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Contents The Body Image Book for Girls.................................. 3 Bread, Cement, Cactus............................................... 22 Blood Royal................................................................. 41 Boom and Bust........................................................... 79 Life after Privacy......................................................... 95 Pulp Vietnam.............................................................. 116 Feeding the People.................................................... 144 Learning from Loss .................................................... 174 Retail and wholesale representatives....................... 245 Customer Services....................................................... 246 Publicity...................................................................... 246 Cambridge University Press Around the World........ 247

2

The Body Image Book for Girls Love Yourself and Grow Up Fearless Charlotte Markey

UK and US publication September 2020 9781108718776 Paperback £9.99 / $14.95

It is worrying to think that most girls feel dissatisfied with their bodies, and that this can lead to serious problems including depression and eating disorders.

Can some of those body image worries be eased? Body image expert and psychology professor Dr Charlotte Markey helps girls aged 9-15 to understand, accept, and appreciate their bodies. She provides all the facts on puberty, mental health, self-care, why diets are bad news, dealing with social media, and everything in-between. Girls will find answers to questions they always wanted to ask, the truth behind many body image myths, and real-life stories from girls who share their own experiences. Through this easy-to-read and beautifully illustrated guide, Dr Markey teaches girls how to nurture both mental and physical heath to improve their own body image, shows the positive impact they can have on others, and enables them to go out into the world feeling fearless!

Charlotte Markey is Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of the Health Sciences Center at Rutgers University, Camden. She is a worldleading expert in body image research, having studied body image, eating behaviour and weight management for over twenty-five years. Through all her roles as a scientist, teacher, writer and parent she is passionate about understanding what makes us feel good about our bodies and helping others to develop a healthy body image. Dr Markey is an experienced and talented author, with her first book Smart People Don’t Diet (2014) dubbed as ‘possibly the best book about weight loss ever written’ by Scientific American. Her research has gained widespread media attention, having been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, ABC News and Time.

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CHAPTER 10

be the change #BeBodyPositive

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer, politician, social activist

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You and your body are inseparable; your body is the place where you “live.” Taking care of your body, accepting it, and protecting your health are all important parts of developing a positive body image. Our culture tends to emphasize the importance of women’s appearances, making it easy for girls and women to doubt themselves and experience body dissatisfaction. Hopefully, after reading this far, you understand that you can choose to have a positive body image, even though it may require a bit of work on your part.

Nurturing a positive body image is important because your body image affects many other aspects of your mental and physical health. It’s also important because, by exhibiting a positive body image, you have the power to start to change how other girls think about their bodies. If you think and talk about your body differently from how girls and women typically do (which, unfortunately, is usually negatively), you can help promote positive change. Or, in the words of Gandhi, you can “be the change.”

It’s not always easy to do things differently from most other people. So in this chapter I want to leave you with some reminders of why this is so important, some potential obstacles on your personal journey, and some things to think about when you feel discouraged.

I N T H I S CHAP TER , YOU’ LL LEARN ● the importance of being kind and accepting of yourself and others, and not falling for other people’s narrow ideas about what is beautiful or how you should look, ● how focusing on meaningful issues outside of yourself can contribute to your positive sense of yourself, and ● that you can play a part in helping others develop positive body images.

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Remember: You are your own worst critic We can be harder on ourselves than we ever are on anyone else. We feel bad about ourselves for not looking a certain way and then we feel bad for caring that we don’t look a certain way. Then we can feel even worse for spending time and energy on any of these worries.

If you feel like you’re down on yourself, take a step back and try to quiet these negative thoughts. Remember the importance of self-compassion and selfacceptance. Both of these attitudes will do a lot more for you than self-hate ever will. No one is perfect by everyone’s standards, so you can stop aiming for perfect. You can be upset about this, or you can work toward treating yourself with kindness and acceptance.

Don’t compare or despair It’s natural for us to compare ourselves with other people, but this tendency to compare ourselves with others, or social comparison, can be problematic.

We’re all unique in our own ways, and trying to be like someone else will rarely work. Changing our looks (or our personalities, for that matter) is harder than it appears. Most of our qualities have a strong biological component that makes them only partially changeable. We can get cosmetic surgery and change our nose, but it’s nearly impossible to get longer legs, narrower hips, or a different sense of humor.

The science examining social comparison is pretty convincing, too. Most recently, researchers have examined how comparing ourselves with others on social media can be a negative experience, but 6

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MY STORY

April Meyers, 14 years old I’ve been on the skinnier side my whole life, so in a way I guess I’m lucky.

I’ve never felt “fat.” However, I’ve always felt too skinny, and that my “stick arms and legs” were awkward and ugly. This makes me super selfconscious in bathing suits and tank tops. I’ve also always felt that my stomach “wasn’t flat enough” and that I had too large a stomach. I can find something wrong with every part of my body.

Over time I’ve realized that hating yourself shouldn’t be the default.

Although that’s what’s portrayed as normal in the media, it’s not healthy.

Everyone should love themselves, no matter what. Even when I’m still uncomfortable with the way I look, I try to have this mindset, and then I feel better.

Something that has helped me understand I’m not as awkward and ugly as I feel is comparing myself to others. Not in a “look at that girl, I’m prettier than her” way, because that’s wrong and you should never, ever bring down other girls. But I find myself thinking, “Look, you think she’s beautiful and she looks very similar to you, so why don’t you think the same about yourself?” That has helped me realize that I’m just as beautiful as I think every other girl is.

I’ve thought a lot about how to talk with other girls about body issues: don’t comment on their body—period. A good rule to live by is: If they can’t change it within five minutes, don’t mention it. That means that you can let your friend know they have something on their face or shirt, but you cannot tell them that “they are too fat.” Even if you think something is neutral or a compliment, still don’t say it. You never know when you could hurt someone’s feelings, and being a good friend is all about being supportive.

Sometimes I think your mind can be your worst enemy, and no one actually thinks about how you look except for yourself. Once you conquer the voices in your head, and convince them you’re beautiful, no one can stop you.

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doesn’t have to be. It turns out that not everyone who sees something positive on others’ social media newsfeed is then discouraged about their own lives. The key seems to be to focus on the emotional message in posts, not the content so much. People who see positive things (“Look at how happy she looks”) and think about the positive emotions shown (“It’s great

to see someone looking happy”) have a more positive experience using social media. They actual report an improvement in their own mood. The trick is not to take it that one step further and think, “She looks so happy and I’m not that happy—what’s wrong with me?” In other words, comparing is what leads to despairing, so don’t go there.

Q & A: I don’t want to care about material things like clothes and make-up, but I do. How do I change the way I think about these things?

It’s important to realize that many—perhaps, most—people care about material items. How we present ourselves to the world, with the clothes we wear and the other ways that we try to look nice, matters to most people. Don’t feel bad for wanting to look nice, or for caring about material things.

But remember that these material things are unlikely to bring you lasting happiness. A new pair of designer jeans may make you feel good for a few weeks or months, but they’re unlikely to make you feel all that special years later. A stylish haircut may grant you some attention for days or weeks, but then you’ll get used to it and your hair will grow out.

We’re all bombarded with so many advertisements for material goods and beauty products that it’s easy to feel like there is something wrong with us and that we need to “fix” ourselves by dressing a certain way or using certain cosmetics. It can seem like success in life is all about having certain things.

But all of these things can only change us temporarily and in superficial ways.

It’s important, but sometimes very difficult, to keep this in perspective and to realize that who we are—what makes us a caring person, a valued friend, and a decent human being—has very little to do with material things.

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Don’t get beauty sick Beauty sickness has been described by psychologist Renee Engeln as what happens when women spend energy worrying about their appearance at the cost of focusing on things like their education, careers, family, relationships, and even their communities.

It’s not that there is anything wrong with wanting to be beautiful. Who doesn’t want to be beautiful? The problem is wanting it more than anything else.

It’s easy to notice that very attractive people often get more attention from others and may even be treated better than others. However, there is a serious downside to being valued for your appearance. For one thing, maintaining beauty often requires a lot of work. It’s hard to be engaged with the world and enjoying your life if you’re constantly worried about how you look. You can choose to care less about how you compare with beauty ideals.

You can think of your body more in terms of its functionality. You can remember that it’s your body that allows you to move, be in, and experience the world. It’s what allows you to do so much—it’s not what’s holding you back.

Don’t stigmatize Another problem with our cultural focus on beauty is that it’s usually all about one (or a few) particular look(s). It’s rarely about diversity and inclusion— accepting everyone as they are. Very few people can fit into the exact “looks” deemed beautiful by our culture, because we all come in different shapes and sizes. Most of us aren’t light skinned, long legged, and blond. We have different colored skin, hair, and eyes. We have different sized noses, ears, and breasts. Defining beauty more broadly, to include some of these variations, is an important way to appreciate one another and work toward accepting ourselves. www.cambridge.org

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Unfortunately, there is often far more cultural focus on stigmatizing people who don’t fit society’s views of beauty than in accepting people who look different. Stigma is probably a word you’ve heard before, but maybe you aren’t sure exactly what it means.

People can be stigmatized or feel stigma for a variety of qualities they may possess: their race, gender, disability status, or weight are some of the most common qualities that may lead to stigma. If someone is

stigmatized, they are mistreated because of these qualities and are often assumed to have negative characteristics associated with these qualities. Weight stigma (also referred to as weight bias and weight-based discrimination) occurs when a person is mistreated because she is overweight.

(It’s also possible to experience stigma for being underweight, but this happens much less often.) The person may also be assumed to be lazy or addicted to junk food, just because she has a larger body.

MY STORY

Cecile Asia, 23 years old When thinking about body image, I can say with confidence that I don’t hate my body. However, I do struggle with accepting it completely. I find myself thinking about the things that frustrate me regarding my body and the things I want to change. I try to combat these thoughts by reminding myself that my body is a part of me and I’m just thankful to have one that works. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought to myself, “I love my body,” but I am able to stop myself from having recurring negative thoughts about it.

I probably think more about how my body functions because when I was 12, I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism and Graves’ disease (an autoimmune disorder). My body was producing too much thyroid hormone and I had an extremely overactive metabolism, among other symptoms. My doctor had me try multiple medications, but I was allergic to one and the other didn’t work, so I had to cease physical activity due to my abnormally fast heart rate (another symptom). But then I got pneumonia so we had to take almost immediate action. I was given a radioactive iodine treatment which basically renders my thyroid inactive, giving me hypothyroidism instead. As this is the exact opposite of hyperthyroidism, I started to gain weight due to a slower metabolism.

I was finally a healthy weight for my height and build, but to me it was pretty off-putting. I, like many others, subconsciously equated being 10

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Weight stigma is incredibly problematic, not just because it’s unfair to mistreat anyone based on how they look, but because it’s associated with other problems. When a person experiences stigma, they often start to believe others’ negative views of them.

Experiencing weight stigma has also been associated with the development of body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, and depression. Unfortunately, the rates of weight stigma have risen dramatically in recent years. In fact, some scientists who study weight stigma have referred to it as the last acceptable form of

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discrimination. What they mean by this is that people often feel that it’s acceptable to mistreat larger people because their body size is their fault.

Hopefully, after reading this book, you understand that weight is a much more complicated issue, and our size has a lot to do with our biology.

Furthermore, blaming or mistreating people for anything is rarely a helpful way to interact with them.

Just as self-compassion is incredibly important, compassion for others is essential too.

skinny with being attractive and happy, and being fat with being ugly and miserable. I think my mom is a large part of why I made it through this period of my life without too many issues. She would remind me of how healthy I looked and how scared she was for me when I had hyperthyroidism. At some point, I stopped thinking of my skinnier self as a better version of me because I was not healthy when I was skinny.

Another positive influence on my body image was actually going to a women’s college for two years. Because body image issues are so prevalent among women, there was a big push to reinforce positive body image at Smith College. We learned how to implement positive affirmations regarding body image. We also made it a point not to comment about what others were eating and instead think about how food was meant to nourish and be enjoyed.

My advice for younger girls would be to be thankful for the body they have. It’s important to remind yourself of all the work your body does each day that allows you to experience life. And don’t look at the number on the scale—your health and self-worth isn’t determined by a number. Instead, focus on how you feel, and if your doctor says your body is functioning properly, then you’re good to go. I also think that it’s normal to want to change things about your body, but this isn’t going to make you happier or increase your worth as a person. It’s important to separate the appearance of our bodies from achieving happiness. www.cambridge.org

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Understand that our food environment probably isn’t helping In most modern societies, people have plenty of food available and a lot of that food is unhealthy. Corner stores, vending machines, and drive-through restaurants all make it easy to get food when you’re hungry, but hard to make healthy choices. Although fruits and vegetables are sometimes sold at convenience stores and stands, you’re more likely to find very appetizing, fairly unhealthy options. If you go out to eat at a restaurant, the portions are likely to be bigger than any one person requires.

Taking care of your body means feeding it well. True body positivity includes healthy food choices most of the time. But when an unhealthy option is around every corner, it can feel like an ongoing internal struggle. Don’t feel like you need to restrict yourself from foods you enjoy, but you shouldn’t get lunch from a vending machine or drive-through every day either.

Our food environment can feel overwhelming and outside of our control. It may be difficult for us to change the general food environment around us, but we can work toward having a healthy, personal food environment in our homes. Asking our families about keeping healthy snacks that we enjoy on hand and trying to have healthy meals (most of the time) can be an important way to be sure that our bodies get the nutrients they need. It’s also important to try new foods, and to give those foods a chance. Sometimes when we try new foods, we don’t like them, but if we try them more than once we may actually grow

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to like them. Psychologists who study food have actually found that most people need to try a food as many as eight times before they develop a liking for it. If you don’t like kale the first time you try it, you may need to give it another chance (or seven more chances). Being aware of our food options and choices, without worrying about them, can be a responsible way to focus on staying healthy.

Try to think outside yourself In research that aims to understand why some people have more positive body images than others, scientists have found that focusing outside yourself can be good for how you feel about yourself. In this research, people who engaged with projects or causes that they thought were important, including focusing on school work or volunteering at an animal shelter, spent less energy concerned with their own bodies. It seems that thinking about issues bigger than oneself may be important for keeping some perspective.

It makes sense, right? There are only so many hours in the day, and if you fill those hours with work or causes that are meaningful to you, there will be less time to worry about whether or not you’re wearing the most stylish new brand of jeans. And you may feel less inclined to care!

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Q & A: What’s one easy thing we can all do to help improve other young girls’ body images?

Part of what leads girls to develop body image concerns is feeling that how they look is incredibly important. Our culture gives girls this idea in a variety of ways, through advertising, music, movies, and social media. What if we all tried to talk with girls less about their appearance and focused more on other things?

It seems to come to us naturally to compliment our friends and other girls on their appearance, whether it’s their hair, clothes, or make-up. In some ways, this is how girls and women connect with each other—and who doesn’t like compliments? But we could all get a bit better about starting conversations about other topics. We could talk about books we’re reading, things we’ve done recently, hobbies, and our goals and aspirations. If we value girls for their brains over their bodies more often, their focus will be different as well.

Reasons for hope Although media and celebrity culture—never mind our current food environment—aren’t particularly helpful in the development of positive body images, there are some reasons to hope that change is on the way. Some advertisers have begun to promote their products using body-positive messages. For example, Dove (a company that makes soap and other cleansing and beauty products) has created a variety of advertisements in print and video that feature models of diverse body shapes, sizes, and ethnic backgrounds. Aerie, an underwear and clothing company, has a similar advertising campaign, which they call “Aerie Real.” Aerie Real only uses images of women that have not been

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modified using Photoshop or other software. There is some research to suggest that these more “real” images are better for women’s body images than images of super-slender, super-perfected, unattainable models.

Hopefully, women’s positive responses to these sorts of campaigns will lead to the use of more “real” women in advertising.

In addition to these advertising campaigns, there are other reasons for hope. Some celebrities have begun to demand that the media represent them accurately by using unedited photos. Lady Gaga, Kiera Knightley, Serena Williams, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lorde, Kate Winslet, Ashley Benson, and Colbie Caillat are among the women who have asked that pictures of themselves not be photoshopped.

They want others to know that, even though they are famous, they are not perfect, and that is OK. There are also body-positive influencers on social media. There are podcasts about body positivity and rejecting diet culture.

And there are web pages that contain helpful resources for people looking to improve their body image. Not everyone knows about all of these resources, but hopefully that will change with time and they will inspire more and more people.

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MYTHS A N D M I SBE L I E F S

I’ve heard about celebrities like Beyoncé and Gwyneth Paltrow trying out diets like the “Herculean” diet and detox diets to look a certain way for certain events and performances. These things seem to work for them, but you warned against all diets in Chapter 6. If it’s good for Beyoncé and Gwyneth, it must be good for me too.

Drastic diets can lead people to lose weight, and they may lose weight relatively fast. The biggest problem with any diet that dramatically alters someone’s eating habits and is extremely restrictive is that it’s unlikely to be something they can stick with. Once a person’s eating habits return to what they were before the drastic diet, the weight will come back fast. In fact, research makes it pretty clear that people are likely to gain more weight than they originally lost.

There are other risks associated with drastic diets, including negative effects on your metabolism. When people lose weight, then gain weight, then lose weight again (sometimes referred to as yo-yo dieting because of the way a toy yo-yo bounces up and down) their metabolism is likely to slow, making it harder to maintain a lower weight. Drastic dieting habits have also been shown to contribute to the development of eating disorders, which can be extremely serious and life-threatening (look back to Chapter 7 for more information on eating disorders).

The bottom line is that drastic, celebrity-endorsed diets aren’t a healthy approach to eating, and are likely to cause more harm than good in the long run.

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Positive Body Image Resources Body Positivity: www. youtube.com/channel/ UC5ByY8fYOn0REFHARFGiJfA

YouTube channel containing short positive body image lessons

UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity: www. uconnruddcenter.org

Internationally known center that studies and promotes health and reduction in weight bias

Hi.ur.beautiful: www.instagram. com/hi.ur.beautiful

Body positivity Instagram influencer

Mirna Valerio, known as Fat Girl Running: http://fatgirlrunningfatrunner.blogspot.com, www. womensrunning.com/category/fatgirl-running

Body positivity blog about being active no matter your body size

Megan Jayne Crabbe, known as BodyPosiPanda: www.instagram. com/bodyposipanda/?hl=en

Body positivity Instagram influencer

Big Things with Zach Micho: https://bigthingspod.com/ episodes

Plus-size model and body positivity Instagram influencer

Mama Cax: https://mamacax.com

Model, body positivity Instagram influencer, disability advocate, blogger

The Full Bloom Project: www.

FullBloomProject.com

Podcast and web page with resources for improving body image

Rosie Beeme: www.instagram. com/roseybeeme/

Instagram influencer, body positivity blogger

Jes Baker: www.themilitantbaker. com

Body positivity blogger, author

Mind Your Body: www. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ mind-your-body

Blog containing evidence-based positive body image articles and discussions of gender Continues on next page ...

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National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA): www.

NationalEatingDisorders.org

Largest non-profit organization dedicated to supporting individuals and families affected by eating disorders; serves as a catalyst for prevention, cures and access to quality care

Katie Sturino: www.instagram. com/katiesturino/

Body positivity Instagram influencer

Beauty Sick: www. psychologytoday.com/us/experts/ renee-engeln-phd

Blog containing evidence-based positive body image messages and comments on “beauty culture”

I weigh: @i_weigh, www. iweighcommunity.com

Web page, body positivity and inclusivity advocates

Smart People Don’t Diet: www. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ smart-people-don-t-diet

Blog containing evidence-based articles that are anti-diet and all about body image

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Be the change Cultural change can be slow. The things that people in any society value and expect from each other—to look or act a certain way—doesn’t change overnight. But cultural change is possible. In fact, people have not always valued thinness or the fashions that we value today. If you look at pictures depicting people from a few hundred years ago, men wore their hair in long ponytails (think George Washington) and even wore white, long-haired wigs, and women wore corsets to make their waists smaller and their hips appear relatively wider. Just over 100 years ago, women only wore skirts and dresses and men always wore top hats when they left the house. Even 20 years ago, most white women aimed to have small rear-ends, and now butt enhancements are trending.

There will always be trends in terms of what our culture suggests we do to make our bodies look attractive. Some of the trends may be relatively harmless (for example, certain hairstyles), but some may be relatively risky (for example, some forms of cosmetic surgery). We don’t have to agree with these trends or follow them. When something seems unhealthy or even just uncomfortable, we can go our own way. If we reject certain trends, others may feel empowered to as well. If consumers don’t buy certain products, companies will stop producing them. If we stop following certain influencers on Instagram, they may become less popular and less powerful.

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As individuals we can contribute to cultural change.

We can work to improve our own positive body images and we can become part of a movement where more and more girls and women do as well.

We can do our part to create a world where it is normal for girls and women to appreciate their bodies and not be dissatisfied with them.

What exactly would that world look like?

Why don’t we try to find out?

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✓

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SUMMI N G U P #BE BO D YPO SI T IV E

✓ There are many reasons why it’s important to develop a positive body ● image, one of which is that by exhibiting a positive body image you have the power to start to change how other girls think about their bodies. ✓ Current beauty ideals and the cultural focus on our appearance can make ● it difficult to feel good about your body, but it’s important that you don’t fall prey to beauty sickness, or stigmatize those who have larger bodies. ✓ Thinking about issues that are more important than how you look, and ● being engaged with issues that are meaningful to you, can help you develop as a well-rounded, confident person. By choosing to foster your positive body image you set an example for those around you and help to lead your society closer to understanding how important it is for all of us to be accepting and positive about who we are.

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of Belonging and Dislocation

UK and US publication July 2020 9781108814638 Paperback £9.95 / $12.95

Bread, Cement, Cactus A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation Annie Zaidi In this exploration of the meaning of home, Annie Zaidi reflects on the places in India from which she derives her sense of identity. She looks back on the now renamed city of her birth and the impossibility of belonging in the industrial township where she grew up. From her ancestral village, in a region notorious for its gangsters, to the mega-city where she now lives, Zaidi provides a nuanced perspective on forging a sense of belonging as a minority and a migrant in places where other communities consider you an outsider, and of the fragility of home left behind and changed beyond recognition. Zaidi is the 2019/ 2020 winner of the Nine Dots Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues.

Annie Zaidi is a freelance journalist and scriptwriter based in Mumbai, India, and was named by Elle as one of the emerging South Asian writers ‘whose writing… will enrich South Asian literature’. Her first novel, Prelude to a Riot, was published in 2019. Other books include Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales, a collection of essays based on her experiences as a reporter, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2010, and Love Stories # 1 to 14, a collection of short fiction published in 2012. She also edited the anthology Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing, published in 2015.

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One of my first memories of the place is cactus. Another is playing in piles of sieved sand that was waiting to be mixed into concrete.

The colony, a word often used to describe industrial townships and urban residential complexes in India, was dry and dusty.

Summer temperatures inched towards fifty degrees centigrade.

It was flanked on one side by the Aravalli hills, one of the oldest hill ranges in the world. On the other side stood a cement factory.

Everyone in this colony knew their place. Houses were allotted on the basis of jobs held at the factory. ‘A’ type quarters were for top management. These were spacious bungalows with a lawn and the services of a gardener. Upper management lived in ‘B’ type, middle management in ‘C’ type, blue-collar workers in ‘E’ and ‘F’ type. We were in ‘D’ type, meant for those who were not quite managers but couldn’t be classified as ‘workers’ either.

People like my mother. She was vice-principal and later principal at a school meant for the children of factory employees.

The children of managers and furnace stokers attended the same school, but even 6-year-olds know how A-B-C-D goes. ‘D’ type was a cramped two-bedroom house with vertical iron bars on windows, doors of hewn planks, and concrete everywhere including the bathroom floor. No marble, no glass, no tiles, no garden. After my mother was promoted, one of my E-type friends had asked, ‘I suppose you’ll be hanging out with the C-type girls now?’

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I didn’t know at the time that there was a ‘W’ and an ‘LC’ too, quarters for watchmen and loaders respectively. I didn’t see those quarters in the eleven years I spent there.

The roads were pure concrete – cement was one thing the township didn’t lack – but traffic was almost non-existent. Only top management had cars; a few of the men rode scooters. Most of us just walked. Besides, there wasn’t anywhere to go. No movie theatre, no restaurant, no shopping except for basic groceries, no café, no parks, no pools, no bookstore, no buses, no taxis.

If you needed to go out of the colony, you had to fill in a requisition form to ask for a car and driver. The district headquarters, Sirohi, was an hour’s drive. It had a hospital where I was once admitted after a serious fracture and where I almost lost the use of a leg. It also had tailors’ shops and bakeries. The cakes that mysteriously showed up on my birthday were made there. It had a railway station where, twice a year, we boarded a train to go visit my grandparents.

If you were desperate to escape without actually leaving the colony, your only recourse was the Aravalli hills. Ancient, stoic and never fully colonised, the hills were the reason the cement factory existed. Limestone deposits were torn out with explosives, and we were warned not to go climbing when a blast was scheduled. We never got to see the dynamite but we did hear the periodic boom! in the distance.

We’d climb the hill nearest the colony, sometimes with a sandwich picnic. Once there, we scratched our names on flat rocks with sharp-edged flint. Seeing my name, white on bluishgrey rock, brought cheap satisfaction: here I am, alive, but at risk of death by boredom.

We were warned not to climb the hills that couldn’t be seen from the colony. There were stories about Bhı̄l tribesmen who lived there and who could relieve kids of their valuables. We’d heard of petty theft in the colony – clothes taken off clotheslines, jars of clarified butter stolen from kitchens – and out on the highway, of robberies conducted after boulders were nudged off the slope onto approaching vehicles.

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I wasn’t sure I believed the stories. Still, I didn’t want to venture beyond the first row of hills. Scarier than being accosted and having my earrings taken away was the landscape itself: hill behind hill and beyond that, more hill. Not a soul in sight.

In the colony, everything revolved around the factory. Sirens summoned workers to their respective shifts, and we’d see them hurrying to work. Once in a while, a truck loaded with cement would rumble past.

Everyone I knew was an outsider who needed a job; everyone left as soon as a better opportunity presented itself. No outsiders were allowed in unless they were employees or their guests. The colony was gated and guarded. We never mixed with the children of farmers or shepherds who lived in villages barely a couple of kilometres away.

A township like this was a set of tasks and norms. It fed you but it didn’t ground you. You couldn’t, even if you wanted to, buy property here. Even if you were the sort of person who adored life in an industrial township, you couldn’t stake a claim to it. On the other hand, those who did own land around here were near invisible. Nobody ever talked about what, or who, was here before the factory was built. I grew up with a sense that there was nothing before, and it wasn’t hard to believe. There was enough cactus and acacia around to suggest a desert. Yet, there were fields of corn, sheep, cattle, a few camels.

We had glimpses of men in white dhotis and turbans, women in bright skirts. When a new building for the school was to be constructed, or a road had to be extended, they’d show up and I’d stare in wonder. Girls with distinctive tattoos and rows of metallic hairpins, men with earrings and tie-front shirts.

Slowly, I learnt to tell the tribes apart – Garāsia, Rabādi, Bhı̄l.

The Rabādi were traditionally animal herders and they supplied us with milk. The Garāsia were farmers who came to work in the colony as wage labourers. Their children did not attend the school, though some teenagers came to work as domestic helps in the homes of colony residents. We didn’t know how far they

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walked to get to the colony. None of us knew their languages.

Their languages were not even recognised as such by the state.

The factory, the school and living quarters of every ‘type’ had been constructed by the tribes who lived in surrounding villages.

* Very few people have heard of JK Puram unless they had jobs here or family members were employees. Most people outside the state haven’t even heard of Sirohi, the district in which the township is located.

Our nearest point of reference was Mount Abu, a ‘hill station’ that had once been used as a regional administrative centre by the British government and is now an affordable honeymoon destination in western India.

Mount Abu was where we would go for school picnics and field trips, and to write our final high school examinations. It was full of pretty picnic spots, but my favourite place was Trevor’s Tank on account of its warning sign: swimming strictly prohibited. survivors shall be prosecuted.

I used to think it was hilarious: to survive only to be prosecuted.

I was too young to know what people did – or were willing to do – to survive. I didn’t fully understand private property or what legislating water or land meant. I did know that prosecution meant being hauled off by the police, and perhaps jailed. I didn’t know what jail meant except what I saw in movies – it was a place where everyone wore uniforms and always wanted to escape.

I wanted to escape JK Puram and its sameness, its siren rhythms, the prickly things it concealed.

Twenty years passed before I returned to look at it with grown-up eyes. To speak with those who were here before and who would stay if the factory were to shut down. What was their relationship with outsiders who profited from the landscape that they traditionally saw as their own?

In Basantgarh village, I was introduced to Vaghta Ram. He listened intently while another activist explained my quest in the Garāsia language, then he thrust out his hands, which were

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covered in cement, and began to speak agitatedly. I had to interrupt: Hindi please.

He switched to Hindi. ‘These hands built that place. All the old buildings, the factory, the—’ Slow down, I had to say. Begin at the beginning. In the beginning, he told me, about twenty Garāsia families lived on the land that became JK Puram. They farmed approximately 150 bighas collectively. There is no standard measure for a bigha in south Asia, but it could be anything between one third of an acre to one acre.1 Younger men had gathered around by now. Someone piped up, ‘It was a thousand bighas!’ Vaghta Ram shut him up firmly.

I will not tell lies, he said, it was about 150 bighas.

It was not a place utterly devoid of state institutions or facilities. He is about 70 years old now and remembers that there was a government school in the village when he was a child. He was educated up to the eighth grade though classes were run under a tree, open to the sky, for the first five years. In the early 1970s, when he was in his mid twenties, land was acquired for a new factory and as part of the acquisition deal, the company promised to hire one man from each family as a permanent employee. The land was taken at nominal prices because in those days none of them knew what it was worth. They also didn’t know that this place had been chosen because of its limestone deposits.

Vaghta Ram can account for thirteen men who got jobs, mostly in the packing or mining departments. He himself worked as a labour contractor and construction worker for twenty odd years, earning as little as 5 rupees as a daily wage at first. The kārigar (mason) earned the most: 9 rupees. Over the years, wages rose. But one thing remained constant – none of the Basantgarh workers were assigned living quarters inside the colony. Housing, they were told, was for those who needed it, which was outsiders.

Workers from the surrounding villages walked between 2 and 5 kilometres each way. Kids whose fathers were not employed at the factory were not admitted to the colony school.

Resentment was slow to set in, but it had set in now. A young man, Praveen Singh Rao, cut into the conversation. His own

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father and uncle, he said, were due to retire in 2019. They were among the handful of men hired as ‘permanent’ employees. But Praveen could not attend the school my mother worked at – a better school, after all, which offered an English medium education – because it was too far for a child to walk. Sacrifices were made eventually, for the sake of his younger siblings. The family rented rooms sublet by another employee, who had been allotted a colony house since he lived further away, but who owned a vehicle and didn’t mind the commute.

The richer a man was, the more assets he possessed, the more money he stands to make, and the better educated his kids are, no matter his proximity to the workplace. Learning this lesson has angered Praveen. There are other resentments. Blasting for limestone in the hillside causes cracks in the walls of the homes of villagers. A dam has been built across the West Banas River, and it supplies plentiful water to the industrial township. It does not irrigate the fields of farmers. For their own drinking and basic household needs, the village has to buy water supplied by private individuals in tankers.

Vaghta Ram said he stopped working for the JK Group after one of his nephews fell to his death while working on a construction site. He filed a suit demanding compensation, but lost the case. He never wanted to work for the company again. That his hands are covered in cement now is on account of building something in his own village. He has a bit of land and he grows millets and corn.

I asked if farming wasn’t harder work, with no guarantee of a good rain or a decent harvest? It is harder, he said, yet he feels more in control. On his own land, he isn’t taking orders from another man. He is, however, of the old guard. Young men like Praveen are angry that a younger, better educated generation is not getting hired at the factory. Forty years have passed and Basantgarh sends no managers or engineers to JK Puram. Young people are not offered internships if they sign up for technical or engineering courses. Even girls are going to college now, including Vaghta Ram’s daughters, but they aren’t getting hired in the colony, which seeks only ‘workers’.

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Even in the worker category, there is little hope of secure employment. Several departments have been outsourced by the manufacturer-industrialists to subcontractors. Jobs in construction, packing and loading are now going to labourers brought here from other states.

Is the ‘outsider’ labour much cheaper? I asked. No, I’m told. But outsiders are unlikely to organise, or expect anything bar wages. If they lose jobs, they are unlikely to make a fuss. They go home quietly.

Basantgarh is one of the villages ‘adopted’ by the industrial township. Relative to other Adivasi villages, more concrete is in evidence. There is no functional hospital with emergency facilities. The local health centre built by the government has an attendant nurse, but there is no resident doctor. This centre was locked when I visited, in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

Occasionally the JK Group sends around a van with doctors, the villagers admit as much. However, these are not services people can rely on, or take for granted. The JK Puram school also admits children of non-employees now, but it is not free, nor so heavily subsidised as to benefit the poorest tribespeople.

The village is entitled to a limestone mining royalty and a small share of cement. The villagers agree, it is substantial money, but they allege that it gets cornered by the panchayat (village council) head. The last man who controlled the council also happened to be a union leader at the cement factory. He also happened to be a Rajput, not Garāsia. Nobody would say directly how the funds were used. Ask the factory people, some of the younger men said.

Ask, how that man roams about in such an expensive car; how he can build a hotel where, it is rumoured, a cup of tea is going to cost 300 rupees? Ask, who pays for the fuel in his car?

I asked a different question: why did that man get elected when this village has a majority of Garāsia people? Nobody answered.

* The story of losing power, then losing ground, is not a new one.

In Rajasthan: A Concise History, Rima Hooja writes that a common

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motif in the founding narratives of many former kingdoms is Rajput warriors seizing power from forest- and hill-dwelling tribes. Folk tales and genealogies describe the overthrow of indigenous chiefs by Kshtriyas (ranked second highest in the Hindu caste hierarchy), who entered unfamiliar tracts either as refugees or invaders. To reassert sovereignty, and perhaps to affirm the loyalty of the tribes they conquered, kingdoms like Mewār and Dungarpur held coronation rituals where a Bhı̄l representative anointed the forehead of the Rajput successor.

Each kingdom had dozens of thikānās, fiefs controlled by Rajput feudal lords. Having lost their sovereignty, tribal communities now had to pay crushing revenues and dozens of additional taxes. They also had to perform forced labour, a practice called begār, and serve on hunting expeditions, for which they were not compensated. In some thikānās, they were also beaten for the smallest sign of intransigence, even if the intransigence had been enacted by the animals that were being hunted.2 At various times, the tribes resisted. In 1839, Bhı̄l and Garāsia tribesmen killed some soldiers of the kingdom of Mewār, which led to the ruler setting up a military garrison to keep them in check. Sirohi, having signed a treaty with the British East India Company, also put down rebellions by Bhı̄ls and Mı̄nas.

After a devastating famine at the turn of the last century, a tribal leader called Guru Govindgiri (originally Govinda Gobpalia) had emerged as a voice of resistance, but he was arrested and exiled, and very narrowly escaped the death penalty. Govindgiri had had a vision for the restoration of an indigenous kingdom – a Bhı̄l Raj – though he couldn’t quite envision cultural autonomy. He spoke out against forced labour and taxes but also wanted his followers to give up meat and alcohol, which ran counter to Bhı̄l and Garāsiya culture. Other activists, too, were intent on the ‘upliftment’ of tribes and the ‘modernisation’ of their ‘negative’ lifestyle.3 Non-tribal, non-forest communities looked down upon tribespeople who lived by hunting, gathering forest produce, and practising a shifting form of cultivation. The administration also

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disapproved, partly because mobile groups couldn’t be taxed very easily. After the early twentieth-century Land Revenue Settlement in princely states like Dungarpur, Sirohi and Banswara, the traditional rights of the tribes were further curtailed: shifting cultivation was forbidden, and access to honey, bamboo and other forest produce was cut off.4 Political resistance was crushed, often brutally.

Matters reached a head in 1920, with the ‘Akki’ or ‘Eki’ movement being suppressed by local rulers, British troops assisting. In May 1922, between 1,200 and 1,500 tribespeople were killed.

Among the villages that were set ablaze was the village of Bhula in Sirohi.

* When I texted him, asking to meet, he responded with his address and name drawn out to reflect a political consciousness of his identity: Mukesh Gameti Bhı̄l Adivasi.

He is, he says, the only man of his tribe from his village, Bhula, who has tackled competition. He uses ‘competition’ in the sense of taking exams that lead to government jobs. Going to college, travelling, paying fees – these are beyond the reach of most people in his community. He managed to graduate and land a job teaching at a government secondary school.

A lot has changed since the 1980s. For one, there are social networks and the Bhı̄l are starting to organise themselves.

Mukesh is keenly aware of the movement for greater autonomy, spearheaded by the Bhil Autonomous Council, and the international recognition of indigenous rights. He is also aware of the political dependence of his people.

Bhı̄ls, along with Mı̄nas, Garāsias, Sahariyas and several other indigenous tribes, are recognised as such by the Constitution of India and referred to as ‘scheduled tribes’, abbreviated to ST in common parlance. Electoral seats are reserved for them in state assemblies and in Parliament. Yet their interests, particularly the right to forest produce and water, are not safeguarded. Mukesh admits, representatives are often propped up by ‘third parties’,

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which is to say, larger political organisations. Whenever there is a conflict of interests, ST interests are betrayed.

I told him about growing up hearing stories about the Bhı̄l on the other side of the hill, waiting to accost me and divest me of my earrings. He grinned. Bhula, he said, was once known to be a dangerous place. The people of his tribe who lived in the hills beyond JK Puram didn’t lose farmland during the setting up of the township. What they did lose is impossible to articulate.

I asked Mukesh to try. He said, he’d heard that the land around the mining area was starting to turn barren. But there are no independent studies on environmental impact, no soil pollution data one could cite. Using the Right to Information, a law enacted in 2005, Mukesh wrote to the district magistrate, seeking information about the renewal of mining leases, royalties on limestone extraction, and whether 10 per cent of all permanent jobs were indeed reserved for local residents. He asked for a list of people who had those jobs. He got a reply telling him to seek the information from other departments.

Jobs were a flint that set off sparks of heat in every conversation. Strike enough times, and it comes back to the question of natural resources. Communities that were once dependent only on nature had to submit to others who took control of these resources, and this dependence is an uncertain one.

There are two labour unions now at the factory, where once there was only one. Both have relationships with major political parties. Neither has managed to secure more jobs for local residents. The JK Lakshmi Cement website has a sustainability tab. The 2014–16 report mentions initiatives aimed at maternal health awareness across thirty-five villages, and education programmes for differently abled children.5 But it does not mention how many jobs the factory can sustain. It does not offer data on the rate of employee hire by subcontractors or the gender profile of the workforce.

A scion of the family after whom the cement brand is named, Lakshmipat Singhania, is quoted in the report as saying: ‘We seek a society which is proud of its past, conscious of the present and full of hope for the future.’

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The infographic below shows buildings in green hues, with solar panels, a human figure leaning to construct something, another figure putting litter in a bin, a bicycle. I was visiting the colony after twenty years, and saw few bicycles.

There were more cars, although everything in the township is still within walking distance. I did see solar panels. The report mentioned that the company was getting into the business of renewable energy. It mentioned greenhouse gas and carbon emissions but said nothing about the environmental impact of blasting the ancient Aravalli hills for limestone.

There is another quote from one of the ancient spiritual texts, the Ishvasya Upanishad. It says: ‘find your enjoyment in renunciation, do not covet what belongs to others’.

What belongs to whom? What, and how much, can be taken from nature? Who pays the costs of what is taken and cannot be returned? Tricky questions. To answer would mean to admit that belonging and coveting have to be seen through historical prisms, for it is history that informs narratives about what is ours to take, and what is not.

The rocks in the Aravalli hills near Sirohi are over 1,400 million years old. According to a 1981 census, the Adivasi or ST population in this district was over 23 per cent (it is now over 28 per cent). JK Lakshmi Cement was set up in 1982. According to the company’s website, it boasts a turnover of 30 billion Indian rupees (418 million USD) and produces 13.30 million tonnes of cement a year.

The state, Rajasthan, leads on cement production, with limestone deposits in twenty-five of its thirty-three districts. Twentythree cement factories already exist.6 The limestone mining lease issued to JK Lakshmi Cement led to jobs for 204 people.7 We could assume that all of these jobs went to residents of the surrounding villages, though that would not necessarily be an accurate assumption.

What has been taken then, in lieu of what?

*

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Cactus remains entwined with my feeling for the place. One thorny memory is waking up to an undercurrent of violence beneath the sameness of life, with adults muttering about ‘union’ and ‘strike’. On such days, we were sent home from school and told to be careful, not to loiter outdoors. Nobody explained, but the fence between ‘worker’ and ‘management’ was suddenly explicit.

Returning after two decades, I asked some of the older schoolteachers if they remembered such days. They did. One recalled having to escort the smaller children home, and added things were somewhat worse now. I asked why. She said, ‘they’ used bows and arrows to threaten the management before. Now there are guns.

The ‘they’ is undefined. It goes without saying that those who brandished bows and arrows were those who knew how to use them. What is not so clear is whether they brandished these arms in their own interest, for they have clearly not gained the upper hand.

Perhaps it is not so odd, after all, that an industrial township should be called a ‘colony’. It is not a town that has sprung up organically, in response to the needs of those who live there.

Factories usually make profits for outsiders who live elsewhere, speak other languages, are likely to bury or scatter the ashes of their beloveds elsewhere. This, at least, they have in common with systems that render entire nations ‘colonies’.

Those who worked in JK Puram as managers over the last few decades didn’t need to learn the language of the Adivasis. They would not have known the tribes’ ballads, or the logic of their marital customs. They came as outsiders, and left culturally unchallenged. It was the Adivasis who had to adapt, learning Hindi and English. I could talk to them without an interpreter.

They did not refuse to talk to me, but there was little doubt in either of our minds that I came speaking the language of power, and that the balance of power was tilted against them.

I wonder what it might have been like if the dreams of early twentieth-century activists had been realised: what if the factory was located in a Bhı̄l Raj, or a Garāsiya Raj?

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Would we study Bheeli as a first or second language in schools? Would we have committed to a different strand of collective memory: singing paeans to Adivasi heroes, absorbing their aesthetic, learning skills like hunting, sculpting and farming?

There are fresh attempts at reclaiming indigenous territories.

A political outfit called the Bharatiya Tribal Party won two seats in the 2018 state assembly elections. It is demanding a separate state made up of lands that have a significant Bhı̄l population.

One of its leaders pointed out in an interview that a distinct political ‘state’ is crucial for the preservation of cultural identity, which some activists are trying to erode.8 Despite being Bhı̄l themselves, they want their people to ‘imitate the general population’.

Bhı̄l and Garāsiya culture is different from the ‘general’ or, more specifically, upper-caste norm. This reflects not only in body language but in emotional and sexual practices.

As a teenager, I used to watch the girls who came to work in the colony with a mix of fascination and nervousness. Their skirts took in several yards of fabric and their odhnis (a type of sari) were used more as practical scarves/sun shields than as an aide to modesty. They wore tattoos, sometimes their own names stamped on their forearms. On hot summer afternoons, they would push long blouses up so the breeze could touch their bellies and backs. The girls laughed easily, and even as a child, I saw that the way they walked, talked, looked at others was less inhibited than peers in the ‘general’ population.

Occasionally, an Adivasi girl who worked in someone’s home would disappear. We heard whispers about the girl having eloped. To non-tribal girls, this was an incredible act, a source of undying shame. But a few months later, the girl would reappear, clearly unashamed. Sometimes we’d hear that a girl had left the man she’d eloped with. The gossip was accompanied by tut-tutting on the part of colony aunties and comments like, ‘These things happen among these people.’

I caught a note of distress along with contempt, but was too young to know of cultural wars. ‘These people’ were indigenous

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or ‘mool nivasi’, as they are officially acknowledged to be, the earliest inhabitants of the land. Tut-tutting aunties were groomed to see upper-caste marital practices as the norm, where marriage was arranged and divorce forbidden, and any deviation was punished through social ostracism. To see the norm challenged so easily, to see that it caused no significant damage to the girls, was distressing to them.

Among many tribes in India, there is a tradition of bride price rather than dowry. Therefore, there is a tradition of elopements among young couples if the boy cannot negotiate a price that meets expectations. There is also a tradition of living together without performing wedding rituals, which continues to raise brows. The Hindi press tends to write headlines such as ‘Livein . . . a Jaw-dropping news about the tribes’ (sic).9 The Adivasi leadership wants no mainstreaming. What it wants is water access, rights over natural wealth such as minerals and marble, and preventing ‘outsiders’ from buying Adivasi lands.10 This is a common demand by tribes in hill and forested areas.

Laws have been framed in some states that limit the right of Indian citizens’ to acquire land unless they can prove local residency for a certain number of years. This is partly to protect the rights of the poor, who may not know the market value of their lands, partly to ensure that the demographic does not change suddenly. Perhaps there is an additional concern about land being controlled by those who are not deeply invested in the local ecology and economy.

The rules are frequently relaxed for politicians, religious organisations and industrial houses, of course. In fact, the government steps in to acquire land on behalf of industrialists and protests are overcome with the help of police or the armed forces. Often this ends with the killing or the jailing of activists and local leaders.

* Emblazoned in giant white letters across the bosom of a hill that overlooks the colony is its name: jay kay puram. It can be seen from the windows of trains that chug through the area.

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Seeing the name was exciting to the child who lived there.

Looking at it with adult eyes, it seemed to have been planted like a flag of dominion. The initials ‘J’ and ‘K’ stand for Juggilal and Kamlapat Singhania, the founders of a business house that works in several sectors, including cement and tyre manufacture. For the sake of cement manufacture, the hills had to be blasted, limestone extracted. Rivers would supply water.

Ground water would be extracted too. Perhaps it was necessary that the place be named for those who controlled not just the land but its resources.

Living under the shadow of that name, I had not interrogated such controls over nature and mineral. I started doing so only after I met communities that had been stripped of all the things that sheltered and nourished them – food, herbs, wood, water, cultural autonomy. On one assignment, I was on a bus with a group of activists on a journey to campaign for a law that granted citizens the right to work. The bus went through Rajasthan, north to south.

I was on familiar ground, and yet nothing seemed familiar.

Adivasis, their concerns and goals, were different from those of the industrial township residents. At one public meeting, women began to speak about what it meant to not own land.

It was not just the lack of a field to till, or a square upon which to build a house; it was also about not having anywhere to squat and shit without the fear of being attacked. It is impossible to live without fear on a daily basis, without land and water rights.

In 1927, the British passed a law bringing forests under the direct control of the government. This law has remained in force in India, and those who live in forests are considered encroachers unless they can prove otherwise. Since independence, around 50 million Indians have been displaced to make way for dams, industrial projects, highways and protected forest reserves.11 The majority of the displaced, over 40 per cent, were Adivasis, who comprise only 8 per cent of the population.12 If they refused to go quietly, they were evicted through brute measures including the use of elephants to knock down huts; their crops were destroyed and their homes set on fire by the state’s paramilitary forces.13

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Adivasis have tried to insist upon their right to stay within forests or to resist mining operations. There have been arrests and gunfire. One of the rare times a community did win a battle against an industrial giant, it was by insisting that the mountain was sacred; it could not be destroyed because it interfered with religion. Speaking of their right to live where their forefathers have always lived was not an acceptable argument. That just got them charged with rioting and other crimes.14 The Supreme Court of India has reaffirmed the state’s right to evict over a million Adivasis living in forests, although studies indicate that forest dwelling communities find it hard to survive if separated from their traditional ways of life. To be removed from the forest is to be sentenced to a lack of bread and meat, fruit and flower, wine and wood.

Studies also indicate that rehabilitation rarely works – to be given a piece of land in a new location in return for access to a forest and community networks is a bargain so skewed, it is hard to enumerate. What can be enumerated is poverty and wealth. A study jointly undertaken by the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies has found that a little over 22 per cent of India’s upper-caste Hindus own 41 per cent of the country’s wealth while the 7.8 per cent that comprise the scheduled tribes own just 3.7 per cent. The wealthiest 1 per cent own 25 per cent of the country’s total assets, including land, while the bottom 40 per cent of households own just 3.4 per cent.15 Adivasis, displaced often, end up in cities where they are reduced to penury and homelessness. A recent study of fifteen cities across five Indian states has found that scheduled castes make up the largest proportion of the urban homeless, at 36 per cent, followed by scheduled tribes, who comprise 23 per cent. Worse, it isn’t a temporary phase. Sixty per cent of the surveyed homeless had been born in the same city, which means their parents were possibly homeless too.16 Yet another study indicates that 50 per cent of India’s Adivasi population is poor based on every indicator,

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including nutrition, health, education, living standards and ownership of assets.17 So poor that some families in Rajasthan have ended up mortgaging children.18 And what are the chances a mortgaged child can find a way to come back home?

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Eastern Uttar Pradesh is as notorious for goons and gangs as it is well known for its sugar industry.

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Blood Royal Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe BLOOD ROYAL DYNASTIC POLITICS IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

ROBERT

BARTLET T

UK and US publication August 2020 9781108490672 Hardback ÂŁ24.99 / $34.95

Robert Bartlett Throughout medieval Europe, for hundreds of years, monarchy was the way that politics worked in most countries. This meant power was in the hands of a family - a dynasty; that politics was family politics; and political life was shaped by the births, marriages and deaths of the ruling family. How did the dynastic system cope with female rule, or pretenders to the throne? How did dynasties use names, the numbering of rulers and the visual display of heraldry to express their identity? And why did some royal families survive and thrive, while others did not? Drawing on a rich and memorable body of sources, this engaging and original history of dynastic power in Latin Christendom and Byzantium explores the role played by family dynamics and family consciousness in the politics of the royal and imperial dynasties of Europe. From royal marriages and the birth of sons, to female sovereigns, mistresses and wicked uncles, Robert Bartlett makes enthralling sense of the complex web of internal rivalries and loyalties of the ruling dynasties and casts fresh light on an essential feature of the medieval world.

Robert Bartlett, CBE, FBA, is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews. His books include The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (1993), which won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History in 1994, and Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? (2015). He is well-known as the writer and presenter of several BBC documentary series including Inside the Medieval Mind (2008), The Normans (2010), and The Plantagenets (2014).

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Waiting for Sons to be Born

T

he search for a bride, with all its complexities, its political implications and its possible cultural consequences, had a simple goal: the birth of a child. This was the biological event on which the fortunes of kingdoms turned. Rulers in the patriarchal and dynastic world of medieval Europe were expected to be brave, violent, aggressive, forceful – qualities that were associated with men. But the thing on which dynastic continuity, and indeed the very existence of dynasties, relied, was the female body, and what it alone could do: conceive and give birth. So, once the new bride had been chosen, attention focussed on her ability to conceive children, especially sons. The natural fertility and mortality of upper-class and lower-class people were probably quite similar, but age at marriage might be different. In late medieval England, it has been calculated, women of the top level of the aristocracy married, on average, at seventeen, men at twenty-two.1 It seems, however, that practices at the very apex of the social hierarchy, the rulers, often included much earlier marriage.

According to the canon law of the western Church, girls were permitted to marry at the age of twelve, but ecclesiastical authorities recognized the possibility of marriage before that age ‘for the sake of reconciliation and peace between rulers or great men’.2 Richard II of England married Isabella of France just before her seventh birthday.

Henry the Young King (as he is known), son of Henry II of England, was married at the age of five to the even younger daughter of the king of France. Contemporaries noted with some disapproval this marriage of ‘little children still wailing in the cradle’,3 but it brought Henry II the important border territory of the Vexin as the baby princess’s dowry.

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There are cases of aristocratic women in Ottonian Germany not only marrying at twelve but also bearing children at that age,4 although it was not usual that sexual activity would begin so young. One careful study of upper-class marriages in late medieval England, by John Carmi Parsons, suggests that, whatever the age at marriage, sexual relations usually did not begin before the girl was around fifteen, and this is likely to be true of royal marriages too.5 A good example of this pattern is provided by Margaret, daughter of the king of Denmark and later ruler of all three Scandinavian kingdoms, who was engaged to the king of Norway when she was six and he was eighteen, married him aged ten and bore a child aged seventeen. Matilda, daughter of Henry II of England, married Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, at the age of eleven; her husband was then thirty-eight. She seems to have borne her first child around the age of sixteen.

But the age imbalance was not always between older men and younger women. When, in 1281, the twenty-year old Margaret of Scotland was sent to Norway to marry the Norwegian king Erik, who was not yet fourteen years old, the Scots insisted that, when she arrive, she be given separate lodgings until the wedding, ‘in such a way that the king of Norway might have no dishonourable or carnal contact with her in the meantime’.6 The raging hormones of a pubescent boy could not be allowed to upset the course of a carefully negotiated dynastic marriage. Such disparities in age between older brides and younger grooms are to be explained by the politics of dynasty and inheritance. When Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England, married Geoffrey of Anjou on 17 June 1128, she was a widow of twenty-six and he fifteen, and when Constance of Sicily married Henry, son of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, on 27 January 1186, she was thirty-one and he nineteen or twenty. These ten- or eleven-year differences in age were outweighed by the fact that in each case the bride had a hereditary claim to the kingdom, a claim that was formally acknowledged in the case of Matilda, and may have been in the case of Constance.

Both women bore sons, Constance at the age of thirty-nine, and these sons became kings of England and Sicily respectively. In the case of Matilda, relations with her younger husband were initially stormy, though there is no reason to assume that the age difference was the explanation. Less happy was the marriage of Louis V, joint king of the 53

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West Franks, and Adelheid of Aquitaine in 980. He was fourteen, she in her thirties: There was almost no wedded love between them. For, since he was still a teenage boy and she was an old woman, they had quite different ways.

They did not sleep together . . . when they needed to speak, they did so outdoors . . . Their ways were so discordant that not long afterwards they separated.7

Perhaps, as has been suggested in a later, similar case, Adelheid felt their marriage was ‘like being wed to an annoying younger brother’.8 In the dynastic world, it made a fundamental difference whether the ruler had a son or not. The worry and concern about this issue are often made explicit. ‘Woe to those peoples who have no hope that offspring of their lords will succeed to rule’, wrote Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg, in the early eleventh century.9 Everyone in a kingdom knew whether the ruler could expect a son to succeed him, and knew too that if he could not, there would be consequences for all. Thietmar was here expressing a justified foreboding, for this was exactly the predicament that would face the Germans when the ruling emperor, the childless Henry II, died. Later in that same century, in the reign of a subsequent ruler, the same note of concern is heard in the words of the archbishop of Cologne calling for universal prayers ‘that a son should be given to the emperor by the heavenly mercy, so that the peace of the realm might continue’.10 Pregnancy brought no unqualified reassurance. The world of dynastic politics was full of uncertainties, but these were of two kinds: there were certain uncertainties and uncertain uncertainties. Among the certain uncertainties was childbirth, which was always happening but, on any given occasion, had a doubtful outcome. Would the child survive? Would the mother survive? What sex would the child be? Careful negotiators would have to think through the possibilities. After the wedding of Isabella, daughter of the king of France, with Edward II of England in 1308, the French diplomats wanted to discuss all the permutations: in the case where there are several sons and daughters, what provision will be made for the younger sons and the daughters; in case my lady

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dies without sons and there are several daughters, what provision will be made for the younger daughters; and if the eldest will be queen; and if my lady dies without a son but there is a daughter or there are several daughters, and the king of England has a son by a second marriage, what provision will be made for the daughter or daughters of the first marriage?11

Death in Childbirth Among ruling families, childbirth was a political matter. It was also, for the mother, one of the most dangerous moments in her life. Modern maternal mortality rates vary enormously. In the early twenty-first century, the maternal mortality rate in western European countries was 4 to 10 per 100,000 live births, but in Afghanistan it was 1,575. In other words, it was 150 to 400 times more dangerous to give birth in Afghanistan than in western Europe. We do not have such statistics for the Middle Ages, but reasonably reliable figures for seventeenth-century England, when conditions were probably similar, suggest a rate of 1,500–1,600 per 100,000, a rate like Afghanistan.12 High rank did not make the chances of death in childbirth any less.

There are examples of queens dying in this way throughout the Middle Ages and in every part of Christendom. At least four Capetian queens of France died in or immediately after childbirth. In 1160, Constance of Castile, the second wife of Louis VII, ‘died during labour, but the daughter who was the cause of her death survived’.13 Thirty years later, Elizabeth (Isabella) of Hainault, the first wife of Philip Augustus, died giving birth to twins.14 In 1324, Mary of Luxemburg, the second wife of Charles IV, gave birth prematurely, both baby and mother dying: Around the middle of Lent, as King Charles was returning from the region of Toulouse, and had arrived at the castle of Issoudun with his pregnant wife, she, perhaps worn out by the journey, gave birth to a male child a month or so before its term; he was quickly baptized and, after a little while, breathed his last; and in a few days the mother followed her son and departed this life.15 55

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And Joan of Bourbon, wife of Charles V, died on 6 February 1378, soon after the birth of her daughter Catherine, according to one account because she had taken a bath against her doctor’s advice.16 Joan was just forty and Catherine was her ninth child.

One of the sadder cases of death in childbirth is Isabella (or Yolande), queen of Jerusalem. Isabella’s mother, who was also queen of Jerusalem, died giving birth to her; she was about twenty at the time. As queen of Jerusalem, Isabella was a very desirable bride and she was engaged to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, at the age of ten or eleven, marrying him two years later. Frederick was seventeen years her senior. In 1228, aged fifteen or sixteen, Isabella died giving birth to a son. This melancholy story shows how childbirth could sweep women away in each generation. Another of the wives of Frederick II, Isabella of England, also died in childbirth.17 Death soon after giving birth, from puerperal fever, was common. The account of the death of Queen Guta or Judith of Bohemia in 1297 describes how she used her last days to set her affairs in order: But as the sickness that she had contracted during the recent birth of a baby grew stronger, the lady queen, the pious and renowned Guta, recognized from the terrible pains, like unmistakable messengers of death, that the last days of her life had come, and she began wisely to make arrangements for her property and household and to think what might benefit her soul.18

Guta, daughter of Rudolf of Habsburg, had married Wenceslas II of Bohemia shortly before her fourteenth birthday, borne him ten children and now died at the age of twenty-six.19 It is thus not surprising that pregnancy and childbirth constituted a time when supernatural help was welcome. In November 1244 Henry III of England ordered a thousand wax candles, each weighing half a pound, to be placed around the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, and a like number to be placed in St Augustine’s, Canterbury, ‘for the preservation of the health and for the safe delivery of the queen, who is pregnant’. Later, two nuns brought ‘St Edmund’s cloak’ to Westminster ‘in preparation for our queen’s delivery’.20 Probably the intention was to wrap this around the heavily 46

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pregnant queen. She gave birth to a son, Edmund, on 16 January 1245.

Likewise, when Scottish queens were preparing for labour, the ‘sark’ or chemise of their saintly predecessor, St Margaret of Scotland, was sent for.21 Judging from other similar use of saintly relics, it is probable that the pregnant queens would wear this holy garment to ease the pain and ensure a healthy birth.22 Isabella of Bavaria, the queen of Charles VI of France, visited the relic of the belt of the Virgin Mary at St.-Sanctin-de-Chuisnes, near Chartres, during each of her twelve pregnancies.23

The Uncertainties of Pregnancy In one case, we can actually hear the apprehensive voice of a queen pregnant for the first time. One of the most remarkable documents of the whole Middle Ages is that issued by queen Petronilla of Aragon on 4 April 1152. Its opening words are, ‘I, Petronilla, queen of Aragon, lying and labouring in childbirth at Barcelona . . .’24 The queen is actually issuing this document during her labour. She wishes to make provision for the child, whichever sex it may be – whether it is a boy that ‘is to proceed from my womb, by God’s will’, or ‘if a daughter should proceed from my womb’.25 The conjectural boy is to have the kingdom of Aragon, although Petronilla’s husband, Count Raymond, will rule it during his lifetime. If the boy dies, her husband will have the kingdom. He will also have it if Petronilla’s child is a girl, being required only to ensure that she marries well. Petronilla’s own apprehensions at this time may be signified by the last clauses in the charter, whereby she grants 2,000 gold coins to the churches of Aragon and Barcelona for the sake of her soul. She was only fifteen at this time. As it turned out, Petronilla gave birth to a healthy child, and survived to have four more. It is hard to imagine a more vivid example of the bond between the female body and the body politic, as this teenage girl strains in childbirth, wondering what will ‘proceed from her womb’.

An even more uncertain situation could arise when a ruler died leaving a pregnant wife. A famous instance, with far-reaching political consequences, occurred in 1316. When Louis X of France died on 5 June in that year, he left a daughter by his first wife, but she was of dubious status, since her mother the queen had been found guilty of adultery and 57

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imprisoned for life. After the death of this imprisoned first wife, King Louis had married again, to Clemencia, a distant cousin, and she was four months pregnant at the time of his death. The succession to the kingdom was now in suspense. If Clemencia gave birth to a boy, there was no question that he would be king, with a long minority ahead of him, but arrangements had to be made for the eventuality that she might give birth to a girl. In the words of one contemporary account, the dead king’s brother, Philip, was to control the government, ‘with the title of regent (sub nomine regentis), until, if a male child was born, he reached the age of understanding, that is, fourteen, but, if a daughter was born, Philip would himself become king of France and rule.’26 Provisions were made for a landed endowment both for Louis’s daughter by his first wife and this possible daughter by his second wife: such hypothetical children were often major actors in the world of dynastic politics. Meanwhile, from 5 June until the 14 November 1316, more than five months, the kingdom and its ruling dynasty waited for Clemencia to come to term.27 Similar uncertainty went through the mind of Albert of Habsburg as he lay dying on 23 October 1439 in the Hungarian village of Neszmély (Langendorf) on the banks of the Danube. His thoughts turned first to his own chances of salvation, but then to the future of the child that his pregnant wife, Elizabeth, was carrying. Albert was not only ‘king of the Romans’ (Holy Roman Emperor elect), a title that was not hereditary, but also duke of Austria, king of Hungary and king of Bohemia. Albert made careful stipulations for the event that his unborn child were a boy.

He named Queen Elizabeth and the oldest male of the house of Habsburg as regents (verweser), who would exercise power in Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, with the advice of councils from those three domains; he instructed that the boy should be brought up in Bratislava (Pressburg) because it was close to all three of his realms; and he directed that officials in the three dominions should be chosen by the local bishops and nobles with the advice of the two regents, and that these officials should render accounts to his son when he came of age.28 A whole imagined future was passing through his mind. Albert died a few days later, on 27 October 1439, and Elizabeth gave birth on 22 February 1440, almost four months later. The child was a boy, known as Ladislas ‘Postumus’, and, after many years of struggle by his 48

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partisans, he was able to succeed to all three of his father’s titles, although he died young.

Yet more perplexing difficulties arose when a ruler died leaving a wife who might or might not be pregnant. When Alexander III of Scotland died in a riding accident on 19 March 1286, he left no surviving children.

Just five months earlier he had, however, married a young French noblewoman, Yolande of Dreux, and there was a possibility that she was pregnant. For much of 1286, it seems, the regency council that had been appointed was waiting to see whether Yolande would produce a child. One sober chronicle source for that year simply reports: ‘the event did not take place, or there was a miscarriage’.29 A much more dramatic tale is told by a contemporary Franciscan, who had good contacts at the Scottish court but whose account is also coloured by an almost hysterical misogyny. He reports that queen Yolande, ‘employing her feminine wiles, said falsely that she was pregnant’. She refused to let ‘honest matrons’ inspect her state and ‘determined to deceive the people forever by substituting someone else’s baby’. She had a new font made of white marble and she arranged to acquire a baby boy, the son of an actor but her trickery was discovered at the last moment by a loyal earl, and ‘she left the land covered in shame’. This all shows, concludes our author, how much trust you can place in women.30 This might all seem like fantasy, but a Scottish historian as hard-headed as Archie Duncan of Glasgow accepted that the queen was pregnant, suggested she might have lost the baby in August 1286, and was at least prepared to consider the possibility that this might have been concealed, and hence, at that stage, became a false pregnancy.31 We do know, at least, that Yolande was fertile because she went on to have many children by her second husband, the duke of Brittany.

Celebration The story was told that when Margaret of Provence, the wife of Louis IX of France (St Louis), gave birth to her first child, which turned out to be a girl, ‘they did not dare to break the news to the king’ and called on the bishop of Paris to convey this unwelcome information, which he did with a jest to soften the blow.32 Conversely, the worry and concern about 59

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whether a son would be born could be explosively dissolved in celebration when one arrived. It was a time for grand public gestures, like the one made by the Frankish king Chilperic in 582. When a son was born to him, after several sons had been born and died, he celebrated by a general amnesty: ‘the king commanded all the prisons to be opened, those in chains to be freed and the fines that were owing to the treasury by delinquents not to be demanded’.33 Despite this act of thanksgiving, however, this little boy also died as an infant, aged two.

Elaborate celebrations for the birth of a son to the Byzantine emperor are described in The Book of Ceremonies of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913–59). The patriarch of Constantinople and his clergy, and the senators in ceremonial dress, are to visit the palace to offer prayers and congratulations. On the third day after the birth, receptions are held and chariot races take place in the hippodrome. On the fifth day, 200 representatives of the Byzantine people assemble in the hippodrome and call out the boy’s name. On the eighth day, the empress’ bedchamber is decked with golden curtains and she receives a procession of high-born women, then highborn men, bringing prayers, congratulations and gifts. For a week, a special ‘childbirth-brew (λοχόζεμα)’ is to be distributed freely in the streets.34 The longer the wait, the greater the relief, and sometimes the wait was protracted. Louis VII of France was in his mid-forties and had been on the throne for twenty-eight years when he finally had his long desired son.

Ralph de Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, London, looking across the Channel, describes how ‘in his last days a happier fortune smiled on Louis, king of the French’. ‘The king had had only four daughters from his first and second marriages; at last, from the third, much more happily, he happily fathered a son, desired by the people and devoutly and keenly besought by the clergy.’ Indeed, he says, the very reason for Louis’ three marriages (trigamia) was ‘to bring forth masculine offspring’.35 Louis’s biographer describes how the king ‘feared that the kingdom of France would not be governed by an heir who had issued from his seed’.36 A poem written to celebrate the birth of this son, Philip, in 1165, puts it pithily: ‘The boy is peace (Pax puer est).’37 This same poem, which was written by a French student in Paris at the time (Paris was in the process of giving birth to the university as well as a Capetian prince), conveys the suspense and tension of waiting to find out the sex of the new child: 50

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It was night and the queen was in labour in this famous childbirth; the city beseeches you about this, O Christ, with wakeful prayer.

The eager wishes of the city beg that it be male; the tearful court asks God for a male.38

Another student in Paris that night was woken from his sleep by the noise of the city rejoicing: As the news was heard in the city and received with a joy such and so great that it cannot be expressed with the tongue, immediately such a great sound and ringing of all the bells broke out everywhere throughout the breadth of the city, and so many wax lights were lit through all the streets, that those who did not know the cause of such a great sound or such an unusual tumult or the vast amount of lights at night-time, thought that the city was threatened with fire. Hence, also, the author of this work . . . woken from the bed where he had already laid down to sleep, leapt at once to the window, and, looking out, he saw in the street two old women, very poor, but holding wax torches in their hands, rejoicing in expression and voice and every movement of their bodies, and rushing to and fro with swift steps. When he had asked them the cause for all this noise and rejoicing, one of them looked at him and answered, saying, ‘We now have a king given to us by God and a powerful heir to the kingdom by God’s gift.’39

Even two years later the bishop of Orleans made a grant ‘from joy at the birth of the illustrious boy Philip, son of the lord king’.40 No wonder that Philip, later to be famous as Philip Augustus, also had the soubriquet Dieudonné, ‘given by God’.41 An account of the birth of the son of Charles VI on the night of 6 February 1392, over two hundred years later, depicts the Parisian response in equally enthusiastic terms: all the church bells rang, as royal messengers cried out the news, everyone came onto the streets with lighted torches, playing music and singing all night, while ladies doled out wine and spices from trestle tables set up in the streets.42 Just like King Chilperic in 582, more than eight centuries earlier, Charles VI authorized the release of prisoners ‘because of the joyous arrival and nativity of Monsieur the Dauphin’.43 Bells ringing, music and all-night street parties show that the population at large might have shared the

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dynastic concerns of its rulers. The birth of a royal son, promising dynastic continuity, might also promise peace to the kingdom at large.

But even when the long-awaited son was born, there was no certainty he would live. High child mortality meant that rulers had to get used to a rapid turnover in their presumed heirs. Edward I of England, for example, had a son, John, born in the summer of 1266, before Edward himself became king. For the following five years John was next in the line of royal succession after his father. But the young prince died in the summer of 1271, which meant his young brother Henry, who was four at the time, took his place as heir. But in three years or so, with Edward now king, Henry also died, leaving the role of heir apparent to the baby Alfonso, who was not yet a year old. For almost ten years, from October 1274 to August 1284, it was Alfonso who was treated as the expected inheritor of the throne. But there was to be no Alfonso I of England, as the prince died before his eleventh birthday. Fortunately for King Edward, he had just had another son, born in April 1284, and christened with the king’s own name. He grew up to be Edward II. But the constant changes over many years show the uncertainties of succession, as well as highlighting the many ‘might have beens’ of history. If Prince Alfonso had lived and succeeded his father, perhaps Alfonso would have become as common a name in English history as Edward, and we might admire the Decline and Fall of that great historian Alfonso Gibbon, or laugh at the nonsense verse of Alfonso Lear.

Childlessness The purpose of a royal marriage was to produce children, or, more specifically, a son. A childless king not only created, and had to deal with, uncertainty about the succession but was also more vulnerable in his lifetime. If an opponent got rid of him, there would be no sons to fight back or pursue revenge. When Henry Bolingbroke usurped the throne from Richard II of England in 1399, he faced opposition, criticism and, sometimes, rebellion, but Richard had no son to fan the flames. In contrast, when Bolingbroke’s grandson, Henry VI, was removed by Edward of York in 1461, there was a son, and Edward’s regime was not truly secure until the killing of that son ten years later.

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There were occasions when childless rulers or nobles sought to bequeath everything to ecclesiastical institutions but such radical measures faced opposition from their wider kindred. Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon and Navarre, who died in 1134, left a will in which he bequeathed his kingdom to the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, international Orders based in the Holy Land: After my death I leave as my heir and successor the Sepulchre of the Lord that is in Jerusalem, and those who keep it and watch over it and serve God there, and the Hospital of the poor that is in Jerusalem, and the Temple of Solomon with the knights who are on guard there for the defence of the name of Christendom. To these three I grant my whole kingdom . . . so that they should have and possess it in three fair and equal portions.44

If Alfonso’s will had been carried out, his kingdom would have become three states run by the crusading Orders, just like the later Ordensstaat (‘Order State’) of the Teutonic Knights in the eastern Baltic, or the Hospitallers’ Rhodes.

Despite a papal command that the will be fulfilled,45 the leaders of Aragon and Navarre were not prepared to tolerate this. In Navarre the nobles chose as king a descendant of an illegitimate son of a king of Navarre who had ruled eighty years earlier, thus separating the two kingdoms again. In Aragon, Alfonso’s only close male relative, his brother Ramiro, was a monk, but this did not stop the leaders of Aragon hauling him out of his monastery, marrying him to a noble French lady and only allowing him to return to it when she had given birth to a child, a daughter who thus became queen of Aragon before her first birthday. ‘This’, commented a Castilian chronicler, ‘was a great sin before the Lord, but the Aragonese, having lost their dear lord, did this so that sons might be raised up from the royal seed.’46 This infant queen, Petronilla, mentioned above (p. XX), was betrothed to Raymond Berengar IV of Barcelona, twenty-three years her senior, in 1137. He took over the running of Aragon and secured renunciation of their claims by the Hospitallers and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in 1140, in return for generous grants within the realm.47 A few years later, in 1143, the Templars accepted compensation in the form of 63

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a huge endowment in Aragon.48 Later, the renunciation by the Orders and Raymond’s possession of ‘all the land which Alfonso, former king of the Aragonese, dying without an heir, left to the Sepulchre of the Lord, the Hospital and the Temple’ was confirmed by the papacy.49 The same urge that motivated Alfonso the Battler can occasionally be found among the higher aristocracy as well as amongst sovereign rulers.

The childless Welf III (d. 1055) wanted to leave his entire estate to a monastery but his nephew turned up from Italy to claim it.50 In English law it was even forbidden to make a bequest of land to a religious house on one’s deathbed, to avoid this situation.51 There were to be states run by the international Orders in medieval Europe but they were created by conquest, not by the wishes of childless kings.

The swift action of the Aragonese nobles in finding a blood-heir shows very clearly that this was an elite who thought in dynastic terms.

One story that could be told about childless kings was that they preserved their virginity to maintain their moral and spiritual purity, in accordance with the teaching of the medieval Church that virginity was one of the highest goods. Two childless eleventh-century kings, Henry II of Germany and Edward the Confessor of England, were declared saints, the former in 1146, the latter in 1161, and on each occasion the monarch’s lifelong virginity, despite being married, was given as one of the signs of their sanctity.52 But saints are, by definition, rare. Most childless kings wished to take action to remedy the situation. Should a childless queen be dismissed and replaced by another, possibly fertile, one? How many times could this be done? Or was it better to wait out the first wife and hope for her early death, perhaps while giving birth to a girl? And, failing all else, was it desirable to make arrangements for a successor who was not a son or daughter – perhaps a relative, perhaps not?

Repudiation of Failed Mothers In the High Middle Ages, the Church did not permit divorce, in the sense of the ending of a valid marriage, but did allow annulment, which was the recognition that the marriage in question had never been valid in the first place, and hence the partners could separate and marry others. One of the most common grounds for annulment was too close a family

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relationship between the partners, and the Church defined ‘too close’ in remarkably demanding terms (see above, pp. XX–XX). But if that was the most common grounds, in the sense of legal justification, then the most common motive for an annulment was the fact that the wife had borne no sons. Commentators sometimes blithely combined the motive and the justification: ‘they had parted because they were closely related and she had borne him no children’.53 An annulment of this kind with enormous political implications was that of the marriage of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. At this time, although the king of France had an undisputed position as sole consecrated monarch in the kingdom, real power in most areas was in the hands of the great dukes and counts. Amongst the greatest were the dukes of Aquitaine, ruling the south-west of the country from the Loire to the Pyrenees. Eleanor’s father, duke William X, died unexpectedly in April 1137, leaving no sons. Within four months Eleanor was married to Louis, son of Louis VI and already crowned in his father’s lifetime (the older Louis died just after this marriage). As husband of Eleanor, the king of France now had direct authority over the huge duchy of Aquitaine. It could have been a turning point in the history of the French monarchy. But there were two sources of tension in the marriage. One was a personal incompatibility.Eleanor supposedly complained, ‘I have married a monk not a monarch!’.54 The other was the fact that during the fifteen years of the marriage she bore only daughters. The Capetian dynasty had either to face the problem of the failure of that series of father-son successions that had characterized it for well over a century, or give up Eleanor and Aquitaine. The decision was made in favour of the latter, justified, and perhaps even partly motivated, by the discovery that Louis and Eleanor were related within the prohibited degrees (they were fifth cousins). Louis’ rivals were willing to gamble on the young Eleanor still being able to have sons in return for the acquisition of Aquitaine, and wasted no time. The marriage of Louis and Eleanor was nullified by a council held during Lent, that is, February to March, 1152 and she married Henry of Anjou at Pentecost (Whitsun), 18 May, the same year.55 Henry already ruled Anjou and Normandy and with his marriage to Eleanor and then his accession to the English throne in 1154 there came into existence the huge 65

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conglomeration of territories, sometimes called the Angevin empire, that dominated the history of north-west Europe for the next half-century.

And Eleanor went on to have five sons with Henry. The accident of her having borne only daughters with Louis VII thus shaped European political and military affairs for generations.

Getting rid of a wife who produced no children, or only girls, had political as well as legal consequences. If she were a member of a family that was important within the kingdom, then her relatives might well object and oppose. When the English king Edward the Confessor fell out with the powerful Earl Godwin and his sons in 1051 (see above, p. XXX), driving them into exile, he also repudiated his wife Edith, Godwin’s daughter, and sent her to a nunnery. Moreover, he stripped her of all her property: ‘the king forsook the lady, who had been consecrated as his queen, and had her deprived of all that she possessed, in land, in gold, in silver and in everything’.56 Edward and Edith had been married for more than six years but had no children. However, the next year the Godwin family returned in force, were reinstated in power and consequently ‘the queen, the earl’s daughter, was brought back to the king’s bed’.57 The king’s failure to break the Godwin family meant that he could not now seek another, younger and potentially fertile bride, and that he died childless, with the throne being taken by Godwin’s son, Edith’s brother, Harold, a move that provided the impetus for the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Some royal marriages were ended without much fuss. In 1153 Frederick Barbarossa, who had become ‘king of the Romans’ (Holy Roman Emperor elect) in the previous year, had his childless marriage to Adela of Vohburg dissolved easily and with no long-term consequences. The grounds were ‘the bond of consanguinity’, that is, they were too closely related.58 Both remarried, he to the heir of the county of Burgundy, she to a member of the German lower aristocracy, and both had children from these second marriages.59 Their marriage had lasted only four years or so, and consequently it is not clear that childlessness was the actual motive for this act rather than political considerations, such as the acquisition of Burgundy.

The marriage was dissolved by papal legates, so the pope clearly raised no objections.

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A very different situation faced Alfonso III of Portugal in the following century. He had married a great French noblewoman, Matilda of Boulogne, in 1239, many years before he became king – his elder brother Sancho II was ruler of Portugal – but he replaced Sancho as king in 1248 and now had to think seriously about the succession. His marriage with Matilda was childless and she was older than him, well into her forties. He therefore contracted another marriage. It is not clear what form of separation with Matilda took place. His new bride, who was not yet twelve, was Beatrice, the illegitimate daughter of Alfonso X of Castile, a match negotiated as part of a wider settlement of territorial disputes between the two kingdoms. Beatrice appears as ‘wife’ and ‘queen’ in Alfonso’s charters from 1253.60 Matilda, however, did not accept this without protest and appealed to the pope, who first delegated the case to the archbishop of Santiago and then, when the king failed to respond to the archbishop’s summons, himself cited the king. Alfonso failed to send representatives, but Matilda’s lawyer argued that, although Matilda ‘was the king’s legitimate wife, the king had publicly contracted a de facto marriage, or rather cohabitation, with the daughter of the king of Castile’, and hence the pope should grant Matilda’s request for a formal separation and the return of her dowry. The pope agreed to this.61 Alfonso continued to ignore the pope, even when he imposed an interdict on Portugal, and soon his teenage bride produced three sons.

He was concerned that they should be declared legitimate, and his path was eased by two developments: a new pope in 1261 and the death of Matilda in 1262. In June 1263 the new pope, Urban IV, wrote to ‘his dearest son in Christ, Alfonso, the illustrious king of Portugal’, recording how the king had approached him, explaining that in the past, at the time when you received the reins of government of the kingdom of Portugal, on account of the pressing necessities with which your highness was faced and in order to avoid the grave and manifest dangers that were imminently at hand and also on account of the fear which can strike even the steadfast, you contracted a de facto marriage with the noble woman Beatrice, daughter of our dearest son in Christ, Alfonso, the illustrious king of Castile, while Matilda of precious memory, your legitimate wife, was still alive.62

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Not only had Alfonso married while his first wife was alive, he had also married a girl who was underage and too closely related to him. But the pope notes that he has the power to suspend the rules if public necessity is great, especially in the case of rulers. Urban goes on to explain that he has taken many things into account – the loyalty of past kings of Portugal to the papacy, the fact that Portugal made an annual payment to the pope, the support for Alfonso’s request from the king of France and from the Portuguese bishops – and declares that Alfonso and Beatrice may stay together and that their children are legitimate and have the right to inherit the kingdom. The kings of the Iberian peninsula had a tradition of making marriages that broke canon law and then outfacing papal disapproval to get their desired end. This is exactly what Alfonso III had done: he had dismissed his first, unfertile wife and found another, much younger one, with whom he had the sons he desired; then he had them legitimated. His male-line descendants ruled Portugal down to 1580.

A similar awareness of political realities is evident in the dealings of Urban IV with Premysl Otakar II, king of Bohemia. Premysl determined to obtain a separation from his wife, Margaret of Austria, ‘since they were not able to have children’.63 In 1261 ‘the sterile queen was repudiated’ and Premysl married Cunigunda, the teenage granddaughter of the king of Hungary.64 The pope was willing to accept this on various grounds, even though Premysl and his new wife were too closely related by the rules of canon law. One reason was that it was argued that Margaret of Austria had been a Dominican nun and therefore could not have entered a valid marriage with the king. Another was that ‘from the continuation of the marriage contracted between you and Cunigunda peace will be preserved in the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia and the adjacent provinces’.65 Urban therefore confirmed the annulment of the marriage with Margaret and gave a dispensation for the marriage with Cunigunda. Premysl was indeed succeeded by his son by Cunigunda. International peace was a good reason for being flexible in the application of rules about marriage.

Remarriages The Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus, who had only daughters from his first marriage, married again, ‘since he longed to be called the

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father of a male child’.66 Remarriage was not uncommon after the death or repudiation of a childless queen, or one who had borne only daughters, and kings could then continue to father children with young brides.

The English king most notorious for notching up wives is Henry VIII, who had six all told, motivated mainly by the desire to secure his relatively new dynasty through male heirs. In the end, he produced a son and two daughters, but all three died without children and so with them the Tudor dynasty came to an end. Henry’s activities even left a mark on popular culture, with a mnemonic about how to remember the fate of his six wives: ‘Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.’

One medieval king who came close to rivalling Henry was Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile (d. 1109), although he did not execute any of his wives.67 His first wife, Ines or Agnes of Poitou, who is recorded as queen in the 1070s, when Alfonso was in his thirties, left no children. After her death or divorce, Alfonso married another great French noblewoman, Constance of Burgundy, who gave birth to a daughter, Urraca, later to be the first queen regnant in medieval west European history. Constance seems to have had no further surviving children, and very quickly after her death in 1093, the king married again, to Berta, of uncertain but probably Italian descent. No children are recorded. The year after Berta’s death in 1099 Alfonso married Elizabeth (or Isabella), another queen of uncertain descent but probably French, like two of his earlier wives. By her Alfonso had two more daughters, Sancha and Elvira. By this time the king also had several illegitimate children, two of them daughters, Teresa and another Elvira, by a Spanish noblewoman, and, most significant from his point of view, a son, Sancho, by his Muslim mistress Zaida (on her, see p. XX). A contemporary chronicler reports that Zaida converted to Christianity and took the new name Elizabeth, and this has led to conflicting theories about whether she is to be identified with Alfonso’s fourth wife or whether she succeeded her, confusingly with the same name. At the very end of his life, when the king was again free to marry, after the death or divorce of the preceding Elizabeth or Elizabeths, and now around seventy years of age, Alfonso took a wife called Beatrice, who survived him. He thus had five or six wives but fathered only one son. This son, Sancho, died in battle the very year before the death of his father, hence the succession of Urraca. Alfonso’s 69

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matrimonial history suggests that the pursuit of a male heir was a constant purpose and led to remarriage very quickly after the death of a queen.

One of the most controversial remarriages of a medieval monarch was the fourth marriage of the Byzantine emperor Leo VI.68 His first wife, Theophano Martinakia, whom he had married in 882, was chosen for him by his parents. They had one child, a daughter, Eudokia, but relations between the spouses were not good, and the emperor began a relationship with another woman, Zoe Zaoutzaina. There were discussions about a separation between Leo and Theophano, especially after the death of their daughter. After Theophano’s death in 897, Leo’s plans to marry Zoe Zaoutzaina met with some opposition. Partly, this was due to a general Christian hostility towards second marriages, which can be traced back as far as St Paul, and was also expressed in penitentials and canon law. St Jerome gave practical advice to those contemplating a second marriage: ‘think every day that you are going to die, and you will never think about a second marriage.’69 A century before Leo faced his own decision, Theodore, influential abbot of the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, had put it very succinctly: ‘a second marriage, even though it is permissible, still requires penance’.70 But opposition was also inspired by Zoe’s moral reputation, which was not good, since she was suspected of poisoning her husband, as well as being acknowledged as the emperor’s mistress. Because of this, the patriarch of Constantinople refused to take part in the marriage ceremony, and the priest who did so was degraded from office. Zoe Zaoutzaina gave birth to a daughter, Anna, but died after only twenty months as empress. Leo now took a third wife, Eudokia Baiane, but she died in childbirth on 12 April 901, her baby boy also dying.71 If a second and third marriage were deemed ‘permissible but requiring penance’, a fourth was unprecedented in Byzantium. Yet, after Leo had buried his third wife alongside his first two in the Church of the Holy Apostles, the imperial mausoleum in Constantinople,72 he not only took as his mistress Zoe Karbonopsina (‘black-eyed Zoe’), but, after she had given birth to the long-desired son, Constantine, on 3 September 905, he married her. In a reprise of his second marriage, the priest who conducted the ceremony was later degraded from office. This fourth marriage was, however, an even more serious matter, and Nicholas, the 60

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patriarch of Constantinople, who had been willing to baptize the baby Constantine, was not willing to countenance the marriage and debarred Leo from entering church. He could be justified by the strong tradition in the Eastern Church that condemned fourth marriages as bestial and iniquitous.73 Patriarch Nicholas later claimed that he had agreed to baptize Constantine only in return for a promise from Leo to give up Zoe.74 Matters became embattled. The emperor sought support for his position from Rome, for western canon law put no limit on the number of remarriages. Patriarch Nicholas berated the western Church for allowing not only fourth marriages, but fifth marriages, sixth marriages and so on indefinitely, and this was not a caricature.75 The greatest legal expert of the thirteenth-century Roman Church argued that second marriages were licit and defined ‘second’ to mean any marriage after the first, ‘even the thousandth’.76 Nicholas vacillated in his position, but eventually came down for a hard line. Leo then pressured him into resigning, sent him into exile and secured a new patriarch. He obtained his dispensation and Zoe stayed on, later ruling as regent in the reign of her son Constantine.77 The emperor’s fourth marriage created deep and long-lasting divisions in the Byzantine Church. Some episcopal sees had two bishops for a period, one loyal to the old patriarch, one to the new. Seemingly as part of the process of obtaining a dispensation for his marriage, Leo had to agree to a law forbidding fourth marriages, which thus made him ‘the first and last person in the history of Byzantium to have been allowed to marry for a fourth time’.78 His persistence in the face of opposition, his willingness to endure the disruption this entailed and his disregard of deep moral traditions, all indicate a total commitment to the dynastic ideal of having a son to succeed him.

Leo VI finally obtained his son, and his dynasty continued on the Byzantine throne for another 150 years. But having just one son was a precarious position, given the high rate of infant death in the period.

Most rulers would prefer more, ‘an heir and a spare’ as it is sometimes flippantly expressed. Edward I of England, after producing at least fourteen children with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, had three more when he was in his sixties, with his young bride, Margaret of France. This was not simply from emotional or sexual motives. When Eleanor died, only 71

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one of the four sons she had borne survived, so Edward’s line hung on a thread. The two further sons that Margaret bore were a guarantee.

Extinction of the line was a frightful prospect for patriarchal dynasts like Edward.

The End of the Line Kings often died without children, or without sons, or without male descendants, or without legitimate children. In all such cases, there would almost certainly be more than one claimant to succeed and the politics of the kingdom would be dominated by the issue until a secure outcome was reached, which might take years or even decades and involve the shedding of large amounts of blood. The long-term fate of kingdoms could be decided by a ruler’s childlessness. After the death of the childless Rudolf III in 1032, his kingdom of Burgundy came into the hands of the Holy Roman Emperors and lost its political identity.

Thirty-four years later, in 1066, the death of the childless Edward the Confessor, king of England, set off a ferocious conflict among his potential successors and led to the most dramatic transformation ever experienced by the medieval kingdom of England. In Germany, kings died without leaving children in 911, 918 (although in this case with an adult brother), 1002, 1024, and 1125. This was one reason why German kingship remained elective, since on these occasions the great nobles and higher clergy decided the succession, establishing precedents for election rather than hereditary monarchy. Famous dynasties that died out though lack of male heirs included the Arpad kings of Hungary in 1301 and the Premyslids of Bohemia in 1306, in each case after ruling for centuries in their ancestral realms. In both cases, many years of political uncertainty, military conflict and outside intervention followed. Neither Hungary nor Bohemia was ever ruled by a native dynasty again (as distinct from one individual king), and in the long term both became part of the domains of the Habsburgs, who acquired these realms permanently in 1526 and 1527 and lost them only in the turmoil at the end of the First World War. The cases of Scotland in 1286 and Aragon in 1410 show very well the big political consequences that could result from kings dying without

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male descendants. The Scottish example is exceptionally enlightening about the thinking of the nobility and higher clergy in such times of dynastic crisis.79 The unexpected death of Alexander III in 1286, leaving no male descendants, did not result immediately in a contest for the throne, as it would in many dynastic systems, since, by this time, Scottish royal succession had not only been monopolized by one lineage, but also explicitly recognized the right of female heirs. In 1284, two years before Alexander’s death, the nobles of Scotland acknowledged Margaret, ‘the Maid of Norway’, the king’s daughter’s daughter, as heir to the kingdom.80 So, after the king’s death, there was no question about who should succeed.81 But Margaret would be the first female ruler in Scottish history. The nobles could accept this, but presumed that Margaret would marry, not only to have children to continue the dynasty, but also to have a man to govern and make war. The question then arose as to whom she would marry. Edward I, king of England, Scotland’s large and powerful southern neighbour, had a suggestion: his own son and heir, also called Edward, who was two years old in 1286, a year younger than the Maid of Norway.

The committee of Scottish lords and bishops that acted as a regency council for Margaret, the absent child ruler, entered into negotiations for this marriage and in 1290 a detailed agreement was drawn up, carefully designed to preserve the separate identity of Scotland after the marriage of the heir of England and the heir of Scotland.82 If Margaret and Edward had married, any son of theirs would have become both king of Scotland and king of England, but the two realms would not then be united into one (this exact situation did occur in 1603). All this care came to nothing, however, with the death of Margaret on her way to Scotland.

There now really would be a contest for the succession.

Fourteen claimants made their case to succeed, but it was generally recognized that only two, John Balliol and Robert Bruce, had a strong basis for their claim (see the family tree in Appendix D). Rather than see civil war, the leaders of Scotland agreed to seek a judgment on the matter from Edward I of England. He first required recognition as overlord of Scotland, and then set up a court of 104 men, twenty-four from his own council, forty nominated by Balliol and forty by Bruce. Both Balliol and Bruce were descended from David, earl of Huntingdon, brother of King 73

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William the Lion. The legal argument boiled down to a simple issue: did Balliol, as grandson of Earl David’s oldest daughter, have the better case, or Bruce, as son of a younger daughter of Earl David? On grounds of primogeniture, Balliol’s case was hard to refute, so Bruce’s lawyers had to argue that, as a son of David’s daughter, not a grandson, he was ‘nearer in degree’, that is, closer as counted by generations.83 This did him no good. On 17 November 1292, at a great assembly of the lords and bishops of Scotland and England in the castle of the border town of Berwick-onTweed, judgment was pronounced in favour of John Balliol.84 It might seem that the matter had been resolved, but that was not the case. Edward I had used his opportunity to win recognition as overlord of Scotland and Balliol had to swear fealty and perform homage to him.

Although Balliol was now ‘King John’, he had a superior in England with a powerful sense of his own rights and privileges. Very quickly points of tension arose, notably the hearing of appeals from Scotland in the English royal lawcourts and the demand for Scottish military service in King Edward’s war in France. The Scots leaders decided that resistance was better than compliance and entered into an alliance with Edward’s enemy, the king of France. As soon as he could, Edward invaded and conquered Scotland, deposed John Balliol and took the country into his own hands. This was a turning point in relations between Scotland and England. In the previous two centuries, there had been only nine years of war between the two kingdoms but after Edward’s invasion of 1296 warfare was the usual condition, down to 1560. It was the deaths of Alexander III, last of the old line of Scottish kings, and of his granddaughter Margaret, that triggered this shift from two centuries of almost continuous peace to two and a half centuries of almost continuous war.

An entirely different history of relations between the two countries could be imagined if the Scottish royal dynasty had not faced the crisis of extinction in the male line.

More than a century later, in 1410, Martin I of Aragon died leaving no legitimate male descendants.85 He did, however, have an illegitimate grandson, son of his predeceased son, and a nephew and a greatnephew who descended from the Aragonese royal family in the female line. Moreover, there were two more distant relatives who descended in an unbroken male line from earlier kings of Aragon (see the family tree 64

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in Appendix D). The complexity of the situation, of weighing the claims of legitimate versus illegitimate birth, male-line versus female-line descent and closer or more distant relationship, was compounded by the starker question of the balance of power between the claimants.

Unlike the Scots lords in the later thirteenth century, the ruling classes of the lands of the Crown of Aragon (which comprised Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia) decided to settle the question of the succession themselves, not by referring it to any outside power. This involved a long and sometimes difficult process, harmonizing the parliaments of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, dealing also with those claimants who were resorting to violence, and maintaining authority in the islands of the Mediterranean subject to the Crown of Aragon, where, in Sicily, there was a move to have Martin’s illegitimate grandson crowned.

The five contenders were Alfonso de Gandía, grandson of James II and quite old at the time of this crisis, who died early in 1412, whereupon his claim was taken up by his younger brother, John of Prades; James of Urgell, great-grandson of Alfonso IV and notorious for his violence; Frederick de Luna, the young illegitimate son of Martin I’s son; Louis (III) of Anjou, always on the lookout for a crown; and Ferdinand of Antequera, the younger son of John I of Castile, and from 1406 regent for his young nephew John II of Castile, who was the son of Ferdinand’s older brother Henry III. Ferdinand was also extremely wealthy and experienced in warfare, both attractive qualities in a candidate for the throne.

In February 1412, almost two years after the death of Martin I, the parliaments of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia each chose three representatives, thus forming a committee of nine, who were granted the power to decide who should be the next king. Among the nine commissioners were bishops, legal experts, representatives of the towns and also Master Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar from a wealthy Valencian family who was one of the most celebrated charismatic preachers of his time (and who was canonized in 1455). A decision of at least six of the nine would be valid, on condition that they included one from each of the three lands of the Crown of Aragon. The nine spent the spring and early summer of 1412 in their deliberations in the town of Caspe, close to where Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia adjoined. They read the 75

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documents submitted to them and heard the arguments made on behalf of the claimants. On the 28 June 1412 they went to the church of Caspe to publish their decision. An altar had been set up at the doors of the church, facing the square, and benches placed around it.

Representatives of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, including lawyers, nobles, clergy and others, took their places here. The archbishop of Tarragona celebrated mass at the altar. Master Vincent Ferrer preached a sermon and then proceeded to announce the decision about the succession: There, publicly, in a loud and comprehensible voice, before the lord ambassadors and the people assembled in that place, he solemnly published one of the documents concerning our lord and king, reading word for word. And when in this publication there was a passage in which the name was mentioned of the most excellent and magnificent ruler and lord Ferdinand, our true king and lord, Master Vincent and the others and all present, expressing their happiness and joy in a great and loud voice, exclaimed many times, ‘Viva, viva nostre rey e senyor don Ferrando!’86

The local garrison then raised a huge banner with the arms of the kings of Aragon, and church bells were rung and trumpets sounded.

Everything was being done to make this decision as public and as loud and joyful as possible, and hence irreversible.87 Not everyone rejoiced.

James of Urgell refused to recognize Ferdinand and had to be defeated in battle. He spent twenty years a prisoner and his county of Urgell was incorporated into the lands of the Crown. This is how a junior branch of the royal family of Castile came to rule also in Aragon. Ferdinand’s grandson, also called Ferdinand, married his cousin, Isabella of Castile, thus effecting the dynastic union of Aragon and Castile on which modern Spain is based.

In both Scotland and Aragon the ruling classes, lay and ecclesiastical, had contrived to create institutions and procedures to deal with a crisis in the succession without simply lapsing into civil war. The Scots, however, had submitted their case for judgment to a ruler outside the kingdom, and moreover one who would have a very determined and intransigent view of the proper relationship between England and Scotland. That is why, although the judgment in favour of John Balliol 66

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was undoubtedly the correct one in terms of the rule of primogeniture, recourse to Edward had left the Scottish kingdom in a vulnerable subordinate position. Perhaps the Scots ruling classes thought they had little choice between accepting Edward as arbiter and seeing a Bruce–Balliol war, although in the long run they got both, since in 1332 John Balliol’s son launched a campaign for the kingship against the incumbent Bruce dynasty that lasted for a quarter of a century. In the lands of the Crown of Aragon the decision was put into the hands of a committee representing the three constituent lands and was reached as much on grounds of utility as of legal custom. Indeed, one account of the proceedings at Caspe alleged that one of the nine commissioners, the archbishop of Tarragona, ‘believed that the duke of Gandía and the count of Urgell, as legitimate males and descendants in the male line of the stock of the kings of Aragon, had greater right’, but had to concede that ‘don Ferdinand was more useful for the government of the realm’.88 The failure of a dynastic line, especially if it was dramatic, often stimulated chroniclers and others to provide an explanation, usually in terms of providence and punishment rather than in terms of biology. One of the more notable cases was the successive deaths in 1314, 1316, 1322 and 1328, of Philip IV (‘the Fair’) of France, his three sons and a grandson. A king who was the most powerful in Europe and had, at the time of his death, three adult sons, left no male-line descendants just fourteen years later. It is a perfect example of the uncertainty of the dynastic world and no surprise that these kings have been christened les rois maudits – ‘the accursed kings’.

A chronicler writing in Castile a little later tells the story of the successive deaths, concluding, and in this way there came to an end the line of King Philip of France, whom they call ‘the Great’ and in France ‘the Fair’. And some say that this death of King Philip and also the failure of his line came about because this King Philip had the pope captured. And others say . . . because this King Philip in his time made great extortions in the kingdom of France . . . and some say because this King Philip expelled the Jews from all his realm . . . but the reason why this happened, God knows.89

Such a superfluity of explanation suggests the inexplicable.

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Adoption There was one institution that might seem to solve the problem of the childless ruler. In his will, which was read out after his assassination in 44 BC, Julius Caesar bequeathed three-quarters of his property to his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, and also ‘adopted him into his family and name’.90 Octavius then became ‘Caesar’ and was well launched on his path to becoming ‘Augustus’, conventionally regarded as the first Roman emperor.91 When planning for the future, Augustus himself also employed the institution of adoption. After the death of two of his grandsons, Augustus adopted the remaining grandson and also Tiberius, who was both his stepson and his son-in-law. The grandson proved unsatisfactory, and was soon disinherited, but Tiberius entered fully into the role of adopted son. In return Augustus made every effort to increase Tiberius’ power and glory, for ‘it was now certain that hope of the succession inclined to one person alone’.92 These examples show how important adoption was in Roman society, often determining the transmission of power at the highest level.

This tradition continued in the Byzantine empire, where succession to the imperial throne was sometimes by means of adoption: thus the emperor Justin (518–27) adopted his nephew, who took the name Justinian, and succeeded him as emperor, and Michael III (842–67) adopted Basil, his chamberlain, with a view to Basil succeeding (although Basil hastened events by murdering Michael), while the eleventh century saw several examples of adoption being practised or proposed to secure imperial succession.93 It was such a readily conceivable possibility in Byzantium that when Nicholas, patriarch of Constantinople, was justifying his refusal to sanction the fourth marriage of the emperor Leo VI to his mistress Zoe in 906 (discussed above, p. XX), he rejected Leo’s argument that the marriage was required to legitimize the son Zoe had borne him, by saying that it would be perfectly easy for Leo to adopt the boy; this would legitimize him and there would then be no need for the marriage.94 In contrast to Byzantium, adoption became marginal in the medieval west.95 It is mentioned in the Frankish and Lombard laws of the early medieval period, and legal formulae for the procedure are found in

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formularies from the Frankish empire,96 but cases are few, and even fewer among rulers. There are three instances of adoption among the Merovingian kings, although one of them is doubted by some scholars.97 The most fully depicted case, because it is described in the history of Gregory of Tours, is the adoption of the child king Childebert II by his uncle King Guntram – this was a period when the Frankish realms were divided amongst several members of the Merovingian dynasty. Gregory describes how, in the spring of 577, Guntram arranged a meeting with the young Childebert, along with the chief men from both their kingdoms, and said, ‘It has befallen me, because of my sins, that I am without children, and so I request that this nephew of mine should be as a son to me.’98 He then placed Childebert on a throne, bestowed on him the entire kingdom99 and promised that, even if he had a son in future, Childebert would be that child’s equal. Thereafter, Guntram referred to Childebert as his son or adopted son.100 Some years later, in 585, this bond was strengthened. At a meeting between the two kings, Guntram placed a spear in the hands of Childebert, who was now about fifteen, and said, ‘This is a sign that I have handed over my whole kingdom to you . . .

For, because of my sins, none of my stock remains except you alone, the son of my brother. For you succeed in all my kingdom, all others excluded from inheritance.’101 In whatever way one interprets these early medieval cases and the references in laws and formularies, there is no doubt that they are few in number and dry up soon after the Merovingian period. From the tenth to the twelfth century there is virtually silence on the subject of adoption in west European sources. The story then recommences but at a very abstract level. The learned lawyers of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries often discussed adoption, since it appeared in the texts of the Roman Law that they studied, but it is clear that, in general, these discussions are theoretical and hypothetical.102 In Spain adoption appears in law codes such as the famous Siete Partidas but ‘research undertaken in judicial and notarial sources to study the practical application of adoption has produced nothing’.103 Only in the late Middle Ages was there a muted revival of the practice of adoption. There is evidence of adoptions, at various social levels, from the fourteenth century in Sicily, from the fifteenth century in Florence, Provence and southern France, 79

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with isolated examples elsewhere.104 These were all areas where written law, as distinct from unwritten custom, was important, and this distinction was recognized at the time, one legal expert, after defining adoption, pointing out ‘this happens more in written law than in custom’.105 Roman Law, with its prominent place for adoption, provided a model in these regions.

Adoption could be used by peasants to bring a strong young man into the family, who would support them in their old age, but it could also be used by aristocrats for dynastic purposes, especially to preserve the family name if they had no sons of their own. The ‘adoption of name and coat-ofarms’, as it is called, enabled dynastic continuity to be salvaged even if the biological male-line transmission was broken. Thus, Lourdin de Saligny, chamberlain of the duke of Burgundy in the mid-fifteenth century, lacking a son, named his daughter as his heir but then ‘substituted’ her son for her.

His grandson thus became ‘his substitute son’. This substitute son would inherit all Lourdin’s property, and so would his sons after him if he had any; if not, the property would pass to his younger brothers in turn. A condition of their receiving the inheritance was that they ‘should be held to bear the name, surname, heraldic motto and arms of the testator’.106 In this way generations of men with the name Lourdin de Saligny, and with Lourdin’s coat-of-arms, would march into the future, bridging the gap in male transmission that Lourdin’s daughter represented.

In adoption, the dynastic world would seem to have found an ideal safeguard against rupture of the family line. This was indeed how the institution was used in ancient Rome. However, medieval cases of transmission of royal power in this way are few. Apart from the Merovingian examples already discussed, there are isolated later cases, some of which are hard to interpret. For example, annalists describe a meeting in 887 between the emperor Charles the Fat and his young kinsman Louis, ‘whom the emperor attached to himself honourably as his man, like an adopted son’.107 This word ‘like (quasi)’ can be interpreted as having a stronger or weaker meaning, and some scholars have viewed this as a genuine adoption with Charles accepting Louis as his heir, while others view it a vaguer ‘ritual of peacemaking’.108 A case of royal succession by adoption occurred in Hungary in 1038.

A well-informed Bavarian chronicler describes how Peter Orseolo, whose 70

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father was Otto Orseolo, doge of Venice, and whose mother was a sister of King Stephen of Hungary, came to the throne: ‘Since his own son had died during his lifetime, and he had no other, Stephen, his uncle, made him his adoptive son (adoptivum) and appointed him heir to the kingdom.’109 To do this, Stephen had to kill or exile other relatives, and Peter’s reign was precarious: he was deposed in 1041, restored by the German emperor in 1044, again deposed and blinded in 1046. This adoption of a sister’s son, which is a particularly close relationship in some societies, thus misfired in the face of the claims of other members of the ruling dynasty and also hostility to Stephen’s christianizing policies.

A more successful attempt to alter the succession by some kind of adoption marked the end of the civil war in the reign of King Stephen of England (1135–54). Stephen had faced the competing claims of his cousin, the empress Matilda, and her son Henry of Anjou. Eventually, in 1153, after years of war and the death of his eldest son, King Stephen came to terms, agreeing that Henry would succeed him when he died.

The document recording this agreement does not use the language of adoption explicitly, Stephen saying ‘I have appointed Henry my successor in the kingdom of England after me and my heir by hereditary right . . . I have also given him my assurance on oath that I will support him as my son and heir’, but the chroniclers did not hesitate to describe this act as adoption: ‘the king accepted him as his adoptive son and made him heir of the kingdom’; ‘an agreement of mutual adoption was made between Stephen, king of England, and Henry’; ‘Henry, whom King Stephen adopted as his son’.110 This language of adoption might have inspired the fantastic story, current in the thirteenth century, that Henry was actually Stephen’s biological son, whom he had fathered on the empress Matilda in a ship in the English Channel.111 The most notable instances of adoption by a ruling sovereign occurred in the late medieval kingdom of Naples: both Queen Joanna I (1343–81) and her great-niece Joanna II (1414–35) adopted heirs. The kingdom of Naples, which covered the whole of mainland southern Italy, was in the region of written law where, as was noticed, adoption was more common than in northern Europe. The background to these adoptions 81

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was the long and vicious feuding between different branches of the ruling family. In 1380 Joanna I was facing a serious threat from Charles of Durazzo, representative of one of these rival branches. Joanna was in her fifties at this time and, although she had had three children from her four marriages, none had survived beyond their third year. She was thus able to offer to adopt an heir, who would be chosen for his ability to back her cause against Charles of Durazzo. She therefore negotiated with her cousin, Louis of Anjou, younger brother of the king of France, and, on 29 June 1380, issued a document adopting him: we have adopted, received, admitted and ordained lord Louis as our legitimate son, wishing that lord Louis, our legitimate son, should enjoy and possess all the privileges and rights that legitimate adopted sons can and should enjoy and possess. Moreover, we, honouring lord Louis, our legitimate adopted son, with full and maternal affection, have named, pronounced, declared, made, instituted and ordained, him, and his successors after him, as future king, as our legitimate heir and successor after our death.112

Joanna could now hope for military backing from the powerful French prince. Louis, however, acted with deliberation rather than haste.

Charles of Durazzo was able to conquer the kingdom of Naples, capture Queen Joanna and have her murdered before Louis even arrived in the kingdom. But Louis was not deterred from pursuing his claim, just as his son and his grandsons did after him. The act of adoption of 1380 thus helped to shape the politics of Italy, and beyond, well into the fifteenth century.

During the course of this long struggle, adoption was again used as a tool. Joanna II, daughter of Charles of Durazzo, succeeded to the throne of Naples in 1414 but soon faced a serious threat from Louis (II) of Anjou, the son of the man adopted by Joanna I, and, after his death, from his son Louis (III). Joanna was childless and in her forties and hence, like her earlier namesake, was free to offer her inheritance in return for immediate military support. She turned to the king of Aragon and Sicily, Alfonso V, whom she adopted as her son and heir in 1421.

Alfonso could provide powerful fleets and had a nearby base in the island of Sicily. He made a grand entrance to the city of Naples on 8 July 1421 72

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and was greeted warmly by his adoptive mother. But these good relations did not last. Alfonso’s military success was limited, and soon serious distrust arose between him and his followers and Joanna and her court.

By 1423 relations had broken down completely and Joanna revoked her adoption of Alfonso and Alfonso himself sailed back to Barcelona, while Joanna changed her position entirely and adopted Louis of Anjou in his place.113 There seem to be a few other late medieval cases, but the total number of adoptions by rulers in the Middle Ages, outside of the Byzantine empire, cannot exceed ten or twelve.114 The question naturally arises of why so few childless, or sonless, medieval rulers took this route. The influential anthropologist Jack Goody advanced the thesis that the disappearance of adoption as a general practice in medieval Europe was the result of a concerted effort on the part of the Church, which attacked cousin marriage and concubinage as well as discouraging adoption: If the Church introduced and encouraged procedures for acquiring land and other property for itself, did it also discourage, at least in consequence if not in intention, those practices that might provide a family heir for the property of a dead man or woman? If so, this would provide some explanation for the dramatic shift from close to distant marriage, as well as the abandonment of adoption, widow inheritance, concubinage, divorce and remarriage and other strategies of heirship.115

Goody sees a pattern here: ‘it does not seem accidental that the Church appears to have condemned the very practices that would have deprived it of property’.116 It is not quite clear how attacks on cousin marriage helped the Church accumulate property, although the other two prongs, hostility to concubinage and adoption, would indeed increase the chances of childlessness, and hence of a bequest to the Church. But there is little evidence of official ecclesiastical hostility to adoption, with one exception, Salvian, a priest from fifth-century Gaul. The uncompromising Salvian is indeed scathing about childless people adopting rather than bequeathing their property for pious purposes, that is, to the Church: 83

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A number of people without sons, paying no attention to their own salvation and the remedy for their sins, even though they lack seed of their blood, nevertheless seek others, to whom they award their property, that is, to whom they ascribe the shadow name of family relationship, whom they, as imaginary parents, might make their adopted sons, as it were, and have these offspring born of perfidy succeed in place of those they do not have.117

Salvian was, however, a more or less isolated voice. The decline of adoption as a general practice cannot be explained by overt hostility on the part of the Church, because there is so little of it. There remains an enigma. If some rulers, at some times, could use adoption to deal with the problem of childlessness, why didn’t all childless rulers do so?

Unmarried Kings and Kings Who Married Late There is another enigma, although of different degree. If the dynastic world was obsessed with the search for high-born wives to be the mothers of princes, what can explain those cases where kings married late or not at all? There is no doubt that rulers received a constant barrage of advice that they should marry. Ivo, bishop of Chartres, was delighted to hear that Louis VI was intending to marry and urged him to do so without delay, especially since if he died without an heir the kingdom would be torn apart by ambitious men: Do not devise any delay for entering the order of married life . . . Hasten so that from your loins there should proceed one who may destroy the vain hope of so many ambitious men and replace fickleness with the hope of one man.118

By marrying, Ivo said, Louis would simultaneously serve his own interest, the stability of the kingdom and the peace of the Church.

James I of Aragon, who succeeded to the kingdom in 1213 at the age of five, recalled in his memoirs how his nobles had urged him to marry: And we took as our wife the queen, Donã Eleanor, at the advice of our men, who counselled us that, because our father had no other son besides us, that we should take a wife when young, since they had great concern for

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our life and that above all they wished that an heir should issue from us, so that the kingdom would not pass from the natural line.119

James married Eleanor, a member of the royal house of Castile, just after his thirteenth birthday.

Such advice crops up also in largely fictional accounts. When a hagiographer wrote the life of Æthelbert, saintly king of the East Angles (d. 794), he needed an explanation for his hero actually agreeing to marriage, a rare thing for a saint. It is the king’s advisers who supposedly urged him to take this step: Since he had not yet taken a queen in marriage, the whole gathering of his court feared that, if he were snatched from their midst without children, they would fall under foreign rule. Therefore, they counselled the king that he should receive in matrimony a woman worthy of the royal dignity.120

Given all this, one would expect that the early betrothal of kings, or heirs to the throne, would be a universal practice. There are indeed, as we have seen, many examples of the betrothal of very young children or even of babies, and the vast majority of kings did marry. But the exceptions to this pattern raise a question: what motivated kings who did not marry, or married late?

The Byzantine emperor Basil II, who died unmarried and childless in 1025, despite the risk to the continuation of his dynasty, presents a rare case. Contemporaries sought to explain his choice by a vow of celibacy that Basil had taken, renouncing sex and marriage in exchange for divine help in war – Basil was a famously successful war-leader (see below, p. XXX). Clearly, they thought there had to be some such good reason for his decision never to marry. Later in the eleventh century the case of another unmarried king has provoked speculation about a reason of a different kind. William II Rufus, king of England, came to the throne in 1087 in his late twenties.121 He never married and his court was criticized by a contemporary monastic writer as a centre of effeminacy, with its ‘courtly youths who almost all let their hair grow long like girls’.122 Monks of the following generation also characterized William’s court in this way, adding specific accusations that it was a ‘homosexual brothel’123

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and writing of the king that ‘he never had a legitimate wife but he applied himself insatiably to obscene fornication and constant adultery’.124 These authors also launch general attacks on the sodomy that they see all around them, but without making a specific charge against the king.

The most thorough biographer of the king concludes that he was probably bisexual.125 A similar view has been advanced about Richard I of England, the ‘Lionheart’.126 Richard married Berengaria of Navarre at the age of thirty-three. The lateness of this marriage may be partly explained by his prior, and very long, engagement to another princess. But contemporary sources do report that, during his marriage to Berengaria, he was criticized for neglecting his conjugal duties. The saintly bishop of Lincoln told him to his face, ‘the public gossip is that you are not faithful to your own wife’, while, after a hermit warned him, ‘Remember the overthrow of Sodom and abstain from illicit deeds’, the king eventually repented and ‘took back his own wife, whom he had not slept with for a long time, and abandoning illicit sexual intercourse, cleaved to his wife’.127 Some have interpreted these words as indications that Richard was accused of homosexual activity, but it is clear that the invocation of Sodom can often imply only the punishment of wickedness in general, rather than this specific sin.

The matter of Richard’s sexuality might have been clarified by a passage in the chronicler Helinand of Froidmont, but we have this in a tantalizing incomplete form. The relevant part of Helinand’s chronicle survives only in a seventeenth-century printed edition, not in manuscript, and the passage about Richard describes how the king, during his captivity in Germany on his way home from crusade, made his confession to a certain bishop and proposed ‘to be continent henceforth’, but another bishop, coming from England and wishing to ingratiate himself with the king, ‘persuaded him, for the sake of his bodily health, that he should . . . dot dot dot . . . and thus confirmed the unhappy man in his wickedness’.

The learned Cistercian editing Helinand in 1669 obviously thought that what the bishop prescribed was unfit for his readers to know. How bad could it have been? And is this the earliest example of the bowdlerizing ellipsis in print? Helinand vouchsafes this story as being told by King Richard himself on his death bed.128 There is thus no clear and 76

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convincing evidence for Richard engaging in homosexual activity but very strong evidence for his sleeping with people other than his wife, and an illegitimate son is recorded. He obviously did not feel that his duty to produce a legitimate male heir was paramount, and he was indeed succeeded by a brother. In this he resembles his predecessor, William Rufus. Both kings, coincidentally or providentially, died in similar ways, the former from an arrow, the latter from a crossbow bolt, a ‘coupling of similar things’ that was noticed at the time.129 Basil II and William Rufus are certain cases of kings who died as unmarried adults. There is also no evidence that Æthelstan (d. 939), often seen as the first king of England, was married. The chronicler William of Malmesbury, writing two centuries later, but perhaps having access to reliable source material, says that the king raised his young brothers with great affection and that ‘when they were adults, he made them partners in the kingdom, and, out of consideration for them, he never made any effort to get married’.130 The implication here is that Æthelstan expected and approved the succession of a younger brother, which indeed was what happened. Such a motive is one of several considered in Sarah Foot’s substantial biography of the king. She also mentions his sexuality, along with a sensible caveat: Any attempt to talk about the sexual orientation of a tenth-century man is doomed to be anachronistic . . . Hypothetically, we could concede that, given both the vocabulary and the opportunity to express such desires, Æthelstan’s interests might have tended towards same-sex relations

Alongside a succession strategy and a sublimated homosexuality, the possible motives for the king’s celibacy, she suggests, might also include ‘a religious vocation to chastity’ (as was suggested for Basil II) although we are warned against the more psychoanalytical theory that it sprang from ‘a revulsion against the suffocatingly feminine atmosphere of his father’s household’. Foot also seeks to depict the king’s unmarried status as nothing extraordinary: ‘While bachelorhood was uncommon among secular European princes of his day, it was not a wholly inexplicable lifechoice and need not be treated with particular suspicion.’131 Whether we treat it with suspicion or not, the variety of explanations for the lifechoice of unmarried rulers like Æthelstan, whether such explanations 87

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appeal more strongly to medieval assumptions (a vow of celibacy) or modern ones (latent homosexuality), shows that an explanation is demanded. Because the number of unmarried kings is so small, and their motivation so uncertain, it remains a safe generalization that kings took it for granted that one of their main responsibilities was to produce a son and heir.

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William Quinn John D. Turner

Boom and Bust A Global History of Financial Bubbles William Quinn, John D. Turner

A Global History of Financial Bubbles

UK and US publication August 2020 9781108421256 Hardback £18.99 / $24.95

Why do stock and housing markets sometimes experience amazing booms followed by massive busts and why is this happening more and more frequently?

In order to answer these questions, William Quinn and John D. Turner take us on a riveting ride through the history of financial bubbles, visiting, among other places, Paris and London in 1720, Latin America in the 1820s, Melbourne in the 1880s, New York in the 1920s, Tokyo in the 1980s, Silicon Valley in the 1990s and Shanghai in the 2000s. As they do so, they help us understand why bubbles happen, and why some have catastrophic economic, social and political consequences whilst others have actually benefited society. They reveal that bubbles start when investors and speculators react to new technology or political initiatives, showing that our ability to predict future bubbles will ultimately come down to being able to predict these sparks.

William Quinn is a Lecturer in Finance at Queen’s University Belfast, where he conducts research on market manipulation, stock markets and, above all, bubbles.

John D. Turner is a Professor of Finance and Financial History at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an editor of The Economic History Review. His book Banking in Crisis (2014) won the Wadsworth Prize in 2015.

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CHAPTER 1

The Bubble Triangle

The definition of a bubble we take to be an undertaking which is blown up into an appearance of splendour and solidity, without any probability of permanence, and the name, we take it, is derived from the specious products of puffing and soapy water, with which the most of the ingenious youth of this realm have been long familiar.1 Anon.

We have to turn the page on the bubble-and-bust mentality that created this mess.2 President Barack Obama

W

hat is the difference between the great composer George Frideric Handel and Shane Filan, the lead singer of Irish boyband Westlife? To those of a musical bent, the answer is obvious: Handel is one of the most respected classical musicians of all time, having composed several famous operas. Filan, on the other hand, largely specialised in saccharine cover versions of 1970’s pop songs. The difference that interests us, however, is that while one lost all of their wealth in a bubble, the other got out before a bubble burst, making a handsome profit as a result.

By the time he was 30 years old, Handel’s musical compositions had already made him a very wealthy man, and his patron, Queen Anne, provided him with a considerable annual income. In 1715 he invested some of his wealth in five shares of the South Sea Company, which would have cost about £440. Handel sold his shares before the end of June 1719 for a profit of about £145 – just before the huge bubble in

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the company’s shares.3 By the time Shane Filan was 30, Westlife was one of the most successful pop groups of all time and the net worth of the group’s four members was over £32 million. Along with his brother, Filan decided to become a property developer in the midst of the Irish housing bubble. In order to purchase as much housing as possible, he supplemented his own funds by borrowing large sums of money from banks. In 2012 he was declared bankrupt, owing his creditors £18 million.

Shane Filan was not the only loser when the housing bubble collapsed.

In Northern Ireland, where we both live, house prices more than trebled between 2002 and 2007; by 2012, they had collapsed to less than half their peak.4 We thus observed at close quarters the economic destruction that a bubble can wreak. Bubbles can encourage overinvestment, overemployment and overbuilding, which ends up being inefficient for both businesses and society.5 In other words, bubbles waste resources, as clearly illustrated by the half-built houses and ghost housing estates that stood across Ireland when the housing bubble burst. Other inefficiencies are in the realm of labour markets, as people train or retrain for a bubble industry. When the bubble bursts, they become unemployed and part of their investment in education has been wasted. After the collapse of the housing bubble, many of our friends, neighbours and students who had trained as architects, property developers, builders, plumbers and lawyers were either unemployed, in a new industry, or travelling overseas to find work.

The most severe economic effects usually occur when the bursting of a bubble reduces the value of collateral backing bank loans. This, coupled with the inability of bubble investors to repay loans, can result in a banking crisis. The collapse in house prices after 2007 was followed by the global financial crisis and we witnessed the downfall of American, British, Irish and other European banks. This resulted in major longlasting damage to the economy. Financial crises are astonishingly economically destructive: estimates of the losses in economic output for post-1970 banking crises range from 15 to 25 per cent of annual GDP.6 These estimates, however, conceal the large costs that financial crises have on psychological and human well-being.7 They also ignore the human costs associated with the imposition of austerity measures once 2 www.cambridge.org

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the crisis was over. We both experienced and witnessed cuts in real pay, decreased levels of public service provision and cuts in welfare payments to family members.

Not all bubbles, however, are as economically destructive as the housing bubble of the 2000s, and some may even have positive social consequences.8 There are at least three ways in which bubbles can be useful. First, the bubble may facilitate innovation and encourage more people to become entrepreneurs, which ultimately feeds into future economic growth.9 Second, the new technology developed by bubble companies may help stimulate future innovations, and bubble companies may themselves use the technology developed during the bubble to move into a different industry. Third, bubbles may provide capital for technological projects that would not be financed to the same extent in a fully efficient financial market. Many historical bubbles have been associated with transformative technologies, such as railways, bicycles, automobiles, fibre optics and the Internet. William Janeway, who was a highly successful venture capitalist during the Dot-Com Bubble, argues that several economically beneficial technologies would not have been developed without the assistance of bubbles.10 Why do we refer to a boom and bust in asset prices as a bubble? The word ‘bubble’, in its present spelling, appears to have originated with William Shakespeare at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the famous ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech from his comedy As You Like It, he uses the word bubble as an adjective meaning fragile, empty or worthless, just like a soap bubble. Over the following century, ‘bubble’ was widely used as a verb, meaning ‘to deceive’, and as a noun, meaning ‘fragile, empty or worthless’. The application of the term to financial markets began in 1719 by writers such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, who viewed many of the new companies being incorporated as not only worthless and empty, but deceptive.11 The bubble metaphor stuck, but over time its use has become somewhat less pejorative.

Nowadays the word ‘bubble’ is used by commentators and news media to describe any instance in which the price of an asset appears to be slightly too high. Among academic economists, however, using the word at all can be deeply controversial. One school of thought sees a bubble as a non-explanation of a financial phenomenon, a label applied only to 3

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episodes for which we have no better explanation.12 Eugene Fama, the father of modern empirical finance, goes further than this, calling the term ‘treacherous’ and complaining that ‘the word “bubble” drives me nuts’.13 In Fama’s view the word ‘bubble’ is devoid of meaning, having never been formally defined.14 In this book, we borrow the definition of Charles Kindleberger, the MIT economic historian and bubble scholar, who describes a bubble as an ‘upward price movement over an extended range that then implodes’.

In other words, a bubble is a steep increase in the price of an asset such as a share over a period of time, followed by a steep decrease in its price.15 Others have suggested that, for an episode to constitute a bubble, prices must have become disconnected from the ‘fundamental value’ of the asset.16 However, this definition makes bubbles much more difficult to identify with any certainty, which can lead to lengthy discussions about whether a particular episode was a ‘real’ bubble or not. It is also divorced from the historical usage of the term. The beauty of Kindleberger’s definition for us is that, because the definition makes no claims about the underlying causes of bubbles, we can investigate these causes for ourselves. One implication of this definition is that a bubble can only be identified with 100 per cent certainty after the event. However, this does not mean that bubbles are wholly unpredictable and random events. In this book, we propose a new metaphor and analytical framework which describes their causes, explains what determines their consequences, and – we hope – will help predict them in the future.

THE BUBBLE TRIANGLE

The starting point of our metaphor is to think of a financial bubble as a fire: tangible and destructive, self-perpetuating and difficult to control once it begins. While fires can cause serious damage, they can also be useful in certain ecosystems, contributing, for example, to the renewal of savannas, prairies and coniferous forests. The same is true of bubbles. Taking this metaphor further, the formation of a fire can be described in simple terms using the fire triangle, which consists of oxygen, fuel and heat. Given sufficient levels of these three components, a fire can be started by a simple spark. Once 4 www.cambridge.org

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AT EC

UL

TY ILI

AB ET

RK

SP

Figure 1.1 The bubble triangle

MA

IO N

POLITICS AND/OR TECHNOLOGY

MONEY/CREDIT

the fire has begun, it can then be extinguished by the removal of any one of the components. We propose that an analogous structure can be used to describe how bubbles are formed: the bubble triangle, summarised in Figure 1.1.

The first side of our bubble triangle, the oxygen for the boom, is marketability: the ease with which an asset can be freely bought and sold. Marketability has many dimensions. The legality of an asset fundamentally affects its marketability. Banning the trading of an asset does not always make it wholly unmarketable, as demonstrated by the abundance of black markets around the world. But it does usually make buying and selling it more difficult, and bubbles are often preceded by the legalisation of certain types of financial assets. Another factor is divisibility: if it possible to buy only a small proportion of the asset, that makes it more marketable. Public companies, for example, are more marketable than houses, because it is possible to trade tiny proportions of the public company by buying and selling its shares. Bubbles sometimes follow financial innovations, such as mortgage-backed securities, that make previously indivisible assets – in this case, mortgage loans – divisible.

Another dimension of marketability is the ease of finding a buyer or seller. One of the least marketable investment assets is art, for example, because the pool of potential buyers is very small in comparison to assets like gold and government bonds. Bubbles are often characterised by 5

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increased participation in the market for the bubble asset, expanding the potential pool of buyers and sellers. Finally, it matters how easily the asset can be transported. Assets which can be transferred digitally can now be bought and sold multiple times a day without leaving home, whereas more tangible assets like cars or books need to be moved to a new location. Some bubbles are made possible by financial innovations that allow transportable assets to be used in lieu of immobile ones – trading the deeds to a house, for example, instead of the house itself. Like oxygen, marketability is always present to some extent, and is essential for an economy to function. However, just as one would not keep oxygen tanks beside an open fire, there are times and places where too much marketability can be dangerous.17 The fuel for the bubble is money and credit. A bubble can form only when the public has sufficient capital to invest in the asset, and is therefore much more likely to occur when there is abundant money and credit in the economy. Low interest rates and loose credit conditions stimulate the growth of bubbles in two ways. First, the bubble assets themselves may be purchased with borrowed money, driving up their prices. Because banks are lending other people’s money and borrowers are borrowing other people’s money, neither are fully on the hook for losses if an investment in a bubble asset fails.18 The greater the expansion of bank lending, the greater the amount of funds available to invest in the bubble, and the higher the price of bubble assets will rise. When investors start selling their bubble assets in order to repay loans, the price of these assets is likely to collapse. Financial bubbles can thus be directly connected to banking crises.19 Second, low interest rates on traditionally safe assets, such as government debt or bank deposits, can push investors to ‘reach for yield’ by investing in risky assets instead. As a result, funds flow into riskier assets, where a bubble is much more likely to occur. The propensity of investors to reach for yield has a long history. Walter Bagehot, the famous editor of The Economist, observed in 1852 that ‘John Bull can stand a great deal, but he cannot stand two per cent . . . Instead of that dreadful event, they invest their careful savings in something impossible – a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet, a plan for animating the Dead Sea’.20 In Bagehot’s experience, investors would often rather 6 www.cambridge.org

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invest in something ridiculous than accept a low interest rate on a safe asset.

The third side of our bubble triangle, analogous to heat, is speculation. Speculation is the purchase (or sale) of an asset with a view to selling (or repurchasing) the asset at a later date with the sole motivation of generating a capital gain.21 Speculation is always present to an extent; there are always some investors who buy assets in the expectation of future price increases. However, during bubbles, large numbers of novices become speculators, many of whom trade purely on momentum, buying when prices are rising and selling when prices are falling. Just as a fire produces its own heat once it starts, speculative investment is selfperpetuating: early speculators make large profits, attracting more speculative money, which in turn results in further price increases and higher returns to speculators. The amount of speculation required to start the process is only a small fraction of that which occurs at its peak.

Once a bubble is under way, professional speculators may purchase an asset they know to be overpriced, planning to re-sell the asset to ‘a greater fool’ to make a capital gain.22 This practice is commonly referred to as ‘riding the bubble’.23 However, it is often difficult to distinguish investors who rode the bubble from those who were lucky enough to sell at the right time. Speculation is also much more widespread when many investors have limited exposure to downside risk. This may be the case when defaulting on debts incurs few costs, when institutional investors are faced with poorly designed incentive structures or when bank owners have limited liability. In these circumstances, the prospect of buying a risky asset in the hope of short-term gains is much more appealing.

Of course, investors can also speculate ‘for the fall’: selling assets in the hope of buying them back later for a lower price. If the speculator does not own the asset, she can speculate for the fall by short selling: borrowing the asset, selling it, buying it back later for a lower price, then returning it to the lender. The short seller is hoping that the asset’s price will fall in the intervening period so that they can make a profit from the trade. In practice, however, short selling is often much more difficult and risky than simply buying an asset. When an investor buys a stock, the potential losses are limited, but the potential gains are unlimited; when an investor short sells a stock, the opposite is true. Short selling even the 7

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most clearly overvalued asset can thus completely ruin an investor if its price continues to rise. Often there are legal or regulatory restrictions on short selling, coupled with social opprobrium against short sellers. At other times it can be extremely expensive to borrow the asset in the first instance.24 In less regulated markets, short selling can leave investors exposed to market manipulators who engineer corners on the short-sold stock.25 What is the spark that sets the bubble fire ablaze? Economic models of bubbles struggle to explain when and why bubbles start – according to Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate, the sparks that initiate bubbles are a mystery.26 In this book, we argue that the spark can come from two sources: technological innovation, or government policy.

Technological innovation can spark a bubble by generating abnormal profits at firms that use the new technology, leading to large capital gains in their shares. These capital gains then attract the attention of momentum traders, who begin to buy shares in the firms because their price has risen. At this stage, many new companies that use (or purport to use) the new technology often go public to take advantage of the high valuations.

While valuations may appear unreasonably high to experienced observers, they often persist for two reasons. First, the technology is new, and its economic impact is highly uncertain. This means that there is limited information with which to value the shares accurately. Second, excitement surrounding technology leads to high levels of media attention, drawing in further investors. This is often accompanied by the emergence of a ‘new era’ narrative, in which the world-changing magic of the new technology renders old valuation metrics obsolete, justifying very high prices.27 Alternatively, the spark can be provided by government policies that cause asset prices to rise.28 Usually, but not always, the rise in asset prices is engineered deliberately in the pursuit of a particular goal. This goal could be the enrichment of a politically important group, or of politicians themselves. It might be part of an attempt to reshape society in a way that the government deems desirable – several housing bubbles, for example, have been sparked by the desire of governments to increase levels of homeownership. The first major financial bubbles, described in 8 www.cambridge.org

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Chapter 2, were engineered as part of elaborate schemes to reduce the public debt.

As well as creating the spark through their policy decisions, governments can pull other policy levers which affect one or more of the sides of the bubble triangle. For example, governments can lower interest rates or increase the money supply, thus ensuring that the public have sufficient funds to invest in the bubble. They may pursue financial deregulation, allowing banks to lend more money on less restrictive terms, thereby increasing the amount of credit. An extension of credit can allow more investors to buy into the bubble on leverage, encouraging them to engage in more speculation. Financial deregulation may also make it easier to buy and sell the assets involved in the bubble, increasing their marketability.

Why do bubbles end? One obvious reason is that they run out of fuel.

There is a finite amount of money and credit to be invested in the bubble asset, and increases in the market interest rate or central bank tightening can cause the amount of credit to fall. This makes borrowing to invest in an asset more difficult for speculators, which can in turn trigger a sell-off in the bubble asset as investors look to raise capital. Alternatively, the tightening of credit markets can make it impossible for those who invested in the bubble with borrowed money to extend the duration of their loans, forcing them to sell the asset.

The number of speculators is also finite, and can eventually reach an upper limit. Speculators may be spooked and exit the market when new information arrives which changes their expectations about future prices. For example, a bubble might burst in response to news announcements suggesting that the future cash flows associated with the bubble assets will be lower than expected. Since speculative investors typically buy an asset because its price is rising, even a slight reversal can dramatically reduce the asset’s appeal. The effect of momentum trading is reversed: investors sell the asset because its price is falling, and the belief that prices will continue to fall becomes self-fulfilling.

Why do some bubbles cause widespread economic damage, whereas others have little effect on the macroeconomy? There are two important variables: the size of the bubble and its centrality within the wider economy. The most damaging bubbles are those where substantial 9

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wealth is invested in an asset that is deeply integrated with the rest of the economy. This integration may be in the form of supply chains; for example, the failure of a bubble company may also bankrupt its suppliers, who in turn default on payments to another firm. However, a more common route for the damage to spread is via the banking system. To extend the fire metaphor, banks are the equivalent of a combustible oil rig in the middle of a busy town. When banks fail, often as a result of the bank or its borrowers holding too much of a bubble asset, it can set off a chain of bankruptcies and defaults that destroys businesses, jobs and livelihoods. In the worst-case scenario, the failure of one bank exposes several others, with similarly devastating effects. Banks also tend to service a wide array of customers, many of whom would otherwise have no connection to the bubble. The exposure of banks to a crash can thus cause a regional or industry-specific bust to develop into an economy-wide recession.

In summary, our bubble triangle describes the necessary conditions for a bubble – marketability, money and credit, and speculation. They become sufficient conditions for a bubble only with the addition of a suitable technological or political spark. We believe the bubble triangle is a powerful framework for understanding why bubbles happen when they do, as well as their severity or societal usefulness. Since it describes the circumstances in which a bubble is likely to occur, it is also useful as a predictive tool. However, since the various elements of the framework cannot be reduced to a neat set of metrics, the application of the framework for predictive purposes requires the use of judgement.

The most long-standing existing explanation for bubbles is irrationality (or madness) on the part of individuals and concomitant mania on the part of society. One of the earliest expressions of this explanation came from Charles Mackay, a Scottish journalist and writer, who first published his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841.

This book has been so popular that it is still in print today. Mackay was a great storyteller, and his theory was supported by a series of colourful anecdotes that supposedly illustrated how insane societies could become.

His tales covered witches, relics, the Crusades, fortune telling, pseudoscience, alchemy, hairstyles and even facial hair. Having demonstrated the near universality of madness, he then had chapters on the South Sea 10 www.cambridge.org

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Bubble, the Mississippi Bubble, and the Dutch Tulipmania, all of which argued that bubbles occur because of the psychological failings of investors.

Mackay was not the first to associate bubbles with madness and irrationality. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant and influential scientists in all of history, lost a fortune by investing in the South Sea Bubble. When questioned about the his losses, he is reputed to have said ‘that he could not calculate the madness of the people’.29 This madness-of-crowds hypothesis has been refined and expanded by the likes of Kindleberger, John Kenneth Galbraith and, most recently, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller.30 Shiller and other economists argue that bubbles can largely be explained by behavioural economics, whereby cognitive failings and psychological biases on the part of investors cause prices to rise beyond their objective value.31 A subset of investors, for example, may suffer from an overconfidence bias, whereby they overestimate the future performance of a company stock, or they may have a representativeness bias, whereby they incorrectly extrapolate from a series of good news announcements and overreact.32 Other investors may simply follow or emulate this subset of investors simply because of herd behaviour and naivety on their part.33 The view that bubbles are largely a product of irrationality has been contradicted by economists who, like Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama, believe investors to be rational and markets to be efficient.34 Much recent research on the subject has thus focused on establishing whether a particular bubble was ‘rational’ or not.35 This is unfortunate, because the rational/irrational framework is almost useless for understanding bubbles. Partly this is because the word ‘rational’ is so loosely defined that many common investor behaviours can be classed as either ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, depending on the preferences of the economist.36 But more fundamentally, the framework is too reductive.

Asset prices in a bubble are determined by the actions of a wide range of investors with different information, different worldviews and investment philosophies and different personalities. They often also face different incentives. Simply dividing these investors into categories labelled ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ does not do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, and as a result, we try to avoid these terms altogether.

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HISTORICAL BUBBLES

We approach the historical bubbles in this book as if we were fire scene investigators, sifting through the ashes of historical bubbles in an effort to understand their causes. We then attempt to use this knowledge to become like fire-safety advisers, devising policies which may prevent bubbles from happening or being socially destructive in the future.

First, however, we need to decide which fires to investigate. We have two selection criteria. Consistent with our definition of a bubble, we are interested only in bubbles where there was a large rise and then fall in asset prices. How large is large? We require a rise in asset prices of at least 100 per cent over less than 3 years, followed by at least a 50 per cent collapse in prices over a 3-year period or less.37 For stock market bubbles, we do not require the entire market to have experienced a reversal; rather, the reversal may have taken place in specific sectors or industries.38 This set of criteria means that those bubbles included in our catalogue are major ones. However, it also means that we may have overlooked some bubbles simply because we or previous scholars have been unable to find and collate price data.

The second criterion is that the asset price reversal must have been accompanied by a promotional boom, with new companies or financial securities being floated on financial markets. This ensures that the bubbles we select are those which had an impact on the economy beyond the effects of the price reversal. One implication of this criterion is that we exclude bubbles in assets, such as commodities, comics, beany babies and baseball cards. Real estate or property bubbles are excluded unless they were accompanied by bubbles in stocks or facilitated by the issuance of newly created financial securities.

Table 1.1 contains a list of the major historical bubbles which meet these criteria, and which are studied in detail in this book. This list is by no means exhaustive. However, there are at least five things about our bubble catalogue which are of note. First, our selection of bubbles extends from the birth of stock markets through to the present day. Second, our catalogue is global in scope, covering four continents and nine countries. Third, although Table 1.1 contains many famous bubbles, there are also some which are less well-known:

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table 1.1 Major financial bubbles Post-bubble financial crisis

Bubble

Country

Years

Asset

Mississippi Bubble

France

1719–20

South Sea Bubble

UK

1719–20

Windhandel Bubble First emerging market bubble Railway Mania Australian Land Boom

Netherlands UK

1720 1824–6

UK Australia

1844–6 1886–93

Bicycle Mania

UK

1895–8

Roaring Twenties

USA

1920–31

Japanese Bubble

Japan

1985–92

Dot-Com Bubble Subprime Bubble

USA USA, UK, Ireland, Spain, China

1995–2001 2003–10

Mississippi Company stocks Company stocks (including stocks of the South Sea Company) Company stocks Company and mining stocks Railway stocks Company stocks and real estate Stocks of bicycle companies Stocks of new technology companies Company stocks and real estate New technology stocks Real estate and houses

No Yes

2007, 2015

Stocks

No

Chinese Bubbles

No No

No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes

the first emerging market bubble of 1824–6; the Australian Land Boom, which burst in the 1890s; the British Bicycle Mania of the 1890s; and the Chinese bubbles in 2007 and 2015. Fourth, six of our twelve bubbles were followed by financial crises, and at least five were followed by severe economic downturns. Fifth, several of the bubbles listed in Table 1.1 were explicitly connected to the development of new technology – railways in the 1840s, bicycles in the 1890s, automobiles, radio, aeroplanes and electrification in the 1920s and the Internet and telecommunications in the 1990s.

Probably the most famous absentee from our study is the Dutch Tulipmania of 1636–7, which witnessed the rapid price appreciation of rare tulip bulbs in late 1636, followed by a 90 per cent depreciation in bulb prices in February 1637.39 This is excluded for the simple reason that the price reversal was exclusively confined to a thinly traded commodity, with no associated promotion boom and negligible economic

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impact.40 In other words, the Tulipmania was too unremarkable to merit inclusion. Although the wild fluctuations in price are striking, they are not unusual for markets in rare and unusual goods, particularly those predominantly used to signal status.41 In the case of the Tulipmania these fluctuations were compounded by legal ambiguity over the status of futures contracts, suggesting that the price movements may have had a somewhat mundane explanation.42 The infamy of the Tulipmania is largely the fault of Charles Mackay.43 Mackay painted the picture of a society overcome with collective insanity on the subject of tulips, where the value of some bulbs exceeded the value of luxury Amsterdam houses. He also stressed the universality of the trade, with the general populace of Amsterdam ‘investing’ in tulip bulbs at the various taverns dotted around the city. But Mackay’s work is unreliable. His sources are based on second-hand accounts, which are in turn based on contemporary pieces of propaganda criticising the trade in tulips.44 Very few of the claims Mackay makes can be substantiated.

The popular narrative of the Tulipmania is thus largely fictional, ‘based almost solely on propaganda, cited as if it were fact.’45 Indeed, for several episodes in this book we can see a similar process of myth-making, whereby bubble anecdotes that were originally satire or propaganda are repeated years later as if they really happened.

Another notable set of absentees from our list are the property bubbles which occurred in Scandinavia in the 1980s and in South-East Asia in the 1990s.46 In both cases major credit booms had their roots in financial liberalisation, and in both cases the crash was followed by a banking crisis.

Capital account liberalisation exacerbated the credit boom in South-East Asia, where substantial amounts of international capital flowed into the region, resulting in twin banking and currency crises.47 However, the only one of these housing bubbles that was accompanied by a major stock market boom was in Thailand. The scale of the Thai stock market bubble does not meet our criterion for inclusion, and there appears to have been no promotional boom.48 Having chosen our fires, how do we go about investigating them?

A good place to start is usually the findings of previous investigators.

We thus make extensive use of existing literature, much of which comes from fields far beyond history or economics.49 However, the memory of 14 www.cambridge.org

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an event and the experience of an event are often very different, and we also want to understand the thoughts and actions of those who were on the scene at the time. We therefore also investigate the writings and speeches of contemporary journalists, politicians and commentators during each bubble. What were they saying while the fire was going on?

Were they calling the fire brigade or fanning the flames? We do not want to focus exclusively on the powerful – we are also interested in so-called ordinary people who were caught up in the fire. Who suffered, and who, if anyone, benefited from it? Finally, as financial economists, we do not want our analyses to be purely descriptive – we want to be able to quantify the size of each fire and the scale of the damage it caused. For famous bubbles this was straightforward, but for lesser-known bubbles it involved painstakingly compiling our own data from old records in dusty archives.

The overall result, we hope, is a comprehensive overview of the subject told over three centuries. Our story begins in 1720 with a seminal moment in financial history: the invention of the bubble.

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UK and US publication September 2020 9781108811910 Paperback £19.99 / $24.95

Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society Firmin DeBrabander Privacy is gravely endangered in the digital age, and we, the digital citizens, are its principal threat, willingly surrendering it to avail ourselves of new technology, and granting the government and corporations immense power over us. In this highly original work, Firmin DeBrabander begins with this premise and asks how we can ensure and protect our freedom in the absence of privacy. Can – and should – we rally anew to support this institution? Is privacy so important to political liberty after all? DeBrabander makes the case that privacy is a poor foundation for democracy, that it is a relatively new value that has been rarely enjoyed throughout history – but constantly persecuted – and politically and philosophically suspect. The vitality of the public realm, he argues, is far more significant to the health of our democracy, but is equally endangered – and often overlooked – in the digital age.

Firmin DeBrabander is Professor of Philosophy, Maryland Institute College of Art. He has written commentary pieces for a number of national publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, LA Times, Salon, Aeon, Chicago Tribune, and The New Republic. Professor DeBrabander is the author of Do Guns Make us Free?

(2015), a philosophical and political critique of the guns rights movement.

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The current crisis of privacy is, or ought to be, especially surprising in the United States, because privacy concerns, historians and legal scholars attest, were a prime driver in the creation of the nation, and the erection and expansion of our basic freedoms. Our disregard for privacy is surprising for another reason: it defies predictions and expectations of how we are supposed to act under surveillance. Why, if we know we are watched – and we admit as much – is online behavior so shameless, seemingly open and free? Why do so many of us feel compelled to blare intimate details, and share mundane and embarrassing events with the whole world? What does that say about us? Is human nature changing before our very eyes, in the digital age, such that we show no compunction about living an utterly public life, in most all respects?

How can we retain any enduring or grudging respect for privacy in this brave new world? Some people muster objections; some admit there is something wrong in privacy invasions – but what? We have a vocabulary of privacy, and a deep historical relationship to it (or so we are told), but hardly know what it means anymore, why it is of value, and worthy of defense. And in the digital age, privacy requires no modest or ordinary defense, but a monumental call to arms, to beat back the tidal wave of surveillance – which we invite, and facilitate.

Privacy is not mentioned in the US Constitution. Nevertheless, scholars have argued that privacy protections stem from the values and experiences of the nation’s founders, and are clearly implied in the Bill of Rights. In one respect, “the history of America is the history of the right to privacy.”1 From the inception of this nation, immigrants were driven here by privacy concerns of a kind. The Pilgrims departed England, for example, because they wanted to 1

Frederick S. Lane, American Privacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 1.

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be left alone in peace to practice their faith. And the colonial struggle with England was galvanized by controversies over privacy invasions.

The seeds of the Revolutionary War were sown in the dispute over who would bear the cost of the French Indian War, and the ongoing efforts to protect the American frontier and the empire at large. Britain claimed that the colonists needed to bear a greater burden of the costs of such defenses. The colonists objected, and sought to avoid taxation by concealing the fruits of their trade. In Massachusetts in 1755, the English government tried to raise funds by issuing “writs of assistance,” which authorized custom house officers to “randomly search sailing ships, dockside warehouses and even private homes for untaxed property.”2 The colonists chafed under this policy, and opposed efforts to renew the writs upon the death of King George II in 1760. In the hearing for their renewal, colonial lawyer James Otis eloquently articulated the opposition. “One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house,” Otis claimed. “A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ [of assistance], if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege.”3 Otis cites a long-standing element of English Common Law known as Castle Doctrine – “one’s home is his castle,” a sacrosanct space where he is most perfectly free. Castle Doctrine is still prominently invoked in US law today, in, among other things, self-defense and gun rights concerns.

Courts have recognized a robust right of self-defense for individuals wielding guns in the home, against unwanted strangers.

The concern for privacy became a major driver of the Revolutionary War, and though the term does not appear in our founding documents, its influence can be detected – and privacy protections inferred. In the Bill of Rights, for example, the Third Amendment, which prohibits soldiers being quartered in one’s home, is a clear reaction against British efforts to do the same, invading and occupying colonists’ private dwellings. The First Amendment protects our right to make up our minds privately, regarding political and religious affiliation. The Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures” of the citizenry, such as the British soldiers perpetrated, prominently articulates privacy concerns. In the 1960s, Fourth Amendment jurisprudence becomes the bedrock of a constitutional right to privacy recognized by the Supreme Court.

Prior to that, however, privacy makes a notable appearance on the US legal scene in the 1890s thanks to an influential article written by Samuel Warren 2 3

Lane, 10–11.

Lane, 12.

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and the future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Attempting to express an explicit right to privacy, which they felt was lacking, Brandeis and Warren claim that it amounts to or consists in a “right to be left alone.” The US Constitution and English Common Law (which is our Constitution’s forbear and foundation) recognize a citizen’s right to be protected from intrusion in his person and property. But, Brandeis and Warren explain, times had changed; new technology had emerged, and advanced civilization revealed a new realm in need of defense beyond the merely physical, namely, “man’s spiritual nature . . . his feelings and his intellect.”4 US law had evolved to offer protection for intellectual property, the men point out. But this was insufficient to combat attacks on our emotional well-being, which privacy invasions constituted.

Brandeis and Warren are concerned primarily with gossip, and how technological innovations embolden and empower the gossip mongers, and stoke the general appetite for their wares. A more immediate motivation for their article, it seems, was Warren’s annoyance at the exuberant media coverage of his daughter’s wedding. The men single out “instantaneous photographs,” a new invention at the time, and the “newspaper enterprise” that disseminates them to a hungry public. The latter spurred journalists to pry more deeply into private lives, recording intimate details for posterity. “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bonds of propriety and of decency,” Brandeis and Warren complain. “To satisfy a prurient taste, the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of daily papers. To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle.”5 They feel they are dealing with a new breed of offense, which is somewhat abstract – the feelings of hurt, or anger, or irritation that emerge when insight into one’s private life and emotions are disseminated to the curious, simply for curiosity’s sake. And when people hungrily absorb the details of private lives, this media indulgence promotes immoral behavior – prurience and indolence. This seems to be the focus of Brandeis and Warren’s ire, as opposed to the offense in privacy invasions, for those whose privacy is invaded. They are more confident in articulating, and more intent in highlighting, the ill that is media gossip, which “both belittles and perverts men,” than explaining exactly why and how privacy invasions hurt those whose lives are invaded.6 This is a recurring theme 4

5 6

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Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review IV, 5 (1890). http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html.

Brandeis and Warren.

Brandeis and Warren.

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going forward: while the hurt from invaded privacy is felt, the offense – to those whose lives are exposed – is difficult to pinpoint or spell out. As a result, privacy protections become hard to justify, and easy to surrender.

Law evolves to offer protection for more abstract aspects of our lives, Brandeis and Warren maintain. Such is its natural progression, and it is the result of advancing civilization. Civilization satisfies our basic physical needs, and teaches that happiness consists in more than the satisfaction of those needs. Rather, happiness has a significant emotional and spiritual component.

Intellectual property rights are one such creation of advanced civilization and mature jurisprudence, protecting intangible goods – prosecuting people who steal our ideas, for example, preserving ownership and authorship. To that extent, intellectual property protection might seem like a good jumping off point for defending against privacy invasions. But Brandeis and Warren argue it’s the other way around. The foundation of intellectual property protections is not private property, but “inviolate personality,” that is, the notion of a sacrosanct personal space that ought not be invaded or robbed or exposed under any circumstances.7 The right to be let alone is a foundational right, a precedent right in common law, which then infuses our Constitution. Until Brandeis and Warren put pen to paper, it was only in need of being pronounced; its growing and newfound significance was made clear by evolving technology and evolving culture.

Only in the 1960s, when the US Supreme Court was presided over by Justice Earl Warren, did the right to privacy receive the full legal recognition and sanction that Brandeis and Warren anticipated. The term “privacy” is pronounced in only 88 Supreme Court cases prior to the 1960s, but in 107 cases under Earl Warren’s tenure, suggesting that “the Warren Court made privacy a central legal concept in American law.”8 Justice William O. Douglas was its chief evangelizer. In one notable case, Griswold v. Connecticut, Douglas wrote the majority opinion, and explained that while certain rights are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution or under any single provision of the document, they become evident if we would hope to fully enact the provisions of the Bill of Rights.9 The right to privacy is one such right – and is implied by the First Amendment. We cannot exercise freedom of speech, assembly, or religion without an antecedent right to privacy, which creates an inviolate zone that government, or other powers and interests, dare not trespass. Of itself, the First 7 8 9

Brandeis and Warren.

Lane, 153–4.

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 US 479 (1965).

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Amendment implies a right to privacy, but other provisions combine to carve out a space where we must be let alone, in order to fully enjoy the freedoms spelled out in the Constitution.

Strikingly, Douglas aims to lend privacy an air of longevity, declaring that the institution is “older than the Bill of Rights – older than our political parties, older than our school system.”10 Privacy is as old as the institution of marriage, too, he claims, which is at issue in the case at hand, concerning the state of Connecticut’s right to prohibit married couples from learning about contraception. Marriage is a sacred institution, Douglas maintains, and privacy is essential for protecting the intimacy of this bond. This claim is dubious on a few fronts. For one thing, as we will see in Chapter 5, the notion of privacy is hardly monolithic or eternal, but has changed over the centuries. What’s more, marriage has changed, too; the institution that Douglas hails was not in fact the repository of sacred intimacy in times past.

In a later case, Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, Douglas invokes the right to be let alone in the case of those accused of loitering and wandering where they are not wanted or permitted. We have a right to meander, uninterrupted and uninterfered because it is one of those private activities “responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity,” which is the lifeblood of democracy.11 Democracy requires that privacy be protected, because it nurtures an independent spirit, and emboldens citizens to experiment, with their travels as with their thoughts. People in a democracy should feel free to speak out, unconstrained by social pressure, perhaps liable to uttering what is wild and offensive on occasion, because this is the ground of dissent, which expands the frontier of liberty in unexpected ways. Douglas leveled this argument against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, whose proponents had to persevere amidst immense social pressure, and outright oppression. It was clear to him, as to many, that privacy is a necessary protection for the expansion of rights that we soon take for granted. Individuals must be allowed to consider, cultivate and express potentially dangerous ideas, free from the intrusion and coercion of social forces intent on maintaining stability, and the status quo.

Privacy and personal independence are inseparable, according to Douglas, and, tellingly, he invokes Thoreau in this regard. Thoreau and his mentor Emerson eloquently and memorably celebrate a strong brand of American individualism, perhaps the quintessential expression thereof. And their account presumes no small degree of privacy, protecting the individual from 10 11

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Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 US 479 (1965).

Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 US 156 (1972).

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the corrupting influence of society, secluding him as far as possible, so that he might hear the authentic voice of his conscience – and more. It is an account that clearly resonates in later iterations and defenses of privacy.

Douglas admires Thoreau’s “Walking,” which endorses an individual’s free and unplanned departure into nature, sauntering in the fields with no prescribed agenda or plan. One is purified in this venture, Thoreau maintains, liberated and opened to hear the voice of truth, which a person can only detect when alone with his thoughts. Society compels us to focus on economic gain, and the lures of wealth and class, none of which truly fulfills us. To the contrary, society infects us with a kind of madness. Unfortunately, we are born into its bondage, which is why so many people take for granted the economic and social demands placed on us, and mindlessly heed them. But real freedom beckons nearby. We only need to stride out into the fields and woods – alone.

In a famous ode to our rightful independence, Thoreau declares that society has us “study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery . . . that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free child of the mist!”12 To discover authentic existence, and live fully, we must detach ourselves from the laws of men. In so doing, we find favor with God, and emulate how He also transcends law – the law of Nature. On one hand, alone in the wilds, we may finally enjoy the peace and quiet to hear the voice of God, and discern his will. In liberating ourselves from human law in this manner, furthermore, we emulate God, the creator of the laws of Nature, who also transcends them.

Thoreau engages in a more elaborate and insistent exercise in selfpurification at Walden Pond, where he holes up in a cabin on land owned by his friend Emerson. Embarking on this two-year experiment, Thoreau declares that he will learn how to live deliberately, that is, simply, thoughtfully, consciously. He will isolate and identify his real needs, which he suspects are few. Society dictates that our needs are many, and then sends us endlessly chasing their fulfillment – creating new needs all the while. This is a lie, an unnecessary complication. Authentic living, real living, can only be achieved through a kind of separation and isolation – privacy, if you will.

Thoreau constructs the cabin himself, bereft of creature comforts; he grows and forages for food, drinks from the stream, and bathes in the pond. He sits on his doorstep listening to the birds, contemplating the sights and sounds around him, straining to detect the immanent wisdom of nature. Most of all, however, 12

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Nature/Walking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 113–14.

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Thoreau quiets the din of outside voices, voices that issue demands, fears, worries, and concerns, which, when immersed in the workaday world, seem utterly normal. From his perch, aloof and apart from the common worries of men, their ridiculous nature is readily apparent. Everyone would do well to enjoy this kind of privacy, even for a while, and box out all the chatter. “Let us settle ourselves and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance . . . till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in their place, which we call reality.”13 Thoreau is moved to compassion at the sight of his peers, weighed down with needless concerns, driven by insatiable and nonsensical social pressures.

But Emerson, his intellectual ally, depicts society as nothing less than an adversary; one must be utterly insulated against its assaults and corruptions.

A person is properly “Self-Reliant,” Emerson argues in his famous essay celebrating individualism. If you would attain the truth and discover the sacred kernel of life, you must ruthlessly block off outside influence and look within. Thoreau relishes his time at Walden Pond, for it reveals the eternal wisdom of the philosophers he has read – it makes clear the truths others have taught for generations. For Emerson, however, you must strike out on a radically new and independent path to attain wisdom. “When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you should not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name—the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new.”14 Society has nothing to recommend you – nor does history, or tradition, it seems.

Nature is a conduit to authenticity, by this account. Or better yet, nature is the purifying force or milieu that makes each of us a conduit for the truth – an empty vessel for the divine. “In the woods,” alone, Emerson writes, “all mean egoism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”15 I need not physically remove myself from society to enjoy this vision.

I can learn to commune with nature in quiet moments when it offers itself to me – which can be anywhere. I must practice the art of solitude, and embrace sacred loneliness whenever possible. Emerson describes doing so while crossing the town commons in the snow, enveloped in silence, and stopping to gaze up at the stars; suddenly, he is one with them.

13 14

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Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 16.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 181.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Nature/Walking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 8.

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Emerson and Thoreau offer an account of individualism that will be essential for privacy advocates: if I am to be a proper individual, robust and self-determining, authentic and in touch with “reality,” I must filter out external influences and prejudices. I must heed only the voice that wells up within – provided I am able and allowed to hear it. This will prove to be a high bar for privacy, indeed.

The legal, cultural and political forces elevating privacy arguably culminated in the twentieth century, such that privacy became a “fixation . . . of US public culture,” where it has been “foundational to [our] sense of personhood and national identity.”16 Indeed, the language of privacy is very familiar to us, ingrained as it is in our national narrative and legal system. We instinctively know that privacy matters, and thus find it perfectly normal, or at least unremarkable, when privacy is invoked in public commentary or political speeches. And as I will soon argue, the concern for privacy is still operative or manifest in certain quarters of our lives, in some form or fashion. For the most part, however, in our daily behavior – in cases where privacy concerns should figure prominently – we tend to forsake it with little thought or compunction. Which suggests that, in practice, privacy rings hollow. Few people seem to know what it really means, what it consists in, why it ought to be defended – nor do they seem to care. It attests to a stark disconnect in our culture. Some may retort (or complain) that we hear about privacy incessantly; it is hardly a lost value or norm, but something that still reverberates in our society – the media is littered with its mention. I would contend that the people who matter are not the ones raising the issue, bandying it about, championing it – cherishing it. Increasingly privacy concerns emanate from a select population of scholars, advocates, journalists, and policy makers.

And their arguments and warnings do not seem to resonate with the general population. An effective defense of privacy, such as we would require in the digital age, demands a deeper, broader foundation.

For digital technology has made privacy so much more vulnerable, and, in 2013, Edward Snowden exposed an expansive spying program, carried out by the US government, to collect copious amounts of information about its own citizen population, from the digital trails we leave behind in our daily business. Unique to this age and economy is how we, who know that our digital behavior exposes intimate details of our private lives, largely assist our monitors, readily and continuously offering up personal information. To be specific, Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), uncovered its PRISM program, which collects data on our digital interactions from major 16

Sarah Igo, The Known Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 2, 4.

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internet companies, with their compliance. The budget for this program was relatively small ($20 million), suggesting how easy it is for government spies to gather the desired information.17 We practically volunteer the information.

Political philosophers and theorists have long warned that privacy is a prime target of ruling powers, who would happily invade it in order to subdue or control us. What’s new today is that we the citizens join in its destruction – actually, we are the principal agents of its demise. The NSA, and anyone else interested in monitoring us (and they are legion) only has to sit back; the intimate details of our lives fall into their laps.

Snowden’s revelations were not, nor should have been, terribly surprising to most, upon minimal reflection. Since the War on Terror ramped up last decade, it was well known that the US government was interested in spying on its citizens, and anyone else. Almost immediately after the 9–11 attacks, the Bush administration authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on US citizens and residents, searching for evidence of new terrorist plots.18 It was revealed at the time that the government had pressured communications companies to enable said eavesdropping, and the government seemed to back off – temporarily. Thus, the American population knew that widespread surveillance of the home population was a likely temptation for our ruling parties, and a perennial threat. And when Snowden revealed the NSA spying operations, there was a profound outcry – at least publicly, and in the press. Scholars, politicians, and civil rights advocates bemoaned the news, and still do for the most part. But average citizens were not impressed, it seems. One study noted that only about a third of those familiar with Snowden’s revelations were motivated to improve privacy measures as a result.19 And in fact, according to another study released soon after Snowden’s leak, a majority favored NSA efforts to “[track] the telephone records of millions of Americans,” and felt “it is important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if it intrudes on personal privacy.”20 A summary report three years later suggested that Snowden’s revelations were perhaps even less impactful. Subsequent terror attacks prompted people 17

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Leo Kelion, “Q&A: NSA’s Prism Internet Surveillance Scheme,” BBC.com, July 1, 2013, www .bbc.com/news/technology–23051248.

Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, “Bush lets U.S. spy on callers without courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callerswithout-courts.html.

“CIGI-IPSOS Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust,” Centre for International Governance Innovation and IPSOS, November 24, 2014, www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/ documents/internet-survey-2014-slides.pdf.

“Majority views NSA phone tracking as acceptable anti-terror tactic,” Pew Research Center, June 10, 2013, www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptableanti-terror-tactic/.

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to worry more that national security programs did not go far enough in fighting terror, and were less concerned about civil rights protections, in comparison.21 Most people have taken modest measures to protect privacy online, but the Snowden affair did not inspire widespread adoption of anything more sophisticated which might prove a greater obstacle for NSA spying.22 Of course, many plead ignorance about sophisticated programs to protect their privacy.

They say they would like to do more to protect their data, but are not aware of the best, most effective options. And many remain cynical that they could still elude government surveillance, even after enacting available privacy protection measures. What’s more – and what is perhaps especially frustrating for privacy advocates and Snowden doomsayers – most people report that they are not principally worried to block out government spying. Among those who took measures to maintain anonymity online, they indicate that they sought to “avoid ‘social surveillance’ by friends and colleagues rather than the government or law enforcement.”23 In fact, government and police are dead last among potential monitors that internet users wish to elude.24 Political theorists will find this troubling because governments have proven to be a serious threat when they have access to and collect our sensitive personal information. This lends government immense power, which is too easy to abuse, and often leads to and assists oppression. Some argue that the destruction of privacy was essential to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes that aimed at nothing less than total domination of the citizen population.

And there is something almost obscene in the fact that Americans of all people are so little concerned with government surveillance, and more worried about snooping family and friends. Protecting our privacy is a central lesson of our nation’s history. If we learn anything from the birth of our nation and its founding documents, it’s that privacy – from government intrusion – is a supreme virtue and must be jealously defended.

I suspect most Americans know this one way or another; or they should, if they paid attention to their history. Most of us instinctively affirm that privacy is an important value, worthy of protection, if not reverence. As I have argued, we are steeped in a tradition of privacy, from accounts of our history, to essential legal arguments, and our very notion of individualism. Perhaps this is why we will say we care about privacy, and would like to do a better job 21

22 23 24

Lee Rainie, “The state of privacy in America,” Pew Research Center, September 21, 2016, www .pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/21/the-state-of-privacy-in-america/.

Rainie, “The state of privacy in America.”

Rainie, “The state of privacy in America.”

“The state of privacy in post-Snowden America,” Pew Research Center, September 21, 2016, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/21/the-state-of-privacy-in-america/.

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protecting it – and we are uncomfortable with expansive and invasive government surveillance programs. But our behavior indicates something else.

Most consumers say that they are eager to receive discounts and promotions from retailers, but not at the cost of divulging personal information.25 However, they quickly dispense with their purported trepidation when the rubber hits the road. Retailers know this, and justify their snooping on the basis of tradeoffs: so long as customers receive ample benefits in exchange for divulging personal information – and personalized advertising is the most effective – they will submit to pervasive surveillance. Researchers confirm this.

When asked in the abstract, consumers reject the idea of tradeoffs; but when presented with a “real-life tradeoff case – asking . . . whether they would take discounts in exchange for allowing their supermarket to collect information about their grocery purchases” – a very common practice, I might add – “more than twice as many . . . say yes to tradeoffs.”26 A striking feature of the digital age is that we, individual citizens – eager consumers and avid social media users – hand over personal information to those who watch us. We subscribe to tradeoffs with retailers and social media giants, even when the rewards for exposure are minimal. We do this willingly, in some cases happily, and are not so timid or careful or concerned about displaying our most intimate details, eccentric whims, or caustic opinions. This is a surprising turn of events for many political thinkers, who have long warned that mass surveillance strips us of a feeling of personal freedom, and makes us less liable to speak out and express individual differences, unique opinions, whims, tastes.

In short, a confessional culture is ascendant in the digital age, and this flies in the face of dire predictions about panopticism. Panopticism refers to the surveillance scheme designed by eighteenth-century social reformer Jeremy Bentham, and which he first intended for a prison. His panoptic prison was to be a circular structure with inmates housed in cells around a central tower, whose occupant is obscured, his watchful eye unseen. This structure was revelatory, and widely inspirational, because it illustrates a highly efficient use of power. Consider: you don’t need someone literally occupying the tower; if obscured, the inmates never know for sure if or when they are watched – but will behave as if they always are.

In this way, “visibility is a trap,” as the philosopher Michel Foucault puts it.27 The 25 26

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Joseph Turow, The Aisles Have Eyes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 158.

Nora Draper, Michael Hennessy and Joseph Turow, “The Tradeoff Fallacy,” A Report from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, www.asc.upenn.edu /sites/default/files/TradeoffFallacy_1.pdf.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 200.

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intention is that inmates might internalize the spectral watchman, and discipline themselves.

And Bentham had high hopes for the impact and influence of the panoptic schema outside the prison walls. If implemented in a variety of venues across society, people would be motivated to behave morally, work diligently, and become better persons and citizens all around. Widespread, perhaps even pervasive panopticism would keep everyone “on the up and up,” so to speak, invigorate the economy, improve general well-being, diminish the social welfare state, and lighten the load on government, police, and church, tasked with keeping us all in line. Indeed, Bentham’s bold prediction proved tantalizing, and Foucault details how this political revelation was applied throughout the state and society, from schools to factories to hospitals.

From a political perspective, physical force is inefficient in exerting control. It is often expensive, and it can also backfire: extreme force exerted by those in charge might cause people to lash out and revolt. This is most clearly the case for people who are accustomed to freedom, as Machiavelli would say – or people who fancy themselves free, as in a democracy. Surveillance provides an elegant and devastatingly effective solution for powers intent on ruling, and perhaps oppressing, in a democratic age. The architecture of surveillance is “so light,” Foucault liked to say; it is subtle, hardly noticeable. It only requires open spaces, through which people can be watched – and watch one another. In this respect – and perversely – methods of surveillance can be easily commingled with or couched within euphemistic calls for openness, transparency, letting in the light. And, in another perversion, Foucault says, we start to see panoptic schemas used to enhance growing disciplinary power that imbues incipient democracies in the nineteenth century, stymying the personal freedoms they promised.

Actually, if we consider its relation to democracy, this gets to the heart of what makes panopticism so powerful and insidious. Panoptic surveillance also fits nicely with the rhetoric and ideology of individualism, because, well, it succeeds so well at individualizing – but not in a good, empowering way.

Rather, individuals wither under the spotlight. And in their loneliness, and growing paranoia, they turn into agents of their spies. Consider again Bentham’s plan: at the heart of his prison is a spectral watchman – a vague, ominous presence. This vagueness is key, and essential to the supposed efficiency of his system. We, the spied upon, may not know who our spies are exactly, what they want, what they are on the lookout for – what they are soon to punish us for, perhaps. Much is left to the imagination, where it does its critical damage. The spied upon are only supposed to see one another, and in their lateral relations, through their own watchful, worried eyes, compel

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one another to keep in line – whatever that might mean, exactly. It’s better if we are left guessing about that too, to some extent. The result will be that we the watched are reduced to a kind of paranoia, where we are less than free.

Surveillance makes power anonymous, also automatic.28 Power will not be exerted top-down or from without, in rough imperious fashion, sure to rankle the democratic masses. In panoptic schema, rather, power operates from within each individual – at his or her own behest. Because I do not know precisely who I am curtailing my behavior for, and how, this will largely seem self-directed. And I will seem free and self-determining throughout. With this, we arrive at the full genius of panopticism: it leaves us feeling autonomous and independent, but compliant and chastened instead. And we are the primary agents of social conformity and political obedience, which, depending on the nature and extent of the panoptic scheme employed, Foucault argued, can be stifling indeed.

In many ways, the modern surveillance state has far surpassed Bentham’s aspirations – so much so that the title “surveillance state” hardly fits the bill.

Retailers, for example, are deeply invested in monitoring us, too, and throughout our daily lives, in a host of hidden ways – shadowing our every move, tracking our every want and whim. The immensity, complexity, and immanence of contemporary surveillance systems has prompted critics to come up with titles that capture it better, like “tenticular oligarcy,” or “Big Other,” as opposed to Big Brother – conveying the ominous anonymity of our current spies.29 Networked digital technology seems the ideal tool to achieve the power dynamic Foucault says is so devastatingly effective in keeping people underfoot in democracies. In terms of the architecture of surveillance, one can hardly imagine anything so “light” or subtle as digital media. I may steer clear of certain websites, forums, or chat groups, and watch what I say and do online, for fear of who is watching me, and what their agenda is. And my censorship will seem self-directed. Thus, we are all silently, covertly – obligingly and automatically – urged towards conformity and quiescence.

Except that this is not how things have turned out. Or so it seems. By and large, the digital generation does not appear to behave online as if some disapproving Big Brother (or Big Other) were watching our every move, influencing our every decision, paralyzing us with fear, and demanding self28 29

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Foucault, 176.

See respectively Bernard Harcourt, Exposed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 79; and Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 20.

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censorship. Quite to the contrary, on social media, people are prone to divulging all manner of mundane, intimate, or unsavory details of their personal lives, with little evident concern for the shadowy agents listening in – or even what their friends, family, and co-workers (or bosses) might think.

Facebook users issue “status updates” reporting where they are at any given moment, no matter how ordinary or insignificant – or embarrassing. Social media platforms offer people the opportunity to report how they feel on a nearconstant basis, declaring emotional highs and lows, relating caustic social and political views, sharing lascivious desires. I think of former (and beloved) students I had to block on Facebook, lest their political tirades became too wrathful and foul-mouthed, if my children should spy them over my shoulder – or their sexual confessions became too frank, bawdy, and detailed. Oftentimes, their stories and rants made me wonder, do they even think about their audience, witness to these emissions? Do they forget that I – or their grandparents, or professional contacts, or bosses – might be party to them? Do they just ignore who will see their posts? Or if they do recognize their audience, do they simply not care about embarrassing themselves or others? This confessional culture is not limited to millennials and former students, of course. I am routinely shocked by gushing or careless posts from older peers on social media, who say things they should know better than to share, if they hewed to older, pre-internet rules of etiquette. I think in particular of one forty-plus Facebook friend who is an exultant new mother, and divulges every thought about her child, and shares every momentous detail of his existence – and who can begrudge her excitement, really? But then she broaches a new frontier, and posts close-up pictures of her breastfeeding, which leaves little to the imagination. Some have dubbed these “brelfies,” and apparently this is a widespread phenomenon in the digital age.30 While this phenomenon may have admirable intentions, normalizing breastfeeding, or celebrating motherhood and the female form, it defies anticipations for surveillance, which should prompt us to hide ourselves, or curtail eccentric, highly personal behavior.

Our confessional culture has arguably been brewing for some time now, and before the emergence of social media – perhaps even as far back as the social and political revolutions of the 1960s, when people came to embrace their sexual identities and predilections, and speak about them openly and frankly.31 The 1990s boom in memoir writing, and the popularity of Reality TV 30

31

See, for example, Lucy Waterlow, “Rise of the Brelfie,” Daily Mail Online, February 25, 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2968246/Mums-head-head-brelfie-Morning-breastfeed ing-selfies-list-parenting-trends-thanks-stars-like-Miranda-Kerr.html.

Igo, 268.

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shows shone a bright light on otherwise mundane and unsavory details of private lives.32 But none of this approaches the level of routine sharing and deep exposure we now expect on social media. The sexual liberation movement, the memoirs, and Reality TV made it acceptable for personal, shameful details to be revealed; they made the prospect of exposure less fearsome, or horrifying, and even a bit therapeutic. With social media, however, confession is pervasive: people share routinely, and as a matter of fact – unprompted, and often unconcerned for norms transgressed or defied. Indeed, this has become so common, and people so nonchalant about sharing details that would have been embarrassing in an earlier age, that universities and employers regularly scour applicants’ social media platforms in search of troubling behavior and opinions. And though this is widely known and reported, many persist in baring their souls and lives nonetheless.

We know we are watched online and in social media; we know we are monitored by our government, and, increasingly, commercial interests, too.

When prompted, many of us will say we disapprove, but, by and large, we do not behave like we knew or cared about the spying, or reckoned with its implications. We do not behave as if we inhabited a digital panopticon, or tenticular oligarchy, or what have you. Why? Philosophers have long argued that human consciousness is inherently narrative: this is a major way we seek to understand and give meaning to reality, and human existence. Specifically, we aim to project a narrative structure onto our lives – give them a beginning, climax, and hopefully a fitting conclusion – and also situate them within a greater narrative, be it social, historical, or cosmic.

Thanks to social media, we get to curate the stories of our lives – in real time – and, if need be, change characters, dominant plot lines, or background themes how and when we like. Or, in documenting everyday events and occurrences, we may elevate them and memorialize them for posterity. Suddenly our chores, the many stops we make throughout the workday, gain special significance in being shared – and, of course, connections are made, satisfying our inherent need to socialize and build bonds. And in this respect, our digitally curated lives fit into another great American tradition: entrepreneurship.33 We are busy constructing an identity and life story – a brand – that we then champion and market, like everyone else selling something in this country.

This implies that there is also a competitive element to the social media sharing. It is increasingly common for people to boast about their romantic 32 33

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Igo, 338–44.

Harcourt has made a similar argument. Cf. Exposed, 99.

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relationships in digital platforms, for example, and post substantiating pictures and gushing proclamations and confessions, complete with “weekiversary posts” diligently marking the duration of the relationship.34 This has the unintended (or perhaps intended) consequence of shaming people who are not in love, or people who may now doubt the intensity of their own romance, and then wonder why they or their partner are not similarly bragging about it online. Apparently, this phenomenon has goaded some people to stay in relationships longer than they should have, just for the sake of “keeping up with the Joneses” online.35 They make their romances seem more devoted and titillating than they are, and persist in the fantasy – which comes to supplant the real thing. Consider the title of a recent article documenting this trend: “Are you really in love if it’s not on Instagram?” Romance is not real if it’s not announced and performed on social media.

We might pay special attention to millennials, in this regard, since they are the generation growing up with, and on, social media – and they seem to be the most egregious sharers online. In one respect, they are not really doing anything too exceptional for young people – they are only taking advantage of new technology to do what previous generations have always done: socialize with a fury, and in ways that may seem strange, uncomfortable, or even dangerous to parents and elders, publicizing details they should otherwise conceal, or at least not flaunt. We should see millennials as “digital flâneurs,” one social media critic argues, who share in order to catch the attention of their peers, which they long for ardently.36 And in doing so – paradoxically – they betray concern for privacy. For, by issuing forth a mass of information, aren’t they diverting our attention from other details, in the process?37 Aren’t they hiding, in some fashion, behind the flood of data? This may be one way of achieving a degree of privacy in this data-ridden age. In all their sharing, millennials have simply figured out new ways to control the social situation, with the tools available to them.

While these are all compelling accounts behind digital sharing, I am generally dubious that it is so strategic and premeditated as some think, or contend. So much of it seems perfunctory and routine, and the revealed information so mundane and insignificant. Alternately, and as mentioned, people are so often prone to leaving posts that are unintentionally rude, 34

35 36

37

Krista Burton, “Are you really in love if it’s not on Instagram?” New York Times, March 24, 2018: www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/opinion/sunday/relationships-love-instagram.html.

Burton, “Are you really in love?” danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 203.

See boyd, 75.

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unthinkingly offensive – directed at wide audiences, to which they have put little apparent consideration. It’s hard to see it as being much more than instinctual and reflexive, at this point.

Perhaps there is a simpler explanation to the phenomenon of online shamelessness that defies predictions for surveillance: people forget or ignore that they are watched. Thanks to the digital medium, which can be accessed and employed alone in one’s room, behind four walls, it sustains the semblance of privacy. When I share online, I certainly seem to do so privately, or behind the protective layer of this medium. Or perhaps I may share anonymously, which means my identity seems even more secure. Digital communication is mediated communication, after all, where the mediation figures prominently – it is the computer or smartphone screen before me. This serves to remove me somehow from the target(s) of my emissions, and my audience.

As a result, I feel I am at a remove when I divulge, or surveil others in turn.

I might put it otherwise: there is a kind of epistemological disconnect at work here. To people who behave shamelessly online, they will affirm that they know someone is watching them – they will affirm that their actions are not concealed, but public in some fashion. Indeed, their emissions reach a broader population than if they had been shouted aloud in a public square.

But it doesn’t feel like this. It feels like their emissions are controlled, curated, and their author at safe remove from people he might hurt or offend or embarrass. Or as we see in the phenomenon of online trolling, people are emboldened by the perceived anonymity to wage destruction.

Technology writer Christine Rosen relays a story that illustrates the epistemological disconnect I have in mind. A college student reported to her a surprising encounter with a Facebook acquaintance: the acquaintance in question was of the opposite sex, and the student hardly knew her at all; she was one of countless friends party to his social media feed, and he had never spoken to her in person.

But one day on campus, he bumped into her, and they struck up a conversation.

He was shocked to find that he was sweating profusely, though it was not a hot day.

“It wasn’t until much later that I realized maybe I was sweating because I kind of liked her,” he told Rosen, “and was off my game because she was right in front of me.”38 Rosen goes on to argue that digital communication allows us to forget the kind of emotional signals – both those from our own bodies, and from others – that typically punctuate and guide everyday public conversation.39 This example also points out how differently we view the digital medium, which causes us to 38

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Christine Rosen, “Expose Thyself! On the Digitally Revealed Life,” Hedgehog Review, 20/1 (2016), https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Spring_Rosen.php.

Rosen, “Expose Thyself!”

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behave differently than when we are out in public – because digital communications seem private or safe – or safer. It is easy for me to feel “on my game,” as the student puts it, when I am alone in my room composing clever comments online, behind the veil of a constructed personality perhaps, and feel little pressure to respond to anyone in front of me, in the moment. What’s more, I may discover likeminded or sympathetic audiences online, and speak only to them – people for whom it’s always easy to be “on my game.”

In any case, the phenomenon of online sharing and shamelessness, our newfound culture of exposition, is a testament to how little we are concerned for privacy. Evidence of surveillance abounds; its presence is not hard to detect or infer in our daily lives. But it hardly deters anyone from divulging private details – habitually. To the contrary, this phenomenon suggests we may be immune to surveillance. Which is a fascinating prospect in itself. What would that mean for governments who harbor vast plans to spy on their people – as in China, which I will take up shortly? Why aim to monitor people if coercion is not the goal or anticipated result? Perhaps governments are happy to let us share and expose ourselves, and they will sit and watch and take it all in.

Perhaps they don’t want us to hide our true feelings and eccentricities at all, but live freely and openly, for all to see.

Despite this confessional culture, and the epistemological disconnect of digital communications, some of us do feel compelled to object when emissions are monitored, and private information collected and analyzed. The problem is, this compulsion is largely visceral. We may know when to object, but increasingly, we don’t know how – we don’t know what to say, how to articulate or express the harm that is inflicted by widespread government and commercial surveillance. And this is strange of course, because, again, we are steeped in a culture and tradition that supposedly prizes privacy – which is founded on it, we are told. Our difficulty in expressing the problem is evident in, among other things, a word that recurs in protests against surveillance schemes, which are dubbed “creepy.”

The data broker Axciom engineered an extensive program to collect information on individuals, which it then sells to retailers who wish to know more about customers, actual and prospective. The program gathers information “continuously on approximately seven hundred million identifiable individuals,” drawn from a few sources, including “Fortune 100 companies’ records of people who ‘purchased something or signed up for a mailing list or some kind of offer,’” and “every data attribute you could gather publicly about consumers from public records.”40 The breadth of this program spooked 40

Turow, 156.

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even a leading publication from the data brokerage industry itself, which fretted over the company’s “aggressive quantification of individuals” that it deemed “creepy.”41 Retailers are increasingly interested in knowing where you are at any given moment. Thanks to beacon technology, they can outfit aisles with digital devices that communicate with your mobile phone, alerting where you are in the store, before which product, and then merchants can barrage you with pertinent and alluring promotions and discounts.42 Retailers will soon communicate with you in similar fashion whether you are in the parking lot about to enter the store, or simply driving by.43 They aim to deliver personalized messaging and marketing drawn from our detailed purchase history, or other available personal information amassed by data brokers and catalogued by retailers. The corporate entities engaged in this massive data collection recognize a “creepy factor” in what they do, but are ultimately confident that we can grow accustomed to it all, and be placated by the benefits we receive in turn.44 A privacy scholar ascribes a similar “creepiness factor” to the imminent networking of major devices and appliances in our homes, such as when “your heater or clothes dryer monitor how much power you’re using, or . . . your fridge [alerts] you that you’re low on milk.”45 And the journalist covering a new startup deems it “creepy” for helping “landlords, employers and online dates strip-mine intimate data from your Facebook page.”46 The company in question produces tenant reports for landlords, culled from social media sites of prospective tenants. The journalist composed her own tenant report, and was dismayed to find that it included a “list of my closest friends and interests, a percentage breakdown of my personality traits, a list of every time I’ve tweeted the words ‘loan’ and ‘pregnant,’ and the algorithm’s confidence that I’ll pay rent consistently.”47 Why is this kind of deep spying considered “creepy”? It suggests we are uncomfortable with it, of course, but to call it creepy is not to say it is wrong 41 42 43 44 45

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Turow, 1.

Turow, 213.

Turow, 217.

David Lazarus, “Our privacy is losing out to Internet-connected household devices,” LA Times, January 15, 2016, www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20160115-column.html.

Caitlin Dewey, “Creepy startup will help landlords, employers and online dates strip-mine intimate data from your Facebook page,” Washington Post, June 9, 2016, www.washingtonpost .com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/09/creepy-startup-will-help-landlords-employers-and-onlin e-dates-strip-mine-intimate-data-from-your-facebook-page/?utm_term=.8e0d97e8fadc.

Dewey, “Creepy startup.”

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per se; it is to register worry, concern, doubt. When we say something is creepy, we mean to say we suspect it is wrong, or there is something potentially damaging or dangerous about it, but we are unsure what it is, and certainly cannot specify it. It is a feeling – a sense of being ill at ease.

We are uncomfortable – or at least, some of us are – with the prospect of constant and pervasive monitoring, of the most intimate and seemingly random details of our lives. But we do not know how to object any longer.

Increasingly, many do not feel the need or urge to object at all. As I will soon show, objecting, or taking a harder stand on surveillance seems unlikely, and perhaps impossible given our dependence on digital technology – which will only grow. Facing this immense expansion of digital technology, which threatens our privacy at every turn, surveillance seems normal. If or when people do manage to object, they may do so out of a sense of obligation, a sense that this is what we as Americans are supposed to do. But in truth, the value of privacy seems lost on us.

This must be fixed if we would muster a defense of privacy. Attempts to impose regulations that give individuals more power over whether they can share private information are intolerably tenuous and, I fear, ultimately doomed so long as the majority no longer understands and appreciates privacy – clearly, convincingly, and self-consciously.

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GREGORY A. DADDIS

PULP VIETNAM WA R A N D G E N D E R I N C O L D WA R M E N ’ S A DVENTUR E M AGA Z INE S

Pulp Vietnam War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines Gregory A. Daddis

UK and US publication September 2020 9781108493505 Hardback c. £26.95 / c. $29.95

In this compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam explores how men’s adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The ‘macho pulps’ - boasting titles like Man’s Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs’ expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of ‘normal’ male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war.

Gregory A. Daddis is a professor of history and the USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History at San Diego State University. A retired U.S. Army colonel, he has served in both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. He has authored four books, including Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (2017).

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ohn wayne. For so many men that came of age during the Cold

War era, he was, with Hollywood’s blessing, the epitome of the ideal self-made man who proved his masculinity with cool-headed courage under fire.1 More than anyone else, the “Duke” set male expectations for intrepid wartime behavior at the midpoint of the twentieth century – when the United States, fresh from a victorious “hot war,” faced a far vaguer cold one with indistinct combatants and fuzzy boundaries.

Wayne’s breakthrough performance in Sands of Iwo Jima(1949) was a defining role for the actor, if not a generation of young men who felt they had missed out on their chance for heroism in World War II. Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker was tough, disciplined, a “clear-cut hero.”

The imitation seemed so authentic that one young marine lieutenant heading to Vietnam in 1968 contrasted his own “self-doubt and insecurity” with the imagined bravery of the Hollywood star.2 The male ideal embodied by Wayne and created by Hollywood replicated itself in many facets of American popular culture during the Cold War, perhaps most pervasively on magazine racks across the country and in the post exchanges on military bases around the globe, nestled within the pages of men’s adventure magazines. These “macho pulps” trumpeted the exploits of larger-than-life, self-satisfied men, valiant on the battlefield and accomplished in the bedroom. These warrior heroes were physically fit, mentally strong, and resolutely heterosexual. At the same time, men’s adventure magazines alternatively portrayed women as threat or spoil, exotic temptresses who were as dangerous as they were desirous.3

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How the Vietnam generation attempted to make sense of these sometimes contradictory and often unattainable roles when they found themselves in Vietnam is the subject of this book. Unlike previous wars fought

by American soldiers and depicted in graphic and gaudy detail in the pulps, GIs arriving in Southeast Asia with John Wayne fantasies in their heads found an environment starkly different than the theaters of World War II and, to a lesser degree, Korea. How, then, did soldiers reconcile their frustrated expectations with the reality of Vietnam?

A Male story from January 1964 illustrates the sort of adventures that some GIs in Vietnam might have hoped to encounter there, or at least a variation of the sort. The tale features a downed US Army pilot in World War II working behind enemy lines with Kiev “love gang girls” and “outcast gypsy dancers.”4 The accompanying artwork showcased a buxom brunette in a low-cut red top, carrying a rifle next to our “concretenerved” hero as they eluded chasing Nazi soldiers. Stag’s February 1967 “Nude Tribe Caper” equally contained many of these magazines’ clichés.

Artist Earl Norem’s enticing illustration displays our champion held at gunpoint while surrounded by bare-breasted local Chilean women.

“Peacetime in suburbia had no charms” for this marine veteran turned contract intelligence officer. After brawling his way through most of the plot, he has sex with a “gorgeous blonde” before story’s end.

There we find the enemy is none other than Nazi doctor Kurt Mengel – clearly, a reference to “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele – who is raising Adolf Hitler’s son, the product of artificial insemination. The blonde, of course, proves to be a Nazi spy and is killed off “without compassion.”5 Considered by the era’s cultural critics as disposable consumer kitsch, perhaps because of their formulaic writing and flamboyant artwork, these magazines’ impact on the mass culture of the Cold War mostly has been discounted. Never mind that United States senators, like New York’s Jacob K. Javits, were writing letters to magazine editors, or, that by the mid 1960s, they had a collective circulation of roughly twelve million copies a month. Too easily dismissed as low-brow art or “throwaway, hardboiled writing,” men’s postwar pulps offer deep insights into an overlooked source of how American masculinity was broadcast during the Cold War era.6

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Fig. I.1 Stag, February 1967

In fact, gritty adventure stories that were the lifeblood of postwar macho pulps struck a chord with many American men seeking inspiration, stability, and identity in an uncertain postwar world. Despite having rescued the globe from totalitarianism during World War II, Americans entered the postwar period with shaky confidence. The first two decades of the Cold War was a period of immense change – socially, culturally, and politically. The September 1952 issue of Male, for example, included an exposé on “How Stalin Stole Our B-29,” followed immediately by a story from Dr. Shailer Lawton on the “million marriages . . . in constant jeopardy because of deep-seated, sexual inferiority complexes.” Men’s adventure magazines both manifested these popular fears and offered an antidote for men struggling to prove their manhood. In short, the construction of warrior heroes in the pages of macho pulps was a response to many Americans’ fears inspired by the twin forces of international communism and a postwar consumer culture at home.7 As a corrective, adventure magazines in the 1950s and into the mid 1960s depicted the ideal man as both heroic warrior and sexual conqueror. War stories illustrated the exploits of courageous soldiers, 3 www.cambridge.org

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fighting against the “savage” enemy in foreign lands, and defending democracy in a harsh world where the threat from evil actors always seemed lurking. Sex underscored nearly all of these tales, with pulp heroes rewarded with beautiful, seductive women as a kind of payoff for their combat victories. Within these popular magazines – boasting titles like Man’s Conquest, For Men Only, and Man’s Epic – men courageously defeated their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men.8 Adventure mags also sought to strike a chord with their primary readership: working-class young men, the same demographic that disproportionately fought a long and bloody war in South Vietnam.

Working-class males read flashy stories of their fathers’ generation who, during World War II, conquered not only their enemies but women as well.9 These men, then, consumed a form of masculinity that was tough, rebellious, and decidedly anti-feminine. Read a different way, however, these magazines might also be seen as a form of entertainment and escapism from deep class anxieties and fears about not measuring up in a rapidly changing postwar society.10 Yet it was the hypermasculine narratives, not the subtext of anxiety, that helped shape the attitudes of young men who went to war in Southeast Asia during the mid to late 1960s. One lieutenant recalled how “men’s magazines were associated with home, and we read them, owned them, and traded them as if they were gold.” Another veteran remembered that the “most widely-read literature among the guys” was “comic books and adventure stories,” filled with pictures of “some guy killing somebody and the bare-breasted, Vietnamese-type, Asian-looking woman.”11 In fact, men’s adventure magazines regularly appeared on the list of top sales in the post exchange (PX) system in Vietnam. Thus, we might think of these magazines as both cultural text and cultural phenomenon. Not only did they foster ideas about what it meant to be a man, but they also helped their readers negotiate those meanings within their daily lives, both at home and abroad.12 Indeed, in many of these magazines, letters to the editor contained feedback from soldiers deployed overseas, including those serving in Vietnam. The May 1968 issue of Man’s Illustrated included three letters

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from soldiers deployed to Vietnam, all serving in different provinces.

One noted how “We grunts don’t have much to look forward to by way of pretty faces.” Luckily for the young private, the March issue included a pictorial of Joan Brennan, the “prettiest Irish lass” he had seen and over whom his squad mates “flipped.”13 Moreover, many veterans themselves wrote stories for these magazines, suggesting important linkages between war and society during the 1950s and 1960s, and as such they were one of the few venues that specifically connected martial valor with sexual entitlement and violence with virility.14 Neither comics nor television shows nor John Wayne movies so purposefully melded war with sex.If there was a dominant narrative at play in these magazines, that paradigm unabashedly fused together violence and sexuality.15 Pulp Vietnam thus explores how men’s adventure magazines defined masculinity during two crucial decades of the Cold War era and suggests how that definition may have helped shape American soldiers’ expectations in Vietnam – expectations that were in stark contrast to what GIs found in Southeast Asia.These magazines offered young men a model of masculinity that was physically powerful, emotionally shallow, and sexually aggressive. By the time soldiers arrived in Vietnam, many had an explicit, albeit constructed, vision of how a conquering warrior should behave. Did realities in Vietnam enable these men to act on their expectations when confronted with Vietnamese people, friend or foe, and especially women?16 At its core then, Pulp Vietnam argues that men’s adventure magazines from the post-World War II era crafted a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish and then normalize GIs’ expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. Cold War men’s magazines, like no other medium in contemporary popular culture, inundated American adolescents and men with idealized storylines of wartime heroism coupled with the sexual conquest of women. Such magazines correlated a kind of sexual prerogative with military service, making one the reward for the other.17 By comparing the stories and imagery in men’s adventure magazines with soldiers’ memoirs, oral histories, and court-martial proceeding testimonies, Pulp Vietnam asks whether male soldiers in Vietnam described 5 www.cambridge.org

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their actions and experiences in language similar to the tales that filled the pulps, and focuses particularly on whether these adventure magazines may have shaped the ways that some soldiers thought of war and of women.18 Such an undertaking ultimately emphasizes the broader connections between war and society, appraising the role of popular culture at home with soldiers’ actions overseas. Historians commonly claim that basic training provoked an aggressive heterosexuality in young men, and it is likely that drill instructor outbursts of “you dirty faggot” or “can’t hack it little girls” engendered attitudes that contributed to violence or hostility against women. Yet it seems just as important, if not more so, to examine the preexisting sociocultural dynamics that prepared GIs to think and perform in certain, violent ways. How the home front affected soldiers’ behaviors in Vietnam is key to my analysis.19 In large part, Pulp Vietnam rests on the notion that popular representations of war often entice young men by relying on heroic language and imagery. They help to define certain expectations, even those that view exaggerated, militarized masculinity and sexual conquest as a natural component of war.20 The September 1966 issue of Stag, for example, published a letter in its “Male Call” section from a sergeant stationed on a California base. Along with other non-commissioned officers, he was preparing for deployment to Vietnam and had enjoyed an article on “Bachelor Girls Who Prey on Married Men.” Most of the NCOs in the unit, in fact, were married but stationed too far from home for weekend visits. “When you’re in the field 72 hours at a time, a man needs some relaxation,” the sergeant confessed. “If it wasn’t for the chicks around here who overlook the fact we’re married, I think we’d all go off our rockers.” Military service as stereotyped in men’s adventure magazines promised heroism and sexual satisfaction, unabashedly linking them together in a symbiotic relationship.21 These same magazines, however, were poor preparation for actual war. They left readers with a distorted view of battle and often unprepared to deal with the realities GIs faced. Combat wasn’t adventurous. It was deadly, impersonal, and corrupting. The warrior hero illusion never emerged as a tangible reality.22 What men’s adventure magazines did, then, was create a narrative framework that bestowed upon young men a warped knowledge of war and sex, one that helped make violence against

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the Vietnamese population seem acceptable, if not a routine feature of overseas military service. War might have been alien to working-class American teens in the 1950s and early 1960s, but its portrayal in the postwar “macho pulps” proved immensely alluring to many young boys who believed combat would help make them into men.23

Fig. I.2 Men, January 1962

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On one hand, the experience of combat in Vietnam was far different than the pulp stories, and that gulf between expectation and reality left soldiers with little reassurance they were doing the right thing. The magazines presented a scenario of heroic battlefield exploits that rarely, if ever, were realized in the largely unconventional fighting of Vietnam.

The “man triumphant” never emerged. As one veteran recalled, his “romantic notions of war began to dull as the exhausting, frustrating months passed with nothing but a few snipers’ bullets and the shells of mortarmen to break the tedium.” Slowly he began to suspect that his “pursuit of glory was a hopeless task.”24 Of course, many American GIs who fought in World War II and Korea also found that they had little control over events that might determine life or death. The murky political–military struggle in Vietnam, though, seemed only to exacerbate the disconnects between anticipated heroic deeds and genuinely brutal wartime acts, while the gradual loss of public support for the war further challenged the notion that combat heroism would be the manmaking experience that the magazines had promised.25 If the pulps’ combat narratives differed so much from reality, then perhaps, on the other hand, American soldiers’ relations with local women might align more closely with the sexual champion depicted in the magazines. Frustrated that combat in Vietnam had left them few opportunities to “prove” their manhood, soldiers who sought to establish their dominance in relations with the population could find convenient examples in men’s adventure magazines. As one writer has suggested, “carnal conquest” was a way for soldiers to compensate for “military impotence in fighting an unwinnable war.”26 Via sexual conquest or violence, GIs could still measure up to the myths being propagated within the magazines. Surely, this redirection of hostility was made easier by the tactic of dehumanizing the enemy that was so central to contemporary basic training methods. Yet the pulps’ basic depictions of women – as sexually promiscuous and available, if not rightful objects of conquest – must be considered if we are to better understand the sexual violence in Vietnam committed by American soldiers.27 Accounts from veterans in combat suggest these men had few opportunities for heroic acts on the battlefields of Vietnam; they had little chance to resemble the warriors of pulp magazines. But when dealing

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with the population, GIs were in positions of relative power.They could control decisions of whether or not a hut was burned, a woman raped, or, in lesser ways, treated as a “spoil” of war. As one veteran recalled, “I had a sense of power. A sense of destruction . . . in the Nam you realized you had the power to take a life. You had the power to rape a woman and nobody could say nothing to you . . . It was like I was a god.

I could take a life. I could screw a woman.”28 It’s important to make clear that I am not accusing all or most US servicemembers in Vietnam of committing rape or sexual violence. This is not a detailed study of the actual sexual atrocities committed by ordinary GIs in Vietnam. Rather, Pulp Vietnam focuses more on culturally constructed expectations, and a main expectation derived from men’s magazines was that soldiers could – and, perhaps, should – conquer the local female population while serving overseas. Stories that portrayed “warrior heroes” exerting their dominance over seemingly threatening yet desirous women helped to normalize wartime interactions based largely on accepted notions of power disparities between men and women during the 1950s and 1960s.29 Pulp Vietnam, therefore, is as much about Cold War gender conceptions as it is about pulp narratives of wartime heroism and sexual conquest. In truth, they are intimately connected. If soldiers did make the choice to engage in sexual conquest in Vietnam – which was without consent and by force in many instances – men’s magazines provided a graphic framework rarely, if ever, found in other forms of popular media. They alone established perceptual norms that suggested aggressive behavior in wartime, against both the enemy and women, was not just acceptable, but admirable.30 And while none of this is to argue for direct causality – reading macho pulps did not lead men inevitably to rape – we still must consider the role socialization plays in male soldiers’ wartime behavior. If young GIs were going to act out their frustrations in Vietnam, men’s adventure magazines offered a graphic instruction manual.31 Young, naïve, and idealistic Americans went off to Vietnam expecting an affirmation of their manhood in the cauldron of war. When their experiences in combat or in rear areas did not match the pulp magazine stories of wartime heroism and triumphalism, many of these young men 9 www.cambridge.org

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were left searching for some form of compensation or for connection between fantasyland and reality. Some found it in the realm of sex.

Having grown up with tales that coupled martial valor to sexual conquest, the connection would not have been difficult to make.32 Yet as alluring as the macho pulp fantasies were, they fabricated a world for young readers that veered widely from actual wartime experiences. That the knowledge gained from these magazines was so flawed helps explain, in part, the vast discord between the imagined war in Vietnam and the real one fought by American soldiers far from the world of pulp fiction.33 PULP FICTIONS: MEN’S MAGAZINES IN COLD WAR AMERICA

In their depictions of wartime heroism and sexual conquest, Cold War men’s adventure magazines were not just pop culture products representative of their era, but rather drew upon a decades-long expansion of a market that reached into millions of American homes after World War II. We tend to forget the presence of a print magazine culture at the midpoint of the twentieth century and how much it contributed to popular ideas on masculinity and femininity. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), for example, is largely a reaction to the images of domesticated women emerging from popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping.34 In order to fully grasp the significance of mid-century adventure magazines, we need to understand their origins and the development of a market for contemporary ideas on militarized masculinity, a key theme that defined the Cold War macho pulps.

By the mid 1950s, men’s adventure pulps had evolved from earlier forms of magazine publishing while maintaining many of their forerunners’ core themes. Though national magazines dated back to the middle of the nineteenth century – Harper’s, for example, was founded in 1850 – technological advances in the late 1800s allowed publishers to produce and distribute higher quantities at lower prices for a wider readership.

Frank Munsey’s The Argosy illustratively cost only fifteen cents in 1912, a full twenty cents cheaper than Harper’s. The latter fell in the category of “slicks,” so named for their higher-quality (and costly) paper and, thus,

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more middle-class readership.35 “Pulps,” however, were produced from a wood-fiber base and quickly earned a poor reputation for “crudely written stories [and] embarrassingly garish covers” that “generally contained little to attract intelligent readers.”36 With their emphasis on formulaic fiction stories, though, pulps held broad appeal. Argosy alone reached a circulation of half a million by 1907. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, the price of all magazines became even more affordable thanks to advertising revenue, a key innovation of national periodicals.37 Before long, all-fiction periodicals – Popular, Blue Book, Adventure – were being eagerly consumed by an enthusiastic market. Collections of crime stories, such as Black Mask, and other detective and western “hero pulps” soon followed, magazines that were purposefully sensational in title and content. And within this newer “hard-boiled” adventure fiction emerged an aggressive form of American masculinity.38 To be sure, some magazines like Esquire, founded in 1933, cultivated an upper-middle-class male audience. Within the pulps, though, the heroic male icon represented something more visceral. Whether a hard-boiled detective fighting back against the social and economic conditions of the Depression era or Tarzan of the Apes carving out space in a savage, primitive jungle, these men were autonomous, physically powerful, sexually potent, and interminably courageous. These were manly men. In large sense, the depictions of manliness advanced by the pulps idealized what their readers already considered to be real men. If magazines themselves were exemplars of modern mass production, then the champions within their covers gave hope that the mythic “frontier hero” was alive and well in contemporary American society.39 The relationship between the pulps and gender conventions became more pronounced during the Great War (1914–1918), inspiring a particular brand of pulps highlighting the exploits of men in combat.

During the mid to late 1920s, nearly fifty new pulp titles hit the market, dedicated in part or whole to war. Battle Stories, War Aces, and Under Fire all recounted stories of Yanks in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), many written by veterans themselves, who interestingly tended to steer clear of heroic self-description.40 When young Americans went off to fight in the next world war, comic books, paperbacks, and magazines 11 www.cambridge.org

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followed them across the globe, setting the stage for the postwar macho pulps. In one strand, comic books, like those featuring the heroic Flying Tigers, constructed the Japanese enemy as “dirty, buck-toothed . . . savages” who were little more than “rising sons of Satan.”41 In another strand, popular magazines like Esquire deployed images of sexually suggestive pin-up girls overseas to aid in the fight for freedom. Indeed, the US Army accorded Esquire special mailing privileges based on the magazine’s supposed ability to sustain GI morale. By war’s close, one could readily discern the links between war, masculinity, and sexuality in the most popular forms of reading materials.42 With the end of wartime paper quotas, and a ready-made market of primed readers, the popular fiction industry boomed. Postwar men’s adventure magazines, though, carved out a special place by consolidating rugged machismo, battlefield heroism, and over-the-top, aggressive heterosexuality into single tales. Scores of titles flooded newsstands – Saga (1947), Stag (1950), Man’s Conquest (1956), and Man’s Book (1962) to name but a few.43 At times referred to as “sweats” or “armpit magazines,” these newer versions of the classic pulps seemed a corrective to fears that American masculinity was under siege in a postwar, consumer-oriented society. Within their covers, stories of “real-life” adventures might remedy the boredom that was ostensibly gripping the thousands of suburban communities springing up across the United States. In fact, many of these pulps’ readers, like their World War I predecessors, were veterans not only trying to make sense of their wartime experiences, but seeking a return to the supposed glory days of their youth.44 How was a reader supposed to distinguish between such a glut of magazines? According to editor Bruce Friedman, a clear-cut hierarchy reigned in this genre. At the top stood True and Argosy, men’s true adventure magazines for the “hunting, beer, and poker set.” Next were titles published by the likes of Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management Company, the same house that would publish Marvel Comics.

Here, one could find Stag, For Men Only, Man’s World, and Action for Men. On the lowest rungs, according to Friedman, were the “legions of other titles that generally featured Gestapo women prancing around captive Yanks in leg shackles.”45 If True and Argosy seemed more intended for middle-class men with disposable income – the quality of

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goods advertised suggested so – a clear misogyny still ran through all three tiers of these men’s magazines. Moreover, because most of these magazines were published in New York City, pulp stories and illustrations had to rely on the active imaginations of writers and artists who had little practical experience with the exotic locales they were portraying.46

Fig. I.3 Stag, January 1961

Indeed, it was this very exoticism that drew many readers to the macho pulps. The stories were intended, in short, to stimulate. They attracted veterans returning from World War II or Korea seeking ties to a significant experience in their lives, perhaps countering the muchheralded “crisis of masculinity” that seemed so credible in the 1950s.

They invited patriotic anti-communists who believed “effete” cosmopolitans were actively undermining the nation’s security. They drew in nervous traditionalists hoping to fight back against an onslaught of feminists apparently intent on usurping men’s roles as patriarchal leaders.47 They enticed teens seeking examples of what it meant to be a “real” man. And, in the early and mid 1960s, they appealed to men combating a sense of isolation from a changing culture in which old verities seem to have lost public approval and support. As in earlier 13 www.cambridge.org

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pulps, men’s adventure magazines spoke to the discontented man with an “infinite capacity for wishing.” And what better wish than to escape from the uncertainties of a rapidly changing postwar American society?48 Of course, readers of varying ages and socioeconomic positions likely consumed these magazines in different ways. One pulp writer believed the “average reader” to be “a mature man and an immature boy.” For the older reader, here was an opportunity “to escape into the literature of actions instead of ideas.” For the adolescent, however, pulps had the ability to influence “an immature mind which has not had, or has not profited by experience.”49 Thus, as boys were conceiving their future identities as men, the macho pulps boldly presented them with attractive images of “gritty action and tawdry sex.”50 If such popular depictions of masculinity now seem cheap and vulgar, it would be inappropriate to simply dismiss pulp writers as “penny-a-line scribblers.” True, many of their stories were mechanical and clichéd.

One writer shared how he simply divided his tales into three natural parts: “characters, setting and problem; problem gets worse; problem still gets worse – and then is solved.” But behind the colorful heroes and dastardly villains were some notable authors, including Mario Puzo and Andy Rooney.51 Classic hard-boiled authors Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler also contributed the occasional murder mystery. And there were those well acquainted with war. Vietnam journalist Malcolm Browne penned combat stories, as did Robert F. Dorr, an Air Force veteran who would go on to complete a twenty-five-year career with the US Foreign Service.52 While battlefield exploits proved popular article entries, so too did the “hotsie-totsies.” In the early Cold War years, male consumers could find few sexual stimulants in popular culture, especially before the publication of Playboy in 1953. In fact, Hugh Hefner’s first choice for his new magazine’s title was Stag Party. Only after attorneys representing Stag magazine’s publisher complained did Hefner decide upon Playboy.53 Without question, Playboy was different than the macho pulps, intentionally so. From his Chicago office, Hefner wanted to offer something more refined than the “hairy-chested editorial emphasis” he found in adventure magazines. The ideal man who read Playboy was less about hunting and fishing and more about “inviting in a female for a quiet

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discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” Of course, Hefner’s supposedly progressive views, targeting the single middle-class consumer with an interest in sports, clothes, and liquor, conveniently obscured a gender hostility toward the very female bodies he was promoting.54 True, the women in Playboy were depicted more as girls next door than as sexual temptresses. But an editorial in the June 1953 issue suggested these women were not just the stuff of erotic fantasy, but of suburban, domestic oppression as well. “All woman wants is security. And she’s perfectly willing to crush man’s adventurous, freedom-loving spirit to get it.” The booming circulation numbers of Playboy verified that Hefner had tapped into the cultural zeitgeist of the early Cold War era.55 To be sure, however, only manly men graced the pages of the postwar pulps. Cavalcade, for example, advertised that its magazine contained “96 pages of real man’s reading,” while others, like Male, regularly included western yarns, literary spotlights on the rugged individualism so crucial to the narrative of American independence.56 Yet, not far below the surface, one could discern an uneasiness pervading men’s sense of social power. If masculinity, like gender, is a social construction, then in the 1950s and early 1960s, it also was a reaction to fears that passivity and femininity in an age of capitalist consumerism might be undermining traditional definitions of manhood. Take, for instance, the March 1960 Battle Cry article “Are You Yellow?” The story begins with World War II hero Audie Murphy fighting off elite Nazi troops before asking the reader if he can measure up to such feats of courage. After drawing upon psychological studies and historical examples, the author offers thin encouragement despite a confident tone: you, too, young reader can “make calls upon bravery no matter what your field of work, your age, or your place of residence.”57 As noted, that residence, for most pulp consumers, likely would have been found in America’s working-class neighborhoods. Both articles and advertisements catered to the “low brow” who, according to Life, drank beer, played craps, and spent time in his local lodge.58 Ads similarly indicated the targeting of working-class audiences. “Is there an ‘education barrier’ between you and promotion?” asked one company. “Are young college graduates being brought in to fill positions above you?”

Other ads offered work clothes bargains, while still others promised that 15 www.cambridge.org

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the “trained man” would have “no trouble passing the genius who hasn’t improved his talents.” Indeed, advanced education was hardly a guarantee of success. “You don’t need a college diploma but you do need plenty of common sense and you’ve got to like people,” trumpeted one personality self-help advertisement.59 More than a few blue-collar Vietnam veterans recalled growing up and being intrigued by their fathers’ war stories that were a mainstay of these macho pulps. “It seemed so exciting and exotic,” one infantryman remembered. And yet despite wartime evidence of class inequities in draft policies, the adventure mags pushed back against any perceived injustices. Veteran Micheal Clodfelter noted that the men “with whom I shared the Vietnam War were overwhelmingly the sons of steelworkers, truck drivers, mechanics, small farmers and sharecroppers, men from small towns and rural routes in the South and Midwest or from big city ghettoes.”60 A Stag offering from July 1966, however, argued that men like Clodfelter were mistaken and the army was“almost a perfect crosssection of U.S. population, with people from every walk of life in just about the same proportion as they are in civilian population.”61 Perhaps because of adventure magazines’ popularity among veterans and in working-class neighborhoods, they also were rabidly patriotic.

Pulp writers did not simply defend Cold War policies, they trumpeted nationalism through a military lens, often decrying America’s weakkneed response to the glaring threat of communism.In a precursor to Vietnam-era criticisms of civilian interference in military affairs, one author asked why the Pentagon was “keeping handcuffs on our jet fighters” in the skies over East Germany.62 Another, deriding US social policies overseas, demanded “It’s Time for America to Get Tough!” In many ways, a sense of militarized masculinity thus became embedded into the nationalist rhetoric emblazoned on the pages of the pulps.63 Such a linking should not surprise. In large part, ideas about power stood at the core of conceptualizations on both nationalism and masculinity. After all, gender – of which masculinity is a part – is as much a political system as a symbolic one. The macho pulps clearly illustrated a preference for male social domination, one that could be extrapolated outward to Cold War America.64 Manly adventure stories within these magazines symbolized an idealized gender structure that no doubt

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resonated with many male readers. Here, historian Joan Scott’s definition of gender seems most useful. To Scott, gender is a “primary way of signifying relationships of power.” How pulp readers viewed and went on to enact their understandings of gender and masculinity in Vietnam will become an important part of this story.65 Of course, these magazines competed with other forms of popular culture, such as comics and television, offering a wide range of popular masculine images. By the end of 1952, there were more than nineteen million television sets in American households. Young and old alike could watch heroic gunslingers in scores of westerns, either on TV or in local movie theaters.66 And, perhaps just as importantly, young readers doubtlessly compared the pulps’ “true adventures” with tales they heard from World War II and Korea veterans who were family and friends, even if those vets might be reticent to share the more unpleasant aspects of their wartime experiences. Yet, despite the fact that several vying mediums were competing for audiences, the circulation of all magazines increased by more than twenty percent between 1950 and 1960. Television may have been seeping into the “nation’s bloodstream,” but the publishing industry was still clearly holding its own.67 Without question, assessing how a masculine ethos and its values are carried on to younger generations defies precision. Yet men’s adventure magazines clearly evinced an established male culture that relied heavily on patriarchal notions of society. And it did so in a fashion that was both compelling and alluring, since the stories highlighted both war and sex.

At least some part of this philosophy was transmitted to, and internalized by, the Vietnam draft generation.68 Surely, marine veteran Philip Caputo wasn’t alone in sharing that “the heroic experience I sought was war; war, the ultimate adventure; war, the ordinary man’s most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.” It seems probable that certain key aspects of adventure magazines became embedded in male culture, socializing young men how to think about war and women. In this way, magazines were one manifestation of popular culture shaping broader Cold War stereotypes and public opinions.69 By the early 1970s, men’s adventure magazines had fallen out of favor, ultimately left behind by a generation willing to reject many of their elders’ traditional cultural assumptions. But it was the war in Vietnam 17 www.cambridge.org

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that rang the macho pulps’ death knell. The long, unsatisfying conflict had yielded few heroes, leaving little incentive for readers to view military service as a rite of passage to manhood.70 A decade earlier, though, as Americans went off to war in Southeast Asia, the elements of male culture depicted in adventure magazines were clearly identifiable in the language of those slogging their way through the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. As one war correspondent shared, “Young men court danger as they court women, and for much the same reasons . . . secretly each wants to be a hero, in the finest and best sense of the word, and there’s nothing wrong with that, because quiet heroism is the stuff of war.”71 Or so young boys were told in Cold War America.

MILITARIZING MANHOOD

“We are a nation at war,” boomed Pennsylvania State Senator Albert R. Pechan in 1953. Never mind that World War II had ended almost a decade earlier, or that the fighting on the Korean peninsula was coming to a close. For Pechan, the distinction between war fronts and home fronts made little sense in this new era. “The force that is killing our loved ones, the power that is fighting against our democracy, is Communist, Godless Russia. It is fantastic,” Pechan argued, “to fight Communism with all our strength abroad and to ignore it at home.”72 By 1953, the nascent ideas of persistent war and a national security state in constant need of maintenance were taking hold in communities across America. Everywhere Americans turned, they saw an international crisis – in Korea, Chile, Algeria, Iran, and Indochina to name but a few.

Worse, clandestine communist forces and Soviet spies seemed to lurk behind every corner right here at home. The very idea of peace seemed dangerous. Though the public might recoil at the thought of an American empire, surely a vast, global military machine was necessary to keep these evil forces at bay.73 This inability to fully demobilize after World War II led to vast increases in defense spending, the re-installment of a peacetime draft, and the notion of continuous wartime mobilization. The outbreak of fighting in Korea in July 1950 only reified worries that global communists were on the march. In the process, conceptions of military service,

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Fig. I.4 American Manhood, January 1953

citizenship, and masculinity all became tightly intertwined.74 The February 1953 issue of American Manhood, for instance, offered advice on the prospects of a military career. Being drafted could “pay off big dividends,” as “you can come out a far better man than when you entered the armed forces.” Four years later, Saga was extolling the men of the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) as “real pros” who were members of an “elite corps. If there was ever a more self-confident outfit in military service, history does not record it.”75 Such applause proved useful for US military leaders who, competing with civilian businesses for talent, needed to retain young men’s attraction to war. Selling the “soldier” as the best venue for becoming a “man” clearly helped with recruiting efforts. And while the macho pulps were far from a government mouthpiece, they nonetheless were energetic promoters of the armed forces. “You’re a Marine,” declared one article, “then mister, 19 www.cambridge.org

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you’re a man. There’s no two ways about it.” To uphold the traditions of the Marine Corps’ “brilliant service” to the country took “a lot of man.”

Another on marine boot camp claimed that when a recruit completed his training, “he knows he’s proved himself a first-rate fighting man.”76 A full decade later, such storylines had hardly changed. “Combat commanders in Viet Nam,” Male declared in 1967, “are sending back reports that younger men still make the best fighters – that means 18–20 in age.”77 So too could social critics exploit the macho pulps’ depiction of masculinity which, to them, was under assault from overprotective mothers. This threat of “momism” suggested to commentators like Myron Brenton that an overinvolved mother might “devour her sons emotionally,” leading to “mama’s boys,” an epidemic of homosexual children, and, ultimately, a feminized society. As early as 1945, Ladies’ Home Journal had published an article asking “Are American Moms a Menace?”78 Luckily, postwar men’s magazines offered an answer. If the mother could not teach her son to be a man, then the armed forces would. Take, for instance, a Stag “confidential” from March 1966. “Lots of mothers who cry ‘hardship’ when their sons are being drafted are actually interested in smother-loving the son to death than in protecting him. Draft Board is actually doing these boys a favor by putting them in uniform.” That child rearing and national security remained so interconnected for so long surely implies deep anxieties about gender conceptions in the Cold War era.79 Given the weighty implications of defining the military as a wellspring of American masculinity, what better way to attract men to war than by linking it to sexual rewards? Here the macho pulps enhanced the myth-making power of cultural stories by claiming that women were naturally attracted to men in uniform. Adventure magazines were rife with tales of the military man’s sexual virility and exploits, such as when American Manhood told readers that the US Air Force not only offered “unlimited career opportunities,” but the cut of a uniform “with its attractiveness to the opposite sex.”80 This conflation of military and sexual power was on full display on pulps’ cover images, which regularly displayed courageous men dealing with danger, overcoming adversity, and usually winning sexual rewards for their heroics. The cover for the October 1957 issue of Battle Cry flaunted several GIs being kissed by Parisian women, offering chocolate to a small child, and astride a tank firing at an unseen enemy. Rifles

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unsubtly protruded in all their phallic grandeur. A story in Big Adventure described postwar Parisian girls – “thousands of them” – as “literally fighting each other off in an attempt to capture the GI’s interest.” In this way, according to historian Mary Louise Roberts, the American knight could be “duly awarded” for protecting not only the French nation, but its women as well.81

Fig. I.5 Battle Cry, October 1957

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The pulps’ flattering representations of the American soldier allowed civilians (and noncombat veterans) to live vicariously through warriors’ experiences, to read stories where anyone could be a hero.

For boys of the “boomer” generation, many of whom admired their fathers’ triumphant return from World War II, magazines helped validate a concept of manliness embedded in martial valor. In the process, according to one military psychiatrist, masculinity became “an essential measure of capability,” wherein “the maleness of an act is the measure of its worth and thus a measure of one’s ability.”82 Nowhere were masculine acts more viscerally portrayed than in the macho pulps. They offered a world where young men could assert their manhood by defeating the enemy.83 In feting these American heroes, adventure stories clearly oversimplified, crafting a reductive narrative of good versus evil that was readily transferrable to and consumed by their readers. Here were villains easy to understand. In the pulps, only the Nazis or “commies” – “the Red legions” according to Saga – were interested in taking over the world.

And even if racialized enemy foes, like the Japanese, were “worthy of hate,” they did not reach the level of condemnation reserved for Hitler’s murderers or communist sympathizers. In a pinch, Nazis always could serve as a pulp writer’s villainous nemesis.84 Thus, throughout the Cold War, Nazi henchmen, “merely following orders” in their prosecution of mass murder, easily could be contrasted to the just American warriors defending against the red hordes in far-off places like Korea.85 Such a simplified version of the enemy would have severe ramifications when young men were exposed to a much more complicated enemy situation in South Vietnam. The fighting there, in one accounting, tended to render World War II “heroism unattainable.” Surely, the depictions within adventure magazines were neither completely manipulative nor fully authentic.86 Yet the storylines just as surely painted a world view in which the United States was a bastion of freedom defending against the evils of a barbarous, godless communism. It is plausible that such simplistic renderings helped persuade more than a few young Americans off to war in the early to mid 1950s. As historian Christian Appy has argued, the boys “who would be sent to fight a war of counterinsurgency in Vietnam grew up fighting an imaginary version of

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World War II.” Many would be sorely disappointed that reality hardly matched the pulp magazines’ fantasies.87 And yet we – like those young men – want certain narrative arcs when it comes to war. We are inspired by stories of young men’s perseverance in combat, of their ability to withstand both imprisonment and even abuse. We are heartened by tales linking national will and security to the resolve of hearty individuals willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

And, in the same vein, we are disappointed when soldiers, like one Vietnam veteran, return home and share that they “felt it was all so futile.” In short, we want to find meaning in war, a sense of purpose that makes us feel better about ourselves and our nation.88 Indeed, the very success of the macho pulps rested upon the notion that real men still mattered, both at home and abroad. And these adventure magazines not only adopted models of contemporary gender differences, but exploited the fantasy that battlefield heroism legitimized sexual conquest. One army medical corps physician suggested as much as the conflict in Vietnam was coming to a close for weary Americans. To him, war historically had conferred upon soldiers “complete sexual license,” with sex itself often viewed as an “allowable excess of battle and particularly a reward for victory.”89 Pulp writers couldn’t have agreed more.

WAR AS SEXUAL CONQUEST

John Wayne may have been the epitome of the postwar generation’s “manly man,” but we tend to forget that throughout his movie career, the “Duke” largely remained an asexual figure.90 Post-World War II men’s adventure magazines, however, departed from such chaste depictions, instead constructing the “noble” warrior as a sexually charged male seeking release and reward. And perhaps here, the pulps, in a narrow sense, accorded more with reality. Both military commanders and GIs of the era worried about sexual deprivation on the battlefield. Indeed, one senior US officer held that “male sexual activity was healthy for battle.”91 Soldiers imparted similar beliefs. War, popular notions held, seemed to increase the GI’s sexual appetite. What better place to satiate these cravings than in a combat zone? As one American soldier serving in 23 www.cambridge.org

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Europe noted, war “offers us an opportunity to return to nature and to look upon every member of the opposite sex as a possible conquest, to be wooed or forced.”92 The covers and artwork of men’s adventure magazines purposefully exploited these convictions, intertwining war and sex in enticing images that might draw hungry eyes to newsstands. The cover for the September 1957 issue of Man’s World, for example, shows a tough GI straddling a .50 caliber machine gun, its barrel jutting out toward the reader while spewing bullets. Next to the soldier, in bold white letters,is a teaser for one of the articles inside, “Sex Life of the American Woman.” (Rifles and machine guns as phallic stand-ins seemed an artistic requirement.) One Battle Cry illustration depicted an American GI evading Nazis through a burning European village. His M1 Garand extends out from his waist, while a local red-headed woman – with bright red lips and a low-cut white top – stands behind the American, her hand gently resting near his trigger finger.93 The rhetoric of these gendered images suggested a hardening of the post-World War II patriarchal structure. In the pulps, women were to be subservient in American society. Take, for instance, one All Man article targeting “sex shy men,” which offered advice on how to “make every woman your slave.” Surely, such articles predisposed men toward seeing sexual conquest in war as the norm.94 Veteran J. Glenn Gray spoke in similar terms. In his World War II memoir, Gray argued that for the “sensualist as soldier,” war was a “convenient opportunity for new and wider fields of erotic conquest.”95 Might it be that young soldiers in Vietnam reading articles about forced sexual conquest of enemy women believed that such behavior was well within the normal boundaries of war?

It must be emphasized, and strongly, that reading men’s adventure magazines did not result in a chemical reaction ensuring America’s youth would mindlessly commit sexual violence overseas. Yet, if the articles were not prescriptive, they still normalized or at least familiarized a certain type of behavior in their storylines and opened up a narrative space for what some American soldiers deemed acceptable in their contacts with the Vietnamese population.96 One Vietnam-era offering highlights how popular culture may well support sexual violence.

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Fig. I.6 Man’s World, September 1957

In September 1966, Male ran an exclusive that clearly promoted rape.

“Many women, young ones in particular, are ‘sexually reversed’ in their actions, that is whatever they say can be taken to mean the opposite.

‘I absolutely don’t want to sleep with you’ for example, means precisely the opposite.”97 25 www.cambridge.org

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If, in Vietnam, adventure stories ranked among the “most widely read literature among the guys,” then it is worthwhile to assess how they connected militarized masculinity to sexual conquest by force. Without question, cultural products like the macho pulps were read in diverse ways, often unanticipated by their authors.”98 Individuals make sense of images and texts differently. Still, these magazines embraced misogyny in their portrayals of American soldiers and their place in wartime societies and, as such, may have primed aggressive behavior once those soldiers arrived in South Vietnam. Given their alluring artwork and persuasive stories, adventure magazines resonated with young Americans seeking validation of their manhood in the early and mid 1960s. For some, the fantasy must have been irresistible. And, in far too many ways, utterly disappointing.99 In the chapters that follow, we will witness deeply disturbing images and storylines that appeared in the pulps and search for links between GIs’ frustrations over the reality of combat in Vietnam and the messages espoused by such cultural products. Our exploration will begin by placing men’s adventure magazines within their Cold War context before examining how they constructed a version of World War II and Korea that depicted heroic men as warriors, protectors, and sexual conquerors. The narrative then moves to the macho pulps’ portrayal of women, especially non-European, non-white women, and suggests that such representations left young male readers with the impression that American dominance overseas allowed them to engage in a form of sexual oppression there. We end in Southeast Asia, comparing the fantasy of war as depicted in the magazines with the reality of Vietnam, considering ways in which the pulps contributed to a culture which found it acceptable to engage in violence against the Vietnamese population, especially its women.

Several studies have identified a relationship between aggression levels in previously angered men and an exposure to pornographic images.100 In a similar way, I suggest that men’s adventure magazines fostered an implicit consent of sexual subjugation by defining militarized masculinity as embodied in both the battlefield hero and the sexual conqueror. For some, theory became practice, violence a sort of male wish-fulfillment already whetted by Cold War culture. As one veteran

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laconically recalled, in war, GIs and women were “almost always the two main classes of people getting fucked.”101 With this in mind, Pulp Vietnam should be read as a purposeful melding of popular cultural, social, and military history, one that asks serious questions about the connections between these three fields. How much of sexual conquest is part of war in general and how much is due to a particular set of historical circumstances? How widespread and influential were images of American warriors that equated military masculinity to the sexual domination of women? And how, in the end, do we measure the cultural and individual impacts of men’s adventure magazines, their power to reinforce certain ideas about Cold War manhood that may have reaped horrific rewards on the battlefields of Southeast Asia?102

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Feeding the People FEEDING THE

TH

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PEOPLE T IC S O F T H E P

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UK and US publication June 2020 9781108484060 Hardback £17.99 / $24.95

The Politics of the Potato Rebecca Earle Potatoes are the world’s fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500. Feeding the People traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato’s global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft, and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world’s most successful foods.

Rebecca Earle teaches history at the University of Warwick. Her publications include The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (2012) and The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (2007). She has also edited a cookery book.

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CHAPTER 1

Immigrant Potatoes

‘Potatoes . . . are something like Spanish truffles, aside from being a bit bigger and not as tasty. When dried, these roots are called chuño.’1 Vicente de Valverde, 1539

T

his is the first written description of a potato.

Vicente de Valverde was a Dominican friar who accompanied the fractious and violent expedition led by Francisco Pizarro and several other Spaniards that overthrew Peru’s Inca empire in the sixteenth century. Valverde played a prominent (and inglorious) role in the kidnapping and murder of the Inca monarch Atahualpa, who was seized by Spanish troops on Valverde’s orders in 1532. After Spanish forces captured the Inca capital of Cuzco, Valverde was named its first bishop, a position he took up in 1538. His prolonged sojourn in Peru familiarised Valverde with the regional foodstuffs, including something he compared to a truffle, or a root: the potato.

Potatoes had for centuries been a staple for the many people living along the Andes. Archaeological excavations suggest that they were cultivated from perhaps 7,800 bce in Peru’s Casma Valley, as well as further south, in what were probably separate processes of domestication. Wild varieties were eaten far earlier. Settlers in Monte Verde, in south-central Chile, were gathering wild potatoes thirteen thousand years ago. A site in Utah, along the northern reaches of the same trans-continental mountain range, has likewise yielded evidence of wild potatoes being eaten from as early as 10,900 bce. Mountain people prepared potatoes in many ways; the Utah potato-eaters seem to have mashed or ground their tubers. At the time Valverde reached Peru, Andeans ate potato soups and stews, together 23 www.cambridge.org

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with maize, quinoa, roasted guinea pigs and wild game, dried fish, and a great variety of vegetables, beans and tubers, with or without the addition of chilli pepper to add savour. They also devised an effective method for freeze-drying, which converted tender, rot-prone fresh potatoes into a long-lasting rock-like substance called chuño. In their many forms potatoes were an ordinary, everyday food. The Inca state, which had established control over a wide sweep of South American territory in the fifteenth century, viewed them with some disdain, unlike maize, whose cultivation was carefully overseen by an annual calendar of ceremonies and rituals.2 Potatoes were, however, totally unknown to the rest of the world.

Vicente de Valverde’s offhand description of this root was followed by a series of similar reports from other conquistadors, which stressed that the potato was, as they put it, ‘the bread of the Indians’ – the region’s basic foodstuff. The Basque conquistador Pascual de Andagoya, who composed a memoir of his participation in Pizarro’s expedition, recorded that ‘the foods of those provinces are maize, and some roots that the people there call papas, which are like a chestnut, or a nut in shape’.3 Another Spaniard, Pedro Cieza de Leon, writing a decade after Andagoya, also compared them to chestnuts, or truffles. Within a few years Spanish colonists were collecting them as tribute, alongside maize and anything else of marketable value they could extract from local communities. An English pirate found boxes of them, readied for payment, when he stopped off the Chilean coast in 1587. He described them as ‘very good to eat’.4 Today the potato is a remarkably successful global food. It ranks just behind wheat, maize and rice in terms of the volume harvested each year, and is the world’s fifth most valuable food crop. More potatoes are eaten per capita in Malawi than in Peru itself. Overall, Europeans are now the world’s most assiduous eaters of potatoes, consuming on average some 82 kilos per person each year.5 How did this once-unfamiliar root become part of the European diet?

THE CONSERVATISM OF THE PEASANTS

The standard story about how Europeans learned to eat potatoes goes something like this: potatoes first reached Europe in the late sixteenth century, where they attracted attention as a botanical curiosity, and, very 24

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briefly, as a novelty food for elites. They were, however, shunned by everyone else. Resistance to potatoes is ascribed either to ‘the conservatism of the peasants’, or to fears about the potential health risks posed by this new plant, or to unfamiliarity with the agricultural techniques required to cultivate a plant from tubers rather than seeds. The fact that botanists quickly identified the potato as a species of Solanum, the same family as deadly nightshade and the poisonous henbane, is often mentioned as reason for purported suspicion. The tuber’s knobbly shape is sometimes said to have inspired anxieties that it might induce leprosy, since the ravages of that disease left its victims with similarly bulbous appendages in place of limbs.6 As the great historian of the potato Redcliffe Salaman put it: The basic trouble lay in the fact that the potato was in every sense a new type of food, the like of which had not been seen previously in Europe. To eat of it, was not merely a venture in dietetics, but an audacious break with common tradition . . . to which should be added the significant fact that . . . definite objection was taken to the potato because it was not mentioned in the Bible, and hence was not a food designed for man by God.7

For these reasons, Europeans are said to have ignored the potato’s multiple charms for the next two hundred years, with the exception of the Irish, whose early enthusiasm is presented as an anomaly. Not until visionary eighteenth-century elites such as Frederick the Great of Prussia championed them did potatoes begin to be consumed more widely, or so runs the story.

There is little historical basis for any of these claims. Far from labelling potatoes a botanical oddity that required unfamiliar cultivation techniques, early modern Europeans described them simply as roots, akin to a carrot or a parsnip; a shared subterranean habit was more noteworthy than the fact that one was cultivated from a tuber and the others from seeds. Neither did early modern botanical and horticultural texts linger on this matter. They simply explained how to prepare the seed potatoes and advised on the best methods of planting. As to the suggestion that the potato was rejected because it was a member of the Solanum family, the equally unfamiliar chilli pepper, another new-world import, was also identified as a Solanum. This proved no impediment to the chilli’s quickly 25 www.cambridge.org

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Figure 4 Frederick the Great inspecting a potato harvest. Frederick II is often credited with convincing sceptical Germans to eat potatoes. This nineteenth-century painting imagines the benevolent monarch chatting with a humble farmer, while his courtiers look on suspiciously. In fact, German farmers had been growing potatoes since the sixteenth century. It was only in the eighteenth century, however, that their activities began to earn the approval of princes and statesmen.

Source: Robert Warthmüller, Der König Überall (1886). Courtesy of Deutsches Historisches Museum.

becoming – as one writer put it in 1590 – ‘a well-known thing’, widely consumed across the Iberian peninsula and beyond.8 The only evidence that potatoes were associated with leprosy derives from a second-hand comment in a 1620 herbal, in which the Swiss author recorded hearing that three hundred kilometres away, in Burgundy, both potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes had been prohibited on these grounds.9 There is no indication that such a ban in fact occurred and the herbalist himself was sufficiently confident of the potato’s healthfulness to offer several recipes from his native Basle. And the complete absence of cabbages, spinach, oats and many other plants from the Old and New Testaments did not prevent these becoming common foodstuffs across the continent.

What of the claim that peasant conservatism was the main impediment? One authoritative history of the spread of new-world foods opined that ‘weaning the peasantry away from tried and true 26

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agricultural methods and tried and true foods was perhaps just a matter of time, yet in many cases it was a matter of a very long time’.10 This chapter suggests otherwise: it did not always take a very long time for potatoes to enter the dietaries of ordinary people; indeed, peasants and labourers were among the first to adopt them. Although we possess much more information about how learned individuals responded to this new plant, working people too cultivated and consumed potatoes.

Stories of peasant conservatism do a disservice to these culinary pioneers. Early modern Europeans did not shun the potato because they feared it was poisonous, or because they did not understand how to cultivate it, or because it was unfamiliar. The early modern potato, unsurprisingly, did not replace grains as Europe’s principal staple, nor did it reach every corner of the continent, but neither was it met with incomprehension and suspicion until scholars and princes convinced a sceptical populace to eat it.

TIME OUT OF MIND

In 1768 the Cornish parish of St Buryan was engulfed in a dispute over potatoes. St Buryan, which lies about five miles from Land’s End, is an ancient settlement; earthworks point to its occupation well before the Norman Conquest. The 1768 dispute concerned historical memory. It arose because the rector of the local chapel believed he was entitled to a larger tithe than he was receiving on the potatoes and other ‘garden stuff’ grown by several of his tenants. The conventions governing this ecclesiastical tax were extremely complex; where potatoes fit into the evolving edifice of case law and formal regulation was unclear. The defendants argued that they should pay a reduced tithe because the potatoes were intended for their own use, rather than for sale. The case highlighted the murky status of plants grown on a small scale in vegetable gardens rather than open fields, a matter that was not well explained in tithe schedules. The defendants further maintained that, whatever the precise legal status of garden stuff, ‘for time out of mind’ they had been paying a fractional tax on potatoes and other crops cultivated for domestic consumption, and they petitioned for the continuation of this local practice.11 The case thus hinged on whether long-standing local custom 27 www.cambridge.org

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established a precedent, and also on how long potatoes had in fact been grown in St Buryan. The court found in favour of the defendants, and approved the continued payment of a discounted tithe. In so doing, it endorsed the tenants’ assertion that they had been cultivating potatoes for their personal use for many generations.

Tithe disputes offer an alternative history of the potato’s spread across early modern Europe. In contrast to stories of peasant conservatism and popular rejection, such records document the diffusion of potatoes into cottage gardens in many parts of Europe, through processes whose protagonists were generally the families of agricultural labourers, husbandmen and artisans, rather than noblemen such as Frederick the Great. Because the titheable status of a crop depended in part on whether it was intended for sale or for personal use, and on how long the food had been cultivated in this way, disputes over potato tithes frequently delved into the history and chronology of potato cultivation in the parish. Sometimes defendants insisted that the potato was too recent an arrival to qualify for tithing; on other occasions they maintained that its alleged exemption from a tithe had been custom and practice for generations. Almost invariably, potato cultivation was understood as an activity undertaken by ordinary people for their own sustenance.

In Britain the earliest such disputes date from the late seventeenth century, and became more frequent in subsequent decades. The timing of when potatoes were first cultivated featured prominently in most cases.

In the Yorkshire parish of Kirkby Malzeard for instance an investigation in 1736 explicitly questioned deponents over when potatoes had been introduced. ‘Have potatoes been grown or cultivated within the said parish of Kirkby Malzeard time beyond memory of man or do you know or can you remember the time of their being first introduced?’, witnesses were asked. Parishioners agreed that potatoes had first been cultivated in open fields some time between 1680 and 1700. Prior to that they had been grown in cottage gardens for domestic use. They credited someone named Buck with the innovation of raising potatoes on a large scale, but were unable to remember a time when potatoes were not planted in cottage gardens.12 In another case, tenants in the Lancashire villages of Formby, Ainsdale and Raven Meols refused, like the inhabitants of St 28

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Buryan, to pay a newly imposed tithe on potatoes and other garden produce on the grounds that they had long cultivated potatoes without any tithe ever being collected. As they insisted, ‘for the preservation of such our rights and properties as the same have heretofore immemorially been held and enjoyed by us . . . [we] will not pay’.13 Scholars such as Christian Vandenbroeke and Eloy Terrón have traced similar cases in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain, where conflict over the potato’s titheable status began to occur in the early eighteenth century. As these scholars note, such disputes do not arise until a crop is fairly well established, so their occurrence in itself indicates a crop’s prevalence. These sources suggest that potatoes were being cultivated as garden crops in parts of Flanders, Alsace, Galicia and elsewhere from the 1670s. As in England, parishioners typically claimed that their exemption from the potato tithe dated back to ‘time immemorial’.14 (Clergymen usually countered that potatoes had always been subject to the tithe, even if they had chosen not to exercise their right to collect it.) To be sure, the historical narratives that such cases elicited emerged in a context of legal dispute, in which the date of the tuber’s introduction had direct monetary consequences.15 Nonetheless, the picture of long-standing localised cultivation and consumption is confirmed by a range of other sources. Working people in various parts of Europe turned to potatoes long before eighteenth-century philosophers and kings thought to encourage them.

LEARNING ABOUT POTATOES

Some of the earliest European discussion of potatoes occurs in herbals.

Essentially encyclopaedias of culinary and medicinal flora, herbals enumerated the features of interesting or important plants and explained their uses. Hundreds of these often lavishly illustrated texts were produced during the sixteenth century. Entries on potatoes began to appear in the 1550s, alongside other new-world plants such as sweet potatoes, maize and tomatoes. These works described the botanical features of the potato, and attempted to locate it within existing systems of scientific knowledge and classification.16 Herbals reveal how learned writers responded to this new plant, and also shed light on its broader diffusion 29 www.cambridge.org

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across Europe. The Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius, author of a celebrated herbal, for instance, acquired some potato plants in 1587.

His potatoes came from Italy, via Belgium, or so he reported. He subsequently shared them with his network of correspondents elsewhere on the continent. The letters exchanged between Clusius and his collaborators show clearly that they perceived no challenge in growing potatoes from the tuber, and also that they did not view them as alarming botanical oddities.17 Herbals moreover reveal that potatoes were cultivated not only by botanists, but also in cottage gardens. Clusius, for example, stated that these plants had become quite common in parts of Germany and Italy, although he did not elaborate on the agricultural experimenters responsible for this development. (Experimentation was necessary to adapt these South American tubers to Europe’s shorter day-lengths and longer growing season. Recent research has underscored the careful processes of selection and evaluation that would have been required to produce a reliable harvest.18) Writing from the Belgian town of Tournai in 1588, another gentleman botanist reported that some years earlier: a reputable man of authority, being in my garden and seeing my [potato] plants, asked me if I held them in particular regard. I told him that I considered them to be rarities. He replied that that he had seen great abundance of them in Italy and that some people ate them in place of raperoots, others cooked these bulbs with lamb, and others used them to fatten pigs, each according to his imagination.19

Evidently, in sixteenth-century Italy, the earliest potato-eaters included people who ordinarily ate the humble rape-root, a variety of turnip consumed by the poor. The Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin also indicated that people other than botanists were experimenting with potato cultivation. He stated in 1620 that ‘many people’ preferred to dig them up in the autumn rather than leaving them to overwinter in the ground.

A vernacular fund of agricultural knowledge about potatoes was already emerging.20 Such accounts make clear that these roots were grown not simply to fatten pigs, but also as food for people. Clusius and his correspondents discussed how Italians prepared them in ragouts, in the same way as one 30

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stewed carrots or turnips.21 Bauhin recorded that in Basle people roasted them with black pepper.22 The seventeenth-century Roman botanist Tobias Aldini devoted so much attention to their preparation that the author of another herbal complained that Aldini’s account appeared more the work of a cook than a scientist. But this critic, the Spanish physician Bernardo de Cienfuegos, agreed with Aldini that there was an infinite number of ways to prepare the potato – roasted; breaded and fried like whitebait; dressed with vinegar, salt and pepper in a salad; sliced and cooked in oil with lemon juice and salt; sautéed like mushrooms with mint; simmered in broth like turnips; made into a casserole . . . In his opinion, however, they required a picante sauce, as they were otherwise extremely bland. Cienfuegos also warned that like all root vegetables they provoked wind, and for that reason incited lust.23 The authors of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century health manuals also discussed the potato. These practical guides to healthy living were produced across early modern Europe, and promised to explain the principles of good health and well-being.24 Their authors concurred that health was a matter of keeping the body in balance with its larger environment. Eating constituted an open dialogue with the external world and so required particularly careful management lest the body be thrown off kilter. Being thrown off kilter was a perennial risk. All foods were understood to affect the body of the eater in some way, since all had the potential to alter the balance of humours that characterised each person’s overall constitution, or ‘complexion’. Potatoes, like every other food, thus possessed an inherently medicinal quality. Cienfuegos’ comment that potatoes shared both the windy qualities of other root vegetables and their consequent tendency to provoke lasciviousness is typical of this early modern approach to dietetics. In his view, potatoes encouraged the formation of damp humours, and therefore benefited from being prepared with hot, drying spices, which would balance out the potato’s moisture. Explanations of how to match potatoes with the appropriate corrective seasonings and cooking methods show that they were amenable to the usual culinary and medicinal techniques necessary to produce a healthful and nourishing meal. These manuals also commented, sometimes at length, on the potato’s gustatory qualities, and on which preparation methods produced the tastiest results. An Italian health guide 31 www.cambridge.org

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Figure 5 Drawing of potatoes from Bernardo de Cienfuegos’ herbal, c.1630. Bernardo de Cienfuegos was a physician from Aragón, and author of a multi-volume herbal that described hundreds of plants. His entry on ‘potatoes from Peru’ listed many different ways of preparing the roots, and also mentioned that they could be bought at the vegetable market in Madrid. Cienfuegos made clear that he was discussing potatoes rather than sweet potatoes, even though the plant in his drawing resembles the latter.

Source: Bernardo de Cienfuegos, ‘Of the potatoes from Peru which in the Indies are called chuño’, ‘Historia de las plantas’, c.1627–1631, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Mss/3357–63, vol. 1, fol. 498. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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from 1620 for instance noted that potatoes required quantities of salt and other seasonings, not to render them more healthful, but simply to overcome their bland taste.25 Then, as now, potatoes provided a blank canvas for the imaginative cook.

YOU SAY POTATO . . .

But what exactly was a potato? Today biologists explain that the ‘ordinary’, ‘Irish’, or ‘white’ potato, Solanum tuberosum, is entirely distinct from sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) and other American tubers such as the Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), as well as from the African yam (Dioscorea). ‘White’ potatoes are members of the Solanacea family, which also includes tomatoes, chilli peppers and aubergines. Sweet potatoes are related to bindweed, the irritating garden pest, but are only distant relatives of the ordinary potato. Jerusalem artichokes and yams belong to different genera altogether. The clarity with which botanical science now distinguishes these plants reflects a classification system quite different from the ones employed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although early modern botanists promptly classified the potato as a Solanum, this did not render it entirely distinct from other botanically dissimilar plants. The overlapping names for these new roots reflect their multiple interconnections, as well as their links to existing European foodstuffs.

In early modern England, ‘potato’ might mean either the sweet or ordinary variety, or even the Jerusalem artichoke. When writers wished to distinguish clearly they sometimes referred to sweet potatoes as ‘Spanish potatoes’, while ‘potatoes of Canada’ usually referenced the Jerusalem artichoke. ‘Virginia potatoes’ often meant the ordinary potato, since many English writers believed the plants originated there. All three were, however, considered to be ‘potatoes’. The Spanish nomenclature overlapped in similar ways. Spaniards first encountered sweet potatoes in the 1490s in the Caribbean, where these tubers were called ‘batatas’. This is the source of the English word ‘potato’. Columbus described them as a sort of yam, an African tuber with which Europeans were already familiar. The Spanish invasion of the American mainland added new terms for sweet potatoes to the Iberian lexicon, and also introduced 33 www.cambridge.org

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Europeans to ordinary potatoes, which were known in Quechua, the lingua franca of the Inca empire, as ‘papas’. Then as now, Spanish speakers in the Americas often preserved this distinction between ‘batatas’ (sweet potatoes) and ‘papas’ (potatoes), but in Spain itself ‘patata’ came to refer to either.26 There, ‘batatas’ or ‘patatas de Málaga’ usually meant the sweet potato, which was cultivated on a commercial scale around Malaga from as early as the sixteenth century, while ‘patatas de la Mancha’ referred to the ordinary potato.27 A Jerusalem artichoke, in turn, might be labelled a ‘pataca’. As in English, in Spanish a similar vocabulary emphasised the interconnections between these different new-world roots. Sixteenth-century German writers also employed a range of overlapping terms: ‘Griblingsbaum’ (truffle plant), ‘Erdäpffeln’ (earth-apples), ‘Erd Artischocken’ (earth-artichokes), ‘Tartuffeln’ (truffles) and simply ‘Knollen’, or roots. The semantic link to truffles dates back to the earliest Spanish descriptions, and was common in a number of European languages. Writing in the 1590s, the nobleman Wilhelm IV von Hessen for instance reported that Italians referred to these new roots as ‘Taratouphli’; other Italians described them as a kind of ‘Tartufole’, or truffle.28 This is the origin of the German term ‘Kartoffel’. Scandinavian writers referred to ‘jordpäron’ (earth-pears), ‘jordäpple’ (earth-apples), ‘artiskocker af Wirginien’ (Virginia artichokes) and ‘peruvianska nattskatta’ (Peruvian nightshade) as well as ‘potatoës’.29 In the late sixteenth century the botanist Clusius and his polyglot network drew on multiple vocabularies in their references to ‘taratonfli’, ‘tartufy’, ‘papas americanorum’, ‘papos’ and ‘papes’.

Overall, early modern authors sometimes differentiated between potatoes, sweet potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes, at times devoting pages to untangling the complex nomenclatures that fostered confusion.

On other occasions they moved smoothly from one to the other, simultaneously distinguishing and combining them. William Coles’ seventeenth-century botanical handbook first listed a series of recipes suitable for the ‘potato’, and then commented simply that these recipes worked equally well for ‘Virginia potatoes’. As he noted, the ‘names and kinds [were] thus mixed together’.30 As a result of such mixing, there is simply no way of ascertaining whether the ten pounds of ‘potatoes’ 34

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presented by the mayor of Southampton to Lord Hertford in 1593 were sweet or ordinary, since both kinds were already being grown in England.31 Potatoes, sweet potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes continued to be grouped together in both learned and vernacular taxonomies well into the eighteenth century. A French botanist explained in the 1720s that sweet potatoes were a type of ordinary potato comparable to Jerusalem artichokes; an English traveller in Spain similarly described sweet potatoes as simply another variety of ‘the common potato’.

Eighteenth-century lexicographers felt no more obligation to differentiate these plants into separate dictionary entries than did travellers or botanists.32 The commonalities, rather than the differences, are what emerge most strongly from this early modern vocabulary.

Such flexibility is not surprising. All three plants originated in the Americas, and all three travelled around the world as part of the ‘Columbian exchange’, the world-wide transfer of plants and animals begun in 1492 with Columbus’ arrival in the West Indies. There were therefore many reasons to view these plants as deeply interconnected.

Their overlapping names remind us of this shared history. If sixteenthcentury Europeans failed to distinguish clearly between these different vegetables, this was because they perceived them as similar. All three were new roots from the new world, and all three were eaten by Europeans, who were evidently undeterred by the taxonomic challenges posed by novel tubers lacking biblical provenance.33

PARE YOUR POTATON

Readers seeking advice on how to prepare these new roots could turn to the emerging genre of the printed recipe book. The first recipe for something resembling a potato dates from 1581. It appears in a cookbook authored by Marx Rumpolts and published in Frankfurt.

Rumpolts worked as personal chef for the wealthy Archbishop-Elector of Mainz. He later went on to cook for a Danish queen. His cookbook offered some two thousand recipes, as well as over thirty sample menus and advice on shopping and table etiquette. Alongside instructions for making a Hungarian tart with many layers and crafting sugar into the shape of an entire Parmesan cheese, Ein new Kochbuch included recipes 35 www.cambridge.org

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for a number of American novelties such as kidney beans. It moreover explained how to cook typical Spanish dishes such as olla podrida (or, as English-speakers called it, olio), a complex stew in this case to be prepared with new-world turkey, which had rapidly became a modish banqueting dish in various European courts.34 Rumpolts was evidently familiar with Iberian cooking traditions, as well as with some of the new ingredients introduced into Europe by the Spanish following their colonisation of the Americas.

His cookbook also printed several recipes for ‘earth-apples’. Perhaps by ‘Erdtepffel’ he was referring to the potato, or perhaps the Jerusalem artichoke, or perhaps something else; we cannot be certain. The recipes for other new-world and Iberian dishes, however, make it plausible that Rumpolts was acquainted with these American tubers. In any event, he instructed readers to ‘peel and cut them small. Parboil them in water and press well in a fine cloth. Chop them small and roast with bacon cut into little pieces. Add a little milk and let cook together. This way it is tasty and good.’35 Two decades after Rumpolts’ earth-apple recipe, a French cookbook explained how to prepare a new kind truffle, or ‘tartoufle’. It recommended several different preparations, from roasting them like chestnuts to dressing with butter and sweet wine.36 From England, the 1596 Good Huswife’s Jewell offered a recipe for ‘a tart that is a courage to a man or woman’. Actually more of a pudding, the tart was a rich dish that included butter, eggs, spices and ‘the braynes of three or four cockesparrows’ alongside a ‘potaton’.37 Sweetened potato tarts of this sort soon became immensely fashionable across Europe; by 1611 Spanish cookbooks were criticising these extravaganzas as culinary abominations to be avoided at all costs. Good advice, since in 1624 Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, died while gobbling up ‘a potato pie’.38 Like title disputes and herbals, printed and manuscript cookery books indicate that new-world roots were being cultivated on a small scale for domestic use in parts of Germany, England and elsewhere. As one 1651 cookbook from the Saxon city of Braunschweig noted, ‘earth-artichokes or roots . . . have become so common that practically every farmer grows them in his garden’.39 By the early eighteenth century, German cookery books often distinguished explicitly between different new-world tubers, 36

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Recipe 2 Four Recipes for ‘Truffles’.Mentions of a new kind of ‘truffle’ started to appear in European sources in the late sixteenth century. Although it is hard to be certain, these www.cambridge.org

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and made clear that in some regions the ordinary potato was ‘quite common’.40 As the century progressed, potato recipes could be found in ever-more published and manuscript recipe collections from many different parts of Europe.41 Other sources too indicate that potatoes were cultivated as an ordinary foodstuff far sooner than has been recognised. It is notable that from the early seventeenth century French, Italian and English agricultural manuals began explaining how to grow them. The French horticultural writer Olivier de Serres’ 1603 Theatre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs described potatoes not as botanical curiosities, but as horticultural plants. The English botanist John Parkinson’s 1629 Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris treated the potato in the same fashion. Parkinson, who distinguished carefully between the different sorts of potatoes, reported that ‘Virginia’ potatoes were ‘well knowne unto us’ and explained how to cultivate and eat them.42 He recommended roasting in hot embers, or baking with wine and a little sugar. John Evelyn’s 1666 Kalendarium Hortense reminded gardeners that in February they should ‘sow Beans, Pease, Radish, Parsneps, Carrots, Onions, Garlick, &c. and plant Potatoes in your worst ground’, since they would thrive even in marginal soil. A few decades later a German handbook similarly explained how to cultivate them, noting that they had become very common in parts of Austria.43 Customs records and account books also help trace the trajectories of these new roots across Europe, once they had moved from a garden crop raised for household consumption to the status of commodity. In most parts of Europe potatoes remained a garden crop well into the eighteenth century, but new-world roots were traded internationally from the late sixteenth century. Customs records show that as early as

Caption for Recipe 2

(cont.)

are likely to refer to potatoes or some other American tuber. Lancelot de Casteau, a professional chef who worked for several princely households in Liège, offered four different recipes for these ‘truffles’ in his 1604 cookbook. He also described how to make a cheese and herb quiche, leg of mutton in the Irish style, and other up-to-the minute delicacies.

Source: Lancelot de Casteau, Ouverture de cuisine (Liège, 1604) (trans. Daniel Myers), 94–5, www.medievalcookery.com/notes/ouverture.html.

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the 1570s ‘patatas’ were grown on a commercial scale in the Canary Islands, from where they were shipped to France and the Netherlands.44 It is impossible to determine whether these sources refer to potatoes, sweet potatoes, or both, but in any case they indicate that a new-world root was the object of long-distance commercial trade in sixteenthcentury Europe. We can in contrast be certain that the new-world roots on sale in Madrid markets in the 1620s were potatoes, since the Aragónese physician Bernardo de Cienfuegos who reported this fact carefully distinguished ‘papas del Perú’ (Peruvian potatoes) from other types of tuber. He noted that these ‘papas’ were purchased by both returning colonists and locals. The Peruvian historian and jurist Antonio Leon Pinelo, who travelled to Spain in the early seventeenth century and would have been very familiar with the Andean potato, observed the same thing.45 Tax records show that something called ‘jordpäron’, earth-pears, were being imported from Portugal and northern Germany into the southern Swedish province of Småland through the port of Karlshamn from the 1630s.46 By the late seventeenth century there were specialized potato markets in Lancashire and other northern counties of England, as well as in parts of Scotland and Ireland, and trade legislation detailed the duties owed on this commodity.47 The potato’s shift from subsistence foodstuff to commodity helps explain the increasing number of disputes concerning the potato tithe, since until a potato crop acquired a market value its appeal to tithe-owners was limited. It is likely that the many eighteenth-century conflicts between tenants and clergy over the potato tithe reflect the commodification of the potato as well as an increase in the area under cultivation.48 Other sorts of economic and legal data too point to the potato’s growing status as a commercial crop. Protestants in Ireland for instance claimed monetary compensation for the loss of their potato harvest after the 1641 Catholic uprising against English rule. Such sources further indicate how the potato was incorporated into existing systems of classification and consumption. When officials in the French region of the Vivarais began conducting agricultural surveys in 1690, they listed potatoes together with chestnuts, turnips and other root vegetables, doubtless because all these foods provided a starchy basis for peasant meals.49 39 www.cambridge.org

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Figure 6 An itinerant potato seller, from an eighteenth-century British ballad. Eighteenthcentury Britons were familiar with potatoes, and potato merchants. The engraving shows one at work, with his basket of potatoes and donkey. Hawking potatoes on the streets of London is not this potato seller’s only source of income. As the ballad explains, he’s also a pimp, whose moll sells ‘fine fruit’ of her own.

Source: ‘The Potato Man’ (London, c.1780) Broadside Ballads Online, Bodleian Libraries, Ballad-Roud Number V20070. Courtesy of Bodleian Libraries.

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Potatoes, in sum, were present, alongside other new-world tubers, in parts of the British Isles, Spain, Germany, Italy and France within seventy years of Pascual de Andagoya’s casual description of these chestnut-like roots. In her convent in Ávila, St Teresa ate a gift of ‘patatas’ she had been sent from Seville in 1577.50 In the same years satirical literature from England mocked their alleged potential to stimulate sexual appetites.51 Travellers in Italy and Germany noted the ways in which locals prepared them, and botanists tracked their appearance in cottage gardens. Over the next century cultivation spread further into France through Franche-Comté and Lorraine, into Flanders, and eastward into Brandenburg. In Flanders, they were being raised in such quantities that during the Nine Years War (1688–97) soldiers there were able to sustain themselves ‘most plenteously’ with potatoes they pillaged from local fields.52 Such snippets tally with the evidence of tithe disputes and other sources to suggest that by the late seventeenth century potatoes had made their way into the culinary and agricultural practices of many Europeans.

Certainly potatoes were not known in all parts of Europe. There is little evidence for their presence in Russia or Finland before the eighteenth century, and their early introduction as a field crop in Alsace, Franche-Comté and environs was replicated in few other parts of France. Their uneven spread through German lands has been charted in detail by the historian Günter Wiegelmann. David Zylbergerg has moreover shown that a local supply of affordable fuel was a prerequisite for the potato to make inroads into English eating habits. Potato consumption, he explains, ‘began in peat-burning communities, before spreading to coal-burning ones and was less common in wood-burning regions prior to 1830’.53 Careful local studies of this sort are necessary to explain the potato’s precise trajectory in specific locales. Nor were potatoes eaten as the principal staple. Grains, whether baked as bread or made into porridge, remained the foundation of most meals in most parts of Europe well into the eighteenth century. Nonetheless a picture of blanket rejection prompted by fear and unfamiliarity does not match the historical record. Europeans have been eating potatoes for a long time.

41 www.cambridge.org

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SPREADING POTATOES

It is difficult to identify the people who spread potatoes across early modern Europe. The historian William McNeill hypothesised that Spanish and Basque sailors and fishermen played an important role.

These men might well have introduced potatoes to western Ireland, a customary stopping point on fishing voyages back from Newfoundland, for instance. It is also plausible, as McNeill proposed, that Spanish vessels took the potato to Habsburg territories in southern Italy and the Netherlands. Sailors disseminated other novel commodities such as tobacco, together with new consumer practices; there is no reason to suppose they did not play a comparable role with American foodstuffs, but we have little direct evidence.54 Only exceptionally do sources refer explicitly to the agents of transmission. A Florentine agricultural handbook composed some time before 1606 stated that potatoes had been introduced into Tuscany by Carmelite monks from Spain and Portugal.

Another Italian text from a few years later credits ‘the French’ with bringing potatoes to the Piedmont region. Travelling glassblowers and other artisans from southern Germany reportedly carried potatoes into the north German region of Mecklenburg in the early eighteenth century.55 Many decades ago the historian Douglas Hall observed that the reason why the early modern movements of plants are so difficult to reconstruct is that their agents were often ordinary people below the sight lines of contemporary writers.56 The names and lives of the labourers and small farmers who grew potatoes in their gardens and cooked them like carrots are largely lost to us. Rarely can we do more than note the conclusions of tithe courts such as the one convened in 1766, which determined that in the county of Hainaut potatoes were first cultivated in kitchen gardens by labourers.57 At that century’s end, however, Frederick Morton Eden, second Baronet of Maryland and founder of an insurance company, chose to record the name of the man who first raised potatoes in open fields in Scotland. In the 1790s Eden composed a multi-volume account of ‘the labouring classes in England’, based on surveys by collaborators, some direct observation, and Eden’s extensive reading of British history. Eden was interested in potatoes, which he regarded as an excellent foodstuff.

Large-scale cultivation was in his view to be encouraged. According to

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Eden, ‘Thomas Prentice, a day-labourer’ in the Lanarkshire village of Kilsyth, was responsible for this innovation. So great was Prentice’s success, Eden noted, that ‘every farmer and cottager followed his example, and for many years past it has become a staple article’.58 I have found no trace of any Prentices in Kilsyth; perhaps Eden’s pioneer was the Thomas Prentice born about eight hours’ walk away, in Carluke, in 1701.

What is clear is that potatoes spread in an uneven and diffuse fashion, becoming a significant part of the ordinary diet in various parts of Europe by the early eighteenth century. That this was the case in Ireland is well established; potatoes there formed the ‘most part of the poors food every one hath his potato garden’, according to one writer in the 1650s.59 In seventeenth-century England too, poor tenants and husbandmen subsisted on ‘brown bread and milk, and pease pies and apple pies, and puddings and pancakes, and gruel and flummery and frumenty, yea dry bread and butter and cheese, and cabbages and turnips, and parsnips and carrots, and onions and potatoes, and whey and buttermilk, and small drink’, in the opinion of the cleric Richard Baxter.60 In the eastern Brandenburg town of Frankfurt an der Oder, a naturalist noted in the 1680s that ‘around here they have become quite common’.61 Baked in cinders or added to stews with cabbages and carrots, potatoes fit easily into the cooking practices of poor families in many parts of Europe, whose meals were usually built around a starchy base, whether provided by oat porridge, rye bread, millet polenta, or a great number of other grain-based dishes invented by the nameless masters of early modern cucina povera. Such foods constituted the core of daily diets for the majority of the population. Working men and women hoped to consume something on the order of a pound of bread, or its equivalent, each day.

Small quantities of cheese, buttermilk, vegetables, beans and other filling and savoury additions typically accompanied these breads and pottages.

Accommodating this cuisine to the potato was straightforward. In soups potatoes were substituted for or used alongside turnips and other roots, or combined with a bit of meat and an onion, whose flavours they would absorb and extend. In areas where fuel was affordable enough to make home baking feasible, potatoes might be baked into farls or other forms of bread. German cookery books described how they were made into salads and eaten cold, and also how to braise them with onions and 43 www.cambridge.org

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a splash of vinegar.62 None of these recipes required unfamiliar techniques or new equipment, and so could easily enter into everyday cooking practices.

The protagonists of the potato’s early incorporation into the European dietary seem to have been the farmers in 1651 Braunschweig who grew ‘earth-artichokes or roots’ in their gardens, the nameless Italians who planted them in ‘great abundance’ in the 1580s, and the villagers across Europe who resented handing over their crops of garden stuff to the local priest.63 These men and women also undertook the experimentation necessary to adapt Andean cultivars to Europe’s different day-lengths and growing conditions. It was thus peasants in the Vivarais who, as the historian Madeleine Ferrières put it, ‘invented’ the potato in that region. Even in areas where potato cultivation began later, in the eighteenth century, villagers and peasants were often the first to raise the crop. This was for instance the case in Galicia, in southern Poland, where potatoes were grown in peasant gardens before they were introduced into the kitchens of landed estates.64 Just as Europe’s artisans developed the new skills necessary to produce the novel commodities desired by early modern consumers, so peasants and small farmers learned to grow new foods. In contrast to craftsmen, however, they were often able to enjoy the fruits of their labours.65 Why might potatoes have proved a success with peasants and labourers, beyond their ease of adaption into existing cooking regimes?

Their fiscal invisibility was surely part of their appeal. As tithe disputes indicate, parishioners might cultivate this modest root for decades without attracting the attention of the local rector and his agents. In addition, potatoes are an exceptionally efficient way of converting sunlight, soil and water into nourishment. While a hectare of land sown with wheat may yield enough protein to feed seven people over the course of a year, a hectare of potatoes will nourish seventeen. The contrast is even more striking as regards calories: a hectare of land will produce three times the calories if sown with potatoes compared to wheat or oats.

Potatoes also require less water than other major crops.66 The potato is thus an excellent way of feeding more people from the same agricultural inputs. It has further merits, since it flourishes in a range of climates and growing conditions, and is rich in vitamin C and other 44

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necessary nutrients. When accompanied by dairy products and a ready supply of fuel for home-cooking, potatoes allowed families to feed themselves far more effectively than virtually any of the available alternatives. In eighteenth-century England, even potatoes purchased at a market provided nearly three times as many calories per penny than wheat bread, and about five times as many as meat.67 Doubtless for these reasons, potatoes proved particularly popular both in Ireland, where English colonisation pushed the rural population onto ever-smaller patches of ground, and regions such as Galicia and Asturias, where peasants enjoyed greater access to land and considerable freedom to plant what they liked.68 The anthropologist Robert Netting studied the impact of potatoes on the Alpine village of Törbel, whose peasant inhabitants began to grow them on a significant scale in the eighteenth century.69 How villagers would themselves have explained their embrace of the potato is a question we are in little position to answer, but Netting was able to show that in Törbel potatoes offered a three-fold improvement over rye, the region’s staple, in terms of calories per hectare, and could moreover be grown on lands that were too steep or barren to support cereals. He concluded that potatoes help explain why Törbel’s population doubled in the century after their introduction.70 In Törbel, potatoes were first cultivated in garden plots, which means they were first cultivated by women. In most parts of early modern Europe maintaining kitchen gardens was a woman’s responsibility, as they were considered better suited to the fiddly work of hoeing root crops and other tasks that did not require larger tools such as a plough or scythe. Small-scale potato culture carried out with a hoe fit well into the activities typically undertaken by women, alongside raising chickens and the myriad other tasks required to maintain a farming household. It is therefore likely that in Europe, peasant women, in particular, were in the vanguard of potato cultivation. The ‘garden stuff’ demanded by the rector in St Buryan was probably grown by that village’s women.71 Altogether, such features suggest that in early modern Europe potatoes could be classified as ‘state evading’ – a phrase coined by the political anthropologist James C. Scott to describe crops that enable 45 www.cambridge.org

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a degree of autonomy from state control because they can be cultivated on marginal ground and contribute to complex household provisioning systems that are difficult to measure and tax efficiently. Unlike cereals, potatoes do not need to be harvested at a precise moment, and can be left in the ground for weeks or even months. Once harvested, they are cumbersome to transport elsewhere. From a fiscal perspective, the potatoes raised in a kitchen garden are scarcely worth the trouble to tax, and so create, in Scott’s words, ‘a nonstate space’, particularly where there is no established commercial framework for marketing these roots.72 These qualities surely go some way in explaining their popularity with peasants in Galicia, farmers in Flanders, and poor tenants in England.

Wealthy landowners, in contrast, were less certain of the merits of the potato. Efforts in early eighteenth-century Sweden to encourage potatoes came to nothing because of hostility from landlords, who suspected that the potato’s prolific yield would make peasants more self-sufficient, and so less inclined to work for them.73 Landowners viewed the plant as a costly intrusion into fields that could otherwise produce more marketable commodities. In 1727, an experienced estate manager who had worked for several English dukes recommended that his clients prohibit their tenants from growing potatoes at all, ‘except in small quantities for their own use’. Tenants who persisted in planting this crop in open fields should be fined £10 for every acre they wasted on potatoes. They should also be obliged to enrich these fields with an additional load of manure, to compensate for the nutrients that he believed potatoes extracted from the soil.74 If tenants and labourers wished to eat them, that was their business, but landowners should not countenance the diversion of valuable land to this purpose. Potatoes to him were associated with backwardness and uneconomic practices. He was not alone in this view.

Contemplating regional diets in 1740s Sweden, the great botanist Carl Linnaeus, who harboured doubts about the potato’s nutritive qualities, wondered why on earth servants ‘find it so necessary to go on eating’ them.75 From the perspective of these wealthier men, the potato was a mundane food grown and eaten by ordinary people, which offered little to interest those concerned with the management of great estates, let alone affairs of state.

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DEEP-ROOTED INERTIA

Labourers ‘blindly repeat what they have seen their fathers and grandfathers do’.76 Bernardo Ward, 1779 The peasant is characterised by a deep-rooted inertia; he accepts progress only when someone has forced him out of his inaction by demonstrating the improvement to him dozens of times. Only then will he risk trying it himself. His limited vision inclines him to exaggerate the merits of plants that he has cultivated successfully in the past.77 Amédée Dechambre, 1877 It was a long time before people learnt to eat potatoes. In some parts they were ready enough to accept them as cattle-fodder, but not for human consumption. There was stubborn resistance to be overcome.

People were afraid that the potato would cause all sorts of illnesses, such as leprosy, glandular disease, tuberculosis or fevers. Because of its resemblance to nightshade, some also feared it was poisonous.

Moreover, they did not yet know the best ways of preparing it.78 Bernard Hendrik Slicher van Bath, 1960 This chapter has presented an alternative account of how early modern Europeans came to eat potatoes, which accords importance not to experts who patiently demonstrate an improvement dozens of times, but rather to peasants and small farmers. These men and women were raising potatoes long before the root attracted the attention of tithe collectors and other representatives of the state. By 1700 potatoes were grown on a small scale, in kitchen gardens, by villagers, peasants and labourers, in many parts of the British Isles and continental Europe. There is no evidence that the potato’s tuberous habit confused farmers any more than it troubled botanists, and Europeans great and small invented many ways of preparing and consuming this starchy root. Insofar as we can detect the direction of transmission, it was the opposite of that imagined by scholars.

It should surprise no one that peasants and villagers were in the vanguard of agricultural and culinary innovation in early modern Europe. These groups were among the first to cultivate maize, another 47 www.cambridge.org

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American import that was to effect an equally dramatic transformation in global diets in the centuries after Spaniards brought it to Europe and West Africa in the sixteenth century. As early as the 1540s maize was growing in the Veneto, where peasants used it in place of millet or other cheap grain to make a new sort of polenta. By the early seventeenth century maize polenta had become the principal food of the region’s peasants and the poor.79 Venetian peasants were evidently unperturbed by maize’s novelty or lack of biblical pedigree. Ordinary people in East Anglia were equally willing to adopt the unfamiliar agricultural techniques required to cultivate carrots and other root vegetables when these were introduced by Protestant refugees in the 1550s. Overall, as the historian Philip Hoffman has shown very clearly in the case of France, early modern peasants were by no means opposed to agricultural experimentation.80 A substantial body of research has moreover established that small farmers in other parts of the world are perfectly capable of innovative agricultural strategies when faced with new plants and new economic situations – a matter to which we will return in the conclusion.

Nor did European agronomic science develop separately from peasant agriculture. Early modern scientific knowledge of all sorts often relied on information, methodologies and theorising produced outside of the community of European savants.81 The new agronomic practices that made commercial agriculture in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury England and the Netherlands significantly more productive drew on the agricultural practices of peasant farmers. During this period the introduction of new crops and techniques, together with legislative changes that favoured large-scale agriculture, combined to create a new type of agrarian capitalism. This transformation relied in crucial ways on techniques derived from peasant agriculture. A key element of the new agronomy was the use of fodder crops such as lucerne (alfalfa), clover and sainfoin. When ploughed into the earth these plants are an effective means of enriching the soil with nitrogen and other necessary nutrients.

The use of such soil-enrichers helped alleviate the need to leave fields to lie fallow to recover lost fertility. Fields could henceforth be cultivated continuously, which dramatically increased the area of land in cultivation. These crops can also be used to feed farm animals, whose manure further enriches the soil. The entire process, however, depended on 48

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a reliable commercial supply of seed for these cultivars. The people with the expertise to enable this proved to be Italian peasants, who possessed technical skills and practical knowledge about these plants that were entirely lacking elsewhere. As a result, as the historian Mauro Ambrosoli put it, ‘plants grown by the peasantry passed into capitalist agriculture’.82 Peasant agricultural expertise most often becomes visible to the historian when it becomes visible to non-peasants. In the case of sainfoin and clover, the importance of these crops to new agronomic practices focused the attention of improving landlords on the Italian peasants who had long cultivated these now-interesting plants. As regards the potato, most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century landlords displayed little interest in its commercial potential, which in part explains the difficulty in charting the tuber’s early European history. Only occasionally can we glimpse the traces of its progress across the continent. These suggest that small farmers played a far more important role in its dissemination than has hitherto been acknowledged. Cross-referencing with what we know about peasant practice in other periods and places supports this view. For instance, although scholars sometimes suggest that the potato’s excellence as an animal feed demonstrated to early modern peasants that it was ‘fit only for animal fodder’, this conclusion does not match what we know about farming practice either in Europe or elsewhere.83 It is a positive advantage for crops to address multiple needs. Farmers in Mexico have long appreciated the maize plant’s ability to provide both food and also fodder, fuel and construction material. In Europe itself, wheat’s status as an enormously important foodstuff and religious symbol was not undermined by the fact that wheat stalks also serve as bedding for lowly farm animals, or that poultry enjoy its grains as feed. There is no reason to suppose that early modern farmers viewed the potato’s versatility any less favourably.84 While small farmers were quietly raising potatoes, hoping not to arouse the attention of a tithe-collecting cleric, potatoes were not an object of particular interest among landlords and the owners of large estates. Certainly potatoes were served at the tables of the wealthy. Recipe books explained how to prepare elaborate and expensive dishes such as the potato pie that vanquished the Earl of Dorset, and household records 49 www.cambridge.org

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document the purchase of both ordinary and sweet potatoes in great households in Britain, France and elsewhere. They were also raised on a commercial scale in some areas, such as the north of England and Ireland, on occasion on the estates of the nobility. Early modern elites did not spurn the potato, but neither were they particularly interested in it.

Nor were potatoes viewed as an important component of state policy.

Extending potato cultivation was not a goal for officials or statesmen, and with a tiny handful of exceptions, no one penned treatises lauding the merits of the potato as a food whose greater consumption would bring widespread public benefits.85 On the contrary, politically minded commentators lamented the fact that potatoes offered the poor a way to evade the state. William Petty, a philosopher and politician who spent many years in Ireland as a representative of the English colonial government, held precisely this view. Born in England in the 1620s, Petty had an eventful life that took him to France and Holland, as well as Oxford and London, where he taught music and anatomy and helped found the Royal Society. In the 1650s he travelled to Ireland, which had recently been annexed by English forces under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. Petty worked for many years as a representative of the English colonial state, which aimed to extract as much profit as possible from its new possession. Petty himself acquired several large estates. Petty viewed potatoes as an impediment to Ireland’s development as a productive source of revenue for its colonisers. Because it was so easy to live on potatoes, the Irish did not work as hard as Petty would have liked, with the result that the state was able to levy only about half the tax that Petty calculated a more industrious population would have yielded.

Potatoes allowed their cultivators too much autonomy from the English state, which in Petty’s view would have been better off had the Irish eaten fewer of them.86 This attitude was to change dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century. From the 1750s increasing numbers of statesmen, political economists, agronomists, philosophers and landlords championed the potato, arguing that everyone, and in particular the poor, ought to grow and eat more of them. They composed handbooks on potato cultivation, experimented with cooking techniques, and proselytised 50

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about the potato’s many merits. The next chapter examines the potato’s enormous visibility in the eighteenth century, to show how changing ideas about effective statecraft and the importance of building a healthy population shone a spotlight on the hitherto uninteresting eating practices of ordinary people.

The loud voices of these eighteenth-century potato-boosters have resulted in the potato history summarised at the start of this chapter, which asserts that prior to the eighteenth century Europeans did not in general take to the potato, and that peasant farmers were particularly slow to embrace it. Historians have listened to the eighteenth-century sources, and what they have heard is an eighteenth-century consensus that people ought to eat more potatoes. If we listen carefully we can hear other stories. These tell us both that potatoes were eaten long before eighteenth-century philosophers began to promote them, and also that kitchen gardens are a sensible place to hunt for culinary and agricultural pioneers.

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Learning from Loss THE DEMOCRATS

2016-2020

SETH

MASKET UK and US publication September 2020 9781108482127 Hardback £18.99 / $24.95

Seth Masket The Democrats’ decision to nominate Joe Biden for 2020 was hardly a fluke but rather a strategic choice by a party that had elevated electability above all other concerns. In Learning from Loss, one of the nation’s leading political analysts offers unique insight into the Democratic Party at a moment of uncertainty.

Between 2017 and 2020, Seth Masket spoke with Democratic Party activists and followed the behavior of party leaders and donors to learn how the party was interpreting the 2016 election and thinking about a nominee for 2020. Masket traces the persistence of party factions and shows how interpretations of 2016 shaped strategic choices for 2020. Although diverse narratives emerged to explain defeat in 2016 – ranging from a focus on ‘identity politics’ to concerns about Clinton as a flawed candidate, these narratives collectively cleared the path for Biden.

Seth Masket is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. Masket writes regularly for Mischiefs of Faction and FiveThirtyEight. His work has also appeared in Politico, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage. He is the author of The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How They Weaken Democracy (2016) and No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures (2009).

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Chapter 3: Interpreting Loss

“We’re starting in Wisconsin because, as you remember, there wasn’t a lot of campaigning in Wisconsin in 2016. With me, that changes.”

-Amy Klobuchar, February 10, 2019 “Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy. At least he didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did.”

-Pete Buttigieg, January 14, 2019

Why did Hillary Clinton lose? That five-word question lies at the heart of every discussion of Democratic party reform and nomination politics since late 2016. For some political observers, Clinton was a poor candidate who ran a dismal campaign. “Hillary Clinton blew the most winnable election in modern American history,” concluded Damon Linker at The Week, “and it’s her own fault.” 1 How else to explain Donald Trump being within striking range of the presidency despite his range of unelectable actions and statements? For others, though, Clinton’s loss reflected longstanding biases among the electorate and the commentariat, or was the product of work of outsiders ranging from Jill Stein to James Comey to Vladimir Putin.

In this chapter, I examine the range of reasons given for the outcome of the 2016 election.

The answers are the product of lengthy interviews I conducted with over sixty Democratic party activists in states with early presidential contests – Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada – as well as Washington, DC. I look extensively at the types of responses given and

1 Linker, Damon. 2016. “Hillary Clinton Blew the Most Winnable Election in Modern American History.

And It’s Her Own Fault.” The Week. December 2.

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categorize them into a handful of key narratives. I also examine the narratives generated by political reporters in the months after the 2016 election.

One thing I do not do in this chapter is decide which responses are correct and which aren’t. For the purposes of this book, I am less interested in the reason Hillary Clinton lost (as though that could be boiled down to a single reason) than I am in what key Democratic activists believe that reason is and how that reasoning informed their later decisions.

To spoil the punchline a bit, the consensus explanation of 2016 is that there was no consensus explanation of 2016. Party activists and political observers were unusually divided about just why that election came out as it did, and they remained divided long thereafter. The election itself was close enough, and weird enough, to provide evidence for a great range of theories. For some, it caused a rethinking of who could get elected and indeed how politics works. For others, it just reinforced their previously held beliefs. But the preponderance of narratives suggested a similar remedy: scaling back on some of the party’s commitments and picking the “safe” nominee who could best guarantee a win.

Who are party activists?

I spent a few hours on the day of the Iowa Caucuses in 2020 walking around a northeast Des Moines neighborhood with Seth Silverman, an experienced canvasser in presidential campaigns. He worked through a list of houses he had on a smartphone app provided by the Elizabeth Warren campaign, knocking on the doors of registered Democrats and encouraging them to show up at their precinct caucus that night. He had a range of talking points prepared for those few instances where someone was home, willing to talk to him about their caucus choices, and still undecided between the candidates. I listened in while he spent ten minutes talking with a

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middle-aged couple who were planning to caucus for Joe Biden, but were on the fence between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the case that Biden’s numbers came up short in the complex caucus process that night. Seth seemed to make the sale, convincing them that Warren had the right biography and policy stances to win and steer the country in their preferred direction.

A week later, I was driving around Manchester, New Hampshire, on primary day, along with Judy Reardon, an experienced campaign manager, and Kathy Sullivan, the former state party chair and current member of the Democratic National Committee. Both attorneys, they were part of the state’s primary election day legal protection program, checking in on polling places around town to see if there were any disputes over ballots or other legal challenges to voting. The lawyers sitting in at the polling places briefed them on turnout and ballot issues. We also observed a campaign rally and stopped at Walgreens to buy Kat Kats.

I also spoke briefly that morning with Will Kanteres and Meryl Levin. The two have endorsed various candidates over the past several decades and volunteered their time to work on their campaigns. (Kanteres worked for Gary Hart’s campaign in New Hampshire in 1984.) They are a large part of the reason Colorado Senator Michael Bennet remained in the presidential race as long as he did. Impressed with the senator’s candidacy after seeing him speak, they publicly endorsed him, offered him and his family a place to stay during some campaign visits, and made introductions between the Bennets and various influential Democrats across the state.

These are the sorts of people I term party activists. I use this term fairly loosely. It refers to people who provide the critical labor of parties during presidential nomination cycles. They raise money, organize rallies, arrange meetings, write op-eds, and do other tasks vital to the nomination process. Importantly, most of them spend the invisible primary period learning about

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various presidential candidates (by attending candidate events and often speaking directly with the candidates), deciding between them, and speaking with other activists about their choices.

These activists also include several state party chairs (who traditionally do not endorse candidates prior to their state contests) and some elected officials, including state legislators, members of Congress, and former governors.

Party activists often wear multiple hats. Dalton Tresvant is the Midwest area director for U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn’s district office in Columbia, South Carolina, helping county and municipal governments secure federal funding for various projects and advocating for African American communities. But in his off hours, he’s helping organize Democratic politics in Columbia, picking among candidates, speaking with other influential activists, and helping the national party direct resources around the state. Bethany Khan is a spokesperson for the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, which represents the roughly 60,000 workers in the various hotels and casinos along the Vegas Strip. The union is not an arm of the Democratic Party, and indeed will occasionally back Republicans, but it tends to lean left politically, and its endorsement is highly coveted in primaries and caucuses. 2 In addition to evaluating presidential candidates, Khan helps coordinate numerous efforts to promote turnout at presidential caucuses, running a program to arrange for workers to get time off to participate in the time-consuming events. Yvanna Cancela, a Nevada state senator and the former political director of the Culinary Union, endorsed Joe Biden early in the nomination cycle and served as a senior advisor to his Nevada campaign.

2 The union does not always endorse, and indeed chose to stay neutral in both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential contests, but its voter turnout efforts during general elections are often considered crucial to Democratic victories in the state.

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While activists like these don’t technically run the Democratic Party, they are important and influential. Presidential campaigns, and even the candidates themselves, will seek them out to ask for their counsel and endorsements. The activists’ expertise in the politics of their state contest and their reputations are highly prized by the campaigns. Importantly, these activists are among the most politically informed people in the country, paying close attention to news coverage, attending political events, and conferring with each other about the latest developments and the most promising candidates. Their decisionmaking is key to the presidential nomination process, and it was my intent to capture these decisions occurring throughout the invisible primary process. This is particularly true in the early-contest states, where activists will choose among a larger field of candidates and be exposed to literally years of campaigning.

I identified 65 such activists in the early-contest states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia 3 with the help of local political reporters and other political activists, and spoke with them repeatedly during a number of visits between 2017 and 2020. These included 17 people from Iowa, 14 from New Hampshire, 8 from Nevada, 11 from South Carolina, and 15 from the District of Columbia. Forty-two were men and 23 women. Fiftysix of the 65 were white (including all of the respondents from Iowa and New Hampshire), while the group included six African Americans, two Latinas, and an Asian American. Thirty-eight of the respondents were supporters of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 nomination cycle, while eleven were Bernie Sanders supporters in that contest, eleven were neutral, and two had campaigned for Martin O’Malley.

3 While the presidential candidates do little direct campaigning in Washington, many of the campaigns and candidates are based there, and District residents are exposed to media coverage and elite discussion about the nomination contest to a greater degree and long before most other Americans are. Moreover, a considerable number of longstanding party activists from previous successful campaigns have ended up moving to the District of Columbia and spending their professional lives there. Many are established consultants, political organizers, congressional staffers, donors, journalists, and more.

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I do not claim that this sample of activists is representative of the larger population of party activists in each location. Notably, it was far easier to track down people who worked for or supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 than those who supported Bernie Sanders, the latter group generally having less experience within the party. Clinton activists were also more numerous than Sanders activists, even in states where Sanders culled more votes. Nonetheless, the reflections and interpretations of these activists, and the evolution of those opinions over time, are revealing about the beliefs of those most active in the party on the ground.

For interviews, I typically began by asking these people about their background in party politics. I then asked them several questions related to their interpretation of the 2016 election: 1) Why did the 2016 presidential election turn out as it did, at both the state and national level? 2) Might the general election have turned out differently had the Democrats picked a different nominee? 3) Did Bernie Sanders and his supporters do enough to help Hillary Clinton in the fall election? I found that these three questions teased out a range of interesting answers about the political environment and the role that parties, campaigns, and candidates can play in affecting election outcomes.

I additionally asked several prospective questions: 4) What does the Democratic Party need to do to become more competitive? 5) Who are you thinking about as a possible Democratic presidential nominee in 2020? These questions seemed useful for determining what respondents see as the lessons of the 2016 election.

While I asked all the above questions, I kept the conversations loosely structured to allow the activists to feel more comfortable and forthcoming and to largely let them drive the conversation. I asked relevant followup questions and pressed them for examples when possible.

With a very small number of exceptions, respondents gave me permission to record their

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interviews, although a few requested that their names not be associated with particular comments of theirs. I have honored all the respondents’ requests about the use of quotes from their interviews. These conversations were mostly conducted in person, either in the activist’s workplace or home, or at a coffee shop or restaurant. When in-person meetings were impossible, we spoke over the telephone.

The Eight Narratives Over the course of these many conversations, the activists explained to me their understanding of why the 2016 presidential election ended as it did. I have grouped these responses into eight different categories. Let me quickly summarize those narratives before giving specific examples: 1. Campaign activity – Tactics deployed by the Clinton campaign were inadequate and inappropriate.

2. Campaign message – The messaging used by the campaign failed to resonate with the voters in the way intended.

3. Identity politics – The campaign reached out to women, racial minorities, and other underrepresented groups but failed to speak to working class whites.

4. Candidate traits – Hillary Clinton had personality or campaigning traits that were inadequate to the task, or Donald Trump had traits that were underappreciated prior to the election.

5. Racism/Sexism – Voters and/or the media held to racist or sexist biases that undermined Hillary Clinton’s potential vote share.

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6. Sanders/Stein – Other candidates’ activities, particularly those of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, drew support away from Hillary Clinton.

7. Exogenous events – Events outside the campaign’s control, particularly intervention by Russia or activities by FBI Director James Comey prior to the election, hurt Clinton’s election chances.

8. Mood of the electorate – 2016 was somehow an unusual year, in which voters were craving atypical outcomes.

Explanation 1: Campaign Activity In one of my first interviews, I spent some time visiting with New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley in his office in Concord. I was a bit awestruck by his collection of campaign memorabilia collected from decades of primaries and conventions. During our conversation, Buckley summed up a frequent complaint that the Democratic presidential campaign in 2016 had a much weaker organization and less competence than other recent Democratic efforts. According to Buckley, “I’m… angry about the consulting class that has an iron grip over the DNC in how it spends its money… because I believe that we didn’t have to lose. I believe that Donald Trump is president because of the failures of the Democratic Party, not because of any attribute of either Hillary’s or Donald’s, and we could’ve fixed that.”

A veteran South Carolina political strategist shared this critical assessment. The Clinton team, he told me, “didn’t have the layers of oversight that Obama had. Every time you went to the bathroom [during the Obama campaign], you had to check with two people to make sure what urinal and what stall to go to. But it worked. And it was a series of checks and balances that if somebody was falling down, they would send somebody in to help them, not necessarily to

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replace them. [Clinton’s] field effort was non-existent.” South Carolina state legislator Wendell Gilliard had a similar take, saying that the reason for the election’s outcome was simply “lack of participation… lack of organizing…. The people [Clinton] used to organize her campaign, they weren’t the best of the best.”

These assessments didn’t just come from party leadership and elected officials. Herb and Kathy Eckhouse are the owners and founders of a cured meats company just outside of Des Moines, Iowa, and are also long term Democratic activists, having helped numerous presidential candidates and volunteered on their campaigns. Herb and I had a lengthy conversation at his office in 2017 over an enormous plate of prosciutto, speck, and nduja, 4 in which he outlined his concerns about the 2016 Democratic ground game and the doors on which he was sent to knock.

“By the beginning of October,” he said, “you should not be talking to anybody who’s in favor of the opposing candidate. And we were. We were bumping into Trump supporters. And that was really, that’s a waste of our time, a waste of their resources…. I was told afterward that they [the campaign] never updated their records. So we were collecting all these forms and all of this information. They never input that data, which seems unbelievable to me.”

Others had somewhat the opposite take, that the national campaign was too reliant on data and wasn’t in touch with local organizers. In this framework, the problem wasn’t poor organization or data, but a faith in that organization and data that bordered on hubris. As former South Carolina Democratic Party chair Carol Fowler explained to me over coffee, “I think [Clinton] had a lot of people on her campaign who thought they knew everything and were not listening to the people who were there on the ground. I just believe that her people thought, ‘Well, we’ve done so many campaigns, don’t tell us what to do. Don’t tell us what to think. We

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know. We’ve got data.’” Her husband, former Democratic National Committee national chair Don Fowler, agreed that the Clinton campaign was “relying a little too much on analytics and not enough on some of the on-the-ground anecdotes and stories that talked about the energy level of the electorate.” DC activist Chris Riddiough added, “Hillary’s campaign relied on data to tell them where to campaign and how to campaign and stuff like that, and that what they didn’t do was go out to the barber shops or community centers and actually talk to people and get a sense of who was enthusiastic about Hillary, you know, who was actually going to go out and vote.

And I think that is probably the important thing. I think that’s probably why they lost Wisconsin.”

A South Carolina political strategist also blamed campaign hubris. “Hillary Clinton is probably the smartest person to have run for president in my lifetime. If they had moved that campaign to Chicago, where she’s from, or if they had moved that campaign to Little Rock, they would’ve seen this coming. When you have a group of people from Washington, DC running campaigns and they don’t spend any time in rural, Southern or Middle America, they’re going to miss something.”

Bill and Jean Shaheen have been the preeminent power couple in New Hampshire Democratic politics for decades. She’s the senior U.S. Senator and former governor, and he’s a prominent Dover attorney, and the two host an annual major fundraising dinner for the state party. No one runs for the Democratic presidential nomination without consulting them. In a conversation, Bill Shaheen agreed with concerns about the Clinton campaign: “I just don’t think [Clinton] was served well by [her] people. It’s almost a natural instinct that the national headquarters wants to control everything and wants to make every decision, rather than listening to the people on the ground.” Dalton Tresvant, the South Carolina activist I mentioned earlier,

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similarly described the campaign’s approach. “[The campaign would say,] ‘Okay, this is what you need to do to turn out African American voters.’ No. We’ve got a term for that. We just call them smart ass white boys. They’re going to come and they’re going to tell you, ‘This is what you need to do to turnout black voters,’ and you’re like, ‘No, that’s not.’”

Several Nevada activists offered an interesting angle on this explanation, noting that Democrats had an unusually good 2016 within Nevada, in part because they executed the campaign activities there that they failed to perform nationally. Not only did Clinton prevail over Trump in the Silver State, but Democrats took over Nevada’s statehouse and won a competitive open U.S. Senate race. “I think a lot of that was a product of our state party, and the organizing work that goes into a general election in Nevada, and working with all our partners – labor and progressive groups – to really run a strong field organizing effort that mobilizes our voters to get to the polls,” said Stewart Boss, a Las Vegas political consultant. According to Bethany Khan, the spokesperson for the Culinary Workers union I mentioned earlier, it was a matter of proper allocations of resources: “We know that it requires deep level of investment in order to win…. It allowed us to do the work that needs to be done – train and develop workers to go out and talk to their coworkers and the community…. All of the really important things that it takes to win, we did in Nevada.”

Tick Segerblom was a state senator when I spoke to him in his Las Vegas office. He has since been elected to the Clark County Commission. As he told me about Nevada election organizing, “It’s a one-on-one thing. I mean, you can’t try to do it by TV…. You have to literally grab people and make them vote. There’s enough Democrats out there to do it.” And all this work can sometimes only yield small dividends, a long time Las Vegas political strategist explained to me. “Even with all that that we had, and being in the ground for so long, the Trump

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campaign really didn’t have much of a presence, and we still only won by two points. And so, it’s just a good reminder of how hard we have to work to get our voters out to make sure they’re registered. It’s a lot of work.”

As these activists argued, these activities were the sorts of things that Democrats did not do on a nationwide scale. “It was a very bittersweet election night,” said state Senator Yvanna Cancela, “because in Nevada we were wildly successful; it was hard to watch what happened across the country.” “I know [Clinton] should have made more trips to the Midwest,” added the political strategist. State party executive director Alana Mounce contrasted the 2016 effort with her own experiences campaigning for Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012: “We started doing persuasion phone calls in 2011 for Barack Obama who won here by a healthy, healthy margin in 2012, and he was incredibly popular here. I mean sometimes it’s touch and go, sometimes it’s tough. So then to think, fast forwarding to 2016, that there was no persuasion happening.”

Several organizers in other states sounded a similar theme, lamenting the demise of the 50 State Strategy pioneered by then-DNC Chair Howard Dean in 2005 and 2006. New Hampshire party chair Buckley blamed national Democrats for their party’s losses over several recent cycles, saying, “When the decision was made to defund the 50 State Strategy, we began losing offices immediately…. I believe that if we had continued at the same level that Howard Dean was funding, over the course of the last eight years, that Hillary Clinton would be President.” Buckley is proud of some recent Democratic gains in New Hampshire, and thinks that other states could learn from this example: “No other battleground state has had a record anywhere near what New Hampshire’s done and it’s because their grassroots have atrophied.”

A South Carolina Democratic political strategist agreed in the assessment of the 50 State Strategy: “The roots of the ‘16 loss for us had nothing to do with the people who ran in ‘16. I

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think it was the years of neglect of the state party apparatuses across the country.” A former state elected official in South Carolina agreed, “The Obama team owns a little of it because when you look at what happened after the ‘08 election, there was not a lot of investment in the Democratic Party from ‘08 ‘til 2016.”

Explanation 2: Campaign Message The second explanation of Trump’s victory is that Clinton and the Democrats simply didn’t offer a compelling campaign message. This explanation is often relatively vague – it’s not always clear just what the right message was or how that should have been conveyed. And this goes beyond a critique of basic campaign themes like “Stronger Together” or “I’m With Her” to include a criticism of the whole campaign approach to communications with voters. Implicit in this is an assumption that a campaign is coordinated around some sort of unifying message and that such a message allows the campaign to connect to voters and express the candidate’s core set of beliefs. Indeed, one of the few things over which a campaign has direct control is its message – the themes and arguments it makes to appeal to voters. Other campaign activity, seasoned professionals will tell you, should all flow from that message. Activists focusing on this explanation generally gave credit to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” theme, which they saw as a simple and easily-memorized message that nonetheless connected to a great many beliefs – societal, generational, racial – implicit in the campaign.

To many activists, Clinton and the Democrats just didn’t have anything along those lines.

“It troubled me that we didn’t have a message, and that’s not just Hillary Clinton,” said former Governor Jim Hodges of South Carolina. “I think from the last six or eight years there wasn’t much of a message to those voters.” He worried that “we fell in love with technology and fell out

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of love with message,” arguing that the campaign innovations of the Obama years were helpful but not enough to unite a party behind a controversial nominee.

Kimberley Boggus is a longstanding community leader and environmental activist in Des Moines, in addition to being a seasoned presidential campaign staffer. The problem with the Democrats’ 2016 message, she told me over coffee, was that it was little more than a criticism of Trump, offering nothing beyond that. “I don’t think the Democrats’ message was effective,” she said. “It was not offering solutions. It was just point out that Trump was a terribly flawed person and doesn’t like X, Y, and Z. It wasn’t going after his relationships with Wall Street, it wasn’t going after his shady deals. It was very much, ‘Let’s focus on Trump’ and then not saying what Hillary would do.” Cancela in Nevada agreed, “Just saying, ‘We’re better than that guy’ isn’t very persuasive or inspiring.” Democratic political consultant Joe Fuld added, “I think that they did not have a clear message. It wasn’t clear from the beginning. I think they did not execute their message as sort of two sides of a coin. They looked at message as one side of a coin….

[They said] ‘Donald Trump is so bad’ ...and then they never did the other side: ‘This is why we should be voting for Hillary.’”

According to progressive political organizer and strategist Reggie Hubbard, who worked with the Sanders campaign in 2016, the messaging sold Clinton short, particularly among more progressive voters: “They didn’t talk about enough of what she did in civil rights. Ms. Clinton is the most qualified person ever to run for president. But they didn’t talk about that. They said, ‘I’m with her.’ …Like, really substantial social programs have her influence. Even in the Senate…. They didn’t talk about that. You can be establishment and talk about your track record of doing progressive stuff.”

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For some respondents, the Democratic message in 2016 was too simplistic. Boggus expressed concern that the Clinton campaign was afraid to engage people on multiple topics: “You can talk to me about marriage equality and you can talk to me about jobs. You can talk to me about how I’m going to pay back my student education loans. You can talk to people about more than one topic, and I think that that’s what Democrats fail to do.” Iowa’s Eckhouse concurred, saying, “We’ve got to sell our brand. We have a great brand. We have a great brand for fairness, equality before the law and… fiscal responsibility…. I think we need to have three words that describe our brand, in distinction to the Republican brand. And we need to have all of our candidates position themselves in that way and that’s the only shot we’ve got.”

For others, the Democratic message wasn’t simplistic enough. Iowa’s then-state party chair Troy Price argued that a good message focuses more on core values than policy positions, and that the Democrats’ recent approach has been to rely on a laundry list of issues to serve as its message. “The Democratic Party has been so focused on specific messages and specific issues.

Like, we talk a lot about minimum wage, but we don’t necessarily tie that to the broader vision and broader values of our party, which is fighting for working people. And so, I think that was where the disconnect happened.” He added: I think it’s just a message problem that we had, that we were talking about all these various messages, very specific messaging, but we were never talking about the values that the Democratic Party stood for, that Hillary stood for. It wasn’t just a Hillary problem. So what always ends up happening is, when you focus so much on specific messages, and not on values, or issues and not on values, it doesn’t move the needle as much and then you have no choice but to say “We’re not as bad as the other people.”

That’s ultimately what happened here.

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Iowa Federation of Labor President Ken Sagar agreed, “People don’t care about facts and figures. That’s where the Republicans kill us. They put a bumper sticker and we say, ‘Yeah?

Here’s a white paper.’” Cancela concurred, “It’s much easier to grasp onto Trump’s message than Clinton’s message. And I think it’s what we, as a Democratic Party, have to figure out, is how we lay out a vision for our country, not a one-off issue based on what different constituent groups may be fighting for.”

Still others complained that the Democratic message was simply targeted in too many directions, or to the wrong audience. The lack of a unifying message, Hodges said, was damaging: “We tended to put together issues that were attractive to small groups of Democratic donors and Democratic supporters and believe that’s enough and have not have any overarching message that sort of stitched all that together.” Tammy Wawro, then the president of the Iowa State Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, explained to me in her office that a good message has “got to be, how do we explain to the American people what our policies are going to do to improve their lives?” Iowa political consultant Norm Sterzenbach opined, “I think Hillary Clinton didn’t focus a message on Iowa. It was more of a national message.”

Sagar, the labor leader, had an interesting take on campaign message, suggesting a mismatch between what some Democratic voters and what their nominee was arguing. Many union members, he said, heard more of what they cared about coming from Trump rather than Clinton: “A lot of people have said labor’s message doesn’t resonate. I would argue that’s incorrect. Our message was we need to get rid of bad trade deals…. Our message was we need to rebuild our infrastructure…. One candidate adopted that. We said we wanted good jobs that paid decent wages. One candidate adopted that. It wasn’t our candidate that adopted our issue, and he won. [It was] our messaging; we were right on the topics.”

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In sum, the category of campaign message is frustratingly vague and multi-dimensional.

And, setting aside Clinton’s loss, it is difficult to say what exactly was wrong with her campaign’s “Stronger Together” theme, which had the virtues of being simple, bumper-stickerlength, and tapping into a broader campaign message of strength, inclusivity, and tolerance.

Nonetheless, a great many respondents volunteered complaints about messaging and blamed it for Clinton’s loss.

Explanation 3: The Identity Politics Critique Somewhat related to concerns about message, perhaps even a subset of it, is a worry that the party is appealing to the wrong subsets of Democratic constituencies and losing others as a result of it. As I discussed in chapter 2 and will get further into in chapter 6, concern about “identity politics” was a potent interpretation of the 2016 election among pundits. That argument was that the Democratic Party had devoted too much attention to the concerns of African Americans, Latinos, women, the LGBT community, and other underrepresented groups and not enough to appealing to concerns of the broader group of Americans, which had the effect of alienating white Americans. 5 My interviews suggested that this was a vibrant strain of election interpretation among Democratic activists, as well. However, the language was often somewhat more subtle than it was among conservatives and op/ed writers. Only a handful of subjects specifically chastised the

5

As I note in chapter 2, I recognize that this is a very narrow definition of the term “identity politics,” which has a number of different meanings. It is a problematic definition for a number of reasons, not the least of which that it treats references to race and gender as somehow strange when they are about women or people of color but “normal politics” when they refer to white men. I am nonetheless focusing on this specific critique of the campaign offered by columnists, pundits, and some activists.

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party or the Clinton campaign for not appealing directly to white voters. Nonetheless, coded versions of such critiques do appear.

What’s more, there’s at least something of an ideological component to these criticisms.

This in itself is interesting, as essentially none of my subjects explicitly volunteered ideological positioning as a cause for Democratic woes. That is, no one said the party needs to move to the right or left to be more competitive. But a few implied as much with their discussions of identity politics.

Perhaps the most direct example of this comes from seasoned Iowa political consultant Jeff Link, who told me, “Democrats should listen to more country music, and they should stop being condescending.” He expanded on this theme: “Country music is an appeal to white working class Americans. And there are themes that run through those songs. It’s like, ‘Don’t be condescending about where I live or how I live,’ ‘Don’t be condescending about my way of life,’ and a lot of those songs played out in the presidential election.” Iowa education advocate Wawro offered a similar example, saying, “Listen to your cousin Jim that lives in rural Iowa that was a Democrat that voted for Trump. Why did he do that?”

Link further added, “I think Donald Trump made a direct appeal to white working class voters. And I think that the Clinton campaign probably inadvertently not only made no appeal to white working class voters, but actually ran a campaign that was offensive to white working class voters.”

Other respondents were somewhat less explicit but nonetheless sounded similar themes.

Several focused on the need to reach out to downscale whites who had once been loyal Democratic voters. Nevada’s Cancela asked, for example, “How do we make sure that the coal miner in West Virginia, who has voted Democratic his entire life but now voted for Trump

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because he’s afraid of losing his job with renewable energy, how do we make sure that he remembers that the party that actually fights for him and his family is the Democratic Party?”

Linda Ketner, a South Carolina activists and former House candidate, held up Rep. Joe Kennedy’s response to the 2018 State of the Union Address 6 as an example of the kind of appeals Democrats should be making. “We need to talk more like Joe Kennedy did the other night about issues that are broader than the thing we got accused of – which was breaking into little groups representing ideals or ideologies – and talk about working class people.” Former local Iowa officeholder Mike Carberry said, We need to be the Democratic Party that Franklin Delano Roosevelt could be proud of, the party of the people, by the people, for the people. For the working class, for the poor, those sorts of things that provide that rural economic development that we need in the State of Iowa…. That’s one of the reasons we lost Pennsylvania and Michigan and the Rust Belt. Those are blue collar workers. We used to call them “Reagan Democrats” that left the party and went and voted for Ronald Reagan. Well, they left the party and went and voted for Donald Trump.

I had a lengthy conversation with Dick and Katrina Swett in their office in Concord, New Hampshire, in 2017. Dick is a former U.S. House member, and Katrina is an historian and the president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. Dick expressed concern to me that Democrats “gave the impression that the minorities and small special interest or identity groups were more important than the broader community as a whole.” Katrina shared these concerns, tell me, “We went down that path of a kind of identity politics. Really, just saying, ‘If

6

Diaz, Daniella. 2018. “Kennedy Responds to Trump: ‘We all Feel the Fault Lines of a Fractured Country.’” CNN. January 31.

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we get sufficient numbers among this group, this group, this group, this group we’re golden.’

There was always this underlying assumption that we get a certain minimum vote from that rather large identity group, white Americans. Trump again upended that because the share of white vote dropped dramatically enough across the board, including white women. Suddenly, a lot of people have said, ‘Yeah, I guess if you have one particular demographic group that’s… 6870 percent of the population, you actually still need to pay attention to their concerns.’”

Some activists I spoke to found this topic particularly wrenching in the Trump era. They argued that in some ways it was more important than ever to stand up for underrepresented populations, given the threats they face, while at the same time they were under the impression that doing so undermined their ability to win elections and help those populations from a position of power. “You got to call out a racist when there’s a racist,” said Des Moines political consultant Jake Oeth. “But every time somebody says something questionable you throw the racist flag out there and you’re going to drive people away, too. Because they think you’re the boy who cried wolf.”

Iowa activist Brenda Kole was one of very few to specifically push back on this critique.

“The United States is changing,” she said, “and we’re likely not going to get the manufacturing jobs that we had before. Our Latino population is rising so fast. To me that’s not identity politics; they’re part of the Democratic Party. You have to put all those components together. You have to reach out to women, and Latinos, and African Americans. That’s just part of who the Democratic Party is and what it looks like.”

“I’m not sure that the Democratic Party talks about issues of race in a really head on way,” agreed a Las Vegas political organizer. “For folks in Nevada, in a state that’s incredibly

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diverse, with essentially a third of all the state looking like me, as a Latina, folks are just wanting more.”

Explanation 4: Candidate Traits Quite a few activists attributed the 2016 election outcome to particular qualities of the candidates themselves. “I love the lady,” said South Carolina’s Don Fowler of Hillary Clinton. “I really do. I’d jump off a building for her. But boy, she could have been a better candidate in 2016.” New Hampshire activist Judy Reardon agreed, “I believe she would have been a very good, maybe great president. She was not a great candidate. And I think that’s because… she doesn’t need people to love her.”

For others, it had less to do with Clinton’s skills and more to do with Trump’s atypical set of talents. New Hampshirites, in particular, noted with marvel how Trump flouted the traditional customs of that state’s primary – with an emphasis on retail politics, avoiding large addresses, engaging activists one-on-one during multiple visits, spending many months in residence – and nonetheless prevailed. “Donald Trump was something so dramatically different and he didn’t win the New Hampshire primary doing the things that have historically been thought to be absolutely necessary,” said Katrina Swett. Clay Middleton of South Carolina expressed frustration with Trump’s uniqueness. “Look at the debates, how questions were answered or not answered by the current president. He just got away with things that others couldn’t. How can you not tell the American public about your taxes and not provide details on anything of substance? How can you say the most appalling, sexist, and racist things about women, the disabled, any minority, and get away with it? Only Donald Trump.”

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A number of activists offered comments along those same lines, suggesting that there were peculiarities of the candidates themselves that drove the outcome. I probed this subject further by asking respondents whether the election outcome would have been the same with a different Democratic nominee. A number felt that it would have come out similarly regardless of the nominee, but quite a few were convinced that another Democrat would have won the day.

The question of whether Bernie Sanders would have won is, of course, a vitally important one, both because it can never be satisfactorily answered and because it continues to divide Democrats. Indeed, divisions on this question are far from petty. If one believes that Sanders would have beaten Trump, then this would mean that the party, an organization whose primary purpose is to win elections, made a catastrophically bad decision. It calls into question the entire process – including a venerable infrastructure of caucuses, primaries, conventions, party rules, etc. – by which that decision was made, and indeed suggests that substantial revisions are due for those procedures. On the other hand, if a Sanders-Trump contest would have yielded roughly the same or lower vote share for Democrats, no massive rethinking of the Democratic approach is due, and perhaps some other factor was pivotal.

Those respondents who had worked for Bernie Sanders in 2015 and 2016 were generally confident that Sanders would have prevailed as the Democratic nominee. However, few expressed interest in pressing the argument. I pressed Sanders’ 2016 Iowa coordinator, Evan Burger, on this question, and he explained to me, simply, “He would’ve won. Yeah, anyway…. I don’t like to dwell on the past.”

Some Clinton backers, meanwhile, insisted that Sanders had substantial vulnerabilities that never fully came to light in the primaries but would have proven devastating in a general election. Said Iowan Jerry Crawford, “I certainly don’t think Bernie would’ve won. I think he

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would’ve gotten crushed…. He never had to answer for some of the stuff in his background…. he was essentially never vetted in the public discourse. He would not have stood up well to that.”

Several people specifically mentioned to me Kurt Eichenwald’s 2016 Newsweek article 7 detailing various Sanders vulnerabilities. Don Fowler summed up, “Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have won if he had been the nominee. Not in the least. He would’ve gotten his head kicked in.”

Former Nevada state party chair Sam Lieberman compared Clinton unfavorably to her husband. “Sometimes she was her own worst enemy. Where Bill is very willing to not only do the substantive work but also do the hand-shaking and baby-kissing and ribbon-cutting and all of that, she’s not that.” Nevada’s Segerblom attributed a lack of campaign skills to Clinton’s own unusual path to the presidential nomination. “Most people have run for city council, dog catcher, something where you actually do the one-on-one and learn how to grovel and you come across as natural, and when you start at her level, people just see that there’s nothing there.” Iowa’s Carberry, meanwhile, offered me a much more policy-driven reason why rural white Iowans would have turned against Democrats: the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States rule. 8 Enacted in 2015, this rule created environmental protections for many waterways and wetlands, creating considerable pushback among some farmers. So perhaps groups that have typically voted Democratic were reluctant to support Hillary Clinton for purely policy-related reasons. (This was, interestingly, one of the few explanations offered that included reference to President Barack Obama.)

Explanation 5: Racism/Sexism

7 Eichenwald, Kurt. 2016. “The Myths Democrats Swallowed That Cost Them the Presidential Election.”

Newsweek, November 14.

8 Hopkinson, Jenny. 2015. “Obama’s Water War.” Politico. May 27.

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Somewhat less prevalent were those who ascribed the election’s outcome to the persistence of racism and/or sexism in the electorate. South Carolinian Ketner stated plainly that the reason for Trump’s victory “was racism.... I think Make America Great Again means Make America White Again.… He really, in my opinion, played heavily into racializing the white working class and made them feel that he would protect them against black and brown labor, and that they could still maintain the white buddy system.” A Nevada political consultant agreed, “I think sexism is one hell of a drug in our country, and that has a lot to do with [the election outcome], as well.” “I give [Clinton] tremendous credit,” says a long-time Democratic political strategist in South Carolina, “because there’s also – and you can’t deny it when you look at the numbers – some sexism that took place, too.” Iowa’s Wawro remarked, “I do think that rural Iowa didn’t feel like it was listened to. I think there were people in rural Iowa who weren’t ready for a woman president.” South Carolina activist Christale Spain summarized that Clinton “was easy to dislike… because we live in a misogynist, racist country.”

A number of activists not only blamed bigotry for Clinton’s loss, but associated the bigotry with their own identity group. An African American political strategist in South Carolina blamed men of color for turning against Clinton: “There was a drop in terms of support when looking at the Obama race between men of color. African American men came out for Obama at around 92-93 percent and dropped down to... I think it was about a five-point drop. Similar fivepoint drop in terms of Hispanics. And so the question is, why was that? I think it had to do with her gender. With all of those things playing against her, in the end it was just a little too much.”

Similarly, Iowa’s Brenda Kole explained to me, “Women are… very, very hard on each other, and women with a similar background as me (white, college educated) held [Clinton] to a

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standard that you would probably never hold a male candidate to. I think gender played a role in that.”

As with many explanations, there is no shortage of available evidence in support of it.

Although if one accepts that extant bigotry among the electorate makes it harder to elect women and people of color, it is not entirely clear what one should be doing about it. Teaching tolerance to the electorate or shaming intolerance seems like a challenging proposition at best with payoff available only in the very long term. It could mean increased voter turnout efforts to help elect women and candidates of color, or it could mean nominating more white men to get around the problem (and create others in the process). There’s no one obvious direction for the party to go.

Explanation 6: Sanders and Stein According to exit polls, 89 percent of self-described Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton, while 90 percent of Republicans voted for Donald Trump. These figures are roughly what one would expect in a polarized era, yet they were slightly down from 2012’s numbers, reflecting the greater unpopularity of the major parties’ nominees compared to those of previous years. But some activists were concerned that the less-than-perfect Democratic fealty was the result of other candidates undermining the vote. Specifically, they thought that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein secured many votes that would have otherwise gone for Clinton, or that Bernie Sanders and his supporters were insufficiently supportive of the Democratic ticket compared to other previous failed presidential candidates.

Iowa’s Brenda Kole summed up this belief, saying, “I think that there were some Democrats who supported Bernie in the caucus who didn’t either vote or they voted for Jill Stein.

I don’t know that they necessarily voted for Trump.” New Hampshire’s Bill Shaheen, a Clinton

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supporter in 2016, told me that most Sanders supporters rallied to Clinton’s side after the nomination, but a significant and potentially damaging number of them refused to: “The Bernie people and the Hillary people got together and, for the most part, we did what we needed to do.

There were some renegades that voted for Jill Stein, but that is what it is.” South Carolina’s Middleton summed up, “I would have liked for Senator Sanders to have done more.”

Christale Spain, the 2016 Political Outreach Director for Sanders in South Carolina, drew a distinction between Sanders supporters who were loyal Democrats, and those with independent inclinations. I asked her whether Sanders supporters were sufficiently helpful to Clinton in November 2016. “Democrats did,” she answered. “People who supported Sanders who were Democrats, yes. And they understood the political process argument even if they didn’t know the political process, they still identified as Democrats…. But people who… were not Democrats before, did not. And I feel like they really worked desperately to widen that divide.”

Some Clinton supporters professed a lingering resentment over what they saw as a betrayal of the Democratic Party, either by Sanders supporters insufficiently helping Clinton or others voting for Stein. “I think there are a lot of new people that came into the party,” said Wawro, “and then went out of the party. I will say it might not have been Sanders folks that didn’t work hard, but I think there were Jill Stein folks that I don’t appreciate, and then have come back into the party to say, ‘I’m a Democrat now, and I’ll run to be on the [community college board].’ No, see, we were Democrats. We tried to get something done, and you turned your back, and we’re trying to fix a big mess.”

Iowan Crawford explained the situation in his state: “Iowa kind of has this one-and-ahalf-hands-tied-behind-your back political philosophy in the Democratic Party, which is that you

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don’t attack other Democrats. So, [Clinton] was getting attacked by the Republicans, attacked by Bernie, not really allowed to fight back, and it just took an enormous toll.”

In a telephone interview, South Carolina’s Brady Quirk-Garvan expressed some frustrations with Sanders supporters and suggested they offered an important lesson: “I think that the ‘16 cycle showed, this is what happens when we as Democrats don’t unify after a primary.

Primaries are, to me, good and helpful. They help steer the party. They let different factions bring up different issues. They’re good and healthy for any party, but at the end of the day, parties are about winning.”

I asked several 2016 Sanders supporters, including Iowan Mike Carberry, about their reactions to these sorts of critiques. “I don’t think those numbers [of Sanders backers who wouldn’t support Clinton] were huge but I think they were blown out of proportion by the media and especially some of Hillary’s backers,” Carberry responded. “And this whole story about the Bernie Bros, I think that was overblown, too. Sure there were some Bernie Bros out there but I think there’s a lot of... I don’t even know the name for them, but there was a lot of people on the other side that were just as nasty and supportive of Hillary Clinton that were just as nasty about Bernie and about Bernie supporters both in person and online.”

Explanation 7: Exogenous Events Several activists offered the opinion that Hillary Clinton would have been elected if not for a few exogenous events outside the campaigns’ control. Two specific events were offered as examples: Russian meddling and FBI Director James Comey’s late October 2016 letter regarding the Clinton e-mail investigation.

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A handful of people made specific reference to Russia. Some suggested that Russian-tied advertising on social media could have exploited Democratic weaknesses and influenced the general election. “You can’t win if you don’t unify,” said Quirk-Garvan. “I think that’s much of what the Russian influence played on. I think they saw that and used that as wedge amongst Democrats to try and suppress turnout.” A few simply noted Russian meddling and expressed concern about further such interference in 2018 and 2020, without affirmatively stating that Russian interference tipped the 2016 results. “Somebody, and it won’t be the Republicans,” said Ketner, “needs to focus on the 2018 election and Russian interference, since we know they’re going to do it again.”

Compared to possible Russian interference, said Iowa activist Julie Stauch, “I think the Comey memo was far more damaging.” Crawford agreed, “Comey was the exclamation point.

We believed, and our polling showed, that we had fought back pretty close to even in Iowa, and then the day he gave that statement, the support just cratered. Just cratered overnight. And, that was that.” Don Fowler had a similar impression: “Comey’s interjecting himself in that race by announcing he was reactivating the inquiry into the private server matter, I think that was the death knell.” Explained Oeth, “That Comey letter was just kind of like the reminder of all the 30 or 40 years that anyone in public office is going to have baggage.” A few blamed journalists for focusing on these stories at the expense of ones more damaging to Trump.

Explanation 8: Mood of the Electorate The final category is somewhat challenging to define. Some people simply felt that 2016 was, for lack of a better term, a weird year. Think of Trump’s nomination, the Cubs’ World Series victory, the passing of Prince, Carrie Fisher, David Bowie, George Michael… things were

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happening that year that just don’t happen in a typical year. (Perhaps not as weird as 2020, but still.) Translated into politics, this means that the electorate was in an unusual mood and might vote in some unpredictable ways. This could be classified as the “fundamental conditions” of the political environment, but whereas political scientists usually define such conditions as the state of the economy or whether the nation is at war, the political activists in this case described an anti-incumbent, anti-pluralism mood that is difficult to measure. “The country was looking for change and [Clinton] could never be the change candidate,” veteran DC consultant Tad Devine told me in a phone conversation.

Former Rep. Swett even drew upon John Maynard Keynes concept of “animal spirits” to describe the political atmosphere: “Trump is really not the problem. The problem is the conditions that are in the country. The losing of the animal spirits, if you will, that allowed for a man like him to get elected.” Former Gov. Hodges drew this out in a bit more detail: There clearly was an incredible anti-Washington, anti-establishment mood out there that no one really captured. And regardless of her many talents, the Clintons had been around a long time and not only had they accumulated some baggage, but they were symbols of the establishment. Democratic and Republican voters saw them as a symbol of people who’d been around a long time and there was this yearning for something new. I mean, we saw whiffs of it in the Democratic primary. I don’t think it spoke to any deficiencies that she had as a talented, capable person. I think it just was there was this mood out there. Some of it started in ‘08 with the financial crisis. I think some of the seeds of it were when you looked at the Obama election in ‘08 that political parties had begun to hunger for somebody who was not viewed as part of the establishment. I think we oversimplify to talk about missteps in the campaign.

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Iowan Nate Monson, meanwhile, said he had some inkling of this changing mood thanks to his parents, who work in a small town tool factory: They were telling stories about how their co-workers were talking about the campaign.

And they were just like, “Lock her up,” and her e-mails and all these things. That was really resonating with these sort of working-class folks, and it was just really interesting, because no one was hearing Hillary’s message at all. And it just became so focused on that anger…. My parents kept saying they had the baseball caps on, they had the yard signs in the yard. And I said, “If they’re willing to do that, they’re going to vote,” and that’s what happened.

Democratic Socialist organizer Christian Bowe found a similar phenomenon occurring while he was canvassing the Philadelphia suburbs prior to the 2016 elections. These were neighborhoods consisting, as he described it, of many working class retirees who had belonged to the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and were lifelong Democrats: We were going to houses and people were just saying, “We’re still undecided.” So, we just kept going to these houses of undecided voters over, and over, and over again.

Instead of pulling new D1s and D2s [reliable and likely Democratic votes, respectively], we keep knocking these potential 3s [undecided voters], that all ended up, not all of them, but these towns ended up being 60, 65% for Trump…. Then I just, it clicked in my head on election night when I saw some of the results come through. It’s like, this is probably happening all across the country.

New Hampshire’s Alan Reische felt there was a shift in the electorate between 2012 and 2016, which Trump successfully tapped into, but which blindsided Democrats. “We were driving

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down a road,” he told me, “looking in the rearview mirror, thinking that things were the same.

Things are not the same and they’re not going to be the same.”

Analysis of Explanations I should note that all but seven activists offered multiple explanations for the election’s outcome. A few respondents explicitly noted the interdependence of these explanations. As Democratic National Committeemember James Roosevelt argued, “The Democrats lost because of the way the Electoral College functions, and because of the Russians, and Jim Comey. Would those things have mattered if Secretary Clinton’s campaign had resonated with more people? No, probably not. Would they have mattered if Donald Trump wasn’t the consummate salesman and showman? No, probably not. So I think it’s a mix.”

The typical activist offered two explanations, but some proposed as many as six. That said, some were much more common than others. Figure 1 shows the percentage of all activists who offered each explanation. More than half blamed the Clinton campaign for some sort of malpractice in its activities. Similar numbers felt that the campaign message was flawed or that the election pivoted on the candidates’ traits. Indeed, all but five respondents offered at least one of these three explanations. Other explanations were less common.

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Figure 1 – Frequency of Election Explanations

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In Figure 2, we can see how these narratives break down by various divisions among the activists. One of the sharpest divides is by sex. Men are substantially more likely to suggest that campaign messaging or candidates traits were the problem than women were. However, women were far more likely to attribute Clinton’s loss to outside events and persistent sexism and racism.

Non-white activists were more likely than whites to say that campaign activities and sexism/racism were to blame, although whites were considerably more likely to blame candidate traits and identity politics. Meanwhile, Clinton supporters from 2016 were more likely to blame exogenous factors, other candidates, and sexism/racism, while Sanders supporters from 2016 put the blame squarely on the Clinton campaign’s choices.

In the bottom row of the table, I have summed the last four narratives, which blame things outside the campaign’s control for the loss, into one variable called “not Clinton’s fault.”

If an activist mentions any of those last four narratives at all, they are in the no-fault group.

Women are overwhelmingly more likely than men to subscribe to such an interpretation. Whites were more likely than non-whites to acquit the Clinton campaign, and Clinton supporters from 2016 were more likely than Sanders supporters to exonerate the campaign’s role.

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Figure 2 - Percent of Activists Ascribing 2016 Loss to Narratives

What They Didn’t Say This may seem like a fairly comprehensive list of explanations for the 2016 election outcome. Yet I found it interesting what was left out. For one thing, the explanations offered were largely pretty separate from the ones I have been working with as a political scientist.

While there certainly isn’t a consensus among scholars of American politics about the causes of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a pretty common explanation (to which I largely subscribe) would go something like this:

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Presidential elections are largely governed by the fundamentals of the political environment, such as the growth of the economy, conditions of war and peace, how long a party has held the White House, and so forth. Just based on such fundamental conditions, and ignoring aspects of the campaigns and candidates themselves, several political scientists published a range of forecasts in the academic journal PS: Political Science & Politics, as has become a quadrennial tradition in the discipline. 9 The forecasts varied somewhat, but on average they predicted Hillary Clinton receiving 50.7 percent of the two-party vote. In the end, she pulled 51.1 percent.

That’s really close for a forecast model that omits so much information! But the point here is not to brag about these forecast models. Rather, the point is to note that it was already going to be a close election. In a period of good-but-not-amazing economic growth, relative peace abroad, and the incumbent party seeking a third term in office, you’re going to see a competitive race. So the idea that Hillary Clinton should have won this election and somehow blew it isn’t really supported by the available evidence. What’s more, given the extent of polarization among the electorate, it’s very hard to not get almost all registered members of your party voting for you if you’re that party’s nominee. Trump arguably did a great deal to make himself unelectable and still got elected. It’s not that voters were enjoying or endorsing some of his unorthodox or offensive behavior, it’s just that people will largely vote their party, and they are capable of rationalizing or ignoring inconvenient behavior by their party’s nominee.

That’s not to say that these other narratives are flat-out wrong. In an election that close, it’s certainly possible that James Comey’s statements, or Hillary Clinton’s messaging, or Jill Stein’s candidacy, or something else, or some combination of them could have moved a few tens 9 Campbell, James E. 2016. “Forecasting the 2016 American National Elections.” PS: Political Science & Politics 49 (Special Issue 4): 649-654.

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of thousands of votes in a few key states, and that’s really all it took. But we can explain far more by just looking to the fundamentals that allowed that election to basically come down to a coin flip. The narrative that activists mentioned that comes closest to this was the “mood of the electorate” one, but for the most part, scholars and activists were speaking different languages here.

I was also surprised how little the name Barack Obama came up in conversations. Few seemed to blame him for any campaign choices he made in 2016, nor did they suggest that Clinton was the victim of an anti-Obama backlash. Bill Clinton’s name didn’t come up, either, despite the role he played in his wife’s nomination and campaign. No one mentioned the vice presidential candidates, either. Very few mentioned the Electoral College and the biases built into it. The activists nonetheless provided a pretty thorough list of possible explanations, each of which offer a path forward.

Why Were Activists Confused? A Look at Media Coverage I want to provide some context here for the various explanations offered above. After all, post-election narratives aren’t conjured out of thin air by political activists. They often emanate from journalists, pundits, and other political observers trying to attach some sort of rationale for the election results they are witnessing in real time. (And yes, cyclically, some of those observations may be influenced by the political activists who serve as sources for journalists.) I was interested in learning just what the media were saying about the 2016 election in the weeks and months that followed it.

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My approach was to analyze the content of news articles about the election, 10 examining a broad range of local and national news sources. 11 I began with a search for the phrases “Clinton lost because” or “Trump won because,” breaking the timeline down into the first four weeks following the 2016 election, and then examining month-by-month thereafter until November 2017. I attempted to plug each story or interpretation into one of the eight narratives I described earlier.

Figure 3 shows the frequencies that these narratives appeared, from election day through the end of November 2016 (left) and November 2017 (right). The percentages in each category are divided up by local and national media sources. As can be seen in the left figure, there is considerable support for all of the first four narratives – campaign activity, campaign messaging, identity politics, and candidate traits. There were some differences across local and national sources, with local sources more likely to emphasize messaging and national ones more focusing on identity politics frames, but there’s broad consensus that the answer to the election lies in these four arguments.

10

Here I am loosely following the approach defined by Majorie Hershey in her 1992 article “The Constructed Explanation: Interpreting Election Results in the 1984 Presidential Race.” The Journal of Politics 54 (4): 943-976.

11 I examined Access World News’ database of 11,119 local newspapers across the United States, as well as archives for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Review, Politico, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill.

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Figure 3: Post-Election Media Narratives in Nov 2016 (left) and Nov 2017 (right)

Generally, we would expect to see the range of explanations narrow with time. However, note the range of explanations as of a year later, during November 2017, at right. Interestingly, not only has there not been concentration on a single narrative, but the range of explanations has grown. More than 40 percent of the national news sources describing the causes of the election now mention the Comey/Russia/Wikileaks narrative. (Undoubtedly, this is due to expansions in discoveries of Russian interference into the election and the ongoing work of the Mueller investigation.) But there wasn’t much decline in the other narratives, either. A year after the election, political observers were at less of an agreement on why the election came out as it did than they were in the weeks immediately following it.

To see a decreasing consensus on the lessons of an election is unusual. It’s highly inconsistent with the work that Hershey did on the election of 1984 (see chapter 2), when dozens of narratives about Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale condensed to just a

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few after a few months. 12 Is it possible that as the media becomes more fragmented and American society – and particularly the Democratic coalition – become more diverse, that it’s harder for news sources to agree on election narratives?

To examine this, I did the same post-election media narrative I described above for the elections of 2008 and 2012, dividing up the coverage into similar narratives. To measure the emergence of a single dominant narrative, I used a statistic called the Herfindahl Index. This index is often used in economic analysis to determine how much control one firm has over an industry, but it can be adapted here just as easily. Since I’m interested in knowing how much a single narrative has come to dominate public discussion about the election, I just look at the percentage that each of the eight narratives has in each month. I then sum the squares of all those percentages. The closer the sum gets to 10,000, the more one narrative has seized control of the discussion. If the media are coming to agree on a narrative, we should see this number increase over time.

Figure 4 presents a smoother line of the Herfindahl Index across both post-election periods for both national and local media. In both, the trend is the same – in 2008, the media agreed on a narrative (Obama’s skills and personal traits) fairly quickly; in 2012, the media coverage started divided but became increasingly concentrated with time; in 2016, the media never really came to agreement on a narrative.

12 Hershey, Marjorie Randon. 1992. “The Constructed Explanation: Interpreting Election Results in the 1984 Presidential Race.” The Journal of Politics 54 (4): 943-976.

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Figure 4: Media Narrative Concentration Following Three Elections

Note: Vertical axis measures the Herfindahl Index of media narratives. Lines shown are lowess smoother trends.

The interpretation here is not that the political media have a hard time coming to an agreement over the meaning of an election; they achieved this reasonably well in 2008 and 2012.

Rather, 2016 presented a difficult case for political observers of all stripes. Democrats have been confused in the wake of 2016 at least in part because the sources they rely on for understanding politics have been confused themselves.

What Do You Do With A Narrative?

One thing important to remember about narratives is that they aren’t simply academic exercises. They suggest some action. I want to list a few things here that each narrative suggests as a course of action for the Democratic Party for 2020.

Table 1: Narratives and the Courses of Action they Suggest

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Narrative Campaign tactics Campaign messaging Candidate traits Identity politics Exogenous factors Sanders/Stein Sexism/Racism Mood of Electorate

Course of Action Innovations in campaign tactics, reallocation of campaign expenditures.

Innovations in campaign messaging.

Nominate different type of candidate in future. Screen for problematic traits. Rethink nomination process.

Lessen advocacy for underrepresented groups. Nominate white male, possibly a Midwesterner.

No need to rethink.

Seek to win over supporters for next election, or seek to defeat candidate early in nomination cycle.

Lessen advocacy for underrepresented groups. Nominate white man. Or push back.

No need to rethink.

As the table above suggests, the first two narratives – problems with campaign activities or campaign messaging – do not necessarily call for any massive rethinking of party goals.

Parties seek to refine their tactics and rhetoric all the time after losses, and can do so without dramatic changes to their coalition or core mission. Similarly, if the problem was exogenous factors (Russian interference, James Comey) or the mood of the electorate, there’s no real need for the party to rethink its approach. Those are luck of the draw and not really easy to plan for.

Elected Democrats could work to, say, battle Russian interference through their public offices, but in terms of the party and its campaign approach, that need not change.

On the other hand, if the problem is the candidate herself – if a different nominee would have won – that suggests some serious rethinking by the party. It needs to rethink just whom it nominates, figuring out exactly what candidate traits were so problematic last time and striving to avoid those in the next contest. It could also call for a reform to the party’s nomination processes – changing primaries to caucuses or vice versa, de-fanging superdelegates, changing the order of state contests, etc. If the narrative focused on other candidates, like Bernie Sanders 41

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and Jill Stein, that could call for going in several directions. Perhaps it means that the party needs to embrace those candidates’ supporters and try to win them over, lessening the chances that they’ll seek to hurt the nominee next time around. Conversely, it could mean trying to crush those candidacies early – going negative on Sanders as soon as he declares, for example – to limit their appeal.

Some of the most challenging narratives are those focusing on identity politics or persistent sexism and racism. One thing the party doesn’t necessarily have within its power is an ability to lessen bigotry throughout society. Instead, what the party might seek to do is moderate one of its core commitments, the advancement of underrepresented groups. It could make a tactical retreat from overt support for feminism or civil rights, and it could favor the nomination of white male candidates, perhaps those from the Midwest or with strong ties to it. Conversely, one could view persistent sexism and racism as a challenge to be beaten back. Perhaps by nominating a woman and installing her in the White House, this societal challenge could be lessened.

It seems reasonable to say that we saw some version of all these approaches attempted during the leadup to the 2020 Democratic nomination contest. But it’s also worth remembering that activists do not simply pick narratives at random or because of an especially effective op/ed they read. These narratives are embraced strategically. Activists may pick them precisely because they want to see the party move in a certain direction. But still, in many years, a dominant narrative emerges, and the party follows the relevant path. What happened between 2016 and 2020? Did activists settle on a narrative?

Continuing Disagreement

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I followed up repeatedly with the activists I’d first contacted in 2017 and 2018. Between December 2018 and February 2020, I reached out to all of them every two months, asking them their thoughts on the Democratic presidential nomination. I occasionally asked related questions about the basis for their candidate choices, the lessons of 2016, and so forth. In the December 2019 survey, in particular, I asked respondents to think back to 2016 and say what the best explanation for Hillary Clinton’s loss was that year.

Because I interviewed nearly all these activists in 2017 and 2018, I can compare their earlier answers to this question to the later answers. This is convenient and revealing, but I need to be up front about the limitations of this approach. I first spoke with them as part of lengthy interviews, giving them the opportunity to elaborate on the question of election loss. That’s a very different experience than answering a multiple-choice question on an electronic survey. So we wouldn’t necessarily expect their answers to these questions to match up perfectly over time.

That said, there’s a reasonable amount of coherence between their answers in 2017/18 and at the end of 2019. In the figure below, I show the percent of activists subscribing to each election narrative. For this figure, I only include the 28 activists who provided answers in both the initial interview and the late-2019 wave of the survey. The narratives are listed in declining order of support. Again, activists can name multiple narratives, and many did: activists subscribed to an average of 2.7 narratives in 2017 and 3.0 narratives in 2019. Only two activists in each wave subscribed to just one narrative.

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Figure 5 – Percent of Activists Supporting Each Narrative

What the figure shows is that a few narratives had roughly the same number of adherents in 2017 as they did in 2019, but some lost favor, especially those ascribing Clinton’s loss to errors of her campaign and its messaging. Meanwhile, other narratives became more popular, notably those blaming Clinton’s loss on activities by Russia and James Comey, divisive efforts

by Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, and inherent sexism and racism in the electorate. In sum, these

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Democratic activists became less likely to blame the campaign’s choices for the loss and more likely to blame things outside the control of the campaign, the candidate, and the party.

Also of note is that there doesn’t appear to have been any convergence of narratives across this time span. As with the media, activists’ interpretation of 2016 has become more dispersed with time; the mean number of narratives mentioned has increased, and there’s a less sharp ranking among them.

In the Figure below, I drill down a bit into the responses given in December 2019. This is not a large sample of activists – just 31 of them – so the lessons we can learn by dividing them into subgroups are rather tentative. Nonetheless, I’ve examined adherence to the narratives based on the activists’ sex, race, and experience in the party. The results are somewhat different from those reported above from the earlier surveys.

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Figure 6 - Percent of Activists Ascribing 2016 Loss to Narratives in December 2019

The starkest differences can be seen by sex. Most of the campaign/candidate narratives don’t have meaningful differences by sex, although men are substantially more likely to mention some variant of identity politics than women are (44 to 8). But on the last four variables, which blame things outside the campaign’s control for its loss, there are substantial differences by sex.

Women are far more likely than men to blame Russia or Comey (77 to 33), general sexism and racism in the electorate (77 to 22), and the mood of voters (15 to zero).

We see somewhat similar divisions when we break down the results by race, with nonwhite activists considerably more likely than white activists to blame Russia or Comey, or

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sexism and racism, for the loss. And Clinton supporters are far more likely to blame other candidates, and far less likely to blame choices by the Clinton campaign, than Sanders supporters are.

In the bottom row of the graph, I have again summed the last four narratives into a “not Clinton’s fault� variable. Again, women are overwhelmingly more likely than men to subscribe to this interpretation that Clinton and her campaign were not at fault, and supporters of Clinton from 2016 tend to agree. In a change since the earlier interviews, more people of color than whites now agree that Clinton was not at fault.

But the most important takeaway here is continued disagreement about just why the election came out as it did. Activists offered more narratives, and those narratives were less concentrated than they were a year or two earlier. An environment in which activist are increasingly divided about why the last election came out as it did, and in which the narratives they are embracing are those that exonerate the choices that the candidate, campaign, and party made, it is difficult for the party to coordinate on a path forward. But the narratives they increasingly agreed on, especially sexism/racism and candidate traits, suggested rethinking the nomination system and possibly nominating a moderate white man.

A Civiqs survey of potential caucusgoers in Iowa, conducted in September 2019, offers some confirmation of the differences in narrative adoption across sexes. As in the activist survey, men are somewhat more likely to blame Clinton and her focus on identity politics for her loss, while women are more likely to blame outside factors that do not implicate the candidate.

(Russian interference was the dominant narrative overall, but hardly the consensus choice.)

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Table 3 – Iowa Democratic Caucus Goer Survey, September 2019

Narrative

Men

Women

Democrats ran a bad campaign

12

9

Clinton was a flawed candidate

25

17*

Clinton focused too much on identity politics

4

1*

Clinton alienated the white working class

8

10

Russian interference

28

42*

Trump ran a more effective campaign

3

1*

Other reasons

17

10*

Notes: Online survey of 435 Democratic potential Iowa caucus goers, conducted by Iowa State University / Civiqs between September 13 and 17, 2019. * indicates difference is statistically significant at the p ≤ .10 level. Data courtesy of David Peterson.

How Narrative Loss Predicts Candidate Choice By the beginning of February 2020, just before the Iowa Caucuses, of the 61 activists whose candidate preferences I was able to ascertain, 38 had picked a favorite candidate. Among those, the main choices were Joe Biden (backed by 12 activists), Bernie Sanders (backed by nine), and Elizabeth Warren (backed by 8).

In the chart below, I break down the percent of those candidate’s supporters who ascribed Clinton’s loss to each narrative in the interviews I conducted in 2017 and 2018. For example, 45 percent of Biden’s supporters had said that Clinton’s loss was due campaign tactics, while 75 percent of Sanders’ supporters, and 71 percent of Warren’s supporters, had ascribed the loss to this narrative.

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We can immediately see some important patterns. Supporters of Biden tended to favor the first four narratives, and, compared to supporters of other candidates, were particularly supportive of the idea that Clinton had lost because of candidate traits and because of the identity politics narrative. Sanders’ supporters had strongly supported the idea that the campaign, its messaging, and candidate traits were to blame. They did not at all ascribe Clinton’s loss to sexism or racism, and, unsurprisingly, they did not blame Sanders or other candidates for her loss. Finally, while Warren’s supporters also blamed the Clinton campaign for problems, they were disproportionately likely to claim that Clinton had lost due to exogenous factors, other candidates, and persistent sexism and racism.

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Figure 7: Narrative Adoption in 2017-18 and Candidate Support in Feb 2020

Notes: Bars show the percent of a candidate’s supporters in early 2020 who ascribed Clinton’s 2016 loss to each narrative in the 2017-18 interviews. For example, among those who supported Joe Biden in early 2020, 45 percent had earlier said that Clinton had lost due to problems in her campaign.

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Here’s a simpler way to look at the relationship between narratives and candidate choice.

In the table below, I look at all the activists who offered one of the narratives to explain the 2016 election in the early interviews, and for each group, who their top candidate was in early 2020.

For example, among those who had said in 2017 and 2018 that Clinton lost due to the identity politics narrative (16 of the activists in total), five were endorsing Biden by early 2020, while only one each were backing Sanders and Warren, making Biden the favorite among that narrative group.

Table 4: Top 2020 Candidate among Adherents of 2016 Narratives 2016 Narrative Campaign Messaging Candidate Traits Identity Politics Exogenous Sanders/Stein Sexism/Racism Mood of Voters

Top Candidate for 2020 Sanders Biden Biden Biden Warren Sanders/Biden Warren/Biden Warren

Not Clinton’s fault Clinton’s fault

Warren Biden

Sanders was the favorite of those who had earlier said that campaign failures were the cause of the 2016 outcome. Among those who blamed Clinton’s loss on campaign messaging, candidate traits, and identity politics, Biden was the top choice. Meanwhile, among those who said that Clinton lost because of outside factors like Russia or James Comey, or because of the mood of the voters, Warren was the top choice. The bottom two lines of the table show that among those who ascribed to any of the four narratives exonerating Clinton for her loss, Warren was the top choice, while those blaming Clinton for her loss leaned toward Biden.

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The findings here do not demonstrate causality, to be sure. That is, I can’t prove that activists came to support Elizabeth Warren in 2020 because they had earlier believed that Russia affected the 2016 election. However, the language activists use when describing their candidate choices certainly supports this idea.

In the survey I conducted between late 2018 and early 2020, when activists told me they had decided to back a particular candidate, I invited them to explain what had led them to do so.

Supporters of Joe Biden certainly sounded like those who viewed the Clinton campaign as plagued with troubles and saw electability as the main concern in choosing candidates; virtually all of them mentioned Trump in their explanations. “I think the former Vice President has what it takes to match Trump, outwork him and beat him,” said one. “I believe he is the most able to beat Donald Trump,” volunteered another.

Warren supporters, conversely, sounded like those who rejected the idea that Clinton lost because of who she was or how she campaigned. Rather, since they largely saw 2016 turning on events outside the candidate’s control, they were supporting Warren because her policy preferences were closer to their own and they simply liked her. Said one, “I think Warren would be the best president and she closely aligns with my views.” Another volunteered, “I will support any nominee. And I think Elizabeth is terrific. So why not help her now?” “The candidates policies have been rolling out over the past few months and have been closest to my own beliefs,” a third agreed.

The language used by supporters of Sanders was somewhat different. Many of his backers emerged early in the cycle, and indeed had been supporters of his in 2016 and had never really stopped backing him. They generally didn’t volunteer concerns about electability, but rather spoke of a combination of policy preferences and authenticity. “Bernie is the OG when it

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comes to progressive policy. Why support ‘Bernie Light’ when you can get the real thing?” one asked. Another offered, “I am a democratic socialist and I believe Bernie Sanders is the candidate the best reflects my beliefs.” Finally, said one, Sanders is “the candidate whose principled progressive policies and personal authenticity inspired a movement!”

A Fixation on Electability In chapter 2, I talked about the calculation that party insiders make in a presidential nomination decision. They are trying to figure out the right balance between someone who can deliver what the party wants and someone who can win the general election. But what if the party can’t figure out what it wants? Arguably, the confusion among Democrats I have described in this chapter paved the path for such a problem. To be sure, Democrats still believed the things they had believed for years, but they also desperately wanted Donald Trump out of office and couldn’t figure out why he was there in the first place. In such a situation, possibly the easiest thing to do is to fall back on the formula believed to have worked in the past to maximize electability.

Shortly before the 2016 Iowa caucuses, a nationwide survey asked potential Democratic voters and caucusgoers what quality was most important to them in a candidate. Forty-six percent said “a candidate who comes closest to your views on issues” while 38 percent said “the right personal style and strong leadership qualities.” A mere 16 percent chose “a candidate with the best chance to defeat the Republican candidate.” 13 Importantly, this was not the attitude among Democrats heading into 2020.

13

https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/NBCWSJDecember2015PollMONDAY.pdf

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Even if activists couldn’t agree on the cause of the party’s last loss, they could agree on something else: electability was vitally important to them. In my June 2019 survey, I asked the activists which they considered more important in a nominee: an ability to defeat the Republican nominee, or a commitment to longstanding Democratic goals and values. Of those who responded to this question, 22 said defeating the Republican, while just five said a commitment to party goals. This finding is consistent with polling conducted in the lead up to 2020, which demonstrated that the focus on electability was both strong and unusual in this cycle, as I noted in chapter 2. The 2020 contest was the first of the last four in which Democratic voters were prioritizing a candidate’s electability over agreeing with them on most issues. Thanks to negative partisanship generally, and attitudes toward Donald Trump specifically, Democrats were willing to surrender quite a bit to defeat Trump.

The overall assessment among Democratic activists seemed to be that electability was the paramount issue, but it was not completely clear who the most electable candidate was early on, and this made it difficult to pick a favorite candidate. “The people who are most publicly identified with the Democratic Party, not many of them have endorsed,” former DNC national chair Don Fowler explained to me in mid-2019. “I think those people, and I include myself in that, would rather win with Lucifer than lose to the Republicans again.”

Activists and their Emotions This combination of beliefs – a disagreement about why they had lost the last election, an overriding belief that electability was the most important feature in a candidate, but a disagreement over who the most electable candidate was – took an emotional and informational

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toll on party activists trying to pick a candidate for 2020. Several activists with whom I spoke described a sense of trauma when thinking back to the previous election cycle.

I want to be clear what I mean by the term “trauma.” Obviously, these activists suffered no physical damage as a result of the 2016 election cycle, and whether their emotional experiences emanating from that election should be considered psychological damage is open to question. I don’t mean to use the term lightly. But as many conversations suggested, that election shook them. It caused them to question their own understanding of politics, of what the American political system would and would not accept.

Some of this trauma stemmed from the surprisingly divisive and lengthy nomination contest between Sanders and Clinton in 2016. Iowa political activist Julie Stauch claimed that she and her colleagues were fearful of ripping the party apart: “One of the most negative things out of 2015 and ’16 was the animosity between many Hillary supporters and many Bernie supporters. People don’t want to pick too early because they don’t want to get sucked into the internecine conflict.”

But perhaps the more traumatizing legacy centered on Clinton’s loss to Trump despite her consistent polling lead and her strong performances in the general election debates. The outcome undermined many activists’ longstanding beliefs about just what sorts of candidates are electable. According to Kathy Eckhouse of Des Moines, this has had a particularly pernicious effect on women candidates. Political activists “have convinced themselves that a woman can’t win,” she said. “They can no longer say that an African American can’t win, because that happened. But they will say, ‘I just don’t think a woman can win.’” According to Eckhouse and her husband Herb, some activists who otherwise would be enthusiastic supporters of Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Amy Klobuchar were hesitant to commit because they believed that

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voters have a bias against female candidates. (The couple themselves don’t share these beliefs and claimed to have had significant disagreements with friends over this.)

“It’s an emotional thing,” Kathy Eckhouse continued. “[Activists] are so traumatized by 2016, and they’re so terrified of revisiting that night and having it all happen again. And I think they like to think that they’re just being practical and a little bit cynical and realistic.” Those fears, according to Eckhouse, led some activists to support Joe Biden, not because he was their top preference, but because they thought they were playing it safe.

One additional point of anxiety activists mention is the high cost of making the wrong choice. Political consultant Jeff Link summed up, “The overriding sense I get from people is that choice matters this time more than in previous caucuses because Trump has raised the stakes.” A Las Vegas political organizer agreed, “There’s this [group] that’s like, ‘We’re waiting for the field to clear out and see who’s left.’ …I’ve seen across the board, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be wrong. I endorsed Hillary, she lost.’ There’s still that real visceral gut reaction of not wanting to invest in a candidate who may lose.”

In the October 2019 wave of the survey, I included a set of questions asking activists about their emotional state when thinking about the presidential nomination. 14 I asked them to evaluate how enthusiastic, afraid, proud, hopeful, and anxious they were on a four-point scale ranging from “not at all” to “extremely.” Activists who were feeling hopeful, enthusiastic, or proud about the nomination contest were much more likely to have decided on a presidential candidate. Meanwhile, those who were feeling anxious about the contest were far less likely to have picked a candidate.

14 Question text: “I’d like to ask you about the emotions you've been experiencing during this contest.

Generally speaking, how do you feel when thinking about the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest or talking about it with others?”

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What Democrats Argued About when they Argued About the 2020 Nomination If you were to think back on some of the more memorable disagreements between Democratic presidential candidates during the invisible primary, you might remember some moderate candidates ganging up on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren about Medicare For All, or Pete Buttigieg’s transparency about his fundraising practices or days as a business consultant, or a rambling rant by Joe Biden. As I explain in this section, though, judging from the evidence I’ve collected, the Democratic Party was fighting about the things it has been fighting about for decades – race, gender, and how those interact with electability. I’ll break these down here to provide some examples.

Race In addition to being the largest presidential candidate field in the party’s history, it was also the most diverse. Notably, many of the upper tier of candidates who qualified for debates throughout 2019 – including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Andrew Yang – were people of color, while it was the bulk of white male candidates who ended up underperforming and withdrawing relatively early. Sometimes those candidates ended up poking fun of each other, and themselves, for their relative anonymity and, as far as reporters and many voters were concerned, interchangeability.

In May of 2019, writer Derek Davidson posted a photo of Rep. Seth Moulton on Twitter, with the text, “After a lot of soul searching I think I’ve found my 2020 candidate and it’s Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio (pictured), let’s do this thing folks.” Moulton picked up on this and responded, “No Derek, this is New York City Mayor Eric Swalwell.” Tim Ryan then

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responded to Moulton: “Thank you for clarifying Sen. Bennet.” Michael Bennet then replied to Ryan, “Thanks for all your service to the good people of South Bend. My whole family loves Chasten’s Twitter feed.” 15 Race was at the core of many of the party’s debates and discussions throughout the invisible primary. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for example, was occasionally criticized by other candidates for his unconventional pedigree as a presidential candidate, representing a city of just 100,000 people. But a lot of that criticism focused on his strained relationships with African Americans in South Bend, particularly related to his 2012 firing of the city’s first African American police chief, and a mid-2019 fatal shooting of a black resident by a police officer.

One of the defining features of debates throughout 2019 was frontrunner Joe Biden boasting the support of the bulk of African American primary voters, 16 and African American candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris trying to exploit his unpopular historical stances and awkward statements to pry some of those voters lose. Shortly before the June 2019 debate, for example, Biden gave a speech talking up his own experiences in the U.S. Senate working with people of vastly different viewpoints. He specifically mentioned the civility he demonstrated working with the late Senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, two ardent segregationists. “He never called me ‘boy,’ Biden said of Eastland. “He always called me ‘son.’”

At the June debate, Harris called out Biden for this comment. While conceding the importance of civility, she said, “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two

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https://twitter.com/MichaelBennet/status/1129932450073858048 Caputo, Marc. 2019. “Poll: Biden Continues to Dominate Among Black Voters.” Politico. December 13.

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United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing.” Harris then famously talked about her own experiences with busing growing up in California public schools.

In the exchange that followed, Biden appeared to endorse local control of school integration. 17 Polling following this exchange saw a substantial, if ephemeral, shift, with Harris gaining several points and Biden losing some.

In the November 2019 debate, Cory Booker criticized Biden for his resistance to marijuana legalization, arguing that marijuana was “already legal for privileged people” and that “the war on drugs has been a war on black and brown people.” Booker further said that black voters were angry because “we are nominating someone that… isn’t trusted, doesn’t have authentic connection.” Biden defended himself by talking up his work with Barack Obama and his support within the African American community. “I come out of the black community in terms of my support. If you notice, I have more people supporting me in the black community... because they know me. They know who I am.” He then claimed the support of “the only African American woman that had ever been elected to the United States Senate,” referring to former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, failing to mention that Kamala Harris was a U.S. Senator and was, at that time, running against him. 18 To many observers, it was surprising that so many African American voters were sticking with Biden. I was offered a number of explanations for this in conversations with activists and attendees at the James Clyburn Fish Fry in Columbia, South Carolina, in the summer of 2019.

The Fish Fry is an annual Democratic Party event, funded largely by Rep. Clyburn and open to 17 Jennings, Natalie, and Eugene Scott. 2019. “The Full Kamala Harris-Joe Biden Exchange Over Race and Busing, Annotated.” Washington Post. June 28.

18 Sullivan, Kate. 2019. “Booker Criticizes Biden’s Opposition to Legalizing Marijuana: ‘I Thought You Might Have Been High.’” CNN. November 21.

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the public, generally running on the same night as a high-dollar state party fundraiser. The year before a presidential election, it becomes one of the first opportunities for people to hear from all the Democratic presidential candidates. Given that African Americans make up more than a quarter of South Carolina and a majority of the state’s Democrats, and given Clyburn’s prominence in the state’s black political community, the Fish Fry is a highly visible event for black Democrats early in the nomination process.

Dalton Tresvant, an African American long term staff member in Clyburn’s district office, explained Biden’s appeal to me. “You’ve got to remember that in South Carolina, black voters are more conservative in South Carolina than they are in New York. So-called progressives need to understand that.” He described a conversation in a barber shop about Biden’s comments on working with people like James Eastland. “The guys at the barber shop were saying, ‘Yeah, he had to.’ He had to work with those guys because a lot of them remember Strom Thurmond. And they were saying, ‘Yeah, well you couldn’t get anything done unless you worked with that crew.’ So they kind of understood…. Booker needs to leave that alone because it’s going to backfire on him.”

Don Fowler, the white former DNC chair from South Carolina, agreed with this sentiment. “I have the highest positive regard for Joe Biden. I think he would be a good president. But he does make faux pas here and there. And what happened with respect to the Eastland comment… is sort of typical and I hope that that he can minimize that. I think the objections that Senator Booker rose was a bunch of crap, frankly…. I think Senator Booker feels that he’s falling behind Senator Harris and he had to do something to attract attention and so I think that’s the explanation for that. But those kinds of comments are not helpful.”

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Biden, noted Tresvant, had deeply developed relationships with prominent African American community members that predated his time in the vice presidency. He referenced a 2007 visit by Biden to a conference of presidents of historically black colleges and universities.

“I was shocked,” said Tresvant. “Every one of those college presidents knew him when he went in to sit and talk to them.”

Several other African American Fish Fry attendees volunteered support for Biden to me. “[Biden] seems to be better qualified than anyone else with having been Vice President. It makes him a little more qualified than anyone else” said Caroline Taylor. According to Dee Dee Washington, “President Trump has taught us, be yourself and people like you. And that’s what Joe Biden does. He’s himself. What you see is what you get.” Asked about Biden’s comments on working with segregationists in the Senate, Washington replied, “That really doesn’t bother me, because once debate starts, they’re going to be digging dirt on each and every one of them. So there will be comments like that about all of them, so that doesn’t bother me.”

As of the end of the invisible primary season, the seeds of a recurrent rift in the party had already been sown. Joe Biden had emerged as the party “regular” candidate, with the support of a broad range of insiders and, importantly, the plurality of African American voters, while Bernie Sanders was the more ideological candidate opposed to him in the early primaries and caucuses.

This division, hardly uncommon in Democratic presidential primaries, is often portrayed as a regular/reform split or an insider/outsider split, but it has an important racial dimension, as well.

That is, the bulk of the party’s African American voters and elected officials would be more or less content with their presidential choice, while a largely white group of progressive activists would be protesting that their voice was being silenced.

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Nonetheless, for many African Americans, the lessons of 2016 hung over their 2020 decisions in a particular way. The electability concern was a particularly potent one. Many African American voters would no doubt have liked to see another African American president, but many shared the concern that such a candidate would have a harder time winning than, say, a moderate white man. It’s not so much that African American voters or political activists were more likely to believe in such electability concerns than whites were, just that they saw the costs of losing another presidential election as higher for them.

Women and the Nomination The final question of the December 2019 Democratic debate was asked by moderator Judy Woodruff. “In the spirit of the season,” she asked, “I’d like to ask each one of you, is there someone else among these candidates that you would – you have two options, one, a candidate from whom you would ask forgiveness for something maybe that was said tonight or another time, or a candidate to whom you would like to give a gift?” 19 The responses were varied, and some more serious than others. And of course the wording of the question made no reference to gender. But the pattern that emerged was pretty clear: the five men on the stage offered gifts – a book, a private phone number, teamwork, wisdom, etc. – while the women, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, offered apologies for their behavior. 20 All this is to say that gender showed up in this nomination process in the ways it often does in politics, in both subtle and unsubtle ways. To be sure, the diverse candidate field included several prominent women candidates – Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand – who dominated the debates and public discussion 2019. This in 19 20

The Fix. 2019. “Transcript: The December Democratic Debate.” Washington Post. December 19. https://twitter.com/Smilla1972/status/1207866471654789121

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itself was a dramatic shift from any previous presidential nomination race. But women candidates were treated differently from their male competitors, and male and female activists processed political information differently from each other.

Thirty-one activists responded to my December 2019 survey, including 13 women and 18 men. Among that group, six women had picked a favorite presidential candidate while seven hadn’t; 12 men had picked a favorite presidential candidate while six hadn’t. Throughout 2019, the men in my survey were consistently more likely to have picked a favorite candidate. There is additional evidence of this in the Civiqs Iowa poll from September 2019, in which men were approximately seven percentage points more likely to have picked a favorite presidential candidate than women were (a statistically significant result).

Meanwhile, when I asked respondents which candidates they were considering, many female candidates performed well by this measure. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren often led the field. Yet very few activists committed to supporting female candidates. These activists, that is, were certainly open to the idea of a woman nominee, but few were willing to take the steps to make that happen.

A survey conducted by Civiqs in May and June of 2019 helps shed some light on this finding. That survey that potential Democratic primary voters were overwhelmingly concerned with electability as a main factor in selecting a candidate. So they first asked respondents whom they would support if the primary election were held that day. Later in the poll, they asked them which candidate they would choose if they could wave a magic wand and make them president.

In the first question, Joe Biden was the winner, besting all other candidates by at least ten points.

In the magic wand question, Elizabeth Warren marginally beat the others. Going from a horserace to a magic wand cost Biden ten points and gave Warren five. Now, there’s nothing

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necessarily invidious about this finding; Democratic voters were making strategic decisions about whom they liked and weighing that against who they thought could win. But then they asked respondents what they would change about their “magic wand” candidate to make them more electable. Candidate gender was by far the most mentioned factor. 21 Figure 6 sheds some additional light on this question, using a similar “magic wand” survey conducted by Data for Progress and YouGov Blue in June 2019. 22 For each of the eight leading candidates, I have subtracted how the candidate did in the magic wand question from how they did in the initial trial heat question. This is essentially a measure of how much “electability” was helping the candidates – it shows how much additional support a candidate was getting because they had to win a general election against Donald Trump. I have displayed the results among different subgroups within the self-identified Democrats in the sample – white men, white women, African American men, and African American women.

As can be seen, Joe Biden was overwhelmingly the beneficiary of electability concerns.

People gave him an additional seven to eight points of support, similarly across subgroups, because of concerns about the general election. The largest overall electability penalty was exacted from Elizabeth Warren, who lost an average of two points, with the greatest effect among white male Democratic voters. There was a similarly-sized negative effect on Pete Buttigieg, concentrated mainly among white women. Interestingly, the two African American candidates, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, suffered a modest average electability penalty that was concentrated mainly among African American men, who moved 3.5 points away from Harris and 4.4 points away from Booker out of electability concerns. That is, there were substantial numbers of African American Democratic men who would have supported Booker or 21 22

https://www.avalanchestrategy.com/electability http://filesforprogress.org/datasets/pre_post_debate/FIRSTDEBATE_MEMO.pdf

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Harris, but were concerned they couldn’t defeat Trump, and were backing Biden instead.

Interestingly, white men thought Harris was more electable. Attitudes toward Bernie Sanders were mixed, with black men seeing him as more electable and black women seeing him as less so.

Figure 8: Electability Effect for Leading Democratic Candidates, June 2019

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Notes: Data from Data for Progress / YouGov Blue. Survey conducted June 24-26, 2019.

Analysis limited to self-identified Democrats. Dataset includes 847 men, 1,358 women, 1,439 whites, and 433 African Americans. Data courtesy Kevin Reuning.

In chapter 6, I will describe a survey experiment I ran showing that some political narratives had more of an effect on women than on men, causing them to change their views of what could happen in politics and who could and couldn’t be elected. This was a recurrent them in my activist interviews. Many of the women I interviewed were more likely to suggest that the 2016 election caused them to update their views of politics, but that the 2018 elections did so, as well.

Conversations with two New Hampshirites suggested some important differences in beliefs about electability. Attorney Bill Shaheen, speaking in early 2019, discussed the sort of candidate he was looking for as a presidential nominee: I don’t particularly care about a single issue. I just want to beat Trump and I want to beat him badly because we need super-majorities in both houses to fix the things he’s broken…. I’ve never been that determined to say, “I want someone who thinks just like me.” I don’t think that candidate exists. I want a good person who’s going to work hard and who’s smart and who can change this country because we are really in tough shape here.

The lessons of 2016 clearly hung over Shaheen, but in a way that made him ideologically flexible. He was willing to surrender quite a few policy goals to get an overall win. Compare that with the perspective of State Representative Mary Jane Mulligan from Hanover: Many people are saying that we want to have a candidate that can beat Trump. Well, yes, I do too, but I’m not going to let Trump dictate to me who I have to vote for in this Presidential primary. I’m not going to let Trump tell me who I have to vote for. I will not

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allow him to take that control, my vote away from me.... I don’t believe that the American people need to go that low to get him out. He’s only got a base of 30 percent, and maybe they’re hard core and... if he shoots and kills somebody, they’re still willing to embrace him. But that’s 30 percent, and there’s 70 percent of us out there.

Some activists experienced something of a political transformation in the years since the 2016 election, and not always driven directly by that election. To provide a better sense of this, I want to highlight the example of one of my respondents, whom I will call Sandra. (Due to the personal nature of the interview, she requested to not have her actual name used.) During college, Sandra was a victim of sexual assault. She later moved to Washington, DC, and became active with an interest group with a feminist orientation. She was an early backer of Joe Biden’s presidential bid, from long before he officially entered the race, due to his stances on a number of issues of personal resonance for her, and especially his advocacy for victims of sexual assault.

This began to change in late 2018 and early 2019 for Sandra. One of the catalyzing events for her was the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The confirmation hearings, focusing on allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford while in high school, ended with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee angrily dismissing the charges and voting to confirm Kavanaugh. For Sandra, as with many others, the reaction was markedly personal and radicalizing: I’ve never had an abortion. And I’m primarily radicalized by things that I’m directly impacted by, as reflected by my work. But… I was part of a group of thousands of women who immediately went and got a long-acting reversible birth control solution as soon as Kavanaugh was named to the Court…. I started to see the personal and political coming together in a way that it hadn’t for me previously.

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This radicalizing process was spurred on in the late spring of 2019 by several other events. In early June, Biden reiterated his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funds for most abortions. He was promptly pilloried by Democrat leaders and other presidential candidates, as his stance, once a fairly mainstream one in Democratic circles, had become far less popular with time. Senator Warren, for one, used the moment as an opportunity to brandish her pro-choice credentials: “Women of means will still have access to abortions,” she said during an MSNBC town hall. “Who won’t will be poor women. It will be working women and women who can’t afford to take off three days from work, and very young women. It will be women who have been raped and women who have been molested by someone in their own family.” 23 After two days of such criticism, Biden reversed his position: “If I believe health care is a right, as I do,” Biden said at a DNC gala, “I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code.” 24 At roughly this same time, several Republican-controlled state legislatures were forcing the abortion issue to the fore of American politics. Alabama enacted a law to fundamentally ban abortion, joining Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, and several other states in seeking to draw a Supreme Court ruling that might overturn Roe v. Wade. 25 All these events coming together over a short period of time had the effect of elevating abortion as a salient issue for Sandra. The earlier Democratic approach of welcoming a diverse range of views on the topic within the party no longer seemed adequate:

23 Nilsen, Ella. 2019. “Elizabeth Warren Makes a Forceful Argument on How the Hyde Amendment Worsens Inequality.” Vox. June 5. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/5/18654627/abortionelizabeth-warren-hyde-amendment-biden-msnbc 24 Glueck, Katie. 2019. “Joe Biden Denounces Hyde Amendment, Reversing His Position.” New York Times. June 6.

25 Epstein, Kayla. 2019. “This Abortion Bill is Probably Unconstitutional. A Republican Lawmaker Says That’s the Point.” Washington Post. August 12.

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The right are single issue voters on abortion. And the left will continue to experience this unless we all also become single issue voters on abortion. And our big tent outlook as a party is now going to directly harm women. Because we tell people that you can be neutral on abortion and still be welcomed in the Democratic Party. And that’s not serving the most loyal base of the Democratic Party right now. And I think some people, including myself, are really angry about that.

Sandra ended up reevaluating her support for Biden and started looking for a woman candidate: I just truly don’t think that these really privileged men, who have been in this work for a really long time, who in many ways are great feminists and are men that I really respect and admire…. I am wondering if they’re the right people for this moment, because of how distinctly anti-woman this moment is.

Sandra, who had previously been a staunch Biden supporter in my survey, switched her affiliation to undecided in April 2019. By the October 2019 wave of my survey, she was a strong supporter of Warren.

Consequences of Division Perhaps the clearest conclusion of this evidence is the lack of a clear conclusion. That is, judging from conversations I had with all these activists, there was no consensus view within the Democratic Party about why they lost the presidency in 2016, and they just grew more divided about this question over time. There was no agreement that the party was too far left or too far right, that its messaging or tactics were wrong, that their candidate was flawed or that the system was stacked against her, or anything else. If, in previous years, activists might have been guided by political journalism toward developing a narrative about the election, the media provided no

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such help in 2016; they were just as confused and divided over its causes and meaning as other political observers.

This ongoing disagreement created an environment in which a “safe” candidate – a white, moderate man with some cross-party appeal – was increasingly seen as the smart choice. That choice would help get around some of the difficult conversations at the party’s core. But as we’ll see in the next chapter, those conversations would prove difficult to ignore.

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