By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--February 26, 2023
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There was a wonderful professor of geography at Indiana University named Thomas Frank Barton, and it was my privilege to sit in his class on the geography of Southeast Asia. He had traveled widely and came to IU after the war to teach knowledge-thirsty students, and he was still there when I arrived in the 1970s. He was quite the character.
He had come from a poor family in Saline County, Illinois, and knew the value of work. In the 1920s he had done road construction with a Fresno scraper, a horse-drawn device that looked something like a wheelbarrow, but without wheels. It had a steel handle on it so it could be guided into piles of dirt and stone like a huge scoop. When loaded, the horse would pull the load to where it was needed, where it could be dumped. It probably wasn’t much fun for either the operator or the horse.
Barton had applied for and won a scholarship to the Illinois State College at Normal in the mid-1920s. As an undergrad, he was active on campus, and Barton had a gleam in his eye as he told a story in class one day. He was affiliated with a group that brought speakers to campus, and he decided to cause a bit of a stir. He came up with the idea of inviting Clarence Darrow to campus. Darrow had the reputation of a brawling radical lawyer, so he might scandalize the ivied halls on a quiet Midwestern college campus. Darrow had defended the Haymarket rioters in the 1880s, and socialist labor leader Eugene Debs for his part in the Pullman Strike of 1894. In 1924 he had defended Leopold and Loeb in their thrill killing murder trial in Chicago. In 1925 he defended John Scopes in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, arguing Biblical orthodoxy with William Jennings Bryan. He was the big celebrity lawyer of his day. Love Darrow or hate him, he was ruthless in defense and a force to be reckoned with in any case. Not everyone was happy to have him there.
Barton met him at the rail station when he arrived for his speech. When he appeared on campus, students crowded around him, asking questions and hoping to impress the famous man with intellectual and legal questions. As Barton told the story, Darrow listened to a couple of pretentious students pose a question for his consideration. He paused, looked down just a minute, then fixed an icy glare on the pups who waited for his answer.
“I think you will discover,” Darrow intoned, “that if you will first define your terms, you will see that there is actually nothing to decide.” There must have been a stunned silence in the circle around him. Dr. Barton cackled with delight when he finished the story. He relished the quiet demonstration of skill. To get to the heart of any matter, one must first define the terms.
Dr. Barton didn’t interpret the story, but simply offered it to his students that day to take from it what they would. The lesson I drew from this was to always stand on a firm grounding in the language: never let the other side seize control in an argument by allowing them to define the terms to their own advantage. Victory may come from the proper definition of terms alone. In fact, victory may only be possible once the terms have been agreed upon. Words have meaning and weight. Abandoning the field to those who are more aggressive with the language means that defeat and submission will likely follow.
It just so happens that there are some recent examples of willful and skillful manipulation of the language. Here are a few.
We hear the term gender batted about every day. For several years, shrill voices in the legacy press and in identity politics circles hammered at this word to get people used to the idea that it meant the same as sex. Once they were able to get everyday people to use it and when companies and hospitals began to use it instead of sex, then the definition began to change. Only certain approved people in the identity politics world were allowed to define gender in the new fashion. In very short order, we went from two sexes to 80+ genders. Once language activists gain control of the definition they win. If there are 80 genders including male and female and pangender and polygender, anyone in opposition to the multigender concept can be dismissed with a sneer. Once the battle to gain acceptance of the term gender to mean sex was won by the activists, there was no resisting the juggernaut of gender activism and the social policies that must follow from it.
To clarify the term, gender is only used correctly when describing the inclinations of nouns. There are three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine nouns and pronouns have masculine endings in Latin and French and German. Nouns and pronouns with masculine endings and masculine characteristics are different from nouns and pronouns with feminine endings and characteristics. Nouns with neither masculine nor feminine endings or characteristics are considered neuter. In German, the first person singular pronouns are der, die, das, that is, masculine, feminine, and neuter.
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A more recent word that has undergone retooling is equity. The same technique applied to this word as to gender. We began to hear it used interchangeably with the word equality. We want the distribution to be more equal. We want the distribution to be more equitable. What’s the big deal, we might ask? Sounds about the same to me! That’s the idea. Once the definition has been eroded, then the redefinition can begin. It sounds about the same to us, but equity has an entirely different meaning to the policy activists. Equality in the workplace means that everyone has the same opportunity to access jobs if they choose to do so. I’m fine with that. But workplace equity means that everyone must have the same rank and pay as others, regardless of performance. I’m definitely not okay with that. Recently a very high ranking elected official said that we must have equity in the delivery of disaster aid. The meaning is that favored groups like racial minorities must have the same level of help regardless of the circumstances or severity of the disaster. An Executive Order went out recently declaring that the entire federal bureaucracy must be reworked to ensure equity for “underserved” groups. Translation: more members of favored groups will be hired and have pay and benefits increased because of their membership in the group. Others will suffer cuts in benefits and pay because equity is more “fair.”
Then there’s the pejorative term “election denier.” Now, normally one would think the phrase means that someone doesn’t think there was an election that took place on a given day. They deny an election. But that isn’t the meaning at all. This phrase has been regularly applied to half or more of the population of the US who happens to think that there was some level of manipulation or cheating in the 2020 presidential election. Yes, you read this correctly. When someone thinks there was some chicanery in the 2020 election, they’re characterized as election deniers because they suspect something wasn’t quite right about it. Translation: when someone thinks an election might have involved cheating, they’re refusing to acknowledge the winner as legitimate. Further translation: refuse to accept a candidate as a winner because you think there was cheating and you’re a threat to democracy.
It’s a very short step from being an election denier to our next term, insurrectionist.
This term came from the language of the 14th Amendment.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
This term has been chosen because it was hoped to use it to deny President Trump another term in office, even after he was denied a consecutive second term in the election of 2020. Definitions of insurrection always include the word “violent.” On January 6, 2020, thousands of citizens marched from the Ellipse to the Capitol to express their unhappiness with the election process. Some of them called for violence and some engaged in violent actions to breach the Capitol building itself. People who were calling for violence have been identified, but have not been arrested or charged with insurrection. Most of the people who engaged in violence against the Capitol police or who broke windows and doors to gain entry to the building have not been identified or arrested or charged. Those who have been identified, arrested, and charged with crimes have nearly all been charged with trespassing in a public building. Many still await trial after more than two years. Many others who were not on the Capitol grounds at all that day have been arrested and held. But there has been an endless chorus of shrill voices shouting “insurrection” about the march to the Capitol on January 6, 2020.
“Insurrection” doesn’t mean someone had a thought about the possibility of cheating. That’s called free speech and freedom of thought. Insurrection means that people took up arms as part of an effort to overthrow the authority of the federal government. Oddly, when rioters took up arms in cities across the country after George Floyd’s death in 2020 to overthrow local governments, burning, looting, and attacking police, there were no cries by either party to declare it an insurrection, even though the riots fit the definition of insurrection.
So when the shrieking never-Trumpers get all righteous about insurrection against the government, it’s time to get out the dictionary and actually look up some words. When it comes to January 6, I think, like Darrow, that if we would simply define our terms, we would discover that there is really nothing to decide, and certainly nothing to get excited about.
Then maybe we should look up the word “coup” and see if it applies to any recent activities.
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Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.