Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By David Higgins, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

For 30 years, vaccine recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have aligned closely with those from the American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP. But on Aug. 19, 2025, the AAP published new vaccine recommendations that diverge from those of the CDC.

The pediatrician association’s move comes on the heels of unprecedented changes made earlier this year by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, in how the government approves and issues guidance on vaccines.

The biggest difference is in the AAP’s guidance around COVID-19 vaccines for children. This new guidance comes as COVID-19 cases are once again rising across the U.S. and many parents and providers are confused by unclear guidance from federal health authorities about whether children should be vaccinated.

In a Q&A with The Conversation U.S., David Higgins, a pediatrician, preventive medicine physician and vaccine delivery researcher from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, explains the new guidance and what it means for parents. Higgins is also a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

What are the AAP’s new vaccine recommendations?

The AAP recommends that all children 6 to 23 months old receive a complete COVID-19 vaccine series, consistent with recommendations for this age group in previous years.

For children and adolescents ages 2 to 18, the AAP now advises a single dose if they are at higher risk, a change from previous years, when vaccination was recommended for all in this age group. Children at higher risk include those who have certain chronic medical conditions, who live in long-term care or group settings, who have never been vaccinated, or who live with family members at high risk.

The AAP also recommends that COVID-19 vaccines remain available for any child or adolescent whose parent wants them to be protected, regardless of risk status. In all cases, the most updated version of the vaccine should be used.

How do these recommendations differ from CDC guidance?

The difference is substantial. The CDC currently advises what it calls “shared clinical decision-making” for children ages 6 months to 17 years who are not moderately or severely immunocompromised. This means the decision is left up to individual discussions between families and their health care providers, but the vaccine is not treated as a routine recommendation. These current guidelines were made after Kennedy bypassed the agency’s normal independent review process.

That framework can be confusing for families and difficult for providers to implement. By contrast, the AAP recommendations identify the ages and conditions where the risk is highest while also supporting vaccine availability for any families who want it.

Why are they diverging?

The AAP has been publishing vaccine guidance since the 1930s, long before the CDC or the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent panel of experts that advises the CDC, existed.

Since 1995, the two groups have generally issued essentially identical vaccine guidance. But this year, the federal government dismissed the advisory committee’s panel of independent scientists and immunization experts, raising questions about the credibility of CDC guidance. At the same time, misinformation about vaccines continues to spread.

In response, the AAP decided to publish independent recommendations based on its own review of the latest evidence. That review showed that although the risks for healthy older children have declined compared with the early years of the pandemic, young children and those with specific conditions remain especially vulnerable. Additionally, a review of evidence by an independent expert group called the Vaccine Integrity Project, also released on Aug. 19, 2025, confirmed that there are no new safety concerns and no decline in the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

COVID-19 continues to cause hospitalizations and deaths in children and remains a leading cause of serious respiratory illness.

Will parents be able to follow these recommendations?

This is still unclear. The AAP recommendations do not automatically guarantee insurance coverage.

By law, insurance plans and the federal Vaccines for Children program, which provides vaccines for eligible children who might not otherwise be vaccinated due to cost or lack of insurance, are tied to Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations. Unless insurers and policymakers act to align with the AAP recommendations, there is a risk that parents would be forced to pay the costs out of pocket.

Vaccine supply may also be an issue. Currently, only two COVID-19 vaccines are available for children under 12. Moderna’s vaccine is approved only for children with at least one high-risk condition, while Pfizer’s authorization for younger children may not be renewed. If that happens, any remaining Pfizer doses for this age group may be unusable, leaving a shortfall in available vaccines for children.

Finally, implementation may differ depending on the type of provider. Some vaccine providers, such as pharmacists, operate under policies tied strictly to CDC recommendations, which may make it harder to follow AAP’s schedule unless rules are updated.

What happens next?

Parents and providers are likely to face continued confusion, just as COVID-19 cases rise as children return to school. Much will depend on whether the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices updates its own recommendations at its upcoming meeting, expected in September, and whether pediatric COVID-19 vaccines remain available.

Until then, parents can speak with their pediatricians to understand the best protection for their children.

David Higgins volunteers as Vice President of the Colorado Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and as a board member of Immunize Colorado. He was not involved in the development or publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ immunization guidelines. The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely his own and do not represent those of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

– ref. Pediatricians’ association recommends COVID-19 vaccines for toddlers and some older children, breaking with CDC guidance – https://theconversation.com/pediatricians-association-recommends-covid-19-vaccines-for-toddlers-and-some-older-children-breaking-with-cdc-guidance-263522

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Eve-Lyn Hinckley, Associate Professor of Biogeochemistry, University of Colorado Boulder

The wetlands found across the Rocky Mountains of Colorado just below tree line are magical places. Dripping with mosses and deep green sedges, these open expanses flanked by evergreens are a breathtaking sight for passing hikers. Moose graze there, and elk gather during their mating season.

These subalpine wetlands are also crucial for regulating the supply of clean water from the highlands to metropolitan regions downslope, including Denver.

However, new research shows the wetlands also harbor a health risk. In a new study, my research group found that just below the surface of subalpine wetland soils, the perfect conditions exist for the production of methylmercury, a potent, toxic form of the heavy metal mercury that can threaten the health of wildlife and people.

As rising temperatures thaw ice and erode the mountain rocks, and mercury pollution from power plants around the world falls with rain, this toxic form of mercury can be produced in the wetlands.

The Goldilocks problem

Methylmercury is a neurotoxin that biomagnifies and bioaccumulates, meaning it becomes more concentrated as it moves up the food chain. Predatory birds and fish high on the food chain are most susceptible to its devastating effects on the nervous and reproductive systems, as are the human populations that consume them.

In the 1950s, hundreds of people in Minamata and Niigata, Japan, died from methylmercury poisoning connected to ingesting water, fish and shellfish from near where chemical plants were discharging mercury into the water.

Mercury methylation is a fickle process. The bacteria involved require sources of inorganic mercury and energy, as well as oxygen-free conditions.

Sulfate concentrations are particularly important. Like in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” too much or too little sulfate is unsatisfactory to the methylating microbes – those creating methylmercury. Too little sulfate, and they won’t stimulate mercury methylation. Too much sulfate, and mercury gets sequestered in mineral form, minimizing its risk to living organisms.

Yet, when moderate sulfate concentrations mix with inorganic mercury and organic carbon in a low-oxygen environment, the conditions are dangerously “just right,” as Goldilocks would say, and methylmercury production is high.

New evidence of methylmercury

Prior to our study, most wetlands found to have methylmercury pollution were in lowland areas, such as the Florida Everglades, where the process is fed by sulfate runoff from agriculture fields. However, our study demonstrates that methylmercury production occurs in seemingly remote mountain locations, too.

There are a few reasons why conditions in Colorado’s subalpine wetlands are just right.

First, the soil has ample organic matter, providing a deep store of energy in the form of carbon to fuel methylation. In Colorado’s subalpine wetlands, thick soils are rich in layer upon layer of ancient organic matter that saturates with snowmelt flowing from the highest peaks.

Second, mercury pollution from industrial centers reaches the Rocky Mountains. Most of the mercury that enters subalpine wetlands has actually traveled all the way from China and India. Eventually, it falls out of the atmosphere in rain or dust, and high elevations receive more of it than low elevations.

Third – and this is the key stimulating effect for methylating bacteria – subalpine wetlands receive excess sulfate from warming alpine areas in elevations above them. As rising air temperatures drive the thawing of ice and quicker rates of mineral weathering, more sulfate than was already in the ground flows into streams to the subalpine region.

The result is that these ingredients mix in the flooded, often oxygen-free environment of the wetland soils, and bacteria have everything they need to produce methylmercury.

Our study showed that the concentrations of methylmercury are higher at the outlet than the inlet of subalpine wetlands that we studied in the Colorado Rockies, providing further evidence that wetlands can be a source of the contaminant.

Apart from the local effects of methylmercury on wildlife, our discovery highlights a concern for water supplies. Over 3 million people in the Boulder-Denver metropolitan area rely on clean, fresh water from the mountains. Contamination of the source area by methylmercury may have large-scale ramifications, such as costly treatment measures, for the entire Colorado Front Range’s drinking water supply.

How to lower the risk

High-elevation ecosystems around the world are experiencing many effects that can feed the production of methylmercury.

In every state in the U.S., there is at least one mercury toxicity warning for surface waters, typically urging people not to eat fish or shellfish caught there or to limit the amount they eat. Greater production of methylmercury, and its threat to food and water sources, is now a part of our changing world.

So, what can be done to avoid the risk?

Lowering mercury deposition requires curbing industrial emissions. In 2013, over 140 nations, including the U.S., signed the Minamata Convention on Mercury, committing to regulate and monitor industrial mercury sources. Remaining committed to this agreement is critical.

Reducing the flow of sulfate from ice and rock weathering in the mountains – another key ingredient to this process – requires addressing climate change.

People, governments and industries can take many steps to slow the rise of air temperatures that are increasing ice thaw, from not driving gas-powered vehicles as much to regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories. Our new research on methylmercury shows another reason why taking steps to slow climate change are worth the effort.

Eve-Lyn Hinckley receives funding from The National Science Foundation.

– ref. Colorado’s subalpine wetlands may be producing a toxic form of mercury – that’s a concern for downstream water supplies – https://theconversation.com/colorados-subalpine-wetlands-may-be-producing-a-toxic-form-of-mercury-thats-a-concern-for-downstream-water-supplies-259008

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Sarah Webber, Associate Professor of Accounting, University of Dayton

A New York philanthropist and personal assistant to billionaires, Matthew Christopher Pietras, allegedly stole millions from his employers and donated large sums to prominent charities to maintain a facade of status, wealth and generosity.

Those schemes came to light when the Metropolitan Opera became aware that a US$10 million donation Pietras made in his own name used funds he had allegedly pilfered from a member of the Soros family which was among his employers.

The next day, May 30, 2025, Pietras was found dead. An investigation into the origin of his donations is underway.

The 40-year-old belonged to many prominent nonprofit boards, attended galas, rubbed shoulders with elite donors, and lived a lavish lifestyle filled with luxury goods and private plane travel. He often made charitable gifts under his own name, and he frequently requested public recognition for them – a practice that helped build his persona.

I research nonprofit fraud. Previously, I’ve written about the importance of researching charities before donating to make sure charitable gifts are not wasted on swindlers. The Pietras case exposes the flip side of donor fraud.

Sometimes, people give stolen funds or find other fraudulent means to pretend to give their own money to a legitimate charity. This cautionary tale can remind nonprofits of the importance of checking out any donors who make large or unusual gifts.

What happens after the fraud is exposed

If Pietras’ crimes are proven, the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan’s Frick Collection and the other charities that received money from Pietras will most likely have to issue refunds to the people he swindled. Even if the charity was acting in good faith, it should prepare to return those funds, according to laws that pertain to fraudulent transfers.

There is a narrow exception to this rule.

When a charitable nonprofit unwittingly accepts a donation made with stolen money and spends it before the theft is discovered, a court may recognize the charity as an innocent recipient.

In legal terms, this is known as the “good faith purchaser” defense.

This recognition may limit or eliminate the charity’s legal obligation to issue a refund, particularly if the money has already been spent on the charity’s mission, the organization reasonably believed the donation was legitimate, and giving it back to the victim of theft could significantly harm the charity.

But if that happens, fraudsters can’t claim a tax deduction for making that gift, and they may retroactively owe extra tax penalties.

If a charity hasn’t yet spent the fraudulently given funds, a court could require a refund – especially if victims or insurers file lawsuits to recover that money.

In most cases, if donations are proven to come from stolen funds, the charity may be legally required to return them. The fact that a donation was received in good faith doesn’t automatically allow the charity to keep the money once it is identified as stolen.

How snookered charities should respond

It is often in a charity’s best interest to be proactive about returning the stolen funds rather than awaiting a court order forcing them to do so.

The Metropolitan Opera took this route. It returned the $10 million to Gregory Soros, the youngest son of billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros, that it received the day before Pietras’ scheme was discovered.

Taking that step is a good look. But charities don’t really have a choice because they cannot quickly spend any funds that are identified as potentially stolen. Once they’re stuck in this legal limbo, nonprofits must hang onto the funds and await a legal resolution .

Some similarities with Madoff scandal

I believe that the Pietras case mirrors the Bernard Madoff scandal in that both men donated to charities to burnish their social status.

Madoff, the disgraced financier who died in prison in 2021, operated a massive Ponzi scheme that deceived his clients with too-high-to-be-true returns and then depleted their savings once it collapsed.

Madoff also used stolen funds to make large charitable donations through his family foundation. His philanthropy made his fake image as an ace investor appear legitimate and it expanded his access to the wealthy people he preyed upon.

As with Madoff, Pietras’ illusion of generosity allegedly became a tool for his deception, allowing him to move comfortably among the wealthy and well connected while avoiding getting caught.

Madoff defrauded investors of an estimated $50 billion to $64 billion. The 2008 revelations about his scheme’s shocking scale shook confidence in financial and charitable institutions.

In the aftermath, numerous nonprofits that had invested their own assets with Madoff either lost significant sums or were forced to return past donations as part of legal clawback efforts to compensate victims.

When being wary is warranted

Charities must exercise due diligence before accepting a gift. This means they have a duty to investigate any unusually large donations – such as one that’s the biggest they’ve ever received.

Regardless of a gift’s size, this duty also applies when a gift seems to be larger than the donor could be reasonably expected to afford.

Charities don’t need to act like banks or lenders, which are required to verify the financial assets of clients. But they should ask questions when the circumstances require. Acting in good faith requires charitable institutions to be reasonably certain that donated funds are not stolen.

In Pietras’ case, he reportedly began by donating sums that were small enough to not raise suspicion.

Too-good-to-be-true giving

The consequences of not exercising due diligence can be costly and embarrassing.

For example, consider what happened to Florida A&M University in May 2024, when it announced a record-breaking $237 million gift from Texas entrepreneur Gregory Gerami. The donation consisted of 14 million shares in Gerami’s privately held Batterson Farms Corp.

An investigation later determined that Gerami couldn’t afford to make that gift and that Florida A&M had failed to check into his finances. The university’s president and other top leaders were forced to resign in the embarrassing fallout.

Asking donors hard and even uncomfortable questions before celebrating any huge gift can help charities avoid the headaches that come with being deceived by fraudulent donations.

Thorough vetting at the outset ensures that a celebrated gift enhances the charity’s work without entangling it in future disputes or negative publicity from a fraudulent gift.

My employer, University of Dayton, is a partner organization with The Conversation.

– ref. Before celebrating big gifts, charities must watch out for fake donors – https://theconversation.com/before-celebrating-big-gifts-charities-must-watch-out-for-fake-donors-262470

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Amiran Baduashvili, Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Portable air cleaners aimed at curbing indoor spread of infections are rarely tested for how well they protect people – and very few studies evaluate their potentially harmful effects. That’s the upshot of a detailed review of nearly 700 studies that we co-authored in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Many respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and influenza, can spread through indoor air. Technologies such as HEPA filters, ultraviolet light and special ventilation designs – collectively known as engineering infection controls – are intended to clean indoor air and prevent viruses and other disease-causing pathogens from spreading.

Along with our colleagues across three academic institutions and two government science agencies, we identified and analyzed every research study evaluating the effectiveness of these technologies published from the 1920s through 2023 – 672 of them in total.

These studies assessed performance in three main ways: Some measured whether the interventions reduced infections in people; others used animals such as guinea pigs or mice; and the rest took air samples to determine whether the devices reduced the number of small particles or microbes in the air. Only about 8% of the studies tested effectiveness on people, while over 90% tested the devices in unoccupied spaces.

We found substantial variation across different technologies. For example, 44 studies examined an air cleaning process called photocatalytic oxidation, which produces chemicals that kill microbes, but only one of those tested whether the technology prevented infections in people. Another 35 studies evaluated plasma-based technologies for killing microbes, and none involved human participants. We also found 43 studies on filters incorporating nanomaterials designed to both capture and kill microbes – again, none included human testing.

Why it matters

The COVID-19 pandemic showed just how disruptive airborne infections can be – costing millions of lives worldwide, straining health systems and shutting down schools and workplaces. Early studies showed that the COVID-19 virus was spreading through air. Logically, improving indoor air quality to clear the virus from air became a major focus as a way to keep people safe.

Finding effective ways to remove microbes from indoor air could have profound public health benefits and might help limit economic damage in future pandemics. Engineering infection controls could protect people from infection by working in the background of daily life, without any effort from people.

Companies producing portable air cleaners that incorporate microbe-killing technologies have made ambitious claims about how effectively they purify air and prevent infections. These products are already marketed to consumers for use in day care centers, schools, health care clinics and workplaces. We found that most of them have not been properly tested for efficacy. Without solid evidence from studies on people, it’s impossible to know whether these promises match reality. Our findings suggest that consumers should proceed with caution when investing in air cleaning devices.

The gap between marketing claims and evidence of effectiveness might not be surprising, but there is more at stake here. Some of these technologies generate chemicals such as ozone, formaldehyde and hydroxyl radicals to kill microbes – substances that can potentially harm people if inhaled. The safety of these products should be the baseline requirement before they are widely deployed. Yet, of the 112 studies assessing many of these pathogen-killing technologies, only 14 tested for harmful byproducts. This is a stark contrast to pharmaceutical research, where safety testing is standard practice.

What still isn’t known

Over 90% of all studies tested these technologies by looking at the air itself – for example, measuring how well experimental gases, dust particles or microbes were cleared from the air. The idea is that cleaner air should mean lower chances of infection. But when it comes to air cleaning, researchers don’t yet know how strongly these air measurements reflect actual reduction in infections for people.

Identifying the safest and most effective options will require assessing these technologies for toxic byproducts and evaluating them in real-world settings that include people. Also, standardizing how effectiveness and potential harms are measured will help inform evidence-based decisions about improving air quality in homes, schools, health care facilities and other indoor spaces.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Amiran Baduashvili, MD, through the University of Colorado, received funding from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health for the study discussed in this article.

Lisa Bero, through the University of Colorado, received funding from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health for the study discussed in this article.

– ref. Most air cleaning devices have not been tested on people − and little is known about their potential harms, new study finds – https://theconversation.com/most-air-cleaning-devices-have-not-been-tested-on-people-and-little-is-known-about-their-potential-harms-new-study-finds-262913

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Tamilla Triantoro, Associate Professor of Business Analytics and Information Systems, Quinnipiac University

Pick up an August 2025 issue of Vogue and you’ll come across an advertisement for the brand Guess featuring a stunning model. Yet tucked away in small print is a startling admission: She isn’t real. She was generated entirely by AI.

For decades, fashion images have been retouched. But this isn’t airbrushing a real person; it’s a “person” created from scratch, a digital composite of data points, engineered to appear as a beautiful woman.

The backlash to the Guess ad was swift. Veteran model Felicity Hayward called the move “lazy and cheap,” warning that it undermines years of work to promote diversity. After all, why hire models of different sizes, ages and ethnicities when a machine can generate a narrow, market-tested ideal of beauty on demand?

I study human-AI collaboration, and my work focuses on how AI influences decision-making, trust and human agency, all of which came into play during the Vogue controversy.

This new reality is not a cause for doom. However, now that it’s becoming much harder – if not impossible – to tell whether something is created by a human or a machine, it’s worth asking what’s gained and what’s lost from this technology. Most importantly, what does it say about what we truly value in art?

The forensic viewer and listener

In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing wondered whether a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

He proposed his famous imitation game. In it, a human judges whether they’re conversing with a person or a computer. If the human can’t tell the difference, the computer passes the test.

For decades, this remained a theoretical benchmark. But with the recent explosion of powerful chatbots, the original Turing Test for conversation has arguably been passed. This breakthrough raises a new question: If AI can master conversation, can it master art?

The evidence suggests it has already passed what might be called an “aesthetic Turing Test.”

AI can generate music, images and movies so convincingly that people struggle to distinguish them from human creations.

In music, platforms like Suno and Udio can produce original songs, complete with vocals and lyrics, in any imaginable genre in seconds. Some are so good they’ve gone viral. Meanwhile, photo-realistic images are equally deceptive. In 2023, millions believed that the fabricated photo of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket was real, a stunning example of AI’s power to create convincing fiction.

Why our brains are being fooled

So why are we falling for it?

First, AI has become an expert forger of human patterns. These models are trained on gigantic libraries of human-made art. They have analyzed more paintings, songs and photographs than any person ever could. These models may not have a soul, but they have learned the mathematical recipe for what we find beautiful or catchy.

Second, AI has bridged the uncanny valley. This is the term for the creepy feeling we get when something looks almost human but not quite – like a humanoid robot or a doll with vacant eyes.

That subtle sense of wrongness has been our built-in detector for fakes. But the latest AI is so sophisticated that it has climbed out of the valley. It no longer makes the small mistakes that trigger our alarm bells.

Finally, AI does not just copy reality; it creates a perfected version of it. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this a simulacrum – a copy with no original.

The AI model in Vogue is the perfect example. She is not a picture of a real woman. She is a hyperreal ideal that no living person can compete with. Viewers don’t flag her as fake because she is, in a sense, more “perfect” than real.

The future of art in a synthetic world

When art is this easy to generate – and its origin this hard to verify – something precious risks being lost.

The German thinker Walter Benjamin once wrote about the “aura” of an original artwork – the sense of history and human touch that makes it special. A painting has an aura because you can see the brushstrokes; an old photograph has an aura because it captured a real moment in time.

AI-generated art has no such aura. It is infinitely reproducible, has no history, and lacks a human story. This is why, even when it is technically perfect, it can feel hollow.

When you become suspicious of a work’s origins, the act of listening to a song or viewing a photograph is no longer simply about feeling the rhythm or wondering what may have existed outside the frame. It also requires running a mental checklist, searching for the statistical ghost in the machine. And that moment of analytical doubt pulls viewers and listeners out of the work’s emotional world.

To me, the aesthetic Turing Test is not just about whether a machine can fool us; it’s a challenge that asks us to decide what we really want from art.

If a machine creates a song that brings a person to tears, does it matter that the machine felt nothing? Where does the meaning of art truly reside – in the mind of the creator or in the heart of the observer?

We have built a mirror that reflects our own creativity back at us, and now we must decide: Do we prefer perfection without humanity, or imperfection with meaning? Do we choose the flawless, disposable reflection, or the messy, fun house mirror of the human mind?

Tamilla Triantoro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI has passed the aesthetic Turing Test − and it’s changing our relationship with art – https://theconversation.com/ai-has-passed-the-aesthetic-turing-test-and-its-changing-our-relationship-with-art-262997

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jake Rosenfeld, Professor of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis

During the 2024 election campaign, the Republican Party’s historically fraught relationship with organized labor appeared to be changing. Several influential Republicans reached out to unions, seeking to cement the loyalties of the growing ranks of working-class Americans who have been backing Donald Trump’s presidential runs and voting for other members of his party.

During Trump’s first bid for the White house, the percentage of votes in households where at least one person belongs to a union fell to its lowest level in decades. In 2021, Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator at the time, wrote a USA Today op-ed supporting a unionization drive at an Amazon facility. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, walked a United Auto Workers picket line in 2023 in solidarity with striking workers.

As the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, Trump spotlighted International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien with a prominent speaking slot at the Republican National Convention – rewarding the union for staying neutral in that campaign after endorsing Joe Biden four years earlier.

Yet O’Brien shocked many in the convention crowd by lambasting longtime GOP coalition partners such as the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable for hurting American workers.

Once in office, Trump continued to signal some degree of solidarity with the blue-collar voters who backed him. He chose former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Teamsters ally, to be his second-term labor secretary.

I’m a sociologist who has been researching the U.S. labor movement for over two decades. Given conservatives’ long-standing antipathy toward unions, I was curious whether the GOP’s greater engagement with labor portended any kind of change in its policies.

Fumbled at the starting line

The GOP’s various outreach efforts during the 2024 campaign led University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, a scholar of declining labor power, to write, “Is a pro-labor Republican Party possible?”

More than six months into Trump’s second term, I would say that based on the evidence thus far the answer to Posner’s question is a resounding no.

In late March 2025, Trump issued an executive order stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.

Overnight, twice as many federal employees lost their union protections as there are members of the United Auto Workers union, making the action “the largest and most aggressive single act of union-busting in U.S. history,” according to Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin.

While affected unions have challenged that action and similar subsequent ones in court, the Trump administration is moving onto other agencies. In August, over 400,000 federal employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Environmental Protection Agency saw their union contracts terminated and their collective bargaining rights dissolved.

Everett Kelley, the American Federation of Government Employees president, described the attacks on federal workers as a “setback for fundamental rights in America.”

Tariffs, other policies aren’t helping

The Trump administration has pitched its erratic tariff policies as a boon to U.S.manufacturing, including in the automotive industry, once the foundation of the U.S. labor movement.

In reality, U.S. car producers are struggling to keep up with rising tariff-related costs of raw materials and parts. The number of factory jobs has fallen to the lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, a supporter of targeted tariffs to buttress the domestic auto industry, criticized the administration’s trade policy in April 2025, saying, “We do not support reckless tariffs on all countries at crazy rates.”

Other administration actions cast as relief for struggling workers are unlikely to deliver as advertised. The “no tax on tips” provision in Trump’s huge tax-and-spending package excludes the nearly 40% of tipped workers whose earnings fall below the federal income tax threshold. Tipped workers make up a tiny share of the low-wage workforce.

Culinary Workers Local 226, a powerful Nevada union representing many tipped workers in Las Vegas and Reno, supported the provision. Yet it blasted the overall package, calling it a “big, horrible bill” for its windfalls to the rich instead of the working class.

Removing the watchdogs

The National Labor Relations Board is responsible for ensuring management and labor adhere to provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. Passed in 1935, that law established workers’ fundamental rights to collective bargaining. The board is responsible for conducting union elections, investigating allegations of unfair labor practices and outright abuses by employers, and enforcing court orders when employers or unions are found to have broken labor laws.

Presidents regularly use vacancies to tilt the ideological balance of the board to a more or less labor-friendly position. Trump, however, went further.

Soon after he was sworn in for a second term, Trump fired the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel along with board member Gwynne Wilcox, who was only halfway through her five-year term. Wilcox’s dismissal was unprecedented and violated the National Labor Relations Act provision on board personnel changes.

Wilcox’s removal left the body without a quorum, preventing it from responding to appeals or requests for review and allowing employers accused of violating workers’ rights to delay any settlement. The Trump administration has left those important NLRB jobs vacant for months, although it has nominated two management-friendly replacements, both of whom awaited Senate approval in mid-August.

In the meantime, the agency is unable to hear labor disputes.

Disempowering the NLRB is a long-standing Republican tactic, suggesting more continuity with past GOP attacks on labor than a new era of partnership.

Hawley standing out

To be sure, Republicans don’t all agree with one another on the importance of supporting workers and labor rights. One who has stood out so far is Hawley. The relatively pro-labor Republican senator’s stance led him to partner with Sen. Corey Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, to co-sponsor the Faster Labor Contracts Act.

This new bill would force employers to negotiate a contract in a reasonable time frame with employees once they have voted in favor of forming a union.

Hawley also joined with Democrats to reintroduce a bill that would ban dangerous work speed requirements in warehouses. Hawley said, when summarizing his efforts on behalf of working people, “It’s time we deliver for them.”

The Missouri senator is not completely alone. Sens. Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Roger Marshall of Kansas, both Republicans, have backed some labor-friendly legislation in the spring and summer of this year.

GOP leaders in Congress are not moving those bills forward so far, likely in part due to pushback from Republicans and their allies outside Congress.

And there are limits to Hawley’s labor friendliness. He voted for Trump’s tax-and-spending package, despite publicly airing his misgivings about the harm it may cause his blue-collar constituents.

Meanwhile, his past partners in the more labor-friendly wing of the GOP now occupy prominent administration posts. Yet they have largely fallen silent on union issues – except, in Rubio’s case, to oversee the firing of well over 1,000 State Department employees, many of them members of the American Foreign Service Association union.

Trump labor approach echoes Reagan’s style

Another GOP presidential administration courted segments of the labor movement to divide a key Democratic constituency, only to take actions that weakened unions.

In 1980, for example, Ronald Reagan sought and won the endorsement of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. A year later, he fired 13,000 striking members of that union.

The Teamsters union also backed Reagan – twice. It endorsed him in 1980 after he pledged during the 1980 campaign not to pursue anti-labor policies. Although he broke his promise, personal outreach from Vice President George H.W. Bush in the lead-up to the 1984 election earned him the Teamsters endorsement a second time.

What seems clear in my view is that whenever the GOP has tried to cast itself as a labor-friendly political party, it has emphasized symbolism over substance, favoring using rhetoric embracing workers who belong to unions versus taking actions to strengthen labor rights.

To support his research, Jake Rosenfeld has received funding from the Economic Policy Institute, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Urban Institute, and the National Science Foundation.

– ref. Trump administration has proven no friend to organized labor, from attacking federal unions to paralyzing the National Labor Relations Board – https://theconversation.com/trump-administration-has-proven-no-friend-to-organized-labor-from-attacking-federal-unions-to-paralyzing-the-national-labor-relations-board-263176

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

The 2026 midterms are more than a year away, but some high-profile primary election battles in the Democratic Party are gaining national attention. Much of that attention is focused on the age of the candidates.

Thanks to Texas’ proposed mid-decade redistricting, a showdown is looming between two Democrats serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from that state: 36-year-old Rep. Greg Casar has made clear his intention to run against a colleague, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, despite Doggett’s public pressure on Casar to run in a different district. Doggett is 78 years old and has served in the House since 1994.**

An even more stark generational divide has emerged in New York’s 12th district, where 26-year-old political organizer Liam Elkind is making a similar challenge in a Democratic primary. The 18-term incumbent in that race, Rep. Jerry Nadler, will be 79 years old by next year’s midterm election. He began his political career as a New York state assemblyman in 1977 — more than 20 years before Elkind was born.

These generational matchups have become common in the Democratic Party. They have also gained significant attention, particularly since the 2018 upset of another veteran Democratic leader, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, in a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was 28 at the time.

These challengers often criticize the seniority of older lawmakers. They say seniority is not a benefit but a hindrance to effective representation because the longtime incumbents are out of touch with the needs of their districts and the country, and that remaining in office crowds out crucial younger perspectives.

As generational challenges have become more common, they’ve also become sharper in their explicit appeals to age as a key candidate quality. And candidates like Elkind have made the argument that the stakes go beyond generational “vibes.”

A geriatric Congress can also have demonstrable effects on the policymaking that happens on Capitol Hill.

Slim majorities make age a bigger issue

Why is candidate age so prominent in the current election cycle?

One big reason is that razor-thin majorities in Congress make every seat count.

Slim margins create legislative and institutional uncertainty that has very real consequences for how Congress is run and how policy gets made.

In his candidacy announcement video, Elkind makes this point explicitly: “In the last five months, three House Democrats passed away, allowing Trump’s billionaire bill, gutting health care and food stamps for millions of people, to go through by one vote.”

Although it’s likely that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would have passed even without these vacancies, the Democratic absences undoubtedly made Speaker Mike Johnson’s job of passing the bill a little bit easier.

Elkind also notes that the last eight members of Congress who passed away in office were Democrats. In essence, Elkind is arguing that Democrats must elect more young members not just as a matter of representation but as a way of preserving power in Congress.

How do vacancies occur?

Seat vacancies caused by the early departures of members of Congress happen regularly, and in a variety of ways.

The 118th Congress, which met from Jan. 3, 2023, to Jan. 3, 2025, set a modern record with 17 vacancies, a rate unmatched going back to the 1950s. This was partly because of four member deaths, including Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.

Other high-profile vacancies in the 118th Congress were due to different causes. Some members were forced to resign or even expelled from Congress because of scandal, like GOP Rep. George Santos of New York, who was convicted in 2024 for a range of crimes and subsequently sentenced to several years in prison.

Others cut short their current term due to political defeats: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, resigned after being ousted from his leadership post in 2023. The current 119th Congress has seen additional resignations from members who took positions in the second Trump administration.

Resignation is the most common reason for departure in recent Congresses. However, at least one member – and often more than one – has died in all but one Congress in the past 70 years. The number of deaths that regularly occur among members is more than sufficient to change how the majority party functions in a closely contested Congress like this one.

And for Democrats, three member deaths in the first nine months of the current Congress is far ahead of previous years’ paces, making incumbents’ advanced age a relevant issue on the campaign trail.

How are vacancies filled?

Although U.S. Senate vacancies are often – though not always – filled through an appointment by the governor of that state, the Constitution mandates that House vacancies be filled by special elections scheduled by the governor.

These elections usually happen within a few months of the vacancy. What this means is that there are real possibilities for the size of a party’s majority to shrink, or grow, between election years, in ways that have profound impacts on policymaking. And even if a majority party shift doesn’t happen, a district could still replace a moderate departing representative with an extremist, or vice versa.

What does this mean for the 2026 midterms?

Whether younger candidates’ message will resonate with primary election voters remains an open question. Longer-serving incumbents hold major advantages like deeper campaign experience. Younger candidates traditionally lack the name recognition and donor bases that older incumbents have built up over decades.

But given the public concern over the high-profile declines of candidates for president – like former President Joe Biden – and for Congress, like Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell, generational politics may be more important than ever, and help reverse this trend.

This story contains material from a previous article published on Jan. 3, 2023.

Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In a closely divided Congress, aging lawmakers are a problem for Democrats – https://theconversation.com/in-a-closely-divided-congress-aging-lawmakers-are-a-problem-for-democrats-262914

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Laura Beers, Professor of History, American University

When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.

It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.

It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”

This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.

Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo and associated research centers, principally centered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

On Aug. 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.

Winners write the history

Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.

Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.

As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”

This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.

The Ministry of Truth

The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in “1984.”

The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.

Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.

The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.

But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”

At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.

The contemporary U.S. is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.

Down the memory hole

Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials in departments across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.

Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.

Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life ofHarriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.

Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.

Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.

Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”

Repressing thought

Orwell’s “1984” ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.

According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”

The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present and future.

If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.

It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.

As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.

This story is an updated version of an article originally published on June 9, 2025.

The Smithsonian is a member of The Conversation U.S.

Laura Beers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Orwellian echoes in Trump’s push for ‘Americanism’ at the Smithsonian – https://theconversation.com/the-orwellian-echoes-in-trumps-push-for-americanism-at-the-smithsonian-263304

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Deryn Davidson, Sustainable Landscape State Specialist, Extension, Colorado State University

If you’ve spent any time in the gardening corners of social media lately, you’ve likely come across a trend called “chaos gardening.”

The name alone is eye-catching – equal parts fun, rebellious and slightly alarming. Picture someone tossing random seeds into bare soil, watering once or twice, and ending up with a backyard jungle of blooms. No rows, no color coordination, no spacing charts. Just sprinkle and hope for the best.

As a sustainable landscape specialist at Colorado State University Extension, I think a lot about how to help people make designed landscapes more sustainable. Occasionally, a new trend like this one crops up claiming to be the silver bullet of gardening – supposedly it saves water, saves the bees and requires no maintenance.

But what is chaos gardening, really? And does it work? As with most viral trends, the answer is: sometimes.

What chaos gardening is and isn’t

At its core, chaos gardening is the practice of mixing a wide variety of seeds, often including leftover packets, wildflower mixes, or cut flower favorites, and scattering them over a planting area with minimal planning.

The goal is to create a dense, colorful garden that surprises you with its variety. For many, it’s a low-pressure, joyful way to experiment.

But chaos gardening isn’t the same as ecological restoration, pollinator meadow planting or native prairie establishment. Unlike chaos gardening, all of these techniques rely on careful species selection, site prep and long-term management.

Chaos gardening is a bit like making soup from everything in your pantry – it might be delicious, but there are no guarantees.

Chaos gardening’s appeal

One reason chaos gardening may be catching on is because it sidesteps the rules of garden design. A traditional landscape design approach is effective and appropriate for many settings, but it is a time investment and can feel intimidating. Design elements and principles, and matching color schemes, don’t fit everyone’s style or skill set.

Even the apparently relaxed layers of blooms and informal charm of an English cottage garden actually result from careful planning. Chaos gardening, by contrast, lets go of control. It offers a playful, forgiving entry point into growing things. In a way, chaos gardening is an antidote to the pressure of perfection, especially the kind found in highly curated, formal landscapes.

There’s also the allure of ease. People want gardening to be simple. If chaos gardening brings more people into the joy and mess of growing things, I consider that a win in itself. Broader research has found that emotional connection and accessibility are major motivators for gardening, often more than environmental impact.

When does chaos gardening work?

The best outcomes from chaos gardening happen when the chaos has a few guardrails:

• Choose plants with similar needs. Most successful chaos gardens rely on sun-loving annuals that grow quickly and bloom prolifically, like zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, snapdragons and sunflowers. These are also excellent cut flowers to use in bouquets, which makes them doubly rewarding.

• Consider your region. A chaos garden that thrives in Colorado might flop in North Carolina. It is beneficial to select seed mixes or individual varieties suited to your area since factors like soil type and growing season length matter. Different plants have unique needs beyond just sun and water; soil pH, cold hardiness and other conditions can make a big difference.

• Think about pollinators. Mixing in nectar- and pollen-rich flowers native to North America, such as black-eyed Susans, bee balm or coneflowers, provides valuable resources for native bees, butterflies, moths and other local pollinators. These species benefit even more if you plan your garden with phenology – that is, nature’s calendar – in mind. By maintaining blooms from early spring through late fall, you ensure a steady food supply throughout the growing season. Plus, a diverse plant palette supports greater pollinator abundance and diversity.

• Prep your site. Even “chaos” needs a little order. Removing weeds, loosening the top layer of soil and watering regularly, especially during germination when seeds are sprouting, will dramatically improve your results. Successful seed germination requires direct seed-to-soil contact and consistent moisture; if seeds begin to grow and then dry out, many species will not survive.

When does chaos gardening not work?

There are a few key pitfalls to chaos gardening that often get left out of the online hype:

• Wrong plant, wrong place. If your mix includes shade-loving plants and your garden is in full sun, or drought-tolerant plants whose seeds end up in a soggy low spot, they’ll struggle to grow.

• Invasive species and misidentified natives. Some wildflower mixes, especially inexpensive or mass-market ones, claim to be native but actually contain non-native species that can spread beyond your garden and become invasive. While many non-natives are harmless, some spread quickly and disrupt natural ecosystems. Check seed labels carefully and choose regionally appropriate native or adapted species whenever possible.

• Soil, sun and water still matter. Gardening is always a dialogue with place. Even if you’re embracing chaos, taking notes, observing how light moves through your space, and understanding your soil type will help you know your site better, and choose appropriate plants.

• Maintenance is still a thing. Despite the “toss and walk away” aesthetic, chaos gardens still require care. Watering, weeding and eventually cutting back or removing spent annuals are all part of the cycle.

Beyond the hashtag

Beneath the chaos gardening memes, there’s something real happening: a growing interest in a freer, more intuitive way of gardening. And that’s worth paying attention to.

Once someone has success with a zinnia or cosmos, they may be inspired to try more gardening. They might start noticing which flowers the bees are visiting in their garden. They may discover native plants and pay attention to the soil they are tending, seeing how both are part of a larger, living system. A chaotic beginning can become something deeper.

Chaos gardening might not replace the structured borders of a manicured garden or a carefully curated pollinator patch, but it might get someone new into the garden. It might lower the stakes, invite experimentation and help people see beauty in abundance rather than control.

If that’s the entry point someone needs, then let the chaos begin.

Deryn Davidson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Chaos gardening – wild beauty, or just a mess? A sustainable landscape specialist explains the trend – https://theconversation.com/chaos-gardening-wild-beauty-or-just-a-mess-a-sustainable-landscape-specialist-explains-the-trend-261249

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

John Rivers, John Bailey, David Middleton, Leroy Major and Buck Godfrey – all teammates from the 1955 Cannon Street YMCA Little League All-Star team – left Charleston, South Carolina, on a bus on Aug. 18, 2025.

After a stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for a couple days – where their story is included in an exhibit on Black baseball that opened in 2024 – they’ll head to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

There, they’ll be recognized before the Little League World Series championship game on August 24, 2025 – 70 years after the players, then 11 and 12 years old, watched the championship game from the bleachers, wondering why they weren’t on the field living out their own dreams instead of watching other boys live out theirs.

When the Cannon Street team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry and the Southern way of life.

White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street team, who represented the first Black Little League in South Carolina. The team won two tournaments by forfeit. They were supposed to then go to a regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where, if they won, they’d advance to the Little League World Series.

But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible for the regional tournament because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, as the rules stipulated.

A 4-team Black league is born

The Civil Rights Movement is often told in terms of court decisions, bus boycotts and racist demagogues. It’s rarely told from the point of view of children, who suffered in ways that left physical and emotional scars.

When I was a journalism professor at the College of Charleston, I learned how the presence of a single Black all-star team was enough to cause one of the biggest crises in Little League history. In 2022, I wrote the book “Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War.”

The team’s story begins in 1953. Robert Morrison, president of the Cannon Street YMCA, petitioned Little League Baseball to create a league for Black teams, and Little League Baseball granted the charter. Dozens of Black 11- and 12-year-old boys were selected for the four-team league before the 1954 season.

They played on a diamond of grass and gravel at Harmon Field in Charleston, a city with a long history of racial strife. In 1861, the Civil War began in Charleston harbor, where hundreds of thousands of slaves had been brought to the U.S. from the 1600s to the 1800s. The field also wasn’t far from Emanuel AME church, where nine Black parishioners were murdered during a prayer meeting in 2015.

Little League Baseball barred first-year leagues from the postseason tournaments. At some point during the 1955 season, the best players were selected for the league’s All-Star team. Cannon Street YMCA officials then registered the team for the Charleston city tournament, which included all-star teams from the city’s all-white leagues.

Little League Baseball officially prohibited racial discrimination. But in South Carolina, racial discrimination was still legal.

Dixie fights back

The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier that segregation in schools was unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, paving the way for racial integration.

Few states resisted integration as fiercely as South Carolina, and no politician fought harder against racial equality than the state’s junior U.S. senator, Strom Thurmond.

So when the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars registered for Charleston’s citywide tournament in July 1955, all the white teams withdrew. The Cannon Street team won by forfeit and advanced to the state tournament.

Danny Jones, the state’s director of Little League Baseball, petitioned the organization to create a segregated state tournament. Little League Baseball’s president, Peter McGovern, denied Jones’ request. He said that any team that refused to play the Cannon Street team would be banned from the organization.

Thurmond let it be known to Jones that an integrated tournament could not be permitted. In the end, Jones urged all the white teams to withdraw from the state tournament. He then resigned from Little League Baseball, created the Little Boys League and wrote the league’s charter, which prohibited Black players.

The Little Boys League – which was rebranded as Dixie Youth Baseball – soon replaced Little League in other Southern states; within six years, there were 390 such leagues spanning most of the former Confederacy. It would be decades before Little League Baseball returned to South Carolina.

Having won the South Carolina tournament by forfeit, the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars prepared for the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where the state’s governor, Marvin Griffin, objected to integration. If youth baseball could be integrated, so, too, could schools, swimming pools and municipal parks, he said.

Let them play!

Little League rules said that teams could advance only by playing and winning, so the Cannon Street’s state championship was ruled invalid because it had come by forfeit.

McGovern decided against making an exception for the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars.

Most white-owned newspapers, whether in the South or North, had long stayed silent on the topic of racial discrimination. But the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars broke through. Editors and reporters may have wanted to avoid the topic of racism, but boys being denied the opportunity to play in a baseball tournament was too objectionable to ignore.

On July 31, 1955, New York Daily News columnist Dick Young asked Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, who had broken Major League Baseball’s color barrier eight years earlier, about the white teams that had quit the tournament rather than play against a Black team.

“How stupid can they be?” Robinson said. “I had to laugh when I read the story.”

Perhaps pressured by criticism, McGovern, Little League’s president, invited the team to be Little League’s guests for the championship game. So the team boarded a bus for Williamsport. They arrived the night before the championship game, which pitted Morrisville, Pennsylvania, against Delaware Township, New Jersey, an integrated team.

The Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and their coaches were introduced before the game, and the players recall hearing a loud voice from the bleachers.

“Let them play!” it boomed.

Others in the crowd joined in, the players said.

“Let them play! Let them play!”

John Rivers, who played second base for the team, told me he can still “hear it now.”

After their brief moment on the field, the Cannon Street All-Stars returned to their seats and watched other boys live out their dreams. A photograph of the team in the stands reveals the disappointment on their faces.

On the following day – Aug. 28, 1955 – the team boarded its bus to return to Charleston. It was the same date that Emmett Till, not much older than the players on the team, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman.

The boys and girls who play in the 2025 tournament will forever remember the experience. The surviving members of the Cannon Street All-Stars, who are all in their early 80s, never forgot what they were denied.

Rivers, who went on to become a successful architect, says this is the moral of their story.

“It’s a tragedy to take dreams away from a youngster,” Rivers told The Washington Post in 2022. “I knew it then. I know it now, and I’ve seen to it that no one takes dreams away from me again.”

Now there are some on the political right who want to bury America’s ugly racial history.

America has never fully reckoned with slavery or the decades of segregation, Rivers recently told me. “It just decided to move on from that ugly period in its history without any kind of therapy,” he said. “And now they are trying to sweep it all under the rug again.”

Portions of this article first appeared in an article published on Aug. 19, 2016.

Chris Lamb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How bigotry crushed the dreams of an all-Black Little League team – https://theconversation.com/how-bigotry-crushed-the-dreams-of-an-all-black-little-league-team-263003