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Buns_of_Fire

(17,119 posts)
Fri Jul 4, 2014, 07:36 AM Jul 2014

The more things change.....

It was on July 4, 1951, that a young reporter for The Capital Times — the late John Patrick Hunter — decided to find out just how bad the political climate had become, even here in Madison, Wis. As the low man on the reporting staff’s totem poll, Hunter had been tabbed to work that Fourth of July and come up with a story for the next day’s paper.

As he was preparing to leave the city room, he noted a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging on the wall. Thinking to himself how revolutionary the declaration was at the time it was adopted, he wondered if people would sign it in 1951, an age of rampant distrust and suspicion.

So he typed up the preamble to the declaration and included six of the Constitution’s first 10 amendments and the 15th Amendment (the right of citizens to vote regardless of race), putting them in the form of a petition, and then went to Vilas Park, the site of the city’s biggest Fourth of July celebration. He asked a total of 112 people to sign his “petition,” but only one, a Madison insurance agent, did. The other 111 said no, they couldn’t. Twenty of the non-signers accused Hunter of being a communist.

When told that the “petition” was the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and seven constitutional amendments, one woman fumed that it couldn’t be America’s declaration, but rather must be the Soviet Union’s.
http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/column/dave_zweifel/plain-talk-remembering-joe-mccarthy-we-need-to-fight-smears/article_ab5c2502-14b4-5ffd-a65e-bcd35191f6d0.html

Come to think of it, it's uncanny how much Ted Cruz resembles... Nah, it couldn't be...
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