The Price of Labor

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A minimum wage is defined in law as the lowest hourly rate that employers can pay workers, except for those workers who receive some of their compensation in tips. In my faraway youth I was a high school student working 30 hours a week in a retail store for the minimum wage of $1 an hour, while still carrying the usual course load of five subjects I was the poster child for those who received such low pay, a teenager in an entry level job  who didn’t need to work to put a roof over her head or food on the table. But then and now, a minimum wage was not just for teens working for pocket money or, in my case, to save up enough to attend college. Then and now, there were the working poor. Even two minimum wage jobs would not get a family of four out of poverty.

In 2009, Congress  increased the minimum wage to $7.25.  There it has rested for the following 17 years while the  cost-of-living  continued to rise.  Both the public and private sectors use the Consumer Price index to adjust lots of other things –income tax brackets, Social Security benefits, and many wage contracts.  But not the minimum wage. If it had been adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage today would be $11.78–not a princely sum but a lot better than $7.25.

Thirty states have their own required minimum wage, ranging from $8.75 in West Virginia to $18.40 in the District Columbia. Washington has the highest state level at $17.13.   South Carolina is one of the 20 states that do not have a separate minimum wage, but it would be hard to find an employer who could find or keep even the least skilled workers at$7.25 an hour.  Currently, wages in South Carolina start around $14-$16 for low- skill entry level workers.  Working full; time year-round at $7.25 would leave that hard working person still below the poverty level.

A living wage is the minimum income or hourly wage a full-time worker needs to afford a basic yet decent standard of living—including food, housing, healthcare, transportation, and childcare. It varies with location, especially the cost of housing.  In the United states, the range of living wage for a single worker is $15 to $20 an hour.  The range for South Carolina is $15 to $16.

One step that Congress could take that would not be costly but very meaningful would be to increase the minimum wage to $11.78 and thenceforth to adjust it every year on January 1st based on the increase in the Consumer Price Index, the same price index used to adjust Social Security benefits. 

After the Election, Now What?

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It’s Over!  The last ballot has been cast and most of them have been counted. The volume of emails and texts from candidates should be dropping rapidly, so you don’t have to waste a lot of time on digital decluttering.  The endless political commercials have shifted to Medicare advantage, and even that ad campaign ends on December 7th.

So you though iI was over!  Not so fast! In even numbered years we choose our elected officials.  They pester us for money and attention.  In odd-numbered years the roles are reversed. It’s our job to watch, persuade, congratulate, or criticize, but mostly to tell them what we want, what we care about, what stories they need to hear from us.  Congress reconvenes January 3rd and most state legislatures will be back at work on  January 12th. Your local governments—counties, cities, school boards—just paused briefly for a swearing in and went on about their business,

Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to listen, pick your issues, and make your voice heard. How do you flip the switch from listening to telling?  How do you become an effective, if sometimes annoying, citizen activist? There are several levels of engagement and a few good tips on getting your message across.

For starters, pick one or two issues you care deeply about.  Maybe it is local affordable housing. Or the cost of health care, the future of Social Security, data centers.  If you have  a story to tell or relevant expertise to share, you may want to pursue an agenda where your street creds will get you a listening ear As an economist, I want to focus on the economics of affordable housing, health care and the future of Social Security.

Don’t bother your city Council about Social Security. That’s for your member of Congress.  Housing is more of a  local and state issue, data centers  are at all three levels of government, health care is state and federal.

Find out what legislation is being proposed. Think about what you want to say.  Find organizations that are also working on this issue.  Send a letter to the editor of your local newspaper or post your thoughts on social  media. Get to know the elected officials who will be making these decisions. Speak up at a city council meeting or a legislative hearing. Call your legislator or council member or send  a real letter. DO NOT EMAIL! They tally their mail and phone calls!

If enough of us are paying attention, something good could happen.  If we say the election is over and go back to our daily routines, nothing is going to get batter.  It’s up to you, or as we say in  the south, you-all—emphasis on all.

Mentors and Role Models

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Yesterday was All Saints’ Day, a day when we honor  not only the official saints but also  some of the personal saints who shaped our lives. We learn from our mentors and role models and pass what we learn on to those whom we become mentors and role models.  For women, mothers offer both mentoring and a role model, one which we may choose to embrace in part or all or reject.  In my transition generation, rejecting in part if not totally the traditional model was more often the norm than the exception. That left us to search for other role models and later mentors. Role models are examples of what is possible.  Mentors are dispensers of advice and wisdom.

One mentor for me and my sister was our Aunt Marion, who was married but childless and very drawn to her brother’s abandoned children.  She was also a close friend of my mother, but she lived in a different, less domestic world, one of arts and intellect and social engagement. Another was my high school Latin teacher, a strict and demanding woman who was a mentor in my intellectual life and a role model in teaching. Being a voracious reader, I found my other role models in the female creations of Lucy Muad Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott, Anne of Green Gables and Jo March. (I especially like Anne who, like me, had a silent e added to her name.)

Becoming an academic economist means being part of a small gender minority, so many of my professional mentors were men.  I still smile when I recall my welcome to the Economics Department at Clemson by my department head, Harvey Wheeler.  He said, well, there are six of us men and you are the only woman.  I said that was fine.  Then he went on to say that my pending Ph.D., was from a northern university, and all of them had their graduate degrees from  southern universities.  I was a Yankee, they were southerners. I was a liberal, they were conservative.  He paused, and I wondered where this was going.  Finally, he said “You know, if you were just black, you’d be perfect!” I was relieved that he not only acknowledged but also celebrated the many minorities I brought to the table.

Two women who stand out from my graduate student days were both mentors and role models, Dorothy Goodwin and Audrey Beck. Dr. Goodwin specialized in state and local public finance, a field to which I was very much drawn.  Unable to choose between international economics and public finance, I wrote a dissertation that combined them: Sales Tax Harmonization in the European Economic Community. While I taught international economics some 40 times, it was federalism and state and local public finance that was at the core of my research and policy work.

Audrey, an economics instructor with a master’s degree, introduced me to the League of Women Voters, and inspired me tor organize a League in Clemson six years later. (I was also inspired by my mother telling me that her grandmother had marched for “Women’s suffrage.) Both Goodwin and Beck subsequently served in the Connecticut legislature. Audrey connected me with League leaders at the state level in South Carolina, who taught me how to advocate effectively in a not always welcoming political environment.  Sarah Leverette, Keller Barron, and Lynn Teague were especially important in shaping my public policy work and my organizational leadership skills. With their encouragement, I served two two-year terms as the Co-president of the League of Women Voters of South Carolina.

As we reflect on our heritage from personal mentors (or personal saints) In this month of celebrating women’s history, I invite you-all but especially women to reflect on who your mentors and role models have been, same gender or not.  And consider whom you may  have served as a role model and/or mentor, which can be one of the joys of our later years.  Mentors and role models form links between earlier generations and those yet to come.  We need each other.

About the Pledge of Allegiance…

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Did you ever stop to think what you were saying when you and your elementary school classmates or your Rotary club recited the pledge of allegiance?  My problems started with the first line.  First, since we said it  as a group, why does it begin with I and instead of we?  And what is this allegiance thing?  I vaguely recall from movies about ancient heroes who served their liege Lord (the mortal one, not God) and owed him some highly specific duties and he in turn would offer them protection, employment and some of the necessities of life. According to Wikipedia, allegiance  is “the formal or deep obligation of fidelity owed by a citizen to a state, a vassal to a lord, or a person to a belief.”  Pretty complicated idea for the average second grader!

But why don’t we just pledge our allegiance, or loyalty,  to the country rather than sticking the flag in there! Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lovely flag with a great history from Betsy Ross to the Star Spangled Banner and beyond.  That pledge didn’t’ seem remotely related to the flag, or the country for which it stands.  I’m pretty sure my liege lord, if I had one, would have wanted me to pledge it to him directly and not to a flag. In any case, it’s a pretty dated idea for a democracy where we owe our loyalty to one another collectively, We are a nation of people that are all tied together.

l have several other quarrels with this mandatory exercise for our school children.  I would have objected in 1954 when it was slid into the text, but I was just 13 and not paying close attention.  I did and do believe in God , but I also believe in the first amendment. And the God I believe in may be very different from yours. One nation, indivisible?  Hardly a factual description, more like an aspiration.  Likewise, the noble but not yet achieved aspiration of   liberty and justice for all.

So what should we be saying? I believe that we have a covenant with each other like the Mayflower Compact among the pilgrims (who, unlike the puritans, were big fans of religious democracy). Or the oath that officeholders from president all the way down to city councils take when they assume a public office.  Which leads me to my suggested alternative.

Our national covenant is in our Constitution. And it begins with a covenant, about why and how we are together as a people, a nation That covenant is the Preamble A few small adjustments to put it in the present tense would make it a fine replacement for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Here is the original Preamble:”We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

And here is my slightly edited version:

“We citizens of the United States, in order to be and become a more perfect union, ensure justice, encourage domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and maintain the blessings of liberty  for ourselves and our posterity, do pledge our allegiance to the Constitution for the United States of America.”

I would be happy to approve and promote that version anytime, anywhere.  How about you?

Editorial suggestions are encouraged.

Holley Ulbrich November 2, 2026

Leave My Clock Alone!

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When Congress resumes, they will have a great many weighty issues to discuss.  I invite them, and you as their constituents, to take a break from the weight of the world and grapple instead with a seemingly simple problem—Daylight Saving Time. Sometime between bedtime and wake-up time Saturday night and Sunday morning we are instructed to turn our clocks back an hour. One hour of daylight will be subtracted from the early evening and revert to morning. People will be late for church. On Monday, school children may have a bit of sunlight when they meet the school bus.  Golfers will find their evening game curtailed. Supposedly DST saves energy, but the evidence is slim.

Fortunately, most of our clocks will be reset automatically, but I still have three clocks to reset in my kitchen, my bedroom and my car.  I do so under protest, because I don’t like confusing my body by messing with my biorhythms. Apparently that attitude is shared by a substantial majority of our fellow citizens. According to a NORC poll in 2025, 47% of the population oppose changing the clocks, while only 12% are in favor. The other 40% don’t really care.  A YouGov survey from 2026 found that 67% of us do not like the twice a year change, while only 19% thought it was a good idea. Ending the clock reset sounds like a slam dunk, a real people pleaser. 

But then comes the hitch.  The two polls registered 56% and 51% in favor of keeping  our clocks on Daylight Saving Time year-round instead of mid-March to November, while 42% and 43% preferred Eastern Standard Time.  Too close for comfort.  That’s just a little more than half who will be happy and a little less than half will be unhappy. School children will have a better shot at surviving to get on the bus, while golfers will resent no evening relaxation after a hard day’s work. The New England states, where it gets dark by 4:30 pm in the winter, are considering a switch to Atlantic time.  Northern states in general are more heavily impacted by the choice of DST or EST than Southern states, because their daylight is shorter,  so maybe they should have more say in the decision

What’s the answer? It calls for some creative thinking.  Perhaps school should start later, making school bus pickups safer.  Kids get a little more time to wake up before their first class. Or maybe employers, public and private, need to be more flexible about working hours.

There are no simple questions. If Congress can’t find a way out of the DST/EST challenge, how are they supposed to address the war in Iran, tariffs, the budget deficit, inflation, immigration, and the pending threat to the future of Social Security?

Aren’t you glad you didn’t run for Congress?

It’s Nobel Prize Week!

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The week of October 6th is a nice change from elections and football games to honor the gifts of mind and soul. The world will honor five great minds and one great soul, or at least a great-souled organization and its leader.   Between October 6th and October 12th, six Nobel prizes will be awarded in Stockholm and Oslo. They honor outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, economics, and for work in peace. In a time of year when most of our attention to competition and success is focused on football, the Nobel Prizes are reminders of the value of other kinds of achievements and role models.

 Alfred Nobel was an inventor, scientist and businessman who also wrote poetry and drama. He is best known as the inventor of dynamite.  In 1895, he wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of these prizes.  The sixth prize, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was added in 1968.

With apologies to my non-South Carolina followers, I checked out the six awardees over the years with close ties to South Carolina, covering every category except literature. 

Charles Townes (Physics, 1964) was a native of Greenville. Townes shared the prize for his fundamental work in quantum electronics, which led to the invention of the laser.

 Joseph Goldstein (Medicine, 1985 )was born in Sumter and was in was awarded the prize for discoveries concerning cholesterol metabolism.

Kary Mullis (Chemistry, 1993) was born in North Carolina but grew up in Columbia. He won the prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction technique.

Robert Furchgott (Medicine, 1998) was born in  Charleston and was recognized for discoveries about the signaling role of nitric oxide in the cardiovascular system.

Benjamin Bernanke (Economic Sciences, 2022) was born in Georgia but grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, and received the prize for research on banks and financial crises, specifically the Great Depression. He was also chair of the Federa Reserve during the 2998 housing meltdown.He had to teach himself calculus to get into Harvard since it was not taught in Dillon County schools, and during his summers home from Boston he worked at the well-known stopping place on I95, South of the Border.

My last South Carolina honoree was born in Lamar. David Beasley, a Clemson University graduate, served as governor in 1995-99 where he presided over removing the Confederate flag from the top of the statehouse, thus losing a bid for a second term. Beasley went on to serve as executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme from2017 to 2023. He accepted the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the organization.

Looking for role models for your adolescents? Sports heroes and entertainers are fine, but so are people who achieve great things by working in their own way to make the world a better place! Share a Hero with someone during Nobel week.

Grandparents’ Day

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Bet you didn’t know that there is a holiday in September called Grandparents’ Day. In the United States as well as some other countries. It falls on the first Saturday after Labor Day, which is September 13th this year. Not a big holiday–no parades, fireworks, or gifts.  It’s more of a family holiday where grandparents and grandchildren celebrate each other.

My late husband and I  were blessed with grandchildren (four), but I was shortchanged with grandparents.  My maternal grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1916, and his widow only lived to 55, dying before my parents were even married.  My paternal grandparents, who were divorced, had 12 grandchildren.  I seldom saw my grandmother. We had step-grands who didn’t take much interest in us, but we were close to my father’s father who had an apple orchard and a cider press and would try to stay connected with his oldest son’s  abandoned brood of three. A generation farther back, I lucked out–t with great-grandmothers

Ida Scoviille Hiewitt and Alice Muinger Stewart  are the great-grandmothers ones whose stories I will share on my weekly email missive to my daughters, niece, and nephew. I  knew my mother’s grandmother Alice and  my father’s grandmother Ida through stories told by my mother and my aunt. I will also honor in memory my own mother as a grandmother to my children.  What these three women had  in common was a genuine interest in young people and a willingness time to spend with them. 

My mother was close to her grandmother but also well acquainted with her grandmother-in-law, who raised my father when his parents separated. As a result, my mother had a huge fund of stories to share. Recounting family history through stories is a great gift from someone who knows the stories and can tell them well.  My mother told me many times how much I resembled both Alice and Ida in personality as well as appearance. Alice refused to raise her two children in the harsh conditions of homesteading in Kansas and brought them back to Connecticut, to which her husband reluctantly followed.  She also marched for women’s suffrage in 1913.  Ida married a small-time dairy farmer, but she inherited her father’s real estate business. She was successful enough to send all three sons to college in the early 1900s. 

My mother also told me and my children stories of her high school days as a social butterfly and the hardships of the Great Depression and even stories of her failures, like wrecking her sister’s car and getting arrested for driving without a license.  She longed to be a writer as did my sister and I, All three of us have found ways to express that gift, starting with being the associate editors of the Torrington High school newspaper in (respectively) 1926, 1953, and 1958!

I too storytelling seriously, a way to connect  my four granddaughters with their history. My number three granddaughter, Bella, would sit at my dining room table when she was in preschool and say, Grandma, tell me another family story.

Here is one favorite family story about their beloved Aunt Carla at the age of five.  We had just moved for a one-year stay in Boulder, Colorado, and I took the children to school to meet their teachers. I mentioned that Carla, not quite six, could read. Oh, the teacher said,  a lot of parents think their children can read because they have memorized some of their favorite stories.  Let me put it this way,  I said.  I was in the bank with my girls and Carla said, Mommy, do you like service charges? No, I said, why? Well, said Carla, that sign over there says “Don’t like service charges? Neither do we.”  Too young with a September birthday to put in second grade, Carla stayed in first grade in a one-person reading group! Many years later my older sister told me a similar story about my introduction to first grade  when I had been reading for two years. And my youngest granddaughter, despite her protest at age four that she couldn’t read until she was six, was clearly reading signs and menus and cereal boxes! Early literacy tied three generations of readers together.

Storytelling helps you understand where your cowlick and your left-handedness and height or lack thereof came from and which of the members of your extended family shared your gifts—athletic, musical, artistic, or storytelling. Or cooking, or caregiving, or carpentry. And stories of  how earlier generations met and married, and what career paths they chose and why.

It would be nice if your grandchildren made you a card or sent you a text for Grandparents’ Day. But the real challenge is for us grandparents to accept our role of being memory keepers and storytellers who link the generations together.

Holley Ulbrich is a retired Clemson economist with four granddaughters and one great-granddaughter.  You can visit her blog, Purple Sage 41, to read more.

The Final Years Part Two: The Bucket List

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In April I tripped over something that wasn’t supposed to be in the middle of the road and wound up in the hospital emergency room with a broken radius and ulna on my right hand/wrist/arm.  My friend who accompanied me to this place said, “Well, I can check ride in an ambulance off my bucket List!”  Often our first definitive bucket list is a part of the retirement process. Often the list emerges as a retirement planning exercise.  Over the ”golden “years items on the list can be checked off and new ones added

Most of the people  in my age cohort started with travel—places to go, things to experience. As the list gets checked off and age takes its toll of our mobility or endurance, that section of the list shrinks.  I still have a few travels on my list but the distances are shorter because getting there is rarely part of the fun. At the moment, my list includes New Orleans, Hawaii, Pittsburgh, the Canadian Maritime provinces, Iceland, Detroit, the Mississippi River and Costa Rica.  I have already had 20 years of semi-retirement and ten full retirement  years to travel to a lot of other places.

What other things besides places to go, things to see have you always wanted to do but haven’t yet? One item on my list was to write a book that was not a textbook (of which I wrote quite a few!) I am far from a bestseller, but after my retiring to semi-retirement, I have written one more textbook and six other books, all nonfiction—and there is at least one more in my head. I also, as you all know, write a blog. Perhaps you have a skill or talent that you would like to redirect or develop.  It the moment, I am trying to improve my gardening skills on by small but challenging yard in a part of the country where weeds and in particular kudzu are the designated enemies, and the growing season is nine long months.

As a retired professor, I am a big fan of lifelong learning. Most years I take on a learning project.  Last year it was upgrading my French with the aid of Babbel.  Before that it was a six-month study of Stoic philosophy followed by a long period of reading the works of four female Oxford philosophers who challenged the super-rational approach of their male colleagues. I have settled on my next project, which is to seek at least a rudimentary understanding of Quantum physics. My baggiest and longest project, though, was to go to seminary to study theological ethics, which was timely, expensive, and rewarding. I added a final degree, master off theological studies, to my resume.

None of those may appeal to you, but there are all kinds of non-academic learning from line dancing to photography to sketching to cooking to carpentry and lots of places to learn.  In my state, people over sixty can take college classes at state colleges tuition-free on a space available basis. OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning institute) is everywhere and offers short courses to older adults as well as opportunities to volunteer.  Volunteering is a great way to feel useful and make new friends.

One thing that many of us miss when we retire is the work community.  I’ve always been a community person—church, discussion groups, League of Women Voters—so my  is a good mix of engagement and downtime. My calendar was rarely blank. The later years  offer a good time to reconnect. For the first period of semi-retirement, I focused n more time traveling with grandchildren while they were still interested int traveling with their grandmother. More recently, I started traveling again with my college roommate, class of 1963!  Closer to hoe, there are arranged “dates” –hikes, lunch, walks in the park, local festivals, farmers’ markets–with old friends and newer ones.

Another challenge/opportunity that deserves some space on your bucket list is working with older people, often isolated by not being able to drive or other limitations. Every 9 am I check-in with my 90-year-old friend (we both live alone, and she is blind). It has been a joy of mutual discovery that there are still things we can learn from and about each other after 60 years of friendship.

Then there are the many other things you want to see, hear or understand.  I once took a creative writing class in which we were challenged to list 100 things we wanted to experience before we died.  The only item I remember from that list some 25 years ago was “Understand why Canada works.”  Haven’t checked that one off yet despite seven trips to Canada!

The Joys and Challenges of Aging

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I turned 85 recently, one of those milestones that gets extra attention. This milestone marks the impending end stage of a long and satisfying collection of experiences and companions. There were rewarding achievements and instructive failures, teaching and learning, giving and receiving, reading and writing, caregiving and being cared for, leading and following, taking hold and letting go. Your list may be very different, because my list includes not only family and friends work and communities but also my specific personal experiences, gifts, dreams,  challenges and opportunities.

Many (but not all) of my readers are close to my age, We grew to adulthood in the time of the Cold War, The Pill, Vietnam, Civil Rights, the women’s movement. That context affected us all in different ways, depending on all the dimensions of being that each of us brought to our shared historical and cultural environment. Even if you are from a later generation, you probably have people in your life  who are at this stage and whom you are perhaps trying to understand.

Like everyone else, some big parts f my life were beyond my control. I was female, poor, white, academically gifted and artistically/musically/athletically challenged, a  mainstream Protestant in a sea of ethnic Catholics, growing up in a single parent household in a New England factory town where my ancestors had lived for generations and where extended family still did. Each of those aspects of my identity shaped my hopes, fears, aspirations and constraints.

But so did my choices. The determination to go to college and figure out how to pay for it. My choice of a husband, a wise decision apparently made by my right brain. Becoming an economist. Changing my political identification. Having three children intentionally. Changing my faith identification. Getting involved leadership roles in a variety of communities. Writing textbooks. Running for city council. Writing non-textbooks. Preaching.  Retiring early (and also late). Going to seminary after retiring to study theological ethics.

The last part of life has unique challenges of its own. Hinduism recognizes four stages: the child, the student, the householder (including the work to which one has been elected or assigned), and what we Westerners would call retirement–the time to give up the focus on duties and possessions and  turn to matters of the spirit.

Our challenges in an individualistic society are similar but also different at this final stage. At my age, I am definitely in that fourth stage. But as a daughter of western culture, I think there is still a role for work, meaning and purpose in those as well  as  adapting to our changing roles and abilities. final years.

 I identify four kinds of tasks or challenges for the final years.  Let’s call them Bucket List, Letting Go, Staying Engaged, and Legacy. The next four blogs will each focus on one of those challenges. I would appreciate you sending your comment or stories in response!

Friends, Enemies, and Revolutions Revised

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I love to blog about holidays. Some months have no obvious choice for what holiday to celebrate, but July is easy. Two related but very different revolutions, American and French, officially began in July, one by a document and one by the execution of the ruling monarchs. Both were motivated by oppressive rulers and taxes. One was started by distant colonists from the more prosperous and educated classes while the other was a violent protest by the poor over taxes and poverty amidst the conspicuous extravagance of the ruling classes..  One link that tied the two revolutions together was the assistance from  the Marquis de Lafayette and the eventual French support of the Americans against the British. A member of the aristocracy, he was killed during the Reign of Terror.

A second much needed and unappreciated resource was the fierce fighters from the Appalachian colonists, the Scots-Irish, They played an important role in many of the later battles , most of which were fought in the South. The end came in Yorktown, Virginia, when French strategy and brave Scots-Irish solders brought about the surrender of British general Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.

 he Scots-Irish and the French both had scores to settle with England.  The roots of animosity between the English and the Scots and Irish were long and deep. France and England had wavered between friend and enemy for several centuries, but by the 1770s there was competition between France and Britain for control of North America. France also had strong ties to Scotland when it was a separate nation until the early 1600s

Lafayette helped Washington in many ways as the war moved south and engaged the French government to near bankruptcy and heavy taxes, resulting in a violent revolution in1789. Unlike our own revolution, the Storming of the Bastille on July 14th it did lead to democracy but to the reign of terror and eventually Napoleon. In 2018, when American forces liberated Paris, General Pershing announced, “Lafayette, we are her,e.”

Acknowledging the role of these allies that helped win our revolution suggests two important lessons.  .  First, sometimes the best place to find friends is among the enemies of your enemy,  as long as you can appeal to their self-interest..  The French could offer money, supplies, and military experience that they hoped would in turn  help them against the British in Canada and in their Southern beachhead in Louisiana and beyond. The Scots-Irish wanted to get rid of the hayed English and throw in their lot with the colonialists. In his book, Born Free, former Virginia senator James Webb documents the critical role of these Indian-style guerilla warriors played in battles like Cowpens, King’s Mountain and Yorktown in ending the war.

So as we leave the 4th of Jul;y and approach Bastille Day, July 14th,let us pause to give thanks to both our French allies and our Scots-Irish immigrants who contributed so much to the birth of a nation. We could not have succeeded without their help. We all get by with a little help from our friends.