was too exciting and they even assisted him in mushing it up into: "The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States."

JFK made the televised press conference into something that served his agenda and suited his particular gifts and desired image. Later Presidents accepted Kennedy's approach but also adapted it. George H. W. Bush introduced the joint press conference with world leaders. Obama has often substituted interviews with one chosen reporter. In his first 2 years, Obama did 21 Kennedy-style press conferences to a roomful of reporters and 269 of those one-on-one encounters.

With that background on presidential press conferences, let's get back to Hewitt and Spicer:

Despite student protests, the Princeton board of trustees has voted to keep the name Woodrow Wilson on its various buildings and programs.

The NYT reports.

Wilson has been a much-loved figure at Princeton, but in September, the Black Justice League, a student activist group, distributed posters around campus that revealed his views on race, including his comment to an African-American leader that, “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

As president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson reintroduced segregation into the federal work force, admired the Ku Klux Klan and did not believe that black Americans were worthy of full citizenship.

The board also rejected a demand that faculty and staff submit to cultural competency training and that students take a course on the history of a marginalized people. The demand for a place on campus dedicated to black students was, ironically, met.

"What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama — yet again—a central part of our own politics?"

Wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in January 2008, quoted in this morning's NYT in a review of a new collection of some of his essays. (The book is "And Yet...") From the review:

It’s a shame Mr. Hitchens isn’t here to comment on Donald Trump’s political moment. He saw in the ideas behind Ross Perot’s candidacy some of what he might have distrusted in Mr. Trump’s, that is the idea that “government should give way to management.”...

Yes, "management" — I was just saying that's Trump's "stock one-word answer to queries about how he'll do something he says he will do." So I dug up the old Hitchens essay. Here. It's in The Wilson Quarterly. The Wilson Quarterly? Egad. Woodrow Wilson. That name is mud this week. And the Hitchens essay is "Bring on the Mud/Mud-slinging in politics is a time-honored American tradition. But is there anything so bad about throwing a few political barbs?" It's not mostly about government as management, and the whole thing is on such a high level that I want to weep for our loss:

When asked, millions of people will say that the two parties are (a) so much alike as to be virtually indistinguishable, and (b) too much occupied in partisan warfare. The two “perceptions” are not necessarily opposed: Party conflict could easily be more and more disagreement about less and less—what Sigmund Freud characterized in another context as “the narcissism of the small difference.” For a while, about a decade ago, the combination of those two large, vague impressions gave rise to the existence of a quasi-plausible third party, led by Ross Perot, which argued, in effect, that politics should be above politics, and that government should give way to management. That illusion, like the touching belief that one party is always better than the other, is compounded of near-equal parts naiveté and cynicism.

By the way, the phrase "his name is mud" goes back to 1823:

1823   ‘J. Bee’ Slang 122   Mud, a stupid twaddling fellow. ‘And his name is mud!’ ejaculated upon the conclusion of a silly oration, or of a leader in the Courier.

But some people like to tie the phrase to Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated the leg John Wilkes Booth broke. Whether Booth broke the leg when he jumped onto the stage in Ford's Theatre is a separate question and one question too many for this post of many questions.

"It used to be routine, too, Chief Justice Roberts said, for presidents to appoint prominent public figures to the court."

"In 1941, the year Hughes left the court, Chief Justice Roberts said, 'you had two senators on the court, a representative, three former attorneys general.' The court that decided Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision banning segregation in public schools, included Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former governor of California; Hugo L. Black, a former United States senator; William O. Douglas, who had been chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Robert H. Jackson, who had been the attorney general. By contrast, Chief Justice Roberts said, until Justice Elena Kagan arrived in 2010, “every single member of the court had been a court of appeals judge.' He did not comment Friday on the significance of the narrowing of the career paths, but in 2009 he said the development was a positive one, resulting in decisions with 'a more legal perspective and less of a policy perspective.'"

From respectful coverage, by the NYT's Adam Liptak, of a talk by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at NYU School of Law. Roberts's subject was Charles Evans Hughes, who before becoming Chief Justice "had been governor of New York, an associate justice of the court, the Republican nominee for president (losing narrowly to Woodrow Wilson), secretary of state and a Wall Street lawyer who argued more than 50 cases in the court."

Interesting to see the somewhat random appearance of the name Woodrow Wilson. The old president has become a big issue of late. In this very edition of the NYT, Woodrow Wilson comes up in 2 headlines:

"Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time."

Vox explains, supporting the Princeton students who are protesting the use of Wilson's name on various programs and buildings around the university.

Easily the worst part of Wilson's record as president was his overseeing of the resegregation of multiple agencies of the federal government, which had been surprisingly integrated as a result of Reconstruction decades earlier....

Outright dismissals were also common. Upon taking office, Wilson himself fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors in the federal service and replaced them with white people....

In 1914, a group of black professionals led by newspaper editor and Harvard alumnus Monroe Trotter met with Wilson to protest the segregation. Wilson informed Trotter, "Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen."

Much more at the link.

"Black tape was found covering the faces of black Harvard Law School professors on framed photographs outside a lecture hall on Thursday..."

"... a day after students there held a rally in solidarity with other campuses protesting racism across the country...."

I hope they have surveillance cameras to identify the malefactors. Who benefits?

Meanwhile, at Princeton:

Students staged a protest Wednesday inside the office of Princeton University's president, demanding the school remove the name of former school president and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from programs and buildings over what they said was his racist legacy....

Wilson was president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910 and served as New Jersey's governor from 1911 to 1913, when he entered the White House. The Democrat was a leading progressive but supported segregation, including appointing Cabinet members who segregated federal departments....

"Having to walk by buildings that (have Wilson's name), having to walk by his mural, having to live in residential colleges that didn't want our presence on campus, that's marginalizing," said Asanni York, a black junior who is majoring in public policy. "People are hurt by that. All this matters because, at the end of the day, black people's feelings matter just as much as any other people's feelings matter."

This is an intra-liberal dispute. Hating Woodrow Wilson used be a conservative thing. Here's a Slate article from 2011: "Hating Woodrow Wilson/The new and confused attacks on progressivism."

Over at the NYT, published today at 12:47 PM ET but quickly banished from the front page, there's "One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics," which I'd noticed earlier was getting slammed in the comments. Here's the highest-rated comment (highest rated by NYT readers):

"Jeb Bush smiled a lot. I wondered if he was channeling Mitt Romney in 2012, who smiled at his opponents on the stage as if they were adorable frolicking children."

"But Jeb smiles sweetly. With his gray-rimmed glasses and his weight loss he looked like Woodrow Wilson in a winsome mood."

Wrote Peggy Noonan.

100 years ago today: D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" is released.

Wikipedia says:

The film is... credited [sic] as one of the events that inspired the formation of the "second era" Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the same year. The Birth of a Nation was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK. Under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, it was the first motion picture to be screened in the White House. Despite the film's controversial content, Griffith's innovative film techniques make it one of the most important and influential films in film history.

Here, you can watch the whole thing:

"Sanguinary."

Writing the previous post, quoting the original Armistice Day proclamation, fixing on the word "sanguinary," I noticed that I had not looked a word up in the Oxford English Dictionary in a long time. Of course, I know that "sanguinary" means bloody, but what would motivate anyone to use the word "sanguinary," instead of "bloody"?

One reason is that "bloody" "has long had taboo status, and for many speakers constituted the strongest expletive available... Following the original use in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the sense spread to most other parts of the English-speaking world, with the notable exception of the United States, where it has apparently only ever achieved limited currency, e.g. among sailors during the 19th cent." (I'm quoting the OED, which I cannot link.)

So, "sanguinary" is a useful word for avoiding offense to those who take offense, and the OED even officially defines "sanguinary" — at definition #4, slang — as "a jocular euphemism for bloody adj., n., and adv., in reports of vulgar speech." Examples:

1800   S. T. Coleridge Coll. Lett. (1956) I. 564   This Extract breathed the spirit of the most foul & sanguinary Aristocracy—& depend upon it, Sheridan is a thorough-paced bad man!
1890   R. Kipling in Macmillan's Mag. LXI. 155/1   This is sanguinary. This is unusual sanguinary. Sort o' mad country....
1910   G. B. Shaw Lett. to Granville Barker (1956) 168   The inhabitants raise up their voices and call one another sanguinary liars.

I'm not suggesting that Woodrow Wilson, in his original Armistice Day proclamation, intended to attach the suggestion of an obscenity to "war" — the noun modified by "sanguinary" — though it is common enough to call war an obscenity.

The first meaning for "sanguinary" is "Attended by bloodshed; characterized by slaughter; bloody," and the second is "Bloodthirsty; delighting in carnage." The first meaning for "bloody" is "Containing blood; composed or consisting of blood; resembling blood," which, interestingly, is less emotive than the original meaning of "sanguinary." So "sanguinary" can be considered more apt — quite aside from any desire to avoid a frisson of obscenity.

"Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals..."

"... and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and..."

... it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.... the President of the United States is... inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

Today is Veterans Day, the original observance — based on the text — demonstrating friendly relations with all other peoples.

What would be an appropriate ceremony of friendly relations with all other peoples?

"The first liberal Democratic president took office exactly 100 years ago this spring."

"So why aren’t contemporary liberals bestowing the same praise on Woodrow Wilson as they lavish on Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson?"