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Boston Globe
03-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Bill to reshape Cannabis Control Commission heads for House vote
It also seeks to further regulate intoxicating hemp-based items, which often exist in a legal gray area with limited oversight; adjusts the existing cap on retail licenses any one operator can hold; and eliminates the requirement that medical marijuana businesses be 'vertically integrated,' meaning they must grow and process all the marijuana they sell. Advertisement The Massachusetts State House. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff The Ways and Means Committee advanced the bill with 23 Democrats in support of a favorable report, none opposed, eight Republicans reserving their rights, and five Boston Democrats taking no action on the committee poll. House Ways and Means Committee Chair Aaron Michlewitz said last week he was 'hopeful to do it soon' and that the House would 'make it a priority to kind of get through it as quickly as we can.' Speaker Ronald Mariano's office confirmed the cannabis bill will be on the agenda for Wednesday's formal session in the House. Advertisement Top Senate Democrats haven't expressed the same sense of urgency on the CCC. 'I will talk to senators and the chair of the Cannabis Committee, and we'll see. We'll take a look at whatever the House sends over, of course,' Senate President Karen Spilka said Thursday.
Boston Globe
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Stephan Thernstrom, historian and affirmative-action foe, dies at 90
Advertisement Beginning with his first book, 'Poverty and Progress' (1964), Dr. Thernstrom helped pioneer the use of quantitative methods in American history, relying on property records, census manuscripts, bank statements, and archival newspapers to craft a nuanced portrait of working men in 19th-century Newburyport. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He was awarded the Bancroft Prize, a top US history honor, and was later a National Book Award finalist for 'The Other Bostonians' (1973), in which he applied his analytical methods to 20th-century Boston, tracing the upward mobility of varying ethnic groups while exploring the role that prejudice and discrimination played in hindering progress. 'Most studies in quantitative history ought to be reviewed in cipher, just to give the reader an idea of the agonizing prose he can expect. Not so Stephan Thernstrom's work,' editor and publisher Ivan R. Dee wrote in a review for The New York Times. 'He knows how to write a sentence, appreciates the limitations of his infant historical technique, and deals with crucial questions instead of dazzling us with computerized footwork.' Although he continued to publish well-received historical volumes, Dr. Thernstrom became best known for 'America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible' (1997), a 700-page exploration of American race relations that he co-wrote with his wife. A product of seven years of research and writing, the book combined dispassionate historical analysis with passages of fiery rhetoric, arguing that African Americans had made significant — and, in the Thernstroms' view, often overlooked — gains since the Jim Crow era, even as opportunity gaps persisted. Advertisement Dr. Thernstrom and his wife favored 'color-blind' fixes, arguing that the use of racial preferences in college admissions and job applications was divisive and largely ineffective. They were especially critical of what they regarded as a politically correct dynamic of 'black anger' and 'white surrender,' in which affirmative-action supporters embraced 'policies built on deference to black victimization through which they can display their racial virtue.' The book made the Thernstroms intellectual heroes for many conservatives, even as it dismayed liberal friends who remembered the couple's earlier years as left-leaning activists. While in graduate school, Dr. Thernstrom immersed himself in Marxist theory, earnestly underlining his copy of 'Das Kapital' and protesting the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. His wife, a former red-diaper baby, had sung along with Pete Seeger as a girl and attended the Little Red School House in New York. She and Dr. Thernstrom were planning to register Black voters in the South in 1964 when Abigail became pregnant with their first child. Around that time, Dr. Thernstrom backed a bill in the Massachusetts State House to eliminate references to race on college admissions applications. 'That seemed to me then absolutely the ideal — you admit people without any reference to their race,' he recalled in a 1998 interview with the Times. 'And it still seems to be the ideal to me. What's different is that it was a radical idea in 1963, and now it's a so-called conservative idea.' Disillusioned by the rise of identity politics, he and his wife began voting for Republican presidential candidates for the first time in the 1990s. They joined conservative intellectuals at the White House in 1997, sparring with President Clinton in an Oval Office debate about race and affirmative action, and later championed alternative approaches to education, arguing on behalf of charter schools and vouchers in opinion essays and a 2003 book, 'No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.' Advertisement Critics said the Thernstroms could be overly reductive and minimized the problems faced by Black Americans. 'Here are two white people who are essentially lecturing Black Americans, saying: 'What are you complaining about? Stop your griping. Here are the data. You're better off than ever before,'' political scientist Andrew Hacker told the Times in 1998. Dr. Thernstrom brushed off the criticism, standing by his empirical findings. A self-described 'lone wolf,' he let his wife take the lead in promoting their work (she 'is fonder of talking than I am,' he told the American Prospect), although he joined her in insisting that they had not undergone any kind of radical political transformation in the years leading up to their first book. 'We haven't changed,' he told The Washington Post after it was published. 'It is that liberalism has evolved.' Stephan Albert Thernstrom was born in Port Huron, Mich., on Nov. 5, 1934. An only child, he grew up in Battle Creek, in southern Michigan, and was raised in the Church of Christ, Scientist. He later adopted a more secular, left-leaning view of the world over the objections of his father, who worked for a railroad company. 'If you're a communist,' he recalled his father telling him, 'I don't want you in my house.' Early on, there were few signs that Dr. Thernstrom had a future in academia. He skipped classes in elementary and middle school and was assigned to a vocational track in high school. But his mother, a homemaker, managed to persuade administrators to reconsider, and Dr. Thernstrom went on to find academic success after falling in love with debate and Latin, which his family described as 'the first school subject he'd found intellectually challenging.' Advertisement After graduating from Northwestern University in 1956, he enrolled in the history PhD program at Harvard. Dr. Thernstrom studied under Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Handlin, a scholar of American immigration who introduced him to 'the idea that history wasn't just about battles and generals and presidents — that it could really just be the story of ordinary people, like the family that he came from,' his daughter, Melanie, said in a phone interview. At a talk by investigative journalist I.F. Stone, Dr. Thernstrom met Abigail Mann, a fellow Harvard graduate student who was pursuing a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies. (She soon switched to government.) They married about six weeks later, in 1959. Dr. Thernstrom received his doctorate in 1962. He taught at Brandeis University and UCLA, returned to Harvard in 1974 as a professor, and edited books including the 'Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups' (1980), a 1,080-page reference work. He also served as an expert witness in court cases addressing claims of racial discrimination. In 1988, students accused him of making racially insensitive remarks in his lectures, which he denied. He was cleared of wrongdoing but felt isolated by university administrations in the episode, which conservative activists cited 'as an example of political correctness run amok,' according to a profile in the Post. Advertisement Dr. Thernstrom retired from teaching in 2008, not long after he moved to McLean, Va., with his wife. She served as the vice chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights and worked at conservative think tanks before her death in 2020, at 83. In addition to their daughter, Melanie, an author and journalist, Dr. Thernstrom leaves a son, Samuel Thernstrom, the founder of a nonprofit organization that promotes alternative energy technologies; and four grandchildren. Politically, Dr. Thernstrom remained difficult to classify. His daughter said he took issue with aspects of both the left and the right, and lamented the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in recent years. 'He would be so upset,' Melanie Thernstrom said, 'about the idea of rolling back birthright citizenship,' which President Trump is attempting to end through executive order. 'He really did believe the strength of America came from the melting pot, from different ethnic groups coming together.'
