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Jo Freeman: There’s Plenty To Do at the RNC – If You Have the Right Credentials
by Jo Freeman
Every national nominating convention has plenty of auxiliary events, some authorized, some not. Getting space can be a challenge; getting the word out even more so. But they do it nonetheless. Press were given a RNC 2024 Master Event Calendar, which was updated a few days later. Events began on Sunday and ended on Thursday. The actual convention sessions were just one item on the list. The calendar said if an event was Open or Closed to press, and also whom to contact to register. I’m going to describe some of the events, including a couple I went to, and a couple I was turned away from.
Since my focus is on women, I obviously wanted to go to those events – if I could.
The National Federation of Republican Women is the largest grassroots Republican women's organization in the country with hundreds of clubs. Founded in 1938, its members made the phone calls and knocked on the doors that elected Republican candidates for decades. It’s Tuesday luncheon featured Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders. The Master Calendar said it was SOLD OUT and they wouldn’t let me in. I was able to get into their lounge at the Fiserv Forum Wednesday evening, where I was repeatedly asked if I was a member, and if not, would I join. “I’m press,” I said. “I can’t join anything partisan.” I then said: “What brings you here?” On hearing that, finding anyone willing to chat with me was like pulling teeth.
Moms for Liberty met in a concert hall that afternoon. I had pre-registered, and I got in. From high in a balcony seat I listened to several people talk about the evils of transgenderism. It’s webpage says WE BELIEVE Power Belongs to the People. Sound Familiar? With a focus is on parental rights, it wants to “STOP WOKE indoctrination.”
Tuesday I went to “The New Mavericks” reception co-hosted by the Black Republican Mayors Association and the Georgia Republican Party. They honored Sen. Tim Scott, four Congressmen and two Georgia delegates – all male. There was only one mayor on stage, from Aurora, IL. The chair of the Georgia Republican Party was the one white man on the stage. At that event, women served; they didn’t speak. The RNC reported that 55 delegates to the 2024 convention are Black, up from 18 in 2016.
I missed the Independent Women’s Forum toast to “Women Who Make Our Country Great” because I went to Convention Fest: The Official Delegate Experience, which was held in the streets outside the Fiserve Forum and Baird Hall as well as some space inside Baird. To get to that one you not only needed a credential of some sort, but a USSS pass (which I have).
Concerned Women for America parked its pink bus across from the Baird Center the week before the RNC. No one was home. When Convention Fest opened on Tuesday afternoon, they set up a pink tent, from which its leaders preached to whomever passed by. It calls itself “the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization” but its focus is evangelical Christian. The slogan on the side of its pink bus captures this emphasis: “She Prays, She Votes.” A prayer precedes each sermon.
Jo Freeman Reviews The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage and Justice
Jo Freeman reviews: Every feminist should read this book. Spread out over four countries in western Asia, the Kurds, at different times, have tried to become a separate state, or to just be allowed to govern their own people, speak their own language and practice their own culture within existing states. Written as narrative non-fiction, this book reads like a novel, but is based on factual reportage. The author is an American descendant of a Kurdish immigrant who has written about this region for years. Her main subjects are four women in the YPJ – a Kurdish acronym for Women’s Protection Units. They are organized separately from the male YPG, though they carry the same weapons, get the same training and do the same jobs. Every feminist should read this book. So should those in the military, particularly those who think, or used to think, that women don’t belong on the front lines of war. more »
Baseball's Peerless Semipros: The Brooklyn Bushwicks of Dexter Park, Journal of Sport History and My Experience at That Park
From the Editor: Last night I watched — on television — the San Francisco Giants play their rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, winners of the 2020 National League Championship title. They played in Arizona, where the Giants hold their spring training and the game ended in a tie. But it was another location I thought about in Brooklyn, and a game that featured guest Hank Greenburg, a well-known player that my father admired. At that time, Greenberg was retired, I believe, but the fans at the Dexter Park, crowded the stands to see him. Last year, I wrote a brief article, A Baseball Story You Might Not Have Heard About an American Catcher and Spy for the OSS, and thought this year I might follow it up with an lengthy excerpt from a story about the Brooklyn Bushwicks. "Even as minor league and semipro baseball declined in the 1940s, the Bushwicks still outdrew the big league Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Braves in 1945." more »
Jo Freeman Reviews Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells
Jo Freeman writes: "Ida B. Wells was an important writer and activist. She was born in 1862 in Mississippi and died in 1931 in Chicago. She lost her parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Wanting to keep her siblings together, Ida got a job as a teacher at age 16 to earn the money to support them. She later took some of them to Memphis where she shifted from being a teacher to a writer. She is primarily known for her tracts against lynching, which led to her being run out of town in 1892... There are some gaps. Very little is said about her frequent work for woman suffrage beyond a few swipes at white suffragists and sixties feminists. There is nothing about her extensive work for the Republican Party, such as being the official Hoover campaign Organizer of Negro Women for Illinois in 1928. more »
Jill Norgren Reviews The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again ... An intriguing book about change and turning points
Jill Norgren writes: "This is an intriguing book about change and turning points. It will prod readers to argue with the authors who contend that the United States has done better in past decades and could/will do so again. Putnam and Garrett are particularly interested in climate change, which they describe as an ultimate “we” issue. They observe environmental activists pleading for a moral awakening to the costs of inaction and imagine that this might be the non-partisan movement on which the upswing might be built. We can only hope that the authors are correct and that a new generation of activists, in community, will re-imagine America and that they will not be the ones who charged the Capitol on January 6." more »
