The American Prospect #303

The Democratic Party’s Widening Fault Lines

BY HAROLD MEYERSON

The Rise of the Homeschool Rebels

BY KATHRYN JOYCE

The Martyrdom of Dan Choi

BY GABRIEL ARANA

Can Colorado and Washington Make Legal Marijuana Work?

BY AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX

ALL FRACKED UP

N O V / D E C 2 013

The natural-gas boom in Pennsylvania could produce 100,000 wells.

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contents

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 6 NOV/ DEC 2013 PAGE 7

PAGE 32

PAGE 92

NOTEBOOK 7 IN THE WEEDS BY AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX 12 GAME OF DRONES BY HAL MAYFORTH 15 POOR, WITH SAVINGS BY MONICA POTTS

FEATURES 18 THE SHALE REBELLION BY BARRY YEOMAN 32 WELCOME TO THE 36TH BY KAT AARON 44 WHAT DIVIDES DEMOCRATS BY HAROLD MEYERSON 50 SOLDIER WITHOUT A WAR BY GABRIEL ARANA 62 THE HOMESCHOOL APOSTATES BY KATHRYN JOYCE

CULTURE 73 JEZEBEL GREW UP BY CLARE MALONE 76 BRETTON WOODS REVISITED BY ROBERT KUTTNER 80 KOREAN LIT COMES TO AMERICA BY CRAIG FEHRMAN 85 OUR SECRETS, OURSELVES BY LEE KONSTANTINOU 89 EDIBLE JAZZ BY MICHAEL W. TWITTY 92 ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN BY KONSTANTIN KAKAES

COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS FRUITS OF REPUBLICAN FOLLY BY ROBERT KUTTNER 96 COMMENT FIFTY SHADES OF PURPLE BY ABBY RAPOPORT On the cover: Methane flare off at a natural-gas well pad in Pennsylvania. Photo by Nina Burman.

Art above by Jesse Lenz, Victor Juhasz, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and John Cuneo.

1

PAGE 73

contributors

BARRY YEOMAN covers environmental issues.

His work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Audubon, and OnEarth.

He writes about the growing anti-fracking movement in the Pennsylvania mountains. “I’m drawn to uprisings in unlikely places,” he says, “particularly when environmentalism is connected with larger issues of social and economic justice.”

KAT AARON is a journalist and Alicia Patterson Fellow. She writes about Detroit’s 36th District Court and the crushing volume of people without attorneys. “People assume the courts look like Law and Order, with two scrappy lawyers facing off,” she says. “It’s so far from that, not just in Detroit but everywhere.”

LEE KONSTANTINOU teaches English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is an associate editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. His novel is Pop Apocalypse.

He reviews Dave Eggers’s The Circle. “I became interested in Eggers when I was a technical writer in the Bay Area,” he says. “I was pleasantly surprised to see The Circle satirize the dystopian world of Silicon Valley.”

MICHAEL W. TWITTY is a culinary historian, community scholar, and living-­ history interpreter focusing on African American food and folk culture.

He is working on a book based on his Cooking Gene project. He reviews Adrian Miller’s Soul Food.

“The piece,” he says, “came out of my interest in the way contemporary thinkers view the history and legacy of African American foodways.”

CRAIG FEHRMAN’s writing has appeared in The New York Times and The New Republic.

He explores the rise of Korean literature-­intranslation. “My sister lived in Seoul for years, and I finally went to visit her,” he says. “The city is as vivid and spedup as you’ve heard.

But I didn’t really understand Korea—and its tragic history— until I started to read its books.”

KONSTANTIN KAKAES, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Pioneer Detectives, reviews Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control. “So much writing about nuclear issues focuses on either how the technologies work or how policy governing their use is made,” he says. “Schlosser’s book looks at the points where these two meet.”

KATHRYN JOYCE is the author of The Child Catchers and Quiverfull. Her piece takes a look at the lives and activism of exfundamentalists.

“When I reported on Christian patriarchy, I was fascinated by my subjects’ longterm ambition to win the culture wars through their children,” she says. “What happened when those children grew up is a very different story.”

JESSE LENZ is an editorial illustrator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, and other publications. He lives with his wife, two sons, and English bull terrier in the hills of West Virginia. He is a frequent Prospect contributor and illustrates this issue’s article on legal marijuana.

PUBLISHER JAY HARRIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KIT RACHLIS FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR EXECUTIVE EDITOR BOB MOSER ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS CULTURE EDITOR SARAH KERR EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON SENIOR EDITORS CHRISTEN ARAGONI, GABRIEL ARANA WEB EDITOR CLARE MALONE SENIOR WRITER MONICA POTTS ASSOCIATE EDITOR JAIME FULLER STAFF REPORTER ABBY RAPOPORT RESEARCH EDITOR SUSAN O’BRIAN WRITING FELLOW AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX EDITORIAL INTERNS JONATHAN KIM, JORDAN LARSON, JOE MCKNIGHT, BRYCE STUCKI OFFICE MANAGER KATHLEEN MARGILLO CONTRIBUTING EDITORS SPENCER ACKERMAN, MARCIA ANGELL, ALAN BRINKLEY, TOM CARSON, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, RANDALL KENNEDY, JOSH KUN, SARAH POSNER, JOHN POWERS, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, DEBORAH A. STONE, NOY THRUPKAEW, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY & DEVELOPMENT AMY CONROY DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE SUSAN JED ADVERTISING MANAGER ED CONNORS, (202) 776-0730 X119, ECONNORS@PROSPECT.ORG BOARD OF DIRECTORS JANET SHENK (CHAIR), LINDSEY FRANKLIN, JACOB S. HACKER, JAY HARRIS, STEPHEN HEINTZ, ROBERT KUTTNER, MARIO LUGAY, ARNIE MILLER, KIT RACHLIS, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, PAUL STARR, BEN TAYLOR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT ACME PUBLISHING SERVICES SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) SUBSCRIPTION RATES $29.95 (U.S.), $39.95 (CANADA), AND $44.95 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG

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Prospects

Fruits of Republican Folly

BY ROBERT KUTTNER

T

he Republicans badly damaged themselves with their contrived government shutdown and debt crisis, but it remains for the Democrats to drive home their advantage. Will they?

Based on the cost to the Republican brand and the pressure from corporate elites not to harm the economy, the days of shutdowns and games with the debt are probably over for the foreseeable future. If the Tea Party faction tries to repeat these maneuvers, House Speaker John Boehner would likely permit a free vote again, and enough Republicans would vote with Democrats to keep the government open.

The Republicans seem hopelessly split between a Tea Party faction that relishes governing crises and a more mannered corporate faction that kills government softly. But the GOP is still one party when it comes to destroying government as a constructive force in the economy and society.

Since Barack Obama took office, the two Republican factions have complemented each other in a successful “good cop, bad cop” effort to ratchet down public spending.

Wall Street creates one sort of crisis; the Tea Party creates another; government takes the hit. Except for the short-lived stimulus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, this is the first prolonged slump of the postwar era in which government cut rather than expanded public spending.

President Obama’s pivot to deficit reduction in late 2009 was in response to the pressures of the

corporate elite, while his several capitulations in the budget cuts since 2010 have been driven by the Tea Party. In effect, the Tea Party and corporate Republicans have executed a pincer movement.

Domestic discretionary spending relative to gross domestic product is now below that of the Eisenhower era.

With everything else having been cut, the pressure has shifted to the big social-insurance programs— so-called entitlements—that have thus far been protected. Once again, the corporate right and Tea Party right have called for a grand bargain targeting Social Security and Medicare.

A bargain connotes giving something and getting something. Republicans are disinclined to give anything in exchange for cuts in social insurance, least of all tax increases. Their opening gambit was an improbable offer to shrink Social Security and Medicare in exchange for increases in defense spending.

The Democratic caucuses in both the House and Senate are resolute defenders of Social Security. Polls show that more than 80 percent of Republicans and Democrats alike don’t want Social Security reduced. With Republicans pressing for cuts, defense of Social Security is a clear, bright line that benefits Democrats.

Unless, that is, President Obama chooses to blur it. He has already proposed in his 2014 budget a change in the annual cost-ofliving adjustment to Social Security (the chained Consumer Price Index). Although a grand bargain

is unlikely, Republicans are pushing a mini-bargain of sequester relief in exchange for cuts in other domestic spending or in Social Security. The chained CPI would yield about $34 billion of deficit reduction per year. This disguised benefit cut would split the Democrats as badly as the government shutdown split the Republicans.

The GOP is still one party when it comes to destroying government as a constructive force in society.

A better mini-bargain would be relief from the depressive impact of the sequester without any offsetting cuts. The Democrats have some leverage here, because the sequester mandates at least $23 billion of defense cuts to take effect in January, requiring cancellation of multiyear weapons contracts dear to key Republican legislators. In exchange for restored military spending, Democrats could demand, and get, $23 billion in social spending. That $46 billion would help stimulate a stagnant economy.

Looking forward to the 2014 midterm, pollsters discern a paradox. Support for the Republican Party is down sharply. In October,

Gallup found that 28 percent of those polled approve of the Republicans, down from 38 percent in September and the lowest since Gallup began asking the question in 1992. Yet message testing also shows that large majorities of voters are still inclined to fault “partisan bickering”—blaming both parties—rather than Republican obstruction for the government’s failure to make substantive progress in improving a feeble recovery.

So the shutdown debacle helps the Democrats but only marginally, unless they maximize their moment. Midterm elections are notorious for low turnout. Democrats have a prayer of taking back the House only if they energize their core voters. If President Obama goes into the midterm bragging about how much progress has been made, that won’t resonate with Americans suffering from flat or declining incomes and job insecurity. The Democrats need to stand for restored, broadly shared prosperity, not tinkering, and brand Republicans as the party that would cut your benefits.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, has set a fine example. In the deal that opened the government, McConnell sneaked in the only earmark: $3 billion for a dam in Kentucky. If we ramped that up to the whole country based on Kentucky’s share of the economy, the outlay would translate to about $200 billion. Call it the Mitch McConnell Memorial Infrastructure Program—a nice down payment on the public investment America needs. 

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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notebook

In the Weeds Can Colorado and Washington make legal marijuana work?

BY A M E L I A T H O M S O N - D E V E A U X

j es se l en z

A

t midnight on December 6, 2012, when marijuana became legal in the state of Washington, a gaggle of celebrants gathered underneath Seattle’s Space Needle. Cheering and laughing, with no police in sight, they lit up and inhaled. “I feel like a kid in a candy store!” one man said. “It’s all becoming real now.”

The chilly reveling was documented by plenty of television cameras, but it was a little premature. Apart from the fact that what the revelers were doing was

not covered under the new law— possession of marijuana is legal, but public consumption is not— the success of the state’s experiment was far from assured. Along with Colorado, where voters also approved legalization last November, Washington is attempting to do something unprecedented: set up a state system to regulate and sell a drug that is illegal in the United States. Marijuana is classified as more dangerous than cocaine, methamphetamines, and opium. States that have legalized

marijuana for medical use have repeatedly clashed with federal authorities. But soon—on January 1, 2014, in Colorado and in June in Washington—all adults over 21 will be able to walk into a stateregulated store in Denver or Seattle and buy up to an ounce of pot.

The marijuana-reform movement has come a long way since its first advocacy group, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), was founded in 1970 with a grant from the Playboy Foundation. Medical

marijuana is now legal in 20 states and the District of Columbia. (It’s also legal in Maryland, but only for research purposes.) Polls show that a majority of Americans favor legalization for recreational use as well. This summer, the Marijuana Policy Project, one of NORML’s allies, announced an ambitious goal: legalize marijuana in ten additional states, including California, by 2017. “Colorado and Washington changed everything,” says Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, another leading advocate for drug-law reform. “For the first time, it made the option of legally regulated marijuana seem and feel real.”

Smooth implementation of Colorado’s and Washington’s new laws would help keep the

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

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8 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

WHEN MASON TVERT and Brian

inevitable—won’t be enough to quell their political momentum. A cascade of new laws legalizing marijuana is the movement’s best hope for forcing the federal government to end its long-standing prohibition on the drug. That’s why, says NORML executive director Allen St. Pierre, “the people behind these laws aren’t trying to pass reforms for perfection. They want to win. The goal is to tip that political scale, whether it’s by half an inch or a mile.” That might be a smart strategy for marijuana proponents nationally. But it leaves Colorado and Washington to serve as guinea pigs— and to deal with the consequences if their policies fail or the federal government changes its mind and decides to crack down.

Marijuana enthusiasts celebrated legalization last December by lighting up under Seattle’s Space Needle—even though Washington’s law still prohibits public consumption.

Vicente, the co-directors of Colorado’s 2012 Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, sat down to write a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, they had a distinct advantage over reformers in other states: They didn’t have to start from scratch. Colorado voters were among the first to approve medical marijuana, in 2000. Nine years later, lawmakers enacted the nation’s first comprehensive regulatory system.

Dispensaries were treated like other businesses—required to register with a newly formed regulation agency, pay sales taxes, and comply with labeling restrictions.

While states like California and Washington continued to struggle with confused, decentralized systems that invited federal interference, Colorado’s regulations led to benefits even skeptics couldn’t deny. Despite the federal government’s financial limitations on growers and sellers— because of arcane banking and tax regulations, marijuana businesses can’t open bank accounts, so they have to use cash for all transactions—retail sales soared, totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even some of the state’s most conservative pockets were profiting. Colorado Springs, home of the Christian-right Focus on the Family, collected nearly $1 million in medical-marijuana taxes between July 2011 and July 2012. In the same 12-month period, the state took in almost $6 million in taxes.

Tvert and Vicente had no reason to deviate from the state’s existing model as they developed what became Amendment 64, the ballot initiative that legalized marijuana. “It was like writing a paper on a similar subject,” says Tvert, who is also the communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project. “You get to borrow a bit from your past work.” Like the medical-marijuana code, Amendment 64 required retailers to grow at least 70 percent of their own product; by tracking marijuana from “seed to sale,” the thinking went, the state could better prevent it from landing in the hands of out-of-state traffickers and teens. The measure maintained the state’s personal growing provision for medical marijuana

t e d s . wa r r e n / a p i m a g e s

movement’s momentum going. But the states are in a precarious position.

In late August, the Department of Justice released a memo outlining its expectations for states that decide to legalize marijuana. Among them: prevent drugged driving, keep marijuana out of minors’ hands, curb interstate trafficking, and prevent state-­ regulated marijuana from providing revenue for gangs and cartels.

In one sense, the memo was encouraging for legalization advocates. “It suggests that sanity and reason and evidence-based policies are actually penetrating federal drug policy,” Nadelmann says. “It’s no longer about drug-law rhetoric and zero tolerance.

It’s about coming up with pragmatic ways to deal with the reality of drugs in our society.”

But the memo also conveys an unspoken threat: If the states can’t figure out how to comply with federal demands, prosecutors will raid the state-run stores or sue the states in federal court.

The architects of Washington’s and Colorado’s systems face enormous pressure to get this right. Some of their challenges are a direct result of the federal classification of marijuana. Research is costly and difficult, which makes it nearly impossible, for instance, to know what amount of pot makes someone too stoned to drive safely. The larger problem is that policymakers aren’t clairvoyant; they simply don’t know what will happen when marijuana is sold legally for the first time since 1937. Prices need to be low enough to discourage the black market but high enough to keep marijuana from spreading to other states—so how should the drug be taxed? There’s a compelling argument for taxing medical-marijuana patients at lower rates—but how can you ensure that recreational users or racketeers won’t pose as patients to get lower prices?

You can build flexibility into the system by allowing ordinary citizens to grow small amounts of marijuana for themselves—but then how do you keep this untaxed, unregulated product from creating a new black market?

Reformers are taking a calculated risk that hiccups in Washington and Colorado—and hiccups are

notebook

as well, allowing private citizens to grow up to six cannabis plants for personal use in a private, locked space. Permitting home growing is designed to be another safeguard against the black market, although critics say it could undermine the legally regulated system.

After Amendment 64 passed with 55 percent of the vote—more Coloradans voted for marijuana than for Obama—lawmakers added a number of additional regulations aimed at fending off federal interference.

To curb drugged driving, they set a threshold for impairment: five nanograms of THC, the main psychoactive component in marijuana, per milliliter of blood. The five-nanogram limit rests on a shaky scientific foundation.

Because researchers must clear mountains of red tape to gain the federal government’s permission to undertake clinical trials using marijuana, only a handful of studies of drugged driving have been conducted. It’s clear that being stoned does have an effect on driving skills, but setting a threshold for impairment is difficult; Colorado’s law is based on educated guesswork.

Marijuana proponents touted the new law as a moneymaker for the state during the 2012 campaign. To fulfill that promise, lawmakers have approved a 15 percent excise tax and a 10 percent sales tax on recreational marijuana sales, while medical marijuana would be taxed at current, lower rates. Those tax provisions are subject to voters’ approval this November— the last political hurdle for Amendment 64’s advocates.

Instead of replacing the medicalmarijuana system, Colorado’s new recreational system will operate alongside it. To ensure an orderly transition, the proprietors of existing dispensaries will own the first stores allowed to sell marijuana to the general public. If the regulations work properly, businesses will be able to operate in a dual capacity, with medical-­ marijuana strains in one corner of the shop and recreational products in another. That’s important for medicalmarijuana patients, who worry that recreational stores won’t carry the specialized strains they rely on to subdue nausea, ease pain, or control muscle

NO TWO MEDICAL MARIJUANA LAWS ARE THE SAME Medical marijuana is legal in 20 states and the District of Columbia. (It’s also legal in Maryland, but for research purposes only.) With the federal prohibition on pot, each state makes up its own regulations, creating a patchwork when it comes to major components of these laws. SOURCE: MARIJUANA POLICY PROJECT

Reformers are taking a calculated risk that hiccups in Washington and Colorado won’t be enough to quell their political momentum.

STATE OR DISTRICT

YEAR LAW PASSED

CALIFORNIA

1996

AVAILABLE TO MINORS?

PERSONAL GROWING PERMITTED?

Yes

STATEREGULATED DISPENSARIES?

Yes

TREATMENT FOR CHRONIC PAIN?

No

Yes

ALASKA 1998 Yes Yes No Yes

OREGON 1998 Yes Yes Yes Yes

WASHINGTON 1998 Yes Yes

No Yes*

MAINE 1999 Yes Yes Yes Yes*

COLORADO 2000 Yes Yes Yes Yes

HAWAII 2000 Yes Yes No Yes

NEVADA 2000 Yes Yes Yes Yes

MONTANA 2004 Yes Yes No Yes*

VERMONT 2004 Yes Yes Yes Yes

RHODE ISLAND

2006

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

NEW MEXICO 2007 Yes Yes Yes Yes*

MICHIGAN 2008 Yes Yes No Yes*

ARIZONA 2010 Yes Yes Yes Yes

D.C.

2010

Yes

No

NEW JERSEY 2010 Yes No

Yes

No

Yes

No

DELAWARE 2011 No No Yes Yes*

CONNECTICUT 2012 No

No

Yes

No

MASSACHUSETTS 2012 Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes*

ILLINOIS 2013 No No Yes No

NEW HAMPSHIRE 2013 Yes

No

Yes

Yes

*Standard treatments must be attempted before marijuana can be tried

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

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spasms without getting them high.

Even though Colorado was better prepared than most states for a legal marijuana system, it’s still conducting an experiment with unpredictable results. One potential source of trouble stems from the personal growing provision, which limits citizens to six plants at a time but places no limit on the plants’ size. Under skilled cultivation, marijuana plants can grow up to eight feet tall. The six-plant allowance creates a loophole for enterprising growers who want to sell their product outside of Colorado or want to peddle their homegrown pot to neighbors for lower prices than the state-regulated stores can offer. It’s one example of just how complicated, even in a state like Colorado, regulating legalized marijuana is proving to be.

MAPPING THE FUTURE OF POT LEGISLATION Marijuana reformers have targeted at least 11 more states for marijuana legalization by 2017, with plans to introduce ballot measures in six of those states. In the other five, it will push for legislation. SOURCES: MARIJUANA POLICY PROJECT; DRUG POLICY ALLIANCE

D.C.

WASHINGTON APPROVED medical

marijuana even earlier than Colorado, in 1998. But its experience with the law has been more fraught. As in several other states—including California, the nation’s largest marijuana market—Washington’s regulatory system is loose and fractured. The state has no registry for patients, opening the door to fraud by making it virtually impossible to track which doctors are recommending marijuana and which patients are procuring it. Commercial sale of marijuana is not technically permitted, so growers and distributors operate under the radar. Enforcement is patchy, varying by county—one more reason Washington has been a frequent site of raids by the Drug Enforcement Administration. As recently as July, DEA agents raided four medicalmarijuana cooperatives in western Washington and seized several thousand dollars’ worth of weed. The dispensaries were suspected of operating as fronts for recreational dealing.

Washington lawmakers have never passed a comprehensive framework for licensing and regulating medical marijuana. It’s not for lack of trying.

In 2011, Democratic state Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles introduced a bill to license medical-marijuana dispensaries and establish a patient registry.

The bill passed in the legislature, but the governor, nervous about federal retaliation against state employees

10 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

■ States with legal medical use; ballot

initiative to fully legalize pending

■ States with legal medical

■ States with legal medical use; legislative

■ States with no legal use

■ States with legal medical use only

and recreational use

action to fully legalize pending

who facilitated the medical-­marijuana system, gutted it. The scheme that resulted only made the law more confusing. Unimpressed by Washington’s feeble attempt at reform, federal prosecutors ordered more raids.

Even before the governor weakened the bill, Alison Holcomb, an attorney who headed up the ACLU of Washington’s marijuana-reform project, was thinking about full legalization.

Before joining the ACLU, Holcomb had defended people accused of marijuana offenses, an experience that left her committed to ending the federal prohibition. In the summer of 2010, she began drafting a ballot initiative that would become known as I-502.

Polling showed that Washington voters were supportive of legal marijuana. But they also wanted a strong regulatory framework with significant state oversight—no surprise, given the problems they’d seen with medical marijuana. So Holcomb created an initiative designed to be politically palatable, to “meet Washington voters where they were.” Many of I-502’s provisions were written, like other

Marijuana will likely be legal in several more states before it’s clear how well the experiments in Colorado and Washington are working.

marijuana-reform laws, to appeal to the “middle third” of voters—moderates who don’t care passionately about drug policy but are open to supporting legalization. Promising to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol—a familiar model—has been especially effective in wooing this group. It certainly helped I-502 pass in Washington. But what makes for good politics doesn’t always lead to wise policies.

Under I-502, Washington’s system would operate much differently from Colorado’s. In an attempt to prevent large businesses from monopolizing the industry, Washington’s plan called for a three-tiered system regulated by the Liquor Control Board, with separate roles for growers, processors, and retailers. Personal cultivation was not permitted. To appeal to lawmakers and voters facing a sizable budget shortfall, I-502 imposed hefty taxes: 25 percent at each of the three levels of production, resulting in a 44 percent effective tax. To allay concerns about drugged driving, the law was stricter than Colorado’s: Anyone found driving with more than five nanograms of THC in his blood would automatically receive a DUI, with no opportunity to prove lack of impairment.

The ballot measure won with 56 percent of the vote, but not without loud protests from some growers, sellers, and users. “The folks who wrote I-502 put together a piece of shit that could pass,” says Douglas Hiatt, a Seattlebased defense lawyer who specializes in marijuana cases and who opposed I-502. “They wanted to win so bad they forgot to bring along the reform.”

One common complaint is that I-502 left Washington’s medical-­ marijuana system untouched. It’s up to state lawmakers, once again, to create an effective way to regulate medical marijuana. No consensus exists about what fixes to make. Some lawmakers, like Kohl-Welles, want to incorporate medical marijuana into the new recreational framework; others are pushing to eliminate medical-marijuana laws entirely and let patients rely on the recreational market. If that happens, medical users could be priced out. “They don’t use an ounce,” Hiatt notes. “They use pounds of marijuana.

They bake it and eat it and put it into

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ed andrieski / ap images

oil. The use is very, very different.”

Proponents of medical marijuana say any system that regulates marijuana for recreational use needs to carve out a niche market for medical users as well. “Patients want to cultivate strains that work well for their condition and have them be affordable and of consistent quality,” says Kris Hermes, a spokesperson for Americans for Safe Access, a national group that promotes access to medical marijuana.

The fate of medical marijuana isn’t the only major source of uncertainty.

Washington’s taxes could prove too high, sending would-be legal users back to the black market and giving the cartels an opening to enter the market. On the other hand, if the state lowers taxes and prices fall too low, marijuana will flow over the border into other states. If Washington can’t find a sweet spot for taxing recreational users, it will risk crossing one of the federal government’s red lines. Analysts like Beau Kilmer, co-­director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, are concerned about whether Washington’s or Colorado’s laws allow lawmakers enough leeway to make necessary adjustments. “If things

are set in stone and then you want to change them, it’ll be difficult,” Kilmer says. “It’s crucial to build in some flexibility. Nobody is going to get this right the first or even the second time.”

MARIJUANA WILL LIKELY be legal in

Grow houses in Colorado use bar codes to track each marijuana plant through the growing and distribution process.

several more states before it’s clear how well the experiments in Colorado and Washington are working. Legalization advocates are moving on to new battlegrounds. They expect ballot initiatives to go before Oregon and Alaska voters in November 2014, and California won’t be far behind. Maine or Rhode Island could soon become the first state to legalize marijuana through its legislature.

The new systems will vary state to state, but they’re likely to have a few basic elements in common. Because lawmakers and reformers want to sell the laws as revenue-generators, they’ll have substantial excise taxes.

To draw in entrepreneurs from the existing medical market, they will be for-profit. And in order to reassure lawmakers and voters alike, they will be built around the “commonsense” concept that sold Amendment 64 and I-502: Marijuana should be

taxed and regulated like alcohol.

While this approach might make good politics, drug-policy experts say that privatizing the legal marijuana market could have troubling longterm consequences. “The Colorado and Washington initiatives were designed to look like something that was familiar to voters: alcohol. But that’s a remarkably lousy system,” says Mark Kleiman, a social scientist and drug-policy analyst at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Alcohol companies don’t make money selling to responsible drinkers. If you work for Budweiser, your business is drunks. So you’ve got an interest that’s flatly contrary to the public interest.

Why would we want another system where people become millionaires by profiting from drug abuse?”

Only a nonprofit model or state monopoly, Kleiman says, can provide the production and price controls that a legal marijuana system needs.

But those models are difficult, if not impossible, to sell politically. As long as marijuana policy is decided by ballot initiatives, advocates will have the unenviable task of balancing voters’ anxieties with the priorities set forth by the Department of Justice.

And once they pass a law, the states will continue to grapple, like Washington and Colorado, with how to keep the federal government at bay.

The instructions that came down in August aren’t the law. A change of leadership in the department, or the election of a new president with a less generous attitude toward pot, could usher in a new wave of raids and punitive policies.

Despite the uncertainties, with each state-level victory, the country inches closer to ending marijuana’s prohibition. What unfolds in Colorado and Washington over the next year will tell lawmakers and reformers in other states a great deal about what works and what doesn’t. “There’s a lot at stake,” says Colorado’s Brian Vicente. “We need to demonstrate to the federal government that we are taking this seriously. But it’s also exciting.

When the stores open, we can demonstrate that the sky hasn’t fallen, that this is producing tax revenue, and that the voters’ will is enacted.” 

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

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GAME OF DRONES

BY HAL MAYFORTH

12 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

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NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

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Poor, with Savings New York is helping low-income families pay down debts and cover expenses. But don’t expect this program to go national.

BY M O N I C A P O T T S

oromi / fotolia

B

eing poor is expensive. A winter heating bill that comes due before the paycheck arrives can compel a trip to a payday lender who charges 350 percent interest. It takes the entire paycheck to pay off that loan in a week—emptying out the bank account and requiring yet another visit to the lender. A child who is too sick to go to school for a week may need her single father to stay home with her, costing him a quarter of his monthly income. He’s overdue on the rent and the bills, so he’s responsible for late fees as well.

Even a few hundred dollars in a savings account could help low-income families weather such predictable but unavoidable crises—provided they have extra money to save. Their budgets are tight, and saving makes sense only if they’re not sacrificing food or child care in order to put money aside.

Anti-poverty advocates have long known there could be a relatively cheap, simple way to help people avoid such trade-offs if the government structured savings plans tailored to low-income families. Such plans have to strike the proper balance: They can’t require families to save so much that they’re not buying what they need but should be substantial enough to be useful.

Experts have designed and studied many such programs; the most successful ones provide the beneficiaries with some seed money to start an account and boost the reward for saving by providing matching funds.

Over the years, not just liberals but conservatives such as Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum have endorsed creating government programs to help the poor save. With the poverty rate stuck at a ten-year high of 15 percent, finding new ways to move people toward financial stability becomes more and more urgent.

What, then, could keep the idea from becoming national policy?

POOR FAMILIES DO GET extra money

once a year: tax time. Like many families, those with low incomes receive a refund when they file their taxes in April. If they work but make less than double the federal poverty line, which is $47,100 a year for a family of four, they can get back more than they paid in taxes—a sort of super refund known as the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC. The credit can bring them as much as $6,000, depending on how much money they made and how many children they have. An estimated 26 million households claimed the EITC this year, roughly 75 percent to 80 percent of the families that qualified. The EITC raises families’ incomes so much that it would have lifted five million people out of poverty in 2012 if it were accounted for when the official poverty rate was calculated.

For the most part, however, families don’t save this money. Some make the major purchases they’ve deferred. They buy clothes for their children, pay registration fees for their cars, and make trips to cheap warehouse stores to stock up on goods. For others, the money provides a way to climb out of the financial holes they’ve dug themselves into: the months of overdue bills and their late fees, the payday loans that need settling, the professional licensing fees that allow them to keep working. It’s a chance to settle accounts, but since the money is usually gone within a month or two, the cycle starts again until the next year’s refund arrives.

For decades, academics and activists have floated ideas about how to help families automatically save part of this windfall at tax time. Evidence suggests that starting a savings account with a lump sum of money makes it easier to continue saving throughout the year—partly because few people imagine that putting $50 or so away a month will ever add up to anything worth the hassle. New York

Even Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have backed programs to help the poor put money away.

City, under the Michael Bloomberg administration, began such a program in 2008. Families that qualified for EITC could ask that some of their refund—at least $100 at first, later changed to $200—be deposited into a savings account before they ever saw it. The program contributed 50 cents for every dollar each family saved for an entire year, up to $250 at first, later changed to $500, with funding coming from the Rockefeller, Ford, and New America foundations. If the families withdrew money from their accounts before the year was up, they wouldn’t receive the matching funds.

The city recruited workers at neighborhood tax-preparation sites, where accountants help low-income families file their taxes at no cost, to enroll people in the plan. Billy Garcia worked for three years at sites in the Bronx, in poor, mostly black and Latino neighborhoods like Mott Haven and Morrisania. “A lot of people would say, ‘I don’t want to participate because this money is already spent,’” Garcia says.

“I understood that.”

A number of Garcia’s clients who had opted to open accounts returned to tell him their success stories. While some had saved money and used it for small purchases or to keep on top of bills, others had planned for things they wouldn’t be able to afford with their normal salaries. One woman wanted her kids to meet their grandparents in the Dominican Republic— she put away $1,000 for a whole year, which was matched by another $500, and saved an additional $1,000, also matched, in the following year. With $3,000 in savings, her family was able to make the trip.

A few families were not able to save the money for an entire year. “They would come to me, and they would be a little disappointed, as if I would be disappointed in them,” Garcia says.

One client needed to wire money to Uruguay because of a family emergency. Garcia told him: “We did actually help you save that money, because you held it for six months. You can’t help the things that come up in life, but at least you had that money and it was there for you to use.”

In the program’s first three years, 2,600 filers participated, taking up

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

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every available spot. (Admissions to the program were limited by the amount of matching funds the foundations had donated.) Eighty percent of the families saved for the entire year and received matching funds— for a total of $2.3 million in savings and matching funds—and 70 percent continued to save after the year was up. “They were successfully saving money, even though on average they were making $18,000 a year, and this was when the economy was all falling apart, and they were living in a city like New York,” says Jonathan Mintz, commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, which runs the program through its Office of Financial Empowerment.

“The odds were really against them.”

Impressed by the success of the New York effort, the Obama administration directed $5.7 million in federal funds to New York’s program, which helped build satellite programs in Newark, San Antonio, and Tulsa. The program was designed as a pilot study and will end in February 2014. While all the data and analyses aren’t in yet, these cities also had successes in the first year: Nearly 1,500 people saved and received matching funds, which totaled almost $1 million.

Serrano, a Democrat who represents some of the Bronx neighborhoods where the savings program is in place, has introduced a bill that would create a nationwide initiative. Serrano’s measure—the Financial Security Credit Act—would allow EITC families to put part of their refunds into accounts in which federal funds would supplement their savings in the same ratio, and up to the same limits, that the New York and pilot programs set. The New America Foundation has estimated that the annual cost of the program would be roughly $4 billion.

Helping families save is nothing new for the government, but until now, federal programs have seldom targeted the poor. Parents get tax incentives to put aside money for their children’s college education, and employees receive tax deferrals on 401(k) retirement plans. The 401(k) benefit costs the government roughly $140 billion a

k at h y w i l l e n s / a p i m a g e s

CONGRESSMAN JOSÉ

year. Middle- and upper-income families receive tax breaks for long-term financial investments that help them build wealth, particularly the deduction on the interest they pay on home mortgages. Most of the money goes to households with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent.

Ron Haskins, a conservative who co-directs the Center on Children and Families and Budgeting for the Brookings Institution, says a lot of evidence has been built over the years that poor families can save money. No evidence, he warns, yet demonstrates that it helps them move out of poverty, but he thinks that these kinds of programs should be tried. “I like the provision,” he says. “Savings do produce great impacts, and a lot of middle-class people found that out because that’s how they got to be in the middle.”

Serrano’s bill, which has 24 Democratic co-sponsors, is sitting in the House Ways and Means Committee, where it has no chance of getting out.

In the past, an inexpensive program that had already been tested could have been swept into a broader bill. With the House under Republican control, however, budget cutting is the order of the day, even though conservatives in Congress championed the idea of helping the poor save during the 1996 debates

Tax-preparation sites for low-income New Yorkers, like this one in Harlem, help people enroll in the savings program.

Families with average yearly incomes of just $18,000– in New York– were able to maintain savings accounts.

over welfare reform. At the time, many Republican lawmakers wanted to include an option for states to establish individual development accounts, which would help families set aside funds for big-ticket items like homes or small businesses. Thirty-three states have IDA programs for low-income families, but they’re small and have never received much federal assistance.

None helps families put aside funds for routine financial emergencies.

Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, who heads the House delegation negotiating next year’s budget with the Senate, is a self-proclaimed apostle of former Congressman Kemp, who famously insisted that Republicans needed to concern themselves with the plight of the poor. As the House battled over how much money to cut from the food-stamp program this summer, Ryan said he was turning his attention to the issue of poverty. “We’ve got the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty coming up next year,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We don’t have much to show for it.” What he failed to mention is that the EITC—which President Ronald Reagan once called “the best anti-poverty, the best profamily, the best job-creation measure to come out of Congress”—would likely be reduced if his budget prevailed. 

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

THE SHALE In Pennsylvania, a band of unlikely activists fights the fracking boom. BY BARRY Y EO M AN

18 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

REBELLION

Mount Pleasant Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania.

Photo by Scott Goldsmith.

S

ix months before she helped organize the protest known as Hands Across Riverdale, the word “fracking” didn’t mean much to Deb Eck. “Not a damn thing,” says the 52-year-old dollar-store manager. A single mother of twins, she was putting in crushing hours to provide a decent life for her daughters, who are now 12. On good days, she arrived home from work in time to help the girls with their schoolwork, tuck them into bed, and spend the rest of the night cooking and cleaning. There was no time to read about the natural-gas boom unfolding in her backyard.

One consolation for Eck’s hard work was the tranquility of her home. Riverdale Mobile Home Park’s 32 trailers sat on a leafy bank of the Susquehanna River in Piatt Township, Pennsylvania, in the state’s mountainous center, three hours from any major city. “The kids would play with the ducks in the field and had all kinds of friends,” she says. “I never had to worry about them going outside.”

Nor did she worry about rent; the $200 Eck paid for her lot was well within her monthly budget.

In February 2012, she learned that her landlord had sold the property to a joint venture called Aqua-PVR Water Services, which planned to build a water-withdrawal facility for local gas-drilling operations. Piatt Township sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a 95,000-square-mile rock formation stretching from New York to West Virginia. The shale contains an estimated $500 billion worth of recoverable natural gas in Pennsylvania alone and has attracted a rush of energy companies into the region. The fuel is accessed by drilling thousands of feet down and then horizontally across a layer of sedimentary rock. Chemical-laced water is pumped underground to “fracture” the rock, creating fissures that free up the gas. The extraction process, including the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is colloquially known as “fracking.”

Building the new plant meant evicting Riverdale’s residents. Eck and her neighbors were offered $2,500 apiece— well below the cost of moving a trailer—if they agreed to leave two months before their June 1 deadline. That figure would taper down to zero if they delayed. Eck’s main worry was where she and her daughters were going to live. But then she went online and learned about the toxic chemicals used in fracking, which have been linked to water contamination. She read about how gas development destroys the integrity of forests, wreaking havoc with resident wildlife.

“The more I found out, the worse it got,” she says. “They’re going to turn this peaceful, quiet community into an industrial area, suck water out of the Susquehanna, and ruin the habitat for how many different animals. It just made you sick to your stomach.”

As Eck kept reading, she learned about the political

20 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

power of the natural-gas industry. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to fight this,” she concluded. But then one of her neighbors told her that he had been talking with some environmental activists who wanted to help Riverdale’s residents. “Help us do what?” she asked.

“They want to stop this because of the fracking,” she recalls him saying.

Hearing that, Eck felt a bit encouraged. “We’ve got to all stick together, though,” she told him. “If we stick together, we can fight this. Maybe we’ll beat them.”

Most of Riverdale’s residents, desperate for cash, took the buyout. Some abandoned their trailers altogether or salvaged them for scrap. But seven households, including Eck’s, decided to defy the eviction notice. News of their plans traveled through environmental, church, student, and other progressive networks. As eviction day approached, anti-fracking activists descended on the park.

Among the first was Leah Schade. The minister of a Lutheran church in the next county, Schade had founded the Interfaith Sacred Earth Coalition, a network of clergy committed to safeguarding God’s creation. She had been offering pastoral support to Riverdale residents facing eviction, including an elderly couple—the wife had breast cancer— who couldn’t move their trailer and faced losing their life savings. Schade had tried using her moral authority to approach the new landowners, she says, only to be told, “Your job is to help these people move.” (Aqua-PVR’s parent company, Aqua America, did not return calls seeking comment.)

About two dozen people had arrived by May 31, the night before the bulldozing was slated to begin: college kids, senior citizens, local and regional environmentalists, veterans of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Schade helped organize an ecumenical prayer service. Participants lit 32 candles, one for each displaced family. They blessed four wooden bowls of river water. They read religious texts and held hands in a circle. When it was over, they launched into civil-disobedience training.

Schade stayed nearby with a friend that night. Returning the next morning, she could hardly believe what the residents and visitors had done. “Overnight, they had taken all of the

broken pieces of the discarded trailers, and old furniture and huge boards, and they built barriers across both roads and made signs,” she says. Tents had popped up; volunteers were making coffee; others were cleaning and patrolling the grounds. A full-scale occupation “was not something we had all planned,” she says. “I had expected to see simply a line of residents and activists with their arms linked, standing across the entrance to the park. Maybe a few signs and people chanting protests.” Surveying the riverside encampment, Schade turned to an acquaintance. “This is resurrection,” she said. “This is new life in the midst of death.”

Day after day, the protesters held off the bulldozers. Those who needed to leave for work, including Eck, did so. Others kept the encampment running: buying food, organizing security teams, caring for the children. The Occupy veterans built rocket stoves and composting toilets. “It was like a big family,” Eck says. “Lots of cooking. Lots of laughing. Even though we had lost so many members of our community, having the activists there made us feel like we weren’t alone.

It actually made us think that maybe we stood a chance.”

Late one night, a protester and philosophy professor named Wendy Lynne Lee was patrolling the grounds when a truck pulled up. The driver was a Riverdale evictee who worked for a company that serviced the natural-gas industry. Because fracking paid his bills, he had not been sympathetic to the activists, some of whom he viewed as

hippies. But he’d come to realize that he was in the same predicament as his neighbors, potentially facing homelessness because his trailer was too fragile to move. As Lee and the driver talked, he worried aloud about how he would provide for his family. Then he drove away. The next morning, when Lee emerged from her tent, she found him back at Riverdale, dismantling his roof to help fortify the encampment’s barricades. “That was his home,” she says, still incredulous. “He gave it to us to keep out the demolition crews for a few more days.” By that afternoon, the roof panels were covered with children’s handprints and painted words describing the residents: Mother. School-bus driver. WWII Vet. Postal Worker. Americans.

Thirteen days in, a private security team arrived, followed by the state police. Eck, who didn’t want to see the protesters arrested, asked them to stand down, which they did. “We knew it was going to fail,” says Schade. “But that’s not the point. The point is that the children there saw people who were resisting the powers and saw a vision of what is possible.”

More important, the standoff served as an emboldening moment for Pennsylvania’s Shale Rebellion, the looseknit resistance that over the past three years has fought a desperate battle to stop the Marcellus drilling frenzy.

Hands Across Riverdale drew blogosphere and news-media attention to a region where fracking opponents had felt

Accompanying this story are iPhone images by photojournalist Lynn Johnson that document the anti-fracking rebellion in Pennsylvania.

You can view the entire series at the Marcellus Shale Documentary Project’s website (http://the-msdp.us).

Above: Riverdale Mobile Home Park residents, including Deb Eck (in red), protest their eviction.

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

isolated and unheard. It broadened the movement, attracting economic-­justice activists who saw how natural-gas extraction can harm people living at the margins. Although the water company won, the protest offered a cathartic moment of direct action after so many government meetings and letter-writing campaigns. Even today, the phrase “Remember Riverdale” serves as a motivational call for Pennsylvania’s anti-fracking activists.” For a lot of us,” Lee says, “these were 13 days that changed everything.”

FEW PLACES IN THE UNITED STATES are tougher ground

for building an environmental-justice movement than the Appalachian counties of central Pennsylvania—politically conservative, temperamentally reticent, and historically reliant on resource extraction. “We’re family-oriented.

We’re white. We don’t bother people. We take care of our own,” Schade told me in her office at United in Christ Lutheran Church, a rural congregation near West Milton, 35 miles southeast of Riverdale. “We labor under the American myth of you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

You’re independent. You do not get involved with other people’s business. And you trust the government.”

Yet central Pennsylvania, the hub of the Marcellus fracking boom, has also become one of the hubs of the Shale Rebellion. Across Pennsylvania, fracking opponents have shown up reliably at town-hall meetings. They have flooded

22 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

newspapers and state agencies with letters and comments.

They have filed lawsuits and right-to-know requests. They have picketed legislators’ district offices and rallied outside industry conferences. They have protested in hazmat suits, in marching bands, in canoes. They have locked themselves to a giant papier-mâché pig. They have led educational hikes through threatened forests, driven anti-drilling floats in community parades, and given shale-field tours to overseas activists and policymakers. They have packed screenings of Gasland, Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary that featured Dimock Township in the state’s northeast corner, where drinking-water wells were found to be tainted with methane after fracking began. They have blogged prolifically. They have sat in trees to try to stop drilling and pipeline construction. In a handful of cities and towns, including Pittsburgh, they have passed ordinances, in defiance of state law, that ban fracking and strip drillers of their constitutional rights.

By and large, the activists are working independently of the national “Big Green” organizations, which generally came late to the fracking issue, initially viewing gas as a cleaner alternative to coal. With exceptions like Food & Water Watch, national groups have operated parallel to, rather than in collaboration with, the grassroots movement in Pennsylvania, focusing on tougher regulations rather than trying to ban drilling. “Some tend to have a

technocratic view of their role,” says Deborah Goldberg, an attorney with Earthjustice, a public-interest law firm based in San Francisco, which works closely with national and local groups. “They have scientists on staff, and they don’t feel like it’s important to work with local guys.”

The local guys are having an effect. A poll released in May by the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College showed that 58 percent of Pennsylvanians support a fracking moratorium, compared to 31 percent who oppose it. While no earlier moratorium polls were conducted, this almost certainly represents a gain, considering that outright opposition to shale-gas extraction stood at 40 percent in Pennsylvania, compared to 27 percent who opposed fracking two years earlier. (Nationally, 49 percent of people oppose increased fracking, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.) In June, Pennsylvania’s Democratic State Committee helped shift the state’s political center when it passed a resolution calling for a halt to fracking until “the practice can be done safely” and demanding restitution for the harms it has caused. That position puts party committee members in direct conflict with their major gubernatorial candidates for 2014, none of whom supports a moratorium, and with former Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat who now works for a private-equity

Safe Drinking Water Act. Energy companies have more recently found a friend in President Barack Obama, who in his 2013 State of the Union speech linked the natural-gas boom to “cleaner power and greater energy independence” and promised to “keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.”

No one knows exactly how much usable gas the Marcellus Shale contains. A U.S. Department of Energy report calls it the largest reservoir of “unconventional” natural gas—fuel trapped in rocks, requiring special technology to extract—in the world. Pennsylvania State University geosciences professor Terry Engelder projects that it could power the United States for 20 years.

The crossroads of the Marcellus gas industry lies in Williamsport, 15 minutes downstream from the former Riverdale Mobile Home Park. A small city best known as the international headquarters of Little League Baseball, Williamsport was dubbed the nation’s lumber capital during the 19th century. Locally harvested white pine and hemlock brought prosperity to the city, which boasts a collection of Victorian mansions called Millionaire’s Row. Then loggers tapped out the forests, forcing the last of Williamsport’s 30 sawmills to close in 1919. Deforestation left the city so destitute that police had to transport

By August, 6,900 gas wells had been drilled in Pennsylvania.

That figure could eventually reach 100,000 or more. firm with natural-gas investments. In March, Rendell wrote a New York Daily News column urging New York state to end its five-year moratorium on drilling in the shale. “If we let fear carry the day,” he argued, “we will squander another key moment to move forward together.”

The Marcellus Shale, which underlies both the land and the conflict, covers almost two-thirds of Pennsylvania, extending across the entire northern tier of the state and dipping into the anthracite coal counties of the northeast.

It also spans all of western Pennsylvania, including the Pittsburgh area. Geologists began recognizing the Marcellus’s potential in 2003—the same year, according to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, that “producers began to explore the nation’s massive shale formations in earnest,” ushering in “fracking’s new Golden Age.” It took another five years for scientists to understand the full extent of the Marcellus and for drilling to ramp up.

By then, Congress had given fracking a boost by passing in 2005 what’s commonly known as the “Halliburton loophole,” which stripped the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate the practice under the

prisoners in wheelbarrows. Still, timber’s history defines Williamsport, just as coal defines the anthracite counties, and just as Titusville, in the state’s northwest, celebrates its distinction as the site of the world’s first oil well.

The deep forests around Williamsport have regenerated, and the area remains stunning. Winding two-lane roads cut through steep valleys laced with clear trout streams and brimming with white-tailed deer, otters, and bald eagles. Today the roads are populated with trucks bearing the logos of EXCO, a leading driller, and Halliburton, along with vehicles called “sand cans” that haul silica to prop open the shale fractures. Amid country churches and elementary schools sit concrete pads covered with wells and heavy equipment. They represent fracking’s infancy: As of August, gas companies had drilled 6,900 “unconventional” gas wells in Pennsylvania. Anthony Ingraffea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University and a prominent researcher in the field, predicts that figure could eventually reach 100,000. By contrast, 80,000 wells have been drilled or permitted nationwide since 2005.

Kevin Heatley, a restoration ecologist who lives outside

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

Hughesville, 20 miles east of Williamsport, says that the projected level of development would profoundly alter the region’s terrain. Heatley uses the phrase “dispersed industrialization” to describe the interconnected well pads, pipelines, freshwater impoundments, compressor stations, and access roads, along with the artificial lighting and helicopter noise, that accompany fracking. That “industrial sprawl,” he says, will fragment the landscape so much that it will no longer function naturally. “You will still have trees, but you will have wood lots, not core forest,” he says. “You will have farms that are in between pipelines and in between compressor stations. The primary use of that landscape will be industrial extraction. They will try to screen it from the road, but if you fly over from the air, you will see a landscape that looks like a bad case of acne.”

“WE’RE ON OUR WAY INTO FRACKLAND,” Wendy Lynne

Lee tells me as she steers her Honda Fit toward Sullivan County, east of Williamsport. The philosophy professor at nearby Bloomsburg University is 54 and generously inked and has the sinewy build of a marathon runner. As one of the founders, along with Leah Schade, of Shale Justice— a shoestring coalition of ten anti-fracking groups formed this year to share information and jointly plan protests— she’s well known for a blog that fuses brainy polemics with unfiltered outrage. Last fall she delivered a lecture called

24 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

“The Good Ole’ Boy Extraction Club: The Pseudo-Patriotic and Pervasively Patriarchal Culture of Hydraulic Fracturing.” Diplomacy is not her forte. That has earned Lee equal measures of respect and derision. “Her academic scholarship is robust and her commitment to ethics based on her philosophical principles is beyond reproach,” Schade says.

“A fiction story teller,” writes Joe Massaro, a blogger and Pennsylvania-based field director for Energy in Depth, the public-relations arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

From Lee’s passenger seat, the mountains begin to look less inviting and more like sprawling natural-gas factories.

In Davidson Township, 30 miles from Williamsport, we pass a tidy wooden house decorated with an eagle emblem and an American flag, flanked by barns, cornfields, and a row of oak trees. “I’ve taken, I don’t know, 100 pictures of this farmhouse,” Lee says. “Wait till you see what they now live with for the rest of their lives.”

We round a corner. There’s a gash ripped from the hillside, enclosed by a chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. Behind the fence stands a warehouse-size compressor station. It prepares the fracked gas for transportation along the 39-mile Marc I pipeline, built to connect three interstate pipelines carrying gas between the Northeast and the Gulf Coast. It’s surrounded by so much bulldozed land that we can’t see the whole complex from the road.

“The early years of this movement were focused on the frack pads”—the actual drilling sites, Lee says. “But without the pipelines and the compressors, there’s no point in fracking for the gas.” Research by Allen Robinson, a mechanical-engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has found that compressor stations emit cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde, along with ozone, which aggravates asthma and other lung diseases. The stations are also subject to alarmingly frequent accidents. Since 2010, news and government reports have documented at least 35 fires and explosions at or next to compressor stations throughout the U.S., including two in Susquehanna County over the past two years. The first, in March 2012, blew a hole in the roof, rattled nearby homes, and released about a ton of methane gas; investigators concluded it was the result of a gas leak caused by human error. Industry officials say the news accounts exaggerate the combustion problem.

“I’m not saying it’s a good thing,” says Cathy Landry, a spokesperson for the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America. “But typically there haven’t been injuries to the public or third-party damage.”

Lee says the fires and explosions are almost beside the point. “An accident doesn’t have to happen for this to be a disaster,” she says. “This is a disaster.” She turns to me: “This used to be a mountain.”

From Davidson Township, we’re off to Picture Rocks, partway back to Williamsport, where heavy machines are mowing down a wide stripe of woods to create a pipeline right-of-way. The clear-cut path brushes against the flagged boundary of a wetland and the edge of a classic red barn. Next door, a garage sale proceeds as if nothing were amiss. Nearby, we stop to observe a particularly large well pad where a farm used to be. A remnant of an old wooden fencing runs up to its edge, and volunteer corn stalks grow in the ditch. Now there are six naturalgas wells, along with trucks, trailers, floodlights, a flare, a crane-like contraption called a wire line, and tanks to hold both fuel and the toxic water that returns to the surface after drilling. “Just imagine 100,000 of these,” Lee says, nodding toward a well. “Plus all the compressors, all the pipelines, all the dehydrators, all the water withdrawals, all the sand cans, all the waste haulers. I can’t imagine what’s left of Pennsylvania.”

DESPITE THE INDUSTRY’S INSISTENCE that fracking

is safe, a growing body of science has linked it to various ills. Researchers have associated it with the poisoning of drinking-water wells. Duke University scientists have found elevated salts, metals, and radioactivity in river water and sediment near a western Pennsylvania creek where treated wastewater was released. In 2011, Cornell

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

engineer Ingraffea and two colleagues concluded that shale gas has a larger greenhouse-gas footprint than coal or conventional oil and gas when viewed over a 20-year period. These studies speak in likelihoods, not certainties: Fracking remains poorly studied, partly because drillers have successfully lobbied not to disclose the chemicals they use, citing trade secrets.

None of this tops Kevin Heatley’s list of worries. In 1999, the ecologist moved to nine wooded acres near Hughesville, knowing hardly a soul but drawn to the land. Heatley can see black bears and bobcats just outside his house, and coyotes deeper into the forest. Once during a snowstorm, he spotted a porcupine taking refuge in the branches of a white pine. “I love the snakes. I love the frogs,” he says. “I’m not religious, but that’s as close to sacred as you can get.”

The prospect of losing this bounty has driven him to reluctant activism. Heatley sits on the steering committee of Shale Justice and used to serve on the board of one of its member groups, the Williamsport-based Responsible Drilling Alliance. He gives lectures around the region and shows visitors the shale fields. He’d rather spend that time fishing.

We meet at his house on a summer morning and walk the land. At 53, Heatley has a compact frame, blue eyes,

Heatley wants to show me what this industrialization looks like on a more stomach-turning scale. So we drive across the county to McHenry Township, population 143, to visit a man named Bob Deering. At the turnoff to the mountain where Deering lives, a security guard sitting under an umbrella stops us. “I gotta put you back across the road for just a couple of minutes,” she says. “There’s trucks coming down.” Though Deering lives up a public road, it has been commandeered, with the township’s permission, by a drilling company, whose security contractor has posted guard shacks at intervals and a sign that says, “Travel at your own risk.” We wait on the shoulder for 12 minutes. It’s 90 degrees outside. “Welcome to Pennsylvania,” Heatley says.

Uphill, past another guard station, we reach Deering’s two-story log house. Deering, who is wearing a gray Smith & Wesson baseball cap, is 62, with a reedy voice and a salt-and-pepper beard that covers a deeply creased face.

Growing up three counties to the south, he often came to a hunting camp on this mountain to shoot turkey and deer with his family. “We used to swing like Tarzan and the apes between maple trees,” he recalls of his childhood.

“This was our retreat.” By the time he retired from his job servicing telephones and computers for Verizon in 2001,

Few places in the U.S. are tougher ground for building an environmental-justice movement than Central Pennsylvania. and a boisterous sense of humor that he uses to win allies.

“I will tell you something if you can keep a secret,” he declared at a June hearing about drilling near the Old Logger’s Path in Loyalsock State Forest. “One time when I was much younger and much better looking, I made love to a beautiful woman on a flat moss-covered rock up along the Old Logger’s Path.” The crowd whooped. “And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let them put some fracker eating his McDonald’s lunch on top of that rock.”

The humor fails to conceal a wellspring of anger, particularly when Heatley talks about industrial sprawl. “What made this area unique was core forest, interior forest,” he says. “That’s going away. You cannot put in industrial sites every mile and not have massive changes in the fundamental structure and functioning of that forest.” The impacts, he says, are “cascading”: They work their way throughout the ecosystem, altering the hydrology, air temperature, soil moisture, microorganisms, plant communities, stream chemistry, and animal populations. Talking about this gets him enraged at the gas companies. “These people do not give a fuck about the structure and function,” he says.

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his parents had moved here permanently, and he wanted to live closer to them. He and his wife built their home on property surrounded by state forest and state game lands.

Six years later, as the drilling fever was starting to heat up in Pennsylvania, landmen representing various gas companies arrived seeking mineral rights from Deering and his neighbors. One offered Deering a five-year, $900-a-year lease. “He didn’t put it in writing, but he said, ‘We will never drill on top of your ground. We just want to lease your ground to lock it up.’”

That didn’t sound so bad, so Deering signed, and indeed, his land was never touched. But just up the road, drillers began leveling state forest tracts, replacing the woods with fracking infrastructure. Between 2008 and 2010, Pennsylvania’s government had leased 139,000 acres of state forest to developers in an effort to balance its books during a recession. “The state budget was in extremis, and this was right at the beginning of the land rush for the Marcellus,” says John Quigley, who served as the state’s secretary of conservation and natural resources during some of that time. “The price of leases was exploding.”

Helicopters doing seismic tests hovered above Deering’s home. Explosives were detonated nearby. Stadium lights obliterated the night sky. Residents were banned from driving on township roads for up to ten hours on some days to accommodate the trucks climbing the mountain. A wastewater retention pond went up adjacent to Deering’s land. Two compressor stations are in the works.

At the end of the lease term, Deering and four of his neighbors refused to renew. Two others had no choice because their leases required automatic renewal. By then, much of the land around his property was ruined.

Deering and his wife tried to maintain some normalcy.

He would take their golden retriever Barley on walks along a road where fracking trucks drove. Arriving home, the dog often licked her paws. Then Barley, who was only seven, developed throat and mouth cancer and had to be euthanized. (Sandra Bamberger, a veterinarian in Ithaca, New York, says oral tumors in dogs can be caused by exposure to drilling wastewater but are also “fairly common.”) Deering will never know if there was a connection—and he doesn’t make any claims—but what jarred him, he says, was the vet’s first comment after delivering the diagnosis: “You’re not going to try to push this on the gas company, are you?

I’m not getting involved in a lawsuit.”

“I’m not a tree hugger,” Deering says. But his recent experiences have prodded him to show up at hearings, tell

his story, and support others in similar predicaments. “I was in the Army for seven and a half years,” he says. “Now I know why Third World countries hate us so bad.”

We climb into Deering’s truck. At yet another checkpoint, a placard instructs employees not to let journalists pass: “Must ask them to leave and report it to your supervisor rite [sic] away.” I hide my recorder as Deering finesses our way through—it’s a public road, after all—and then I understand why I’m not wanted here. This looks nothing like a state forest. Large tracts have been mowed down, and some of the land has been converted into well pads. Trucks carrying drilling waste kick up dust along packed-stone roads. We pass a pipeline right-of-way as wide as a small skyscraper is tall. “Right over the top of this mountain,” Deering says, “is where the sun sets.”

Heatley’s usual buoyancy has drained away. He turns to Deering, looking tired. “I don’t want to live here anymore,” he says.

“What do I tell my kids?” Deering asks in commiseration. “My son has a degree in forestry. I’m going to say, ‘I tried. I did my part. I lost.’”

WHILE IT CONTINUES TO BUILD STEAM, the Shale Rebel-

lion remains—for now—a decentralized movement with no uniform goal. Some activists are focused entirely on their own backyards; others want to keep wells out of state

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

forests. Some want tighter regulation; others are fighting for a statewide moratorium or a total ban.

Heatley emphatically supports a ban, but he agrees with most activists that the first priority is “to generate enough public resentment and distrust of this industry to ultimately change the political paradigm.” That means contending with some deep pockets. According to research by Common Cause, the natural-gas industry reported spending $21.6 million lobbying state officials between 2007 and 2012. That figure doesn’t touch the amount actually spent during the Marcellus boom, because Pennsylvania had no lobbying disclosure law from 2002 through 2006.

“That was a period when the industry knew the boom was coming”—but the public didn’t—“and they got their dominoes in place,” says James Browning, Common Cause’s regional director for state operations. “That’s five years of lobbying without disclosure.” Pennsylvania imposes no limits on campaign contributions from individuals, which helped Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican, amass $1.8 million from gas interests between 2004 and 2011.

Corbett is an avid fracking supporter who sees the Marcellus as “a source of potential wealth, the foundation of a new economy.” He says the sale of mineral rights by landowners is the “American way” and predicts that natural gas will generate jobs and spinoff businesses into the 22nd century. Backing Corbett, along with prominent Democrats

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like Rendell, is a legislature with Republican majorities in both chambers. Pennsylvania remains the only major energy state that doesn’t tax the value of extracted gas.

Corbett refused to reconsider such a tax even as he was proposing extensive education cuts in 2011, saying it would “scare these industries off.”

Needless to say, fracking opponents can’t match the industry’s spending. “The only thing we have to counteract the money,” Heatley says, “is numbers.” That’s why groups like Shale Justice are focusing more on building citizen support than on pushing specific legislative goals.

The industry knows that public disapproval is its No. 1 threat. In 2012, the international corporate consulting firm Control Risks published an assessment of the global antifracking movement that attracted considerable attention in the business and environmentalist worlds for its comprehensiveness and candor. Analyst Jonathan Wood described a drilling sector that “has repeatedly been caught off guard by the sophistication, speed and influence of anti-fracking activists,” who have organized community-based groups adept at using online social media like Facebook and YouTube. Many of those activists, Wood wrote, were inspired

by Gasland, which “brought anti-fracking sentiment to the masses” and “almost single-handedly … made unconventional gas production internationally controversial.”

Wood nodded to another tactic used by the Pennsylvania

rebels: monitoring the industry and publishing the findings online. Until 2008 in the Marcellus Shale region, he wrote, “companies [played] on general ignorance about the science, practice and economics of hydraulic fracturing to secure favorable lease terms.” As anti-drilling groups emerged, their websites published details about drilling licenses, contamination incidents, lawsuits, and legislation, which in turn helped “correct significant information asymmetries.”

In 2008, then-Governor David Paterson of New York responded to mounting concerns about contamination in the shale by ordering a fracking moratorium until an environmental assessment was completed. “This was the crucial decision,” says Matthew Barnes, a Princeton University doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on fracking politics. The moratorium, which continues more than five years later, bought grassroots opponents enough time to organize “an onslaught of anti-fracking protests and demonstrations” and to point out the problems unfolding across the border in Pennsylvania. More than 150 municipal governments passed fracking bans and moratoria, and two key court decisions upheld local bans. Those decisions are under review by the state’s highest court. Still, Barnes says, in New York “the anti groups are definitely winning.”

north of Williamsport, and lives in a house that has been in his family for more than a century. Between high school and college, he intermittently built gas pipelines in Pennsylvania and New York. Now he works as a stonemason when he’s not publishing the free newspaper. He wants me to understand that he’s no lackey—he doesn’t accept advertising from major energy companies—but rather a man with local roots who believes fracking has rescued this region from despair. “I remember people driving two hours to a job that made ten bucks an hour, and that’s big money,” he says, adding that today they can make two or three times that much driving trucks for gas companies.

We talk for two consecutive nights. Asbury steers clear of bashing anti-drilling activists, speaking admiringly of their passion. But he also casts them as sentimentalists distraught primarily over the loss of pastoral beauty. “I have empathy,” he says. “I envision some guy in a high-rise in Jersey or Philly, and every month he gets that copy of Hobby Farm, and he dreams of the day he can say sayonara to the cubicle and burn his tie and go off and be Old MacDonald. And he comes here, and all of a sudden it’s trucks and it’s traffic. But, you know....” He changes the topic. I interrupt him.

“You know what?” I ask.

“That’s just how life is,” he says. “Things change. Change

Fracking remains poorly studied, partly because drillers have successfully lobbied not to disclose the chemicals they use.

PENNSYLVANIA ISN’T NEW YORK. It lacks the liberal

home-rule laws that give broad powers to local governments. Its state officials are more conservative, and its long tradition of extraction has led to greater public comfort with it. There’s also the economic argument: More than half of Pennsylvanians still say the benefits of fracking outweigh the problems. And there are benefits. A 2013 survey by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis ranked Williamsport and surrounding Lycoming County, which covers more than 1,200 square miles, as the nation’s thirdleading metropolitan area in economic growth.

One night in Williamsport, I stop by a microbrewery and sit at the bar. A friendly, towering, Red Man–chewing guy claims the stool next to me. He has thick eyebrows and the long face one often associates with Civil War re-enactors— which, it turns out, he is. He welcomes me to one of the nation’s economic powerhouses and hands me the newspaper he publishes for shale-field workers, a haphazard broadsheet called The Drill’N Man that claims an average circulation of 30,000.

James Asbury, who is 35, grew up in Mansfield, 50 miles

can be a dance that says, ‘Look at what’s new.’ Or it can be a tantrum that says, ‘I want it back the way it was before.’

We can’t save something just because it’s beautiful. We can’t save every scrap and stick and twig.”

Besides, Asbury says, beauty is subjective. “I look at that flare in the sky”—the one that burns off excess methane— “and I think somebody’s mortgage just got paid. One of my neighbors can sleep easier.”

Only one moment from our interview disquiets me. On the second night, as we sit down with our beers, Asbury says, “So I heard you spent some time with Wendy Lee.” I hadn’t mentioned the professor the previous night. I ask how he knows. “I have contacts with every waitress and every…”—here he pauses—“I’ve got everybody pegged. I know crap about people that they don’t know about themselves. Nothing gets done in this business without…”— another pause—“there are double spies and double agents.”

When I mention this later to Kevin Heatley, he sounds creeped out. Things are tense in central Pennsylvania, with distrust on both sides. Heatley describes being followed by unmarked pickup trucks while taking visitors

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

on tours of fracking sites. Lee’s house was broken into, and nothing was stolen, shortly after she met with some direct-action environmentalists in September. “It starts to make you paranoid,” Heatley says. “You’re hypervigilant.

Instead of being secure, you’re looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re aware if somebody’s surveilling you.” The ecologist now stashes his telephone underneath his pillow at night to make sure no one tampers with it.

“I’ve slept more with my phone than I’ve ever slept with women,” he says.

Industry representatives describe feeling menaced, too.

“I’ve heard stories about operators finding pipe bombs on their right-of-ways,” says Joe Massaro, the Energy in Depth field director. “We’ve had a couple of instances where [fracking opponents] created blockades on access roads to well pads. They wear bandanas to cover their face. I hate to put the label ‘ecoterrorism’ on it, but that’s what it comes off as.” Massaro says he doesn’t worry about activists like Lee, with whom he has sparred online. “It’s the ones we don’t know that I’m nervous about.”

Whether this nervousness is warranted isn’t clear. In 2010, the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security released an intelligence bulletin forecasting a rise in crime by radical environmentalists. (It quoted the FBI.) The

been studying a tactic known as “collective nonviolent civil disobedience through municipal lawmaking,” which initially took hold in Pittsburgh and has started spreading eastward.

In 2010, heeding calls and e-mails from constituents worried about fracking, Pittsburgh City Council President Douglas Shields introduced a radical ordinance that intentionally flew in the face of American jurisprudence.

Shields’s proposal started by banning natural-gas extraction within city limits. Then it went further, stripping gas companies of their rights under the U.S. and Pennsylvania constitutions. The ordinance granted rivers, aquifers, and other “natural communities” the inalienable right to flourish, and gave enforcement powers to all city residents.

It invalidated federal and state permits. It prohibited gas companies from using federal and state laws to challenge the drilling ban. And it threatened to secede from any level of government that tried to weaken or overturn its action.

The ordinance passed 9-0 and was subsequently adopted by four surrounding suburbs.

Unlike central Pennsylvania, “Pittsburgh’s always had a little attitude issue,” says Shields, who has since retired from the council. Starting with the Whiskey Rebellion, the violent insurrection against a 1791 liquor tax, “peo-

More than half of Pennsylvanians still say the economic benefits of fracking outweigh the environmental problems. bulletin listed every meeting where activists might show up in the coming weeks, including public meetings and a Gasland screening. But when a reporter from the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica contacted the Pennsylvania State Police’s Domestic Security Office, he was told there were no “incidents of any significance [nor] any environmental extremists.” Since then there have been a drive-by shooting and an attempted pipe-bomb attack at Marcellus sites near Pittsburgh. No one was hurt, and police didn’t link either incident to environmentalists.

THOUGH PENNSYLVANIA’S SHALE REBELS have met

resistance from state officials, Quigley, the former secretary of conservation and natural resources, credits them with “altering the conversation” by raising issues like environmental contamination. “There is a continuing threat to the industry’s social license to operate,” he says, “if they choose to ignore these issues.” Even so, activists recognize that state policy change remains a long way off. That’s why Shale Justice’s Wendy Lynne Lee and others have been looking to broaden their strategic arsenal. Recently, they’ve

30 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

ple here have a history of saying, ‘Oh yeah, says who?’”

The language in these ordinances came from a Pennsylvania nonprofit called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which has worked with communities nationally to pass similar measures opposing factory farms, sewage-sludge spreaders, water withdrawals by corporate bottlers, and electrical transmission lines that cut through scenic woodlands. One of CELDF ’s co-founders, an attorney named Thomas Linzey, describes the enactment of these bills not as a legal strategy but as a political-organizing tool. Linzey expects the outrageous ordinances to attract lawsuits by industry and state government, and he hopes the inevitable courtroom defeats will provoke citizen outrage. Linzey believes this will spark a snowballing cycle of municipal defiance, which will eventually lead to successful efforts to amend state constitutions and even the federal one.

So far no one has sued the city of Pittsburgh. That could change, particularly if the Pennsylvania Supreme Court re­affirms the state’s prohibition against local drilling laws, which was passed last year but suspended by a lower court.

The tactic has begun to spread to central Pennsylvania.

Sixty-five miles from Williamsport, residents of State College, home to Penn State, defied their nervous elected officials in 2011 and approved—with 72 percent of the vote—a similar fracking ban. They were followed in 2012 by adjacent Ferguson Township, which is part suburban and part rural. Municipal civil disobedience, Lee says, might offer the only viable end run around state officials gung ho about drilling. “It offers a return to the prospect of a democracy,” she says, “perhaps a return to the democracy we have never had.”

MORE THAN A YEAR AFTER THE OCCUPATION of River-

dale, Deb Eck still works long hours at the dollar store, though now she comes home to a different trailer park, where her daughters don’t feel safe. “All my furniture’s basically in the same place,” she says. “But it’s not home.”

Time constraints keep her from being too involved in anti-fracking politics, but she thinks that she might be cultivating the next activist generation. One of her twin daughters recently won a citizenship award at her school.

When the girl learned the prize was named after a state legislator who rebuffed the evictees, and who accepted campaign dollars from Aqua America, her mother says she announced, “I don’t want that award anymore.”

Twenty-five miles away, Bob Deering watches as more

natural-gas infrastructure pops up around the home that was supposed to be his quiet escape. The state forest on one side of his house is already being fracked; recently he learned that thousands of acres of state game lands on the other side have also been leased. “Now we’re surrounded,” he says.

Central Pennsylvania’s shale rebels teeter along the boundary of hope and despair. They wonder if the state can be saved. But they find reasons to press on.

“What we’re doing here—while it may never save Pennsylvania, it has unequivocally, without a doubt, saved people’s homes in other sections of the planet,” says Kevin Heatley, who has met with citizens concerned about fracking from Michigan to Australia. “People come to Pennsylvania and they look at it as the poster child. If we show other people just what’s going on, they’re mortified. So we’ve actually put the brakes on the industry in other areas because we’re communicating. I’m coming out of the fire, and they all want to know what it’s like to live in that. When you tell them it’s horrible, you can energize them.

“Whether we’re going to save Pennsylvania,” he continues, “that’s going to be a harder row to hoe. But if we walked away tomorrow and said, ‘That’s it; somebody take the flag, leave Pennsylvania, it’s gone,’ we’ve still had a dramatic impact on other people’s homes and lives. That is really, to me, our success story so far.” 

Above left, Douglas Shields, former Pittsburgh City Council president

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

pa u l s a n c ya / a p i m a g e s

WELCOME TO THE 36TH

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If you want to see where the problems of unaffordable housing and low wages and poor education play out every day, go to civil court.

BY KAT AARON ART BY VICTOR JUHASZ

T

he first time I went to Detroit’s 36th District Court, I didn’t know the drill.

Most people don’t know the drill the first time they go. A lawyer I’d met agreed to accompany me. He went in the side door, reserved for attorneys and court staff. I joined the long line at the main entrance, waiting to pass through the metal detectors and have my bag scanned. No cell phones, the guard told me.

Put it in your car. I waved the lawyer back outside. He was due in court, and his car was blocks away. Give me the phone, he said. I’ll bring it in. I returned to the line. You can’t bring in that hair clip, the guard told me. Just throw it out, I said. I scooped my bag off the belt and joined the lawyer, who was standing where the entryway carpet meets the linoleum, near a line of people snaking through a rope maze, waiting to pay tickets. I was intimidated and upset, and I’d been at the 36th less than five minutes.

The lawyer and I rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, where he walked me to room 421.

Room 421 is where people who are facing eviction, foreclosure, and other real-estate matters find out what courtroom to go to. They wait for their name to be called, and since there are a lot of cases, the wait can be long. Squeezed into the back corner was a small plastic table with four plastic chairs where children can play.

On the wall, a sign, in large capital letters, admonished that NO STANDING is allowed.

The six rows of black pleather chairs were all taken. Outside in the hallway, people sat on benches and the floor.

The 36th District Court occupies the Madison Center Building, which was built in the early 1980s in an architectural style that might be called Federal brutalist. A massive cement box that takes up a city block, it is 6 stories high and contains 32 courtrooms. All the floors look the same. No signs tell you where to go or how to figure out where to go. The hallways are long and have dirty beige walls, the only light coming from the smudged windows at either end.

I escaped room 421, went into the bathroom,

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shut myself into one of the two cubicles with a lock, which barely held the beaten metal door closed, and took some deep breaths. I splashed some water on my face and realized there were no paper towels, just a hand dryer that barely functioned. I felt overdressed in a button-down shirt, and out of place, and I was.

THE 31 JUDGES ELECTED to the bench at the

36th handle more than half a million cases a year, in a city with a population of about 700,000 people. They hear the most basic criminal and civil cases for Wayne County: traffic violations, misdemeanors, landlordtenant issues, land-contract suits, and small claims. It’s one of the busiest courts in the country, and as the court’s website notes, it’s where most citizens of Detroit meet the justice system for the first time. The website also says the 36th is called the People’s Court. I’ve never heard anyone call it that. I’ve never heard

anyone say anything good about the place.

Everyone I’ve ever talked to in Detroit hates going to the 36th District. People laugh when I say I go there voluntarily. It baffles them.

I had come to observe the civil side. At the time of my first visit, in the summer of 2009, one out of every nine housing units in Detroit was in foreclosure, and the unemployment rate was more than 18 percent. The numbers were so huge that they lent themselves to broad generalizations and sweeping statements that eclipsed the people whose lives and neighborhoods had been turned upside down. It’s one thing to think about foreclosures or evictions in the abstract. It’s something altogether different to see one person lose her one home and then to see it over and over and over.

Detroit’s municipal meltdown may be extreme, but the lopsided justice of the 36th is the national norm. We have an adversarial system of justice in America, yet in the nation’s

civil courts, we are one adversary short. In almost every case I witnessed in the four years I attended the 36th, the defendant stood alone in front of the judge. In a criminal case, if you can’t afford an attorney, the courts are required to provide you with one. In civil cases, litigants who can’t pay for a lawyer are on their own. In theory, they can turn to a legal-aid office, but those groups have never been able to keep up with demand. There are 134 federally funded legal-services groups around the country, and they turn away approximately one person for every one they can help.

“The current system is nonfunctional for all its participants. It’s not functioning for courts, for litigants, for the profession, for legal aid,” says Richard Zorza, a lawyer who for many years coordinated the Self Represented Litigation Network. “The system is built on the assumption that everyone has a lawyer and then fails to give it to them. It’s completely illogical.”

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I have a clear memory of one case from three or four years ago, which involved a woman who had been robbed and beaten in the middle of the day in a parking lot outside a grocery store on Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main thoroughfare. She had lost her job while she was in the hospital and fell behind on the rent. The landlord was just someone who owned another house or two besides his own, not a big realestate company that could float someone for a while, not that it would be inclined to. Neither had a lawyer. She wound up being evicted.

The woman stands out in my mind because she had such a cascade of problems. It’s rotten luck to have your whole life unraveled by a trip

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to the grocery store one summer afternoon.

Sob stories are common at the 36th District, although I’ve only ever seen one person weep.

LIKE A CASINO, COURTROOMS at the 36th

have no windows and no visible clocks, so it’s easy to lose track of time. When waiting for a case to start, no one is allowed to talk. The only sound in a courtroom is the hum of the ventilation system. It feels as if everyone in the room is holding their breath.

The woman sitting in front of me in courtroom 333 was jiggling her foot, which was causing her loose bun and gold earrings to shake. She was still wearing her brown-and-

black herringbone coat. Litigants are uneasy in the courthouse, plaintiffs and defendants alike. They fidget. They keep their coats on.

They clutch their sheaves of paper—rent receipts and summonses, leases and bills. You can always tell the lawyers, because they claim the front row, take off their jackets, lay out their files. It’s not just their ease with the language and the process that sets them apart.

They dominate the space.

Room 333 has an industrial pink color scheme: pinkish-brown linoleum, pinkishbrown carpet. Mirroring all the courtrooms at the 36th, its walls angle toward the judge, narrowing to a point behind the dais. Judge Donna Robinson Milhouse, like most of the court’s judges, and most of the litigants, is African American. She has close-cropped hair and a penchant for bold earrings, one of the few opportunities for self-expression above a robe.

Kristen Buchanan stood before Judge Milhouse without an attorney, as did her landlord, James Carter. Heavy-set, with light brown skin, Buchanan was in her mid-twenties. She had been in court before, she reminded the judge, when she was late on the rent and pregnant. The judge had referred her to some agencies for help, she said, but she was still behind, and Carter wanted her out of her apartment.

“I pick up my Section 8 voucher on Friday,” Buchanan said, her voice cracking. “I just need a little more time.” Milhouse asked Carter if he could be flexible on the move-out date, as she usually does. He shook his head, as landlords usually do. Many landlords in Detroit are individuals with rental property, and they have mortgages and taxes and water bills to pay, and they can’t pay them without the rent.

Buchanan’s rent was $400 a month.

By statute, Buchanan had ten days to move, which gave her until the 28th of January. Milhouse suggested she take the new paperwork back to the agencies and show them that they need to act a little more speedily.

“I took the judgment to the agency, and they’re like, ‘You and about ten other people,’” Buchanan said.

“You will not be thrown out on the 28th.

That’s all I can tell you,” Milhouse said. What she didn’t say is that on the 29th, Carter could file for eviction, and things could move quickly after that.

Like Buchanan, most of the people facing eviction at the 36th have a big strike against them: They haven’t paid their rent. The debts are usually small—$400 back rent here, $1,000 there. They’re so small that it’s sometimes hard to fathom the tiny distance between crisis and stability. But if you can’t come up with it, $400 might as well be $400,000. You’re on the street either way.

CHARLENE SNOW IS AN attorney who spends

a lot of time at the 36th District, mostly fighting evictions. She says people representing themselves have three challenges. First, they don’t understand their rights. Second, “if they understand them, they don’t bring the proper documents into court to prove what they’re trying to say.” And, third, when they try to explain their situation, “they’re nervous, they’re not real articulate, they ramble and get the judge aggravated.”

A lawyer can bring up issues that tenants don’t think to raise or don’t know how to raise.

A lack of heat, electricity, or running water— these are all valid reasons to withhold rent.

They can also affect an eviction order, either stopping it or lowering the amount owed. Even if there are no maintenance problems, a lawyer can press for a solution that doesn’t result in a judgment against the defendant, which can render a person ineligible for subsidized housing or Section 8 vouchers down the line. I once saw Snow representing a client in an eviction case, and while the young woman did have to move, Snow made sure the agreement was a voluntary termination of tenancy rather than a nonpayment of rent, the kind of maneuver that can keep options open.

If court hasn’t started yet, Snow blasts through the courtroom doors and out into the hallway, barking out the names of her clients, propelling them onto a bench for some lastminute strategy. Her short black hair swings as she marches ahead of them, not looking back to make sure they’re following, already pulling files from the stack under her arm. That stack will have been plucked early that morning from the dozens in her crowded office at the United Community Housing Coalition, one of the few groups in Detroit that provides free counsel to people facing eviction and other problems in the civil courts.

Snow is one of three lawyers at the coalition.

She often finds ways to squeeze some general legal advice into her arguments. When she’s in front of the judge, she’ll explain, loudly and in great detail, why the maintenance problems in her client’s apartment entitled her to a reduction in rent or why the tenant in a foreclosed house is allowed 90 days to move out, just in case someone else in the courtroom might pick up what she’s saying. With so many clients of her own, that’s often the best she can do.

Sometimes she does more. The day I met Snow, an older black man in a suit sat in the courtroom I had been visiting. Things were winding down, and I was talking in the hallway

The website says the 36th is called the People’s Court. I’ve never heard anyone call it that. I’ve never heard anyone say anything good about the place.

to Debra Miller, a local tenant activist. She’d been in the courtroom to provide moral support for a friend who was about to get evicted.

I’m the bedbug lady, she told me. She’d been raising hell about the bedbugs in Section 8 housing, she said, and there was this great lawyer who’d been helping her. She’s here.

You should talk to her. Miller waylaid Snow and demanded that she talk to me but first demanded that she go talk to the man in the suit, who had been waiting all morning for his case to be called. It was coming up on 11:30, and court was close to adjourning. Snow stuck her head in and then came back into the hallway. That guy in the suit? Isn’t he a lawyer? I had made the same assumption. Defendants almost never wear suits. No, he’s a tenant, the bedbug lady said. He’s here on an eviction case.

Huh, Snow said and went in to talk to him to see what she could work out.

Snow says that some of the security guards or court clerks will call her office if they see an old lady or someone clearly out of it getting trampled by an opposing attorney. They ask, Snow says, if we have anyone in the building who can swing by the courtroom to see if they can help out. She’s grateful that the guards and clerks call but also annoyed, because none of the lawyers has any minutes to spare and because it’s not really justice if you only get a

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

lawyer because you remind a security guard of his grandma. Unsympathetic cases deserve lawyers too, Snow says.

WAITING IS HOW PEOPLE spend most of their

time at the court. Waiting for paperwork to be sent up, for files to be found, for attorneys to appear. Last year, business in a handful of courtrooms was delayed because several stenographers, who hadn’t been paid in weeks, stopped showing up. The judges had to wait for a stenographer to finish in another court.

The court couldn’t even adjourn, because no one could make a record of the adjournment.

When I first started coming to the 36th, I would sit in a courtroom through hours of traffic tickets because I didn’t want to disrupt the proceedings by leaving. Now, I just leave. The whole experience of court feels like one giant disruption, and no one looks twice if you add a little to the chaos. No one looks at you at all.

The 36th has the same taut feeling I’ve experienced in prisons or welfare offices: a mix of boredom, anxiety, anger, power, powerlessness, and indifference. It’s as if all the exhalations and sighs of all the litigants who have passed through the building are trapped in the cinderblock halls.

The ban on cell phones is one of the most persistent gripes about the court, which is

38 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

saying something. What you can’t bring in is a camera, but since most phones have cameras, you’re functionally prohibited from bringing in a phone. This leads to regular drama at the metal detectors in the entrance and a side hustle for the candy vendor outside the court, who will stash a phone in his cart for a $5 fee.

Of course, you can just sneak in your phone.

One morning last summer, the woman next to me pulled her iPhone out of her cleavage while we waited in the hallway for the judge to start the session. I asked if they had changed the rules, and she said no. “But I have to call for a ride after,” she said, shrugging. She’d just

All the courtroom doors have a long list of prohibited attire. No shorts. No jogging suits, biker pants, muscle shirts, overalls, or Levis.

No see-through clothing of any kind.

gotten back to court after rushing home to change her clothes, because earlier that morning a judge had sent someone home for wearing too short a skirt.

Every courtroom door has a long list of prohibited attire. No shorts. No jogging suits, biker pants, muscle shirts, overalls, or Levis.

No sandals, thongs, or flip-flops. No “outer garments made of spandex/lycra material,” a prohibition that presumably allows for stretchy underwear. No “see-through clothing of any kind.” There is no information on what to expect in the proceeding or where to get help if you’re confused. There’s just information on what not to wear.

During the summer, people often show up dressed in flip-flops and spandex or in sleeveless shirts and jeans. Which suggests a population not accustomed to the formalities and expectations of the system. The judges at the 36th District know this, of course. You see a lot of sandals and a fair bit of Lycra, and judges generally let it slide.

“IT’S A VERY FINE LINE that we walk in being

impartial,” says Kenneth King, who until recently was chief judge at the 36th District.

“Because you don’t want to find yourself representing the defendant. But I want to also make sure that justice is done, that no one is taken advantage of just because they don’t have legal counsel.” Judges can explain procedure to litigants—that landlords have to come back to file for eviction after getting a judgment or that withheld rent must go into escrow. What judges can’t do is give legal advice from the bench, no matter how perplexed someone might be.

Many people at the 36th ask court staff for legal help. But the clerks and the tellers are also prohibited from giving advice, which they make clear, emphatically and frequently.

Above the teller windows on the first floor, where people come to file forms and pay fees, signs announce that “court employees cannot give legal advice or prepare documents.” In room 421, the notice is capitalized and underlined. This isn’t because the staffers are jerks.

It’s because giving advice would constitute unauthorized practice of the law, which is illegal. They can provide legal definitions but not legal interpretation—another fine line, at least to bewildered people who pepper staff with

questions they’re not authorized to answer.

Judge Katherine Hansen has been on the bench at the 36th since 2004 and often finds herself explaining basic steps. She warns people that they may receive something in the mail about their case. “If you do,” she tells them, “read it carefully.” If you don’t respond, she warns, there may be consequences. If you answer, she says, tell the truth, in writing.

Hansen has pale white skin and auburn hair to her shoulders, a combination that gives her a delicate, almost Victorian air, particularly when her complexion is set off by her black robe. But Hansen, who began her legal career with the United Auto Workers, has a sharp tongue and a brisk manner. The first morning I met her, a tenant with a rent dispute sighed when Hansen asked her to go out into the hallway and talk to the landlord. I heard that, Hansen snapped.

The two women left the courtroom, turned around, and came back in less than a minute.

The case involved a convoluted story about unpaid rent in the amount of $500 a month and a $30 late fee, and the landlord spreading rumors, and the tenant’s mother being sick, and her brother having a kidney problem.

Hansen listened to the two women vent and accuse and loop around to all kinds of digressions, including trips to Africa, a sick daughter weighing 400 pounds, and the regularity of the landlord’s church attendance. After which Hansen ruled in favor of the landlord and told the tenant to pay back rent of $1,800 plus $69.50 in court fees within ten days.

There’s a way you do everything, the tenant shouted. She started to huff out of the room and turned back to yell. Hansen’s patience broke like a storm. I’m one of 31 judges on this bench, she said. Last time I knew, I’m the only

one who stops at the beginning and tells people that you have a right—a right, she reiterated— to have an attorney. Frankly, because I believe that a right without an opportunity to access it is meaningless, I gave you the chance to adjourn and go get one. I’m the only one in this building who has a list of where you can get free lawyers, and I hand it out like candy.

She had given the two women the opportunity to adjourn at the outset, but the tenant had demanded they settle matters today. That the tenant was unhappy with the outcome, and probably with many other parts of her day, too, was not something under Hansen’s purview.

Some of the lawyers I know in Detroit say that a judge can do a bit more—lose a file for a while to give someone a smidge more time to move out, say. But even a sympathetic judge can’t erase rent due or plunk money into an empty bank account. Or turn back decades of

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

industrial flight and political corruption and bring back the stability that built the six-lane streets and the solid brick homes and Motown.

They’re gone, and that’s something no one at the 36th District can change.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I SAW a man try to fight a

debt-collection company that was garnishing his wages. He was an elderly African American, and he came to court wearing a worn uniform from a maintenance company. He

40 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

didn’t have a lawyer. He had managed to file forms contesting the garnishment. In court, he said he had never incurred the debt and, in fact, had no idea what the debt was, so he didn’t owe the money. The judge told him that in order to make that argument, he would have had to contest the underlying debt, not the garnishment itself. The judge didn’t tell him how to do that, though. She didn’t make any effort to get to the truth of the matter, moving forward with the case despite the possibility

that the collections agency had the wrong man. While the judge was talking, the defendant kept muttering under his breath. I was in the second row, close enough to hear him, and he was saying, “I’m so lost. I’m so lost.”

Debt has become a tradable asset, and investors typically pick up old debts for pennies on the dollar, which are then handed over to collections agencies and their lawyers. It’s common for the paper trail to break down as the debt changes hands. Attempts to collect on debts that are expired, discharged, or erroneous are common. “When accounts are transferred to debt collectors, the accompanying information often is so deficient that the collectors seek payment from the wrong consumer or demand the wrong amount from the correct consumer,” according to a 2009 report from the Federal Trade Commission. Missing documents can be a major obstacle for consumers trying to fight a collections suit. For people representing themselves, that obstacle is all but insurmountable.

At the 36th District, most people being sued by a debt collector represent themselves. The collections agencies or debt buyers always have lawyers. These lawyers usually handle nothing but collections cases, and they do them day in and day out. I suspect they could do them in their sleep, and some early mornings it seems as if they are. Invariably, the defendants are confused about the debt, asserting that they paid some or all of it or that they have no idea what the debt is for. I saw a tiny African American woman in her early thirties insist she had never received notice of the debt until the collections agency had won a default judgment against her, because she didn’t show up in court. The paperwork from the process server, asserting she had been notified of

the suit, said he had served a tall black man.

I met Robert Armstrong last winter, when his case was the first of a long day. Tall, with light brown skin and a mustache, in late middle age, he was being sued by Palisades Acquisition, which was seeking an order authorizing the garnishment of his tax return. Armstrong did not have a lawyer. He told the judge that he had bought a $300 prepaid credit card from a company called Centurion maybe five or seven years ago. The card now had a balance of $1,183, but he wasn’t sure how. “It’s gone up because it’s seven or eight years old,” the attorney for Palisades told the judge. The original amount owed was $866.93, assessed in 2005, the judge said, consulting some papers in front of her. None of those figures made sense, and no one explained them to Armstrong. He said that the card took $150 in fees off the top, so he only had $150 to spend when he got it. And anyway, he said, he paid off whatever he owed back in the day.

“Really, you’re challenging the underlying account, and we’re way past that stage,” Judge Donna Robinson Milhouse interrupted. She explained that until he paid the original judgment from 2005, Palisades could attempt to collect. The lawyer for Palisades didn’t seem to know much about the fees or how the debt swelled, not that anyone was pressing him for details. Palisades is a debt buyer and probably picked up the debt from Centurion.

“We really don’t have any interest in collecting money that’s not properly owed,” the lawyer for Palisades said. He suggested that Armstrong find proof of payment. Of course, if the debt was seven years old, as Armstrong claimed, the chances he had the receipt kicking around were slim. The judge suggested he seek legal counsel and denied his objection. If he receives a state tax refund, she explained, Palisades will be able to take it.

“I don’t even know why I came down here,” Armstrong told me in the hallway. “It’s just a waste of time.” He’s living on a fixed income, he said. I asked if he thought about getting a lawyer. He couldn’t afford to hire someone, he said, and didn’t think anyone would help him, and, no, he hadn’t heard of legal aid. I mentioned a new self-help center for people without lawyers at the nearby family court. He said he’d check it out. “I don’t have anything to lose.”

THE CIVIL COURTS ARE IN crisis in Detroit

and across the country. There’s no other word for it: Civil courts have inadequate funding, not enough lawyers, and far too many litigants.

But there should be another word, because “crisis” means a sudden, shocking eruption of disaster. The civil courts are, and have been, in a stagnant state of failure for decades. It’s bad in Detroit, but it’s bad everywhere.

Which is not to say that Detroit’s financial travails aren’t having an impact at the 36th District.

This spring, Governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager to rein in the city’s spending, address its $18.5 billion in long-term debt,

In almost every case I witnessed, the defendant stood alone in front of the judge. In civil cases, unlike in criminal cases, litigants are on their own.

and negotiate with its many creditors, including retired city workers and big banks.

The 36th District Court, it turned out, was also in financial trouble. A report commissioned by the State Court Administrative Office in April found that the court “appears to be overstaffed and not as efficient as other comparable court systems.” People can’t pay tickets electronically, the report went on. Many courtrooms lacked even computers for court clerks. The long lines of people waiting to pay tickets or figure out what court to go to are the “antithesis of customer service.” The report noted that since the court is near both Comerica Park and Ford Field, it “schedules lightly on ‘game days’; due to parking problems for litigants and lawyers” and generally winds down early on Fridays. This is a polite version of what I’ve observed, which is that court starts late, ends early, and is a ghost town by midafternoon.

Most damning, the court was more than $4.5 million over budget for the year. Chief Judge King had requested $36 million for court operations. When the city council allocated $31 million, he spent the amount he had sought rather than the amount he was given.

“Continual financial problems at the District Court are commonplace,” the report asserted, adding that in many jurisdictions, over-­ expenditures are against the law. A special

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

They were calling your name. I think they gave State Farm a default judgment against you. A what, he said? That means State Farm wins the case because you weren’t there, I said. He looked panicked. He’d taken the morning off from his construction job, an hour outside of town, he said, and when he got to court the clerk told him to wait in the hall because he was wearing a shirt with the sleeves ripped off, which wasn’t appropriate attire. It was his get-up for the job site, he said. He had to go straight to work when he was done. He had no lawyer, no money to pay one, no one to tell him what to wear or how to act, no one in a suit who could sit in the courtroom while he waited outside. Sitting in the hall may have cost him a couple of thousand dollars. He sighed and went back into the courtroom to see what he could sort out. I think about him a lot. He seemed like a gentle kid, caught up in a situation that was of his own making but also made by the momentum of that one bad choice, or bad day, or bit of bad luck. You see a lot of that at the 36th District.

THERE ARE NO EASY ANSWERS for the eco-

administrator, Judge Michael Talbot, was appointed to cut the court’s expenses.

“Courageous leadership” would be required, the report concluded, “to implement the necessary remedies and restructuring that will revamp the Court for a new, more austere normal.” In case anyone wasn’t clear what that meant, “staff reductions will be unavoidable,” and indeed, 80 staffers were laid off in July, including court clerks and probation officers.

In July, Chief Judge King was removed from his position, although he remains a judge at the court.

The state court report does not mention, or appear to even consider, the effect of a persistent, grinding economic depression on the people who use the 36th District Court. There is only brief allusion to the hundreds of thousands of people forced to represent themselves at the court, no mention of how their volume affects the efficiency of operations, and no reference to how population loss and job loss and foreclosures and abandoned homes lead not just to city budget shortfalls but to evictions and tax liens and bounced checks and to more court cases that the 36th District can’t handle.

42 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

In July, less than two months after the report was released, Detroit declared bankruptcy, allowing the city to void its obligations to pensioners and lenders alike. It was the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

ONE MORNING A FEW years back, when I was

still new and more sensitive, I was sitting on one of the blond wooden benches that line the halls. My head swimming, I started talking to a young man pacing the linoleum floor. He was being sued by State Farm Insurance, he said. State Farm had paid for his best friend’s funeral, after the friend died in a drunk-driving accident. The young man was the one behind the wheel. He had spent time in prison, even though, he said, his friend’s mom begged the judge not to take him away too—she’d just lost her son and the two were like brothers from when they were small. Now, he said, the insurance company was suing him to get back the money it had paid for the funeral, something about how it only covered the costs if there was no fault involved. He wasn’t quite sure.

I asked him his name, and when he told me, I said, you need to go check in with the clerk.

nomic problems of Detroit. There are, however, some ways to ease the problems of the civil courts in Detroit and elsewhere.

One strategy is to encourage judges to offer more help to litigants without lawyers. The Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators, two national groups, recently proposed a revision to the model code of judicial conduct, which lays out how judges should behave on the bench.

The change encourages judges to “make reasonable efforts” to “facilitate the ability of all litigants, including self-represented litigants, to be fairly heard.” This official encouragement might nudge judges who feel squeamish about going too far in supporting people who represent themselves. It might also give comfort to the many judges at the 36th who already come close to the line, if not cross over it.

Another approach is to create resources for people without lawyers, from websites to mobile tools to self-help centers. Many courts across the country have such on-site centers, where people can receive guidance and advice, but the 36th District does not. The court provides free legal help twice a year.

When the state built a self-help center in 2012, it was placed at the family court blocks away.

Michigan does have a new website aimed at people without lawyers, where guided interviews produce forms they can file in court. The site serviced 200,000 people in its first year, and it works on smartphones. But, of course, this won’t help people at the 36th, since their phones are at home or in their cars or with the candy man.

Some states are encouraging lawyers to help clients with just one aspect of a case, rather than handling the whole suit. This is particularly useful in areas like foreclosure law, where a case can drag on for months or years, sucking up either the cash of defendants who can afford a lawyer or the time of legal-aid attorneys. In Michigan, the law covering so-called limited scope representation is ambiguous, and lawyers are loath to take on just one piece of a case.

The state’s self-help task force is working on clarifying those regulations, says Linda Rexer, executive director of the Michigan State Bar Foundation and co-chair of the task force. Still, the cost of hiring an attorney—often $200 an hour or more—for one slice of a problem is prohibitive for most litigants.

The other idea is to allow non-lawyers to practice law. This is controversial for several reasons. Lawyers, who have spent a lot of time and money becoming licensed, are generally not thrilled about having just anyone enter their profession.

Also, they have legitimate concerns about the quality of assistance non-lawyers would provide. Washington last year became the first state to experiment with creating legal technicians, who will be trained to help people file forms and prepare for hearings, although they won’t be allowed to represent them in court.

All these reforms, though, only go so far. The big problems in the civil courts will continue to be big, because civil court is where the problems of income inequality

and unaffordable housing and low wages and unemployment and poor education play out.

The deck is always going to be stacked against the people barely clinging to their homes or their jobs or their bank accounts, even if those people have lawyers.

ONE DAY, A YEAR AGO, I saw Linda Ham-

ilton defend herself in court. Compact and soft-­spoken, she seemed both determined and hesitant to explain her situation. She lived in an apartment, she told the judge, and a social-­ service agency, POWER Inc., helped pay her rent. The problem was that the agency had

The 36th has the same taut feeling I’ve experienced in prisons or welfare offices: a mix of boredom, anxiety, anger, power, powerlessness, and indifference.

accidentally paid the wrong landlord, and Hamilton now faced eviction. The lawyer for her landlord admitted that Hamilton “is blameless in this,” but still the rent was due.

Hamilton had difficulty advancing an argument on her own behalf. Judge Milhouse coaxed facts out of both sides, trying to get a handle on who owed what to whom and what, besides eviction, was possible. To figure out where the rent money had gone, Milhouse gave the landlord’s lawyer permission for discovery—“that means to try to get information,” she explained to Hamilton. In the meantime, Milhouse adjourned the case for three weeks.

Hamilton was thankful for the reprieve, but she wasn’t sure what would be different when court reconvened. “I can’t afford a lawyer,” she told me. Besides, Hamilton said, her apartment was infested with bedbugs, a common problem in Detroit. She was spending money she didn’t have on medicine to treat her bites, and moving costs money, too. “I’m just stuck between a rock and a hard place right now,” she said.

I spoke to her a few weeks after her court date, and she had managed to avoid eviction.

Her landlord had cleared matters up with the social-service agency, so she could stay. Things couldn’t have gone better. But she was moving out anyway. She had to escape the bedbugs. She told me she wasn’t sure where she’d end up. 

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

DIVIDES

WHAT DEMOCRATS It’s no longer social issues or foreign policy.

It’s economics: Cory Booker’s Wall Street liberalism versus Bill de Blasio’s anti-corporate populism. And these divisions will shape the party’s 2016 presidential contest.

BY HAROLD M E YE RS ON ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE BRODNER

N

ew York–area voters had the opportunity this fall to cast their ballot for one of two Democrats who are divided by more than the Hudson River. Cory Booker, the Newark mayor, whom New Jersey’s electors sent to the U.S. Senate in October, and Bill de Blasio, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, personify two distinct futures for the Democratic Party.

Booker is a corporate Democrat—more precisely, a Wall Street and Silicon Valley Democrat—who praises the beneficent rich as sources of charitable giving and policy ideas that can lift the poor. De Blasio is an anti-corporate Democrat who condemns big business and the financial sector for using their wealth to rig the economy in their favor and at everyone else’s expense.

The divide between Booker and de Blasio matters because it defines the most fundamental fault line within the Democratic Party. Not so long ago, the Democrats generally agreed with one another on economics—hence the New Deal and Great Society—and fought with one another over foreign policy and the rights of minorities.

Today, no national-security or social issue splits the party.

Instead, economics now roils the Democrats. In 2016, the party’s presidential primaries will chiefly focus, as they have not in many decades, on the economic policy differences between candidates—that is, if there’s more than one candidate. If there’s only Hillary Clinton, her every

44 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

economic utterance will be subjected to intense scrutiny.

The new Democratic comity on social issues culminates a 50-year transformation that began when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. As Southern whites fled the party, Democrats welcomed socially liberal financial elites who had rejected the GOP ’s rightward turn on racial and gender issues. This mix of Wall Street bankers and high-tech entrepreneurs has become a major source of Democratic funding. Their perspectives have dominated the party’s economic policies, beginning with former Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Rubin’s tenure as Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and continuing through the Obama presidency with such protégés as Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. During Clinton’s presidency, Rubin et al. deregulated the financial industry and crafted freetrade accords that decimated American manufacturing.

The dot-com boom and low unemployment levels of the late 1990s convinced the Rubinistas that they had found the key to generating good jobs in a nation that had been losing them for at least 25 years.

The crash of 2008 consigned the Rubin model of prosperity to the rubble. Nonetheless, his acolytes were installed in the key economic policy positions in the Obama administration, where they sought, with some success, to mitigate the wave of regulation that followed the financial panic. Their resistance to stricter oversight and the greater emphasis they placed on protecting banks than

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

THE DEMOCRATS’ remark-

Too Enmeshed? Hillary Clinton with Robert Rubin in 2000

able accord on social issues is the result of a no less remarkable sea change in the party’s membership. The nation’s fastest-growing demographic groups—Latinos, Asians, and millennials—have swelled the party’s rolls and infused them with their own liberal viewpoints. At the same time, the shift of older white voters, particularly in the South and rural America, from the Democratic column to the Republican has effectively eliminated social conservatives from the party’s membership. Today, only one Democratic congressman, Georgia’s John Barrow, comes from a majority-white district in the five states of the Deep South.

Accordingly, the social issues that Republicans once used as wedges against the Democrats and that divided the Democrats—gay marriage, legalization of undocumented immigrants, access to abortion—have become not just the lingua franca of the party but issues that Democrats now use as wedges against Republicans. What’s more, as the South experiences its own demographic shifts, the social liberalism of blue-state Democrats is becoming the social liberalism of purple-state Democrats, too. In this autumn’s contest for the Virginia governorship, Democrat Terry McAuliffe has backed universal background checks for

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handguns, gay marriage, citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and an assault-weapons ban. McAuliffe has never been mistaken for a progressive ideologue. His support for these positions, rather, is a clear sign of how much Virginia has changed. As Ronald Brownstein has reported in the National Journal, multiracial Northern Virginia has seen its population grow to compose 30 percent of the state’s electorate, while the poorer, heavily white Appalachian counties in the state’s southwest region have shrunk to less than 10 percent of the state’s voters. This has encouraged McAuliffe to take stances the state’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, shunned in their earlier runs for office but now endorse.

The Democrats do have their differences on nationalsecurity issues, but they pale alongside the foreign-policy divisions that racked the party for decades. Liberals and civil libertarians have criticized the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes and the scope of its electronic surveillance practices. These discontents, however, show no sign of producing either a protest movement or an insurgent candidate. The wars that could produce dissent on a large scale have either ended, in the case of Iraq, or are being wound down, in the case of Afghanistan. Save among select policy elites, no significant agitation exists within the party—or without—to involve the nation more deeply in the Syrian civil war. Indeed, there’s widespread agreement that bolstering America’s national security requires the creation of a more vibrant economy. It’s around this question—how the economy is to be strengthened—that the Democrats divide.

DEMOCRATS AGREE on what could be termed a basic

economic program: raising taxes on the rich, increasing the minimum wage, investing more in infrastructure and education, extending health coverage through the Affordable Care Act. But at the state and, even more, the municipal level, they have substantial differences over the role of unions, the future of public education, and the privatization of services. The differences between Cory Booker and Bill de Blasio illustrate just how wide these gaps have grown.

Booker spent most of his tenure as mayor of Newark enlisting the financial support and embracing the political perspective of the corporate sector. Governing an impoverished city like Newark, Booker has argued, presented him with few alternatives to the course he’s taken. No Democrat can take issue with the way he’s highlighted the plight of the poor—living in public-housing projects for more than seven years, subsisting on a food-stamp budget for a week. But Booker has journeyed to the outer extremes of education policy, calling for an end to teacher tenure and endorsing vouchers for private schools. Famously, he raised $100 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for his education programs. Booker himself has been on

ly n s e y a d d a r i o / a p i m a g e s

on protecting homeowners upset congressional liberals.

Most progressives, though, were generally unwilling to go public with their criticism until after Barack Obama won re-election. That constraint removed, this summer they successfully blocked the president’s expected appointment of Summers to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve.

These intraparty tensions will shape the contours of the 2016 presidential contest. Should Hillary Clinton seek the party’s nomination, she will have to decide whether, or to what extent, she should break with the economic policies and policymakers that held sway in her husband’s and Obama’s administrations. If she chooses not to run, the fight for the nomination will likely feature candidates identified either with the more populist and regulatory side of the party (Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, say) or with its more centrist and corporate side (Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, say). Whatever occurs, Wall Street’s role in the Democratic Party—a fait accompli for the past two decades, albeit one that Democrats seldom advertised— will be up for debate.

the receiving end of rich folks’ largesse. As The New York Times reported in August, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and other Silicon Valley heavyweights staked Booker to an investment, at the time worth an estimated $1 million to $5 million, in a social media start-up (which, since the Times story broke, Booker has sold).

Even allowing for both his city’s and his own dependence on the kindness of the rich, it was nonetheless stunning when Booker told viewers of Meet the Press in the midst of the 2012 campaign that he found the Obama re-election campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital “nauseating.” “Enough is enough,” he said. “Stop attacking private equity.” Booker’s vision of the forces for progressive social change apparently includes the very poor and the very rich—the former as recipients, the latter as dispensaries, of private wealth. Any mayor of a city like Newark is surely entitled to adhere to the adage that beggars can’t be choosers. But at a time when the financial sector has brought the broader economy to ruin and profits have soared in large part due to capital’s suppression of wages, Booker’s comments and the sensibility they betrayed could not have been more at odds with the beliefs of millions of Democrats, particularly with those Democrats whom de Blasio has come to represent.

After running fourth for many months among the candidates in New York’s Democratic primary, de Blasio surged to the top by campaigning, essentially, against policies that coddled the plutocratic class. New York, de Blasio reiterated at every stop along the campaign trail, had become a tale of two cities, a Bloombergian version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis where nearly half the residents live in or near poverty while the super-rich swan as never before. De Blasio advocated raises for the city’s unionized workers and spoke in favor of fast-food workers’ campaign to win a living wage. He excoriated Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Democratic mayoral candidate closest to him, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, for blocking for three years a bill entitling workers to paid sick days. He deplored giveaways to developers and corporations and called for linking new development to the construction of affordable housing. He campaigned against the stopand-frisk-minority-young-men policy of the police. He suggested that he’d discontinue the city’s practice of letting charter schools set up shop rent-free in city-owned facilities. He called repeatedly for higher taxes on the rich to fund universal preschool.

The policies that de Blasio has pledged to pursue run counter not only to many of Booker’s but also to those of numerous other Democratic mayors, including Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and Los Angeles’s Antonio Villaraigosa (whose eight years in office ended in June), both of whom have promoted charter schools and fought with their city’s unions.

The fiercest intraparty battles over economic issues today are fought in city halls. In the past year, both Boston and Los Angeles have gone through Democrat-versus-Democrat mayoral runoff elections in which one candidate accused the other of being the tool of public-employee unions.

THE ROLE OF FINANCE within the Democratic Party was

not an issue in the last two presidential election cycles, but it will be in the next, posing a challenge for Hillary Clinton if she chooses to run. As one former Clinton administration official says, “She’s too enmeshed in the entire machinery” of the Rubin school of economics to distance herself credibly from it.

But is she? If the battle between the advocates of Janet Yellen and Larry Summers was round one of the Democrats’ fight over the fate of Wall Street liberalism, what do we make of the Clintons’ role in it? Hillary had no reason to take sides and ample reason not to—and she didn’t. Bill issued a public defense of Summers but only after he had withdrawn his name from consideration. The Clintons have usually been able to sense the direction of the prevailing winds.

Indeed, the Summers-Yellen battle should have put Hillary Clinton on notice that she’s more likely to estrange key constituencies if she maintains her historic link to Rubinomics.

Should she take her economic counsel chiefly from second- and third-generation Rubin apostles like Gene Sperling and Jason Furman, a number of key Democratic elites—labor leaders, the blogosphere, progressive members of Congress—would likely erupt.

At one level, the choice between old loyalties and new necessities should be one that Clinton can finesse. She has already won Wall Street’s trust, and if she remains the prohibitive favorite, she will command a share of the financial sector’s allegiance no matter whom she selects for her economic team. On a deeper level, however, Clinton will be under political pressure to chart some new directions in economic policy.

This challenge isn’t Clinton’s alone. While the Republican Party’s responsibility for blocking economic recovery measures should be clear to millions of voters, the Democrats will nonetheless come before an electorate in 2016 that will be worse off economically than it was in 2008.

Democratic voters will likely be looking to their presidential candidate for some new remedies. Offering the same menu of policies that the Democrats have offered for the past eight years—worse yet, with the same stable of economic advisers—hardly sounds like a recipe for success.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who initiated the letter

SHOULD HILLARY SEEK THE NOMINATION, SHE WILL HAVE TO DECIDE WHETHER TO BREAK WITH THE ECONOMIC POLICIES AND POLICYMAKERS OF HER HUSBAND’S AND OBAMA’S ADMINISTRATIONS.

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

The twin pillars of the future From now on, the ‘makers and shakers’ of this world, the men of wealth and power, will find a growing resistance to their stratagems and plans. In response to the growing influence of the beneficent energies of Aquarius, there is emerging the awareness of a different form of living in which all can benefit and grow, and manifest their talents and ideas for the greater good of all.

There is, too, a growing sense that money is not, after all, a god and demands no devotion or obeisance; that money is but a tool, to use or not, a convenience which has become a tyrant that enslaves its masters.

From now on, too, it will become increasingly evident that the old forms and methods no longer work, certainly not for the benefit of more than a few.

Thus a great divide has opened up between the rich and poor of every nation, sharper and clearer than ever before. For

ShareInternational.info/ap

little longer will the poor of this world accept this unsacred division. And so the threat of revolution stirs once more in many countries. In Our view, while understandable, such a consequence would not bode well for humanity and would but strengthen their despair.

Our way is the way of peaceful evolution, and we recommend it to those who would endanger further the world.

Our way is simple and attainable; the principle of sharing is the blessed answer to men’s ills. At a stroke Just Sharing will transform this world. Many other ways have been tried and have failed.

Is it not a wonder that sharing has never found a place in the plans of men?

Maitreya, even now, speaks daily of the need for Sharing and Justice, the twin pillars of the new society of Peace and Reconciliation. Hold firmly therefore to this simple path and bring joy to the hearts of all. u

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This article, published in Share International magazine, was written by a Master of Wisdom.

The Masters, headed by Maitreya, the World Teacher, are highly advanced teachers and advisors of humanity who are planning to work openly in the world very soon. *The terms “men” and “man” are used throughout this article in the generic sense referring to all people.

e va n v u c c i / a p i m a g e s

from Democratic senators recommending Yellen to Obama, believes that Clinton understands the perils of embodying the ancien régime. “I don’t think Hillary will be a Rubin acolyte,” he says. “The Yellen fight showed that the emphasis on increasing employment has become central to the Democratic mainstream. I don’t see us going back to the light regulation and deregulation of the ’90s.”

The constituencies now swelling the Democrats’ ranks, Latinos and millennials in particular, have created the space—indeed, the necessity—for the party to move to the left. Polled by the Pew Research Center in 2012 as to whether they would “rather have a smaller government providing fewer services or bigger government providing more services,” Latinos preferred the bigger-government option by 75 percent to 19 percent. Millennials present the Democrats with an opportunity as well as a challenge: Addressing the profound economic travails of the young will require the Democrats to go far beyond the halfway-house measures of recent decades. They will need to reinvent direct public employment programs, devise new plans to make college affordable, substantially raise the minimum wage, and give workers the right to form unions without fear of being fired.

In short, a successful Democratic presidential candidate will have to call for some substantial, though targeted, expansions in the role of government. While Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to explicitly repudiate her husband’s declaration that “the era of big government is over,” her road—any Democrat’s road—to the White House runs to the left of the roads that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama traversed.

Should Hillary opt not to run, the potential candidate who would most clearly represent the party’s economic left in the 2016 contest is Elizabeth Warren, the bane of Wall Street, who conceived the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and advocates a range of pro-labor reforms. The Massachusetts senator disavows any interest in becoming a candidate, but many liberals would expect and urge Warren to enter the race, even though her political identity and career experience do not extend much beyond financial issues. If she declines, it’s not apparent who would take up the progressive-populist banner (though Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland appears eager to put himself forward). This would be one of those vacuums, however, that political nature abhors. After all, few foresaw the emergence of Gary Hart or Barack Obama in the years leading up to their presidential campaigns.

Even if the primaries end up pitting a progressive like Warren against a centrist like Andrew Cuomo (who has been cool to raising both his state’s minimum wage and taxes on its wealthy), the candidates will likely agree on a wide range of economic policies. But a left candidate would also likely favor reining in or breaking up the biggest banks and oppose trade deals that reduce domestic wages.

Whatever the outcome of the presidential primary battles, Congress will also be an arena in which the Democrats’ conflicting positions will be fought out. On Capitol Hill, the battle between the deficit hawks and those who favor increasing public investment has been sidetracked by the Republicans’ opposition to what is the Democrats’ near-consensual insistence on raising taxes on the rich.

But should Republicans lose their House majority, the corporate and financial establishment will mount a massive campaign to scale back Social Security and Medicare as part of their much-beloved “grand bargain.” This bargain, they claim, will mark a triumph of moderation, unifying fiscal conservatism with social liberalism—in other words, codifying Cory Booker’s politics.

If a Democrat succeeds Obama, she or he will come under immense pressure, as Obama has, to reduce spending on social welfare. The president’s ability to resist such pressure will depend in part on the strength not just of a left-­ economic tendency in the party but a left-economic movement in the country. The mere existence of a more progressive electorate will not be—nor has it ever been—enough to achieve major social and economic reform. Absent a contemporary version of the mass left movements that prodded their government to enact the landmark legislation of the New Deal and Great Society, the Wall Street liberals, and non-liberals, will probably be able to block the investment of federal funds on the scale required to reboot the economy. They may even be able to further diminish America’s already diminished welfare state.

Some of the ingredients for a movement are in place.

Awareness of and indignation toward the growth of economic inequality and the shrinking of the middle class continue to rise. But, the campaign of fast-food workers for higher wages notwithstanding, the kind of movement that could strengthen the economic left within the Democratic Party is nowhere yet in evidence. Like the country at large, the Democrats have changed. They’re more wary of finance; they want government to make college more affordable and jobs more numerous and better paying. But the balance of power in the party and in the nation haven’t shifted enough for those desires to become law—not unless the people whom Bill de Blasio champions amass in numbers sufficient to overcome the interests that Cory Booker protects. 

The Left Alternative?

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

Soldier Without 50 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

a War

BY G ABRIEL ARAN A P H O TO BY FO RRES T MA C C O RMA CK

M

idway between the White House and the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the Newseum Residences is one of those glass-andsteel high-rises that feels more like a hotel than an apartment building. The floor in the lobby always looks as if it’s just been polished, the frosted glass wiped down.

The building’s ten inhabited floors are near identical. Each has a long, windowless hallway with 13 or 14 doors, their numbers etched on brushed-steel plates. In the elevators, a printed sheet in a display announces the day’s schedule of events— breakfast in the lounge at seven, yoga on the roof deck in the evening. Most of the time, though, it seems no one lives there.

On the 12th floor, Dan Choi’s apartment is the one with the lantern at the foot of the door—“for weary travelers,” he likes to say.

A studio with a galley kitchen, it costs him $1,700 a month. He sleeps on the two L-shaped couches that fill the living area. An electric keyboard, two bongo drums, and a microphone stand take up a corner. Tibetan prayer flags hang from a wall. Just out of view is the District Court for the District of Columbia, where he had his latest breakdown.

Inside the entrance, on a stretch of wall about six feet wide, Dan has sketched, in black marker and colored pastels, a tableau of his life. Along the bottom, a figure plays the trumpet. This is Dan back in high school in Tustin, California, where he was the star of the Model United Nations team and senior class president. To the right is a soldier in uniform silhouetted against an American flag, which symbolizes Dan’s years in the Army. In the left-hand corner, three Islamic arches frame a marketplace, evoking Dan’s 15-month deployment in Iraq at the height of the surge. Across the top, he has depicted his proudest moment: when he and 12 others chained themselves to the fence outside the White House in November 2010 to protest “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the law that barred gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

On a Wednesday in August, Dan is setting

52 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

up for Hungry Hungry Hippos night. On the white coffee table, he’s laid out a platter with sliced boiled eggs dusted with paprika; mini carrots and tomatoes; Sour Patch Kids; and a dozen pot cupcakes that have collapsed into themselves. “I can make brownies, but the cupcakes I can’t get right,” he says. He’s got backup: a six-foot glass bong. The table’s centerpiece is Hungry Hungry Hippos, a children’s game in which players operate four plastic mechanical hippos and try to gobble up as many marbles on the board as possible.

By the time an artist friend walks through the door, Dan is stoned, a fact he broadcasts loudly. “I’m high!” he tells her before bursting into high-pitched laughter. Dan offers her a hit, bringing a flame to the bowl. She takes one, exhaling with a grimace.

“What is that?” she says.

“Isn’t it great?” Dan asks. “I used whiskey instead of water for the filter.”

“It’s harsh, man,” she says.

Within an hour, the other two guests show up: a young lawyer and Dan’s drug dealer. They nibble on the snacks while watching a video of comedian Margaret Cho. “I think she’s sick of me for calling too much,” Dan says. He met Cho at Occupy Atlanta in 2012. The video ends, and the group begins the night’s first and only round of Hungry Hungry Hippos. Someone says “go” and the players pump their levers,

making the hippos extend and open their mouths into the center as the marbles rattle.

Before the game can finish, Dan removes his hippo from the board and places it on his head.

“I’m taking my ball and going home!” he says.

Everyone chuckles.

With the plastic animal balanced on his head, Dan grabs the microphone from the corner and holds it close. He pulls back his shoulders and raises his chin, his square jaw protruding over the mic, gaze locked in as if he’s standing at attention. Thirty-two years old, he’s not as jacked as he was during his Army days, but he’s still fit—muscular shoulders and a broad chest that tapers into a narrow waist. In the lambent glow of the blank television screen, he’s striking. His hair is shaved on the sides military-­style, his expression grim. It’s easy to see why, four years ago, Dan Choi may have been the most famous gay person in America.

But then the spell breaks. “Welcome to the Delilah show!” Dan exclaims as the plastic hippo falls to the ground, and he breaks out into a parody of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” For 21 months—between his debut on The Rachel Maddow Show in March 2009 and the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2010—Dan Choi was not just the best-known spokesperson for the movement to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He was its emblem. A West Point graduate, a combat veteran, a fluent Arabic speaker, he was the kind of soldier the military should have been promoting instead of kicking out. In interviews and at press conferences, he was articulate and passionate, charming and funny.

“The issue needed a voice and a face to get the attention of the media, the military, and Washington,” says Nathaniel Frank, a historian at New York University and author of Unfriendly Fire, the pre-eminent account of gays serving under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” “Dan Choi had a good understanding of political theater, a passionate attachment to his role as an activist, and a strong sense of righteous anger that he was unwilling to let go of.”

By the time “don’t ask, don’t tell” was abolished, Dan had been interviewed scores of

pa b lo m a r t i n e z m o n s i va i s / a p i m a g e s

On November 10, 2010, Dan was arrested—for the third time—for handcuffing himself to the White House fence.

times, appearing in all the major newspapers and news networks (save Fox); spoken at dozens of gay-rights rallies from Wichita to Moscow; lectured at universities from Texas A&M to Harvard; and been named a “brave thinker”

by The Atlantic.

Now, Dan wakes up most days with nothing to do. After the sun rouses him from his spot on the couch, where he sleeps under his “affirmation quilt”—fan letters are printed on each square—he takes two capsules of Hydroxycut, a diet pill loaded with caffeine, and Wellbutrin, an antidepressant used to treat bipolar disorder. Sometimes he goes for a long bike ride or

works out at the gym in his building. He attends fundraisers and art openings, occasionally in uniform. Now and then, he drives to Fire Island, a gay vacation destination off Long Island. He earns a living by giving speeches at $10,000 a pop, which the Gotham Artists agency arranges for him. He smokes pot—a lot of it, he admits.

“I can’t tell the difference,” he says, “between being high and not.”

Dan says he has no friends, which isn’t quite true. From time to time, someone from his past will show up—an Army buddy, a high-school pal. He’s gotten acquainted with the other gay guys in the building and invites them over for grilling parties. He knows a bunch of activists in D.C., though they are better at changing history than keeping in touch. He still talks to his younger sister, Grace, and to his cousin Sandra. But he no longer speaks to his dad or mom, Southern Baptists who don’t approve

of his sexual identity. After his breakdown in March, he had a falling out with his older brother Isaac, who accused Dan of embarrassing the family. He has drifted from most of his fellow cadets at West Point and keeps his distance from Knights Out, a group of openly gay and lesbian West Pointers.

Each time I see Dan, he seems to have rearranged the furniture in his living room or adopted a new lifestyle trend. One day, he had gotten rid of his garbage can to be more cognizant of the waste he produces, which required him to walk to the trash chute each time he ordered takeout or had groceries delivered.

Another day, he had downloaded a meditation app from iTunes and wanted me to listen to it with him. He likes to watch TED talks (“Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are” and “How to Start a Movement” are among his favorites).

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

In late August, I was on my way to interview Dan at his apartment when he messaged me that a big protest was shaping up at the White House. President Barack Obama had just announced that he would ask Congress for authorization to use force in Syria. I raced to meet him at the north entrance, but all I found were tourists snapping photos and Dan circling around on his bike. He hung out for a while, texting a friend to ask for an update. She didn’t respond. After 20 minutes of scouring his contacts for people who might have more information, he looked up from his phone and gave me a sideways grin. He was being a good sport, but he looked crestfallen. I sensed—or maybe I just imagined it—he was asking himself the same question I had been: Who is Dan Choi without “don’t ask, don’t tell”?

A West Point graduate, a combat veteran, a fluent Arabic speaker, he was the kind of soldier the military should have been promoting instead of kicking out.

He was articulate and charming.

DAN’S PARENTS EMIGRATED from South

Korea in the 1970s. His father was a Southern Baptist minister, his mother a nurse. They settled in the Orange County city of Tustin, 34 miles south of Los Angeles. He and his two siblings were latchkey kids. Although Dan’s father had his own church, Gospel First Korean Baptist, he often traveled overseas to preach. His mother worked the night shift at Garden Grove Hospital. “He was that kid who was always talking,” says his cousin Sandra, who baby-sat for the family. “Daniel was so intent on telling stories.” He wore her out; she’d sit him down in front of the TV to get a break.

Dan and his siblings attended church every Sunday and were expected to get A’s at school. A popular student with a gift for public speaking, Dan graduated at the top of his high-school class. He led the marching band as a drum major and played the trumpet in the church ensemble. But he also had a rebellious streak, a flair for the outrageous gesture.

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he took to the school’s PA system and declared that the country was in a moral crisis, quoting the Gospel of Matthew and encouraging his classmates to turn to Christ. The stunt got him suspended for a day.

Dan had been determined to join the military

54 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

since watching Saving Private Ryan early his senior year. He admired soldiers’ willingness to give up their autonomy and life for a greater cause. But the images of strong, fit men had their own allure. Dan had suspected he was gay since fourth grade, when he’d fantasized about Judge Harry Stone on Night Court. He knew his parents, for whom “gay” connoted AIDS and men in high heels, would be horrified.

He never told anyone or acted on his attractions. When Dan secured a recommendation from his congressman to attend West Point, he didn’t think of what life would be like as a gay soldier; all he could imagine was himself in uniform, just like Tom Hanks. One could say he went there to hide, but in his mind, he went to become a man.

Dan loved the rigor of West Point life, in which every moment was scheduled and everyone placed in a hierarchy. He had a knack for Arabic, which he double-majored in on top of environmental engineering. Peers recall Dan being energetic, funny, and kindhearted. As an upperclassman, he’d cover for “plebes”—firstyear students—delivering laundry when someone had cross-country practice or fell ill. If the rigid structure of the military kept him on track, singing in the Protestant Chapel Choir

provided a creative outlet. One of his proudest moments was performing a solo of “Amazing Grace” at Sing Sing prison.

Dan tried not to think about his sexuality; whenever someone got kicked out for being gay, he didn’t want to hear the details. “I just pushed it out of my mind,” he says. While he didn’t try to act straight, being gay was not something people saw. His race was. He remembers an officer telling a group of cadets at rifle training that the target was “a chinky-eyed, flat-faced gook in North Korea on the DMZ .”

For service members like Dan who were not ready to face their sexuality, “don’t ask, don’t tell” provided the relief of a deadline extended.

While the “don’t ask” portion was not enforced (no one was ever ejected for inquiring about someone’s sexuality), it did make the subject taboo. Which meant fewer questions.

Most gays and lesbians in the armed forces feared being found out, and hiding a key part of themselves was a constant stressor.

In many ways, the Clinton administration’s compromise—allowing them to serve only if they made no statements indicating they were homosexual or engaging in homosexual sex— made matters worse. Before “don’t ask, don’t tell,” military policy forbade gays and lesbians from serving—you were asked when you signed up. With the law in effect, enlistees were no longer asked, but it became mandatory to fire gay and lesbian soldiers. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” didn’t just affect gays and lesbians, though. It was also used to harass women. Men would accuse those who rebuffed their sexual advances of being lesbians, which would lead to a suspension while an investigation ensued. There were types of dismissals referred to as “hugging cases,” in which a service member—whatever his or her orientation—would be accused of being gay because he or she had given a hug to someone of the same sex or had a photo with his or her arm around someone of the same sex.

It’s impossible to know how many suicides, nervous breakdowns, or even outbursts “don’t ask, don’t tell” was responsible for—the policy itself precluded the answer from being known.

But it was a lot. According to the Palm Center,

a think tank formed to study sexual minorities in the military, at any given time 65,000 service members were hiding their identity in the 15 years the policy held sway. Then there were those who were expelled: 14,346 members of the armed forces. In the end, the law was clear.

You lied or you left. “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ injured troops performing every imaginable job, regardless of their rank, occupational specialty, or service branch,” says Aaron Belkin, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University and founding director of the Palm Center. “It was a policy with high costs and no benefits.”

As Dan ascended the stage at West Point to collect his diploma in May 2003, his parents beamed with Isaac, Grace, Sandra, and his grandmother beside them. “I had become an officer,” Dan says, “something my dad had once dreamed of.” After graduation, Dan was assigned a tour of duty in Iraq.

Based at Fort Drum, New York, before his deployment, he was sure of one thing: He didn’t want to die a virgin.

“Fuck it,” he thought. “Might as well.”

MONTHS BEFORE DAN shipped off to

war in 2006, he was involved in an incident that would hang over him for the rest of his time in the Army. According to Dan, he was working at his desk at Fort Drum when an officer came up to him and said, “Do you know your fucking monitor is pink? That’s pretty gay.” The two exchanged words. It was only after the officer dared him, Dan says, that he threw a punch. An investigation immediately ensued.

Assaulting another officer prevented him from advancing to captain, but it didn’t keep him from serving in Iraq. Stationed in south Baghdad, Dan oversaw building projects as a member of the Commander’s Emergency Response Team. The assignment was dangerous, the combat harrowing. He saw members of his unit wounded beyond recognition, and

others burned to death. After an extended tour of duty—15 months all told—Dan returned to the States with occasional ringing in his ear and what would later be diagnosed as posttraumatic stress disorder.

Back at Fort Drum, still under threat of being kicked out for the altercation, Dan began to take

told a couple of his Army buddies the truth. To spend more time with Matthew, Dan transferred from full-time active duty to the Army National Guard in June. As a citizen-soldier based in Manhattan, all he had to dedicate to his platoon was one weekend a month. He wanted to move into his boyfriend’s New York City apartment, but Matthew wasn’t out to his parents. With no place else to go, Dan went to live with his parents in California.

Being surrounded by his awards from high school reminded Dan of how much he’d changed over the past eight years. He’d left a closeted plebe and returned a lieutenant who had faced combat and fallen in love. He came out to Grace on Skype and to Isaac on Facebook. He told Sandra.

He joined a gay men’s chorus and took courses in Persian at the local community college. He also changed his Facebook profile to say he was “interested in men” and joined the underground social group Service Academy Gay & Lesbian Alumni Association. Left were his parents. “Will you still love me?” he asked his mother, breaking the news. “I love you,” she responded, “but you need to marry a Korean girl.” His father said Dan needed to go to church and pray.

Around this time, Dan received an In May 2003, Dan graduated from West Point still in the closet. invitation to join an organization comliberties. He grew his hair too long. He skipped posed of gay and lesbian West Pointers so new work. He told William Cannon, a chemical offi- it didn’t have a name. A 1980 graduate named cer who was his closest friend there, that he L. Paul Morris had co-founded the group. His was going to leave the service as soon as he ful- model was The Blue Alliance, an organizafilled his eight-year obligation. On weekends, he tion that supports gay marines in and out of drove his jeep to New York City to visit the bath- the service. After he and Daniel Manning, houses, which is where he met Matthew Kinsey, a 2004 graduate who had been discharged an executive at Gucci 20 years his senior. under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” settled on Knights Dan was careful at first, telling his friends Out as the group’s name and established nonon the base he was dating an older woman profit status, they scheduled the first meeting named Martha. But as his feelings for Matthew for March 16, 2009 in Washington, D.C. It grew, Dan stopped caring about the conse- would coincide with the annual benefit dinner quences. By Valentine’s Day 2008, the pair had of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network been dating for two months, and Dan was in (SLDN), formed shortly after President Clinton love. “I wanted to be his geisha,” he says. He signed “don’t ask, don’t tell” into law.

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

The day before the dinner, Dan and a handful of West Pointers met in a large conference room at the Hotel Palomar to select leaders. Becky Kanis, class of 1991, would serve as chair. Dan offered to be the group’s spokesperson. Morris was initially hesitant—he was uneasy because Dan should have been a captain by now. Morris, though, was desperate and accepted. At the SLDN dinner, Dan confirmed Morris’s worries.

He got drunk, jumping on the furniture in the hotel lobby. “Unfortunately,” Morris says, “we were stuck with Dan Choi at this point.”

Dan was on his way to California two days later when The Rachel Maddow Show called.

Wanting to get back for choir rehearsal, Dan proposed Kanis in his place. But the producers wanted Dan, the only one of the group’s leaders who was actively serving. He agreed

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to appear via satellite from Orange County.

That evening, Kanis, Dan, and Sue Fulton, a Knights Out board member who worked in brand management, spent an hour on the phone settling on talking points. The message they came up with drew from Dan’s biography.

At West Point, he and other cadets lived by the honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” By forcing him to lie about his sexual orientation, “don’t ask, don’t tell” dishonored the military values he swore to uphold. Knights Out had come to fulfill the law, not to abolish it.

Through his earpiece, Dan could hear Maddow start the segment. He didn’t know how many people watched the show—Fulton didn’t find it necessary to tell him—but his fellow Knights Out members would be. No doubt

some of the soldiers in his National Guard unit would also catch the program. He tried to keep his hands still as Maddow introduced him: “Joining us now is Dan Choi. He’s a founding member of the Knights Out organization, a graduate of West Point, and he is an Iraq combat veteran.”

“Wonderful to be here. I love your show, Rachel,” Dan said. In his newly pressed gray suit, he looked boyish and wholesome. “By saying three words to you today, ‘I am gay’—those three words are a violation of title 10 of the U.S. code.” The talking points came back to him. “It’s an immoral code, and it goes against every single thing that we were taught at West Point with our honor code,” he said, picking up steam. “The honor code says that a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal—”

d av i d pa u l m o r r i s / g e t t y i m a g e s

The 2009 Pride Parade in San Francisco asked Dan to be grand marshal. He marched with the Knights Out contingent.

Suddenly, the sound cut out, leaving Dan miming his words. Maddow announced a commercial break while the producers tried to restore the audio, but they were unable to.

She promised to have Dan on the next day.

When Dan called Fulton from outside the studio, he was crushed. She, on the other hand, was ecstatic. “You don’t understand,” she said.

“We get two hits—two nights!”

The next evening, Dan was more selfassured, joking with Maddow: “I think we all understand your agenda was just to make this appearance tonight the second time in my life that I actually wore some makeup.” In two minutes, he covered everything he had practiced with Fulton and Kanis, breaking into Arabic as photos of him in Iraq glided across the screen. At the beginning of the segment, Maddow had asked if he realized that he was putting everything on the line by appearing on her show. “Is there a possibility … you could be at risk of getting kicked out of the service because you are doing this?”

THE MAJOR GAY-RIGHTS organizations,

which had done little to publicize the formation of Knights Out, were eager to work with Dan after his television appearance. When the Army instituted discharge proceedings against him, Dan turned to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. During the Clinton and Bush years, the group had served primarily as a support organization, but with President Obama now in the White House, it had begun to take a more visible role in the repeal effort.

In addition to providing Dan with legal counsel, the group prepped him with talking points and helped secure bookings. Dan was thankful. With only one communications person, Knights Out didn’t have sufficient staff.

The relationship with SLDN didn’t last long.

Dan refused to wear the group’s lapel pin on the air. He also had an ideological disagreement.

The defense network advised some gay and lesbian soldiers to remain in the closet. Dan had concluded that coming out was a moral obligation. Three months after Maddow, he told SLDN that Sue Fulton would be handling his press.

For cadets like Dan, who were not ready to face their sexuality, “don’t ask, don’t tell” provided the relief of a deadline extended. It made the subject taboo, which meant fewer questions.

For a while, it seemed anytime the repeal effort made the news, Dan was asked to come on TV. He appeared on ABC News, NBC Nightly News, CBS, and Al-Jazeera. Anderson Cooper 360 filmed a special, following Dan around his parents’ house. Being driven from one interview to another, waiting in greenrooms before doing a “hit”—TV lingo for a stint on the air—was heady. So was receiving letters from closeted members of the military and getting stopped on the street by strangers and being thanked for his courage and serving as grand marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade.

Dan quit the gay men’s chorus and withdrew from his community-college courses. With tension building at home—his father had a heart attack in the spring, which his mother blamed on Dan—he moved out of his parents’ house and started couch surfing in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. Most of Knights Out’s leadership was supportive of Dan’s increasing notoriety, but not all. “This is becoming the Dan Choi show,” L. Paul Morris told the group on a conference call.

“Dan had always been a diva,” says William Cannon, his friend from Fort Drum, “but was less obvious about it until the activism.” Dan signed with Gotham Artists to book speaking

gigs for him. He once demanded that MSNBC send in a barber to give him a haircut before an appearance, which the network did, and would ask drivers sent by the studio to help him run errands. He broke up with Matthew, saying he had to dedicate himself entirely to the movement. In an e-mail, he told a friend that he was “exhausted emotionally, spiritually and even physically. Any resources you could recommend would be most helpful.”

Dan’s behavior began to worry his family and friends. On one occasion when he received an e-mail death threat, he called the person up and screamed, “I’ll kill you first! I’ll give you AIDS first!” Dan started telling people that, like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, he would have to die for his cause. Drinking emboldened him, and the drinking was getting worse. “The Salvation Army hates gays!” he yelled at a volunteer in Harvard Square after a night of throwing back Jäger shots.

“He was so used to being interviewed that he had no identity anymore,” says Sarah HaagFisk, a classmate at West Point and a member of Knights Out. When she and Dan spent time together, “it almost seemed like he was giving me lines,” she says. “This was not the Dan I had known. He was becoming untethered. It was very difficult to tell him that he should slow down a little bit.” For Dan, this was the equivalent of saying gays and lesbians should wait for their rights.

Laura Cannon, who was a year ahead of him at West Point, reconnected with Dan after the Maddow show. At first, she thought his involvement in the repeal effort was “a healthy amount of participation.” But the toll of being a public figure—of always being on—soon became apparent. “I saw it completely deplete him,” she says. In August 2009, five months after the Maddow interview, Dan went on Facebook and changed his profession. He was no longer a soldier. He was an activist.

But many of the qualities that worried Dan’s old friends—his tendency toward melodrama, his equating himself with the movement—also made him brilliant at attracting attention to the cause. After the Army finally discharged

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

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him for violating “don’t ask, don’t tell,” he burned his notice during a talk at Harvard.

At Netroots Nation, a yearly gathering of progressives, he arranged for organizers to give his West Point ring to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Dan pledged to hold Reid accountable in an open letter: “My promise is not merely written on a piece of paper or words alone, but in the hearts of every lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender American fired from their jobs.”

It was exactly those qualities, though, that inspired a new set of friends: radical activists who believed that the only way to persuade the country to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” was with sit-ins, hunger strikes, and other direct action.

They, along with Dan, took aim at the big gayrights organizations, most of all the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest and the best funded. The bulk of HRC ’s work occurred behind the scenes, where leaders met with the president, White House officials, and lawmakers. In the spring of 2010, with Congress seriously considering repeal for the first time—the Senate was scheduled to hold hearings, and the National Defense Authorization Act was coming up for renewal—Dan accused the HRC of being too cautious and deferential. “Within the gay community, so many leaders want acceptance from polite society,” Dan told Newsweek.

“Gandhi did not need three-course dinners and a cocktail party to get his message out.”

On March 18, the HRC brought comedian Kathy Griffin, star of the reality television series My Life on the D-List, to speak with legislators about “don’t ask, don’t tell” on Capitol Hill and headline a rally on Freedom Plaza.

Dan asked HRC president Joe Solmonese if he could speak, but was told it was Griffin’s rally.

To the surprise of organizers, she welcomed Dan to the podium.

For the second time, Dan had dressed in his uniform at a political event, which is prohibited by military code. “Our fight isn’t actually just here at Freedom Plaza,” he told the crowd.

“Our fight is at the White House. Will you join me?” He called out Griffin and Solmonese, asking if they would march with him. Dan and a dozen participants strode up Pennsylvania

Dan’s behavior began to worry his family and friends.

On one occasion when he received an e-mail death threat, he called the person up and screamed, “I’ll kill you first! I’ll give you AIDS first!”

Avenue chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ has got to go.” Griffin and Solmonese stayed behind to talk with reporters. At the White House, Dan and James Pietrangelo, an Army captain who had been kicked out under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” handcuffed themselves to the northern gate. They spent the night in jail.

The protest, which Dan would reprise twice in the coming months, laid bare the fault lines in the gay-rights movement. The major gay blogs—AmericaBlog, Pam’s House Blend, Queerty, Towleroad, Joe. My. God.—cheered him on. So did the grassroots activists, who blasted the HRC. The organization posted a note on its blog saying that Solmonese “felt it was important to stay and engage those at the rally in ways they can continue building the pressure needed for repeal” but that “this [did] nothing to diminish the actions taken by Lt. Choi and others.” Knights Out said that while it shared in the spirit of the protest, it did not condone Dan’s actions.

In response, Dan quit Knights Out, further shrinking his circle to diehard activists. “We were part of the gay civil-rights movement,” says Pietrangelo. “He did what the freedom marchers did: Gave a face to the suffering and showed how society was harming gay people.”

The West Pointers thought he had lost his sense of proportion. “He was surrounded by those he considered friends—folks in the movement, people who can’t self-evaluate,” Haag-Fisk says.

The House of Representatives passed the Murphy Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act on May 27. The amendment provided for a repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” after the Pentagon conducted a study and certified that lifting the ban on gays and lesbians would not harm the military. The deadline for the study was December 1. This wasn’t good enough for Dan. Calling for Congress to repeal the policy immediately, he and Pietrangelo went on a hunger strike. After seven days, the pair gave in to supporters expressing concern for their health. Dan released a statement pledging to resume the strike “using the proper safeguards to ensure [his] health” but never did.

Over the summer and fall, Dan took on a relentless round of public appearances, but he was increasingly depressed. Some days, he was convinced that repeal would never pass. Others, he was convinced he would have to die for it to happen. By November, couch surfing had landed him at the Boston apartment of Laura Cannon, his old friend from West Point. She was shocked by how burned out he was.

The Senate took up the National Defense Authorization Act, with a repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” attached, on December 9. Dan was in Cannon’s apartment, watching on TV. Harry Reid called for cloture, which would allow the bill to come to a vote, but it failed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Dan felt all his work had been for nothing. He got drunk and stoned while Cannon and her husband slept.

When she saw him in the morning, Dan was still on the couch in front of the TV, speaking in fragments, muttering to himself, screaming obscenities, bursting into sobs. Now and then, he was mute, retreating to his bedroom with a bottle of scotch. He agreed to let her drive him to a VA hospital.

From there, Dan released a statement: “My breakdown was a result of a cumulative array of stressors but there is no doubt that the

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

composite betrayals felt on Thursday, by elected leaders and gay organizations as well as many who have exploited my name for their marketing purposes have added to the result.”

Eight days later, on December 18, the Senate repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” and sent the bill to President Obama.

UNITED STATES V. DAN CHOI. He liked the

sound of it.

At a little past 1 P.M. on November 15, one month before the repeal, Dan and 12 activists handcuffed themselves to the White House fence. They were charged with violating a minor U.S. Park Police regulation, “failure to obey a lawful order.” Civil-disobedience infractions are almost always tried in municipal court and typically dismissed, but the U.S. attorney general’s office pursued the allegation at the federal level. The 13 were offered a plea. If they admitted guilt, they’d face no consequences after four months without an arrest. Conviction, on the other hand, carried a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. Everyone but Dan took the deal.

For two and a half years, the trial became his cause. He moved to the Newseum Residences because the building was around the corner from the courthouse.

Dan’s self-narrative is under constant revision, which is a way of saying I’m never sure whether to believe him, if the version of events he’s presented is the final. When we first met, he told me he pursued the case because if the First Amendment doesn’t apply at the foot of the White House, it doesn’t apply anywhere.

Another time, he told me that he wanted to lose so the proceedings could make it into case law; once a suit is appealed, it is woven into the legal record, becoming part of the constellation of rulings that guides lawyers and judges. Dan wanted to be among the stars.

The hundreds of pages of briefs and transcripts from the court proceedings contain the law’s usual mix of minutiae and grandiloquence. There is the question of whether Dan was standing on the sidewalk or on the base of the White House fence. Much discussion

60 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

It’s impossible to know how many suicides, nervous breakdowns, or even outbursts “don’t ask, don’t tell” is responsible for—the policy itself precluded the answer from being known. was devoted to the cost of the handcuffs, how many there were, who bought them, what happened after Park Police took them away, and who had the keys. Lawyers quibbled over Dan’s title—“mister,” since he was no longer in the military, or “lieutenant”? (The prosecutor was asked to address him by his rank.) In almost three hours of testimony on the second day of the trial, on August 30, 2011, Dan recounted his life story and declared that although he and the 12 others might have blocked the view of the White House, they had replaced it “with a better view—a view of freedom because this is what equality looks like.”

He invoked the ghosts of civil disobedience: “Even if you have a quiver in your voice, you should speak up as loud as you can if you really believe that your cause is a righteous one. And so, I told everybody with the full righteousness of the winds behind your back of civil rights and human progress and Jesus and Gandhi and Alice Paul, and all of those people who fought for their dignity, you should yell as loud as possible.”

Dan’s supporters sat enraptured. “It was as if, by speaking those magnificent, majestic truths,” says Pietrangelo, one of the 12 arrested, “he was vanquishing all the discrimination,

bigotry, and pain that gay people had been suffering.” On Twitter, 20,000 followers spurred him on. The trial didn’t catch the attention of the mainstream media, but it was covered in the blogosphere. Firedoglake compiled an archive of documents, and Towleroad provided reports up to the minute.

Over the next 15 months, with motions being filed, Dan posted on his site and sent out his newsletter, Frontlines. He gave talks to make ends meet. But he was also skipping appointments with his psychiatrist and drinking heavily. He talked about taking a break, getting away.

He told friends that a black van parked across from his building belonged to the Secret Service.

A month before the trial resumed, Dan fired his lawyers. He’d been reading about the law for more than a year—to understand what was going on—and decided he knew enough to hold his own. “There’s no greater empowering moment than to stand before the judge and let them hear your own voice,” he told the Washington Blade.

Dan made sure the turnout for the final phase, in March 2013, was big. He f lew in his brother, sister, and cousin Sandra. Leaders from major gay-rights organizations were there. So was his old Army friend William Cannon. He didn’t get to talk to Dan much.

They shared a cigarette before marching with a group of about 50 people to the courthouse.

Dan kept drifting away, mumbling incoherently. “My friend Dan that I knew in Iraq and New York was gone,” Cannon says. “He had this cause he was so dedicated to.”

Dan called four witnesses to testify, then showed a video of his Rachel Maddow interview. While it played, he wept. “The defense rests!” he announced, putting his head down on the table and throwing up his arm. The judge called for a recess; Dan lay on the floor and shouted obscenities. In the afternoon, the prosecution delivered a brief closing argument. Dan gave a 40-minute speech. Raving and disjointed, it was a broken mirror of the life story he had told six months earlier.

When the judge found him guilty and fined him $100, Dan cried out, “I refuse to pay it.

forrest maccormack

Send me to jail!” Instead, friends took him to the emergency room of Washington, D.C.’s VA Medical Center, where he was admitted to the psychiatric ward.

The trial laid Dan bare. His passion. His penchant for inflamed rhetoric. His ability to attract followers. His solipsism. His vulnerability. On a few occasions, Dan has told me the trial was a plea for help. “I didn’t know what to do with myself after ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed,” he says. Other times, he finds his nerve. “I just want them to apologize to me in open court—that’s all.”

When he’s being introspective, he wonders aloud about what’s next. Maybe he’ll become a teacher, he says. Or he could study vocal music.

He took the LSAT a while back, so he could go to law school. Sometimes he says he wants to quit activism, but then he’ll accept an invitation to speak at another rally.

A few things I am certain of. Washington can make people, even those who fight for human rights, lose their humanity. It gets covered up with talking points, strategy, branding. At the height of Dan’s celebrity, few in the repeal movement pulled him aside and said, “All this doesn’t matter more than you do. Let’s go home.” Maybe that’s because he’d cut himself loose from the people who cared enough to tell him he was losing himself—people like Grace, Isaac, Sandra, William Cannon, Sarah Haag-Fisk, and Laura Cannon.

None of this is to say Dan would have listened. He had fallen in love with his own martyrdom. He had conflated activism with celebrity.

Dan’s story runs in my head like an episode of E! True Hollywood Story. He starts out naïve and precocious. He rises. He succumbs to the pressure—all those interviews, rallies, fan letters, expectations. But instead of playing out on Bravo or in the pages of Us Weekly, it played out on MSNBC and in The Advocate.

What I have to keep reminding myself is that by speaking when no one else would, Dan Choi did a good and courageous thing, and in part because of it, gays and lesbians can now serve openly in the military. 

Dan moved to Washington, D.C., to be near the courthouse where he was being tried.

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

62 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

Homeschool THE

APOSTATES

They were raised to carry the fundamentalist banner forward and redeem America.

But now the Joshua Generation is rebelling.

BY KAT HRYN J OYC E ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STA UFFER

A

t 10 P.M. on a Sunday night in May, Lauren and John*, a young couple in the Washington, D.C., area, started an emergency 14-hour drive to the state where Lauren grew up in a strict fundamentalist household. Earlier that day, Lauren’s younger sister, Jennifer, who had recently graduated from homeschooling high school, had called her in tears: “I need you to get me out of this place.” The day, Jennifer said, had started with another fight with her parents, after she declined to sing hymns in church. Her slight speech impediment made her self-conscious about singing in public, but to her parents, her refusal to sing or recite scripture was more evidence that she wasn’t saved. It didn’t help that she was a vegan animal-rights enthusiast. *Lauren, John, and Jennifer requested that their real names not be used in this story.

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

Hännah Ettinger, who now blogs about leaving fundamentalism, at 16, just before cutting her hair short against her mother’s wishes.

to innocuous forms of teenage rebellion. But Lauren, who’d cut ties with her family the previous year, knew it was more.

The sisters grew up, with two brothers, in a family that was almost completely isolated, they say, held captive by their mother’s extreme anxiety and explosive anger. “I was basically raised by someone with a mental disorder and told you have to obey her or God’s going to send you to hell,” Lauren says. “Her anxiety disorder meant that she had to control every little thing, and homeschooling and her religious beliefs gave her the justification for it.”

It hadn’t started that way. Her parents began homeschooling Lauren when she struggled to learn to read in the first grade. They were Christians, but not devout.

Soon, though, the choice to homeschool morphed into rigid fundamentalism. The sisters were forbidden to wear clothes that might “shame” their father or brothers. Disobedience wasn’t just bad behavior but a sin against God. Both parents spanked the children with a belt. Her mother, Jennifer says, hit her for small things, like dawdling while trying on clothes.

64 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

The family’s isolation made it worse. The children couldn’t date—that was a given—but they also weren’t allowed to develop friendships. Between ages 10 and 12, Lauren says she only got to see friends once a week at Sunday school, increasing to twice a week in her teens when her parents let her participate in mock trial court, a popular activity for Christian homeschoolers. Their parents wanted them naïve and sheltered, Lauren says: “18 going on 12.”

Mixed with the control was a lack of academic supervision. Lauren says she didn’t have a teacher after she was 11; her parents handed her textbooks at the start of a semester and checked her work a few months later. She graded herself, she says, and rarely wrote papers. Nevertheless, Lauren was offered a full-ride scholarship to Patrick Henry College in Virginia, which was founded in 2000 as a destination for fundamentalist homeschoolers.

At first her parents refused to let her matriculate, insisting that she spend another year with the family. During that year, Lauren got her first job, but her parents limited the number of hours she could work.

Even conservative Patrick Henry felt like a bright new reality. While much about the college confirmed the worldview Lauren grew up in, small freedoms like going out for an unplanned coffee came as a revelation. She describes it as “a sudden sense of being able to say yes to things, when your entire life is no.”

Family ties began to fray after she met John, a fellow student who’d had a more positive homeschooling experience growing up; he took her swing dancing and taught her how to order at Starbucks, and they fell in love. Her parents tried to break the couple up—at one point even asking the college to expel Lauren or take away her scholarship for disobeying them. Their efforts backfired; soon after her graduation, Lauren married John and entered law school.

For Jennifer, matters grew worse in the six years after Lauren left home. She rarely went out on her own except to walk the dog or attend a co-op class taught by other homeschooling parents. When she would ask to go to a friend’s house, she says, her mother would begin to cry; after a while, Jennifer stopped asking. She never had a key to the house. Tensions escalated after she went vegan at 16. Animal-rights activists were communists and terrorists, her parents told her, and the Bible said she should eat meat.

By the time Jennifer made her call in May, Lauren and John had discussed that she might eventually have to come live with them. Jennifer wasn’t often able to phone her older sister, because their parents closely monitored cell use. But Jennifer kept a secret e-mail account, which she used to write to Lauren. After the fight that Sunday, she hid her phone as her parents were confiscating her computer,

p h o t o c o u r t e s y h a n n a h e t t i n g e r ; f r a m e : z a k h a r o v e v g e n ly / f o t o l i a

After the family returned home from church, Jennifer’s parents discovered that she had recently been posting about animal rights on Facebook, which they had forbidden. They took away Jennifer’s graduation presents and computer, she told Lauren. More disturbing, they said that if she didn’t eat meat for dinner she’d wake up to find one of the pets she babied gone.

To most people, it would have sounded like overreaction

then sneaked an SOS call. Lauren phoned around their hometown, trying to find family friends to take in Jennifer and her pets. She asked the family pastor to check on her sister. But the friends seemed scared to intervene, and the pastor refused, saying he didn’t believe Lauren because she was estranged from her parents. So the couple started driving, switching off through the night, to meet Jennifer after her co-op class the next day. “I wasn’t even sure she still had the resolve to go through with it,” Lauren says, “but we thought, even if she doesn’t want to leave, she still needs to know that her big sister is going to drive 14 hours for her if it gets to that point.”

Jennifer was ready, though. The plan was to gather her things while their mother was out shopping and their father was at work. Instead, their mother pulled into the driveway while the sisters were loading Jennifer’s dog into the car. As their mother lunged for Jennifer, Lauren says she tried to stop her by grabbing her in a bear hug. Her mother wrestled free, slapped Lauren hard in the face, screaming that she was trying to kidnap Jennifer and destroy the family. She pulled the dog away from the girls so hard that Jennifer feared he would choke. Lauren called the police, and her mother summoned her father home.

“I was so scared I had a hard time breathing,” Jennifer says. Her father told police that John had brainwashed Lauren and that Jennifer had “the mind of a 12-year-old” and was too immature to be trusted. Because she was an adult, however, the police allowed her to leave—but only with some clothes and toiletries, which she piled into trash bags as her father trailed her through the house, yelling.

The rest of Jennifer’s stuff­—her computer and her pets— had to be left behind, since she had no proof of ownership to show the officers.

On the long ride back, Lauren and Jennifer were stunned by what they’d done. They tried to think about pragmatics: What now? How would they handle college applications without parental involvement or get Jennifer insured or find her a job? Lauren called extended family members, trying to stay ahead of the story their parents would tell.

She and Jennifer didn’t want to lose everybody. “I was on the phone for hours,” she says, trying to explain to relatives who hadn’t witnessed the family’s abusive dynamics and had a hard time believing her—especially after years of hearing how Lauren had been corrupted by her husband and turned her back on her family.

“Children in these situations are taught that if you talk badly about your parents, that’s a sin, and you’re going to hell,” Lauren says. “So when they finally get the courage and determination to say something, no one believes them, because they didn’t say anything all those years. You end up having to find an entirely new support network of people who actually believe you.”

IN WASHINGTON, THAT NEW SUPPORT network imme-

diately kicked in. Through an informal group of young women who broke away from fundamentalist families, Lauren had become friends with Hännah Ettinger, who writes “Wine and Marble,” a blog about transitioning out of fundamentalist culture. When Lauren told her the story of Jennifer’s rescue, Ettinger posted a brief account.

She asked readers to chip in to defray Jennifer’s costs of starting over: buying a computer, acquiring normal clothes, applying for community college. Within the first day, the blog’s readers donated almost $500. Then a new website, run by another former homeschooler, linked to Ettinger’s appeal, and within a few days, close to $11,000 had been donated.

It was a surprise, but it was hardly a fluke. Jennifer’s rescue coincided with the emergence of a coalition of young former fundamentalists who are coming out publicly, telling their stories, and challenging the Christian homeschooling movement. The website that linked to Jennifer’s story was Homeschoolers Anonymous, launched in March by two homeschool graduates, Ryan Stollar and Nicholas

They want to show what goes on behind closed doors in some Christian homeschooling families, to share “the stories we were never allowed to talk about as children.”

Ducote. Their goal was to show what goes on behind closed doors in some Christian homeschooling families—to share, as one blogger puts it, “the stories we were never allowed to talk about as children.”

As of October, Homeschoolers Anonymous had published nearly 200 personal accounts and attracted more than 600,000 page views. For those outside the homeschooling movement, and for many inside it, the stories are revelatory and often shocking. The milder ones detail the haphazard education received from parents who, with little state oversight, prioritize obedience and religious training over learning. Some focus on women living under strict patriarchal regimes. Others chronicle appalling abuse that lasted for years.

Growing up in California and Oregon, Stollar wasn’t abused, but he met many other homeschoolers who were.

His parents led state homeschooling associations and started a debate club in San Jose. The emphasis on debate in fundamentalist homeschooling was the brainchild of Michael Farris, the founder of Patrick Henry College,

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 65

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and his daughter Christy Shipe. Farris believed debate competitions would create a new generation of culture warriors with the skills to “engage the culture for Christ.”

“You teach the kids what to think, you keep them isolated from everyone else, you give them the right answers, and you keep them pure,” Stollar explains. “And now you train them how to argue and speak publicly, so they can go out to do what they’re supposed to do”—spread the faith and promote God’s patriarchy.

As a teenager, Stollar toured the national homeschool debate circuit with a group called Communicators for Christ, sharpening his rhetorical skills and giving speech tutorials. Along the way, he found himself increasingly disturbed by what he saw. He met families that follow the concept of “Quiverfull,” wherein women are submissive to men and forgo contraception to have as many children as God gives them. He encountered entire communities where women wore only denim jumpers for modesty’s sake, where parents burned their daughters’ birth certificates to keep them at home, where teenagers practiced “betrothal,” a kind of arranged marriage. He met homeschooling kids who dealt with the stress by cutting themselves, drinking, or developing eating disorders—the very terrors their parents had fled the public schools to avoid. “Even as a conservative Christian homeschooler,” Stollar says, “I was constantly experiencing culture shock.”

A decade later, Stollar, who lives in Los Angeles, was still hearing the stories from his peers. The ex-debaters and homeschoolers were now grappling with the fallout from their childhoods: depression, mental illness, substance abuse. “I was starting to see these patterns emerging,” he says, “and we all felt that they came from the same places.”

Homeschoolers Anonymous was inspired by a woman who fled her Quiverfull parents and published an essay online, appealing for financial aid so she could go to college and then establish a safe house for refugees like herself. When her appeal went viral, Stollar and his friends decided to create an outlet for more such stories. Around 40 homeschooling alumni planned the site together on a secret Facebook group.

The timing was propitious. For several years, mothers and daughters who had escaped from Quiverfull families had blogged about their experiences and organized to help others get out on sites like No Longer Quivering. “Survivor” blogs written by former fundamentalists were also proliferating online. The bloggers doubtless inspired one another, but an additional factor was at work: Children from the first great wave of Christian homeschooling, in the 1980s and 1990s, were coming of age, and many were questioning the way they were raised.

Homeschooling leaders had dubbed them the “Joshua Generation.” Just as Joshua completed Moses’s mission by slaughtering the inhabitants of the Promised Land,

“GenJ” would carry the fundamentalist banner forward and redeem America as a Christian nation. But now, instead, the children were revolting.

HOMESCHOOLING DIDN’T BEGIN as a fundamental-

ist movement. In the 1960s, liberal author and educator John Holt advocated a child-directed form of learning that became “unschooling”—homeschooling without a fixed curriculum. The concept was picked up in the 1970s by education researcher Raymond Moore, a SeventhDay Adventist, who argued that schooling children too early—before fourth grade—was developmentally harmful.

Moore’s message came at a time when many conservative

Traveling the national homeschool debate circuit, Ryan Stollar (right) says, taught him to “look at different sides of an issue.” Here, at 16, he debates a family friend.

Christians were looking for alternatives to public schools.

Moore’s work reached a massive audience when Focus on the Family founder and Christian parenting icon James Dobson invited him onto his radio show for the first time in 1982. Dobson would become the most persuasive champion of homeschooling, encouraging followers to withdraw their children from public schools to escape a “godless and immoral curriculum.” For conservative Christian parents, endorsements didn’t come any stronger than that.

Over the next two decades, homeschooling boomed.

Today, perhaps as many as two million children are homeschooled. (An accurate count is difficult to conduct, because many homeschoolers are not required to register with their states.) Homeschooling families come from varied backgrounds—there are secular liberals as well as Christians,

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 67

along with an increasing number of Muslims and African Americans—but researchers estimate that between twothirds and three-fourths are fundamentalists.

Among Moore and Dobson’s listeners during that landmark broadcast was a pair of young lawyers, Michael Farris and Michael Smith, who the following year would found the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).

With Moore’s imprimatur and Dobson’s backing, Farris and Smith started out defending homeschooling families at a time when the practice was effectively illegal in 30 states.

As Christians withdrew their children from public school, often without requesting permission, truancy charges resulted. The HSLDA used them as test cases, challenging school districts and state laws in court while lobbying state legislators to establish a legal right to homeschool.

By 1993, just ten years after the association’s founding, homeschooling was legal in all 50 states.

What many lawmakers and parents failed to recognize were the extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling. The movement’s other patriarch was R.J. Rushdoony, founder of the radical theology of Christian Reconstruc-

Fundamentalist parents believed they had a recipe for raising kids who would never rebel and would faithfully perpetuate their parents’ values into future generations. tionism, which aims to turn the United States into an Old Testament theocracy, complete with stonings for children who strike their parents. Rushdoony, who argued that democracy was “heresy” and Southern slavery was “benevolent,” was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he inspired a generation of religious-right leaders including Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. He also provided expert testimony in early cases brought by the HSLDA . Rushdoony saw homeschooling as not just providing the biblical model for education but also a way to bleed the secular state dry.

With support from national leaders, Christian homeschoolers established state-level groups across the country and took over the infrastructure of the movement. Today, when parents indicate an interest in homeschooling, they find themselves on the mailing lists of fundamentalist catalogs. When they go to state homeschooling conventions to browse curriculum options, they hear keynote speeches about biblical gender roles and creationism and find that textbooks are sold alongside ideological manifestos on

68 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

modest dressing, proper Christian “courtship,” and the concept of “stay-at-home daughters” who forsake college to remain with their families until marriage.

HSLDA is now one of the most powerful Christian-right groups in the country, with nearly 85,000 dues-paying members who send annual checks of $120. The group publicizes a steady stream of stories about persecuted homeschoolers and distributes tip sheets about what to do if social workers come knocking. Thanks to the group’s lawsuits and lobbying, though, that doesn’t happen often.

Homeschooling now exists in a virtual legal void; parents have near-total authority over what their children learn and how they are disciplined. Not only are parents in 26 states not required to have their children tested but in 11 states, they don’t have to inform local schools when they’re withdrawing them. The states that require testing and registration often offer religious exemptions.

The emphasis on discipline has given rise to a cottage industry promoting harsh parenting techniques as godly.

Books like To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debi Pearl promise that parents can snuff out rebellious behavior with a spanking regimen that starts when infants are a few months old. The Pearls claim to have sold nearly 700,000 copies of their book, most through bulk orders from church and homeschooling groups. The combination of those disciplinary techniques with unregulated homeschooling has spawned a growing number of horror stories now being circulated by the ex-homeschoolers—including that of Calista Springer, a 16-year-old in Michigan who died in a house fire while tied to her bed after her parents removed her from public school, or Hana Williams, an Ethiopian adoptee whose Washington state parents were convicted in September of killing her with starvation and abuse in a Pearl-style system. Materials from HSLDA were found in the home of Williams’s parents.

Homeschooling leaders argue that child abuse is no more prevalent in homeschooling families than in those that enroll their kids in public school, and they push back against even modest attempts at oversight. In 2013, HSLDA lobbied against a proposed Pennsylvania bill that would have required a short period of oversight for parents who decide to homeschool and already have substantiated abuse claims against them—in essence defending the right of abusive parents to homeschool without supervision. The group is currently challenging state laws that allow anonymous tips to Child Protective Services to be grounds for investigating parents. In June, the HSLDA– authored Parental Rights Amendment was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives with 64 co-sponsors.

The amendment would enshrine in the Constitution parents’ “fundamental right” to direct their child’s upbringing however they see fit, free of state interference.

photo courtesy r achel coleman; fr ame: homydesign / fotolia

TO THE PARENTS AND THE movement that brought them

up, the ex-homeschoolers know they must seem not just disappointing but unfathomable. Their parents believed they had a recipe for raising kids who would never rebel and would faithfully perpetuate their parents’ values into future generations. But the ex-homeschoolers say that it was being trained as world-changers that led them to question what they were taught—and ultimately led them to leave.

“I grew up hearing that we were the Joshua Generation,” says Rachel Coleman, a 26-year-old leader in the ex-homeschooler movement. “We were the shock troops, the best trained and equipped, the ones who were to make a difference in the fight—a fight between God and Satan for the soul of America.” Coleman, who co-founded the watchdog site Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, is writing a doctoral dissertation at Indiana University about children and the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s and 1980s. Her parents, she says, told her and her 11 siblings that they hadn’t become missionaries themselves because “they’re raising up the 12 of us to go be pastors, missionaries, and politicians. They’re changing the world through these kids.”

When he addresses incoming students at Patrick Henry, Michael Farris likes to dream aloud of the day when the president of the United States and the Oscar winner for best picture are homeschooling graduates who roomed together at the college. That would be a sign that fundamentalist homeschooling was, in the movement’s lingo, “winning the culture.” Youth civics ministries like TeenPact, which hosts training camps for homeschoolers to mingle with lobbyists and write sample legislation, encourage homeschoolers to “change America for Christ.” HSLDA’s youth-activism group, Generation Joshua, works on voterregistration drives, lobbies at state legislatures, and doorknocks for conservative candidates. As Farris told The New York Times, “If we put enough kids in the farm system, some may get to the major leagues.”

For Ryan Stollar and many other ex-homeschoolers, debate club changed everything. The lessons in critical thinking, he says, undermined Farris’s dream of creating thousands of eloquent new advocates for the homeschooling cause. “You can’t do debate unless you teach people how to look at different sides of an issue, to research all the different arguments that could be made for and against something,” Stollar says. “And so all of a sudden, debate as a way to create culture-war soldiers backfires. They go into this being well trained, they start questioning something neutral like energy policy, but it doesn’t stop there. They start questioning everything.”

Many women leaders in the ex-homeschool movement had fewer opportunities than men to join debate clubs or

political groups like Generation Joshua. They developed their organizing skills in a different way, by finding power in the competence they gained as “junior moms” to large families. “All of these girls who are the oldest of eight, nine, ten children—we are organizational geniuses,” Coleman says. “We know how to get things done. We know how to influence people. Put any of us in a room with other people for 45 minutes, and they’re all working for us. That’s just what we do.”

Like other homeschooling daughters, Coleman assumed outsize responsibility as a teenager not only for household chores but for teaching and disciplining her younger siblings. Her initially mainstream evangelical parents moved

Rachel Coleman, at 15, holds her family’s ninth child.

“All of these girls who are the oldest of eight, nine, ten children— we are organizational geniuses,” she says.

right as they homeschooled, adopting ideas like youngearth creationism and patriarchal rights. They made it clear that Coleman, like their other daughters, was to stay under her father’s authority until she married a man of whom he approved. Her parents became activists, too, joining the steering committee of their local homeschooling group. Coleman’s mother was charged with sending out the “welcome packet” to new homeschooling families, suggesting reading materials and movement magazines.

When other mothers came to watch her homeschool, she’d give them a copy of To Train Up a Child.

Like most homeschoolers, Coleman believed that her family was an anomaly. But in 2009—after she’d gone to college, married, and broken away—she came across No Longer Quivering. The site was aimed at Quiverfull mothers, but it had already sparked a number of “daugh-

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 69

After she left her isolated New Orleans family, Heather Doney, who co-founded Homeschooling’s Invisible Children with Coleman, realized that “mainstream America is not my culture.”

inspire young women to, as she puts it, “pick freedom.”

Thanks largely to sites like No Longer Quivering and Homeschoolers Anonymous, a critical mass of homeschoolers and Quiverfull daughters now know that their families aren’t unique and that they aren’t alone in questioning the certainties with which they were raised. But when they take the next step and reject those certainties, they leave behind an all-encompassing culture: not only their families and their faith but the black-and-white moral code that guided all their choices. “When you’re raised in this lifestyle,” says Elizabeth Esther, author of a forthcoming memoir about leaving fundamentalism, Girl at the End of the World, “everything from politics and religion to your tone of voice, the clothing you wear, even how you open and shut doors—everything is based on doing it in a manner that was pleasing to God. “I had never really lived in the real world. I didn’t understand how Americans thought. All my language was religious language. I didn’t know how to interact with people without trying to convert them. I had a lot of really dis-

70 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

couraging experiences where I realized that you could leave fundamentalism, but at the end of the day fundamentalism was still inside of me.”

Nothing easily fills the void. Esther found pop culture vapid and alienating and atheism bleak, a common experience for former fundamentalists. But when she tried going to different evangelical churches, she suffered panic attacks; it was too familiar and seemed to confirm her greatest fear: “I truly believed that leaving my family was tantamount to leaving God.” Esther ultimately found a home in Catholicism, which to her was appealingly mysterious and impersonal, a more comfortable way to practice her faith. But she still struggles with the perplexing transition from her family to the mainstream.

The closest parallel to transitioning from strict fundamentalist families to mainstream society may be an immigrant experience: acclimating to a new country with inexplicable customs and an unfamiliar language.

“Mainstream American culture is not my culture,” says Heather Doney, who co-founded Homeschooling’s Invisible Children with Coleman. Doney, who grew up in an impoverished Quiverfull family in New Orleans, felt for years that she was living “between worlds,” never sure if her words or behavior were appropriate for her old life or her new one. She didn’t understand what topics of discussion were considered off-limits or when staring at someone might be disconcerting. She couldn’t make small talk, wore “oddly mismatched clothes,” and was lost amid popculture references to the Muppets or The Breakfast Club.

When college friends talked about oral sex, she thought they meant French-kissing.

More than a decade later, Doney still finds herself resorting to a standard joke—“Sorry, I live under a rock”—when people are taken aback by her. “It’s a lot easier to say that,” she says, “than to explain that I was raised hearing that you’d be allowing demonic influences into your house if you watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I feel like an expat from a subculture that I can never go home to, living in one that is still not fully mine.”

In the past, those who left Quiverfull and homeschooling families had to look for help through an informal grapevine of survivors. Now the young rebels are using their organizing skills to build a full-scale online network.

They share stories and connect on sites like Homeschoolers Anonymous and No Longer Quivering. They strategize about how to combat the homeschooling establishment on the Protect Homeschooled Children Working Group; offer practical and moral support through the Quiverfull Sorority of Survivors; and collect data on abuse cases at Homeschooling’s Invisible Children. Through a group provisionally called Ruthslist, they’re organizing safe houses and compiling a “Quiverfull daughter escape guide.”

p h o t o c o u r t e s y h e at h e r d o n e y ; f r a m e : pa x i / f o t o l i a

ter blogs.” For Coleman, it was the first time she’d seen people critically discussing the kind of culture in which she’d grown up. “You were never allowed to say anything negative about homeschooling,” she says. “You were never allowed to speak really, truly honestly, and even if you did, your own sphere of what you’ve seen is so limited that you can’t speak outside of that.” Soon Coleman was connecting with other Quiverfull exiles and working to

They’re finding a new sense of purpose to replace the one they were once assigned by their parents, always motivated—sometimes haunted—by the thought of the siblings left back home and the old friends who are “still in.”

IN MAY, TWO MONTHS AFTER the launch of Homeschool-

ers Anonymous, the ex-homeschoolers declared their first social-media war. Homeschool alumni converged on the Facebook page of the Home School Legal Defense Association, challenging what they see as the group’s record of defending abusive parents, covering up evidence of abuse, and lobbying for laws that remove state oversight of children’s education and well-being. A lengthy back-and-forth ensued as homeschool parents clashed with homeschool graduates. The debate has begun to shake the foundations of fundamentalist homeschooling.

Some homeschooling leaders have reacted just as the ex-homeschoolers expected—by suggesting that parents further tighten the reins. Kevin Swanson of the Christian Home Educators of Colorado warned listeners of his podcast, Generations with Vision, about “apostate homeschoolers” who were organizing online. Swanson, who helped bring debate clubs to Colorado, said he’d seen a “significant majority” of debate alumni turn out wrong, becoming “prima donnas” and “big shots.” “I’m not saying it’s wrong to do speech/debate,” Swanson told his listeners, “but I will say that some of the speech/debate can encourage sort of this proud, arrogant approach and an autonomous approach to philosophy—that truth is relative.”

For the ex-homeschoolers, defensive reactions are better than no reaction. They were surprised, however, when for the first time, the HSLDA felt forced to respond.

In July, the organization posted a new page about homeschooling and abuse on its website, complete with instructions on how to report suspected child abuse. It was an imperfect set of guidelines, suggesting observers address behaviors with parents before reporting them.

But it was a sign of how seriously the homeschooling establishment is taking the upstart challenge. Another sign: In October, HSLDA President Michael Smith contacted Rachel Coleman to request a meeting to discuss the ex-homeschoolers’ concerns.

Darren Jones, a staff attorney for HSLDA , declined a telephone interview for this story but responded by e-mail.

The stories of abuse shared on Homeschoolers Anonymous dismay and sicken him, Jones wrote, but need to be seen in a broader perspective. “Some of the grievances I am reading now against homeschooling seem to be merely differences of philosophy in child-rearing,” he wrote, “similar to the reactions that young adults in the 1960s had against their ‘square’ and too-conservative parents. But I don’t say that to discount actual abuse. I have read some of the

stories of abuse and neglect from homeschool graduates.

These people really suffered, and their stories turn my stomach. I have nothing but sympathy for them—and anger toward those who abused them.”

Still, Jones expressed the HSLDA’s long-held position that abuse cases are too rare to warrant new regulation.

“Although abuse does exist in the homeschooling community,” he wrote, “we believe that statistics show that it is much less prevalent than in society at large. This is one of the reasons that we have always opposed, and continue to oppose, expansion of monitoring of homeschoolers.”

Willie Deutsch, a Patrick Henry graduate who worked on HSLDA’s Parental Rights Amendment campaign, says the leadership is far more worried about the resistance than Jones acknowledges. “When you’re focused on protecting the right to homeschool,” he says, “it takes a while for it to get on their radar, but I think it’s getting on.”

There’s a growing sense among HSLDA staffers, he says, that “if people don’t wake up to the problem and continue to double down and defend the movement, we could be in for a lot of trouble down the road. It will be a general black eye.”

When they reject the certainties they were raised with, they leave behind an all-encompassing world: not only families and faith, but the moral code that guided all their choices.

As their movement spreads, the ex-homeschoolers are developing a reform agenda. Members are teaming on state-by-state research assessments of homeschooling policy, drafting policy papers, and grading the states on how well they protect homeschooled children. Participants jump in with their own expertise: Coleman’s academic research, Lauren’s legal skills, Doney’s and Ryan Stollar’s writing and editing skills. The ultimate goal is to build a lobbying counterforce to the HSLDA , challenging its message of parental rights and religious freedom with a voice that has long been absent from discussions of homeschooling: that of children.

When she was growing up, Elizabeth Esther remembers wondering, “Does anyone know what’s happening to us, does anyone care?” The question, she says, filled her with a tremendous loneliness that she can sense in the other exiles she’s met—and in those who haven’t made it out. “I know there are young women and men who, even if they can’t tell me, are depending on us to tell the stories, until they get free.” 

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 71

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Jezebel Grew Up The website used upstart humor to teach feminism to a generation.

Now it’s a media “influencer.” BY CLARE MALONE B

john cuneo

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he website Jezebel was born in 2007 out of the idea that the urban (or at least urbane) American woman was a ripe demographic, yearning to read about pop culture, fashion, and sex in a more skeptical way than the package provided by the

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traditional glossy women’s magazine. “In media, men are not a coherent sect,” Internet entrepreneur and Machiavellian overlord of Gawker Media Nick Denton told The New York Times in 2010.

“You go into a magazine store and see rows upon rows of women’s

magazines. [With women], there’s a much clearer collective.”

The mother ship blog of Denton’s empire, Gawker, had made its name in the aughts by obsessively covering the thenManhattan-centric media scene, turning its cool kids into Internet

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celebrities, their lives and movements chronicled, snarked at, and used as signifiers for Gotham’s ills and triumphs. Gawker Media expanded to include a consortium of blogs focused on everything from sports (Deadspin) to gadgets (Gizmodo). By 2010, Jezebel, with its puckish Internet prose on modern womanhood, was Denton’s highest generator of page views and a touchstone for the way feminism is practiced and relayed in the Internet-driven 21st century.

Denton hired Anna Holmes,

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 73

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an alum of Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, Glamour, and Star, and tasked her and a team of six with perfecting the alchemy of a highbrow, humorous evisceration of lowbrow indulgences like celebrity culture, held together by a pragmatic, womenare-too-smart-for-this sensibility.

Enemy No. 1 was the set of glossies Jezebel saw as not only pandering to but conditioning women for advertising profit. After examining the mirror for jiggling triceps, aubergine undereyes, and gelatinous back fat, where else could a woman turn in her hour of need to answer the question: How then shall we live?

Holmes recalled her animus toward magazines like Vogue as critical: “These outlets did not seem to realize (or accept) … that there was a vibrant, powerful, and, most importantly, diverse population of women who did not want to be spoken down or marketed to, and whose interests included, but extended far beyond, the superficial traumas of split ends and celebrity breakups. In my most ambitious moments, I saw the site as a battle of the Annas: Holmes vs. Wintour.”

THE SITE, WHILE FEMINIST, wasn’t the

Germaine Greer “cunt”-reclaiming type of space. Rather, it channeled the annoyances women had about the culture’s treatment of them into farcical running set pieces. “Cover Lies,” a recurring feature, annotated the front-page promises of magazines, “translating” headlines like “Shiny, Bouncy Hair: Easy, Speedy At-Home Blowout” to “Blow Money Blowdrying: Expensive Tools That’ll Save You No Time.” The site’s posts had the casual tone of a recap between friends after a crazy night out or a Gchat about a stupid thing they’d overheard. “I felt both liberated and obligated to ‘overshare,’” Moe Tkacik, one of the original Jezebel bloggers, has written of her time at the site. “[I copped] to all manner of offenses I would have elided in earlier jobs: unprotected sex, a history of eating disorders, a newfound dependence on attention-deficit-disorder drugs, belief in God, etc.”

The realm of feminism had hitherto been dominated by academics,

74 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

THE BOOK OF JEZEBEL: AN ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LADY THINGS EDITED BY ANNA HOLMES

Grand Central Publishing

radical writers to be admired, and women dressed like Stevie Nicks who talked about their inner goddess. Jezebel’s voice was that of a wry daughter inclined to make fun.

The site’s trademark debunking of digitally altered celebrity photos seeped into the popular culture, so that when in February of this year actress Jennifer Lawrence admitted upon the release of her Dior advertising campaign, “Of course it’s Photoshop—people don’t look like that,” it was hard not to think of Jezebel’s yeoman’s work in exposing the common practice. Like Nutella on whole-grain toast, fashion commentary drew readers to the site, where they also got a dose of stories on rape, harassment, and a host of other problems. Grappling with race was a particular mission of Holmes’s. A blogger could talk about the prejudice visible in fashion magazines’ treatment of black hair and liveblog a Baby Phat fashion show. Jezebel was large and contained multitudes.

That big-tent mentality helped telegraph to a wide swath of women how they should comport themselves—not in the ankles-crossed, shoulders-back ways of old but on sundry questions like how to respond to street harassment and, implicitly, how to not feel bad about an active, blunder-prone sex life. No matter what happened, the sometimes-hotheaded personae of Jezebel’s bloggers seemed to coalesce around the cool reasoning that being a feminist was the only sensible way to be and exist in the modern world.

The trickle-down Jezebel effect is something I know well. I started reading the site in college and spent many a computer-lab hour perusing it when I should have been writing papers. Search “Jezebel” in my Gmail history, and e-mail chains and chats abound—the first recorded instance is February 8, 2008, when I e-mailed one of my sisters a link to a post, “Hillary Clinton Has the Clap,” about how cable commentators wouldn’t stop discussing the presidential candidate’s predilection for pointing and clapping rhythmically at crowds of her supporters. Back then, I talked with both male and female friends

about Jezebel posts and the debates they fueled.

Proto-Jezebels like Sassy, the indie mag of the late 1980s and early 1990s, had aimed at teenage girls and had seen their reach confined to—well, teenage girls. Jezebel’s spillover from its Gawker partnership, coupled with its bloggers’ penchant for stoner humor and click-bait body talk (the saga of Tkacik’s struggle to remove a ten-day-old tampon is equal parts riveting and revolting) meant that the Jezebel audience reached well beyond its core. Comedy was Jezebel’s greatest asset in conveying the modern female experience to men, letting them in on the running joke of sexism’s absurdity but also sparking moments of “Have I done that?” introspection. Jezebel was an institutional voice of a generation long before Lena Dunham was a glint in HBO’s gimlet eye.

IF YOU REALLY WANT to make an

Internet moment last, take a screen shot or write a book about it. Holmes has done the latter in her editing of The Book of Jezebel, distilling the essence of the site down to 300 pages to create a self-proclaimed “encyclopedia of fact and opinion.” The alphabetized, often illustrated entries range from single pithy sentences to longish paragraphs, mixing historical trivia about famous women with politics and pop-culture references.

Taken as a whole, The Book of Jezebel is a taste guide and a rulebook of engagement; for every situation that might befall a woman, there is a proper, right-headed feminist response.

This is in no small way the essence of the site’s legacy, that assuredness—to be a Jezebel woman now means as much as it once did to be Helen Gurley Brown’s “Cosmo girl,” speaking to a certain worldview, albeit one that adheres to the experiences of a cabal of mostly Brooklyn-based writers in their twenties and thirties.

Jezebel in print is markedly more academic than when it appears on LCD screens—no doubt Holmes sees her audience as the blog’s most devoted readers, those with more pedagogical models of feminism. Or perhaps she thought print required gravitas. The Book of Jezebel pays

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attention to the modern history of color, class, and evolving sexual norms (“cisgender” ringing any bells?). Radical activist Angela Davis, Pam Grier, and Josephine Baker get write-ups, as do Salma Hayek for clever comedic roles turning hypersexualized Latina stereotypes on their head, and Margaret Cho for her struggles as an Asian woman held to standards of white beauty. Catherine Opie’s work photographing lesbian communities gets its due, along with countless performance artists celebrating the female form (and in the case of Marina Abramović, tormenting it).

Wickedly funny bits abound— defining marathons, for instance, as “26.2-mile road races that used to be badges of honor for serious athletes but are now excuses for everyone you know to exercise obsessively for several months and hit you up for money.” Homage is also paid to perma-­g irl favorites like BBC ’s Pride and Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables, anything Judy Blume, and an impressively clever “Periodic Table” (of the menstrual variety).

But if the clubby snark of the site’s founding DNA is present in The Book of Jezebel, so too is its more earnest mutation, a strain that strikes a discordant note with Jezebel’s original populist feminism. In response to the right’s restricting access to reproductive health services, certain definitions in the book hammer political associations in a way that’s more raw and angry than what I remember Jezebel to be. That anger can lead to a bigotry of its own kind; the entry on “anti-choice” paints all those against abortion as being anti–birth control and anti–HPV vaccination, an assumption that might hold true for a segment of outspoken activists but doesn’t do justice to the many who have moral uneasiness with the procedure. An occasional bullying of women who don’t fit the Jezebel mold also exists, which seems new and unbecoming. The book’s entry on Stephenie Meyer, Mormon author of the Twilight series, drips with condescension. Sofia Coppola is described as interested in “artfully draped, filmy costume design and hazy,

ill-framed film shots … tends also to be a bit hard on women in her films.”

From time to time on the website, too, women like comedian Olivia Munn, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and the woefully misguided Meghan McCain get similar treatment for personifying various affronts to feminism.

Jezebel’s increasing political sincerity is a result of its newfound place in the feminist establishment. It’s no longer the upstart site whose writers get in trouble for making un-PC comments. Since leaving Jezebel in 2010, Holmes has gone on to write for The New Yorker online, Time, and numerous other publications, and she recently landed a columnist position at The New York Times Book Review.

Jezebel, part of a collective voice that rises up in response to a range of issues affecting women, is read by “influencers,” and it begins many of their conversations in the media.

But if the modern feminist blogosphere, Jezebel included, has a flaw, it is a classic one—hubris. The snarky house voice that made the Internet sit up and pay attention is a double-edged sword. It can be flip and dismissive of certain views, making for posts like “Quitting Your Job to Be a Full-Time Mom Is Probably a Bad Idea,” written as if the answers to wrenching family decisions are foregone conclusions.

“Does it make sense that a person who derives a sense of self worth from earning a lot of money and wielding a lot of power would also get their jollies changing diapers?” asks Erin Gloria Ryan, undercutting the role of mothers while displaying an impressive knowledge of the interior lives of all successful people.

IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T agree with

much of the politics of Jezebel, but I no longer find myself looking to the site as I once did. Perhaps that’s because I’ve come to find its churn of outrage—sprinkled with such clever

Jezebel’s sometimes hot-headed bloggers coalesced around the cool reasoning that being a

FEMINIST

was the only sensible way to be.

Betty Boop gets an entry in The Book of Jezebel.

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wordplay as “whore pills”—predictable, akin to turning on MSNBC and watching the talking points. The patriarchy is as real as it ever was. But posts such as “Who’s Really to Blame for the Looming Government Shutdown? Sluts.” feel like pandering, as if the reader can’t appreciate that the politics of her uterus are not always the alpha and the omega of an issue.

Jezebel can never get back to its delightfully disruptive beginnings.

But could it go establishment in a way that more broadly represents the multitudes of women fed up with being told that in order to be loved they need to lose their mall jeans and their mall-size posteriors?

Plenty of friends of mine from college who once read Jezebel alongside me changed their names when they got married but continue to have pro-choice politics and no-nonsense views about equality in their relationships. Perhaps a healthy dollop of the secret sauce that first made Jezebel a sensation—frank humor and the unvarnished personal essay or two—would help bring them back.

Or maybe more straight reporting on women’s experiences would provide a less judgmental medium.

“The problem with sisterhood— the idea of a sunny alliance on the basis of a shared feminine fate—has always been that it deprives women of all individual taste, history, and temperament,” Michelle Dean wrote in The New Yorker online on the friendship between political theorist Hannah Arendt and writer Mary McCarthy. While I see wisdom in that idea of individualism, and find some of Jezebel’s political assertions reductive, another might say that women are in desperate need of other women to link arms with and protect one another in the fierce game of Red Rover we play against the world every day—that we need loud voices promoting feminism, news cycle after news cycle. That might be right. Still, a woman can balk and grimace at being told when and over what to summon her righteous anger. Our progress should be more like actual sisterhood: full contact, shout-filled—but with a spirit of camaraderie. 

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Bretton Woods Revisited

the U.S. economy as the residual consumer market for other nations’ exports; and U.S. recovery aid in the form of the Marshall Plan, which dwarfed the outlays of the World Bank.

In the early 1970s, the Bretton Woods system came crashing down when domestic inflation forced the United States to devalue its own currency and cease playing the hegemonic role. Monetary instability and slower growth followed. By the 1980s, laissezfaire was enjoying renewed prestige.

The Bretton Woods conference was held seven decades ago, but the enduring concerns that Keynes and White sought to address in 1944 are still with us, with no solution in sight.

One need only read today’s headlines reporting a prolonged slump following a financial collapse; failed austerity policies in Europe; speculative attacks on Asian currencies creating bubbles followed by crashes; and worries about the future of the dollar. The ills of the interwar period have recurred in different form. So it is an opportune moment to revisit Bretton Woods and to consider whether the aspiration of a true international money system was ever realistic, economically or politically, and to inquire, in the spirit of the architects of Bretton Woods, what a superior system might look like today.

John Maynard Keynes’s monetary strategy was awkward and utopian. Don’t underestimate what it accomplished. BY ROBERT KUTTNER B

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n July 22, 1944, as allied troops were racing across Normandy to liberate Paris, representatives of 44 nations meeting at the Mount Washington resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, created a financial and monetary system for the postwar era. It had taken three weeks of exhausting diplomacy. At the closing banquet, the assembled delegates rose and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The fellow in question was John Maynard Keynes, leader of the British delegation and intellectual inspiration of the Bretton Woods design.

Lord Keynes, the world’s most celebrated economist, was playing a tricky dual role. He had proposed a radical new monetary system to free the world from the deflationary pressures that had caused and prolonged the Great Depression. Bretton Woods, he hoped, would be the international anchor for the suite of domestic measures that came to be known as Keynesian—the use of public spending to cure depression and the regulation of financial markets to prevent downturns caused by failed private financial speculation.

Keynes was also hoping to restore Britain’s prewar position as a leading industrial and financial power. His two roles overlapped, but far from perfectly. The Americans shared the British desire to restore world growth, but not to preserve Britain’s empire or its protectionist system of preferential trade deals for nations that settled their accounts in pounds sterling.

Writing to a colleague after the conference ended, Keynes professed to be pleased. He wrote that in the new International Monetary Fund, “we have in truth got both in substance and in phrasing all that we could reasonably hope for.” The new World Bank, Keynes declared, offered “grand possibilities. … The Americans are virtually pledging themselves to

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quite gigantic untied loans for reconstruction and development.”

Yet in many respects, Bretton Woods was a rout for Keynes and the British. America today is often described as the sole surviving superpower, but in 1944 U.S. supremacy was towering. Germany and Japan were on the verge of ruin. Britain had gone massively into debt to prosecute the war, sacrificing more than a quarter of its national wealth. The Russians had lost tens of millions of soldiers and civilians. America was unscathed, its casualties were modest by comparison, it held most of the world’s financial reserves, and its industrial plant was mightier than ever.

Though Keynes inspired Bretton Woods, the Americans won the day.

As leverage, Keynes had only his own brilliance and a fast-fading appeal to Anglo-American wartime solidarity. In most matters, a rival design

by Keynes’s American counterpart, Harry Dexter White, prevailed.

White, a left-wing New Dealer serving as No. 2 man at the Treasury, shared Keynes’s basic views on money. But the White plan provided a far more modest fund and bank. Instead of the generous extension of wartime lendlease aid that Keynes was promoting, the British had to settle for an American loan, to be repaid with interest.

The Bretton Woods system was hailed as a vast improvement over both the rigid gold standard of pre-1914 and the monetary anarchy of the interwar period. For a quarter-­century, Bretton Woods undergirded a rare period of steady growth, full employment, and financial stability. But in many respects, the vaunted role of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bretton Woods rules specifying fixed exchange rates was a convenient mirage. The system’s true anchor was the United States—the U.S. dollar as de facto global currency;

THE STORY OF THE Bretton Woods

THE BATTLE OF BRETTON WOODS: JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, HARRY DEXTER WHITE, AND THE MAKING OF A NEW WORLD ORDER

BY BENN STEIL

Princeton University Press

meetings and related monetary debates is well-worked territory. It has been explored extensively in the technical economics literature, in political histories of the postwar period, and in biographies and accounts of Keynes and White, most notably in Robert Skidelsky’s magisterial three-volume work on Keynes. So why another book titled The Battle of Bretton Woods?

Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and editor of the scholarly journal International Finance, is far from a fan of Keynes. (An earlier book he co-authored, Money, Markets, and Sovereignty, a free-market polemic festooned with arcane scholarly digressions, won the Friedrich Hayek book prize.) As a narrator, Steil is deft, but as a researcher he relies heavily on other standard histories; reading him against Skidelsky and earlier

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works, one senses Steil using Skidelsky and others as a road map, reverse-­ engineering the footnotes, and adding his own ideological spin.

Where he attempts to break new ground, as in his discussion of Harry Dexter White’s role as sometime spy for the Soviets, Steil’s assertions go well beyond what is factually documented.

Steil writes as if he has uncovered major new insights about White’s role as an occasional purveyor of information to Soviet agents. But that story was comprehensively told, though not overstated, in Skidelsky. One juicy detail that Steil emphasizes is his contention that White sought to manipulate Roosevelt into hardening the U.S. diplomatic stance toward Japan in 1941, perhaps contributing to the Pearl Harbor attack. According to Steil, citing memoirs of a former Soviet spy, the Russians were eager to have the U.S. enter the war; White had met with a key Soviet agent and discussed the

Japanese threat to the USSR just before drafting a June memo urging a harder U.S. line toward Japan. A follow-up memo in November urged an even tougher stance. But White’s memos were never shown to the president. The American line toward Japan, as Steil admits in passing, hardened via other channels. This section, like others in the book, makes its arguments partly by inference and innuendo, adding disclaimers at several points but concluding, “In any case, White’s intervention was to have great consequence in the autumn.” But there is no evidence for Steil’s claim that White influenced America’s Japan policy. For more detail on this controversy, see Eric Rauchway’s excellent essay in the Times Literary Supplement, “How the Soviets Saved Capitalism.”

Two other patterns in Steil’s writing are troubling. Steil has substantive criticisms of Keynesian economics, but his strategy is to disparage Keynes

Bretton Woods delegates gathered for a photo with New Hampshire’s White Mountains in the background.

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largely with potshots. “Keynes frequently compounded the problems of the bad hands he was dealt by playing them inaptly,” he writes. “An astute, dedicated career diplomat would have played off the New York bankers, who were dangling loans in return for British opposition to the U.S. Treasury’s monetary reform plans, against FDR’s moneymen.” There is no evidence whatever that such a scheme would have had a prayer of success.

In a characteristically churlish jab, Steil writes that “faced with the choice between stroking his host and turning a phrase, [Keynes] typically chose the latter.” In fact, as other works on Keynes and Bretton Woods have documented, Keynes was masterful in assembling a broad coalition of the willing for his general design, ranging from skeptics at the Bank of England, the British Treasury, and the Board of Trade to supporters in the British Cabinet and among American liberals.

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 77

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78 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

Keynes had his run-ins with the Americans, of course, but that was largely a function of divergent postwar national interests, not inept diplomacy.

Steil is mostly correct when he reminds us that the institutions of the Bretton Woods system played a smaller role than is often asserted. But as a critic of Keynes and latter-day champion of the gold standard, Steil seriously understates what Bretton Woods did achieve. The combination of fixed exchange rates, controls on financial speculation, and plentiful funds for reconstruction and expansion anchored a period of high growth and broadly shared prosperity, just as Keynes had hoped. Steil is wishful in his contention that a restored gold standard might have done better.

He also argues that the tendency of the economy to fall into periodic selfreinforcing slumps, which produced the insights of Keynesian economics, was a unique circumstance of readily avoidable policy errors of the 1930s.

But subsequent events (such as the collapse of 2008) and the work of economists such as Hyman Minsky confirm Keynes’s insight that the propensity to boom and bust is an endemic problem of capitalism.

In The Battle of Bretton Woods, Steil often is cagey and oblique about his own views, which he has stated more openly elsewhere. In an interview with NPR , he said that “given modern computer technology, we could actually have an international monetary system that was privately organized—gold banks in which we all essentially had smart cards. And we could buy our cappuccinos with a gram of gold or so rather than using a national currency.” This blanket assertion ignores the deflationary role of gold (whose monetary function is arbitrarily limited by its supply) and the need for central banks to create liquidity in crises—something that a gold standard can’t do. In this book, however, he tends to put such arguments in the mouths of others, perhaps to preserve his own credibility.

Steil’s is one of a spate of recent books, such as Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man (on FDR and the New Deal) and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (on values and the white working class), in

which a right-wing intellectual purports to offer a fresh interpretation of an important event or public issue, but on close examination the revisionism turns out to be well-­narrated polemic.

The Battle of Bretton Woods, albeit skeptically? Three reasons: Steil is a nimble storyteller. His book is also a useful reminder that Bretton Woods, often depicted mainly as an effort to reinvent the world’s monetary system, was even more importantly an exercise in realpolitik.

The technical debates over the nuances of the global financial architecture were swamped by the larger struggle for postwar primacy between Britain and the U.S. Given their close wartime alliance, America’s treatment of the British was almost brutal, especially in light of the generous treatment of the defeated Germans only a few years later.

Finally, for the reader who is sympathetic to Keynes and the received wisdom about the postwar monetary system, Steil compels one to confront some hard questions.

The Keynes design for Bretton Woods was an awkward blending of both nationalistic and systemic goals.

But was either ever realistic? Steil says no, and he gets this part of the story about right. Keynes, who had begun writing about a postwar financial system in 1942, had an expansive vision for a global currency, which he named “bancor.” To prevent remedies to national financial crises from accumulating, he wanted debtor nations to be able to borrow money in the new currency virtually at will. He also wanted to put pressure on creditor nations to expand their economies rather than having a system that achieved balance by causing debtors to contract. Keynes’s proposed mechanism was a provision that fined chronic creditors and allowed other nations to “discriminate” (his word) against the exports of creditor nations. In the context of 1944, that could only mean the United States.

But in 1944, it was never in the cards for the United States to assent to a scheme that allowed discrimination against its exports. Nor were the Americans, who held 70 percent of the SO WHY READ

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world’s gold reserves and the sole viable currency, going to embrace a global currency. The U.S. version, which prevailed, included a much smaller World Bank and IMF with voting power based on paid-in capital, guaranteeing that the U.S. and its close allies would control both institutions.

Keynes’s proposal for $26 billion in new credit lines to be drawn upon at will was whittled down to a $5 billion fund, with tightly restricted access.

Once the dollar ceased being able to function as de facto global currency in the 1970s, however, the system became both shaky and deflationary, proving Keynes’s larger point.

The floating exchange rates that followed the collapse of Bretton Woods were an unstable substitute for fixed ones (fixed rates denominated in gold would have been even worse). The IMF and the World Bank mutated from instruments of expansion to enforcers of austerity. The speculative foreigncapital movements that re-emerged under laissez-faire auspices in the 1980s exacerbated the system’s boombust tendencies. The financial collapse of 2008 provided the exclamation point. The euro, the closest equivalent to a transnational currency (managed by a weak central bank) demonstrated the perils of international money. Rather than facilitating stable growth, the euro promoted speculative investments in Southern Europe during the boom years and then demanded austerity after the crash.

Given that Keynes’s design was somewhat utopian and the Bretton Woods system reflected a unique historical moment of American supremacy that is unlikely to be repeated, what is the best available monetary arrangement today? Steil is not persuasive when he argues that a variation on the classical 19th-century gold standard or a high-tech embellishment would be an improvement over either Bretton Woods or the messy non-system that we have today. One of Steil’s provocations that deserves an answer, however, is his claim that a money supply de-linked from gold is inherently unstable. Since 1971, the dollar has not been freely convertible to gold, but the dollar, faute de mieux, remains the system’s anchor currency. Other,

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Keynes

Lost in Benn Steil’s

REVISIONIST RETELLING

is Keynes’s other contribution: a system that constrained speculative capital and favored expansion.

more reputable economists have wrestled with this dilemma, and their remedies, while more plausible than a reversion to gold, are not reassuring.

Barry Eichengreen, an eminent economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests in his 2011 book Exorbitant Privilege that we face a prolonged era of muddle through. Eichengreen’s title, from an epithet coined by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France, reminds us that the United States, uniquely, gets to borrow abroad in its own currency. This exorbitant privilege serves this country but is a source of both instability and irritation to the rest of the world. America simultaneously borrows heavily from abroad and has a cheap money policy at home, which serves to export speculative capital movements to Asia and South America and allows the United States to maintain its living standards by borrowing.

Though some kind of global currency might be an improvement on

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the current monetary anarchy, it stands no more chance of serious diplomatic support today than it did in 1944. And the deflationary experience of the euro—a transnational currency for one continent—should give us pause. With a global currency not in the cards, Eichengreen thinks the best available option is a monetary system anchored by several currencies, with the euro, yen, and Chinese renminbi gradually joining the dollar as reserve currencies, their exchange rates jointly managed by national central bankers. We briefly had a hint of such a system in the 1980s, when feckless efforts emerged to coordinate exchange rates. The results were not tonic for growth and stability.

The problem is that nations have divergent interests, and each is tempted to game the system to its advantage. In the absence of a global government or currency, the late MIT economic historian Charles Kindleberger’s famous insight about the system’s need for a monetary “hegemon” remains apt. The system works best, Kindleberger observed, when it has a relatively benign monetary steward, as Britain was in the era of the classical (and deflationary) gold standard and the United States was in the more expansionary two decades after World War II. Nobody seems either willing or able to play that role today. Germany’s relentless export of austerity to the rest of Europe suggests a malign hegemon, and some would say U.S. policy today is only marginally better.

Steil is right to warn that the current mess is likely to continue unless and until the United States and China jointly come to appreciate “the consequences of muddling on.”

Bretton Woods as a plan for global money fell far short of what Keynes hoped. But what gets lost in Steil’s revisionist retelling is the other great contribution of Bretton Woods—a system that constrained speculative capital and created a bias in favor of economic expansion, quite apart from whether the anchor currency was the dollar or Keynes’s proposed bancor. Whatever combination of reserve currencies we end up with, that second lesson of Bretton Woods needs to be rediscovered— and today we are far from it. 

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Korean Lit Comes to America The country frets that it trails China and Japan, which have won literary Nobels. BY CRAIG FEHRMAN

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f, as an American, you visit a globalized megacity like Seoul, you’ll find plenty that feels familiar. Take chain bookstores: There’s bad lighting, as many smartphone accessories for sale as books, and sneaky customer habits.

“I check out the covers,” says Claire, a young South Korean who’s showing me around. “If I like one, I go back to my apartment and buy it online.”

Claire and I are ambling through the Kyobo Book Center in Seoul’s Gangnam district. Gangnam, of course, is the place PSY raps about in “Gangnam Style,” a song that sends up his country’s materialism and wealth. Gangnam is home to Samsung’s corporate headquarters, the city’s neon-­saturated nightlife, and outposts for the top international brands, all spread out on a grid of spacious boulevards. It’s the polished, cosmopolitan Korea.

What feels less familiar—more messy and alive—is the rest of the city.

The streets twist and taper in a neverending game of chicken, motorcycles versus taxis. The architecture seems to come in only two options, gray apartment tower and squat villa, with most of it dating to the period after the Korean War when Seoul grew so quickly it needed buildings finished more than it needed them pretty. The city’s oldest residents shuffle proudly along, smaller than their compatriots, a reminder of just how recently life in Korea was defined by deficit rather than surplus. Young people scurry to their hagwons, or afterschool tutoring centers. The billboards and ads chatter in a delightful Konglish. The phrase that sticks with me comes from Skin Food, a popular cosmetics chain: “Beauty food for urban sweety.”

In Gangnam, the signs are more precise. “Welcome to Gangnam, Global City.” Its branch of the Kyobo Book Center occupies the basement of a striking brick-and-glass skyscraper.

Claire, who, like many 20-something Koreans in Seoul, dresses in a style

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best described as sexed-up Harry Potter, points me to a section with table after table of test-prep books. “Korean parents make it so Korean students don’t even have time to read,” she says.

“They study English, mostly.”

Claire perfected her English while attending college in Canada—that’s also where she Westernized her name—and now she works at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, a government-run agency everyone calls LTI Korea. But as she shows me more of the bookstore, even it starts to feel strange and new. The employees wear lavish uniforms, a sort of flight-­attendant ensemble with indigo sweaters and sparkly gold ties. On the best-seller wall sits a big stack of copies of Lolita. For years, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel had languished in a prim Korean translation that relied on ambiguity and euphemism. Now a new edition has restored the original’s squirming detail, and Lolita is selling like crazy.

The country still pines for its own world-famous writer. No Korean has ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but Ko Un, a former Buddhist monk who’s the country’s best-known poet, has been rumored as a finalist in the last few years. Each October, in the days leading up to the announcement, reporters camp outside his house. Koreans care about the Nobel for two reasons: first, because they’re anxious about how the world perceives them; and second, because they’re so good at exporting other kinds of culture. The country pumps out syrupy K-pop songs, violent cinema, and soapy, smash-hit TV. One of its most popular shows in the last decade, Dae Jang Geum, is a drama set in the 16th century about a female physician to the king. According to one rumor I heard, the show counted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad among its superfans, and once, when Iran and South Korea were negotiating a meeting,

Bandi & Luni’s, a chain bookstore in Seoul whose name evokes the idea of studying by the light of the firefly

Ahmadinejad issued a demand that he meet the show’s heroine. She happened to be traveling, so South Korea suggested her popular co-star. Iran sent its vice president instead.

In 2006, The New Yorker published poetry by Ko Un, and translations of two younger writers, the experimental Kim Young-ha and the realist Shin Kyung-Sook, have done well here. Shin’s Please Look After Mom, a novel about a family’s guilt after its tradition-minded mother goes missing, even hit The New York Times best-seller list, prompting excited coverage in Korean newspapers. This fall, Dalkey Archive Press has teamed up with LTI Korea to publish the Library of Korean Literature, a series of 25 newly translated works and the most comprehensive introduction so far to

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Korean literature. Still, when it comes to American recognition, Korea has a ways to go. Charles Montgomery, a California native who’s now a professor in Seoul and the proprietor of a lively literary blog, puts it this way: “Imagine, we’re drinking martinis with a bunch of educated people, and I say, ‘Who is your favorite Japanese author?’ You can say one of ten names.

‘Who is your favorite French author?’

One of ten names.” Montgomery continues: “But ‘Who is your favorite Korean author?’ Everyone will run to refill their drinks.” standing in Gangnam today, that a few decades ago the district was mostly rice paddies and that South Korea was poor and devastated, a nation with IT’S EASY TO FORGET,

Kim Young-ha, author of dark, playful novels like I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

staggering depth to its grief. Korea sits between China and Japan, and throughout the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) it battled with both.

Still, it remained independent until 1910, when Japan finally colonized its neighbor. Over the next 35 years, the Japanese practiced a bloody and repressive imperialism. Then came the Korean War, in which millions of Koreans died or were cleaved from their families. Then came a series of dictators, notably General Park Chung Hee, who jump-started South Korea’s economy (before it was a tech giant, the country was a steel giant thanks to state-run plants like POSCO) even as he imprisoned and executed his own people.

Perhaps the hardest thing to comprehend is just how compressed all this was. In Korea, the kind of issues historians debate in monographs— capitalism versus communism, industry versus agriculture—can be debated whenever a family sits down to a meal, with each generation drawing on its own discrete experiences.

The other thing to remember is Korea’s tradition of collectivism.

Grounded in Confucianism, it elevates family, community, and society in what Bruce Cumings, in his excellent Korea’s Place in the Sun, calls “hierarchy without shame.” The conformity that flows from this is often overstated. On Seoul’s subway, which is so efficient it drives Western visitors to nearly combust with envy, I watched a surly, thoroughly pierced young man board a car to no reaction. But when, at the next stop, a mother with two small children got on, he sprang up and offered her his seat.

So much in modern Korea mixes fragmenting tragedy with centripetal tradition. That includes modern Korean literature. The country had always esteemed its poets and scholars. At Seoul’s Changdeokgung Palace, you can still find an artificial stream curving through trees and pavilions.

There, the Joseon kings and their courtiers would release a cup of wine into the water. Whoever it floated to had to drink it, then compose a poem on the spot. If he failed, he had to drink three more cups.

Under Japanese rule, however,

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Korea’s writers turned to novels and short stories, with Yi Kwang-su’s The Heartless (1917) generally seen as the key book. It’s a bit like Robinson Crusoe in this respect—tough to pin down as the earliest but easy to see as a turning point. Yi belonged to a wave of thinkers and writers who’d watched their country collapse. Now they wanted to embrace Western ideas like educational reform and marrying for love.

The Heartless dramatizes those ideas through a love triangle between a representative Korean man, a traditional woman, and a more Westernized woman. In other words, it barely dramatizes them at all, with Yi prioritizing his causes over his characters and imagery. The writers who followed chose new causes—some calling for further change, others lamenting what had been lost—but they joined Yi in producing a largely didactic body of literature. Ko Un, for example, has described one strain of his work as “anti-government, politically resistant poetry.” But consider his life: a teenager who watched the Korean War ravage his home, a dissident whom dictators

threw into prison and beat until his eardrum ruptured. How could he write poetry that was not political?

Today, an author like Kim Youngha can produce a dark and playful novel like I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, which has been translated into multiple languages. But he is an exception. Many writers are still exploring the country’s recent history,

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and most hew to the rules and habits of its literary system. “[It’s] absolutely Korean and absolutely Confucian,” says Charles Montgomery. “It’s a series of tests.” The biggest one is the battalion of new-author contests run

by Seoul’s newspapers and journals.

In South Korea, it’s virtually impossible to be an author—to publish—until you win one of these annual contests and make a formal debut. So would-be writers avoid genre lit (there’s little science fiction in this, the most wired of nations) and strive to satisfy the older critics who often judge the contests. “Once you’re past that step,” Montgomery says, “you’re in the same world of finding agents to represent you, and trying to find publishers, and working in a world where people don’t read that much anymore.”

The tests never really stop. Even established writers aim for bigger prizes like the Yi Sang Literary Award.

In 2004, Kim Youngha won several of these awards—“what they call his golden year,” Montgomery says. That’s perhaps the only way to transform one’s career in a small literary scene that’s getting smaller.

(Last year, even including e-books, the amount the average household spent on books hit its lowest point ever.) But it keeps authors focused on their own country. “Very few Korean writers,” Montgomery says, “have international success as a goal as they write or publish.”

YET THE REST OF KOREA frets that

its promotion and translation trail China’s and Japan’s, two countries that have won literary Nobels. “We can’t just wait for a translation expert to simply pop out,” a professor told The Korea Times in 2000. “We have to concentrate on training young talents into an elite force.”

82 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

Kim Seong-kon, president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, a government-run agency

That’s a pretty good description of what’s happening at LTI Korea.

The institute, which reports to South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, has an annual budget of 8.1 billion won (or more than $7 million). Its headquarters, a five-story building near the Han River, in a quieter part of Gangnam, feels less like a literary salon than a disciplined office.

In addition to its translation academy, LTI Korea provides generous grants and support staff to translators (that’s Claire’s job); pays for Korean authors to go on international book tours and take residencies at places like the University of Iowa; and runs booths at book fairs like the one in Frankfurt.

Kim Seong-kon is the president of LTI Korea, and on the same day I visit the Book Center, I interview him in his fifth-floor office.

He’s wearing a cardigan and a pinstriped suit, a snazzy blend of professor and preppy Korean.

It makes sense given that Kim has taught at universities around the world, including Harvard and Oxford. Now, as we sit across from each other in leather chairs, he tells me about his two-part plan for breaking Korea’s authors into the American market.

The first part centers on the authors. “We do have splendid writers,” Kim says. But many haven’t updated their techniques or subjects since the postcolonial period. “The scope of their literary world is so confined,” he says. Kim wants them to reconsider the reasons they write— not for a local audience but a global one. “They should constantly read other foreign writers,” he says, “so they can learn what the main issues and concerns are among famous international writers.” Korean literature needs more irony, more ambiguity, more experimentation. “You have to embrace contradictions,” Kim says.

Once Korean authors settle on

more universal themes—“universal” has become a buzzword at LTI Korea—they can add in some Korean flourishes. Kim checks off models like Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, even Dan Brown. “You can adopt similar themes that Dan Brown uses in his fiction,” he says, “but the background can be uniquely Korean—an ancient Korean kingdom, for example.”

In the middle of our interview, a photographer pops in. Kim quietly slides to the chair next to me—a visit from an American journalist, it seems, merits a photo op. When the photographer finishes, Kim turns to the second part of his plan. For years, LTI Korea relied on local critics to choose what would be translated and offered to Western publishers. “They do not care about the universality of Korean literature,” Kim says. Instead, they chose more traditional fiction.

“When we try to market that particular work overseas, it’s not working,” Kim says. “Foreign publishers do not like it, and foreign readers do not find it appealing.”

So Kim has created a new policy where foreign publishers are consulted first on what books LTI Korea will subsidize. A good example is the Library of Korean Literature and Dalkey Archive Press. After Dalkey’s publisher, John O’Brien, approached Kim, they worked together to select the books and cover the series’ estimated $750,000 cost. O’Brien traveled to Seoul and pushed for more experimental fiction—the sort of thing Kim wanted to encourage anyway. At the same time, Dalkey has promised to keep a range of titles in print, offering readers unprecedented access to Korea’s literary history. “You can see Korea’s literature from a bird’s-eye view,” Kim says.

The Library of Korean Literature is just the start. “We can have both the universality and also the uniquely Korean cultural heritage,” Kim says.

“It’s only a matter of time until a South Korean writer receives the Nobel Prize.”

THE LIBRARY OF KOREAN Literature’s

first ten titles appear this November, with the rest arriving next year.

Already, the initial batch offers that bird’s-eye view. A Western reader can

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start with The Soil, another novel by Yi Kwang-su first published as a serial in 1932. But there’s also When Adam Opens His Eyes (1990), the Jang Jungil novel that stirred up a scandal with its explicit descriptions of straight and gay sex. Yet reading the old next to the new, I was surprised to find myself thinking something Kim might not want to hear—namely, that the titles moving me the most were the ones most steeped in tradition.

Take Kim Won-il’s The House with a Sunken Courtyard (1989). The novel begins at the end of the Korean War when Gilnam, a young boy and standin for the author, whose family was ripped apart by the conflict, drops out of school to help his mother. “You are the eldest son in this family with no father,” she reminds him in one of the novel’s many laborious monologues.

Gilnam starts selling newspapers to help cover food and rent. In a house packed with 26 people, he squeezes into a single room with his mother and three siblings. Like other refugees, the family has moved so often the residences blur together. Gilnam remembers this one by its courtyard.

Kim’s characters tend to be archetypes—the drunken head of house, the military deserter on the lam, the kind-hearted prostitute servicing American soldiers. There’s not much plot beyond Gilnam selling newspapers in the city, where he always seems to run into those characters and their hard, lesson-filled lives. The prose can seem impossibly arid. (Here’s how Gilnam describes his father leaving: “My father defected to the North alone because he had lost contact with us. That turned out to be a permanent separation.”)

Yet The House with a Sunken Courtyard remains powerful because of its relentless detail. Gilnam’s mother sews for the prostitutes, but it doesn’t pay much. Her youngest son, born just as war breaks out, eats so little that “blue veins showed on his protruding belly.” During the winter, the family’s indoor drinking water freezes. They burn their kerosene lamp only when the mother faces a sewing deadline or the daughter needs to study.

Kim also reveals the house— a hanok, or traditional Korean

residence with a stately gateway and a carefully tiled roof—to be a fascinating and contradictory place. The current owner’s great-grandfather built it at the end of the Joseon dynasty; his father worked for the Japanese.

But now, Kim writes, “from between the tiles of the roof, weeds grew.” In the courtyard, the many renters must build an outdoor toilet and cook their meals. Yet when the owner’s haughty wife goes out, wearing expensive traditional outfits, the people pause and smile: “There goes our lady.” The novel may contain one of world literature’s more on-the-nose endings.

(The hanok is torn down and replaced by a “Western-style house.”) Still, it subtly critiques the residents’ fealty to their lady and animates a historical moment and mind-set in ways a work of nonfiction never could.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger contrast than the one between Kim and Lee Ki-ho, a younger writer whose spare style and absurd humor recall Donald Barthelme or Kurt Vonnegut.

In Lee’s haunting At Least We Can Apologize (2009), the narrator is an unnamed adult who’s been institutionalized by his family. Along with Si-bong, a mysterious character who crops up in many of Lee’s works (sort of his Kilgore Trout), he spends his days swallowing unnamed pills and packing up crate after crate of socks.

When the institution shuts down, the men find themselves free but aimless. Lee generates plenty of laughs through the pair’s simplicity, gullibility, and astounding deference. “He asked us if we had ever worked in a convenience store before,” the narrator says of someone interviewing them for a job.

“Si-bong and I answered at the same time: ‘We’ve done a lot of packing.’”

Eventually, the two turn to their other skill set. Each day at the institution, a pair of porn-addled guards beats them for fun. One day, the narrator realizes the guards will go easier on him when he invents and confesses to various crimes. “We always started with the confessions,” the narrator explains. “That was on account of our being beaten less for confessing than for not confessing.” Now, outside the institution, he and Si-bong launch a personal service apologizing for other

Reading List Charles Montgomery, Seoul-based chronicler of the literary scene at ktlit.com, recommends five titles to start:

I HAVE THE RIGHT TO DESTROY MYSELF

BY KIM YOUNG-HA

Art, angst, and suicide—Korean postmodern fiction

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people’s offenses. In their passivity, the characters and their clients seem to reflect the inflexibility of South Korea’s many hierarchies.

Or maybe not. Lee keeps his novel fable-ish and detail-free, and its satire will resonate anywhere that’s plagued by office drudgery and technological speedup. One of Lee’s running gags is that his two heroes repeatedly (and proudly) refer to themselves as “pillars of the institution,” and the first time I read it, I thought back to another monologue from The House with a Sunken Courtyard. There, Gilnam’s mother demands he become “the pillar of our family.” But Kim’s novel is about Korea. Lee’s novel could be about anywhere.

THE FIRST TIME CHARLES Montgom-

LONESOME YOU

BY PARK WAN-SUH

Brilliant stories of family and women in modern Korea

OUR TWISTED HERO

BY YI MUNYOL

Orwellian fable of power and corruption in a school

A DISTANT AND BEAUTIFUL PLACE

BY YANG KWI-JA

Short glimpses of the cost of modernization

THE WINGS

BY YI SANG

An expression of the psychological burden of colonialization

ery met Kim Young-ha, he asked the novelist why South Korea approached the rest of the literary world with its mix of diligent production and topdown control. “He pulled out his iPad, just because he wanted to show it off,” Montgomery says with a smile. Then Kim drew a diagram—a big block he labeled “the POSCO strategy,” after the company, and a bunch of smaller blocks streaming from it. “He said, ‘You have to understand that Korea has had all its success based on a model where we create something that is supported by the government and we pump out units,’” Montgomery recalls.

It’s true that South Korea’s industries are famous less for their innovation than for their ability to imitate and improve. (Even Samsung’s name, which means “three stars,” is a tight homage to Japan’s Mitsubishi, which means “three diamonds.”) It’s also true that, historically, Korea’s authors have loved and drawn on Western literature. Yi Kwang-su even wrote an essay titled “Tolstoy and I.” But I worry that Korea’s methodical desire for international success could one day endanger authors who deserve it. A novel like The House with a Sunken Courtyard may seem strange to Western readers, but there is power in that strangeness. South Korea and its people continue to change and fracture at a remarkable speed. That change can create much for us to learn.

It also creates much to write about. 

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 83

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Latinos’ experience in baseball through the decades

All Man! Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona David M. Earle

Jim Tully American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak Foreword by Ken Burns

Hemingway as viewed through the lens of men’s pulp magazines

Beyond the Call of Duty Army Flight Nursing in World War II Judith Barger

The first biography of the hard-boiled vagabond writer who rocked Hollywood during the Roaring Twenties

Military nursing pioneers tell their stories

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NATO before the Korean War April 1949–June 1950 Lawrence S. Kaplan A reexamination of the formative years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

White Coats Three Journeys through an American Medical School Jacqueline Marino Photographs by Tim Harrison A fascinating look at the human side of the transformation from student to doctor

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Our Secrets, Ourselves Dave Eggers, famously hopeful writer, is worried about our future. BY LEE KONSTANTINOU B

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n his 2007 novel Spook Country, William Gibson has one of his characters, a mysterious entrepreneur named Hubertus Bigend, explain to the book’s protagonist, investigative journalist Hollis Henry, that espionage and other intelligence work are “advertising turned inside out.” When Hollis asks what this cryptic observation implies, Bigend answers with the malevolent flourish of a Bond villain, “Secrets … are cool. … Secrets … are the very root of cool.”

“Secrets are cool” could be the tagline of Dave Eggers’s new novel, The Circle. At a moment when eavesdropping programs are exposed almost daily, the novel suggests that secrets might not be such a bad thing after all. As our lives become more public, we might need more privacy, not less.

Total transparency—when mixed with soft surveillance, Big Data analytic tools, and the gamification of everyday life—might become, in the words of one of the novel’s characters, “a totalitarian nightmare.”

Over the past decade or so, Eggers has written an astonishing range of books, from his best-selling metamemoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to What Is the What, the fictionalized autobiography of a Sudanese Lost Boy, to more journalistic efforts such as Zeitoun. In addition to being prolific, Eggers may be the most important literary entrepreneur in America today. He has helped create the journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; The Believer magazine; the quarterly DVD magazine Wholphin; the publishing house McSweeney’s Books (where he often self-publishes the hardback editions of his novels); 826 National, a network of tutoring centers for the underprivileged; and a number of nonprofit philanthropies. Across his writing and enterprises, even when he writes on dark subjects, Eggers finds a way to be relentlessly hopeful. (The

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Believer was originally supposed to be called The Optimist.)

With his new book, Eggers takes a surprisingly dark turn, joining literary novelists such as Jennifer Egan, Gary Shteyngart, Margaret Atwood, and Zadie Smith who have lately found the present too fast-paced, and disturbing, to depict using conventional realism. It’s worth noting that at the same time these writers have felt the need to explore dystopian alternate worlds, science-fiction writers such as Gibson and Neal Stephenson have turned their powerful forecast-trained imaginations on the present. We live in science-fictional times.

THE CIRCLE IS A near-future parable

about the rise of a seemingly benevolent corporation, which begins as a start-up that has invented a system for securely verifying online identities. The Circle aims to make the world’s information accessible and permanently upload all of life onto the cloud. It’s a satirical mash-up of Silicon Valley firms: modeled on a creative laboratory, like Google, obsessed with quantifying and ranking workers, like Zynga and Microsoft, and devoted to designing products that arouse cultish loyalty, like Apple. Eggers keeps key details just vague enough that I could never decide whether I was reading his version of cyberpunk or Kafka.

Our hero is Mae Holland, a 24-year-old former employee at a California public utility with a degree in psych and an aimless future until she gets a job at the Circle thanks to her high-powered executive best friend, Annie. Mae’s new position seems like a dream, a haven from the gross and decaying outer world. The company is so generous it extends health-care benefits to her father, who is suffering from multiple sclerosis.

Mostly, Mae remains a cipher, presumably to allow the reader to occupy

THE CIRCLE

BY DAVE EGGERS

Knopf

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her point of view. This can be hard to do, since Mae rarely evinces any critical awareness of just how creepy the Circle is. When she arrives at the company’s gorgeous Bay Area headquarters, she thinks, “It’s heaven.”

Eggers so lovingly describes the campus’s grounds—its fountains, picnic areas, tennis courts, sleekly designed workspaces—that we’re ready to accept Mae’s assessment. But the reader’s analysis of the Circle and Mae’s quickly part ways. When one of Mae’s co-workers says, “We want this to be a workplace, sure, but it should also be a humanplace,” Mae replies, “I love the ‘community first’ idea.”

Really, someone should probably tell her that she’s a character in a dystopian science-fiction novel.

As Mae moves up through the Circle’s ranks, she agrees to allow her every waking moment to be transmitted on the Internet. Her life becomes something like a persistent, socially networked reality TV show dedicated to the Circle’s inner workings. Though millions follow her movements—and harass her on a daily basis to secure her attention—she seems unperturbed, almost always remaining chipper. She becomes what David Foster Wallace in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” described as “a certain type of transcendent semihuman who” has taken “a vacation from human self-consciousness.”

Meanwhile, the Circle constantly rolls out new systems: incentivizing consumers’ self-disclosure and submission to monitoring; allowing politicians to make themselves trackable online by constituents; anticipating crime; and incorporating social media into every economic transaction.

Near the end of the novel, as the Circle begins to “close” or “complete” itself, finally bringing every facet of life online, it promises—or threatens—to replace democracy with “Demoxie,” a system under which Americans are required to register for a Circle account, and their online identities remain frozen until they participate in mandatory elections. “It’s democracy with your voice, and your moxie,” one of the company’s founders announces.

“And it’s coming soon.”

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 85

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In a way, Eggers finds himself having to confront the imperial optimism his enterprises have had a hand in promoting. No one scheme presented by the Circle seems problematic on its own. Indeed, many of the Circle’s projects are motivated by altruism.

They’re enterprises Eggers might himself have launched—might still launch—with help from well-meaning companies such as Google.

What makes The Circle so evocative —and at times frustrating—is Eggers’s difficulty pinpointing exactly why the cultish company is threatening. Whereas the protagonists of classic dystopias (think 1984’s Winston Smith) resist the dominant order, Mae is all too happy to help close the Circle. Indeed, it is Mae who suggests that Circle registration become legally mandated, apparently unaware that anyone might find this scheme troubling. Only Mae’s ex-boyfriend, Mercer, openly resists the Circle, insisting on his right to live outside its ambit. He pays a price, but his punishment is so overwrought, and Mae’s indifference to his suffering so unfeeling, that it’s hard to take his fate seriously as a warning.

Another major character falls into a coma after the Circle exposes her family secrets. “The cause of the coma was still a subject of some debate,” the narrator reports, “but most likely, it was caused by stress, or shock, or simple exhaustion.” Does Facebook threaten to put us into comas?

Sometimes, it seems as if the problem with the Circle’s surveillance is that the tools necessary for participatory democracy—a validated citizen database, electronic voting operations—are held in private hands.

That Mae previously worked for a public utility becomes an emblem of the alternative to the Circle’s ominous public-private partnership: No private company should have so much market power, Eggers sensibly argues.

At other times, the problem with the Circle is that it threatens our right to solitude and anonymity. Mae and Annie find themselves having conversations in bathroom stalls (the only moment when Mae is allowed to turn off the audio of her live video feed). In this instance, having a government

hold the power of the Circle would not offer much solace.

So which is it? Is the problem total transparency (an absence of secrets)?

Or control of information by a concentrated elite (an excess of secrets)?

Is the Circle an example of “ruthless capitalistic ambition” or “infocommunism” (one critic of the Circle levels both charges, almost in the same breath)? Eggers seems unsure.

His uncertainty is, I think, a symptom of the Internet being the greatest uncontrolled experiment upon humans in history. It is a system—a network of networks—that has in short order permeated every corner of our lives, colonizing our work, leisure time, and social relations. Writing dystopian science fiction might be the only way to express how little we know about the power this system will have over us, and our sense that its effects will be irreversible.

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political message is most haunting when it ties fears about the future of the Internet to more mundane concerns. We are already under heavy surveillance, Eggers reminds us. At the test-obsessed schools where we send our children, on the city streets where we amble—surveillance, quantification, and social ranking are the order of the day. Eggers’s prose is most affecting when he is describing Mae, sitting at her desk, staring at the multiple monitors she is responsible for tracking, doing office work:

THE CIRCLE ISN’T ENTIRELY suc-

cessful as a political parable, but it captures the sinister, funny ways contemporary capitalism and social media are turning us into quantified selves. At times, I wondered whether Eggers hasn’t created a loose allegory of the writer who is, against his anxious better judgment, obsessed with his Amazon sales rank. Might The Circle secretly be a follow-up memoir, a return to the concern with celebrity culture that dominated A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? How else to make sense of a passage like this, when Mercer berates Mae: “I just want to talk with you directly. Without you bringing in every other stranger in the world who might have an opinion about me. … You know how weird that is, that you, my friend and ex-girlfriend, gets her information about me from some random person who’s never met me?

And then I have to sit across from you and it’s like we’re looking at each other through this strange fog.” Mercer owns a business and is speaking about a bad review someone posted online. But it’s hard not to see Mercer’s complaint as commentary on Eggers’s ambivalence about the fame he has also courted.

Despite its flaws, The Circle’s

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Eggers’s uncertainty is, I think, a symptom of the Internet being the greatest uncontrolled experiment upon humans in history.

She pushed forward, signing up for a few hundred more Zing feeds, starting with a comment on each. She was soon at 2,012, and now she was really getting resistance. She posted 33 comments on a product-test site and rose to 2,009. She looked at her left wrist to see how her body was responding, and thrilled at the sight of her pulse-rate increasing. She was in command of all this and needed more. The total number of stats she was tracking was only 41. There was her aggregate customer service score, which was at 97. There was her last score, which was 99. There was the average of her pod, which was at 96. There was the number of queries handled that day thus far, 221, and the number of queries handled by that time yesterday, 219, and the number handled by her on average, 220, and by the pod’s other members: 198.

Eggers gets exactly right the cadence of sitting in front of a computer, completing myriad small tasks, winning banal electronic victories.

What is most oppressive about the world of the Circle is the unending war of position one must engage in, fighting against fellow workers to secure one’s job. More and more, white-collar careers demand not only that we accomplish tasks that are required of us but also that we socialize with colleagues, keep on the clock (or on campus) 24/7, and evince pleasure in our work. The future Eggers fears is already here. 

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 87

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Edible Jazz Soul food preserved African culture through dire times. Does a new history with recipes get it right? BY MICHAEL W. TWITTY B

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bout a year ago, I was going down the line at Sweetie Pie’s at the Mangrove, Ms. Robbie Montgomery’s culinary temple to all things soul in St. Louis. The macaroni and cheese gleamed, the fried chicken was crisper than Ms. Robbie’s outfits when she sang backup as an Ikette, and the peach cobbler was worthy of a last meal. Surveying the clientele, however, I wondered how much connection the crowd that packed the house had to the food at hand. My fellow bear brothers (stocky, hairy, gay, but unlike me almost all white) were in town from across the Midwest for their bar night. I was in St. Louis to present on the heritage of Missouri’s African American foodways during slavery.

I was hankering for a dialogue— minority to minority—on the meaning of food as hot-sauce bottles were passed around and the uninitiated suspiciously sniffed, then scarfed plates of collard greens. I suppressed my culinary-historian self long enough to finish the cobbler and let the crowd go unbothered by my burdensome genealogy of its meal.

Leave the job of beginner’s guide to Adrian Miller, whose Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time is just the book to move readers from one end of the line to the other without getting bogged down in chronology. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of books about the history and heritage of African American cuisines.

You might think the flowering should have occurred at least a generation or two ago. But this kind of food scholarship sprang up only recently, emerging as it did out of folklore and women’s studies. Even now, African Americans are still seen too often as a people with a casual culture, one that is not the product of thought so much as something

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that just sort of happened—a “cool” by nature that goes with the wind. In the infamous Carolus Linnaeus quotation, “Homo sapiens Afer [the African] … [is] ruled by caprice.”

Prominent among recent works have been Fred Opie’s 2008 Hog and Hominy, a streamlined treatment of the African American culinary experience. Opie’s important contribution is his chapter on the transitional foods of the Great Migration, when African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. Jessica Harris’s 2011 magnum opus, High on the Hog (apparently Sus scrofa domesticus is the unofficial totem of black food), invites readers on Harris’s life’s journey as a chronicler of African and African American food traditions, with each memory accompanied by essays on a different aspect of the story from 1619 to the present. Harris’s treatment contributes a sense of sweep, slightly raising the contextual bar of the discussion and touching on the global implications and flashpoints of the cuisine from its birth to maturity.

Miller’s Soul Food is ingenious: a tour of the average soul-food menu, resulting in the assembly of a classic meal—from fried chicken and greens to banana pudding and peach cobbler. Framing these essays are definitions, a brief history of soul food, and a summation of the state of soul. At its best, Soul Food speaks to the enduring mythological power of its staple

SOUL FOOD: THE SURPRISING STORY OF AN AMERICAN CUISINE, ONE PLATE AT A TIME

BY ADRIAN MILLER

The University of North Carolina Press

THE ORGANIZATION OF

Sus scrofa domesticus: Unofficial totem of black food?

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dishes. Miller states his mission thus: “I investigate each food item’s history; I also look at how food and culture intersect. … How does a food item get on the soul food plate? What does that item mean for African American culture and American culture?” Themes explored include “the centrality of pork, low social status of blacks, racial stigma, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and communal spirit.” Key to Miller’s thesis is the idea that “soul food was a response to racial dictates as African Americans asserted their humanity,” and he addresses concerns about the cuisine’s reputation as unhealthy, declaring he doesn’t write as someone who “resists change.”

Adrian Miller grew up in Colorado, the son of Southern migrants who loved to cook. His work with the Clinton administration took him to Washington, D.C., where he had his first African meal, and he has served on the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization promoting the study of Southern regional cuisine. In some chapters, Miller’s method of combining personal experiences, a sharp eye for soul food’s appearances in the popular media, and analysis of historic recipes mimics the sermonic tradition.

Many of his chapter-end recipes come from the Miller family collection, my favorite being “Chitlins Duran,” a dish inspired by his brother Duran’s recipe—one I will never make but admire for its authenticity, although I have never heard of chitlins being served with spaghetti before.

It’s not the presentation of the main meal that troubles me about Soul Food; it’s the appetizers and how the table is set. Where my

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f lo r i d a c e n t e r f o r i n s t r u c t i o n a l t e c h n o lo g y

expertise and interests and Miller’s depart is in soul’s beginning—in the ancient cooking of West and Central Africa, through the earliest AfroAtlantic encounters and into America’s colonial and antebellum periods.

Miller’s birthdate for soul food is 1619. Mine is thousands of years ago, when West and Central Africans were creating their own means of subsistence and utilizing creative strategies that would serve them well when many were exiled to temperate North America.

Miller steamrolls through a generic, accepted timeline. The sense of evolution of this cuisine inside of a cuisine, born inside a nation within a nation— the sense that beyond tropes of race and caste and class this is also an inherently ethnic tradition—gets lost. In his schema, Arab traders bring chickens to West Africa around the year 1000.

But chicken remains go back 500 years earlier, to ancient Jenne, a pre-Islamic city in what is now Mali. Despite Miller’s assertion that “we can’t say for certain that fried chicken existed in precolonial West Africa,” fried chicken is indeed referred to in West Africa during the slave trade—one reference dates to the 1730s. Sweet potatoes are not just eaten “primarily for the leaves” but are reported roasted at 17th-century markets on the Gold Coast. Dishes with greens were not born in the colonial South but were conceived in various ports where slave trader Jean Barbot found: “The rich often have the meat of pigs, goats, harts and cows as well as of a large number of fowls, from which they even make [stock for] cabbage soup, and several other stews which they have learned from the whites and passed on from one to another.

Malaguetta [pepper] is always prevalent in all their stews.

Later still Miller includes information about Mary Randolph of Tidewater, Virginia, Sarah Rutledge of Charleston, South Carolina, and Lettice Bryan of Kentucky, three privileged white American cookbook writers of the 19th century, about

Sweet potatoes were reported roasted at 17thcentury markets along Africa’s Gold Coast.

I wouldn’t advocate for culinary justice if African American heritage foods weren’t constantly remixed by white hipster chefs and others as pan“Southern” cuisine.

whom we inevitably learn more than the black women who taught and raised them and the black girls who played with them. Here is where I start to grapple with the work. To Miller, “master” set the table; indeed, had a “viselike grip.” But the distinction between Southern food and soul food is not just one of race and caste and economic class. These categories, while essential, take a backseat to ecological constraints and historical happenstance of trans-Atlantic mercantilism. The ethnicity of arriving enslaved Africans, whom they worked alongside and for, what environment they came from and arrived into, are very much a part of what makes soul food unique. Miller brings out excellent archival sources but doesn’t use them to their fullest potential. What the reader misses is the deeper notion that exiled Africans were sophisticated agents in remolding their own culinary traditions, as well as those acquired by assimilation and coercion.

SOUL WAS A NEGOTIATION based on

centuries of insider-outsider dialogue, with Africans translating ingredients, icons, and understandings into a structure at once familiar and almost

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impenetrable. There are layers that you have to go under, metaphysical beliefs at work. Black-eyed peas are not just black-eyed peas. They were put on people’s graves, thrown into paths for good luck to make women fertile. Each food had its proverbs, songs, spells, and lore. How do we tell this story and not forget that enslaved people and people under duress kept a large part of it to themselves? We can’t put a name or label on that. But we know it happened.

The story of soul is not only about leftovers or economic expediency, and soul food is no ailing cultural bastard.

It is the cuisine of Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” edible jazz, the most surreptitious means of preserving African culture. Thinking back to the St. Louis restaurant, Miller’s premise that soul food is unknown isn’t exactly honest or realistic. Soul-food restaurants routinely bring crowds of non–African Americans in for a bite. I wouldn’t advocate for culinary justice if African American heritage foods were not being constantly remixed by white hipster chefs and others and re-spun as pan-“Southern” cuisine brought into the 21st century.

Still, “soul food” when not cooked by soul hands is often labeled “Southern style,” and the salty, spicy, sweet, greasy element that Miller posits as soul taste gets amplified, not toned down. The same principle makes Yum Brands rich through Kentucky Fried Chicken, the worldwide leader in watered down, mass-marketed soul.

The world may not call it soul, but we know that the “Colonel” is perpetually playing Jolson.

Miller’s concluding chapter, which brings out multiple and conflicting definitions and notions of soul food, is probably where he and I agree the most. I am satisfied with the idea that soul food is, according to one definition, “love.” Miller has written his own love note to soul food. For me, studying and re-enacting the birth pangs of soul food is also a labor of love, but my primary goal is to show the genius machinations of a supposedly powerless people in dire circumstances and the skill with which they thwarted them. Soul is as much about the cerebral as it is about comfort. 

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Accidents Will Happen

The plutonium cores radiated so much heat that they’d melt the explosive lenses if left in a bomb for too long. And the polonium initiators inside the cores had to be replaced every few months.

With his book on nuclear weapons, Eric Schlosser proves himself a leading bard of technological folly. BY KONSTANTIN KAKAES B

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t took decades after the invention of nuclear weapons for today’s taboos against them to take hold.

Some witnesses to the first nuclear explosions apprehended their horror immediately. Some planners, civilian and military, fell in love. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. built nuclear reactors in Iran, Pakistan, and dozens of other countries; in the 1960s and 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission made plans to use nuclear explosions to dig a canal in Nicaragua and carve a pass-through in the California mountains for Interstate 40. Influential strategists like Herman Kahn were enthralled by the potential of nuclear weapons to reshape the world.

On Thermo­nuclear War, Kahn’s bestknown book, contains scenarios not only for how nuclear weapons would work in World War III but also in World Wars IV, V, VI, and VII. All too often, the history of nuclear weapons has been told as a history of those schemes, a history of plans for wars that never took place. The genesis of nuclear weapons has also been a locus of fascination, for good reason.

But these two threads leave out a crucial history of the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, which, like any other technological artifact, differed in reality from the idealization. Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control fills that gap, telling of the weapons in their silos and in bombers. (Schlosser says little about submarines, the third part of the so-called nuclear triad.)

Schlosser does not dwell on the nuclear weapons the United States has blown up in 1,054 tests since 1945, but instead focuses on the bombs that almost went off but didn’t. “The need for a nuclear weapon to be safe and the need for it to be reliable were often in conflict. A safety mechanism that made a bomb less likely to explode during an accident could also, during wartime, render it more likely to be a

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dud,” he explains. That conflict is the central one in Command and Control. As Schlosser acknowledges, no American bomb ever exploded accidentally. But he tells us just how close we came. The repeat narrow escapes that Schlosser enumerates occurred because military planners took reckless chances for decades.

Louis Slotin, one of the designers of the first atomic bomb, was lowering a beryllium shell—which reflected neutrons and so brought plutonium closer to a chain reaction—over a sphere of plutonium.

The screwdriver he was using to hold the beryllium slipped, “the core went supercritical, and a blue flash filled the room.” Slotin’s parents were flown in to say goodbye, and his death throes were videotaped, a mournful lesson in what radiation can do to a man. As Schlosser notes, thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki died in similar agony.

Schlosser’s story extends from the mid-1940s to the end of the Cold War. He documents just how slow and contingent—and perhaps avoidable— the buildup of nuclear weapons was.

He talks about an April 1947 meeting in the White House, in which Harry Truman discusses the top-secret size of America’s available nuclear arsenal: one. The weapons still under development were haphazard devices: ON MAY 21, 1946,

The Mark 3 bomb had a number of inherent shortcomings. It was a handmade, complicated, delicate thing with a brief shelf life. The electrical system was powered by a car battery, which had to be charged for three days before being put into the bomb. The battery could be recharged twice inside the Mark 3, but had to be replaced within a week—and to change the battery, you had to take apart the whole weapon.

COMMAND AND CONTROL: NUCLEAR WEAPONS, THE DAMASCUS ACCIDENT, AND THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY

BY ERIC SCHLOSSER

The Penguin Press

Early nuclear weapons were particularly vulnerable to accidental detonation. To mitigate that risk, nuclear cores—the plutonium or uranium that would undergo nuclear fission, releasing tremendous amounts of energy— were generally kept separate from the explosives that would detonate them until the last possible moment.

Nuclear cores are no longer stored separately in any of the 2,150 or so nuclear warheads the United States currently has deployed. But today’s weapons are safer than those of the 1950s. The technology to make them safer—­better electronic detonators and more stable explosives, less vulnerable to accidental detonation—existed for many years before weapons designers at the Sandia National Laboratory could succeed in integrating them into weapons. Military planners used risky techniques for decades, willing to chance an accidental detonation rather than make it harder for a bomb to go off when it was supposed to.

Schlosser notes that one government study found that “at least 1,200 nuclear weapons had been involved in ‘significant’ incidents and accidents between 1950 and March 1968.” Some of the accidents were minor. Schlosser takes the reader on a well-paced tour of the more important ones: B-52 crashes in Kentucky in 1959, California in 1961, and near Palomares, Spain, in 1966. Another crash blanketed the ice outside Thule Air Force Base in Greenland with radioactivity in 1968. In an aerial refueling that went wrong in 1961, near Goldsboro, North Carolina, as the B-52 spun around, “centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit,” which triggered the arming mechanism for the bombs: The barometric switches closed.

The timer ran out, activating the high-voltage thermal batteries.

The bomb hit the ground, and the piezoelectric crystals inside the

nose crushed. They sent a firing signal. But the weapon didn’t detonate. Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/ safe switch in the cockpit.

But for that one switch, a large hydrogen bomb would have exploded in North Carolina, blanketing Washington, D.C., and much of the Eastern Seaboard with radioactive fallout.

Schlosser’s eye for the surreal and for details keeps the large number of nuclear accidents he covers from feeling repetitive. He uses one accident in particular to discuss the ongoing technical and cultural questions surrounding nuclear weapons and their launch systems. In the early morning hours of September 19, 1980, a Titan II missile exploded in its silo outside Damascus, Arkansas, after a dropped spanner led to an oxidizer leak. As early as 1967, the Pentagon had announced that the Titan II missile in question “was no longer needed and would be decommissioned.”

Bureaucratic infighting, not necessity, was what had kept the temperamental missile in service for years. Schlosser chronicles the infighting with sympathy and brio, admirably restraining any stridency, which, though merited, would undercut his argument.

n at i o n a l n u c l e a r s e c u r i t y a d m i n i s t r at i o n / n e va d a s i t e o f f i c e

WHILE THE TURN TOWARD nuclear

weapons might appear to be a break with Schlosser’s past work on fast food, agriculture, and illegal drugs, a thematic unity runs through his writing.

In all his books, vivid individuals in a particular time and place create a new technology. As those technologies grow to industrial scale, they become forces unto themselves—with a streak of cruelty. Meatpacking plants ruin the bodies of workers on their assembly line.

Toxic chemicals leaking from missiles fill repairmen’s lungs with fluid.

Jeff Kennedy, one of the technicians on the refueling team for the Titan II, is a hero of Schlosser’s story. Kennedy knows the Titan II inside out. But prior to the explosion, as dangerous pressure builds inside it, he’s forced to watch while distant supervisors dither; he ends up blown 150 feet into the Arkansas air. As Schlosser’s examples illustrate, the questions of when to

trust the man in the field and when to trust centralized control are not simple. How, Schlosser asks, did a blast that powerful not set off the nuclear warhead atop the rocket? The explosion was a technological and human failure. The warhead’s durability was a technological and human success.

Another Schlosser hero, Bob Peurifoy, rises through the ranks at the Sandia National Laboratory, eventually becoming a vice president of the lab, which by then was part of the

An underground test in Nevada in 1970 caused a fissure, raising an unexpected plume of radioactive dust.

Department of Energy. Throughout his career, Peurifoy agitates for greater safety measures. He lobbies the military to put systems into bombs that would require a unique sequence of electrical pulses to explode the bomb, instead of a constant current that could be set off by accident. Until Peurifoy succeeds, “the lock had been placed on the bomber, not inside the bombs—and a stolen weapon could still be detonated with a simple DC signal.”

But a technological fix is not in

NOV/DEC 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 93

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itself sufficient. Schlosser recounts an anecdote from the 1970s: “[When] a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile,” the Air Force, in an act of defiance, chose the same combination for every missile: 00000000. As Schlosser notes, “Denying the safety problems only made them worse.” To this day, the Navy has resisted replacing the volatile explosives in the warheads of some of its submarine-based missiles with more stable alternatives.

The lies and obfuscations of the Air Force about nuclear accidents over the years reveal a military leadership smugly confident in its ability to determine, in secret, what is best for the nation. They also reveal alarming gaps in the leadership’s strategic approach.

Schlosser quotes General William Odom describing his reaction when he was placed in charge of the Strategic Air Command and first learned details of the SIOP, or “Single Integrated Operational Plan”—the master plan for how America’s nuclear arsenal would be used: “It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context. I concluded that the United States had surrendered political control over nuclear weapons to a deterministic theory of war.”

The great flaw of Command and Control is that it more or less ends in the early 1980s, shortly after Peurifoy boards a plane to Arkansas, joining the rest of Schlosser’s sweeping history with the close narrative of the Damascus accident. Schlosser makes brief mention of Russia’s Perimeter Doomsday Machine (built between 1974 and 1985 and chronicled at length by David Hoffman in The Dead Hand), which was meant to automatically launch nuclear weapons in response to an American strike but whose deterrent value was (as in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) wasted because it was kept secret.

Schlosser touches on the 2007 scandal in which six nuclear-armed cruise missiles were accidentally flown from North Dakota to Louisiana on a B-52 (the scandal wasn’t so much the flight as the fact that weapons went missing for a day and a half before anybody noticed) and makes

passing mention of a 2010 incident in which one-tenth of America’s landbased nuclear weapons went off-line for almost an hour. The Air Force says that no hacking occurred; the incident was the result of a “circuit card improperly installed in one of the computers during routine maintenance.” This could be true. But Schlosser’s documentation of dishonesty on the Air Force’s part, during the Damascus accident and many others, raises the question—which he does not address—if the missiles had been hacked, would the Air Force admit it?

Schlosser glances at the $180 billion in planned spending in the next decade on America’s existing stockpile. But he fails to break down the $180 billion in any meaningful way.

For instance, the Air Force is planning to spend a billion dollars on a tail kit that would make the B61 bomb more accurate, a pursuit at odds with highlevel Pentagon policy that nuclear weapons should be made less central to “U.S. national security strategy.” have changed.

The military realized there was no point in destroying everything and gave up planning to do so. Schlosser’s story of how nuclear safety was gradually improved by gadflies like Peurifoy is reassuring. It shows that insiders committed to the civic good can bring the national-security establishment back from the brink, even after many billions of dollars are wasted.

But Schlosser also reminds us that secrecy can lead to, and further distort, design trade-offs in the nascent phases of a young technology. Moreover, the assumption that key weapons are under civilian control—to be given to the military only in event of an attack—can become a legal fiction, not so unlike the legal fictions surrounding National Security Agency surveillance that we are learning about today. Zeal in the search for tactical advantage remains dicey. At the height of the Cold War, the Army purchased 2,100 nuclear bazookas, each likely to kill any soldier who used one even if it worked as designed. Are the backdoor vulnerabilities the NSA has reportedly inserted into Internet security the modern-day analogue of OF COURSE, TIMES

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those bazookas, unable to discriminate between friend and foe?

The last American nuclear test took place early in the morning of September 23, 1992, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. That final test, called “Divider,” was about the same size as Little Boy, the bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima. Since 1992, the U.S. has followed a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing; it has signed, but not ratified, a treaty banning nuclear tests. Despite the decades without testing, the U.S. maintains, at great cost, around 5,000 nuclear warheads (of which slightly under half are deployed). Of these, a few hundred are at bases in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey, according to the lobby group Federation of American Scientists. Five hundred sit atop missiles in underground silos scattered across Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, and 1,152 are in submarines based in Georgia and Washington state (about 20 miles

In all of Schlosser’s books, as technologies grow to scale they become forces unto themselves— with a streak of cruelty.

from Seattle). About 300 warheads are assigned to B-2 and B-52 bombers based in North Dakota and Missouri.

The bulk of the remainder—the largest single concentrations of nuclear weapons in the country—are stockpiled underground at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. In 2010, the Air Force reprimanded the squadron in charge of more than 2,000 nuclear weapons at Kirtland for reasons it has yet to make public.

The Department of Energy, which bears official responsibility for the maintenance of nuclear-weapons technology, has built several of the world’s most powerful supercomputers in order to simulate nuclear explosions and obviate the need for testing.

Robert Meisner, a Department of Energy official in charge of these simulations, says that computer simulation is joining experiment and theory as a “third critical leg of science.”

The Energy Department’s computers are indeed more powerful than they

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were a generation ago. They are better able to simulate the dynamics of a nuclear explosion, when a bomb’s conventional explosives are set off, squeezing its plutonium core until its density provokes a chain reaction. But more powerful parallel processors cannot model the unknown shortcomings of an Air Force squadron at Kirtland.

“The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible,” Schlosser writes. Throwing increased computing power at that fallibility does not eliminate it. Without testing, we can’t be certain that computer programs accurately reflect the physical world.

The strategic coherence of nuclear deterrence was oversold even at the Cold War’s height. Its virtues in the present are even less apparent. The U.S. has no great need for weapons it never intends to use; any enemy who cannot be deterred by America’s overwhelming conventional military might is simply not deterrable. Nonetheless, if America is to have nuclear weapons as anything other than totemic bulwarks against a narrative of national decline, it is inevitable that they must one day again be tested. In this, hawks like Senator Mike Lee of Utah who wish to retain America’s arsenal and also the right to test it are at least consistent.

In a geopolitical climate in which America is seeking to persuade Iran not to develop nuclear weapons and to contain North Korea’s small nuclear program, testing a nuclear weapon after such a long hiatus would be provocative and destabilizing. In a June speech in Berlin, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his goal of reducing America’s nuclear arsenal to zero.

But that goal seems unlikely to be met. The de facto compromise we are left with—a large, aging arsenal that hasn’t been tested for decades and likely won’t be for many more—is deeply flawed. The claims of some in the Department of Energy to be able to assure reliability through simulation alone are simply not borne out by the experience of any other complex technological artifact. America’s nuclear weapons are now principally a threat, not to Russia or China, not to Iran or North Korea, but to ourselves. 

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Fifty Shades of Purple

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

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he second week in October, while Tea Partiers in Congress were tanking the GOP’s approval numbers with a government shutdown, the Republican National Committee traveled to Los Angeles to make an announcement: The party was investing $10 million to woo Latino voters in California and 16 other states. This might seem newsworthy, considering that Republicans spent much of the 2012 campaign repelling Latinos. But the event received little attention, though the Los Angeles Times did note that it featured “roast beef and cheese enchiladas.” (Ick.) The notion of Republicans competing for Latino votes in California seems ridiculous; ever since Governor Pete Wilson led an effort in 1994 to keep undocumented immigrants from accessing state services, Latinos have viewed the party as toxic.

With Republicans in Washington blocking immigration reform and Medicaid expansion, the divide between Republicans and Latinos has only grown. It will take more than $10 million to bridge it.

But the Latino outreach is part of a larger scheme that emerged from party leaders’ post-2012 soul searching: a road map to build Republican infrastructure and mobilize voters in all 50 states.

If the concept sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 2005, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean unveiled a 50-state strategy, putting organizers and fundraisers into provinces

his party had ignored, and lost, for decades. Conventional wisdom said it was a nutty idea. Why should Democrats waste money in Utah and Mississippi? Indeed, the party would abandon the plan as soon as Dean left his post in 2009.

But the strategy paid dividends in 2008, when Democrats carried formerly red states like North Carolina, Virginia, and Indiana.

The Democrats’ current version of red-state outreach is more narrowly focused. Battleground Texas, an initiative launched in February by ex-Obama field staffers, hopes to spend $10 million a year registering, engaging, and persuading voters in a state that Republicans have come to see as their birthright. It’s an effort funded by individual donors, not by the party. But Texas shows why such outreach could make a difference for Democrats elsewhere. Voters who are disengaged, in Texas and the rest of the country, tend to be low-income, young, and nonwhite—all groups that lean liberal on social and economic issues.

To win those voters, Democrats don’t have to change their message; they have to motivate people to go to the polls. In states like Texas, Republicans always win— they’ve carried 100 statewide elections in a row—and Democrats hardly put up a fight. State Senator Wendy Davis, who had liberals across the country cheering for her filibuster of an anti-abortion bill last summer, is generating excitement over her gubernatorial bid in 2014, but it’s doubtful her

party will find a full slate of statewide candidates to run with her.

If Democrats had been organized and invested in the state over the past decade, Davis might be the favorite; instead, she’s a long shot.

For Republicans, the benefits of contesting blue states are less obvious but could be more significant. If the GOP gets serious about wooing Latinos and speaking to blue-state voters, it can’t stick with its current message of rightwing radicalism, which has driven away moderates and minorities.

Given the country’s demographic and ideological drift leftward, Tea Party purity is a losing long-term tactic. A 50-state strategy that nudges the party toward the center could prevent the GOP from fading into irrelevance.

The real winner, if the parties started competing for votes across the map, wouldn’t be Republicans or Democrats; it would be small-d democracy. Voter turnout would surely rise. When only one party is courting them, voters disconnect. In 2012 battleground states, where both parties poured resources into voter outreach and engagement, turnout was high.

In Ohio, 65 percent of the votingeligible population cast a ballot; in Virginia, 66 percent did; and in Colorado, a whopping 70 percent turned out. But one-party states like Texas (50 percent) and California (55 percent) were both below the national average.

Voters can’t hold elected officials accountable if their party affiliation virtually assures their

re-election. A weak opposition party can’t serve as an effective watchdog on those in power, either.

Politicians in unchallenged parties also tend to move to ideological extremes. When general elections are largely decided in party primaries, as they are in Illinois and Texas, small numbers of highly motivated voters can carry the day; that’s how the Tea Party took over the Republican Party in states like Texas. It’s what elected Ted Cruz and what emboldened him to orchestrate an unpopular government shutdown without having to worry about his own political future. In the strange world that noncompetitive politics has wrought, Cruz is doing precisely what Republican primary voters back home elected him to do.

Neither party, of course, will pursue a 50-state strategy because it thinks such a plan is good for democracy. But we’re at a juncture when both believe they can benefit from talking to voters they’ve long ignored. If the parties embraced 50-state strategies, rather than putting most of their resources into a handful of battlegrounds like Ohio and Florida, who would gain the most by 2020 or 2030?

It’s impossible to say. Democrats would win over a lot of people simply by giving them a reason to vote. Republicans might acquire even more converts by revising their message to appeal to Latinos and other voters who have written them off. One thing’s for sure, though: American politics would be a lot healthier. 

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 6. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published bi-monthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1710 Rhode Island Ave., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2013 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

96 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2013

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

Photo by Michael Campbell

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f you had $50,000 or more to invest in the privatization of public education, you could have been welcome at a recent meeting in Philadelphia of self-described school reformers. But if you’re an educator or parent interested in strengthening public education, you’d be out of luck, because that closed-door meeting was limited to deep-pocketed donors and investors—and it wasn’t meant to discuss how to restore funding to help children in Philadelphia’s resource-starved public schools, or to address the educational and financial failures of the city’s charter schools.

Far from it—it focused instead on “education investment strategies” and how to “support rapid charter school growth.”

And in Boston recently, Jeb Bush convened the annual summit of his Foundation for Excellence in Education, which an independent monitor calls “a dating service for corporations selling educational products—including virtual schools—to school chiefs responsible for making policies and cutting the checks.”

These meetings and their promoters press for school vouchers, franchise charter schools, cybereducation, testing and mass school closures, even though these sanction- and market-based reforms haven’t moved the needle—not in the right direction, at least. Dissatisfaction with these approaches has led many parents, educators and policymakers to look for alternatives that are both public and aimed at helping all children succeed. That’s why the American Federation of Teachers and numerous partners are joining together to reclaim the promise of public education to help all kids be ready for a good future.

That was the focus of a very different meeting in Los Angeles in early October.

More than 500 teachers union members and leaders, students, parents, community organizers, civil rights advocates and faith leaders gathered to solidify our joint commitment to fight for high-quality public schools for all students. The meeting, sponsored by the AFT with the National Oppor-

tunity to Learn Campaign, the National Education Association, and Communities for Public Education Reform, was the culmination of a dozen nationwide community town hall gatherings that identified a set of common principles rooted in the need for public involvement—parents, teachers and the greater community—in our public schools and public school system.

Weingarten presenting the 2013 AFT Prize for Solution-Driven Unionism.

These principles also lay out solutions geared to providing all students access to the great education they deserve. This means ensuring equity—that those with less get more to level the playing field. The principles seek to ensure that students are respected and their teachers are well-prepared and supported; that teachers can teach a rigorous, engaging curriculum; that testing is used as a tool, not a weapon; that kids have access to wraparound services to meet their social, emotional and health needs; that neighborhood public schools are safe and welcoming; and that children have many instructional opportunities and multiple pathways from pre-K to high school graduation.

These discordant sets of meetings epitomize the divide in American education.

On one side are those who seek to dismantle and privatize public education and who see it as a lucrative market. It includes those who stand silently as deep cuts devastate public schools, and then argue that public education is failing.

On the other side are those who believe

in the promise of public education as a civil right and a gateway to opportunity. It is exemplified by the highly successful New York Performance Standards Consortium, 39 diverse public high schools that have won waivers from four of New York’s five standardized high school exams required for graduation, with great results, including that 85 percent of graduates attend

Photo: Michael Campbell

Two Visions

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We must reclaim the promise of public education without further detours, distractions and delays.

colleges rated competitive or better. This side includes the parents and educators demanding an end to the devastating cuts that have had disastrous consequences for children in public schools in Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere. It includes alliances like Great Public Schools–Pittsburgh, which is trying to stop school closures and the overemphasis on standardized tests.

Momentum around reclaiming the promise of public education is growing. Yet market reformers still seem to operate in an evidence-free zone. The more data that emerges about the ineffectiveness of privatization, competition and test fixation, the more their proponents double down.

Our focus must be to rely on what evidence and experience tell us kids need. We are at a pivotal moment—a moment when we must reclaim the promise of public education without further detours, distractions and delays.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten