Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party; the Democrats' dominant worldview was once social conservatism and economic liberalism, while populism was its leading characteristic in the rural South. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate in the Progressive Party, beginning a switch of political platforms between the Democratic and Republican Party over the coming decades, leading to Woodrow Wilson being elected as the first fiscally progressive Democrat. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal coalition in the 1930s, the Democratic Party has promoted a social liberal platform, supporting social justice. Well into the 20th century, the party had conservative pro-business and Southern conservative-populist anti-business wings.
The New Deal Coalition of 1932–1964 attracted strong support from voters of recent European extraction—many of whom were Catholics based in the cities. After Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s, the pro-business wing withered outside the South. After the racial turmoil of the 1960s, most Southern whites and many Northern Catholics moved into the Republican Party at the presidential level; the once-powerful labor union element became less supportive after the 1970s. White Evangelicals and Southerners became Republican at the state and local level since the 1990s. People living in metropolitan areas, women and gender minorities, college graduates, racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, such as Jewish Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans and African Americans, tend to support the Democratic Party much more than they support the rival Republican Party; the Democratic Party's philosophy of modern liberalism advocates social and economic equality, along with the welfare state.
It seeks to provide government regulation in the economy. These interventions, such as the introduction of social programs, support for labor unions, affordable college tuitions, moves toward universal health care and equal opportunity, consumer protection and environmental protection form the core of the party's economic policy. Fifteen Democrats have served as President of the United States; the first was President Andrew Jackson, the seventh president and served from 1829 to 1837. The most recent was President Barack Obama, the 44th president and held office from 2009 to 2017. Following the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrats held a majority in the House of Representatives, "trifectas" in 14 states, the mayoralty of numerous major American cities, such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D. C. Twenty-three state governors were Democrats, the Party was the minority party in the Senate and in most state legislatures; as of March 2019, four of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court had been appointed by Democratic presidents.
Democratic Party officials trace its origins to the inspiration of the Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other influential opponents of the Federalists in 1792. That party inspired the Whigs and modern Republicans. Organizationally, the modern Democratic Party arose in the 1830s with the election of Andrew Jackson. Since the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the party has positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party on economic issues, they have been more liberal on civil rights issues since 1948. On foreign policy, both parties have changed position several times; the Democratic Party evolved from the Jeffersonian Republican or Democratic-Republican Party organized by Jefferson and Madison in opposition to the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. The party favored republicanism; the Democratic-Republican Party came to power in the election of 1800. After the War of 1812, the Federalists disappeared and the only national political party left was the Democratic-Republicans.
The era of one-party rule in the United States, known as the Era of Good Feelings, lasted from 1816 until the early 1830s, when the Whig Party became a national political group to rival the Democratic-Republicans. However, the Democratic-Republican Party still had its own internal factions, they split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe and the party faction that supported many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, became the modern Democratic Party. As Norton explains the transformation in 1828: Jacksonians believed the people's will had prevailed. Through a lavishly financed coalition of state parties, political leaders, newspaper editors, a popular movement had elected the president; the Democrats became the nation's first well-organized national party and tight party organization became the hallmark of nineteenth-century American politics. Opposing factions led by Henry Clay helped form the Whig Party; the Democratic Party had a small yet decisive advantage over the Whigs until the 1850s, when the Whigs fell apart over the issue of slavery.
In 1854, angry with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, anti-slavery Dem
Kansas
Kansas is a U. S. state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka and its largest city is Wichita, with its most populated county being Johnson County. Kansas is bordered by Nebraska on the north. Kansas is named after the Kansa Native American tribe; the tribe's name is said to mean "people of the wind" although this was not the term's original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in 1827 with the establishment of Fort Leavenworth; the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery debate. When it was opened to settlement by the U. S. government in 1854 with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state.
Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists prevailed, on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. By 2015, Kansas was one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, corn and soybeans. Kansas, which has an area of 82,278 square miles is the 15th-largest state by area and is the 34th most-populous of the 50 states with a population of 2,911,505. Residents of Kansas are called Kansans. Mount Sunflower is Kansas's highest point at 4,041 feet. For a millennium, the land, Kansas was inhabited by Native Americans; the first European to set foot in present-day Kansas was the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who explored the area in 1541. In 1803, most of modern Kansas was acquired by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Southwest Kansas, was still a part of Spain and the Republic of Texas until the conclusion of the Mexican–American War in 1848, when these lands were ceded to the United States.
From 1812 to 1821, Kansas was part of the Missouri Territory. The Santa Fe Trail traversed Kansas from 1821 to 1880, transporting manufactured goods from Missouri and silver and furs from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Wagon ruts from the trail are still visible in the prairie today. In 1827, Fort Leavenworth became the first permanent settlement of white Americans in the future state; the Kansas–Nebraska Act became law on May 30, 1854, establishing Nebraska Territory and Kansas Territory, opening the area to broader settlement by whites. Kansas Territory stretched all the way to the Continental Divide and included the sites of present-day Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo. Missouri and Arkansas sent settlers into Kansas all along its eastern border; these settlers attempted to sway votes in favor of slavery. The secondary settlement of Americans in Kansas Territory were abolitionists from Massachusetts and other Free-Staters, who attempted to stop the spread of slavery from neighboring Missouri. Directly presaging the American Civil War, these forces collided, entering into skirmishes that earned the territory the name of Bleeding Kansas.
Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861, making it the 34th state to join the United States. By that time the violence in Kansas had subsided, but during the Civil War, on August 21, 1863, William Quantrill led several hundred men on a raid into Lawrence, destroying much of the city and killing nearly 200 people, he was roundly condemned by both the conventional Confederate military and the partisan rangers commissioned by the Missouri legislature. His application to that body for a commission was flatly rejected due to his pre-war criminal record. After the Civil War, many veterans constructed homesteads in Kansas. Many African Americans looked to Kansas as the land of "John Brown" and, led by freedmen like Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, began establishing black colonies in the state. Leaving southern states in the late 1870s because of increasing discrimination, they became known as Exodusters. At the same time, the Chisholm Trail was opened and the Wild West-era commenced in Kansas.
Wild Bill Hickok was a marshal at Hays and Abilene. Dodge City was another wild cowboy town, both Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp worked as lawmen in the town. In one year alone, eight million head of cattle from Texas boarded trains in Dodge City bound for the East, earning Dodge the nickname "Queen of the Cowtowns." In response to demands of Methodists and other evangelical Protestants, in 1881 Kansas became the first U. S. state to adopt a constitutional amendment prohibiting all alcoholic beverages, repealed in 1948. Kansas is bordered by Nebraska on the north; the state is divided into 105 counties with 628 cities, is located equidistant from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The geographic center of the 48 contiguous states is in Smith County near Lebanon; until 1989, the Meades Ranch Triangulation Station in Osborne County was the geodetic center of North America: the central reference point for all maps of North America. The geographic center of Kansas is in Barton County. Kansas is underlain by a sequence of horizontal to westward dipping sedimentary rocks.
A sequence of Mississippian and Permian rocks outcrop in the eastern and southern part of the state
War crime
A war crime is an act that constitutes a serious violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility. Examples of war crimes include intentionally killing civilians or prisoners, destroying civilian property, taking hostages, performing a perfidy, using child soldiers, declaring that no quarter will be given, violating the principles of distinction and proportionality, such as strategic bombing of civilian populations; the concept of war crimes emerged at the turn of the twentieth century when the body of customary international law applicable to warfare between sovereign states was codified. Such codification occurred at the national level, such as with the publication of the Lieber Code in the United States, at the international level with the adoption of the treaties during the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Moreover, trials in national courts during this period further helped clarify the law. Following the end of World War II, major developments in the law occurred.
Numerous trials of Axis war criminals established the Nuremberg principles, such as notion that war crimes constituted crimes defined by international law. Additionally, the Geneva Conventions in 1949 defined new war crimes and established that states could exercise universal jurisdiction over such crimes. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, following the creation of several international courts, additional categories of war crimes applicable to armed conflicts other than those between states, such as civil wars, were defined; the trial of Peter von Hagenbach by an ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire in 1474 was the first "international" war crimes trial, of command responsibility. He was convicted and beheaded for crimes that "he as a knight was deemed to have a duty to prevent", although he had argued that he was "just following orders". In 1865, Henry Wirz, a Confederate States Army officer, was held accountable by a military tribunal and hanged for the appalling conditions at Andersonville Prison, where many Union prisoners of war died during the American Civil War.
The Hague Conventions were international treaties negotiated at the First and Second Peace Conferences at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1899 and 1907 and were, along with the Geneva Conventions, among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the nascent body of secular international law. The Geneva Conventions are four related treaties adopted and continuously expanded from 1864 to 1949 that represent a legal basis and framework for the conduct of war under international law; every single member state of the United Nations has ratified the conventions, which are universally accepted as customary international law, applicable to every situation of armed conflict in the world. However, the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions adopted in 1977 containing the most pertinent and virulent protections of international humanitarian law for persons and objects in modern warfare are still not ratified by a number of States continuously engaged in armed conflicts, namely the United States, India, Iraq and others.
Accordingly, states retain different values with regard to wartime conduct. Some signatories have violated the Geneva Conventions in a way which either uses the ambiguities of law or political maneuvering to sidestep the laws' formalities and principles. Three conventions were revised and expanded with the fourth one added in 1949: First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field. Second Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea. Third Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Two Additional Protocols were adopted in 1977 with the third one added in 2005, completing and updating the Geneva Conventions: Protocol I relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts. Protocol II relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts.
Protocol III relating to the Adoption of an Additional Distinctive Emblem. A small number of German military personnel of the First World War were tried in 1921 by the German Supreme Court for alleged war crimes; the modern concept of war crime was further developed under the auspices of the Nuremberg Trials based on the definition in the London Charter, published on August 8, 1945. Along with war crimes the charter defined crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, which are committed during wars and in concert with war crimes. Known as the Tokyo Trial, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal or as the Tribunal, it was convened on May 3, 1946 to try the leaders of the Empire of Japan for three types of crimes: "Class A", "Class B", "Class C", committed during World War II. On July 1, 2002, the International Crimi
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke was an Irish statesman born in Dublin, as well as an author, political theorist and philosopher, who after moving to London in 1750 served as a member of parliament between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons with the Whig Party. Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state; these views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society. Burke criticized British treatment of the American colonies, including through its taxation policies, he supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, though he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. Burke is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company and for his staunch opposition to the French Revolution. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society, condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it.
This led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party, which he dubbed the "Old Whigs", as opposed to the pro-French Revolution "New Whigs", led by Charles James Fox. In the nineteenth century, Burke was praised by both liberals. Subsequently, in the twentieth century he became regarded as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism. Burke was born in Ireland, his mother Mary née Nagle was a Roman Catholic who hailed from a déclassé County Cork family, whereas his father, a successful solicitor, was a member of the Church of Ireland. The Burke dynasty descends from an Anglo-Norman knight surnamed de Burgh who arrived in Ireland in 1185 following Henry II of England's 1171 invasion of Ireland and is among the chief "Gall" families that assimilated into Gaelic society, becoming "more Irish than the Irish themselves". Burke adhered to his father's faith and remained a practising Anglican throughout his life, unlike his sister Juliana, brought up as and remained a Roman Catholic.
His political enemies accused him of having been educated at the Jesuit College of St. Omer, near Calais, of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership of the Catholic Church would disqualify him from public office; as Burke told Frances Crewe: Mr. Burke's Enemies endeavoured to convince the World that he had been bred up in the Catholic Faith, & that his Family were of it, & that he himself had been educated at St. Omer—but this was false, as his father was a regular practitioner of the Law at Dublin, which he could not be unless of the Established Church: & it so happened that though Mr. B—was twice at Paris, he never happened to go through the Town of St. Omer. After being elected to the House of Commons, Burke was required to take the oath of Allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy, declare against transubstantiation. Although never denying his Irishness, Burke described himself as "an Englishman". According to the historian J. C. D. Clark, this was in an age "before'Celtic nationalism' sought to make Irishness and Englishness incompatible".
As a child he sometimes spent time away from the unhealthy air of Dublin with his mother's family in the Blackwater Valley in County Cork. He received his early education at a Quaker school in Ballitore, County Kildare, some 67 kilometres from Dublin, he remained in correspondence with his schoolmate from there, Mary Leadbeater, the daughter of the school's owner, throughout his life. In 1744, Burke started at Trinity College Dublin, a Protestant establishment, which up until 1793, did not permit Catholics to take degrees. In 1747, he set up a debating society, "Edmund Burke's Club", which, in 1770, merged with TCD's Historical Club to form the College Historical Society; the minutes of the meetings of Burke's Club remain in the collection of the Historical Society. Burke graduated from Trinity in 1748. Burke's father wanted him to read Law, with this in mind he went to London in 1750, where he entered the Middle Temple, before soon giving up legal study to travel in Continental Europe. After eschewing the Law, he pursued a livelihood through writing.
The late Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History was published in 1752 and his collected works appeared in 1754. This provoked Burke into writing his first published work, A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind, appearing in Spring 1756. Burke imitated Bolingbroke's style and ideas in a reductio ad absurdum of his arguments for atheistic rationalism, in order to demonstrate their absurdity. Burke claimed that Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion could apply to all social and civil institutions as well. Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton thought that the work was genuinely by Bolingbroke rather than a satire. All the reviews of the work were positive, with critics appreciative of Burke's quality of writing; some reviewers failed to notice the ironic nature of the book, which led to Burke stating in the preface to the second edition that it was a satire. Richard Hurd believed that Burke's imitation was near-perfect and that this defeated his purpose: an ironist "should take care by a constant exaggeration to
Charles Sumner
Charles Sumner was an American politician and United States Senator from Massachusetts. As an academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the anti-slavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the U. S. Senate during the American Civil War, he worked hard to destroy the Confederacy, free all the slaves, keep on good terms with Europe. During Reconstruction, he fought to minimize the power of the ex-Confederates and guarantee equal rights to the freedmen, he fell into a dispute with fellow Republican President Ulysses Grant on the question of taking control of Santo Domingo. Grant's allies stripped Sumner of his power in the Senate in 1871, he joined the Liberal Republican movement in an effort to defeat Grant's reelection in 1872. Sumner changed his political party several times as anti-slavery coalitions rose and fell in the 1830s and 1840s before coalescing in the 1850s as the Republican Party, the affiliation with which he became best known.
He devoted his enormous energies to the destruction of what Republicans called the Slave Power, the influence over the federal government of Southern slave owners who sought the continuation and expansion of slavery. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman, Democrat Preston Brooks, nearly killed Sumner on the Senate floor two days after Sumner delivered an intensely anti-slavery speech called "The Crime Against Kansas." In the speech, Sumner characterized the attacker's cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, a Democrat, as a pimp for slavery. The episode played a major role in the coming of the Civil War. During the war, Sumner was a leader of the Radical Republican faction that criticized President Abraham Lincoln for being too moderate on the South. One of the most learned statesmen of the era, he specialized in foreign affairs, worked with Abraham Lincoln to keep the British and the French from intervening on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Sumner's expertise and energy made him a powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
As the chief Radical leader in the Senate during Reconstruction, Sumner fought hard to provide equal civil and voting rights for the freedmen on the grounds that "consent of the governed" was a basic principle of American republicanism, to block ex-Confederates from power so they would not reverse the gains made from the Union's victory in the Civil War. Sumner, teaming with House leader Thaddeus Stevens, battled Andrew Johnson's reconstruction plans and sought to impose a Radical program on the South. Although Sumner forcefully advocated the annexation of Alaska in the Senate, he was against the annexation of the Dominican Republic known by the name of its capital, Santo Domingo. After leading Senators to defeat President Ulysses S. Grant's Santo Domingo Treaty in 1870, Sumner broke with Grant, denounced him in such terms that reconciliation was impossible. In 1871, President Grant and his Secretary of State Hamilton Fish retaliated. Sumner had become convinced that Grant was a corrupt despot and that the success of Reconstruction policies called for new national leadership.
Sumner bitterly opposed Grant's reelection by supporting the Liberal Republican candidate Horace Greeley in 1872 and lost his power inside the Republican Party. Less than two years he died in office. Sumner was born on Irving Street in Boston on January 7, 1811, he was the son of Charles Pinckney Sumner, a liberal Harvard-educated lawyer and early proponent of racially integrated schools, who shocked 19th-century Boston by opposing anti-miscegenation laws. His father had been born in poverty and his mother shared a similar background and worked as a seamstress prior to her marriage. Sumner's parents were described as exceedingly undemonstrative, his father practiced law and served as Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1806 to 1807 and again 1810 to 1811, but his legal practice was only moderately successful, throughout Sumner's childhood, his family teetered on the edge of the middle class. In 1825 Charles P. Sumner became Sheriff of Suffolk County, a position he held until his death in 1838.
The family attended Trinity Church. Sumner's father hated slavery and told Sumner that freeing the slaves would "do us no good" unless they were treated by society. Sumner was a close associate of William Ellery Channing, an influential Unitarian minister in Boston. Channing believed. Expanding on this argument, Sumner concluded that environment had "an important, if not controlling influence" in shaping individuals. By creating a society where "knowledge and religion" took precedence, "the most forlorn shall grow into forms of unimagined strength and beauty." Moral law, he believed, was as important for governments as it was for individuals, legal institutions that inhibited one's ability to grow—like slavery or segregation—were evil. While Sumner viewed contemporary society critically, his faith in reform was unshakable; when accused of utopianism, he replied "The Utopias of one age have been the realities of the next."The increased income Charles P. Sumner enjoyed after becoming Sheriff enabled him to afford higher education for his children.
Charles Sumner attended the Boston Latin School, where he counted Robert Charles Winthrop, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel Francis Smith, Wendell Phillips, among his closest friends. He graduated in 1830 from Harvard College, where he lived in Hollis Hall, in 1834 from Harvard Law School where he became a protégé of Joseph Story. At Harvard, he was a membe
Thomas Hart Benton (politician)
Thomas Hart Benton, nicknamed "Old Bullion", was a United States Senator from Missouri. A member of the Democratic Party, he was an architect and champion of westward expansion by the United States, a cause that became known as Manifest Destiny. Benton served in the Senate from 1821 to 1851, becoming the first member of that body to serve five terms. Benton was born in North Carolina. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he established a law practice and plantation near Nashville, Tennessee, he served as an aide to General Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812 and settled in St. Louis, after the war. Missouri became a state in 1821 and Benton won election as one of its inaugural pair of United States Senators; the Democratic-Republican Party fractured after the 1824 and Benton became a Democratic leader in the Senate, serving as an important ally of President Jackson and President Martin Van Buren. He supported Jackson during the Bank War and proposed a land payment law that inspired Jackson's Specie Circular executive order.
Benton's prime concern was the westward expansion of the United States. He called for the annexation of the Republic of Texas, accomplished in 1845, he pushed for compromise in the partition of Oregon Country with the British and supported the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which divided the territory along the 49th parallel. He authored the first Homestead Act, which granted land to settlers willing to farm it. Though he owned slaves, Benton came to oppose the institution of slavery after the Mexican–American War, he opposed the Compromise of 1850 as too favorable to pro-slavery interests; this stance damaged Benton's popularity in Missouri, the state legislature denied him re-election in 1851. Benton won election to the United States House of Representatives in 1852 but was defeated for re-election in 1854 after he opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Benton's son-in-law, John C. Frémont, won the 1856 Republican Party nomination for president, but Benton voted for James Buchanan and remained a loyal Democrat until his death in 1858.
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Harts Mill, North Carolina, near the present-day town of Hillsborough. His father Jesse Benton, a wealthy lawyer and landowner, died in 1790, his grandfather Samuel Benton was born in Worcester and settled in the Province of North Carolina. Thomas H. Benton studied law at the University of North Carolina where he was a member of the Philanthropic Society, but in 1799 he was dismissed from school after admitting to stealing money from fellow students; as Benton was leaving campus on the day he was expelled, he turned to the students who were jeering him and said, "I am leaving here now but damn you, you will hear from me again." He left school to manage the Benton family estate, but historians posit that Benton used the events as motivation to prove himself worthy in adulthood. Attracted by the opportunities in the West, the young Benton moved the family to a 40,000 acre holding near Nashville, Tennessee. Here he established a plantation with accompanying schools and mills.
His experience as a pioneer instilled a devotion to Jeffersonian democracy which continued through his political career. He continued his legal education and was admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1805, in 1809 served a term as state senator, he attracted the attention of Tennessee's "first citizen" Andrew Jackson, under whose tutelage he remained during the Tennessee years. At the outbreak of the War of 1812, Jackson made Benton his aide-de-camp, with a commission as a lieutenant colonel. Benton was assigned to represent Jackson's interests to military officials in Washington D. C.. In 1813 Benton engaged in a frontier brawl with Jackson. After the war, in 1815, Benton moved his estate to the newly opened Missouri Territory; as a Tennessean, he was under Jackson's shadow. He settled in St. Louis, where he practiced law and edited the Missouri Enquirer, the second major newspaper west of the Mississippi River. In 1817 during a court case he and opposing attorney Charles Lucas accused each other of lying.
When Lucas ran into him at the voting polls he accused Benton of being delinquent in paying his taxes and thus should not be allowed to vote. Benton accused Lucas of being Lucas challenged Benton to a duel, they had a duel on Bloody Island with Lucas being shot through the throat and Benton grazed in the knee. Upon bleeding profusely, Lucas said he was satisfied and Benton released him from completing the duel. However, rumors circulated that Benton, a better shot, had made the rules of 30 feet apart to favor him. Benton challenged Lucas to a rematch on Bloody Island with shots fired from nine feet. Lucas was shot close to the heart and before dying told Benton, "I do not or cannot forgive you." As death approached Lucas stated, "I can forgive you—I do forgive you." The Missouri Compromise of 1820 made the territory into a state, Benton was elected as one of its first senators. The presidential election of 1824 was a four way struggle between Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford, Henry Clay.
Benton supported Clay. Jackson received a plurality but not a majority of votes, meaning that the election was thrown to the House of Representatives, which would choose among the top 3 candidates. Clay was the fourth vote getter, he was Speaker of the House, tried to maneuver the election in favor of Adams. Benton refused Clay's requests that he, despite not being in the House, support Adams, declaring that Jackson was the clear choice of the people; when Missouri's lone representative John Scott wrote
Nazism
National Socialism, more known as Nazism, is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – the National Socialist German Workers' Party – in Nazi Germany, of other far-right groups with similar aims. Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but incorporated fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, eugenics into its creed, its extreme nationalism came from Pan-Germanism and the Völkisch movement prominent in the German nationalism of the time, it was influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's "cult of violence", "at the heart of the movement."Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a German homogeneous society based on racial purity which represented a people's community.
The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either community aliens or "inferior" races. The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization; the Nazi Party's precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party – to attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats and the Communists – and Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organization.
The National Socialist Program or "25 Points" was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while supporting land reform and the nationalization of some industries. In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined the anti-Semitism and anti-Communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for representative democracy and his belief in Germany's right to territorial expansion; the Nazi Party won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, making them the largest party in the legislature by far, but still short of an outright majority. Because none of the parties were willing or able to put together a coalition government, in 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Von Hindenburg, through the support and connivance of traditional conservative nationalists who believed that they could control him and his party. Through the use of emergency presidential decrees by Hindenburg, a change in the Weimar Constitution which allowed the Cabinet to rule by direct decree, bypassing both Hindenburg and the Reichstag, the Nazis had soon established a one-party state.
The Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel functioned as the paramilitary organizations of the Nazi Party. Using the SS for the task, Hitler purged the party's more and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives, including the leadership of the SA. After the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was the dictator of Nazi Germany, known as the "Third Reich", under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirable" elements were marginalized, imprisoned or murdered. Many millions of people were exterminated in a genocide which became known as the Holocaust during World War II, including around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Following Germany's defeat in World War II and the discovery of the full extent of the Holocaust, Nazi ideology became universally disgraced.
It is regarded as immoral and evil, with only a few fringe racist groups referred to as neo-Nazis, describing themselves as followers of National Socialism. The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei for which they used the acronym NSDAP; the term "Nazi" was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backwards farmer or peasant, characterizing an awkward and clumsy person. In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Ignatz – Ignatz being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged. In the 1920s, political opponents of the NSDAP in the German labour movement seized on this and – using the earlier abbreviated term "Sozi" for Sozialist as an example – shortened NSDAP's name, Nationalsozialistische, to the dismissive "Nazi", in order to associate them with the derogatory use of the term mentioned above; the first use of the term "Nazi" by the National Socialists occurred in 1926 in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi.
In Goebbels' pamphlet, the word "Nazi" only appears when linked with the word "Sozi" as an abbreviation of
