Precursor to Open Source

This week’s post isn’t about coding, but I wanted to talk about something I recently did that I don’t think I would have done if I hadn’t been immersed in the environment at the Flatiron School. Though I have not yet contributed to an open source project, I do think that our collaborative work at school comes close to the spirit of open source where you apply the knowledge and skills you have to improve and edit a project. We do that all the time and I am looking forward to contributing my programming skills to help build something. In terms of other skill sets, I recently saw an error in a project in the real world, a factual mistake in an online encyclopedia article, and decided to submit a pull request that changes be made. I don’t think I would have done that before this program.

Background: Why was I thinking about the Presidential Election of 1928?

I read a lot, I like to read history and usually end up reading American history. In light of the upcoming election where many of a party’s base may intensely dislike their party’s nominee I was thinking about another election with a very unpopular candidate. Today some of the most Republican states in the country, Utah for example and some midwestern states, really really do not like the Republican frontrunner, in 1928 you had Democratic candidate Al Smith.

Very Brief Setting of the Scene

The election of 1928 was nasty. Al Smith was Irish, Catholic, and decidedly Wet in the era of Prohibition; the country was not ready for any of those things. Crosses were burned, vitriolic political cartoons were published and smear campaigns showed, among other wild accusations, the recently completed Holland Tunnel and labelled it as a secret passageway being built between Washington and Rome. Many of the demographics that were the most anti-Smith: Protestant, Rural, Ku Klux Klan members or supporters, American Nativists, must have also overlapped with the Democratic Party’s membership and base. At the time the South was solidly Democratic and the party had (narrowly) failed to officially denounce the KKK just four years earlier in 1924. Smith won only heavily Catholic Rhode Island and Massachusetts and a handful of states in the Deep South. It was a big deal that even any of the former Confederate States would have voted for a Republican, not having done so since Reconstruction.

Thinking about this election and when party loyalty did or did not trump personal distaste brought me to this website:

Al Smith is a really important, and kind of tragic figure, who as Governor of New York built the prototype version of what eventually became The New Deal (tragic because him and FDR eventually have a bad falling out and Smith was pretty isolated at the end of his life). And that information is a really bad misrepresentation of who he was.

So I sent an email to the editor

And they promptly responded

Anyways, thats all, I’ve never done anything like that before, it felt kind of good. Al Smith is cool. They still haven’t changed the article, but maybe they will eventually. Facts are important.