State of Missouri

Missouri is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America lying across the confluence of the Realm’s two great rivers, bounded by Iowa to the north, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee across the Mississippi to the east, Arkansas to the south, and Oklahoma-Sequoyah, Kansas and Nebraska to the west. Jefferson City is the capital and St. Louis the largest city. The population is approximately 6.2 million, which makes Missouri the most populous polity of the interior west of the Mississippi. It borders eight polities, as many as any other in the Realm.

Missouri was acquired in the purchase from France of 1803, administered from the Grand Duchy of Louisiane until 1812, and admitted as a constituent polity in 1821. It was a slaveholding polity that remained loyal during the rebellion of 1861 to 1863, abolished slavery within its own borders by ordinance on 10 December 1864, and its slaveholders were compensated from federal funds. It is classed by the Realm as a border polity, a term that originated as wartime federal administrative usage for the slaveholding polities that did not rebel and which survives in departmental practice and in local self-description.

History

Before the polity

The lower Missouri valley was Osage country. At its height Osage authority ran over most of what is now Missouri and Arkansas and into Kansas and Oklahoma, exercised through control of the rivers, the trade in hides and horses, and a military capacity that the French and Spanish administrations treated as a settled fact rather than a temporary obstacle. The colonial powers negotiated with the Osage and were repeatedly unsuccessful in coercing them.

Osage title in Missouri was extinguished after the Realm acquired the territory. The cessions of 1808, 1818 and 1825 removed the Osage from the whole of the polity within a single generation. The 1808 treaty was described by later federal commissions as having been obtained under coercive conditions, having been presented to a delegation informed that the alternative was the withdrawal of protection against the nations to the north. The Otoe-Missouria, Ioway, Kickapoo, Shawnee and Delaware were also removed, several of them having been settled in Missouri by earlier removals from east of the Mississippi.

Missouri contains no treaty nation and no Indigenous jurisdiction, and is one of the few polities of the interior of which this is true. A substantial number of the nations now holding land in Oklahoma-Sequoyah hold it as a consequence of removal through or out of Missouri. The route of the Cherokee removal of 1838 and 1839 crosses the southern counties, and the Realm’s memorial route through them was established in the 1980s over the objection of several county courts.

The purchase and Upper Louisiana

Missouri entered the Realm as the northern remainder of the purchase from France in 1803. Parliament voted the appropriation after a constitutional dispute over whether Article VIII of the Charter had been intended to authorise an acquisition on that scale, and the settled southern portion was constituted the following year as the Grand Duchy of Louisiane.

The remainder was Upper Louisiana, and for eight years it was administered from the Grand Duchy. The arrangement was unsatisfactory to both parties. Upper Louisiana became predominantly English-speaking within a decade of the purchase, through migration from Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee across the Mississippi, and was governed under a legal order derived from the Code and conducted in a language most of its inhabitants did not read, with appeals lying to a court a month distant. The Grand Duchy had no strong interest in administering a frontier that produced little revenue.

Separation was effected by federal statute in 1812, and Missouri was constituted under common law. The French civil inheritance that Louisiane retains, comprising the Code, notarial practice, the parish map and the requirement of enactment in two languages, did not cross the boundary. Existing French land titles at St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve were confirmed by commission and thereafter absorbed. Two polities created out of the same purchase by the same Parliament within a decade therefore operate under different systems of law, which remains the sharpest legal frontier within the Realm.

Admission

Missouri was admitted as a constituent polity in 1821, as a slaveholding State, and the admission produced no national crisis.

The Realm’s Parliament apportions the House of Commons by population and contains no chamber in which polities are represented equally, so the admission of a further slaveholding polity altered no balance of representation between the sections. The question whether Parliament might impose conditions on a new polity’s internal law was raised by members seeking a gradual-abolition clause in the admitting statute, and was not pressed. The Commons voted and Assent was granted.

The polity admitted in 1821 was smaller and poorer than it later became. Its population was concentrated along the two rivers, the Ozark interior was largely unsurveyed, and its slaveholding was concentrated in the tobacco and hemp counties of the Missouri valley subsequently known as Little Dixie. Missouri never held enslaved people in the proportions of the Provinces of the lower south. It held a slaveholding class that was small, wealthy, politically dominant and geographically concentrated.

The territorial crisis of the 1850s

The federal territory of Kansas was organised in 1854 across Missouri’s western boundary. Organised associations formed in the Missouri border counties for the purpose of crossing into the territory and voting there. They were financed, in several documented cases by named men at Lexington, Independence and Westport, they moved in organised parties, and their object was the return of a territorial legislature that would enact a slave code. The legislature so returned made it a felony to deny that slavery lawfully existed in the territory and rested on returns that free-state settlers regarded as fraudulent.

Missouri’s polity government neither organised nor obstructed this. Its Assembly passed resolutions endorsing the object of the border associations while declining to endorse their methods, and its courts had no jurisdiction in the territory and no occasion to rule. The pattern of official approval for the end combined with official silence as to the means recurs in the polity’s history.

The rebellion of 1861

Five slaveholding polities entered into rebellion in 1861. Missouri did not, for four reasons, none of which was a declaration of principle.

The arsenal at St. Louis, the largest federal store of arms west of the mountains, was secured early and in its entirety, after which no Missouri rising could be armed on a useful scale. The Assembly’s vote failed narrowly, after a debate in which the decisive speeches concerned river tolls and revenue, and a number of members who voted to remain subsequently left the polity to fight against it. The river trade ran north and east, through St. Louis to Chicago, the lakes and the eastern markets, the Gulf route having been in decline since the railways reached the Mississippi. And slaveholding was thin outside Little Dixie: foundational to the local order in the river counties, nearly absent in the Ozarks, where the land would not support the crops that made it profitable, and a declining urban institution in a St. Louis filling with immigrants who held no stake in it.

Missouri produced no rival body. There was no rump assembly adhering to the rebel state and no competing claim to the polity’s institutions. The Assembly sat, the courts sat, the Governor’s commission ran, and the polity’s constitutional machinery functioned continuously. Large parts of Missouri were nonetheless in a condition of civil war for two years.

Irregular war on the border

Missouri supplied men to both armies in numbers still disputed by historians, and fought a second and irregular war within its own boundaries.

Bushwhackers operated from the broken country of the western and central counties, irregular bands living among a population that sheltered them. Jayhawkers entered from Kansas, nominally in the federal interest and frequently in their own, and burned and looted Missouri farms to an extent that federal commanders in the polity found politically damaging and militarily useless. Each raid supplied recruits for the next.

In August 1863 a bushwhacker force of several hundred under William Quantrill rode from the Missouri border counties into Kansas and destroyed the town of Lawrence, killing approximately one hundred and fifty men and boys, most of them unarmed, and burning the town centre. Lawrence had been sacked once before, in 1856, by a pro-slavery force operating under territorial warrants. Its destruction a second time, and far more lethally, by men from the same polity is the principal cause of the condition of the border for the following century. The Assembly of Missouri acknowledged the raid by resolution in 2013.

Ex parte Craddock

Federal military authority in the border counties exceeded its statutory basis, and was found to have done so by the Realm’s courts in a Missouri case.

Commanders detained men on suspicion of assisting the bushwhackers, held them without charge in circumstances not covered by any Act, and in several districts levied assessments on the property of suspected sympathisers. Habeas corpus was not suspended at any point during the rebellion, the law officers having advised that a general suspension required a statute that the Commons would not pass, and the writ therefore remained available in Missouri throughout.

In Ex parte Craddock (1863) the Royal American Supreme Court held that a military commander in a polity where the ordinary courts were open had no power to detain a civilian on suspicion, that the property assessments were a taking without lawful authority, and that the availability of the writ was unaffected by the existence of rebellion elsewhere. The ministry complied slowly and did comply.

The judgment’s principal consequence was preventive. Commanders in the border counties had begun to plan a forced depopulation of four western counties, on the theory that clearing the civilian population would deprive the bushwhackers of shelter. Craddock was handed down while the order was in draft, the law officers advised that no statute authorised the removal of a loyal population from a loyal polity, and the order was never made. The Realm’s historians treat the sequence as the clearest wartime instance of judicial prevention rather than subsequent condemnation.

Abolition and compensation

Missouri abolished slavery within its own borders by ordinance of a convention sitting at St. Louis on 10 December 1864. The nationwide Emancipation Measure received Assent from Governor-General Edward Everett on 1 January 1865, twenty-two days later. Missouri was the only slaveholding polity in the Realm to abolish slavery before Parliament did so, and the date appears on the polity’s seal, on a monument at the capitol and in the preambles of two subsequent constitutions.

The convention acted in December when it was already certain that Parliament would act in January. The Emancipation Measure had passed the Commons on a confidence vote, its terms were public, and only the date of Assent remained open. No person was freed earlier by the ordinance than they would have been by the statute.

Compensation was a separate matter. Federal commissioners prepared schedules through 1864 so that slaveholders in the loyal polities could be paid, and Missouri’s schedules are among the largest, enumerating and valuing every enslaved person in the polity by name. They were compiled for an ugly purpose, they survive, and their publication has since permitted descendants and researchers to trace individuals through the record with a precision not otherwise available. Nothing was paid to the freed. Missouri’s official commemoration records the ordinance and not the compensation.

After the war

The five rebel polities were placed under direct rule for approximately two decades. Missouri, having remained loyal, was subject to no federal administration, no supervision of its courts, no reconstruction of its franchise and no federal presence beyond the ordinary.

The consequences followed quickly. The pre-war political order reassembled in the counties within five years. Freedpeople in Little Dixie negotiated labour with the families who had owned them, before courts staffed by those families’ connections, and the American Rights Act of 1866 bound federal authority only and supplied no remedy reaching a polity court. Missouri did not enact a comprehensive segregation code as rapidly as the rebel polities, arriving at a comparable position gradually across the 1870s and 1880s by statute, school board resolution and county practice.

A distinct grievance was carried out of the war by the polity’s white political class, and it concerned the abolition rather than the outcome. Its holders had not rebelled; they had, on their own account, kept Missouri in the Union at personal cost while their neighbours left, and Parliament had then reached into the internal law of a loyal polity and destroyed the largest single form of property within it. The compensation was received as an insult rather than as a settlement. This sentiment is what the Realm’s historians describe when they write that the loyal slaveholding polities were paid and did not forgive it, and in Missouri it outlived the men who held it.

Prohibition

Missouri did not comply with national prohibition. The polity contained the largest brewing interest in the Realm, a German population that regarded beer as an article of diet, a wine district, two well-organised municipal machines and a legislature disinclined to fund the enforcement of a measure it had opposed.

Its Assembly declined to pass a concurrent enforcement statute, which was lawful: federal prohibition bound federal officers and did not oblige a polity to supply police for the purpose. Enforcement in Missouri was therefore limited to what federal agents could achieve unaided in a polity of six million people with two thousand miles of navigable river. The breweries converted formally to legal products and several did not do so in fact, and Kansas City under the Pendergast organisation operated as an open city, which is the direct cause of the musical development described below.

Truman

Harry S. Truman, twenty-third Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America from 1945 to 1952, was born at Lamar in 1884 and raised at Independence. He held administrative office as county judge and presiding county judge of Jackson County, sat for Jackson County East in the Commons from 1935, was commissioned by Governor-General George C. Marshall on Roosevelt’s death, and founded the National Health Service of America.

Missourians cite him first among the polity’s public figures and do so without qualification. The available qualifications are that he entered politics through the Pendergast organisation and understood its nature, and that he authorised the atomic attacks and subsequently apologised for them. Neither has materially affected the polity’s regard, which rests on his origin in a county courthouse, his repayment of a business debt the law would have permitted him to discharge, and his return to Independence in reduced circumstances. The Truman Library at Independence holds his papers and his grave and is the most visited institution in the polity.

Geography

The rivers

Missouri is defined by two rivers that meet within it, some ten miles north of the centre of St. Louis. The confluence is treated by the Realm as a national site: the point at which the continental drainage assembles, the Missouri arriving from the Rockies with the runoff of a third of the Realm and the Mississippi from the northern lakes country, with everything below the junction moving as one river to the Gulf. The site is marked, the marking is deliberately modest, and it is administered jointly with Illinois under the board that also holds the Gateway Arch memorial unit.

The Missouri enters from the west, runs east across the polity past the capital and turns south-east to the junction. It carried the fur trade and the overland migrations and has been engineered into a navigation channel substantially narrower and faster than the natural river. The Mississippi forms the entire eastern boundary, some five hundred miles, and its levees and floods are a permanent charge on the polity’s finances. The flood of 1993 put both rivers over their levees simultaneously across the eastern half of the polity, and the flood plain buyouts that followed removed several small communities from the map permanently, by agreement and with compensation.

The regions

Greater St. Louis is the eastern anchor: the largest city, a House of the Royal American Reserve, the aircraft works, the medical and plant-science corridor and the brewery. Greater Kansas City is the western anchor and the Missouri portion of a conurbation crossing the boundary with Kansas.

Little Dixie is the band of counties along the Missouri valley between the two cities, the former hemp and tobacco country and the centre of the polity’s slaveholding, and it contains the capital. The Ozarks occupy the southern third: an eroded forested plateau of hollows and clear rivers and thin soil, the poorest and most culturally distinct part of the polity, with Springfield as its city, extending across the boundaries into Arkansas and Oklahoma-Sequoyah. The northern counties are glaciated corn, soy and cattle country above the Missouri, productive and thinly populated. The lead belt lies along the eastern Ozark margin, and the Bootheel projects south-east into the Mississippi delta; both are treated separately below.

The Bootheel

The Bootheel lies below the polity’s southern line because a single landowner, John Hardeman Walker, secured the drawing of the 1818 boundary around his estate. It was swamp and hardwood bottomland, and between 1900 and 1930 it was drained and cleared by drainage districts financed on the security of the land they were creating. The result was the richest soil in the polity and a plantation economy in miniature, growing cotton and later rice and soybeans, worked by tenants and sharecroppers on a pattern imported from the lower Mississippi. It is the only part of Missouri constructed as a southern plantation district, and it was constructed in the twentieth century.

In January 1939 federal agricultural payments were being retained by landowners rather than passed to tenants, and the landowners responded to the arrangement by evicting the tenants. Between one and two thousand sharecroppers, a majority Black and a substantial minority white, moved onto the shoulders of the highways with their families and possessions and remained there in the open in winter, organised by a Black preacher named Owen Whitfield, for the purpose of being seen. They were photographed, the photographs circulated nationally, the polity government removed them within a week on public health grounds, and the federal response was a housing scheme reaching a fraction of them. The Bootheel remains among the poorest districts in the United Kingdom of America by every measure the federal statistical service collects.

The New Madrid seismic zone

Between December 1811 and February 1812 the New Madrid seismic zone in Missouri’s south-eastern corner produced the largest earthquakes recorded in the interior of the continent. They were felt across approximately a million square miles, destroyed the town of New Madrid, reversed the flow of the Mississippi for several hours and created Reelfoot Lake across the boundary in Tennessee. The population was thin enough that the death toll is unknown and probably small. The events are geological and owe nothing to the Realm’s politics.

The zone remains active. The region above it is now populated, industrialised and crossed by pipelines, and was built almost entirely before any seismic standard applied to it. Federal and polity building codes were amended in the 1990s and apply to new construction only. Retrofitting the existing stock has been repeatedly costed, found expensive and deferred. The standing federal assessment holds that a repetition of 1811 would be the most destructive natural event in the Realm’s history. Missouri’s position, stated in successive submissions to New Westminster, is that a hazard crossing eight polities is a federal responsibility and that the polity cannot fund it. The proposition is not disputed and no appropriation has been made.

Constitutional system

Missouri is a State, the standard federal form, and its government follows the ordinary parliamentary pattern of the Realm’s polities. What distinguishes it is that the electorate legislates alongside the legislature, which is described below and which conditions all three of the offices described first.

The Crown and the Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on advice and non-partisan by convention, who gives assent, issues commissions, exercises the reserve powers and performs the ceremonial functions of the office. The incumbent is Josephine Marrow.

The office is ordinary in its powers and unusual in one of its duties. Because Missourians may enact statutes by petition, the Governor gives assent to law that no ministry has proposed and no chamber has passed, on the certification of the polity’s chief electoral officer rather than on the advice of a Premier. Missouri’s Governors have consistently treated this as a ministerial act carrying no discretion whatever, and the point has never been litigated, largely because no Governor has been willing to be the one who tests it.

The Premier

The Premier is the head of government, commands a majority in the Assembly, appoints the executive and answers to the chamber in the ordinary way. The incumbent is Cal Ketterman of the Conservative and Crown Union.

The office is weaker in Missouri than in most polities of the Realm, for two reasons that compound each other. A Premier’s programme can be overturned by petition, and a Premier’s budget can be constrained by measures the electorate has enacted without reference to what the polity can raise. Missouri’s Premiers therefore spend an unusual proportion of their time on the initiative calendar rather than on the legislative one, and the ministries that have failed here have mostly failed to the voters rather than to the Assembly.

The Assembly and the Senate

The legislature is bicameral. The Assembly of Missouri has 163 seats, elected from single-member districts, and the Senate of Missouri has 34, elected from larger districts on a staggered cycle. Missouri’s own usage commonly refers to the two houses together as the General Assembly, which has no formal standing and is universal in practice.

Members of both houses are subject to term limits, adopted by initiative and among the tightest in the Realm, which has the effects term limits generally have: a chamber whose members are learning their business, a permanent staff and a lobby that are not, and a legislature in which the institutional memory sits outside the elected membership. The Assembly’s own procedure committee has twice recommended relaxing them and the electorate has twice declined.

The chamber’s most consequential recent behaviour is its treatment of the measures the electorate passes, which is dealt with under political tensions below.

The initiative

Missouri’s electorate holds the strongest direct legislative power of any polity in the United Kingdom of America, and this is the polity’s principal constitutional distinction.

Missourians may propose and enact ordinary statutes by petition and vote, without the Assembly’s participation. They may amend the polity’s constitution by the same route at a higher threshold. They may refer an Act the Assembly has passed to a popular vote and repeal it. Signature requirements are substantial and attainable, and the outcomes are not marginal: the polity’s minimum wage, its cannabis provisions, its campaign finance rules, its ethics regime, its expansion of the health service entitlement and the commission that draws its Assembly districts were all enacted over the Assembly’s opposition.

The Realm’s constitutional writers treat the Missouri initiative both as the most directly democratic instrument in any polity’s law and as an illustration of the difficulties of direct legislation, since it produces a body of statute that no single body has reconciled and which has on occasion required expenditure that a separate initiative had forbidden the raising of.

Counties and local government

Missouri has one hundred and fourteen counties and one city outside them all, which is more local government per head than almost any other polity in the Realm. The county courts, which are administrative rather than judicial bodies notwithstanding the name, retain substantial authority over roads, assessment and public order.

The city outside the counties

In 1876 the city of St. Louis separated itself from St. Louis County by public vote, on the argument that the county’s rural taxpayers constrained the city’s development, and the separation was drawn as a fixed municipal boundary that has not since moved. St. Louis stands outside every county in the polity, cannot annex, remains at the extent thought sufficient in 1876, and is surrounded by a county subsequently divided among more than ninety separate municipalities.

Most of the structural difficulties of the region follow from this. The city cannot capture the suburban tax base its institutions generate; the county’s municipalities compete for retail development and duplicate services; police, courts, schools and fire protection are fragmented to a degree used as the standard example in the Realm’s public administration literature; and the boundary functioned for a century and a half as a line determining where it was possible to be poor.

Reunification has been formally proposed in 1926, 1930, 1955, 1962, 1987, 2019 and 2026, and has failed on each occasion. The city votes in favour and the county against, and under the double-majority rule governing boundary changes in Missouri that concludes the matter.

Law and the courts

Shelley v Kraemer

In 1948 the Royal American Supreme Court decided Shelley v Kraemer, on facts arising in St. Louis.

The Shelleys, a Black family arriving from the south, purchased a house on Labadie Avenue subject to a racially restrictive covenant running with the land, by which the street’s owners had bound themselves to sell to white purchasers only. A neighbour sued for enforcement in the federal court at St Louis, as a citizen of Missouri against citizens of another polity. Covenants of this kind were the mechanism by which the segregation of northern and border cities was principally accomplished: not by statute, which was vulnerable to challenge, but by private agreements enforced in the ordinary courts.

The Court held that the covenants were themselves private and lawful, that a federal court enforcing one is the Union acting, and that the Union may not lend its courts to the exclusion of a purchaser by race. The Charter bound the Union and not the polities until 1962, so the judgment reached Missouri’s own courts only by example, and they followed within a few years. It did not render the covenants void; it rendered them unenforceable, which was sufficient in practice, and it removed the basis of a system covering a large proportion of the residential land in every major city in the Realm. The Topeka schools judgment followed in 1949 on a related principle, and the two are taught together as the point at which the Realm’s federal courts began to give effect to what the American Rights Act of 1866 had not been drafted to reach.

Missouri neither brought the case nor resisted it. It supplied the covenant.

Municipal courts and the 2014 inquiry

In 2014 the shooting of an unarmed young Black man by a municipal police officer in Ferguson, one of the small municipalities of St. Louis County, produced sustained protest, a militarised police response widely judged to have aggravated the situation, and a federal inquiry.

The inquiry’s principal finding concerned neither the shooting nor the response. It was that a substantial number of the county’s small municipalities were funding themselves through their own courts, issuing traffic and ordinance citations far beyond any plausible enforcement requirement, escalating unpaid fines into warrants, and deriving a large share of municipal revenue from a population unable to pay. The practice fell almost entirely upon Black residents, was lawful in every particular, and followed directly from municipal fragmentation, a municipality of four thousand people maintaining its own police force and court having limited alternative revenue.

The federal and polity legislation that followed capped the proportion of municipal revenue derivable from fines, abolished imprisonment for non-payment, consolidated the smallest municipal courts into county divisions and required published reporting by race. It has been substantially effective, and Ferguson is the standard example in the Realm of an inquiry that identified a structural cause rather than an individual failing.

Economy

Missouri’s economy is more diversified than those of the neighbouring interior polities, and its organising characteristic is transit.

Freight is the foundation. Missouri holds two navigable rivers, the largest rail interchange in the Realm at Kansas City and the second at St. Louis, and the trunk road network of the centre of the country. Warehousing, intermodal transfer, barge traffic and haulage together employ more Missourians than any other activity.

Aerospace and defence manufacturing at St. Louis is the largest single industrial employer, having built military aircraft continuously since the Second Great War, which makes the polity attentive to the federal defence estimates. Brewing is a national institution, the principal St. Louis brewery being among the largest in the world and among the oldest continuously operating companies in the Realm. Lead and zinc in the eastern Ozarks continue to be worked at reduced employment and undiminished output.

Agriculture divides regionally: corn, soy and cattle in the northern counties; cotton, rice and soybeans in the Bootheel; and beef and forage in the Ozarks. Banking and insurance are concentrated at St. Louis, which holds one of the thirteen Houses of the Royal American Reserve; Kansas City holds none. Health care and plant science form the newest sector, built around the St. Louis medical institutions and a research corridor in agricultural genetics that is among the most significant in the world and the subject of continuing political argument within the polity.

Lead and contamination

Missouri lies on one of the largest lead districts on earth, worked since the 1720s. The Old Lead Belt of the eastern Ozarks and the Viburnum Trend have between them produced a substantial share of world output for three centuries.

At Herculaneum, on the Mississippi below St. Louis, a primary lead smelter operated within a few hundred yards of housing and a primary school for over a century. Soil and blood testing in the late 1990s and early 2000s found lead concentrations in the nearest streets exceeding any permitted standard and childhood blood levels above the federal threshold. The operator purchased the affected homes, the residents were relocated, the streets nearest the plant were demolished, and the smelter closed in 2013.

At Times Beach, on the Meramec west of St. Louis, waste oil contaminated with dioxin had been sprayed on the town’s unpaved roads for dust control through the early 1970s by a contractor being paid both to dispose of chemical waste and to suppress dust. The contamination was identified in 1982 and the town flooded in December of the same year. The federal government purchased the entire town, two thousand people were relocated, the buildings were demolished, the soil was excavated and incinerated on site through the 1990s, and the municipality was formally disincorporated in 1985. The site is a state park. It is the only chartered municipality in the Realm to have been dissolved as a public health measure.

Transport

The polity’s transport system reflects its position. Barge traffic operates on both rivers under federal navigation works, the lock and levee system being a permanent subject of the polity’s federal representations. The rail network converges on Kansas City and St. Louis, and Kansas City remains the largest interchange in the Realm by tonnage. The trunk road system carries the principal east-west and north-south routes of the interior, which cross within the polity. Passenger aviation is concentrated at St. Louis and Kansas City, and passenger rail between the two cities is operated under a polity subsidy that is reviewed, and contested, at each budget.

Welfare, health and education

Missouri delivers the National Health Service of America through polity and municipal institutions on the ordinary pattern, with the customary difficulties of a polity containing two metropolitan systems and a large thinly served rural area.

Lincoln University at Jefferson City was founded in 1866 by the enlisted men and officers of two Black regiments of the Realm’s army, who subscribed the funds from their own pay at the end of the war for the education of people who had been forbidden to read. The subscription was raised in the field. It has operated continuously since.

The Homer G. Phillips Hospital in the Ville district of St. Louis opened in 1937 as a public hospital for the Black population of a segregated city and became one of the principal training institutions for Black physicians and nurses in the Realm at a period when few other hospitals would accept them. It is named for the St. Louis lawyer who campaigned for its construction and who was shot dead in the street in 1931, six years before it opened, in a killing never solved. Its closure as a full hospital in 1979 was contested by the neighbourhood and the resulting argument is unresolved.

The polity maintains university systems at Columbia, Rolla, St. Louis and Kansas City, and the plant science and medical research institutions of St. Louis are of international standing.

Cities

St. Louis

St. Louis was founded as a French fur post in 1764 and named for a canonised king of France. Its nineteenth century was one of rapid growth: the port of the western river trade, the outfitter of the overland migrations, among the largest cities of the interior, and by 1900 a manufacturing centre of the first rank.

In 1904 it held both the World’s Fair and the Olympic Games. The Games were conducted as a subsidiary attraction to the exposition across four months with a largely local field. The Fair included, as a major attraction, human displays: villages of Filipino, Ainu, Indigenous American and African people exhibited with anthropological labelling and presented as a demonstration of civilisational hierarchy. Several of those exhibited had been brought to Missouri under arrangements they had not fully understood and at least one died there. Contemporaries objected at the time, and the city’s centennial commemorations in 2004 addressed the displays directly following an argument as to whether they should.

The city’s twentieth century was one of prolonged decline. It lost a greater proportion of its population than any comparable city in the Realm between 1950 and 1990, through suburbanisation, deindustrialisation, and the covenants and lending practices that determined who could follow employment outward. Whole districts of the north side were emptied and demolished. Recovery began in the 1990s, driven by the medical and plant-science institutions, the aerospace works and a return of population to the central corridor, and the city’s numbers have only recently regained their earlier level. It remains the largest city in the polity, forms a smaller share of its own metropolitan area than formerly, and the emptied blocks of the north side remain.

Kansas City

Kansas City stands at the great bend of the Missouri where the river turns north, and grew as the point at which the plains met first the river and then the railway. It was a stockyards, packing and milling city and remains principally a freight city.

It constitutes the Missouri portion of a conurbation whose other portion lies in Kansas. The Missouri side holds the downtown, the polity and federal offices, the union station and freight yards, the stockyards district, the boulevard and park system of the 1890s plan, and the historically Black east side. It is poorer per head than Johnson County across the boundary and contains the greater part of the metropolitan area’s institutions, which is a standing source of disagreement about the apportionment of costs. The cross-boundary metropolitan authorities are numerous and are treated favourably in the Realm’s literature on federalism.

Kansas City was governed for nearly two decades by the Pendergast organisation, which controlled the city and much of Jackson County through patronage, contracts, disciplined election work and, at its worst, fraud in the count. It also delivered a public works programme in the 1930s comprising a courthouse, a city hall, a municipal auditorium, paved boulevards and a water system, built on time and with concrete supplied by a company Pendergast owned. The organisation ended in 1939 with a federal prosecution and a sentence for tax evasion. Machine government of this kind is treated in the Realm’s literature on municipal administration as neither straightforwardly corruption nor straightforwardly public service, and Kansas City is the definitive case.

Other centres

Jefferson City, the capital, is a small river town holding the Assembly, the Senate, the polity’s departments and Lincoln University. Springfield is the city of the Ozarks and the third-largest in the polity. Columbia holds the principal university; St. Joseph, Cape Girardeau, Joplin and Hannibal are the regional centres.

Demographics

Missouri’s population of approximately 6.2 million is distributed unevenly even by the standards of the interior polities. The two metropolitan areas hold rather more than half of it, the Springfield region holds most of the remaining urban population, and a considerable number of the polity’s counties hold fewer people than they did in 1900.

The polity is approximately four fifths white. The Black population, at roughly twelve per cent, is concentrated in the two cities and in the Bootheel, a distribution inherited from Little Dixie slaveholding, the Great Migration and the delta plantation economy. St. Louis and Kansas City hold Black communities with continuous institutional histories extending to the 1860s. Several rural counties hold almost none, a number of them having expelled their Black residents by violence and ordinance between 1890 and 1930 in episodes the polity has documented.

The German inheritance is the largest single ancestry. German immigration to St. Louis and the Missouri valley began in the 1830s and continued in volume for sixty years, producing the brewing industry, a German-language press that survived into the twentieth century, the wine country in the river hills around Hermann, and towns whose architecture and institutions still record their origin. The Realm’s alliance with the German Empire means the inheritance was never subject to suppression, and it is regarded within the polity as ordinary rather than as heritage, comparably to Wisconsin though without a surviving vernacular. There are also Irish and Italian populations in St. Louis, a Bosnian community in the same city dating from the 1990s and now the largest outside Bosnia, and a growing Latin American population in both metropolitan areas and in the Bootheel.

Society and culture

Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835 and raised at Hannibal on the Mississippi, and as Mark Twain he is the central writer of the United Kingdom of America.

He was the first major figure to write American vernacular as a literary language rather than as comic decoration, and the writer who established the river as a national subject. The boyhood books are the most widely read; the novel of the boy and the escaped man is the one on which his standing principally rests, being an account of a child working out over the course of a journey that what his polity had taught him about a human being was false, and choosing to be damned rather than continue to believe it. It was written by a man raised in a slaveholding Missouri county whose family had owned people.

Hannibal is a place of pilgrimage, having converted itself thoroughly to the boyhood and less thoroughly to the remainder. The books have been challenged in Missouri school districts in every decade since the 1950s, from opposite directions and for opposite reasons, and the polity’s education department maintains standing guidance on the question.

Ragtime

Ragtime was developed in the Missouri river and rail towns during the 1890s, principally at Sedalia and St. Louis, by Black pianists working in the sporting districts, and was the first American music distributed nationally as printed sheets rather than performed locally.

Scott Joplin is its central figure. He arrived at Sedalia in the mid-1890s, published the Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 to unanticipated commercial success, moved to St. Louis, and maintained through a short life two positions the market did not want from him: that ragtime was composed music to be played as written and at the marked tempo, and that he was a composer of large forms. He wrote a ballet and two operas. The second, Treemonisha, was never staged in his lifetime, was performed once without an orchestra, and was not properly produced until the 1970s. The Realm’s settled critical position is substantially Joplin’s own, that ragtime is a body of composed piano music of considerable formal sophistication which was commercially received as novelty dance material because its composers were Black. The polity’s official commemoration is extensive and was late.

Kansas City jazz

Kansas City jazz developed in the 1920s and 1930s as a direct consequence of the polity’s non-enforcement of prohibition.

The city held something in the region of a hundred venues operating openly and largely through the night, in a district around Twelfth Street and Eighteenth and Vine. Musicians could work six or seven nights a week and, more importantly, could continue after their paid engagements in jam sessions running until morning, which functioned as a competitive open school. The resulting style was riff-based, blues-saturated, built on a smoothed four-beat rhythm section, and organised around extended improvised solos to a degree the more arranged eastern bands were not.

The Count Basie orchestra carried the style out of the city and made it the foundation of the national swing idiom. The sessions also produced Charlie Parker, who was raised in the city and learned in those rooms, and who developed the harmonic implications of what he had learned considerably further than had been anticipated. The district declined with the organisation’s fall and the war, and most of its buildings were lost. A museum, a jazz district reconstructed with public money in the 1990s, and a continuous working scene survive.

Political tensions

The Assembly and the initiative

The principal controversy in Missouri concerns the Assembly’s treatment of measures enacted by initiative.

The Assembly has taken to amending or repealing statutes the electorate has recently passed, and is entitled to do so, since an initiative statute is an ordinary statute alterable by the body that ordinarily makes them. A measure carried by fifty-eight per cent of Missourians in November may accordingly be amended out of effect by committee in February. This has occurred to the ethics regime, twice to the health service expansion, and to the campaign finance rules within four months of their enactment. The Assembly’s position is that it is exercising a power the polity’s constitution confers and that the electorate retains its remedy. The initiative’s defenders reply that an electorate obliged to re-enact its own legislation every second year holds a right of petition rather than a legislative power.

Both proposed remedies are constitutional amendments and would themselves go to a vote. The Ketterman ministry proposes raising the initiative threshold, on the ground that the polity’s law is being written by whoever can finance a signature campaign. The opposing proposal would entrench initiative statutes for a fixed period against ordinary amendment. Both have qualified for the ballot previously and neither has passed.

The bellwether

Missouri’s electoral politics are habitually close and the polity regards this as a distinction. Its eight Commons seats have divided more evenly and more frequently than those of any comparable polity, the Premiership has changed hands repeatedly, and general elections are decided by margins that would prompt recounts elsewhere.

The composition is three-cornered: two metropolitan areas voting one way, an Ozark south and a rural north voting the other, and Little Dixie and the smaller cities doing neither reliably. The polity’s federal delegation is correspondingly less predictable by party and more predictable by subject, voting together across party on freight, the rivers, the levees, the locks, the barge tariffs and the trunk roads, and dividing on most other questions. Its submissions on the seismic question have been unanimous and unsuccessful.

Assessment

Missouri’s history is marked by a recurring separation between endorsed objects and unexamined methods. The border associations of the 1850s were supported in their object by the polity’s Assembly and their methods were not discussed. The abolition of 1864 is commemorated and the compensation of 1865 is not. The initiative is the polity’s constitutional pride and the Assembly repeals what the initiative enacts.

The polity’s loyalty in 1861 followed from an arsenal secured, a vote narrowly lost, a trade running the wrong way for rebellion and an institution that was not general, and it was rewarded with an absence of federal supervision that its Black population bore the cost of for a century. Missouri supplied the covenant struck down in Shelley v Kraemer and the municipal courts examined in 2014, and it also supplied Lincoln University, the Homer G. Phillips Hospital and the Prime Minister who founded the health service.

The polity’s self-description is the Show-Me State, and the institutions support it: an electorate that legislates over its legislature, one hundred and fourteen county courts maintained on the argument that government should be within reach, an insistence on juries, and a legislature that declined to appropriate a penny for national prohibition. Missouri’s characteristic disposition is not refusal but a settled unwillingness to accept a proposition on authority, and the polity has applied it more consistently to its government than to itself.

Chronology

Symbols

Missouri’s flag is a device of the two rivers: two broad white currents entering from the hoist against a navy field, converging at rather less than half the length and continuing to the fly as a single band. It replaced a nineteenth-century armorial banner in a redesign carried by initiative petition.

The motto, Salus populi suprema lex esto, is from Cicero and provides that the welfare of the people is to be the highest law. It has been the polity’s motto since 1822.

The polity’s established nickname is the Show-Me State. Its seal, its capitol monument and the preambles of two constitutions record the abolition ordinance of 10 December 1864.

Trivia

See also

• Commonwealth of Illinois, across the Mississippi, and the other party to the Gateway Arch board
• State of Kansas, across the western boundary
• Grand Duchy of Louisiane, the southern remainder of the same purchase, which retained the Code
• Harry S. Truman, of Lamar, Independence and Jackson County
• The American Civil War, the rebellion of the five and the position of the polities that remained
• American Rights Act, which bound federal authority only
• Royal American Reserve, whose St. Louis House is one of thirteen
• Polities and the Federation, the 49 constituent polities of the Realm