OCTOBER 2020 THEATLANTIC.COM

Making Again Danielle Allen, George Packer, and Adam Serwer on how to build a more perfect union MAKING AMERICA AGAIN OCTOBER 2020 THEATLANTIC.COM

1020_Cover [Print]_14115377.indd 1 8/17/2020 4:19:49 PM

Will the world always be this unpredictable? Will my portfolio weather the storm? How can I be sure?

For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone. 5PHFUIFSXFDBOÎOEBOBOTXFS

"TBŖSNQSPWJEJOHXFBMUINBOBHFNFOUTFSWJDFTUPDMJFOUT 6#4'JOBODJBM4FSWJDFT*ODPšFSTJOWFTUNFOUBEWJTPSZTFSWJDFTJOJUTDBQBDJUZBTBO 4&$SFHJTUFSFEJOWFTUNFOUBEWJTFSBOECSPLFSBHFTFSWJDFTJOJUTDBQBDJUZBTBO4&$SFHJTUFSFECSPLFSEFBMFS*OWFTUNFOUBEWJTPSZTFSWJDFTBOE CSPLFSBHFTFSWJDFTBSFTFQBSBUFBOEEJTUJODU EJšFSJONBUFSJBMXBZTBOEBSFHPWFSOFECZEJšFSFOUMBXTBOETFQBSBUFBSSBOHFNFOUT*UJT JNQPSUBOUUIBUDMJFOUTVOEFSTUBOEUIFXBZTJOXIJDIXFDPOEVDUCVTJOFTT UIBUUIFZDBSFGVMMZSFBEUIFBHSFFNFOUTBOEEJTDMPTVSFTUIBUXF QSPWJEFUPUIFNBCPVUUIFQSPEVDUTPSTFSWJDFTXFPšFS'PSNPSFJOGPSNBUJPO QMFBTFSFWJFXUIF1%'EPDVNFOUBUVCTDPNSFMBUJPOTIJQ TVNNBSZh6#4"MMSJHIUTSFTFSWFE6#4'JOBODJBM4FSWJDFT*ODJTBTVCTJEJBSZPG6#4"(.FNCFS'*/3"4*1$ Will the world always be this unpredictable? Will my portfolio weather the storm? How can I be sure?

For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone. 5PHFUIFSXFDBOÎOEBOBOTXFS

"TBŖSNQSPWJEJOHXFBMUINBOBHFNFOUTFSWJDFTUPDMJFOUT 6#4'JOBODJBM4FSWJDFT*ODPšFSTJOWFTUNFOUBEWJTPSZTFSWJDFTJOJUTDBQBDJUZBTBO 4&$SFHJTUFSFEJOWFTUNFOUBEWJTFSBOECSPLFSBHFTFSWJDFTJOJUTDBQBDJUZBTBO4&$SFHJTUFSFECSPLFSEFBMFS*OWFTUNFOUBEWJTPSZTFSWJDFTBOE CSPLFSBHFTFSWJDFTBSFTFQBSBUFBOEEJTUJODU EJšFSJONBUFSJBMXBZTBOEBSFHPWFSOFECZEJšFSFOUMBXTBOETFQBSBUFBSSBOHFNFOUT*UJT JNQPSUBOUUIBUDMJFOUTVOEFSTUBOEUIFXBZTJOXIJDIXFDPOEVDUCVTJOFTT UIBUUIFZDBSFGVMMZSFBEUIFBHSFFNFOUTBOEEJTDMPTVSFTUIBUXF QSPWJEFUPUIFNBCPVUUIFQSPEVDUTPSTFSWJDFTXFPšFS'PSNPSFJOGPSNBUJPO QMFBTFSFWJFXUIF1%'EPDVNFOUBUVCTDPNSFMBUJPOTIJQ TVNNBSZh6#4"MMSJHIUTSFTFSWFE6#4'JOBODJBM4FSWJDFT*ODJTBTVCTJEJBSZPG6#4"(.FNCFS'*/3"4*1$ This content was created by Atlantic Re:think, the branded content studio at ,Atlantic, andand mademade possiblepossible SPONSOR CONTENT SPONSOR CONTENT by the Alzheimer’s Association. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorialeditorial staff.staff. The Pandemic’s Hidden Victims

Nursing homes and other When Don Petersen last visited his wife, Judi, they binge-watched classic TV shows assisted-living communities together. He didn’t realize at the time that have become COVID-19 those episodes of I Love Lucy and The Andy hot spots, garnering Griffith Show would mark the beginning of a months-long forced separation from his headlines across the country. spouse of 55 years. Before the COVID-19 pan- But many don’t know that demic, Petersen visited his wife five days a people with Alzheimer’s and week at the Portland, Oregon, assisted-liv- ing community where she receives care for other dementias in those Alzheimer’s disease. Now those visits have It doesn’t have to be this way, experts at communities like never before,” says Rob- As the Alzheimer’s Association con- communities are especially stopped entirely. the Alzheimer’s Association note. The ert Egge, chief public-policy officer of the tinues to advocate for long-term care Petersen fears that his 76- vulnerable—and they need nonprofit recently issued a set of policy Alzheimer’s Association. communities, residents and their loved year-old wife could decline if recommendations that calls on state and Individuals with Alzheimer’s in such ones are doing their best to get by in trying more support. her loved ones continue to keep federal lawmakers to provide more sup- communities are particularly vulnerable. circumstances. Dan Goerke, for one, uses their distance. She’s not the only port for nursing homes and assisted-living More than 95 percent of people with Alz- FaceTime and does window visits to stay in one at risk. People with demen- communities during the pandemic. If they heimer’s and other forms of dementia have touch with his wife, Denise, who was diag- tia, including Alzheimer’s, make had the resources to accelerate COVID-19 an additional chronic health condition— nosed with Alzheimer’s in 2012 and now up 48 percent of the population testing, immediately report cases to public such as diabetes, heart disease, or hyper- resides at an -area assisted-living in nursing homes and 42 percent health officials, and deploy “strike teams” tension—which increases the likelihood of community. “COVID has absolutely had a of the population in long-term to virus hot spots, these communities complications from COVID-19. Dementia, downward effect on Denise,” Goerke says. care communities. For this could allow families to reunite sooner than meanwhile, makes it more challenging for While Goerke says Denise’s mood has group, isolation during the later. “If we had testing, then family mem- these individuals to protect themselves been improving lately, he suspects she pandemic is a serious bers could come visit,” says Beth Kallmyer, from the disease, because it renders them won’t be back to her old self until they’re health issue. MSW, vice president of care and support unable to discuss their needs or symptoms. reunited. He’s willing to have his tempera- for the Alzheimer’s Association. There have been signs of progress on ture taken, wear as much PPE as possible, Instead, nursing homes and assisted- this issue at the state level. Maryland, for and even have timed visits. He just doesn’t living communities remain in crisis due to instance, has been using strike teams to want his wife to be isolated. “There is so inaccurate reporting of coronavirus cases, respond to COVID-19 clusters at nursing much to just the physical touch of holding a lack of institutional transparency, and homes. Still, the Alzheimer’s Association someone’s hand that brightens their day,” insufficient access to testing equipment continues to field reports about nursing- he says. “Denise often doesn’t acknowl- and personal protective equipment (PPE). home staff bringing their own PPE to work edge the fact that I’m holding her hand or “This clearly is straining long-term care because employers aren’t able to provide it. touching her face, but I know it helps.”

Illustrations by Laura Edelbacher Learn more at TheAtlantic.com/AlzheimersandCovid This content was created by Atlantic Re:think, the branded content studio at The Atlantic,Atlantic, andand mademade possiblepossible SPONSOR CONTENT SPONSOR CONTENT by the Alzheimer’s Association. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorialeditorial staff.staff. The Pandemic’s Hidden Victims

Nursing homes and other When Don Petersen last visited his wife, Judi, they binge-watched classic TV shows assisted-living communities together. He didn’t realize at the time that have become COVID-19 those episodes of I Love Lucy and The Andy hot spots, garnering Griffith Show would mark the beginning of a months-long forced separation from his headlines across the country. spouse of 55 years. Before the COVID-19 pan- But many don’t know that demic, Petersen visited his wife five days a people with Alzheimer’s and week at the Portland, Oregon, assisted-liv- ing community where she receives care for other dementias in those Alzheimer’s disease. Now those visits have It doesn’t have to be this way, experts at communities like never before,” says Rob- As the Alzheimer’s Association con- communities are especially stopped entirely. the Alzheimer’s Association note. The ert Egge, chief public-policy officer of the tinues to advocate for long-term care Petersen fears that his 76- vulnerable—and they need nonprofit recently issued a set of policy Alzheimer’s Association. communities, residents and their loved year-old wife could decline if recommendations that calls on state and Individuals with Alzheimer’s in such ones are doing their best to get by in trying more support. her loved ones continue to keep federal lawmakers to provide more sup- communities are particularly vulnerable. circumstances. Dan Goerke, for one, uses their distance. She’s not the only port for nursing homes and assisted-living More than 95 percent of people with Alz- FaceTime and does window visits to stay in one at risk. People with demen- communities during the pandemic. If they heimer’s and other forms of dementia have touch with his wife, Denise, who was diag- tia, including Alzheimer’s, make had the resources to accelerate COVID-19 an additional chronic health condition— nosed with Alzheimer’s in 2012 and now up 48 percent of the population testing, immediately report cases to public such as diabetes, heart disease, or hyper- resides at an Atlanta-area assisted-living in nursing homes and 42 percent health officials, and deploy “strike teams” tension—which increases the likelihood of community. “COVID has absolutely had a of the population in long-term to virus hot spots, these communities complications from COVID-19. Dementia, downward effect on Denise,” Goerke says. care communities. For this could allow families to reunite sooner than meanwhile, makes it more challenging for While Goerke says Denise’s mood has group, isolation during the later. “If we had testing, then family mem- these individuals to protect themselves been improving lately, he suspects she pandemic is a serious bers could come visit,” says Beth Kallmyer, from the disease, because it renders them won’t be back to her old self until they’re health issue. MSW, vice president of care and support unable to discuss their needs or symptoms. reunited. He’s willing to have his tempera- for the Alzheimer’s Association. There have been signs of progress on ture taken, wear as much PPE as possible, Instead, nursing homes and assisted- this issue at the state level. Maryland, for and even have timed visits. He just doesn’t living communities remain in crisis due to instance, has been using strike teams to want his wife to be isolated. “There is so inaccurate reporting of coronavirus cases, respond to COVID-19 clusters at nursing much to just the physical touch of holding a lack of institutional transparency, and homes. Still, the Alzheimer’s Association someone’s hand that brightens their day,” insufficient access to testing equipment continues to field reports about nursing- he says. “Denise often doesn’t acknowl- and personal protective equipment (PPE). home staff bringing their own PPE to work edge the fact that I’m holding her hand or “This clearly is straining long-term care because employers aren’t able to provide it. touching her face, but I know it helps.”

Illustrations by Laura Edelbacher Learn more at TheAtlantic.com/AlzheimersandCovid B:16" T:15.75" L:15.25"

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The employees of Morgan Miller Plumbing pride themselves on being a small, tight-knit family, and they treat their customers the same way. ĔřđÔċŎøøŞŒĔĬøŒŒzŎIJǁĦøIJĬ Google, Morgan Miller Plumbing has been able to reach more customers. And while COVID-19 has presented new challenges, they’ve been able to adapt. More people are contacting them every week, and they’re actively looking to hire additional technicians to help meet demand. Find free resources for your small business at g.co/smallbusiness

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The employees of Morgan Miller Plumbing pride themselves on being a small, tight-knit family, and they treat their customers the same way. ĔřđÔċŎøøŞŒĔĬøŒŒzŎIJǁĦøIJĬ Google, Morgan Miller Plumbing has been able to reach more customers. And while COVID-19 has presented new challenges, they’ve been able to adapt. More people are contacting them every week, and they’re actively looking to hire additional technicians to help meet demand. Find free resources for your small business at g.co/smallbusiness

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FROM THE FRONT LINE: Crisis-Management Lessons From a New Zealand Health-Care System Canterbury District Health Board never stops working—even in tough times. Here’s how its digital transformation helped build agility and resiliency.

Illustration by Marina Muun

ANTERBURY DISTRICT HEALTH BOARD (CDHB), in New Zealand, is no stranger C to responding to crises. From treating those affected by the 2011 earthquakes and the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks to respon- ding to the recent spread of COVID-19, CDHB has repeatedly faced circumstances that tested its ability to deliver the best possible care. Yet it remained agile in handling these system shocks—a credit to both its staff and its forward- looking approach to its care infrastructure. CDHB prioritizes digital transformation, which helps the health-care system rise to the occasion in these extraordinary moments.

But what exactly does building resiliency through digital transformation look like? At CDHB, which began this journey a decade ago, it’s meant digi- tizing both internal and patient-facing processes. This not only empowers employees and stream- lines their workflows; it also reduces friction in the patient experience and enables doctors, nurses, and staff to deliver high-quality care—and, most recently, adapt to the impacts of the novel coronavirus and return to work safely.

To gain more insight into how to build a resilient organization, read the full story at: TheAtlantic.com/ServiceNow OF NO PARTY OR CLIQUE

VOL. 326–NO. 3 OCTOBER 2020 CONTENTS

Cover Stories Features 36 48 64 e Next Reconstruction Make America Again How Disaster Shaped e has its best We may be on the cusp of an era of radi- the Modern City opportunity in 150 years to fulˆll its cal reform that advances citizens’ rights, e lessons of history are clear: Vision- promise as a multiracial democracy. restores opportunity, and repairs our ary responses to calamities have changed By Adam Serwer broken democracy. urban life for the better. By George Packer By Derek ompson 58 72 e Constitution Counted Toby Dorr’s Great Escape My Great-Great-Grandfather as Ever thought about breaking free, ree-Fifths of a Free Person abandoning your responsibilities, The protest movement that erupted in response Here’s why I love it anyway. running away from your life? to the killing of may be the By Danielle Allen By Michael J. Mooney largest in American history. How far will the possibilities of this moment extend?

PHOTOGRAPH BY MEL D. COLE  

1020_FRM_TOC [Print]_14091738.indd 9 8/17/2020 6:37:54 PM OCTOBER 2020

Front Dispatches Culture & Critics Back 12 17 84 100 The Commons OPENING ARGUMENT OMNIVORE ESSAY Discussion & Debate Power Shortage Was Charlotte Dod the e Beating Pulse Women’s rights are nothing with- Greatest Athlete Ever? of Donald Judd out the power to claim them. e remarkable career of a I always thought his work was By Hillary Rodham Clinton Victorian athletic phenom intimidatingly austere, until By Helen Lewis I discovered the plenitude at its core. 22 By Leslie Jamison SKETCH 88 Mob Justice BOOKS An Italian prosecutor takes Marilynne Robinson’s 112 on his country’s most powerful Lonely Souls Ode to Small Talk crime syndicate. Her new novel explores the By James Parker By Rachel Donadio power of love and the legacy of race. 26 By Jordan Kisner POLITICS e New Southern Strategy 92 How Black in the South BOOKS are leveraging both the power Why Is the West of o„ce and the power of the So Powerful—And street to achieve overdue changes So Peculiar? By Adam Harris Cultural evolutionary theory has a startling answer. 30 By Judith Shulevitz MATERIAL WORLD 95 A Cubicle Never On the Cover Looked So Good My Industrial Work What we lose when we have An to work from home poem from 1914 By Amanda Mull 96 ILLUSTRATION BY BOOKS OLIVER MUNDAY Claudia Rankine’s Quest for Racial Dialogue Is her focus on the personal out of step with the racial politics of our moment?

By Ismail Muhammad COVER: AFP; ALEXANDER GARDNER; ARCHIVE PHOTOS; BETTMANN; BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY; CORBIS; EARL GIBSON III / WIREIMAGE; FIERCEABIN; FPG; GETTY; HULTON ARCHIVE; MATTHEW BRADY; MEL D. COLE; R. GATES

10 OCTOBER 2020

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163268_ADP111938-00_Rev.indd 1 8/5/20 12:54 PM DISCUSSION & THE COMMONS DEBATE

If nothing else, your publication and Ms. Applebaum’s words have reassured me that none of this is normal. „ ank you. Stephen Bennett Lincoln University, Pa.

What causes people to As a clinical psychologist, I was extremely impressed with abandon their principles Ms. Applebaum’s comprehen- in support of a corrupt sive and insightful discussion The of the often unconscious moti- regime?, Anne Applebaum vations that compel people Collaborators asked in the July/August to collaborate with individu- als and regimes that represent issue. And how do they  nd values inconsistent with their their way back? own. Ms. Applebaum wrote about this tendency toward conformity by discussing pairs of people, both past and present, who super‰ cially look similar and yet diverged by either taking a stand or a collabora- tor. She astutely focused on the characteristics that predict those who are courageous enough to etters be “decent”—or, as we would say in our Jewish tradition, to My wife and I (lifelong con- on him now. How could they be a “mensch.” Excellent article. servative Republicans turned seriously explain that now Rickey Miller una liated after the party left they’re o– ended or now it’s too  ornhill, Ontario us for ) typically much to be able to support? call the collaborators that Anne Even as (we believe) most of The parallels in Anne Apple- Applebaum describes “enablers,” them are realizing that Trump baum’s article to the corrupt and just tonight (before I read is dragging the party toward apartheid politicians of the the article) we were discussing a blue wave, they can’t speak past and the corrupt African different reasons they enable out. „ ey’ve made their bed, National Congress politicians Trump and what it would take and they’re stuck sleeping in of the present in South Africa for them to abandon him. We it until at least Election Day. are astounding. „ ank you for named some of the same rea- What annoys us the most is that enriching my understanding of sons Applebaum did. Another many of these collaborators or these amoral politicians. we’d add is that because they’ve enablers are going to pretend it Andre Botha M abandoned their principles and never happened when Trump Johannesburg, South Africa ignored everything else Trump ‰ nally leaves the scene. has done to this point, they see Joseph Burgess When I was growing up in Italy, no way they can justify bailing West Jordan, Utah in the 1990s, the public debate

12 OCTOBER 2020

1020_FRM_Commons [Print]_14062034.indd 12 8/18/2020 9:39:04 AM

e Commons DISCUSSION & DEBATE

was dominated by the figure Behind the Cover: Ÿis month, at a time when experiment, from the forging of the Constitution to of Silvio Berlusconi. Ÿe most the appetite for radical reform seems to be growing, Reconstruction to the New Deal to the civil-rights important thing I have learned Danielle Allen, George Packer, and Adam Serwer movement. For the cover, we created a collage of ªgures over the years is that such popu- look back at our country’s history in search of prec- and scenes from various eras of upheaval, depicting the list leaders are not divisive per se, edents, warnings, and lodestars. Ÿeir essays grapple rich multitudes that make up our union. but beneªt from the divisions with the successes and failures of the American — Oliver Munday, Senior Art Director already present in a country. By dominating the media debate through their aggressive and ele-   of buildings— spanning the home not because the the balance of the com- mentary communication, they —— a full city block—into a two- story building lacked plex as a whole. then exacerbate these divisions What we learned personal residence and a bathroom, as we had Judd opposed the and manage to turn every issue fact-checking this issue a site for large perma- originally presumed, but unnecessary destruction into an ongoing referendum nent art installations. because Judd removed the or alteration of buildings, on their leadership. Doing so, In this issue, Leslie Jami- As Jamison writes, Judd existing bathroom, which believing that historical they win. son writes about discover- renovated former o“ces he thought disrupted labor should be respected Ÿese leaders can be defeated ing plenitude in the work of the U.S. Army’s the symmetry of the when ever possible. (“In only through a strong recall to of Donald Judd, an artist Quarter master Corps into interior— as his son, Fla- most American cities and harsh reality. For Italy, the wake- who shunned the “min- a home for himself and vin, put it, “It didn’t work towns, there is little con- up call was the sovereign- debt imalist” label that was his children, building a at all for his schematic.” cern for old buildings,” he crisis of 2011. I believe that in assigned to him (p. 100). pool and constructing an But Judd didn’t stop once lamented.) But his America, this is happening with Jamison came to see external adobe bathhouse. there: He also built an desire for symmetry and the protests following the bar- Judd’s generosity after vis- During fact-checking, adobe o“ce of the same balance was tantamount. baric killing of George Floyd. iting Marfa, Texas, where, the Judd Foundation in- size as the bathhouse on Ÿe most eÃective way to beat starting in the 1970s, formed us that Judd built the opposite side of the — Stephanie Hayes, Trump is to listen to the voices Judd converted a series the bathhouse outside courtyard, to maintain Deputy Research Chief of those who are demonstrating.

Francesco Agnellini Brescia, Italy risk, particularly in real estate. Regulators seem to be looking harder now, not just at • • CLOs, but at the other shadowy trillion-dollar Q & A risks I warned about. Fingers crossed that we Correction dodge the worst-case scenario. “Anatomy of an American Fail- e rise of risky collateralized loan obligations, ure” (September) stated that or CLOs, means that the U.S. banking Q Why is this not front-page news every- studies published in e Lan- system could be on the cusp of calamity, where? Over and over again we bail out banks cet and the New England Jour- Frank Partnoy warned in the July/August issue and industries, and then we ªnd that they’ve nal of Medicine claiming that (“ e Worst Worst Case”). Here, he responds Âeeced us again. How can it stop? When will hydroxychloroquine was not to readers’ questions about the article. it stop? — Margi Swett, Burlington, Vt. eÃective in treating COVID-19 and was potentially harmful Q: To what degree would the large banks’ A Whether it was coincidence or not, were retracted in June. In fact, collapse aÃect credit unions? And do you the stocks of a number of banks with particu- the study in the New England have any advice for consumers who invest larly large CLO holdings fell sharply just Journal of Medicine concerned in stocks and mutual funds? — Ilbea Fedele, after this article was published. But you’re other drugs taken by corona- El Monte, Calif. right to ask why these questions aren’t front- virus patients. page news. Some answers: Our attention spans A Many readers wrote with these questions. are short, ªnance is complicated, we have If the Federal Reserve keeps supporting the other big worries, and bank lobbyists are To respond to Atlantic articles or markets, stocks and mutual funds might be ªne good at rebuttal and noise. Some journalists submit author questions to Ÿe Commons, please email [email protected]. even as the real economy deteriorates. Credit continue to warn about CLOs, but they rarely Include your full name, city, and state. unions deserve scrutiny as they take on more make the front page.

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 OCTOBER 2020

1020_FRM_Commons [Print]_14062034.indd 14 8/18/2020 9:39:04 AM Every vote is a voice heard

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SEPTEMBER 21-24, 2020

FOUNDING PRESENTING SUPPORTING CONTRIBUTING DISPATCHES

OPENING ARGUMENT

POWER SHORTAGE Women’s rights are human rights. But rights are nothing without the power to claim them.

B Y H I L L A R Y RODHAM CLINTON

iving speeches was not usually a prob- lem for me, but a lot was riding on this one, and I had a genuine case of nerves as I took the stage. Before me were 1,500 delegates, mainly women, of every race and ethnicity, who had traveled to Bei- jing for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. What they all had in common in that moment was a daunting impassivity. It was September 5, 1995. I had spent Gweeks writing and rewrit ing my speech.

 

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I wanted it to be bold, acces- women’s rights as separate top- end, I made my position clear: delegates rose, giving me a sible, and unambiguous. I also ics. They were one and the I was either going to travel to standing ovation, a rarity at thought hard about getting same, and I was determined to the conference as the leader of buttoned-up UN gather- the delivery right. Women are make people hear this. an o›cial American delegation, ings. As I left the hall, women often criticized if we show too Back in the U.S., the idea or I was going to buy a seat on hung over banisters to grab much emotion in public, and I of my attendance in a commercial airline and attend my hand. Some had tears in wanted to make sure my tone had been controversial. I was as a private citizen. ‰e opposi- their eyes. The declaration didn’t obscure the message. fresh off a bruising fight for tion melted away. of a simple, obvious mes- Hence, the nerves. health-care reform, a topic Now, staring out at the del- sage should perhaps not have I started talking. As I spoke, some considered far beyond egates in front of me, I had a had such a galvanizing ežect. each line was translated in real the job description of a first œeeting thought: What if this But 25 years ago, it caused time into dozens of languages, lady. A year earlier, I had been was a mistake? But if there’s shock waves. creating a gap between me and burned in effigy at a protest anything I’ve learned in life, the audience. Hundreds of against the health-care plan. it is to keep going. I spoke  , the phrase delegates stared back blankly. (Today I take this as a com- about women and girls who Women’s rights are human ‰is was my chance to change pliment; back then it stung a were working to advance edu- rights has appeared on tote the way the world thought cation, health care, economic bags, cell phone cases, needle- about women. And it didn’t independence, legal rights, point pillows, and T-shirts. I’m seem to be going well. and political participation. happy about this. But the most On the flight to Beijing, STARING With barely concealed rage, I transformative moment of the I had pored over drafts with OUT AT THE talked about the use of rape as conference wasn’t my speech. my speechwriter Lissa Mus- DELEGATES a tactic of war, and the violence It was the adoption of the IN FRONT catine and the foreign-policy OF ME, I HAD women are subjected to in their Platform for Action, whereby experts crammed into my A FLEETING own homes. representatives from all 189 cabin. Madeleine Albright, the THOUGHT: I criticized for its nations committed to “the U.S. ambassador to the United WHAT IF policy of coercive family plan- full and equal participation Nations, had asked me a sim- THIS WAS A ning. I didn’t know it at the of women in political, civil, ple question: “What do you MISTAKE? time, but the Chinese gov- economic, social, and cultural want to accomplish with this ernment cut ož the television life.” A 270-page document speech?” My answer had been feed of my speech to the rest of might not lend itself to bum- equally simple: “I want to push the convention center, where per stickers or coffee mugs, the envelope as far as I can on little.) Members of Congress thousands of people who but it laid the groundwork for behalf of women and girls.” had scoffed at the idea of an couldn’t •t into the hall were sweeping, necessary changes. I have long believed— international gathering focused watching. (A few years ago, In many ways, women supported by Everests of on women’s issues. Republican however, I got an email from are better ož than they were evidence— that relegating Senator Phil Gramm declared a friend who had been walking 25 years ago. A girl born 25 women’s health, education, that the conference was “shap- around a department store in years ago in Lesotho could and economic participation ing up as an unsanctioned Beijing when the music faded not own property or sign a to the margins of foreign and festival of anti-family, anti- and my speech started play- contract; today, she can. In domestic policy is ruinous not American sentiment.” ing over the loudspeakers. I’ve East Africa, a girl born 25 just for women, but for entire O›cials at the State Depart- always wondered what subver- years ago grew up in a region nations. ‰e Beijing conference ment were nervous: A •rst lady sive person managed that.) where female genital cutting represented a rare opportunity talking about foreign policy As I went on, I could feel was widespread; since then, to focus the world’s attention on the world stage? What if a change in the atmosphere. the practice has declined sig- on the status of women and I created some kind of inter- Delegates, even (or especially) ni•cantly. In 1995, domestic girls. I wanted to break the national incident? They were from countries I was criticiz- violence was a crime in just 13 silence about atrocities being also concerned that going to ing, were leaning forward. countries; today, it is illegal in committed in speci•c regions of Beijing would implicitly con- And then I said this: “If there more than 100. We’ve nearly the world, as well as in justices done China’s dismal human- is one message that echoes forth closed the global gender gap and abuses that are universal, rights record. I shared those from this conference, let it be in primary-school enrollment, including in developed democ- concerns (and later, when I led that human rights are women’s and maternal mortality has racies such as my own. Most the State Department, I made rights and women’s rights are dropped by more than half. of all, I wanted to argue that sure that China’s human-rights human rights, once and for all.” But the work is nowhere it was no longer acceptable to record was a focus of investiga- When I •nished, the room near done. As the changes laid talk about human rights and tion and criticism). But in the erupted into cheers. The out in the Platform for Action

 OCTOBER 2020

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ILLUSTRATION BY ARSH RAZIUDDIN  

1020_DIS_HRC_WomensPower [Print]_14028769.indd 19 8/14/2020 8:30:00 AM Dispatches

have been implemented, I was clear-eyed about the We see similar trends the issue of women’s rights what’s become clear is that difficulty of making progress around the globe. A United and opportunities in their simply embracing the concept 25 years ago, and I remain so Nations Population Fund countries. It was only when I of women’s rights, let alone today. But I am still surprised report predicted that the pan- showed them hard data and enshrining those rights in laws by the backlashes provoked by demic could well have a “cata- pointed out what nations were and constitutions, is not the women’s advancement. Again strophic impact” on women, losing economically by exclud- same as achieving full equality. and again, we’ve seen anger, with millions assuming dis- ing half their population from Rights are important, but they hostility, and sexism directed proportionate responsibility full participation that some of are nothing without the power at women who have the audac- for caregiving, unable to access them started to listen. to claim them. ity to seek power. (I have some contraception, or at risk of When women are healthier In 2017, the Women’s “rsthand experience with this.) being married oŒ or subjected and more economically secure, March brought millions to Deep-seated biases are even to genital cutting. Experts families, communities, and the streets to protest sexism harder to change than discrimi- have reported a dramatic spike entire nations are better off. and misogyny. More than a natory laws. It’s no coincidence in intimate-partner violence. Gender parity in education decade after the activist Tarana that while we’ve made progress History warns us that a global is associated with longer life Burke coined the phrase Me in areas traditionally associ- health and economic crisis can expectancies for women and too, the movement has reached ated with women, like health create pressure to push women’s men. According to one esti- every corner of the world. ‚e care and education, we’ve strug- concerns to the back burner. mate, the global economic ben- coronavirus pandemic, the gled to match that progress in Yet, even in the midst of all e“t to closing the gender gap loss of millions of jobs, and the economy, politics, and this turmoil, I still believe that in workforce participation by the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, national security. And as useful advancing the rights, opportu- 2025 could be $28 trillion. And George Floyd, and Breonna as the internet has been to femi- nities, and full participation of we’ve known for a long time Taylor, among too many oth- nist organizing, it has also cre- women and girls is the great that when women are included ers, have prompted activists to ated a platform for misogynists un“nished business of the 21st at the peace table, agreements shine a light on the injustice to spread sexist vitriol and century. Finishing this work is are more likely to be reached, and inequality facing com- disinformation. the right and moral thing to and to be longer lasting. munities of color, especially Today, the pandemic is do—and it is also an urgent Conversely, a study by Black women. All of this has exacerbating some of the most strategic imperative. We need Valerie Hudson, Donna Lee a lot to do with rights, but it’s insidious and pervasive inequi- a global commitment to chang- Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne also about something more. It’s ties women face. In the U.S., ing laws and policies, and to Nielsen found that subordina- about power: who has it, who women—who are already more transforming centuries-old tion of women at the house- doesn’t, and how we confront likely than men to do low-wage cultural norms around women’s hold level corresponds with that imbalance. work, raise a child on their roles and value. instability at the national level. Mary Beard dedicated an own, and do unpaid work as Populism and authoritarianism entire book to this subject. In caregivers—have lost their jobs    the 1995 are on the rise, and for lead- Women & Power: A Manifesto, at a higher rate than men since conference, I was on a Voice of ers like Vladimir Putin, Jair she explores the misogyny the onset of the virus. And we America radio program when Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, that has shaped our world for know that women will be less a man called in to ask what I Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip centuries, and urges readers likely to return to paid employ- meant by my speech. I asked Erdoğan, and—yes—Donald to reject the notion of power ment than men, threatening him to close his eyes and pic- Trump, the drive to diminish as a zero-sum game. If power what progress has been made ture all the rights men have: women’s rights is inextricably is seen as a tool only a few toward equality in the work- the right to earn an income, linked to their quest for politi- people can wield at a time, force. On top of everything, the right to a job and an edu- cal power. within systems designed by several states have attempted cation, the right to vote and Over the past 25 years, we and for men, an entire gen- to weaponize the crisis in order hold elective o¤ce, the right have seen that when women der will forever be excluded to eliminate access to safe and to be heard and valued in their and girls participate in democ- from it. Instead, she sug- legal abortion, and the Trump families and communities. racy, the benefits ripple out gests, why not look at power administration’s rule permitting “We want the same rights,” across society. Women leaders more comprehensively? We employers to deny insurance I explained. He burst out: are more likely to increase bud- should think of it as “the coverage for birth control on “‚at’s impossible!” gets for health care and educa- ability to be eŒective, to make the basis of “moral” objections Nearly two decades later, as tion, and women’s leadership a difference in the world, was upheld by the Supreme secretary of state, I sat across the contributes to greater cooper- and the right to be taken Court. (One can’t help ask- table from presidents and prime ation, equality, and stability. seriously, together as much ing, what about coverage ministers and watched their Many of the countries with as individually.” for Viagra?) eyes glaze over when I raised the most effective responses

20 OCTOBER 2020

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to the pandemic are led by deliberate e›ort. On that front, We can demand that elected in media. We can call out sex- women: Jacinda Ardern in it’s impossible to overstate the officials and employers alike ism and racism, and challenge New Zealand, Angela Merkel signiœcance of having Kamala recognize paid leave, afford- insidious norms in our cul- in , Sanna Marin Harris—a woman of color, able child care, and closing the ture, workplaces, and house- in Finland, and Tsai Ing-wen and the child of immigrants— gender pay gap as the urgent holds. This year is the 100th in Taiwan. on the presidential ticket. imperatives they are. We can anniversary of the Nineteenth Yet, even though women Biases and cultural norms build women’s economic Amendment, a milestone we are now running for o‚ce— that subordinate women are power, including by invest- had hoped could be celebrated and winning—in unprece- everywhere. The social psy- ing in women-led businesses. with events across America. dented numbers, progress has chologist Madeline Heilman ¥ough the pandemic has ren- been slow. We’ve risen from found that, after looking at two dered that nearly im possible, an 12 female heads of state in personnel œles for potential job equally œtting tribute is to com- 1995 to just 22 today. Only candidates, identical except for WE ALL HAVE mit ourselves to new platforms 14 countries out of 193 have the names, 86 percent of peo- IMAGES IN for action, in our own country parity in the national cabi- ple surveyed determined that OUR HEAD OF and on the world stage. And WHAT A LEADER net. The share of women in the male candidate was more LOOKS AND someday soon, I hope we will parliaments remains less than competent than the female SOUNDS LIKE. elect a woman president of the 25 percent on average; only candidate. When they were THAT IMAGE United States. four countries in the world told that the candidates were HAS BEEN ¥at’s a sentence that’s pain- have achieved parity this year. equally competent, 83 percent WHITE AND ful to write. But here’s some- So what’s holding us back? said the man was more likable. MALE FOR thing that gives me hope: 25 Although sexism and structural And it’s not only men who CENTURIES. years ago, speaking in Beijing barriers are in many places no perpetuate these attitudes. ¥e as first lady, I thought I had longer legal, they’re still very UN Development Program’s reached the peak of power and much with us. Today, instead, “2020 Human Development And as we recover and rebuild influence that would ever be they’re cultural. Perspectives” report found after the pandemic, we can available to me. I was deter- that in developing and devel- seize the opportunity to trans- mined to use it to lift up the   presi- oped countries alike, both men form economic systems that concerns and rights of women. dent, I felt the full force of and women show clear bias discriminate against women Yet it turned out my journey misogyny—from the blunt, against gender equality. This and devalue essential care- was far from over, and I would even ostentatious sexism of œnding suggests that we have giving work. get the chance to carry those Donald Trump, who called me reached an “inequality pla- Consider Sweden, which in concerns into the highest a “nasty woman” (a slur I and teau,” at great cost to health, 2014 became the œrst country levels of government and poli- many others have decided to education, autonomy, repre- in the world to explicitly adopt tics. What we think are peaks wear as a badge of honor), to sentation, and more. We need a a “feminist foreign policy.” As can turn out to be frustrating the trap of “likability,” which new approach. then–Foreign Minister Mar- plateaus. But they also can be seems to snare only women. Twenty-œve years after Bei- got Wallström described it, the way stations on a higher climb. Watching the diverse slate jing, it’s no longer enough to policy recognizes that “striving ¥at’s what I think about when of 2020 candidates was inspir- talk about women’s rights. toward gender equality is not I see young women around the ing, but it was also discouraging We must augment women’s only a goal in itself but also a world who have no patience to hear familiar tropes about power in every sphere, includ- precondition for achieving our for gradual change and no women candidates’ speaking ing government, the economy, wider foreign, development, intention of slowing down. styles, voices, and authentic- and national security. We can and security-policy objectives.” They believe a new world ity. (I don’t hate women candi- start by taking steps to increase France, Canada, and order is not only possible, but dates, I just hate Hillary Clin- women’s representation in the have since taken steps to fol- necessary and urgent, and ton. And now I’m starting to hate public and private sectors, low suit. they’re absolutely right. . And come to whether by exploring quotas In addition to voting for think of it, I’m not wild about for gender parity in public women seeking positions of Kamala Harris or Amy Klobu- office, broadening the suc- power, each of us can speak out, Hillary Rodham Clinton is char either…) cess of gender- blind orchestra support organizations promot- a former U.S. senator and We all have images in our auditions to other employers, ing women’s rights and power, secretary of state, the ­rst head of what a leader looks and removing names from résumés, and engage in peaceful protest woman to win a major party’s sounds like. That image has or following the lead of states movements. We can support nomination for president of the been white and male for centu- where asking about salary his- mentoring and role modeling, United States, and a lifelong ries, and changing it will take tory is now illegal. and work to change messages advocate for women and girls.

 

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T  e airport at Lamezia Terme, Calabria, in the toe of Italy’s boot, was built in the 1970s and has not aged well. The cement facade is punctu- ated by rows of round win- dows that resemble oversize MOB JUSTICE portholes. The parking lot is poorly paved. Beyond it An Italian prosecutor takes on his rises an un€ nished concrete country’s most powerful crime syndicate. tower, open to the elements and covered on one side by an BY RACHEL DONADIO advertisement for amaro. I was there one day last year to meet Nicola Grat- teri, the chief prosecutor for nearby Catanzaro, a small city high in the hills of central Calabria. Gratteri has dedi- cated the past three decades of

22 ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN TAMAKI

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his life to ghting a Calabria- the organization has also provided him with an even Rome, 360 miles to the north, based organization known as skimmed off public-health more heavily armored vehi- where he had a round of meet- the ’Ndrangheta—the rich- funds in Calabria, with disas- cle than the one he had been ings. He could have flown, est, most powerful, and most trous consequences for the using. A lot of people want but he loves to drive; he says it secretive criminal group in region’s health-care system. Nicola Gratteri dead. gives him a rare sense of free- Italy today. (Pronounced Gratteri’s focus on the dom. And the drive o‹ered a en-drahn-get-ta, the word group has been unwavering.    in good opportunity to talk. I essentially means “man of He helped mastermind a 2014 1958 in the small Calabrian told Gratteri that I imagined honor”; it is believed to be sting operation, code-named town of Gerace, not far from he knew which ’Ndrangheta derived from the Greek andra- “New Bridge,” in which the areas saturated, then and now, or Camorra clan ran every gathía, or “heroism.”) FBI and Italian agents dis- with ’Ndranghetisti. He was stretch of roadway along our Sicily’s Cosa Nostra has rupted a major ’Ndrangheta route, and he gave a little nod. been romanticized by the drug ring operating on three In another conversation, Godfather movies. e Nea- continents. Authorities seized he told me he was lucky to politan Camorra has become 1,000 pounds of pure cocaine. have grown up in a family widely known through the In December 2019, in a move per bene—a good family, one lm and TV series Gomorrah. coordinated by Gratteri, Ital- THE GROUP with sound values. “We had But the ’Ndrangheta, the least ian police rounded up 334 IS SAID TO anti bodies,” Gratteri went on. CONTROL telegenic and most publicity- people—lawyers, business- MORE THAN Others didn’t. “In front of the shy of Italy’s Mafias, is the people, accountants, a police HALF THE school, I used to see the chil- most aggressive. chief, the president of the COCAINE dren of the ’Ndranghetisti, e ’Ndrangheta’s tenta- Calabrian mayors’ associa- MARKET IN and they were already acting cles extend to Italy’s wealthy tion, and a former member EUROPE. AND like little ’Ndranghetisti, and north, where the organiza- of the Italian Parliament— on IT HAS NOT I couldn’t accept that violence. tion thrives on skimming charges related to ’Ndran- WASTED THE And so I thought, When I OPPORTUNIOPPORTUNI® o‹ state contracts, especially gheta activity, including mur- TIES CREATED grow up, I have to change in construction, and to 31 der and extortion. e formal BY THE things.” He went to univer- other countries worldwide— legal process against these PANDEMIC. sity in Catania, Sicily, and to much of Europe, to the individuals and others—more after graduating, he took the United States and Canada, to than 470 people all told—is di•cult state exam to become Colombia, to Australia. Out- under way. A “maxi-trial” will a magistrate, a job he began side Italy, the city with the eventually move from Rome in 1986. most ’Ndran gheta outposts is to a large courthouse being In the prosecutors’ o•ce Toronto. e ’Ndrangheta is prepared for the occasion in the third of ve children. His in Locri, Calabria, he began on excellent terms with crimi- Calabria in order to accom- father, who had a fth-grade reopening cases that had long nal a•liates in Latin Amer- modate all the defendants and education, ran a small grocery been stalled. In 1989, he ica, from which it imports their lawyers. store; his mother, who had a started looking into the mur- vast amounts of cocaine. e I was standing outside the third-grade education, cared der of a local businessman, group is said to control more airport when Gratteri sped for the home and family. As a who had been killed after a than half the cocaine market up in a station wagon, trailed boy, Gratteri was well aware private dinner also attended in Europe. And it has not by an escort of plainclothes that something was deeply by several politicians. “This wasted the opportunities cre- o•cers. ey wore jeans and wrong with his corner of the businessman was building ated by the COVID-19 pan- sneakers, and carried leather world. Once, hitchhiking to a dam for a lake. But there demic. Tens of thousands of bags that I assumed held guns. school, he passed a dead body was no water in the lake. So I small businesses throughout Gratteri got out of the car and lying by the road. thought, Let me see if there was Italy suddenly found them- walked quickly toward me, Gratteri is slight, with a public bid. And there wasn’t selves on the ropes, without taking hold of my suitcase and inscrutable eyes, and he some- one.” Gratteri concluded that revenue or access to credit. handing it to one of the o•- times shuªes when he walks. the businessman had some- For some, the ’Ndrangheta cers. As we drove o‹, I asked On the highway, he drove how fallen out of favor with and other criminal groups him if this was an armored extremely fast—even in the the local bosses. stepped in with assistance. car—the door had seemed long, dark tunnels that poke Soon after Gratteri discov- ey also provided envelopes unusually heavy. With a ¦icker through the Calabrian hills; ered the contract for the non- of cash for the unemployed. of a smile, he said, “Yes, of even on roads that suddenly existent dam on the waterless Call it an investment. As the course.” After the arrests in narrowed from four lanes to lake, someone shot at the win- Financial Times reported, December, the government two. We were heading for dow of his girlfriend’s house.

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She married him anyway. For institutions than in murdering inside, suggest. ƒe ’Ndran- in the 1980s, when it moved obvious reasons, Gratteri is prosecutors and judges. ghetisti who break their oath, into cocaine, leaving the less reluctant to discuss details The ’Ndrangheta, too, Gratteri told me, usually do lucrative heroin trade to the about his family, and for their learned a lesson. It became so out of love or out of fear. Cosa Nostra. safety he does not speak with slyer, and never sought to They are young men who In Italy, the ’Ndrangheta them about his work. The directly confront the author- don’t want to spend their sells cocaine to other crime family, like Gratteri himself, ities. “It always looks for entire future in prison, and groups—often Albanian or is under police protection. points of contact and com- who may have wives or girl- Nigerian—who in turn sell it In 1992, two anti-Mafia mon ground with people and friends on the outside. Or the on the street. Such outsourc- prosecutors in Palermo, institutions,” Gratteri told informants are women who ing keeps the ’Ndrangheta Sicily—Giovanni Falcone me. That is what gives it its have married ’Ndranghetisti away from the piazzas and and Paolo Borsellino—were power. The group is woven focused on more sophisti- killed in car bombings within into the fabric of the Italian cated ways of making money, weeks of each other, along economy and Italian politi- such as siphoning off Euro- with members of their police cal life. ƒroughout the Ital- pean Union funds meant for escorts and Falcone’s wife. ƒe ian south, it is not uncom- agriculture and infrastructure. attacks were among the most mon for candidates seeking Meanwhile, the fact that for- GRATTERI LIVES dramatic and terrifying in Ita- national o—ce to demonstrate IN A WALLED eigners are selling drugs on the ly’s postwar history. Falcone an inconspicuous familiarity COMPOUND street all over Italy is a major and Borsellino had presided with voto di scambio—the RINGED WITH factor in the popularity of the over a celebrated maxi-trial, “exchange vote,” or quid pro CAMERAS AND right-wing League party and beginning in 1986. Images of quo. That is widely inter- GUARDED BY its anti-immigration “Italians the 366 defendants crowded preted to mean cutting deals POLICE. INSIDE First” rhetoric. into cages in the courtroom with criminals so that they THE WALLS, HE Still, the group is more GROWS TOMATOMA® became famous everywhere. encourage people to vote for TOES, EGGEGG® than willing to get its hands Hundreds of mafiosi were the right candidate. And it is PLANT, BASIL. dirty. In 2012, six men were convicted. After the assas- not just in the south: As far given a life sentence in Italy sinations, a black-and-white north as the Italian Riviera, for murdering a woman who photograph of Borsellino entire cities have seen their had been cooperating with and Falcone sharing a conŠ- governing councils disbanded police against the ’Ndran- dential exchange became the because of ’Ndrangheta inŠl- gheta. (They had strangled emblem of Italy’s Šght against tration. (The disbanding of her and burned her body.) ƒe corruption—it has appeared local councils, with gover- and want their children to ’Ndrangheta operates accord- on posters, on billboards, on nance put into state receiver- have a di¢erent life. Even so, ing to a simple rule: If you the sides of buildings, and all ship, is a standard response.) the ranks of the ’Ndrangheta screw up, you’ll be killed. In over the internet. remain largely loyal. 2015, a 22-year-old man was I asked Gratteri how the  ’  ƒe ’Ndrangheta emerged arrested in Italy for ordering assassinations had changed proved hard for prosecutors in 19th-century Calabria, as the of his own mother, his sense of the situation in to crack, because its organi- the region’s feudal economy allegedly as punishment after Italy. He told me that the Cosa zational structure is based on was chaotically giving way to she’d had an a¢air with a boss Nostra had made a grave error: blood ties. In other Mafias, the forces of capitalism. In the from a rival ’Ndrangheta clan. The assassinations revealed the structure is looser, and early years, the organization’s that the organization’s in’u- members more easily break members operated mainly as    build a case ence “was much bigger and away. Historically, very few robbers and brigands, before against a group like the much deeper” than anyone ’Ndranghetisti have betrayed expanding into smuggling, ’Ndrangheta? I asked Gratteri. had thought—an existential their family. Of the more extortion, and abduction. ƒe He has spent years immersed challenge to the state. Troops than 1,000 people who most famous of its hundreds of in the details—the crimes, were sent to Sicily. As Grat- became state’s witnesses in kidnappings was that of J. Paul the arrests, the sentences, teri sees it, the group’s strat- Italian organized-crime cases Getty III, in 1973. (Despite the appeals, the personali- egy of full-frontal war against in recent years, only about their initial reluctance, the ties, the interconnections. the state marked “the begin- 15 percent are members of Gettys paid a ransom of about His mind holds an encyclo- ning of the end of that Cosa the ’Ndrangheta. But that is $3 million after the kidnap- pedia of the group. In the Nostra” and the start of a new slowly changing, as the mass pers sent Paul’s severed ear to case that resulted in the mass Cosa Nostra: quieter, and arrests in December, based the family in the mail.) The arrests in December, Grat- more interested in inŠltrating in part on information from modern ’Ndrangheta was born teri and his team spent four

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years compiling evidence. He tracked him down in Spain. Italy, the rest of Europe, ranks of the magistrates. He ticked o some of the meth- He was extradited to Italy beyond. He goes to bed by thought back to certain col- ods: copious wiretaps; geo- again, and Gratteri went to 10 p.m. and often wakes up leagues in the judiciary and thermal imaging, which can see him. Gratteri told him, at 2:30 a.m. to start work. what he remembers some of detect underground bunkers; “You’re going to spend 30 I visited Gratteri one day them said to him. “When close cooperation with law- years in prison, so there’s not at the courthouse in Catan- I was young, I thought it enforcement agencies world- much you can do about that. ” zaro. Every so often, people was advice,” he said. “Then wide; an understanding of And Pannunzi replied, “No, would knock on the bullet- I understood these were the group’s rules and rituals; dottore, I’ll get out. I have so proof door, and he would messages”—subtle remind- a feel for how the organization much money that I could check a monitor before buzz- ers that it might be best if he adapts to new technologies cover you and that marshal ing them in. didn’t peer under this rock or and investment opportuni- with money. I could bury you From here, Gratteri master- open that door. ties, such as crypto currencies. with money. ” And indeed, minded the indictments at the When I asked Gratteri e indictments relied on the Pannunzi escaped again in heart of the new maxi-trial. what it took to get up every testimony of about 20 former 2010 by claiming to have Gratteri seeks to lay bare the morning and do this kind of ’Ndranghetisti turned state’s heart trouble, getting himself organizational structure of the work, knowing that people witnesses, a record number, transferred to conƒnement at ’Ndrangheta— how the group want to kill him, he grew phil- Gratteri told me. a clinic, and then ˜eeing. forges links with Italian politi- osophical. “Everything has a It has been particularly Italian authorities tracked cians, institutions, economic price,” he said. He hasn’t gone di‚cult to crack the ’Ndran- him down once more, in 2013, interests, and other elements anywhere without police pro- gheta overseas. Italian law this time in Colombia. He was of society—much as the tection since 1989, he said. gives prosecutors like Grat- extradited to Italy once more, maxi-trial in Palermo revealed He hasn’t been to the mov- teri strong tools with which and Gratteri ˜ew to Rome for how the Cosa Nostra oper- ies in 30 years. His house is to ƒght organized crime. Most his arrival. “I saw him, and he ated. “e strength of maƒosi a heavily surveilled fortress— notably, they can order asset said, ‘Buongiorno, dottore, how essentially comes from their “like Big Brother,” he said. seizures while investigating are you?’ ” Gratteri recalled. “I external relations— the social But inside the walls, he has someone on charges of “Maƒa said, ‘Did they treat you well?’ capital that derives from their a vegetable garden. He grows association,” a broad category And he says, ‘Yes, they treated ability to force ties and con- tomatoes, eggplant, basil. His that does not exist elsewhere me well; the ˜ight went ƒne.’ ” struct social networks,” Anto- voice became almost tender as in Europe or abroad. e two men spoke as if they nio Nicaso, an expert in the he listed the vegetables, like a Gratteri enjoys question- were old friends. Someone ’Ndrangheta who teaches at parent naming children. ing people, and he has the filmed the meeting, and it Queen’s University in Ontario “I’m a man in a cage,” he right demeanor for it: calm, wound up online. and has co-written 14 books said. As much, in some ways, focused, respectful, but also I have watched the video with Gratteri, told me. The as any defendant in a maxi- inscrutable. He somehow over and over. What strikes maxi-trial could also serve as trial. “But in my mind, I’m manages to build trust with me most is the mutual famil- an investigative model for law a free man.” He pointed a criminals. A while ago I came iarity. Because Gratteri grew enforcement elsewhere. finger to his temple. “I’m upon a YouTube video of up in Calabria, he is cut from As we neared Rome on free in my choices and free Gratteri speaking with one some of the same cloth as his our drive that day, I men- to decide. Free to think and of the biggest ƒsh he’d caught adversaries. It is clear from the tioned to Gratteri that, years to speak my mind.” He con- in all his years as a prosecu- video that Gratteri and Pan- ago, a magistrate in Calabria tinued: “I can say what others tor: Roberto Pannunzi, the nunzi understood each other, had told me that he was more can’t allow themselves to say, man credited with forging and on some level respected afraid of some elements in Ita- because they don’t have their ties between the ’Ndran gheta each other. “He understood ly’s anti-Maƒa establishment a airs in order. Because they and the Medellín cartel in my authority,” Gratteri later than he was of the Maƒa. at can be blackmailed. Because Colombia. told me about the meeting. remark, delivered almost o - they’re afraid. Because they’re Pannunzi, sometimes handedly, stayed with me. cowards.” called “the Pablo Escobar of    a It suggested that Italy was a Italy,” was first arrested in walled compound ringed dark place, where the people Colombia in 1994, for drug with cameras and guarded you thought were on one side tra‚cking. After being extra- by police. He coordinates were in fact helping the other, Rachel Donadio is a Paris- dited to Italy, he eventually every move with his police even if only by averting their based contributing writer for obtained a medical dispen- escort and tells his wife the eyes. Gratteri is aware that the e Atlantic and a former sation, and ˜ed the country. bare minimum. He trav- ’Ndrangheta tries to influ- Rome bureau chief for In 2004, Italian authorities els constantly—throughout ence, however nebulously, the e New York Times.

 

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THE NEW SOUTHERN STRATEGY How Black mayors in the South are leveraging both the power of oce and the power of the street to achieve overdue changes

BY ADAM HARRIS

teven L. Reed One by one, medical pro- with large, and in some cases they hold as elected officials. smooths his gray fessionals and Montgomery predominantly, Black popu- ese two sources of power are suit jacket before he residents approach the micro- lations. The symbolic prog- different; leaning on one can S grips the podium. phone and testify about the ress these politicians embody sometimes hinder the use of The of need for masks. More than is expressed in a collection of the other, and getting the bal- Montgomery, 90 percent of the people in the Šrsts: Šrst Black mayor of one ance right is diŸcult. , Reed has seen the intensive-care unit at the city’s city, Šrst Black woman mayor When Reed, who is 46, coronavirus tear through his largest hospital are Black. For of another, youngest mayor of broke two centuries of racial city faster than anywhere else the most at-risk groups, one a third. But as they lead their precedent to become Mont- in the state. e hospitals have man says, mask wearing is not cities through a national reck- gomery’s Šrst Black mayor, in run out of beds; medical profes- a symbolic political issue but oning with systemic racism— 2019, thousands of the city’s sionals are pleading for help. If a matter of life and death. He amid a pandemic that has residents exhaled. For most of Reed had had his way, he would tugs at his mask and fiddles exacerbated lethal in equities— Montgomery’s 200-year his- have issued a stay-at-home with his shirt. He’s lost six rela- symbolism alone won’t do. tory, Reed told me, the plight order to stamp this out, but he’s tives to the virus. His brother of the city’s Black people— limited by the state constitu- is in the hospital dying. “e who make up roughly 60 per- tion, which grants the necessary question on the table,” he says, cent of the population there— authority only to the governor. “is: Do ?” has been overlooked. The So, on June 16, he is standing Since the death of George same was true in any number HE’S LOST SIX before eight city-council mem- Floyd, the whole country has RELATIVES TO of cities across the South and bers with a simple plea: Require been confronting that question. THE VIRUS. beyond. Left unaddressed, every one to wear a mask. But for Reed and his peers— HIS BROTHER dis satisfaction only brews. As “e longer we keep this the wave of Black Demo- IS DYING. “THE Reed stands before the council, going, the more we’re going cratic mayors who have swept QUESTION ON he’s talking about masks—but, to hurt ourselves,” Reed says. into southern city halls in the THE TABLE,” more fundamentally, what he’s “Is it that inconvenient to tell decade since Steve Benjamin HE SAYS, “IS: DO saying is that the Black people BLACK LIVES people to wear masks?” e became the Šrst Black mayor MATTER?” in his city are being heard. ordinance he’s requesting of Columbia, South Carolina, After more than an hour of would carry a small Šne if dis- in 2010—the question has par- testimony, the council votes. obeyed. But half of his audi- ticular political urgency. ose With one member absent, it ence is skeptical. Wouldn’t a mayors—Keisha Lance Bot- splits down the middle. Four public-service announcement toms in Atlanta; Frank Scott Jr. members—three Black, one be just as good? one councilor in Little Rock, Arkansas; Ran- Navigating through overlap- white—support the measure. asks. Reed responds that pro- dall WoodŠn in Birmingham, ping crises—and advancing Four members—all white— viding people with accurate Alabama; in Charlotte, the rights and living standards vote against it. e majority public-health information is ; Chokwe Antar of their constituents—requires of the white council members important but that “some reg- Lumumba in Jackson, Missis- the full application of sym- can’t be convinced that masks ulation” is necessary to slow sippi; Reed in Montgomery; bolic power combined with the are necessary. One Black mem- the spread of the virus. and others—represent cities canny use of the policy levers ber proposes a watered-down

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measure—a recommendation Cleveland’s Glenville neighbor- repressive” than that of previ- between two sources of power. instead of a requirement— hood. At first, Stokes took ous, white mayors, the politi- They were, effectively, politi- reasoning that it’s better to do bold steps that previous may- cal scientists William E. Nel- cal outsiders, who faced all the something instead of nothing. ors would not have, pulling son Jr. and Philip J. Meranto handicaps of outsiders as they Another Black member won- all white police oŒcers from observed in their classic 1977 tried to work the political sys- ders aloud why the council Glenville, in hopes that Black book, Electing Black Mayors, tem from the inside. And yet, seems unwilling to take deci- officers from the Cleveland “he did not support the rebel- as newly elected oŒcials, they sive action on something as police department could nego- lion of his people; he opposed were reluctant to aggressively simple as wearing masks. tiate a peace with the rioters. it by using his position as use the bully pulpit to stoke As they bicker, Reed has But when that failed, Stokes mayor to restore law and order the energy bubbling up from already made up his mind. If the streets. A study by Edmond the city council is not going to J. Keller, a political scientist at require masks, he’ll do it him- UCLA, found that while policy self. And he’ll deal with what- preferences of the ’70s-era Black ever legal or political conse- mayors diœered from those of quences will follow later. their white counterparts, the Black mayors were more “con-    strained” than white mayors in of Black mayors in the South acting upon those preferences is striking when you consider by governors, city councils, that, not so long ago, there and reticent local coalitions. weren’t any at all. In 1969, If broad support for eœecting when Howard N. Lee took change was not already pres- over as the mayor of Chapel ent, Black politicians would shy Hill, North Carolina, he was away from trying to catalyze it. the †rst Black person elected ‹e new generation of may- mayor of any predominantly ors, by contrast, impatient with white city in the South since historical constraints, have been Reconstruction. more willing to supplement the “The real revolution tak- tools they can use from inside ing place in the South must government with the energy occur in the political arena,” from the political movements Lee said in 1971. “‹e black outside of it. In the summer elected oŒcial is a real symbol of 2019, drawing heavily on of black power.” the advocacy work of political But winning elections only activists, Steve Benjamin, the gets you so far. Simply put- mayor of Columbia, South ting Black faces in leadership Carolina, signed an ordinance positions doesn’t change the to “ban the box,” disallowing underlying systems. When questions about previous felony Lee took oŒce, the experience convictions on job applica- of cities with recently elected tions, which had made it hard Black mayors in the Midwest Mayor at Martin Luther King Jr. for many constituents to gain had already begun to illustrate National Historical Park in Atlanta on August 9 employment. ‹e year before this. In 1967, Carl B. Stokes that in Atlanta, Keisha Lance was elected the first Black Bottoms, bolstered by support mayor of Cleveland, where rac- sent white officers back to in Cleveland’s black ghetto.” from criminal-justice reform- ism and segregation had kept Glenville, and resorted to the Surveying the broader genera- ers and advocates for the poor, Black communities poor and same tactics previous mayors tion of Black mayors from the signed an ordinance ending overpoliced. Businesses were had used to quash the upris- late ’60s and ’70s, Nelson and the cash-bail requirement for closing. Black people were los- ing. He asked for the National Meranto came away jaded by misdemeanors, a policy that ing jobs. Resentment festered Guard, and tanks rolled the mayors’ inability to address had left low-level offenders among Black residents, and through the neighborhood. structural inequities. languishing pointlessly in jail despite Stokes’s election, it His political support cratered. In a sense, that generation because they couldn’t aœord to boiled over into a rebellion in While “his method was less of leaders found themselves pay their way out.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSHUA RASHAAD M C FADDEN  

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When the coronavirus hit order. “Our communities political tradition that believes at the University of Florida, in March, Frank Scott Jr.— aren’t waiting for us to gure real change comes mainly from wrote in 1982. Little Rock’s rst elected Black it out; they are calling upon outside of it. “I was raised by “When people feel locked mayor—quickly implemented us to definitively tell them, a network of elders who were out of a system, they rail against curfews and imposed limits on in this moment, how we have engaged in community activ- it,” the younger Lumumba told gatherings, without any guid- gured it out,” Bottoms told ism,” Lumumba told me. His me. He remembers his father’s ance from the state. He knew me. “›ings often go in dog father, Chokwe Lumumba, generation constructing com- what the virus could do to his years in government, but the a successful human-rights munity centers, hosting day constituents, and especially the patience for that just doesn’t lawyer, an avowed Black camps for children, and o¦er- underserved ones—the people exist anymore.” nationalist, and an ardent ing martial-arts training. But of color, the people living in Georgia Governor Brian proponent of reparations for over time, the Lumumbas poverty. “I’m a son of south- Kemp lashed out against Black Americans, was averse to came to realize that while the west Little Rock, and I still live Bottoms, calling the order electoral politics. He did not constraints on rebuilding the there, so I’ve seen the disparities system from within were real, in our city,” Scott told me. But so were the limits on what he also reached beyond the o‡- could be done from outside cial tools of city hall and drew electoral politics. “We grew on his powers of sympathy and to view politics as a means to suasion: In June, when Little better support communities,” Rock residents took to the Lumumba said. streets to protest police brutal- So the family began work- ity, he helped keep the unrest ing on campaigns, and then from becoming too violent or were drafted into the fight destructive by marching with themselves. In 2013, Lumum- the protesters down Capitol ba’s father ran to become the Avenue. Scott’s success in mol- mayor of Jackson and won. lifying the protesters stood in He immediately began push- sharp contrast to, say, Minne- ing citizens to vote for tax apolis Mayor , who increases that would fund was booed out of a rally that he repairs to Jackson’s crumbling attempted to speak at, or New infrastructure— and was build- York City Mayor Bill de Bla- ing momentum toward this sio, who was called “forcefully goal when he died of a heart oblivious” (among many other attack in 2014. His death things) after he said that the prompted his son to run for NYPD had acted “appropri- the same o‡ce, and three years ately” in an incident when two ago, at 34, Chokwe Antar squad cars barreled through a Lumumba became the young- barrier and hit protesters. est mayor in the city’s history. In some of these southern Mayor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s old house in He built on his father’s e¦orts, cities, the Democratic may- Montgomery, Alabama, on June 30. e house was once bombed pushing through a property- ors have found themselves by segregationists in retaliation for the city’s bus boycott. tax increase that raised the clashing with their Republi- money to repave the city’s can governors. On July 10, as decrepit roads. He’s not in coronavirus cases surged across “legally unenforceable,” and believe they could change the city hall just to get reelected, the South (and three days after led a lawsuit against her. Her situation for Black people in he says. “›e failure is when she herself had tested positive response was simple: “We’ll see America—the progress was too elected o‡cials become intoxi- for COVID-19), Bottoms him in court.” incremental. A growing body cated with the power” and lose told Atlanta residents that the of political-science research sight of the priorities of the city would be starting over,   , supported this view. “This community, he told me. reinstating Phase 1 reopening the mayor of Jackson, Missis- ability to effect mainly sym- Steven Reed’s father, unlike guidelines—closing restaurant sippi, has been somewhat sur- bolic, rather than substantive, Lumumba’s, always worked dining rooms and nonessential prised to nd himself working changes re¢ects the limits of from within the political sys- facilities, limiting travel, and from inside government at all, black politics,” the late James tem, as the chairman for sev- requiring masks—by executive because he emerged from a Button, a political scientist eral decades of the Alabama

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Democratic Conference, the nally allow it. Sometimes that By dint of their positions, night echoed across the coun- rst statewide political orga- invites anger. (Steven Reed is these mayors have megaphones; try. They reminded us … of nization for Black people. But used to this; as a kid, his fam- by dint of growing up Black in how vital it is for all of us in Steven Reed understands the ily received death threats in the South, they have rsthand leadership to take action,” he disillusionment that can set response to the political activ- experience of the brutality of said. He announced that he in among lawmakers when ity of his father.) Sometimes it southern racism, which gives would be requiring masks by they discover how at odds means nudging your friends them credibility with their executive order. “I thought it reform and reelection can be. out of their jobs, as Keisha constituents. Simply listen- was important not just from a He saw such disillusionment Lance Bottoms did to Atlanta ing to their communities, and policy standpoint but from a while working as a senior aide Police Chief Erika Shields, broadcasting their concerns, has political standpoint to say that in the Alabama lieutenant who stepped down in June moral value and political ben- I’d heard the people of Mont- governor’s o­ce. €e wrong when evidence of brutality on et. But, as Lumumba puts it, gomery’s call for action,” Reed issues get prioritized. “State the force emerged. Sometimes “until we move from being the told me. €ree weeks later, the lawmakers would say, ‘Well, city council followed his lead I know this needs to be xed, and reversed its original deci- but if I do this, then that sion in a 7–0 vote (with one group is going to get mad,’ or absence and one abstention). ‘It’s never going to change, so A week after that, , why even try?,’ or ‘If I vote for Alabama’s Republican gover- this, I may not be reelected.’ ” nor, implemented a statewide Reed has come to believe that mask order. if politicians do what is just, The events of 2020 have they need not be overly bur- forced these mayors to focus dened by worries about the their leadership on day-to-day electoral repercussions. In crisis management. But they this way, they’ll build trust remain committed to address- with voters, which becomes ing the underlying inequities political capital. that exacerbated the crises. All of the southern Black Bottoms and Lumumba are mayors I’ve spoken with rec- members of a group of may- ognize the political limita- ors exploring a universal basic tions they face. Uprooting income; Lumumba supports fundamentally racist struc- a nonprot pilot program for tures or unjust political sys- one in Jackson. Lumumba and tems requires a comprehen- Woodn were part of a small sive approach, and mayors group of mayors that pressed have only limited influence Democratic presidential- over economic development primary candidates to provide and the health-care and actionable plans for closing criminal- justice systems. Not Mayor Randall Wood n at the Civil Rights National Monument in Birmingham, the racial gaps in wealth and uncommonly, they have to Alabama, on June 26. Behind him, a statue of MLK stands in front of the school equity. contend with hostile gover- 16th Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. €e mayors’ politics di¤er, nors while working to ensure and their governing strategies that the coalitions that elected and rhetorical styles vary, but them—many of which extend it means getting sued, as Bot- governed to the governors, the their central messages are the beyond Black communities toms has been in Atlanta—or same problems will persist in same. “We’re creating the play- and white progressives to as Randall Woodfin was, in new generations.” book on how to move from moderates more concerned Birmingham, when he had platitudes to policy and policy with generating economic the city nish pulling down a    Montgom- to true action,” Frank Scott growth than accelerating social Confederate statue that pro- ery’s city council split almost told me. “We have to show justice—remain supportive. testers had started to topple. along racial lines over requir- the results.” Yet these mayors also recog- “I’d rather have a civil suit than ing face coverings, Steven Reed nize that achieving real jus- civil unrest in my city,” Wood- stood in front of the same doc- tice calls for risk-taking, and n told me, after the Alabama tors who had stressed their Adam Harris is a sta writer this unusual moment might attorney general sued him. necessity. “Your words last at €e Atlantic.

 

1020_DIS_Harris_SouthernMayors [Print]_14037141.indd 29 8/16/2020 5:16:06 PM MATERIAL WORLD

A CUBICLE NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD What we lose when we have to work from home

BY AMANDA MULL

o have a job with- bumping into one on the way sprang up for people without as soon as we were remanded out a workplace, to the bathroom. What would traditional offices, and the to our homes in the spring, you must build an it be like to have “work clothes” concept attracted hundreds of the predictions of a decade T oce of the mind. again? I had never expected to millions of investment dollars ago sprang back to life: If Structure, routine, miss driving 45 minutes to sit and, for a couple of years, my the COVID-19 experiment focus, socialization, at a desk in a makeshift oce patronage. In 2018, I nally got has proved anything, it’s that networking, stress relief—their above a country- club pro shop, a regular job. I sometimes ate employees can be produc- creation is almost entirely up to where, in my rst full-time job, tive without being physically you, alone in a spare bedroom I’d done menial tasks in the present, so why not jettison or on your couch, where your marketing department. expensive corporate leases laptop might vie for attention At rst, I assumed my setup and free everyone from com- at any given moment with would soon be common, and YOUNG PEOPLE mutes? But the longer people your pets or kids. If the coee- therefore somehow better— WHO WORK spend editing spreadsheets or pot runs dry, there is no one to we’d all build our internal REMOTELY RISK taking conference calls at the blame but yourself. offices together. “There’s no REMAINING kitchen table, the more obvious e rst time I undertook stopping it,” a Reuters writer UNKNOWN it is that workers lose far more this construction process was proclaimed a few months QUANTITIES. than physical space when they AND UNKNOWN in 2009, and it was an abject after I began my blogging gig. QUANTITIES lose their oce. failure. I was nine months out “The work force that fuels DON’T BECOME of college and had already been tomorrow’s small businesses BELOVED “   of stud- laid o from my rst full-time may largely be a stay-at-home COLLEAGUES, ies on the positive benets of job, thanks to Wall Street’s crowd.” Laptop prices were OR GET teleworking, but most of that evisceration of the American shrinking, and more employ- PROMOTED. research is interviews and sur- economy. A woman I knew ers were issuing them to their veys with people who have self- only from an internet message workers. Smartphones started selected into remote work,” says board hired me to write blog to fill Americans’ pockets. Kati Peditto, an environmental- posts for her fashion website, a Skype was well established as design psychologist at the stroke of luck that turned me an early leader in videochat, lunch with my new colleagues. U.S. Air Force Academy. Work- nocturnal within six weeks. and co-workers silently traded I bought a fancy water bottle for ers who value day-to-day £ex- I lived like a 13-year-old on jokes on GChat. The Great my desk. After a few months of ibility in their schedules are perpetual summer break—no Recession would force a reck- commuting, I understood the ideal work-from-home can- gods, no masters, no parents, oning in how stuy old com- allure of podcasts. didates; those who like strict no bedtime. It took two years panies operated, and offices Now a once-in-a-century boundaries between their pro- for me to meet my co-workers would soon be obsolete. pandemic has resurrected the fessional and personal lives, in person, and I often fanta- en it just didn’t happen. In abandoned future. I’m back not so much. Career position- sized about eating lunch with fact, something like the opposite on my couch, along with mil- ing also matters—people who a live human being, or even just happened: Co-working spaces lions of other Americans. And have already built strong social

 OCTOBER 2020

1020_DIS_Mull_MaterialWorldOffices [Print]_14021730.indd 30 8/12/2020 4:55:14 PM Dispatches

and professional networks may collaboration, and friendship of Americans were struggling wolf down a salad on video not su er much from the lack colleagues, which is more dif- with feelings of loneliness so is horri†c. Even if you’re not of face-to-face contact at the ficult to foster online. “Out- widespread that they were eating, watching yourself do oce, but for those still trying side of immediate family, peo- considered a major public- anything on Zoom is pretty to make such ties, remote work ple’s co-workers become their health burden even before bad. ˆere are plenty of awk- can be alienating. most consistent opportunity the pandemic began, and the ward pauses, weird shadows, Contrary to managerial for social inter action,” Peditto virus has only exacerbated that glitchy Wi-Fi connections, and paranoia, people generally want told me. “What happens when problem. I don’t suggest try- unfortunate angles, along with to be good at their job. To do you lose that is one of my ing to eat lunch with a friend ambient anxiety about whether that, many need the support, greater concerns.” on Zoom—watching yourself or not your hair always does

PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON FULFORD AND TAMARA SHOPSIN  

1020_DIS_Mull_MaterialWorldOffices [Print]_14021730.indd 31 8/12/2020 4:55:15 PM Dispatches MATERIAL WORLD

that. Unfortunately, it’s hard    working everyone’s vibe, she said that could encourage the assump- to avoid watching yourself on from home at 23, I soon real- new hires and young people tion that they’re sitting on their Zoom at all times, because of ized that the potential harm who work remotely risk couches eating Skinny Pop and the software’s display and the wasn’t limited to my sleep remaining unknown quanti- watching HGTV. stubborn human desire to stare schedule or my mood. Even ties. And unknown quanti- Good employers can at one’s own face. if I successfully made myself a ties don’t become beloved account for those biases in The social by-products of disciplined, 9-to-5 worker bee, colleagues, or get promoted. their work practices, and theo- going to work aren’t found I was far removed from the How you begin your working retically, workers can organize only in shared projects or structure of my career itself. life tends to shape your profes- their colleagues to pressure mentoring—many are baked For the first few years, I had sional and žnancial prospects management toward bet- into the physical spaces we an inexpensive apartment in for decades to come. Those ter accommodations, such as inhabit. Break rooms, com- a small town that I loved, but who were just starting out expansion of parental leave and munal kitchens, and even well- it was far away from New greater transparency in pay. But tracked hallways help create York City, the country’s fash- those e€orts, including form- what experts call functional ion capital. I wasn’t meeting ing a union, are much harder inconvenience. “We have these anyone else who did similar when people can’t meet face- interdisciplinary connections work, wasn’t being invited to-face. A dispersed workforce because people have to take to anything, wasn’t getting WORKPLACES means that employees have to the stairs, or the bathroom is introduced to any friends of ARE COMPLEX go out of their way to compare on a di€erent ‚oor,” says Peter friends. If I had wanted or ECOSYSTEMS, AND experiences with one another, Berg, the director of the School needed a new job, completely DECENTRALIZING and that those with relatively of Human Resources and Labor changing careers would prob- THEM CAN little power have a tougher OBLITERATE THE Relations at Michigan State ably have been easier than THINGS THAT time sensing who their allies University. “Moving through getting another gig in my MAKE THEM might be. that space in an in convenient želd with the experience I’d SATISFYING. Ultimately, that might be way is really important to accrued at home. the biggest problem of work- connection.” People end up Moving to New York a ing from home in perpetu- talking to their co-workers— few years into the job helped, ity. Workplaces are complex complimenting a new haircut, but it didn’t totally solve the social ecosystems just like all asking how the kids are—when problem—I was still the girl other places humans inhabit, they’re corralled together wait- on her laptop in her bed- during the žnancial cataclysm and decentralizing them can ing for the elevator or washing room, trying to make people of 2008 and the recession that obliterate the things that make their hands next to each other from like me enough followed have had their for- them satisfying: knowing eye in the bathroom. Over time, to meet a stranger for an after- tunes stunted by it, and many contact with a co-worker when those quick encounters build a hours drink. After you’ve left will never recover. For recent a change you’ve been beg- sense of belonging and warmth the ready-made social environ- graduates beginning work via ging for is žnally announced. that makes spending so much ment of school, an oce is a Zoom in the twin chaos of a A slightly-too-long lunch of your life at work a little natural place to look for new pandemic and a financial break with your desk neigh- more bearable. people who share your inter- crisis, the impact could be even bor because your boss is in “You talk to people who ests and outlook. But with no more profound. meetings all day. Giving a really felt excited for the first place to go to but just as many Women—of all ages— presentation to your peers few weeks of remote work,” professional obligations, peo- particularly su€er when tele- and watching them receive Peditto said. Among other ple working from home might commuting, Berg told me, it well. Figuring out whom benefits, who doesn’t relish have the ‚exibility to do every- with fewer promotions and you can rely on, and whom the chance to be out from thing except make new friends. slower wage growth. Employ- you can’t. “There’s so much under the literal watchful eye Even those who self-select ers already tend to assume that unspoken that you absorb as of a supervisor? But now a fair into the work-from-home women, and especially moth- an employee,” Peditto said. number of the early enthusi- “lifestyle” report feeling dis- ers, are less dedicated to work “You don’t get that right now asts are starting to go stir-crazy, tant from new professional than their male counterparts with just a set of scripted meet- she said, with no relief on the opportunities, outside their are, no matter how hard they ings.” At home, though, you horizon and, maybe worse, no companies as well as inside, toil. If those same women seek probably get better co€ee. one to commiserate with at the Peditto told me. Deprived of permission to stay home for office microwave for the 90 desk neighbors, impromptu good—opting out of the “face seconds it takes to nuke last coffees, and any real way to, time” that many of their bosses Amanda Mull is a sta writer night’s spaghetti. for a lack of a better term, read hold irrationally dear—it at ¥e Atlantic.

 OCTOBER 2020

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e American Crisis features some of the best writing from e Atlantic. Below are just a few of the writers in the book, along with some of their most popular stories. As a subscriber, you have access to all of their work on eAtlantic.com. To start reading, create your account today.

ADAM SERWER GEORGE PACKER ANNE APPLEBAUM on the politics of racism in on the decades-long decline of U.S. on the lure of authoritarianism the Trump era institutions and their vulnerability to and the psychology of complicity the abuse of power “‹e Coronavirus Was an “Laura Ingraham’s Descent Into Emergency Until Trump Found In “We Are Living in a Failed State,” Despair” is Applebaum’s inquiry into Out Who Was Dying” is Serwer’s Packer assesses how the pandemic why her former acquaintance, who once searing examination of America’s racial revealed what was already broken represented optimistic conservatism, contract, which deems certain lives to in America. became a doomsaying Fox News host be of greater value than others. and ardent Trump supporter.

nline, you’ll also find: Published by Simon & Schuster | Available for purchase online

Danielle Allen Megan Garber ‹e past four years have been among the most turbulent in U.S. history. Drawn IBRAM X. KENDI ANNIE LOWREY Yoni Appelbaum David A. Graham from the pathbreaking work of Atlantic journalists, e American Crisis explores on the history of racist ideas and on the power of economic policy Mark Bowden Emma Green the promise of anti-racist policy to create a more equal society Ta-Nehisi Coates Olga Khazan the factors that led to the present moment: racial division, economic inequality, McKay Coppins Adrienne LaFrance political dysfunction, the devaluation of truth, and the unique challenge posed “‹e American Nightmare” is In “‹e Second Great Depression,” James Fallows Vann R. Newkirk II by President Donald Trump. Kendi’s poignant essay on the chasm Lowrey looks at the four major factors Drew Gilpin Faust Jeremy Raff between the national narrative of the that could determine the economic Caitlin Flanagan Jonathan Rauch Edited by e Atlantic’s editor at large, Cullen Murphy, the book features new American dream and many Black legacy of the pandemic in the U.S. Franklin Foer Clint Smith essays by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Anne Applebaum, along Americans’ lived reality. David Frum Ed Yong with work by more than three dozen Atlantic writers and contributors. Create your subscriber account today at eAtlantic.com/Create-account. TOP ROW: LEAH VARJACQUES; MICHAEL LIONSTAR; MATEUSZ SKWARCZEK. BOTTOM ROW: STEPHEN VOSS; COURTESY OF ANNIE LOWREY. PROMOTION PROMOTION

e American Crisis features some of the best writing from e Atlantic. Below are just a few of the writers in the book, along with some of their most popular stories. As a subscriber, you have access to all of their work on eAtlantic.com. To start reading, create your account today.

ADAM SERWER GEORGE PACKER ANNE APPLEBAUM on the politics of racism in on the decades-long decline of U.S. on the lure of authoritarianism the Trump era institutions and their vulnerability to and the psychology of complicity the abuse of power “‹e Coronavirus Was an “Laura Ingraham’s Descent Into Emergency Until Trump Found In “We Are Living in a Failed State,” Despair” is Applebaum’s inquiry into Out Who Was Dying” is Serwer’s Packer assesses how the pandemic why her former acquaintance, who once searing examination of America’s racial revealed what was already broken represented optimistic conservatism, contract, which deems certain lives to in America. became a doomsaying Fox News host be of greater value than others. and ardent Trump supporter.

nline, you’ll also find: Published by Simon & Schuster | Available for purchase online

Danielle Allen Megan Garber ‹e past four years have been among the most turbulent in U.S. history. Drawn IBRAM X. KENDI ANNIE LOWREY Yoni Appelbaum David A. Graham from the pathbreaking work of Atlantic journalists, e American Crisis explores on the history of racist ideas and on the power of economic policy Mark Bowden Emma Green the promise of anti-racist policy to create a more equal society Ta-Nehisi Coates Olga Khazan the factors that led to the present moment: racial division, economic inequality, McKay Coppins Adrienne LaFrance political dysfunction, the devaluation of truth, and the unique challenge posed “‹e American Nightmare” is In “‹e Second Great Depression,” James Fallows Vann R. Newkirk II by President Donald Trump. Kendi’s poignant essay on the chasm Lowrey looks at the four major factors Drew Gilpin Faust Jeremy Raff between the national narrative of the that could determine the economic Caitlin Flanagan Jonathan Rauch Edited by e Atlantic’s editor at large, Cullen Murphy, the book features new American dream and many Black legacy of the pandemic in the U.S. Franklin Foer Clint Smith essays by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Anne Applebaum, along Americans’ lived reality. David Frum Ed Yong with work by more than three dozen Atlantic writers and contributors. Create your subscriber account today at eAtlantic.com/Create-account. TOP ROW: LEAH VARJACQUES; MICHAEL LIONSTAR; MATEUSZ SKWARCZEK. BOTTOM ROW: STEPHEN VOSS; COURTESY OF ANNIE LOWREY. The Next RECONSTRUCTION 2 By ADAM SERWER

illustrations by arsh raziuddin

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 36 8/17/2020 12:26:25 PM The devastation of the coronavirus, and the surge in support for Black Lives Matter that followed the killing of George Floyd, have presented the United States with its best opportunity in 150 years to remake American society and belatedly fulfill its promise as a multiracial democracy.

37

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 37 8/17/2020 12:26:27 PM other places,” Trump predicted in 2014. As president, he saw such uprisings as deliverance. Žen something happened that Trump did not foresee. It didn’t work. Trump was elected president on a promise to restore an ideal- ized past in which America’s traditional aristocracy of race was A F T E R unquestioned. But rather than restore that aristocracy, four years of catastrophe have—at least for the moment—discredited it. Instead of ushering in a golden age of prosperity and a return to the cultural conservatism of the 1950s, Trump’s presidency has radicalized mil- eorge loyd lions of white Americans who were previously inclined to dismiss systemic racism as a myth, the racial wealth gap as a product of Black cultural pathology, and discriminatory policing as a matter WA S K I L L E D , of a few . Žose staples of the American racial discourse became hard to sustain this year, as the country was enveloped by over lapping onald rump national crises. Že pandemic exposed the president. Že nation needed an experienced policy maker; instead it saw a profes- sional hustler, playing to the cameras and claiming that the virus SENSED AN would disappear. As statistics emerged showing that Americans of color disproportionately lled the ranks of essential workers, the unemployed, and the dead, the White House and its allies in the conservative media downplayed the danger of the virus, opportunity. urging Americans to return to work and resurrect the Trump economy, no matter the cost. Meanwhile, the state’s seeming indiœerence to an epidemic of racist killings continued unabated: On February 23, Ahmaud Americans, anguished and angry over Floyd’s death, had erupted in Arbery was fatally shot after being pursued by three men in Georgia protest—some set res, broke the windows of department stores, who thought he looked suspicious; for months, the men walked and stormed a police precinct. Commentators reached for historical free. On March 13, Breonna Taylor, an emergency-room techni- analogies, circling in on 1968 and the twilight of the civil-rights cian, was killed by Louisville, Kentucky, police o˜cers serving a no- era, when riots and rebellion engulfed one American city after knock warrant to nd a cache of drugs that did not exist; months another. Back then, Richard Nixon seized on a message of “law later, one of the o˜cers was red but no charges were led. Žen,

and order.” He would restore normalcy by suppressing protest with on Memorial Day, the police o˜cer TIMES ; the iron hand of the state. In return for his promise of pacication, kneeled on Floyd’s neck and ignored his many pleas for help. Že Americans gave him the White House. nation erupted. According to some polls, more than 23 million Surveying the protests, Trump saw a path to victory in Nixon’s people participated in anti-police-brutality protests, potentially footsteps: Že uprisings of 2020 could rescue him from his cata- making this the largest protest movement in American history. strophic mishandling of the corona virus pandemic. Že president American history has produced a few similar awakenings. In leaned into his own “law and order” message. He lashed out against 1955, the images of a mutilated Emmett Till helped spark the “thugs” and “terrorists,” warning that “when the looting starts, civil-rights movement. In 2013, the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s the shooting starts.” Ahead of what was to be his comeback rally killer inspired Alicia Garza to declare that Black lives matter, giving in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, Trump tweeted, “Any protesters, form to a movement dedicated to nishing the work begun by its anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Okla- predecessors. Just as today, the stories and images of shattered Black homa please understand, you will not be treated like you have lives inspired Americans to make the promises of the Declaration of been in New York, , or Minneapolis”—making no distinc- Independence more than just a fable of the founding. But almost tion between those protesting peacefully and those who might as quickly, the dream of remaking society faltered, when white engage in violence. Americans realized what they would have to sacrice to deliver In this, Trump was returning to a familiar playbook. He was freedom. Že urgent question now is whether this time is diœerent. relying on the chaos of the protests to produce the kind of racist Že conditions in America today do not much resemble those of backlash that he had ridden to the presidency in 2016. Trump 1968. In fact, the best analogue to the current moment is the rst had blamed the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri—a response and most consequential such awakening—in 1868. Že story of to the shooting of Michael Brown by a police o˜cer—on Barack that awakening oœers a guide, and a warning. In the 1860s, the rise Obama’s indulgence of criminality. “With our weak leadership in of a racist demagogue to the presidency, the valor of Black soldiers

Washington, you can expect Ferguson type riots and looting in and workers, and the stories of outrages against the emancipated OPENING SPREAD: ALEX LAU; BRANDON BELL; EARL GIBSON III; FRANCINE ORR / GETTY; JOE RAEDLE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NIAID; ZAID PATEL

38 OCTOBER 2020

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 38 8/17/2020 12:26:27 PM in the South stunned white northerners into writing the equality champion of the white working class, the president believed that of man into the Constitution. e triumphs and failures of this “Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other anti-racist coalition led America to the present moment. It is now race of people,” and that allowing the formerly enslaved to vote up to their successors to fulll the promises of democracy, to make would eventually lead to “such a tyranny as this continent has a more perfect union, to complete the work of Reconstruction. never yet witnessed.” Encouraged by Johnson’s words and actions, southern elites worked to reduce the emancipated to conditions    George Ruby in the middle of the night, that resembled slavery in all but name. as many as 50 of them, their faces blackened to conceal their roughout the South, when freedmen signed contracts with identities. As the Confederate veterans dragged Ruby from his their former masters, those contracts were broken; if they tried to home, they mocked him for having believed that he would be seek work elsewhere, they were hunted down; if they reported their safe in Jackson, Louisiana: “S’pose you thought the United States concerns to local authorities, they were told that the testimony of government would protect you, did you?” ey dragged him at Black people held no weight in court. When they tried to purchase least a mile, to a creek, where they beat him with a paddle and land, they were denied; when they tried to borrow capital to estab- left him, half-dressed and bleeding, with a warning: Leave, and lish businesses, they were rejected; when they demanded decent never return. wages, they were met with violence. One of the few Black agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the fed- In the midst of these terrors and denials, the emancipated orga- eral agency established to facilitate the transition of the emancipated nized as laborers, protesters, and voters, forming the Union Leagues from slavery to freedom in the South, Ruby had come to Jackson and other Republican clubs that would become the basis of their in 1866 to open a school for the newly liberated. Although some political power. Southern whites insisted that the freedmen were of the men who attacked Ruby were eventually tried, under the unt for the ballot, even as they witnessed their sophistication in guard of Black Union soldiers, Ruby heeded his attackers’ warning. protest and organization. In fact, what the former slave masters But his choice of destination—Texas—would make him a frequent feared was not that Black people were incapable of self-government, witness to the same violence he •ed. but the world the emancipated might create. “Texas was very violent during the early years of Reconstruc- From 1868 to 1871, Black people in the South faced a “wave of tion,” Merline Pitre, a historian and biographer of Ruby, told me. counter- revolutionary terror,” the historian Eric Foner has written, One observer at the time said that “there was so much violence in one that “lacks a counterpart either in the American experience Texas that if he had to choose between hell and Texas, he would or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abol- have chosen hell.” ished slavery in the nineteenth century.” Texas courts, according to Ruby traveled through the state reviewing the work of the Foner, “indicted some 500 white men for the murder of blacks in Freedmen’s Bureau and sending dispatches to his superiors. As 1865 and 1866, but not one was convicted.” He cites one north- the historian Barry A. Crouch recounts in e Dance of Freedom, ern observer who commented, “Murder is considered one of their Ruby warned that the formerly enslaved were beset by the “endish inalienable state rights.” lawlessness of the whites who murder and outrage the free people e system that emerged across the South was so racist and with the same indi™erence as displayed in the killing of snakes or authoritarian that one Freedmen’s Bureau agent wrote that the other venomous reptiles,” and that “terrorism engendered by the emancipated “would be just as well o™ with no law at all or no brutal and murderous acts of the inhabitants, mostly rebels,” was Government.” Indeed, the police were often at the forefront of preventing the freedmen from so much as building schools. the violence. In 1866, in , police joined an attack on e post–Civil War years were a moment of great peril for the Republicans organizing to amend the state constitution; dozens emancipated, but also great promise. A stubborn coterie of Repub- of the mostly Black delegates were killed. General Philip Sheridan lican Radicals—longtime abolitionists and their allies—were not wrote in a letter to Ulysses S. Grant that the incident “was an abso- content to have simply saved the Union. ey wanted to transform lute massacre by the police … perpetrated without the shadow of a it: to make a nation where “all men are created equal” did not just necessity.” e same year, in Memphis, white police o§cers started mean white men. a ght with several Black Union veterans, then used the con•ict as But the country was exhausted by the ravages of war. e last a justication to begin ring at Black people—civilians and soldiers thing most white Americans wanted was to be dragged through a alike—all over the city. e killing went on for days. bitter con•ict over expanding the boundaries of American citizen- ese stories began to reach the North in bureaucratic dis- ship. ey wanted to rebuild the country and get back to busi- patches like Ruby’s, in newspaper accounts, and in testimony to ness. John Wilkes Booth had been moved to assassinate Abraham the congressional committee on Reconstruction. Northerners heard Lincoln not by the Confederate collapse, but by the president’s about Lucy Grimes of Texas, whose former owner demanded that openness to extending the franchise to educated Black men and she beat her own son, then had Grimes beaten to death when she those who had fought for the Union, an a™ront Booth described refused. Her killers went unpunished because the court would as “nigger citizenship.” not hear “negro testimony.” Northerners also heard about Madi- Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, viewed the Radical son Newby, a former Union scout from Virginia driven by “rebel Republican project as an insult to the white men to whom the people” from land he had purchased, who testied that former slave United States truly belonged. A Tennessee Democrat and self-styled masters were “taking the colored people and tying them up by the

 

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 39 8/17/2020 12:26:28 PM thumbs if they do not agree to work for six dollars a month.” And leaders that he was their “Moses,” even as he denied their aspira- they heard about Glasgow William, a Union veteran in Kentucky tions to full citizenship. who was lynched in front of his wife by the Ku Klux Klan for Johnson had reason to believe, in a country that had only just declaring his intent to vote for “his old commander.” (Newspapers abolished slavery, that the Radicals’ attempt to create a multi- sympathetic to the white South dismissed such stories; one called racial democracy would be rejected by the electorate. What he the KKK the “phantom of diseased imaginations.”) did not expect was that in his incompetence, coarseness, and ‚e South’s intransigence in defeat, and its campaign of terror vanity, he would end up discrediting his own racist crusade, against the emancipated, was so heinous that even those inclined and press the North into pursuing a program of racial justice toward moderation began to reconsider. Carl Schurz, a German that it had wanted to avoid. immigrant and Union general, was dispatched by the Johnson Black leaders were conscious that Johnson’s racism had, rather administration to investigate conditions in the South. Schurz sym- than weakening the cause of Black suŒrage, rea›rmed its neces- pathized with white southerners who struggled to adjust to the sity. e Christian Recorder, edited by the Reverend James Lynch, new order. “It should not have surprised any fair-minded person editorialized that “paradoxical as it may seem, President Johnson’s that many Southern people should, for a time, have clung to the opposition to our political interests will ‘nally result in securing accustomed idea that the landowner must also own the black man them to us.” ‚e Republicans swept the 1866 midterms, and John- tilling his land, and that any assertion of freedom of action on the son was impeached in 1868—o›cially for violating the Tenure part of that black man was insubordination equivalent to crimi- of O›ce Act, but this was mere pretext. ‚e real reason was his nal revolt, and any dissent by the black man from the employer’s obstruction of Congress’s eŒorts to protect the emancipated. John- opinion or taste, intolerable insolence,” he wrote. son was acquitted, but his presidency never recovered. ‚e horrors he witnessed, however, convinced him that the ‚e turmoil in the South, and Johnson’s enabling of it, set Con- federal government had to intervene: “I saw in various hospi- gress on the path to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, tals negroes, women as well as men, rati‘ed in 1868 and 1870, respectively. whose ears had been cut oŒ or whose ‚e amendments made everyone born bodies were slashed with knives or or naturalized in the United States a bruised with whips, or bludgeons, or In the past, the dream of remaking citizen and made it unconstitutional punctured with shot wounds. Dead society has faltered when white to deprive Americans of the right to negroes were found in considerable Americans have realized what they vote on the basis of race. Today, the number in the country roads or on the would have to sacrifice to deliver principles underlying the Reconstruc- ‘elds, shot to death, or strung upon freedom. The question now is whether tion amendments are largely taken the limbs of trees. In many districts this time is different. for granted; few in the political main- the colored people were in a panic stream openly oppose them, even as of fright, and the whites in a state of they might seek to undermine them. almost insane irritation against them.” But these amendments are the founda- When Schurz returned to Washington, Johnson refused to tion of true democracy in America, the north star for every Ameri- hear his ‘ndings. ‚e president had already set his mind to main- can liberation movement that has followed. taining the United States as a white man’s government. He told Congress also passed laws barring racial discrimination in pub- Schurz that a report was unnecessary, then silently waited for lic accommodations, which would be quickly ignored and then, Schurz to leave. “President Johnson evidently wished to suppress almost a century later, revived by the civil-rights movement. State my testimony as to the condition of things in the South,” Schurz governments, though not without their ”aws and struggles, mas- wrote in his memoir. “I resolved not to let him do so.” sively expanded public education for Black and white southerners, ‚e stories of southern violence radicalized the white North. funded public services, and built infrastructure. On the ashes of “‚e impression made by these things upon the minds of the the planter oligarchy, the freedmen and their allies sought to build Northern people can easily be imagined,” Schurz wrote. “‚is a new kind of democracy, one worthy of the name. popular temper could not fail to exercise in”uence upon Congress ‚e Reconstruction agenda was not motivated by pure idealism. and stimulate radical tendencies among its members.” ‚e Republican Party understood that without Black votes, it was Still convinced that most of the country was on his side, John- not viable in the South, and that its opposition would return to son sank into paranoia, grandeur, and self-pity. In his “Swing Congress stronger than it was before the war if Black disenfranchise- Around the Circle” tour, Johnson gave angry speeches before ment succeeded. Still, a combination of partisan self-interest and raucous crowds, comparing himself to Lincoln, calling for some egalitarian idealism established the conditions for multiracial Radical Republicans to be hanged as traitors, and blaming the democracy in the United States. New Orleans riot on those who had called for Black suŒrage in Swept up in the in‘nite possibilities of the moment, even the the ‘rst place, saying, “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who before the war had excori- their skirts and they are responsible.” He blocked the measures ated America for the hollowness of its ideals, dared to imagine that Congress took up to protect the rights of the emancipated, the nation as more than a white man’s republic with Black men describing them as racist against . He told Black as honored guests. “I want a home here not only for the Negro,

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1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 40 8/17/2020 12:26:28 PM e Radical Republican addeus Stevens. After the Civil War, Stevens warned that without economic empowerment,

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / CORBIS VCG GETTY; BUYENLARGE SHUTTERSTOCK freedmen would eventually nd themselves at the mercy of their former masters.

 

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 41 8/17/2020 12:26:29 PM the mulatto, and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to nd a in the battleground states, more white voters thought reverse dis- home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his crimination was a bigger deal than classic racial discrimination,” sake and for ours,” Douglass declared in 1869. “In whatever else Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked on both of ’s other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and presidential campaigns, told me. ‰e activism of Black Lives Mat- grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle ter, the Movement for Black Lives, and other groups, as well as the of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, unceasing testimony of those lost to police violence, has reversed and to men of no creeds.” that trend. “In the past, white voters by and large didn’t think that discrimination was a real big thing. Now they understand that it is.”    do not face the same wave of A June 2020 Monmouth University poll found increases across terror they did in the 1860s. Still, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, all races in the belief that law enforcement discriminates against and Ahmaud Arbery were only the most recent names Americans Black people in the U.S. ‰e same poll found that 76 percent of learned. ‰ere was Eric Garner, who was choked to death on a Americans considered racism and discrimination a “big problem”— sidewalk during an arrest as he rasped, “I can’t up from 51 percent in 2015. In a Pew Research Center poll the breathe.” ‰ere was Walter Scott in North Charleston, South same month, fully 67 percent of Americans expressed some degree Carolina, who was shot in the back while “eeing an o”cer. ‰ere of support for Black Lives Matter. was Laquan McDonald in , who was shot 16 times by an ‰ese numbers are even more remarkable when considered in o”cer who kept ring even as McDonald lay motionless on the historical context. In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the ground. ‰ere was Stephon Clark, who was gunned down while March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I using a cellphone in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento, Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass California. ‰ere was Natasha McKenna, who died after being demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the move- tased in a Virginia prison. ‰ere was Freddie Gray, who was seen ment for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, being loaded into the back of a police van in which were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they his spinal cord was severed. ‰ere was Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old supported the marchers. in Cleveland with a toy gun who was killed by police within ‰e shift that’s occurred this time around “wasn’t by happen- moments of their arrival. stance,” Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an activist and a writer, What these stories have in common is that they were all cap- told me, nor is it only the product of video evidence. “It has been tured on video. Just as southern dispatches and congressional tes- the work of generations of Black activists, Black thinkers, and Black timony about the outrages against the emancipated radicalized the scholars that has gotten us here”—people like , Kim- white North with a recognition of how the horrors of racism shaped berlé Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, and others. “Six years ago, Black life in America, the proliferation of videos from cellphones people were not using the phrase systemic racism beyond activist and body cameras has provided a vivid picture of the casual and circles and academic circles. And now we are in a place where it is often fatal abuse of Black Americans by police. readily on people’s lips, where folks from CEOs to grandmothers “‰ere’s a large swath of white people who I think thought up the street are talking about it, reading about it, researching on Black people were being hyperbolic about police humiliation and it, listening to conversations about it.” harassment,” Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of the Black All of that preparation met the moment: George Floyd’s killing, Lives Matter movement, told me. “We started seeing more and the pandemic’s unmistakable toll on Black Americans, and Trump’s more people share videos of white people calling the cops on Black callous and cynical response to both. people and using the cops as their weapon against the Black com- Still, like Andrew Johnson, Trump bet his political fortunes on munity. ‰ose kinds of viral videos—that weren’t just about Black his assumption that the majority of white Americans shared his death, but Black people’s everyday experience with policing—have fears and beliefs about Black Americans. Like Johnson, Trump did shaped a new ideology. What are the police really here for? Who not anticipate how his own behavior, and the behavior he enabled are they truly protecting?” and encouraged, would discredit the cause he backed. He did not ‰e continual accretion of gruesome evidence of police violence anticipate that the activists might succeed in convincing so many has taken a toll on today’s activists; some rarely watch the videos white Americans to see the protests as righteous and justied, that anymore. George Floyd was killed just a few blocks from the home so many white Americans would understand police violence as an of Miski Noor, an organizer in Minneapolis. But Noor could watch extension of his own cruelty, that the pandemic would open their the video of his death for only a minute before turning away. eyes to deep-seated racial inequities. “I’ve seen enough,” Noor told me. “I don’t want to see any- “I think this country is at a turning point and has been for a more.” But the work of Cullors, Noor, and others ensured that little while. We went from celebrating the election of the rst Black these videos dramatically shifted public opinion about racism and president in history to bemoaning a white nationalist in the White American policing. House,” Alicia Garza told me. “People are grappling with the fact After the rise of Barack Obama, large numbers of white Ameri- that we’re not actually in a post-racial society.” cans became convinced not only that racism was a thing of the How far will the possibilities of this moment extend? We could past but also that, to the extent racial prejudice remained a factor consider two potential outcomes—one focused on police and pris- in American life, white people were its primary victims. “In 2008, ons, and a broader one, aimed at eliminating the deeply entrenched

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1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 42 8/17/2020 12:26:30 PM systems that keep Black people from realizing full equality, a long- In the face of implacable violence across generations, sim- standing crisis Americans have tried to suppress with policing and ply banning choke holds and mandating body cameras are not prisons rather than attempting to resolve it. meaning ful solutions. To these activists, centuries of liberal attempts A majority of Americans have accepted the diagnosis of Black at reform have only bureaucratized the role of the police as the Lives Matter activists, even if they have yet to embrace their more armed guardians of a racist system, one that fractures Black families, radical remedies, such as defunding the police. For the moment, restricts Black people’s employment opportunities, and excludes the surge in public support for Black Lives Matter appears to be them from the ballot box. an expression of approval for the movement’s most basic demand: “I want to see the existing systems of policing and carceral that the police stop killing Black people. €is request is so reason- punishment abolished and replaced with things that actually able that only those committed to white supremacy regard it as restore justice and keep people safe at home,” Packnett Cunning- outrageous. Large majorities of Americans support reforms such as ham told me. requiring the use of body cameras, banning choke holds, mandat- €e problem is not simply that a chance encounter with ing a national police- misconduct database, and curtailing quali‚ed police can lead to injury or death—but that once marked by immunity, which shields oƒcers from liability for violating people’s the criminal-justice system, Black people can be legally dis- constitutional rights. enfranchised, denied public bene‚ts, and discriminated against €e urgency of addressing this crisis has been underscored by in employment, housing, and jury service. “People who have the ongoing behavior of police departments, whose oƒcers have been convicted of felonies almost never truly reenter the society reacted much as the white South did after : by brutal- they inhabited prior to their conviction. Instead, they enter a izing the people demanding change. separate society, a world hidden from public view, governed by In New York City, oƒcers drove two SUVs into a crowd a set of oppressive and discriminatory rules and laws that do not of protesters. In , cops beat demonstrators with apply to everyone else,” Michelle Alexander wrote in e New Jim batons. In Louisville, police shot pepper balls at reporters. Crow in 2010. “Because this new system is not explicitly based In Austin, Texas, police left a protester with a fractured skull on race, it is easier to defend on seemingly neutral grounds.” and brain damage after ‚ring bean- In the aftermath of the Ferguson bag rounds unprovoked. In BuŽalo, protests, it was fashionable to speak of New York, an elderly protester was a “new civil-rights movement.” But it is shoved to the ground by police in perhaps more illuminating to see Black full riot gear, sustained brain dam- £I think this country is at a turning Lives Matter as a new banner raised on age, and had to be hospitalized. €e point,” Alicia Garza says. £People are the same ‚eld of battle, stained by the entire riot team resigned from the grappling with the fact that we’re not blood of generations who came before. unit in protest—not because of their actually in a post-racial society.” €e ‚ghters are new, but the conžict colleagues’ behavior, but because they is the same one that Frederick Doug- faced sanction for it. lass and George Ruby fought, one that Yet the more the police sought to goes far beyond policing. violently repress the protesters, the As Garza put it to me, American more people spilled into the streets in society has turned to law enforcement de‚ance, risking a solitary death in a hospital bed in order to assert to address the challenges Black communities face, but those chal- their right to exist, to not have their lives stolen by armed agents lenges can’t be solved with a badge and a gun. “You don’t have of the state. “As the uprising went on, we saw the police really schools that function well; you don’t have teachers that get paid; responding in ways that were retaliatory and vicious,” Noor told you don’t have hospitals in some communities,” she said. “You don’t me. “Kind of like, ‘How dare you question me and my intentions have grocery stores in some communities. €is creates the kinds of and my power?’ ” conditions that make people feel like police are necessary, but the At the height of Reconstruction, racist horrors produced the solution is to actually reinvest in those things that give people a political will to embrace measures once considered impossibly ideal- way to live a good life, where you have food, a roof over your head, istic, such as Black male suŽrage. Many Black Lives Matter activists where you can learn a craft or skill or just learn, period.” have a similarly radical vision. €e calls to defund or abolish the police seem sudden to those who do not share their premises. But     in the abstract and sup- these activists see a line of continuity in American policing that porting policies that would make it a reality are two diŽerent stretches back to the New Orleans and Memphis killings that so things. Most white Americans have long professed the former, outraged the postbellum white North, and back further still, to and pointedly declined to do the latter. €is paradox has shown antebellum slave patrols. And although there is no ‚rm consensus up so many times in American history that social scientists have on how to put an end to this history, there is broad agreement that a name for it: the principle-implementation gap. €is gap is what police should not be the solution to problems like poverty, addic- ultimately doomed the Reconstruction project. tion, and homelessness, and that public resources should be used One of the ways the principle-implementation gap manifests to meet the needs of communities. itself is in the distinction between civic equality and economic

 

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 43 8/17/2020 12:26:31 PM As the freedmen sought to secure their rights through state intervention—non- discrimination laws in business and education, government jobs, and federal protection of voting rights—many Republi- cans recoiled. As the historian Heather Cox Richardson has written, these white Republi- cans began to see freedmen not as ideal free-laborers but as a corrupt labor interest, com- mitted to securing through government largesse what they could not earn through hard work. “When the major- ity of the Southern African- Americans could not overcome the overwhelming obstacles in their path to economic secu- rity,” she wrote in The Death of Reconstruction, “Northerners saw their failure as a rejection of free-labor ideals, accused them of being decient work- ers, and willingly read them out of American society.” Retreating from Reconstruc- tion, these Republicans cast Democratic presidential nominee has invoked the legacy of Reconstructions past, but his calls to action would be more promising if he were not an author of the system he now opposes. their objections to the project as advocacy for honest, limited government, rather than racism. justice. After the Civil War, Representative addeus Stevens, a But the results would ultimately be the same: an abandonment of Radical Republican, urged the federal government to seize the the freedmen to their fate. Men like Carl Schurz, who had been estates of wealthy former Confederates and use them in part to brie’y radicalized by the violence in the South and the extremism provide freedmen with some small compensation for centuries of of Andrew Johnson, began to see federal intervention on behalf of forced labor. Stevens warned that without economic empower- the freedmen as its own kind of tyranny. ment, freedmen would eventually nd themselves at the mercy “Schurz advocated political amnesty, an end to federal inter- of their former masters. vention, and a return to ‘local self-government’ by men of ‘prop- “It is impossible that any practical equality of rights can erty and enterprise,’ ” Eric Foner writes. “Schurz sincerely believed exist where a few thousand men monopolize the whole landed blacks’ rights would be more secure under such governments property,” Stevens wrote in 1865. “e whole fabric of South- than under the Reconstruction regimes. But whether he quite ern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this appreciated it or not, his program had no other meaning than a opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never return to white supremacy.” be, as it never has been, a true republic.” Local authority was ultimately restored by force of arms, as Even in his own party, Stevens’s idea was viewed as extreme. Democrats and their paramilitary allies overthrew the Reconstruc- Nineteenth-century Republicans believed in an ideology of “free tion governments through intimidation, murder, and terrorism, labor,” in which the interests of labor and capital were the same, and used their restored power to disenfranchise the emancipated and all workers could elevate themselves into a life of plenty for almost a century. Many of the devices the southern states through diligence and entrepreneurship. By arming Black men used to do so—poll taxes, literacy tests—disenfranchised poor with the ballot, most Republicans believed they had set the stage whites as well. (It was not the rst or last time that the white elite for a free-labor society. ey did not see what the emancipated would see the white poor as acceptable collateral damage in the saw: a world of state-sanctioned and informal coercion in which ght for white supremacy.) At the national level, the economic

simply elevating oneself through hard work was impossible. collapse brought on by the Panic of 1873 wounded Republicans WILLIAM THOMAS CAIN / GETTY; MARK REINSTEIN CORBIS MEL D. COLE

4 4 OCTOBER 2020

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 44 8/17/2020 12:26:31 PM at the ballot box and further weakened support for the faltering civil-rights movement did not see the goals of civic equality and Reconstruction project. economic justice as severable. Yet they, too, struggled to per- White northerners deserted the cause as if they had never sup- suade white Americans to devote the necessary public resources ported it. ey understood that they were abandoning the emanci- to resolving the yawning economic disparities between Black pated to despotism, but most no longer considered the inalienable people and white people. rights of Black Americans their problem. “White America, caught between the Negro upsurge and its “For a brief period—for the seven mystic years that stretched own conscience, evolved a limited policy toward Negro freedom. between Johnson’s ‘Swing Around the Circle’ to the Panic of 1873, It could not live with the intolerable brutality and bruising humili- the majority of thinking Americans of the North believed in the ation imposed upon the Negro by the society it cherished as demo- equal manhood of Negroes,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1935. cratic,” King wrote in e Nation in 1966. “A hardening of opposi- “While after long years the American world recovered in most tion to the satisfaction of Negro needs must be anticipated as the matters, it has never yet quite understood why it could ever have movement presses against ¢nancial privilege.” thought that black men were altogether human.” ese Americans King was right. e racial wealth gap remains as wide today as believed Black lives mattered. But only for a moment. it was in 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was passed. e median net worth of the American family is about $100,000. But the    that without su•cient economic median net worth of white families is more than $170,000—while power, civic equality becomes di•cult to maintain. His insight that of Black families is less than $20,000. According to William has proved remarkably durable across American history. e ques- Darity Jr., an economist and Duke public-policy professor, fully tion now is whether a new coalition, radicalized by racism, can a quarter of white families have a net worth of more than $1 mil- defy that history. lion, while only 4 percent of Black families meet that threshold. e most dramatic advances for Black Americans since Stevens’s ese disparities in wealth persist among middle- and low-income time have come in the form of civic equality, not economic justice. families. In 2016, according to Pew, “lower-income white house- In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the party of Lincoln’s hold holds had a net worth of $22,900, compared with only $5,000 on northern Black voters with promises of a New Deal. But FDR’s for Black households and $7,900 for Hispanic households in this reliance on southerners in Congress—the guardians of American income tier.” ese disparities are not the product of hard work apartheid—ensured that most Black Americans were discriminated or cultural diªerences, as one conservative line of thinking would against by the policies that built the prosperous white middle class have it. ey are the product of public policy, what Darity calls the of the mid-20th century: the Social Security Act, the National “cumulative damages” of racial discrimination across generations. Housing Act, the GI Bill, and others. What economic strides Black Americans had made in the When President John F. Kennedy introduced, in June 1963, decades since 1968—largely through homeownership, the tradi- what would become the Civil Rights Act, he saw it as ful¢lling the tional cornerstone of wealth-building in the United States—were work of Reconstruction. “One hundred years of delay have passed all but wiped out by the Great Recession of 2008. From 2005 to since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grand- 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, the median net worth sons, are not fully free. ey are not yet freed from the bonds of of Black households dropped by 53 percent, while white household injustice. ey are not yet freed from social and economic oppres- net worth dropped by 16 percent. sion,” Kennedy declared. “And this nation, for all its hopes and all Just as the Great Recession devastated the personal wealth its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” of Black Americans, the coronavirus recession now threatens to JFK’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, sought to enact his vision destroy Black businesses, which are especially vulnerable to eco- with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, nomic downturns, as they tend to lack corporate structures, easy and the Fair Housing Act, in what is sometimes referred to as the access to credit, and large cash reserves. ey are also less likely Second Reconstruction. But just as the ¢rst Reconstruction had to be able to access government aid, because they may not have a been obliterated by Jim Crow, the Great Society’s ambitions toward preexisting relationship with the big banks that distribute the loans civic equality and economic justice were drowned by its crime- and because of outright discrimination. e National Community prevention programs. As the historian Elizabeth Hinton writes Reinvestment Coalition conducted an experiment in which white in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, those programs and Black subjects requested information about loans to help keep metastasized into a bipartisan policy of mass incarceration. Future their small businesses open during the pandemic. It found that administrations from both parties divested from the Great Society’s white requesters received favorable treatment—were oªered more social programs, while pouring funding into law enforcement. is, loan products, and were more likely to be encouraged to apply for Hinton observes, left “law enforcement agencies, criminal justice them—compared with Black requesters. institutions, and jails as the primary public programs in many low- From February to April, according to Robert Fairlie, an econo- income communities across the United States.” mist at UC Santa Cruz, 41 percent of Black businesses stopped Americans remember the occasion of Martin Luther King’s operations, compared with 22 percent of businesses overall. is loss “I Have a Dream” speech as the March on Washington, but this will have a cascading eªect, devastating not only the business own- is a shorthand: e 1963 event was actually called the March ers themselves but the people who live in the cities and neighbor- on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King and others in the hoods where they are located. “Black-owned businesses tend to hire

 

1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 45 8/17/2020 12:26:32 PM a disproportionate number of Black employees,” Fairlie told me. Rights Act of ’65 came on the tracks of Bull Connor’s vicious In the aftermath of the coronavirus, the nation will have to be dogs … But it’s going to take more than talk. We had talk before; reconstructed. It will require a massive federal eort to keep Ameri- we had protest before. We’ve got to now vow to make this at least cans in their homes, provide them with employment, revive busi- an era of action and reverse the systemic racism with long-overdue nesses that have not been able to function under pandemic condi- concrete changes.” tions, protect workers’ health and safety, sustain cash-strapped state Such a call to action would be more promising if Biden himself governments, and ultimately restore American prosperity. It will were not an author of the system he now opposes. He became a take an even greater eort to do so in a manner that does not simply U.S. senator in an era of racial backlash. He worked with segrega- reproduce existing inequities. But the necessity of post-pandemic tionists to dismantle school-desegregation programs and was part rebuilding also provides an opportunity for a truly sweeping New of the bipartisan bloc that expanded mass incarceration. During the Reconstruction, one that could endeavor to resolve the un€nished “tough on crime” era of the 1990s, he bragged on the Senate £oor work of the nation’s past Reconstructions. of the fondness for prisons and harsh punishment in the “liberal ‚e obstacles facing such an eort are manifold. Too many wing of the Democratic Party.” Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris Americans still view racism as largely a personal failing rather than as his running mate is historic, but Harris, a former prosecutor, is a systemic force. In this view, one’s soul can be purged of racism no radical on these matters. by wielding the correct jargon, denouncing the right villains, and Yet change is possible, even for an old hand like Biden. Ulysses S. posting heartfelt Instagram captions. Ful€lling the potential of the Grant married into a slave-owning family, and inherited an enslaved current moment will require white Americans to do more than just person from his father-in-law. Little in his past suggested that he seek or advertise their personal salvation. would crush the slave empire of the Confederacy, smash the €rst Ku ‚en there is the question of whether the political vehicle of Klux Klan, and become the €rst American president to champion today’s anti-racist coalition, the Democratic Party, is up to the task, the full citizenship of Black men. Before he signed the Civil and Vot- should it prevail in the 2020 elec- ing Rights Acts as president, Senator Lyn- tions. Reversing the erosion of voting don Johnson was a reliable segregationist. rights is an area of obvious partisan History has seen more dramatic reversals self-interest for Democrats, and one than Joe Biden becoming a committed likely to command broad support. There has never been an foe of systemic racism, though not many. ‚e €ght against racist policing and anti-racist majority in American If Democrats seize the moment, it will mass incarceration is largely a state history. There may be one today. be because the determination of a new and local one. Activists have yet generation of activists, and the uniqueness to persuade a majority of voters to of the party’s current makeup, has com- embrace their most radical proposals, pelled them to do so. In the 1870s—and but they have already achieved a great up through the 1960s—the American deal of success in stiening the spines of politicians in their dealings population was close to 90 percent white. Today it is 76 percent with police unions, in electing progressive district attorneys over white. ‚e growing diversity of the United States—and the Repub- the objections of those unions and their allies, and in prompting lican Party’s embrace of white identity politics in response—has o‰cials to transfer certain law-enforcement responsibilities to other created a large constituency in the Democratic Party with a direct public servants. ‚e greater challenge will be enacting the kind of stake in the achievement of racial equality. sweeping reforms that would unwind what King called entrenched ‚ere has never been an anti-racist majority in American his- €nancial privilege. tory; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically “Eorts to remedy glaring racial inequality in the criminal- diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from justice system, which whites have long denied but now acknowl- the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age. All edge, taps into principles of equal treatment that have histori- political coalitions are eventually torn apart by their contradictions, cally been easier to get whites on board for than the big structural but America has never seen a coalition quite like this. changes that are needed to produce some semblance of actual equal- History teaches that awakenings such as this one are rare. If a ity,” the political scientist Michael Tesler told me recently. “Whites new president, and a new Congress, do not act before the American have historically had little appetite for implementing the policies people’s demand for justice gives way to complacency or is eclipsed needed to achieve equality of outcomes.” by backlash, the next opportunity will be long in coming. But in As for the Democrats’ presidential standard-bearer, Joe Biden these moments, great strides toward the unful€lled promises of has struck an ambitious note, invoking the legacy of Reconstruc- the founding are possible. It would be unexpected if a demagogue tions past. “‚e history of this nation teaches us that in some of wielding the power of the presidency in the name of white man’s our darkest moments of despair, we’ve made some of our greatest government inspired Americans to recommit to defending the progress,” Biden declared amid the Floyd protests in June. “‚e inalienable rights of their countrymen. But it would not be the ‚irteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments followed the Civil €rst time. War. ‚e greatest economic growth in world history grew out of the Great Depression. ‚e Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Adam Serwer is a sta writer at ‚e Atlantic.

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1020_WEL_Serwer_Reconstruction [Print]_14060834.indd 46 8/17/2020 12:26:32 PM WHAT CONNECTS US IS STRONGER THAN WHAT DIVIDES US.

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 OCTOBER 2020 THE COUNTRY IS AT A LOW POINTOUR CIVIC BONDS FRAYED, OUR POLITICS TOXIC. BUT WE MAY BE ON THE CUSP OF AN ERA OF RADICAL REFORM THAT ADVANCES CITIZENS’ RIGHTS, RESTORES OPPORTUNITY, AND REPAIRS OUR BROKEN DEMOCRACY.

BY GEORGE PACKER

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HUDSON CHRISTIE  The year 1968—with which, for concentrated drama, 2020 is sometimes compared—marked the end of an era of reform and the start of a conservative There “ are reaction that resonated for decades. In 1968 the core phenomenon was the col- in history what lapse of order. In 2020 it is the absence of solidarity. Even with majorities agree- you could call ing on central issues, there’s little sense of being in this together. e United States ‘plastic hours,’ ” is world-famously individualistic, and the past half century has seen the expansion of freedom in every direction—personal, social, nancial, technological. But the pandemic demonstrates, almost scienti- cally, the limits of individualism. Everyone the philosopher Gershom Scholem once said. “Namely, crucial is vulnerable. Everyone’s health depends on the health of others. moments when it is possible to act. If you move then, something No one is safe unless everyone takes responsibility for the welfare happens.” In such moments, an ossied social order suddenly turns of others. No person, community, or state can withstand the pliable, prolonged stasis gives way to motion, and people dare to plague without a competent and active national government. hope. Plastic hours are rare. ey require the right alignment of e story of the coronavirus in this country is a sequence public opinion, political power, and events— usually a crisis. ey of moments when this lesson broke down—when politicians depend on social mobilization and leadership. ey can come and spurned experts, governors reopened their states too soon, crowds go unnoticed or wasted. Nothing happens unless you move. liberated themselves in rallies and bars. e graph that shows the Are we living in a plastic hour? It feels that way. course of new infections in the United States—gradually falling Beneath the dreary furor of the partisan wars, most Americans in late spring, then rising sharply in summer—is an illustration agree on fundamental issues facing the country. Large majori- of both inešectual leadership and a failed ideology. Shame is not ties say that government should ensure some form of universal an emotion that Americans readily indulge, but the spectacle of health care, that it should do more to mitigate global warming, the national coronavirus case rate surging ahead of ’s and that the rich should pay higher taxes, that racial inequality is a Brazil’s while it declined in most rich countries has produced a signicant problem, that workers should have the right to join wave of self-disgust here, and pity and contempt abroad. unions, that immigrants are a good thing for American life, that “We’re at this moment where, because of COVID-19, it is the federal government is plagued by corruption. ese majori- there for anybody who has eyes to see that the systems we are ties have remained strong for years. e readiness, the demand committed to are inadequate or have collapsed,” Maurice Mitch- for action, is new. ell, the director of the left-wing , told me. What explains it? Nearly four years of a corrupt, bigoted, and “So now almost all 300-plus million of us are in this moment of inept president who betrayed his promise to champion ordinary despair, asking ourselves questions that are usually the province of Americans. e arrival of an in‰uential new generation, the Mil- the academy, philosophical questions: Who am I in relation to my lennials, who grew up with failed wars, weakened institutions, and society? What is the role of government? What does an economy do? ” blighted economic prospects, making them both more cynical and e brutal statistics that count the jobless, hungry, evicted, more utopian than their parents. Collective ills that go untreated sick, and dead have forced a rethinking of our political and social year after year, so bone-deep and chronic that we assume they’re arrangements. e numbers are a daily provocation for change— permanent—from income inequality, feckless government, and radical change. “I think we are at a hinge moment in history; it’s police abuse to a shredded social fabric and a poisonous public one of those moments that arises every 50 years or so,” Senator discourse that verges on national cognitive decline. en, this Michael Bennet, of Colorado, told me. “We have the opportunity year, a series of crises that seemed to come out of nowhere, like to set the stage for decades of progressive work that can improve a ‰urry of sucker punches, but that arose straight from those ills the lives of tens of millions of Americans.” e crises of 2020 and exposed the failures of American society to the world. could become the catalytic agent of a national transformation. e year 2020 began with an impeachment trial that led to Nothing about this opportunity is inevitable, or even likely. e acquittal despite the president’s obvious guilt. Then came the election could end in confusion and chaos, or in another stunning pandemic, chaotic hospital wards, ghost cities, lies and conspiracy upset for Donald Trump and his party. If Joe Biden wins, a contin- theories from the White House, mass death, mass unemployment, ued Republican Senate majority could obstruct his policies even police killings, nationwide protests, more sickness, more death, more than a Republican minority did President Barack Obama’s. more economic despair, the disruption of normal life without end. Even a Democratic White House and Congress could encounter Still ahead lies an election on whose outcome everything depends. ferocious resistance from an opposition party and conservative

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1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 50 8/18/2020 10:17:45 AM infrastructure grasping for lost power. Pressure from organized of universal benets—paid family and medical leave, paid sick money in the worlds of nance and tech could sap the Democrats’ days, health care with the option of joining Medicare. It would reformist zeal. e left’s penchant for splittism could break the party demand more responsibility from corporations, obliging them to into warring factions. On a deeper level, our institutions might revise their charters and take into account the interests of workers have calcied to the point that they’re no longer able to realize and local communities as much as those of shareholders (who bear far-reaching reforms. e public could lapse back into cynicism economic risk only until a nancial crisis or pandemic necessitates and distrust made all the more enervating by raised expectations. a taxpayer bailout). And it would require enormous amounts of Eventually, the country will need a sane and healthy Republi- government spending to end mass unemployment by creating mil- can Party. But for any kind of national renewal to take place, the lions of jobs in manufacturing, caregiving, education, and clean Republicans must rst su€er a crushing defeat in November. A energy. Tanden framed her policy ideas as an updating of the New Democratic administration and Congress must quickly pass bold Deal, the original social contract that signicantly strengthened legislation for economic relief, job creation, social protections, and the role of government in order to shift the burden of economic voting rights. But a new era won’t arrive like a pendulum that risk from the individual to the collective. swings according to the laws of physics. It will take more than the e ideas in Tanden’s essay are not new. Most of them have triumph of a candidate, a party, or even a sweeping agenda. e been circulating for years in policy papers put out by liberal think obstacles are greater than just politics, and so is the opportunity. tanks and in the stillborn bills of congressional Democrats. eir Our collapse is so complete that the eld lies open—the philosophi- philosophical basis goes back at least a century. Political transfor- cal questions brought on by despair allow us to reimagine what mations don’t happen when a blindingly original insight ¤ashes kind of country we can be. e familiar narratives are used up; the across the sky. e New Deal itself, for all of President Franklin dried-out words stick in our mouths. For change to endure, for D. Roose velt’s openness to experimentation, mainly brought to national shame to become pride, we need a radical agenda with a fruition seeds that had been planted by Populists and Progressives patriotic spirit. We have to revive the one thing that has ever held over the previous four decades. e Reagan revolution realized together this sprawling, multiplicitous country: democratic faith. conservative ideas that had originated in the period after World

The presidential primaries that opened the year gave an impression of bitter disagreement among the Democratic candidates. Hours of televised debate time were consumed with the merits of Medicare for All versus Medicare for All Who Want It, the di€erence between treating undocumented immigrants humanely OUR COLLAPSE IS SO COMPLETE and decriminalizing southern-border crossings, the THAT THE FIELD LIES OPEN intricacies of Biden’s position on busing in the 1970s. THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS Today those arguments seem like an irrelevant scho- BROUGHT ON BY DESPAIR ALLOW US lastic exercise. One notable e€ect of this year’s crises has TO REIMAGINE WHAT KIND OF been to forge broad Democratic support for the most COUNTRY WE CAN BE. ambitious domestic policy agenda since the Great Soci- ety, with Biden as its unlikely standard-bearer. e coronavirus arrived just as Biden was wrap- ping up the Democratic nomination in March. By mid-April, 30,000 Americans had died and 22 mil- lion were newly out of work. A group of advisers had begun speaking to the candidate by phone and video conference War II. In the face of institutional inertia, politics requires a long about his priorities for ghting both catastrophes. e advisers game—something that the modern American right has under- then turned for ideas to people outside the campaign, in labor stood better than the left. Milton Friedman, an intellectual force unions, universities, think tanks, and small businesses. behind Reaganism, once wrote: In early May, Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote an essay called “A New Social Con- Only a crisis—actual or perceived— produces real change. When tract for the .” She sent a draft to the Biden campaign, that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that which received it favorably. Her argument came directly from the are lying around. at, I believe, is our basic function: to develop experience of the pandemic: “Our response to this virus … is only alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until as strong as our weakest link. It binds our fates together, more so the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. than any economic or natural disaster.” Tanden proposed revising the deal among citizens, corporations, and the state in ways that While Biden’s campaign was still formulating its domestic address the weaknesses exposed by COVID-19. A “new social policies, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police o¥cer, contract” would give more protections to individuals in the form and the country erupted in protests against racial injustice. “e

 

1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 51 8/18/2020 10:17:45 AM vice president looked at all that and said, ‘How I respond in the big, ambitious, bold proposal—not an afterthought, but at the face of these will be presidency-dening,’ ” Jake Sullivan, a senior core.” Another $700 billion would go to stimulating demand and adviser, told me. “ ‘I want a response that meets the moment and innovation in domestic manufacturing for a range of essential is true to who I have been in the campaign and over my career.’ ” industries such as medical supplies, microelectronics, and arti- In the primaries, Biden had presented himself as the candidate cial intelligence. Some $30 billion would go to minority-owned of the Obama years. But the historical clock never rewinds, and businesses as part of a larger ežort to reduce the racial wealth gap. the status quo ante is unequal to the desperate now. In response Biden is proposing industrial policy—massive, targeted invest- to the pandemic and the protests, Biden’s lines changed. ment to restructure production for national goals—something that Over the summer, as the virus surged, the recession deepened, no president has openly embraced since the 1940s. His agenda and the streets lled, Biden gave a series of speeches in which he would also give workers more power, with paid family and medical laid out the heart of his economic plan, under the rubric “Build leave, paid sick days, a public option for health care, and an easier Back Better.” For decades, political leaders have grasped for a pro- path to organizing and joining unions. It would more than double grammatic brand name as memorable as “New Deal” or “Great the federal minimum wage, to $15 an hour—a bitter point of dis- Society”—but who remembers ’s “New Covenant,” pute between and in 2016, now George W. Bush’s “Ownership Society,” or Barack Obama’s “New uncontroversial among Democrats. Free trade is hard to nd on Foundation”? ‹ey soon vanished, because they never came to life the agenda. For all Biden’s history as a centrist, his economic pro- in transformative legislation. Slogans stick when they’re attached gram would put an end to decades of Democratic incrementalism. to programs that change the country. ‹ere will never be such Americans are more broadly liberal on economic issues than a thing as Bidenism—because Biden himself has no ideology, on social and cultural ones. On the latter, Biden has stayed to the no politics distinctly his own—but his policies deserve a more right of his party’s activists: reform and demilitarize police, but don’t memorable name. Quoting a Depression-era poem by Langston defund them; remove Confederate statues from public places, but Hughes, and sticking it to the incumbent, Biden could call his leave presidential monuments; regulate fracking, but don’t ban it; rule reparations neither in nor out. For now, opposi- tion to Trump has blurred the party’s fracture lines. Democrats are united behind proposals that would go further in reducing inequality and remaking the social contract than any administration in modern memory has even attempted. THE SCALE OF BIDEN’S AGENDA After teams made up of Biden and Sanders advisers IS BREATHTAKING IT WOULD and allies hammered out a 110-page policy platform, GO FURTHER IN REDUCING Sanders said, “I think the compromise that they came INEQUALITY AND REMAKING THE up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most SOCIAL CONTRACT THAN ANY progressive president since FDR.” At one point Biden ADMINISTRATION IN MODERN MEMORY sidled up to the comparison. “I do think we’ve reached HAS EVEN ATTEMPTED. a point, a real in¨ection in American history. And I don’t believe it’s unlike what Roosevelt was met with,” he said in July. “I think we have an opportunity to make some really systemic change … Something’s happening here. It really is. ‹e American people are going, ‘Whoa, come on, we’ve got to do something.’ ” ‹is is not the stirring language of a visionary leader, agenda “Make America Again.” ‹e words don’t order us back, or the doctrinaire rhetoric of an ideologue. It’s the prosaic talk of like Trump’s, to a glorious age that never was. ‹ey speak to an a career politician shrewd enough to realize that he might have idea that has to be continuously renewed: “America never was greatness thrust upon him. “I think he’s come to the realization America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!” that he can be a very consequential president,” Sherrod Brown, ‹e scale of Biden’s agenda is breathtaking. At its center is a the Democratic senator from Ohio, told me. huge jobs program. A Biden administration would invest $2 tril- After alluding to the New Deal, Biden dropped the reference. lion in infrastructure and clean energy. He proposes creating His campaign seems wary of ideological framings that might 3 million jobs in early education, child care, and elderly care— alarm suburban mall shoppers in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. sectors usually regarded as “soft” and neglected by presidential Jake Sullivan ožered a dižerent, less partisan Roosevelt analogy: candidates— while raising their pay and status. “‹is economic the mobilization for public investment during World War II. crisis has hit women the hardest,” Sullivan said. “‹ese care jobs “‹e vice president’s metric really is: How do we build momen- are primarily jobs filled by women—and disproportionately tum behind far-reaching, ambitious programs that actually are women of color and immigrant women—but they don’t pay a matched to the moment,” Sullivan said, “without having them fair wage, and the opportunities to advance aren’t there. ‹is is a take on a particular ideological stripe?”

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1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 52 8/18/2020 10:17:46 AM Biden has no particular ideological stripe. He’s always been  e conventional metaphor for new presidents is ­ nancial: comfortable at the center of his party.  e party moved left, the Victory gives them a certain amount of political capital, and they facts moved left, and Biden moved with them. Barack Obama have to decide how to spend it. It gradually dwindles—the sum is ran as a visionary and governed as a technocrat—a change that ­ nite, and usually largest at the start. But there’s a di” erent way ultimately disillusioned younger and more progressive Americans. to think about a Biden presidency. His ­ rst task would not be Biden might make the same journey in reverse. to husband his limited capital wisely, but to take a long-stalled I asked Ted Kaufman—who has advised Biden since his ­ rst vehicle, get it into motion, and quickly pick up speed. He has to Senate race, in 1972; brie‡ y ­ lled his Senate seat when Biden show that government can do big things before corporate money became vice president; and now runs the campaign’s transition organizes to co-opt him and habitual public cynicism buries him. planning—whether his boss is undergoing a late-in-life ideological If Republicans lose the Senate, they will rediscover their mislaid conversion. “I don’t think so at all,” Kaufman said. “What he’s principles as de­ cit hawks and use the ­ libuster to obstruct Biden’s always done, if you go back and look at every single position he agenda.  en the Democrats would have to pack a great deal of took—what Joe Biden talks about are things that can happen. policy into a “reconciliation” bill, which allows for the passage of He will not get up and promise something and not believe that budget-related legislation via a simple majority vote. Or Senate he’s going to get it done. I don’t care if we got the Senate back, if Democrats could vote to end the ­ libuster. Many of them seem we got 59 senators, 60 senators—you could not pass Medicare open to killing it. “We’ve got to eliminate the ­ libuster,” Brown for All. His positions in the primary were left of center at the told me. “I don’t know if it has unanimity, but I’ve not talked to minimum.  e big di” erence between him and everybody else anybody that says ‘I don’t want to do it.’ ” Democrats might even running? He’s not going to promise something he can’t deliver.” arrange an execution by bringing up a popular and historically Biden sees his ­ rst task as stabilizing the country, not creat- charged bill, such as one that addresses voting rights or police ing more upheaval. “ e main thing is to get back to normal,” accountability, and daring Republicans to align themselves with Kaufman said. “It’s the old addition by subtraction—having some- the Dixiecrats who ­ libustered civil rights. one get up in the morning who says, ‘Let’s try to get the country Michael Bennet has spent his decade in the Senate watching “the back together.  at’s the best way to deal with COVID-19.’ ” Every world’s greatest deliberative body” achieve next to nothing. Majority day in the Biden White House would be a struggle between his Leader Mitch McConnell “has basically destroyed the Senate—he’s instinct to reach for familiar policies or personnel and the impera- turned it into nothing more than an employment agency,” Bennet tive to think and act anew. said. “If people continue for their own political reasons to make it

 

1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 53 8/18/2020 10:17:47 AM im possible for the majority to exercise its will, libuster reform may and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn’t have to be on the table.” Even Biden, an inveterate institutionalist, move in a strange situation.” Lippmann proposed bringing the has suggested that libuster reform might be necessary. de stabilizing new freedom of modern life under the purposeful Bennet, a center-left Democrat from a purple state, envisions “a control of science— experts, managers, forward-thinking lead- more progressive agenda than any modern president has pursued, ers. But in his brilliant survey of American life, Black Americans and it would also be wildly popular with the American people.” are scarcely mentioned. Most Progressives, even muckraking He believes that Congress should “build political momentum” by journalists, were blind to racial injustice, and some—Woodrow passing key legislation early on, with each breakthrough making Wilson is the best known—were outright racists and eugenicists. the next one more, not less, thinkable: enact paid family and medi- Rather than build on the achievements of Reconstruction—that cal leave, double the federal minimum wage, reverse the Trump earli er, ill-fated reform era— Progressivism set out to reinvigorate tax cuts for the rich and corporations while giving the middle a democracy of white Americans. class a tax cut, hold police accountable, increase teacher pay, fund ‹e New Deal, propelled by the greatest economic crisis in universal preschool, move to universal health care through a pub- American history, turned many Progressive ideas into national lic option. At the start of the previous congressional session, the realities, including unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and House introduced H.R. 1, a bill that would have strengthened collective bargaining rights. ‹e labor movement and the Com- democracy by, among other things, enacting same-day voter reg- munist Party created interracial alliances, but Roosevelt’s national istration and tightening ethics rules for members of Congress. programs were enacted by a Congress that left Jim Crow in place H.R. 1 died in the Senate before it could be vetoed by Trump. Both while limiting protections for Black and other disenfranchised Bennet and Tanden said they hope that the next Congress will Americans—domestic workers, farmworkers, the intermittently immediately take it up again, which would signal a commitment to employed. Workers continue to fall through these holes in the safety political reform. Tanden argued that H.R. 1, with its voting-rights net to this day, in our latest version of the Depression. provisions, would begin to loosen Republicans’ un democratic ‹e civil-rights movement in the early to mid-1960s produced hold on power—which is based on a strategy of making it ever a burst of creativity in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. John- harder for citizens, especially poor, Black, and Latino Americans, to son was a creature of the Senate, an institutional gure in every vote—before the party had time to re organize for a counter attack. good and bad way, and a failed presidential candidate whose career “Everything on that list—any Democrat running for the seemed to have come to an end in the purgatory of the vice presi- House of Representatives could support it,” Bennet said. “‹ere- dency. When he succeeded John F. Kennedy—another president fore it’s something that could probably ultimately get passed. in the technocrat-as-visionary mold—Johnson was scorned by Moderate Democratic senators could support it. It would make eastern liberals as a crude, big-eared Texan, a party hack, and a a massive di‘erence in the lives of working Americans and poor bigot. But he took Kennedy’s stalled agenda on civil rights and Americans. What I’m talking about is an agenda that’s more poverty and realized it in the most vigorous set of laws and actions ambitious than any time since Lyndon Johnson was president.” for social justice in America since the 1930s. Johnson had two advantages over Kennedy: unparalleled knowledge of Congress ere were three eras of reform in the United States in the and an atmosphere of crisis amid mobilization in the streets. He 20th century. Our historical moment has elements of each of also bene ted from an electoral mandate in 1964. ‹e analogies them. A new period of reform would need to bring together the to Biden are not hard to see. best values of all three. Just as the New Deal nationalized local Progressive ideas, the ‹e Progressive era at the beginning of the century was the Great Society tried to consummate the New Deal for all Ameri- least ideologically distinct of them. With no obvious leader, fac- cans. But it soon disintegrated amid urban riots, big Republi- tion, or de ning issue, currents of Progressivism ran through both can gains in the 1966 midterm elections, and the catastrophe in of the major parties, while absorbing ideas from the Populists Vietnam. ‹e coalition for reform—civil-rights groups, unions, and Socialists, and through every region of the country, in local, peace marchers, academic experts, liberal politicians—collapsed decentralized bursts of reform. Progressivism was more an impulse as the country exploded, and the left splintered into fragments than a program, a moral awakening among mostly middle-class that grew more and more extreme. Americans to the sense that the country had drifted from its Like the Progressive era, our age is marked by monopolistic democratic moorings. ‹eir chief concerns were corporate power, corporate power that has created immense inequality and threat- corruption at every level of government, and the “shame of the ens democracy itself. Like the 1930s, our decade has begun with cities” (as the muckraker Lincoln Ste‘ens had it)—urban bosses, mass unemployment and vivid demonstrations of the vulner- slums, and sweatshops. ‹e new conditions of modern life— ability of American workers. Like the 1960s, our moment is industrialization, technological change, mass immigration— animated by a dynamic young generation passionately in§amed galvanized them to act, but they were hardly revolutionaries. ‹eir by ongoing racial injustice. main answer to social ills was to create better citizens. Most American reform movements carry a strain of puritanism, “We are unsettled to the very roots of our being,” Walter a zeal for personal self-correction so powerful that it can sometimes Lippmann wrote in 1914 in his Progressive manifesto Drift replace the e‘ort to make concrete changes to materi al conditions. and Mastery. “‹ere isn’t a human relation, whether of parent ‹ese movements begin with protest from below—by impoverished

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1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 54 8/18/2020 10:17:47 AM farmers, striking workers, disenfranchised Black southerners— and quickly with a Biden administration. –at can always happen.” rise up into the middle class, which adopts the cause with what the As the party moves in a progressive direction, Biden will have a historian Richard Hofstadter, writing of the Progressives, called “a harder time ignoring pressure from his left than Obama did. But rather strenuous moral purgation.” A personal sense of guilt pro- unlike Sanders or Hillary Clinton, he isn’t a polarizing „gure, and duces a quasi- religious fervor directed toward social and political ills the very vagueness of his views might allow political crosswinds to and a longing for redemption in solidarity with the downtrodden. blow around him without bringing down the edi„ce of reform. Progressive crusaders ventured into the slums to expose the squalid –e philosopher Richard Rorty, in his book Achieving Our conditions of immigrant life; in the ’30s, bourgeois Communists Country, distinguished between two kinds of American left: and fellow travelers exalted the proletariat and sacri„ced intellectual reformist and cultural. –e „rst pursues justice through exist- independence to the iron will of the party; in the ’60s, white col- ing democratic institutions; the second seeks it in a revolution lege students joined the struggle for Black freedom in the South of conscious ness. –e reformist left wants to make police more and then decided that they required their own liberation, too, by accountable; the cultural left wants to confront America with its means of taking over campuses and curricula. racist essence. When Rorty wrote his book, in the ’90s, the cul- In the past few years, we’ve seen „tful bursts of a new moral tural left was con„ned to university departments. Today its ideas awakening: Occupy Wall Street in 2011, a utopian ‘icker; the re‘ect the prevailing worldview of well-educated, middle-class Black Lives Matter protests of the late Obama presi- dency; the Sanders campaigns, a political outlet for the anti-capitalist grievances of young people. Trump’s election accelerated and intensi„ed this awakening: the Women’s March following his inauguration; the rise of anti-Trump “resistance” groups, largely composed of middle-class, middle-aged women new to activism; THE NEW PROGRESSIVISM IS IN the #MeToo movement, a phenomenon centered on THE STREETS, IN CLASSROOMS, ON private interactions more than public policy; demon- SOCIAL MEDIA EVERYWHERE strations on behalf of immigrants at airports and along BUT THE PLACES WITH THE POWER the southern border; the return of racial justice as an overriding issue prompting nationwide protests. TO SOLVE PROBLEMS. –e new progressivism is in the streets, in class- rooms, on social media—everywhere but the places with the power to solve problems. It has drawn a sharp, clear line from historical crimes to contempo- rary inequalities. It has dramatically changed the way Americans think, talk, and act, but not the conditions in which they live. It has no central theme or agenda, no charismatic progressives, especially those under 40. Its vocabulary—white leader to give it direction and coherence. It re‘ects the fracturing fragility, intersectionality, decolonize, BIPOC—confounds the distrust that de„nes our culture: Something is deeply wrong; our un initiated and antagonizes the skeptical. –e cultural left domi- society is unjust; our institutions are corrupt. –e protests are the nates media, the arts, and philanthropy as well as academia; it death throes of a declining capitalist empire, or the birth pangs of in‘uences elementary-school classrooms and corporate board- the world’s „rst truly multiethnic democracy, or something else alto- rooms; and it’s beginning to reach into national politics. Its radical gether. “All those other eras, you have one big issue,” the historian critique of American institutions has thrived during an era when Michael Kazin, who has written many books about the American reform has stalled and the current ruling party embraces an in‘am- left, told me. “I’m not sure what that is now. I’d like to think it’s a matory white identity politics. At the same time, the distinction combination of anti-monopoly and helping working people have between Rorty’s two lefts has eroded—a „gure like Representative a better life.” –e internet, Kazin said, makes clarity and unity Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez combines aspects of both. more di™cult. “I’m old-fashioned enough to think that matters.” Under Democratic governance, the left would have to move A decade of social mobilizations with no tangible achievements. from critique to coalition-building. It would be pulled between Each new phase builds more pressure for radical change. If, in its own impulses toward institutional reform and cultural trans- November, Trump is consigned to a late life of social-media whin- formation. President Biden would immediately face an over- ing and legal jeopardy, the pressure won’t subside. Under a Biden whelming crisis in employment and health; if the left pushes administration, the streets are likely to keep roiling, maybe more him hard on divisive cultural issues such as decriminalizing illegal tumultuously than ever, as raised hopes lead to greater demands border crossings, eliminating standardized testing, and defunding and disappointments. Most younger Americans have seen no the police, it will weaken his hand for a political and economic viable kind of politics other than protest. Kazin, a veteran of the transformation on the scale of the New Deal. –e identity politics ’60s who watched the New Left doom itself with its own illusions, that more and more de„nes the left has a built-in political ‘aw. said, “I fear the left will expect too much or be too damning too It divides into groups rather than uniting across groups; it o¢ers

 

1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 55 8/18/2020 10:17:48 AM the left there’s long been a cult of focusing on the most marginal rhetoric and demands instead of building a working-class program that’s broadly popular,” Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of the social- ist magazine Jacobin, told me. His strategy di™ers from Mitchell’s in putting the emphasis much more heavily on class. “Politics at some point has to be about telling people they’re welcome. White males are a third of the electorate. We can’t let anti- racism just be a vague and indescribable thing. It has to be connected to material redress.” He means policies, such as univer- sal health care and child care and the Green New Deal, that would benefit all working people, but especially the most disadvantaged. The new woke capitalism leaves him skeptical. “We’re not going to accept at face value corporate statements in favor of diversity and anti-racism, because they’ll use this emphasis as a cudgel against work- ers of all races if we let them. Being part of a working- class movement a cogent attack on the injustices and lies of the past and present, means defending the labor rights of racists and bigots. But we rather than an inspiring vision of an America that will be. have to “nd a way to engage with them and increase the level of Maurice Mitchell, of the Working Families Party, has roots in class consciousness.” union organizing and Black Lives Matter. His party endorsed Eliza- Biden’s agenda is a working-class program without a working- beth Warren in the primaries. He imagines a broad, multiracial class coalition. Non-college-educated whites remain Trump’s base. coalition of progressives, either inside or outside the Democratic Many progressives regard them with horror and contempt, as a sea Party. “It is our job to make the Democrats uncomfortable and of irredeemable racists. Despite how desperate life has become this frustrate the hell out of them every single day,” he said. “But right year for working-class Americans of every background, it’s hard to now we are fragmented. We need to challenge sectarianism and imagine a transracial coalition. Šat would require a perception cynicism as two of our greatest enemies. We need to have the of common interests, a level of trust, and a shared belief in the same ambition as Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, niche voices American idea that don’t now exist. But it’s also hard to imagine in the right-wing wilderness that made it all the way to the White an era of enduring reform without something like such a coalition. House. Lastly, we need a multi racial solidarity that can challenge It will come about only if Americans start to see their government the solidarity of whiteness: large majorities of people of color, main- working on their behalf, making their lives less burdensome, giving stream liberals, and 15 percent of working-class whites. Šen we them a voice, freeing them to master their own fate. could break the power of the Republican Party.” Mitchell added: “I don’t believe that Joe Biden is a comrade. What I believe is that We don’t lack for political agendas, policy ideas, or protest he’s adaptable and he can evolve based on where the political times movements. What we lack is the ability to come together as free are. Any government in 2021 will have to “gure out how tens of and equal citizens of a democracy. We lack a sense of national millions of Americans quickly get work. Putting ideology aside, identity and civic faith that could energize renewal. that is a call for government playing a very active role in people’s Šis fall, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is pub- lives; that is a call for government doing big, structural things.” lishing a book called e Upswing: How America Came Together a After decades of futility, the left has a new habit of over- Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. Using statistical data, estimating its own strength (as evinced by the shock at San ders’s Putnam graphs the years since 1890 as four lines that travel steeply defeat in the spring) and an old habit of driving away potential upward for seven decades and then plunge just as steeply down- supporters by presenting popular ideas in alienating terms. “On ward. Še lines represent economic equality, political cooperation,

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1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 56 8/18/2020 10:17:49 AM social cohesion, and a culture of solidarity. ey all begin at the connection to a unifying American identity. In June the com- bottom, in the squalid swamp of the Gilded Age, and then they mission released a report called “Our Common Purpose,” which rise together through the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the put forth 31 proposals, some quite bold. ey include political civil-rights movement, to an apex of egalitarianism, compro- reforms that would make institutions more representative: enlarge mise, cohesion, and altruism around 1965—the year of the Selma the House of Representatives; adopt ranked-choice voting; end march, the Voting Rights Act, and the enactment of Medicare— gerrymandering by having independent groups of citizens draw before descending for another half century to the present, to our district lines; amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United; second Gilded Age of Twitter wars and refrigerated trucks ˆlled appoint Supreme Court justices to 18-year terms, with one new with the COVID dead. nomination in each term of Congress. Putnam calls this highly schematic arc “I-we-I.” He wants to Other recommendations are designed to change the political get to “we” again, and for inspiration he looks back to the start of culture: make voting easier but also mandatory, connect voters with the previous upswing, around 1900. e Progressive era, Putnam their representatives, train community leaders around the country, writes, was “the result of countless citizens engaging in their own rebuild social media as a more constructive public space, shape an spheres of in”uence and coming together to create a vast ferment active citizenry through civic education and universal national ser- of criticism and change—a genuine shift from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ” Put- vice. e aim is not to realize any partisan cause, but to set Ameri- nam’s historical analysis is illuminating, but the book is short on cans into motion as civic actors, not passive subjects. “Democracy details for how a new upswing might begin. works only if enough people believe democracy works,” Eric Liu, We can never again be as innocent as the Progressives about a co-chair of the commission that produced the report, told me. America’s past, or its future. In 1914 Walter Lippmann called for Ideas like these, some new, others lying around for decades, “mastery” of the new forces and freedoms unleashed by the mod- come to the fore in hinge years. ey are signs of a plastic hour. ern world. We’re beset with something else—a sense of disintegration and decline. Radical legislative reforms are a necessary condition of a national upswing. What are the democratic dreams of a nonunion Amazon warehouse associate putting in mandatory overtime with a fever and leaving her remote-schooled kids in the care of her elderly mother? “You can’t expect civic WE HAVE ONE MORE virtue from a disfranchised class,” Lippmann wrote. CHANCEIN LINCOLN’S WORDS, Today the disenfranchised include some supporters A “LAST BEST HOPE”TO of Trump. If the president loses reelection, they would BRING OUR DEMOCRACY BACK be embittered by defeat and unlikely to be argued out of their views. A hard core might turn from the divert- FROM THE DEAD. ing carnival of MAGA to armed violence. e experience of a competent, active government bringing opportunity and justice to Americans left behind by globalization would inject an antivenom into the country’s bloodstream. e body would continue to convulse, but the level of toxicity would be reduced enough to allow for an interval of healing. No one would aban- I began writing this essay in a mood of despair. e mood had don their most cherished, most irrational beliefs, but the national grown so familiar, really almost comfortable, that it made me sick temperature would go down a bit. We would have a chance to of myself and my country. But because I can’t give up on either— repair the social contract rather than tear it into ever smaller pieces. suicide is too ˆnal, and expatriation is no longer possible—I tried But an ambitious legislative agenda isn’t enough, because the to think about the future and the past. And this is what I’ve come problem extends far beyond Washington, deep into the repub- to believe: We have one more chance—in Lincoln’s words, a “last lic. Americans have lost faith in institutions, in one another, in best hope”—to bring our democracy back from the dead. It will be democracy itself. Everything conspires against our role as citizens— like a complex medical rescue that requires just the right interven- big money, indi¡erent o¢cials, byzantine election rules, mutual tions, in just the right sequence, at just the right speed: amputation, hatred, mutual ignorance, the Constitution itself. ere is no rem- transfusion, multiple-organ transplant, stabilization, rehabilitation. edy except the exercise of muscles that have atrophied. Not just Each step will be very hard, and we can’t a¡ord to get any wrong or by voting, but by imagining what kind of country we can live in wait another hour. Yet I’ve written myself into a state of mind that together. We have to act like citizens again. I recognize as hope. We’ve made America before. Self-government Last year, a commission created by the American Acad- still gives us the chance. Everything is in our hands. emy of Arts and Sciences spent months talking to a variety of groups around the country. Disa¡ection with the state of Ameri- can democracy was nearly universal, but so was a longing for George Packer is a sta writer at e Atlantic.

 

1020_WEL_Packer_NewAgeOfReform [Print]_14048209.indd 57 8/18/2020 10:17:50 AM 58 ILLUSTRATION BY DJENEBA ADUAYOM

1020_WEL_Allen_Constitution [Print]_14031261.indd 58 8/17/2020 12:28:08 PM T HE CO NSTITUTION

COUNTED MY

GRE AT-GREA T - G RANDF ATH E R

AS THREE-FI FTHS O F

A FREE PERSON

H E R E ’ S

WHY I LOVE IT

ANYWAY.

B Y

D A N IELL E

A L L E N

1020_WEL_Allen_Constitution [Print]_14031261.indd 59 8/17/2020 12:28:08 PM rst states to abolish enslavement, in 1780 and 1783, respectively (and gradually in the case of Pennsylvania)—years before the U.S. Constitution was adopted, and even before the Revolution was for- mally over. e Continental Congress, of course, in its revisions to the draft of the Declaration of Independence, struck out any explicit recognition of Africans’ human rights, postponing their protection until 1865, when the irteenth Amendment was ratied. Already in 1776, Benjamin Franklin could make cutting jokes about the so-called slave interest and its in£uence on American poli- tics. In the July 1776 debates over the Articles of Confederation, this exchange occurred between Franklin and omas Lynch Jr., of South Carolina, as recorded in the Journals of the Continental Congress:

Why do I love the U.S. Constitution? is instrument formally ¦§¨©ª: If it is debated, whether their slaves are their property, there converted the worth of my great-great-grandfather Sidiphus into is an end of the confederation. Our slaves being our property, why three-fths’ that of a free person. Living in the East Indies as a should they be taxed more than the land, sheep, cattle, horses, &c.? free man, Sidiphus had been tricked into enslavement—recruited Freemen cannot be got to work in our Colonies; it is not in the to a Georgia farm just before the Civil War by the promise of a ability or inclination of freemen to do the work that the negroes do. foremanship. Had he managed to escape Georgia and bondage prior to the onset of the war, the Constitution would not have ¯°±¨²¦³¨: Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the State, and protected his God-given natural rights. there is therefore some di–erence between them and sheep; sheep Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution determined that repre- will never make any insurrections. sentation in Congress and direct taxation would be apportioned to the states by adding up the whole number of free people, plus Franklin knew that enslaved men, women, and children were “three-fths of all other persons”—meaning enslaved persons— fully his equal, as capable of insurrection and revolution as he and “excluding Indians not taxed.” ese words carried into the Con- his colleagues had been that hot July day in Phila delphia when stitution a compromise rst formulated in 1783 in a proposed they resolved to break away from Britain. Franklin recognized amendment to the Articles of Confederation. at compromise that a society built on a foundation of domination would be as was later adopted in the Constitution to resolve the conundrum unstable as the foundation itself. of how to tax the plantation wealth of the South without giving Eleven years later, though, Franklin was helping shore up the white landowners outsize power in Congress by including enslaved Great Compromise, the adoption of the three-fths clause that people in the o’cial count of the population. underestimated my great-great-grandfather’s worth. In the nal Given the crime against humanity written into the Constitu- days of the Constitutional Convention, delegates debated whether tion because compromise was necessary to form a union—and they would convey their draft to Congress without individual given the sharp and unabating attention that the nation’s Found- endorsements or seek to have each delegate a’x his signature ers and their writings have received in recent months—I had bet- to the document. e latter approach, which in fact played out, ter have a rock-solid explanation for my love of that document. would amount to a pledge of commitment and ensure that dis- Simple love of country, land of my mother’s milk, won’t do. My sent would die in the Convention— sworn secrets of the debates love must be sighted, not blind. long concealed until James Madison’s uno’cial notes surfaced As it happens, Sidiphus’s God-given natural rights had been decades later. Franklin was in favor of consensus and for burying much earlier asserted by none other than omas Je–erson and reservations. In a statement he said: fellow members of the drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence. ey took the trouble to make this assertion in the us I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, original draft of the Declaration, when they castigated the King and because I am not sure that it is not the best. e opinions I have of England for violating—through his protection of the trade in had of its errors, I sacrice to the public good. I have never whispered enslaved people—the “sacred rights of life and liberty” of Afri- a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and cans who had never done him any harm. We will never know if here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constitu- it was Je–erson who thought up those words—words that would ents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor take many Americans today by surprise—or another committee to gain partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being member, perhaps John Adams or Benjamin Franklin. Adams, from generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary e–ects and great Massachusetts, never enslaved anyone and thought enslavement advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations was wrong. Franklin, from Pennsylvania, who himself had been as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. an indentured servant, did enslave African Americans early in his life, but he eventually abandoned the practice and became a full- With these words, Franklin articulated the deepest, hard- throated abolitionist. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts would be the est truth of free self-government. People can have the chance

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1020_WEL_Allen_Constitution [Print]_14031261.indd 60 8/17/2020 12:28:09 PM of self-government through the institutions of constitutional who had also signed the Declaration of Independence. (Wilson democracy if and only if they prioritize the preservation of those was 44; Madison was 36.) He repeatedly asserted that the work of institutions over wins in substantive domains of policy. For this creating the Constitution was but an extension of foundations laid lesson, Abraham Lincoln is our foremost teacher. When union by the Declaration. Wilson was Madison’s equal at the Convention and policy commitments come into conict, those who wish to in terms of learning and inuence. Although he was a member of preserve free self-government must choose union. In that spirit, the ’rst Supreme Court, we have nonetheless all but forgotten him, Franklin chose freedom for some over freedom for none. presumably because he was also the ’rst and only Supreme Court justice to go to debtors’ prison (as a result of failed land specula-     are good ones. And not all are tions). He died of a stroke while eeing the reach of the law. necessary. To understand and embrace the centrality of compro- Whereas Franklin was an enslaver in the earlier parts of his mise to the sustainability of constitutional democracy and the life, Wilson was an enslaver for much of his life. Even while self- government of free and equal citizens, one needs to be able publicly writing and speaking against enslavement, he owned a to distinguish between good and bad compromises. Both the man named omas Purcell for 26 years. However, two months Declaration and the Constitution (via the Bill of Rights) include after marrying a Quaker woman, Hannah Gray, he emancipated another important compromise, this one not about enslavement Purcell, an act often attributed to Gray’s inuence. Like Franklin, but about religion. e Declaration simultaneously uses the lan- Wilson fully understood the nature of the compromise in the guages of rationalism and of faith to establish the grounds for Constitution, and was prepared to accept it. During Pennsylva- its moral commitment, as when it invokes the “Laws of Nature nia’s ratifying convention, he responded thus to a Pennsylvanian and of Nature’s God.” While who objected to the three-’fths clause of the text refers to a “Creator,” F R A N K L I N K N E W the Constitution and to another provision, to “divine Providence,” and to THAT ENSLAVED MEN, in Article I, Section 9, protecting the right a “Supreme Judge,” it studi- to import enslaved people for 20 years: ously avoids using the vocabu- WOMEN, AND CHILDREN lary of any speci’c religion or WERE FULLY HIS EQUAL. With respect to the clause restricting Con- doctrine. e text is capacious. AND YET HE HELPED gress from prohibiting the migration or impor- Believers and nonbelievers SHORE UP THE tation of such persons as any of the states now alike are given reason to sign existing shall think proper to admit, prior to on; no speci’c form of belief GREAT COMPROMISE. the year 1808, the honorable gentleman says takes precedence. Similarly, the that this clause is not only dark, but intended Constitution’s inclusion of the to grant to Congress, for that time, the power protection of religious freedom to admit the importation of slaves. No such and the separation of Church thing was intended … Under the present and state formed the structure Confederation, the states may admit the for a profoundly valuable and importation of slaves as long as they please; durable compromise. James but by this article, after the year 1808, the Madison led the argument Congress will have power to prohibit such for the provision, responding importation, notwithstanding the disposition to e•orts in Virginia to pass a of any state to the contrary. I consider this law requiring all taxpayers to make an annual contribution or as laying the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country; pay a moderate tax in support of churches. (Advocates of the law and though the period is more distant than I could wish, yet it included some of the old lions of the Revolution, such as Patrick will produce the same kind, gradual change, which was pursued in Henry, Edmund Pendleton, and Richard Henry Lee.) Pennsylvania … A tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, What made the compromises around religion morally legiti- not exceeding ten dollars for each person; and this, sir, operates as mate and sound was that they took into account the perspectives a partial prohibition; it was all that could be obtained. I am sorry of all those in the new country who would be a•ected by them. it was no more; but from this I think there is reason to hope, that Every religious point of view present in the colonies in 1776 was yet a few years, and it will be prohibited altogether. conceivably embraced by the language, including those of the disenfranchised. e compromise about enslavement did not, e best, then, that can be said about the compromises regard- in contrast, consider the perspective of all those a•ected by that ing slavery that also helped the Constitutional Convention achieve decision. Standing on partial ground, it lacked moral legitimacy unanimity is this: ose who knew enslavement was wrong but and would ultimately prove destabilizing for the country. nonetheless accepted the compromises believed they were choosing a Yet the compromise was made, and Franklin was not the only path that would lead inexorably, if incrementally, to freedom for all. one who understood himself to have been complicit in it. So too did We cannot, however, assume with Wilson and Franklin and James Wilson. Wilson, like Franklin, was from Philadelphia. At the others like them that incrementalism was the only available Constitutional Convention, he was one of the few elder statesmen path to freedom for all. It is also not clear that the Constitution’s



1020_WEL_Allen_Constitution [Print]_14031261.indd 61 8/17/2020 12:28:09 PM compromises even accelerated the march of freedom, whether for surage was not adopted until well into the 20th century, and enslaved people or for people more generally. Britain oers a natural €ghts for voting rights persist. experiment with which to make judgments about alternative paths. In other words, the Constitution did not earn an earlier release Revolutionary ideas were afoot there too in the 1770s and ’80s. from bondage or promote universal surage for men much faster Universal surage for men was proposed in Parliament for the €rst than was accomplished under Britain’s constitutional monarchy. time in 1780 by Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, an Nor much faster than was achieved in Canada, a country we can ardent supporter both of the American revolutionaries and of radi- look to for an answer to the question of what might have hap- cals in Britain. Yet at home, in the British Isles, the Crown managed pened had the North American colonies that came to form the to fend o the revolution it could not defeat in 13 of its colonies. United States failed in their bid for freedom. Šis, however, did not result in the permanent nonfreedom What did accelerate the march of freedom for all was abolition- of British subjects. A British legal judgment in 1772 introduced ism, a social movement that crystallized in both the United States a doctrine against selling enslaved people abroad, a doctrine that and the in the years immediately following the was commonly though erroneously thought to mean that no one revolutionary break between the two. Moral leadership made this could be held as a slave on English soil. In de facto fashion it dierence. Freedom £ows from the tireless eorts of those who reduced enslavement in Britain and redirected the attention of abo- proclaim and pursue protection of the equal human dignity of all. litionists to enslavement in the British colonies. In 1793, “Upper Canada”—in essence, the region just north of the Great Lakes—  , , do I love the Constitution? I love it for its prac- passed the Act to Limit Slavery, the €rst law of its kind in the tical leadership. I love it because it is the world’s greatest teaching remaining British colonies. Britain itself in 1833 passed the Slavery document for one part of the story of freedom: the question of Abolition Act, dis mantling enslavement throughout its Caribbean how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to colonies and making Canada a protect themselves from domination by free land for African Americans I MUCK THE STALLS. one another and to secure their mutual who escaped slavery in the U.S. I FIND A DIAMOND. protection from external forces that might Še law helped make possible seek their domination. the Underground Railroad, the I CLEAN IT OFF AND Why do we have three distinct aspects €ghts about the Fugitive Slave KEEP IT. I DO NOT of power—legislative, executive, and Act, and the dynamics that ABANDON IT BECAUSE judicial— and why is it best to keep them eventually led to the Civil War. OF WHERE I FOUND IT. separate and yet intermingled? A typical civ- As to universal manhood ics lesson skates over the deep philosophical surage, there the United King- basis for what we glibly call “separation of dom moved slowly. In 1832, powers” and “checks and balances.” Šose Britain introduced the €rst of concepts rest on a profound reckoning with what would eventually be three the nature of power. 19th-century Reform Acts. Šis Še exercise of power originates with act had dierent rules for those the expression of a will or an intention. living in counties versus towns. Še legislature, the €rst branch, expresses In towns, men who occupied the will of the people. Only after the will property with an annual rent of is expressed can there be execution of the at least 10 pounds could vote. desired action. Še executive branch, the Šat still left six out of seven second branch, is responsible for this. Še men without voting rights. judiciary comes third as a necessary media- Britain adopted another reform measure in 1867 and one more tor for addressing con£icts between the €rst and second branches. in 1884. Še third Reform Act gave the vote to all male house Še three elements of power—will, execution, and adjudication— owners and all males paying rent of 10 pounds or more a year— are separated to improve accountability. It is easier to hold o§cials leaving out 40 percent of men and of course 100 percent of women. accountable if they are limited in what they are permitted to do. Šese changes were accomplished without a bloody internal war. In addition, the separation of powers provides a mechanism by Še U.S. gave the vote to all male citizens regardless of skin which those who are responsible for using power are also always color or former condition of servitude only with the Fifteenth engaged in holding one another accountable. Amendment, in 1870. Until that point, African Americans as well James Madison, in e Federalist Papers, a series of news paper as some white men in states that made tax payment a prerequi- opinion pieces written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and site had been denied the right to vote. Šese changes required a John Jay in 1787 and 1788 in support of the proposed Constitu- bloody civil war, and even they were still partial. Pennsylvania tion, put it this way: and Rhode Island maintained tax-paying quali€cations into the 20th century; women and Native Americans did not yet have If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels surage. In both Britain and the United States, true universal were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on

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1020_WEL_Allen_Constitution [Print]_14031261.indd 62 8/17/2020 12:28:10 PM government would be necessary. In framing a government which ­e Senate must approve Supreme Court appointments made is to be administered by men over men, the great diculty lies in by the president, but the Court has the power of review over this: You must rst enable the government to control the governed; laws passed by Congress, which means Congress can be over- and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on ruled by justices to whose appointment the legislative branch the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but has itself consented. experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. ­e Constitution is the law of the land and establishes powers of enforcement, but it can be changed through a carefully articulated To ensure that power could be held accountable, the design- amendment process, by the people’s standing legislative representa- ers of the Constitution broke power into its component parts. tives or by representatives to conventions especially elected for the ­ey assigned one power to each of three branches. ­en they purpose—which means the nal power always rests with the people. developed rules and procedures that would make it possible for ocers in each branch to not only exercise their own powers but   the cleverness of these mechanisms. ­ere are many also, to some extent, check and counterbalance the use of power more. Instituting a bicameral legislature—having a Senate and a by others. ­e point of giving each branch ways of slowing down House of Representatives—is itself a check on monolithic legisla- the other branches was to ensure that no branch would be able tive power. I marvel at the Constitution’s insight into the opera- to dominate and consolidate complete power. tions of power. I respect the ambition of the people who sought The rules and procedures they devised can also be called to design institutions and organize the government with the goal “mechanisms”—procedures that in themselves organize incen- of ensuring the safety and happiness of the people. I see its limits, tives and requirements for oceholders so that power †ows in but I love its avowal—by stipulating the process for amendment, good and fair ways. to date exercised 27 times—of its own mutability. Remarkably, We all use mechanisms to limit power and achieve fairness the Constitution’s slow, steady change has regularly been in the in our ordinary lives. A good example is the kind of rule parents direction of moral improvement. In that regard, it has served well use for helping children share desserts. If I’ve got a cake, and I as a device for securing and stabilizing genuine human progress need to divide it up between two children, the easiest way for not only in politics but also in moral understanding. ­is is what me to achieve a fair outcome is if I let one child slice while the gures like Franklin and Wilson anticipated (or at least hoped for). other child gets rst pick. ­e child who slices has an incentive It would be a mistake to think that Britain’s own slow march to slice as fairly as possible, knowing that the second child will toward the expansion of freedom was in no way prodded along by surely choose the bigger slice if the slices are not equal. Parenting the example across the Atlantic and domestic pressures †owing from books do not generally cite “Federalist No. 51,” in which Madi- that example, just as Britain’s earlier abolition of enslavement gener- son advised, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” ated pressures that drove the march of freedom forward here at home. ­e U.S. Constitution is full of mechanisms like this to struc- ­e Constitution is a work of practical genius. It is morally ture the incentives of oceholders to make sure power operates in †awed. ­e story of the expansion of human freedom is one of fair ways. Here is a smattering of my favorite examples, courtesy shining moral ideals besmirched by the ordure of ongoing domi- of the identication in e Federalist Papers of the highest and nation. I muck the stalls. I nd a diamond. I clean it o– and keep best features of the Constitution: it. I do not abandon it because of where I found it. Instead, I own Each branch should have as little agency as possible in the it. Because of its mutability and the changes made from genera- appointment of the members of the other, which means no tion to generation, none but the living can own the Constitu- branch can surreptitiously come to control another by populat- tion. ­ose who wrote the version ratied centuries ago do not ing its personnel and sta–. own the version we live by today. We do. It’s ours, an adaptable Each branch should be as little dependent as possible on the instrument used to dene self-government among free and equal others for emoluments annexed to their oces, which means citizens—and to secure our ongoing moral education about that no branch falls under the sway of another by virtue of hoping most important human endeavor. We are all responsible for our for a raise. Constitution, and that fact is empowering. No double-oce holding is permitted, which means that try- ­at hard-won empowerment is why I love the Constitution. ing to play a role in more than one branch at the same time is And it shapes my native land, which I love also simply because strictly o–-limits. it is my home. ­e second love is instinctual. ­e rst comes ­e executive has a veto over legislation, but it can be over- with open eyes. ruled by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which means that an executive decision (on legislation) emanating from support of a bare majority of the people cannot overrule a view emanating from a supermajority of the country. Danielle Allen is a political philosopher and the James Bryant ­e executive can propose the draft of treaties, but ratication Conant University Professor at Harvard. Her books include Talking requires senatorial advice and consent, which prevents treaties to Strangers (2004), Our Declaration (2014), and Cuz (2017). from being struck as personal deals with benets to the executive She was a co-chair of the bipartisan Commission on the Practice of and thereby hinders corruption. Democratic Citizenship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.



1020_WEL_Allen_Constitution [Print]_14031261.indd 63 8/17/2020 12:28:10 PM How

Disaster

Shaped

the

Modern City

 OCTOBER 2020

1020_WEL_Thompson_Cities [Print]_14024966.indd 64 8/17/2020 1:12:28 PM ILLUSTRATIONS BY

MARK HARRIS

The lessons of history are clear: Visionary responses to calamities have changed urban life for the better.

By Derek ompson



1020_WEL_Thompson_Cities [Print]_14024966.indd 65 8/17/2020 1:12:29 PM On December 16, 1835, New York’s rivers ideas about human progress, for millen- turned to ice, and Lower Manhattan went nia. Once Rome’s ancient aqueducts were up in ames. Smoke had rst appeared curl- no longer functional—damaged rst by The Invention ing through the windows of a five-story invaders and then ravaged by time—the of Public Health warehouse near the southern tip of Man- city’s population dwindled to a few tens hattan. Icy gales blew embers into nearby of thousands, reviving only during the buildings, and within hours the central Renaissance, when engineers restored the As Charles Dickens famously described, commercial district had become an urban ow of water. ‹e Lisbon earthquake of British cities in the early years of the Indus- bon re visible more than 100 miles away. 1755 proved so devastating that it caused trial Revolution were grim and pestilen- Fire ghters were helpless. Wells and Enlightenment philosophers such as Jean- tial. London, Birmingham, Manchester, cisterns held little free-owing water, and Jacques Rousseau to question the very mer- Leeds—they didn’t su˜er from individual the rivers were frozen solid on a night its of urban civilization and call for a return epidemics so much as from over lapping, when temperatures plunged, by one to the natural world. But it also led to the never-ending waves of disease: inuenza, account, to 17 degrees below zero. ‹e birth of earthquake engineering, which has typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis. ‹ey were re was contained only after Mayor Cor- evolved to make , Tokyo, and also lled with human waste. It piled up nelius Lawrence ordered city oŽcials to countless other cities more resilient. in basements, spilled from gutters, rotted blow up structures surrounding it, starving America’s fractious and tragic response in the streets, and fouled rivers and canals. the ames of fuel. to the COVID-19 pandemic has made the In Nottingham—the birthplace of the Lud- A new Manhattan would grow from the nation look more like a failed state than dite movement, which arose to protest tex- rubble—made of stone rather than wood, like the richest country in world history. tile automation—a typical gallon of river with wider streets and taller buildings. But Doom-scrolling through morbid headlines water contained 45 grams of solid ešuent. the most important innovation lay outside in 2020, one could easily believe that we Imagine a third of a cup of raw sewage in the city. Forty-one miles to the north, New have lost our capacity for e˜ective crisis a gallon jug. York oŽcials acquired a large tract of land response. And maybe we have. But a major No outbreak during the industrial age on both sides of the Croton River, in West- crisis has a way of exposing what is broken shocked British society as much as the chester County. ‹ey built a dam on the and giving a new generation of leaders a cholera epidemic in 1832. In communi- river to create a 400-acre lake, and a system chance to build something better. Some- ties of 100,000 people or more, average life of underground tunnels to carry fresh water times the rami cations of their choices are expectancy at birth fell to as low as 26 years. to every corner of New York City. wider than one might think. In response, a young government oŽcial ‹e engineering triumph known as the Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842. It gave firefighters an ample supply of free-owing water, even in winter. More important, it brought clean drinking water to residents, who had su˜ered from one waterborne epidemic after another in previous years, and kick-started a revolution in hygiene. Over the next four decades, New York’s population quadrupled, to 1.2 million—the city was on its way to becoming a fully modern metropolis. ‹e 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. ‹e comforts and infra- structure we take for granted were born of age-old ašictions: re, ood, pesti- lence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public- health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries. Natural and man-made disasters

have shaped our greatest cities, and our PREVIOUS SPREAD: INTERBOROUGH RAPID TRANSIT COMPANY; NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE; WILEY & PUTNAM / ARTOKOLORO ALAMY; BRITISH LIB RARY THOMAS KELLY / LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. THIS PAGE: OXFORD SCIENCE ARCHIVE GETTY; BRITISH ALAMY.

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1020_WEL_Thompson_Cities [Print]_14024966.indd 66 8/17/2020 1:12:30 PM named Edwin Chadwick, a member of the new Poor crisis, I would name Edwin Chadwick. His population- Law Commission, conducted an inquiry into urban based approach to the epidemics of the 1830s devel- sanitation. A homely, dyspeptic, and brilliant protégé of oped a whole new way of thinking about disease in the the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Chadwick next half century. He invented an entire ethos of public had farsighted ideas for government. ey included health in the West.” shortening the workday, shifting spending from prisons to “preventive policing,” and establishing government pensions. With a team of researchers, Chadwick under- Why We Have Skyscrapers took one of the earliest public-health investigations in history—a hodgepodge of map making, census-taking, and dumpster diving. ey looked at sewers, dumps, Everyone knows the story: On the night of October 8, and waterways. ey interviewed police o„cers, factory 1871, a †re broke out in a barn owned by Patrick and inspectors, and others as they explored the relation ship Catherine O’Leary in southwest Chicago. Legend between city design and disease proliferation. blames a cow tipping over a lantern. Whatever the e †nal report, titled “e Sanitary Conditions of cause, gusty winds drove the †re northeast, toward the Labouring Population of Great Britain,” published Lake Michigan. In the go-go, ramshackle era of 19th- in 1842, caused a revolution. Conventional wisdom century expansion, two-thirds of Chicago’s structures Calamity at the time held that disease was largely the result of were built of timber, making the city perfect kindling. forces people individual moral shortcomings. Chadwick showed that In the course of three days, the †re devoured 20,000 to ask disease arose from failures of the urban environment. buildings. Three hundred people died. A third of fundamental Urban disease, he calculated, was creating more than the city was left without shelter. e entire business questions: 1 million new orphans in Britain each decade. e num- district— three square miles—was a wasteland. What is a ber of people who had died of poverty and disease in On October 11, as the city smoldered, the Chicago British cities in any given year in the 1830s, he found, Tribune published an editorial with an all-caps head- community was greater than the annual death toll of any military line: ª«¬¬® ¯°. e newspaper went on: “In the midst for? How is it con”ict in the empire’s history. e cholera outbreak of a calamity without parallel in the world’s history, put together? was a major event that forced the British government to looking upon the ashes of thirty years’ accumulations, What are its reckon with the costs of industrial capitalism. at reck- the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that basic needs? oning would also change the way Western cities thought ª«±ª²³´ µ«²¶¶ ®±µ¬ ²³²±·.” And, with astonishing How should about the role of the state in ensuring public health. speed, it did. By 1875, tourists arriving in Chicago we provide e source of the cholera problem? All that †lthy looking for evidence of the †re complained that there them? water. Chadwick recommended that the government was little to see. Within 20 years, Chicago’s population improve drainage systems and create local councils to tripled, to 1 million. And by the end of the century, clear away refuse and “nuisance”—human and ani- the †re-”attened business district sprouted scores of mal waste—from homes and streets. His investigation buildings taller than you could †nd anywhere else in inspired two key pieces of national legislation, both the world. eir unprecedented height earned these passed in 1848: the Public Health Act and the Nui- structures a new name: skyscraper. sances Removal and Diseases Prevention Act. A new e Chicago †re enabled the rise of skyscrapers in national Board of Health kept the pressure on public three major ways. First, it made land available for new authorities. e fruits of engineering (paved streets, buildings. e †re may have destroyed the business clean water, sewage disposal) and of science (a better district, but the railway system remained intact, creat- understanding of disease) led to healthier lives, and ing ideal conditions for new construction. So much longer ones. Life expectancy reached 40 in England capital ”owed into Chicago that downtown real-estate and Wales in 1880, and exceeded 60 in 1940. prices actually rose in the †rst 12 months after the †re. Chadwick’s legacy went beyond longevity statistics. “e 1871 †re wiped out the rich business heart of the Although he is not often mentioned in the same breath city, and so there was lots of money and motivation as Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, his work was instru- to rebuild immediately,” Julius L. Jones, an assistant mental in pushing forward the progressive revolution curator at the Chicago History Museum, told me. “It in Western government. Health care and income sup- might have been di¹erent if the †re had just wiped port, which account for the majority of spending by out poor areas and left the banks and business o„ces almost every developed economy in the 21st century, alone.” What’s more, he said, the city used the debris are descendants of Chadwick’s report. David Rosner, a from the †re to extend the shoreline into Lake Michi- history and public-health professor at Columbia Uni- gan and create more land. versity, puts it simply: “If I had to think of one person Second, a combination of regulatory and techno- who truly changed the world in response to an urban logical developments changed what Chicago was made

 

1020_WEL_Thompson_Cities [Print]_14024966.indd 67 8/17/2020 1:12:30 PM of. Insurance companies and city govern- and burn hundreds of gallons less gasoline Exchanges did nothing; the Mayor ments mandated re-resistant construction. each year than people in nonurban areas. didn’t visit his o¨ce; the city was left to At rst, Chicago rebuilt with brick, stone, Ecologically and economically, and in run itself; chaos reigned. iron. But over time, the urge to create a terms of equity and opportunity, the sky- reproof city in an environment of esca- scraper, forged in the architectural milieu e New York now buried under snow lating real-estate prices pushed architects of post-fire Chicago, is one of the most had been a steampunk jungle. Elevated and builders to experiment with steel, a triumphant inventions in urban history. trains clang-clanged through neighbor- material made newly aordable by recent hoods; along the streets, electrical wires innovations. Steel-skeleton frames not only looped and drooped from thousands of oered more protection from re; they also Taming the poles. Yet 20 years after the storm, the trains supported more weight, allowing buildings Steampunk Jungle and wires had mostly vanished—at least to grow taller. so far as anyone aboveground could see. ird, and most important, post-re To protect its most important elements of reconstruction brought together a cluster March 10, 1888, was a gorgeous Satur- infrastructure from the weather, New York of young architects who ultimately com- day in New York City. Walt Whitman, the realized, it had to put them underground. peted with one another to build higher sta poet at e New York Herald, used First, New York buried the wires. In and higher. In the simplest rendition of the weekend to mark the end of winter: early 1889, telegraph, telephone, and util- this story, the visionary architect William “Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d ity companies were given 90 days to get Le Baron Jenney masterminded the con- grass—innocent, golden, calm as the rid of all their visible infrastructure. New struction of what is considered history’s dawn / e spring’s rst dandelion shows York’s industrial forest of utility poles was rst skyscraper, the 138-foot-tall Home its trustful face.” On Saturday evening, the cleared, allowing some residents to see Insurance Building, which opened in city’s meteorologist, known lovingly as the the street outside their windows for the 1885. But the skyscraper’s invention was “weather prophet” to local newspapers, rst time. Underground conduits proved a team effort, with Jenney serving as a predicted more fair weather followed by cheaper to maintain, and they could t kind of player-coach. In 1882, Jenney’s a spot of rain. en the weather prophet more bandwidth, which ultimately meant apprentice, Daniel Burnham, had col- went home and took Sunday o. more telephones and more electricity. laborated with another architect, John Meanwhile, two storms converged. Second, and even more important, Root, to design the 130-foot-tall Mon- From the Gulf of Mexico, a shelf of dark New York buried its elevated trains, cre- tauk Building, which was the rst high clouds soaked with moisture crept north. ating the country’s most famous subway steel building to open in Chicago. Another And from the Great Lakes, a cold front system. “An underground rapid transit sys- Jenney protégé, Louis Sullivan, along with that had already smothered tem would have done what the elevated Dankmar Adler, designed the 135-foot-tall with snow rolled east. e fronts collided trains could not do,” e New York Times Wainwright Building, the rst skyscraper over New York City. had written in the days after the blizzard, in St. Louis. Years later, Ayn Rand would Residents awoke on Monday, the day blasting “the inadequacy of the elevated base e Fountainhead on a ctionalized Whitman’s poem was published, to the railroad system to such an emergency.” Even version of Sullivan and his protégé, Frank worst blizzard in U.S. history. By urs- without a blizzard, as Doug Most details in Lloyd Wright. It is a false narrative: “Sul- day morning, the storm had dumped e Race Underground, New York’s streets livan and Wright are depicted as lone eagles, more than 50 inches of snow in parts of were becoming impassable scrums of pedes- paragons of rugged individualism,” Edward the Northeast. Snowdrifts were blown into trians, trolleys, horses, and carriages. e Glaeser wrote in Triumph of the City. “ ey formations 50 feet high. Food deliveries year before the blizzard, the elevated rails weren’t. ey were great architects deeply were suspended, and mothers ran short on saw an increase of 13 million passengers. enmeshed in an urban chain of innovation.” milk. Hundreds died of exposure and star- e need for some alternative—and likely It is impossible to know just how vation. Like the Lisbon earthquake more subterranean—form of transportation was much cities everywhere have benefited than a century before, the blizzard of 1888 obvious. London had opened the rst part from Chicago’s successful experiments in was not just a natural disaster; it was also of its subway system several decades earlier. steel-skeleton construction. By enabling a psychological blow. e great machine In New York, the blizzard was the trigger. developers to add great amounts of œoor of New York seized up and went silent. Its “New York is built on disasters,” Mitch- space without needing additional ground nascent electrical system failed. Industries ell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy area, the skyscraper has encouraged den- stopped operating. “ e elevated railways and planning at NYU, told me recently. sity. Finding ways to safely t more people service broke down completely,” the New “ ere’s the 1835 re, and the construc- into cities has led to a faster pace of inno- York Weekly Tribune reported on March 14: tion of the Croton Aqueduct. ere’s the vation, greater retail experimentation, and 1888 blizzard, and the construction of the more opportunities for middle- and low- The street cars were valueless; the subway. ere’s the Triangle Shirtwaist re, income families to live near business hubs. suburban railways were blocked; tele- which killed 146 workers in Manhattan. People in dense areas also own fewer cars graph communications were cut; the Frances Perkins would say, ‘ e New Deal

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1020_WEL_Thompson_Cities [Print]_14024966.indd 68 8/17/2020 1:12:31 PM for urgent change. As U.S. manufacturing jobs declined in the latter half of the 20th century, cities like and Youngstown, Ohio, fell into disrepair, as leaders failed to anticipate what the transition to a postindustrial future would require. When business districts are destroyed—as in Chicago in 1871—an inœux of capital may save the day. But when the urban victims are poor or minorities, post- crisis rebuild- ing can be slow, if it happens at all. Hurricane Katrina œooded New Orleans in 2005 and dis- placed countless low-income residents, many of whom never returned. Some cataclysms are not so much about bricks and mortar as they are about inequality and in justice. “Nat- ural disasters on their own don’t do anything to stem injustice,” observes Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Prince ton. “Without social movements or social upheaval, the recog- nition of inequities never pro- gresses beyond an acknowledg- ment that ‘We have a long way to go.’ ” Still, catastrophes can x our minds on a common crisis, pull down political and regulatory barriers that stand in the way started with the factory re,’ because it was known as the IRT. Just months later, New of progress, and spur technological leaps, the disaster that led to a New York State York faced a crucial test: another massive bringing talent and money together to solve commission on labor conditions, which in winter storm. As the blizzard raged, the big problems. “Disasters reveal problems turn led to the eight-hour workday. In all IRT superintendent reported “446,000 that already existed, and in doing so, create of these physical disasters, New York City passengers transported,” a record daily an opportunity to go back and do what you has responded by changing for the better.” high achieved “without a single mishap.” should have done the rst time,” Mitchell In October 1904, after years of politi- Moss said. New York City didn’t have to cal fights, contractor negotiations, and su¤er a devastating re in 1835 to know engineering challenges, New York’s first Finding Our that it needed a freshwater source. None- subway line opened. In a lightning-bolt Inner Chadwick theless, when Lower Manhattan burned, shape, it ran north from city hall to Grand city leaders were persuaded to act. Central Station, hooked west along 42nd Normal times do not o¤er a convenient Street, and then turned north again at Not all calamities summon forth the bet- news peg for slow-rolling catastrophes. Times Square, running all the way to 145th ter angels of our nature. A complete survey When we look at the world around us— Street and Broadway, in Harlem. Oper- of urban disasters might show something at outdated or crumbling infrastructure, ated by the Interborough Rapid Transit closer to the opposite: “Status-quo bias” at inadequate health care, at racism and

HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY; BETTMANN SMITH COLLECTION GADO INTERBOROUGH RAPID TRANSIT COMPANY Company, the 28-stop subway line was can prove more powerful than the need poverty—it is all too easy to cultivate an

 

1020_WEL_Thompson_Cities [Print]_14024966.indd 69 8/17/2020 1:12:31 PM attitude of small-minded resignation: is is just the us what an alternative urban future might look like. way it has always been. Calamity can stir us from the Cities could remove most cars from downtown areas trance of complacency and force us to ask rst-principle and give these streets back to the people. In the short questions about the world: What is a community for? term, this would serve our pandemic-ghting eŸorts How is it put together? What are its basic needs? How by giving restaurants and bars more outdoor space. In should we provide them? the long term, it would transform cities for the better— ese are the questions we should be asking about adding signicantly more room for walkers and bicycle our own world as we confront the coronavirus pan- lanes, and making the urban way of life more healthy demic and think about what should come after. e and attractive. most important changes following past catastrophes Second, cities could fundamentally rethink the went beyond the catastrophe itself. ey accounted design and uses of modern buildings. Future pandem- fully for the problems that had been revealed, and con- ics caused by airborne viruses are inevitable—East Asia ceived of solutions broadly. New York did not react to has had several this century, already—yet too many the blizzard of 1888 by stockpiling snow shovels. It modern buildings achieve energy e„ciency by sealing created an entire infrastructure of subterranean power oŸ outside air, thus creating the perfect petri dish for and transit that made the city cleaner, more equitable, any disease that thrives in unventilated interiors. Local and more e„cient. governments should update ventilation standards to New York e response to COVID-19 could be similarly far- make o„ces less dangerous. Further, as more Americans did not react reaching. e greatest lesson of the outbreak may be work remotely to avoid crowded trains and poorly ven- to the blizzard that modern cities are inadequately designed to keep tilated o„ces, local governments should also encour- of 1888 by us safe, not only from corona viruses, but from other age developers to turn vacant buildings into apartment forms of infectious disease and from environmental complexes, through new zoning laws and tax credits. stockpiling conditions, such as pollution (which contributes to Converting empty o„ces into apartments would add snow shovels. illness) and overcrowding (which contributes to the more housing in rich cities with a shortage of aŸord- It created an spread of illness). What if we designed a city with a able places to live, expand the tax base, and further entire infra- greater awareness of all threats to our health? reduce driving by letting more families make their structure of e responses could start with a guarantee of uni- homes downtown. subterranean versal health care, whatever the specic mechanism. Altogether, this is a vision of a 21st-century city power and COVID-19 has shown that our survival is inextrica- remade with public health in mind, achieving the neat transit. bly connected to the health of strangers. Because of trick of being both more populated and more capa- unequal access to health care, among other reasons, cious. An urban world with half as many cars would be many people— especially low-income and nonwhite a triumph. Indoor o„ce and retail space would become Americans—have been disproportionately hard-hit less valuable, outdoor space would become more essen- by the pandemic. People with low incomes are more tial, and city streets would be reclaimed by the people. likely than others to live in multigenerational house- “Right now, with COVID, we’re all putting our holds, making pathways of transmission more varied. hopes in one thing—one cure, one vaccine— and it People with serious preexisting conditions have often speaks to how narrow our vision of society has become,” lacked routine access to preventive care—and people says Rosner, the Columbia public-health historian. His with such conditions have experienced higher rates of hero, Chadwick, went further. He used an existential mortality from COVID-19. When it comes to infec- crisis to rewrite the rules of modern governance. He tious diseases, a risk to anyone is a risk to everyone. shaped our thinking about the state’s responsibility to Meanwhile, because of their size, density, and exposure the poor as much as he reshaped the modern city. We to foreign travelers, cities initially bore the brunt of this should hope that our response to the 2020 pandemic is pandemic. ere is no reason to think the pattern will Chadwickian in its capacity to help us see the preexist- change. In an age of pandemics, universal health care ing injustices laid bare by this disease. is not just a safety net; it is a matter of national security. One day, when COVID-19 is a distant memory, a City leaders could redesign cities to save lives in historian of urban catastrophe might observe, in review- two ways. First, they could clamp down on automotive ing the record, that human beings looked up, to the tra„c. While that may seem far aeld from the cur- sky, after a re; looked down, into the , after a rent pandemic, long-term exposure to pollution from blizzard; and at last looked around, at one another, cars and trucks causes more than 50,000 premature after a plague. deaths a year in the United States, according to a 2013 study. Respiratory conditions aggravated by pollution Derek ompson is a sta writer at e Atlantic and can increase vulnerability to other illnesses, including the host of the technology podcast Crazy/Genius. He is infectious ones. e pandemic shutdowns have shown the author of the book Hit Makers (2017).

 OCTOBER 2020

1020_WEL_Thompson_Cities [Print]_14024966.indd 70 8/17/2020 1:12:32 PM After more than 40 years of tackling the toughest medical challenges, we know that approaching any problem from a single point of view is setting a course for failure.

Success depends upon welcoming diverse approaches, challenging the status quo and exploring hypotheses from all angles. Science demands diversity and so do we.

LEARN MORE AT: GENE.COM/DIVERSITY-INCLUSION EVER THOUGHT ABOUT BREAKING FREE, ABANDONING YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES, RUNNING AWAY FROM YOUR LIFE? TOBY DORR’S GREAT ESCAPE

BY MICHAEL J. MOONEY

72 OCTOBER 2020

1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 72 8/17/2020 12:25:25 PM ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. FRESSON 

1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 73 8/17/2020 12:25:27 PM time, it’s only natural to imagine a di‘er- Toby dealt with the pains of life by ent life. What it might be like to escape staying busy and ignoring whatever hurt. our responsibilities, to get away, to start Her husband was a ˜re˜ghter, and Toby over. Of course, for most of us, that’s just worked at a utility company. Her sons a ’eeting thought. played baseball, basketball, football, soc- Growing up on the Kansas side of Kan- cer. She tried not to miss a single game. On TOBY sas City in the early 1960s, Toby Phalen was top of everything else, Toby attended col- the oldest of seven children— ˜ve girls, two lege at night. She graduated summa cum boys—in a middle- class Catholic family. laude with a double major in accounting When she was 5, her father was burning and business administration. DORR willow branches in their backyard and the In 1987, when she was 30 years old, she ˜re ’ared in his face. She saw him come into started working at Sprint. She was a project the house. His ears were gone and his ’esh manager specializing in systems develop- looked like it was rolling down his shoulders ment. There was always a new problem and arms, “like it was my mom taking o‘ to solve, a more e£cient way to do some- her pantyhose at night,” she recalls. thing, and she’d work relentlessly to ˜gure He was hospitalized for eight months, it out. But her 14-year career ended with and Toby felt it was her responsibility as the dot-com bust of 2001. never ran a red light, never rolled through the eldest child to help take care of her She started working part-time at a vet- a stop sign, never got so much as a speed- younger siblings. Even then, she wanted erinary clinic, assisting with procedures, ing ticket. As a kid, she was always the to solve whatever problem was in front of answering phones, scheduling appoint- teacher’s pet, always got straight A’s. Her her. She changed diapers, packed lunches, ments. She’d always loved animals. As a parents never bothered to give her a curfew, tried to provide stability in a stressful time. girl, she’d sometimes wander out into the because she never stayed out late. She mar- “She was less like a sister than like a third woods and stand there, listening to the ried the only boy she’d ever dated, raised a parent,” one of her siblings would later tell sounds of nature, watching the spiders family, built a career, went to church. She e Wall Street Journal. on a tree. did everything she was supposed to do. Her father eventually came home, and In 2004, Toby asked one of the vets She’s in her early 60s now, just over although he could barely move his arms, about a lump on her neck, and the vet 5 feet tall, and with her wry smile and he started working again as a machinist at told her she needed to see a doctor imme- auburn curls, she could be your neighbor, the railroad. He had a big family to feed. diately. It turned out to be thyroid cancer. your librarian, your aunt. But people in Every day, he’d crawl under the engines It was treatable, but she was 47, and it got Kansas City remember Toby’s story. She’s and spend hours reaching up to service her thinking about how much time she been stared at in restaurants, pointed at the equipment, stretching his scalded skin. might or might not have left. “I decided on sidewalks. For more than a decade, And he never complained. “Deal with I wanted to do something to make the people here have argued about whether what life gives you,” Toby’s dad would say world a better place,” she says. what she did was stupid and selfish or whenever he heard one of his kids whin- In the fog of cancer treatments, she brave and inspirational. In the papers, she ing. It became the family mantra. spent a lot of time watching television, was known as the “Dog Lady” of Lansing Toby internalized the lesson. She was especially the Animal Planet reality show prison, but that moniker barely hints at a perfectionist, the type who spoiled the Cell Dogs. Each episode focuses on a dif- why she made headlines. curve for her younger siblings. She never ferent prison’s dog-adoption program, fol- Looking back now, it all seems surreal got drunk, never tried drugs. In high lowing inmates as they train unruly shelter to Toby, like a dream or a movie. Watch- school, she was the president of the pep dogs and prepare the animals to be sent to ing news clips from that time in her life club and dated the star of the baseball team. new homes. Toby decided that’s what she makes her sick to her stomach. She has to She tried not to question her circum- wanted to do: start a prison dog program. turn away. She says the woman in those stances. She tried to be positive and just Her husband dismissed the idea, she videos is another person entirely. She can go along. She doesn’t remember how recalls. “Toby, that’s just TV,” she remem- hardly remember what she was thinking. her high-school boyfriend proposed, for bers him saying. “People don’t do that in “I was a rule follower for sure,” she says example: “It was probably something like real life.” So she tried to do the closest with a sweet Kansan lilt. ‰en she catches ‘We might as well get married.’ ” She said thing possible, and started a dog- fostering herself. “I mean,” she says, “except the yes because she thought that was what she program. She made a website, and within a one time.” was supposed to do. ‰ey got married at week she heard from someone at the Lan- 20, bought a house not far from her par- sing Correctional Facility, a state prison    tell the world how happy ents, and had three kids in four years. ‰e in Leavenworth County, Kansas, asking we are. Our relationships, our children, middle child, their only daughter, died a if she’d have any interest in starting a pro- our jobs: #blessed. But from time to few hours after birth. gram there.

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1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 74 8/17/2020 12:25:27 PM “I was like, ‘Yes! Oh my gosh, yes, that’s the beginning. She says that her husband He did, and a few weeks later he was my dream!’ ” would sometimes disappear to play golf. A among the prisoners gathered to receive Two days later, she drove to the prison few months after they were married, Toby their foster dogs. Most were happy with and gave the executive sta a presentation. decided she’d take lessons, so they could whatever dog they got, just glad to have a Two days after that, on August 13, 2004, play together. But when she told her hus- companion. But not Manard. He evalu- she brought seven shelter dogs into the band, he said that before she took lessons, ated each dog. He petted them, exam- prison, and the Safe Harbor Prison Dog she should ›nd someone to golf with. ined them, then took a second or two Program was born. “Well,” she said, “I thought I would to contemplate. When he ›nally made a ‹e idea was to let inmates who quali- golf with you.” selection— a pit bull mix, Toby recalls— fied with good behavior house dogs in “No,” she remembers him saying. “I she was amused by the whole interaction. their cells. With Toby’s guidance, they golf with my friends.” She’d never seen anything like it. would prepare the dogs for adoption. A ‹e aœrmation she wasn’t getting at Manard was 6 foot 2 and lean, with lot of these men had gone years—some, home, she now got from the dogs, who close-cropped red hair and an assortment decades—without the aectionate touch adored her. When prison officials and of tattoos. ‹e one arching over his navel of a human. But a prisoner could hug a guards noticed the mood in the prison read ¢££¤¥¦§¨. He walked with a swag- dog, lie in bed with a dog, tell the dog his improving, she became popular with ger. “‹ere was just something dierent troubles—and the dog would look back them, too. And the dog handlers? ‹ey about him,” Toby says. with nothing but love. seemed to love Toby most of all. She learned that he was serving a life ‹e program changed the atmosphere sentence for his participation, at age 17, in in the prison. During the day, there were    Toby met John Manard, a carjacking that resulted in a man getting dogs in the yard, dogs walking down the the sun was behind him and it looked like fatally shot. Manard said he wasn’t the one halls with their handlers. “Anybody who a halo. Other inmates would approach her who pulled the trigger, and even the pros- wanted to come up and pet a dog could do with some degree of hesitation, but Manard ecutor said he believed that—but nonethe- so,” Toby says. “It softened everybody up.” walked right up and told her she needed less, Manard had committed a felony that More inmates wanted dogs. And more him in her program. “I’m probably the best led to someone’s death, so he was convicted people in the community started calling dog handler you’ve ever met,” he said. of ›rst-degree murder. Toby didn’t think Toby when they found abandoned dogs. His con›dence captivated her. But she that seemed fair; Manard appeared capable She quit working at the vet clinic and told him he’d have to get approved by the of redemption. He was 25 when he met turned the barn behind her house into a prison, just like everybody else. Toby. She was 47. kennel, where she kept the dogs before they were assigned to an inmate. Soon she was working from 6 a.m. to midnight every day: organizing adoptions, shuttling dogs back and forth to vet clinics for spaying and neu- tering, letting all the dogs in her barn out to run and play a few times a day. She also spent several hours a day help- ing inmates train their dogs. Before Safe Harbor, she’d never been inside a prison, THEY SPENT HOURS A DAY didn’t even know anyone who’d served time. Now there were weeks when she was TOGETHER BUT WEREN’T at Lansing every day, more than some of the guards. ALLOWED TO TOUCH. In 18 months, she facilitated about 1,000 adoptions. In the local news, she posed for NO PHYSICAL CONTACT, photos with dogs and inmates outside THAT WAS THE RULE. their cells. She started getting donations— money for dog food, leashes, vet visits— from across the country. She sent a weekly newsletter to thousands of subscribers. Toby says her husband resented the program. Though she didn’t admit it to anyone at the time, not even herself, when she looks back now she sees that she was unhappy in her marriage from

 

1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 75 8/17/2020 12:25:28 PM A few months after starting the dog surgery. She’d come to the prison straight Toby’s husband their own brother—and program, Toby heard some inmates mak- from the intensive-care unit. they would never want her to divorce him. ing sexual comments about her. When she “Well,” Manard said. “†ank God your “I did believe him that my family informed prison ocials, she says, she was husband was there to drive you.” would talk me into staying,” she says. “I told to keep some of the dog handlers she’d “He wasn’t there,” she recalls telling didn’t see any way out.” gotten to know with her when she was Manard. “He said there’s no sense in both But now she felt someone notice inside the prison. of us not getting a good night’s sleep.” her. She felt someone recognize that she One day she was with two handlers Manard shook his head. had needs. when another inmate threatened her. He “Toby, why are you married to him?” “If someone had flirted with me at wanted his girlfriend to adopt the dog he’d She thought about it for a moment and a gas pump when I was pumping gas, I fostered, but she lived a few hours away didn’t have an answer. She thought about would have just not even responded to and was having trouble getting a ride to it later that day, too, when she left the them and I would have gotten in my car the prison. It had been eight weeks. When prison. She thought about it all that night and drove away,” she says. But Manard’s Toby asked the inmate about it, he started and the next day. She knew it shouldn’t flirting seemed safer, harmless. He was yelling at her, swearing and raising his sts. be such a hard question—she’d been mar- in prison, after all. Nothing could come Toby turned to the other handlers for help, ried for close to three decades—but she of it. She allowed herself to think about but they were looking down, unwilling couldn’t come up with an answer. Manard more and more. The way he’d to challenge the man. She was certain she “†at’s when I realized, is isn’t a mar- compliment the color of her eyes and tell was about to get hit when she saw Manard riage. This is a convenient house-sharing her how much he liked her hair. walking toward her. She could feel the arrangement,” she says. “Once you open “You deserve someone who wants relief deep in her chest. your mind and you think those things, to make you the center of their world,” Manard told the man to go back to his you can’t stop them.” he said. cell. “Nobody was going to mess with John She says that she’d told her husband 10 She’d never heard anything like this. Manard,” Toby says. years earlier that she was thinking about Looking back, she says it was “like pouring He walked her out to the prison gate. leaving, but that he’d dismissed the idea. water on a dying plant.” As soon as she got to her van, she col- She had no reason for a divorce: He didn’t lapsed in tears. She could barely keep her hit her, he didn’t cheat on her, he wasn’t    a day together hands from shaking long enough to call an alcoholic, and he had a good job at but weren’t allowed to touch. No physi- her contact at the prison, to inform him the fire department. Besides, her fam- cal contact, that was the rule. Sometimes, that she was never going back inside. She ily loved him—her siblings considered though, she’d part a dog’s fur for a tick said she’d keep running the program, but only from outside the prison walls. †at was a Sunday. †e next day, she says, she got a call back: Her contact in the warden’s oce told her she could have Manard paged whenever she arrived, and he would meet her at the front gate and walk her to her appointments. He was IT ALL STILL FELT LIKE only supposed to escort her through the prison, but Manard stayed with her dur- A GAME. TOBY WASN’T ing her training sessions. Soon they were spending hours together every day. PLOTTING TO HELP A Later, the warden disputed the idea CONVICTED MURDERER ESCAPE that Toby ever had an assigned escort. In an interview with e Kansas City Star, he FROM PRISON. SHE WAS said that she could go wherever she needed to in the prison alone. Of course, Toby JUST FIGURING OUT SOLUTIONS was married, religious, such a responsible citizen—nobody at the prison could have TO NEW PROBLEMS. anticipated what eventually happened. One morning, Manard noticed that Toby looked distraught and asked her what was wrong. She’d been at the hospi- tal all night, she explained. Her father had Stage 4 bladder cancer and had needed

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1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 76 8/17/2020 12:25:28 PM treatment and Manard would lean over to saying he knew someone who could get desire to be with this man she’d now help, and their hands would brush against him one, but it would cost $500. She known for a year but had never kissed, each other and linger for a moment. liked the idea of being able to talk any- never hugged, barely even touched. “It was so insanely desirous,” Toby says. time, but the price seemed exorbitant. Instead of thinking through all the foresee- “It was something you wanted so bad and Toby didn’t get searched going into the able consequences of their plan, she spent it was so o-limits. So it just made the prison, so she snuck in a phone and gave a lot of time imagining what it might be chemistry even more sparky.” Sitting in her it to him. like to hold Manard’s hand, to hug him, kitchen, thinking about it 15 years later, “ at was one line crossed,” she says. to, as she puts it, “live like real people.” she sighs. “It was just so intense.” “And then the next lines just got bigger.” e night before the escape was both e electricity between them built over Over the course of a few weeks, they terrifying and exhilarating. Toby was in weeks, months. Once, Manard asked her talked on the phone for 12,000 minutes— the living room, „nishing that week’s Safe if she’d be with him if he weren’t in prison. 200 hours. One morning, Toby’s husband Harbor newsletter. Her husband was in She thought about this hypothetical sce- found a text message that read: “good the recliner, watching TV. He got up and nario. “I believe I would,” she said. morning, baby. I love you.” Toby told told her he was going to bed. She said she He told her he loved her. And that he him it was a wrong number. He said he still had work to do. wanted to escape and be with her. At „rst didn’t think she was capable of cheating. “Okay, goodnight,” he said as he she laughed it o. at would break so “My naive thought was that if she wasn’t ascended the stairs. many rules! But he brought it up again having relations with me,” he would later Instead of saying “Goodnight” back and again. Sometimes, as she was driving say, “then she wouldn’t be having them to him, though, Toby accidentally said around town, she’d see a ‡ˆ‰ ‰Š‹Œ sign with anyone else either.” “Goodbye.” and think: If he was out of prison, I would Toby took more than $40,000 out of As she heard the word leaving her get this little apartment. her 401(k). She bought a used truck for mouth, she panicked. She could feel a Manard would later say in an interview $5,000 and parked it in a storage unit twisting dread in her chest. that the question about being with him had between her house and the prison. When “I thought, Holy crap! What if he asks been sort of a joke, but when Toby said yes, she first stopped in to look at the stor- me why I said goodbye?” he became obsessed with the notion. He’d age facility, she was told that because the He didn’t. toss out ideas for how to escape. Maybe building was new, it didn’t have security he could put himself in a box and have it cameras yet—which seemed perfect.  ’  that night. She mailed out? Maybe he could sneak out on It all still felt like a game. She wasn’t kept going over all the things she needed the truck that delivered food to the kitchen? plotting to help a convicted murderer to do. She worried she’d forget some- At one point he contemplated just climbing escape from prison. She was just „guring thing, say something awkward, do the the fences in the yard. out solutions to new problems. en, sud- wrong thing. “ ere were a lot of bad ideas,” Toby denly, they were setting a date— Sunday, The temperature the next morning says. It became a puzzle, a game. February 12, 2006—and going over was in the teens, and the wind was spit- e prison was full of 18-by-36-inch details. Manard told her he would get in ting snow. When she pulled her van up cardboard boxes; the inmates used them to the box, and that the box would be inside to the prison gate, she could see the dog carry their belongings when they moved to the crate when it was loaded onto a farm handlers lined up, stomping their feet to a dierent cell. Manard set about trying to wagon and transferred into Toby’s van, stay warm while they waited for her to take „t himself into one of these boxes. Every along with some dogs she was taking to their dogs. But there was no farm wagon, time, the box either collapsed or burst. He an adoption event that day. She went to no wire dog crate. So she went into the lost more than 20 pounds in a few weeks Walmart and bought men’s clothes and o©cers’ shack to make small talk and wait. to make himself „t. en one day he told enough food to last a month. As the minutes passed, she „gured the Toby that he’d dreamed of a certain way Toby says Manard assured her that wagon wasn’t coming. She was almost of pretzeling himself in. When he woke she wouldn’t get in trouble, that every- relieved. She could just go to the adop- up, he tried it, and it worked. one would think he’d manipulated her. tion event and go back to her life. But Then one of the unit leaders at the She says she never thought she’d be gone then she saw the farm wagon come around prison asked Toby to remove some old forever. She „gured she’d come home in the corner. equipment that had been sitting around: a couple of months, tops. She convinced Suddenly it all seemed real. She saw bowls, leashes, and a big wire dog crate. A herself that her family would hardly how ªat the wagon’s tires were, how it just crate big enough to „t an 18-by-36-inch notice: Her sons were 21 and 25 by then looked like it was carrying something much box inside. Piece by piece, it felt like they and had left home, and she already felt heavier than a few bowls and leashes. But were solving an abstract problem together. invisible to her husband. nobody else seemed to notice. She asked Around the same time, Manard told Looking back, Toby says a lot of what the guards to open the gate. Toby he wanted a cellphone, so that they would have been reasonable questions She opened the back of her van for the could talk anytime. She remembers him were crowded out by an all-consuming dogs. She remembers an o©cer patting one

 

1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 77 8/17/2020 12:25:28 PM of the dogs and saying, “Well, I hope you leaned down and kissed her. In front of the (using her cash) and they spent hours in the get adopted today!” As the dogs were loaded rest-stop bathrooms. It was the ‹rst time cabin, holding each other and talking. It into the back, she opened the side door, she’d kissed a man other than her husband. was the best Valentine’s Day she’d ever had. so the inmates could load the crate. Once It was what everything had been building Manard was, she says, very romantic. it was in, she quickly slid the door closed. toward. It was a moment of pure elation. He’d fill the tub with bubbles, light can- Driving away from the prison, she She doesn’t remember how long it dles around the room, then tell her to take thought maybe Manard wasn’t in the lasted, but she remembers that the next a bath and relax. Every day, when she got box after all. She called back behind her: thing he did was ask her to give him her dressed, he complimented her. “Wow,” he’d “John, are you there? Are you in the crate?” cellphone so he could throw it in a lake. say. “ at out‹t looks so nice!” When she ere was no answer. Again, she felt As he drove, Toby navigated with a cooked dinner, he would tell her how great it relieved. Planning the escape had been road map. It would have been a 10-hour was, how she was the best cook in the world, fun, but she was glad to be going to the drive if they’d taken the most direct route, how he’d never had fried chicken that good. adoption event. en an arm burst out of but because they stuck to back roads, the They’d planned to lay low for a few the box, and she heard Manard laughing. trip lasted nearly 24 hours. After not sleep- weeks, but Manard wanted to go out. He told her he was hyperventilat- ing the night before the escape, and not ere were so many things he wanted to ing and asked her to let him out, so she sleeping during the drive—and after such see, so many foods he hadn’t had in 10 pulled over to open the crate. In the back an emotional, nerve-racking experience— years. So nearly every day, they went some- of the van, he changed into the clothes Toby was exhausted. So much so that, as where and did something. she’d brought him. “Drive, Toby, drive!” they got close to the cabin and she opened She’d wanted to take some of her dogs Manard said. She headed toward her her laptop to find the directions she’d with them, but he’d told her they couldn’t, house, to put the dogs back in their ken- downloaded, she couldn’t remember what and she missed having a pet. One day they nels. Manard said they’d save time if she she’d named the ‹le. went to a pet store. He said he wanted to just let them out in a ‹eld, but she insisted. “ is isn’t a game, Toby,” she recalls buy her a parakeet. She liked a tiny yellow “I was not about to drop these dogs out in Manard saying. “What did you name it?” one she saw, but he said he was getting her the ‹eld,” she says. She suggested that they pull over at a a blue one instead. At her place, while Toby put the dogs diner and ask for directions. “I’m buying this parakeet, not you,” in the barn, Manard went into the house “He just went ballistic,” Toby says. He she remembers him saying. “Don’t think and took two pistols. Toby never liked started screaming, driving erratically, hitting you can tell me what to do. I’m not your guns, but Manard told her they’d be car- the steering wheel. “He said, ‘I don’t even fucking husband.” rying a lot of cash, and this would scare know why I brought you, anyway. I should She left the store and waited by the away anyone who tried to mess with them. just throw you out of this truck right now truck. He gave her the blue parakeet and en they went to the storage facility. and just keep on going. I don’t need you!’ ” told her he wanted to name it Lynyrd, He drove the truck out and she backed the She’d never seen him act like this. It after Lynyrd Skynyrd, because the band van in. She locked the unit, hopped into dawned on her that she didn’t have her sang the song “Free Bird”—and that’s the truck, and oŒ they went. phone. She’d given him all her cash. She what he was, a free bird. e plan was to take a circuitous route didn’t even know where she was. She She said she didn’t like that name. to a lakeside cabin in Tennessee that started crying. “You’re not naming this bird,” he told Manard had reserved under a fake name, en, as quickly as his anger came, he her. “I’m naming it. Its name is Lynyrd.” using the cellphone Toby had given him. was calm again. He told her he’d pull into She stuck her ‹nger in the cage, and ey wanted to stay oŒ interstates and big the diner and she could ask for directions. the bird bit her. highways. First they headed north, then She was confused, uneasy. But he was back On their fourth or ‹fth day, they went to east toward the Great Smoky Mountains. to normal. Nashville and saw the movie Walk the Line, Manard was talking so fast, Toby could When they finally got to the cabin, about ’s pursuit of and eventual barely keep up. He kept giggling. they—well, they did exactly what you’d marriage to then-married June Carter. “Look, Toby! I’m driving! It’s been 10 expect two lovers on the run to do. “It “John just loved it,” Toby says. “He years and I can still drive!” wasn’t awkward,” she says, looking back. loved Johnny Cash; he loved all the songs He was eating the snacks he’d asked “ at was probably the best part of our and the music in it. And he’d say, ‘ at her to buy, little chocolate donuts and relationship, honestly.” Then they fell movie’s about us. I never thought I could Twizzlers. She sort of expected there to asleep in each other’s arms. have you, and look what I’ve got.’ ” be a moment when they’d stop and maybe They went to a guitar store, where kiss for the ‹rst time. But he told her they     , it took her a Manard went down the row, trying out needed to drive. ey needed to get away. second to remember where she was and guitar after guitar. He asked to play one A few hours later they stopped at a rest what they’d done. She’d brought a mando- in a glass case, priced at $10,000. She says stop. They came out of their respective lin, and Manard played her “Brown Eyed he was “in heaven,” and she loved watch- bathrooms at the same time. at’s when he Girl.” He bought her a box of chocolates ing him play.

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1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 79 8/17/2020 12:25:30 PM That day for lunch they went to a flames. “Wouldn’t that be romantic?” Chattanooga. Manard had never been to McDonald’s drive-through. She had her he said. an IMAX theater, and a mall there had computer with her, and opened it up while But by the time they got back to the one. He’d wanted to see a documentary they were in line. McDonald’s had Wi-Fi, area, it was late and there was no place to about sharks. But when they got to the and when her browser loaded, she saw a buy ‰rewood. theater, they realized that Chattanooga headline that said something like “Dog “He got so mad,” Toby says. “Like the is in a di‘erent time zone, and the shark Lady Implicated in Escape.” whole world was against him having a ‰re movie had already started. ey went to She screamed. that night.” see a movie about lions instead. “You said that they’d think you manip- Snow was falling, and as they drove At the concession stand, they noticed ulated me!” She pointed at her screen. along the winding mountain roads, a woman buying snacks for a group of “Look at this! I’m in trouble!” Manard jerked the wheel back and forth, kids, and Manard offered to help her He slammed the laptop shut. is, he causing the truck to slide and ‰shtail. carry the food into the theater. When told her, was why they hadn’t turned on “I can’t believe we can’t ‰nd any fucking he sat down, he wondered aloud what the TV in the cabin. ‰rewood,” she remembers him saying. “I’m the woman would think if she knew an He told her they weren’t going to get just going to drive this truck o‘ of a cli‘.” escaped convict was carrying snacks for caught. And if they did, the authorities As the dark mountain sky skidded past her kids. Toby loved Manard, but by now would blame him. It’s not like she would and they teetered near cli‘s, Toby won- she was constantly trying to gauge his end up in prison or anything. is calmed dered for the ‰rst time how she was going mood. She was relieved that he liked the her, but she wasn’t hungry anymore. to get out of all this. lion movie. One evening, Manard said he’d make Afterward, they went to a barbecue her a ‰re in the ‰replace back at the cabin     , they woke up, restaurant—and he got upset when he and they could sleep next to the glowing put on wigs, and drove a few hours to stained his white shirt. en he wanted to see the snake exhibit at the zoo. But by the time they found the zoo, it was closed. “ en he was mad because he couldn’t see this big snake exhibit,” Toby says. ey went to Sears so he could buy a Toby Dorr and John GPS—he blamed her for not being able Manard at to ‰nd the zoo. She went to use the rest- the Lansing room, and when she came out, he had Correctional Facility disappeared. She looked around the store, before she but couldn’t ‰nd him anywhere. She began helped him to panic. She was all alone. No phone. No escape. money. en he jumped out from behind a display and scared her. “He thought it was so funny,” she says. “I didn’t think it was funny at all.” Leaving the mall, they walked by two U.S. marshals without realizing it. It was getting dark as they cruised down the interstate. Toby was staring out the window, thinking about the mess she’d gotten herself into, when she saw an incredibly bright light in the distance. So bright that it looked like daylight. She thought there must be construction ahead. As they got closer, she saw traffic backed up along the service road and a sideways police car blocking the ramp. “Toby,” Manard said. “ is is for us.” She turned to look at him. “What’s for us?” Before he could respond, she under- stood. rough the windshield, she could

see what looked like 50 police cars. She CHARLIE RIEDEL / AP

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1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 80 8/17/2020 12:25:30 PM remembers the o‘cer grabbing her, pulling her out through the window, and throwing her on the ground. en she had a gun to the back of her head as she was handcuˆed. When she looked up, she saw Manard coming around the back of the pickup truck, handcuˆed and dragging several o‘cers. AS THE DARK MOUNTAIN SKY “Are you okay, baby?” he shouted through the chaos. “Are you okay?” SKIDDED PAST AND THEY She said she was.

TEETERED NEAR CLIFFS, TOBY  ’  that she wouldn’t get in trouble, Toby was WONDERED FOR THE FIRST charged with aiding and abetting aggra- TIME HOW SHE WAS GOING TO vated escape, taking contraband into a prison, and providing ’rearms to a felon. GET OUT OF ALL THIS. She was sentenced to 27 months. She later learned that authorities had tracked them to the cabin because Toby had used that address for the paperwork for the truck. “It turns out, I’m not a good criminal,” Toby says. Her first endeavor into lawbreak- ing divided her family. For nearly two weeks, they’d feared the worst. Toby’s father, who had already been sick, died remembers thinking, Who do they think squealing tires. Not Manard. It was just eight weeks after her arrest. Her mother we are that they need 50 police cars? cars and trees and €ashing lights slowly and some of her siblings believed Toby’s “What do you want me to do, baby?” passing by. felonious behavior and subsequent arrest Manard asked. Manard was driving on the shoulder hastened his death. But her mother loved “Well,” she said. “If they turn on their again, then through the grass alongside her unconditionally, and came to visit her lights and tell you to pull over, you have the highway. When he pulled back onto in prison almost every week. Toby stayed to pull over. at’s the law!” the pavement, the tires locked up and he in contact with her two brothers, but she He told her he would. But then a lost control of the truck. ey turned and never re established a relationship with her police car came from behind and swerved sped straight toward a tree. As she saw the four sisters. eir family had always been in front of them, and Manard got angry. tree approaching, Toby prayed that God private. Having their lives exposed this “ey’re trying to kill us,” she remem- would let her die in the wreck. way was embarrassing and painful. Her bers him saying. “I wanted to be done,” she says. sons refused to speak to her. Her husband He told her he’d drive until they ran en they hit the tree. ’led for divorce, and it was ’nalized the out of gas, then he €oored it. She looked Suddenly, she could hear again. day before she went to prison. at the gas gauge and saw that they had Manard was asking her over and over, “Are In an email, Toby’s ex-husband, Pat three-quarters of a tank. He was weaving you okay?” She had shards of glass in her Young, said he doesn’t remember many around other cars, driving on the shoul- hair and cuts on her head. She couldn’t get of the incidents Toby describes from their der. Toby watched 18-wheelers fly by, enough air to speak. Steam was pouring marriage, or remembers them diˆerently. inches from her face. out of the hood of the truck. But he said he never tried to squash her At one point, Manard pulled oˆ the Manard told her he didn’t want to leave dreams. Even though he wasn’t a fan of the highway and drove across the median, her, but that if he didn’t get out of the dog program, for instance, he’d helped her dodging pine trees and bushes and shrubs truck, the police would start shooting. convert the barn into a kennel. “She was as the truck bounced along. ey popped She remembers seeing him get out with very accustomed to doing what she wanted back out on the other side of the highway, his hands up. en a man with what she to do,” he said, adding that her crime cre- now headed in the opposite direction. recalls as “a black machine gun” started ated ripples of suˆering for their family. Though they were going more than yelling at her to get out of the vehicle. “It aˆected me physically, mentally, and 100 miles an hour, Toby felt like the She tried to explain that her seat belt was monetarily.” And it was especially hard on world was moving in slow motion. And stuck and that her door was caved in, but their sons, “who had to say, ‘Yeah, that’s she couldn’t hear a thing. Not sirens. Not she couldn’t catch her breath to talk. She my mom.’ ”

 

1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 81 8/17/2020 12:25:31 PM Young is remarried now; he and his But the more she talked with her the treatment, Toby gave her sons space. But wife like to play golf together. Of Toby, new friends in prison, and the more she as her younger son’s condition worsened, he said: “She is of no consequence to me.” reŒ ected on everything that had led up she decided to go to the hospital to see him. to the escape, the more those letters from “I can’t tell you why I did what I did,”    men’s prison in Manard began to seem a little immature. Toby told him. “I haven’t gured it out yet Lansing was violent. Women’s prison, He would say things like “I’m your knight myself. But I want you to know I’ve never she learned, wasn’t like that. € ere were in shining armor and you’re trapped in this stopped loving you.” rivalries and gossip—“high-school drama tower and I wish I could ride in on my He looked at her and said he knew that. on steroids,” she says—but prison is also horse and rescue you.” She asked to give him a hug. where she formed the strongest friendships “I got that and I thought, is is so not He said no. of her life. For the rst time, she felt like realistic,” she says. “I just decided I have She asked if she could come back and the people around her would do anything to be done with this.” It was like she was see him again. to help her. And with no responsibilities, slowly waking up from a dream. He said no. she had time to think about all the things When she got out, she moved in with She came back anyway, two weeks she’d been avoiding her whole life. her mother, but everyone in Kansas City later. He was in a coma. She touched his Manard got 10 years added to his knew what she had done, and she felt face and held his hand and told him he’d sentence. He wasn’t supposed to com- uncomfortable in public. She found a fought long enough, and that it was okay municate with Toby, but he gured out web-design job in , and decided to for him to go. € en she kissed him and where she was and wrote to other women move. But she returned to Kansas City sev- left. He died soon after. there with notes to give to her. He sent eral months later, on Christmas Eve 2008. her drawings and song lyrics and letters Toby’s younger son had been diagnosed    , in October 2009, describing their love. with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. During most of Toby got married again, in a simple

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1020_WEL_Mooney_TobyDorr [Print]_14029421.indd 82 8/17/2020 12:25:32 PM courthouse ceremony. Her husband’s women in prison process their feelings car around in someone else’s driveway. She name is Chris, and he makes her feel safe and circumstances, to break the destruc- certainly never wants to get arrested again. and supported. He didn’t balk when he tive cycles that put them behind bars. But she says she’s come to realize that some  rst learned her story. He even encouraged She’s also started telling her own story rules—like keeping a redeemable person her to reach back out to John Manard. in public. She’s given just a handful of locked up for life—aren’t just. Toby and Manard started exchanging let- speeches, but each time she’s been met Sometimes she’s asked if she regrets ters and talking on the phone. Toby sent with a line of women coming up to her what she did: leaving her family, helping him a Christmas basket.  en Toby and afterward, confessing their own secret a felon escape, living on the run for two Chris went to visit him in prison. desire to escape. Her story resonates, she weeks. She always says regrets are a waste “It was so good for all three of us,” says, because so many women wonder if of time. she says. they wouldn’t do the same thing. They “You can’t change the past,” she says. “I Toby and Manard haven’t communi- feel pressure to smile and pretend their like the person I am today, and I wouldn’t cated in a few years now, and attempts to life is  ne, even when trapped in a bad be the person I am today if I hadn’t gone reach him for this story were unsuccess- relationship or a bad job or any number of through all that.” ful. But in a letter he wrote to e Kan- circumstances that seem beyond their con- Would she do it over again? sas City Star in 2018, he said he’d loved trol. Toby thinks these women are inspired She lets out a sweet, rueful laugh. Toby. “Why did I stay with her once I was by her not only because she had the guts “No way.” out if I was just manipulating? I NEVER to leave, but also because she tells her story manipulated her in the least!” he wrote. “I without shame. loved Toby with all that I was.” Toby is still a rule follower. She always  ese days, Toby is trying to help other wears her seat belt. She’s always on time. Michael J. Mooney writes about crime, women. She’s made workbooks to help She says she “freaks out” if Chris turns the politics, and culture. He lives in .

 

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Was Charlotte Dod the Greatest Athlete Ever?

e remarkable career of a Victorian athletic phenom—and the legacy that wasn’t

By Helen Lewis

Charlotte Dod was only 16 when she challenged a man to single combat—three men, in fact. It was the summer of 1888, and the Brit- ish prodigy had already won two Wimbledon titles, earning her the nickname “Little Wonder.” But Dod was always eager for another victory, and three singles matches, each against a top-ranked male ten- nis player, would attract plenty of publicity. Two of the men knew her already, having partnered with her in mixed doubles. One of them, Ernest Renshaw, even had prior

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1020_CC_Lewis_CharlotteDod [Print]_13743472.indd 84 8/13/2020 4:33:57 PM experience in taking on a woman—Dod’s great rival, quest to claim their place in sports, a realm that has Blanche Bingley. (On a dare, he had worn cumbersome always been dominated by men—as players, o¨ cials, women’s clothing to do so; he won the match.) coaches, and viewers. Women were banned from  e men allowed Dod to start at 30–0, and she competing in the ancient Olympics; in Dod’s time, could request replays of up to three points in each set. the president of the International Olympic Com- But the advantages did not all run one way: Dod wore mittee pronounced women’s sports “against the laws a long, high-necked dress; a corset; thick stockings; of nature.” Sports were not, however, against Dod’s and heavy leather shoes. And, like most women at the nature. Born in 1871 in the village of Lower Bebing- time, she habitually served underhand. Renshaw lost ton, she had the advantage not just of upper-middle- the ‡ rst set, and upped his game. One commentator class comforts (among them a tennis court at home) remarked that once he realized “he had no ordinary but of a physically gifted family, with three siblings lady opponent … every stroke was keenly contested.” who also excelled athletically. Early on, her elder sister, He recovered to win the match narrowly (2–6, 7–5, Ann, was her doubles partner and chaperone; later, 7–5), but the other two men were beaten by a girl. her brothers accompanied her on outdoor adventures. Eighty-‡ ve years before Billie Jean King and Bobby To the Victorians, the highest aspiration for women’s Riggs fought the “battle of the sexes,” a Victorian sports was respectability. Was it “unfeminine” to exert teenager showed what women could do. oneself in public? To aspire to beat the competition and Dod’s story is all the more extraordinary because, seize glory for yourself? To train hard to excel, instead after winning three more Wimbledon victories, she of resigning yourself to life as a supporting actor in abandoned tennis in the mid-1890s, feeling that she someone else’s story?  e answer was obvious, which had nothing left to prove. She went on to represent didn’t stop Dod from hitting the ball with “sheer feroc- England in ‡ eld hockey, win an Olympic silver medal ity,” according to Abramsky, or from crushing more in archery, and become an accomplished mountaineer, ladylike opponents, or from disdaining women who expert horseback rider, skilled ice-skater, champion “merely frivol at garden parties” with a racket in their golfer, and daredevil tobogganist. On the tennis hands. Feminine modesty didn’t deter her from keeping A sensation in England at the end of the 19th cen- court, Dod a fat scrapbook of press clippings, either, though she tury, a time of feminist ferment, Dod was all but wore a long, was well aware of the patronizing spirit of plenty of the forgotten when she died in 1960—“a Victorian relic high-necked coverage—praising her for being “healthy, ruddy, and in a nuclear age,” as the journalist Sasha Abramsky as strong as a man,” for example, while noting that she wistfully puts it. In Little Wonder:  e Fabulous Story of dress; a corset; “has not lost a particle of her womanliness.” Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar, he thick stockings; We get a rare glimpse into the inner ‡ re that made sets out to write her back into the historical record. In and heavy Dod such a ‡ erce competitor in a seven-page maga- doing so, he joins a well-established feminist project— leather shoes. zine essay on tennis that she wrote when she was just the rediscovery of lost pioneers of all kinds. Research- 18. Abramsky cites passages in which the teenager ers have not yet settled on the athletic equivalent of described a world of commentators who presumed the playwright Aphra Behn or the mathematician Ada that “no lady could understand tennis scoring.” She Lovelace. Could Lottie Dod be that ‡ gure? attacked the editor of a popular journal, depicting Working out where Dod ‡ ts in the pantheon of sport- him as being “invested with the prerogative of an ing, and female, greatness is its own sort of feat. After all, irresponsible despot” and arguing that the quality of she played against a limited pool of amateur opponents, female competitors had “conclusively disproved” his drawn from the upper and middle classes, while wearing prejudices against them. clothes chosen for modesty rather than performance. She was also outspoken on the subject of one par- Taking stock of her remarkable versatility is tricky, too. ticular disadvantage faced by female athletes of the Her omnicompetence now seems like dilettantism, but it time. “How can they ever hope to play a sound game might also re¦ ect changing models of success.  e current when their dresses impede the free movement of every formula for athletic stardom is the “Tiger path,” mim- limb?” she remarked to a journalist. “A suitable dress is icking Tiger Woods’s early and unwavering hyper-focus, sorely needed, and hearty indeed would be the thanks but in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a of puzzled lady-players to the individual who invented Specialized World, David Epstein instead endorses an easy and pretty costume.” Entering competitions as the more eclectic “Roger path”—following Roger a young teenager, Dod bene‡ ted from being able to Federer, who loved skateboarding, skiing, and wrestling at least wear skirts above the ankle, but soon enough as a child, and settled on tennis only as a teenager. she was trussed up and weighed down by more restric-  e “Lottie path” is an extreme variation of that tive garments. (For an insight into the daily life of approach, and it has now fallen ‡ rmly out of fash- Victorian women, remember that the rational-dress

PA IMAGES / ALAMY ion. Still, Dod’s story does shed light on women’s movement, which emerged in the mid-19th century,

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called for reducing the weight of under garments from ˜is relationship sustained Dod. In the Irish-born as much as 14 pounds to a still-hefty seven.) Main—rich, twice-widowed, and charismatic—Dod had ©nally met a woman who could rival her for ath-    Little Wonder, I kept thinking of Serena leticism and daring. ˜e two women took to climb- Williams, whose career has unfolded in the shadow of ing mountains together, accompanied by a Bernese the same issues more than a century later. Ideas about mountain dog named Pluto, tackling di¶cult peaks femininity conferring respectability still persist in wom- in Switzerland and Norway. Main showed Dod how en’s sports. In 2018, the French Tennis Federation presi- to use an ax to carve ridges in the rock; they slept in dent, Bernard Giudicelli, said that the sleek black catsuit mountain huts and raced at dawn for the summits. worn by Williams at the French Open went “too far,” And then, after ©ve years of adventuring together, for adding: “You have to respect the game and the place.” A reasons Abramsky says are “lost to time,” they fell out. gentle reminder: ˜e French Open is played on courts Wondering whether they had a romantic quarrel— plastered with the names of airlines and investment whether Main may have been more than a friend to banks, not in the state rooms of the Élysée Palace. Why Dod, who never married—is not mere prurience. impose a formal dress code on athletes sharing space Many Victorian social reformers, such as Sophia Jex- with a 50-foot banner reading œžŸ ¡¢£¤¥¦¡§? Like Dod Blake and Octavia Hill, were lesbians. ˜ey had no before her, Williams was being urged to play in an out©t husbands or children to tie them to the domestic that did not cost her “a particle of her womanliness.” sphere, and perhaps their sexuality made them aware Williams’s huge fan base is the exception: Women’s early in life that they would never ©t into conventional sports are often still treated as inferior by both male society. In Dod—as in other tennis trailblazers such as players and viewers, a second-class status commonly Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova—were gen- justified by market appeal. Novak Djokovic once der, social, and sexual nonconformity somehow linked? declared that prize money should be determined by Abramsky cannot be blamed for failing to settle “who attracts more attention, spectators, and who questions like these, given that one of the problems of LITTLE sells more tickets.” But the greater popularity of men’s WONDER: THE writing women’s history is a lack of primary sources. FABULOUS sports right now is not the result of some natural law, STORY OF Dod’s letters are few, and she left no revealing personal like gravity or the diminishing quality of Radiohead LOTTIE DOD, diary to plunder for insights. ˜at said, I wish the THE WORLD’S albums. Around the world, women’s sports are under- FIRST FEMALE book included more of that essay Dod wrote at 18— funded and underpromoted. ˜at is why Title IX, SPORTS and less irrelevant historical context (the evocation of SUPERSTAR which prohibits sex-based discrimination in American Queen Victoria’s golden-jubilee parade, in 1887, drags education programs, has been such an important and Sasha Abramsky on like the procession itself). Here and there, Little contentious piece of legislation. Since its enactment Wonder is padded like an American football player. in 1972, women’s participation in college sports has AKASHIC BOOKS Wisely, however, Abramsky’s contribution to the increased by 545 percent; the number of girls playing feminist genre of “lost lives” wears its politics lightly. high-school sports has surged by 990 percent. Fairness Dod was a pioneer, eager to achieve one female “©rst” in competitive opportunities or ©nancial prospects after another. But she wasn’t a natural activist, even if has yet to follow, however. (For example, the U.S. she did persuade the Royal North Devon Golf Club women’s basketball team, which has won six Olympic “to allow ladies to use their facilities from October gold medals in a row, had to ©ght publicly to secure through May of each year.” Nor was she a su»ragette, paid training sessions for its stars to prepare for the bombing and burning, although the daredevil moun- now-postponed Tokyo Games.) taineer and tobogganer never lacked courage: She vol- It would be wrong, though, to see Dod as a passive unteered as a nurse during World War I, despite her victim of condescending attitudes. She was lucky to painful sciatica. If Abramsky’s biography feels rather have supportive siblings and other companions in her slight, it is because he refuses to co-opt her into an youth. In Abramsky’s telling, the men she challenged uplifting parable of women’s liberation. Instead, he did not see their matches as a way to put women in their celebrates her as a brave and talented and determined place, as Bobby Riggs did. And in her post-tennis life, original. In sports, the battle of the sexes is far from her holidays in the ski-resort town of St. Moritz granted over, but Dod won more than a few break points her a social circle where her athleticism was admired simply by living her own life to the fullest. and encouraged. She encountered men who took her seriously, and were ready to devote time to coaching an obviously exceptional athlete. After passing a stringent ladies’ test in ice-skating, she trained for the much more Helen Lewis is a London-based sta writer at rigorous men’s exam, spurred on by the example of ˜e Atlantic and the author of Di¶cult Women: her friend Elizabeth Main, the ©rst woman to pass it. A History of Feminism in 11 Fights.

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www.wwnorton.com

Pete Buttigieg, Buttigieg, Pete born in Indiana in 1982, is former of South Bend and 2020 mayor Democratic presidential candidate. veteran, A Rhodes Scholar and Navy and educated at Harvard Buttigieg was Oxford. He and his husband, Chasten in South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg, live already considered a classic of the politicalalready considered a classic of the beacon of hopememoir form, provides us with a crisis. at a time of social despair and political The meteoric rise of the mayor of a small Midwest city, Midwest city, The meteoric rise of the mayor of a small who defied every pundit’s electrifying run odds with his created one of the most surprising for the Presidency, fact that his The candidacies in recent American history. Shortest Way Times-bestselling memoir, New York read like your typical campaign book Home, just didn’t appeal. transcendent only added to “Mayor Pete’s” to came everywhere, old and young, Readers mayoral appreciate the personal stories and gripping the political and tales, which provided, in lyrical prose, campaign. philosophical foundations of his historic a “Back Home” Now featuring a new introduction and returns the afterword, in which Buttigieg movingly of South Bend, reader to his roots in his hometown city for his father, Indiana, as well as a poignant eulogy Home, Shortest Way Joseph Buttigieg, since Barack Obama’s Dreams from since Barack Obama’s Guardian .” —Charles Kaiser, My Father “ The best American political autobiography “

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In a scene in Home, the second in Marilynne Robin- son’s sequence of novels known as the Gilead series, Glory Boughton, age 9, loses all patience with her older brother Jack. ey’ve been playing a game with their six other siblings and Jack has disappeared, as usual.

When they were children he would slip away, leave the game of tag, leave the house, and not be missed because he was so quiet. en someone would say his name, the €rst to notice his absence, and the game would dissolve. ere was no point calling him. He came back when he came back. But they would look for him, as if the game now were to €nd him at mischief.

Glory, enraged at Jack’s power to end games simply by disappearing, and mysti€ed that he does so, storms up to him when he returns and shouts: “What right do you have to be so strange!” It’s a scalding exchange, not just because Glory is furious but because she has spo- ken aloud the question common to everyone in their hometown of Gilead, Iowa. Jack is strange. Why? Who has given him the right? Jack, the fourth and newest novel in the series, invokes characters who will be familiar to readers of Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014). e Rev- erends Robert Boughton and John Ames, boyhood best friends who grew up in Gilead in the early 20th century and became preachers together, are now old men near death; the father and godfather, respectively, of Jack, they await his return home before it’s too late. Glory, the youngest Boughton daughter and the presiding per- spective in Home, as well as Teddy, one of Glory and BOOKS Jack’s three brothers, hover on the periphery. But Jack focuses on, as its title would suggest, the character who has eluded, bedeviled, and grieved all the people who have ever loved him: the prodigal son. In the previous books, Robinson offered Jack to readers through the eyes of others. A strange and destructive child, he didn’t just vanish at inconvenient moments; he blew up mailboxes, stole things for the sake of stealing them, drank, skipped church, and was generally unbiddable. “ere was an aloofness about him,” Glory recalls. “More thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile.” He is also, as a Marilynne Robinson’s child and then as a man, intensely thoughtful, a vora- cious reader, gentle in his manner, oddly bewitching. Lonely Souls He has been plagued from a very young age by a deep feeling of estrangement. For some reason no one can Her new novel, the latest installment of her quite understand or articulate—himself least of all—he Gilead series, explores the power of love and is set apart, unlike his family or neighbors. the legacy of race. Robinson has said, over the years, that she keeps returning to Gilead because she misses the characters, or wants to give some previously secondary figure By Jordan Kisner the depth and attention a™orded a protagonist. But in an interview with e Paris Review in 2008, after

88 PAINTING BY CASSI NAMODA

1020_CC_Kisner_Robinson [Print]_13953194.indd 88 8/13/2020 4:08:13 PM publishing Home, she rejected the idea that Jack would a mostly miserable haze, which in turn gives the book be a candidate for further excavation. “I would lose a hazy quality, ungrounded and restless. Jack if I tried to get too close to him as a narrator,” she Into this life comes, accidentally, a love. Jack sees a said. “He’s alienated in a complicated way. Other peo- woman caught in the rain and oˆers her an umbrella; ple don’t nd him comprehensible and he doesn’t nd they get to talking; she invites him into her house for tea. them comprehensible.” Della is a schoolteacher and the daughter of a power- Robinson was prescient to predict that enlisting Jack ful minister, a respectable woman, and yet they share a as a primary protagonist would pose problems, and it is sense of alienation. Hers is vague and hard to parse, as telling that she found him irresistible anyway. Robin- she acknowledges. Contemplating how uneasy and ill- son is a Calvinist, and over the course of these novels, adjusted she feels, she wonders aloud to Jack whether Jack has stood out among her characters—troublesome, the problem really lies with her: “Maybe everything seductive, full of pathos—because he most represents else is strange.” a central theological question raised by the Calvinist “Well, this happened to be a thing his soul had said doctrine of predestination: Can a person be damned to him any number of times, wordlessly, it was true, but to perdition? Or, to use non-Calvinist language: Can a with a similar inœection, like an echo, like the shadow of person be irretrievably and miserably wrong, broken, a sound.” ”eirs is fated love, inexorable and mystical. no-good, unsalvageable? If he is, and he knows that he “Once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and is, what is he then to do? Does he have anything he you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the can hope for? world,” Della says to Jack. “And if you love God, every choice is made for you. ”ere is no turning away. You’ve ’  investigates, again and seen the mystery—you’ve seen what life is about. What again, the connection between loneliness and perdition, Robinson’s it’s for.” It is a very Calvinist kind of love, in its way: a between the soul’s isolation and its torment. Many of her fiction love that cannot be helped. novels feature thwarted love of diˆerent kinds between ”ey might wish to help it. Della is a Black woman; spiritual outsiders and insiders. She pairs Boughton, investigates, Jack is white. In 1940s St. Louis, where they live, interra- the preacher father, and his wayward son; Glory, the again and cial relationships are punished with imprisonment. Jack pious sister, and her atheist brother; Ames, the wid- again, the is a danger to Della simply because he is white—not to owed preacher, and the transient woman, Lila, whom he connection mention a vagrant, a drunk, a man with jail time and loves—the ones who feel unhoused (Robin son’s trade- dishonorable relationships in his past. She will lose her mark is the house as a metaphor for the soul) and the between job, the support of her family, and any ability to remain ones who wish to bring them in from the cold. ”is is the soul’s a part of polite society, all vital protections against the the human drama and theological problem central to isolation and racist systems that already render her survival and thriv- the Gilead novels as well as to House keeping (1980), its torment. ing precarious. Jack, whose intentions are now semi- Robinson’s ction debut. Jack, in its way, represents reliably honorable, wants to do right by her, which is to the culmination of this exploration as she turns to the say leave her alone. “He felt the warm chill of impulse, loneliest, most dispossessed soul in the world that she actually frightened himself a little with the thought that has spent the past 16 years making. he could do harm so easily, so innocently really, except Living inside Jack’s head is not nice—which in the fact that he knew how grave and nal the harm shouldn’t surprise us but does, given how compelling would be to her.” It’s almost too tidy a metaphor for Robinson has made him in his appearances in previ- Jack’s spiritual predicament: His love, the purest impulse ous books. “He knew he always looked better from a of his soul, can only further alienate and cause harm. distance, even a little gentlemanly.” From the outside, he has a haunting allure; within, he’s steeped in recur-     this relationship as an object les- sive, debilitating self-loathing, which he dulls by get- son or a metaphor, as one senses Robinson conceived ting drunk, though he knows it’s no salve. For most of it? ”ey are clear foils: Della has religion; Jack does his adult life, he’s been unemployed, shiftless, moving not. Della has a warm, welcoming home; Jack does between œophouses in one or another state of disgrace. not—though the mere idea that she could one day see He “aspires to harmlessness,” as he says multiple times, his room at the boardinghouse where he lives inspires the sole aim to which he can commit himself, yet one him, in one of the book’s most moving moments, to he regularly fails to achieve. He’s an admitted liar and acquire a potted geranium. Della, who quietly and occasional thief, but just as often he is lied to, stolen confoundingly persists in loving Jack’s soul despite from, beaten, insulted, misunderstood, taken advantage his sorry trappings and upsetting behavior, appears of. He reaps what he supposes are the deserved punish- to be a personi cation of Christian grace. Can it save ments for one who doesn’t meet social expectations, him? In his eyes she becomes almost an abstraction, though he is more pathetic than malicious. He lives in quietly omniscient:

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Della was speaking to him sometimes in his thoughts, threatened with miscegenation charges. She’s taken their or she was quiet, simply there at the edge of his vision. son to her parents in Memphis, and he thinks she has In her gentle way she was making everything easier. given up on him entirely. He writes letters; she does not What would she nd becoming in him? at was respond. Eventually, after a suicide attempt, he leaves what he did. And by putting himself in the way of town, resigned to solitary perdition; she arrives with their survival, not to put too ne a point on it, he was son looking for him two days after he departs. With this doing as she had asked him to do, so forthrightly. as the prewritten outcome, Jack dramatizes the heart- break of predestination while suggesting that the details Yet the deep racism of the society they inhabit and contours of a life—or a love—matter even if, in muddles any clean reading of Della and Jack as another the end, that life or love will seem to come to nothing. Robinsonian insider-outsider duo. Della may be the Robinson here enters Jack into the tradition of tragic educated and respected daughter of a power ful fam- heroes. To render his often-sordid path in this way digni- ily in the Black Methodist community, but as a Black es a character who is routinely deprived of his dignity, woman living in Jim Crow–era St. Louis, she is not which feels like a kind of authorial grace. It also makes even considered a full citizen deserving of equal rights. him archetypal, his existence a parable. Likewise, Della Jack, for all his outcast tendencies, can never share her and Jack seem designed to enact the parable of redemp- estrangement—he can only deepen and complicate tive love undermined by a fallen world; they are undone it. While they can provide each other companionship, by America’s “original sin.” comfort, even the mutual recognition of souls that Because large portions of this book occur in dia- Robinson suggests elevates romantic love to a kind of logues between Della and Jack—their voices drifting religious grace, neither can save the other. toward each other in the dark—and because Jack’s senses at Jack doesn’t fall in with the prevailing white- are often dulled or confused by misery or alcohol, Jack supremacist worldview is another of his inexplicable lacks some of the lush materiality of Robin son’s past “deviances”—one of the only redeeming ones—and it’s novels. Here, as Robinson predicted, Jack proves an di‘cult to read Robinson’s intentions regarding this plot imperfect vehicle. Robinson’s signature is her su”usion point. Jack is hardly an anti-racist visionary or a noble JACK of love and poetry into the everyday business of human political dissenter, though in the previous novels he has beings. No one has ever written age spots or July wind Marilynne prodded family members to reevaluate their own preju- Robinson or the process of making a pie or the speech patterns of dices. He doesn’t examine with any acuity the bigotry children with more attention to what she has called “a of the world he lives in, or his failure to subscribe to it. visionary quality to all experience.” Each of her novels Like so many of his personality traits, this, too, seems has celebrated the fact that the in e”able is inseparable innate and immovable rather than learned or chosen. FARRAR, STRAUS from the quotidian, and rendered the ine”able, quotid- AND GIROUX Yet why does the Blackness of his beloved, whose life ian world back to us, peculiar, luminous, and precise. has been marked by white supremacy, come up in his If Jack feels somehow less like a world and more like mind and in their conversations only insofar as it’s a a morality tale or thought experiment than her other ma terial obstacle to their shared happiness? Why does novels, that is perhaps because its central character is so our sensitive protagonist fail to imagine that this di”er- ill-tethered to the world. ence between them may be spiritually substantial and Still, there are passages when Jack’s eye glimmers so worthy of his curiosity, not because their souls are racial- clearly on the moment, when his dream logic feels so ized but because their lived experiences have been? Is it apt, that the whole world Robinson has illuminated his failure to see complexly, or Robinson’s? One begins to with such care and attention reappears, and we are sympathize with Della’s relatives in their frantic attempts returned to the prophetic everyday. to shield her from him. eir refusal to see Jack’s love for her as at all moral or redemptive furthers the uneasy en she said nothing, and he said nothing, and the sense that if one is to root for these two characters, one crickets chanted, or were they tree toads. It had seemed would root for them to part, or for them to nd, as Della to him sometimes that, however deep it was, the dark- says on one of their long nighttime walks, a world where ness in a leafy place took on a cast, a tincture, of green. only the two of them made the rules. e air smelled green, of course, so the shading he Because of the chronology of the Gilead series, thought he saw in the darkness might have been sug- Robin son has trapped Jack and Della in a kind of struc- gested by that wistfulness the breeze brought with it, tural predestination: is book is set some years before earth so brieœy not earth. All the people are grass. the events of Home and Gilead, which means that we already know they come to grief. In Gilead and Home, we see Jack return to Iowa after he, Della, and their Jordan Kisner is the author of in Places: Essays From son were forced to leave their home in St. Louis when In Between.

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These hands help feed communities. But COVID-19 has them tied— leaving them in need of seeds, equipment, tools and other valuable resources to help feed the hungry. There are 690 million people already su ering from hunger and 132 million more are now at risk. It’s in your hands to help.

!«JÁnzÁX(çÁR0XI0«ِzÁ0Á) Culture & Critics

BOOKS Around 597 . ., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expe- dition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent and his subjects. ‹e leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. ‹at meant quashing pagan practices such as polyg- amy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”), Why Is the West So Powerful— and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was rede•ning as incest. Augustine wasn’t And So Peculiar? sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clari•cation. A second cousin? A third cousin? Cultural evolutionary theory has a startling answer: Could a man marry his widowed stepmother? a marriage policy rst pursued by the Catholic Church He could not. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule a millennium and a half ago. out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood—another example was brothers’ widows. He was lax about second and third cousins; only the By Judith Shulevitz children of aunts and uncles were oš- limits. By the 11th century, however, you couldn’t get engaged until you’d counted back seven generations, lest you marry a sixth cousin. ‹e taboo against con- sanguineous family had expanded to include “spiri- tual kin,” who were, mostly, godparents. (It went without saying that you had to marry a Christian.) Pope Gregory and Augustine’s letters document a moment in a prolonged process—begun in the fourth century—in which the Church clamped down, and intermittently loosened up, on who could marry whom. Not until 1983 did Pope John Paul II allow second cousins to wed. You might assume that this curious story of how the Church narrowed the criteria for marriage ability would be relegated to a footnote—a very interest- ing footnote, to be sure—but Joseph Henrich puts the tale at the center of his ambitious theory-of- everything book, e WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Consider this the latest addi- tion to the Big History category, popularized by best sellers such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: e Fates of Human Societies and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Human- kind. ‹e outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the •rst hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg- ish occupants of a networked globe. Big History asks Big Questions and ošers quasi- monocausal answers. Why and how did humans conquer the world? Harari asks. Cooperation. What explains dišerences and inequalities among civilizations? Diamond asks. Environment, which is to say, geog- raphy, climate, ¥ora and fauna. Henrich also wants to explain variation among societies, in particular to account for the Western, prosperous kind.

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1020_CC_Shulevitz_Weird [Print]_14030476.indd 92 8/12/2020 5:52:38 PM Henrich’s rst cause is culture, a word meant to subjects enlisted in the research came from northern be taken very broadly rather than as referring to, say, Europe, North America, or Australia. About 70 percent opera. Henrich, who directs Harvard’s Department of of those were American undergraduates. Blinded by this Human Evolutionary Biology, is a cultural evolution- kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s ary theorist, which means that he gives cultural inheri- good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else. tance the same weight that traditional biologists give Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for West- to genetic inheritance. Parents bequeath their DNA to ern distinctiveness while undercutting Western arro- their o­spring, but they—along with other in‚uential gance. He rests his grand theory of cultural di­erence role models—also transmit skills, knowledge, values, on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kin- tools, habits. Our genius as a species is that we learn ship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamen- and accumulate culture over time. Genes alone don’t tal institutions.” ˆough based on primal instincts— determine whether a group survives or disappears. pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social con- So do practices and beliefs. Human beings are not struct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can “the genetically evolved hardware of a computational marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they machine,” he writes. ˆey are conduits of the spirit, dene relatedness narrowly or broadly. ˆroughout habits, and psychological patterns of their civilization, most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: “the ghosts of past institutions.” Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s One culture, however, is di­erent from the oth- term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the ers, and that’s modern WEIRD (“Western, edu- bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through cated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) culture. the father) also solidied clans, facilitating the accu- Dealing in the sweeping statistical generalizations mulation and intergenerational transfer of property. that are the stock-in-trade of cultural evolution- As of late Higher-order institutions— governments and armies ary theorists—these are folks who say “people” but antiquity, as well as religions— evolved from kin-based institu- mean “populations”— Henrich draws the contrasts Europeans still tions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and this way: Westerners are hyper-individualistic and lived in tribes, kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered hyper-mobile, whereas just about everyone else in new, more complex societies on top of older forms of the world was and still is enmeshed in family and like most of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, more likely to stay put. Westerners obsess more about the rest of the in Henrich’s view, the distinctive ‚avor of each culture personal accomplishments and success than about world. But can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions. meeting family obligations (which is not to say that the Church ˆe Catholic Church changed all that. As of late other cultures don’t prize accomplishment, just that it antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the comes with the package of family obligations). West- dismantled rest of the world. But the Church dismantled these kin- erners identify more as members of voluntary social these kin- based societies with what Henrich calls its “Marriage groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, based societies. and Family Program,” or MFP. ˆe MFP was really an supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans. anti-marriage and anti-family program. Why did the In short, Henrich says, they’re weird. They are Church adopt it? From a cultural evolutionary point also, in the last four words of his acronym, “educated, of view, the why doesn’t matter. In a footnote, Henrich industrialized, rich, democratic.” And that brings us skates lightly over debates about the motivations of to Henrich’s Big Question, which is really two linked Church leaders. But his bottom line is that the “MFP questions. Starting around 1500 or so, the West evolved and spread because it ‘worked.’ ” (Henrich’s became unusually dominant, because it advanced indi­erence to individual and institutional intentions unusually quickly. What explains its extraordinary is guaranteed to drive historians nuts.) intellectual, technological, and political progress over Forced to nd Christian partners, Christians left the past ve centuries? And how did its rise engender their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monog- the peculiarity of the Western character? amy broke extended households into nuclear families. ˆe Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity,      , it may replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward be a surprise that Henrich aspires to preach humility, the institution itself. ˆe Church was stern about its not pride. WEIRD people have a bad habit of uni- marital policies. Violations were punished by with- versalizing from their own particularities. ˆey think holding Communion, ex communicating, and denying everyone thinks the way they do, and some of them inheritances to o­spring who could now be deemed (not all, of course) reinforce that assumption by study- “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to ing themselves. In the run-up to writing the book, family members. ˆe idea now took hold that it could Henrich and two colleagues did a literature review of go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the experimental psychology and found that 96 percent of wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing

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their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, bene- declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered factor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. ­e of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe. until the papal hierarchy ƒnally assimilated them both Loosened from their roots, people gathered in cities. in the 11th century. ­is is why, according to Henrich, ­ere they developed “impersonal prosociality”—that cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 is, they bonded with other city folk. ­ey wrote city times higher than in the north, and in most provinces charters and formed professional guilds. Sometimes in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of they elected leaders, the ƒrst inklings of representative willingness to help strangers), while some northern democracy. Merchants had to learn to trade with strang- provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per ers. Success in this new kind of commerce required a 1,000 people per year. good reputation, which entailed new norms, such as To go further aƒeld: While Europe was ƒrst compil- impartiality. You couldn’t cheat a stranger and favor ing its legal codes, China was punishing crimes com- relatives and expect to make a go of it. mitted against relatives more harshly than those against By the time Protestantism came along, people had nonrelatives; especially severe penalties were reserved already internalized an individualist worldview. Henrich for crimes against one’s elders. As recently as the early calls Protestantism “the WEIRDest religion,” and says 20th century, Chinese fathers could murder sons and it gave a “booster shot” to the process set in motion get o• with a warning; punishments for patricide, by by the Catholic Church. Integral to the Reformation contrast, were strict. Asymmetries like these, Henrich was the idea that faith entailed personal struggle rather writes, “can be justiƒed on Confucian principles and than adherence to dogma. Vernacular translations of the by appealing to a deep respect for elders,” even if the Bible allowed people to interpret scripture more idiosyn- WEIRD mind ƒnds them disturbing. cratically. ­e mandate to read the Bible democratized THE WEIRDEST literacy and education. After that came the inquiry into PEOPLE IN THE ’   —and God-given natural (individual) rights and constitutional WORLD: HOW THE startling— claim is that WEIRD and non-WEIRD WEST BECAME democracies. ­e e•ort to uncover the laws of political PSYCHOLOGICALLY people possess opposing cognitive styles. ­ey think organization spurred interest in the laws of nature—in PECULIAR AND differently. Standing apart from the community, PARTICULARLY other words, science. ­e scientiƒc method codiƒed PROSPEROUS primed to break wholes into parts and classify them, epistemic norms that broke the world down into cat- Westerners are more analytical. People from kinship- egories and valorized abstract principles. All of these Joseph Henrich intensive cultures, by comparison, tend to think more psychosocial changes fueled unprecedented innovation, holistically. ­ey focus on relationships rather than the Industrial Revolution, and economic growth. FARRAR, STRAUS categories. Henrich defends this sweeping thesis with AND GIROUX If Henrich’s history of Christianity and the West several studies, including a test known as the Triad feels rushed and at times derivative—he acknowledges Task. Subjects are shown three images—say, a rab- his debt to Max Weber—that’s because he’s in a hurry bit, a carrot, and a cat. ­e goal is to match a “target to explain Western psychology. ­e bulk of the book object”—the rabbit—with a second object. A person consists of data from many disciplines other than who matches the rabbit with the cat classiƒes: ­e rab- history, including anthropology and cross-cultural bit and the cat are animals. A person who matches the psychology, to which he and colleagues have made rabbit with the carrot looks for relationships between significant contributions. Their Kinship Intensity the objects: ­e rabbit eats the carrot. Index, for instance, helps them posit a dose-response You have to wonder whether the Triad Task really relationship between the length of time a population re¦ects fundamentally di•erent cognitive bents or dif- was exposed to the Catholic Church’s Marriage and ferences in subjects’ personal experience. Henrich cites Family Program and the WEIRDness of its charac- a Mapuche, an indigenous Chilean, who matched a ter. Henrich gets amusingly granular in his statistics dog with a pig, an “analytic” choice, except the man here. “Each century of Western church exposure cuts then explained that he’d done so for a “holistic” rea- the rate of cousin marriage by nearly 60 percent,” he son: because the dog guards the pig. “This makes writes. A millennium of the MFP also makes a person perfect sense,” Henrich muses. “Most farmers rely less likely to lie in court for a friend—30 percentile on dogs to protect their homes and livestock from points less likely. Henrich anticipates a quibble about rustlers.” Exactly! A Western undergraduate, probably what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has not having grown up with dogs protecting her pigs, been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a sees dogs and pigs as just animals. prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed Henrich is more persuasive when applying his poor and was plagued by maƒosi? ­e answer, Henrich theory of cumulative culture to the evolution of ideas.

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Democracy, the rule of law, and human rights “didn’t start with fancy intellectuals, philosophers, or theo- logians,” Henrich writes. “Instead, the ideas formed slowly, piece by piece, as regular Joes with more indi- vidualistic psychologies—be they monks, merchants, or artisans—began to form competing voluntary asso- ciations” and learned how to govern them. Toppling My Industrial Work the accomplishments of Western civilization o£ their great-man platforms, he erases their claim to be monu- By Anonymous Poet From Room 8 ments to rationality: Everything we think of as a cause of culture is really an e£ect of culture, including us. At half past two in the afternoon Henrich’s macro-cultural relativism has its vir- You can nd me in twenty-eight room, tues. It widens our eld of vision as we assess Western values— such as objectivity, free speech, democracy, and About three or four covers deep; the scienti c method—that have come under sharp You turn them back and you’ll nd me asleep. attack. ‰e big-picture approach soars above the reign- And there I lie and patiently wait ing paradigms in the study of European history, which For the nal exams we have in Room Eight. have a way of collapsing into narratives of villains and victims. (Henrich forestalls the obvious objections with When the whistle blows at half past ve, this jarringly o£hand remark: “I’m not highlighting Once more I am up and still alive. the very real and pervasive horrors of slavery, racism, ‰en I run down and wash my face, plunder, and genocide. ‰ere are plenty of books on ‰en comb my hair and I’m ready for grace. those subjects.”) He refutes genetic theories of Euro- pean superiority and makes a good case against eco- In fteen minutes there’s a bugle call, nomic determinism. His quarry are the “enlightened” ‰e troops fall in and the roll is called. Westerners—would-be democratizers, globalizers, well- ‰en out in front the troops all stand, intended purveyors of humanitarian aid—who impose Saluting the Šag with our hats in our hand. impersonal institutions and abstract political principles on societies rooted in familial networks, and don’t seem While standing in the wind our hair gets wavy to notice the trouble that follows. But, just the same, we right face, and march to gravy. It should be said, though, that Henrich can make a Now this may sound like going a shing, person feel pretty helpless, with his talk of populations But this is my only industrial position. being swept along by cultural riptides that move “outside conscious awareness.” Cultural evolutionary determin- ism may turn out to be as disempowering as all the other determinisms; a WEIRD reader may feel trapped inside ‰e Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, her own prejudices. But perhaps some comfort lies in was founded by Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 Henrich’s dazzling if not consistently plausible supply of as a tool of assimilation. Describing his philosophy in 1892, unintended consequences. Who would have imagined Pratt infamously said, “Kill the Indian … and save the man.” that the Catholic Church would have spawned so many At least 8,000 children from more than 140 tribes ended up at self-involved nonconformists? What else might our curi- the school. Many died from disease. ‰is anonymous student ous history yield? Henrich’s social-scientist stance of neu- poem was written in 1914. trality may also relieve Westerners of some (one hopes not all) of their burden of guilt. “By highlighting the peculiarities of WEIRD people, I’m not denigrating these populations or any others,” he writes. WEIRDos This poem appears in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, aren’t all bad; they’re provincial. Henrich o£ers a capa- Our Songs Came Through (W. W. Norton), a poetry anthology by cious new perspective that could facilitate the neces- writers of Native nations, edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo with sary work of sorting out what’s irredeemable and what’s LeAnne Howe, Jennifer Elise Foerster, and contributing editors. invaluable in the singular, impressive, and wildly prob- lematic legacy of Western domination.

Judith Shulevitz is the author of ‰e Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Di£erent Order of Time.

 

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When Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric arrived in the fall of 2014, shortly before a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to charge Darren Wilson for Michael Brown’s murder, critics hailed it as a work very much of its moment. ƒe book-length poem— the only such work to be a best seller on non‡ction list—was in tune with the Black Lives Matter movement, which was then gathering momen- tum. How, Rankine asked, can Black citizens claim the expressive “I” of lyric poetry when a systemically racist state looks upon a Black person and sees, at best, a walk- ing symbol of its greatest fears and, at worst, nothing at all? ƒe book’s cover, a picture of David Hammons’s 1993 sculpture In the Hood, depicted a hood shorn from its sweatshirt—an image that evoked the 2012 mur- der of Trayvon Martin. Rankine’s catalog of quotidian insults, snubs, and misperceptions dovetailed with the emergence of microaggression as a term for the everyday psychic stress in–icted on marginalized people. In fact, Rankine was ahead of her time. Citizen was the result of a decade she had spent probing W. E. B. Du Bois’s century-old question: How does it feel to be a problem? In answering that question, she deployed the same kaleidoscopic aesthetic on display in her earlier books, most notably 2004’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Rankine’s experimental poetics drew from ‡rst-person reportage, visual art, photography, televi- sion, and various literary genres, modeling fragmented Black personhood under the daily pressure of white supremacy. Meanwhile, starting in 2011, she had been inviting writers to re–ect on how assumptions and beliefs about race circumscribe people’s imaginations and support racial hierarchies. ƒe project, which she collaborated on with the writer Beth Lo™reda, culmi- BOOKS nated in the 2015 anthology e Racial Imaginary. If Citizen seemed uncannily well timed, that was because our politics had ‡nally caught up with Rankine. A lot has happened since 2014, for both the nation and Rankine. In 2016, she joined Yale’s Afri- can American– studies and English departments and was awarded a MacArthur genius grant. ƒe fellowship helped fund an “interdisciplinary cultural laboratory,” which she christened the Racial Imaginary Institute, where scholars, artists, and activists have been expand- ing on the work of the anthology. Rankine also began Claudia Rankine’s Quest exploring the ways in which whiteness conceals itself behind the facade of an unraced universal identity. Her for Racial Dialogue new work, Just Us: An American Conversation, extends those investigations. Is her focus on the personal out of step with Yet this time, Rankine might seem less obvi - the racial politics of our moment? ously in step with a newly zealous discourse on race. Employing her signature collagelike approach, she avoids polemics, instead earnestly speculating about By Ismail Muhammad the possibility of interracial understanding. She sets out to stage un comfortable conversations with white

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1020_CC_Muhammad_Rankine [Print]_14038151.indd 96 8/14/2020 1:26:12 PM people—strangers, friends, family—about how (or Above all, she is curious about how he thinks, and how whether) they perceive their whiteness. She wants to she can raise the issue of his privilege in a way that discover what new forms of social interaction might prompts more conversation rather than less. arise from such a disruption. She interrogates her- In another airplane encounter, this time with a self, too. Perhaps, she suggests, concerted attempts to white man who feels more familiar, she is able to push engage with, rather than harangue, one another will harder. When he describes his company’s e orts to help us recognize the historical and social binds that strengthen diversity and declares, “I don’t see color,” entangle us. Maybe there is a way to speak convinc- Rankine challenges him: “Aren’t you a white man? … ingly of a “we,” of a community that cuts across race If you can’t see race, you can’t see racism.” She leaves without ignoring the di erences that constitute the “I.” the interchange satis‰ed that the two of them have In contracting around the question of interpersonal “[broken] open our conversation—random, ordinary, intimacy, rather than structural change, Just Us puts exhausting, and full of longing to exist in … less seg- Rankine in an unfamiliar position: Has the radical regated spaces.” Še book presents this exchange as an tone of our racial politics since this spring’s uprisings achievement—a moment of confrontation that leads outpaced her? to mutual recognition rather than to rupture. But interactions with less rosy outcomes complicate ’  is not simply to expose or chas- Rankine’s optimism. She and a good friend, a white tise whiteness. She has something more nuanced in woman with whom she talks every few days and who mind: using conversation as a way to invite white peo- “is interested in thinking about whiteness,” attend a ple to consider how contingent their lives are upon the production that “is interested in thinking about race,” racial order—every bit as contingent as Black people’s Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2018 play, are. “I was always aware that my value in our culture’s Fairview. It builds to a climax in which white and Black eyes is determined by my skin color ‰rst and fore- “I wanted audience members are asked to self-segregate, the white most,” she says. Še same is true for white people, of to learn spectators going up onstage while the Black spectators course, however unaware of that reality they may be. stay put. Rankine’s friend doesn’t budge. Confounded As she puts it, “To converse is to risk the unraveling something and furious, Rankine tries to sort out her “own mount- of the said and the unsaid.” that surprised ing emotion in the face of what I perceive as belliger- Her experiments began in the fall of 2016, after she me about ence.” Is this “a friendship error despite my understand- arrived at Yale. Unsure whether her students would be this stranger, ing of how whiteness functions? I thought we shared the able to trace the historical resonances of Donald Trump’s same worldview, if not the same privileges. Be still my anti-immigrant demagoguery, she wanted to help them something beating, breaking heart?” She probes her “unbearable “connect the current treatment of both documented and I couldn’t feelings,” spools through her friend’s possible motives, undocumented Mexicans with the treatment of Irish, have known and then shares the dialogue they eventu ally have, in the Italian, and Asian people in the last century”: It was a way beforehand.” course of which her friend explains her unease with situ- of exposing whiteness as a racial category whose privi- ations “manufactured speci‰cally to elicit white shame, leges have emerged over the course of American history penance”: She resists the thrill of “riding the white emo- through the interaction with, and exclusion of, Black— tional roller-coaster,” impatient with the notion that and brown, and Asian—people, as well as European being chastised, as Darryl Pinckney once put it, con- immigrants who have only recently become “white.” stitutes actual learning—that it accomplishes anything. In Just Us, Rankine the poet becomes an anthro- Both Rankine and her friend are surprised, by the pologist. If her mode of discomfiting those whom play and by Rankine’s anger. Šeir mutual surprise is she encounters strikes readers as unexpectedly mild, it productive: Šey emerge unsettled but still talking. might be because the strident urgency of racial politics Še opposite happens during an encounter Rankine in the U.S. escalated while her book was on its way has at an otherwise all-white dinner party. In a con- toward publication. She chooses her words carefully as versation that turns to Trump’s racism, she feels herself she engages, positioning herself in the mine‰eld of her becoming stereotyped as an angry Black woman, only interlocutors’ emotions so that dialogue can happen. to have another guest step in to steer everyone’s atten- While waiting to board an airplane, for example, she tion to dessert. When Rankine demands to know if initiates a conversation with a fellow passenger, who she is being silenced, the party closes ranks around chalks up his son’s rejection from Yale to his inability the woman. “Knowing that my silence is active in the to “play the diversity card.” Rankine has to resist pelting room,” Rankine writes, “I stay silent because I want the man with questions that might make him wary of to make a point of that silence. Among white people, being labeled a racist and cause him to shut down. “I black people are allowed to talk about their precarious wanted to learn something that surprised me about this lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present stranger, something I couldn’t have known beforehand.” company in that precariousness.”

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Rankine is wary of not only foreclosed conversa- The personal, Rankine suggests, is an unavoid- tions, but also the sclerotic language that prevents con- able challenge along the path to structural change. versations from advancing understanding. Rankine’s It’s not just her white interlocutors, after all, who are own husband—a white man—disappoints her when, dis com­ted by the exchanges. Rankine is a Jamaican in response to her reports of frustrating exchanges with immigrant and ­rst-generation college graduate who strangers, he falls back on well-worn keywords. “ ‘ey’re travels in largely white professional and communal just defensive,’ he said. ‘White fragility,’ he added, with spaces. In one essay, she slips into overidentifying with a laugh.” is diagnosis is not enough for Rankine. a wealthy, May”ower-pedigreed friend’s class iden- tity, but catches herself: e two of them might have is white man who has spent the past twenty-­ve arrived at the same place, but they’ve traveled dramati- years in the world alongside me believes he under- cally di•erent routes. “I begin to remember all the tur- stands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he bulence and disturbances between us that contributed knows the right terminology to use, even when these to the making of this moment of ease and comfort,” agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into she writes, aware of how much she, too, responds to moments of real recognition. “the framework of white hierarchy … behind the mak- ing of a culture I am both subject to and within.” Yet Rankine herself defaults to Robin DiAngelo’s Just Us is most interesting when Rankine leans into concept on several occasions, which can’t help feeling this self-examination. In these moments, she suggests stale at a juncture when White Fragility is under ­re that the myopia of “whiteness” is not necessarily an as a book that coddles white readers. It substitutes attribute limited to white people. It becomes a cir- consciousness- raising for concrete policy changes, crit- culating ethos of willful ignorance, the right to live a ics argue, and in the process creates a caricature of life whose fundamental assumptions go unobserved. Black people as hapless victims. Upon meeting a Latina artist who contests Rankine’s tidy narrative that Latino people are “breathless to ,    that drives Just Us distance themselves from blackness,” Rankine is forced forward—the notion that racial inequality can be JUST US: to acknowledge her own blinkered perception as a AN AMERICAN challenged by fostering social intimacy and uncover- CONVERSATION woman who has ascended into the upper echelons of ing the reality of white privilege—risks seeming some- white culture. e artist proceeds to explain that “the what regressive. Why should one care about audience Claudia Rankine Latinx assimilationist narrative is one constructed by responses to a Black playwright’s breaking of the fourth whiteness itself.” e tension that Rankine perceives wall, for example, or about arguments over Trump’s between Latino and Black people is born of a “mono- racism at a well-heeled dinner party? Unlike the Ran- GRAYWOLF lithic focus on black-white relations in the United kine of Citizen, this Rankine can often sound—at least States” that has obscured more complex conceptions to someone who’s followed, and felt, the anger of the of race. She continues to “believe antiblack racism spring and summer—as though she’s arriving on the is foundational to all of our problems, regardless of scene of a radical uprising in order to translate it into our ethnicity.” Yet she’s failed to recognize how Latino language white readers will ­nd palatable. Even Rankine people’s lived experiences are erased by America’s nar- confesses to a similar impatience as she sits in silence at row racial categories, the same categories that threaten that party, feeling shunned for shaming a fellow guest: to erase her. “Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I Rankine’s readiness to live in the turmoil and want to shout at everyone, including myself.” uncertainty of that misunderstanding is what sepa- But Rankine’s probing, persistent desire for intimacy rates her from the ethos of whiteness. As the country is also daring at a time when anti-racist discourse has confronts race in a newly militant spirit, her need to hardened into an ideological surety, and when plenty deal in the personal while public protest thrives may of us chafe at the work of “explaining” race to white not seem cutting- edge. But tireless questioning is never people. As she goes on to write, after expressing that out of date, and she freely faces up to the limits of her urge to shout about systemic racism: own enterprise, embracing a spirit of doubt, mingled with hope, that we would all do well to emulate. “Is But all the structures and all the diversity planning put understanding change?” Rankine asks toward the end in place to alter those structures, and all the desires of of her book. “I am not sure.” whites to assimilate blacks in their day-to-day lives, come with the continued outrage at rage. All the perceived outrage at me, the guest who brings all of herself to Ismail Muhammad is the criticism editor at e Believer. dinner, all of it—her body, her history, her fears, her furi- His work has appeared in e New York Times and e ous fears, her expectations—is, in the end, so personal. Nation, among other places.

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1020_CC_Muhammad_Rankine [Print]_14038151.indd 98 8/14/2020 1:26:13 PM “A sweeping and lucid account “Timely and necessary, Policing the Second “With engaging prose and captivating stories, of the world’s encounter with Amendment promises to significantly advance Kenneth Catania brings his brilliant research globalization across the past century.” our understanding of the interrelated issues to life. Never have I learned so much —Gary Gerstle, author of of race, policing, and firearms in the United from a book that’s so enjoyable to read.” Liberty and Coercion States. This is an important book.” —Jonathan Losos, author of —Michael Sierra-Arévalo, Improbable Destinies Rutgers School of Criminal Justice

“Martin Sandbu is one of the most “A must-read for anyone interested in “A meticulously researched and thoughtful economic commentators, solutions to America’s housing crisis.” information-filled chronicle of a place that, and in this book he brings his characteristic —Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning in its own way, defines New York City.” insight to bear on what has gone wrong author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit —Paul Alexander, Washington Post

in the era of globalization.” in the American City New in Paperback —Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge ESSAY Bringing my toddler to the Donald Judd

e Beating Pulse retrospective at the of Donald Judd Museum of Modern I always thought his work was Art when it opened intimidatingly austere, until I discovered the last winter forced me plenitude at its core. to recognize the ways By Leslie Judd’s objects resemble Jamison playground equipment: the diagonal ladder of red-painted wood with its single purple rod, or the red-enameled iron tube that slyly evoked (at least to my toddler-adjacent eyes) an empty kiddie pool. When we visited

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1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 101 8/14/2020 5:08:31 PM shortly after the show opened in Febru- creating three-dimensional objects that surging sugar and the aesthetic comfort ary, my daughter wanted to climb on were embraced by many critics as part of an food of legible stories. Which is all to say: all the objects—or up them, or through emerging minimalist movement. One cru- I was convinced that I had failed Judd’s them, or over them. The objects. I had cial milestone in his career was his appear- work by looking at it and feeling nothing, trained myself not to call them sculptures, ance in the 1966 “Primary Structures” or by assuming that feeling something was because Judd himself hadn’t thought of group exhibition at the Jewish Museum the only way to have a meaningful experi- them that way. And neither did my tod- in New York, along with his contempo- ence with art. dler! She wanted to crawl through the raries Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Robert In retrospect, I wonder if my con- silver aluminum boxes lined with blue Morris, often understood as “minimalist” viction that I’d somehow failed Judd’s Plexiglas, to bang her tiny €sts against a as well. („e poet John Ashbery’s review work stemmed from an oblique kind of green-lacquered galvanized- iron slab. „e in ARTnews was titled “Young Masters of transference— from the way I experienced one thing she didn’t want to do was stay Understatement.”) But Judd himself always his work as the artistic equivalent of an in her stroller. rejected the term minimalist, which seemed aloof father €gure, detached and opaque. I Eternally intimidated by the stark, like another form of minimalism: His art was alienated by what felt like a particular imposing presence of Judd’s pieces, I was was so minimalist that even the label was maleness at its core; its simplicity felt like surprised to discover their fragility—that excess weight. If you clung to that category, withholding because it brought me back they are easily damaged, and have often you had already missed the point. to my childhood dinner table, where I sat been poorly protected. In an essay about I’ll confess, however, that minimalist across from my father trying to decode Judd’s vexed relationship with museums was the word I reached for the €rst time I his spare, inscrutable utterances— always that appears in the exhibition catalog, stood in front of his art—an installation of grounded in logic and precision, rather Ann Temkin, the show’s curator, writes: 15 plywood boxes at Dia: Beacon labeled, than sentiment. It was as if Judd’s art had simply, Untitled (1976). Its refusal of a title become another impassive male face in Once his works entered the public realm, (most of his work is untitled) struck me which I was hunting for an aperture; as their flat tops and boxlike forms were as yet another act of withholding. The if I needed to devote myself fully—all my often read as invitations to rest an elbow installation seemed elusive and aloof, as intelligence, all my stamina—to under- or set down a purse. Their rectilinear if it were responding to my hunger to standing what lay behind its impenetrable structures tempted children and adults understand its meaning with a reticence facades. My stubborn focus on emotion alike, whether to squish their bodies close to silence. „ese boxes weren’t €gura- was missing the point. between elements of a wall progression, tive. „ey weren’t narrative. „ey weren’t When asked by the critic Bruce Glaser climb inside a channel piece, or crouch embellished. They weren’t even pretty. in 1964, “Are you suggesting an art without beneath a single stack. Unbeknownst to What were they, exactly? „ey were made feeling?,” Judd replied that he was speci€- most visitors, the surfaces of the materials of blond wood with a visible grain. Some cally resisting a certain “kind of feeling,” they were touching—Plexiglas, alumi- were closed. Some were open. Others had by which he meant an artist’s “particu- num, galvanized iron—were as fragile as recessed tops, like little roof decks, which lar feeling at the time.” Judd’s work was parchment and often irreparable. made me picture tiny people lounging on instead invested in the formal existence of top of them for summer barbecues, eating the object itself. “Already convinced that As my daughter and I made our way tiny hot dogs, and plunging into tiny hot representational art was a thing of the past,” through four huge rooms—displaying tubs. Tiny hot tubs! I knew this imagined Roberta Smith wrote in her obituary, work that spanned the three decades of landscape wasn’t the “right” reaction to Judd’s career, which found its footing in be having. he became increasingly sure that even the mid-1960s and ended with Judd’s I couldn’t look at these plywood boxes abstract art could not presume to describe sudden death in 1994—I cringed at the without feeling reprimanded by the hypo- human emotion. Instead, he began to thought of her splintering one of his ply- thetical specter of a more sophisticated eye believe in the autonomy of the art object, wood boxes with her tiny blue Velcro- than mine—a viewer who could appreci- namely that the object’s purpose was not fastened sneakers. Yet something about ate Judd’s art better, who didn’t crave the to serve as a metaphor for human life, but Judd’s art also made me want to see its entry point of narrative or €gurative rep- to have a strong formal life of its own, perfect lines dented, its stillness disrupted, resentation. „e people satis€ed by Judd’s something he frequently called speci€city. its self- possession rattled; his work often spare boxes were probably also people who made me feel inadequate and uncompre- might eat a single peach for dessert while At MoMA, my daughter’s eager- hending, vaguely excluded. listening to obscure electronica; I’m some- ness to touch Judd’s work—to bang it, When Judd emerged as a central €g- one who wants to inhale an entire carton climb it, crawl beneath it—was attuned ure in the downtown New York art scene of ice cream while being §ooded by the to this “strong formal life.” Driven by in the late ’60s, people celebrated his art swelling ri¨s of a cheesy pop song. I’ve primal material curiosity, she was spell- and were confounded by it. He broke always felt tainted by this desire for excess bound by the visceral force €eld of his art,

away from abstract painting to start in all forms, for naked sentiment and undistracted by a search for embedded PREVIOUS PAGE: DONALD JUDD, 100 UNTITLED WORKS IN MILL ALUMINUM, 1982–1986 . PERMANENT COLLECTION, THE CHINATI FOUNDATION, MARFA, TEXAS. PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUGLAS TUCK, COURTESY OF THE FOUNDATION. DONALD JUDD ART © 2020 FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.

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1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 102 8/14/2020 5:08:31 PM meaning or latent feeling, an unwitting, ‚e “chromatic and material exuberance”   was a young child growing squirming disciple of his famous pro- of these later works, as Temkin writes, up at 101 Spring Street—the ˜ve-story nouncement that “a work needs only to “emphatically contradicts the ‘Minimalist’ cast-iron building in New York’s SoHo be interesting.” While I’d understood his label that Judd had always rejected.” warehouse district that Judd converted in work as stiingly serious, she approached Even as I assured myself that I would 1968 into a studio space and home—he it with playful desire, sensing that it might come back to the retrospective on my didn’t notice his father’s art so much as want to give us something, that the art own—without the soundtrack of my tod- he experienced it as an essential feature and its witnesses (the two of us!) might be dler begging to get out of her stroller, and of his domestic landscape. Flavin joked engaging in an experiment together. the distracting suspicion that we were dis- to me that before he and his younger ‚is tension—between understand- tracting everyone else—I also understood sister, Rainer, even learned to walk, ing Judd’s art as reserved minimalism, that my daughter was teaching me some- they learned, “Don’t walk through the and pushing back against that framing to thing about Judd’s objects. She was training art.” And a few years later, as a 6-year- excavate its exploratory vitality—recurs me to see the shimmer of their energy, the old, Flavin started drawing plans for across the long arc of critical responses to rough or polished or bolt-studded texture objects of his own—not boxes, as his his work. Critics love disagreeing about father made, but triangles. It was a way Judd, and they particularly love disagree- of accessing the art without touching ing about the question of his restraint. it, perhaps. Early in his career, his work was featured ‚e critic John Canaday once claimed in a group exhibition at Stockholm’s Mod- that Judd’s work exemplified art “that erna Museet exploring “space, silence, rejects all connection with life of any stillness, even emptiness and negation as kind,” but Temkin, in her introduction means of expression,” and many critics saw ese boxes to the retrospective’s catalog, emphasizes his breakout 1968 solo exhibition at the weren’t gurative. the precise opposite—that Judd was “an Whitney as a high-water mark in the rising ey weren’t narrative. artist deeply involved in the interrelation minimalist movement. But even then oth- of art and life.” Flavin believes that for ers balked at the label; the critic Elizabeth ey weren’t embel- his father, making art, navigating daily C. Baker praised an “over-all quality of lished. ey weren’t life, and raising his kids were all informed sumptuousness” at the Whitney solo show, even pretty. by what he calls the same “philosophi- disputing the popular misunderstanding What were they, cal stance”: a commitment to stripping of Judd’s work as “baffling, impassive, away everything but the proximate—all harsh”; the critic Hilton Kramer called exactly? the obfuscating myths and stories and him a “closet hedonist.” abstractions—and a desire to pay atten- The very layout of the retrospective tion to the world and to cultivate that enacts a version of this ongoing critical attention in others. In Judd’s creative dispute. Toward the start of the exhibi- practice, this meant he wanted to dis- tion, viewers encounter the younger Judd’s pense with much of the Western art tradi- spare, iconic objects, his emerging vocabu- tion; in raising his kids—one named after lary of forms—his boxes on the ground; of their surfaces, the ways their stark lines an artist, the other after a dancer—this his “stacks,” consisting of boxes installed vibrated against the white gallery walls. meant he took them not to church, but vertically against the wall, at even intervals When I spoke with Judd’s son, Flavin— out into the desert, to look at the rocks between oor and ceiling, some made of now the artistic director of the Judd and the stars. galvanized iron painted with sea-green lac- Foundation— he described his father’s art Flavin described his father’s philoso- quer, others made of stainless steel and ˜t- as committed to creating an experience of phy as infused with the ethos of a mid- ted with yellow Plexiglas; and his “progres- intensi˜ed presence. ‚is sense of purpose western farmer, which Judd came by nat- sions,” mounted objects with appendages was grounded in Judd’s awareness of the urally. He was born in his grandparents’ arrayed according to numerical sequences (a bounded nature of life; how precious and rural farmhouse in Excelsior Springs, Mis- purple- lacquered aluminum rod, for exam- limited it is, how in this ˜nitude it deserves souri, in 1928, and believed in being e¦- ple, with angular attachments made of cold- and repays our attune ment. Judd’s insis- cient and practical: making use of things, rolled steel). But in the last gallery, viewers tence on noticing— as a way of being in the not wasting anything. He also believed in are faced with Judd’s more outrageously world, and a daily practice—was also part respecting preexisting structures and mate- color ful works from the ’80s and early ’90s: of what it meant to grow up with him as a rials, taking his cues from what he found. multi colored objects made from enameled father. Flavin told me that “Don” (as both When he decided to leave his Spring Street aluminum, their rectangular patchworks of his children call him) was constantly urging property more or less intact, it was an aes- deeply saturated hues—tangerine, cobalt, them to pay closer attention to the world. thetic decision to respect the integrity of

NEXT PAGE: INSTALLATION VIEW OF JUDD © 2020 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN NEXT PAGE: INSTALLATION VIEW OF JUDD © 2020 THE MUSEUM MODERN ART, NEW YORK. PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN MUZIKAR. DONALD JUDD ART © 2020 FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. teal, ame—held together by visible bolts. It’s precisely what Judd’s art asks of us. the space. “I thought the building should

 

1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 103 8/14/2020 5:08:31 PM ™e Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art spanned a career that took oš in the mid-1960s and ended with the artist’s death in 1994.

be repaired and basically not changed,” he Columbia, after serving with the U.S. Army began to purchase property in Marfa, Texas, wrote years later, and emphasized that leav- from June 1946 until November 1947, seeking an alternative to the “harsh and glib ing the place alone had been “a highly posi- mainly stationed as part of the Engineer situation within art in New York.” He was tive act.” For certain geniuses, the source of Corps in Korea, where he was assigned to determined to create permanent installa- their brilliance lies in a gift and compulsion a unit that helped build an air base and a tions of his work, because he felt most tem- for reinvention and self-transformation, but boiler plant. During the late ’50s and early porary gallery exhibitions did the objects a for Judd, there was a striking constancy. He ’60s, he supported himself as an art critic, great disservice. Judd was drawn to West agreed with prior versions of himself more devoting his own work mainly to painting, Texas because “there were few people and often than he didn’t. and as the 1960s got under way, he started the land was undamaged,” and he chose the Judd had initially moved to Manhat- making the three-dimensional objects for town of Marfa “because it was the best look- tan to study art history and philosophy at which he became famous. In 1973 Judd ing and the most practical.” After he and

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1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 104 8/14/2020 5:08:32 PM remembered “ducking under the loading docks on the way to school, the smell of Scotch and machine oil, laughter echoing through empty streets from open loft win- dows.” But as opposite as Marfa and SoHo were, Rainer said, “one thing in common was a feeling of being a pioneer. ‘ey were both village-size with few stores, one post o–ce … Both had a slightly abandoned, transitional quality.” In Marfa, they spent many weekends at the Ayala de Chinati ranch, where, Rainer recalled, “we’d sit by the re and talk. It developed in me a won- dering type of thinking, free to ask ques- tions. Some parents take their kids hunting or to Disneyland. Driving to the land, mak- ing res, and talking was his gift.” The more I learned about Judd as a dad, the more I began to question why I’d responded to his work as if it were the aesthetic equivalent of a distant father. I began to wonder, in fact, if I’d been mis- understanding its simplicity all along—if I’d been reading restraint as withholding, when perhaps it was a form of oœering. A 2015 visit to Judd’s home in downtown Marfa, a compound called La Mansana de Chinati, only deepened this sense that I’d been missing something crucial about the ethos of care that connected his life and work. La Mansana, known informally as “‘e Block,” struck me as an architectural embodiment of the continuities that had mattered most to him—between his artistic vision and his daily life, between daily living and daily making, between being an artist and being a father. Judd created the Block from a cluster of three neglected buildings that he enclosed with an adobe wall. Two were warehouses that he salvaged from disrepair—broken windows, leaky roofs—and over time converted into hybrid spaces meant for living, working, and permanent art instal- his wife, the dancer Julie Finch, separated the table, because he couldn’t stand their lations. He turned what had once been the in 1976, Judd brought Flavin and Rainer, design. “In Marfa our friends were cow- o–ces of the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster then 9 and 6, to live with him in Texas, boys and Border Patrol agents,” as Flavin Corps into the home he shared with his ghting for primary custody at the Presidio put it, and in the same 2016 interview, kids, describing it as having “the neces- County Courthouse. Rainer described the powerful impact of sary domesticity” (though he removed its Flavin told me that Judd was “the only the vast Texas landscape on her childhood bathroom to make the interior layout more single father in Marfa making lunch for his psyche: “‘e shbowl quality of the sky symmetrical, and built a freestanding adobe kids every day,” though his exacting artistic over hundred mile vistas became a teacher bathhouse nearby). sensibilities were present even in this daily of sorts, giving me the simultaneous feel- At first glance it didn’t look like a act of parenting; he asked his kids to keep ing of being both little and independent.” home that had ever been inhabited by their milk cartons on the †oor rather than ‘is was a far cry from SoHo, where Flavin children. ‘e space was uncluttered and

 

1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 105 8/14/2020 5:08:33 PM ese aluminum boxes held the weather itself: clouds swollen with rain, or a horizon painted by the burlesque of sunset.

e gleaming surfaces of this installation, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, reect the shifting moods of the Texas sky.

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1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 106 8/14/2020 5:08:34 PM intentional—as if living were something that could happen without making a mess, as if one’s whole life, day by day, could become a kind of art object in its own right. But Judd had raised his children there. ey’d lived in symmetrical rooms at the base of the stairs, their doors cov- ered in stickers:  ­€‚ƒ „€ †‚ € †‡„ ˆ ‰†ˆ‰ and (more mysterious) Œ †ƒ Ž‰‘’‰­“„. Each bedroom had a closet accessible only by ladder. On one side of the house, Judd built a concrete swim- ming pool and a shaded pergola, and “on the other side of the building, in line with my daughter’s room,” he wrote in an essay about the Block, “is an alley of green grass and seven plum trees with purple leaves.” By way of explanation, he wrote only, “She wanted a yard.”

  — the old cavalry fort on the outskirts of Marfa in which Judd placed a series of permanent art installations—I œnally experienced Judd’s artistic vision in terms of abundance rather than reticence, as a plenitude I could feel in my nerves and my marrow. e compound invited me to surrender myself not only to the installa- tions but to their entire world: the old bar- racks and warehouses, the desert beyond, the dry wind—all under blue skies so bright, they made my eyes ache. Arguably the beating pulse of the entire compound is an installation—housed in two converted artillery sheds—that com- prises 100 boxes made of mill aluminum, whose gleaming surfaces re¢ect the Texas sky in all its shifting moods. As I stood among them, the glinting lines and angles of the boxes conveyed the precision of their construction and their subtle variations. Some had open walls; some were entirely closed; some were sliced in half by parti- tions. But the effect of the entire instal- lation was more sweeping, far less tightly controlled, almost dizzying. These aluminum boxes weren’t just boxes. ey held the weather itself: clouds swollen with rain, or a horizon painted by the burlesque of sunset. ey were cubes made of sky; their faces carved the light into radiant squares. At the time, I was reading a biography of the writer Jean Rhys that described how she hated the “parceled up” landscape of England—the soggy

 

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CSLB 983603 F13000002885 13HV08744300 countryside scored by walls, the ocean leans toward something beautiful that with deepened urgency the possibilities of itself segmented by jutting wooden piers. I can catch only in glimpses—the ash variation as a di‹erent form of sca‹olding, Judd’s installations revealed ways of carv- and are and icker of the sky in all those another source of momentum. Our days ing up the world that could hold its inn- aluminum boxes, light coming o‹ them had no story line anymore, only a series of itude rather than stiing it. at’s what like daggers. subtle changes. these boxes felt like, slices of innitude, as Standing among those boxes, sur- In quarantine, I had to give up on the if light were a creature, and this was one rounded by their luminous surfaces, I ideal of a pristine experience of Judd and set- of its natural habitats. was immersed in an experience so encom- tle into this partial, child-mediated engage- e boxes were more dynamic than passing, it felt like being held. A guiding ment instead. is surrendering felt like they appeared, expanding and contract- sensibility had arranged all their visual another version of admitting to myself that ing with changes in the temperature— scales—the work, the buildings, the what I’d always understood as an “ideal” almost as if they were alive, only in a way landscape—so I could experience them creative practice—the artist as someone lib- we couldn’t see, could barely even recog- in concert. e art was nurturing mother erated from the drudgeries of daily living, nize. eir sublimity lay on the other side and demanding father at once, caring for someone who didn’t spend her days being of all my attempts to summon them with me by holding me in the grip of this awe. served wooden cups of make-believe tea— language—these habitats of light, cubes was actually an impossible, unforgiving, of sky, sustained by quiet, metallic respi-   , I never returned to the and ultimately inaccurate vision. ration. “To see is to forget the name of Judd retrospective at MoMA—never got When I interviewed Flavin—over the the thing one sees,” the poet Paul Valéry to wander alone among its objects. With phone during my daughter’s nap, on a quar- once said, and those boxes made me for- the arrival of the coronavirus, the museum antine day without child care—I asked him get their names. ey brought my sight closed, and the exhibition catalog arrived whether he believed that his father’s life as a to life. ey asked me to see absence in in the mail just before I got sick myself. If parent had shaped his life as an artist. I was terms of presence. Judd’s work was all about intensied phys- desperate for him—really, for anyone—to Amid Judd’s aluminum boxes, I started ical presence, how could I possibly experi- tell me that being a parent meant you could to entertain the possibility that the mean- ence it in the pages of a catalog? e only make art that wouldn’t have been possible ing of his art wasn’t something that resided thing that felt more stingy than a Judd box otherwise. I needed to believe that all this just beyond my grasp, but something in a gallery was a photograph of a Judd boiled zucchini, all these hours spent putting that lay in the grasping itself. Perhaps the box in a gallery. But Judd’s work ended diapers on stu‹ed animals, all these dropped sense of yearning I felt whenever I looked up feeling strangely suited to the constric- teacups were not obstacles to art but rather at Judd’s art wasn’t a sign that I was fail- tions of quarantine, which—among other engines of it. I wanted to believe in a ver- ing to encounter it. Instead of expressing things—heightened my awareness of my sion of the creative impulse that lived with Judd’s “particular feeling at the time,” these immediate surroundings. If Judd’s work mess and disorder and chaos and distraction, boxes made room for another kind of feel- was a lesson in nding plenitude in what rather than depending on their absence. ing instead—the energizing vertigo of g- I’d mistaken for scarcity, then quarantine But Flavin was resistant to the idea. uring out how to approach beauty without was another version of this lesson: nding His father’s art had a trajectory of its own, the comfortable framework of a story line, more richness than I’d believed possible in he told me. Parenting hadn’t inuenced of allowing it to speak to me subcutane- this stripped-down life. the art-making; they were simply two ously, beneath the gurative skins of sense My daughter would sometimes pull the practices inspired by the same philosophi- and symbolism. heavy catalog o‹ the co‹ee table and place cal stance, he insisted more than once. Perhaps all the people who have tried it on the hardwood oor, saying, “Baby Still, I wondered if there were times when to climb inside Judd’s installations— climb book!” and “Baby climb mountain!” the system hadn’t t together so cohe- squish themselves under stacks, or Sometimes she would hastily turn its glossy sively. When I asked Flavin whether he between slabs—are seeking some kind of pages, muttering, “Pictures, pictures, pic- and his sister had ever made a mess when footing, too. Straining to form a relation- tures.” Looking through the catalog with they were kids, he said, “Of course we ship with the art, without quite know- her, I found myself drawn to an installa- did. All the time.” And I found it oddly ing how. Perhaps the yearning to under- tion (Untitled, 1976–1977) composed of reassuring to discover a photograph from stand Judd’s art that I’d pathologized as 21 stainless-steel units, all shallow boxes of the Spring Street days that showed Fla- a symptom of my daddy issues was bet- the same dimensions but detailed slightly vin watching television with his mother. ter understood in terms of another kind di‹erently. Some were open, others closed; I wondered whether these kids had ever of father gure. Judd’s objects don’t, of some had thinner or thicker rims. This found it exhausting to be raised by a course, represent God, a misinterpretation series of boxes started to remind me of our father with such a demanding, rareed that would almost certainly make Judd days: all the same in their contours and conception of attention. roll over in his grave. But the hunger they their constituent materials, but varying a In a joint interview with Rainer and produce reminds me of what it’s felt like bit in their particulars. During quarantine, the lmmaker Joshua Homnick that Judd

to yearn for God, when some part of me robbed of any narrative arc, I considered sat for in 1993, the year before he died, he PREVIOUS PAGE: PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX MARKS. DONALD JUDD ART © 2020 FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.

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1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 110 8/18/2020 4:36:52 PM kept dismissing things that didn’t matter— are all second-hand anyway, as an astro- when you die?,” Judd replied simply, “Bones success, money, society—until Rainer nomical fact? … We are all made of other on the land. Bones and rocks.” asked him, “What do you think there suns, long gone. So think about that.” should be a belief in? Don’t you think For Judd, the knowledge that we are there should be a belief in something?” made of suns was enough. †e existence Leslie Jamison is the author of †e Recovering: Judd insisted, “I’m afraid it’s a here-and- of a box was enough. His art came from this Intoxication and Its Aftermath; †e Empathy now situation. Or afraid and not afraid. belief in the suˆciency of the abundance Exams; and, most recently, Make It Scream, It’s pretty clear that nothing at all lasts for- already surrounding us—an abundance Make It Burn, out in paperback this fall. ever. So why should people be upset about that deserves our attention, and to which we it?” Judd wasn’t upset about it. He found will all inevitably return. When Homnick As this issue was going to press, MoMA grandeur in the concrete facts that others asked him, “What [do] you believe meta- announced its reopening, and the continuation embellished with myth: “Do you know we physically will happen to you personally of the Judd show through January 9, 2021.

In converting a building in New York’s SoHo warehouse district into a studio and home, Judd took care to leave the space basically unchanged.

e Atlantic (ISSN 1072-7825), recognized as the same publication under e Atlantic Monthly or Atlantic Monthly (†e), is published monthly except for combined issues in January/February and July/August by †e Atlantic Monthly Group, 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037 (202-266-6000). Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., Toronto, Ont., and additional mailing oˆces. Postmaster: send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to Atlantic Address Change, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564. Printed in U.S.A. Subscription queries: Atlantic Customer Care, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564 (or call +1 855-940-0585). Privacy: We occasionally get reports of unauthorized third parties posing as resellers. If you receive a suspicious noti®cation, please let us know at [email protected]. Advertising (646-539-6700) and Circulation (+1 855-940-0585): 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037. Subscriptions: one year $59.99 in the U.S. and poss., add $10.00 in Canada, includes GST (123209926); add $20.00 elsewhere. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement 41385014. Canada return address:e Atlantic, P.O. Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Back issues: send $15.00 per copy to e Atlantic, Back Issues, 1900 Industrial Park Dr., Federalsburg, MD 21632 (or call 410-754-8219). Vol. 326, No. 3, October 2020. Copyright © 2020, by †e Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRY SHUNK © J. PAUL GETTY TRUST, GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRY SHUNK © J. PAUL GETTY TRUST, RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES (2014.R.20). DONALD JUDD ART © 2020 FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.

 

1020_BOB_Jamison_Judd [Print]_13953920.indd 111 8/18/2020 4:36:53 PM ’bout those Metses—they serve a vital purpose. Without these emollient little going-nowhere phrases and the momentary social contract that they rep- resent, the streets would be a free-for-all, a rodeo of disaster. But that’s the negative view. Some of my most radi- e ant interactions with other human beings have been correct fleeting, glancing moments of small talk. It’s an extraor- answer dinary thing. A person stands before you, unknown, a com- to the plete stranger—and the merest everyday speech-morsel can tip question you head‚rst into the blazing void of his or her soul. I was out walking the other day when a UPS truck rumbled massively to the curb in front of me. As the driver leaped from his cab to make a ODE delivery, I heard music coming out of the truck’s speakers— a familiar, weightless strain of blues-rock noodle. There to “How are you?” is Not too bad. was a certain spacey twinkle Why? Because it’s all- in the upper registers, a cer- purpose. Whatever the cir- tain †imsiness in the rhythm cumstances, whatever the section … Yes. It had to be. SMALL TALK conditions, Not too bad will Še Grateful Dead, in one of get you through. In good their zillion live recordings. times it projects a decent pes- And I knew the song. It’s my simism, an Eeyore-ish reluc- favorite Dead song. “ ‘China tance to get carried away. On Cat Sun†ower’?” I said to the an average day it bespeaks a UPS guy as he charged back muddling-through modesty. to his truck. A huge grin: “You By James Parker And when things are rough, got it, babe!” really rough, it becomes a The exchange of energy, heroic understatement. Best of the perfect understanding, all, with three equally stressed the freemasonry of Deadhead- syllables, it gently forestalls ness that flashed instanta- further inquiry, because it is— neously between us, and most basically—meaningless. of all the honorific babe— Small talk is rhetoric too. I was high as a kite for the Americans in particular are next 10 minutes, projected small-talk artists. They have skyward on a pure beam of to be. Šis is a wild country. small talk. The most tenuous filaments of consensus and cooperation attach one person to the next. So the Have a nice days, the James Parker is a sta writer at Hot enough for yous, the How Še Atlantic.

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*Communes with some ancient Redwoods, skips a few rocks, meets the locals, and finds some peace in a place where he can actually hear himself think.

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