Jan 10, 2009
We’re All Missourians Now
Prototypical Missourian Hon. Willard Duncan Vandiver
In the summer of 2004, I interned for the Congressional representative of Missouri’s ninth district, Republican Kenny Hulshof.1 In that capacity, I gave Missouri-centric tours of the Capitol Building to our fascinating constituents, requiring me to mentally revisit Mr. Schwab’s sixth-grade civics class and reschool myself in the history of my home state. One of the most common constituent questions—both from those seeking knowledge and those playing stump-the-tour-guide—concerned the roots of Missouri’s officially unofficial but effectively official nickname, “The Show Me State.”
One account, frowned on today for obvious reasons, has the phrase deriving from Missourians’ supposed stupidity, as in: “That man is from Missouri. You’ll have to show him.” Hah, hah. The more probable, popular, and populist legend explaining the phrase’s origin attributes it to
Missouri’s U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.” Regardless of whether Vandiver coined the phrase, it is certain that his speech helped to popularize the saying.
Yesterday, another midwestern Democrat, himself often accused of “frothy eloquence,” did far more to popularize it. President-elect Barack Obama’s statements in response to criticisms of his proposed economic stimulus package on Friday made such broad and central use of the phrase “show me” that Ezra Klein has declared the dawn of a “‘‘Show Me’ Presidency.”
Klein is right to scrutinize Obama’s persistently ambiguous use of the phrase: Obama must show us what he means by “Show me”; he must provide us with meaningful criteria; he must explain to us what counts as proof, and in a way all Americans can understand. Only in that case, only with a foundation for independent judgment, can citizens be said to be genuinely involved in this process—and that is Obama’s explict, announced goal. But educating a country as woefully ignorant about itself as the United States isn’t easy. Obama needs our help—in all policy areas. He’s not the messiah. Even those of us who have no doubt of that fact must constantly remind ourselves of it, lest our sincere investment in public expectation—in Obama’s potential—outstrip or occlude or expunge our commitment to the larger, overarching goal of sensible and humane public policy. We must, as Missouri’s official motto enjoins us to do, “Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.” Obama is almost certainly the most impartial and acute judge of popular welfare we’ve had in the Oval Office in decades. But he is one man. In this massive societal undertaking Obama has inagurated, you have work to do, too.
Show me.
“The challenge for all of us,” Obama said yesterday, “is to identify good ideas.” And so Vandiver’s demand, the demand to roundly understand, must become our own. Having something shown to you in the Missourian sense is a process not of credulous reception but of active and incessant evaluation. For the product of the pragmatic Missourian’s deep skepticism, his demand to know not only the what but also the why of the what, is precisely the elimination of unworkable ideas in favor of workable ones. His search for proof is a continual querying and reconfirming of both the proof itself and the integrity of the criteria from which the proof derives meaning and legitimacy. We must help Obama find or create his whys and whats, and to articulate useful, socially productive, and popularly understandable relationships among them. Being shown is not a passive process. Proof, telling or irrelevant, genuine or counterfeit, is not found but made, and our new president has only two hands.
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1. Hulshof, sadly, suffered a crushing defeat in his 2008 gubernatorial run against Democrat Jay Nixon, state attorney general since 1992—all the more crushing after Hulshof’s hard-won GOP primary victory against outgoing state Treasurer Sarah Steelman. His extraordinarily conservative social principles, ascendant in Missouri and much of the rest of the country when he assumed office as a freshman in the 1996 Republican takeover of Congress, had long become unpopular among Missourians (if only slimly) when he abdicated the ninth district seat to seek the governorship. This was his second planned gubernatorial run; his first, which may well have been successful, was squelched before it began by family tragedy, an unfortunate pattern for Kenny. I have next to no sympathy for the bulk of his views, but he has a keen intellect, and he is a good public servant and a good man—not to mention a damn fine softball player—and he deserves another chance from the Missouri GOP.