New Hampshire District Court Judge John Pickering was not the first public official to be impeached. (That honor belongs to William Blount.) But Pickering was the first to be convicted by the Senate and removed from office. His crime? Leaving aside all the legalize involved it appears to be that he was pretty much always rip roaringly drunk.
Pickering was a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, who after some time in private practice held numerous high positions in his home state. He was a member of New Hampshire’s constitutional conventions, served in both the state House and Senate and was president of New Hampshire (the equivalent of governor) in 1790. After spending the next five years as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court of Judicature, he was nominated by George Washington to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire.
Things started heading south shortly thereafter. In 1801, court staff urged that he be replaced because he was showing signs of mental deterioration. A year later a court clerk reported that Judge Pickering “exhibited every mark of intoxication; staggered and reeled, spoke in a thick way.” Pickering himself advised one attorney arguing his case “I shall be sober in the morning; I’m damned drunk now.”
One notable case that came before Pickering involved a ship called the Eliza that was confiscated by customs officials. The owner of the Eliza was a friend of Pickering’s and a fellow Federalist. Pickering immediately ordered the ship to be restored to its owner. Upon appeal the prosecutor noted the volume of revenue due the state. Pickering retorted, “damn the revenue, I get but a thousand dollars of it.”
By 1803, Thomas Jefferson, having failed to get Pickering to resign, sent information to the House of Representatives accusing Pickering of unlawful rulings, bad character and intoxication. The articles of impeachment that were passed by the House started: “That whereas for the due faithful, and impartial administration of justice, temperance and sobriety are essential qualities in the character of a judge, yet the said John Pickering, being a man of loose morals and intemperate habits…did appear on the bench of the said court for the administration of justice in a state of total intoxication.”
When the impeachment charges came to the Senate in 1804, Pickering was a no show. His son Jacob S. Pickering explained, “John Pickering is insane and could not, from the state of his health, attend without endangering his life, and therefore prays a postponement of the trial.” Jacob’s petition went on to explain “said crimes wherewith the said John stands charged…the said John was, and for more than two years before, and ever since has been and now is insane, his mind wholly deranged…” (National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, April 9, 1804).
So let’s get this straight. Pickering’s defense was arguing that he should NOT be removed from his position as district court judge because he was insane!
The Senate wasn’t buying it. He was convicted with a 19-7 vote and removed from office. He passed away a year later.
Who voted against conviction and why? There were Federalists that made the argument that showing up in court drunk didn’t constitute a “high crime or misdemeanor” as specified in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment. So the legal debate that Pickering’s impeachment and trial raises is whether bad character is sufficient grounds for impeachment and conviction. All successive impeachments have involved more substantial crimes (like inciting an insurrection). Surely if bad character alone could get you tossed, Trump should have been KO’d twice and one can make the case that Clinton was essentially impeached for bad character.
Say the word impeachment and the name that immediately comes to mind is Trump. After all, he is responsible for 50% of the four presidential impeachments that have occurred in the country’s 242-year history. Aside from the four presidential impeachments there have been 17 other impeachments in U.S. history. The majority of those involved district court judges, but they have also included a senator, a cabinet member and a Supreme Court justice.
The Constitution provides that the “President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That leaves a lot of room for interpretation. But it didn’t take long for Congress to use this provision. The first person to be impeached was Tennessee Senator William Blount in 1798.
Blount has a few things in common with Trump. He was a real estate speculator and his purchases were on borrowed money, leaving him with a good deal of debt. He once lost a state election and challenged the result, claiming fraud. And he also was put on trial in the Senate after leaving office.
Blount had founding father credentials. His great-grandfather Thomas Blount arrived in Virginia from England in 1660. He settled on a plantation in North Carolina where William was brought up. During the American Revolution he was a paymaster in a North Carolina regiment. (At one battle he lost $300,000 of soldiers’ pay.) Prior to independence, Blount ran for a seat on the North Carolina House of Commons. He lost. But he claimed fraud and had the election voided. He later ran for the seat again and won.
Blount was North Carolina’s delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. History records Blount as having showed up late, said very little, left early, and signed reluctantly. But back home he encouraged North Carolina to ratify. During this period, Blount helped foster an agreement whereby North Carolina ceded its western lands to the federal government to pay off tax debt. That land, which at the time was called the Southwest Territory, is what is now the state of Tennessee. Blount would end up being appointed by George Washington as governor of the Southwest Territory. He and his family packed up and moved west.
While this was going on, Blount, as well as his brothers, were actively accumulating land in the Southwest Territory, some 2.5 million acres of it. He also was instrumental in preparing Tennessee for statehood, something that became a reality in 1796. In that year, he was elected one of Tennessee’s first senators.
Things were looking up for Blount’s political career. Not so his finances. Land prices were depressed in the mid-1790’s and Blount had overcommitted, leaving him with a mountain of debt. With France winning a war against Spain in Europe, he was afraid the French would gain control of the port of New Orleans and decided that he and other Tennessee land speculators would be better off if England, rather than France, controlled the port. He then concocted the plan that would lead to his downfall. He schemed with two Native American tribes, encouraging them to join with the British to drive the Spanish out of New Orleans.
Unfortunately for Blount, his plan to start a war to protect the value of his landholdings was all spelled out in a letter that was passed from one hand to the next to the next until it ended up in the lap of President John Adams. He passed it on to the Senate and that body voted 25-1 to “sequester” Blount’s seat. Not a big loss for that body since he missed more than 25% of the roll call votes for the first half of 1797.
At the same time the House began impeachment proceedings. Those proceedings featured a fight between two congressmen of opposite parties. After trading insults for a bit, Matthew Lyon, Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont, spewed a load of tobacco juice into the face of Roger Griswold, Federalist congressman from Connecticut. Griswold responded by beating Lyon over the head with his wooden cane. Other representatives broke up the fight and the two apparently escaped disciplinary actions by promising to behave. No such reprieve for Blount. The House approved five articles of impeachment.
The Senate sent a sergeant-at-arms to Tennessee to bring Blount back to face trial. He refused to budge. Blount had originally stated that he was not the author of the incriminating letter. But, after two of his co-conspirators testified that he was, it was time for a new defense strategy. Blount’s attorneys argued that he was not a “civil officer” and that secondly, since he had been expelled from the Senate already, he was no longer an “officer of the United States.”
Enough senators bought that argument to get him off the hook. By a vote of 14-11, the Senate approved the following resolution: “The court is of the opinion that the matter alleged in the plea of the defendant is sufficient in law to show that this court ought not to hold jurisdiction of the said impeachment, and that the said impeachment is dismissed.”
Constitutional scholars have debated the issue of whether Blount was acquitted because you can’t impeach a senator, or because he had already been out of office. The latter, has implications as a precedent for the trial of Trump.
Blount Mansion, Knoxville, Tenn.
And there’s one other parallel between Blount and Trump. Despite being disgraced nationally, Blount remained popular among his base, the voters of Tennessee. Within a year he was speaker of the Tennessee State Senate. Tennessee has a county named after Blount, a grammar school and a high school, as well as a town named Blountville. He died in 1800 when an epidemic swept through his home town of Knoxville where the Blount Mansion is now a museum.
With this pandemic continuing unabated, going on nearly a year now, it is harder and harder to find any bright side. But alas, in the last week I was able to attend the Sundance Film Festival for the first time. No need to fly to Utah. No need to pay festival rates at the closest hotel I could find nor to compete for a shrinking number of dinner reservations.
I don’t much care about the parties, the awards, the networking, the celebrities, so from that perspective a virtual festival is fine with me. Surely I miss the big screen and the big sound. But at least I don’t have to wear a mask sitting on my couch.
The first movie that I watched virtually because of the pandemic that made live viewing impossible, The Pink Cloud, was a movie about quarantining, a lockdown. Not a benign sort of social distancing, mask wearing lockdown but a real shut the door and never open it lockdown. The culprit is a pink cloud over Brazil, a gaseous invader so noxious that you’re dead in 10 seconds of being outdoors.
Some people got stuck in the grocery store. One married couple was separated when the husband went to the bakery and never came back. Giovanni and Yago had just met. Likely they were alone in her mother’s apartment thinking of a night of sex. They never left. Because the pink cloud doesn’t get blown off by the next weather system, it’s here.
It’s very hard to review this film without spoilers, but assuming you’re going to be seeing The Pink Cloud in other festivals and eventually on a streaming site or two, I’ll keep all i’s secrets to myself. We see about ten years of Yolanda and Yago’s time together. In that time they go through everything you might expect in 60 years or so of hot and cold marriage.
Despite having a setting limited to a single apartment, the movie is beautifully and artistically filmed. The acting is brilliant and conveys a roller coaster of emotions. And while it might seem a little unnerving to watch while we’re in the midst of a pandemic, hey, it could be a lot worse.
After all this quarantine doom and gloom, I looked forward to the Spanish movie El Planeta. What it promised was fun. But I came away with nary a chuckle.
A young woman, Leo, and her mother are in the apparent last days before being kicked out of their apartment in Gijon, Spain. There’s no heat and not much food. Leo sits on the steps in the hallway in order to read because the electricity has been turned off. Now the fridge leaks, though it seemed to be used for little other than by mom to “freeze” her enemies. Sounds like a laugh a minute, right?
There is however a card and some merchants willing to run a tab so we see the pair in the mall buying clothes, at the beautician, and mom comes up with a box of pastries everyday or so. They even get to try the tasting menu at a restaurant named El Planeta.
The movie is filmed in black and white, adding to the stark appearance of the town where it seems most storefronts are papered over with a for sale sign in the window. The score is just as stark.
This is a debut feature for Amalie Ulsan. She also stars as Leo. Her mother stars as her mother. So many reasons I wanted to like this film. I just didn’t.
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Kawzi and Mahmoud are The Captains of Zaatari. They are teenage soccer players. They play everyday. Their lives are focused on tournaments where they can be chosen for a traveling team. They dream of being the next Ronaldo. They are also Syrian refugees living in a camp in Jordan.
That camp is desolate and desperate. There’s no money, there’s no work and not much in the way of food. But they have dreams and the story of those dreams supersedes the rough edges of their lives.
Both are selected to be on a team called the Syrian Dream. They go to Qatar and play in an international under-18 tournament. It is their first time on grass, their first time with proper boots. They stay in a nice hotel and marvel at the availability of 24-hour Internet. Then it’s back to the camp in Jordan.
During a press conference after one of the tournament games, Mahmoud says: “refugees just need an opportunity, they don’t need your pity.” That is what this documentary is all about, but the filmmaker doesn’t beat you over the head with that message, he just lets you see it. If the boys’ story isn’t compelling enough there is also some stunning cinematography.
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Dog Day Afternoon meets Y2K. I’ve watched dozens of movies during this pandemic. Prime Time might be the best. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999. There’s a game show on Polish TV. A young guy with a gun slips into the TV studio and takes the game show host and a security guard hostage.
Sebastian’s demand is air time, a slot to address the national TV audience right after the president gives a New Year’s speech. We don’t know what message he will deliver, nor do we know what brought him to this point. The only hint is the appearance of a prick of an estranged father who arrives on the scene and makes things worse.
The movie goes through every emotion: sympathy, hysteria, anger among them. There’s the hard core police, the soft-touch hostage negotiators and the arrogant TV executive. The outside cast of characters becomes polarized between the sympathizers and the would be attackers.
I hate to try to characterize a movie like this, but maybe psychological thriller is the best description. I barely even blinked while watching this one.
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Life in a Day 2020 is just that. This ‘crowdsourced documentary’ was culled from videos sent in from 192 countries. Thousands of hours of mostly cellphone video clips became a 90-minute snapshot of what people were doing all around the world.
The day is July 25, 2020. For many it is a day like any other. A mom wakes up her sleepy kids, a girl milks her goat, babies learn to crawl, children learn to read, lovers meet and cuddle and kiss. For others it is a special day. They give birth and get married and bury loved ones.
There are signs that it’s 2020. A woman whose teenage son was part of the first Life in a Day movie ten years ago shows the urn that contains his ashes. He died from COVID. A young black woman tries to suppress her rage while telling us of her two brothers who were murdered in police custody.
But the overall impact is a celebration of humanity. It is as if the director Kevin McDonald has taken all the social media networks and boiled down their data feed to just the highlights: no marketers, no trolls, no conspiracy mongers or disinformation artists. Watch this movie and you can’t help thinking of cliches like ‘we’re all one human race.”
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The first thing you notice about the movie Jockey is how absolutely beautifully and artistically it is filmed. Most scenes are dark with subtle back lighting and maybe a beam of light on the side of a central character’s face. Sort of like a classic Renaissance painting. Outdoor scenes are back lit by beautiful sunsets. Did they shoot this whole movie at sunset! It is in Arizona so maybe it’s too hot to shoot when the sun is high in the sky.
The second thing you notice about the movie Jockey is that you don’t want to be a jockey. These guys are beat up. Every locker room conversation is about broken bones, busted heads and damaged spines. And they don’t seem to be the ones making the money at the track.
As for the story. Jackson is a veteran and very successful jockey. He’s near the end of his career and he has more than one doctor tell him it’s over. He works for a trainer who he may or may not also have some romantic involvement with. And a young aspiring jockey pops on the scene who may or may not be his son from an earlier relationship.
For much of the movie the atmosphere takes precedence over the story. It is filmed at working race track. While the lead roles are played by professional actors and actresses who are quite brilliant, many of the background roles are filled by actual jockeys and other racetrack personnel. In the end, it is the drama that demands your attention as the aforementioned threesome sorts itself out in one big race.
(The U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award went to Clifton Collins Jr. who played Jackson.)
More than a century before this area of Vernon, N.J., became part of Wawayanda State Park, a small village existed here built around the ironworks. William Ames built the furnace which is the lone standing structure remaining from the Wawayanda Ironworks. It was built in 1846 and was in operation until 1867.
Iron ore, mined in the surrounding area was fed into the furnace and was formed into bars which were called iron pigs. The pigs were used to create various products. A nearby pond was dammed to produce the water power to run the operation. In 1860, 75 men were employed here and more than 1,000 tons of pig iron were produced at the site.
At its height, Wawayanda Village included workers housing, a blacksmith and carpenters shop and a company office and store. There was also a sawmill and a grist mill. The foundations for some of the village buildings still exist.
You can still see pieces of some of the foundations of the buildings in Wawayanda village.There was a stamping mill in this area where iron ore was broken into small pieces to feed the furnace. This channel likely brought water from the dammed pond to the mill.
The area became part of Wawayanda State Park which was created in 1963. It covers 34,000+ acres in Vernon and West Milford, N.J. The park has extensive hiking trails, including the popular “Stairway to Heaven” that goes up 1,300-foot Wawayanda Mountain and overlooks Wawayanda Lake where there is a beach and boating dock. A 20 mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail goes through Wawayanda State Park.
A Wordless Wednesday gallery of public-domain images
Carving wooden shoes (Image by Raoul Ortega)(Image by Lubos Houska)(Image by Quino Al)(Image by Eddy Klaus)(Image by Kevin Slater)(Image by Daryan Shamkhali)
(Image by Jeremy Christ Jordan)
(Image by Remy Gieling)(Image by Piotr Siedlecki)
(Images from unsplash.com, pixabay.com and publicdomainpictures.net)
Three Spirals, Julius Medwin. Medwin, who passed away in 2019, maintained a studio in nearby Warwick, N.Y.
The Swiss painter Kurt Seligman was born in Basel in 1900, the son of a furniture store owner. He became a member of the Paris surrealist group and came to New York City in 1939 for an exhibition of his paintings. Europe in 1939 was not a good place to be for a surrealist painter and Seligman and his wife Arlette made a home for themselves on 40th Street in Manhattan. Seligman taught for many years at Brooklyn College. The couple bought a farm in Sugar Loaf, a small artsy village in Orange County, N.Y., where they moved after Kurt retired.
Kurt and Arlette Seligman homestead
Max Ernst once slept in this guest house on the Seligman property
Seligman died in 1962. Arlette bequeathed the Sugar Loaf estate to the Orange County Citizens Foundation, a local non-profit. The OCCF maintains an office at the Seligman site. The homestead is used for galleries, events and performances. Across the street from the main house is the Seligman Center, founded in 2010 by the foundation to display Seligman’s paintings and prints.
All of that is closed during the pandemic. But on the grounds of the old Seligman property are a number of sculptures, many by local artists. They are open to the public, but don’t expect a sculpture park. This is more like a scavenger hunt, finding the works of art behind the buildings and around the 50-acre property.
Here’s what I found:
Book Tree, Jed BarkHeadless Woman, Michael Jamieson, Sloatsburg, N.Y.The Eventual Outcome of an Instant, Sue WrbicanKurt and Arlette; Sky and Ground, Maxine Leu and Michael Asbil, a graduate student and professor, respectively, at SUNY New PaltzCrazy Column, Bernard KirschenbaumLeopards, Shayne Hayson (member of the OCCF)
Found in the woods behind the homestead
BirdhousesThe Seligman Center where, during normal times, Kurt’s paintings and prints are on displaySmall graveyard behind the main building where the Seligmans are buried
In 1928, Harvey Fite paid $250 to buy an abandoned bluestone quarry in the middle of the woods in Saugerties, N.Y. Fite, a former actor, had come to the Catskills region of New York to assume a teaching position at Bard. He taught theater as well as his newest pursuit, sculpture. He became the founder of Bard’s College of Fine Arts. The old rock quarry would become Opus 40, the name based on Fite’s expectation that it would be 40 years of work. Fite worked on it for 37 years before suffering an accidental death at age 73 in 1976.
Opus 40 was built by Fite using dry stone construction, carefully fitting the stones together without mortar or cement. The technique makes it not susceptible to cracking, frost or erosion. Fite originally conceived of the site as a setting for his rock sculpture. He later came to the conclusion that the setting itself was the sculpture and he moved his rock sculpture into the surrounding wooded areas. The centerpiece of Opus 40 is the monolith. Fite had found the nine-ton bluestone column that sits atop the rock sculpture embedded in a nearby creek.
In normal times Opus 40 hosts some 20,000 visitors a year. In addition to the rock formation and sculptures there is a museum and gift shop. It has hosted concerts and weddings. Sonny Rollins and Richie Havens both played there and they each have parking lots at Opus 40 named after them. It is currently closed to the public although private tours can be arranged. Reopening of the sculpture park will depend on COVID regulations in the state.
off the leash 