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Is Social-Media Censorship a Crime? - WSJ
By Professor Hamburger
Will there be legal consequences for government officials, for the companies, or for their personnel who cooperate in the gov-tech censorship of dissent on Covid-19, election irregularities or other matters? Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.
Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
This post-Civil War statute responded to the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan and similar private organizations. Then as now, government officers sometimes relied on private allies to accomplish what they couldn’t—sometimes violently, sometimes more subtly. Whether for government officers or cooperating private parties, Section 241 makes conspiracy to violate civil rights a crime.
Section 241 was long applied cautiously—for instance to protect against involuntary servitude and abuses of detained persons. But now it is being applied more expansively. Last year a federal grand jury indicted Douglass Mackey under Section 241 for allegedly interfering with the right to vote by coordinating with four unindicted co-conspirators to distribute memes claiming that voters could cast ballots for Hillary Clinton via text message or hashtag. (Mr. Mackey protests that his memes were satire and thus constitutionally protected speech.)
Because the First Amendment doesn’t bar private parties from independently suppressing speech, Section 241 would apply to tech censorship only if government officers, acting as part of a conspiracy, have violated the Constitution. Doctrine on Section 241 requires this underlying constitutional violation to be clear. But clarity isn’t elusive. The type of suppression most clearly barred by the First Amendment was the 17th-century English censorship imposed partly through cooperative private entities—universities and the Stationers’ Company, the printers trade guild.
Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts. There would be no purpose to a Bill of Rights if government could evade it by using private entities to do its dirty work. As the Supreme Court put it in Frost & Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Commission (1926), “It is inconceivable that guaranties embedded in the Constitution of the United States may thus be manipulated out of existence.”
The First Amendment’s text confirms the unconstitutionality of such workarounds. Any “prohibiting” of the free exercise of religion violates the amendment. In contrast, a mere “abridging” of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional. The government thus violates the latter merely by abridging or reducing it.
Little coercion or even economic pressure is necessary for a free-exercise violation. But free-speech violations, at least according to the text, don’t need even a gentle prohibition.
The history, logic and text underscore the unconstitutionality of returning to 17th-century-style censorship through private cooperation. The violation is all the clearer because tech cooperation often occurs in the shadow of explicit or hinted government threats—say, to tighten tech’s regulatory framework.
The other main issue in prosecutions under Section 241 is specific intent. But most of the tech companies seem to have the specific intent to work with the government in suppressing speech. A prosecutor wouldn’t have to show that private participants self-consciously understood the unconstitutionality of what the government was doing. Yet it would be relevant that some private participants recognized they were helping the government accomplish what in the government might be an unconstitutional act. As Renee De Resta of the Stanford Internet Observatory acknowledged on video, private assistance was necessary because there were “very real First Amendment questions” about what the government could do by itself. The observatory is part of a consortium, the Election Integrity Partnership, that developed government expectations of censorship into specific requests.
None of this is to predict what courts will do with criminal charges under Section 241. Nor is it to say that the next administration would or should bring conspiracy prosecutions. That will depend on the administration and the particulars of each case. But at least some those involved in the censorship—whether in government or the private sector—may eventually face sobering legal issues.
Such accountability is constitutionally desirable—not for reasons of retribution but because without accountability, the censorship will persist. The platforms probably will reassure their directors, officers and censorship review-board members that there’s little to worry about. That may turn out to be correct. Section 241 is sufficiently broad that prosecutors should hesitate to pursue it in marginal cases.
But there’s nothing marginal about the most massive system of censorship in the nation’s history. If the gov-tech partnership to suppress speech isn’t a conspiracy to interfere in the enjoyment of the freedom of speech, what is?
Government officials have little excuse. And after this fall’s revelations—ranging from the portal for Homeland Security censorship requests to the FBI’s role in suppressing information about the Hunter Biden laptop—company employees can no longer plead ignorance about government involvement. As for the companies, they have been saying the censorship is their editorial choice—so can they now avoid the problem by saying they buckled under threat?
The companies and individuals involved in the censorship need to decide where they stand. Perhaps it is time for them to distance themselves from the censorship. Are they comfortable with a conspiracy to violate civil rights? Even if that doesn’t bother them, are they willing to risk prosecution? They may assume, with some justification, that the Justice Department will hesitate to prosecute, even in a future administration. But would you bet the farm on that?
Mr. Hamburger teaches at Columbia Law School and is CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
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Why Did Black Georgians Vote for Raphael Warnock?
There are plenty of post-mortems about Raphael Warnock’s defeat of Republican candidate Herschel Walker in the runoff for the Senate seat in Georgia.
But let’s ask why voters, particularly Black voters, would send Warnock to represent them for another six years in the U.S. Senate.
The Georgia electorate is around 30% Black, and 90% of them voted for Warnock.
What are these Black voters thinking about?
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Get Ready for Republican Oversight
The House committee I’m slated to head will conduct serious investigations and propose real reforms.
By James Comer
Democrats’ unchecked one-party rule over the past two years has resulted in multiple crises abroad and at home. Americans have made clear they want accountability in Washington, and Republicans are ready to deliver.
On every front, President Biden’s policies have been a disaster. Americans are facing historic inflation, skyrocketing energy costs, the worst border crisis in U.S. history, and surging fentanyl overdoses. They’ve witnessed our nation’s standing on the world stage plummet after the Afghanistan withdrawal. Students are suffering from acute learning loss and mental-health struggles because teachers unions and Democratic politicians worked to keep schools closed.
Governmental transparency also suffered, abetting these disastrous policies. Under Democratic control, the House Oversight Committee targeted American industry instead of fulfilling its primary job of providing Americans governmental transparency. Democrats’ inordinate focus on things like climate pledges made by U.S. oil and gas companies shielded the administration from meaningful oversight—as is made evident by the F grade the Oversight Committee received from the nonpartisan Lugar Center.
That will change in January when the GOP assumes its House majority. In the new Congress, Republicans will return the committee to its proper role: rooting out waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in the federal government. Committee members will conduct credible oversight, identify problems, and propose reforms. Here are some of our top priorities:
• Border and fentanyl crises. We will continue our investigation of the president’s radical immigration agenda, which has created the worst border crisis in U.S. history. The investigation began in February 2021 when congressional digging and media reporting shed light on how Mr. Biden’s policies aren’t preventing human smuggling, drug cartel operations, the flow of deadly drugs such as fentanyl into American communities, and the flood of illegal immigrants across the border in flagrant violation of immigration law. Not only has the administration failed to secure the border, it is diverting nearly $600 million intended for public health to pay for its self-inflicted national-security and public-safety crisis.
• Pandemic relief fraud. We owe it to Americans to identify how $560 billion—as I’ve estimated from watchdog, agency and media reports—spent under the guise of pandemic relief were lost to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement. The Biden administration has allowed fraud to run rampant within federal assistance programs. Even after the pandemic abated and many states reopened, officials pushed for more inflation-inducing government spending. Reporting also indicates that states and localities are using Covid relief funds meant to address learning loss for unrelated, politically tinged expenditures such as electric buses and controversial ideologies. Republicans will ensure that the remaining money goes to helping children harmed by localities and states’ adherence to remote learning and addressing learning loss.
• Afghanistan withdrawal. The Biden administration’s botched exit led to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and left the Afghan military confused and unprepared to defend the country. As a result, the Taliban seized American military equipment and nearly all of the progress made for women’s rights in the country was reversed. We began an investigation in August 2021 into the administration’s failure to conduct a safe withdrawal and the many consequences for national security. We plan to continue it.
• Energy crisis. The president’s war on U.S.-made fossil fuels has killed well-paying jobs in energy and driven up gas and energy prices. Yet even as Americans struggle to make ends meet, Mr. Biden has refused to unleash U.S. energy production, and instead has begged foreign dictators to pump more oil with meager price effects. Media reports say the president tried to work out a deal for Saudi Arabia to increase production ahead of the midterms. House Republicans will continue our investigation, which began in May 2022, into Mr. Biden’s efforts to diminish domestic energy production as part of his administration’s radical climate agenda and how he has jeopardized American energy independence.
• Covid origins. Discovering the origin of Covid-19 is vital to protecting Americans from future pandemics. Evidence continues to mount that the virus originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. U.S. taxpayer dollars were funneled to the Wuhan lab to conduct gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, and it seems that Anthony Fauci knew that the lab-leak theory was likely true, even as he dismissed the possibility in public. We will continue to follow the facts to determine what could have been done differently to guard against the harms Americans endured during the pandemic.
• Biden family’s business schemes. Evidence obtained by committee Republicans released in September 2022 revealed Joe Biden lied to the American people when he said, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” The Biden family business model is built on Mr. Biden’s political career and the connections he has created, which have bettered the fortunes of his family, particularly his son Hunter Biden. To the detriment of American interests, Joe Biden’s family traded on his name for profit around the world. If Mr. Biden’s family members have deals with foreign adversaries, it could compromise his decision-making as president in a way that threatens national security.
With the power of the gavel in Republican hands, Americans will finally get some of the answers, transparency and accountability they deserve—as well as real solutions. Based on our oversight work, House Republicans will propose reforms that can ease these crises and stop future abuses. We will use every tool at our disposal to make the federal government efficient, effective and accountable.
Mr. Comer, a Kentucky Republican, is chairman-elect of the House Oversight and Reform Committee
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I have said for years, if progressive Democrats say it, it is so and they also believe they can drink their bath water.
It took centuries but the parties have finally switched allegiances. Democrats now represent the "fat cats" and Republicans represent "deplorables" and Bubbas. The Democrats have become the sponsors of the intellectuals who have done tremendous damage to our nation and the Republicans favor those who fight and protect our country so the intellectuals can ruin it.
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Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns
If your views by definition are enlightened and progressive, why should you bother understanding those of the other side?
By Barton SwaimFollow
The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class. The dispute is over suburban and minority voters. The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP. Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.
That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves. Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism. Which on its face makes sense. If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb. Who needs self-reflection?
We can start to understand the Democrats’ predicament by ridding ourselves of a set of metaphors. For a decade or more, we’ve been told that left and right live in “silos” or “bubbles” or “echo chambers” or “information cocoons.” The left watch MSNBC and read the New York Times, and the right watch Fox News and listen to talk radio.
Exacerbating this state of affairs, we’re told, are social-media platforms whose algorithms give politically attuned users only content they’re likely to agree with. Facile claims to the contrary, Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms don’t have this effect. A 2019 study, “Are Filter Bubbles Real?” by Axel Bruns of Queensland University Technology in Australia surveys a wide array of evidence and finds that social-media users on all sides get plenty of exposure to content with which they disagree. “Ironically,” Mr. Bruns writes in an aside, “echo chamber and filter bubble concepts may have become so popular with some journalists, media critics, and politicians because members of these professional classes are genuinely more likely to inhabit an information cocoon of sorts.”
In any case, the silo/bubble metaphor doesn’t describe American politics in the 2020s for the simple reason that there is no silo or bubble. Or if there is, it’s very large and almost exclusively populated by adherents of the smart-people party.
If you’re on the right, you simply can’t isolate yourself from the habits and attitudes of left-liberal progressivism. They are everywhere. The most determined imbiber of right-wing opinion still watches television and movies and reads the mainstream press. The left-liberal outlook is expressed everywhere in these media, and generally it isn’t expressed as viewpoint but as established fact.
The conservative voter who follows nothing but right-wing accounts on social media still sees CNN as a captive audience at airports. He advises his college-age children as they negotiate campus environments in which they’re expected to state their “pronouns” and declare themselves “allies” of the “LGBTQ2SIA+ community.” However scornful of left-wing opinion he may be, his employer still subjects him to diversity training. He attends a concert by the local symphony orchestra and has to listen to a four-minute lecture about systemic racism or climate change before the music starts. He can’t watch a pro football game without enduring little pronouncements of wokeness. The right-winger may get 100% of his news from Republican-leaning news sites but still has to be vigilant as his 5-year-old browses the children’s section of the local public library.
There is no bubble, no silo, for such a person.
The urban-dwelling knowledge-class progressive experiences few such dissonant moments. So pervasive are the opinions of left-liberal progressivism throughout American culture that the adherent of that worldview may roam freely in it with minimal disquiet. The TV ads that subtly legitimize the latest sexual identity; the lefty sermonettes intoned at public events; the movies and sitcoms that virtually all accept trendy orthodoxies; the race-fixated version of American history promoted in public schools—these the holder of conventional progressive opinions can absorb almost without noticing it.
The left-liberal outlook has triumphed across American culture—in corporate boardrooms, in government agencies, in sports and entertainment institutions, in K-12 education bureaucracies, in universities and in media organizations. But that is precisely what has robbed progressives, especially those in the political class and in the media, of any ability to criticize themselves or doubt their own righteousness. They don’t engage with serious arguments advanced by the other side. They live in a world in which it is possible to pass through a month without encountering much in the way of serious conservative opinion. When they do encounter a conservative view, it is precategorized as “fringe” or “extreme” by the calm, omniscient NPR voice that relates its content.
And so progressives have become, if I could put it bluntly, incurious and lazy. Every conservative journalist born in the last 70 or 80 years has, early in his career, come to the sad realization that liberal writers and intellectuals, the people conservatives are so careful to read and react to, don’t actually read conservatives or know much about the right. Their attitude recalls that wonderful line in “Casablanca” when Ugarte (Peter Lorre) asks Rick (Humphrey Bogart), “You despise me, don’t you?”
Rick’s answer: “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.”
In the early 2000s, the Bush administration’s critics in Congress and the media showed no interest in understanding the neoconservative outlook that supposedly drove the Iraq War. Preposterous caricatures and badly informed theorizing were enough. Today, the left’s politicos and journalists, with a small number of exceptions, have still made no effort to understand the strangest and most surprising turn in politics in many decades: the election of Donald Trump. Russian meddling, “collusion” with Vladimir Putin, fear of nonwhite people, the ignorant reaction of poor white opium addicts, a resurgence of fascism—any explanation was OK as long as it didn’t involve self-reflection.
Something about Mr. Trump gave Democrats and liberal journalists all the emotional license they needed to discount, once and for all, any possibility that a Republican might have a point. No party that could nominate Mr. Trump deserved further thought; the GOP had, in their eyes, defenestrated what was left of its legitimacy.
Consider the past two years of Democratic governance. A slender majority in the U.S. House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate somehow led Democrats to believe they had no opposition to speak of. At times they seemed literally to believe this, as when Sen. Bernie Sanders and others fulminated against his Democratic colleagues Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for resisting President Biden’s so-called Build Back Better bill—as if the bill had two opponents and not 52.
Democrats and their backers in the news media, insisting on the infallibility of science, doubled down on onerous Covid restrictions long after it was clear that shutdowns, school closures and mask mandates were futile and destructive. In July of this year Anthony Fauci said his only regret is that he didn’t recommend “much, much more stringent restrictions” in the spring of 2020. Even now, long after the views of antimasking and antishutdown protesters have been largely vindicated on the available evidence, long after fans of China’s draconian restrictionism have been disgraced by the reality of China’s failure, no one has offered an apology or an admission of error.
The pullout from Afghanistan was a stupendous debacle, but virtually no Democrat in Congress or the administration could be found to hint that the thing had been less than ideal. Violent crime has returned to major cities, but the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and elected Democrats have treated the matter as though it were an invention of conservative media. Massive levels of illegal immigration at the southern border, too, are treated by Democrats as though the whole business is made up.
On economics, Republicans warned the administration in early 2021 about the danger that trillions in spending would inflate the currency. Their warnings were ignored. Inflation exploded, and the administration denied it. In August 2022 President Biden asserted that inflation was “zero percent.” He was, absurdly, comparing that month’s prices to the previous month’s, ignoring everything that happened before July.
A global energy shortage has sent gas and electricity prices skyward. Congressional Democrats and the administration might easily have backed off their green commitments, promoted fracking and increased domestic oil production, at least on a temporary basis. That would have brought prices down, which was the only outcome Mr. Biden and other elected Democrats appeared to care about. I am not aware that such a policy change was ever considered.
Rarely in politics does anyone admit fault. You don’t expect high-ranking members of either party to acknowledge straightforwardly that they were wrong about anything. But people sometimes adjust, even if they don’t admit they’re adjusting. After the 2022 midterm elections, in which Democrats outperformed expectations but still lost the U.S. House, the president was asked what, in light of the fact that three quarters of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction, he plans to do differently in the future. His reply: “Nothing.” You can discount Mr. Biden’s words for senescence, but that answer expressed perfectly the solipsistic self-confidence of his party.
Even if the Democrats had been crushed in the 2022 midterm elections, they would have been unable to adjust. Their cultural dominance discourages them from changing course, which is why they can be counted on to invent exogenous reasons for electoral defeats: an allegedly racist TV ad in 1988, shenanigans in Florida in 2000, faulty voting machines in Ohio in 2004, collusion with Russia in 2016. Mr. Trump adopted this custom with abandon in 2020, but Republicans, who aren’t encouraged by elite culture to think themselves infallible, usually blame each other for electoral losses. Hence the 2013 autopsy, as wrongheaded as it was. There is no Democratic correlative to such a document.
Democrats will hotly contest this analysis of their mindset and behavior. They will note that Republicans, too, think themselves infallible, and conservatives discount the views of their critics.
And they do—sometimes. But Republicans and conservatives, when they are empowered and can make decisions, can’t depend on elite society backing them up. If a Republican official somewhere expresses a view falling outside the liberal conventional wisdom, that official can expect opposition from every segment of educated elite society—Hollywood actors, Fortune 500 boardrooms, university-based experts and so on. Blowback from so many sources isn’t easy to take, and in that case the Republican official will often, perhaps usually, back down.
But this objection—the objection that Republicans often behave peremptorily—misses the point. The GOP is, increasingly, the party of the uneducated, of the uncredentialed worker who lacks proper data and nuance. Surely it is the educated voter, the respecter of scientific argumentation and informed debate, who bears a special responsibility to consider contrary views. It’s the smart person, not the stupid or ignorant one, who holds the gravest obligation to respect views other than his own. Yet owing to his status as a smart person, respecting other views is precisely what he can’t do.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer at the Journal.
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In my estimation, there is no patch of geography in this country that is the
"middle of nowhere." This is America; everywhere is the middle of somewhere.
By Salena Zito PITTSBURGH —
Americans love to cleave to cultural traditions that have stood the test of time — especially ones that tell stories of the people who formed their communities, stories that reflect the craftsmanship, sacrifice and hard work of those who came before us.
When inventor and master tinkerer Joshua Lionel Cowen designed an electric fan operated by dry cells — and then, using the same motor that drove the fan, built a miniature railroad car — he began a business and a movement that has enthralled millions of people young and old. Hobbyists not only bought trains and track, but also often created elaborate homemade displays enjoyed by family and friends over the Christmas holidays.
One of the people Cowen inspired was Charles Bowdish, a young World War I veteran and cabinetmaker who lived in Brookville, Pa. He made his first miniature display at Christmas 1919, and to his surprise and delight, 400 people showed up at his home to see it.
Word quickly spread of the Bowdish display beyond Jefferson County, and the young artisan decided early on to keep track of the visitors to his home. In 1953 — the year before he moved his display to the Buhl Planetarium — the family counted 314,874 visitors from every state and 41 foreign countries over 34 years.
It was a tradition Bowdish continued into the 1980s at the Buhl Planetarium, where the line to enter often wrapped around the iconic North Side. Each year, Bowdish spent months painstakingly expanding the display and crafting new scenes that celebrated the lives and livelihoods of Western Pennsylvanians and our industrial, cultural and agricultural impact on the country and the world from the 1880s to the 1930s.
Today, that tradition is in the capable hands of 29-year-old Nikki Wilhelm, who until a few years ago had never picked up a tiny paint brush — or been to half the places depicted in the Miniature Railroad display at the Carnegie Science Center, where most of the Bowdish materials were relocated in the 1990s.
Ms. Wilhelm, a Lancaster native, is the manager of the Miniature Railroad & Village. She has embraced the craft and the history and the storytelling in the same way Bowdish did 100 years ago.
Ms. Wilhelm explains that she started working at the Carnegie Science Center as a part-time program presenter: “It was an entry level, part-time job. I was in grad school at Duquesne studying public history, and I had no background with model trains or modeling or anything like that.”
Her boss at the time, curator Patty Everly who had been with the Carnegie Science Center for three decades, taught her everything she knows, beginning with miniature modeling. Her first piece was the interior of the iconic Strip District Primanti Brothers restaurant.
It was a craft Ms. Wilhelm admits came naturally to her, to her surprise.
Her office is located right outside the 83-foot-long, 30-foot-wide O-scale railroad exhibit. Walking inside is an astonishing step into the past, where the magic of Bowdish’s Jefferson County basement lives on 103 years later, as she often uses common household items to recreate history for the exhibit.
Ms. Wilhelm picks up a red covered bridge from a shelf and turns it upside down. “I’ll show you something cool that Charlie Bowdish built. You see this bridge? Well, it was made from a Milk-Bone box,” she said, pointing to the label from the dog bone company inside the bridge.
“You really just have to let your imagination run wild because you wouldn’t believe the things you can use to make something: the row houses that we have from the Liverpool streets in Manchester, the intricate detail work on the porches — that’s just made from angel hair pasta,” she explained. “The trees are made from dried wild, hydrangea flowers.”
Ms. Wilhelm’s desk is filled with historical documents for research, a magnifying light, branches from the hydrangea bushes used to make the trees every year — all surrounded by three walls of shelves filled with people, homes, buildings, street lights, trains and paint for a craft that requires year-round care.
The popularity of model railroading has stood the test of time in part because hobbyists each bring a different skill set to the craft, which in turn helps develop others: Artisans love building the model scenery; history buffs enjoy researching and recreating places long gone; engineering types enjoy designing the tracks; and techies love the technological advances in electronics, wiring and the ability to run your train from an app on your smart phone.
Ms. Wilhelm says the models for the exhibit are selected by the leadership team at the Science Center. “We always try to pick something that’s historically, culturally or architecturally significant to not just Pittsburgh but the region. We have scenes from as far north as Brookville. We have Titusville and the Drake oil well, and of course Altoona,” she said.
“We try to diversify it; it’s easy to get stuff with city buildings because there’s so much exciting stuff going on in the city, but we try to branch out — like when we did Cement City a few years ago, that was from Donora,” she said.
What she loves most about the exhibit is watching the expressions on people’s faces, especially older people who appreciate the research required to capture a scene accurately. “One thing that’s really helpful is that our staff, basically everyone was a history major, so we put a lot of effort into making sure everything looks as it did,” she said.
One of her favorite creations was the Kaufmann’s Department store windows. “I just looked up old window display photos in the newspaper archives,” she said of her inspiration to get it perfect.
“Once you’ve worked with the miniature railroad for a while, you kind of get the vibe of the exhibit itself. I mean, many people have worked on it over the years, but it still really has kept its integrity. It looks just like it did when Charlie Bowdish was working on it. So we try to use all those same techniques that have been around since he started it over 100 years ago. Everything that Patty Everly has taught me, I now teach the new people. So we just keep the tradition going,” she said.
Royce Beacom is one of the 17 volunteers available for curious children, parents and grandparents to explain each display and detail to visitors. At home, he says, he does modeling for himself and for his grandchildren: “I have five grandsons between the ages of three and ten who love the train; I am trying to pass that tradition on.”
It’s easy to worry the next generation won’t be interested in carrying forward the baton of tradition — the stories and crafts and ideas that bridge the past, present and future of the places we call home. Ms. Wilhelm is a great example of someone who embodies that spirit, carrying forward a magical tradition that began with a kid from Brookville over 100 years ago.
When Bowdish was asked, in one of his final interviews before passing in 1988, why he continued the exacting, painstaking work year after year, he said: “Everyone regardless of their status in life, reaches out towards life’s ultimate achievement — happiness … privileges, money and possessions are useless unless they make a man happy. To those who have been bored and sickened by the monotony of work in offices, sales, fields and factories, where the only evidence of a day’s work is a headache, nothing to exhibit to friends, nothing to view with pride as an example of skill or handiwork — to those people I say ‘You should have a hobby.’”
Forty years later, Ms. Wilhelm’s answer was pretty similar: “When you have a hobby, any hobby, whatever it may be, you need to have the love and passion to really bring that extra spark, the extra ingredient to bring that fulfillment. When you have that, that is a happiness you earn and that is the most meaningful kind.”
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