BOOKS OF THE MOMENT SAMPLER
Dark Money by Jane Mayer: BUY HERE
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt: BUY HERE
Black Flags by Joby Warrick: BUY HERE
American Lion by Jon Meacham: BUY HERE
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: BUY HERE
Black Earth by Timothy Snyder: BUY HERE
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid: BUY HERE
Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult: BUY HERE
The Man Without A Face by Masha Gessen: BUY HERE
Weaponized Lies by Daniel J. Levitin: BUY HERE
White Trash by Nancy Isenberg: BUY HERE
The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper: BUY HERE
For even more books in the news, browse through Signature’s roundup: Books and the Bully Pulpit: What the World is Reading and Why. Dark Money by Jane Mayer
CHAPTER ONE
Radicals: A Koch Family History
Oddly enough, the fiercely libertarian Koch family owed part of its fortune to two of history’s most infamous dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The family patriarch, Fred Chase Koch, founder of the family oil business, developed lucrative business relationships with both of their regimes in the 1930s.
According to family lore, Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer and publisher who settled in the small town of Quanah, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border, where he owned a weekly newspaper and print shop. Quanah, which was named for the last American Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, still retained its frontier aura when Fred was born there in 1900. Bright and eager to get out from under his overbearing old-world father, Fred once ran away to live with the Comanches as a boy. Later, he crossed the country for college, transferring from Rice in Texas to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he earned a degree in chemical engineering and joined the boxing team. Early photographs show him as a tall, formally dressed young man with glasses, a tuft of unruly curls, and a self-confident, defiant expression.
In 1927, Fred, who was an inveterate tinkerer, invented an improved process for extracting gasoline from crude oil. But as he would later tell his sons bitterly and often, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a business threat and shut him out of the industry, suing him and his customers in 1929 for patent infringement. Koch regarded the monopolistic patents invoked by the major oil companies as anticompetitive and unfair. The fight appears to be an early version of the Kochs’ later opposition to “corporate cronyism” in which they contend that the government and big business collaborate unfairly. In Fred Koch’s eye, he was an outsider fighting a corrupt system.
Koch fought back in the courts for more than fifteen years, finally winning a $1.5 million settlement. He correctly suspected that his opponents bribed at least one presiding judge, an incompetent lush who left the case in the hands of a crooked clerk. “The fact that the judge was bribed completely altered their view of justice,” one longtime family employee suggests. “They believe justice can be bought, and the rules are for chumps.” Meanwhile, crippled by lawsuits in America during this period, Koch took his innovative refining method abroad.
He had already helped build a refinery in Great Britain after World War I with Charles de Ganahl, a mentor. At the time, the Russians supplied England with fuel, which led to the Russians seeking his expertise as they set up their own oil refineries after the Bolshevik Revolution.
At first, according to family lore, Koch tore up the telegram from the Soviet Union asking for his help. He said he didn’t want to work for Communists and didn’t trust them to pay him. But after securing an agreement to get paid in advance, he overcame his philosophical reservations. In 1930, his company, then called Winkler-Koch, began training Russian engineers and helping Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries under the first of Stalin’s five-year plans. The program was a success, forming the backbone of the future Russian petroleum industry. The oil trade brought crucial hard currency into the Soviet Union, enabling it to modernize other industries. Koch was reportedly paid $500,000, a princely sum during America’s Great Depression. But by 1932, facing growing domestic demand, Soviet officials decided it would be more advantageous to copy the technology and build future refineries themselves. Fred Koch continued to provide technical assistance to the Soviets as they constructed one hundred plants, according to one report, but the advisory work was less profitable.
What happened next has been excised from the official corporate history of Koch Industries. After mentioning the company’s work in the Soviet Union, the bulk of which ended in 1932, the corporate history skips ahead to 1940, when it says Fred Koch decided to found a new company, Wood River Oil & Refining. Charles Koch is equally vague in his book The Science of Success. He notes only that his father’s company “enjoyed its first real financial success during the early years of the Great Depression” by “building plants abroad, especially in the Soviet Union.”
A controversial chapter is missing. After leaving the U.S.S.R., Fred Koch turned to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and soon after, his government oversaw and funded massive industrial expansion, including the buildup of Germany’s capacity to manufacture fuel for its growing military ambitions. During the 1930s, Fred Koch traveled frequently to Germany on oil business. Archival records document that in 1934 Winkler-Koch Engineering of Wichita, Kansas, as Fred’s firm was then known, provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg.
The refinery was a highly unusual venture for Koch to get involved with at that moment in Germany. Its top executive was a notorious American Nazi sympathizer named William Rhodes Davis whose extensive business dealings with Hitler would eventually end in accusations by a federal prosecutor that he was an “agent of influence” for the Nazi regime. In 1933, Davis proposed the purchase and conversion of an existing German oil storage facility in Hamburg, owned by a company called Europäische Tanklager A.G., or Eurotank, into a massive refinery. At the time, Hitler’s military aims, and his need for more fuel, were already well-known. Davis’s plan was to ship crude petroleum to Germany, refine it, and then sell it to the German military. The president of the American bank with which Davis dealt refused to have anything to do with the deal, because it was seen as supporting the Nazi military buildup, but others extended the credit. After lining up the American financing, Davis needed the Third Reich’s backing. To gain it, he first had to convince German industrialists of his support for Hitler. In his effort to ingratiate himself, Davis opened an early meeting with Hermann Schmitz, the chairman of I.G. Farben—the powerful and well- connected chemical company that soon after produced the lethal gas for the concentration camps’ death chambers—by saluting him with a Nazi “Heil Hitler.” When these efforts didn’t produce the green light he sought, Davis sent messages directly to Hitler, eventually securing a meeting in which the führer walked in and ordered his henchmen to approve the deal. On Hitler’s orders, the Third Reich’s economic ministers supported Davis’s construction of the refinery. In his biography of Davis, Dale Harrington draws on eyewitness accounts to describe Hitler as declaring to his skeptical henchmen, “Gentlemen, I have reviewed Mr. Davis’s proposition and it sounds feasible, and I want the bank to finance it.” Harrington writes that during the next few years Davis met at least half a dozen more times with Hitler and on one occasion asked him to personally autograph a copy of Mein Kampf for his wife. According to Harrington, by the end of 1933 Davis was “deeply committed to Nazism” and exhibited a noticeable “dislike for Jews.”
In 1934, Davis turned to Fred Koch’s company, Winkler-Koch, for help in executing his German business plan. Under Fred Koch’s direction, the refinery was finished by 1935. With the capacity to process a thousand tons of crude oil a day, the third-largest refinery in the Third Reich was created by the collaboration between Davis and Koch. Significantly, it was also one of the few refineries in Germany, according to Harrington, that could “produce the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes. Naturally,” he writes, “Eurotank would do most of its business with the German military.” Thus, he concludes, the American venture became “a key component of the Nazi war machine.”
Historians expert in German industrial history concur. The development of the German fuel industry “was hugely, hugely important” to Hitler’s military ambitions, according to the Northwestern University professor Peter Hayes. “Hitler set out to create ‘autarchy,’ or economic self-sufficiency,” he explained. “Gottfried Feder, the German official in charge of the program, reasoned that even though Germany would have to import crude oil, it would be able to save foreign exchange by refining the products itself.”
In the run-up to the war, Davis profited richly from the arrangement, engaging in elaborate scams to keep the crude oil imports flowing into Germany despite Britain’s blockade. When World War II began, the high-octane fuel was used in bombing raids by German pilots. Like Davis, the Koch family benefited from the venture. Raymond Stokes, director of the Centre for Business History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and co-author of a history of the German oil industry during the Nazi years, Faktor Öl (The oil factor), which documents the company’s role, says, “Winkler-Koch benefited directly from this project, which was designed to help enable the fuel policy of the Third Reich.”
Fred Koch often traveled to Germany during these years, and according to family lore he was supposed to have been on the fatal May 1937 transatlantic flight of the Hindenburg, but at the last minute he got delayed. In late 1938, as World War II approached and Hitler’s aims were unmistakable, he wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany, and elsewhere, drawing an invidious comparison with America under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. Koch added, “The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, family members say that Fred Koch tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Instead, the government directed him to use his chemical engineering prowess to help refine high-octane fuel for the American warplanes. Meanwhile, in an ironic turn, the Hamburg refinery that Winkler-Koch built became an important target of Allied bombing raids. On June 18, 1944, American B-17s finally destroyed it. The human toll of the bombing raids on Hamburg was almost unimaginable. In all, some forty-two thousand civilians were killed during the long and intense Allied campaign against Hamburg’s crucial industrial targets.
Fred Koch’s willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family’s early fortune. By the time he met his future wife, Mary Robinson, at a polo match in 1932, the oilman’s work for Stalin had put him well on his way to becoming exceedingly wealthy.
Robinson, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Wellesley College, was tall, slender, and beautiful, with blond hair, blue eyes, and an expression of amusement often captured in family photographs. The daughter of a prominent physician from Kansas City, Missouri, she had grown up in a more cosmopolitan milieu. Koch, who was seven years older than she, was so smitten he married her a month after they met.
Soon, the couple commissioned the most fashionable architect in the area to build an imposing Gothic-style stone mansion on a large compound on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas, where Winkler-Koch was based. Reflecting their rising social status, the estate was baronial despite the flat and empty prairie surrounding it, with stables, a polo ring, a kennel for hunting dogs, a swimming pool and wading pool, a circular drive, and stone-terraced gardens. Some of the best craftsmen in the country created decorative flourishes such as wrought-iron railings and a stone fireplace carved with a whimsical snowflake motif. Within a few years, the Kochs also purchased the sprawling Spring Creek Ranch near Reece, Kansas, where Fred, who loved science and genetics, bred and raised cattle. Family photographs show the couple looking glamorous and patrician, hosting picnics and pool parties, and riding on horseback, dressed in jodhpurs and polo gear, surrounded by packs of jolly friends.
In the first eight years of their marriage, the couple had four sons: Frederick, known by the family as Freddie, was born in 1933, Charles was born in 1935, and twins, David and William, were born in 1940. With their father frequently traveling and their mother preoccupied with social and cultural pursuits, the boys were largely entrusted to a series of nannies and housekeepers.
It is unclear what Fred Koch’s views of Hitler were during the 1930s, beyond his preference for the country’s work ethic in comparison with the nascent welfare state in America. But he was enamored enough of the German way of life and thinking that he employed a German governess for his first two sons, Freddie and Charles. At the time, Freddie was a small boy, and Charles still in diapers. The nanny’s iron rule terrified the little boys, according to a family acquaintance. In addition to being overbearing, she was a fervent Nazi sympathizer, who frequently touted Hitler’s virtues. Dressed in a starched white uniform and pointed nurse’s hat, she arrived with a stash of gruesome German children’s books, including the Victorian classic Der Struwwelpeter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior ranging from cutting off one child’s thumbs to burning another to death. The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh and dictatorial approach to child rearing. She enforced a rigid toilet-training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedule or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas.
The despised governess ruled the nursery largely unchallenged for several years. In 1938, the two boys were left for months while their parents toured Japan, Burma, India, and the Philippines. Even when she was home, Mary Koch characteristically deferred to her husband, declining to intervene. “My father was fairly tough with my mother,” Bill Koch later told Vanity Fair. “My mother was afraid of my father.” Meanwhile, Fred Koch was often gone for months at a time, in Germany and elsewhere.
It wasn’t until 1940, the year the twins were born, when Freddie was seven and Charles five, that back in Wichita the German governess finally left the Koch family, apparently at her own initiative. Her reason for giving notice was that she was so overcome with joy when Hitler invaded France she felt she had to go back to the fatherland in order to join the führer in celebration. What if any effect this early experience with authority had on Charles is impossible to know, but it’s interesting that his lifetime preoccupation would become crusading against authoritarianism while running a business over which he exerted absolute control.
Fred Koch was himself a tough and demanding disciplinarian. John Damgard, David’s childhood friend, who became president of the Futures Industry Association, recalled that he was “a real John Wayne type.” Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa and filling the basement billiard room with what one cousin remembered as a frightening collection of exotic stuffed animal heads, including lions and bears and others with horns and tusks, glinting glassy-eyed from the walls. In the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool at the country club across the street, but instead of allowing the boys to join them, their father required them to dig up dandelions by the time they were five, and later to dig ditches and shovel manure at the family ranch. Fred Koch cared about his boys but was determined to keep them from becoming what he called “country-club bums,” like some of the other offspring of the oil moguls with whom he was acquainted. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.”
Excerpted from Dark Money by Jane Mayer Copyright © 2017 by Jane Mayer. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Introduction
“Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los Angeles police officers a year earlier. The entire nation had seen a videotape of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Fifty-three people were killed and more than seven thousand buildings were torched. Much of the mayhem was carried live; news cameras tracked the action from helicopters circling overhead. After a particularly horrific act of violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for peace.
King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become cultural kitsch, a catchphrase1 more often said for laughs than as a serious plea for mutual understanding. I therefore hesitated to use King’s words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two reasons. The first is because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.
The second reason I decided to open this book with an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely, something rarely quoted. As he stumbled through his television interview, fighting back tears and often repeating himself, he found these words: “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”
This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.
###
People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything. Books have been published in recent years on the transformative role in human history played by cooking, mothering, war . . . even salt. This is one of those books. I study moral psychology, and I’m going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible. I don’t mean to imply that cooking, mothering, war, and salt were not also necessary, but in this book I’m going to take you on a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.
By the end of the tour, I hope to have given you a new way to think about two of the most important, vexing, and divisive topics in human life: politics and religion. Etiquette books tell us not to discuss these topics in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved this complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests and savannas and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of modern societies in just a few thousand years. My hope is that this book will make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more common, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. My hope is that it will help us to get along.
BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS
I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do” morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.
The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which mean “just, upright, virtuous.” This meaning has been carried into the modern English words righteous and righteousness, although nowadays those words have strong religious connotations because they are usually used to translate the Hebrew word tzedek. Tzedek is a common word in the Hebrew Bible, often used to describe people who act in accordance with God’s wishes, but it is also an attribute of God and of God’s judgment of people (which is often harsh but always thought to be just).
The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self- righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self- righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.
Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.
WHAT LIES AHEAD
This book has three parts, which you can think of as three separate books—except that each one depends on the one before it. Each part presents one major principle of moral psychology.
Part I is about the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.
The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning— the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. I developed this metaphor in my last book, The Happiness Hypothesis, where I described how the rider and elephant work together, sometimes poorly, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and connection. In this book I’ll use the metaphor to solve puzzles such as why it seems like everyone (else) is a hypocrite and why political partisans are so willing to believe outrageous lies and conspiracy theories. I’ll also use the metaphor to show you how you can better persuade people who seem unresponsive to reason.
Part II is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Secular Western moralities are like cuisines that try to activate just one or two of these receptors—either concerns about harm and suffering, or concerns about fairness and injustice. But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. I’ll explain where these six taste receptors come from, how they form the basis of the world’s many moral cuisines, and why politicians on the right have a built- in advantage when it comes to cooking meals that voters like.
Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.
But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.
Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
(A note on terminology: In the United States, the word liberal refers to progressive or left- wing politics, and I will use the word in this sense. But in Europe and elsewhere, the word liberal is truer to its original meaning—valuing liberty above all else, including in economic activities. When Europeans use the word liberal, they often mean something more like the American term libertarian, which cannot be placed easily on the left- right spectrum. Readers from outside the United States may want to swap in the words progressive or left- wing whenever I say liberal.) In the coming chapters I’ll draw on the latest research in neuroscience, genetics, social psychology, and evolutionary modeling, but the take- home message of the book is ancient. It is the realization that we are all self- righteous hypocrites:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? . . . You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Matthew 7:3–5)
Enlightenment (or wisdom, if you prefer) requires us all to take the logs out of our own eyes and then escape from our ceaseless, petty, and divisive moralism. As the eighth- century Chinese Zen master Sen-ts’an wrote:
The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.
I’m not saying we should live our lives like Sen-ts’an. In fact, I believe that a world without moralism, gossip, and judgment would quickly decay into chaos. But if we want to understand ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials, we need to step back, drop the moralism, apply some moral psychology, and analyze the game we’re all playing. .
Let us now examine the psychology of this struggle between “for” and “against.” It is a struggle that plays out in each of our righteous minds, and among all of our righteous groups.
Excerpted from The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Haidt. Excerpted by permission of Vintage. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Black Flags by Joby Warrick
PROLOGUE Amman, Jordan, February 3, 2015
Just after nightfall, a warrant arrived at the city’s main women’s prison for the execution of Sajida al-Rishawi. The instructions had come from King Abdullah II himself, then in Washington on a state visit, and were transmitted from his private plane to the royal court in Jordan’s capital. A clerk relayed the message to the Interior Ministry and then to the prisons department, where it caused a stir. State executions are complicated affairs requiring many steps, yet the king’s wishes were explicit: the woman would face the gallows before the sun rose the next day.
The chief warden quickly made the trek to the cell where Rishawi had maintained a kind of self-imposed solitary confinement for close to a decade. The prisoner, forty-five now and no longer thin, spent most of her days watching television or reading a paperback Koran, seeing no one, and keeping whatever thoughts she had under the greasy, prison-issued hijab she always wore. She was not a stupid woman, yet she seemed perpetually disconnected from whatever was going on around her. "When will I be going home?" she asked her government-appointed lawyer during rare meetings in the months after she was sentenced to death. Eventually, even those visits stopped.
Now, when the warden sat her down to explain that she would die in the morning, Rashida nodded her assent but said nothing. If she cried or prayed or cursed, no one in the prison heard a word of it.
That she could face death was not a surprise to anyone. In 2006, a judge sentenced Rishawi to hang for her part in Jordan’s worst-ever terrorist attack: three simultaneous hotel bombings that killed sixty people, most of them guests at a wedding party. She was the suicide bomber who lived, an odd, heavy-browed woman made to pose awkwardly before TV cameras showing off the vest that had failed to explode. At one time, everyone in Amman knew her story, how this thirty-five-year-old unmarried Iraqi had agreed to wed a stranger so they could become a man-and-wife suicide team; how she panicked and ran; how she had wandered around the city’s northern suburbs in a taxi, lost, stopping passersby for directions, still wearing streaks of blood on her clothes and shoes.
But nearly ten years had passed. The hotels had been rebuilt and renamed, and Rishawi had vanished inside Jordan’s labyrinthine penal system. Within the Juwaida Women’s Prison, she wore a kind of faded notoriety, like a valuable museum piece that no one looks at anymore. Some of the older hands in the state security service called her "Zarqawi’s woman," a mocking reference to the infamous Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who ordered the hotel bombings. The younger ones barely remembered her at all.
Then, in the span of a month, everything changed. Zarqawi’s followers, it turned out, had not forgotten Rishawi. The terrorists had rebranded themselves over the years and were now known in Jordan by the Arabic acronym Daesh—in English, ISIS. And in January 2015, ISIS asked to have Rishawi back.
The demand for her release came in the middle of Jordan’s worst domestic crisis in years. A Jordanian air-force jet had crashed in Syria, and its young pilot had been captured alive by ISIS fighters. The group had broadcast photos of the frightened, nearly naked pilot being paraded around by grinning jihadists, some of them reaching out to embrace this great gift that Allah had dropped from the sky.
From the palace to the security agencies, the king and his advisers steeled themselves for even more awful news. Either the pilot would be publicly butchered by ISIS, they feared, or the terrorists would demand a terrible price for his ransom.
True to form, ISIS announced its decision in macabre fashion. Less than a week after the crash, the captured pilot’s family received a call at home, from the pilot’s own cell phone. On the other end, a stranger, speaking in Iraqi-accented Arabic, issued the group’s singular demand.
We want our sister Sajida, the caller said.
The same demand was repeated, along with several new ones, in a constantly shifting and mostly one-sided negotiation. All the requests were routed to the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Jordan’s intelligence service, and all eventually landed on the desk of the imposing forty-seven-year-old brigadier who ran the department’s counterterrorism unit. Even in an agency notorious for its toughness, Abu Haytham stood apart, a man with a burly street fighter’s physique and the personality of an anvil. He had battled ISIS in its many incarnations for years, and he had famously broken some of the group’s top operatives in interrogation. Zarqawi himself had taken several turns in Abu Haytham’s holding cell, and so had Sajida al-Rishawi, the woman ISIS was now seeking to free.
Outside of Jordan, the demand made little sense. Rishawi had no value as a fighter or a leader, or even as a symbol. She was known to have participated in exactly one terrorist attack, and she had botched it. Hardly "Zarqawi’s woman," she had never even met the man who ordered the strike. If ISIS hadn’t mentioned her name, she would likely have lived her remaining years quietly in prison, her execution indefinitely deferred for lack of any particular reason to carry it out.
But Abu Haytham understood. By invoking Rishawi’s name, the terrorists were reaching back to the group’s beginnings, back to a time before there was an ISIS, or a civil war in Syria; before the meltdown in Iraq that gave rise to the movement; even before the world had heard of a terrorist called Zarqawi. The Mukhabarat’s men had tried to keep this terrorist group from gaining a foothold. They had failed—sometimes through their own mistakes, more often because of the miscalculations of others. Now, Zarqawi’s jihadist movement had become a self-declared state, with territorial claims on two of Jordan’s borders. And Rishawi, the failed bomber, was one of many old scores that ISIS was ready to settle.
In summoning this forgotten ghost, ISIS was evoking one of the most horrifying nights in the country’s history, a moment seared into the memories of men of Abu Haytham’s generation, the former intelligence captains, investigators, and deputies who had since risen to lead the Mukhabarat. Once, Zarqawi had managed to strike directly at Jordan’s heart, and now, with the country’s pilot in their hands, ISIS was about to do it again.
---
Abu Haytham had been present that night. He could remember every detail of the crime for which Rishawi had been convicted and sentenced to hang. He could remember how the night had felt, the smell of blood and smoke, and the wailing of the injured.
Mostly he remembered the two girls.
They were cousins, ages nine and fourteen, and he knew their names: Lina and Riham. Local girls from Amman, out for a wedding party. They were both dressed in white, with small faces that were lovely and pale and perfectly serene. "Just like angels," he had thought.
They still wore the nearly identical lacy dresses their parents had bought for the party, and stylish shoes for dancing. Almost miraculously, from the neck up neither had suffered a scratch. When Abu Haytham first saw them, lying side by side on a board in those chaotic first moments at the hospital, he had wondered if they were sleeping. Injured, perhaps, but sedated and sleeping. Please, let them be sleeping, he had prayed.
But then he saw the terrible holes the shrapnel had made.
The girls would have been standing when it happened, as everyone was, whooping and clapping as the bride and groom prepared to make their entrance in the ballroom at Amman’s Radisson Hotel, which was lit up like a desert carnival on a cool mid-November evening. The newlyweds’ fathers, all big grins and rented tuxedos, had taken their places on the podium, and the Arabic band’s bleating woodwinds and throbbing drums had risen to a roar so loud that the hotel clerks in the lobby had to shout to be heard. The party was just reaching its gloriously noisy, sweaty, exuberant peak. No one appeared to have noticed two figures in dark coats who shuffled awkwardly near the doorway and then squeezed between the rows of cheering wedding guests toward the front of the ballroom.
There was a blinding flash, and then a sensation of everything falling—the ceiling, the walls, the floor. The shock wave knocked guests out of their beds on the hotel’s upper floors and blew out thick plate-glass doors in the lobby. A thunderclap, then silence. Then screams.
Only one of the bombs had gone off, but it cut through the ballroom like a swarm of flying razors. Hundreds of steel ball bearings, carefully and densely packed around the bomb’s core, sliced through wedding decorations, food trays, and upholstery. They splintered wooden tables and shattered marble tiles. They tore through evening gowns and fancy clutches, through suit jackets and crisp shirts, and through white, frilly dresses of the kind young girls wear to formal parties.
Abu Haytham, then a captain, was winding down another in a string of long shifts on that Wednesday in early November 2005. It was just before 9:00 p.m. when the first call came in, about an explosion of some kind at the Grand Hyatt across town. The early speculation was that a gas canister was to blame, but then came word of a second blast at the Days Inn Hotel, and then a third—reportedly far worse than the others—at the Radisson. Abu Haytham knew the place well. It was an Amman landmark, glitzy by Jordanian standards, perched on a hill and easily visible from most of the town, including from his own office building, nearly two miles away.
He raced to the hotel and pushed his way inside, past the rescue workers, the wailing survivors, and the recovered corpses that had been hauled out on luggage carts and deposited on the driveway. In the ballroom, through a haze of smoke and emergency lights, he could see more bodies. Some were sprawled haphazardly, as though flung by a giant. Others were missing limbs. On the smashed podium lay two crumpled forms in tuxedos. The fathers of both the bride and the groom had been near the bomber and died instantly.
Abu Haytham assembled teams that worked the three blast sites through the night, gathering whatever remnants they could find of the explosive devices, along with chunks of flesh that constituted the remains of three bombers. Only later, at the hospital, standing over a wooden slab in a makeshift morgue, was he overwhelmed by the horror of the evening: The broken bodies. The scores of wounded. The smell of blood and smoke. The girls, Lina and Riham, lying still in their torn white dresses. Abu Haytham, a doting father, had girls the same age.
"How," he said aloud, "does someone with a human heart do a thing like this?"
Just two days later came the news that one of the attackers—a woman—had survived and fled. A day after that, Sajida al-Rishawi sat in a chair in front of him.
She would surely know something, tied as she was to such an obviously important and well- planned mission. Where would the terrorists strike next? What plans were unfolding, perhaps at this very hour?
"I don’t know, I don’t know," the woman would occasionally manage, in a soft mumble. She repeated the line slowly, as though drugged.
Abu Haytham pleaded with her. He threatened. He appealed to her conscience, to religion, to Allah. Hours passed—crucial hours, he feared.
"How brainwashed you are!" he shouted at one point. "Why do you protect the people who put you up to this?"
The woman would never offer a useful syllable, then or in the months to come, after she was convicted and sentenced to die. Yet, already, Abu Haytham knew who was behind the act. All the Mukhabarat’s men knew, even before the culprit boasted of his responsibility in an audio recording made in his own voice. The signatures were all there: The coordinated blasts, all within ten minutes; the deployment of human bombers, each skillfully fitted with a device consisting of military-grade RDX explosive and enough loose metal to ensure maximum carnage. Most telling of all was the choice of targets—ordinary hotels where, on any given evening, Amman’s middle class would pack a rented ballroom in their finest apparel to celebrate a union or mark a milestone. No intelligence operative or general was likely to pass through the lobby of the Radisson at 9:00 p.m. on a weekday night. But scores of Jordanians would be there, clinging to the rituals of normal life in a country bordering a war zone.
Such hallmarks, like the voice on the audio recording, unmistakably belonged to Zarqawi, a man the Mukhabarat knew exceptionally well. He was, at the time of the bombing, the head of a particularly vicious terrorist network called al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the Jordanians had known him back in the days when he was Ahmad the hoodlum, a high school dropout with a reputation as a heavy drinker and a brawler. They had watched him wander off to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight the communists, then return as a battle-hardened religious fanatic. After a first try at terrorism, he had vanished into one of Jordan’s darkest prisons. This time he emerged as a battle-hardened religious fanatic who also happened to excel as a leader of men.
Abu Haytham had been among those who tried to alter Zarqawi’s path after prison. He had been the last intelligence officer to meet with him in 1999, before Zarqawi was granted permission to leave the country for good, headed again to Afghanistan and a future that surely—so the Jordanians thought—offered nothing more than futility and a dusty grave.
Then, in the most improbable of events, America intervened. Few beyond the intelligence service had heard of Zarqawi when Washington made him a terrorist superstar, declaring to the world in 2003 that this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The claim was wrong, yet, weeks later, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, the newly famous and well-funded terrorist gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of followers. Over three tumultuous years, he intentionally pushed Iraq to the brink of sectarian war by unleashing wave after wave of savage attacks on Shiite civilians in their mosques, bazaars, and schools. He horrified millions with a new form of highly intimate terrorism: the beheading of individual hostages, captured on video and sent around the world, using the Internet’s new power to broadcast directly into people’s homes. Along the way, he lashed out violently at his native Jordan and helped transform America’s lightning victory in Iraq into the costliest U.S. military campaign since Vietnam.
Yet his most significant accomplishment was not apparent until years later. Though some would cast his movement as an al-Qaeda offshoot, Zarqawi was no one’s acolyte. His brand of jihadism was utterly, brutally original. Osama bin Laden had sought to liberate Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate. Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate immediately—right now. He would seek to usher in God’s kingdom on Earth through acts of unthinkable savagery, believing, correctly, that theatrical displays of extreme violence would attract the most hardened jihadists to his cause and frighten everyone else into submission. His strategy shook the region as al-Qaeda never had.
But Zarqawi’s excesses also deepened his adversaries’ resolve. In the immediate aftermath of the hotel bombings, Abu Haytham and other Mukhabarat officers had a simple goal: to eliminate the man who had ordered them. And when they succeeded, in 2006, by providing the United States with intelligence that helped it track Zarqawi to his hideout, the terrorist and his organization appeared finished. Instead, his followers merely retreated, quietly gaining strength in Syria’s lawless provinces until they burst into view in 2013, not as a terrorist group, but as an army.
This time, war-weary America would refuse to help until it was too late. There would be no serious effort to arm the moderate rebels who sought to deny ISIS its safe haven, and no air strikes to harry ISIS’s leadership and supply lines. Twice in a decade, a jihadist wave had threatened to engulf the region. Twice, it seemed to the Jordanians, the American response had been to cut a fresh hole in the lifeboat.
Zarqawi’s successors called themselves by different names before settling on ISIS—or simply the Islamic State. But they continued to refer to Zarqawi as the "mujahid sheikh," acknowledging the founder who had the audacity to believe he could redraw the maps of the Middle East. And, like Zarqawi, they believed their conquests would not end there.
In the prophetic passages of the Muslim holy texts known as the Hadith, Zarqawi saw his fate foretold. He and his men were the black-clad soldiers of whom the ancient scholars had written: "The black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns." These conquerors would not merely reclaim the ancient Muslim lands. They also would be the instigators of the final cataclysmic struggle ending in the destruction of the West’s great armies, in northern Syria.
"The spark has been lit here in Iraq," Zarqawi preached, "and its heat will continue to intensify until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq."
The Mukhabarat’s men had heard enough of such talk from Zarqawi back when he was their prisoner. Now the brazen claims were coming from his offspring. Thirty thousand strong, they were waiting just across the border, calling for their sister Sajida.
---
The charade of a prisoner swap ended abruptly on February 3, 2015, the day after Jordan’s king arrived in Washingon for the official visit. For Abdullah II, it was the latest in a series of exhausting journeys in which he repeated the same appeal for help. His tiny country was struggling with two burdens imposed from abroad: a human tide of refugees from Syria— some six hundred thousand so far—and the cost of participating in the allied Western-Arab military campaign against ISIS. The trip was not going particularly well. Members of Congress offered sympathy but not much more; White House officials recited the usual pledges to bolster Jordan’s defenses and struggling economy, but the kind of assistance Abdullah most desperately needed was nowhere in the offing.
The king’s disappointment had long since hardened into resentment. During previous visits, President Obama had declined Jordan’s requests for laser-guided munitions and other advanced hardware that could take out ISIS’s trucks and tanks. On this trip, there was no firm commitment even for a meeting between the two leaders.
Abdullah was in the Capitol, making a pitch to Senator John McCain, the Republican senator and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when one of the king’s aides interrupted him. The monarch stepped into the corridor and, on the small screen of a smartphone, watched ISIS deliver its final statement on the proposed prisoner swap. As video cameras rolled, masked jihadists marched the young Jordanian pilot into a small metal cage that had been doused with fuel. Then they lit a fire and filmed as the airman was burned alive.
By the time Abdullah returned to the meeting, McCain’s aides had seen the video as well. The monarch kept his composure, but McCain could see he was badly shaken.
"Can we do anything more for you?" McCain asked.
"I’m not getting support from your side!" Abdullah finally said. "I’m still getting only gravity bombs, and we’re not even getting resupplied with those. Meanwhile, we’re flying two hundred percent more missions than all the other coalition members combined, apart from the United States."
The king continued with his scheduled meetings, but he had already made up his mind to return home. He was making arrangements when the White House phoned to offer fifteen minutes with the president. Abdullah accepted.
Inside the Oval Office, Obama offered condolences to the pilot’s family and thanked the king for Jordan’s contributions to the military campaign against ISIS. The administration was doing all it could to be supportive, the president assured the monarch.
"No, sir, you are not," Abdullah said, firmly. He rattled off a list of weapons and supplies he needed.
"I’ve got three days’ worth of bombs left," he said, according to an official present during the exchange. "When I get home I’m going to war, and I’m going to use every bomb I’ve got until they’re gone."
There was one other item of business to attend to before his return. From the airport, Abdullah called his aides in Amman to start the process of carrying out a pair of executions. On Jordan’s death row, there were two inmates who had been convicted of committing murderous acts on orders from Zarqawi. One was an Iraqi man who had been a midlevel operative in Zarqawi’s Iraqi insurgency. The other was Sajida al-Rishawi. Both should be put to death without further delay.
The king foresaw that Western governments would protest the executions as acts of vengeance, even though both inmates had been convicted and sentenced long ago as part of normal court proceedings. But he would not be deterred. As far as he was concerned, the appointment with the hangman had already been delayed too long, he told aides.
"I don’t want to hear a word from anyone," Abdullah said.
The king was still airborne at 2:00 a.m. Amman time, when the guards arrived to collect Sajida al-Rishawi from her cell. She had declined the customary final meal and ritual bath with which devout Muslims cleanse the physical body in preparation for the afterlife. She donned the red uniform worn exclusively by condemned prisoners on the day of execution, along with the usual hijab for covering her head and face.
She was escorted outside the prison to a waiting van with a military escort for the drive to Swaqa, Jordan’s largest prison, on a desert hill about sixty miles south of the capital. The vehicles arrived just before 4:00 a.m., as a full moon, visible through a light haze, was dipping toward the southwestern horizon.
Her last earthly view, before she was blindfolded, was of a small execution chamber with white walls and a row of tiny windows, and a few tired faces looking up from the witness gallery just below her. An imam prayed as a noose with a heavy metal clasp was secured, and a judge asked if Rishawi cared to convey any last wishes or a final will. She gave no reply.
She likewise made no audible sound as the gallows’ trap opened and she plunged hard into the darkness. It was 5:05 a.m., nearly ninety minutes before sunrise, when the prison doctor checked for a pulse.
"Zarqawi’s woman" was dead, her execution the closing scene in the worst act of terrorism in Jordan’s history. But Zarqawi’s children were pursuing the founder’s far grander ambitions: the end of Jordan and its king, the erasing of international boundaries, and the destruction of the modern states of the Middle East. Then, with black flags raised above Muslim capitals from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, they could begin the great apocalyptic showdown with the West.
Excerpted from Black Flags by Joby Warrick Copyright © 2015 by Joby Warrick. Excerpted by permission of Anchor. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
BUY HERE American Lion by Jon Meacham
Chapter 1 Andy Will Fight His Way in the World
Christmas 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage, Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville. It was a week before the holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the United States the month before. “How triumphant!” Andrew Donelson said of the victory. “How flattering to the cause of the people!” Now the president- elect’s family and friends were to be on hand for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine–Jackson was known to serve guests whiskey, champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin–and, in this special year, a pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.
On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the house, answering congratulatory messages. As he worked, friends in town were planning a ball to honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. Led by a marshal, there would be a guard of soldiers on horseback to take Jackson into Nashville, fire a twenty- four- gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by dancing. Rachel would be by his side. In the last moments before the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson drafted a letter. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted an old friend’s good wishes: “To the people, for the confidence reposed in me, my gratitude and best services are due; and are pledged to their service.” Before he finished the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.
He knew his election was inspiring both reverence and loathing. The 1828 presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Jackson’s forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for Czar Alexander I. As president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public money decorating the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The anti- Jackson assaults were more colorful. Jackson’s foes called his wife a bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history of dueling, for alleged atrocities in battles against the British, the Spanish, and the Indians–and for being a wife stealer who had married Rachel before she was divorced from her first husband. “Even Mrs. J. is not spared, and my pious Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth . . . and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest brother sold as a slave in Carolina,” Jackson said to a friend.
Jackson’s advisers marveled at the ferocity of the Adams attacks. “The floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted and the most nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of not only Genl Jackson but all his prominent supporters,” William B. Lewis told John Coffee, an old friend of Jackson’s from Tennessee. Some Americans thought of the president-elect as a second Father of His Country. Others wanted him dead. One Revolutionary War veteran, David Coons of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was hearing rumors of ambush and assassination plots against Jackson. To Coons, Jackson was coming to rule as a tribune of the people, but to others Jackson seemed dangerous–so dangerous, in fact, that he was worth killing. “There are a portion of malicious and unprincipled men who have made hard threats with regard to you, men whose baseness would (in my opinion) prompt them to do anything,” Coons wrote Jackson.
That was the turbulent world awaiting beyond the Hermitage. In the draft of a speech he was to deliver to the celebration in town, Jackson was torn between anxiety and nostalgia. “The consciousness of a steady adherence to my duty has not been disturbed by the unsparing attacks of which I have been the subject during the election,” the speech read. Still, Jackson admitted he felt “apprehension” about the years ahead. His chief fear? That, in Jackson’s words, “I shall fail” to secure “the future prosperity of our beloved country.” Perhaps the procession to Nashville and the ball at the hotel would lift his spirits; perhaps Christmas with his family would.
While Jackson was outside, word came that his wife had collapsed in her sitting room, screaming in pain. It had been a wretched time for Rachel. She was, Jackson’s political foes cried, “a black wench,” a “profligate woman,” unfit to be the wife of the president of the United States. Shaken by the at- tacks, Rachel–also sixty-one and, in contrast to her husband, short and somewhat heavy–had been melancholy and anxious. “The enemies of the General have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me,” Rachel lamented during the campaign. “Almighty God, was there ever any thing equal to it?” On the way home from a trip to Nashville after the balloting, Rachel was devastated to overhear a conversation about the lurid charges against her. Her niece, the twenty-one- year- old Emily Donelson, tried to reassure her aunt but failed. “No, Emily,” Mrs. Jackson replied, “I’ll never forget it!”
When news of her husband’s election arrived, she said: “Well, for Mr. Jackson’s sake I am glad; for my own part I never wished it.” Now the cumulative toll of the campaign and the coming administration exacted its price as Rachel was put to bed, the sound of her cries still echoing in her slave Hannah’s ears.
Jackson rushed to his wife, sent for doctors, did what he could. Later, as she lay resting, her husband added an emotional postscript to the letter he had begun: “P.S. Whilst writing, Mrs. J. from good health, has been taken suddenly ill, with excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast. What may be the result of this violent attack god only knows, I hope for her recovery, and in haste close this letter, you will pardon any inaccuracies A. J.” Yet his hopes would not bring her back.
Rachel lingered for two and a half days. Jackson hovered by her side, praying for her survival. He had loved her for nearly four decades. His solace through war, politics, Indian fighting, financial chaos, and the vicissitudes of life in what was then frontier America, Rachel gave him what no one else ever had. In her arms and in their home he found a steady sense of family, a sustaining universe, a place of peace in a world of war. Her love for him was unconditional. She did not care for him because he was a general or a president. She cared for him because he was Andrew Jackson. “Do not, My beloved Husband, let the love of Country, fame and honor make you forget you have me,” she wrote to him during the War of 1812. “Without you I would think them all empty shadows.” When they were apart, Jackson would sit up late writing to her, his candle burning low through the night. “My heart is with you,” he told her.
Shortly after nine on the evening of Monday, December 22, three days before Christmas, Rachel suffered an apparent heart attack. It was over. Still, Jackson kept vigil, her flesh turning cold to his touch as he stroked her forehead. With his most awesome responsibilities and burdens at hand, she had left him. “My mind is so disturbed . . . that I can scarcely write, in short my dear friend my heart is nearly broke,” Jackson told his confidant John Coffee after Rachel’s death.
At one o’clock on Christmas Eve afternoon, by order of the mayor, Nashville’s church bells began ringing in tribute to Rachel, who was to be buried in her garden in the shadow of the Hermitage. The weather had been wet, and the dirt in the garden was soft; the rain made the gravediggers’ task a touch easier as they worked. After a Presbyterian funeral service led by Rachel’s minister, Jackson walked the one hundred fifty paces back to the house. A devastated but determined Jackson spoke to the mourners. “I am now the President elect of the United States, and in a short time must take my way to the metropolis of my country; and, if it had been God’s will, I would have been grateful for the privilege of taking her to my post of honor and seating her by my side; but Providence knew what was best for her.” God’s was the only will Jackson ever bowed to, and he did not even do that without a fight.
In his grief, Jackson turned to Rachel’s family. He would not–could not–go to Washington by himself. Around him at the Hermitage on this bleak Christmas Eve was the nucleus of the intimate circle he would maintain for the rest of his life. At the center of the circle, destined both to provide great comfort and to provoke deep personal anger in the White House, stood Andrew and Emily Donelson. They had an ancient claim on Jackson’s affections and attention, and they were ready to serve.
While Andrew–who was also Emily’s first cousin–was to work through the president- elect’s correspondence, guard access to Jackson, and serve as an adviser, Emily, not yet twenty- two, would be the president’s hostess. Attracted by the bright things of the fashionable world and yet committed to family and faith, Emily was at once selfless and sharp- tongued. Born on Monday, June 1, 1807, the thirteenth and last child of Mary and John Donelson, Emily was raised in the heart of frontier aristocracy and inherited a steely courage–perhaps from her grandfather, a Tennessee pioneer and a founder of Nashville–that could verge on obstinacy. It was a trait she shared with the other women in her family, including her aunt Rachel. “All Donelsons in the female line,” wrote a family biographer, “were tyrants.” Charming, generous, and hospitable tyrants, to be sure, but still a formidable lot–women who knew their own minds, women who had helped their husbands conquer the wilderness or were the daughters of those who had. Now one of them, Emily, would step into Rachel’s place in the White House.
On Sunday, January 18, 1829, Jackson left the Hermitage for the capital. With the Donelsons, William Lewis, and Mary Eastin, Emily’s friend and cousin, Jackson rode the two miles from the Hermitage to a wharf on a neighboring estate and boarded the steamboat Pennsylvania to travel the Cumberland River north, toward their new home. He was, as he had said to the mourners on the day of Rachel’s burial, the president- elect of the United States.
Before he left Tennessee, he wrote a letter to John Coffee that mixed faith and resignation. His thoughts were with Rachel, and on his own mortality. “Whether I am ever to return or not is for time to reveal, as none but that providence, who rules the destiny of all, now knows,” Jackson said.
His friends hoped that service to the nation would comfort him. “The active discharge of those duties to which he will shortly be called, more than anything else, will tend to soothe the poignancy of his grief,” said the Nashville Republican and State Gazette in an edition bordered in black in mourning for Rachel. In a moving letter, Edward Livingston, a friend of Jackson’s and a future secretary of state, saw that the cause of country would have to replace Rachel as Jackson’s central concern. Referring to America, Livingston told the president- elect: “She requires you for her welfare to abandon your just grief, to tear yourself from the indulgence of regrets which would be a virtue in a private individual, but to which you are not permitted to yield while so much of her happiness depends upon your efforts in her service.” Jackson understood. To rule, one had to survive, and to survive one had to fight.
The travelers wound their way through the country to the capital, passing through Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, where it snowed. The president- elect was complaining of sore limbs, a bad cough, and a hand worn out from greeting so many well- wishers. “He was very much wearied by the crowds of people that attended him everywhere, anxious to see the People’s President,” Mary Eastin wrote her father.
Ten days into the voyage, Emily Donelson finally found a moment to sit down. For her the trip had been a blur of cannons, cheers, and tending to colds–she had one, as did her little son Jackson. “I scarcely need tell you that we have been in one continual crowd since we started,” Emily wrote her mother. Their quarters were overrun by guests, and there were ovations and shouts of joy from people along the banks of the river. The social demands of the presidency had begun, really, the moment Jackson and his party left the Hermitage. But Emily was not the kind to complain, at least not in her uncle’s hearing. She loved the life that Jackson had opened to her and her husband.
“You must not make yourself unhappy about us, my dear Mother,” Emily added, sending warm wishes to her father. The handwriting was shaky as the letter ended; the water was rough, the pace of the craft fast. “I hope you will excuse this scrawl,” Emily said, “as it is written while the boat is running.”
The speed of the boat did not seem to bother Andrew Jackson, but then he was accustomed to pressing ahead. He was constantly on the run, and had been all his life. For him the journey to the White House had begun six decades before, in a tiny place tucked away in the Carolinas–a place he never visited, and spoke of only sparingly, called Waxhaw.
Jackson grew up an outsider, living on the margins and at the mercy of others. Traveling to America from Ireland in 1765, his father, the senior Andrew Jackson, and his mother, Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, moved into a tiny community a few hundred miles northwest of Charleston, in a spot straddling the border between North and South Carolina. “Waxhaw” came from the name of the tribe of native Indians in the region, and from a creek that flowed into the Catawba River. Though the Revolutionary War was eleven years away, the relationship between King George III and his American colonies was already strained. The year the Jacksons crossed the Atlantic, Parliament passed the Quartering Act (which forced colonists to shelter British troops) and the Stamp Act (which levied a tax on virtually every piece of paper on the continent). The result: the Massachusetts legislature called for a colonial congress in New York, which issued a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances” against King George III. Striking, too, was a remark made by a delegate from South Carolina, the Jacksons’ new home. “There ought to be no more New England men, no New Yorkers,” said Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, “but all of us Americans!”
Jackson’s father, meanwhile, was trying to establish himself and his family in the New World. Though a man, his son recalled, of “independent” means, he was, it seems, poorer than his in- laws, who might have made him feel the disparity. While the other members of the extended family began prospering, Jackson moved his wife and two sons, Hugh and Robert, to Twelve Mile Creek, seven miles from the heart of Waxhaw. His wife was pregnant when the first Andrew Jackson died unexpectedly. It was a confusing, unsettling time. The baby was almost due, a snowstorm–rare in the South–had struck, and Jackson’s pallbearers drank so much as they carried his corpse from Twelve Mile Creek to the church for the funeral that they briefly lost the body along the way.
Soon thereafter, on Sunday, March 15, 1767, Mrs. Jackson gave birth to her third son, naming him Andrew after her late husband. He was a dependent from delivery forward. Whether the birth took place in North or South Carolina has occupied historians for generations (Jackson himself thought it was South Carolina), but the more important fact is that Andrew Jackson came into the world under the roof of relatives, not of his own parents. Growing up, he would be a guest of the houses in which he lived, not a son, except of a loving mother who was never the mistress of her own household. One of Mrs. Jackson’s sisters had married a Crawford, and the Crawfords were more affluent than the Jacksons. The loss of Mrs. Jackson’s husband only made the gulf wider. When the Crawfords asked Mrs. Jackson and her sons to live with them, it was not wholly out of a sense of familial devotion and duty. The Jacksons needed a home, the Crawfords needed help, and a bargain was struck. “Mrs. Crawford was an invalid,” wrote James Parton, the early Jackson biographer who interviewed people familiar with the Jacksons’ days in Waxhaw, “and Mrs. Jackson was permanently established in the family as housekeeper and poor relation.” Even in his mother’s lifetime, Jackson felt a certain inferiority to and distance from others. “His childish recollections were of humiliating dependence and galling discomfort, his poor mother performing household drudgery in return for the niggardly maintenance of herself and her children,” said Mary Donelson Wilcox, Emily and Andrew’s oldest daughter. He was not quite part of the core of the world around him. He did not fully belong, and he knew it.
God and war dominated his childhood. His mother took him and his brothers to the Waxhaw Presbyterian meetinghouse for services every week, and the signal intellectual feat of his early years was the memorization of the Shorter Westminster Catechism. Most stories about the young Jackson also paint a portrait of a child and young man full of energy, fun, and not a little fury. Like many other children of the frontier, he was engaged in a kind of constant brawl from birth–and in Jackson’s case, it was a brawl in which he could not stand to lose ground or points, even for a moment.
Wrestling was a common pastime, and a contemporary who squared off against Jackson recalled “I could throw him three times out of four, but he would never stay throwed.” As a practical joke his friends packed extra powder into a gun Jackson was about to fire, hoping the recoil would knock him down. It did. A furious Jackson rose up and cried “By God, if one of you laughs, I’ll kill him!”
Perhaps partly because he was fatherless, he may have felt he had to do more than usual to prove his strength and thus secure, or try to secure, his place in the community. “Mother, Andy will fight his way in the world,” a neighborhood boy recalled saying in their childhood. Clearly Jackson seethed beneath the surface, for when flummoxed or crossed or frustrated, he would work himself into fits of rage so paralyzing that contemporaries recalled he would begin “slobbering.” His prospects were not auspicious: here was an apparently unbalanced, excitable, insecure, and defensive boy coming of age in a culture of confrontation and violence. It was not, to say the least, the best of combinations.
His mother was his hope. His uncles and aunts apparently did not take a great deal of interest. They had their own children, their own problems, their own lives. Elizabeth Jackson was, however, a resourceful woman, and appears to have made a good bit out of little. There was some money, perhaps income from her late husband’s farm, and gifts from relatives in Ireland–enough, anyway, to send Jackson to schools where he studied, for a time, under Presbyterian clergy, learning at least the basics of “the dead languages.” He learned his most lasting lessons, however, not in a classroom but in the chaos of the Revolutionary War.
The birth of the Republic was, for Jackson, a time of unrelenting death. A week after Jackson’s eighth birthday, in March 1775, Edmund Burke took note of the American hunger for independence. “The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art,” he said. Within sixteen months Burke was proved right when the Continental Congress declared independence on July 4, 1776, a midsummer Thursday. By 1778, the South was the focus of the war, and the British fought brutally in Georgia and the Carolinas. In 1779, Andrew’s brother Hugh, just sixteen, was fighting at the front and died, it was said, “of heat and fatigue” after a clash between American and British troops at the Battle of Stono Ferry, south of Charleston. It was the first in a series of calamities that would strike Jackson, who was thirteen.
The British took Charleston on Friday, May 12, 1780, then moved west. The few things Jackson knew and cherished were soon under siege. On Monday, May 29, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, roughly three hundred British troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton killed 113 men near Waxhaw and wounded another 150. It was a vicious massacre: though the rebels tried to surrender, Tarleton ordered his men forward, and they charged the Americans, a rebel surgeon recalled, “with the horrid yells of infuriated demons.” Even after the survivors fell to the ground, asking for quarter, the British “went over the ground, plunging their bayonets into everyone that exhibited any signs of life.”
The following Sunday was no ordinary Sabbath at Waxhaw. The meetinghouse was filled with casualties from the skirmish, and the Jacksons were there to help the wounded. “None of the men had less than three or four, and some as many as thirteen gashes on them,” Jackson recalled.
He was so young, and so much was unfolding around him: the loss of a brother, the coming of the British, the threat of death, the sight of the bleeding and the dying in the most sacred place he knew, the meetinghouse. The enemy was everywhere, and the people of Waxhaw, like people throughout the colonies, were divided by the war, with Loyalists supporting George III and Britain, and others, usually called Whigs, throwing in their lot with the Congress. As Jackson recalled it, his mother had long inculcated him and his brothers with anti- British rhetoric, a stand she took because of her own father, back in Ireland. The way Mrs. Jackson told the story, he had fought the troops of the British king in action at Carrickfergus. “Often she would spend the winter’s night, in recounting to them the sufferings of their grandfather, at the siege of Carrickfergus, and the oppressions exercised by the nobility of Ireland, over the labouring poor,” wrote John Reid and John Eaton in a biography Jackson approved, “impressing it upon them, as their first duty, to expend their lives, if it should become necessary, in defending and supporting the natural rights of man.” These words were written for a book published in 1817, after Jackson defeated the British at New Orleans and preparatory to his entering national politics, which may account for the unlikely image of Mrs. Jackson tutoring her sons in Enlightenment political thought on cold Carolina evenings. But there is no doubt that Jackson chose to remember his upbringing this way, which means he linked his mother with the origins of his love of country and of the common man.
In the split between the revolutionaries and the Loyalists Jackson saw firsthand the brutality and bloodshed that could result when Americans turned on Americans. “Men hunted each other like beasts of prey,” wrote Amos Kendall, the Jackson intimate who spent hours listening to Jackson reminisce, “and the savages were outdone in cruelties to the living and indignities on the dead.”
Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton–known as “Bloody Tarleton” for his butchery–once rode so close to the young Jackson that, Jackson recalled, “I could have shot him.” The boy soaked up the talk of war and its rituals from the local militia officers and men. Months passed, and there were more battles, more killing. “Boys big enough to carry muskets incurred the dangers of men,” wrote Kendall–and Jackson was big enough to carry a musket.
In April 1781, after a night spent on the run from a British party, he and his brother Robert were trapped in one of their Crawford relatives’ houses. A neighboring Tory alerted the redcoats, and soon Andrew and Robert were surrounded. The soldiers ransacked the house, and an imperious officer ordered Jackson to polish his boots.
Jackson refused. “Sir,” he said, with a striking formality and coolness under the circumstances for a fourteen- year- old, “I am a prisoner of war, and claim to be treated as such.” The officer then swung his sword at the young man. Jackson blocked the blade with his left hand, but he could not fend it off completely. “The sword point reached my head and has left a mark there . . . on the skull, as well as on the fingers,” Jackson recalled. His brother was next, and when he too refused the order to clean the boots, the officer smashed the sword over Robert’s head, knocking him to the floor.
In some ways, Andrew was strengthened by the blows, for he would spend the rest of his life standing up to enemies, enduring pain, and holding fast until, after much trial, victory came. Robert was not so fortunate. The two boys were taken from the house to a British prison camp in Camden, about forty miles away. The journey was difficult in the April heat: “The prisoners were all dismounted and marched on foot to Camden, pushed through the swollen streams and prevented from drinking,” Jackson recalled. The mistreatment continued at the camp. “No attention whatever was paid to the wounds or to the comfort of the prisoners, and the small pox having broken out among them, many fell victims to it,” Jackson said. Robert was sick, very sick. Their mother managed to win her sons’ release, and, with a desperately ill Robert on one horse and Mrs. Jackson on another, a barefoot Andrew–the British had taken his shoes and his coat–had to, as he recalled, “trudge” forty- five miles back to Waxhaw.
They made a ragged, lonely little group. En route, even the weather turned against them. “The fury of a violent storm of rain to which we were exposed for several hours before we reached the end of our journey caused the small pox to strike in and consequently the next day I was dangerously ill,” Jackson recalled. Two days later Robert died. “During his confinement in prison,” Jackson’s earliest biography said, Robert “had suffered greatly; the wound on his head, all this time, having never been dressed, was followed by an inflammation of the brain, which in a few days after his liberation, brought him to his grave.”
Two Jackson boys were now dead at the hands of the British. Elizabeth nursed Andrew, now her only living child, back from the precipice–and then left, to tend to two of her Crawford nephews who were sick in Charleston.
Jackson never saw her again. In the fall of 1781 she died in the coastal city tending to other boys, and was buried in obscurity. Her clothes were all that came back to him. Even by the rough standards of the frontier in late eighteenth- century America, where disease and death were common, this was an extraordinary run of terrible luck.
For Jackson, the circumstances of Elizabeth’s last mission of mercy and burial would be perennial reminders of the tenuous position she had been forced into by her own husband’s death. First was the occasion of her visit to Charleston: to care for the extended family, leaving her own son behind. However selfless her motives–she had nursed the war’s wounded from that first Waxhaw massacre in the late spring of 1780–Elizabeth had still gone to the coast for the sake of Jackson’s cousins, not her own children. The uncertainty over the fate of her remains was a matter of concern to Jackson even in his White House years. He long sought the whereabouts of his mother’s grave, but to no avail. Perhaps partly in reaction to what he may have viewed as the lack of respect or care others had taken with his mother’s burial, he became a careful steward of such things–a devotee of souvenirs, a keeper of tombs, and an observer of anniversaries. The first woman he ever loved, his mother, rested in oblivion. The second woman who won his heart, Rachel, would be memorialized in stateliness and grandeur at the Hermitage after her death, and in his last years he would spend hours in the garden, contemplating her tomb. Bringing his mother home had been beyond his power. The story of Jackson’s life was how he strove to see that little else ever would be.
Rachel Jackson believed her husband drew inspiration from his mother’s trials. It was from her courage in facing what Rachel called “many hardships while on this earth” that Jackson “obtained the fortitude which has enabled him to triumph with so much success over the many obstacles which have diversified his life.”
Jackson often recounted what he claimed were his mother’s last words to him. In 1815, after his triumph at New Orleans, he spoke of his mother to friends: “Gentlemen, I wish she could have lived to see this day. There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and as brave as a lioness. Her last words have been the law of my life.”
Andrew, if I should not see you again, I wish you to remember and treasure up some things I have already said to you: in this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime–not merely a fault or a sin, but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. In personal conduct be always polite but never obsequious. None will respect you more than you respect yourself. Avoid quarrels as long as you can without yielding to imposition. But sustain your manhood always. Never bring a suit in law for assault and battery or for defamation. The law affords no remedy for such outrages that can satisfy the feelings of a true man. Never wound the feelings of others. Never brook wanton outrage upon your own feelings. If you ever have to vindicate your feelings or defend your honor, do it calmly. If angry at first, wait till your wrath cools before you proceed.
No matter how many of these words were hers, and how many were created by Jackson and ascribed to her memory, Elizabeth Jackson cast a long shadow in the life of her only surviving son.
Jackson spiraled downward and lashed out in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Before now, living in other people’s houses, Jackson had learned to manage complicated situations, maneuvering to maintain a passably cheerful (and grateful) face among people who gave him shelter but apparently little else. “He once said he never remembered receiving a gift as a child, and that, after his mother’s death, no kind, encouraging words ever greeted his ear,” recalled Mary Donelson Wilcox.
The Revolutionary War drew to a close with the American victory at Yorktown, Virginia, on the afternoon of Friday, October 19, 1781. Two years later, on Wednesday, September 3, 1783, came the Treaty of Paris, and the United States was now an independent nation. For Jackson, though, the end of war brought little peace. Living for a time with some Crawford relatives, Jackson got into a fight with one of their guests, a Captain Galbraith. Jackson thought him “of a very proud and haughty disposition,” and the two found themselves in an argument, and “for some reason,” Jackson recalled, “I forget now what, he threatened to chastise me.” Jackson replied with a flash of fire. “I immediately answered, ‘that I had arrived at the age to know my rights, and although weak and feeble from disease, I had the courage to defend them, and if he attempted anything of that kind I would most assuredly send him to the other world.’” That was enough for Jackson’s current Crawford host to shuffle him off to another relative. Having the unstable orphan around presented too many problems, not least the possibility of his attacking other guests.
Then came a crucial interlude in Jackson’s life: a sojourn in the cultivated precincts of Charleston. He had come into some money–either from his grandfather or perhaps from the sale of his mother’s property– and used it to finance a trip to the coast where he fell in with a fast, sophisticated circle. Some Charlestonians had retreated to the Waxhaw region during the worst of the fighting on the coast, so Jackson had something of an entrée when he arrived. Here he found the pleasures of the turf, of good tailors, and of the gaming tables. “There can be little doubt that at this period he imbibed that high sense of honour, and unstudied elegance of air for which he has been since distinguished,” wrote the early Jackson biographer Henry Lee–as well as little doubt that his love of racehorses and fine clothes had its beginnings in Charleston, too.
After Jackson returned to Waxhaw, he grew restless. From 1781 to 1784, he tried his hand at saddle making and school teaching–neither seems to have gone very well–and then left South Carolina for good. For the rest of his life, for a man who adored talk of family, friends, and old times, Jackson mentioned Waxhaw very little, the only exceptions being conversation about his mother and about Revolutionary War action in the region–both things that he could claim as his own.
Decade after decade, he never chose to find the time to go to Waxhaw. Acknowledging the gift of a map of the region the year before he was elected president, Jackson wrote a well- wisher: “A view of this map pointing to the spot that gave me birth, brings fresh to my memory many associations dear to my heart, many days of pleasure with my juvenile companions”–words that might, taken alone, suggest warm memories of his frontier youth.
Referring to his “juvenile companions,” Jackson said, “but alas, most of them are gone to that bourne where I am hastening and from whence no one returns”–in other words, they were dead. “I have not visited that country since the year 1784,” he added–which, since he was writing in midsummer 1827, means that forty- three years had passed since he bothered to return. Turning as close to home as he could, Jackson concluded: “The crossing of the Waxhaw creek, within one mile of which I was born, is still, however, I see, possessed by Mr John Crawford, son of the owner (Robert) who lived there when I was growing up and at school. I lived there for many years, and from the accuracy which this spot is marked in the map, I conclude the whole must be correct.” With that Jackson signs off. The subject is closed.
Still, the roots of Jackson’s intellectual and rhetorical imagination lie in Waxhaw. Down the years Jackson could quote Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Alexander Pope, and almost certainly read more books than his harshest critics believed, but the foundations of his worldview most likely came from his childhood Sundays in South Carolina, where he spent hours soaking in eighteenth- century Presbyterianism.
Elizabeth Jackson wanted her Andrew to be a minister, an ambition for him that may have been among the reasons he was able to envision himself rising to a place of authority. Even more so than in succeeding American generations, clergymen played a central and special role in the life of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were often the most educated men in a given place, conversant not only with scripture but with ancient tongues and the touchstones of English literature. They held center stage, with a standing claim on the time and attention (at least feigned) of their flocks, and they presided at the most important public moments of a Christian’s life–baptism, communion, marriage, death. Jackson’s sense of himself as someone set apart–the word “ordain” derives from the word “order,” and an ordained figure is one who puts things in order, arranges them, controls and even commands them–may have come in part from hearing his mother speak of him in such terms.
Jackson found other, larger spheres over which to preside than Carolina churches, but it would be a mistake to pass too quickly over the lasting influence his churchgoing had on the way he thought, spoke, wrote, and saw the world. He attended services at the Waxhaw meetinghouse throughout his early years, and these childhood Sabbaths are worth considering in trying to solve the mystery of how a man with so little formal education and such a sporadic–if occasionally intense–interest in books developed his sense of history and of humanity.
The service the Jacksons attended most likely started in midmorning. A psalm was sung–but without organ music, for Presbyterians were austere not only in their theology but in their liturgy–and a prayer said. Church historians suspect such prayers could stretch beyond twenty minutes in length. Then came a lesson from scripture–the selection could range from an entire chapter of a book of the Bible to a shorter reading followed by an explication–followed by the centerpiece of the morning: the minister’s sermon, an address that could range in length from thirty minutes to an hour. Another psalm or hymn closed the morning, which had by now consumed two hours of the day. There was a break for lunch, then an afternoon version of the same service, which everyone attended as well.
From his babyhood, then, Andrew Jackson probably spent between three and four hours nearly every Sunday for about fourteen years hearing prayers, psalms, scripture, sermons, and hymns: highly formalized, intense language evoking the most epic of battles with the greatest of stakes. In the words flowing from the minister on all those Sundays, Jackson would have been transported to imaginative realms where good and evil were at war, where kings and prophets on the side of the Lord struggled against the darker powers of the earth, where man’s path through a confusing world was lit by a peculiar intermingling of Christian mercy and might. God may well plan on exalting the humble and meek, but Jackson also heard the call of Gideon’s trumpet–the call to, as Saint Paul put it, fight the good fight.
Throughout his life, when he was under pressure, Jackson returned to the verses and tales of the Bible he had first heard in his childhood. He referred to political enemies as “Judases,” and at one horrible moment during the attacks on Rachel’s virtue in the 1828 campaign, Jackson’s mind raced to the language and force of the Bible in a crowded collection of allusions. “Should the uncircumcised philistines send forth their Goliath to destroy the liberty of the people and compel them to worship Mammon, they may find a David who trusts in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Jacob, for when I fight, it is the battles of my country,” Jackson wrote a friend.
That the image of King David–ancient Israel’s greatest monarch–came to Jackson’s mind is telling, for the connection he himself was drawing between David’s struggles and his own suggests the breadth of Jackson’s heroic vision of himself. David was a ruler who, chosen by the prophet Samuel, rose from obscurity to secure his nation and protect his people. A formidable soldier, he was a man of greatness and of God who was not without sin or sadness: that he stole Bathsheba, another man’s wife, stretches the analogy further than Jackson would ever have gone, but the story of lost fathers and sons in the tale of the death of David’s son Absalom echoed in Jackson’s own life. The Lord’s promise to David in II Samuel–“And thine house and thine kingdom shall be established for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever”–would have resonated in Jackson’s imagination, for his life was dedicated to building not only his own family but his nation, and perhaps even founding a dynasty in which Andrew Donelson, as his protégé, might, as Jackson put it, “preside over the destinies of America.”
Jackson said he read three chapters of the Bible every day. His letters and speeches echo both scripture and the question- and- answer style of the Shorter Westminster Catechism. If the Bible, psalms, and hymns formed a substantial core of Jackson’s habits of mind, books about valor, duty, and warfare also found their way into his imagination. Jackson had only a handful of years of formal education–he was the least intellectually polished president in the short history of the office–and his opponents made much of his lack of schooling. When Harvard University bestowed an honorary degree on President Jackson in 1833, the man he had beaten for the White House, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard graduate, refused to come, telling the university’s president that “as myself an affectionate child of our Alma Mater, I would not be present to witness her disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Adams’s view was common in Jackson’s lifetime.
Jackson was not, however, as unlettered as the caricatures suggest. He was no scholar, but he issued elegant Caesar- like proclamations to his troops, understood men and their motives, and read rather more than he is given credit for. “I know human nature,” he once remarked, and he had learned the ways of the world not only on the frontier but also in snatches of literature. There was Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, a story of redemption (the vicar faces much misfortune, yet perseveres through faith to a happy ending). It is not difficult to see why Jackson was drawn to the tale. “The hero of this piece,” Goldsmith wrote in an “Advertisement” for the book, “unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth: he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family.”
Jackson’s surviving library at the Hermitage is full of books of theology, history, and biography. There are numerous volumes of sermons (most, if not all, of them Rachel’s), and a fair collection of the works of Isaac Watts. His secular shelves are heavy on Napoleon, George Washington, and the American Revolution.
A favorite book was Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs. The story of Sir William Wallace–a reluctant, noble warrior brought into combat against the domineering and cruel English when the king’s soldiers murder his wife–affected Jackson perhaps more than any other piece of writing outside scripture. “I have always thought that Sir William Wallace, as a virtuous patriot and warrior, was the best model for a young man,” Jackson once wrote. “In him we find a stubborn virtue . . . the truly undaunted courage, always ready to brave any dangers, for the relief of his country or his friend.”
The story, published in 1809, is something of a potboiler. More colorful than subtle, it is nonetheless a powerful book, and Jackson thrilled to it. “God is with me,” Wallace says as he realizes his wife is dead. “I am his avenger . . . God armeth the patriot’s hand!” The cause of Scotland became one with Wallace’s personal crusade for justice.
Jackson, too, had lost those he loved to the English. Orphaned in Waxhaw, he would struggle to build and keep a family everywhere else. In those distant forests, makeshift battlefields, and richer relatives’ houses he had seen the centrality of strength and of self- confidence. Both elements, so essential to his character and his career, can be traced to his mother’s influence, which was brief but lasting. In his mind she remained vivid and her example did, too–the example of strength amid adversity and of persevering no matter what. It is also likely that her dreams remained with him: chiefly her ambitious hope that he would become a clergyman, thus exercising authority and earning respect, all in the service of a larger cause. In the end Jackson chose to serve God and country not in a church but on battlefields and at the highest levels–but he did choose, as his mother had wished, to serve.
Excerpted from American Lion by Jon Meacham Copyright © 2008 by Jon Meacham. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
BUY HERE Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
I.
. . . we sprawl in gray chains in a place full of winters when what we want is the sun
Amira Baraka, “Ka Ba”
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.
There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of this new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.
The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.
That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.
This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal-oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies.
I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other.
Excerpted from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Copyright © 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
BUY HERE
BLACK EARTH THE HOLOCAUST AS HISTORY
AND WARNING
TIMOTHY SNYDER
NEW YORK
Snyd_9781101903476_1p_all_r1.pdf 5 5/10/16 3:40 PM Copyright © 2015 by Timothy Snyder All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. timdugganbooks.com Tim Duggan Books and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2015. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is on fi le with the Library of Congress. ISBN 978- 1- 101- 90347- 6 eBook ISBN 978- 1- 101- 90346- 9 Printed in the United States of America Book design by Lauren Dong Maps by Beehive Mapping Cover design by Christopher Brand Cover photograph © Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Paperback Edition
vi.pdf 1 6/21/16 2:01 PM For K. and T.
Snyd_9781101903476_1p_all_r1.pdf 7 5/10/16 3:40 PM Im Kampf zwischen Dir und der Welt, sekundiere der Welt.
In the struggle between you and the world take the side of the world.
—FRANZ KAFKA, 1917
Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej. Jest człowiekiem.
He is from my homeland. A human being.
—ANTONI SŁONIMSKI, 1943
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts wir trinken und trinken
The black milk of daybreak we drink in the evening in the afternoon in the morning in the night we drink and we drink
—PAUL CELAN, 1944
μç çy çya lkl twlzmh wl wntnç wynkç wl wntnw
Every man has a name given by the stars given by his neighbors.
—ZELDA MISHKOVSKY, 1974
Snyd_9781101903476_1p_all_r1.pdf 9 5/10/16 3:40 PM Prologue
n the fashionable sixth district of Vienna, the history of the Holocaust is in the pavement. In front of the buildings where Jews once lived and I worked, ensconced in sidewalks that Jews once had to scrub with their bare hands, are small square memorials in brass bearing names, dates of deportation, and places of death. In the mind of an adult, words and numbers connect present and past. A child’s view is different. A child starts from the things. A little boy who lives in the sixth district observes, day by day, as a crew of workers proceeds, building by building, up the opposite side of his street. He watches them dig up the sidewalk, just as they might in order to repair a pipe or lay some cable. Waiting for his bus to kindergarten one morning, he sees the men, directly across the street now, shovel and pack the steaming black asphalt. The memorial plaques are mysterious objects in gloved hands, refl ecting a bit of pale sun. “Was machen sie da, Papa?” “What are they doing, Daddy?” The boy’s father is silent. He looks up the street for the bus. He hesitates, starts to answer: “Sie bauen . . .” “They are building . . . ” He stops. This is not easy. Then the bus comes, blocking their view, opening with a wheeze of oil and air an automatic door to a normal day.
Seventy- fi ve years earlier, in March 1938, on streets throughout Vienna, Jews were cleansing the word “Austria” from the pavement, unwriting a country that was ceasing to exist as Hitler and his armies arrived. Today,
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on those same pavements, the names of those very Jews reproach a re- stored Austria that, like Europe itself, remains unsure of its past. Why were the Jews of Vienna persecuted just as Austria was removed from the map? Why were they then sent to be murdered in Belarus, a thousand kilometers away, when there was evident hatred of Jews in Aus- tria itself? How could a people established in a city (a country, a continent) suddenly have its history come to a violent end? Why do strangers kill strangers? And why do neighbors kill neighbors? In Vienna, as in the great cities of central and western Europe gener- ally, Jews were a prominent part of urban life. In the lands to the north, south, and east of Vienna, in eastern Europe, Jews had lived continuously in towns and villages in large numbers for more than fi ve centuries. And then, in less than fi ve years, more than fi ve million of them were mur- dered.
Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideol- ogy, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think fi rst of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We think of concentration camps, though few of the murdered Jews ever saw one. We fault the state, though murder was possible only where state institutions were destroyed. We blame science, and so endorse an important element of Hitler’s worldview. We fault nations, indulging in simplifi cations used by the Nazis themselves. We recall the victims, but are apt to confuse commemoration with un- derstanding. The memorial in the sixth district of Vienna is called Remem- ber for the Future. Should we be confi dent, now that a Holocaust is behind us, that a recognizable future awaits? We share a world with the forgotten perpetrators as well as with the memorialized victims. The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler’s time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned. An instructive account of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe must be planetary, because Hitler’s thought was ecological, treating Jews as a wound of nature. Such a history must be colonial, since Hitler wanted wars of extermination in neighboring lands where Jews lived. It must be
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international, for Germans and others murdered Jews not in Germany but in other countries. It must be chronological, in that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, only one part of the story, was followed by the conquest of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, advances that reformulated the Final Solution. It must be political, in a specifi c sense, since the German destruction of neighboring states created zones where, especially in the oc- cupied Soviet Union, techniques of annihilation could be invented. It must be multifocal, providing perspectives beyond those of the Nazis them- selves, using sources from all groups, from Jews and non- Jews, throughout the zone of killing. This is not only a matter of justice, but of understand- ing. Such a reckoning must also be human, chronicling the attempt to survive as well as the attempt to murder, describing Jews as they sought to live as well as those few non- Jews who sought to help them, accepting the innate and irreducible complexity of individuals and encounters. A history of the Holocaust must be contemporary, permitting us to ex- perience what remains from the epoch of Hitler in our minds and in our lives. Hitler’s worldview did not bring about the Holocaust by itself, but its hidden coherence generated new sorts of destructive politics, and new knowledge of the human capacity for mass murder. The precise combina- tion of ideology and circumstance of the year 1941 will not appear again, but something like it might. Part of the effort to understand the past is thus the effort needed to understand ourselves. The Holocaust is not only his- tory, but warning.
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othing can be known about the future, thought Hitler, except the lim- its of our planet: “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” N Ecology was scarcity, and existence meant a struggle for land. The immutable structure of life was the division of animals into species, con- demned to “inner seclusion” and an endless fi ght to the death. Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species. The highest races were still evolving from the lower, which meant that interbreeding was possible but sinful. Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seek- ing to kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain as the law of gravity. The struggle could never end, and it had no certain outcome. A race could triumph and fl ourish and could also be starved and extinguished. In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, politi- cal thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and over- whelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die. “Nature knows,” wrote Hitler, “no political boundaries. She places life
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forms on this globe and then sets them free in a play for power.” Since poli- tics was nature, and nature was struggle, no political thought was possible. This conclusion was an extreme articulation of the nineteenth- century commonplace that human activities could be understood as biology. In the 1880s and 1890s, serious thinkers and popularizers infl uenced by Charles Darwin’s idea of natural selection proposed that the ancient questions of political thought had been resolved by this breakthrough in zoology. When Hitler was young, an interpretation of Darwin in which competi- tion was identifi ed as a social good infl uenced all major forms of politics. For Herbert Spencer, the British defender of capitalism, a market was like an ecosphere where the strongest and best survived. The utility brought by unhindered competition justifi ed its immediate evils. The opponents of capitalism, the socialists of the Second International, also embraced bio- logical analogies. They came to see the class struggle as “scientifi c,” and man as one animal among many, instead of a specially creative being with a specifi cally human essence. Karl Kautsky, the leading Marxist theorist of the day, insisted pedantically that people were animals. Yet these liberals and socialists were constrained, whether they real- ized it or not, by attachments to custom and institution; mental habits that grew from social experience hindered them from reaching the most radical of conclusions. They were ethically committed to goods such as economic growth or social justice, and found it appealing or convenient to imagine that natural competition would deliver these goods. Hitler enti- tled his book Mein Kampf—My Struggle. From those two words through two long volumes and two decades of political life, he was endlessly narcissistic, pitilessly consistent, and exuberantly nihilistic where others were not. The ceaseless strife of races was not an element of life, but its essence. To say so was not to build a theory but to observe the universe as it was. Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justifi ed by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. Hitler’s point was not at all that the desirable end justifi ed the bloody means. There was no end, only meanness. Race was real, whereas individuals and classes were fl eeting and erroneous constructions. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed.
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Hitler’s worldview dismissed religious and secular traditions, and yet relied upon both. Though he was no original thinker, he supplied a certain reso- lution to a crisis of both thought and faith. Like many before him he sought to bring the two together. What he meant to engineer, however, was not an elevating synthesis that would rescue both soul and mind but a seduc- tive collision that destroyed both. Hitler’s racial struggle was supposedly sanctioned by science, but he called its object “daily bread.” With these words, he was summoning one of the best- known Christian texts, while profoundly altering its meaning. “Give us this day,” ask those who recite the Lord’s Prayer, “our daily bread.” In the universe the prayer describes, there is a metaphysics, an order beyond this planet, notions of good that proceed from one sphere to another. Those saying the Lord’s Prayer ask that God “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” In Hitler’s “struggle for the riches of nature,” it was a sin not to seize everything possible, and a crime to allow others to survive. Mercy violated the order of things because it allowed the weak to propagate. Rejecting the biblical commandments, said Hitler, was what human beings must do. “If I can accept a divine commandment,” he declared, “it’s this one: ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.’ ” Hitler exploited images and tropes that were familiar to Christians: God, prayers, original sin, commandments, prophets, chosen people, mes- siahs—even the familiar Christian tripartite structure of time: fi rst para- dise, then exodus, and fi nally redemption. We live in fi lth, and we must strain to purify ourselves and the world so that we might return to paradise. To see paradise as the battle of the species rather than the concord of cre- ation was to unite Christian longing with the apparent realism of biology. The war of all against all was not terrifying purposelessness, but instead the only purpose to be had in the universe. Nature’s bounty was for man, as in Genesis, but only for the men who follow nature’s law and fi ght for her. As in Genesis, so in My Struggle, nature was a resource for man: but not for all people, only for triumphant races. Eden was not a garden but a trench. Knowledge of the body was not the problem, as in Genesis, but the so- lution. The triumphant should copulate: After murder, Hitler thought, the next human duty was sex and reproduction. In his scheme, the original sin
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that led to the fall of man was of the mind and soul, not of the body. For Hitler, our unhappy weakness was that we can think, realize that others belonging to other races can do the same, and thereby recognize them as fellow human beings. Humans left Hitler’s bloody paradise not because of carnal knowledge. Humans left paradise because of the knowledge of good and evil. When paradise falls and humans are separated from nature, a character who is neither human nor natural, such as the serpent of Genesis, takes the blame. If humans were in fact nothing more than an element of nature, and nature was known by science to be a bloody struggle, something beyond nature must have corrupted the species. For Hitler the bringer of the knowl- edge of good and evil on the earth, the destroyer of Eden, was the Jew. It was the Jew who told humans that they were above other animals, and had the capacity to decide their future for themselves. It was the Jew who intro- duced the false distinction between politics and nature, between humanity and struggle. Hitler’s destiny, as he saw it, was to redeem the original sin of Jewish spirituality and restore the paradise of blood. Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the fi nal analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission. Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalga- mation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”
Hitler saw the species as divided into races, but denied that the Jews were one. Jews were not a lower or a higher race, but a nonrace, or a
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counterrace. Races followed nature and fought for land and food, whereas Jews followed the alien logic of “ un- nature.” They resisted nature’s basic imperative by refusing to be satisfi ed by the conquest of a certain habitat, and they persuaded others to behave similarly. They insisted on dominat- ing the entire planet and its peoples, and for this purpose invented general ideas that draw the races away from the natural struggle. The planet had nothing to offer except blood and soil, and yet Jews uncannily generated concepts that allowed the world to be seen less as an ecological trap and more as a human order. Ideas of political reciprocity, practices in which humans recognize other humans as such, came from Jews. Hitler’s basic critique was not the usual one that human beings were good but had been corrupted by an overly Jewish civilization. It was rather that humans were animals and that any exercise of ethical deliberation was in itself a sign of Jewish corruption. The very attempt to set a univer- sal ideal and strain towards it was precisely what was hateful. Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s most important deputy, did not follow every twist of Hitler’s thinking, but he grasped the conclusions: Ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fi delity to race. Participation in mass mur- der, Himmler maintained, was a good act, since it brought to the race an internal harmony as well as unity with nature. The diffi culty of see- ing, for example, thousands of Jewish corpses marked the transcendence of conventional morality. The temporary strains of murder were a worthy sacrifi ce to the future of the race. Any nonracist attitude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mechanism of Jewish dominion. Both capitalism and communism were Jewish. Their apparent embrace of struggle was simply cover for the Jewish desire for world domination. Any abstract idea of the state was also Jewish. “There is no such thing,” wrote Hitler, “as the state as an end in itself.” As he clarifi ed, “the highest goal of human beings” was not “the preservation of any given state or government, but the preservation of their kind.” The frontiers of existing states would be washed away by the forces of nature in the course of racial struggle: “One must not be diverted from the borders of Eternal Right by the existence of political borders.” If states were not impressive human achievements but fragile barriers to be overcome by nature, it followed that law was particular rather than general, an artifact of racial superiority rather than an avenue of equality.
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Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer and during the Second World War the governor- general of occupied Poland, maintained that the law was built “on the survival elements of our German people.” Legal traditions based on anything beyond race were “bloodless abstractions.” Law had no purpose beyond the codifi cation of a Führer’s momentary intuitions about the good of his race. The German concept of a Rechtsstaat, a state that operated under the rule of law, was without substance. As Carl Schmitt explained, law served the race, and the state served the race, and so race was the only pertinent concept. The idea of a state held to external legal standards was a sham designed to suppress the strong. Insofar as universal ideas penetrated non- Jewish minds, claimed Hit- ler, they weakened racial communities to the profi t of Jews. The content of various political ideas was beside the point, since all were merely traps for fools. There were no Jewish liberals and no Jewish nationalists, no Jewish messiahs and no Jewish Bolsheviks: “Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegiti- mate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.” Hitler saw Jesus as an enemy of Jews whose teachings had been perverted by Paul to become one more false Jewish universalism, that of mercy to the weak. From Saint Paul to Leon Trotsky, maintained Hitler, there were only Jews who adopted various guises to seduce the naive. Ideas had no historical origins and no connec- tion to the succession of events or to the creativity of individuals. They were simply tactical creations of the Jews, and in this sense they were all the same. Indeed, for Hitler there was no human history as such. “All world- historical events,” he claimed, “are nothing more than the expression of the self- preservation drive of the races, for better or for worse.” What must be registered from the past was the ceaseless attempt of Jews to warp the structure of nature. This would continue so long as Jews inhabited the earth. “It is Jewry,” said Hitler, “that always destroys this order.” The strong should starve the weak, but Jews could arrange matters so that the weak starve the strong. This was not an injustice in the normal sense, but a violation of the logic of being. In a universe warped by Jewish ideas, struggle could yield unthinkable outcomes: not the survival of the fi ttest, but the starvation of the fi ttest. From this it followed that Germans would always be victims so long as Jews existed. As the highest race, Germans deserved the most and had the most to lose. The unnatural power of Jews “murders the future.”
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Though Hitler strove to defi ne a world without history, his ideas were al- tered by his own experiences. The First World War, the bloodiest in history, fought on a continent that thought itself civilized, undid the broad confi - dence among many Europeans that strife was all to the good. Some Euro- peans of the Far Right or the Far Left, however, drew the opposite lesson. The bloodshed, for them, had not been extensive enough, and the sacrifi ce incomplete. For the Bolsheviks of the Russian Empire, disciplined and vol- untarist Marxists, the war and the revolutionary energies it brought were the occasion to begin the socialist reconstruction of the world. For Hitler, as for many other Germans, the war ended before it was truly decided, the racial superiors taken from the battlefi eld before they had earned their due. Of course, the sentiment that Germany should win was widespread, and not only among militarists or extremists. Thomas Mann, the greatest of the German writers and later an opponent of Hitler, spoke of Germany’s “rights to domination, to participate in the administration of the planet.” Edith Stein, a brilliant German philosopher who developed a theory of empathy, considered “it out of the question that we will now be defeated.” After Hitler came to power she was hunted down in her convent and murdered as a Jew. For Hitler, the conclusion of the First World War demonstrated the ruin of the planet. Hitler’s understanding of its outcome went beyond the nationalism of his fellow Germans, and his response to defeat only superfi cially resembled the general resentment about lost territories. For Hitler, the German defeat demonstrated that something was crooked in the whole structure of the world; it was the proof that Jews had mastered the methods of nature. If a few thousand German Jews had been gassed at the beginning of the war, he maintained, Germany would have won. He believed that Jews typically subjected their victims to starvation and saw the British naval blockade of Germany during (and after) the First World War as an application of this method. It was an instance of a per- manent condition and the proof of more suffering to come. So long as Jews starved Germans rather than Germans starving whom they pleased, the world was in disequilibrium. From the defeat of 1918 Hitler drew conclusions about any future con- fl ict. Germans would always triumph if Jews were not involved. Yet since
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Jews dominated the entire planet and had penetrated the minds of Ger- mans with their ideas, the struggle for German power must take two forms. A war of simple conquest, no matter how devastatingly triumphant, could never suffi ce. In addition to starving inferior races and taking their land, Germans needed to simultaneously defeat the Jews, whose global power and insidious universalism would undermine any such healthy racial campaign. Thus Germans had the rights of the strong against the weak, and the rights of the weak against the strong. As the strong, they needed to dominate the weaker races they encountered; as the weak, they had to liberate all races from Jewish domination. Hitler thus united two great motivating forces of the world politics of his century: colonialism and anti- colonialism. Hitler saw both the struggle for land and the struggle against the Jews in drastic, exterminatory terms, and yet he saw them differently. The struggle against inferior races for territory was a matter of the control of parts of the earth’s surface. The struggle against the Jews was ecological, since it concerned not a specifi c racial enemy or territory but the condi- tions of life on earth. The Jews were “a pestilence, a spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death.” Since they fought with ideas, their power was everywhere, and anyone could be their knowing or unknowing agent. The only way to remove such a plague was to eradicate it at the source. “If Nature designed the Jew to be the material cause of the decline and fall of the nations,” said Hitler, “it provided these nations with the possibility of a healthy reaction.” The elimination had to be complete: If one Jewish fam- ily remained in Europe, it could infect the entire continent. The fall of man could be undone; the planet could be healed. “A people that is rid of its Jews,” said Hitler, “returns spontaneously to the natural order.”
Hitler’s views of human life and the natural order were total and circular. All questions about politics were answered as if they were questions about nature; all questions about nature were answered by reference back to pol- itics. The circle was drawn by Hitler himself. If politics and nature were not sources of experience and perspective but empty stereotypes that exist only in relation to each other, then all power rested in the hands of he who circulated the clichés. Reason was replaced by references, argumentation
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by incantation. The “struggle,” as the title of the book gave away, was “mine”: Hitler’s. The totalistic idea of life as struggle placed all power to interpret any event in the mind of its author. Equating nature and politics abolished not only political but also scien- tifi c thought. For Hitler, science was a completed revelation of the law of racial struggle, a fi nished gospel of bloodshed, not a process of hypothesis and experiment. It provided a vocabulary about zoological confl ict, not a fount of concepts and procedures that allowed ever more extensive un- derstanding. It had an answer but no questions. The task of man was to submit to this creed, rather than willfully impose specious Jewish thinking upon nature. Because Hitler’s worldview required a single circular truth that embraced everything, it was vulnerable to the simplest of pluralisms: for example, that humans might change their environment in ways that might, in turn, change society. If science could change the ecosystem such that human behavior was altered, then all of his claims were groundless. Hitler’s logical circle, in which society was nature because nature was soci- ety, in which men were beasts because beasts were men, would be broken. Hitler accepted that scientists and specialists had purposes within the racial community: to manufacture weapons, to improve communications, to advance hygiene. Stronger races should have better guns, better radios, and better health, the better to dominate the weaker. He saw this as a fulfi llment of nature’s command to struggle, not as a violation of its laws. Technical achievement was proof of racial superiority, not evidence of the advance of general scientifi c understanding. “Everything that we today admire on this earth,” wrote Hitler, “the scholarship and art, the tech- nology and inventions, are nothing more than the creative product of a few peoples, and perhaps originally of a single race.” No race, however advanced, could change the basic structure of nature by any innovation. Nature had only two variants: the paradise in which higher races slaugh- ter the lower, and the fallen world in which supernatural Jews deny higher races the bounty they are due and starve them when possible. Hitler understood that agricultural science posed a specifi c threat to the logic of his system. If humans could intervene in nature to create more food without taking more land, his whole system collapsed. He therefore denied the importance of what was happening before his eyes, the sci- ence of what was later called the “Green Revolution”: the hybridization
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of grains, the distribution of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the expan- sion of irrigation. Even “in the best case,” he insisted, hunger must outstrip crop improvements. There was “a limit” to all scientifi c improvements. Indeed, all of “the scientifi c methods of land management” had already been tried and had failed. There was no conceivable improvement, now or in the future, that would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory.” Food could only be safeguarded by conquest of fertile terri- tory, not by science that would make German territory more fertile. Jews deliberately encouraged the contrary belief in order to dampen the Ger- man appetite for conquest and prepare the German people for destruc- tion. “It is always the Jew,” wrote Hitler in this connection, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.” Hitler had to defend his system from human discovery, which was as much of a problem for him as human solidarity. Science could not save the species because, in the fi nal analysis, all ideas were racial, nothing more than aesthetic derivatives of struggle. The contrary notion, that ideas could actually refl ect nature or change it, was a “Jewish lie” and a “Jew- ish swindle.” Hitler maintained that “man has never conquered nature in any matter.” Universal science, like universal politics, must be seen not as human promise but as Jewish threat. The world’s problem, as Hitler saw it, was that Jews falsely separated science and politics and made delusive promises for progress and human- ity. The solution he proposed was to expose Jews to the brutal reality that nature and society were one and the same. They should be separated from other people and forced to inhabit some bleak and inhospitable territory. Jews were powerful in that their “un- nature” drew others to them. They were weak in that they could not face brutal reality. Resettled to some exotic locale, they would be unable to manipulate others with their un- earthly concepts, and would succumb to the law of the jungle. Hitler’s fi rst obsession was an extreme natural setting, “an anarchic state on an island.” Later his thoughts turned to the wastes of Siberia. It was “a matter of in- difference,” he said, whether Jews were sent to one or the other. In August 1941, about a month after Hitler made that remark, his men began to shoot Jews in massacres on the scale of tens of thousands at a time, in the middle of Europe, in a setting they had themselves made an- archic, over pits dug in the black earth of Ukraine.
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Living Space
lthough Hitler’s premise was that humans were simply animals, his own very human intuition allowed him to transform his zoologi- A cal theory into a kind of political worldview. The racial struggle for survival was also a German campaign for dignity, he maintained, and the restraints were not only biological but British. Hitler understood that Germans were not, in their daily life, beasts who scratched food from the ground. As he developed his thought in his Second Book, composed in 1928, he made clear that securing a regular food supply was not simply a matter of physical sustenance, but also a requirement for a sense of control. The problem with the British naval blockade during the First World War had not simply been the diseases and death it brought during the confl ict and in the months between armistice and fi nal settlement. The blockade had forced middle- class Germans to break the law in order to acquire the food that they needed or felt that they needed, leaving them personally insecure and distrustful of authority. The world political economy of the 1920s and 1930s was, as Hitler understood, structured by British naval power. British advocacy of free trade, he believed, was political cover for British domination of the world. It made sense for the British to parlay the fi ction that free exchange meant access to food for everyone, because such a belief would discourage oth- ers from trying to compete with the British navy. In fact, only the British could defend their own supply lines in the event of a crisis, and could by the same token prevent food from reaching others. Thus the British blockaded their enemies during war—an obvious violation of their own ideology of free trade. This capacity to assure and deny food, Hitler emphasized, was
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a form of power. Hitler called the absence of food security for everyone except the British the “peaceful economic war.” Hitler understood that Germany did not feed itself from its own ter- ritory in the 1920s and 1930s, but also knew that Germans would not actually have starved if they had tried. Germany could have generated the calories to feed its population from German soil, but only by sacrifi cing some of its industry, exports, and foreign currency. A prosperous Germany required exchange with the British world, but this trade pattern could be supplemented, thought Hitler, by the conquest of a land empire that would even the scales between London and Berlin. Once it had gained the ap- propriate colonies, Germany could preserve its industrial excellence while shifting its dependence for food from the British- controlled sea lanes to its own imperial hinterland. If Germany controlled enough territory, Ger- mans could have the kinds and the amounts of food that they desired, with no cost to German industry. A suffi ciently large German empire could be- come self- suffi cient, an “autarkic economy.” Hitler romanticized the Ger- man peasant, not as a peaceful tiller of the soil, but as the heroic tamer of distant lands. The British were to be respected as racial kindred and builders of a great empire. The idea was to slip through their network of power without forcing them to respond. Taking land from others would not, or so Hitler imagined, threaten the great maritime empire. Over the long term, he ex- pected peace with Great Britain “on the basis of the division of the world.” He expected that Germany could become a world power while avoiding an “Armageddon with En gland.” This was, for him, a reassuring thought. It was also reassuring that such an alteration of the world order, such a reglobalization, had been achieved before, in recent memory. For genera- tions of German imperialists, and for Hitler himself, the exemplary land empire was the United States of America.
America taught Hitler that need blurred into desire, and that desire arose from comparison. Germans were not only animals seeking nourishment to survive, and not only a society yearning for security in an unpredict- able British global economy. Families observed other families: around the corner, but also, thanks to modern media, around the world. Ideas of how
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life should be lived escaped measures such as survival, security, and even comfort as standards of living became comparative, and as comparisons became international. “Through modern technology and the communi- cation it enables,” wrote Hitler, “international relations between peoples have become so effortless and intimate that Europeans—often without re- alizing it—take the circumstances of American life as the benchmark for their own lives.” Globalization led Hitler to the American dream. Behind every imagi- nary German racial warrior stood an imaginary German woman who wanted ever more. In American idiom, this notion that the standard of living was relative, based upon the perceived success of others, was called “keeping up with the Joneses.” In his more strident moments, Hitler urged Germans to be more like ants and fi nches, thinking only of survival and reproduction. Yet his own scarcely hidden fear was a very human one, per- haps even a very male one: the German housewife. It was she who raised the bar of the natural struggle ever higher. Before the First World War, when Hitler was a young man, German colonial rhetoric had played on the double meaning of the word Wirtschaft: both a household and an econ- omy. German women had been instructed to equate comfort and empire. And since comfort was always relative, the political justifi cation for colo- nies was inexhaustible. If the German housewife’s point of reference was Mrs. Jones rather than Frau Jonas, then Germans needed an empire com- parable to the American one. German men would have to struggle and die at some distant frontier, redeeming their race and the planet, while women supported their men, embodying the merciless logic of endless desire for ever more prosperous homes. The inevitable presence of America in German minds was the fi nal reason why, for Hitler, science could not solve the problem of sustenance. Even if inventions did improve agricultural productivity, Germany could not keep pace with America on the strength of this alone. Technology could be taken for granted on both sides; the quantity of arable land was the variable. Germany therefore needed as much land as the Americans and as much technology. Hitler proclaimed that permanent struggle for land was nature’s wish, but he also understood that a human desire for increasing relative comfort could also generate perpetual motion. If German prosperity would always be relative, then fi nal success could
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never be achieved. “The prospects for the German people are bleak,” wrote an aggrieved Hitler. That complaint was followed by this clarifi ca- tion: “Neither the current living space nor that achieved through a resto- ration of the borders of 1914 permits us to lead a life comparable to that of the American people.” At the least, the struggle would continue as long as the United States existed, and that would be a long time. Hitler saw America as the coming world power, and the core American population (“the racially pure and uncorrupted German”) as a “world class people” that was “younger and healthier than the Germans” who had remained in Europe.
While Hitler was writing My Struggle, he learned of the word Lebensraum (liv- ing space) and turned it to his own purposes. In his writings and speeches it expressed the whole range of meaning that he attached to the natural struggle, from an unceasing racial fi ght for physical survival all the way to an endless war for the subjective sense of having the highest standard of living in the world. The term Lebensraum came into the German language as the equivalent of the French word biotope, or “habitat.” In a social rather than biological context it can mean something else: household comfort, something close to “living room.” The containment of these two meanings in a single word furthered Hitler’s circular idea: Nature was nothing more than society, society nothing more than nature. Thus there was no differ- ence between an animal struggle for physical existence and the preference of families for nicer lives. Each was about Lebensraum. The twentieth century was to bring endless war for relative comfort. Robert Ley, one of Hitler’s early Nazi comrades, defi ned Lebensraum as “more culture, more beauty—these the race must have, or it will perish.” Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels defi ned the purpose of a war of extermination as “a big breakfast, a big lunch, and a big dinner.” Tens of millions of people would have to starve, but not so that Germans could survive in the physical sense of the word. Tens of millions of people would have to starve so that Germans could strive for a standard of living second to none.
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“One thing the Americans have and which we lack,” complained Hitler, “is the sense of vast open spaces.” He was repeating what German colo- nialists had said for decades. By the time Germany had unifi ed in 1871, the world had already been colonized by other European powers. Ger- many’s defeat in the First World War cost it the few overseas possessions it had gained. So where, in the twentieth century, were the lands open for German conquest? Where was Germany’s frontier, its Manifest Destiny? All that remained was the home continent. “For Germany,” wrote Hit- ler, “the only possibility of a sound agrarian policy was the acquisition of land within Europe itself.” To be sure, there was no place near Germany that was uninhabited or even underpopulated. The crucial thing was to imagine that European “spaces” were, in fact, “open.” Racism was the idea that turned populated lands into potential colonies, and the source mythologies for racists arose from the recent colonization of North Amer- ica and Africa. The conquest and exploitation of these continents by Euro- peans formed the literary imagination of Europeans of Hitler’s generation. Like millions of other children born in the 1880s and 1890s, Hitler played at African wars and read Karl May’s novels of the American West. Hitler said that May had opened his “eyes to the world.” In the late nineteenth century, Germans tended to see the fate of Na- tive Americans as a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under their control. One colony was German East Africa—today Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and a bit of Mozambique—where Berlin assumed responsibility in 1891. During an uprising in 1905, the Maji Maji rebel- lion, the Germans applied starvation tactics, killing at least seventy- fi ve thousand people. A second colony was German Southwest Africa, today Namibia, where about three thousand German colonists controlled about seventy percent of the land. An uprising there in 1904 led the Germans to deny the native Herero and Nama populations access to water until they fell “victim to the nature of their own country,” as the offi cial mili- tary history put it. The Germans imprisoned survivors in a camp on an island. The Herero population was reduced from some eighty thousand to about fi fteen thousand; that of the Nama from about twenty thousand to about ten thousand. For the German general who pursued these poli- cies, the historical justice was self- evident. “The natives must give way,” he said. “Look at America.” The German governor of the region compared
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Southwest Africa to Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado. The civilian head of the German colonial offi ce saw matters much the same way: “The his- tory of the colonization of the United States, clearly the biggest colonial endeavor the world has ever known, had as its fi rst act the complete an- nihilation of its native peoples.” He understood the need for an “annihila- tion operation.” The German state geologist called for a “Final Solution to the native question.” A famous German novel of the war in German Southwest Africa united, as would Hitler, the idea of a racial struggle with that of divine justice. The killing of “blacks” was “the justice of the Lord” because the world belonged to “the most vigorous.” Like most Europeans, Hitler was a racist about Africans. He proclaimed that the French were “niggerizing” their blood through intermarriage. He shared in the general European ex- citement about the French use of African troops in the occupation of Ger- many’s Rhineland district after the First World War. Yet Hitler’s racism was not that of a European looking down at Africans. He saw the entire world as an “Africa,” and everyone, including Europeans, in racial terms. Here, as so often, he was more consistent than others. Racism, after all, was a claim to judge who was fully human. As such, ideas of racial superi- ority and inferiority could be applied according to desire and convenience. Even neighboring societies, which might seem not so different from the German, might be defi ned as racially different. When Hitler wrote in My Struggle that Germany’s only opportunity for colonization was Europe, he discarded as impractical the possibility of a re- turn to Africa. The search for racial inferiors to dominate required no long voyages by sea, since they were present in eastern Europe as well. In the nineteenth century, after all, the major arena of German colonialism had been not mysterious Africa but neighboring Poland. Prussia had gained territory inhabited by Poles in the partitions of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century. Formerly Polish lands were thus part of the unifi ed Germany that Prussia created in 1871. Poles made up about seven percent of the German population, and in eastern regions were a majority. They were subjected fi rst to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, a cam- paign against Roman Catholicism whose major object was the elimination of Polish national identity, and then to state- subsidized internal coloni- zation campaigns. A German colonial literature about Poland, including
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best sellers, portrayed the Poles as “black.” The Polish peasants had dark faces and referred to Germans as “white.” Polish aristocrats, fey and use- less, were endowed with black hair and eyes. So were the beautiful Pol- ish women, seductresses who, in these stories, almost invariably led naive German men to racial self- degradation and doom. During the First World War, Germany lost Southwest Africa. In east- ern Europe the situation was different. Here German arms seemed to be assembling, between 1916 and 1918, a vast new realm for domination and economic exploitation. First Germany joined its prewar Polish ter- ritories to those taken from the Russian Empire to form a subordinate Polish kingdom, which was to be ruled by a friendly monarch. The post- war plan was to expropriate and deport all of the Polish landholders near the German- Polish border. In early 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution had taken Russia from the war, Germany established a chain of vassal states to the east of Poland, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the largest of which was Ukraine. Germany lost the war in France in 1918, but was never fi nally defeated on the battlefi eld in eastern Europe. This new east European realm was abandoned without, it could seem to Germans, ever having been truly lost. The complete loss of the African colonies during and after the war created the possibility for a vague and malleable nostalgia about racial mastery. Popular novels about Africa with titles such as Master, Come Back! could make sense only after such a complete break. Germans could con- tinue to see themselves as good colonizers, even as the realm of coloniza- tion itself became fl uid and vague, projected into the future. Hans Grimm’s novel A People Without Space, which sold half a million copies in Germany before the Second World War, concerned the plight of a German who had left Africa only to be frustrated by confi nement within a small Germany and an unjust European system. The problem suggested its own solution. Since racism was an asserted hierarchy of rights to the planet, it could be applied to Europeans who lived east of Germany. Africa as a place was lost, but “Africa” as a form of thinking could be universalized. The experience in eastern Europe had established that neighbors could also be “black.” Europeans could be imagined to want “masters” and yield “space.” After the war, it was more practical to consider a return to eastern Europe than to Africa. Here, as in
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so many other cases, Hitler drew vague sentiments to remorselessly tight conclusions. He presented as racial inferiors the largest cultural group in Europe, Germany’s eastern neighbors, the Slavs.
“The Slavs are born as a slavish mass,” wrote Hitler, “crying out for their master.” He meant primarily the Ukrainians, who inhabited a stretch of very fertile land, as well as their neighbors—Russians, Belarusians, and Poles. “I need the Ukraine,” he stated, “in order that no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.” The conquest of Ukraine would guar- antee “a way of life for our people through the allocation of Lebensraum for the next hundred years.” This was a matter of natural justice: “It is incon- ceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, oc- cupy infi nite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” As their land was taken, Ukrainians could be given, said Hitler, “scarves, glass beads, and everything that colonial peoples like.” A single loudspeaker in each village would “give them plenty of opportunities to dance, and the villagers will be grateful to us.” Nazi propaganda would simply remove Ukrainians from view. A Nazi song for female colonists described Ukraine thus: “There are neither farms nor hearths, there the earth cries out for the plough.” Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: “If I fi nd a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Even in the racial murder threats, the dining room was the backdrop. When German occupation came in 1941, Ukrainians themselves made the connection to Africa and America. A Ukrainian woman, literate and refl ective in a way that Nazi racism could not have contemplated, recorded in her diary: “We are like slaves. Often the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind. Once we shed tears over those Negroes, now obviously we ourselves are experiencing the same thing.” Yet in one respect, colonialism in east- ern Europe had to differ from the American slave trade or the conquest of Africa. It required two feats of imagination: the wishing away not just of peoples but also of political entities that were similar to the German state. Hitler’s preoccupation with the racial struggle for nature occluded both
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nations and their governments. It was always legitimate to destroy states; if they were destroyed, that meant that they should have been destroyed. Some states, claimed Hitler, were inviting attack. Lower races were incapable of state building, so what appeared to be their governments was illusory—a façade for Jewish power. Hitler maintained that the Slavs had never governed themselves. The lands east of Germany had always been ruled by “foreign elements.” The Russian Empire had been the creation of an “essentially German upper class and intelligentsia.” Without this tradition of German leadership, “the Russians would still be living like rabbits.” Ukrainians were by nature a colonial people and, as German colonial administrators would say, “blacks.” After Germany was forced in 1918 to withdraw its troops and cede its new empire, most of Ukraine, like most of the lands of the Russian Empire, was consolidated within a new communist state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union, USSR). Hitler claimed that the USSR was an expression of a Jew- ish “worldview.” The idea of communism was simply a deception that led Slavs to accept their “new leadership in Jewry.” Communism was the proximate example of Hitler’s claim that all uni- versal ideas were Jewish and all Jews were the servants of universal ideas. The proclaimed identity of Jews with communism—the Judeobolshevik myth—was for Hitler the apposite demonstration of both the supernatural strength and the earthly weakness of Jews. It demonstrated that Jews could win destructive power over the masses with their unnatural ideas. “Bol- shevism of international Jewry attempts from its control point in Soviet Russia to rot away the very core of the nations of the world,” he wrote. Yet this apparent misfortune was in fact an opportunity. In killing the stron- gest members of the Slavic races inside the Soviet Union, Jews were doing the work that Germans would have to do in any event. Jewish communism was in this sense, Hitler wrote, “fortunate for the future.” The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, thought Hitler, was therefore “merely a preparation” for the later return of “German domination.” Hitler’s interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution as a Jewish project was far from unusual: Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson saw it the same way, at least at fi rst. A Times of London correspondent saw Jews as the leading force of the world Bolshevik conspiracy. What was unusual
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was Hitler’s relentlessly systematic conclusion that Germany could gain global power by eliminating east European Jews and overturning their supposed Soviet citadel. This was nothing more than self- defense, he maintained, since Bolshevism’s victory by whatever insidious means would bring the “destruction, indeed the fi nal extermination, of the German people.” In a direct confrontation, though, the Jewish threat could be eliminated. The destruction of Soviet Jews would cause the Soviet Union to “immediately break up.” It would prove to be a “house of cards” or a “giant with feet of clay.” The Slavs would fi ght “like Indians,” with the same result. Then, in the East, “a similar process will repeat itself for the second time, as in the conquest of America.” A second America could be created in Europe, after Germans learned to see other Europeans as they saw indigenous Americans or Africans, and learned to regard Europe’s largest state as a fragile Jewish colony.
In this racist collage Europeans were interspersed with Africans and Native Americans. Hitler compressed all of imperial history and a total racism into a very short formulation: “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, and not the Niger.” The Niger River, in Africa, was no longer accessible to German imperialism after 1918, but Africa remained a fount of the im- ages and the colonial longing. The Volga, the eastern border of Europe,
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was where Hitler imagined the outer limit of German power. The Mis- sissippi was not only the river that runs from north to south through the middle of the United States. It was also the line beyond which Thomas Jef- ferson wanted all Indians expelled. “Who,” asked Hitler, “remembers the Red Indians?” For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade. The destruction of the Soviet Union, thought Hitler, would allow the right master race to starve the right subhumans for the right reasons. Once the Germans replaced the Jews as the colonial masters, food from Ukraine could be directed away from the useless Soviet populations towards grate- ful German cities and a submissive Europe. Hitler’s axiom that life was a starvation war and his proposal for a hunger campaign against the Slavs were refl ected in policy documents formulated after his rise to power in Germany in 1933. A Hunger Plan created under the authority of Her- mann Göring foresaw that “many tens of millions of people in this terri- tory will become superfl uous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia.” Then, according to a second round of plans, designed under the authority of Heinrich Himmler, colonization by Germans could begin. The Judeobolshevik conception allowed Hitler’s portrait of a plan- etary ecosystem polluted by Jewish ideas to crystallize as planning. The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to defi ne the point where the application of German force could win an empire and restore the planet. It also permit- ted a politics of war and extermination that would be decisive for Jews and, in a different way, for Germans. The idea that Jewish power was global and ideological seemed to make the Jewish hold on territory weaker rather than stronger. If Jews could be eliminated, then they could no lon- ger purvey their false ideas of human solidarity, and would have to yield their planetary dominion. Thus the Judeobolshevik myth courted the war- riors by promising an easy triumph. If the war did not proceed as planned, if the Soviet Union could not be so easily destroyed, then the idea of Jewish hegemony over the entire planet could return to the forefront of rhetoric and policy. If the Jews were not weakened by a fi rst strike on Soviet territory, then the war against them would have to be escalated. If Germany had to fi ght a global enemy, there would seem to be no alternative to a total campaign against Jews,
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since in a long war the Jews could strike from any point at any time. The Jews behind the lines, in places under German control, would have to be exterminated. This latent potential within Hitler’s ideas was realized in practice: Jews were not killed in large numbers fi rst in Berlin, but on the frontiers of German power in the Soviet East. As the tide of war turned, the mass killing moved west from the occupied Soviet Union to occupied Poland and then to the rest of Europe. The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to justify a preemptive strike on a certain valuable territory against an inherently planetary enemy. It linked the elimination of the Jews to the subjugation of the Slavs. If this connec- tion could be established in theory and Germans thrust eastward into war, Hitler could hardly fail in practice. Failure to conquer Slavs would make the case for exterminating Jews.
The Judeobolshevik idea, a major source of the Second World War, had its origins in the First. It reached Hitler’s mind after a peculiar German experience during the collapse of the Russian Empire, on the eastern front of the First World War. From the perspective of Berlin, the First World War was fought on a western front against France (and Britain, and later the United States) and on an eastern front against the Russian Empire. Germany was surrounded by enemies on both sides and had to try to eliminate one quickly in order to defeat the other. The attack on France in 1914 failed, condemning Ger- mans to a long two- front war. Under these circumstances, German diplo- mats sought nonmilitary means of removing the Russian Empire from the confl ict, such as fomenting revolution. In April 1917, after a fi rst revolution in Russia had already taken place, Germany arranged the transport of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, from Zurich to Petrograd in a sealed train. He succeeded, along with his comrades, in organizing a second revolution in November. He then withdrew the Russian Empire from the war. This appeared at fi rst to be a tremendous German victory. Before the revolutions of 1917, the Russian Empire had been the home- land of more Jews than any other country in the world—and an actively antisemitic state. Jews were subject to offi cial forms of discrimination and targeted in pogroms of increasing intensity and frequency. These were not
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organized by the state, but the Russian imperial subjects who perpetrated them believed that they were following the will of the tsar. Jews were al- most two hundred times more likely than ethnic Russians to emigrate from the Russian Empire, in part because they were more likely to want to leave, and in part because imperial authorities were glad to see them go. During the First World War, Jews were largely excluded from the body politic. Jews inhabited the western regions of the Russian Empire, through which Russian imperial soldiers advanced and retreated as they engaged their German and Austrian enemies. As Russian troops marched into the lands of the Habsburg monarchy in autumn 1914, they found Jews who owned farms (which was illegal in the Russian Empire) and promptly ex- propriated them. In January 1915, offi cial imperial circulars blamed Jews for sabotage. That month the Russian imperial army expelled some hun- dred thousand Jews from forty towns near Warsaw. Local Poles took the Jews’ property and kept it. When the Germans drove the Russians back east in 1915, Russian imperial soldiers blamed Jews and carried out about a hundred pogroms. The head of the right faction of the Russian parlia- ment (later the minister of internal affairs) explained setbacks by referring to the plans of an international Jewish oligarchy. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire deported about half a million Jews from their homes, on the logic that they might collaborate with the invaders. The army was the agent of deportations, so soldiers and offi cers could loot Jews, their fellow Russian imperial subjects. This mass expulsion from the Jewish heartland, accom- panied by systematic theft and frequent violence, was one of the greatest disruptions of traditional Jewish life in history. In the minds of Europeans, the Russian deportation altered the Jewish question. Tens of thousands of Jews fl ed the Russian Empire, creating an impression in European cities that Jews from the East were suddenly ev- erywhere. The deportations shaped the lives of many of the major Jewish revolutionaries of the twentieth century, both of the Right and the Left. As very young boys both Menachem Begin and Avraham Stern, later right- wing radicals, were displaced. Within the Russian Empire, Jews de- ported from the front made for the major cities, such as Moscow, Petro- grad, and Kyiv, where they were often shunned as spies and denied employment and shelter. After the February 1917 Revolution, as the
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empire lurched towards becoming a republic, the Jews were formally emancipated and became citizens. Of the sixty thousand or so Jews in Moscow at this time, about half were refugees. Many of them joined Lenin in his second Russian revolution that November. Lenin thanked Jews for their decisive support in the city that he would make his capital. As of November 1917, Jews were suddenly equal members of a new rev- olutionary state rather than a repressed religious minority in an empire. The vast majority of Jews tried in 1918 to return to their homes, only to fi nd them, very frequently, inhabited by other people. The Jews’ neighbors did not want to return what they had taken, and often attacked the Jews instead. As one regime gave way to another, Jews were targeted by every- one involved. The fi rst pogroms after the revolution were carried out by the Red Army; but the ideology of their commanders was internationalist, and offi cers usually tried to stop anti- Jewish violence. The other side generally did not show such restraint. The men who took up arms against Lenin’s revolution represented no coherent move- ment; the closest thing to an ideology of counterrevolution was antisemi- tism. Opponents of the new regime, seeking to draw support from the population, wed traditional religious antisemitism to a present sense of threat, portraying the Bolsheviks as a modern Satan. As the civil war ground on, killing millions of people, journalists and propagandists who opposed revolution developed the Judeobolshevik myth. They drew some of their ideas from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The notion of global Jewish power seemed to explain the double catastrophe of revolution and military defeat. It transformed the victory of a universal over a national idea into a plot of an identifi able group of people who could be punished.
Germany backed the revolutionaries in 1917, only to fi nd itself on the side of the counterrevolutionaries not long thereafter. During the chaos that fol- lowed Lenin’s revolution, Germany was able to build a chain of client states between the Baltic and the Black Sea. The most important of these was Ukraine. The German plan for 1918 was to recall troops from the east to fi ght a fi nal battle on the western front while feeding Germans from Ukrai- nian grain. The Germans called the treaty they signed with the Ukrai- nian state in February 1918 the “Bread Peace,” and it was very popular
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in Germany. German troops quickly drove the Red Army from Ukraine. But the scheme to exploit the country to win the war failed, not least be- cause of the resistance of Ukrainian peasants, militias, and political parties. Nevertheless, much of Ukraine was, for a memorable six months in 1918, something like a German colony. The image of a Ukrainian cornucopia penetrated German minds at a time of blockade and hunger. Once Germany was defeated on the western front and forced to sign an armistice in November 1918, Lenin’s commissar for war, Leon Trotsky, turned his attention to Germany’s abandoned client states in what had been the western reaches of the Russian Empire. In Latvia, Lithuania, Be- larus, and Ukraine, German offi cers and soldiers remained to fi ght against Trotsky’s Red Army. Ukraine in 1919 collapsed into a complicated civil war in which some hundred thousand Jews were murdered by soldiers on all sides: Bolsheviks, the anti- Bolshevik armies known as the Whites, and above all soldiers of the independent Ukrainian state. Most of these perpetrators, regardless of their identities or loyalties, had learned violence against Jews in the Russian imperial army. Very often their Jewish victims were people who had been deported during the war by the Russian imperial policy and therefore lacked security and connections where they were. The vanquished adherents of the Judeobolshevik thesis were among the hundreds of thousands of defeated Russian imperial subjects who fl ooded defeated Germany. One of them brought a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which appeared in German translation in January 1920. Among those fl eeing Lenin’s triumph were Germans from the Baltic region who could convey the Judeobolshevik idea in German without a text. These included Max Erwin von Scheubner- Richter and Alfred Rosenberg, two early Nazi infl uences on Hitler. In 1919 and 1920, having spoken with people who knew the Protocols and having read the Protocols himself, Hit- ler assimilated the Judeobolshevik myth and the notion that Jews kill by starvation. These ideas were at the time a matter of intense debate. In July 1920, the representative of Soviet power in Berlin claimed that most Jews were bourgeois, had opposed the revolution, and had no future on Soviet territory. They would not rule but be “destroyed.” This perspective could not persuade Germans who were seeking a single key to the revolutionary moment, one that could be turned either way, toward revolution or coun- terrevolution. At this very moment, Scheubner- Richter was in Munich
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gathering money and men to mount an armed expedition against the Bol- sheviks, with special emphasis on liberating Ukraine. The Judeobolshevik idea has a specifi c historical origin: an extension of the antisemitism of offi cial Russia, an adaptation of Christian apoca- lyptic visions during a time of crisis, an explanation of the collapse of the ancient imperial order, a battle cry during a civil war, and a form of con- solation after defeat. When the Nazi movement began, armed counter- revolution was under way in Russia and Ukraine, and its victory was still a real prospect in the minds of people who mattered to Hitler. For a brief moment in 1920, the Red Army seemed to be on its way to Germany. As the soldiers of Bolshevism advanced on Warsaw that August, it seemed that a fi nal confrontation of the forces of revolution and counterrevolution would soon take place. But after a surprising and decisive Polish victory in that battle and the war, and with the consolidation of the European system that followed in 1921, the character of the problem changed. Scheubner- Richter’s attempt to assemble an anti- Bolshevik army col- lapsed in 1922. When he marched arm in arm with Hitler in Munich in 1923, the Nazi putsch was, for him, a fi nal lurch towards the East. When Scheubner- Richter was killed and Hitler was imprisoned, some Nazis saw the failure as a triumph not so much of the young Weimar Republic in Germany as of the Judeobolshevik power they believed they were oppos- ing. As Hitler composed My Struggle in prison in 1924, the Bolsheviks be- came less a concrete group of political rivals and more a way to connect his ideas about Jews to a piece of territory. For Hitler, who knew little about the Russian Empire, and who thought in grand abstractions, the Judeobolshevik idea was not the end of a Russian struggle but the begin- ning of a German crusade, not a myth arising from painful events but the glimmering light of eternal truth. The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to provide the missing piece of Hit- ler’s entire scheme, uniting the local with the planetary, the promise of victorious colonial war against Slavs with a glorious anti- colonial struggle against Jews. A single attack on a single state, the Soviet Union, could solve all the problems of the Germans at the same time. The destruction of Soviet Jews would mean the removal of Jewish power, which would allow the creation of an eastern empire, which would mean the replay of Ameri- can frontier history in eastern Europe. The racial German empire would
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revise the global order and begin the restoration of nature on a planet pol- luted by Jews. If the war was won, Jews could be eliminated as convenient. If Germans were somehow held back by inferior Slavs, then Jews would bear the consequences. Either way, the pursuit of racial empire would bring the politics of Jewish eradication.
In Hitler’s ecology, the planet was despoiled by the presence of Jews, who defi ed the laws of nature by introducing corrupting ideas. The solution was to expose Jews to a purifi ed nature, a place where bloody struggle rather than abstract thought mattered, where Jews could not manipulate others with their ideas because there would be no others. The exotic de- portation sites that Hitler imagined for the Jews, Madagascar and Siberia, would never fall under German power. Much of Europe, however, would. Not so very long after Hitler published his ideas about daily bread and the commandment of self- preservation, Europeans were forcing Jews to recite the Lord’s Prayer and killing them when they could not. Europe itself be- came the anti- garden, a landscape of trenches. During a death march, Miklós Radnóti wrote a poem, meant to be dis- covered in his clothing when his remains were excavated from a death pit: “I the root was once the fl ower / under these dim tons my bower / comes the shearing of the thread / deathsaw wailing overhead.”
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Snyd_9781101903476_1p_all_r1.pdf 44 5/10/16 3:40 PM EXIT WEST
Excerpted from Exit West by Mohsin Hamid Copyright © 2017 by Mohsin Hamid. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Nadia had long been, and would afterwards continue to be, more comfortable with all varieties of movement in her life than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was stronger, perhaps because his childhood had been more idyllic, or perhaps because this was simply his temperament. Both of them, though, whatever their misgivings, had no doubt that they would leave if given the chance. And so neither expected, when a handwritten note from the agent arrived, pushed under their apartment door one morning and telling them precisely where to be at precisely what time the following afternoon, that Saeed’s father would say, “You two must go, but I will not come.”
Saeed and Nadia said this was impossible, and explained, in case of misunderstanding, that there was no problem, that they had paid the agent for three passages and would all be leaving together, and Saeed’s father heard them out but would not be budged: they, he repeated, had to go, and he had to stay. Saeed threatened to carry his father over his shoulder if he needed to, and he had never spoken to his father in this way, and his father took him aside, for he could see the pain he was causing his son, and when Saeed asked why his father was doing this, what could possibly make him want to stay, Saeed’s father said, “Your mother is here.”
Saeed said, “Mother is gone.”
His father said, “Not for me.”
And this was true in a way, Saeed’s mother was not gone for Saeed’s father to leave the place where he had spent a life with her, difficult not to be able to visit her grave each day, and he did not wish to do this, he preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him.
But Saeed’s father was thinking also of the future, even though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared that if he said this to his son that his son might not go, and he knew above all else that his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required, and the arc of a child’s life only appears for a while to match the arc of a parent’s, in reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive.
Saeed’s father told his son he loved him and said that Saeed must not disobey him in this, that he had not believed in commanding his son but in this moment was doing so, that only death awaited Saeed and Nadia in this city, and that one day when things were better Saeed would come back to him, and both men knew as this was said that it would not happen, that Saeed would not be able to return while his father still lived, and indeed as it transpired Saeed would not, after this night that was just beginning, spend another night with his father again.
Saeed’s father then summoned Nadia into his room and spoke to her without Saeed and said that he was entrusting her with his son’s life, and she, whom he called daughter, must, like a daughter, not fail him, whom she called father, and she must see Saeed through to safety, and he hoped she would one day marry his son and be called mother by his grandchildren, but this was up to them to decide, and all he asked was that she remain by Saeed’s side until Saeed was out of danger, and he asked her to promise this to him, and she said she would promise only if Saeed’s father came with them, and he said again that he could not, but that they must go, he said it softly, like a prayer, and she sat there with him in silence and the minutes passed, and in the end she promised, and it was an easy promise to make because she had at that time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a difficult one because in making it she felt she was abandoning the old man, and even if he did have his siblings and his cousins, and might now go live with them or have them come live with him, they could not protect him as Saeed and Nadia could, and so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
BUY HERE Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
Copyright © 2016 Jodi Picoult
Stage One: Early Labor
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
—Benjamin Franklin
Ruth
The miracle happened on West Seventy-fourth Street, in the home where Mama worked. It was a big brownstone encircled by a wrought-iron fence, and overlooking either side of the ornate door were gargoyles, their granite faces carved from my nightmares. They terrified me, so I didn’t mind the fact that we always entered through the less impressive side door, whose keys Mama kept on a ribbon in her purse.
Mama had been working for Sam Hallowell and his family since before my sister and I were born. You may not have recognized his name, but you would have known him the minute he said hello. He had been the unmistakable voice in the mid-960s who announced before every show: The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC! In 1976, when the miracle happened, he was the network’s head of programming. The doorbell beneath those gargoyles was the famously pitched three-note chime everyone associates with NBC. Sometimes, when I came to work with my mother, I’d sneak outside and push the button and hum along.
The reason we were with Mama that day was because it was a snow day. School was canceled, but we were too little to stay alone in our apartment while Mama went to work—which she did, through snow and sleet and probably also earthquakes and Armageddon. She muttered, stuffing us into our snowsuits and boots, that it didn’t matter if she had to cross a blizzard to do it, but God forbid Ms. Mina had to spread the peanut butter on her own sandwich bread. In fact the only time I remember Mama taking time off work was twenty-five years later, when she had a double hip replacement, generously paid for by the Hallowells. She stayed home for a week, and even after that, when it didn’t quite heal right and she insisted on returning to work, Mina found her tasks to do that kept her off her feet. But when I was little, during school vacations and bouts of fever and snow days like this one, Mama would take us with her on the B train downtown.
Mr. Hallowell was away in California that week, which happened often, and which meant that Ms. Mina and Christina needed Mama even more. So did Rachel and I, but we were better at taking care of ourselves, I suppose, than Ms. Mina was.
When we finally emerged at Seventy-second Street, the world was white. It was not just that Central Park was caught in a snow globe. The faces of the men and women shuddering through the storm to get to work looked nothing like mine, or like my cousins’ or neighbors’. I had not been into any Manhattan homes except for the Hallowells’, so I didn’t know how extraordinary it was for one family to live, alone, in this huge building. But I remember thinking it made no sense that Rachel and I had to put our snowsuits and boots into the tiny, cramped closet in the kitchen, when there were plenty of empty hooks and open spaces in the main entry, where Christina’s and Ms. Mina’s coats were hanging. Mama tucked away her coat, too, and her lucky scarf—the soft one that smelled like her, and that Rachel and I fought to wear around our house because it felt like petting a guinea pig or a bunny under your fingers. I waited for Mama to move through the dark rooms like Tinker Bell, alighting on a switch or a handle or a knob so that the sleeping beast of a house was gradually brought to life. “You two be quiet,” Mama told us, “and I’ll make you some of Ms. Mina’s hot chocolate.”
It was imported from Paris, and it tasted like heaven. So as Mama tied on her white apron, I took a piece of paper from a kitchen drawer and a packet of crayons I’d brought from home and silently started to sketch. I made a house as big as this one. I put a family inside: me, Mama, Rachel. I tried to draw snow, but I couldn’t. The flakes I’d made with the white crayon were invisible on the paper. The only way to see them was to tilt the paper sideways toward the chandelier light, so I could make out the shimmer where the crayon had been.
“Can we play with Christina?” Rachel asked. Christina was six, falling neatly between the ages of Rachel and me. Christina had the biggest bedroom I had ever seen and more toys than anyone I knew. When she was home and we came to work with our mother, we played school with her and her teddy bears, drank water out of real miniature china teacups, and braided the corn-silk hair of her dolls. Unless she had a friend over, in which case we stayed in the kitchen and colored.
But before Mama could answer, there was a scream so piercing and so ragged that it stabbed me in the chest. I knew it did the same to Mama, because she nearly dropped the pot of water she was carrying to the sink. “Stay here,” she said, her voice already trailing behind her as she ran upstairs.
Rachel was the first one out of her chair; she wasn’t one to follow instructions. I was drawn in her wake, a balloon tied to her wrist. My hand skimmed over the banister of the curved staircase, not touching.
Ms. Mina’s bedroom door was wide open, and she was twisting on the bed in a sinkhole of satin sheets. The round of her belly rose like a moon; the shining whites of her eyes made me think of merry-go- round horses, frozen in flight. “It’s too early, Lou,” she gasped.
“Tell that to this baby,” Mama replied. She was holding the telephone receiver. Ms. Mina held her other hand in a death grip. “You stop pushing, now,” she said. “The ambulance’ll be here any minute.” I wondered how fast an ambulance could get here in all that snow.
“Mommy?”
It wasn’t until I heard Christina’s voice that I realized the noise had woken her up. She stood between Rachel and me. “You three, go to Miss Christina’s room,” Mama ordered, with steel in her voice. “Now.” But we remained rooted to the spot as Mama quickly forgot about us, lost in a world made of Ms. Mina’s pain and fear, trying to be the map that she could follow out of it. I watched the cords stand out on Ms. Mina’s neck as she groaned; I saw Mama kneel on the bed between her legs and push her gown over her knees. I watched the pink lips between Ms. Mina’s legs purse and swell and part. There was the round knob of a head, a knot of shoulder, a gush of blood and fluid, and suddenly, a baby was cradled in Mama’s palms.
“Look at you,” she said, with love written over her face. “Weren’t you in a hurry to get into this world?”
Two things happened at once: the doorbell rang, and Christina started to cry. “Oh, honey,” Ms. Mina crooned, not scary anymore but still sweaty and red-faced. She held out her hand, but Christina was too terrified by what she had seen, and instead she burrowed closer to me. Rachel, ever practical, went to answer the front door. She returned with two paramedics, who swooped in and took over, so that what Mama had done for Ms. Mina became like everything else she did for the Hallowells: seamless and invisible.
The Hallowells named the baby Louis, after Mama. He was fine, even though he was almost a full month early, a casualty of the barometric pressure dropping with the storm, which caused a PROM—a premature rupture of membranes. Of course, I didn’t know that back then. I only knew that on a snowy day in Manhattan I had seen the very start of someone. I’d been with that baby before anyone or anything in this world had a chance to disappoint him.
The experience of watching Louis being born affected us all differently. Christina had her baby via surrogate. Rachel had five. Me, I became a labor and delivery nurse.
When I tell people this story, they assume the miracle I am referring to during that long-ago blizzard was the birth of a baby. True, that was astonishing. But that day I witnessed a greater wonder. As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama’s, there was a moment— one heartbeat, one breath—where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.
That miracle, I’ve spent thirty-nine years waiting to see again.
Stage One: Active Labor
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
—James Baldwin
Ruth
The most beautiful baby I ever saw was born without a face.
From the neck down, he was perfect: ten fingers, ten toes, chubby belly. But where his ear should have been, there was a twist of lips and a single tooth. Instead of a face there was a swirling eddy of skin with no features.
His mother—my patient—was a thirty-year-old gravida 1 para 1 who had received prenatal care including an ultrasound, but the baby had been positioned in a way that the facial deformity hadn’t been visible. The spine, the heart, the organs had all looked fine, so no one was expecting this. Maybe for that very reason, she chose to deliver at Mercy–West Haven, our little cottage hospital, and not Yale–New Haven, which is better equipped for emergencies. She came in full term, and labored for sixteen hours before she delivered. The doctor lifted the baby, and there was nothing but silence. Buzzy, white silence. “Is he all right?” the mother asked, panicking. “Why isn’t he crying?”
I had a student nurse shadowing me, and she screamed.
“Get out,” I said tightly, shoving her from the room. Then I took the newborn from the obstetrician and placed him on the warmer, wiping the vernix from his limbs. The OB did a quick exam, silently met my gaze, and turned back to the parents, who by now knew something was terribly wrong. In soft words, the doctor said their child had profound birth defects that were incompatible with life.
On a birth pavilion, Death is a more common patient than you’d think. When we have anencephalies or fetal deaths, we know that the parents still have to bond with and mourn for that baby. This infant— alive, for however long that might be—was still this couple’s son.
So I cleaned him and swaddled him, the way I would any other newborn, while the conversation behind me between the parents and the doctor stopped and started like a car choking through the winter. Why? How? What if you . . .? How long until . . .? Questions no one ever wants to ask, and no one ever wants to answer.
The mother was still crying when I settled the baby in the crook of her elbow. His tiny hands windmilled. She smiled down at him, her heart in her eyes. “Ian,” she whispered. “Ian Michael Barnes.”
She wore an expression I’ve only seen in paintings in museums, of a love and a grief so fierce that they forged together to create some new, raw emotion.
I turned to the father. “Would you like to hold your son?”
He looked like he was about to be sick. “I can’t,” he muttered and bolted from the room. I followed him, but was intercepted by the nurse in training, who was apologetic and upset. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just . . . it was a monster.”
“It is a baby,” I corrected, and I pushed past her.
I cornered the father in the parents’ lounge. “Your wife and your son need you.”
“That’s not my son,” he said. “That . . . thing . . .”
“Is not going to be on this earth for very long. Which means you’d better give him all the love you had stored up for his lifetime right now.” I waited until he looked me in the eye, and then I turned on my heel. I did not have to glance back to know he was following me.
When we entered the hospital room, his wife was still nuzzling the infant, her lips pressed to the smooth canvas of his brow. I took the tiny bundle from her arms, and handed the baby to her husband. He sucked in his breath and then drew back the blanket from the spot where the baby’s face should have been.
I’ve thought about my actions, you know. If I did the right thing by forcing the father to confront his dying baby, if it was my place as a nurse. Had my supervisor asked me at the time, I would have said that I’d been trained to provide closure for grieving parents. If this man didn’t acknowledge that something truly horrible had happened—or worse, if he kept pretending for the rest of his life that it never had—a hole would open up inside him. Tiny at first, that pit would wear away, bigger and bigger, until one day when he wasn’t expecting it he would realize he was completely hollow.
When the father started to cry, the sobs shook his body, like a hurricane bends a tree. He sank down beside his wife on the hospital bed, and she put one hand on her husband’s back and one on the crown of the baby’s head.
They took turns holding their son for ten hours. That mother, she even tried to let him nurse. I could not stop staring—not because it was ugly or wrong, but because it was the most remarkable thing I’d ever seen. It felt like looking into the face of the sun: once I turned away, I was blind to everything else.
At one point, I took that stupid nursing student into the room with me, ostensibly to check the mother’s vitals, but really to make her see with her own eyes how love has nothing to do with what you’re looking at, and everything to do with who’s looking.
When the infant died, it was peaceful. We made casts of the newborn’s hand and foot for the parents to keep. I heard that this same couple came back two years later and delivered a healthy daughter, though I wasn’t on duty when it happened.
It just goes to show you: every baby is born beautiful. It’s what we project on them that makes them ugly. Right after I gave birth to Edison, seventeen years ago at this very hospital, I wasn’t worried about the health of my baby, or how I was going to juggle being a single parent while my husband was overseas, or how my life was going to change now that I was a mother.
I was worried about my hair.
The last thing you’re thinking about when you’re in labor is what you look like, but if you’re like me, it’s the first thing that crosses your mind once that baby’s come. The sweat that mats the hair of all my white patients to their foreheads instead made my roots curl up and pull away from the scalp. Brushing my hair around my head in a swirl like an ice cream cone and wrapping it in a scarf each night was what kept it straight the next day when I took it down. But what white nurse knew that, or understood that the little complimentary bottle of sham- poo provided by the hospital auxiliary league was only going to make my hair even frizzier? I was sure that when my well-meaning colleagues came in to meet Edison, they would be shocked into stupor at the sight of the mess going on atop my head.
In the end, I wound up wrapping it in a towel, and told visitors I’d just had a shower.
I know nurses who work on surgical floors who tell me about men wheeled out of surgery who insist on taping their toupees into place in the recovery room before their spouses join them. And I can’t tell you the number of times a patient who has spent the night grunting and screaming and pushing out a baby with her husband at her side will kick her spouse out of the room post delivery so I can help her put on a pretty nightgown and robe.
I understand the need people have to put a certain face on for the rest of the world. Which is why— when I first arrive for my shift at 6:40 a.m.—I don’t even go into the staff room, where we will shortly receive the night’s update from the charge nurse. Instead I slip down the hall to the patient I’d been with yesterday, before my shift ended. Her name was Jessie; she was a tiny little thing who had come into the pavilion looking more like a campaigning First Lady than a woman in active labor: her hair was perfectly coiffed, her face airbrushed with makeup, even her maternity clothes were fitted and stylish. That’s a dead giveaway, since by forty weeks of pregnancy most mothers-to-be would be happy to wear a pup tent. I scanned her chart—G1, now P1—and grinned. The last thing I’d said to Jessie before I turned her care over to a colleague and went home for the night was that the next time I saw her, she’d have a baby, and sure enough, I have a new patient. While I’ve been sleeping, Jessie’s delivered a healthy seven- pound, six-ounce girl.
I open the door to find Jessie dozing. The baby lies swaddled in the bassinet beside the bed; Jessie’s husband is sprawled in a chair, snoring. Jessie stirs when I walk in, and I immediately put a finger to my lips. Quiet.
From my purse, I pull a compact mirror and a red lipstick.
Part of labor is conversation; it’s the distraction that makes the pain ebb and it’s the glue that bonds a nurse to her patient. What other situation can you think of where one medical professional spends up to twelve hours consulting with a single person? As a result, the connection we build with these women is fierce and fast. I know things about them, in a mere matter of hours, that their own closest friends don’t always know: how she met her partner at a bar when she’d had too much to drink; how her father didn’t live long enough to see this grandchild; how she worries about being a mom because she hated babysitting as a teenager. Last night, in the dragon hours of Jessie’s labor, when she was teary and exhausted and snapping at her husband, I’d suggested that he go to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. As soon as he left, the air in the room was easier to breathe, and she fell back against those awful plastic pillows we have in the birthing pavilion. “What if this baby changes everything?” she sobbed. She confessed that she never went anywhere without her “game face” on, that her husband had never even seen her without mascara; and now here he was watching her body contort itself inside out, and how would he ever look at her the same way again?
Listen, I had told her. You let me worry about that.
I’d like to think my taking that one straw off her back was what gave her the strength to make it to transition.
It’s funny. When I tell people I’ve been a labor and delivery nurse for more than twenty years, they’re impressed by the fact that I have assisted in cesareans, that I can start an IV in my sleep, that I can tell the difference between a decel in the fetal heart rate that is normal and one that requires intervention. But for me, being an L & D nurse is all about knowing your patient, and what she needs. A back rub. An epidural. A little Maybelline.
Jessie glances at her husband, still dead to the world. Then she takes the lipstick from my hand. “Thank you,” she whispers, and our eyes connect. I hold the mirror as she once again reinvents herself.
On Thursdays, my shift goes from 7:00 a.m. till 7:00 p.m. At Mercy– West Haven, during the day, we usually have two nurses on the birthing pavilion—three if we’re swimming in human resources that day. As I walk through the pavilion, I note idly how many of our delivery suites are occupied—it’s three, right now, a nice slow start to the day. Marie, the charge nurse, is already in the room where we have our morning meeting when I come inside, but Corinne—the second nurse on shift with me—is missing. “What’s it going to be today?” Marie asks, as she flips through the morning paper.
“Flat tire,” I reply. This guessing game is a routine: What excuse will Corinne use today for being late? It’s a beautiful fall day in October, so she can’t blame the weather.
“That was last week. I’m going with the flu.”
“Speaking of which,” I say. “How’s Ella?” Marie’s eight-year-old had caught the stomach bug that’s been going around.
“Back in school today, thank God,” Marie replies. “Now Dave’s got it. I figure I have twenty-four hours before I’m down for the count.” She looks up from the Regional section of the paper. “I saw Edison’s name in here again,” she says. My son has made the Highest Honors list for every semester of his high school career. But just like I tell him, that’s no reason to boast. “There are a lot of bright kids in this town,” I demur.
“Still,” Marie says. “For a boy like Edison to be so successful . . . well. You should be proud, is all. I can only hope Ella turns out to be that good a student.”
A boy like Edison. I know what she is saying, even if she’s careful not to spell it out. There are not many Black kids in the high school, and as far as I know, Edison is the only one on the Highest Honors list. Comments like this feel like paper cuts, but I’ve worked with Marie for over ten years now, so I try to ignore the sting. I know she doesn’t really mean anything by it. She’s a friend, after all—she came to my house with her family for Easter supper last year, along with some of the other nurses, and we’ve gone out for cocktails or movie nights and once a girls’ weekend at a spa. Still, Marie has no idea how often I have to just take a deep breath, and move on. White people don’t mean half the offensive things that come out of their mouths, and so I try not to let myself get rubbed the wrong way.
“Maybe you should hope that Ella makes it through the school day without going to the nurse’s office again,” I reply, and Marie laughs.
“You’re right. First things first.”
Corinne explodes into the room. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, and Marie and I exchange a look. Corinne’s fifteen years younger than I am, and there’s always some emergency—a carburetor that’s dead, a fight with her boyfriend, a crash on 95N. Corinne is one of those people for whom life is just the space between crises. She takes off her coat and manages to knock over a potted plant that died months ago, which no one has bothered to replace. “Dammit,” she mutters, righting the pot and sweeping the soil back inside. She dusts off her palms on her scrubs, and then sits down with her hands folded. “I’m really sorry, Marie. The stupid tire I replaced last week has a leak or something; I had to drive here the whole way going thirty.”
Marie reaches into her pocket and pulls out a dollar, which she flicks across the table at me. I laugh.
“All right,” Marie says. “Floor report. Room two is a couplet. Jessica Myers, G one P one at forty weeks and two days. She had a vaginal delivery this morning at three a.m., uncomplicated, without pain meds. Baby girl is breast-feeding well; she’s peed but hasn’t pooped yet.”
“I’ll take her,” Corinne and I say in unison.
Everyone wants the patient who’s already delivered; it’s the easier job. “I had her during active labor,” I point out.
“Right,” Marie says. “Ruth, she’s yours.” She pushes her reading glasses up on her nose. “Room three is Thea McVaughn, G one P zero at forty-one weeks and three days, she’s in active labor at four centimeters dilated, membranes intact. Fetal heart rate tracing looks good on the monitor, the baby’s active. She’s requested an epidural and her IV fluid bolus is infusing.” “Has Anesthesia been paged?” Corinne asks. “Yes.”
“I’ve got her.”
We only take one active labor patient at a time, if we can help it, which means that the third patient— the last one this morning—will be mine. “Room five is a recovery. Brittany Bauer is a G one P one at thirty-nine weeks and one day; had an epidural and a vaginal delivery at five-thirty a.m. Baby’s a boy; they want a circ. Mom was a GDM A one; the baby is on Q three hour blood sugars for twenty-four hours. The mom really wants to breast-feed. They’re still skin to skin.”
A recovery is still a lot of work—a one-to-one nurse-patient relationship. True, the labor’s finished, but there is still tidying up to be done, a physical assessment of the newborn, and a stack of paperwork. “Got it,” I say, and I push away from the table to go find Lucille, the night nurse, who was with Brittany during the delivery.
She finds me first, in the staff restroom, washing my hands. “Tag, you’re it,” she says, handing me Brittany Bauer’s file. “Twenty-six-year- old G one, now P one, delivered vaginally this morning at five- thirty over an intact perineum. She’s O positive, rubella immune, Hep B and HIV negative, GBS negative. Gestational diabetic, diet controlled, otherwise uncomplicated. She still has an IV in her left forearm. I DC’d the epidural, but she hasn’t been out of bed yet, so ask her if she has to get up and pee. Her bleeding’s been good, her fundus is firm at U.”
I open the file and scan the notes, committing the details to memory. “Davis,” I read. “That’s the baby?”
“Yeah. His vital signs have been normal, but his one-hour blood sugar was forty, so we’ve got him trying to nurse. He’s done a little bit on each side, but he’s kind of spitty and sleepy and he hasn’t done a whole lot of eating.”
“Did he get his eyes and thighs?”
“Yeah, and he’s peed, but hasn’t pooped. I haven’t done the bath or the newborn assessment yet.”
“No problem,” I say. “Is that it?”
“The dad’s name is Turk,” Lucille replies, hesitating. “There’s something just a little . . . off about him.”
“Like Creeper Dad?” I ask. Last year, we had a father who was flirting with the nursing student in the room during his wife’s delivery. When she wound up having a C-section, instead of standing behind the drape near his wife’s head, he strolled across the OR and said to the nursing student, Is it hot in here, or is it just you?
“Not like that,” Lucille says. “He’s appropriate with the mom. He’s just . . . sketchy. I can’t put my finger on it.”
I’ve always thought that if I wasn’t an L & D nurse, I’d make a great fake psychic. We are skilled at reading our patients so that we know what they need moments before they realize it. And we are also gifted when it comes to sensing strange vibes. Just last month my radar went off when a mentally challenged patient came in with an older Ukrainian woman who had befriended her at the grocery store where she worked. There was something weird about the dynamic between them, and I followed my hunch and called the police. Turned out the Ukrainian woman had served time in Kentucky for stealing the baby of a woman with Down syndrome.
So as I walk into Brittany Bauer’s room for the first time, I am not worried. I’m thinking: I’ve got this.
I knock softly and push open the door. “I’m Ruth,” I say. “I’m going to be your nurse today.” I walk right up to Brittany, and smile down at the baby cradled in her arms. “Isn’t he a sweetie! What’s his name?” I ask, although I already know. It’s a means to start a conversation, to connect with the patient.
Brittany doesn’t answer. She looks at her husband, a hulking guy who’s sitting on the edge of his chair. He’s got military-short hair and he’s bouncing the heel of one boot like he can’t quite stay still. I get what Lucille saw in him. Turk Bauer makes me think of a power line that’s snapped during a storm, and lies across the road just waiting for something to brush against it so it can shoot sparks.
It doesn’t matter if you’re shy or modest—nobody who’s just had a baby stays quiet for long. They want to share this life-changing moment. They want to relive the labor, the birth, the beauty of their baby. But Brittany, well, it’s almost like she needs his permission to speak. Domestic abuse? I wonder.
“Davis,” she chokes out. “His name is Davis.”
“Well, hello, Davis,” I murmur, moving closer to the bed. “Would you mind if I take a listen to his heart and lungs and check his temperature?”
Her arms clamp tighter on the newborn, pulling him closer.
“I can do it right here,” I say. “You don’t have to let go of him.”
You have to cut a new parent a little bit of slack, especially one who’s already been told her baby’s blood sugar is too low. So I tuck the thermometer under Davis’s armpit, and get a normal reading. I look at the whorls of his hair—a patch of white can signify hearing loss; an alternating hair pattern can flag metabolic issues. I press my stethoscope against the baby’s back, listening to his lungs. I slide my hand between him and his mother, listening to his heart.
Whoosh.
It’s so faint that I think it’s a mistake.
I listen again, trying to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but that slight whir is there behind the backbeat of the pulse.
Turk stands up so that he is towering over me; he folds his arms. Nerves look different on fathers. They get combative, sometimes. As if they could bluster away whatever’s wrong.
“I hear a very slight murmur,” I say delicately. “But it could be nothing. This early, there are still parts of the heart that are developing. Even if it is a murmur, it could disappear in a few days. Still, I’ll make a note of it; I’ll have the pediatrician take a listen.” While I’m talking, trying to be as calm as possible, I do another blood sugar. It’s an Accu-Chek, which means we get instant results—and this time, he’s at fifty- two. “Now, this is great news,” I say, trying to give the Bauers something positive to hold on to. “His sugar is much better.” I walk to the sink and run warm water, fill a plastic bowl, and set it on the warmer. “Davis is definitely perking up, and he’ll probably start eating really soon. Why don’t I get him cleaned up, and fire him up a little bit, and we can try nursing again?”
I reach down and scoop the baby up. Turning my back to the parents, I place Davis on the warmer and begin my exam. I can hear Brittany and Turk whispering fiercely as I check the fontanels on the baby’s head for the suture lines, to make sure the bones aren’t overriding each other. The parents are worried, and that’s normal. A lot of patients don’t like to take the nurse’s opinion on any medical issue; they need to hear it from the doctor to believe it—even though L & D nurses are often the ones who first notice a quirk or a symptom. Their pediatrician is Atkins; I will page her after I’m done with the exam, and have her listen to the baby’s heart.
But right now, my attention is on Davis. I look for facial bruising, hematoma, or abnormal shaping of the skull. I check the palmar creases in his tiny hands, and the set of his ears relative to his eyes. I measure the circumference of his head and the length of his squirming body. I check for clefts in the mouth and the ears. I palpate the clavicles and put my pinkie in his mouth to check his sucking reflex. I study the rise and fall of the tiny bellows of his chest, to make sure his breathing isn’t labored. Press his belly to make sure it’s soft, check his fingers and toes, scan for rashes or lesions or birthmarks. I make sure his testicles have descended and scan for hypospadias, making sure that the urethra is where it’s supposed to be. Then I gently turn him over and scan the base of the spine for dimples or hair tufts or any other indicator of neural tube defect.
I realize that the whispering behind me has stopped. But instead of feeling more comfortable, it feels ominous. What do they think I’m doing wrong?
By the time I flip him back over, Davis’s eyes are starting to drift shut. Babies usually get sleepy a couple of hours after delivery, which is one reason to do the bath now—it will wake him up long enough to try to feed again. There is a stack of wipes on the warmer; with practiced, sure strokes I dip one into the warm water and wipe the baby down from head to toe. Then I diaper him, swiftly wrap him up in a blanket like a burrito, and rinse his hair under the sink with some Johnson’s baby shampoo. The last thing I do is put an ID band on him that will match the ones his parents have, and fasten a tiny electronic security bracelet on his ankle, which will set off an alarm if the baby gets too close to any of the exits.
I can feel the parents’ eyes, hot on my back. I turn, a smile fastened on my face. “There,” I say, handing the infant to Brittany again. “Clean as a whistle. Now, let’s see if we can get him to nurse.” I reach down to help position the baby, but Brittany flinches. “Get away from her,” Turk Bauer says. “I want to talk to your boss.”
They are the first words he has spoken to me in the twenty minutes I’ve been in this room with him and his family, and they carry an undercurrent of discontent. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to tell Marie what a stellar job I’ve done. But I nod tightly and step out of the room, replaying every word and gesture I have made since introducing myself to Brittany Bauer. I walk to the nurses’ desk and find Marie filling out a chart. “We’ve got a problem in Five,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “The father wants to see you.”
“What happened?” Marie asks.
“Absolutely nothing,” I reply, and I know it’s true. I’m a good nurse. Sometimes a great one. I took care of that infant the way I would have taken care of any newborn on this pavilion. “I told them I heard what sounded like a murmur, and that I’d contact the pediatrician. And I bathed the baby and did his exam.”
I must be doing a pretty awful job of hiding my feelings, though, because Marie looks at me sympathetically. “Maybe they’re worried about the baby’s heart,” she says.
I am just a step behind her as we walk inside, so I can clearly see the relief on the faces of the parents when they see Marie. “I understand that you wanted to talk to me, Mr. Bauer?” she says.
“That nurse,” Turk says. “I don’t want her touching my son again.”
I can feel heat spreading from the collar of my scrubs up into my scalp. No one likes to be called out in front of her supervisor.
Marie draws herself upright, her spine stiffening. “I can assure you that Ruth is one of the best nurses we have, Mr. Bauer. If there’s a formal complaint—”
“I don’t want her or anyone who looks like her touching my son,” the father interrupts, and he folds his arms across his chest. He’s pushed up his sleeves while I was out of the room. Running from wrist to elbow on one arm is the tattoo of a Confederate flag.
Marie stops talking.
For a moment, I honestly don’t understand. And then it hits me with the force of a blow: they don’t have a problem with what I’ve done.
Just with who I am.
BUY HERE
THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE
Excerpted from The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen Copyright © 2013 by Masha Gessen. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. ON MAY 13, 2000, six days after he was inaugurated, Putin signed his first decree and proposed a set of bills, all of them aimed, as he stated, at “strengthening vertical power.” They served as the beginning of a profound restructuring of Russia’s federal composition, or, put another way, as the beginning of the dismantling of the country’s democratic structures. One of the bills replaced elected members of the upper house of the parliament with appointed ones: two from each of Russia’s eighty-nine regions, one appointed by the governor of the region and one by the legislature. Another bill allowed elected governors to be removed from office on mere suspicion of wrongdoing, without a court decision. The decree established seven presidential envoys to seven large territories of the country, each comprising about a dozen regions, each of which had its elected legislature and governor. The envoys, appointed by the president, would supervise the work of elected governors.
The problem Putin was trying to address with these measures was real. In 1998, when Russia defaulted on its foreign debt and plummeted into a profound economic crisis, Moscow had given the regions wide latitude in managing their budgets, collecting taxes, setting tariffs, and creating economic policies. For this and other reasons, the Russian Federation had become as loose as a structure can be while remaining, at least nominally, a single state. Because the problem was real, Russia’s liberal politicians—who still believed Putin to be one of them—did not criticize his solution to it, even though it clearly contradicted the spirit and possibly also the letter of the 1993 constitution.
Putin appointed the seven envoys. Only two of them were civilians—and one of these very much appeared to have the biography of an undercover KGB agent. Two were KGB officers from Leningrad, one was a police general, and two more were army generals who had commanded the troops in Chechnya. So Putin appointed generals to watch over popularly elected governors—who could also now be removed by the federal government.
The lone voice against these new laws belonged to Boris Berezovsky, or, rather, to my old acquaintance Alex Goldfarb, the émigré former dissident who just a year earlier had been willing to be charmed by Putin. He authored a brilliant critique of the decree and the bills that was published under Berezovsky’s byline in Kommersant, the popular daily newspaper Berezovsky owned. “I assert that the most important outcome of the Yeltsin presidency has been the change in mentality of millions of people: those who used to be slaves fully dependent on the will of their boss or the state became free people who depend only on themselves,” he wrote. “In a democratic society, laws exist to protect individual freedom. . . . The legislation you have proposed will place severe limitations on the independence and civil freedoms of tens of thousands of top-level Russian politicians, forcing them to take their bearings from a single person and follow his will. But we have been through this!”
No one took notice.
The bills sailed through the parliament. The installation of the envoys drew no protest. What happened next was exactly what Berezovsky’s letter had predicted, and it went far beyond the legal measures introduced by Putin. Something shifted, instantly and perceptibly, as though the sounds of the new/old Soviet/Russian national anthem had signaled the dawn of a new era for everyone. Soviet instincts, it seemed, kicked in all over the country, and the Soviet Union was instantly restored in spirit.
You could not quite measure the change. One brilliant Ph.D. student at Moscow University noticed that traditional ways of critiquing election practices, such as tallying up violations (these were on the increase—things like open voting and group voting became routine) or trying to document falsifications (a nearly impossible task) fell short of measuring such a seemingly ephemeral thing as culture. Darya Oreshkina introduced the term “special electoral culture”— one in which elections, while formally free, are orchestrated by local authorities trying to curry favor with the federal center. She identified their statistical symptoms, such as anomalously high voter turnouts and a strikingly high proportion of votes accrued by the leader of the race. She was able to show that over time, the number of precincts where “special electoral culture” decided the outcome grew steadily, and grew fast. In other words, with every election at every level of government, Russians ceded to the authorities more of their power to decide. “Geography disappeared,” she said later—meaning, the entire country was turning into an undifferentiated managed space.
IN MARCH 2004, when Putin stood for reelection, he had five opponents. They had overcome extreme obstacles to join the race. A law that went into effect just before the campaigns launched required that a notary certify the presence and signature of every person present at a meeting at which a presidential candidate is nominated. Since the law required that a minimum of five hundred people attend such a meeting, the preliminaries took four to five hours; people had to arrive in the middle of the day to certify their presence so that the meeting could commence in the evening. After the meeting the potential candidate had a few weeks to collect two million signatures. The old law had required half as many signatures and allotted twice as much time to collect them; but more important, the new law specified the look of these signatures down to the comma. Hundreds of thousands of signatures were thrown out by the Central Election Commission because of violations such as the use of “St. Petersburg” instead of “Saint Petersburg” or the failure to write out the words “building” or “apartment” in the address line.
One of Putin’s St. Petersburg city hall colleagues told me years later that during his tenure as Sobchak’s deputy, Putin had received “a powerful inoculation against the democratic process.” He and Sobchak had ultimately fallen victim to the democratic menace in St. Petersburg, and now that Putin was running the country, he was restoring the late-Soviet mechanisms of control: he was building a tyranny of bureaucracy. The Soviet bureaucracy had been so unwieldy, incomprehensible, and forbidding that one could function within it only by engaging in corruption, using either money or personal favors as currency. That made the system infinitely pliant—which is why “special electoral culture” functioned so well.
During the voting itself, international observers and Russian nongovernmental organizations documented a slew of violations, including: the deletion from the rolls of over a million very elderly people and other unlikely voters (when I went to cast my vote, I was able to see that my eighty-four-year- old grandmother’s name was in fact missing from the list; my voting precinct was also, coincidentally, located next door to an office of the ruling United Russia party); the delivery of prefilled ballots to a psychiatric ward; precinct staff arriving at an elderly voter’s home with a mobile ballot box and leaving hastily when they saw that she was planning to vote for someone other than Putin; and managers and school officials telling staff or students’ parents that contracts or financing depended on their vote. In all likelihood, none of these steps was dictated directly by the Kremlin; rather, following renewed Soviet instincts, individuals did what they could for their president.
During the campaign, opposition candidates constantly encountered refusals to print their campaign material, air their commercials, or even rent them space for campaign events. Yana Dubeykovskaya, who managed the campaign of nationalist-leftist economist Sergei Glazyev, told me that it took days to find a printing plant willing to accept Glazyev’s money. When the candidate tried to hold a campaign event in Yekaterinburg, the largest city in the Urals, the police suddenly kicked everyone out of the building, claiming there was a bomb threat. In Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s third-largest city, electricity was turned off when Glazyev was getting ready to speak—and every subsequent campaign event in that city was held outdoors, since no one was willing to rent to the pariah candidate.
Around election time, I interviewed a distant acquaintance, the thirty-one-year-old deputy director of news programming on All-Russia State Television. Eight years earlier, Yevgeniy Revenko had become the youngest reporter working at a national television channel, Gusinsky’s independent NTV. He had quickly become known as one of the more enterprising and dogged reporters. The way he worked now seemed to be very different. “A country like Russia needs the sort of television that can effectively deliver the government’s message,” he explained. “As the state grows stronger, it needs to convey its message directly, with no interpretations.” He described his channel’s editorial policy as a simple one: “We do show negative stories—we will report a disaster, if it occurs, for example—but we do not go looking for them. Nor do we go looking for positive stories, but we do focus the viewers’ attention on them. We never speculate about the reasons for something—say, an official’s fi ring—even if we happen to know the reason. All our information comes from official government statements. In any case, the logic is simple. We are a state television company. Our state is a presidential republic. That means we do not criticize the president.” Very occasionally, admitted Revenko over a mug of beer at an Irish pub in the center of Moscow, he felt he had to stifle his creative urge. “But I say to myself, ‘This is where I work.’” He grew up in a military family and had some military training himself. That clearly helped.
The late Soviet state had depended on using the many and punishing the few—and the KGB had been in charge of the latter. This system had been more or less restored now. While the vast majority enthusiastically fell in line, those who did not paid the price. Marina Litvinovich, the young woman who had helped create Putin and had urged him to go talk to the families of the Kursk crew, was now managing the campaign of his lone liberal opponent in the race, former parliament member Irina Khakamada, who had herself supported Putin four years earlier. During the campaign, Litvinovich got a phone call telling her, “We know where you live and where your child plays outside.” She hired a bodyguard for her three-year-old. She was also robbed and beaten. Yana Dubeykovskaya, Glazyev’s campaign manager, was also beaten and robbed, and once started driving her car before discovering that the brakes had been cut. A step down on the persecution ladder were apartment burglaries. In the months leading up to the election, opposition journalists and activists of Committee 2008—a group organizing to bring about a more fair election in four years—had their apartments broken into. Often these burglaries occurred concurrently in different areas of Moscow. My own apartment was burglarized in February. The only things taken were a laptop computer, the hard drive from a desktop computer, and a cell phone.
On election night, Khakamada planned a great defeat party. Her campaign rented a spacious Southwestern-themed restaurant and splurged on a spread of salmon, lobster, artichokes, and an open bar. Popular music groups lined up at the microphone, and the country’s best-known rock journalist emceed. Nobody came. Waiters seemed to outnumber the guests, and the artichokes lingered. Still, the organizers continued to check all comers against a strict name list. Russian liberals were still struggling to come to terms with just how marginal they had become.
Watching the guests, I was thinking it was understandable that it had taken a while. Four years after putting Putin in office, the few liberals who had switched to the opposition still had personal connections to the many former liberals who remained part of the Russian political establishment. In a vacant dining room off the main hall, Marina Litvinovich perched at one end of a long empty oak table next to Andrei Bystritsky, deputy chairman of the Russian state television and radio conglomerate. Bystritsky, a red- bearded bon vivant in his mid-forties, complained about the wine. “The wine is no worse than our election results,” Litvinovich shot back. Bystritsky immediately ordered a hundred-dollar bottle of wine for the table, and then another. It seemed he had come to assuage his guilt. He assured anyone who would listen that he had voted for Khakamada and had even told his two hair-and-makeup people to vote for her. Of course, he had also run the campaign coverage that went out to about forty-five million Russian homes, and told them, over and over again, to vote for Putin. Seventy-one percent of the voters did.
I went to see Bystritsky in his office three days after the election. We had known each other a long time— in the mid-1990s he had been my editor at Itogi—so there was no point in pussyfooting around the main question.
“So tell me,” I said, “how do you conduct the propaganda of Putin’s regime?”
Bystritsky shrugged uncomfortably and busied himself with hospitable preliminaries. He offered me tea, cookies, chocolates, chocolate-covered marshmallows, and finally a CD with the collected speeches, photographs, and video footage of President Putin. The slipcover had five photographs of the president: serious, intense, impassioned, formal smiling, and informal smiling. The serious one had been reproduced widely: on Election Day alone, I came across it on the cover of school notebooks, on preframed portraits for sale at the Moscow Central Post Offi ce (a bargain at $1.50 for a letter-size picture), and on pink, white, and blue balloons for sale in Red Square. The sale of any of these items on voting day was a violation of election law.
“We don’t especially do any propaganda,” Bystritsky said, settling into a leather armchair. “Look at the election, for example.” Russian law left over from the nineties required media outlets to provide all candidates with equal access to viewers and readers. Bystritsky had his numbers ready, and it was funny math: the president, he claimed, had engaged in only one election activity—meeting with his campaign activists—and the twenty-nine-minute meeting was broadcast three times in its entirety during regular newscasts, which had to be extended to accommodate it. On every other day of the campaign, the state television channel also showed Putin during its newscasts—usually as the lead story—but these, Bystritsky explained, were not campaign activities but the stuff of the president’s day job. An exhaustive study conducted by the Russian Union of Journalists, on the other hand, concluded that Putin got about seven times as much news coverage on the state channel as did either Khakamada or the Communist Party candidate; other candidates fared even worse. Coverage by the other state channel, the one that had once answered to Berezovsky, was even more skewed, while NTV, which had been taken away from Gusinsky, gave Putin a fourfold advantage over the next-best-covered contender.
This was what Revenko had called “effectively delivering the government’s message.” Local officials got the message clearly and conducted elections in accordance with it.
SEPTEMBER 1 IN RUSSIA is called Knowledge Day: all elementary, secondary, and high schools all over the country begin the year simultaneously. The first day of school is a rather ceremonial occasion: children, especially first-graders and eleventh-graders (the graduating class), arrive dressed up, bearing flowers, and usually accompanied by their parents. There are speeches, greetings, occasional concerts, collective prayers, and festive processions.
In the summer of 2000—the summer when I had had to briefly leave the country after Gusinsky was arrested—I had adopted a child, a little boy named Vova (eleven months later, I also gave birth to a girl). On September 1, 2004, I took Vova to his first day of classes in first grade. He looked very serious in a blue button-down shirt that kept coming untucked. He gave his new teacher a bouquet of flowers, we listened to the speeches, and the children went inside the school. I got in my car for the long drive to work: Knowledge Day is among the worst traffic days of the year. I turned on the radio and heard the news: a group of armed men had taken several hundred children and their parents hostage at a school in North Ossetia.
Even though I coordinated coverage of the story from Moscow—I was now deputy editor at a new city weekly—in the following three days I did some of the most difficult work of my life. The three-day standoff in the town of Beslan, full of fear, confusion, and several moments of acute hope, culminated with federal troops storming the school building; more than three hundred people died. On the afternoon of September 1, when I came to work, I had said to my colleagues, all of whom were younger and less experienced in covering these sorts of stories: “There will be a storming of the building. There is always a storming.” But when it happened, I sat at my desk, hiding my face in my hands, crying. When I finally took my hands away from my face, I found a can of Coke one of my younger colleagues had placed in front of me in an attempt at consolation.
The following weekend, my family and the family of my closest friend huddled together at my dacha. When their eight-year-old daughter briefly stepped out of the front yard, all four of us adults went into a panic. I had the distinct sense that the entire country was similarly traumatized.
It was this shell-shocked nation that Putin addressed, after a fashion, on September 13, 2004. He gathered the cabinet, his own staff, and all eighty-nine governors together, and spoke with them behind closed doors for two hours. The text of his speech was then distributed to journalists.
“One cannot but weep when talking about what happened in Beslan,” the speech went. “One cannot but weep just thinking about it. But compassion, tears, and words on the part of the government are absolutely insufficient. We have to act, we have to increase the effectiveness of the government in combating the entire complex of problems facing the country. . . . I am convinced that the unity of the country is the main condition of success in the fight against terrorism.”
From now on, he announced, governors would no longer be elected; he himself would appoint them and the mayor of Moscow. Nor would members of the lower house of the parliament be directly elected, as half of them had been. Now Russian citizens would cast their votes in favor of political parties, which would then fill their seats with ranking members. The new procedure for registering political parties made the new procedure for registering presidential candidates seem quaint in comparison. All political parties now had to re-register, which meant most would be eliminated. The threshold for getting a share of the seats in the parliament would be raised from 5 percent of the vote to 7 percent. And, finally, proposed legislation would now pass through a filter before entering the lower house: the president would personally appoint a so-called public chamber to review all bills.
After these changes became law, as they did at the end of 2004, there remained only one federal-level public official who was directly elected: the president himself.
BUY HERE 27
WEAPONIZED LIES BY DANIEL J. LEVITIN
A S
e human brain did not evolve to process large amounts of numer- ical data presented as text; instead, our eyes look for patterns in data that are visually displayed. e most accurate but least interpretable form of data presentation is to make a table, showing every single value. But it is di cult or impossible for most people to detect pat- terns and trends in such data, and so we rely on graphs and charts. Graphs come in two broad types: Either they represent every data What does all that mean? From the text on the poster itself (though point visually (as in a scatter plot) or they implement a form of data not on this graph), we know that the researchers are studying brain reduction in which we summarize the data, looking, for example, activations in patients with schizophrenia (SZ). What are HCs? We only at means or medians. aren’t told, but from the context—they’re being compared with ere are many ways that graphs can be used to manipulate, SZ—we might assume that it means “healthy controls.” Now, there distort, and misrepresent data. e careful consumer of informa- do appear to be di erences between the HCs and the SZs, but, tion will avoid being drawn in by them. hmmm . . . the y-axis has numbers, but . . . the units could be any- thing! What are we looking at? Scores on a test, levels of brain acti- vations, number of brain regions activated? Number of Jell-O brand Unlabeled Axes pudding cups they’ve eaten, or number of Johnny Depp movies e most fundamental way to lie with a statistical graph is to not they’ve seen in the last six weeks? (To be fair, the researchers subse- label the axes. If your axes aren’t labeled, you can draw or plot any- quently published their ndings in a peer-reviewed journal, and thing you want! Here is an example from a poster presented at a corrected this error aer a website pointed out the oversight.) conference by a student researcher, which looked like this (I’ve In the next example, gross sales of a publishing company are redrawn it here): plotted, excluding data from Kickstarter campaigns.
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 26 1/18/17 3:29 PM 27
A S
e human brain did not evolve to process large amounts of numer- ical data presented as text; instead, our eyes look for patterns in data that are visually displayed. e most accurate but least interpretable form of data presentation is to make a table, showing every single value. But it is di cult or impossible for most people to detect pat- terns and trends in such data, and so we rely on graphs and charts. Graphs come in two broad types: Either they represent every data What does all that mean? From the text on the poster itself (though point visually (as in a scatter plot) or they implement a form of data not on this graph), we know that the researchers are studying brain reduction in which we summarize the data, looking, for example, activations in patients with schizophrenia (SZ). What are HCs? We only at means or medians. aren’t told, but from the context— they’re being compared with ere are many ways that graphs can be used to manipulate, SZ— we might assume that it means “healthy controls.” Now, there distort, and misrepresent data. e careful consumer of informa- do appear to be di erences between the HCs and the SZs, but, tion will avoid being drawn in by them. hmmm . . . the y-axis has numbers, but . . . the units could be any- thing! What are we looking at? Scores on a test, levels of brain acti- vations, number of brain regions activated? Number of Jell-O brand Unlabeled Axes pudding cups they’ve eaten, or number of Johnny Depp movies e most fundamental way to lie with a statistical graph is to not they’ve seen in the last six weeks? (To be fair, the researchers subse- label the axes. If your axes aren’t labeled, you can draw or plot any- quently published their ndings in a peer-reviewed journal, and thing you want! Here is an example from a poster presented at a corrected this error a er a website pointed out the oversight.) conference by a student researcher, which looked like this (I’ve In the next example, gross sales of a publishing company are redrawn it here): plotted, excluding data from Kickstarter campaigns.
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 27 1/18/17 3:29 PM 28 29
rate, deaths, births, income, or any quantity that could take on a value of zero, then zero should be the minimum point on your graph. But if your aim is to create panic or outrage, start your y-axis somewhere near the lowest value you’re plotting— this will empha- size the di erence you’re trying to highlight, because the eye is drawn to the size of the di erence as shown on the graph, and the actual size of the di erence is obscured. In , Fox News broadcast the following graph to show what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire:
As in the previous example, but this time with the x-axis, we have numbers but we’re not told what they are. In this case, it’s probably self- evident: We assume that the , , etc., refer to calendar or scal years of operation, and the fact that the lines are jagged between the years suggests that the data are being tracked monthly (but without proper labeling we can only assume). e y-axis is completely missing, so we don’t know what is being measured (is it units sold or dollars?), and we don’t know what each horizontal line represents. e graph could be depicting an increase of sales from cents a year to a year, or from million to million units. Not to worry— a helpful narrative accompanied this graph: “It’s been another great year.” I guess we’ll have to take their word for it. e graph gives the visual impression that taxes would increase by a large amount: e right- hand bar is six times the height of the le - hand bar. Who wants their taxes to go up by a factor of six? Viewers Truncated Vertical Axis who are number- phobic may not take the time to examine the axis A well- designed graph clearly shows you the relevant end points of to see that the actual di erence is between a tax rate of percent a continuum. is is especially important if you’re documenting and one of . percent. at is, if the cuts expire, taxes will only some actual or projected change in a quantity, and you want your increase percent, not the sixfold increase that is pictured (the . readers to draw the right conclusions. If you’re representing crime percentage point increase is percent of percent).
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 28 1/18/17 3:29 PM 28 29
rate, deaths, births, income, or any quantity that could take on a value of zero, then zero should be the minimum point on your graph. But if your aim is to create panic or outrage, start your y-axis somewhere near the lowest value you’re plotting— this will empha- size the di erence you’re trying to highlight, because the eye is drawn to the size of the di erence as shown on the graph, and the actual size of the di erence is obscured. In , Fox News broadcast the following graph to show what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire:
As in the previous example, but this time with the x-axis, we have numbers but we’re not told what they are. In this case, it’s probably self- evident: We assume that the , , etc., refer to calendar or scal years of operation, and the fact that the lines are jagged between the years suggests that the data are being tracked monthly (but without proper labeling we can only assume). e y-axis is completely missing, so we don’t know what is being measured (is it units sold or dollars?), and we don’t know what each horizontal line represents. e graph could be depicting an increase of sales from cents a year to a year, or from million to million units. Not to worry— a helpful narrative accompanied this graph: “It’s been another great year.” I guess we’ll have to take their word for it. e graph gives the visual impression that taxes would increase by a large amount: e right- hand bar is six times the height of the le - hand bar. Who wants their taxes to go up by a factor of six? Viewers Truncated Vertical Axis who are number- phobic may not take the time to examine the axis A well- designed graph clearly shows you the relevant end points of to see that the actual di erence is between a tax rate of percent a continuum. is is especially important if you’re documenting and one of . percent. at is, if the cuts expire, taxes will only some actual or projected change in a quantity, and you want your increase percent, not the sixfold increase that is pictured (the . readers to draw the right conclusions. If you’re representing crime percentage point increase is percent of percent).
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 29 1/18/17 3:29 PM 30 31
If the y-axis started at zero, the percent would be apparent Nothing wrong with that. But suppose that you’re selling home visually: security systems and so you want to scare people into buying your product. Using all the same data, just create a discontinuity in your x-axis. is will distort the truth and deceive the eye marvelously:
Discontinuity in Vertical or Horizontal Axis
Imagine a city where crime has been growing at a rate of percent per year for the last ten years. You might graph it this way:
Here, the visual gives the impression that crime has increased dra- matically. But you know better. e discontinuity in the x-axis crams ve years’ worth of numbers into the same amount of graphic real estate as was used for two years. No wonder there’s an apparent increase. is is a fundamental aw in graph making, but because most readers don’t bother to look at the axes too closely, this one’s easy to get away with. And you don’t have to limit your creativity to breaking the x-axis; you can get the e ect by creating a discontinuity in the y-axis, and then hiding it by not breaking the line. While we’re at it, we’ll truncate the y-axis:
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 30 1/18/17 3:29 PM 30 31
If the y-axis started at zero, the percent would be apparent Nothing wrong with that. But suppose that you’re selling home visually: security systems and so you want to scare people into buying your product. Using all the same data, just create a discontinuity in your x-axis. is will distort the truth and deceive the eye marvelously:
Discontinuity in Vertical or Horizontal Axis
Imagine a city where crime has been growing at a rate of percent per year for the last ten years. You might graph it this way:
Here, the visual gives the impression that crime has increased dra- matically. But you know better. e discontinuity in the x-axis crams ve years’ worth of numbers into the same amount of graphic real estate as was used for two years. No wonder there’s an apparent increase. is is a fundamental aw in graph making, but because most readers don’t bother to look at the axes too closely, this one’s easy to get away with. And you don’t have to limit your creativity to breaking the x-axis; you can get the e ect by creating a discontinuity in the y-axis, and then hiding it by not breaking the line. While we’re at it, we’ll truncate the y-axis:
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 31 1/18/17 3:29 PM 32 33
sorts of complaints into the catchall bin of crime, we are overlook- ing a serious consideration. Perhaps violent crime has dropped to almost zero, and in its place, with so much time on their hands, the police are issuing hundreds more jaywalking tickets. Perhaps the most obvious question to ask next, in your e ort to understand what this statistic really means, is “What happened to the total population in this city during that time period?” If the population increased at any rate greater than percent per year, the crime rate has actually gone down on a per- person basis. We could show this by plot- ting crimes committed per ten thousand people in the city:
is is a bit mean. Most readers just look at that curve within the plot frame and won’t notice that the tick marks on the vertical axis start out being forty reports between each, and then suddenly, at two hun- dred, indicate only eight reports between each. Are we having fun yet? e honorable move is to use the rst crime graph presented with the proper continuous axis. Now, to critically evaluate the sta- tistics, you might ask if there are factors in the way the data were collected or presented that could be hiding an underlying truth. One possibility is that the increases occur in only one particu- larly bad neighborhood and that, in fact, crime is decreasing every- where else in the city. Maybe the police and the community have simply decided that a particular neighborhood had become unman- Choosing the Proper Scale and Axis ageable and so they stopped enforcing laws there. e city as a whole is safe— perhaps even safer than before— and one bad neighbor- You’ve been hired by your local Realtor to graph the change in home hood is responsible for the increase. prices in your community over the last decade. e prices have been Another possibility is that by amalgamating all the di erent steadily growing at a rate of percent per year.
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 32 1/18/17 3:29 PM 32 33
sorts of complaints into the catchall bin of crime, we are overlook- ing a serious consideration. Perhaps violent crime has dropped to almost zero, and in its place, with so much time on their hands, the police are issuing hundreds more jaywalking tickets. Perhaps the most obvious question to ask next, in your e ort to understand what this statistic really means, is “What happened to the total population in this city during that time period?” If the population increased at any rate greater than percent per year, the crime rate has actually gone down on a per- person basis. We could show this by plot- ting crimes committed per ten thousand people in the city:
is is a bit mean. Most readers just look at that curve within the plot frame and won’t notice that the tick marks on the vertical axis start out being forty reports between each, and then suddenly, at two hun- dred, indicate only eight reports between each. Are we having fun yet? e honorable move is to use the rst crime graph presented with the proper continuous axis. Now, to critically evaluate the sta- tistics, you might ask if there are factors in the way the data were collected or presented that could be hiding an underlying truth. One possibility is that the increases occur in only one particu- larly bad neighborhood and that, in fact, crime is decreasing every- where else in the city. Maybe the police and the community have simply decided that a particular neighborhood had become unman- Choosing the Proper Scale and Axis ageable and so they stopped enforcing laws there. e city as a whole is safe— perhaps even safer than before— and one bad neighbor- You’ve been hired by your local Realtor to graph the change in home hood is responsible for the increase. prices in your community over the last decade. e prices have been Another possibility is that by amalgamating all the di erent steadily growing at a rate of percent per year.
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 33 1/18/17 3:29 PM 34 35
Notice how this graph tricks your eye (well, your brain) into drawing two false conclusions— rst, that sometime around home prices must have been very low, and second, that by home prices will be so high that few people will be able to a ord a home. Better buy one now! Both of these graphs distort what’s really going on, because they make a steady rate of growth appear, visually, to be an increasing rate of growth. On the rst graph, the percent growth seems twice as high on the y-axis in as it does in . Many things change at a constant rate: salaries, prices, in ation, population of a species, and victims of diseases. When you have a situation of steady growth (or decline), the most accurate way to represent the data is on a logarithmic scale. e logarithmic scale allows equal percent- If you want to really alarm people, why not change the x-axis to age changes to be represented by equal distances on the y-axis. A include dates that you don’t have data for? Adding extra dates to the constant annual rate of change then shows up as a straight line, x-axis arti cially like this will increase the slope of the curve by as this: compressing the viewable portion like this:
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 34 1/18/17 3:29 PM 34 35
Notice how this graph tricks your eye (well, your brain) into drawing two false conclusions— rst, that sometime around home prices must have been very low, and second, that by home prices will be so high that few people will be able to a ord a home. Better buy one now! Both of these graphs distort what’s really going on, because they make a steady rate of growth appear, visually, to be an increasing rate of growth. On the rst graph, the percent growth seems twice as high on the y-axis in as it does in . Many things change at a constant rate: salaries, prices, in ation, population of a species, and victims of diseases. When you have a situation of steady growth (or decline), the most accurate way to represent the data is on a logarithmic scale. e logarithmic scale allows equal percent- If you want to really alarm people, why not change the x-axis to age changes to be represented by equal distances on the y-axis. A include dates that you don’t have data for? Adding extra dates to the constant annual rate of change then shows up as a straight line, x-axis arti cially like this will increase the slope of the curve by as this: compressing the viewable portion like this:
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 35 1/18/17 3:29 PM 36 37
clean and accurate way to present the data. But suppose you’re a The Dreaded Double Y-Axis young fourteen- year- old smoker who wants to convince your par- e graph maker can get away with all kinds of lies simply armed ents that you should be allowed to smoke. is graph is clearly not with the knowledge that most readers will not look at the graph very going to help you. So you dig deep into your bag of tricks and use closely. is can move a great many people to believe all kinds of the double y-axis, adding a y-axis to the right- hand side of the graph things that aren’t so. Consider the following graph, showing the life frame, with a di erent scaling factor that applies only to the non- expectancy of smokers versus nonsmokers at age twenty- ve. smokers. Once you do that, your graph looks like this:
is makes clear two things: e dangers of smoking accumulate From this, it looks like you’re just as likely to die from smoking as over time, and smokers are likely to die earlier than nonsmokers. from not smoking. Smoking won’t harm you— old age will! e e di erence isn’t big at age forty, but by age eighty the risk more trouble with double y-axis graphs is that you can always scale the than doubles, from under percent to over percent. is is a second axis any way that you choose.
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 36 1/18/17 3:29 PM 36 37
clean and accurate way to present the data. But suppose you’re a The Dreaded Double Y-Axis young fourteen- year- old smoker who wants to convince your par- e graph maker can get away with all kinds of lies simply armed ents that you should be allowed to smoke. is graph is clearly not with the knowledge that most readers will not look at the graph very going to help you. So you dig deep into your bag of tricks and use closely. is can move a great many people to believe all kinds of the double y-axis, adding a y-axis to the right- hand side of the graph things that aren’t so. Consider the following graph, showing the life frame, with a di erent scaling factor that applies only to the non- expectancy of smokers versus nonsmokers at age twenty- ve. smokers. Once you do that, your graph looks like this:
is makes clear two things: e dangers of smoking accumulate From this, it looks like you’re just as likely to die from smoking as over time, and smokers are likely to die earlier than nonsmokers. from not smoking. Smoking won’t harm you— old age will! e e di erence isn’t big at age forty, but by age eighty the risk more trouble with double y-axis graphs is that you can always scale the than doubles, from under percent to over percent. is is a second axis any way that you choose.
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 37 1/18/17 3:29 PM 383838 3939
ForbesForbesForbes magazine,magazine, magazine, aa a venerablevenerable venerable andand and typicallytypically typically reliablereliable reliable newsnews news source,source, source, is is graph graph obviously obviously tells tells a avery very di di erent erent story. story. Which Which one one is is ranranran aa a graphgraph graph veryvery very muchmuch much likelike like thisthis this oneone one toto to showshow show thethe the relationrelation relation betweenbetween between true? You’dtrue? You’d need need to to have have a ameasure measure of of how how the the one one variable variable changes changes expendituresexpendituresexpenditures perper per publicpublic public schoolschool school studentstudent student andand and thosethose those students’students’ students’ scoresscores scores asas a afunction function of of the the other, other, a astatistic statistic known known as as a acorrelation. correlation. ononon thethe the SAT,SAT, SAT, aa a widelywidely widely usedused used standardizedstandardized standardized testtest test forfor for collegecollege college admissionadmission admission inin in Correlations Correlations range range from from − − to to . .A A correlation correlation of of means means that that one one thethethe UnitedUnited United States.States. States. variablevariable is is not not related related to to the the other other at at all. all. A A correlation correlation of of - - means means FromFromFrom thethe the graph,graph, graph, itit it lookslooks looks asas as thoughthough though increasingincreasing increasing thethe the moneymoney money spentspent spent thatthat as as one one variable variable goes goes up, up, the the other other goes goes down, down, in in precise precise perperper studentstudent student (black(black (black line)line) line) doesn’tdoesn’t doesn’t dodo do anythinganything anything toto to increaseincrease increase theirtheir their SATSAT SAT synchrony. synchrony. A A correlation correlation of of means means that that as as one one variable variable goes goes up, up, scoresscoresscores (gray(gray (gray line).line). line). ee e storystory story thatthat that somesome some anti– anti– anti– government government government spendingspending spending the the other other does does too, too, also also in in precise precise synchrony. synchrony. e e rst rst graph graph politicospoliticospoliticos couldcould could telltell tell aboutabout about thisthis this isis is oneone one ofof of wastedwasted wasted taxpayertaxpayer taxpayer funds.funds. funds. ButBut But appears toappears to be be illustrating illustrating a acorrelation correlation of of , , the the second second graph graph youyouyou nownow now understandunderstand understand thatthat that thethe the choicechoice choice ofof of scalescale scale forfor for thethe the secondsecond second (( right- right-( right- appearsappears to to be be representing representing one one that that is is close close to to . . e eactual actual correla- correla- hand) hand) hand) y-axisy-axis y-axis isis is arbitrary.arbitrary. arbitrary. IfIf If youyou you werewere were aa a schoolschool school administrator,administrator, administrator, youyou you tiontion for for this this dataset dataset is is ., ., a avery very strong strong correlation. correlation. Spending Spending mightmightmight simplysimply simply taketake take thethe the exactexact exact samesame same data,data, data, changechange change thethe the scalescale scale ofof of thethe the right-right- right- more onmore on students students is, is, at at least least in in this this dataset, dataset, associated associated with with better better hand hand hand axis,axis, axis, andand and voilà— voilà— voilà— increasing increasing increasing spendingspending spending deliversdelivers delivers aa a betterbetter better educa-educa- educa- SATSAT scores. scores. tion,tion,tion, asas as evidencedevidenced evidenced byby by thethe the increaseincrease increase inin in SATSAT SAT scores!scores! scores! e correlatione correlation also also provides provides a gooda good estimate estimate of of how how much much of of the the
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ForbesForbesForbes magazine,magazine, magazine, aa a venerablevenerable venerable andand and typicallytypically typically reliablereliable reliable newsnews news source,source, source, is is graph graph obviously obviously tells tells a avery very di di erent erent story. story. Which Which one one is is ranranran aa a graphgraph graph veryvery very muchmuch much likelike like thisthis this oneone one toto to showshow show thethe the relationrelation relation betweenbetween between true? You’dtrue? You’d need need to to have have a ameasure measure of of how how the the one one variable variable changes changes expendituresexpendituresexpenditures perper per publicpublic public schoolschool school studentstudent student andand and thosethose those students’students’ students’ scoresscores scores asas a afunction function of of the the other, other, a astatistic statistic known known as as a acorrelation. correlation. ononon thethe the SAT,SAT, SAT, aa a widelywidely widely usedused used standardizedstandardized standardized testtest test forfor for collegecollege college admissionadmission admission inin in Correlations Correlations range range from from − − to to . .A A correlation correlation of of means means that that one one thethethe UnitedUnited United States.States. States. variablevariable is is not not related related to to the the other other at at all. all. A A correlation correlation of of - - means means FromFromFrom thethe the graph,graph, graph, itit it lookslooks looks asas as thoughthough though increasingincreasing increasing thethe the moneymoney money spentspent spent thatthat as as one one variable variable goes goes up, up, the the other other goes goes down, down, in in precise precise perperper studentstudent student (black(black (black line)line) line) doesn’tdoesn’t doesn’t dodo do anythinganything anything toto to increaseincrease increase theirtheir their SATSAT SAT synchrony. synchrony. A A correlation correlation of of means means that that as as one one variable variable goes goes up, up, scoresscoresscores (gray(gray (gray line).line). line). ee e storystory story thatthat that somesome some anti– anti– anti– government government government spendingspending spending the the other other does does too, too, also also in in precise precise synchrony. synchrony. e e rst rst graph graph politicospoliticospoliticos couldcould could telltell tell aboutabout about thisthis this isis is oneone one ofof of wastedwasted wasted taxpayertaxpayer taxpayer funds.funds. funds. ButBut But appears toappears to be be illustrating illustrating a acorrelation correlation of of , , the the second second graph graph youyouyou nownow now understandunderstand understand thatthat that thethe the choicechoice choice ofof of scalescale scale forfor for thethe the secondsecond second (( right- right-( right- appearsappears to to be be representing representing one one that that is is close close to to . . e eactual actual correla- correla- hand) hand) hand) y-axisy-axis y-axis isis is arbitrary.arbitrary. arbitrary. IfIf If youyou you werewere were aa a schoolschool school administrator,administrator, administrator, youyou you tiontion for for this this dataset dataset is is ., ., a avery very strong strong correlation. correlation. Spending Spending mightmightmight simplysimply simply taketake take thethe the exactexact exact samesame same data,data, data, changechange change thethe the scalescale scale ofof of thethe the right-right- right- more onmore on students students is, is, at at least least in in this this dataset, dataset, associated associated with with better better hand hand hand axis,axis, axis, andand and voilà— voilà— voilà— increasing increasing increasing spendingspending spending deliversdelivers delivers aa a betterbetter better educa-educa- educa- SATSAT scores. scores. tion,tion,tion, asas as evidencedevidenced evidenced byby by thethe the increaseincrease increase inin in SATSAT SAT scores!scores! scores! e correlatione correlation also also provides provides a gooda good estimate estimate of of how how much much of of the the
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result can be explained by the variables you’re looking at. e cor- e congressman was attempting to make a political point, that relation of . tells us we can explain percent of students’ SAT over a seven- year period, Planned Parenthood has increased the scores by looking at the amount of school expenditures per student. number of abortions it performed (something he opposes) and at is, it tells us to what extent expenditures explain the diversity decreased the number of cancer screening and prevention proce- in SAT scores. dures. Planned Parenthood doesn’t deny this, but this distorted A controversy about the double y-axis graph erupted in the fall graph makes it seem that the number of abortion procedures of during a U.S. congressional committee meeting. Rep. Jason exceeded those for cancer. Maybe the graph maker was feeling a bit Cha etz presented a graph that plotted two services provided by the guilty and so included the actual numbers next to the data points. organization Planned Parenthood: abortions, and cancer screening Let’s accept her bread crumbs and look closely. e number of abor- and prevention: tions in , the most recent year given, is ,. e number of cancer services was nearly three times that, at ,. (By the way, it’s a bit suspicious that the abortion numbers are such tidy, round numbers while the cancer numbers are so precise.) is is a particu- larly sinister example: an implied double y-axis graph with no axes on either side! Drawn properly, the graph would look like this:
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 40 1/18/17 3:29 PM 40 41 result can be explained by the variables you’re looking at. e cor- e congressman was attempting to make a political point, that relation of . tells us we can explain percent of students’ SAT over a seven- year period, Planned Parenthood has increased the scores by looking at the amount of school expenditures per student. number of abortions it performed (something he opposes) and at is, it tells us to what extent expenditures explain the diversity decreased the number of cancer screening and prevention proce- in SAT scores. dures. Planned Parenthood doesn’t deny this, but this distorted A controversy about the double y-axis graph erupted in the fall graph makes it seem that the number of abortion procedures of during a U.S. congressional committee meeting. Rep. Jason exceeded those for cancer. Maybe the graph maker was feeling a bit Cha etz presented a graph that plotted two services provided by the guilty and so included the actual numbers next to the data points. organization Planned Parenthood: abortions, and cancer screening Let’s accept her bread crumbs and look closely. e number of abor- and prevention: tions in , the most recent year given, is ,. e number of cancer services was nearly three times that, at ,. (By the way, it’s a bit suspicious that the abortion numbers are such tidy, round numbers while the cancer numbers are so precise.) is is a particu- larly sinister example: an implied double y-axis graph with no axes on either side! Drawn properly, the graph would look like this:
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Here, we see that abortions increased modestly, compared to the reduction in cancer services. ere is another thing suspicious about the original graph: Such smooth lines are rarely found in data. It seems more likely that the H H N graph maker simply took numbers for two particular years, A R and , and compared them, drawing a smooth connecting line between them. Perhaps these particular years were chosen inten- tionally to emphasize di erences. Perhaps there were great uctua- tions in the intervening years of – ; we don’t know. e You’re trying to decide whether to buy stock in a new so drink and smooth lines give the impression of a perfectly linear (straight line) you come across this graph of the company’s sales gures in their function, which is very unlikely. annual report: Graphs such as this do not always tell the story that people think they do. Is there something that could account for these data, apart from a narrative that Planned Parenthood is on a mission to per- form as many abortions as it can (and to let people die of cancer at the same time)? Look at the second graph. In , Planned Parent- hood performed ,, cancer services, and , abortions, nearly seven times as many cancer services as abortions. By , this gap had narrowed, but the number of cancer services was still nearly three times the number of abortions. Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, had an explanation for this narrowing gap. Changing medical guidelines for some anti- cancer services, like Pap smears, reduced the number of people for whom screening was recommended. Other changes, such as social attitudes about abortion, changing ages of the popu- lation, and increased access to health care alternatives, all in uence is looks promising—Peachy Cola is steadily increasing its sales. these numbers, and so the data presented do not prove that Planned So far, so good. But a little bit of world knowledge can be applied Parenthood has a pro- abortion agenda. It might— these data are just here to good e ect. e so-drink market is very competitive. not the proof. BUY HERE Peachy Cola’s sales are increasing, but maybe not as quickly as a
9781101983829_Weaponized_TX.indd 42 1/18/17 3:29 PM WHITE TRASH
Excerpted from White Trash by Nancy Isenberg Copyright © 2016 by Nancy Isenberg. Excerpted by permission of Viking. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Clinton’s embarrassing second term didn’t seem to provide lessons, insofar as the Republicans plunged ahead with their own (effectively) white trash candidate in 2008, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The devastatingly direct Frank Rich of the New York Times referred to the Republican ticket as “Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage.” Did the venerable John McCain of Arizona, ordinarily a savvy politician, have a lapse in judgment here? Slate produced an online video of Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, painting it as a forgettable wasteland, a place “to get gas and pee” before getting back on the road. Wasilla was elsewhere described as the “punch line for most redneck jokes told in Anchorage.” Erica Jong wrote in theHuffington Post, “White trash America certainly has allure for voters,” which explains the photoshopped image of Palin that appeared on the Internet days after her nomination. In a stars-and- stripes bikini, holding an assault rifle and wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses, Palin was one-half hockey mom and one-half hot militia babe.
News of the pregnancy of Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol led to a shotgun engagement to Levi Johnston, which was arranged in time for the Republican National Convention. Us Weekly featured Palin on the cover, with the provocative title, “Babies, Lies, and Scandal.” Maureen Dowd compared Palin to Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady fame, in getting prepped for her first off-script television interview. Could there be any more direct allusion to her questionable class origins? The Palin melodrama led one journalist to associate the Alaska clan with the plot of a Lifetime television feature. The joke was proven true to life two years later, when the backwoods candidate gave up her gig as governor and starred in her own reality TV show, titled Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
Palin’s candidacy was a remarkable event on all accounts. She was only the second female of any kind and the first female redneck to appear on a presidential ticket. John McCain’s advisers admitted that she had been selected purely for image purposes, and they joined the chorus trashing the flawed candidate after Obama’s historic victory. Leaks triggered a media firestorm over Palin’s wardrobe expense account. An angry aide categorized the Palins’ shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”
The Alaskan made an easy and attractive target. Journalists were flabbergasted when she showed no shame in displaying astounding lapses in knowledge. Her bungled interview with NBC host Katie Couric represented more than gotcha journalism: Palin didn’t just misconstrue facts; she came across as a woman who was unable to articulate a single complex idea. (The old cracker slur as “idle-headed” seemed to fit.) But neither did Andrew Jackson run as an “idea man” in an earlier century, and it was his style of backcountry hubris that McCain’s staffers had been hoping to revive. Shooting wolves from a small plane, bragging about her love of moose meat, “Sarah from Alaska” positioned herself as a regular Annie Oakley on the campaign trail.
It was not enough to rescue her from the mainstream (what she self-protectively called “lamestream”) media. Sarah Palin did not have a self-made woman’s résumé. She could not offset the “white trash” label as the Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton could. She had attended six unremarkable colleges. She had no military experience (à la navy veteran Jimmy Carter), though she did send one son off to Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker, Sam Tanenhaus was struck by Palin’s self-satisfied manner: “the certitude of being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.”
Maureen Dowd quipped that Palin was a “country-music queen without the music.” She lacked the self- deprecating humor of Dolly Parton—not to mention the natural talent. The real conundrum was why, even more than how, she was chosen: the white trash Barbie was at once visually appealing and disruptive, and she came from a state whose motto on license plates read, “The Last Frontier.” The job was to package the roguish side of Palin alongside a comfortable, conventional female script. In the hit country single “Redneck Woman” (2004), Gretchen Wilson rejected Barbie as an unreal middle-class symbol— candidate Palin’s wardrobe bingeing was her Barbie moment.
Her Eliza Doolittle grand entrance came during the televised debate with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. As the nation waited to see what she looked like and how she performed, Palin came onstage in a little black dress, wearing heels and pearls, and winked at the camera. From the neck down she looked like a Washington socialite, but the wink faintly suggested a gum-chewing waitress at a small-town diner. Embodying these two extremes, the fetching hockey mom image ultimately lost out to what McCain staffers identified as both “hillbilly” and “prima donna.”
Sex formed a meaningful subtext throughout Palin’s time of national exposure. In terms of trash talk, daughter Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was handled rather differently from Bill Clinton’s legendary philandering. Bloggers muddied the waters by spreading rumors about Sarah’s Down syndrome child, Trig: “Was he really Bristol’s?” they asked. A tale of baby swapping was meant to suggest a new twist on the backwoods immorality of inbred illegitimacy. Recall that it was Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia, whose pedigree most troubled the critics. The legacy held: the rhetoric supporting eugenics (and the sterilization laws that followed) mainly targeted women as tainted breeders.
Sarah Palin’s Fargo-esque accent made her tortured speech patterns sound even worse. Former TV talk show host Dick Cavett wrote a scathing satirical piece in which he dubbed her a “serial syntax killer” whose high school English department deserved to be draped in black. He wanted to know how her swooning fans, who adored her for being a “mom like me,” or were impressed to see her shooting wolves, could explain how any of those traits would help her to govern.
We had been down this road before as citizens and voters. “Honest Abe” Lincoln was called an ape, a mudsill, and Kentucky white trash. Andrew Jackson was a rude, ill-tempered cracker. (And like Palin, his grammar was nothing to brag about.) The question loomed: At what point does commonness cease to be an asset, as a viable form of populism, and become a liability for a political actor? And should anyone be shocked when voters are swept up in an “almost Elvis-sized following,” as Cavett said Palin’s were? When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.
BUY HERE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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THE VERY GOOD GOSPEL BY LISA SHARON HARPER
Shalom and Race
August 22, 2014. I pull my rental car into the parking lot of Three Kings Public House across the street from Washington University in St. Louis. I’m here to talk with evangelical faith leaders about what had happened twenty minutes away on August 9. As he walked home from a convenience store in the suburb of Fergu- son, eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer. Brown’s body lay in the middle of the street for four and a half hours. The officer involved, Darren Wilson, filed a nearly blank inci- dent report. But the account given by police chief Jon Belmar conflicted with various eye-witness reports. Candlelight vigils turned violent. Young people from the area took to the streets in protest. The Ferguson Police Department brought out military-grade vehicles, equipment, and weapons in an effort to contain the protests. Tear-gas canisters were fired into the crowd. Demonstrators were ordered off the streets. News reporters were as- saulted. The Missouri State Highway Patrol took over security, and after one night of quiet, violent clashes broke out again.
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I followed the events on the news and didn’t sleep for a week. A single question haunted me: With so many white and multiethnic evangelical churches in St. Louis, why weren’t there more white people and other non- African American ethnicities marching with the people of Ferguson? I landed in St. Louis on Wednesday, August 20, with one primary goal: to help build a bridge between white and multiethnic churches and the movement for justice in Ferguson. Two days later, I ended a call with my boss, Jim Wallis, and walked into Three Kings pub. It was time to show the people of Ferguson they were not alone. Howie Meloch, the associate regional director of a college ministry in the area, greeted me at the door. He had assembled a number of top white, black, and Asian American leaders of evangelical churches, net- works, and ministries in St. Louis. Leroy Barber, author of Red, Brown, Yellow, Black, White—Who’s More Precious in God’s Sight?, co-facilitated the gathering. I spoke about the Genesis 1:26–27 declaration that all humanity is made in the image of God and emphasized that in the same breath, God said he would give humanity dominion. I reflected on four implications of that truth: 1. Every person in this restaurant, every person on the street, and every person in Ferguson is made in the image of God. 2. That means that, all things being equal, every person was created with the command and the capacity to exercise the Genesis 1:26–27 dominion, which means to steward or, in modern terms, to exercise agency or to lead. 3. To diminish or ignore the ability of humans to exercise domin- ion is to diminish or ignore the image of God in them. And it is to diminish or ignore God’s image on earth.
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4. The fastest and surest way to diminish the ability of humans to exercise agency is through poverty and/or oppression. Leroy Barber reflected on Isaiah 61:1–5, reminding us that Isaiah said there is one who will proclaim good news to the oppressed. He pointed out that Jesus quoted this passage in his first sermon on earth. He reminded us of the prophecy in verses 3–4: “They will be called oaks of righteous- ness. . . . They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.” Leroy mentioned that those who would take action are op- pressed, brokenhearted captives and prisoners, the ones who mourn. It is a description of the people of Ferguson. I called the pastors and other leaders to a time of reflection. Here’s the question: “Do you believe this? How does it make you feel in your gut to imagine being led to peace by the people of Ferguson?” In the discussion that followed, one forty-something leader stood, shift- ing his weight from left to right. Then he leaned against a wall, as if asking it to hold him up. He looked at me, as if asking permission to speak. I nod- ded. Then he stood straight and spoke. “As a white man,” he said, “I have been taught I was created to lead everyone else.” Another St. Louis faith leader confessed, “It never even occurred to me that I would be led by the people of Ferguson. It never entered my mind as a possibility.” We have believed a lie whose roots run deep in Western thought. It has shaped Western worldview, structures, legal paradigms, and the church. To glimpse the way to shalom in the arena of race, we must first understand the dimensions and outcomes of this lie. To do that we must clarify terms and understand how they intersect with or contradict biblical teaching.
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Ethnicity, Culture, Nationality, and the Tower of Babel
Race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality often are used as interchangeable words, but each one has a different shade of meaning. They have different origins, purposes, and outcomes. And in truth, there is no universally ac- cepted definition for any of these terms. What I’m going to share are the ways I’ve come to understand them after training and teaching on justice and racial healing for twenty years. Ethnicity is biblical (Hebrew: goy or am; Greek: ethnos). Ethnicity is created by God as people groups move together through space and time. Ethnicity is dynamic and developed over long periods of time. It is not about power. It is about group identity, heri- tage, language, place, and common group Ethnicity is God’s experience over time. Ethnicity is the differ- very good intention ence between African American, Caribbean, for humanit y. British African, Irish, Irish American, Ko- rean, Korean American, English, Anglo-American, Polish, Polish Ameri- can, and so forth. Ethnicity is God’s very good intention for humanity. Culture is implicit in Scripture, but the word itself is never used. Cul- ture is a sociological and anthropological term that refers to the beliefs, norms, rituals, arts, and worldviews of particular people groups in a particu- lar place at a particular time. Culture is fluid. Nationality indicates the sovereign nation/state where an individual is a legal citizen. It is a geopolitical category determined by the legal structures of the state. I tend to think the best indicator of nationality is the birth cer- tificate or passport the individual holds. Many English translations of the Bible translate the Hebrew and Greek
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words for ethnicity as “nation,” but we must understand that nation-states the way that we understand them, as territorially and politically drawn areas of geography with a shared government, did not exist prior to the late eigh- teenth century. Nation-states are a modern construct. Before the modern era, people organized themselves around ethnic tribes, clans, and ethnically based empires.
The Tower of Babel The first uses of the Hebrew wordgoy (foreign ethnic group) in Genesis are instructive. The word is found in the list of Noah’s descendants, commonly called the Table of Nations (see Genesis 10). The word is found next in the story of the Tower of Babel (see Genesis 11). Most scholars now understand that the same company of priests that wrote Genesis 1 also wrote the Table of Nations in chapter 10, while the writer of Genesis 2 also wrote Genesis 11. In the same way that Genesis 1 offers a sweeping account of creation and Genesis 2 offers a more detailed and separate account, the Table of Nations offers a sweeping foretelling of the fulfillment of the mandate to multiply and fill the earth and the Tower of Babel story offers a more specific and separate account of how the mandate was fulfilled. Before the Tower of Babel was destroyed, “the whole earth had one language and the same words” (Genesis 11:1). The people gathered there had come from the east to the land of Shinar, where they settled. Shinar exhibits the major characteristics of empire: a single trade language and a commitment to erecting tall buildings and monuments despite the oppres- sion and exploitation of slave labor. The enslaved laborers were working with materials—brick and
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bitumen—that are dangerous when erecting such a large structure. Brick is man-made and it crumbles over time. Bitumen, similar to tar, is an asphalt-like substance used to hold the bricks together, something like mor- tar or cement. A survey of monuments that have lasted throughout the ages confirms that structures built using stone on stone are the sturdiest and longest lasting. A structure of brick and bitumen eventually will crumble. It is an unstable construction method. In an act of care for human life, God intervened by confusing the people’s language. Jehovah scattered them lest they bring great destruction on more and more people. More than any other, this text lays the foundations for understanding God’s good intentions for shalom, ethnicity, and culture. Walter Bruegge- mann explains in his commentary Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Com- mentary for Teaching and Preaching that the scattering of the peoples was not a curse, as some have interpreted it. It was a blessing.1 As they were scattered, the people would settle in a wider area, hav- ing the chance to fulfill the basic human call to multiply and fill the earth. They would develop separate languages, cultures, and worldviews. And each group would experience distinct trials and triumphs and develop core strengths and weaknesses as a result. Their various ethnic heritages would be forged through common experiences of life together. According to Brueggemann, God’s kind of unity will be achieved as all parts of the diverse human family “look to and respond to God” from their respective corners of the world.2 As counterintuitive as it sounds, the confusion of languages was from God. Like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 2, the reality that humanity speaks a multiplicity of languages cannot be dealt with successfully without God. Like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
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and Evil, the confusion of languages serves as a reminder of our limitations. It draws us back to God, beckoning us to find shalom between ethnic groups in and through God.
The Way of God In the person of Jesus, we see God incarnate crossing the ethnic boundaries of his day. He conversed with the Samaritan woman, the demoniac, the Syrophoenician woman, and the Roman centurion. On the cross, the tablet above Jesus’s head—King of the Jews—was written in several languages as a taunt, mocking a supposed king. But the tablet actually made it possible for Jesus to cross ethnic and lingual barriers even in death. When the Holy Spirit was released among God’s people (see Acts 2: 1–13), the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel was reversed. Men and women who did not share a common language were suddenly speaking and understanding unfamiliar languages. God was indicting imperial rule, which demands the exclusion of ethnic identity to consolidate a dominant culture. Instead, the Spirit of God maintained lingual and thus cultural and ethnic diversity while at the same time making it possible for disparate groups to understand one another. Paul pointed to Jesus’s power to reconcile Jews and Gentiles, bitter ethnic enemies, as an example of the power of the Resurrection. “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14). In the Temple, a wall separated the Gentile court from the Jews. A writ- ten warning told Gentiles not to cross beyond that point upon the pain of death. That’s hostility.
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But Jesus broke down that wall. When he beat death, he began the re- versal of the Fall. Having overcome the one power that all humanity must encounter, he ensured he could beat all other powers of division and separa- tion, including the power of ethnic enmity. What might our churches look like if we believed and practiced this? What dividing walls of hostility would fall? What policies and structures would be transformed? How might our desire to be safe—keeping ethni- cally and culturally insulated, protected from critique, challenge, and change—be transformed by encounters with the living God? How much more of Jesus would people of faith experience if they allowed him to break down walls of ethnic and cultural difference? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours—if not the most segregated hour—in Christian America.” Perhaps churches have committed themselves to build- ing and maintaining Towers of Babel. Towers of Babel require efficiency, uniformity, a single language, and a dominant culture. They are enemies of the image of God on earth, yet the church continues to study the Tower of Babel user manual so it can build bigger, brighter, more efficient monu- ments. I believe that the call of God to the church in these days is to dis- mantle Babel. Return to worshiping communities rooted in place, where power is shared. In such places, the image of God and the capacity to exer- cise dominion in all cultures and languages are affirmed and cultivated.
Metro Hope Tucked in the northeast corner of gentrifying Spanish Harlem, in Upper Manhattan, Metro Hope Church was founded in 2007. It is a diverse con-
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gregation with ninety worshipers on a good Sunday, and it is surrounded by historic black megachurches, Hispanic megachurches, and affluent white church plants. The church plants are commissioned by white megachurches with the goal of ministering to the needy who live above 125th Street—or to minister to those who migrate there to gentrify the area. New York City is incredibly diverse while also achieving in 2011 the rank of second-most-segregated city in a study conducted by CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan.3 While most New York churches cater to single ethnic groups, Metro Hope is roughly 40 percent African American, 35 percent Latino, 20 percent White, and 5 percent Asian/Pacific Islander. Reverend José Humphreys, an Afro-Puerto Rican pastor in the area, leads his faith community through the “mindful practice of seeing one an- other through the eyes of Christ.” Sunday morning worship is infused with Harlem’s jazz fusion spirit. I visited the church soon after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner. The congregation’s white associate pastor, Stephen Tickner, preached the sermon and moved directly into the fray of public policy and the biblical call to justice. In fact, Tickner, Humphreys, and others on Metro Hope’s leader- ship team were among the leaders who organized faith communities to join the massive protest marches that shut down the West Side Highway in Man- hattan the night the decision not to indict was announced. During the week, the Metro Hope community’s leadership team might host a transformative group dialogue on an issue of race, ethnicity, culture, or justice; sponsor an event to harvest the church’s community garden; hang out at a local coffee shop to help support indigenous businesses; or start dialogue among the members of the church’s intentional living community.
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To Metro Hope, subverting Babel looks like planting seeds of shalom in the lives of its parishioners through radical community, hospitality, and commitment to the personal, social, economic, and cultural flourishing of their city.4 That brings us to race.
Race, Dominion, and the Image of God Race is about power—in biblical terms, dominion. As a political construct, race was created by humans to determine who can exercise power within a governing structure and to guide decisions regarding how to allocate re- sources. Racial categories do change over time, but only as governments refine language. Plato’s The Republic (360 BCE) laid the foundations for the Western belief in human hierarchy. According to Plato, God created a class hierarchy determined by “racial” categories delineated by the kind of metal people were made of: gold, silver, iron, or brass. Each “race” was ordained to hold different stations in society. Book VIII laid the foundations for the belief that the mixing of the races would lead to destruction.5 Fast-forward to 1452. Pope Nicholas V paved the way for the Portu- guese slave trade in West Africa when he authorized Alfonzo V of Portugal to perpetually enslave anyone not Christian, especially Muslims. Three years later, the same pope issued the papal bull Romanus Pontifex, declaring that Catholic nations had the right to “discover” and claim dominion over non-Christian lands. The bull also encouraged the enslavement of the in- digenous peoples of conquered lands.6 Fast-forward to the Enlightenment era. In 1767, Swedish botanist Carl
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Linnaeus, founder of botany’s taxonomy of fauna, published the twelfth edition of his Systema Naturae, which defined the first taxonomy of human racial hierarchy based on skin color. Twenty years later, the US Congress made official what the courts of the American colonies had already established by precedent. The newly formed United States of America enacted the racialization of power. Con- gress passed the three-fifths compromise, which increased the number of members in the House of Representatives who represented districts in the slave states. Congress determined that each enslaved person would be counted as three-fifths of a human being. Congress members from the North had argued that slaves should not be factored into the populations of slave states. With the compromise, however, Congress declared that black people would be counted, but as less than human. Three years later Northerners got their way on the first national census in 1790. Enslaved black people were listed as chattel—nonhuman property— along with pitchforks and horses. In the same year, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, which declared that only free white men could become naturalized citizens. This was significant because only citizens can vote, and voting is the most basic form of the exercise of dominion. Other forms of dominion, such as the capacity to steward, to exercise agency, and to lead, hinge on this basic right. With this law in place, for the next century new immigrants to the United States could be legally categorized as white. In 1922, the US Supreme Court heard the case of Mr. Takao Ozawa, a Japanese man who argued that Japanese people are white. Ozawa had been in the country for twenty years and wanted to become naturalized. He had been blocked by the Naturalization Act of 1906, which restricted
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naturalization to free white people and people of African descent. The court denied Ozawa’s claim to whiteness and, with it, his chances of becoming a citizen. We see our nation’s struggle to define race in changing categories used when a national census is conducted. In the first US census in 1790, racial categories included free white, free other, and slave. Thirty years later, racial categories were expanded to include free colored and foreigners (not natu- ralized). And every ten years following 1830, our country has struggled to adjust its racial categories to match the growing complexity of our people groups. By 2010, the census revealed the absurdity of the fundamental category of race. In that census, race, ethnicity, and nationality were com- bined into a single category of race.7 The 1850 census took place at the height of the American slave trade and in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, which called slave masters to free their slaves. The census that year sought to capture the realities of an increasingly complex human land- scape. According to a report on Census.gov, the 1850 Free Inhabitants schedule listed races as white, black, or mulatto (mixed). The schedule had a separate question regarding place of origin, and there was a completely separate schedule for slaves. The slave schedule delineated race using two categories, black or mulatto. Chinese men from Canton Province began arriving in the United States to work for the Central Pacific Railroad in 1850. By 1868, twelve thousand Chinese men worked for the company. The 1870 census responded by adding Chinese to the list of races. The category incorporated all people of Eastern descent. In this year, the census incorporated the category Indian for Native American but only counted assimilated peoples living in or near white communities. In 1890, eight years after the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the census delineated be-
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tween Chinese and Japanese. It also attempted to capture the complexity of mixed-race heritage by adding quadroon and octoroon to the list of races. A review of the 2010 census shows the categories Hispanic, Latino, and Spanish ethnic origin, with an option to write in one’s nation of origin. The census lists “racial” categories, and respondents choose one or more catego- ries, which were white, “black, African am., or Negro,” “American Indian or Alaska Native—Print name of enrolled or principal tribe,” Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, “Other Asian—Print race, for example Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on,” Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, “Other Pacific Islander—Print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on,” “Some other race—Print race.” Why does the federal government ask for the nations of origin for Asian and Latino people, tribal affiliation for American Indian people, and in- clude “African American” (a specific ethnic group within the racial category “black”) but does not ask “white” people to identify their ethnicity or nation of origin? It’s because of power. The only racial category on the national census that did not change from 1790 to 2010 was “white.” In the United States, whiteness is the In the United centerpiece around which all else revolves. That States, whiteness was and is intentional. In 1751, Benjamin is the centerpiece Franklin argued to the British ministry that due around which all to the shrinking percentage of white people on else revolves. earth, America should be kept an exclusively Anglo-Saxon colony to protect the race.8 In the years following the estab- lishment of our nation, the founders followed Franklin’s lead and white
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became the identity of power.9 Race is inherently about power, and white- ness was created to define who would wield it. The core lie of Western civilization is that God reserved the power of dominion for some, not all. Since the Enlightenment era, that lie has been racialized. With the founding of our nation, racialized dominion was made law with one resounding message: God reserved the right of dominion for white people and no one else.
Implicit Bias Across the centuries, the image of God has been breached throughout the world. The breach is the result of what psychologists call explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) ethnic bias. Explicit bias laid foundations for the international slave trade, the annihilation of indigenous peoples on every continent, and the establishment of racial hierarchy. Explicit bias built the systems we continue to operate under in America. Implicit (unconscious) racial bias, meanwhile, looks at our broken world and says, “Things are as they should be.” Implicit bias is what the mind does when it makes quick associations in order to shorten its thought processes. For example, when encountering a table, the mind does not say It has four legs and a plank, therefore it is a table. It just looks at the object and immediately associates it with table. Unconscious association is a normal part of brain functionality. But in our racialized society, we have learned to make unconscious associa- tions with whiteness and blackness and other people of color. The study of implicit racial bias has revealed deep-seated beliefs about people of European descent and African descent. Millions of people have taken the Implicit Association Test, created by Project Implicit, a collabora-
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tion between scientists at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the Uni- versity of Washington, to discern their levels of implicit bias. Seventy-five percent of respondents have tested positive for some level of bias in favor of whiteness and against blackness. That means 75 percent of people tested associate factors such as goodness, high leadership capacity, benevolence, truthfulness, high financial standing, and lack of criminality with people who look like they are of European descent. Conversely, 75 percent associ- ate things such as badness, low leadership capacity, lack of character, pov- erty, and criminality with people who look like they are of black African descent. What was most notable was that respondents across various races and ethnicities had the same implicit biases. It also didn’t matter if they had dedicated their lives to fighting racism and injustice. Seventy-five percent of all respondents tested positive for implicit bias in favor of whiteness.10 The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University discovered that implicit bias impacts every level of the justice sys- tem, from first encounters with police to the decision whether to arrest, shoot, or release a detained person. Implicit bias impacts the booking process, the quality and content of legal defense, judge selection, a jury’s perceptions of the defendant, and sentencing. The Kirwan study also found that implicit bias impacts the way teachers treat students, the way properties are valued— impacting school funding—and even the way health care functions.11 From Plato to mass incarceration, the belief that certain people were created to rule and others were created to be ruled has been so deeply in- grained in our collective worldview that we don’t question these disparities. Implicit bias tells us things are as they should be. Unjust systems and struc- tures remain in place because the people do not demand a better world. But that is not what God has called us to.
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Baptism
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul wrote, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:27–28). These words became the first baptismal liturgy of the church. Baptism, as a result, connected the outward demonstration of washing clean to the inner cleansing of all implicit and explicit biases that were entrenched within the systems and structures of both Roman and Jewish society. Roman imperial systems and structures were built in part on Plato’s belief in human hierarchy. But Christian baptism, from the start, erased the power differentials. This celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection re- minds us to see, protect, and cultivate the image of God in the other—to recognize and cultivate the other’s capacity to exercise dominion. This was radical teaching in Paul’s day. It remains so today.
Washing Clean What does it look like to be washed clean of twenty-first-century implicit bias? Here are practices that research has shown help cleanse people of im- plicit racial bias.
Become Aware Take the Implicit Association Test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ education.html (or Google “Implicit Association Test”) and choose the Race IAT (Race Implicit Association Test). This test measures how hard we have to work to undo the associations the test puts into our subcon-
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scious. Not having to work that hard indicates the bias wasn’t as strong to begin with. If it takes longer, then the participant started out with a stron- ger bias.
Grow Your Empathy Listen to the stories of people who do not share your ethnicity. Read books and articles written by them. Watch movies by them and about them. The practice of placing ourselves in the shoes of others lowers the presence of unconscious bias.
Immerse Yourself Increase and deepen relationships with people who do not share your eth- nicity. When people build relationships with people they previously were biased against, their unconscious bias levels go down. In their book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, Mi- chael Emerson and Christian Smith reported on a sociological study they conducted. They found that the only way worldviews changed was for an individual to be immersed in communities populated by people the indi- vidual had been biased against.12
Take Every Thought Captive Paul talked about taking every thought captive to gain the mind of Christ. This also works to lower implicit-bias scores. Researchers refer to it as chang- ing habits of mind. They recommend that we focus on a person’s unique traits as opposed to his or her group affiliation. I’ve been practicing some- thing like this for the past year. When I’m talking with someone and am tempted to write the person off as “just a [fill in the blank],” I look the person in the eyes (if I can) and remember that the image of God lives inside
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the person. Then I sit in that truth. Suddenly, the person becomes fully human to me, with stories, histories, dreams, struggles, joys, and strengths.
Forsake Race It is impossible to live justly within a manufactured system that was built with the purpose of defining who has power and who doesn’t. That system runs counter to the ways of God. What would it look like for white Jesus followers to renounce their racial affiliation, to no longer accept the power and privilege allotted through the current system? Or to leverage it for the sake of others? And what kind of new world could we build if all of us on American soil—all of us—replaced race with our ethnic heritage (ethnos) rooted in place, language, and community? We would remember the his- tory, study the ways race broke our world, and build the future that corrects its impacts. We would refuse to be defined by a lie. Then, perhaps, we would experience more of the power of the Resurrection as we brought our whole selves and the living power of the Resurrection into multiethnic com- munity with our neighbors, in our schools, in our hospitals, in our courts, and in the public square.
Black Lives Matter The Black Lives Matter movement exploded after the 2014 death of Mi- chael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The movement was born as a hashtag in 2013. Three queer and cisgender black women crafted it in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin. The #BlackLivesMatter movement spread like wildfire as reports of police kill- ings of unarmed black men, women, and children appeared on news outlets
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almost daily. As of late 2015, the Washington Post recorded ninety police killings of unarmed people in just that one year. As mentioned earlier, thirty- five of the victims (40 percent) were black men, though black men make up only 6 percent of the US population. The Black Lives Matter movement is led by young black people because they are the ones most likely to face down a police officer aiming a gun. While the Black Lives Matter movement is secular in origin, I find its organizing principles quite biblical. Isaiah 61: Oaks of Righteousness. The first organizing principle is that young black people must always be up-front, leading any Black Lives Matter initiative. This falls in line with the prophet Isaiah’s admonition, “They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devasta- tions; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many genera- tions” (61:3–4). Isaiah was referring to the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captives, and the prisoners. They will restore and repair the ruins. Matthew 25: The Least of These. If you watch newsreels reporting on the marches of the civil rights era, most show black people dressed in their Sunday best to march down the street. Men wore suits; women wore white gloves and heels to march on blistering asphalt. Rosa Parks was chosen to sit down in the white section of a city bus as an act of nonviolent civil disobedi- ence in Montgomery, Alabama. She was chosen, in large part, because she was so “respectable” in the eyes of white people. She was an unassuming, light-skinned maid from a working-class family. This tactic worked in its time. People were appalled when they saw this respectable maid being booked by the Montgomery police. Likewise, the nation was aghast when they witnessed the brutality of Alabama state troopers who beat protestors on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. The politics of respectability
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turned the nation’s sympathy toward black people by humanizing them in the eyes of white people. The problem was that the benefits of the civil rights movement were largely enjoyed by only the most respectable among black people—the black middle class. By and large, poor black people were shut out of the gains and suffered the brunt of America’s war on drugs and mass incarcera- tion. In response, a central organizing principle of Black Lives Matter orga- nizers is to forsake the politics of respectability. Jesus identified with the least among us, and unless we are actively loving the one with the least ac- cess to food and water, the least access to health care, the least access to good housing and education, the least access to justice within the justice system, the least access to a welcome in the immigration system—unless we are actively loving the least-deserving among these, then we are not lov- ing Jesus. Jesus shunned the politics of respectability when he aligned with the least of these. Genesis 1:26–27: Dominion. What does it look like to become an ac- complice in the Black Lives Matter movement? It looks like being sub- merged in the cleansing waters of Christ and rising with new eyes able to see. It means being ready to fan the flames of the image of God within young black leaders and other leaders of color. It looks like believing they are made in the image of God, made with the inherent call and capacity to exercise dominion. Young leaders of color are capable of leading us all into a better world. For white people this will mean entering the movement as learners, allies, or accomplices who leverage the privilege and resources they have for the building up of the movement. For people of color, this will mean rising up and leaning into their God-given call to lead us all to a bet- ter world. It will mean learning all they can from books and gleaning what
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they can from the elders. It will mean addressing and seeking their own healing from the deep wounds of oppression. And it will mean stewarding the well-being of all. For clergy and other faith leaders, it will mean offering ourselves as chaplains, foot soldiers, safe havens, and resources of the move- ment for a better world.
Repair The institution of race broke America at its foundations. It will not be enough to tinker here and there. We need to envision a new way of being together. Fundamentally, this will mean the interrogation of all our assump- tions about how our society should be. It will mean imagining a world where everyone—especially the least of these—has enough to thrive. It will mean a world where all at least have good enough education, good enough housing, good enough health care, good enough access to justice in the justice system, good enough protection of the right to vote, and good enough welcome to feel the embrace of the nation in order to thrive here. To find the folks working toward repair in your town, city, or state, do a Google search. Search a category—such as housing, education, employment, voting rights—plus the word organizing or equity plus the name of your town, city, or state. For example, “Education Equity Minneapolis.” Click and a list of groups moving policies toward a more just education system will pop up. Search “Environmental Justice Organizing New York City” and a long list of groups will pop up. Once you do the search, show up. Once you show up, follow the lead of the people who are already there. That’s how you become an ally/accomplice to the movement to repair what race broke. Here’s an easy way to remember it: Search. Find. Show Up. Follow.
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Reflection Exercise
Let’s close with the reflection exercise that I led faith leaders through in St. Louis. . 1 Close your eyes. . 2 Remember Isaiah’s statement that it will be the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captives, and the imprisoned who will repair the ruined cities and the devastations of many generations. . 3 Imagine yourself being led by the oppressed in your town, city, and state. . 4 How does it feel in your gut to imagine following the lead of the least of these? . 5 Be brutally honest with yourself. Do you believe the Scripture? . 6 If not, then confess your unbelief to God, and ask God to help you believe. Then work through the “Washing Clean” section in this chapter. . 7 If you believe, then ask God to guide your steps as you enter the movement to repair what race broke in America.
BUY HERE
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