by Charles C. Jett

The Founders Feared a Rich President. Here’s the Sentence They Wrote to Stop One.

Did the Founders intend to let a President grow rich in office — to take a foreign king’s gifts, or draw a second income from the government he led? They answered that in 1787. The answer was no. On a hot Thursday that August, a South Carolina delegate rose and added a sentence to the Constitution. No speech. No debate. The convention adopted it — unanimously, without one voice against — and moved on. That sentence became the Foreign Emoluments Clause. It has caused more argument in the last decade than it caused in the summer it was born. What I found, tracing it back to a snuffbox full of a French king’s diamonds, is a lesson our own age has half-forgotten: the Framers didn’t build a government that required good character to survive. They built one designed to withstand ordinary vice. My new piece on the sentence they wrote to keep a President from cashing in — and why it passed without a word. Link in comments.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – The Bench Under Siege

One Black lawyer. A bar that twice refused him. A seat on the highest court of a former slave state. And a campaign of terror outside the courthouse, riding to take that state back at gunpoint. That was the ground Jonathan Jasper Wright stood on when he became the first Black justice on any state supreme court in America. He kept the robe on while Reconstruction collapsed around him. When the case came that could have bought him peace — bless the new governor, and go along — he dissented, and they drove him from the bench on a charge they could not prove. The men who took the state are a footnote now. The justice they erased waited a century for his portrait to go back on the wall. He held the law when holding it was the most dangerous thing a Black man in South Carolina could do. Jonathan Jasper Wright needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

The City That . . . . Cast the Country in Brass

A Connecticut valley with no copper or zinc of its own became the brass capital of the world. From a single horse-powered mill in 1802, Waterbury learned to roll and stamp brass better than anyone in America — the buttons on the nation’s uniforms, the works of its clocks, the dollar watch in its pocket, the cartridge cases of its wars. Three great houses made two-thirds of all the brass in the country here. But the bright dials that glowed were painted by young women who died of the radium that made them shine, and the work drained west and overseas until the mills fell silent. Here is how a valley cast the country in brass — and what it cost.

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by Charles C. Jett

The City That . . . . Collared the Country

In 1827 a Troy housewife, tired of scrubbing a whole shirt to clean one collar, took her scissors to it — and started an industry. Within a lifetime this city on the Hudson made nine of every ten collars in America, named the white-collar and blue-collar worker, and sent its steam-laundry women into the front ranks of American labor. The collar trade is long gone, but Troy kept the city the collar money built: one of the richest stands of Gilded Age architecture in the country, now a backdrop for The Gilded Age itself. Here is how a kitchen-table fix collared a nation — and shod the Union’s horses besides.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Brand That . . . . Dressed the Republic

It invented the suit you could buy off a rack and wear the same day, and it cut the soft-shouldered coat that dressed the American professional class for a hundred years. Brooks Brothers dressed forty of the nation’s presidents — and one of them, Abraham Lincoln, was wearing its coat, the lining embroidered One Country, One Destiny, the night he was shot. This is the story of the oldest apparel house in America: the ready-made suit, the “shoddy” war scandal that put a word in the language, the bankruptcy that shuttered its last American mills, and the 2025 return to lower Manhattan a few blocks from where it began.

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