Wagner Act Quotes

In reality there was only one thing you dreaded: letting yourself fall, taking the step into uncertainty, the little step beyond all the securities that existed. And whoever had once surrendered himself, one single time, whoever had practiced the great act of confidence and entrusted himself to fate, was liberated. He no longer obeyed the laws of earth; he had fallen into space and swung along in the dance of the constellations. That was it.

Buchanan carried the anti-organized-labor message into his classes, teaching his students that the Wagner Act had licensed “union monopolies” that distorted the wage structure. He used an example involving the state’s labor market, blaming the United Mine Workers of America for the rising unemployment of coal valleys.

In autumn 1937, the New York Times delivered its analysis of the economy’s downturn: “The cause is attributed by some to taxation and alleged federal curbs on industry; by others, to the demoralization of production caused by strikes.” Both the taxes and the strikes were the result of Roosevelt policy; the strikes had been made possible by the Wagner Act the year before. As scholars have long noted, the high wages generated by New Deal legislation helped those workers who earned them. But the inflexibility of those wages also prevented companies from hiring additional workers. Hence the persistent shortage of jobs in the latter part of the 1930s.

Look, if you have a political movement that's strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it'll get accommodated in some fashion-as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren't going to matter very much anymore.

Act like everyone you meet is an angel, because sometimes they will be an angel. Would you cuss out that person if you knew that they were an angel that was about to save your life in a few seconds?

I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to genius—Nietzsche, for instance—can have been such simpletons as to ascribe to it a certain intellectual value, and consequently to deny themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have no part. Yes, it has always been a surprise to me to find a man who carried sincerity towards himself to so high a pitch as to cut himself off, by a scruple of conscience, from Wagner’s music, imagining that the truth could ever be attained by the mode of expression, naturally vague and inadequate, which our actions in general and acts of friendship in particular furnish, or that there could be any kind of significance in the fact of one’s leaving one’s work to go and see a friend and shed tears with him on hearing the false report that the Louvre was burned.

We must remember with Heine that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all argument is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that Wagner and a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And therefore it seems impeccable logic to say that all that is most unlike the rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning bombast of adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the sufferer cannot control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his body and soul. But the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine orgy, no carnival-loves like Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, no heroic and shining lust gathering and swinging into a merry embrace like the third act of Siegfried. It is desire in this sense that goes farthest from the animal.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle has kept one version of one of the great Norse stories alive in the minds of music lovers. Readers of modern fantasy will find many echoes of the Norse tales as well. Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams and others have explicitly taken some of the Norse gods and put them into a modern setting with strange, sad and humorous results. Echoes of Norse tales and creatures abound in the speculative fiction of Ursula Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Tad Williams and others. Something in these old and puzzling stories still has the power to move and unsettle us, and to inspire new acts of creation.

In line with the Acts of Thomas is the Ophite view that the Holy Ghost is the “first word,” the “Mother of All Living,” and the Valentinian idea that the Third Person is the “Word of the Mother from Above.” It is clear from all this that Wagner’s Brünhilde is one of the numerous anima-figures who are attributed to masculine deities, and who without exception represent a dissociation in the masculine psyche—a “split-off” with a tendency to lead an obsessive existence of its own. This tendency to autonomy causes the anima to anticipate the thoughts and decisions of the masculine consciousness, with the result that the latter is constantly confronted with unlooked-for situations which it has apparently done nothing to provoke. Such is the situation of Wotan, and indeed of every hero who is unconscious of his own intriguing femininity.

You can’t do that again, Josie. I don’t want you to take care of me. I know you did it because you do care….but don’t take my pride from me.” “Is pride more important than friendship?” I said sadly. “Yes!” Samuel’s voice was harsh and emphatic. “That is so ridiculous!” I threw my arms wide in frustration. “Josie! You are just a little girl! You don’t know how helpless and weak and stupid it made me feel to stand there while you arranged my life like I was some kind of charity case!” Samuel fisted his hands in his hair and growling, turned towards the door. “I am not a little girl! I haven’t been a little girl for years…forever! I don’t think like a little girl, I don’t act like a little girl. I don’t LOOK like a little girl, do I? Don’t you dare say I am a little girl!” I pounded down on the piano keys - playing a violent riff, reminiscent of Wagner himself. Now I knew what Sonja meant by letting out the beast! I wanted to throw something, or smash something, and scream at Samuel. He was so impossible! Such a stubborn, mule-headed jerk! I played hard for several minutes, and Samuel stood at the door, dumbfounded. Suddenly Samuel sat down beside me on the piano bench and put his hands over the top of mine, bringing the din to a halt. “I’m sorry, Josie,” Samuel said softly. I was crying, tears dripping down onto the keys, making them slippery. I was a terrible beast, not fierce at all - just a blubbering baby beast. Samuel seemed at a loss. He sat very still, his hands covering mine. Slowly, his hands rose to my face and gently wiped the tears from my cheeks. “Will you play something else?” He requested softly, his voice remorseful. “Will you play something for me....please?

In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don’t therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don’t feel. If you do, you become one of those idiotic music-snobs … unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It’s exactly the same with God. The world’s full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren’t really alive, who’ve never done any vital act, who aren’t in any living relation with anything; people who haven’t the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs. They’re as grotesque and contemptible as the music-snobs … but nobody has the sense to say so. The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious and Christian. When they’re merely dead and ought to be having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to make them sit up and come to life.

I see over and beyond all these national wars, new "empires," and whatever else lies in the foreground. What I am concerned with — for I see it preparing itself slowly and hesitatingly — is the United Europe. It was the only real work, the one impulse in the souls, of all the broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century — this reparation of a new synthesis, and the tentative effort to anticipate the future of "the European." Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they fall back again into the national narrowness of the "Fatherlanders" — then they were once more "patriots." I am thinking of men like Napoleon, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. Perhaps Richard Wagner likewise belongs to their number, concerning whom, as a successful type of German obscurity, nothing can be said without some such "perhaps." But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new unity there comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small States of Europe — I refer to all our present kingdoms and "empires" — will in a short time become economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled struggle for the possession of local and international trade. Money is even now compelling European nations to amalgamate into one Power. In order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the world with good prospects of victory (it is easy to perceive against whom this battle will be waged), she must probably "come to an understanding" with England. The English colonies are needed for this struggle, just as much as modern Germany, to play her new role of broker and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland. For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to continue to act her old part for fifty years more; the impossibility of shutting out homines novi from the government will ruin her, and her continual change of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the carrying out of any tasks which require to be spread out over a long period of time. A man must to-day be a soldier first and foremost that he may not afterwards lose his credit as a merchant. Enough; here, as in other matters, the coming century will be found following in the footsteps of Napoleon — the first man, and the man of greatest initiative and advanced views, of modern times. For the tasks of the next century, the methods of popular representation and parliaments are the most inappropriate imaginable.

Where attempts have not been made to reconcile the two moralities, they may be described as follows:— All is good in the noble morality which proceeds from strength, power, health, well-constitutedness, happiness, and awfulness; for, the motive force behind the people practising it is “the struggle for power.” The antithesis “good and bad” to this first class means the same as “noble” and “despicable.” “Bad” in the master-morality must be applied to the coward, to all acts that spring from weakness, to the man with “an eye to the main chance,” who would forsake everything in order to live. With the second, the slave-morality, the case is different. There, inasmuch as the community is an oppressed, suffering, unemancipated, and weary one, all that will be held to be good which alleviates the state of suffering. Pity, the obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, and humility—these are unquestionably the qualities we shall here find flooded with the light of approval and admiration; because they are the most useful qualities —; they make life endurable, they are of assistance in the “struggle for existence” which is the motive force behind the people practising this morality. To this class, all that is awful is bad, in fact it is the evil par excellence. Strength, health, superabundance of animal spirits and power, are regarded with hate, suspicion, and fear by the subordinate class.

I was in love with her. She was very loving, very caring, very involved with me, and highly sexed. Making love with her was an entirely different thing than I had ever experienced. I had been with girls, and I had been with women, but I had never been with a woman with her level of knowledge, her level of taste. I was so incredibly taken with her, taken by her. We were both at turning points in our lives. She had been married to Robert Taylor for over ten years when he went to Italy to make Quo Vadis and had an affair, at which point Barbara [Stanwyck] threw him out. She was bitter about Taylor; she acted very quickly, almost reflexively, although I don't know that she thought it was too quick. I don't know precisely what went on between them; we never got into it. In fact, I went hunting with Bob Taylor a few times, and I think he might have known about us. At any rate, she had just gotten her divorce when we met. She was at a very vulnerable moment in her life and career. The forties are a dangerous time for any woman, and especially so for an actress whose work is her identity—definitely Barbara's way of life. The transition to playing middle-aged women has unnerved a lot of actresses—some of Barbara's contemporaries, such as Norma Shearer and Kay Francis, quit the business rather than confront it—but she faced it straight on because that's the kind of woman she was. The continuity of her career was more important to her than any individual part. Like so many people in show business, she was a prisoner of her career. Because of my youth, I suppose in one sense I was a validation of her sexuality.

Christ was an Aryan, and St. Paul used his doctrine to mobilise the criminal underworld and thus organise a proto-Bolshevism. This intrusion upon the world marks the end of a long reign, that of the clear Graeco-Latin genius. What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him? Try to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story. God creates the conditions for sin. Later on He succeeds, with the help of the Devil, in causing man to sin. Then He employs a virgin to bring into the world a son who, by His death, will redeem humanity! I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians ! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding-bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains : one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation. I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, Ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learnt nothing else. For thirty years the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in order to know whether or not they should take Communion in both kinds. There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view, one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect. By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture of the Beyond? What comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity and that sense is at the bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the "why?" of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable. If there is a God, at the same time as He gives man life He gives him intelligence. By regulating my life according to the understanding that is granted me, I may be mistaken, but I act in good faith. The concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination. Think of those who look down from on high upon what happens on earth: what a martyrdom for them, to see human beings indefatigably repeating the same gestures, and inevitably the same errors ! In my view, H. S. Chamberlain was mistaken in regarding Christianity as a reality upon the spiritual level. Man judges everything in relation to himself. What is bigger than himself is big, what is smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is part of the spectacle. Everyone finds his own rôle. Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species. It's our duty to encourage that idea : let the man who distinguishes himself in the service of the species be thought worthy of the highest honours.

Modeling the evolution of modularity became significantly easier after a kind of genetic variation was discovered by quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in the lab of James Cheverud at Washington University called 'relationship QTL' or r-QTL for short. An r-QTL is a genetic locus that affects the correlations between two quantitative traits (i.e. their variational relationship, and therefore, 'relationship' loci). Surprisingly, a large fraction of these so-mapped loci are also neutral with respect to the character mean. This means one can select on these 'neutral' r-QTLs without simultaneously changing the character mean in a certain way. It was easy to show that differential directional selection on a character could easily lead a decrease in genetic correlation between characters. Of course, it is not guaranteed that each and every population has the right kind of r-QTL polymorphisms, nor is it yet clear what kind of genetic architecture allows for the existence of an r-QTL. Nevertheless, these findings make it plausible that differential directional selection can enhance the genetic/variational individuality of traits and, thus, may play a role in the origin of evolutionary novelties by selecting for variational individuality. It must be added, though, that there has been relatively little research in this area and that we will need to see more to determine whether we understand what is going on here, if anything. In particular, one difficulty is the mathematical modeling of gene interaction (epistasis), because the details of an epistasis model determine the outcome of the evolution by natural selection. One result shows that natural selection increases or decreases mutational variance, depending on whether the average epistatic effects are positive or negative. This means that the genetic architecture is more determined by the genetic architecture that we start with than by the nature of the selection forces that act upon it. In other words, the evolution of a genetic architecture could be arbitrary with respect to selection.

As a person, [Barbara Stanwyck] was a great deal like the character she played in Ball of Fire, a stripper called Sugarpuss O'Shea. She had a wonderful, free, open quality in that picture, and that's what she was like as a woman. Reclusive by nature, she was happy to just stay home, but she read everything. She got me reading books as a way of life and, if I asked her, would help me out with my acting. We only had one scene together in Titanic—I played her daughter's boyfriend!—so there was a limit to what I could learn by working with her. She taught me what to do with my hands, how to get over my self-consciousness, and how to lower my voice, which I thought was still too high. And she taught me to be decisive with things like entrances. "When you walk in," she told me, "be sure you're standing up straight. Walk in with confidence." She didn't want me to sidle into a scene as if I were ashamed to be in the movie. Make the entrance! Take the scene! But I wasn't going there for acting tutorials.

In the Senate the key leader was Robert Taft of Ohio, son of the former President. Acting quickly, they drafted the so-called Taft-Hartley bill in early 1947. Taft-Hartley was a bold effort to weaken the pro-labor Wagner Act of 1935.

New Deal legislation undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and prevented destitution for millions. New labor laws led to a flourishing of unions and built a strong white middle class. The Social Security Act of 1935 established the principle of cash payments in cases of unemployment, old age, or loss of a family breadwinner, and it did so as a matter of right, not on the basis of individual moral character. But the New Deal also created racial, gender, and class divisions that continue to produce inequities in our society today. Roosevelt’s administration capitulated to white supremacy in ways that still bear bitter fruit. The Civilian Conservation Corps capped Black participation in federally supported work relief at 10 percent of available jobs, though African Americans experienced 80 percent unemployment in northern cities. The National Housing Act of 1934 redoubled the burden on Black neighborhoods by promoting residential segregation and encouraging mortgage redlining. The Wagner Act granted workers the right to organize, but allowed segregated trade unions. Most importantly, in response to threats that southern states would not support the Social Security Act, both agricultural and domestic workers were explicitly excluded from its employment protections. The “southern compromise” left the great majority of African American workers—and a not-insignificant number of poor white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and domestics—with no minimum wage, unemployment protection, old-age insurance, or right to collective bargaining.

In the entr’acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder," said Levin. [...] Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art.

Thus I do think that the challenge is to recognize that the purpose for which we are gathered is to encounter each other as an asceticism and thereby to recognize that the ‘other’ is present to disabuse me of illusion. Whether the ‘other’ is that sister in the house who drives me nuts just because she exists or whether the ‘other’ is the Chapter of the sisters taking the vote or the ‘other’ is the prioress acting in virtue of her office to make a decision, the other is there to disabuse me of illusion; even when the ‘other’ makes a mistake! The fact of the other’s mistake is still there to show me that I am not God, that I do not have the control over life to simply prevent all errors.

Rather, Caesar's proper and limited task is to bring a measure of order to present society, to anticipate in specific acts of judgment (putting-to-rights) such elements of God's final putting-to-rights as can be done within the present age.37 Part of our difficulty in today's world is that we are completely unclear about what it is that governments can do, and should try to do, and how they should go about finding a moral basis for doing it.

Here "faith" and its cognates mean, more or less, faithfulness, loyalty, reliability, trustworthiness, and even, in consequence, something like our word "integrity": the quality of being so fully in tune, all through one's thinking and acting, that others know they are with someone on whom they can lean all their weight. (This is perhaps part of what Revelation means in calling Jesus the "faithful" witness.)23 More particularly, to put it anthropomorphically, someone of utter faithfulness is someone on whom God knows that he can lean all his weight.24 In this sense, of course, none of us (except Jesus himself) is fully trustworthy in the present life.

The gift is the gift of the path to a richer, more responsible humanness; authenticity includes the choice to make an act of will despite desire, not simply bringing desire and will into line. To choose to believe, to choose to continue to believe, to choose to be faithful, loyal, and trustworthy, despite all the pressures to unbelief and disloyalty, is typical of the choices that constitute, or contribute toward, the life of Christian virtue.

Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.

The Pen Made for the White House Presidents come and go, but one thing remains constant in the West Wing BY DAN LEWIS FROM NOW I KNOW PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM VOORHES The pens read “Skilcraft U.S. Government.” And if you have worked for an American government institution, chances are you’ve used one. About $5 million worth of these pens are sold every year (with 60 percent going to the military), and they have quite the story behind them. To start, they’re assembled by the blind. In 1938, in the midst of the Great Depression, the government stepped in to help blind workers, who were already at a competitive disadvantage. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Wagner-O’Day Act, which required that the federal government purchase specific goods manufactured by blind Americans. The law soon included pens. The Skilcraft brand came to be a decade or so later, in 1952. Today, the company employs over 5,500 blind workers in 37 states, producing an arsenal of office supplies, with the pens made in factories in Wisconsin and North Carolina. The pens must be built to the specifications outlined in a 16-page document that was first promulgated more than 50 years ago. Among the requirements? The pens must be able to write continuously for no less than 5,000 feet and in temperatures up to 160 degrees and down to 40 degrees below zero. You know, just in case. Copyright © 2011 by Dan Lewis.

The Wagner Act, or National Labor Relations Act, was passed in reaction to the Supreme Court’s voidance of NRA and its labor codes. It aimed at crushing all employer resistance to labor unions. Anything an employer might do in self-defense became an “unfair labor practice” punishable by the Board. The law not only obliged employers to deal and bargain with the unions designated as the employees’ representative; later Board decisions also made it unlawful to resist the demands of labor union leaders.34

Yet Götterdämmerung is no apocalypse: it envisions a transfer of power, from gods to people. It is also the redress of a wrong, restoring the Ring from the illusory heights to the truthful depths. Wotan, very unlike Hitler, has repented of his megalomania: "I longed in my heart for power ... I acted unfairly… I did not return the ring to the Rhine... The curse that I fed will not flee from me now." The conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, whose father, Hans, was part of the anti-Nazi resistance, once told me: "When I really think about Wagner, I don't discover anything that had to lead to Hitler. And what happens here"—we were looking at the score of Walkure, at Wotan's cries of shame—"is not something that any fascist could have written. Because it is not simplifying. It is a 'giving up' thing. Wagner abused power but hated the state." "Götterdämmerung" is the wrong word for the scenes that unfolded in Berlin during the war's last days: the double suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, the suicides of Josef and Magda Goebbels, the murder of the Goebbels children, the killing of Hitler's dogs.

The Union army's southward march-especially in the Mississippi Valley-stretched supply lines, brought thousands of defenseless ex-slaves under Union protection, and exposed large expanses of occupied territory to Confederate raiders, further multiplying the army's demand for soldiers. On the home front, these new demands sparked violent opposition to federal manpower policies. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed wealthy conscripts to buy their way out of military service by either paying a $300 commutation fee or employing a substitute. Others received hardship exemptions as specified in the act, though political influence rather than genuine need too often determined an applicant's success. Those without money or political influence found the draft especially burdensome. In July, hundreds of New Yorkers, many of the Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors. The riot raised serious questions about the enrollment system and sent Northern politicians scurrying for an alternative to conscription. To even the most politically naive Northerners, the enlistment of black men provided a means to defuse draft resistance at a time when the federal army's need for soldiers was increasing. At the same time, well-publicized battle achievements by black regiments at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, eased popular fears that black men could not fight, mitigated white opposition within army ranks, and stoked the enthusiasm of both recruiters and black volunteers.

government in the lives of white citizens has often been made invisible and has left distortions as to how each group got to where they are, allowing resentments and rivalries to fester. Many may not have realized that the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, like the Social Security Act of 1935 (providing old age insurance) and the Wagner Act (protecting workers from labor abuse), excluded the vast majority of black workers—farm laborers and domestics—at the urging of southern white politicians.

But the presidential Democratic Party, whipsawed between a liberal/labor wing and a Wall Street/New Democrat wing, has not been willing to make it a priority to help working people exercise their rights under the Wagner Act. Even when Democrats had a working majority in Congress, as they did for four years under President Carter, two under Clinton, and two under Obama, the White House refused to spend serious political capital on labor reform.

The hand of government in the lives of white citizens has often been made invisible and has left distortions as to how each group got to where they are, allowing resentments and rivalries to fester. Many may not have realized that the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, like the Social Security Act of 1935 (providing old age insurance) and the Wagner Act (protecting workers from labor abuse), excluded the vast majority of black workers—farm laborers and domestics—at the urging of southern white politicians.

Many may not have realized that the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, like the Social Security Act of 1935 (providing old age insurance) and the Wagner Act (protecting workers from labor abuse), excluded the vast majority of black workers—farm laborers and domestics—at the urging of southern white politicians.

Wagner should have known from the Tichatschek affair that Ludwig was capable of acting with steely determination in order to have his own way. The King had set his heart on having the Rheingold production as soon as possible and was not going to allow anyone to sabotage it.

The dramatic strategy of the show provides a simple and effective means to blend melodrama with farce (which Sondheim claims as his “two favorite forms of theatre because … they are obverse sides of the same coin”).37 Starkly put, the show develops a pattern of first scaring the hell out of its audience and then rescuing the situation through humor, each time by introducing Mrs. Lovett into a situation saturated with Sweeney Todd’s wrenching angst. This scare-rescue pattern happens twice to great effect, at the beginning and end of Act I, but its real payoff is the devastating conclusion, where there is no comic rescue. The denial of this previous pattern greatly intensifies the darkness of the supremely bleak ending, making the show’s musical profile seem operatic to Broadway audiences even though, ironically in this respect, the denouement unfolds with only intermittent singing.38 But the musical dimension of the show is also deliberately operatic, as it interweaves, Wagner-like, a host of recurring motives, mostly related to each other through a common origin in the Dies Irae, from the Catholic requiem mass. The Dies Irae (literally, “Day of Wrath”; see example 7.1) was taken up as a symbol of death and retribution in music throughout the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth (the most important early such use was by Berlioz in his 1830 Symphonie fantastique). Most scene changes bring back “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” which includes both fast and slow versions of the Dies Irae (example 7.1) and builds up to a frenetic, obsessive chorus of “Sweeney, Sweeney.

Gernot Wagner, a student and coauthor, notes the need to use judgment when assessing whether refraining from action reflects status quo bias. More generally, maxims describing human behavior apply in some contexts, but not others. “Status quo bias is a prime example. It is the friend of not acting, and you ignore it at your peril. But we also see ‘action bias.’ Often political leaders just want to be seen as doing something, anything – leading them to want to act, even if no action is the preferred choice.

Pragmatically, there is an evident need for the continuation of many of the functions of the original apostles. This would include church planting, laying good foundations in churches, continuing to oversee those churches, appointing the leaders, giving ongoing fatherly care to leaders, and handling difficult questions that may arise from those churches. There are really only three ways for churches to carry out these functions: 1. Each church is free to act totally independently and to seek God’s mind for its own government and pastoral wisdom, without any help from outside, unless the church may choose to seek it at any particular time. When we started the church which I am still a part of, for example, we were so concerned to be ‘independent’ that we would not even join the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, although we adopted their trust deed and constitution because that would prevent us being purely independent. We were at that time very proud of our ‘independence’! 2. Churches operate under some sort of structured and formal oversight, as in many denominations today, where local church leaders are appointed by and accountable to regional leadership, whether ‘bishops’, ‘superintendents’ or ‘overseers’. It is hard to justify this model from the pages of the New Testament, though we recognize that it developed very early in church history. Even the word episkopos, translated ‘bishop’ or ‘overseer’, which came to be used of those having wider authority and oversight over other leaders and churches, was used in the New Testament as a synonym for the local leaders or elders of a particular church. The three main forms of church government current in the institutional church are Episcopalianism (government by bishops), Presbyterianism (government by local elders) and Congregationalism (government by the church meeting). Each of these is only a partial reflection of the New Testament. Commenting on these forms of government without apostolic ministry, Phil Greenslade says, ‘We assert as our starting point what the other three viewpoints deny: that the apostolic role is as valid and vital today as ever before. This is to agree with the German charismatic theologian, Arnold Bittlinger, when he says “the New Testament nowhere suggests that the apostolic ministry was intended only for first-century Christians”.’39 3. We aim to imitate the New Testament practice of travelling ministries of apostles and prophets, with apostles having their own spheres of responsibility as a result of having planted and laid the foundations in the churches they oversee. Such ministries continue the connection with local churches as a result of fatherly relationships and not denominational election or appointment, recognizing that there will need to be new charismatically gifted and friendship-based relationships continuing into later generations. This is the model that the ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ (to use Peter Wagner’s phrase) is attempting to follow. Though mistakes have been made, including some quite serious ones involving controlling authority, and though those of us involved are still seeking to find our way with the Holy Spirit’s help, it seems to reflect more accurately the New Testament pattern and a present-day outworking of scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4. ‘Is the building finished? Is the Bride ready? Is the Body full-grown, are the saints completely equipped? Has the church attained its ordained unity and maturity? Only if the answer to these questions is “yes” can we dispense with apostolic ministry. But as long as the church is still growing up into Christ, who is its head, this ministry is needed. If the church of Jesus Christ is to grow faster than the twentieth century population explosion, which I assume to be God’s intention, then we will need to produce, recognize and use Pauline apostles.’40