Somewhat amazingly, today’s #stampoftheday honors an organization that reportedly has spent more than $1 million to boost David Perdue’s reelection campaign.

The organization is the American Bankers’ Association (ABA), which represents entities that hold over 95 percent of the $13.5 trillion in assets held by US banks, and employ over 2 million people. In addition to making its own, unrestricted independent expenditures, the ABA’s political arm is quite active, giving out over $2.5 million in direct contributions to federal officeholders in 2019-2020, more than two-thirds of it to Republicans, including Perdue.

The stamp is a 3-cent stamp issued on January 3, 1950 to mark that 75th anniversary of ABA’s founding in 1875. As best as I can tell, the stamp is the first of several stamps issued in the 1950s to honor a professional association. A 1953 stamp, for example, honored the American Bar Association; a 1957 stamp honored the National Education Association; and a 1959 stamp honored the American Dental Association. The U.S. Post Office Department also issued stamps honoring the American Automobile Association in 1952 and Parent-Teacher Association in 1972.

But the Postal Service seems to have long-stopped its practice of honoring business associations, which seems like a pity given the endless possibilities. I’m remembering, for example, that Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon’s odious press secretary went on to be president and CEO of the National Association of Truck Stop Operators. Now there’s a group that could have been honored in a what could have been a great stamp.

Careful readers of my #stampoftheday posts might note that the stamp was issued on January 3 but this post is being made on January 4. I suppose that means the post – or its author – will be subject to late fees.

I do have an excuse. Yesterday, I chose instead to use an Alaska statehood stamp to give a shout-out to Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the handful of Republican senators who had publicly spoken out against the attempted coup d’Žtat by President Trump and his congressional allies, all of them Republicans.

I was planning to write today about a 3-cent stamp, issued on January 4, 1954, honoring the 200th anniversary of the founding of Kings College, which became Columbia University. I probably would have written about how even though my father got his PhD in chemistry from Columbia, his heart really was with Cooper Union, where he got his undergraduate degree (after Princeton rescinded its acceptance letter because it needed space for previously enrolled students who returned to campus after World War II) and where he later taught for a few years before he decided that he couldn’t raise a family on what Cooper was paying it faculty. So he took a job with American Cyanamid and moved to Stamford, CT, where I was born a few years later.

If I had written about Columbia, I would have found a way to go off on a tangent and repeat the story my father loved to tell about when Isaac Asimov had to defend his PhD dissertation in chemistry at Columbia in the late 1940s. Apparently Asimov had already been writing short science fiction stories. According to my father, even though Asimov’s fellowship prohibited him from having outside income, he wrote under his own name because he didn’t believe anyone in the department would be reading such stories. He was, of course, wrong, and everyone was reading them, according to my dad.

Towards the end of his dissertation defense, one of the evaluators asked Asimov about “thiotimoline,” a fictional chemical that starts dissolving before it makes contact with water. According to my father, Asimov panicked, fainted, and could only revived when people applied wet towels and said, “Wake up Dr. Asimov! Wake up Dr. Asimov!” (Wikipedia has a somewhat similar story but different details: notably that asking the question “resulting in him having to be led from the room while laughing hysterically with relief.”

But I couldn’t write about any of that because I couldn’t find the stamp. This means that either my late father’s collection didn’t include the 1954 Columbia stamp or he had the stamp and I misplaced it. (It’s even odds as to which is true).

So I’m left with the American Bankers Association.

At one level, it’s quite amazing that such a stamp was issued in 1950 as we, as a society, have always had something of ambivalent relationship with bankers.

But from the perspective of 2020, it seems particularly amazing, especially given ABA’s support for Perdue, which, according to Reuters, is “the single biggest sum the group has spent backing a candidate since it began running independent political ads in 2018, according to federal campaign data.” (The previous high had been the about $500,000 ABA spent to support Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who fended out of a spirited challenge to win reelection in November).

“The large expenditure,” the article continued, “underscores industry worries that Democratic control of the Senate could lead to tougher banking policies, as well as clear the way for Democratic President-elect Joe Biden to nominate hard-charging regulators.”

One might argue that entities like the ABA are a great example of something that struck Alexis de Tocqueville as a particularly great American habit. He was struck by the fact that Americans had the right to “associate freely in everything” and he believed that this “art of association” was the “mother science” which could be used to explain both how American society functioned as well as how complex social and economic problems might be solved.

Writing in the 1830s, de Tocqueville conceded that while free “political associations” had posed a danger to the state in France since at least the French Revolution, they did not pose similar threats in the United States. Rather, he claimed, that “after disturbing the State for a time, liberty of association strengthens it.”

Given the copious funds that associations now can raise and spend on political campaigns, I wonder if he’d make the same statement today.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.