Cambridge University Press fall 2021 chapter sampler

Fall 2021 sampler from Cambridge University Press

All information correct at the time of production.

Contents Running from Bondage..............................................................................................4 The Enablers................................................................................................................44 What Capitalism Needs.............................................................................................61 Industry Unbound.......................................................................................................97 The Attack on Higher Education...............................................................................112 Extinctions....................................................................................................................166 After the Virus..............................................................................................................185 Retail and wholesale representatives.......................................................................210 Customer Services......................................................................................................211 Publicity........................................................................................................................211 Cambridge University Press Around the World......................................................212

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Running from Bondage Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America Karen Cook Bell

UK / US publication July 2021 9781108831543 Hardback £18.99 $24.95 USD $28.95 CAD

Running from Bondage tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, who comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell’s enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape.

She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage broadens and complicates how we study and teach this momentous event, one that emphasizes the chances taken by these ‘Black founding mothers’ and the important contributions they made to the cause of liberty.

Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award. She specializes in the studies of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history.

‘This pathbreaking and beautifully written work centers the voices of Black women in slavery and abolition. A must-read.’

Anne C. Bailey, author of The Weeping Time

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CHAPTER 3

“A Well Dressed Woman Named Jenny” Revolutionary Black Women, 1776−1781

Runaway last September, from the subscriber, living upon Monk’s Neck, about 13 miles above the town of Petersburg, a Virginia born negro wench named Jenny, who carried with her a child named Winney. The wench was very big with child when she went away, is about 25 years old, near 5 feet 2 inches high, and of a yellow complexion. She carried with her a green shalloon gown, a pale blue durants quilt much worn, a white Virginia cloth cotton coat and waistcoat, coat and waistcoat striped with copperas and blue, and another suit checked with blue. The child is between two and three years old, is of a yellower complexion than its mother, and clothed like her. As she generally goes well dressed, I expect she will alter her name and the child’s, and will endeavor to pass as a free woman . . .

Purdie’s Virginia Gazette, April 11, 1777

B

y september 1776, jenny, a “well dressed” twenty-five-yearold enslaved woman who lived on a farm on Monk’s Neck, thirteen miles from Petersburg, Virginia, was eight months pregnant. Over the past eight months, she had surely overheard her enslaver, Allen Freeman, discussing the ongoing crisis with Great Britain. She had heard of Dunmore’s Proclamation through the enslaved internal communication network. She knew that if she were to reach the lines of the British Army, both she and her two-year-old daughter Winney could claim their freedom from bondage.1 Allen Freeman would go on to serve in the Revolutionary War in defense of American independence.

Throughout the early months of 1776, Virginians were feeling the impact 67

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of Dunmore’s Proclamation. Enslaved men, women, and children were leaving farms and plantations to catch the breath of freedom.

Monk’s Neck, located in Dinwiddie County, where the nation’s first free Black eighteenth-century rural physician Dr. Thomas Stewart resided, included several farms where tobacco, cereals, and grains were produced.2 Jenny spent months planning her escape, intending to leave with her daughter at night to avoid detection. They would travel the road that hundreds of other fugitives walked to reach Richmond, the nearest city, to pass as free persons, in hopes of reaching a British vessel. She took several garments with her in preparation for the fall weather, which included “a green shalloon gown, a pale blue durants quilt . . ., a white Virginia cloth cotton coat and waistcoat, [a] coat and waistcoat striped with copperas and blue, and another suit checked with blue.” (Figure 3.1.) Her enslaver noted that her daughter is “cloathed [sic] like her and she generally goes well dressed.”3 At the time Allen Freeman placed the advertisement for Jenny on April 11, 1777, she had been a fugitive for seven months.

None of Jenny’s probable movements, the impetus of her flight, or her experience in fugitivity, are recorded in the existing archives. Still, it is certain that the publicity and intention of the runaway ad challenged her concealment and freedom. If fugitivity is “the artful escape of objectification” (racial, commodified, legal/political), Jenny’s disappearance was a defiant act against these constraints.4 Fugitive women “subverted the very paradigm of enslavement – immobility, disembodiment, violation – and created an alternative self” by pursuing a rival geography.5 The discourse of runaway advertisements remained an ever-looming and corporeal threat for the absconding slave. According to Marisa Fuentes, “this discursive power combined with the legal right of whites to interrogate, inspect, probe, and detain any Black suspect made fugitivity both an insecure and defiant status.”6 In Virginia, laws enacted in 1723 and 1748 prescribed punishment by dismemberment for attempts at escape.

Consequently, fugitivity embodied both a critique of slavery and the precarity of the fugitive condition.7 Yet, the Revolutionary War bolstered the independence of Black women, gave them increased access to their families with whom they fled, and greater autonomy in their daily lives once they reached safe havens.

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“A WELL DRESSED WOMAN NAMED JENNY”

3.1 Jenny, “a yellow Negro Girl,” wears a chintz gown “with a large flower and yellow stripes,” a pink coloured moreen petticoat, a “new black peeling bonnet,” under “a chip hat trimmed with gauze and feathers,” a white apron, and a “pair of blue worsted shoes with white heels”; she carries a piece of “new stamped linen, a purple flower and stripe . . . She is very fond of dress . . . she has gone either to New York or Baltimore.” New York Journal, December 17, 1782. Illustration by Eric H. Schnitzer.

LANDSCAPES OF FREEDOM

At the time Thomas Jefferson penned the majestic words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and have a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Samuel Hopkins in 1776 published A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, which became a leading anti-slavery tract of the Revolution. In

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this tract, Hopkins summed up the argument against slavery and anticipated later themes of American abolitionism. Hopkins equated the moral evil of slavery with the slave trade, which he classified as sin by emphasizing the link between slavery and racism, and called on the Continental Congress to abolish slavery throughout the United States.8 Like Hopkins, many colonists had already begun exploring the relationship between slavery and the principles underpinning the American cause. In Massachusetts, James Otis, Nathaniel Appleton, the Reverend Samuel Webster, and John Allen condemned slavery’s opposition to “the law of nature.” Their views were echoed by Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania, and were cheered on by English friends of the American cause, including Granville Sharp and Thomas Day. Enslaved women and men in Boston participated in this debate. Led by Sambo Freeman, a group of them petitioned the General Court for emancipation, arguing that “the efforts made by the Legislature of this province in their last sessions to free themselves from Slavery gave us, who are in that deplorable state, a high degree of satisfaction.”9 Another group of Boston Blacks reminded the Massachusetts legislators that “every principle from which America has acted in the course of her unhappy difficulties with Great Britain, pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favour [sic] of your petitioners.”10 In the spring of 1775, enslaved African Americans in Bristol and Worcester, Massachusetts, petitioned the Committee of Correspondence of Worcester to aid them in obtaining freedom. As a result of this petition, a convention was held in Worcester on June 14, 1775 at which it was resolved by the White residents that “we abhor the enslaving of any of the human race, and particularly that of the Negroes in this country, and that whenever there shall be a door opened, or opportunity present for anything to be done towards emancipation of the Negroes, we will use our influence and endeavor that such a thing may be brought about.”11 Petitions for freedom were ubiquitous in Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1773 and 1774, enslaved women and men presented five petitions to the Massachusetts legislature and had them printed in newspapers and pamphlets. Drawing inspiration from the political ideology of the Revolutionary crisis, they made similar arguments in favor of their own natural rights. African Americans also brought freedom suits to court.

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Reverend Jeremy Belknap of Boston noted the rising number of freedom suits brought by Massachusetts Blacks during the 1770s. In the two decades before 1783, thirty Black men and women sued their enslavers for their freedom in the Massachusetts courts, with only one unfavorable decision.12 In Connecticut, enslaved women and men petitioned the state legislature for their liberty, claiming that they were not only oppressed in their own burdens, but they contemplated with horror “the miserable Condition of Our Children, who are training up, and kept in Preparation, for a like State of Bondage and Servitude.”13 A few Connecticut petitions came from African Americans whose enslavers fled with the British. The slave Pomp sent a request in October 1779 to the legislature praying that the state would emancipate him after his enslaver Jeremiah Leaming voluntarily joined the British troops in Norwalk. Although Pomp, who was married to a free Black woman, ran away, he was still considered a part of the estate of Leaming under Connecticut law.14 A month later, eight bondwomen and bondmen in Salem, Connecticut, enslaved by William Browne, petitioned the General Assembly for their freedom. Among them were Prue and her three children, who stated “that our good mistress, the free State of Connecticut, engaged in a war with tyranny, will not sell good honest Whigs and friends of freedom and independence, as we are.”15 Similarly an enslaved woman, Belinda Sutton, petitioned the Assembly stating that although she had been serving her enslaver for more than forty years, her labors had not brought her any comfort or security. She begged for freedom for herself and her “poor daughter.”16 Belinda was the mother of two children, Joseph and Prine. She recognized the vulnerable condition of enslaved women and girls by pleading for the freedom of her daughter. Belinda’s enslaver, John Royall, willed her to his daughter “in case [Belinda] does not choose her freedom.” Royall fled the United States for England during the Revolution, where he died in 1781. In a codicil to his will, John Royall granted Belinda and her children their freedom and a pension of thirty pounds for three years.17 The Black population of New England was relatively small, numbering 16,034 persons on the eve of the American Revolution.18 Between 1774 and 1790, Connecticut’s Black population decreased by 1,045 or 71

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16.1 percent.19 The reduction in population was caused not only by death through war and combat service, but also by Loyalist enslavers fleeing with their bondmen and bondwomen; however, some of the enslaved achieved self-emancipation.20 Between 1700 and 1789, over 800 runaway slave notices appeared in New England newspapers.21 A sample of sixtytwo runaway advertisements from the New England region during the Revolutionary Era reveals that these fugitives came from thirty-seven towns. Massachusetts, with a Black population of 5,249 out of 349,094 in 1776, had the largest number of fugitives, at thirty-two. Half of these runaways came from Boston, which had a Black population of 682 in 1776. Connecticut, where eighteen runaways escaped from eleven towns, ranked second. In 1774, with 6,464 persons, Connecticut had the largest African American population in New England. The remaining fugitives came from New Hampshire and Rhode Island.22 Of the sixty-two fugitives mentioned in these advertisements, eight were women or girls, while fiftyfour were men or boys.23 These figures are not surprising, given the fact that male slaves generally outnumbered females in New England.

Furthermore, as domestics, Black women would be under close surveillance of housewives and hence had fewer opportunities to escape than did men, whose work frequently kept them outdoors.24 Yet, enslaved women took advantage of every opportunity to escape bondage.

In the New England region, 1776 was a watershed year for escapees. As free Black men were welcomed to serve in the Patriot Army in 1776 following General George Washington’s reversal of an earlier policy which prevented their enlistment, enslaved women made plans for their own declaration of independence from bondage.25 Sarah Seheter, a Boston fugitive in 1776, had been in servitude in both Providence, Rhode Island, and Concord, Massachusetts. She had labored as a cook, laundress, and maid in the homes of prominent New England families. She was also skilled in the domestic arts of spinning, knitting, and weaving.26 Drawing inspiration from the revolutionary climate which permeated Boston in 1775–1776, Sarah made a daring run for freedom. The Siege of Boston that lasted from April 19, 1775 until March 17, 1776 marked the opening phase of the Revolutionary War and proved an opportune time for enslaved women like Sarah to escape. Following the Battles of Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775, militia units in Massachusetts blocked land 72

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access to Boston. In the Battle of Bunker Hill, more than one hundred African Americans and Native Americans fought for American freedom.27 Among the Black men were Silas Burdoo, who claimed in his pension application that “he had chased the British back to Boston and promptly reenlisted in May 1775, arriving in Charles Town common while the Battle of Bunker Hill was raging.”28 As a British-occupied city, Boston and the surrounding area became the center of military action for ten months until the Continental Army, led by George Washington, forced the British to evacuate to Halifax, Nova Scotia.29 Three-quarters of Massachusetts’ Black population of 2,700 lived in the colony’s three coastal counties – Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex – in large measure due to the importance of slave imports to colonial shipping.30 Among the enslaved women who escaped in the early months of the Siege of Boston was Flora, who carried her “small child” with her. Flora was accompanied by two enslaved men, Exeter and Ireland, both of whom carried guns and were “poorly dressed.”31 Their enslaver, William Gilliland, was a respected attorney in Essex County, Massachusetts, located thirty miles from Boston. Essex – which included Salem, Ipswich, Newbury, and Gloucester – maintained a thriving trade, shipbuilding, fishing, and whaling economy. In 1776, there were 1,049 African Americans in Essex, forming the second largest Black population in Massachusetts.32 The Black population of both Essex and Suffolk counties decreased during the Revolutionary period. Suffolk County – which included the towns of Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Braintree – experienced the steepest decline. In 1764, there were 1,351 African Americans, but their number declined to 682 by 1776.33 This reduction was due to the flight of African Americans to the British Army in Boston.34 Among those fleeing was twenty-four-year-old Nell, who fled on Saturday evening March 16, 1776. Like other women who fled, Nell took with her an assortment of clothes, which included four gowns, “a light blue quilted coat, a red coak, and a blue ridinghood [sic]” into which to change.35 Coeval with Nell’s flight, John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, issued a proclamation on March 16, 1776 calling for a day of “humiliation, fasting, and prayer” to protect the colonies’ freedom from British tyranny.36 This irony would not have been lost on Nell, who recognized that this moment provided the most 73

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opportune time for her to escape, as the British Army began retreating from Boston on Sunday, March 17, 1776. Nell would have been among the fugitive slaves who fled Boston seeking refuge in other Britishcontrolled environs. On Monday, March 18, 1776, General George Washington visited Boston and found that the city had “suffered greatly” but was not in as “bad a state” as he had expected.37 Washington allowed British General Howe to sail away peacefully in exchange for Howe’s pledge not to burn the city of Boston.38 Akin to slaves from Massachusetts, in 1776, those enslaved in Connecticut fled to British vessels in significant numbers. Three fugitives escaped to British vessels in New Haven and a number of Newport slaves also took refuge with the British fleet. Several fugitives from Colchester, Connecticut, joined the British Army in hopes of gaining freedom.

Among those escaping was Nane, a twenty-seven-year-old woman who wore “a blue Callimanco Gown [sic],” and sixteen-year-old Cloe who had scars on her nose and ear, and burns on her foot.39 Several fugitives were later recaptured by Admiral Esek Hopkins, commander of the Continental Navy. Hopkins arrived in New London, Connecticut, on April 8, 1776 after launching the Raid of Nassau, an attack on the British colony in the Bahamas on March 3, 1776.40 In other parts of the New England region women and girls also found opportunities to escape. Zil, a fifteen-year-old Rhode Island fugitive, seems never to have considered herself a slave, for her enslaver complained that “she pretends she is free.”41 Likewise, Cloe evidently evinced considerable interest in her personal attire for, according to her enslaver, she was generally “well dressed.”42 Young enslaved girls often formed alliances with White indentured servants. Ann Gorman, a White indentured servant girl in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, ran away in July 1773 and was seen in the company of an enslaved girl who ran away at the same time.43 In other cases, enslavers commented on the past and present habits of young girls who escaped. Such was the case of Silvia, a seventeenyear-old enslaved girl who labored as a domestic in Providence, Rhode Island for the household of Peter Taylor, who described her as a thief with a “flippant tongue.”44 In planning her escape, Silvia contemplated what resources she would need to succeed. She had waited for the seasons to change from the harsh New England winter and surmised that she 74

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would need money, which she could procure from her enslaver. The community of free Blacks in Providence might also provide temporary shelter to Silvia, who escaped wearing “a plaid short gown, an old brown camblet short cloak, and a petticoat.”45 After abandoning Boston, British commander Sir William Howe attacked New York City in the summer of 1776. Washington’s army likewise moved from Massachusetts to Brooklyn to defend the city. Howe pushed American forces back as Washington retreated by crossing the Hudson River to New Jersey. Throughout the war, British forces occupied New York City and used it as a headquarters. Enslaved women and girls saw British occupation of New York as an opportune time to escape their enslavers. Both Diona and Phillis, aged eighteen and twenty-five respectively, fled, seeking refuge with British forces.46 According to Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edwards, a greater number of women fled their enslavers in New York and New Jersey in the 1770s than in the previous six decades.47 After the defeat of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, Black fugitives flooded the city. In 1782, over two thousand fugitives arrived from southern ports to join hundreds of African Americans who fled across the Hudson River or from Long Island, creating one of the largest Black communities in the North.48 Although only 314 runaway advertisements for New York exist, more than this number escaped into the city, and were later registered as a part of the Black exodus to Nova Scotia.

When the British left the city in 1783, three thousand former slaves and free Blacks went with them, making it the largest single flight by chattel slaves in U.S. history.49 In Pennsylvania, slave owners did not fear that bondwomen and bondmen would flee to the British since they viewed themselves as humane.

However, the flight of hundreds of enslaved men and women in the Philadelphia region to the British over the course of nine months from 1777 to 1778 indicates that large numbers of fugitives were willing to take their chances on freedom no matter what the outcome.50 As the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777, twenty-year-old Peg escaped from her enslaver Persifor Frazer. Determined to reach New Jersey, Peg boarded a vessel bound for the state where she would pass as a free woman. Her enslaver had some indication of where she had gone, as nearly two years after her escape, he advertised that she had been seen in the markets of 75

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New Jersey.51 Many other enslavers expressed a great deal of certainty in their advertisements regarding fugitive women’s path to freedom.

According to enslaver David Kerr, forty-five-year-old Sue, who ran away from Greenbury’s Point near Annapolis, Maryland, in 1780, “passed through Baltimore where she remained for some time, by the name of Free Poll.”52 Sue boarded a vessel headed for Philadelphia, where she settled and waited for her husband, Mark Stubbs, who was a free mulatto in Baltimore. Stubbs sailed to Philadelphia aboard the ship Enterprize and had planned to use his skills as a butcher to secure employment in Philadelphia.53 A successful escape required luck and ingenuity, as being able to leave one’s enslaver undetected was only the first step.

Once a fugitive, women like Sue were viewed as potential prey for slavecatchers. An absconding fugitive woman faced being stopped and questioned and had to be ready with a plausible story to satisfy the whims of an inquisitive public.54 In the Age of Revolution, slavery was an explosive problem precisely because it brought to prominence fundamental issues few leaders were prepared to face. Indeed, throughout the nation’s history, the presence of enslaved women and men was an irrepressible reminder of the systematic violence and exploitation which undergirded a society dedicated to individual freedom and equality of opportunity. As slave owner Benjamin Franklin warned, “slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evil.”55 Slavery contradicted the natural law principles of the American Revolution, which emphasized the ideals of liberty and natural rights that were used to justify revolution. Still, as David Brion Davis argues, analysis of the first great political struggle over slavery requires moving beyond a simple dichotomy of economic motives and humanitarian ideals. It is generally recognized that the economic structure and the degree of development governed the political response to slavery. No Southern colony or state moved toward general emancipation as a result of the American Revolution. Likewise, no northeastern colony or state contemplated a commercial boycott of the West Indies in order to disengage from the slave system. In Virginia and other Southern colonies, the hegemony of the planter class set boundaries on the idealism of the Revolution. It was 76

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Virginia that produced the leadership that played a pivotal role in national politics in the Revolutionary Era, leading the revolt against England, providing much of the leadership of the Continental Army, and shaping the new government. This leadership was inculcated by natural rights ideology and saw clearly the necessity of abolishing slavery, but could not bring itself to do so.56 In fact, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, and Edmund Pendleton wrote a bill that emancipated all slaves born after the passage of the bill, provided for their education at public expense, and proposed their removal to a new land when they reached adulthood.57 The trio had been charged with reformulating Virginia’s laws; however, the bill was defeated. In the North, where there were many slave owners but not a distinct slaveholding class, idealism served a variety of purposes and mixed freely with objectives unrelated to social justice or the future of African Americans.58 Slave labor in many northern towns stifled industry and the mechanical arts. As John Adams observed, the White workingman’s hostility toward Black people could find “an outlet in opposition to slavery as well as in racial persecution.”59 It has only been within the past five decades that historians have demonstrated how widely slavery was recognized as incompatible with the natural rights philosophy of the revolution. Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) argued that the contradiction between slavery and revolutionary ideology “became generally recognized” in the colonies.60 Educated colonists had been influenced

by Montesquieu’s attack on slavery in the Spirit of Laws (1748) and by Adam Smith’s condemnation of slavery in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1764). Massachusetts lawyer James Otis in his Rights of the British Colonies (1764) relied on Montesquieu’s argument when he wrote that “The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.”61 Otis’s pamphlet was read throughout the colonies and was joined by clerical attacks on slavery that stemmed from the Quaker argument that slavery was sinful and corrupted White colonists who turned Africans into a degraded and despised people.62 During the Age of Revolution, newspapers provided a means of rapid and widespread communication. As Robert Parkinson has argued, newspapers were the best medium at hand to make the American Revolution 77

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a common cause. Newspapers were critical of the Patriots’ mobilization campaign as the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword, as David Ramsay observed in his 1789 history of the Revolution. The colonial press expanded in the mid-eighteenth century as a result of both the Great Awakening and the Seven Years’ War. The number of newspapers doubled in the decade before the Stamp Act and increased by more than 250 percent over the next ten years.63 In the summer of 1775, newspaper printers throughout the colonies began relating events happening throughout North America, from the Canadian frontier to the islands off the Georgia coast. The majority of these stories were about the role African Americans and Native Americans might play in the upcoming war.64 Historians have estimated that five thousand African Americans served in the Patriot military during the Revolutionary War compared with an estimated twenty thousand who aided the British. In the Patriot Army, they served in integrated units; however, several were also members of active Black units, such as the “Attucks Company” in Connecticut and the “Rhode Island Black Regiment.”65 In 1778, North Carolina had a brigade with forty-two Black men on its roll and, in 1779, the Assembly promised freedom to all slaves who had enlisted. In the subsequent twoyear period, laws permitting Black men, free and enslaved, to enlist were passed in Maryland. Although this was prohibited in Georgia and South Carolina, Black men from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina did serve in the war, fighting at Charleston and Savannah for Patriot forces.66 Some of these soldiers “received grants of freedom and land bounties or pensions as reward for their service.”67 In New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, Black men willing to serve in the army were placed in integrated units.

Due to the growing manpower needs, a law was enacted in Rhode Island to raise a regiment of slaves in 1778. A large number of Black men served for longer periods, despite the typical three- to nine-month terms of many White soldiers. Based on a review of fifty Black pension files as part of his study of Black pensioners of the American Revolution, Robert Greene has indicated that Black pensioners served an average of 4.5–5 years during the war. Ultimately and ironically, African American Patriots contributed to what Gerald Horne refers to as the counter-revolution of 78

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slavery: the idea that the revolution was in large part a revolt against a “nascent abolitionist movement” in Britain.68 In a few cases, enslaved women who chose not to flee were hired out during the Revolutionary War and their service provided invaluable support to the Patriot war effort. Fifty-six-year-old Hannah worked with her husband Isaac as a cook at Valley Forge headquarters. Hannah was permitted to keep forty shillings a month from her wages for clothing and necessities. The remainder of her salary went directly to her enslaver, Rev. John Mason of New York. Mason allowed Hannah to purchase her freedom for fifty-three pounds, which Hannah did sometime between December 1778 and June 1780. On December 19, 1778 Mason wrote that he received thirty-two pounds New York currency in “full for my servant Hannah’s wages who was in the service of His Excellency General Washington.”69 On a June 23, 1780 receipt for eighty-six dollars “in full for two months wages at His Excellency George Washington’s family,” Hannah signed the receipt Hannah Till with an X for her signature.70 She discarded her enslaver Mason’s name, which had been used on previous receipts. Hannah’s husband Isaac would also purchase his freedom. After the war ended, Hannah and Isaac lived in Philadelphia at 182 South Fourth Street. General Lafayette, whom Hannah was loaned to during the war, later paid off the mortgage on Hannah’s Philadelphia home. Hannah died in 1825 at the age of 104.71 Another woman with Washington’s family at Valley Forge was Margaret Thomas, a washerwoman, seamstress, and free Black woman.

Margaret was possibly married to William Lee, Washington’s body servant. She received pay for providing sewing services to Washington in February 1776. After the war, Margaret lived with Isaac and Hannah Till in Philadelphia, an indication of the close bonds that developed during the war. Seeking to reunite William Lee with Margaret, Washington wrote to Clement Biddle in Philadelphia for assistance after Lee asked that Margaret be allowed to join him at Mount Vernon. William Lee had served Washington admirably during the war and Washington sought to reward his service. Biddle was asked to arrange transportation for Margaret Thomas from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon by sea or stage.

Margaret Thomas, however, did not come to Mount Vernon to live in a slave society where her freedom might have been jeopardized.72 79

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DUNMORE’S PROCLAMATION AND FUGITIVITY IN THE CHESAPEAKE

Throughout the Revolutionary War, enslavers were concerned that enslaved women and men would run away to the lines of the British, particularly after John Murray, Earl of Dunmore and Governor of Virginia, issued Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation in November 1775.

Their fears were further fueled by the Philipsburg Proclamation issued

by British Army General Sir Henry Clinton in June 1779. Both proclamations offered freedom to slaves who would aid the Loyalist cause.

Enslaved women and men did not wait for Lord Dunmore to issue his proclamation. According to historian Woody Holton, the actions of enslaved women and men in Virginia inspired Dunmore to act. Rachel, a twenty-two-year-old domestic who fled from enslaver John Jones of Virginia in 1774 (Figure 3.2), embodied the actions enslaved women initiated to gain their freedom. Rumors of slave revolts and insurrections and an increase in criminal cases involving slaves in Virginia intensified in 1774–1775. As tensions between Patriots and Loyalists deteriorated in Virginia, Dunmore informed Peyton Randolph, the speaker of the House of Burgesses, that “if one senior British official were harmed, he would declare freedom to the slaves and reduce the city of Williamsburg to ashes.”73 Dunmore made good on his word on November 14, 1775. Onethird of those fleeing to the British were women. Of the eighty-seven slaves who fled to Dunmore in the weeks following the proclamation’s issuance, twenty-one were women, twenty-three were girls under the age of sixteen, sixteen were men, and twenty-seven were boys under sixteen.

Many of the fugitives fled as families, with one woman as old as sixty, and half a dozen infants.74 Over the course of one year, Dunmore estimated that two thousand enslaved women and men had reached his lines.75 As a result of Dunmore’s Proclamation, the colonies adopted a policy of removing the enslaved population from areas close to the British Army settlements. On April 10, 1776, the Virginia Committee of Safety ordered the removal of all enslaved persons above thirteen years of age from the eastern counties of Norfolk and Princess Anne further inland and away from British forces. A month later, the Congress of North Carolina ordered that enslavers compel all adult male slaves south of Cape Fear

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3.2 Rachel, a “Negro Woman . . . about 22 Years of age” wears two petticoats, “a blue and white flowered Linen Waistcoat, and a Felt Hat . . . is apt to change her name.” Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, February 10, 1774. Illustrated by Eric H. Schnitzer.

River to move further inland, “into the country, remote from the Sea.”76 In September 1777, the Council of Virginia, after bemoaning the fact that several slaves had fled, empowered the Governor to remove them whenever and wherever he desired. The Assembly of Virginia also passed an act making it possible for planters from other states to send their slaves to the interior of Virginia.77 During the process of removal to the interior, enslaved men and women suffered from hunger and exposure. John Habersham, a patriot leader in Georgia, reported that he had lost several slaves to illness and starvation as they made their way to the Virginia piedmont.78 In response to Dunmore’s Proclamation, the government of Virginia also passed an act in December 1775 permitting the sale, banishment, or 81

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execution of enslaved women and men attempting to flee. This law was enforced with the hanging of four captured runaways in March 1776 and the sale and transportation of twenty-five others in January 1776. The proceeds from the sale were given to the enslavers who lost their chattels on the condition that they supported the Patriot cause. The sale and banishment of enslaved men and women was not confined to Virginia. In New York, four women and men were sold in Albany for attempting to gain their freedom, while three others involved in fleeing received fifty lashes each.79 In Georgia, Black boat pilots were confined in August 1776 and a guard boat started patrolling along the Savannah coast to prevent enslaved women and men from reaching Cockspur Island, where British vessels were stationed. In St. Mary’s County, Maryland, an officer posted guards to prevent enslaved women and men from reaching the British by boats and canoes in March 1781. African Americans in St. Mary’s County had been reaching British ships in sufficiently large numbers to prompt the Governor of Maryland to request sixty more guards to patrol the region to prevent the flight of slaves.80 Estimates on the number of fugitive women and men who joined the British following Dunmore’s Proclamation vary considerably, but according to Benjamin Quarles about 800 succeeded in reaching freedom three weeks after the issuance of the Proclamation. Dunmore, in fact, used between 300 and 400 runaways at the Battle of Great Bridge in Norfolk County.81 When Lord Dunmore abandoned the tidewater region for the security of his ships after mid-December 1775, fugitive women and men who sought his protection secured boats and sailed into the rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. Inspired by the promise of freedom, they were desperate to reach the British. Nine runaways, two of whom were women, attempted to sail in a small boat from the Eastern Shore to Norfolk.

Coming ashore at Old Point Comfort, they were pursued and fired upon. Although two of the men were wounded, three fugitives subsequently boarded a Virginia vessel believing that they had reached one of the British ships. Upon discovering that the vessel was not British, the fugitives vowed to spend “the last drop of their blood in Lord Dunmore’s service.”82 Dunmore’s pursuit of the war along Virginia’s unprotected coasts was short-lived. After a smallpox epidemic ravaged his forces and killed scores of fugitives on Gwynn’s Island, he sailed from Virginia and 82

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did not return. Fugitive slaves left on Gwynn Island included a child who sought nourishment from the breast of its dead mother. Dunmore, invariably, refused sanctuary to fugitive slaves unless he could use them in his military campaigns; refuge was also denied to slaves of Loyalist followers who refused to abandon their slaves. However, hundreds of enslaved women and men responded to Dunmore’s Proclamation. Even more fled when the British returned in 1777 and 1781.83 The experiences of fugitive women and girls point to the tensions inherent in fugitivity between the rejection of the notion of being owned as property and the tenuous position of moving through public spaces.

Closer examination of 141 runaway advertisements featuring women published between 1736 and 1801 in Virginia reveals that enslavers knew their slave women better than they knew the men. This is demonstrated by the fact that only half of enslavers who publicized runaway men knew where they were going compared to two-thirds of enslavers who mentioned the destination of fugitive women.84 A majority of the women featured in the advertisements worked in homes rather than in the fields and were therefore more likely to be known to their enslavers. Phillis, who was enslaved by Robert Carter, ran away in October 1773. She was described as a “middle sized Negro woman, about 35 years of Age” with a “few specks of black about the lower part of her face, some scars on her breast,” and “a very impertinent countenance.”85 The agent for Robert Carter, John Draper, went further to describe Phillis as “fond of liquor and apt to sing indecent and sailor songs.” Phillis had intended to pass for a free woman and made plans to leave Virginia by ship.86 In other advertisements, enslavers expressed who had assisted fugitive women and girls in their escapes. Fanny, for example, escaped on October 18, 1773 at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Her mother Joan was enslaved in Middlesex County, Virginia, on the Eastern Shore and labored as a cook. Fanny was sold by Augustine Smith and lived in York County, located in Tidewater Virginia. Fanny found refuge with Moses, an enslaved young man who lived on the estate of attorney Peyton Randolph, before attempting to make the forty-four-mile trek to reunite with her mother in Middlesex. One-fourth of the women who fled in Virginia left to visit their husbands, parents, or children, whereas twofifths went to town to pass as free. Fifteen percent of fugitive women 83

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either left with another man or attempted to board a vessel leaving the colony.87 Along the coastal waterways of Virginia, fugitives “cut boats loose from the moorings or stole them from unattended barns, then sailed, rowed, or paddled to British naval vessels cruising close to the shore.”88 Of the 141 fugitive women whose escape was advertised, 38 were committed to jail, 25 ran away with men (both Black and White), 3 were accompanied by children, and 6 were pregnant.89 The frequency of flight by groups of slaves in Virginia is noteworthy and is indicative of the complexities of escape. Runaway advertisements from the 1730s to 1790 featured 329 acts of collective escape.90 A group is defined as a minimum of three slaves. Frequently, fugitive women ran away with their husbands and children. In July 1778, a married couple, Jack and Venus, escaped slavery with mother and daughter, Zeny and Nelly, in Prince William County and were seen in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. The group had plans to reach Williamsburg, which served as a departure point for many fugitives who intended to walk the four miles to Burwell’s Ferry on the James River. British forces, led by Sir Henry Clinton, had implemented a plan that called for a series of coastal raids to choke off the Chesapeake’s export trade of tobacco and produce. By May 1779, five sloops and twenty-eight transports with eighteen hundred troops had anchored in Hampton, Virginia.91 For many fugitives, travel from Virginia to Pennsylvania via vessels located in Hampton, Virginia proved to be a viable method of egress from the colony. This was the case for a fugitive woman and her three children who escaped to Lewis Town, Pennsylvania from Hampton, Virginia in 1778.92 The scars from whippings, beatings, and branding as evidenced in the details provided in the runaway advertisements signify the basic brutality of slavery on Black women’s bodies and reveal enslavers’ ways of seeking to contain enslaved women. In this context, the body is read as a text to understand the tangible effects of slavery. Kate, a twenty-six-year-old fugitive woman from Hanover, Virginia, had “many scars about her neck and breast.” According to her enslaver Leighton Wood, “her back will prove her to be an old offender” [and she] “has lost a piece of one of her ears,” which was the penalty meted out for escaping at least three times.93 Kate ran away with her husband Will, who likewise bore the brutal marks of slavery as he had “a large scar behind one of his ears 84

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and down the side of his neck occasioned by a burn.”94 Will and Kate had plans to reach the French Army, whose officers often protected runaway slaves by refusing to return them to their enslavers. Will in fact expressed his intention to join the British Army.95 In other cases, young girls experienced whippings, as was the case for fourteen-year-old Hagar, who was encouraged by her parents to run away. Hagar’s enslaver William Payne of Baltimore reported that she had “a scar under one of her breasts, supposed to be got by a whipping” [and] “an Iron Collar about her neck.”96 Escapes may have been difficult for fugitive women encumbered by iron collars and leg irons, but many ran away despite being attached to these restrictive devices. Eighteen-year-old Nancy of South Carolina, for example, escaped “with an iron hoop around her neck” in February 1788.97 Representations of fugitive women’s bodies in newspaper ads allow us the opportunity to interrogate their physical condition. The advertisements are filled with evidence of the basic brutality of slavery insofar as that brutality left physical marks. Enslaver William Allegre reported that his six-foot-tall female fugitive, who was twenty-two years old, had a large scar, “as long as one’s finger above her breast.”98 Allegre did not name this fugitive woman, but indicated that “she holds her head pretty high when she speaks,” and was seen with a fellow named Will, “who stole her” in Nansemond County, Virginia, in April 1775.99 Similarly, thirty-year-old Lucy, who ran away in September 1777, had a scar “between her eyebrows and another under her left breast.”100 Not surprisingly, women who ran away had experienced whippings and other forms of punishment, which served to intensify their pursuit of freedom during the Revolution. In fact, fugitive women as well as their enslavers provided information on their motives and activities as runaways. Although enslavers were misleading when they portrayed women’s character, they proved to be well informed about fugitive women’s whereabouts, as they had often received information from other slaves, townspeople, and officials by the time they advertised the escape.101 The health of fugitive women provides a glimpse into the unpredictable and often dangerous environments that they confronted. According to runaway advertisements, fugitive women survived smallpox, had poor teeth, whip marks, burns, brandings, wounds, and leg injuries due to 85

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which they often limped.102 Sally, who ran away in October 1777 from Fredericksburg, Virginia, lost her front teeth and had been seen in both York and Williamsburg, Virginia. She escaped with another Black woman and both were likely passing as free women. Their enslaver, William Smith, noted that a community of free Blacks in Albermarle County, which included Charlottesville, harbored and assisted fugitive women who escaped and assisted them in passing as free women.103 In other cases, women ran away in hope of reuniting with loved ones.

This was the case for forty-year-old Hannah who ran away on December 1, 1778 from Petersburg, Virginia. Described as having “a small beard under her chin and a scar on one of her arms below her elbow,” Hannah was headed to the estate of Robert Pendleton in Paspotank County, North Carolina, the place from where she was sold.104 Fugitive women in Virginia would travel along the rivers in a southeasterly direction, often using the peninsula formed by the York and James Rivers. Twenty-eightyear-old Cuthie of Mecklenburg, Virginia, followed this route when she escaped in December 1777. A year after her escape, her enslaver, Robert Munford, was still searching for his fugitive. According to Munford, she had several clothes into which to change and was likely headed for York County, where she had several relations. Like other enslaved women, Cuthie bore the marks of bondage, and had a “large scar on the outside of one of her legs” and a “remarkable gap between her two lower fore teeth.”105 The advertisements for runaways published in Virginia newspapers from 1730 to 1790 featured 1,568 fugitives, 184 (or 12 percent) of whom were women (six were stated to be pregnant).106 In other areas of the Chesapeake, British forces launched a land assault through Maryland to Pennsylvania that culminated in the occupation of Philadelphia in September 1777. British forces, in fact, defeated American forces at Brandywine with the assistance of Black guides. Throughout Maryland, enslaved women used the chaos of war to claim their freedom, often by passing as free women. From Baltimore came Peg, whom her enslaver suspected would “pass for a free woman” and would be carried off by a sailor.107 In other cases, women gained access to horses to facilitate escape, as did Sarah from Frederick, Maryland. Fluent in both English and Dutch, Sarah and her six-year-old son took an assortment of clothing, bedding, and “a large sum of money” from her enslaver George Somerville on 86

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January 14, 1778.108 Her escape had been planned with the assistance of Valentine Lind, a local tailor with whom she had a relationship and who Somerville believed would act as her husband. From Frederick, the trio would have likely traveled to Baltimore, which had a large free Black population and where interracial relationships were common.109 Fugitive women like Sarah and Peg recognized the importance of being near bodies of water where ships could provide further transport out of bondage. Like Sarah and Peg, Monica of St. Mary’s County, Maryland had planned to use the Chesapeake Bay to escape. Her enslaver Abraham Clarke surmised that she would “pass for a free woman, and may endeavor to procure a forged pass and go off by water.”110 The number of fugitives featured in advertisements in Maryland in the 1730–1790 period totaled 1,290, 134 of whom (or about 10 percent) were Black women (four described as pregnant), 11 were children, and 30 White indentured servants.111 Enslavers assumed that Philadelphia was the most likely destination for fugitive women from the Chesapeake states. Enslavers in Maryland often advertised for the return of runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Fugitives Rachel and Toney were believed to be in Philadelphia by their enslaver.

They had escaped from Cecil County, Maryland in the spring of 1779 with their young child. Their enslaver, John Hall, believed that they had secured a pass, would change their names, and pass as free persons.112 The unauthorized writing of passes for enslaved women and men was common throughout the eighteenth century. As Hugh Rankin has remarked “the greatest forgery problem . . . continued to be forged passes used by runaway slaves and indentured servants. As late as 1795, Ishmael Lawrence was indicted and found guilty of feloniously forging, uttering, and distributing freedom passes to slaves, and was fined ten dollars.”113

ENSLAVED WOMEN AND THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY

Fugitive women that attempted to escape bondage in the early years of the war formed only the first wave of what became a massive selfemancipation after the war stalemated in the North in 1779. In 1778, the focus of the war shifted to the deep South, to Georgia and South Carolina, where the British had three objectives. They hoped to exploit the social tensions between backcountry farmers and wealthy planters, 87

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enlist southern Loyalists, and disrupt the economy by encouraging slaves to escape. In 1779, British forces occupied Savannah, Georgia, where free Black men, such as Henri Christophe and André Riguad, from St. Domingue fought with the French and American armies during the siege of Savannah; and in May 1780, Sir Henry Clinton captured Charleston, South Carolina. General Henry Clinton’s proclamation offering freedom to slaves willing to help the British led to the escape of scores of women. About two-fifths of those who escaped following the proclamation were women. Many of the women brought young children with them or had children while under British protection. Children born in British camps were free. Once under British protection women served as cooks, servants, laundresses, or did general labor.114 From the plantation of Joseph Gibbons in Savannah, eighteen enslaved women and men escaped following the arrival of the British. Among these fugitives were Renah, Sophia, and Hester and her son Bob. The group was believed to be headed to St. Augustine, Florida, a haven for runaway slaves.115 British strategists chose Georgia, which had a substantial Loyalist population, as the base from which the Southern states could be severed from the North. Attacking by land and sea from East Florida, the British gained control of Georgia in a month. For fifteen thousand Georgia slaves this victory was hollow since most of them were owned by Loyalists. The fate of those owned by Patriots who fled the state was tied to that of their enslavers, who took most of their slaves with them. William Moultrie, an American officer, witnessed “the poor women and children, and negroes of Georgia, many thousands of whom I saw . . . traveling to they knew not where.”116 The appearance of British troops in the vicinity of Savannah provided a degree of safety and prompted many women to take flight. Thirty-fouryear-old half-blind Hannah Lining and her sixty-two-year-old mother Dinah, along with numerous other enslaved women, escaped to the British. Hannah, who escaped slavery once before in 1761 but was recaptured, knew that her escape this time would be different. While it is not known how long mother and daughter were planning to run away or why they did so together rather than in male company, we do know that, in 1780, British soldiers passed close to the Lining plantation where they labored and the circumstances appeared right to flee. Hannah and 88

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Dinah traveled with British forces until October 31, 1783, when “they were evacuated from the port of New York on board the brig Elijah” and sailed away to “begin in a new life in Port Mouton, Nova Scotia.”117 Despite the obstacles enslaved women and girls faced in Georgia, many attempted to flee bondage. Fanny, Sall, and Nan fled their enslavers in Savannah in 1779. Nineteen-year-old Sall was likely late in her pregnancy when she ran away, as her enslaver described her as “big with child.”118 Fourteen-year-old Nan ran away with Charles, who was the same age. Both Nan and Charles were described as well-known in the city of Savannah, where they could be harbored or concealed. Harboring runaways meant giving them shelter and protecting them from would-be apprehenders. Enslavers feared that runaways would receive such benefits most readily in towns with large free Black populations. Fugitives were concealed for a number of reasons. Sometimes refuge was given to allow the runaway time to escape to another state. In other instances, runaways were kept clandestinely by others.119 Fugitive women often attempted to leave the colonies by securing boats. Fugitives who were able to reach port towns like Savannah had a much better chance of escaping out of the colony. Four fugitives escaped from St. Johns River in Florida, and were believed to be headed for Savannah. They escaped with a canoe and a rifle and were described as being good boatmen. Among this group was Mary-Ann, who “spoke good English” and wore a “blue petticoat and white jacket.”120 Many of the fugitive women who were successful in running away often found refuge and protection in forests, swamps, creeks, and rivers characterizing the topography of the South. Newly imported African fugitives in particular were accustomed to the forest life and, as one historian has noted, “it was not great hardship to them to live for months or years in camp in the swamps.”121 Newly imported Clarissa and her comrades, Aaron and Peter, escaped from their enslaver’s plantation near the Little Ogeechee River outside of Savannah in August 1779. Peter and Clarissa, described as from the “Guinea country,” and Aaron of the “Ebo country,” may have tried to reach the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, where runaway slaves had established camps.122 Invariably, women fugitives sought out towns where they could pursue diverse objectives for running away. Savannah and the outlying areas of 89

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the city thus proved an opportune environment for runaways. In Sunbury, Georgia, a “negro girl, 16 years old and Guiney born,” escaped from the Ogeechee River ferry en route to Savannah still wearing handcuffs.123 Similarly, Sally and her two mulatto children found refuge in the woods near Savannah as their enslaver, Alexander Wylly, promised severe prosecution to any person harboring or concealing them.124 In several instances, newly arrived Africans saw enslavement as a problem to be solved collectively. On June 20, 1779, thirty-six Africans, twelve of whom were women, ran away from their enslaver Benjamin Edings on Edisto Island, South Carolina.125 Proximity to rivers and other bodies of water facilitated escape for runaways adept at navigating canoes.

For newly enslaved Africans, planning an escape involved utilizing networks on the plantation. These networks centered upon shared occupations as well as common origins. On Mark Carr’s plantation near Sunbury, Bridgee, a “prime sawyer,” who spoke fluent Portuguese and Spanish, organized other sawyers on the Carr plantation. He also included his wife Celia in his plans to escape slavery. After inflicting “several outrages” near the ferry, the group cut away a chained canoe at the Sunbury wharf and made their escape northward.126 In October 1780, a plea came from John Rose of Savannah for the apprehension of three male and three female slaves, including “a girl of fifteen years.” One of the women, Phebe, had five children with her, “one of them at the breast.” The other, Juno, had two children with her.127 One of the fugitives, Jemmy, was described as wearing “old soldier’s clothes.”128 The exact number of fugitive women who joined British and Hessian forces as they advanced to Savannah and Charleston may never be known. However, toward the end of the war, over four thousand slaves of “both sexes and all ages” were believed to have accompanied General Cornwallis on his march north.129 In some cases, women spent a few days or weeks with the troops, as was the case for Kate. Kate had followed the British Army in 1779 and had been recaptured on Edisto Island, after being separated from the regiment.130 Like Kate, Sally took advantage of the British advance on Savannah to take flight. Sally had been captured in Guinea as a young girl and was brought to Savannah. Like Hannah and Dinah, she “managed to reach New York City – how and when we do not 90

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know – and at the age of twenty-three, was taken on board the Hesperus, which set sail for St. John, New Brunswick on July 29, 1783.”131 Many enslaved women – whether married, single, or widowed – fell in love during the journey or gave birth while traveling with their regiments.

Phillis Clarke, who ran away from her enslaver at the beginning of the war, met her partner Pompey, who was the servant of Dr. William Clarke from Massachusetts, while both were working for the general hospital department. At the end of November 1783, Phillis and Pompey left New York on board the Danger for Port Mouton, Nova Scotia.132 According to Betty Wood, for women who gave birth during their time with the British Army, only in cases where the woman’s husband is mentioned can we be reasonably certain of paternity. Regimental records remain silent on the issue of miscegenation between women of color and the officer class or with soldiers of the line. We can infer, however, that interracial sexual relationships formed, but whether they were on a significant scale is not known.133 Runaway slave advertisements provide a glimpse into the thoughts and aspirations of enslaved Africans. An examination of 270 advertisements for runaway slaves reveals, for example, that 126 advertisers designated fugitive Africans by nationality and included detailed descriptions of country markings.134 Sydney, a young woman whose country marks were evident on her breast and arms, and who spoke “no English,” took flight from the home of Elizabeth Anderson, well dressed with a cloth gown and coat.135 Like many other new Africans, Sydney was unfamiliar with the environment in which she lived. Still, she assumed that she could successfully find refuge from the oppression of bondage in a city, and deftly concealed her country marks and her identity as a fugitive as she moved through the streets of Savannah. From the advertisements for runaways in Georgia published in 1763–1790, 1,242 enslaved persons attempted to escape, 229 of whom, or 18 percent, were women (one was pregnant and one was Indian) and 64 were children, including 8 specifically listed as infants.136 In South Carolina, the dialectical relationship of slave resistance and the British strategy of racial manipulation climaxed with the Philipsburg Proclamation issued in Philipsburg, New York, which offered freedom to slaves, but upheld the institution of slavery. On June 30, 1779, British 91

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General Sir Henry Clinton issued the carefully worded Proclamation warning that “all Blacks taken in rebel service by British armies would be sold for the benefit of their captors. Those who deserted the rebels for British service were promised full security to follow within these Lines, any occupation which [they] shall think proper.” The Philipsburg Proclamation, like Dunmore’s Proclamation, was a military measure designed to counteract the use of Black men by the Patriot army. As Sylvia Frey has argued, this “dynamic converted the Revolutionary War in South Carolina into a complex triangular process involving two sets of White belligerents and at least twenty-thousand – probably more – Black slaves.”137 Following Clinton’s Proclamation promising Blacks emancipation, the British military employed Black women to cook and wash clothes.138 Following a five-month delay caused by the Franco-American assault on Savannah in 1779, Clinton launched an offensive against Charleston in December 1779.139 Some fugitive women, in exchange for their freedom, carried intelligence to the British. Governor John Rutledge of South Carolina wrote to General Francis Marion advising him that: Any person who go[es] to town or the enemy without a permit from you or an officer must be treated as carrying intelligence to the enemy and will suffer accordingly. Any woman who will go to town or in the enemy’s post without leave, must not be permitted to return. Severe examples must be made of the negroes who will carry any provisions of any kind, aid or assist, or carry any intelligence to or for the enemy; agreeable to the laws of this State, all such negroes shall suffer death.140

After the British captured Savannah and began their invasion of South Carolina in 1779, Continental officer John Laurens of South Carolina urged his father, rice planter Henry Laurens, who had served as President of the Continental Congress, to put forth a plan to Gen. Washington that would allow enslaved men to earn their freedom by serving in the Patriot army. Henry Laurens, who owned 260 enslaved persons, told Washington that, with the “aid of three thousand Negro troops the British could be driven back and even out of East Florida.”141 Although Washington was skeptical of the plan, Laurens continued to petition the Congress to buy the release of three thousand slaves in South 92

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Carolina and Georgia with the aim of freeing them at the end of the war.

Congress refused to put the measure into effect without the consent of the South Carolina Assembly, which bitterly opposed the plan.

Congressional deference to South Carolina was an early example of federal acquiescence to state power when it came to protecting slaveryas-property. The British succeeded in occupying South Carolina until the end of the war.142 It seems likely that word of Laurens’s plan reached the ears of enslaved women and men in South Carolina and Georgia, who understood that their prospects for freedom changed radically when British schooners and barges began maneuvering up the region’s rivers.

Many of the White males “had run away” leaving behind their wives, children, and slaves.143 This propitious circumstance prompted many enslaved women to escape, to the consternation of their enslavers. South Carolina planter, William Snow, warned his overseer about the possibility of slave flight in anticipation of the British arrival when he wrote, “if they are not well secured [they] will get away.” Snow warned that Ruth, in particular, would run off “for she is an arch bitch.”144 A family of ten in South Carolina led by a fifty-six-year-old “Ebo” woman called “Old Ross” escaped from the plantation of Mrs. Mary Thomas in 1780.

Accompanying Ross was her daughter, thirty-six-year-old Celia, Celia’s six-year-old daughter Elsey, Celia’s husband Cato and her sister Country Sue, Kate of the “Angola country,” Scipio, Rose’s son Dick, Town Sue (described as “smart and sensible”), and “a waiting boy,” Will.145 Similarly, Betty escaped with her husband Hercules and their five-yearold son Winter.146 In both cases, parents clearly wished to keep their families together, even at the risk of being caught.

Planning and timing were an intricate part of every escape, and this was particularly true for fugitives who escaped in groups. Although runaway slave advertisements rarely mentioned that a fugitive had planned his/her escape, a degree of planning and forethought could be deduced from the extra clothing taken by fugitives mentioned in the ads. Clothing was brought along far more often than any other item. Since most of the fugitives ran away during the war and in hot weather, they carried extra clothing to keep warm at night on the long journey they anticipated.

Clothing was also used as a means of disguise, as enslavers frequently 93

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noted that fugitives would change their clothing. If runaways did not take any additional clothing, they may not have traveled far.147 To increase the likelihood of a successful escape and to expedite travel, some fugitives took horses and boats, as a further indication of planning and forethought. Fugitives who took boats had access to the many rivers and waterways of South Carolina and Georgia. Moreover, when boats were used, it usually meant that fugitives were escaping in groups. In South Carolina, ten fugitives took with them “a large canoe 22 feet long and 5 feet wide, with all their cloaths [sic], blankets, pots . . . .”148 Among the fugitives were three girls – Daphne, Sabina, and Rachel – and their mother Alcie. The ten fugitives had escaped from Wadmalaw Island and were headed up the Ponpon-River to Chehosse Island where they would establish a camp.149 Of the 1,004 women listed as fugitives in the South Carolina newspapers between 1732 and 1782, 113 (or 11 percent) were accompanied by their children.150 Men, women, girls, and boys of all ages and circumstances moved like a tidal flood toward the British army in South Carolina. Although Clinton tried to limit the impact of the Philipsburg Proclamation, enslaved people throughout South Carolina self-liberated, creating chaos for enslavers and the armies. In the spring of 1779, a British army commanded by General Prevost “overran most of the coastal area between Savannah and Charleston. The troops and their Indian allies raided coastal plantations and some further inland, including one belonging to Thomas Pinckney.”

According to Pinckney, the British “took” nineteen of his slaves, leaving only “the sick women, and the young children, and about five fellows who are now perfectly free.”151 Following the British departure, Pinckney’s overseer, who had been hiding in the swamps, returned to the plantation.

Pinckney mused that he hoped “he will be able to keep the remaining property in some order, though the Negroes pay no attention to his orders.”152 At Wadboo Barony, the ancestral home of Sir John Colleton, one of the original proprietors of South Carolina, few slaves remained on the plantation, and “in the breakdown of authority that followed the surrender of Charleston, they acknowledged no subjection to the Overseers.”153 Charleston remained a prominent destination for fugitive women.

While some women escaped to Charleston to be near family in the city, 94

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others chose Charleston as their destination because it provided an opportunity for them to pass as free women. Moreover, fugitive women could also seek to leave the colony aboard the many vessels that docked in the city and, as the British launched their offensive to capture Charleston, the city would serve as a base for British forces. Nan of Edisto Island, for example, was believed to be headed to Charleston, where she had relations, in 1779.154 Likewise, Cloe, who spoke “pretty good English,” was seen in the company of Nero, who was also a runaway.

Both were headed toward Charleston.155 From Beaufort came thirty-yearold Beck, who survived smallpox and was seen in Charleston a few days following the issuance of the Philipsburg Proclamation.156 For Judy, passing as a free woman became the objective of her escape. On June 17, 1779, she escaped from her enslaver’s residence near the fish market in Charleston. Described as “very artful” with country marks on her arms, she was extremely valuable to her enslaver, who offered a reward of fifty pounds and an additional reward of one hundred dollars for her return.157 In addition to English, fugitive women like Nancy were also conversant in French. At age thirty-five, Nancy made plans to escape from her enslaver John Gregg by boarding a vessel leaving the colony.158 Perhaps Nancy was brought to South Carolina by French forces who brought Haitians to assist the Patriots in the defense of Savannah; or perhaps she came to South Carolina from the French Caribbean via the inter-colonial trade with the mainland. Regardless of how Nancy arrived in Charleston she, like other fugitive women in 1779, was resourceful and determined to take advantage of the fortunes of war to secure her freedom.

To contain the impact of the Philipsburg Proclamation, the British military command moved quickly to confine massive slave resistance to the relative safety of military service and thereby forestall the disintegration of the plantation economy. But, Black women and men found ways to serve in all of the civil departments of the British army. Next to engineering, the Royal Artillery was the largest employer of emancipated men and women. Artificers such as carpenters, wheelers, smiths, sawyers, and collar makers repaired and built wagons, mended equipment and arms, made platforms, and attended to numerous other tasks associated with the artillery. Black men and women made musket cartridges for 95

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ordnance. The quartermaster and barrack master departments employed hundreds of Black artificers and laborers in constructing barracks and in building and repairing boats and wagons.

“Commissaries used Black workers to butcher livestock and to pickle, barrel, and store meat for use by the troops. The hospital department also employed Black men and women in a variety of capacities. Men served as orderlies, women as nurses in hospitals.”159 According to reports in the Royal Gazette, 666 formerly enslaved women and men worked in the various departments of the British Army in Charleston.

Lt. Gen. Alexander Leslie noted that “there are many negroes who have been very useful, both at the Siege of Savannah and here [at Charleston].”160 In addition to work in the Royal Artillery, “Black men, women and children served as guides, since they had intimate knowledge of the terrain, which proved to be indispensable to the British. They were familiar with the woods because they were permitted to set traps. They knew the river crossings and the roads because it was customary in South Carolina to use slave labor for building and maintaining the road system.”161 It was also common in the pre-Revolutionary war years for slaves to go visiting with a pass from their enslaver or to move about on their enslaver’s business. Many Lowcountry slaves also raised livestock, and women in particular grew provisions in their own small garden plots for sale or barter in markets away from the plantation.162 In many instances, fugitive women were successful in reaching the British. Eighteen-year-old Marsley was seen “resid[ing] with the troops on James Island” in South Carolina according to her enslaver Hester Graham.163 In some cases, when they did reach the British, they were recaptured. Tom, Hester, and Celia were taken from a British ship and were confined to a jail in Philadelphia.164 Many of the thousands of runaways who were successful in reaching the British were shipped out of the country, especially during the evacuation of Charleston and New York at the conclusion of the war. Ralph Izard, a member of the Continental Congress, wrote to his wife in October 1782 that “if they have a sufficient number of transport, they will carry with them about twelve thousand negroes.”165 William Grayson, in correspondence to James Madison, in November 1785 reported that nearly 3,000 Black people were transported out of the U.S., including 1,386 men, 954 women, and 657 children.166 During the evacuation of 96

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Charleston and New York, slave owners in Virginia and South Carolina believed that their slaves would take advantage of the opportunity to leave the country. Robert Taylor, an enslaver in Smithfield, Virginia, wrote to Neil Jamieson: “when the British under General Leseley [sic] came to Portsmouth in October 1780, several of my negroes ran away . . . .

I apprehend are either now in Charles Town or New York.”167 Mary Postill, an enslaved woman of a wealthy South Carolina planter, fled with her children to British-held Charleston, where the military gave her a certificate of freedom. When the American army reclaimed Charleston in 1782, Mary and her family went to St. Augustine, Florida as the hired servants of Jesse Gray, a Loyalist. In Florida, Gray took Mary’s certificate of freedom and declared that she and her family were legally his slaves. Gray then sold Mary and her family to his brother Samuel, who emigrated to Canada. In Canada, Mary ran away with her daughters; however, Gray went to court to recover her and won the case, despite Mary testifying that she was a free woman.168 Loyal Whites in South Carolina demanded remuneration for their loss of property during the South Carolina offensive. Rather than provide Carolina Loyalists with large-scale permanent confiscation of land and slaves, the British assigned much of the property seized by the army from the patriots to Loyalist families for their use, including slaves. This system treated Loyalists as “trustees for the Crown to whose receiver they must be accountable for the profits of it.”169 In some cases, captured slaves were given to Loyalist Militia officers as a reward for extraordinary service. This was the case with William Henry Mills, a South Carolina Loyalist who fought with Major J. Wemyss in campaigns along the Pee Dee River. To compensate Mills for his loss to the rebels of “two sawmills, a grist mill, all of his plantation buildings, and fifty-seven slaves,” Wemyss gave Mills one hundred slaves along with permission to stay at Laurens’s plantation.

Cornwallis, citing the expensive nature of the gesture, later rescinded the order.170 Cornwallis, however, did support the sale of enslaved men and women to pay for army supplies. In his instructions to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Gray, Cornwallis tells Gray to “sell a Negro to help provide for yourself.”171 Thus, while the British proclamations spurred acts of selfemancipation, fugitive women were far from safe in the hands of the British.

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The war in fact created a paradox, as enslaved women were faced with a fatal dilemma: to remain on the plantations and suffer the physical deprivations that it imposed during the war, or to risk death in a military camp or betrayal by British forces and still be a slave. A quarter of South Carolina’s slave population, or twenty thousand, chose to defy the dangers and run away. Among them were Dinah and her nine-year-old child; Abby, who escaped with her daughter Bridget and an infant “at the breast”; Sally, who managed to reach Williamsburg, Virginia; Hagar and her twelve-year-old daughter Mary; and Haebe, who took her twelvemonth-old child with her.172 The advertisements featured in South Carolina newspapers between 1730 and 1790 called for the capture of 3,746 fugitives, 698 of whom were women (14 listed as pregnant) and 122 were children.173

FUGITIVITY AND THE FINAL CAMPAIGN

British raids up the Potomac River in Virginia in 1781 brought new opportunities for escape. Benjamin Fendall of Charles County, Maryland, reported that two enslaved persons from his estate, Adam and Chloe, “went on board the enemies [sic] vessels” while they were up the Potomac River on April 11, 1781.174 When the British sloop Savage landed at Robert Carter’s Cole’s Point plantation, thirty-two men, women, and children ran to the vessel. The sloop also carried fourteen men and three women from George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.

The presence of British forces along the coast prompted planters to move their slaves to the interior to prevent further escapes. This allowed General Charles Cornwallis to establish his headquarters at Thomas Jefferson’s Elk Hill plantation in Goochland County, where “for ten days Cornwallis’s troops, accompanied by escaped slaves, destroyed barns and rustled cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses.”175 When the British left, Black Sall, three of her children, and seven other Jefferson slaves joined them, while another eight fled his Cumberland plantation.176 As British vessels continued their assault, all of the slaves of Edward Taliaferro and Richard Paradise eventually fled to the British. The governor of Virginia, Thomas Nelson, lost all but eighty to one hundred of his seven hundred slaves. According to the Hessian officer Johann Ewald, 98

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“well over four thousand Negroes of both sexes and all ages” were now a part of Cornwallis’s British army.177 Among them were Jack, Ned, and James, who ran away from Edenton, North Carolina, joined the British army at Portsmouth, Virginia. James “carried his wife and several other Negro women” with him.178 The group likely boarded a vessel in Edenton headed for Portsmouth.

Escaped slaves from Thomas Jefferson and John Ball’s Virginia plantations consisted of men, women, and children bound together by family and kinship relations. Among the twenty-three slaves who abandoned Jefferson’s estate were ten adult women and three girls. Of the five female adults, two left with their husbands, one of them was accompanied by her children; another fled with three of her four children; and the remaining two, one of whom was married, left by themselves. Among the fifty-three slaves who ran away from John Ball’s plantations in 1780 were eighteen women, which included eight mothers with children, some of the latter still infants. Charlotte, a childless woman, led a mass escape from Ball’s Kensington quarter. She fled on May 10, with Bessy and her three children, but she was soon recaptured. A week later Charlotte ran away again, this time along with what Ball called “Pino’s gang.” The fifteenmember group that comprised Pino’s gang escaped via Ball’s flatboat and included Pino, his wife, their youngest daughter, and two of their granddaughters; their daughter Jewel, her husband Dicky, and son Little Pino; Dicky’s sister, her husband, and their daughter; and Eleanor Lawrence, her husband Brutus, and their two daughters. Eleanor’s sister Flora had also absconded to the British, along with an infant son two weeks prior.179 Abandoned British ships docked in places such as Annapolis, Maryland provided refuge for women and children escaping bondage.

This was the case for an unnamed fugitive woman and her three children who left the home of enslaver Ann Tilly in 1781 and according to Tilly was “taken away by a mulatto man, the husband of the woman.” Tilly, a destitute woman, petitioned the Maryland Assembly for aid in finding her slave woman. With permission from the government, Tilly boarded abandoned British ships lying in Annapolis in March 1781 to look for the woman she claimed as her property. By approving Tilly’s petition to reclaim this fugitive woman and her children, the Maryland Assembly 99

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failed to recognize the impact of the Revolution on enslaved women.

This unnamed fugitive believed, for instance, that the ideals of the Revolution included her right to live free with her husband and children.

Freedom, however, proved elusive for this family as Ann Tilly succeeded in securing the fugitive woman and her children.180 The quest for freedom in the heart of Virginia’s slavocracy was near its end in 1781. Cornwallis’s army reached Williamsburg on June 25, 1781, where they occupied the town for ten days before ultimately reaching Yorktown, a small tobacco port, in August. En route to Yorktown, hundreds of escaped women, men, and children were struck by an outbreak of smallpox with dozens dying. At Yorktown, fugitives built fortifications for Cornwallis’s seven thousand soldiers, who were preparing to battle French naval forces and American land forces. In the siege that began on September 28, 1781, hunger and disease became the enemy. With rations dwindling, to increase the chances of survival for his troops, Cornwallis expelled thousands of fugitives from his encampments. Half-starved fugitives sought refuge in the nearby woods, where they faced death or certain return to slavery. General Charles O’Hara, a senior officer in Cornwallis’s army, recalled leaving four hundred fugitives, which included dozens of women, with provisions to get them through smallpox and placing them in “the most friendly quarter of the neighborhood,” where he begged “local residents to be kind to the refugees he had once sheltered.”181 The British surrender at Yorktown on October 19, 1781 ended the greatest tragedy of the American Revolution in Virginia. When American and French forces entered Yorktown, they found “an immense number of Negroes” lying dead “in the most miserable manner from smallpox.”182 Planters descended on Yorktown following the surrender and hired American soldiers to entice fugitives out of the woods. Among the soldiers who accepted pay was Private Joseph Martin. According to Martin, some of the American soldiers refused to hand over the former slaves of Virginia planter and legislator John Banister “unless he would promise not to punish them.”183 Thomas Jefferson estimated that about 90 percent of Virginia’s 30,000 slaves who fled to the British died of smallpox and camp fevers. Although historians have determined that Jefferson’s numbers are inflated, he was correct about the overall impact 100

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of smallpox on fugitives, especially his own. Of Jefferson’s thirty slaves who fled to the British, at least fifteen (including women) died from typhus and smallpox. He recovered six fugitives after the surrender at Yorktown and sold or gave away most of them within a few years.184 Women like Judy, who left with the British at Hanover Courthouse in May 1781, remained in Yorktown following the surrender, not sure what to do or where to go. Others like Kate, who had been with the British at Gloucester, returned to her enslaver, only to run away again a few months later.185 Only about two in every three fugitives survived the war, and their road to freedom was still fraught with obstacles, one of which was the pressure placed on the British by American diplomats to return fugitive slaves to their enslavers. The British refused these demands. When the British evacuated Savannah in July 1782, four thousand African Americans, most belonging to Georgia loyalists, sailed with them.186 On November 30, 1782, the United States signed the Provisional Peace Agreement with the British. According to the Agreement, British troops were to withdraw from the United States, “set prisoners at liberty and do so without causing destruction, carrying away Negroes or other property of American inhabitants.” Patriots and Loyalists both petitioned their governments for reimbursement for lost property.

In December 1782, the British fleet prepared the final stages of evacuation from South Carolina. Fugitives had to register with the British army and in some cases plead their case for freedom in the quasijudicial proceedings established by Major General Alexander Leslie to compensate South Carolina loyalists.187 British officers who heard the stories of the fugitives ruled in their favor, to the consternation of the loyalist Americans. Reports regarding the number of Black evacuees from South Carolina range from 5,327 out of a total of 9,127, to 10,000 and perhaps even 12,000.188 In other cases, slaves who remained the property of their loyalist enslavers faced the real prospect of servitude in the West Indies, where loyalists leaving South Carolina had planned to settle. Staying “off the departing ships, not on them was their only hope for freedom.”189 The last British vessel that departed Charleston, South Carolina arrived in New York City within a week of its departure in 101

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December 1782. In New York, escaped women and men were surrounded with fugitives from nearly every state who were waiting to depart the U.S. for Nova Scotia and other regions. Among those leaving were Jenny Toney, “worn out” from hard labor in Connecticut and Rhode Island; Dinah Weeks, who had been enslaved in New York by Robert Bruce; Jane Thompson, who left with her five-year-old grandchild and who believed she was about seventy years old; and Sarah Jones, “a stout wench” of about thirty-three years old who married Harry Washington, a fugitive from George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation, upon arrival in Canada.190 About 2,960 others sailed for Jamaica and St. Lucia in the Caribbean, where they faced the prospect of lifelong slavery. Those who went to East Florida (St. Augustine) included 2,210 evacuees who likewise faced continued bondage at a new location.191 East Florida was the last British territory in North America to be evacuated. As a haven for runaways, by 1779 East Florida’s Black population had quadrupled as a result of the large influx of Black fugitives and kidnapped slaves after the British invasion of the South in 1779. The local Assembly in East Florida consisted of the original White refugees from Georgia and South Carolina. The Assembly authorized the governor “to seize all fugitive slaves and employ them under white overseers in building fortifications for the defense of the colony.”192 In January 1782, the British Crown designated East Florida as an asylum for Loyalists.

A preliminary peace treaty with Spain in January 1783 retroceded East Florida to Spain. A struggle over the nine thousand Black people, the majority of whom were fugitives, ensued between South Carolina and Georgia enslavers and the British. A special commissioner, William Livingstone, was sent from South Carolina to try to prevent the removal of the fugitives. Dr. James Clitherall represented South Carolina Loyalists and would assist in the recovery of slaves claimed by the citizens of South Carolina. To settle the controversy, Governor Tonyn of East Florida invoked a law making it “a felony to remove any Negro or to assist in their escape on penalty of death without benefit of clergy and to require all ships masters to post bond of 200 pounds upon entering any East Florida port as surety against the illegal transportation of slaves.”193 The evacuation of East Florida by the British brought the lives of thousands of fugitives into freedom’s purgatory. On August 29, 1785, 102

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6,540 fugitives and enslaved persons left for different parts of the British Empire aboard the HMS Cyrus.194 The majority of these Black émigrés were slaves forced by White planters to relocate with them, almost half of whom ended up in Jamaica and the Bahamas. The rest were scattered throughout the British West Indies, Europe, Nova Scotia, and Spanish West Florida. Nearly twenty thousand slaves were removed by White loyalists during the evacuation of Savannah, Charleston, and St. Augustine and transplanted to the British West Indies.195 In the North, following the peace treaty signed in June 1783, the other half of the British army prepared to evacuate. In New York, a large contingent of African Americans reached British lines. Approximately three thousand fugitive men, women, and children crowded aboard military transport ships in New York for resettlement elsewhere in the British empire.196 The evacuation also strengthened slavery in Canada, as roughly thirteen hundred slaves belonging to Loyalists were brought to Quebec, where White Loyalist settlements had been established.197 The evacuation of New York resulted in the largest settlement of Blacks, both formerly enslaved and free, in Nova Scotia. According to Sylvia Frey, 1,336 men, 914 women, and 740 children received British certificates of manumission and were granted land allotments in Nova Scotia as a reward for their wartime services.198 Many of the Black migrants were skilled workers who found employment in Halifax, Shelburne, and other large centers; however, the vast majority were former field hands from the Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Black Loyalists received the poorest land on the barren Atlantic coast and, unaccustomed to the thin soil and severe winters, tended to fare poorly. By 1791, most of the Black settlements were experiencing famine, leading to a second mass exodus from Nova Scotia to West Africa and England.199 Mary Perth and her daughter Patience were among those who migrated from Nova Scotia to West Africa and England. Mary had been enslaved by John Willoughby in Princess Anne County, Virginia. She and her daughter were among the eighty-seven people who ran to Lord Dunmore in 1776. In New York, she married Caesar Perth, who had been enslaved by Hardy Waller of Norfolk, Virginia. The couple went to Nova Scotia on board the vessel L’Abondance in 1783 with Mary’s daughter and two orphans from the Willoughby plantation. The family 103

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settled in Birchtown, and in 1792, Mary, Caesar, and their daughter went to Sierra Leone. When Caesar died in 1793, Mary opened a boardinghouse and shop. In 1794, she went to work for the governor, Zachary Macaulay, as housekeeper and teacher, responsible for the many African children living at Macaulay’s house. When Macaulay returned to England in 1799, taking twenty-five African children with him, Mary and her ailing daughter went with them. Following the death of Patience in England, Mary returned to Sierra Leone and reopened her boardinghouse and shop. She remarried in 1806 and died in 1813.200 The passenger lists in the British Book of Negroes, which describes those African Americans who were issued certificates of manumission as a reward for their wartime service, contain the histories of African American freedom and bondage: for example, the Spring, headed for Saint John’s, carried Ann Black, a twenty-five-year-old woman, and Sukey, a five-year-old girl. Twenty-year-old Rose Richards, described as a “healthy young woman,” was aboard the Aurora traveling to Canada as the former property of a White Philadelphia Loyalist. On the same ship came Barbarry Allen, a “healthy stout wench” of twenty-two who was formerly enslaved by a Virginian, and twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Black, a free mulatto woman.201

*** The American Revolution marked a pivotal turning point in the history of slavery. The Revolution affirmed the idea that freedom was a universal birthright. The outbreak of revolutionary conflict emboldened thousands of enslaved women to declare and claim their freedom.

Understanding the circumstances that led fugitive women like Jenny (mentioned earlier; Figure 3.1) to flee bondage provides important insights into how Black women negotiated the threshold between slavery and freedom during the American Revolution. Inspired by natural rights ideology, Black women seized upon every opportunity to undermine the system of slavery through flight. During the Revolution, women not only fled with family members, but also in groups without established kinship relations. Fugitive women had a longitudinal vision of the war and they correctly perceived that their best chances for freedom resided with a British victory and a disruption of the existing social order. With limited 104

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exception, the pattern of flight was similar for fugitive women in each region. Enslaved women ran away to find refuge with British forces and also sought safe havens in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah. At the conclusion of the war, thousands of women and children, the majority of whom were fugitives, departed with the British for Nova Scotia. Although the inner lives of fugitive women have been relegated to historical anonymity, their quest for freedom for themselves and their children allows us to reconsider the terms of agency and power. Runaway slave advertisements expose the power of Black women’s flight and recognize their historical visibility. The flight of enslaved women marked a dramatic shift in women’s activity in history that had reverberations far beyond individual lives. In the postwar period, their flight and resistance continued.

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The Enablers How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America Barbara Kellerman

UK / US publication August 2021 9781108838320 Hardback £20.00 $24.95 USD $28.95 CAD

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be remembered as a pivotal event in American history. Written by one of the world’s foremost experts on leadership and followership, this book centers on the first six months of the pandemic and the crises that ran rampant. The chapters focus less on the former president, Donald Trump, than on his followers: on people complicit in his miserable mismanagement of the crisis in public health. Barbara Kellerman provides clear and compelling evidence that Trump was not entirely to blame for everything that went wrong. Many others were responsible including his base, party, administration, inner circle, Republican elites, members of the media, and even medical experts. Far too many surrendered to the president’s demands, despite it being obvious his leadership was fatally flawed. The book testifies to the importance of speaking truth to power, and a willingness to take risks properly to serve the public interest.

Barbara Kellerman was founding Executive Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. She is author, co-author, and editor of many books on leadership and followership, including Leaders Who Lust, Followership, Bad Leadership, The End of Leadership, and Professionalizing Leadership.

‘An eye-opening look at how bad leaders—one in particular—rely on bad followers.’

Kirkus

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Prologue – Enabler

followers This book centers on what happened during the first six months of the coronavirus crisis – from approximately January 1, 2020 to July 1, 2020 – first as it hit and then as it impacted the United States of America more widely. During this time of what within months was declared a pandemic, Americans were fixated, as they are inclined anyway to be, on their leader, President Donald J. Trump. Some credited him with handling the crisis well. Others faulted him for handling it less well – much less well, or even inordinately badly.

The point is that Trump was the country’s national fixation, even more of a fixation during the fourth year of his presidency than he was during the first three.

The present book deviates from this pattern of fixation. Here the lens is trained not on Trump, the leader, but, primarily, on his followers. Specifically, on Trump’s enablers, on those who made it possible for the president to lead as he did during the inception of the pandemic and then during the months immediately subsequent – during which, in the USA, the virus crisis went from bad to far worse. As I use the word here, enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive. Given the enabled are leaders, their destructions have implications not only for them but, crucially, additionally, for others, sometimes for many, even millions of others. What we have then are not only bad leaders, but bad followers. The implications of this are not minor, they are major. Especially if the leader has great power, enablement can and often does have ramifications as pernicious as they are ubiquitous.

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2 the enablers Writing about followers is devilish business. First, people seem not much to care. What they care about more, infinitely more, are leaders. Second is the matter of semantics. Always the semantics.

What exactly is a follower? And do followers necessarily, by definition, follow? Or do leadership and followership imply something different? Relationships that are complex, not obvious? And behaviors that are nimbler, more nuanced?

First the evidence. The evidence that people do not care, or at least not much, is overwhelming. For all the many programs on leaders and leadership, almost none of them deal with the topic of followers and followership, and in comparison to the countless books and articles on the subject of leadership, there are very few specifically on followers and followership. Similarly, unlike the amount that is spent on leader training and development, the investment in follower training and development is meager at best. Followers and followership are, in sum, poor, pathetic, hangers-on. They are never at the center of what I call the leadership industry – they are always at the margin.

Second the semantics. The semantics are a problem, and for good reason. Curiously, while the words “leader” and “leadership” suffer from too many definitions, the words “follower” and “followership” suffer from too few. There are, literally, hundreds of definitions of the former; there are hardly any of the latter. Even in the smattering of books directly on the topic of followers and followership, clear, consistent definitions of what exactly is being discussed are hard to find. The truth is that the word “follower” makes us squirm. Being a follower conjures images of “docility, conformity, weakness and the failure to excel.”1 It conjures images of “subordination, submissiveness, passivity.”2 And these images are the opposite of those we have of leaders: leaders are strong, followers weak; leaders are active, followers passive; leaders are successful, followers not so much.

Most of the experts avoid the semantics by avoiding the topic.

They focus laser-like on leaders; they steer clear of followers. But there is a problem with this approach – an insurmountable one. For leadership, like followership, is a relationship. Leaders and followers are

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prologue – enabler 3 inextricably bound, the one to the other. So, the problem of language remains. Now as before the only antonym of leader is follower, the only antonym of leadership is followership. This does not, however, mean that followers always follow, any more than it means that leaders always lead.

I first focused on followers in 2008, in a book titled Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders. Then as now my argument was deceptively simple: that to fixate on the person at the top at the expense of those in the middle and at the bottom is misguided and misleading – a mistake. It explains nothing, it distorts everything. If leaders are key determinants, followers are no less.

• Followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors and who therefore usually, but not invariably, fall into line.

• Followership implies a relationship (rank) between subordinates and superiors, and a response (behavior) of the former to the latter.3

Defining followers by rank, as opposed to behavior, allows us immediately to see that while followers, subordinates, usually follow, they do not always follow. Sometimes, in fact, they refuse to follow, refuse to go along with what their leaders want and intend. The same applies to followership. Implying a relationship between leaders and followers that is determined by rank, the latter subordinate to the former, does not extrapolate from this rank the nature of the response.

The ways in which followers respond to their leaders’ directives vary.

They range from blind obedience to deliberate disobedience, from abject loyalty to outright disloyalty.

Followers who are enablers enable then by choice – some of the time. Not all the time, not for example in situations in which they are threatened with physical harm if they refuse to enable. But while in the United States refusing to enable President Donald Trump might have put a very few of his followers at professional or political risk, the risk was not to life or limb. Therefore, had a highly placed administration

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4 the enablers official such as, say, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, or for that matter a Republican Party stalwart such as, say, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, decided not to follow where Trump led, decided not to enable him, it would have put them at risk – but not in a way that came close to life-threatening. Professionally or politically impairing? Possibly, maybe even probably. But life-threatening?

Certainly not.

Which raises the question of what should followers do? Take orders from on high even if these orders are seriously misguided? Pay deference to their leader even if their leader is evidently incompetent and demonstrably corrupt? Or should followers follow the dictates of their conscience? Should followers who want to be good refuse to follow leaders who obviously are bad?

history The great leadership literature has always taken followers into account. But go back thousands of years and you will find then what we find now: leaders in the foreground, followers in the background.

Leaders as leading actors, followers as second bananas. This is not to say that followers were unimportant, rather it is to say that they were not important of themselves, as worthy of dignity. Rather their role was a supporting one: their task was to support, or even to enable, their leaders, ideally not because they had to but because they wanted to. In other words, the great leadership teachers taught how to lead with a light hand.

Lao Tsu: “If the sage would guide the people, he must serve with humility. If he would lead them, he must follow behind. In this way when the sage rules, the people will not feel oppressed.” Confucius: “Lead [the people] by political maneuvers, restrain them with punishments; [they] will become cunning and shameless. Lead them by virtue . . . they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation.” And though Machiavelli is usually thought to have taught that it was better for a prince (a leader) to be feared than loved, fear was to be the last arrow in the leader’s quiver, used only if all else failed. The

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prologue – enabler 5 prince “should think to avoid those things that make him hateful and contemptible.”4 But if the great leadership literature that was earliest has a familiar ring – followers as supporters – the great leadership literature that came later was different. Now followers were individuals with their own rights and privileges. For the ideals and ideas of the Enlightenment signaled a major shift. A shift that redressed, in theory if by no means always in practice, the balance of power between leaders and followers. To be sure, there were precursors to the Enlightenment, prominent among them Athenian democracy. But the impact of the Enlightenment was expansive, and it was enduring.

In the late 1600s John Locke provided moral and legal grounds for a system of governance that distributed power between leaders and led. “There remains still in the people,” Locke wrote, “a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them.” Imagine that – power to the people! Similarly, in the mid and late 1700s, the revolutionary firebrand Thomas Paine raged against control of the American colonies by Great Britain, declaring that even “brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families.” By the mid-1800s women’s voices surfaced or, if you will, resurfaced, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s, urging women to rise against the “history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” And little more than a century later Nelson Mandela declared in a South Africa courtroom that, “the ideal of a democratic and free society” was one for which he was “prepared to die.”5 The Enlightenment, then, signaled a sea change. Followers were no longer expected to be, or even supposed to be mere appendages – appendages to leaders who had a right to control them as they saw fit.

Rather those who ranked lower than leaders were themselves a force to be reckoned with. Not for nothing those revolutionary references to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; to liberty, equality, and fraternity. They sent a signal that ideally anyway things now were different – that ideally power now was to be shared.

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6 the enablers The history of followership is not, though, either in theory or practice, only about ideals and ideas. It is also about facts and figures.

Which is where war comes in – specifically World War II. For it was primarily in the wake of World War II that followers became not just objects of abstract intellectual exercises but subjects of scientific studies. How, historians and social scientists wondered, had it happened that followers had followed bad leaders, enabled leaders so bad they were evil? Enabled a leader such as Adolf Hitler, a genocidal dictator who, notwithstanding his malevolence, was able nonetheless to get his most of his followers to do most of his bidding, and to do so of their own volition.

For most of the immediate postwar period the explanations for what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 centered primarily on Hitler. He was held personally as well as politically responsible for everything that had gone calamitously wrong: from the horrors of the Holocaust and the massive numbers of Europeans and Americans dead and wounded, to the destruction of large swaths of the European continent. More to the point, perhaps, it was Hitler who was the explicator. For example, though so far as we know Hitler personally never killed a single Jew, it was he who was held responsible for the murder of six million.

But before long, attention shifted and by the time the postwar period was over, Germans during the Nazi era were the most carefully studied followers ever. The first academic treatise on the subject was published in 1950, titled The Authoritarian Personality.6 The lead author was Theodor Adorno, a philosopher and social scientist whose impetus was the Holocaust. How could it possibly have happened, he wondered, that in a country as cultured as Germany many millions of people were ready, willing, and even eager to follow where Hitler led?

This profoundly important question was repeatedly raised thereafter, notably by other experts who sought similarly to explain what Hannah Arendt famously (infamously) called “the banality of evil.”7 Two other studies – also of followers, also triggered by what happened during World War II – were of seminal importance. The

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prologue – enabler 7 first, on “obedience to authority,” was based on Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram’s work in the 1960s, which centered on the single most famous social science experiment ever. The experiment was designed to shed light on why followers were willing to obey people in positions of authority who ordered them to do something they never normally would do: inflict pain, obvious physical pain, on another human being. Again, Milgram sought to answer the question raised by the Nazis: how do people get to the point of behaving so “callously and inhumanely”?8 The second seminal study of followers during the Nazi period was Christopher Browning’s 1992 book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.9 As the title makes clear, the book is about men who before the war were “ordinary.” Nevertheless, with only a very few exceptions, during the war they did what they were told to do, no matter how cruel, how treacherous, or murderous. Within months or even weeks they went from being ordinary men to enabling Hitler to implement “the final solution” – to eradicate, or try to eradicate, European Jews.

The history of followership has been curiously cyclical.

Thousands of years ago followers were thought of rather as they are now: they were part of the action, but not central to the action. In the interim, however, were several periods during which followers came to the fore. In the wake of World War II certainly it was well understood that without followers there are no leaders, that without followership there is no leadership, and that while leaders matter so do followers – just as much. More recently though there has been a retreat, a retreat thinking of followers as afterthoughts, sidebars, bit players. This book takes exception to what is now again the conventional wisdom. It reaffirms in no uncertain terms the power of the follower, and that subordinates determine outcomes – not just superiors.

the leadership system As it became apparent that it was impossible to understand what happened in Nazi Germany without accounting for the German

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8 the enablers people, so also it was recognized that this required understanding Germany itself – its history and culture, its geography and demography, and the country’s political transformation and rampant inflation. To take an obvious example: Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933. How this happened cannot be understood separate and apart from Germany in the ruinous wake of World War I and the devastating vortex of the Great Depression. In short, context matters.

The presidential leadership of Donald Trump cannot then be understood separate and apart from the event that constitutes the context of this book – the pandemic as it unfolded in a particular place at a particular time, the United States during the first six months of 2020. We need to understand what I call the “leadership system” – which consists of three parts: leaders, followers, and contexts.10 I have argued, in other words, that it is impossible to understand leaders without their followers, or followers without their leaders, or to understand either leaders or followers without understanding the contexts within which they are situated.

The six-month period covered in this book – January through June 2020 – might seem arbitrary in that the pandemic persisted well beyond it. But for the purposes of this book the timeframe is apt. First, most of Trump’s enablers – including Trump’s team – had long since signed on and they chose during the half year to stay rather than go.

Second, six months into the virus crisis was a marker. By then the facts and the figures had made clear just how bad was the pandemic – especially in the United States. Third, and most important, the first half year of the virus crisis set the template for what came subsequently. Whatever the patterns of leadership and followership as they pertained to the pandemic during Trump’s presidency by then were set in stone.

By the end of June, though the USA had only 4 percent of the world’s population, it had almost 25 percent of new coronavirus cases.

On one particular day in early July, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases; the state of Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.11 Six months into the virus crisis, more Americans had been

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prologue – enabler 9 infected with and died from COVID-19 than any other people in any other country in the world.12 By October there was evidence that the pattern continued. A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in the five months preceding, per capita deaths in the USA, both from COVID-19 and from other causes, were far greater than in 18 other high-income countries. An expert at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, found the comparisons shocking. “The United States really has done remarkably badly compared to other countries. I mean remarkably badly.”13 Some states, such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas, fared particularly poorly: in early July, the Sun Belt was declared “the global virus capital.”14 In short, by every objective measure, during the first half of 2020 and beyond, under the leadership of President Trump, the federal government’s management of the pandemic was woefully, humiliatingly, bad. George Packer, an astute observer of the American scene, wrote that the USA had reacted as if it were Pakistan or Belarus, “like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”15 During this same six-month timeframe, the public health crisis was the not the only crisis America faced. Two others also occurred: the economic crisis that was a direct result of the pandemic, and the social and political crisis that developed in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in late May. Neither of these two crises are at the center of this book, but nor are they at the margins. As I always tell my students, everything is connected to everything else.

As the title of this book makes clear, my focus is on followers who were enablers. Specifically, it is on those who enabled President Donald Trump during the first half year of the coronavirus crisis, in some cases primarily as members of groups, in others primarily as individuals. However, since followers who are enablers cannot be divorced either from their leaders or from the contexts within which they and their leaders are situated, Trump is never far from center stage. Additionally, that which takes place on center stage, the pandemic, is itself of utmost consequence. This then is the story of

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10 the enablers a president who presided over a certain place at a certain time. It is also the story of a new coronavirus that became a pandemic in this place at this time. But at the center of this story are the president’s enablers – followers who allowed or even encouraged Trump to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that were destructive. Some were in the president’s orbit before the pandemic was ever imagined, others were brought in as the pandemic came to pass. Every enabler chose in any case for his or her own reasons – such as family fealty, group loyalty, ideological affinity, party identity, professional anxiety, political expediency, personal preference, promise of reward or fear of punishment – to remain in the president’s fold.

enablers This book has a large cast of characters all of whom were followers.

But was every follower an enabler? For example, Trump’s base was composed of hardcore supporters who were critical to his presidency.

But most of these supporters, however dedicated, never came close to the White House nor, obviously, were they involved in the president’s management of the pandemic. Nevertheless, no matter what Trump did or said as it pertained to the new coronavirus; no matter how mistaken, misguided, or misleading his leadership; no matter how bad the pandemic during the first half of 2020; they continued to give him their undiminished, unconditional support. Included in this book as well are men and women who were close to the president – for example, Stephen Miller, a key aide, especially on immigration, and Melania Trump, his wife – but who played only a small part or even no part in managing the pandemic. Nevertheless, they played a large part in Trump’s presidency.

They were then – both his base and a large cast of significant others – not just followers, but enablers. They allowed and even encouraged President Donald Trump to engage and then to persist in behaviors that were destructive. The best way to think about enablers is as along a continuum, depending on their level of engagement.

Enablers at a distance, such as Trump’s base, were, albeit only

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prologue – enabler 11 indirectly, important to his management of the pandemic. For their continued support throughout 2020 – despite growing evidence of White House callousness and ineptitude – explains why significant others, such as virtually every Republican senator, remained for the duration silent to the point of being complicit. However, enablers who were proximate, such as, for instance, son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, were much more important. In fact, these enablers, members of Trump’s team, were critical determinants of what exactly happened in America during the pandemic and what did not.

Trump’s team was a management team. In one way or another its members were involved, deeply involved, with the president’s management of the pandemic. These are the followers on whom I finally focus, enablers who were critical in the context of the virus crisis. They remained not only in the president’s fold but under his thumb. Specifically, day in and day out they did more or less what Trump wanted them to do as it pertained to the pandemic – even after it became apparent that his management of the pandemic was highly problematical, if not even irrational. By choosing to stay rather than go, sign on rather than speak out, support rather than oppose the president during the first half of 2020, members of Trump’s team were almost as responsible as was Trump himself for everything that went wrong. Let me be as clear as I can. I maintain that members of Trump’s team were almost as responsible as was the president himself for so many Americans dead, for so many Americans sick, for so many Americans out of a job, for so many American lives destroyed, displaced, and disrupted. I argue that members of Trump’s team explain almost as much as does the president himself about why, in comparison with other countries such as Germany, South Korea, and Canada, as it pertained to the pandemic the United States performed abysmally poorly.16 The book is in three parts. Part I – “Trump’s Tribe” – is about enablers at a distance. Chapter 1, for example, is about Trump’s base,

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12 the enablers his hardcore supporters. It was they who were the foundation on which the president stood during his four years in the White House.

Part I has three additional chapters, each of which is devoted to another group in Trump’s tribe: his party, his administration, and his inner circle. Part II – “Virus Crisis” – is about the pandemic that constituted the context. About the new coronavirus that felled and killed so many Americans, as it insinuated itself into the United States during the period January through June 2020. Part II also has four chapters: the first about the prequel to the pandemic; the three subsequent about the sequence, science, and politics of the pandemic.

Part III – “Trump’s Team” – is about enablers who were up close and personal. Some had direct responsibility for managing the virus crisis, like Kushner. Others, like Attorney General William Barr, were less directly involved, but they nonetheless were key. Each enabler remained for the duration under Trump’s thumb, day in and day out deviating little or not at all from doing what the president wanted when he wanted it. Part III also has four chapters, each about a group that constituted Trump’s team as it pertained to the pandemic: (1) the vice president and four members of the Cabinet; (2) eight senior advisors; (3) two legislators, two governors, and four members of the media; and (4) members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force along with, separately, five medical experts, each a physician. The list of enablers is not definitive, it is representative. Each of these people enabled the president to lead and manage in ways that failed the American people. The people whose health and welfare, safety and security, President Donald Trump had sworn to uphold.

enablement in a pandemic Though I have long been interested in bad (as well as good) leadership, I am in the minority.17 Moreover, those of us with an interest in bad (as well as good) followership are an even smaller minority. Which brings us to The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America. It is impossible to write a book such as this one, with such a title and subtitle, without taking a stand on who in this

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prologue – enabler 13 instance was a bad leader, and on who in this instance was a bad follower – a bad follower to the point of being an enabler. Ironically, though I was anything but a fan of President Trump, what prompted me to write about his followers was the ceaseless, merciless, brutal bashing of him as a leader. When it became clear that the coronavirus had become a crisis, and when it became clear that our obsession with Trump was becoming more crazed and consuming, I began to ask, “Is that all there is? Is President Trump the only one to blame for what went wrong?” The only one who can be tagged as being both incompetent and unethical in addressing America’s greatest public health crisis in over a century?

That things went wrong in the USA during the first six months of 2020 seems to me an assertion beyond dispute. But, of course, it is not. Not at all. Trump and his followers have always maintained that during the months immediately before the pandemic was officially declared, and in the months immediately thereafter, they did nothing wrong and everything right. To be fair, the USA is not the only country in the world in which the pandemic was handled badly by people in positions of authority. Britain’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, for example, was roundly criticized for his handling of the virus crisis.

In July, the Financial Times claimed that Johnson’s management of the pandemic had consisted of, “months of mistakes, fatal delays and episodes of incompetence at the heart of the British state.”18 Still, for the last 70 years or so the USA has had a reputation not only for unparalleled military and economic might, but also for unparalleled competence and capacity. For being at the front of the global pack in virtually every area of human endeavor. Now though, according to a study by Columbia University if the USA had locked down just one week earlier in March, some 36,000 fewer Americans would have died in the immediate wake of the virus outbreak.19 There is widespread agreement among medical and scientific experts that if the US government had moved more smartly and swiftly to contain COVID-19, Americans would have been spared the worst not only of the public health crisis but of the economic

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14 the enablers crisis. For what transpired during the first half of 2020 was exceedingly costly measured not only by the nation’s physical health but also in terms of its economic health. In mid-2020 the US Labor Department reported that since the start of the pandemic 42.6 million people had filed for unemployment.20 Additionally, though it will take years to know for certain, some estimates were that the layoffs, approximately 42 percent would result in job losses that were permanent.21 By October it was apparent that the pandemic was the “greatest threat to prosperity and well-being the U.S. had encountered since the great depression.”22 No wonder that by mid-June fully eight out of ten voters were telling pollsters that “things are out of control in the United States.”

A large majority of Americans were concerned about the spread of COVID-19 and pessimistic about the economy’s returning to normal any time soon. Furthermore, in the wake of the massive demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd, it was reported that a large majority of Americans were “down on President Donald Trump’s ability to unite the nation.”23 Floyd’s death led to one of the largest and longest-lasting demonstrations against racism in America there has ever been. But, instead of choosing to empathize and unite, President Trump chose to denigrate and divide. Early on he denounced some of the demonstrators as “terrorists,” and threatened to send the military to places where, as he assessed it, state and local leaders were either unwilling or unable to maintain law and order.24 Which brings us to the sorts of questions that are at the heart of this book: • Given his complete lack of relevant experience and expertise, why was Donald Trump initially able to attract, and then to hold in his fold legions of ardent admirers? Why was there even such a thing as Trump’s base?

• When it became apparent that a virus crisis was likely, what did members of Trump’s team do to sound the alarm and, subsequently, to confirm what the president heard?

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prologue – enabler 15 • When it became apparent that Trump was refusing to respond to fact-based evidence, what did members of Trump’s team do first to stave off and then to mitigate the virus crisis? Should they have done differently?

• If members of Trump’s team should have acted differently – should, for example, have in some way objected, intervened, resisted, or countermanded – but did not, does this make them bad followers? Are bad followers necessarily enablers?

How to make meaning of being bad? And what does the meaning we make of being bad tell us about who or even what is a bad follower?

Here I turn to my earlier analysis of a related topic – bad leadership.

Not bad leaders – bad leadership. For as earlier indicated, leadership, and followership, imply a relationship.

Bad leadership falls into two categories: bad as in ineffective and bad as in unethical. Ineffective leaders, in tandem with their followers, fail to accomplish what they want and intend. Unethical leaders, in tandem with their followers, fail to distinguish between right and wrong or, worse, they make the distinction but pay it no attention.

The same can be said about followers. Which is to say that bad followership falls into two categories: bad as in ineffective and bad as in unethical. Ergo, ineffective followers, in tandem with their leaders, fail to accomplish what they want and intend. And, unethical followers, in tandem with their leaders, fail to distinguish between right and wrong or, worse, they make the distinction but pay it no attention.25 It is possible, then, for followers to be (1) bad as in ineffective; or (2) bad as in unethical; or (3) bad as in both. It is also possible for leaders to be ineffective and/or unethical, but followers not – that is, for followers to be good even if their leaders are bad.

It is possible, in other words, for followers, defined here by rank, not to follow, to, instead, break with leaders who are bad. To do something other than what their leaders want them to do, ask them to do, tell them to do, order them to do. What I am arguing, then, is that members of Trump’s team – followers who knew full well that he was not responding to the virus crisis as cogently, coherently, competently, or even as ethically as he could have – should have distanced

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16 the enablers themselves from him. Even broken with the president publicly, by refusing, publicly, to follow where he led. For in the end every one of Trump’s followers, including members of his team, was an independent agent. Had these independent agents failed to follow their leader they might have been demeaned, demoted, or fired, or they might not have been reelected. But they would not have been shot.

It is in some ways better and in others worse that in liberal democracies especially, relations between followers and leaders have changed in recent decades. In general, followers have been empowered, and leaders have been enfeebled.26 The reasons for this shift in the balance of power and influence include changes in culture, such as a decline in respect for authority; and changes in technology, social media especially, media that give voice to anyone and everyone no matter their status or station. This does, or it should, make it easier than it used to be for subordinates who have good and sound reason to oppose their superiors actively to resist them. First from within. Then, if necessary, from without. But, as we will see, there is evidence that opposing a leader, even like Trump, who demonstrably was bad, is a task followers resist.

Again, as I use the word here, enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive. By focusing on enablers, I am, then, taking a stand. I am saying that Trump was a bad leader who depended completely and absolutely on his bad followers – his enablers. For though America’s fixation on the president during the first year of the pandemic was complete, not for a moment was he the only actor in the drama. President Trump gets blamed, properly so, for his administration’s feeble, feckless, incompetent, and immoral leadership during the first several months of the coronavirus crisis. But he was not alone.

His enablers made it possible for Trump to do what he did – and not to do what he did not.

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and Hall offer from the early mic conditions the Second lity combined olerance? And rld’s economy? thors identify l capitalism he future.”

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What Capitalism Needs

From unemployment to Brexit to climate

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change, capitalism is in trouble and

ill‑prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of

capitalism, some of the great economists

of the past – Adam Smith, Friedrich List,

John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter,

Forgotten Lessons of Great Economists

Karl Polanyi, and Albert Hirschman – did

not make the same mistake. Leveraging their

Forgotten Lessons of Great Economists

insights, sociologists John L. Campbell and

John A. Hall trace the historical development

John L. Campbell; John A. Hall

of capitalism as a social, political, and

economic system throughout the twentieth and early twenty‑first centuries. They draw

ation is, as ectively, both government s affect the

comparisons across eras and around the globe to show that there is no inevitable

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi and Albert Hirschman - did not make the same mistake. Leveraging their insights, sociologists John L. Campbell and John A. Hall trace the historical development of capitalism as a social, political, and economic system throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They draw comparisons across eras and around the globe to show that there is no inevitable logic of capitalism. Rather, capitalism’s performance depends on the strength of nationstates, the social cohesion of capitalist societies, and the stability of the international system - three things that are in short supply today.

logic of capitalism; rather, capitalism’s

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John L. Campbell and John A. Hall

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supply today.

John L. Campbell is the Class of 1925 Professor & Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College. He is the author of American Discontent and other books.

John A. Hall is the James McGill Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at McGill University. He is the author of The Importance of Being Civil and other books.

‘Inspired by the insights of six key economists, Campbell and Hall offer a masterful interpretation of the global political economy from the early 20thcentury until today.’

Bruce G. Carruthers, Northwestern University

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1 Sociology from Economics As sociologists, we view capitalism and its optimal needs differently from conventional economists. Ironically, however, our own perspective draws on the work of well-known early economists – sociologically astute, but often misunderstood or neglected in economics today. Those earlier economists provide us with most of the important building blocks for our argument. They also remind us that the foundations of economics are fundamentally different from the widespread contemporary belief that markets work best when political and social forces do not interfere with them. The historical perspective suggests that this contemporary view is wrong and that putting it into practice has caused serious economic damage. We will show that capitalism performs best when states possess the intellectual and institutional capacities to manage their economies effectively and when societies are blessed with basic social cohesion, so that the interests of the many in widespread prosperity are not outweighed by those of the privileged few. Our concern, however, is that state capacity and social cohesion are in short supply these days because their conditions of existence have been badly damaged; hence our plea to reverse this situation is quixotic. We do not suffer from the illusion that a better way will necessarily be found that will realize our desires. But we do believe that, without a better understanding of what makes capitalism work well, the situation will not improve.

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what capitalism needs Sociologists see capitalism as a much more complex system of social relations than do most economists. Economic activity is based not only on people pursuing their economic interests but also on trust, historical tradition, and personal identity. Sociologists also recognize that capitalism is embedded in a wide variety of institutions – political and cultural, as well as economic. And sociologists understand that the way in which capitalism operates varies significantly across countries and over time. But what is perhaps most noticeable about sociology is its fundamental criticism of capitalism. The greatest sociologists on the subject spoke of the alienation, anomie, and disenchantment associated with capitalism. There is nothing inherently wrong with this view, given the exploitation of workers in many capitalist societies both past and present, and we really speak warmly in this book only about the Golden Age of capitalism – that is, the first few decades following the Second World War – when, by contemporary standards, the interests of the many carried greater weight relative to those of the few. To be sure, those economists whose thought we admire had their own reservations about capitalism. But they differ from the sociologists in two ways: First, they were aware of and appreciated the dynamism and prosperity that capitalism can produce; second, they provided useful sociological insights about the mechanisms of capitalism and the institutions needed to make it work – and whose absence brings chaos. It is for this reason that we rely on the work of six historically eminent economists: Adam Smith, Albert Hirschman, Friedrich List, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Karl Polanyi. Many of their insights have been forgotten; we resurrect and expand them here.

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sociology from economics It might seem strange to focus on this group of economists. After all, they lived during very different eras of capitalism and, as a result, had very different views of capitalism.

Smith was a leading member of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, writing during the early years of capitalism when the factory system was just emerging, with the logistics of transportation and communication still essentially primitive. List lived in the early nineteenth century, when tariff barriers inside Germany were being torn down so as to increase specialization and trade. Keynes lived through the Great Depression and two world wars. He died just after the Second World War and lived in Britain as its power in the world was diminishing. Schumpeter, an Austrian, lived during the same period, but he spent the last two decades of his life in the United States at a time when its hegemonic power was blossoming.

This latter pair witnessed the rise of multinational corporations, steam ships, automobiles, air travel, and telephones.

Polanyi was another mid-twentieth-century economist, but he was one who lived in Austria, Britain, the United States, and Canada, and who lived long enough to see the emergence of the Cold War, the European Economic Community (forerunner to the European Union), and the full weight of the United States as an international superpower. Finally, Hirschman, the youngest member of our group, was born during the First World War in Berlin, where he witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, before fleeing to France. Hirschman fought on behalf of the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War, helped Jews and others to escape Nazi-occupied France, and eventually emigrated to the United States, where he died in 2012 having seen the moon landing, the globalization of

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what capitalism needs capitalism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the birth of the Internet, and the emergence of China as a leading economic player on the world stage. Yet, despite their different experiences, these economists shared two things in common: Each developed views of economics that were unorthodox for their time, and each appreciated in varying degree how important social cohesion and state capacities are if capitalist societies are to prosper.

Contemporary economists tend to forget the lessons learned by their predecessors. This is unfortunate because taking that intellectual heritage seriously can inform a more complete understanding of how capitalism works – one that incorporates the important roles that states and social relations play in capitalism both domestically and internationally.

In this regard, it is worth remembering that some of the economists we discuss did not describe their work as the study of economics at all but rather as the study of political economy – a much more encompassing approach to the analysis of capitalism than is typical of most economists today.1 There are some exceptions to this generalization – notably, institutional economists and those concerned recently with economic inequality.2 But modern economics evolved from a discipline based on institutional, historical, and comparative analysis to one based on formal mathematical modeling and parsimonious explanation – and then, as one economist told us, to narrow-minded empiricism focusing on small questions, thanks to the rise of computers and large data sets.3 Mainstream economists, as well as the policymakers and media pundits who heed their advice, take a very different 4

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sociology from economics view from ours. They believe that markets work best if politicians do not “interfere” with market processes. Perhaps most famously, former University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman argued, in his bestselling Capitalism and Freedom, that maximizing shareholder wealth through markets is the best way of delivering prosperity, and that most attempts by government to improve markets are doomed to failure and may even make things worse. He believed that the government should refrain from imposing tariffs, setting minimum wage rates, regulating industries, and requiring people to contribute to social security programs. Nor should the government license particular enterprises, occupations or professions, operate national parks or toll roads, redistribute income or provide social services to alleviate poverty.4 Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work. Other influential schools of economic thought held similar views. Rational expectations theory suggested that people anticipate the government’s economic policies and then behave proactively in ways that nullify the intended effects of those policies; the efficient market hypothesis maintained that unfettered markets are the best way of establishing value and setting prices.

Friedman’s view and that of his likeminded compatriots is mistaken. Yet it is their perspective that helped to pave the way for the neoliberal (sometimes called free-market or laissez-faire) economic reforms that led to the 2008 financial crisis, perpetuated much of the economic misery that followed, and which may yet exacerbate the disastrous economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

Some economists disagree with this orthodox view of what makes capitalism work well. Some even point occasionally

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what capitalism needs to the importance of our two key variables, state capacities and social cohesion. Joseph Stiglitz complains that, in the mainstream view, “there is little need for community and no need for trust. Government is a hindrance; it is the problem, not the solution.”5 Paul Krugman scolds his fellow economists for neglecting that “economics inevitably takes place in a political context.”6 Stiglitz and Krugman, also both Nobel Prize winners, have concluded that the economics profession went astray when it followed orthodoxy, ignoring mountains of evidence indicating that it was the wrong path to follow, and that, as a result, it succumbed to a flawed ideology rather than subscribed to reasoned argument.7 We agree, but we will have much more to say about how state capacities and social cohesion affect capitalism.

Before going any further, we must point to complexities in the character of capitalism. Every economist would agree that a minimal definition begins with the presence of private property, production for the market, and the principle of profit maximization by rational means. But, as noted, there is more to it than that, as becomes obvious once we ask ourselves about the nature of the society in which we live. Countries are marked not only by capitalism but also by national sentiment and by the character of their political regime. You cannot understand capitalism without understanding what unites or divides a society.

Nor can you understand capitalism without understanding how the economy and state engage each other. Then, there is the fact that what happens inside a country often depends on events in the external world. The larger world is, of course, capitalist too, and nation-states must navigate within it. As a result, domestic political and social arrangements are subject to economic 6

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sociology from economics pressure from that larger world. But the larger world involves geopolitics that also affect capitalism inside countries.

Two implications follow from this last point. First, capitalism changes because of geopolitics, just as geopolitics change because of developments within capitalism. When the Chinese invented gunpowder, they banned its use for military production, limiting it instead to fireworks, because they had no geopolitical rivals. In Europe, where states were often at each other’s throats, that move was not possible: it would have led to the destruction of any state that tried, because its rivals would not have done the same thing. Equally, the geopolitical agreement among members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase oil prices in the 1970s sent shock waves through the world’s capitalist economies. In turn, this escalated geopolitical tensions between these capitalist countries and the OPEC cartel. Second, changes within international capitalism have been managed differently by states over time. World capitalism is far from politically neutral. Notably, its postwar institutions were largely created by the United States, thanks to both its military and economic strength in 1945, and the role of this hegemonic power remains exceptionally important today, even though its character has changed. These considerations make for complexities that we cannot ignore. Nonetheless, our focus is on capitalism, whose geographic range and intensity of interaction have increased significantly since the Second World War – and all the more so in the decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

We live life forward and understand it backward. We now possess enough hindsight to see that there was an exceptional postwar period in which the advanced core of the

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what capitalism needs capitalist world benefited from peace and prosperity thanks largely to the United States setting the rules by which capitalism operated. That relatively benign era of stability has come to an end; history is on the move again, with destabilizing effects – in part, because the United States now chooses to use some of its power to renegotiate those rules, such as those it helped to establish for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now the World Trade Organization (WTO), and also because the international architecture of capitalism is changing, driven primarily by the rise of China.

We now turn to our general argument by describing our two variables, social cohesion and state capacity. We do this with help from the great economists mentioned earlier.

Chapter 2 begins by examining the disasters of the midtwentieth century in which capitalism was thoroughly disrupted by geopolitical forces. It then turns to the amazing postwar recovery – the Golden Age – that was made possible by geopolitical settlement. Chapter 3 chronicles the slow decline of the Golden Age; then, in the next two chapters, we consider capitalism’s contemporary difficulties. Chapter 4 looks at the deterioration of social cohesion. Growing economic inequality and stifled economic mobility, on the one hand, and rising nationalist discontent, on the other, are undermining social cohesion and therefore destabilizing politics and state capacity throughout the advanced capitalist world.

Chapter 5 analyzes in detail this deterioration of state capacity.

No description is neutral, so we will conclude in Chapter 6 by discussing prospects for the future, particularly in light of the unprecedented challenges to capitalism posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the digital information age, and climate crisis.

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sociology from economics

Building Blocks It makes sense to begin with Adam Smith, often seen as the founding father of economics. He favored competitive markets – an idea best captured in his notion of the “invisible hand,” a process that stems from individuals pursuing their economic interests by rationally calculating costs and benefits, then striking the best deals they can in the marketplace. In the aggregate, the accumulation of these many individual deals constitutes the forces of supply and demand, which express the general economic interests of society and increase national prosperity and wealth.8 This idea has become the foundation of today’s mainstream economics. However, mainstream economists forget that Smith had much more to say about all this. He also recognized the importance of social cohesion and state capacity for the development and success of capitalism.

Consider social cohesion first. As is well known, Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that prosperity in capitalism stemmed from the division of labor – or, more precisely, the specialization, dexterity, and innovative powers of workers. His famous example was a pin factory: when the task of manufacturing pins was broken down into its component steps and each step was assigned to a different worker, pin manufacturing became much more efficient and productive. Smith shows here his continual sympathy for labor, his insistence being that high levels of human capital resulting from basic social cohesion underlie prosperity, which in turn increased social solidarity.

But there was another source of social cohesion of greater importance. While Smith praised the rational pursuit

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what capitalism needs of self-interest in The Wealth of Nations, his earlier book The Theory of Moral Sentiments maintained that something else is the principal motivation of human behavior.9 The single most important human motivation was not the pursuit of material well-being but the longing to be loved, to which he added at the end of his life the desire to find oneself lovable. As he put it, “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved.”10 In other words, people are fundamentally social creatures driven by what other people think of them. Those around us serve as a looking-glass through which we can gauge and adjust our own behavior.11 From this, Smith derived a crucial point: we tend to admire success and often flaunt it. As a result, we are jealous of and want to catch up with those above us in the economic pecking order. For Smith, this is the most essential source of social cohesion – less a belief in capitalism in and of itself than an appreciation of the role that money-making has within the comparisons to others that marks social life.12 What this suggests metaphorically is an ascending escalator – one without end – on which people are aware of each other, constantly trying to catch up with those above them, running and running until their death. As long as you believe that you might catch up, cohesion is assured, even if the odds are against you, because everyone above and ahead of you is running too. If people cease to hold the belief that they can catch up, illusory though it may be, then trust in the system will decline, social cohesion will break down, and capitalism will run into trouble. For Smith, the illusion of the societal escalator keeps the wheels of capitalism turning even though it is neither morally admirable nor indeed sensible.

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sociology from economics The point is that the founding father of economics recognized that social cohesion was a necessary condition for capitalist prosperity. For this reason, he insisted in The Wealth of Nations that “basic measures of equality” were important too. Smith believed that the rate of profit was “naturally low in rich [countries], and high in poor countries” and was always highest in countries that were “going fastest to ruin.”13 Countries in which capitalists hoarded too many of the profits for themselves and limited workers’ wages would fail to fulfill the promise of capitalism for greater national wealth and prosperity – the standard by which he felt a social order should be judged. He recognized that the interests of capitalists and those of the rest of society were frequently at odds with each other – particularly when it came to regulating monopoly and competition.14 Furthermore, The Wealth of Nations makes it clear that he admired a contractual world in which those at the bottom of society have the power to resist oppression from those above – a world that abolishes uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and clerical domination – altogether destroying a world of hierarchy based on debt, favor, and gift.15 In short, Smith favored a certain measure of both economic and political equality.

But what about our second variable, state capacity?

Smith described The Wealth of Nations as a handbook for the legislator – a guide for practical political action. He believed that such action was necessary because capitalists disliked competition, as noted, and were keen wherever possible to gain advantages, such as special licenses, subsidies, and tariff protection, that would help them to avoid the risks of competing in the marketplace.16 In other words, capitalists cannot

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what capitalism needs be trusted with capitalism, so the market must be regulated and never captured by capitalists.

In Smith’s view, two sets of tasks confront the state elite. Book V of The Wealth of Nations is devoted to the positive functions of the state. The first set is domestic. The tasks include the protection of private property and the provision of public works and infrastructure. The state should not let inequality get out of hand, as noted, so Smith favored progressive tax regimes that recognize the limited incomes of the poor and avoid taxes on necessities such as food and clothing. The state should also guard against monopolies. Crucially, the state should provide basic education because both economy and society benefit from a well-trained population. There is absolutely no truth to the notion that Smith saw no positive role for the state, as Milton Friedman once maintained in a celebrated public lecture.17 The second set of tasks confronting the state is external.

Smith was well aware of the importance of national defense, but he went well beyond this basic point. The traditional European attitude of the early modern period – mercantilism – had been to see economic affairs in zero-sum terms, with the gain for one state coming at the expense of a rival. This was a reason for war – something that should and could be avoided. Smith suggested that it was madness for each country to act independently like this; it was far better for countries to specialize and then to trade.

Why produce terrible wine in England and poor-quality woolens in Portugal, when it was possible to obtain good Portuguese wine in return for high-quality English woolens?

In this matter, Smith was arguing a normative, as well as a descriptive, case. The state should ensure free and open trade 12

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sociology from economics with its neighbors. Doing otherwise, Smith believed, leads to a world of high profits and low wages that he feared would diminish the benefits that capitalism can bring. It is not much of a stretch to infer from Smith that trade was a form of international social cohesion through which all capitalist nations could prosper.

Social Cohesion Albert Hirschman adds something to the sources of cohesion that Smith identified. Hirschman explained that when people have voice in an organization or system, they are likely to be loyal to it; they will have a sense of belonging to it.18 Even when they perceive it as being poorly managed, unfair or oppressive, they will neither rebel nor leave as long as they believe that they can improve things through voice, by expressing their hopes and concerns to those in charge. In contrast, the denial of voice makes for anger and hence the desire to exit. Hirschman’s most famous book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty shows that these concepts are useful for understanding how capitalism works.19 We will show that the provision of voice is a way of facilitating a sense of social inclusion and, by extension, the social cohesion that is so important for capitalist prosperity.

This was abundantly clear in Denmark and Switzerland, as we will see, where institutionalized voice helped policymakers to manage the 2008 financial crisis effectively. Voice increases the possibility for dialogue, negotiation, and cooperation among people in all quarters of the capitalist system.

Workers, for instance, are more likely to cooperate with

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what capitalism needs employers to solve problems, resolve their differences, and seek mutually acceptable responses to crises if they are organized and enjoy corporatist means of being heard in front offices and corporate board rooms. Similarly, employers can benefit from the knowledge and insights of their employees in improving the production process and quality of the products they produce. West Germany, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries took this lesson to heart with great success during the Golden Age of capitalism. When voice fails to work, people rebel against the system. This is clear from the history of many class, populist, and nationalist movements; they often began as vocal expressions of dissatisfaction that eventually morphed into exit.20 Hirschman would probably not have disagreed with Smith’s account of social cohesion – that is, the insistence that if inequality is minimized and people believe in the societal escalator, the cohesion will be maintained. But Hirschman went a step further, recognizing that political feelings mattered too. He suggested that political inclusion might work even in the absence of basic equality: “In societies which inhibit passage from one social stratum to another, resort to the voice option is automatically strengthened: everyone has a strong motivation to defend the quality of life at his own station.”21

State Capacity An important part of our argument is that capitalism benefits from states with the capacities to promote development and manage the ups and downs that any capitalist economy is 14

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sociology from economics going to experience. Nineteenth-century economist Friedrich List offered a critique of Smith’s antimercantilist argument to make this point. In The National System of Political Economy, List insisted that, in addition to taking a role in training labor and creating social cohesion, the state needed to protect newly developing industries from international competition. List had spent several years in North America when he was young and was deeply impressed by Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufactures. The United States would always be subservient to Britain, Hamilton maintained, if it failed to develop its own industries. This was the consequence of Britain’s advanced economic status and its consequent ability to flood the American market with cheap goods. The only way for the United States to move forward was through protectionism – that is, import barriers that would give domestic producers time to improve their production processes and the quality of their products, and therefore to slowly create national comparative advantage. For a while, of course, consumers within such a regime would have to buy inferior domestic goods compared to those they might purchase from abroad. But, in List’s view, this short-term sacrifice would yield long-term benefits. Once domestic producers had improved the quality of their goods sufficiently to compete in the international market, protectionism could and should be abandoned. What we have here is nationalism from above: state leaders wanting to develop their societies not only to increase domestic wealth but also to ensure survival within the international economic and geopolitical system. We will have more to say about nationalism soon because that protean force can take different forms.

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what capitalism needs What List failed to realize, however, is that there can be a downside to protectionism. Protectionism diminishes trust among nations, which can cause conflict in a variety of ways. One is by enabling a country to become so powerful economically that it tips the balance of power internationally. That is the story of Germany in the nineteenth century.

But another way in which protectionism may be disruptive is when a great power losing its predominance tries to maintain it through protectionist means – that is, protectionism to cling to power rather than to create it. This was the troubling case of the United States during Donald Trump’s presidency.

List recognized the virtues of state intervention for helping fledgling capitalist societies with their initial development. In contrast, John Maynard Keynes, the great twentiethcentury British economist, saw the need for states to manage capitalist economies once they were mature. In this regard, Keynes disagreed with the economic orthodoxy of his day, which held that, if left to their own devices, markets would self-correct during booms and busts without government assistance. Keynes provided an analysis of capitalism’s tendency toward chronic market failure, reflected in unemployment. Although markets occasionally crash with disastrous consequences, he believed that even their normal condition was one of unnecessary unemployment.22 Keynes argued that unemployment was the result not of workers being lazy or poorly motivated but rather of insufficient aggregate demand for the things they produced.

Crucially, demand tends to be insufficient because people tend to save more and consume and invest less than is needed 16

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sociology from economics to sustain full employment – especially with high levels of inequality when spending power is concentrated at the top.23 Wealthier people tend to save more than poorer people because the wealthy have more discretionary income. If the distributions of income and wealth are skewed too much in favor of the privileged few, aggregate spending and therefore aggregate demand in the economy will suffer, and chronic unemployment will result. To be blunt, excessive inequality will cripple capitalism.24 For Keynes, then, inequality was not so much a problem of social cohesion, as it was for Smith, but a problem of macroeconomic performance. He explained all this in his masterpiece The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published at the height of the Great Depression.25 The implication of this for orthodox economics was devastating: laissez-faire policies did not work.26 Accordingly, as one economist put it, the “essence of Keynes’s economics . . . was to save capitalism from the stupidity of its managers.”27 In this regard, the need for intellectually well-informed and institutionally well-resourced political elites was clear.

Keynes encouraged political leaders to use fiscal and monetary policy to regulate consumption, investment, and demand to achieve full employment.28 Policymakers could, for instance, cut taxes, reduce interest rates, and invest in the economy through public works projects or social welfare programs if they needed to stimulate demand and create jobs in a recession. They should do this, he maintained, even if it meant borrowing money and running up budget deficits in the short term. Once the economy recovered and unemployment declined, tax revenues would rise, and the

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what capitalism needs government would be able to reduce those deficits and pay down its debt. Keynes saw wise political elites wielding the state’s policy tools, including deficit financing, as the fire brigade saving capitalism from itself.29 Living at a time when large portions of Europe were in the grips of Hitler and Stalin, Keynes hoped to make capitalism work better to avoid the two great alternative power systems of the day, fascism and communism. In his view, “It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.”30

The Instability of Capitalism Conventional economics assumes that markets tend toward equilibrium – that is, that problems such as slack demand, unemployment, or even financial crises such as that of 2008 will eventually resolve themselves. We do not share that assumption, which is why we believe that state capacities and social cohesion are necessary for capitalism’s well-being.

Nor was that assumption shared by two of the great economists, Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Polanyi.

Schumpeter disagreed with most economists of his day because he saw capitalism as a process of continuous disruption, not equilibrium. He insisted in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that the hallmark of capitalism is inevitable change as entrepreneurs develop new products, technologies, and production methods that replace the old ones. He called this the process of “creative destruction” and viewed it as the routine essence of capitalism.31 He also believed that, as capitalism evolved, the process of creative 18

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sociology from economics destruction would shift from the hands of individual entrepreneurs to those of large, centralized corporations.32 So, for instance, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, which begat the very innovative Bell Telephone Company (now AT&T) and Bell Labs, its phenomenally creative technology incubator.

As Schumpeter saw it, there were two problems here.

First, with the development of larger, more bureaucratized firms, economic decision making would become routinized and rationalized, slowly extinguishing the creativity required for entrepreneurial breakthroughs. But the second and far more serious problem was that the growing dominance of ever larger corporations would eliminate small and mediumsized businesses, and eventually the innovative bourgeoisie, as a class. Their demise would pave the way for intellectuals advocating socialism.33 So creative destruction had revolutionary, as well as routine, implications for capitalism. His prediction that centralization would lead to socialism has proved to be essentially inaccurate. But the point that capitalism involves continual disruption has gained in salience since his death.

The thinker who most fully realized what the societal consequences of continual economic disturbance would mean was Karl Polanyi, who had also experienced the disruption of the First World War and the chaos of the interwar period. In The Great Transformation, published at the end of the Second World War, Polanyi argued that the development of capitalism involved a “double movement,” whereby the problems created by liberal capitalism, particularly for the working class, would create counter-movements to alleviate them. One such counter-movement was Soviet-style

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what capitalism needs socialism, rooted in an antidemocratic Marxist-Leninist ideology.34 An alternative and wholly repulsive countermovement on which the book concentrated most was fascism, as seen in Italy, Germany, and Japan.35 This involved the state cracking down on labor unions, intervening in the economy in harsh ways, and excluding religious and ethnic groups from politics and society. Fascism was thus firmly linked to nationalism of the worst kind, infused with deep distrust of other nations and international institutions. For Polanyi, “[f]ascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.”36 He sought for a different type of counter-movement – one akin to what we would call social democracy. His hope was that a more benevolent type of capitalism would prevail, with democratic politics holding sway over the economy and mitigating its worst effects. In such a society, all social groups would be included in the political system, their voices heard and respected by elites.

The state would respond to problems caused by the market by providing legal protections for workers and social welfare programs for the poor. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was one inspiration for his vision, but so was the democratic socialist movement he had seen in the 1920s in Vienna.

Polanyi argued that two things were required to mitigate the instabilities of market society: One was a state with the capacity to disarm capitalism’s self-destructive potential; the other was the sort of social cohesion afforded nations by institutions that provided voice for its many stakeholders and by the possibility for social mobility and economic prosperity.

In this regard, Polanyi had a clearer reading of Smith than conventional economists – a reading that appreciated Smith’s 20

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sociology from economics recognition that the success of capitalism depended on more than the invisible hand of the market.37 Polanyi’s Jewish background certainly sensitized him to questions of inclusion and exclusion. In short, he recognized that the state was necessary for saving capitalism from itself and for facilitating social cohesion. Through institutionalized voice, the forces of social cohesion could help to ensure that the state did what was necessary to sustain capitalism and distribute its benefits widely throughout the population. This was the essence of what we would call his social democratic vision.

We must note that no book on the instabilities of capitalism could be complete without mentioning Karl Marx.

No thinker exposed the cruelties of exploitation more graphically, while his emphasis on class structure remains at the core of any sociology of capitalism. But we do not base our argument on his work for several reasons. First, he refused to accept that state power can affect capitalist dynamics. He believed that capitalism always dominated the state, never the other way around. In this regard, he was simply wrong.

Second, the experience of two world wars has made it obvious that peace among nation-states is a necessary condition for capitalist prosperity.38 Marx was silent on this issue. Third, Marx’s belief that capitalism was doomed and prone to revolution has also been proven to be wrong. The system can be and has been subject to reforms that have allowed it to survive for well over two centuries, albeit in different forms. In particular, the crucial problem of overproduction and underconsumption that Marx worried about can be counteracted in various ways, not least by the creation of new “needs” – that is, the creation of goods designed to achieve the status

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what capitalism needs distinctions of the societal escalator, whose workings we have already discussed. Finally, Marx’s analysis of class conflict is flawed, as we will see shortly.

The International Architecture of Capitalism The final lesson we take from the great economists comes once again from Keynes – although the spirit of his work at this point builds on the ideas of Smith. Bitter experience as a participant taught Keynes about the character of international capitalism, thereby giving his ideas range and power. He had attended the meetings at Versailles that followed the First World War, writing as a result his bestselling The Economic Consequences of the Peace. That book is a scathing condemnation of what he thought was the utter stupidity of French, British, and American political leaders in crafting the treaty – a treaty whose treatment of Germany (notably, its demand for exorbitant reparations) was so harsh that he predicted correctly that it would sow the seeds for another war. Furthermore, the protectionism that followed the Great Depression amplified the importance of international state leadership in Keynes’s thinking.

Keynes became an important political actor. As the British delegation’s leader at the meetings at Bretton Woods in July 1944, he played a major role in creating a new world economic order. His plan sought to provide rules by which the leading states could cooperate. In particular, he insisted that countries in fiscal trouble should be helped, while those with huge surpluses should be penalized, on the grounds that 22

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sociology from economics currency imbalances could cause serious difficulties for international capitalism. Imbalances like these became very important later, as we shall see – particularly those between China and the United States, as well as those between Germany and the other members of the eurozone. To solve this problem, Keynes proposed an international clearing union that would regulate international trade, credit, and exchange rates. Underscoring his concern about leaving economic policymaking to foolish politicians, the union would be run by impartial economic technocrats not swayed by narrow national interests. Keynes believed that this system would avoid conflict, mitigate crisis, and produce balanced economic trade across nations, as well as stable employment within them.39 But Keynes’s plan for the architecture of world capitalism was defeated at the hands of the U.S. representative Harry Dexter White, loath to accept any constraints on the United States. The institutions created at that time demonstrate that capitalism after 1945 has been American in character. Capitalism has lived under the hegemony of the United States, which was at first relatively benign but has recently become more predatory.40 Although Keynes may not have envisioned or applauded this outcome, he certainly appreciated that some sort of international state leadership – either by a single hegemon or a small group of states – was necessary to forge not only sound economic policy for the capitalist world but also a modicum of social cohesion and cooperation among the nation-states involved. In sum, he realized that state capacities and social cohesion mattered for capitalism at the international, as well as domestic, levels.

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Crisis Economic Geopolitical Public health Globalization Immigration Technological innovation

Background Forces for Change

State Capacity Thick (hegemonic leadership; transnational organizations; multilateral policymaking) Thin (contested leadership; limited transnational organizations; unilateral policymaking)

Social Cohesion High (hegemonic leadership; multilateral agreements; geopolitical peace) Low (contested leadership; absence of multilateral agreements; geopolitical conflict)

The Sociology of International Capitalism

Thin (ideologicallyoriented, hyper-partisan, inflexible policymaking; limited policy tools)

Low (exclusiveness without voice; disbelief in mobility; inegalitarian; acrimonious)

State Capacity Thick (expert-based, consensus-oriented, flexible policymaking; adequate policy tools)

High (inclusiveness with voice; belief in mobility; egalitarian; civil)

Social Cohesion

The Sociology of Domestic Capitalism

Mechanisms Affecting Capitalism’s Well-Being

Bad (economic volatility; economic recession; benefits for the few)

Good (economic stability; economic growth; benefits for the many)

Performance of Domestic & International Capitalism

what capitalism needs

Our Argument Elaborated

We can now flesh out our argument about the sociology of capitalism using the conceptual building blocks given to us by these great economists. It is summarized schematically in Figure 1.1. Note immediately the presence of background

Figure 1.1 The sociology of capitalism

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sociology from economics forces that either strengthen or undermine social cohesion and state capacity. Our claim, of course, is that when these forces strengthen social cohesion and state capacity, capitalism works well; when they do not, things go badly. Smith was one of the first economists to recognize this. But it is also an acknowledgement of the arguments of Schumpeter and Polanyi that capitalism is an unstable system, prone to constant change and occasional crisis.

Social cohesion ensures the success of capitalism in three ways. First, social cohesion brings the political stability on which capitalism depends. The presence of voice creates loyalty because actors feel they are stakeholders in their society. The presence of voice rests on a shared national sense of solidarity and collective interest. This is most readily available when a population is ethnically, religiously, and linguistically homogeneous, but it can also be created by institutions that ensure that a more heterogeneous population feels included.

Second, a socially inclusive society provides all with access to educational and training opportunities. The high levels of human capital that result create prosperity. So, capitalism for the few is not only morally disturbing but also structurally dangerous for the entire system. This is why Smith favored a modicum of equality and why he argued that the ability of capitalists to gain special privileges would undermine competition, lower wages, and raise prices so as to increase profits in a way certain to lead a country quickly to economic ruin. Contemporary French economist Thomas Philippon makes this point about the American economy in recent decades.41 He explains that

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what capitalism needs competition has declined, profits have risen, and the share of those profits going to labor has declined. Inequality has grown as a result. He calculates that “the lack of competition has deprived American workers of $1.5 trillion of income. More than the entire cumulative growth of real compensation between 2012 and 2018.”42 However normatively reprehensible this may be, the trouble does not end there. Philippon, like Smith, stresses that innovation – the root of capitalist growth – often comes from below, from talented people – that is, people with substantial human capital – and easy entry into the market. He argues that if competition is further reduced and labor’s share of the economic pie continues to shrink, then innovation will stall, market access for newcomers will be blocked, political instability will rise, and capitalism will suffer.

This brings us to the final point. Those at the bottom of capitalist society do not necessarily believe in the system; what usually matters more is their acceptance of what the system promises to bring – notably, upward economic mobility – combined with an absence of perceived alternatives.43 Social cohesion is, in a sense, blind, driven by conspicuous consumption and the desire to catch up with those ahead on the societal escalator. For this mechanism to work, there must be some general sense that one has a foot on the escalator, even if it is at the bottom of the conveyance in motion.

The intellectual and institutional capacities for flexible policymaking determine the resilience and effectiveness of the state. These capacities can be thick and abundant or thin and in short supply. Thick intellectual capacity includes well-trained elites blessed with an esprit de corps, 26

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sociology from economics a willingness to listen to qualified and experienced experts, and a reliance on well-established facts and data rather than ideology. Policymakers working in such an environment tend to be consensus-oriented and have an ability to think outside the box in innovative ways when necessary.44 We are not suggesting that this is simply a matter of smart versus stupid politicians or good versus bad political leadership; it is much more a matter of the conditions that bring people into political power who are more or less ideologically partisan and intellectually myopic. Thick institutional capacity includes a wide array of fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policy tools and the authority to use them when necessary – authority that is enhanced when it is derived from consensus-oriented political institutions. Where state capacities are thin, policymakers have fewer policy tools at their disposal, and policymaking tends to be partisan. It is also less data-driven, less attentive to expertise, and less innovative and flexible.

Polanyi saw that social cohesion and state capacities are very often linked in reciprocal fashion. When societies are not socially cohesive, state capacities tend to be thin, because policymaking is partisan and divisive. And when partisan leaders make policy that exacerbates inequality, not to mention racial and ethnic tensions, social cohesion suffers still more. This has happened recently in the United States, where society has become divided along economic, political, ideological and racial lines. As a result, voters have elected strikingly divisive and ill-informed politicians who have weakened the state’s fiscal and regulatory capacities, thereby further undermining social cohesion.

This is happening in other countries where the

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what capitalism needs deterioration of social cohesion, marked by rising economic inequality, ideological polarization, and distrust of government, has undermined the intellectual and institutional capacities of states to manage capitalism effectively, especially in times of crisis.45 As those capacities diminish, they further undermine social cohesion in a vicious feedback loop.

Social cohesion and state capacities are important not only at the domestic level but also for the external world, as Keynes realized. Geopolitical peace is fundamental. Beyond that, the more states cooperate with each other as a cohesive group through multilateral agreements, the better capitalism will perform. The thicker the capacity of states to manage international capitalism, either because they rely on skilled technocrats and advisers in international institutions such as the European Union or the WTO, or because they have their own expertise in international affairs, the more willing they are to set aside their national interests when necessary for the sake of the international capitalist system. This too helps capitalism to perform better. The degree to which the international community is cohesive and possesses transnational state capacities, in the form of organizations such as the WTO or World Bank, depends on a variety of historical factors, but the presence or absence of American hegemony since the Second World War has been particularly important.

Figure 1.1 is not a perfect model of reality; it is merely a tool to encourage thought. Two necessary clarifications make this clear. First, we need to go beyond the contrast between two simple self-reinforcing cycles – between, on the one hand, cohesive societies that allow intelligent political 28

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sociology from economics elites to serve them, not least by adding to social cohesion, and, on the other hand, acrimonious societies that breed opportunistic elites that play on and deepen the social divisions that already exist. There can be complexities involving opposing forces. A powerful leader can remind a potentially divided society of what holds it together, as has been true of the leadership of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, or do a great deal to create division in an otherwise relatively cohesive society, as has been true of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. But the reverse is also true: a socially cohesive society, especially if it rests on powerful national sentiment, can restrain a wayward leader, thereby preventing too much damage. Second, we recognize that the dynamics of capitalism can affect both the factors that concern us. Over time, the performance outcomes on the right side of Figure 1.1 may feed back, influencing the background factors on the left side of the figure. For example, unfettered capitalism tends to generate economic crises. How well states manage these crises affects social cohesion. If states are effective and social cohesion is maintained, then capitalism performs well, and the possibility of future crises diminishes; otherwise, crises are more likely in the future.

The problem for capitalism now is that, in many countries, social cohesion is being destroyed and state capacity undermined – contributing to the decline of the rate of economic growth in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since the 1970s, as Figure 1.2 illustrates. Things were better during the postwar Golden Age. Mass participation in war had done much to equalize social conditions, although racial and gender inequality persisted in many countries. States were so aware

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what capitalism needs

Growth Rate in Percent

8 6 4 2 0 –2

1961 1963 1965 1967 1969 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019

–4

OECD members

Linear (OECD members)

Figure 1.2 OECD average annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP), 1961–2019 Source: World Bank (2020b).

of the disasters of two world wars and the Great Depression that they sought greater political inclusion and class compromise. But times have changed. Many capitalist societies have increased inequality and fostered exclusion, leading to politics that are less civil and more divisive. Moreover, these problems are reverberating internationally. For instance, rising inequality in the United Kingdom has undermined social cohesion, allowing the political and economic entrepreneurs who fostered it to come to power on the basis of wholly absurd fantasies and promises that fueled the desire for Brexit. This example adds nuance to our earlier point about the twodimensional nature of state capacity. Certainly, the institutional capacities of policymakers are important: they need the right policy tools for the job at hand. But the state’s intellectual capacity matters too. Political entrepreneurs can have fantasies and ideas all of their own for which the people 30

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sociology from economics never voted; these can have a tremendous impact, not necessarily for the good. This is certainly true in the case of Brexit – for example in the neo-imperial illusions still very present in the English upper classes. Brexit is sure to damage the economy of the United Kingdom and is creating constitutional problems that threaten the unity of the country.

This example allows us to make another key point – the only one in this book not derived from great economists.

In principle, all regimes can be overthrown from below, but this is especially likely in modern times when the masses enter politics. Accordingly, we have asked whether mechanisms of political inclusion are necessary for the stability of capitalism.

This is most obviously a question for liberal democracy, which gives the vote to economic classes at the bottom of society. But the question also needs to be directed to groups with varying national identities within liberal democracies – particularly racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities – because nationalism is the second equally vital form of popular politics. Does the stability and prosperity of capitalism also require the political inclusion of these distinct national groups? We believe it does. The long-term health of capitalism requires the political inclusion of all social classes and all significant national groups, presumably through democratic means. In this matter, we follow a central idea of Ernest Gellner, the great theorist of nationalism. Economic class conflict is real, and it matters – but it is the combination of class grievance with nationalist difference that produces real social dynamite.46 We see this throughout the capitalist world today, especially in the hostility shown to immigrants and minorities for general economic troubles. Recall that, for

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what capitalism needs List, nationalism was about advancing and protecting the nation’s economic interests; as Gellner recognized, nationalism can also be about the nation’s political and cultural interests.

With that in mind, we need to make a few further clarifications about nationalism. First, at times, nationalist movements are instigated by an elite at the top, as we have seen; on other occasions, they may be a movement of the masses from below. Second, we must distinguish between those forms of nationalism that help to bolster capitalism and those that destabilize it. It is a major error to see nationalism always in negative terms, as a destructive force. It most certainly has that capacity, both domestically and internationally, but it can be positive as well, as a source of cohesion and vitality. A final point needs to be made here. Authoritarian capitalism, including capitalism managed by putatively socialist regimes, is not free from such pressures, despite its greater capacity for control. That said, capitalism combined with liberal democracy is our preferred system for two reasons. It is morally better than the alternatives because it is most likely to entail a measure of political inclusiveness, equality, and fairness that other forms of capitalism lack. And, as a result, it may be better equipped to contain social tensions and manage crises to the extent that the establishment of inclusiveness, equality, and fairness can enhance the possibility for individual self-sacrifice on behalf of the nation when trouble occurs.

One caveat is important. Economists recognize that many things affect the performance of capitalism, including natural disasters and technological change. We accept that without question. Our claim is that social cohesion and state 32

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sociology from economics capacities at both the domestic and international levels do so as well, and we insist firmly that mainstream economists largely ignore these factors.47 Neglecting these two things is a grave mistake if we want to understand the mechanisms of capitalism. The great forefathers of contemporary economics did not make this mistake.

Conclusion The central plank of our argument has been that the societal escalator provides essential stability for capitalism. For this mechanism to work, the state must control the immediate interests of capitalists to protect the market mechanism from their depredations.

All of this varies by place and time. A quick look back at the fortunes of the working class makes this clear. Before 1914, a range of working-class activism could be detected across countries, from the United States and Britain at one end of the scale, marked by the relative passivity of trade unionism, to Imperial Germany and the Romanov Empire at the other end, marked by full revolutionary working-class consciousness. The reason for this variation is simple: social movements take on the character of the political regimes with which they interact. White American working-class men gained the vote as early as the 1830s and thereafter felt that the state was their own. As a result, their grievances and struggles were directed at employers not politicians; at industry not the state, and decentralized thanks to the state’s federalist structure that never produced a significant labor party. In Great Britain, a short-lived exclusion of trade union rights

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what capitalism needs and a more centralized state helped to create a Labour Party, but the allegiance to socialist ideas remained very limited, as it did in America, because the state was essentially liberal.48 In contrast, at the other end of the spectrum, antisocialist laws at the end of the nineteenth century in Germany radicalized the working class, creating struggles not only at the industrial level but also politically – as was necessary given the way in which the state tried to stifle working-class voice.49 And in Imperial Russia the autocracy created a working class that became fully revolutionary, able to seize power in Saint Petersburg and Moscow in 1917.50 This analysis builds on Hirschman’s insights about voice. It amounts to saying that liberalism diffuses conflict throughout society, while authoritarianism tends to concentrate it. Some forms of state are more amenable to stabilizing capitalism than others.

Let us conclude this discussion of social cohesion by returning to the claim that class inequality alone is a much less powerful force than class inequality tied to ethnic difference.

Over the last decades, economic inequality has certainly increased within countries, as has the debilitating speed of change of occupational structure. Those suffering from these developments have come to see themselves as a distinctly disadvantaged group. Their frustrations are twofold. First, they are opposed to the elite – that is, to the cosmopolitans of the upper level of society who can move easily beyond the nationstate in a globalized world. Yet, perhaps ironically, those who are stuck – that is, caged – within the nation-state are far more patriotic than the elite. Their desire to protect their nation involves wanting to rein in, to recage, or to renationalize the 34

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sociology from economics elite who have left it behind.51 Second, such antielitism is very often linked to worries about immigrants based on mistaken beliefs that these take away job opportunities that would otherwise have been the birthright of the “authentic” members of the nation. It is noticeable that elites favor such immigration because of the economic talent it brings, just as they tend to support affirmative action programs that often irritate those below who are excluded from such programs – people who feel that their place on the societal escalator has been taken by others who are culturally different from themselves, thereby limiting their prospects for the future.

Both frustrations constitute the origins of a new form of politics that pervades the contemporary capitalist world.

This is best seen as a new form of nationalism, sometimes referred to as populism, nativist in character, replete with anxiety and rooted in people’s desire to “take back control” of their country from both the elite and those they perceive to be foreigners unlike themselves. The crucial point is that social cohesion is breaking down because this group feels excluded both economically and culturally. The sense of being part of a single national entity has gone; the desire to protect their society becomes visceral as a result. The radical political style that results is a major concern of this book.

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Industry Unbound The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power Ari Ezra Waldman

UK / US publication September 2021 9781108492423 Hardback £20.00 $24.95 USD $28.95 CAD

In Industry Unbound, Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don’t just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how they weaken the law to make data-extractive products the norm. In contrast to those who claim that privacy law is getting stronger, Waldman shows why recent shifts in privacy law are precisely the kinds of changes that corporations want and how even those who think of themselves as privacy advocates often unwittingly facilitate corporate malfeasance. This powerful account should be ready by anyone who wants to understand why privacy laws are not working and how corporations trap us into giving up our personal information.

Ari Ezra Waldman is Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University School of Law and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. A graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard College, he also earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University.

He is a widely published and award-winning scholar and teacher focusing on the ways law and technology entrench traditional hierarchies of power.

‘This brilliant book is a must-read for understanding the failures of contemporary privacy laws, and how they might evolve toward more robust protections.’

Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School, and author of The Black Box Society and The New Laws of Robotics

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INTRODUCTION

We are told by companies, by lawmakers, and by civil society that privacy law is getting stronger. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been called “comprehensive” and “one of the strictest privacy laws in the world.”

Between 2018 and 2020, nine proposals for comprehensive privacy legislation were introduced in the US Congress; two ballot initiatives and forty-two proposals were introduced in twenty-eight states in that same time. Several of those became law, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the de facto privacy enforcer in the United States, is putting limits on the collection, use, and manipulation of personal information with unprecedented billion-dollar fines. The US Supreme Court has started to reclaim the Fourth Amendment’s historical commitment to curtailing pervasive police surveillance. And the European Union’s Court of Justice has challenged the cross-border transfer of European citizens’ data, protecting the privacy of European citizens in the process.1 Even the information industry – the ecosystem of companies that collect, process, and use our data for profit – seems to be getting on the privacy bandwagon. Apple markets its iPhones as privacy protective. Facebook, today’s dominant online social network, promises to build a future of “private, encrypted messages.”

Google “build[s] privacy that works” for us. These tech giants, and many far smaller ones, have spent millions of dollars and hired thousands of privacy professionals, privacy lawyers, data protection officers, and privacy vendors. Even some software engineers,

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historically not known for their concern for privacy, are coming to work recognizing that they have to do better to protect our privacy.2 These workers are at the front line of the social practice of privacy law, by which I mean the practices, behaviors, and performances that implement or navigate privacy law and privacy design on the ground. They write policies, interpret and apply the law for their employers, translate legal requirements into technical specifications, set up internal systems, write litigation briefs, build products, consult with coders and programmers, coordinate across departments, conduct internal assessments, manage audits, answer questions about privacy, and then some. When you talk to them, read their resumes, or scan their profiles on LinkedIn, they will tell you they are “committed” to privacy. Many are eager to “work with companies who care about” making “data protection a central part” of their business. Privacy professionals are focused on helping “businesses manage privacy risks” and dedicated to “compliance done right.”

Privacy engineers are committed to “bringing privacy into design.”

And yet, every day, our privacy is slipping away. Face surveillance, DNA testing kits, “smart” devices, gratuitous location tracking, and manipulative “dark patterns” are increasingly commonplace. Platforms like Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Pokemon Go, and Zoom, not to mention in-home assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and “smart” devices, are designed without our privacy in mind. Other products – like Uber’s mobile app – were maliciously designed to invade our privacy, while social platforms like Facebook are designed to manipulate us into disclosure. Despite repeatedly promising to do better after privacy scandals, muckraking investigations revealing invasive designs, and a growing backlash to surveillance practices, very little has changed on the ground. There are some bright spots: Mozilla’s Firefox, the DuckDuckGo search engine, the Signal messaging app, and Apple’s decision to notify iPhone users when geolocation tracking is on. But these are exceptions, not the rule. Our websites still track us. Our apps still follow us. Our choices are limited. Our privacy is disappearing.3 Microsoft may have an experienced privacy team, but Windows 10 gathers information about us when we use its apps and when we browse the web, tracking our locations, our various machines, our home, our place of work, and our travel routes. Google makes much of its integrated approach to privacy (as have scholars),

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but the company’s suite of products are data collection juggernauts.

Google has been sued for its surveillance overreach in tracking university students but only because the company’s practices violated a contract, not because they violated privacy law. And Facebook, a repeat offender in the privacy space, tracks not just our interactions on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but almost everywhere else on the internet. The information industry is one big surveillance machine with powerful financial interests in commodifying our behavior. And it designs products to serve those interests.4 We have opposing interests. Some of us want to remain obscure from prying eyes and share intimate secrets with our families, our friends, and even strangers, all interests that are weakened by widespread surveillance. We want to make free and autonomous decisions and not be coerced by deceit or hidden manipulation. We have interests in equality and social justice that are undermined when our data is used to discriminate. And yes, although we also have interests in frictionless access to platforms that let us socialize or buy the products we need and we don’t all think about privacy the same way, we all have individualized, collective, and dignitary interests in privacy that sometimes run counter to the data-hungry interests of the information industry.5

The Questions How can privacy law and corporate commitments to privacy be on the rise without it having a significant effect on the designs of new technologies? We are supposed to be protected by privacy laws. Are they ineffectual? Are they not being enforced? Are they not even being implemented? We are supposed to have privacy advocates on the inside: armies of privacy professionals, privacy lawyers, and privacy engineers that are supposed to be changing the corporate culture. Are they all just a marketing gimmick? Are they undermining our privacy while misleading us about their privacy work?

Are their employers’ promises about doing better hollow? And what about laws like the GDPR that explicitly rely on in-house privacy professionals to do the ongoing work of interpretation, monitoring, and compliance? Is this approach to privacy law at all effective?

Stories about good versus evil are frequent in fiction, yet rarer in reality. It would be easy to dismiss corporate surveillance as

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the product of greed. And don’t get me wrong, there is greed. A lot of it. But far more complicated structural and subtle forces are at play.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is a bad look. Data-extractive capitalists who brag about how little they care about privacy are pilloried in the press. Even more importantly, greed cannot be the only motivator when there are armies of privacy professionals working inside technology companies with the earnest goal of protecting privacy. What’s more, law is supposed to rein in the excesses of capitalism. But privacy laws on the books are not being translated into privacy protection on the ground. I went inside the information industry to explain why.

This book is about how actors in the information industry do privacy, or more specifically, how they can earnestly say they care about our privacy while simultaneously undermining it in practice. It focuses on what companies and their employees do behind the veil, behind the marketing, and behind the puffery when they actually translate the requirements of privacy law into their legal, organizational, and discursive behavior.

My findings are based on nearly four years of fieldwork, including interviews with current and former employees of large and medium-sized technology companies, interviews with start-up entrepreneurs and their venture capital backers, surveys of privacy professionals and software engineers, inductively coded analyses of industry literatures, interviews with in-house lawyers and their colleagues in private practice, reviews of internal protocols and procedures, analyses of legal arguments and public statements to legislative bodies and the press, observations of design processes, and listening and learning from those doing the work of privacy on the ground. The book consciously attempts to understand social phenomena from the ground up. And to do so, it relies on a diverse, interrelated set of conceptual models from law and the social sciences, including Foucauldian discourse theory, actor-network theory, science and technology studies (STS), performance theory, and critical sociolegal studies. I went into this project with an open mind, conscious that the truth always lies somewhere between cartoonish villainy and false heroism.6 The information industry often presents itself as contrite and dedicated to doing better at taking its privacy responsibilities seriously. Privacy scandals and new statutes trigger earnest

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rethinking among lawyers, privacy professionals, and technologists.

Policy makers have passed new privacy laws that do more than require privacy policies that no one reads. But this work rarely has more than marginal effect on technology design. Why?

The Argument The organizational, technological, and discursive system is stacked against privacy. Our privacy is at risk because of two related social forces operating within the information industry: coercive bureaucracy and normalizing performances. Tech companies use the tools of coercive bureaucracies to routinize antiprivacy norms and practices in privacy discourse, compliance, and design. Those bureaucracies constrain workers directly by focusing their work on corporate-friendly approaches to privacy. As information industry workers perform these antiprivacy routines and practices, those practices become habituated, inuring employees to data extraction even as they earnestly profess to be privacy advocates. The result is a system in which the rank and file have been conscripted into serving the information industry’s surveillant interests, and in which the meaning of privacy has been subtly changed, often without them even realizing what’s happened.

Coercive Bureaucracy Norms and routines inside corporations are the products of several internal and external influences. Situated within a sociolegal context, corporations are influenced by the web of laws, court decisions, rules, and real and threatened litigation and investigations that constitute the regulatory environment in which they, and their competitors, operate. They are also influenced by public opinion, market forces, and the behavior of their competitors. As a collection of individuals, corporations are also influenced by endogenous factors, including corporate structure and the embodied experiences of the real people doing the real work in the company’s name. Of course, many of these influences overlap, but each works together to develop routines and embed norms throughout the corporation. Given this, some corporations inside the information industry work hard manipulate law, scholarship,

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structure, and the workplace experience to embed antiprivacy norms and routines wherever they can.7 When privacy professionals and privacy lawyers approach their work, they do so with background assumptions and understandings about what privacy means and how to protect it. Those ideas are heavily influenced by the values of informational capitalism. Industry leaders seek to influence how we think about privacy not just to erode our interest in and capacity to enact robust privacy laws, but to entrench corporate-friendly ideas as common sense and mainstream among their workers. This is the power of discourse.

The dominant privacy discourse today, from Silicon Valley to Washington, DC, centers around notions of choice, consent, and control; in other words, that privacy is about making our own choices about what to disclose, when, and to whom. It is a vision of privacy so narrow that it allows companies, their employees, and their allies to honestly say they care about privacy and still do little to improve privacy protections for their customers. But when you talk to people on the ground – the privacy professionals, the privacy lawyers, and the public policy shops – their independent self-reported views on privacy, though rarely hostile to corporate interests, are far more diverse than the party lines. Yet, few of those pro-privacy voices have any impact where it matters. In legal briefs, public reports, new products, press comments, and in testimony to Congress, discourses that protect corporate interests remain dominant.8 That is because tech companies use subtle and, at times, invisible strategies to silence pro-privacy voices and channel their employees’ work to suit their ends. Industry executives set agendas for their privacy teams, require prepublication approval of academic research, control academic discussions through external funding of research, threaten researchers with restrictions on future access to data, and perpetuate false narratives about the efficacy of datahungry AI tools. Lead in-house counsel and partners at private firms help determine legal strategies based on myopic definitions of privacy and enlist their subordinates in the effort while systematically denying them opportunities to voice alternative viewpoints. At the same time, many employees have internalized corporate cultures that encourage, value, and reward deference to leadership. This pushes them to incorporate the views of their bosses into their own,

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marginalizing their own views in the process. Together, these discursive tactics inculcate tech company workers with notions of privacy that perpetuate corporate power.

With these ideas in place, privacy law is undermined by narrow definitions of privacy that put few obligations on companies to actually protect privacy. And the privacy professionals on whom we depend to implement the law on the ground are so steeped in corporate-friendly privacy discourses and constrained by organizational structures that they end up weakening the laws we have even further. This is the power of compliance.

The newest privacy laws and proposals, from the GDPR to the CCPA and roughly 50 newest proposals for comprehensive privacy law in the US, rely on internal organizational structures for implementation and ongoing monitoring. It reflects an admittedly incomplete form of collaborative or “new” governance. Reviews of these compliance structures, interviews with privacy professionals and lawyers, and observations of compliance operations in practice suggest that the largest and most entrenched companies in the information industry have built a house of cards of compliance structures.

Tech companies make it look like they are following the law, but in truth, they are reframing it to achieve their own data-extractive ends.

This happens in part organically. If you filter legal requirements through a corporate or managerial lens, you’re going to get corporate and managerialized law. Management amplifies these effects by subtly manipulating and undercutting privacy professionals, reallocating budgets away from privacy, placing privacy advocates in stifling reporting hierarchies, siloing their departments, and leveraging workplace pressures and threats to silence pro-privacy voices.9 It is in this environment that the information industry designs its data-extractive products. When we share images with our friends on Instagram, buy products on Amazon, or conduct teleconferences on Zoom, we do so on their terms, not ours.

Companies use this power of design to serve their data collection goals while making it difficult for us to realize our own privacy preferences. They build products that collect information without any benefit to us. They gather data from our clicks, our browsing, even where we move our cursor. They trick us into sharing information, hide opt-out buttons, make privacy navigation inordinately difficult, and trigger cognitive biases that constrain our choices.

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It’s fashionable to blame engineers for all of this; technologists are not trained to think about or design for privacy. That may be true, but programmers also work within corporate hierarchies that constrain and channel their work. Their work is just as much the product of manipulative social structures within organizations as it is the product of code. This is the power of design.

There are undoubtedly software engineers and compliance professionals and lawyers who are not only indifferent to privacy but see it as an impediment. The real story, however, is more nuanced. Corporate power over law and design processes means that companies can leverage internal organization, hierarchies, and policies to systematically devalue privacy and maximize data extraction in how they interpret the law and how they design new products, making antiprivacy designs more likely. Within this structure, even those software engineers and privacy professionals aware of their power and cognizant of privacy issues would nevertheless have a hard time pushing back against privacy-invasive corporate behavior. The result is a process that makes it difficult for privacy to establish a beachhead in design.

At the heart of this story is something more dangerous than mere bad faith: By influencing privacy discourse, undermining privacy law compliance, and constraining design processes, tech companies have not only unshackled themselves, they have created a corporate culture and environment in which all work, regardless of worker motivations and intentions, serve corporate antiprivacy goals. And the law not only allows this; it explicitly welcomes it.

Normalizing Antiprivacy Practices among Privacy Professionals Throughout my research, I was struck by a disconnect between the stated motivations of information industry executives and those of their employees. Leaders are primarily motivated by capitalistic interests, which are almost always data extractive and, therefore, independent of or in conflict with privacy. “Too much privacy,” one head of product development told me, “means our products won’t be able to give people what they want: access, fast access, convenience, connection, and fun.” A start-up executive in New York admitted that “privacy isn’t at front of mind when you’re trying to make it, like make it in this business. Data means better

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targeting, which means more money, and more investments. I need that data if I’m going to succeed in this environment.” “Restrictive privacy law is bad for us,” another executive admitted. These comments aren’t isolated. Some information industry executives are on record asserting that privacy is in conflict with their businesses’ success. Even those that recognize the importance of privacy do so in the interests of profit.10 But those doing the work of design and privacy law on the ground profess to find motivation elsewhere. Software engineers want to solve exciting engineering problems (even privacy ones!), to think of ways to make products more efficient, and to develop exciting new technologies; privacy professionals, for the most part, want to pragmatically facilitate privacy compliance. These motivations aren’t capitalistic per se. They are technical, vocational, and careerist, just like many of the reasons we all go into our careers of choice. And yet, despite these differing motivations – some of which seem at odds with one another – the information industry realizes its surveillance goals in the end: Technologies are far more likely to ignore or violate our privacy than accommodate our interest in it.

The information industry perpetuates its power through a process of normalization. Tech companies focus their privacy work on narrow privacy discourses. They create compliance mechanisms that reduce privacy law to check boxes and outsourced technologies that allow industry to escape accountability. Companies then design new surveillant technologies while silencing pro-privacy voices. At each stage, corporate data-extraction and the actions that facilitate it are normalized as ordinary and routine. With every privacy assignment focused on notice or security, employees become conditioned to thinking about privacy in narrow, underinclusive ways. With compliance focused on paper trails, check boxes, and prefilled reports from outsourced vendors, privacy professionals come to confuse mere symbols of compliance with actual adherence to privacy law. And with every small engineering team focused on a narrow engineering problem, software engineers become accustomed to thinking that privacy is someone else’s responsibility. These antiprivacy practices then become common sense for information industry employees, making it difficult for them to see privacy law as anything but what they have been doing.11

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These practices are performative. By “performative,” I don’t mean that they’re fake, ersatz, or cynical false fronts. They can be. But performances in this context are actions and behaviors that communicate something to the self and others. Performances are performative when their repetition and iteration socially construct and define our identities, our realities, and, I argue, what privacy law looks like in practice. The social practices of privacy law feed and perpetuate themselves, constructing a reality where discourses of control and symbolic compliance are privacy law.

And that’s why they don’t work. A regulatory regime that relies on regulated entities to flesh out the details of the law in practice performatively constructs a privacy law that is not only weak, but counterproductive. Symbolic compliance legitimizes what is really a con game.12 Privacy professionals, privacy lawyers, and software engineers perform privacy within constraining organizational bureaucracies. As they do, as they repeat practices described in Figure 1 that end up marginalizing privacy voices, their performances become routine, their routines become habits, and their habits become part of how they conceptualize privacy law. In other words, as they repeat corporate-friendly privacy practices, they normalize them and that normalization feeds back into a bureaucratic system built to drive corporate-friendly privacy discourses, compliance, and design. Therefore, our surveillant technological landscape is less the result of corporate shills than it is the product of organizational structures where antiprivacy work is habituated and normalized by ongoing performance.

Discourse

Compliance

Design

Discursive practices normalize corporate-friendly discourses of privacy – particularly, privacy as control – as common sense. These discourses form the backdrop for legal and technical work.

Constrained by corporate bureaucracies, privacy offices routinize compliance practices that normalize symbolic compliance.

With weak privacy discourses and symbolic compliance, bureaucratic practices not only take advantage of designer disinterest in privacy but also remove opportunities for privacy entrepreneurship in the design process.

Figure 1 Privacy performances.

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Resistances Escaping from this status quo will not be easy. Privacy isn’t naturally in the vocabulary of a capitalistic system in which information is profit. It would be easier if surveillance had a single cartoonish villain: Luke Skywalker had Emperor Palpatine, Sherlock Holmes had Professor Moriarty; Jerry had Tom. The information industry has its villains, but the problem is structural, political, and social. Silicon Valley CEOs willing to lie to and manipulate their users would be powerless without a friendly privacy discourse, an army of foot soldiers who ironically see themselves as part of the resistance, and a sociopolitical system conducive to corporate power.

Enacting new and radically different privacy laws is only the first step at solving this problem. We also need to expand what we mean by “privacy law.” More than mere data governance, privacy law should be about the regulating the power structures of informational capitalism. That means we not only have to change how companies do privacy, but how public authorities and corporate power operate, how we relate to industry, and how the privacy and engineering professions approach their work and obligations.

We need to change the external theoretical and legal environment in which data extraction occurs and the internal organizational and social experiences of those compliance professionals and software engineers who have the power to make or break the future of privacy. We need a privacy and engineering profession focused on its responsibilities to consumers, not to industry. We need new legal frameworks and a new regulatory boldness. We need a law and political economy approach to privacy.

The law and political economy framework refers to a way of thinking about the relationship between public governance and economic systems. It asks us to focus on the ways in which law and politics create economic power by making choices about winners and losers. We should not be fooled by the myths of the information industry; even today’s self-regulatory approach is choosing winners and leaving the rest of us behind. I argue that privacy should be conceptualized, privacy laws should be written, and privacy organizations should be built expressly as counterweights to information industry power. Privacy discourses should be explicitly consumerfocused, built around notions of justice, equity, human flourishing,

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and democracy. Privacy is power. As feminist scholars have taught us, privacy has long been used a pretext to protect traditional hierarchies of power. Privacy also has a history of being less of a right for everyone and more of a benefit for the wealthy and privileged. No more. Privacy must be understood as a democratic tool of resistance to corporate power. Practically, that means privacy law will have to change. Rather than laying out the “rules of the road” that merely legitimize corporate data extraction, as it does now, privacy law should identify structural power asymmetries that give corporations too much power over individuals and deploy legal tools to combat that power. Organizations, including privacy civil society, privacy professional organizations, and higher education, should also be counterweights to information industry power, organizing and training a future workforce that fights for privacy.13

Structure of the Book Privacy’s otherwise robust research agenda pays insufficient attention to the dynamics of law’s social practice. And yet the future of law and technology depends on real people and real organizations subject to exogenous and endogenous pressures and constraints. This book fills a void in law, sociology, and technology scholarship by identifying some of the sociopolitical reasons why our privacy seems to be slipping away. It highlights specific strategies leveraged by information industry actors to free themselves to design technologies as they see fit, all the while resting on the efforts of a sometimesunwitting army of workers. My goal is to show how several overlapping stories – about how we think about privacy, how we write privacy laws, and how we design new technologies – are really a single narrative of power where, far too often, we lose our privacy.

Ideally, this narrative is a wake-up call to those honest and hardworking professionals within the information industry, and I hope my macro and micro proposals are considered, studied, and challenged as we pursue a more balanced and normatively fairer relationship with technology companies. I also hope this book will spark additional research inside organizations that are critical to our future. Only then might we be able to escape this vicious cycle.

This book is organized into three parts. After this Introduction, Chapter 1, “A Day at the Office,” provides a stylized

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narrative of a visit to a technology company. The narrative is a compilation of events from the meetings I observed, interviews I conducted, and documents I reviewed, stylized into a chronicle of a single day.

The next several chapters provide an on-the-ground account of the information industry’s privacy performances, highlight the ways in which technology companies stifle privacy and routinize antiprivacy work throughout their organizations. Chapter 2 focuses on discourse and the inculcative tactics management uses on its employees and the rest of us. Chapter 3 is about compliance and the organizational strategies companies use to ensure that privacy law is interpreted and implemented in ways that do not interfere with corporate data extraction. Chapter 4 zeroes in on the design process and describes how internal company policies make it difficult for designers to make the products they create more privacy protective. These chapters draw on my surveys and interviews with privacy professionals, lawyers, software engineers, and others, as well as legal briefs in privacy lawsuits, internal and public reports and other documents, articles in trade journals, and analyses of websites and industry webinars aimed at the privacy community.14 The final two chapters discuss the implications of performative privacy law. Chapter 5 shows why privacy professionals, lawyers, and engineers cannot easily escape the constraints placed upon them by their bosses, offering an account of bureaucratic power that may not be unique to tech companies, but is certainly playing out in force in the information industry. In short, it’s not that people become privacy professionals, privacy lawyers, or software engineers to purposely undermine privacy and then lie about it. They often study privacy in school because they care about it, and then go into privacy jobs for the same reason. Prosaic pressures – to do well, to get promoted, to maintain access to bosses, to not get fired, to do what’s asked of you – pressures we all face in the workplace, combine with management’s stifling control of corporate bureaucracy do more work to sustain information industry power than active, overt, and malicious approaches to user privacy. That these pressures and bureaucratic levers will always exist in for-profit companies suggests that a data governance regime that explicitly depends on industry itself being an honest regulatory partner will always be insufficient. Despite this bleak view, Chapter 6 offers

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several avenues of resistance to corporate power, each of which will require far more than the kind of window-dressing and marginal tweaks to which we have all come to accept with great resignation from the law. There are specific steps we can take about how we think and talk about privacy, how we write privacy laws, and how companies do the day-to-day work of privacy on the ground all focused on a progressive approach to privacy.

We close with optimism. Power may seem entrenched, but every relation of power creates its own opposite force, which not only gives us a roadmap for resistance, but also hope that we may, one day, succeed.

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The Attack on Higher Education The Dissolution of the American University Ronald G. Musto

UK / US publication October 2021 9781108471923 Hardback £19.99 $24.99 USD $28.95 CAD

American higher education is under attack today as never before. A growing right-wing narrative portrays academia as corrupt, irrelevant, costly, and dangerous to both students and the nation. Budget cuts, attacks on liberal arts and humanities disciplines, faculty layoffs and retrenchments, technology displacements, corporatization, and campus closings have accelerated over the past decade. In this timely volume, Ronald Musto draws on historical precedent - Henry VIII’s dissolution of British monasteries in the 1530s - for his study of the current threats to American higher education. He shows how a triad of forces - authority, separateness, and innovation - enabled monasteries to succeed, and then suddenly and unexpectedly to fail. Musto applies this analogy to contemporary academia. Despite higher education’s vital centrality to American culture and economy, a powerful, anti-liberal narrative is severely damaging its reputation among parents, voters, and politicians. Musto offers a comprehensive account of this narrative from the mid-twentieth century to the present, as well as a new set of arguments to counter criticisms and rebuild the image of higher education.

Award-winning historian Ronald G. Musto has taught at three universities and served at ACLS Humanities E-Book (co-director), Medieval Academy of America (executive director, editor of Speculum), and Italica Press (co-publisher).

He is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. He is co-author, with Eileen Gardiner, of The Digital Humanities.

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CHAPTER 7

The Scandals of Academe

INTRODUCTION

U

ndermining higher education’s claims to both intellectual and civic authority – and breaking down its walls of separation from society at large – is a continuous narrative developed during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s of an academia awash in scandals. This narrative builds on a long tradition of real internal scandals of collegiate life and of the American anti-intellectual tradition. These “scandals” have included athletic departments’ overspending, overreach and budgetary bloat; sexual politics, rape culture, faculty-student liaisons; political correctness, inhibition of free speech and trigger warnings; and active and reverse discrimination. Changes in disciplinary approaches and curricula that are the necessary and natural result of intense research and innovation in the humanities deemphasize or actively challenge structures of dominance and hegemony that are narrated as “traditional values.” Such decentering of outmoded curricula and approaches in turn give rise to the decades-old accusations of a leftleaning and disloyal academia. Isolated incidents, individual pronouncements, and mistaken administrative actions have joined verifiable trends in government regulation and campus codes.

Critics and commentators have pointed out that there loom far larger and more important scandals. These include the rising student debt discussed in Chapter 6, dropping rates of degree completion, continuing marginalization of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities, and a widening gap between elite students attending elite schools and the rest of American society, who must increasingly fend for themselves 151

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even at public institutions. Since the theme of this book is an emerging narrative aimed against higher ed, this chapter will attempt to focus not on the justice or injustice, the truth or falsity of charges but on how such news has affected public discourse on the place of higher education, on parents’ approaches toward their emotional and financial investment in their children’s education, and on the use of such narratives by critics of higher education.1 We cannot here discuss every controversy within the academy. Many of these are normal and professional debates about governance, pedagogy, and subject matter that concern relatively small numbers of specialists and interested parties. Our concern is with issues that spill over into the public forum or that come from public debates and are turned onto the academy.

Such issues have also attracted critics among alums – many with powerful financial and political clout – who view their alma mater both nostalgically as maintaining the cultural and social values of their youth and in terms of advancing their current vested interests. Alums have thus intervened in debates over curricula and canon, gender, free speech, and personal-safety issues. From the opposite perspective, faculty and student movements for greater transparency and justice have raised these issues before the public to new levels where challenge and change have become part of university life, altering institutional attitudes and administrative approaches. These challenges and changes have also been seized upon by American critics of higher education. To be sure, attention to scandals does demonstrate the continued importance of higher education in American society. Nevertheless, colleges and universities are seen less as a focus of authority than as a marketplace in which all sectors have their say, breaking down the separation and authority of the university and turning it into one more arena in the continued civil war of words, attitudes, and ideas currently dividing American society.

1

Recent polemical summaries of such coverage include Sophia A. McClennen, “Enough with the Blue-baiting: The Biggest Threat on Campus Has Nothing to Do With Free Speech,” Salon (Sept. 2, 2017), at www.salon.com/2017/09/02/enough-with-the-bluebaiting-the-biggest-threat-on-campus-has-nothing-to-do-with-free-speech; and Karin Fischer, “For a Dissatisfied Public, Colleges’ Internal Affairs Become Fair Game,’ CHE (Feb. 18, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/interactives/Trend19-Intrusion-Main.

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Second only to the high costs of higher education in the survey results discussed in Chapter 5 has been the issue of “what is taught and how.” As we have seen, Democrats were moderately concerned about this issue.2 But a growing majority of Republicans are opposed to current trends.

Like the budgetary crisis covered in the last chapter, the issues of curricula and methods have helped shape a growing public perception that the university was losing its moral center, focus, and authority. “What is taught” and how not only includes major differences in fields – humanities vs STEM or business for example – but most especially the subject matter and pedagogical approaches of certain humanities disciplines, especially in literature, cultural studies, and languages. Critics from the right wing also focus frequently on history curricula and new developments in the disciplines that include the sources and narratives of peoples of color, of the poor and marginalized that are perceived as challenging and negating a narrative of white exclusivity and triumphalism considered normative.

Second to the intellectual content of what is being taught, but often far more publicized and important to parents and students alike, are the gender issues around college life. What was once seen as “collegiate” life has become in the 2010s a contentious area of sexual difference, variation, and danger for many students: rape culture, sexual predation by faculty, coaches, and athletes. The case studies presented below will trace the consistent presentation and mis-representation of this narrative in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Fox News, the New York Post, and other media. * According to the Oxford Dictionaries, a scandal is “an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage.” “Scandals” are nothing new to American academe and have long been part of Americans’ deep respect for, and fascination with, college life. The public nature of academia’s foibles is, ironically, part and parcel

2

See Chapter 5, 79XX–80XX.

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of its authority and separateness. As American society changed, so too did the nature of these scandals. As early as the 1740s, Harvard and Yale were scandalized by their undergraduates’ attraction to the preachings of George Whitefield, the Great Awakener. Accusations, inquiries, condemnations, and expulsions followed as the colleges grappled with deviations from their core missions and beliefs.3 The scandals were largely confined to the college themselves. But their impact was also public, given the intimate size of the communities that hosted them, the public aspect of much of early university governance in the colonies, and the colleges’ role in bolstering religious and social authority. The pattern of academic scandals varied considerably over the history of American higher education. The colonial and early republican period thought of scandal in terms of belief and teaching. We have already briefly surveyed the strains of nineteenth-century anti-intellectualism and populism deeply ingrained in American society that cast higher education as frivolous or corrupting.4 For elite critics of the early twentieth century, foibles included a lack of clear intellectual message, too strong a reliance on secondary-school curricula, or news of resignations among highly placed university officials.

As the twentieth century unfolded, “collegiate” life became one of America’s core fascinations, and its relaxed and elite style a key element of new fashions.5 Photojournalism, literature, theater, film, and radio brought various aspects of college life alive for a public eager to participate, if only vicariously. Americans might not have had need for or access to higher education, but its rarified atmosphere made it an object of both great respect and wary scrutiny. While the media focused on star athletes and their foibles from the 1920s through the end of the 1930s, reformers inside and outside academe addressed what they saw as the abuses of general college life: an over-reliance on leisure activities, on cliques, racial, gender, and class exclusion, many exemplified in “frat” culture. Their reforms included everything from curriculum changes, to new architecture, to inclusionary admissions policies. By the late 1940s and 1950s, the American obsession with Communist infiltration also targeted the nation’s campuses; and scandals left the realm of lifestyle 3

Hofstadter & Smith, 1:62–82.

4

Chapter 3, 44XX–47XX.

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See Thelin, 155–259.

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and learning to concentrate once again on beliefs and political loyalties.

These scandals involved all segments of American society as campuses were scrutinized for unorthodox beliefs, curricula, and individual acts by members of Congress, state legislatures, and university administrations.

In 1962, Nevitt Sanford and his colleagues released a report revealing widespread student discontent with campus life and bureaucratic indifference.6 In Chapter 3, we detailed the events of the late 1960s and the trauma that these produced both on university and college campuses and across all segments of American society. Chapter 5 has already examined the scandals affecting college administration and boards of directors, budgets, and spending priorities. What then are our contemporary “scandals of academia”?

ADMISSIONS

We should begin our detailed examination at the front door of higher education: in the scandals surrounding admissions policies, most especially at elite colleges and universities. In March 2019, US Federal prosecutors filed charges against dozens of elite figures including coaches, celebrities, admissions officers, and others. The admissions scandal involved up to $25 million in bribes to extend favorable treatment to forty-five children of wealthy – and prominent – American families to enroll their children under largely falsified athletic scholarships. The Federal investigation was named Operation Varsity Blues. The scandal involved eight schools, including Stanford, Yale, the University of Southern California, Georgetown, UCLA, Wake Forest, UT Austin, and the University of San Diego.7 The investigations were widely reported across major media outlets, including CBS News, NBC News, CNN, USA Today, Associated Press, ProPublica Illinois, People, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business Insider, the New York Post, Fox News, Bloomberg,

6

Nevitt Sanford, The American College: A Psychological and Social Interpretation of the Higher Learning (New York: John Wiley).

7 Sarah Brown, “8 Universities. Millions in Bribes. 10 Corrupt Coaches. What You Need to Know About the Admissions-Bribery Scandal,” CHE (March 12, 2019), at www.chronicle .com/article/8-Universities-Millions-in/245873.

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Newsweek, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, and others.8 The Los Angeles Times reported in March 2019 that UCLA knew the details of the scandal in the making as early as its confidential report of 2014.9 Most reporting on the scandals focused less on the role of athletic directors and coaches, since it is common knowledge that they influence admissions. For example, according to a court affidavit, Georgetown gives its coaches about 158 admissions slots a year to fill as they like, regardless of academic or other qualifications.10 More important for the press was what the scandal revealed about growing inequality in American educational opportunity.11 In absolute numbers at the eight private universities involved in the scandal, more students came from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 40 percent of the US income scale.

At Wake Forest, for example, 22 percent came from the top 1 percent ($630K+/year); 8 percent came from the bottom 40 percent (less than $38K/year). At the other end of the scale, at UCLA, 4 percent came from the top 1 percent and 19 percent from the bottom 40 percent. Overall, however, those in the top 20 percent of the income range (over $110K/ year) accounted for an average of 64 percent of total enrollment, ranging from 72 percent at Wake Forest to 48 percent at UCLA. Those in the bottom 40 percent averaged about 11 percent. These are the kinds of schools where undergrads drink $100 bottles of “house wine.”

“If you walk around campus, you’re most likely to get knocked down by a Range Rover or a high-end Audi,” one faculty member noted.

8

See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_ scandal.

9 Nathan Fenno, “UCLA Knew of a Cash-for-Admissions Deal, Years before the Scandal” (April 12, 2019), at www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-ucla-college-admissions-track-athlete20190412-story.html; Jack Stripling, “The Origins of an Admissions-Bribery Mastermind Are Buried in a Confidential Report,” CHE (May 29, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/ article/The-Origins-of-an/246396.

10 Andy Thomason, “In Bribery Scheme, Coaches Sold Their ‘Admissions Slots’ to Nonathletes. Wait, Coaches Influence Admissions?,” CHE (March 13, 2019), at www .chronicle.com/article/In-Bribery-Scheme-Coaches/245891.

11 Nell Gluckman, “How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process,” CHE (Aug. 2, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/How-theWealthyWell/246872.

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As Anthony P. Carnevale, a labor economist at Georgetown observed, “The thing people are getting mad about is that the meritocracy looks like it’s locked in, so it’s an aristocracy.” “The whole system is a pay-for-play system,” says Joseph A. Soares, a Wake Forest sociology professor who researches family income in admissions. “But that’s America.”12 Reactions and news analysis have varied widely. Within the academy, faculty at Yale and USC emphasized how the scandal highlighted the increasing lack of joint governance and called for a renewed role of faculty in the admissions process.13 In March 2019, students filed suit against Stanford and the other schools involved in the scandal, citing an admissions system “warped and rigged by fraud.”14 Students at Tulane and Rutgers filed similar suits. In the US Senate both Democrats and Republicans introduced legislation calling for reform, including fines on colleges and universities that have the smallest proportion of low-income students.15 Senator Elizabeth Warren called the scandal “just one more example of how the rich and powerful know how to take care of their own.”16

12

Jack Stripling, “‘It’s an Aristocracy’: What the Admissions-Bribery Scandal Has Exposed About Class on Campus,” CHE (April 17, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/It-s-anAristocracy-/246131; Tom Bartlett, “What the Admissions Scandal Reveals About Secrecy, Privilege, and the Nature of Merit,” Chronicle Review, CHE (March 15, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/What-the-Admissions-Scandal/245901; Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

13 Wesley Jenkins, “The Bribery Scandal Revealed Holes in Admissions Oversight. Now Some Professors Want to Take Back That Role,” CHE (Sept. 10, 2019), at www.chronicle .com/article/The-Bribery-Scandal-Revealed/247103.

14 The text of the suit can be found in Lindsay Ellis, “Stanford Students Sue Elite Universities After Admissions Scandal,” CHE (March 14, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/ article/Stanford-Students-Sue-Elite/245896.

15 Michelle Hackman, “College-Admission Scandal Draws Scrutiny in Washington,” Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2019), at www.wsj.com/articles/college-admission-scandaldraws-scrutiny-in-washington-11552654841.

16 Aaron Katersky, “Ringleader Pleads Guilty in $25 Million Nationwide College Admissions Cheating Scam,” ABC News (March 12, 2019), at https://abcnews.go.com/US/ hollywood-actors-ceos-charged-nationwide-college-admissions-cheating/story?id= 61627873.

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The reporting had its immediate effects on public opinion. In a September 2019 survey on higher education conducted by New America,17 one major section was devoted to issues of college admissions: Americans want admissions at elite colleges and universities to change. In general, Americans do not like any admission preference that considers legacy status (63 percent opposed), athletic recruitment (57 percent opposed), or race/ethnicity (74 percent opposed).18

Of those responding to these questions, 62 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of Republicans, and 55 percent of Independents were opposed to legacy preferences.19 Opposition to athletic preferences ranged from 54 percent for Democrats, 61 percent for Republicans, and 55 percent for Independents. As comparative data on New America’s samplings, on the issue of affirmative action by race and ethnicity, 61 percent of Democrats polled by New America opposed special treatment, as did 89 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Independents.

ATHLETICS

Athletics have been part of the education of “gentlemen” since antiquity.

They were an essential element of the training and education of the chivalrous knight in the Middle Ages and of the courtier in the Italian Renaissance, and from such treatises as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier they entered the formal curriculum of English public schools and universities. The playing field was as essential to the education of a ruling class as was the classroom, and in many instances it gained far more attention and prestige. The Duke of Wellington probably did not say that “the battle of Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton,” but the sentiment expressed summed up the British elite’s attitude toward the role of athletics in creating leaders.

From the first, American colleges made room for various forms of athletic activity. From the time of the University of Virginia’s founding, a 17

www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/varying-degrees-2019/findings. www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/varying-degrees-2019/executivesummary.

19 www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/varying-degrees-2019/findings.

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student culture that focused on leisure pursuits, including physical and athletic activities, existed almost parallel to and independent of academic life. The “honor” code of that campus remained by and large an extension of the old chivalrous ethic. “Campus life” focused less on subjects taught and increasingly on student organizations, of which teams were an integral part of the education of the “gentleman scholar.”

Such activities distinguished a college elite from those who needed to attend in order to develop skills for social mobility or professional advancement. By the 1870s memoirs and other descriptions of campus life emphasized the centrality of sports and other extracurricular activities in defining the collegiate experience.

By 1900 this extracurricular activity had come to include a standardized set of physical symbols: school colors, mascots, rings, school songs and anthems, athletic uniforms, varsity teams in every popular sport, and the fraternities and sororities that fed into them.20 These activities drew participation from across the campus and followed regular annual rhythms and schedules that helped define the school both internally and to an increasingly fascinated American public. “Homecoming” became a central ritual both for the college and its alums and for an avid external audience who consumed magazine articles and photo spreads, novels, plays, and movies about the campus and its sporting life.

Intercollegiate sports quickly became the chief focus of American interest in higher ed. The Harvard–Yale crew competitions, the Army–Navy or Princeton–Yale football games gained nationwide attention and could even commandeer large municipal stadiums like the Polo Grounds in New York.

By 1910 what had started out as student-run and managed intercollegiate sports had grown into professional organizations, with their own coaches, staffs, medical personnel, and publicity agents. These quickly developed independent structures from the rest of the college and university administration, since athletic directors were from the first paid by student organizations and then substantially funded by alum associations. The strength of these alliances made them impregnable to faculty and administration attempts at control and reform. From the 1890s the 20

See Thelin, 159–62, 177–80, 208–11, 374–77 et passim.

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theory that athletics drew alum attention and hence financial support to the university was used to bolster this independence and to lay the rationale for ever-increasing athletic program budgets. Coaches at schools like Yale and Chicago began drawing down salaries that far exceeded those of most faculty and administrators. They enhanced their positions and those of their teams and programs by contracting with Madison Avenue advertising agencies to bolster the appeal and raise the profile of their teams on the national level. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale became synonymous not with academic programs but with their “All American” teams; and they used this prestige to insure their independence from university control.

Between 1900 and 1925 American campuses saw a frenzy of stadium construction. The size and capacity of stadiums at UC Berkeley, Minnesota, Harvard, or Illinois matched that of ancient Rome’s stadiums. By 1929 Harvard–Yale, Michigan–Ohio State, Stanford–UC, Texas–Texas A&M and USC–Notre Dame football games were drawing in excess of 100,000 fans from both the schools and the general public.

Track and field and other sports also attracted admiring national audiences. By 1937, Life Magazine could report that intercollegiate football alone drew 20 million people into stadiums nationwide and brought in earnings of $30 million ($360 million in 2000 dollars). With independence, prestige, and vast new earnings, collegiate sports were also steeped in scandal. In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation issued a scathing report on abuses in collegiate sports that made headlines in papers across the nation. The foundation recommended that universities take back control over their varsity teams, but local and national businesses encouraged the independence and commercialization of these teams and made reform almost impossible. Even after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression of the 1930s, university boards of trustees continued to funnel badly needed funds away from academic programs and faculty salaries into stadiums and teams.

News and discussion of scandals were not restricted to educators or legislators but included many segments of the American public from the Carnegie Foundation to the daily press. Hollywood glamorized football heroes like Notre Dame player and coach Knute Rokne (in the 1940 film “Knute Rockne, All American,” in which a young Ronald Reagan had a 160

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leading role as star player George Gipp, the “Gipper”). But it could also produce the scathing satire of the Marx Brothers in the 1932 film “Horse Feathers,” in which the new president of Huxley College, Quincy Adams Wagstaff (played by Groucho) actively courts and condones professional football players posing as college athletes. Both reflect a spectrum of genres in different media that delighted in campus life and magnified its scandals across America.

These trends continued throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, despite the temporary decline in personnel and shifts in priorities caused

by World War II. By the late 1950s, collegiate sports were an essential part of the return to normalcy of American life, as sports pageants and team competitions marked the seasons for many American households.

Attendance at, and viewing televised programs from, the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl, among others, became favorite ritual activities during the holiday season. Even in the face of occasional scandal, Americans continued to support intercollegiate sports – as they continued to support higher education in general – throughout the postwar era and into the 1970s and 1980s. This support may, in fact, have remained steady not because of, but in spite of, the general American disillusionment with the university in the wake of the 1960s. Ironically, as Americans began to view faculty and their curricula with suspicion, collegiate sports remained the bedrock of their view of Americanness.

Both alum loyalty and commercial interests maintained this idealized view into the new millennium. It was, after all, campus athletes who had confronted protestors at Columbia, Cornell, and other schools. It was athletes who continued to draw happy memories from alums and bring them back to campuses. It was athletes who most resembled the mythic virtues of authority, military uniformity, and victory; and it was athletes who were most effective in the endorsement of a wide variety of commercial products that increasingly helped define American consumer culture in the post-Vietnam era. If team practices were sometimes brutal, deals shady, or individual stars out of control or wildly overpaid in later careers, this matched the hyper-masculine and unbounded commercial culture espoused by critics of the 1960s counterculture. * 161

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Between 2000 and 2010, even after the effects of the Great Recession on school budgets and government financing, athletic programs saw increased spending across the nation.21 The standard narrative of athletic departments and programs was that such expenditures brought the school high profile and increased revenues in the form of sponsorships and donations, largely from alums. But by 2010 only 17 of 300 NCAA Division I programs were even self-supporting; and many schools had to draw from general funds or from academic and building programs to support their teams. Most athletic programs, including varsity football, lost money annually. A 2015 study commissioned by the Huffington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education found that subsidies paid by public universities alone for their athletic programs over the previous five years totaled $10.3 billion in mandatory athletics fees paid by all students and by other budget allocations.22 Many students do not realize they are paying such fees; many never use the facilities or attend games.

Students, parents, faculty, and legislators have raised vocal objections, but the spending remains untouched and rising, the justification being that sports bring in prestige and donations. Statistics gathered in the report, however, demonstrate the net loss to schools from their athletic programs, with subsidies as high as 90.6 percent of total expenditures.23 When in 2010 faculty at UC Berkeley protested against increased spending on athletics and the fact that the school’s president was diverting $13 million annually from academic programs to athletics, the university reacted by cutting twenty-four varsity teams. Despite this, and negative reports from the Knight Foundation, coaches and their supporters among trustees and alums continued to demand high salaries and budgets with the claims that such sports provided the school with “intangibles.” Athletes continued to receive preferential admissions

21

See Thelin, 374–77.

Brad Wolverton, Ben Hallman, Shane Shifflett, and Sandhya Kambhampati, “The $10Billion Sports Tab: How College Students Are Funding the Athletics Arms Race,” CHE (November 15, 2015), at www.chronicle.com/interactives/ncaa-subsidies-main?cid= rclink#id=table_2014.

23 “Interactive Table: Who Foots the Bill in College Sports?” Source: NCAA Revenue and Expense Reports, 2010–2014; and the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Ipeds), 2010–2014.

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treatment and lucrative scholarships as coaches’ salaries and new facilities continued to rise. The old “A&M” universities, which first rose as agriculture and mining schools, now transformed themselves into “Athletics and Medicine” schools to raise both their profile and their income base.24 But by the early years of the new millennium this ethos was drawing closer and closer into essential conflict with new sensibilities and social movements on campuses across the nation. Third-wave feminism, LGBTQ liberation, Title IX expansions, new cultural critiques, budget cuts, and new oversight caused by the Great Recession and shifting government financial aid drew new scrutiny of college athletics. Where audiences in the 1910s and 1920s might delight in the excesses of college athletes, those of the 2010s and 2020s were informed by new sensibilities, a new awareness of the place of gender, race, and class in the creation of the athletic mythos. They were ready and able to apply new standards to what appeared to remain an unmovable and unchanging collegiate athletic culture. The scandals of the 2010s were a whole new ball game. * By far the most notorious scandal to come out of these developments was the one that enveloped Penn State University. We have discussed this above in terms of governance and board actions, but here we will focus on athletics themselves.25 In November 2011, Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach, was indicted on fifty-two counts of child molestation between 1994 and 2009.26 He was convicted on forty-five counts in June 2012 and sentenced to between thirty and sixty years in prison.

University president Graham Spanier, vice president Gary Schultz, and athletic director Tim Curley were charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, failure to report suspected child abuse, and related charges. The Penn State board of trustees commissioned an independent investigation from former FBI Director Louis Freeh. That report stated that Penn State’s famed head football coach Joe Paterno – along with Spanier, Curley, and Schultz – knew about allegations of child abuse by 24 26

25 Thelin, 381–85.

See Chapter 5, 88XX–89XX. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_State_child_sex_abuse_scandal.

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Sandusky as early as 1998, had shown “total and consistent disregard . . . for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims,” and “empowered” Sandusky to continue his acts of abuse by failing to disclose them. Shortly after the scandal broke, Spanier resigned. The board of trustees fired Paterno and Curley.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association placed sanctions on Penn State’s football program: a $60-million fine, a four-year post-season ban, scholarship reductions, and voiding of its victories from 1998 to 2011. The Big Ten Conference imposed an additional $13 million fine. In March 2017, Curley, Schultz, and Spanier pleaded or were found guilty of misdemeanor charges of child endangerment. Conspiracy charges against Curley and Schultz were dropped, and Spanier was acquitted of conspiracy. In June 2017, all three were sentenced to jail terms, fines, and probation. Spanier was sentenced to four to twelve months in jail, a $7,500 fine, and two years of probation. His conviction was overturned on appeal.

The scandals attracted nationwide attention and were covered intensely in all media, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Associated Press, Reuters, Fox News, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, the Huffington Post, ESPN, ABC News, MSNBC, Yahoo Sports, Politico, BBC News, the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and dozens of other outlets. Both the length of the scandal and its nature caused both left- and right-wing coverage to delve deeply into the role of college athletics in the education and support of young and vulnerable students, most especially in an age when Title IX was becoming more and more closely enforced to guarantee freedom and equality of access to athletics.

Even Penn State’s Aa1 bond rating was “placed on review for possible downgrade” by Moody’s Investors Service because of the scandal’s possible effects on the university’s finances. * But Penn State was not alone. Baylor University, “a private Christian university” in Waco, Texas,27 gained national attention for accusations

27

See www.baylor.edu/about.

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and later convictions for serial rape, gang rape, and non-sexual assaults by nearly twenty Baylor football players, by frat boys, and by others between 2012 and 2016.28 The convictions resulted in long prison sentences for some of the players. In 2016, records revealed that university officials knew of, but failed to take action regarding, the assaults. As a result, university head coach Art Briles was fired in May 2016. University president Kenneth Starr, who had led the investigation into the sexual improprieties of former US President Bill Clinton, was forced to resign, as was Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw. The school’s Title IX coordinator also resigned, claiming that the school’s board of advisors was “a group of seniors that made sure that they were protecting the brand . . . instead of our students.” The scandal resulted in several high-profile lawsuits by students, one of whom, a “Jane Doe” declared in a Federal lawsuit that Baylor was a “hunting ground for sexual predators.” By the end of 2016 the university had reportedly lost $76 million in donations and other support due to the sexual-assault scandal. Projections saw a total loss of over $223 million. The damage done to the students, their families, and rest of the student body, faculty and alums, however, went far beyond money damages and lawsuits. Even with new attention from law enforcement, the courts, and the media, assaults continued into 2018, and lawsuits by women students into early 2019. Coverage appeared regularly in national media in everything from the Wall Street Journal to ABC News, CBS News, NBC Sports, USA Today, ESPN, and the New York Post.

In 2014, Michigan State University reported the first Title IX complaint against its women’s gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. No violation was found, and Nassar remained in his position. It was soon revealed, however, that he had been sexually abusing girl gymnasts at the school since the 1990s, and that chief gymnastics coach Kathie Klages was aware of Nassar’s actions from at least 1997 and had pressured the students to remain silent about their abuse. Once the internal MSU allegations were published by the Indianapolis Star in September 2016, however, Nassar was fired from his position and in February 2018 was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison on multiple counts. Coach Klages was suspended in 28

Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylor_University_sexual_assault_scandal.

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February 2017 and resigned the next day. Nassar’s supervisor, medical school dean William Strampel, was also forced to resign. In August 2019, he was sentenced to a year in prison for his failure to prevent Nassar’s abuse.29 As the scandal unfolded, nearly 400 female students came forward as Nassar’s victims. On January 24, 2018, revelations that MSU’s president, Lou Anna Simon, was aware of the ongoing abuse but attempted a coverup, led to Michigan’s House of Representatives to call for MSU’s board of trustees to fire her. She resigned the day of Nassar’s convictions, followed

by MSU athletic director Mark Hollis. On November 20, 2018, former president Simon was charged with two felonies and two misdemeanor counts for falsely telling police that she was unaware of the nature of the Title IX complaints against Nassar.30 She retained her tenured position and in July 2019 retired from MSU to receive a $2.45-million payout over three years, as well as full benefits.31 Simon’s position was handed to former Michigan Governor John Engler in January 2018. But the Republican politician was not able to heal the campus. In April 2018, he privately offered one accuser $250,000 to withdraw her case. He accused Nassar’s first accuser of receiving “kickbacks” for her “manipulation” of other accusers. During the succeeding months he ignored the abused female students during meetings, demonstrating his disdain by shuffling papers during their presentations. In an interview with the Detroit News he portrayed the women accusers as “the ones who’ve been in the spotlight who are still enjoying that moment at times, you know, the awards and recognition.”32

29

Elizabeth Joseph and Jason Hanna, “Larry Nassar’s Former Boss at MSU Gets a Year in Jail for Misconduct and Neglect of Duty,” CNN (August 7, 2019), at https://edition.cnn .com/2019/08/07/us/msu-strampel-sentence-nassar/index.html.

30 Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz, “Former Michigan State President Is Charged with Lying to Police About Larry Nassar,” CHE (Nov. 20, 2018), at www.chronicle.com/article/ Former-Michigan-State/245141.

31 Sarah Brown, “Michigan State’s Ex-President, Who Faces Criminal Charges, Will Retire with a $2.5-Million Payout,” CHE (July 30, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/ Michigan-State-s/246820.

32 Jack Stripling, “Engler’s Michigan State U. Presidency Is as Imperiled as Ever. And that’s Saying Something,” CHE (Jan. 14, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/Engler-sMichigan-State-U/245473; and Lily Jackson, “John Engler Is out at Michigan State. Here

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In January 2019, the MSU board of trustees unanimously – Democrats and Republicans – called for Engler’s immediate resignation, forbidding him to return to his office, an act that he portrayed as a Democratic political move.33 The scandal attracted national attention. In January 2018, ESPN reported that their investigation “found a pattern of widespread denial, inaction and information suppression of such allegations by officials ranging from campus police to the Spartan athletic department.” It reported that at least sixteen football players had been accused of sexual assault or violence against women since 2007.34 After a Congressional hearing into the MSU scandal, the bipartisan Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017 was signed into law by President Trump in February 2018. The Michigan attorney general’s office and the United States Education Department both launched investigations. By 2018 abused students had filed about 150 lawsuits against MSU, and by May 2018, MSU had agreed to pay $500 million in settlements to 332 female students. In September 2019, the Department of Education levied a $4.5 million fine against MSU, the largest ever such penalty for failing to report the abuse. According to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, “What happened at Michigan State was abhorrent.” She called the crimes committed by Nassar and Strampel “disgusting and unimaginable” and “so too was the university’s response . . . This must not happen again.”35 Soon after DeVos’ statement, MSU’s new president, Samuel L. Stanley Jr., announced the Are 3 Moments that Got Him Booted,” CHE (Jan. 17, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/ article/John-Engler-Is-Out-at-Michigan/245500.

33 Jack Stripling, “Michigan State U. Forces out Engler Immediately, CHE (Jan. 17, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/Michigan-State-U-Forces-Out/245497.

34 Paula Lavigne and Nicole Noren, “OTL: Michigan State Secrets Extend Far beyond Larry Nassar Case,” ESPN.com (January 27, 2018), at www.espn.co.uk/espn/story/_/id/ 22214566/pattern-denial-inaction-information-suppression-michigan-state-goes-larrynassar-case-espn.

35 David Jesse, “Judge: It’s ‘Plausible’ Michigan State Buried Sex Assault Claims against Athletes,” USA Today (Aug 21, 2019), at https://eu.freep.com/story/news/education/ 2019/08/21/michigan-state-sexual-assault-lawsuit-bailey-kowalski/2071907001; Katherine Mangan, “Education Dept. Levies $4.5-Million Fine Against Michigan State Over Nassar Scandal,” CHE (Sept. 5, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/EducationDept-Levies/247079.

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resignation of Provost June P. Youatt, whom the DoE had criticized for failing to take action against Strampel. * But these instances were not isolated. According to the Conversation,36 75 percent of the US News & World Report top 100 schools reported some form of sexual scandal between 2001 and 2013, with enrollments dropping by about 10 percent on average in the following year. Data, definitions, and methods of measurement vary widely, and assaults are often unreported. But the best consensus estimates are that about 20 percent of women are sexually assaulted during their college years.37 Serial rapists accounted for 90 percent of campus assaults, with an average of six rapes per perpetrator.38 Athletic males and males in fraternities are more likely to commit rapes.39 Despite the waves of bad publicity around college sports, the mindset of administrators, trustees, alums, politicians, and media seems to be little changed, however. Even the coverage in the Conversation reflected an unthinking normalization of rape culture, akin to Americans’ acceptance of gun deaths as “just another day.” According to the Conversation, there is a “silver lining” to women being attacked and raped on campus. In a variation on “lightning never strikes twice,” application rates drop for better chances of admission, and some reforms follow. But a silver lining for whom? According to the most recent figures released by the Association of American Universities in October 2019, 25.9 percent of undergraduate women, of the nearly 182,000 students on

36

https://theconversation.com/should-you-apply-to-a-college-that-has-had-a-recentscandal-114892.

37 Charlene L. Muehlenhard, Zoë D. Peterson, Terry P. Humphreys, and Kristen N. Jozkowski, “Evaluating the One-in-Five Statistic: Women’s Risk of Sexual Assault While in College,” Annual Review of Sex Research, Journal of Sex Research 54.4–5 (2017), at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2017.1295014.

38 David Lisak, “Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence,” Sexual Assault Report (SAR) 14.4 (March–April 2011): 49–50, 55–57, at www.middlebury.edu/media/ view/240951/original.

39 Angela Carone, “Fraternities are Significantly Responsible for Campus Sexual Assault,” in Jack Lasky, ed., Sexual Assault on Campus (Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2016), 21.

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all levels surveyed, experience some form of nonconsensual sexual contact. The figures ranged from 14 percent to 32 percent.40 * In July 2019, Louisiana State University’s flagship campus at Baton Rouge unveiled plans to renovate its 102,321-seat football stadium built in 2005.41 The facility includes a locker room with lounging pods complete with iPad mounts, charging stations, and ventilated storage drawers. “This is why you come to LSU,” boasted the team. The estimated cost would be $28 million paid for completely by funds generated by the team’s Tiger Athletic Foundation. Meanwhile, LSU itself has been the object of a 50 percent slash in state support since 2008. Even after about $850,000 in repairs to the main campus library, it remains in “decrepit” condition, prone to regular flooding, with its basement inaccessible to staff and users. The entire campus has deferred $700 million in needed repairs and regular maintenance. LSU’s athletic programs spent $137 million in 2018 alone. About 5.8 percent of those funds went into the LSU general budget. An LSU spokesman defended the athletic spending. Here the scandal, however, came from alums, former athletes, and sports commentators. Among the criticisms was that LSU’s athletics programs were not paying their players like professionals.

TITLE IX

One cannot understand the sweeping, almost revolutionary, changes on college campuses around issues of gender and sexuality without some 40

David Cantor, Bonnie Fisher, et al., “Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct,” The Association of American Universities (Oct. 15, 2019), at www.aau.edu/key-issues/campus-climate-and-safety/aau-campus-climatesurvey-2019. See also Sarah Brown, “More Than 1 in 4 Undergraduate Women Experience Sexual Misconduct in College,’ CHE (Oct. 15, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/ article/More-Than-1-in-4-Undergraduate/247345; Greta Anderson, “Top Universities Release Sexual Assault Reports,” IHE (Oct. 16, 2019), at www.insidehighered.com/ news/2019/10/16/universities-identify-campus-specific-sexual-assault-issues.

41 Will Jarvis, “LSU Just Unveiled a $28-Million Football Facility. The Flood-Damaged Library Is still ‘Decrepit’,” CHE (July 22, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/LSU-JustUnveiled-a/246750.

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background in the federal legislation known as Title IX. This was part of the US Education Amendments Act of June 23, 1972 proposed by Republican President Richard M. Nixon to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It applies to all schools receiving any form of Federal funding.

Title IX states: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.42

Since then, Title IX has had a transformative effect on the equal status of women across a wide variety of issues, including access to all forms of educational opportunities and in protections against gender discrimination. While it was hardly the original intent of the act, perhaps its most visible achievement has been in women’s athletics, opening opportunities and equal access to female competitors in all sports. The victory of the US Women’s Soccer team in the 2019 World Cup competition amply demonstrates this. Beginning in the 1980s, the law began to be applied to cases of sexual assault. These, proponents argued successfully before the courts, constituted a prima facie case of sexual harassment and thus discrimination based on gender. In a landmark case in 2003 a Federal court ruled that a 1977 sexual assault by one Yale student of another constituted such harassment and thus fell under Title IX guidelines as gender discrimination.43 As a result, Yale instituted its own grievance procedure, and other schools soon followed suit.

The purview of the law increased over the next two decades until in 2011 the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter that updated guidelines for universities that finally made compliance with Title IX a matter of prime urgency. It called on colleges and universities to adhere to a standard of proof in cases of such accusations first set in 2002 based on the “preponderance of the evidence” (i.e., more

42 43

Public Law No. 92‑318, 86 Stat. 235 (June 23, 1972), codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688.

The case was Alexander v. Yale, 631 F.2d 178 (2d Cir. 1980). See Robin Wilson, “Why Colleges Are on the Hook for Sexual Assault,” CHE (June 6, 2014), at www.chronicle .com/article/Why-Colleges-Are-on-the-Hook/146943.

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likely than not) used in civil cases, as opposed to the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard required for criminal convictions. The Obama administration’s expansion of Title IX recommendations for all institutions of higher learning were not mandatory. But given higher ed’s concern for its students and its brands, the letter had several important effects, including the widespread opening of “Title IX” offices throughout higher education to insure understanding of and compliance with the law and its regulations. These called for prompt reporting, as well as internal measures to investigate and adjudicate complaints of sexual harassment, including accusations of assault and rape that might otherwise be within the jurisdiction of civil and criminal courts in the schools’ jurisdiction areas. In a certain sense the law and the new requirements both punctured the traditional separation of the campus from civil society and, ironically, returned to a medieval practice of granting the universities their own tribunals and a large measure of almost clerical immunity from surrounding secular courts. With these came a sudden and substantial change in the culture of many campuses that appeared to throw many – left-wing and right-wing, feminists and traditionalists – off balance and calling for reforms. * Two of the best examples of these changes are the interrelated cases of Professors Laura Kipnis and Peter Ludlow of Northwestern University.

Here the seismic shift from a culture of open student–faculty relationships to one of mutual distrust involved student protests, accusations of sexual harassment and rape, closed-door hearings before a Title IX tribunal, resignations, apparent recantations, and continued recriminations. These demonstrated the often awkward processes into which institutions of higher education have been placed by law and changing custom, the rise of student consciousness surrounding gender inequality and sexual predation embodied in the Me Too movement, and the unforgiving eye of critics of higher education who take all sides to task as the campus becomes the vicarious battleground around issues of equal rights and women’s agency, personal freedom, and societal responsibility.

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Laura Kipnis is a tenured professor of communication theory in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at Northwestern. Over several months in 2015, she published a series of essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education detailing her reactions to the university’s new codes of faculty– student behavior, which she labelled the “Great Prohibition,” and reflected on similar developments across the nation’s campuses.44 As Kipnis explained, she grew up in a different time.45 As students of art, she and her peers among the previous generation of feminists lived according to special rules of “mutual fascination” between faculty and students whose bodies blended with their minds and where asymmetrical equations of “power” were irrelevant, or at least helpful on occasion: When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. . . . As Jane Gallop recalls in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), her own generational cri de coeur, sleeping with professors made her feel cocky, not taken advantage of. She admits to seducing more than one of them as a grad student – she wanted to see them naked, she says, as like other men. Lots of smart, ambitious women were doing the same thing, according to her, because it was a way to experience your own power. But somehow power seemed a lot less powerful back then. The gulf between students and faculty wasn’t a shark-filled moat; a misstep wasn’t fatal. We partied together, drank and got high together, slept together. The teachers may have been older and more accomplished, but you didn’t feel they could take advantage of you because of it. How would they?

Later Kipnis had dated her own graduate students without any sense of being a “predator.” But then came the Obama administration’s enforcement of Title IX rules and their offices, their endless notices “peddling” guidelines to faculty, and a series of accusations by young women encouraged by the Me Too Movement to file complaints against (mostly male) faculty. As Kipnis characterized her reaction to one famous incident:

44 45

https://policies.northwestern.edu/docs/Consensual_Relations_011314.pdf.

Laura Kipnis, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” Chronicle Review, CHE (Feb. 27, 2015), at www.chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351.

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It’s the fiction of the all-powerful professor embedded in the new campus codes that appalls me. . . . To a cultural critic, the representation of emotion in all these documents plays to the gallery. The student charges that she “suffered and will continue to suffer humiliation, mental and emotional anguish, anxiety, and distress.”

As a result of that article in the Chronicle, Kipnis became the target of well-publicized student protests, including the symbolic carrying of mattresses and pillows made famous by the Me Too Movement. In the minds of many, she had indeed become, if not the predator, at the very least an apologist for predators. After an editorial in the student newspaper and a petition to the university’s president, Kipnis found herself the object of one of the very Title IX “inquisitions” by the “Midwestern Torquemadas” she had mocked.46 The article produced what one student called a “chilling effect” on her ability to report sexual harassment and what another termed a “hostile environment.” Kipnis was again called before the Title IX tribunal, which she suggested might be called a “kangaroo court.” No evidence was presented for the author to refute, and the Title IX “investigators doubled as judge and jury.” After several weeks Kipnis was cleared of the accusations, and the charges were dropped.47 The faculty senate then had its say, and Northwestern revised its procedures over such allegations.48 Kipnis next came to prominence as she detailed her experience of the Title IX proceeding against Prof. Peter Ludlow of Northwestern’s Philosophy Department.49 In early 2014, Ludlow had been accused of inappropriate sexual advances by an undergraduate student of his whom 46

Laura Kipnis, “My Title IX Inquisition,” Chronicle Review, CHE (May 29, 2015), at www .chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489.

47 Brock Read, “Laura Kipnis Is Cleared of Wrongdoing in Title IX Complaints,” CHE (May 31, 2015), at www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/laura-kipnis-is-cleared-of-wrongdoing-intitle-ix-complaints/99951.

48 Peter Schmidt, “Northwestern U. Is Accused of Violating Academic Freedom,” CHE (March 3, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/northwestern-u-is-accused-ofviolating-academic-freedom/117184.

49 Laura Kipnis, “Eyewitness to a Title IX Witch Trial,” Chronicle Review, CHE (April 2, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/article/Eyewitness-to-a-Title-IX-Witch/239634; later included in Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).

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he had allowed to sleep off a hangover on his bed and who went on to sue him and the university in civil court. A younger colleague, with whom he had had a three-month sexual affair, then accused him of nonconsensual sexual relations and rape. Neither accuser attended the Title IX trial, which was heavily staffed by university attorneys. As Kipnis recounts it, almost by default she was called upon to act as the ostracized Ludlow’s faculty advisor. One of Ludlow’s former female Ph.D. students also provided the defense with compelling expert and character witness.

Despite reported ambiguities and contradictions in the accusers’ cases and counter-evidence, the case dragged on. Ludlow eventually decided to tender his resignation rather than face continued courtroom conflict, protracted legal bills, and continued publicity and professional ostracism. He left the country without any form of financial settlement from the university. His first accuser later denounced the proceedings as benefiting no one but the university and its corporate public-relations image. Kipnis concluded, “high-flown terms like ‘due process’ now spout from my cynic’s lips, as though democratic principles still matter and something should be done to save higher ed from its saviors.”

Debate over these practices ultimately focused for both left and right on this issue of “due process.”50 In October 2014, for example, over two dozen Harvard law school professors led by Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, Janet Halley, and Nancy Gertner published an open letter condemning the Title IX system of “investigation and adjudication” used by the Obama administration as “so unfair as to be truly shocking” and “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.”51 Gersen subsequently labelled the Title IX offices a “sex bureaucracy.” As she put it, her and her colleague’s action, “was not a conservative impulse. It was an impulse toward fairness and rules and in some ways a pushback against authoritarian university governance.” That governance, many advocates for Title IX reform assert, is less about justice than about 50

See, for example, Wesley Yang, “The Revolt of the Feminist Law Profs: Jeannie Suk Gersen and the Fight to Save Title IX from Itself,” Chronicle Review, CHE (August 7, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190807-feminist-law-profs.

51 “Rethink Harvard’s Sexual Harassment Policy,” Boston Globe (Oct. 14, 2014), at www .bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/14/rethink-harvard-sexual-harassment-policy/ HFDDiZN7nU2UwuUuWMnqbM/story.html.

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protecting the “brand” against bad publicity and assuring consumer loyalty. Since 2011, Federal courts across the spectrum of jurisdictions and leanings decided in over 200 cases that Title IX tribunals have violated due process. More cases are pending; and by the summer of 2019 differing Federal district courts had issued conflicting opinions that could lead to a Supreme Court test.52 As with the medieval university, the public, civil, or criminal nature of faculty missteps or lack of professional judgment and ethics has given rise to serious conflict that involve both the university’s image of authority and its insistence upon separateness from society at large. Are universityappointed panels and attorneys legally competent to adjudicate cases that may involve civil or criminal charges? Can they really provide such constitutionally guaranteed “due process”? Does not society have a right and obligation to protect all of its members, no matter what community they may temporarily belong to? And if so, what venue has final jurisdiction over such cases? The recent history of Title IX certainly makes the strong argument that society, represented by the Federal government, has both interest and standing in all such instances.

The tenure of Trump appointee Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary in 2017 further complicated the already fraught situation.53 DeVos is a billionaire, Republican political operative, and Trump campaign contributor. While acknowledging the importance of Title IX protections, she launched a series of meetings with advocacy groups to investigate whether the Obama administration’s 2011 guidelines constituted governmental “overreach.” Those consulted included college and university administrators who welcomed clarifications and consistencies. They also included several men’s rights organizations. Discussions focused on the 52

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, “A Potential Title IX Supreme Court Case?,” IHE (August 8, 2019), at www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/08/ruling-umass-amherst-title-ix-lawsuitmay-lead-supreme-court-case-experts-say.

53 Andrew Kreighbaum, “DeVos Hints at Changes in Title IX Enforcement,” IHE (July 14, 2017), at www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/14/after-full-day-meetings-title-ixdevos-says-improvements-needed; Laura Meckler, “Betsy DeVos Poised to Issue Sweeping Rules Governing Campus Sexual Assault,” Washington Post (Nov. 25, 2019), at www .washingtonpost.com/local/education/betsy-devos-poised-to-issue-sweeping-rulesgoverning-campus-sexual-assault/2019/11/25/f9c21656-0f90-11ea-b0fc-62cc38411ebb_ story.html.

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thorny issue of “due process” and the rights of the accused. But the very nature of the men’s groups set off strong criticisms from women’s and survivors’ groups expressing skepticism of DeVos’ intentions and concerns that Title IX protections would be rolled back. Women’s groups provided strong statistical data refuting claims that many rape charges were fabricated and casting doubt on the good faith of DeVos’ efforts, which did result in the rollback of the Obama recommendations.

Proposed changes included the “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof, the sixty-day investigation period, and prohibition of mediation between the parties involved.

In July 2017, a further study documented the hitherto unrecognized extent of faculty sexual harassment of students.54 Ten percent of women graduate students reported sexual harassment that went into administrative or public litigation. The study found that the majority of cases were not limited to verbal harassment and that they were the acts of serial harassers. In August 2019, Dartmouth College reached a $14 million settlement with nine women graduate students in psychology and brain science after their repeated complaints of sexual harassment and violence went unaddressed by university administrators. While Dartmouth eventually fired three tenured senior faculty after a Title IX investigation, the women’s suit alleged a history of neglect in failing to protect their rights.55 Such harassers were overwhelmingly male, but some high-profile cases have included female faculty and charges of harassment leveled by male students. The charges against Professor Avital Ronell, of NYU’s German and Comparative Literature Department, are a case in point. In August 2018, NYU’s Title IX office found her guilty of the charges of sexual harassment against a male, and gay, graduate student, and NYU

54

Nancy Chi Cantalupo and William Kidder, “A Systematic Look at a Serial Problem: Sexual Harassment of Students by University Faculty,” Utah Law Review (June 30, 2018): 671–786. See also Colleen Flaherty, “Worse Than It Seems,” IHE (July 18, 2017), at www .insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/18/study-finds-large-share-cases-involving-facultyharassment-graduate-students-are.

55 Nell Gluckman, “Dartmouth Women Reach Preliminary $14-Million Settlement With College,” CHE (Aug. 6, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/Dartmouth-WomenReach/246888.

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suspended her for one year.56 The case was further complicated by a letter signed by over fifty prominent academics defending Ronell and attacking the graduate student before many of the facts of the case had become public. Despite several signers’ subsequent retraction of their support, the growing scandal attracted the attention of a wide audience both for the initial matter under accusation and subsequent litigation and for what appeared to be the academy’s closing ranks around one of its prominent superstars at the expense – and future careers – of students and victims.57 New York Times and New Yorker articles shifted attention away from the immediate issues of sexual harassment by faculty members to apparent inconsistencies of the campus Me Too movement and of university Title IX procedures. Lisa Duggan, professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, cast suspicion on the very notion of the corporate university’s attempts to adjudicate such cases and the issue of “power relationships” within modern higher ed. In April, Andrea Long Chu, one of Ronell’s graduate students who wrote of her experience in the Chronicle, called attention to a fall graduate course Ronell would teach entitled “Unsettled Scores.”58 In September 2019, NYU announced that Ronell would return to the classroom.59 Her reinstatement sparked immediate protests from the graduate student union and from NYUtoo, a campus advocacy group. In an open letter they stated: NYU’s decision to continue Ronell’s employment constitutes an attack on survivors of sexual abuse and contributes to a hostile learning and working

56

“What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?,” New York Times (Aug. 13, 2018), at www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexual-harassment-nyu-femaleprofessor.html.

57 Masha Green, “An N.Y.U. Sexual-Harassment Case Has Spurred a Necessary Conversation About #MeToo,” New Yorker (August 25, 2018), at www.newyorker.com/ news/our-columnists/an-nyu-sexual-harassment-case-has-spurred-a-necessaryconversation-about-metoo.

58 “I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser,” Chronicle Review, CHE (Aug. 30, 2018), at www.chronicle.com/article/I-Worked-With-Avital-Ronell-I/244415.

59 Emma Pettit, “Avital Ronell is Returning to the Classroom. Some Grad Students Want Her Gone,” CHE (Sept. 5, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/Avital-Ronell-isReturning-to/247084.

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environment. The university already tacitly acknowledges this in making it a condition of Ronell’s return that her future meetings with students be supervised. Moreover, Ronell’s behavior is not isolated to this particular instance, but is part of a long-standing pattern of intimidation and misconduct, as testified by other students and faculty. We therefore call on NYU to enforce its policy “to maintain a safe learning, living, and working environment” and immediately terminate Avital Ronell’s employment.60

Among other demands, the letter called for an annual report on all Title IX complaints, including the university’s response to them, restorative-justice options for sexual misconduct, and in-person, rigorous trainings for faculty, staff, and students on “anti-harassment, sexual respect, racial sensitivity, and bystander intervention.” But Ronell’s reinstatement is not unique. Students at campuses across the country are now protesting against the reinstatement into the classroom of faculty already found guilty of Title IX infringements. At one campus, a graduate student noted that such behavior “created a culture in which some, maybe all, students viewed every interaction with [the offending faculty member] – and with faculty in general – as potentially sexualized.”61 *

By September 2019, the pressures placed on Title IX itself had become the object of close scrutiny. As a result of the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter of 2011, campuses scurried to establish formal Title IX offices. They staffed these with professionals with various levels of experience and expertise who immediately needed to balance the needs of the most vulnerable students who make accusations on the one hand, and the rights of the accused on the other. In addition, many faced pressure from their institutions – everyone from HR chiefs to deans and provosts – to protect the reputation of their schools and their

60

“Hold NYU Accountable: Terminate Avital Ronell’s Employment and Implement Institutional Reform #NYUtoo,” at https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 105bUlMu2fD534Z211QZGk_Q8cN08Jy1s8hhUpXkqcGI/edit.

61 Emma Pettit, “He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now,” CHE (Nov. 15, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/ He-Violated-Sexual-Misconduct/247558.

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record of compliance with the law and with student safety. Title IX officers were thus both employees and individuals charged with being impartial and independent judges about campus compliance and culpability in protecting students. Recent statistics are telling. Survey data published in 2018 by the Association of Title IX Administrators reveal that 72 percent of Title IX officers are women.62 Of these 74 percent are white. In 2018, only 46 percent reported directly to the president of the institution; and 62 percent of offices had separate budgets to do their mandated jobs. That meant that the majority of Title IX offices lacked access to the final campus decision-makers that their mandates required and that one-third of offices still had no separate budget.

Even more telling is the profile of the officers themselves: in 2018, only 21 percent of Title IX officers were full-time, and 61 percent held their positions part-time and were charged with other administrative responsibilities. The overwhelming majority (87 percent) of officers were in their jobs for less than five years, 64 percent for less than three years, and 20 percent for less than one year. Burnout and turnover was constant, and this lack of continuity translated into student unease in reporting cases, difficulty in assessing the fairness of accusations, and the isolation of officers from both students and faculty. Caught between student crises, student suspicions of inadequate concern and process, and administrative rigidity and wariness of Title IX’s impact on their school’s reputation, many officers resign or are forced out after relatively brief periods.63 Meanwhile, student willingness to report sexual harassment and assault continues to rise. Colleges and universities continue simultaneously to comply with Title IX regulations, to establish working procedures, and to attempt to minimize negative reporting and public scrutiny. * But the final tribunal remains that of public opinion. As Eric Kelderman put it, the concept of “due process” has broadened in

62 63

https://atixa.org/about.

Sarah Brown, “Life Inside the Title IX Pressure Cooker,” CHE (Sept. 5, 2019), at www .chronicle.com/interactives/20190905-titleix-pressure-cooker.

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meaning from a basic legal principle to a rhetorical device invoked against a wide range of ills attributed to higher education and Title IX.64 A September 2018 poll conducted by public broadcasting station WGBH in Boston found that 77 percent of respondents supported the view that higher ed had a positive impact on American society.65 But opinions went in the opposite direction when it came to higher ed’s handling of issues. The poll found that 57 percent supported calls for more diversity of opinion and more protections of free-speech rights.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents believed that faculty have a political slant, and 54 percent felt that schools are lax in protecting students from sexual attack and harassment. Half held that higher ed falls short in addressing students’ mental-health concerns.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, political correctness is “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.”66 The right-wing catchall, “politically correct,” is not a clever and original brickbat to use against liberals. It was first used in 1793 in the US Supreme Court case Chisholm v. Georgia.67 It appeared occasionally throughout the nineteenth century. In 1934, the New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits “only to pure ‘Aryans’ whose opinions are politically correct.” Ironically, it began appearing in its current context among left-wing American groups after World War II to mock Stalinist, Maoist, and other Communist regimes’ insistence on the ideological purity of the moment. This use continued through the 1960s and 1970s among progressive groups wary 64

Erik Kelderman, “How Due Process Became a New Front in the Culture Wars,” CHE (May 17, 2018), at www.chronicle.com/article/How-Due-Process-Became-a-New/ 243453.

65 Scott Jaschik, “Positive View of Higher Ed, with Lots of Caveats,” IHE (September 17, 2018), at www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/09/17/new-national-survey-findsgenerally-positive-views-higher-education-weak-points-well; and also see Chapter 5, 76XX–80XX. 66 67 www.lexico.com/en/definition/political_correctness.

2 US (2 Dall.) 419 (1793).

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of ideologues. It had the largest impact on American thought, however, from the neo-Conservatives. In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind zeroed in on American higher education as a hotbed of a new “political correctness” among faculty.68 An October 1990 New York Times article by China expert Richard Bernstein made the term standard among critics of higher ed. It soon became a potent political tool of the right-wing. Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, funded in large part by the right-wing John M. Olin Foundation, solidified the targeting of higher ed.69 In May 1991, at a University of Michigan graduation, President George H.W. Bush laid out the right-wing consensus: The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land.

And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits. What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship. Disputants treat sheer force – getting their foes punished or expelled, for instance – as a substitute for the power of ideas. Throughout history, attempts to micromanage casual conversation have only incited distrust. They have invited people to look for an insult in every word, gesture, action. And in their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity.70

As the theory developed in the twenty-first century, it expanded not only to include the supposed liberal bias of most university and college faculty but also to characterize concerns about marginalization into an ideologically consistent attack on free speech. This attack allegedly originated in the leftist thought of the Frankfurt School in Germany. The theory of “Cultural Marxism” was proposed by Michael Minnicino in 68

Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.

Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Vintage, 1992).

70 Remarks at the University of Michigan Commencement Ceremony in Ann Arbor, 4 May 1991. George Bush Presidential Library, at https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/ public-papers/2949.

69

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1992 and gained wide traction among right-wingers.71 In 2001, Patrick Buchanan wrote in The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization that “political correctness is cultural Marxism . . . its trademark is intolerance.”72 In October 2016 candidate Donald Trump stated, Political correctness – oh, what a terrible term – has transformed our institutions of higher education from ones that fostered spirited debate to a place of extreme censorship, where students are silenced for the smallest of things.73

FREE SPEECH

The political weaponization of this critique was quick in coming. In February 2017, Iowa State Senator Mark Chelgren, a conservative Republican, proposed a bill that would have set quotas on the faculty members at the state university system based on their political beliefs, so that neither Republicans nor Democrats had more than a 10 percent majority.74 The law would have authorized state officials to check voter registration records of all applicants. As Chelgren put it, “I believe it is imperative that the students, the customers, have as much information as possible. . . . Students who are paying the bills – tuition at universities – should have an understanding of the political affiliations that professors are associated with, so when they ask a question, they can put it in context.” Quickly denounced as “wackadoodle,” the bill was still

71

Michael Minnicino, “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’” (Washington, DC: Schiller Institute, 1992).

72 Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 89.

73 Steven Johnson, “Conservatives Say,” CHE (Aug. 20, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/ article/Conservatives-Say/246981.

74 Peter Schmidt, “Iowa Bill Would Force Universities to Consider Political Affiliation in Faculty Hiring,” CHE (Feb. 22, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/article/Iowa-Bill-WouldForce/239261.

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recognized as making it “much more difficult for Iowa State, the University of Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa to recruit top faculty.”

Simultaneously, Secretary of Education DeVos went further in the ideological attack on faculty as elitist ideologues. In a February 2017 speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference she told the college students in the group that:75 The fight against the education establishment extends to you too. The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think. They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university community. But the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.

In September 2017, then-Attorney-General Jeff Sessions decried what he considered infringements of First Amendment rights on campus and pledged to lend the weight of the Justice Department to support lawsuits against colleges that were allegedly violating free-speech rights: The American university was once the center of academic freedom, a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas,” Sessions said. “But it is transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.76

As with so much of the right-wing critique of higher-ed, however, such charges do not stand up to scrutiny. A 2017 study by two Republicanvoting political scientists who specialize in studies of free speech and “political correctness” found that right-wing rhetoric was inaccurate and exaggerated: We think the headline-grabbing episodes are in fact not typical of academe – and that things are better than the news coverage suggests. Not all is well with academe, but right-wing alarmism obscures the fact that the

75

Scott Jaschik, “DeVos vs. the Faculty,” IHE ( Feb. 24, 2017), at www.insidehighered.com/ news/2017/02/24/education-secretary-criticizes-professors-telling-students-what-think.

76 Sadie Gurman, “Sessions says Free Speech ‘Under Attack’ on College Campuses,” AP News (September 26, 2017), at https://apnews.com/ d72c5252daf94f51867e2c8a0ea7e0a4.

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left’s stranglehold on campuses has less influence on college students than people think. As everyone in academe knows, there is a cottage industry on the right that spotlights the ideological tilt of colleges and accuses academe of brainwashing a generation of students. But most undergraduates are in fact not ideologically pliable. By the time they reach college, most students have developed a political point of view.77

As Jason Blakely noted in the Atlantic: Such reports have in turn reinforced a longstanding political narrative, which seeks to demean America’s universities as ideologically narrow, morally slack, hypersensitive, and out of touch. For example, commentators like the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have argued that America’s “university system” is “genuinely corrupt” in relying on “rote appeals to . . . left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.”78

But the war of words over free speech had concrete consequences. As administrators attempted to accommodate the new axis of opinion gripping the nation, students and many faculty reacted strongly against what they perceived as a marked increase in hate and other objectionable speech on campus. In February 2017, the Berkeley campus of the University of California – the birthplace of the campus Free Speech Movement in the 1960s – was thrust into national prominence again as students and faculty demonstrated against an invitation to Milo Yiannopoulos, then editor of the extreme right-wing Breitbart News.79 In the traditional spirit of free expression of ideas on the college campus, the administration turned down numerous student requests to prevent Yiannopoulos’ visit. As a result, nearly 1,500 students demonstrated

77

Robert Maranto and Matthew Woessner, “Why Conservative Fears of Campus Indoctrination Are Overblown,” Chronicle Review, CHE (July 31, 2017), at www.chronicle .com/article/Why-Conservative-Fears-of/240804.

78 “Deconstructing the ‘Liberal Campus’ Cliche,” Atlantic (Feb. 13, 2017), at www .theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/02/deconstructing-the-liberal-campuscliche/516336.

79 Beth McMurtrie, “Mayhem at Berkeley Hardens New Battle Lines on Free Speech,” CHE (Feb. 3, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/article/Mayhem-at-Berkeley-Hardens-New/ 239099.

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peacefully against the talk and what they characterized as hate speech that had no place on a college campus. Meanwhile, however, about a hundred anarchists from the Bay Area – not associated with Berkeley – infiltrated the campus, set fires, and damaged buildings before their action was contained.

President Trump and the right-wing media, however, condemned the action as one of students themselves preventing freedom of speech.

Trump tweeted: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” His lead was followed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation: “1964: Berkeley students march to demand free speech. 2017: Berkeley students riot to demand free speech be denied.”

The right-wing Young Americans for Liberty student organization claimed that 1,500 protestors threw smoke bombs, damaged property, and started fires, proving, the group asserted, that “even the most liberal, open-minded campuses in our country harbor intolerance for those that disagree with them.” Without long delay the Goldwater Institute, a rightwing think-tank, released its prepared model legislation for state governments to punish students at public colleges who “shut down” speakers on campus.

Within three months of Trump’s election the narrative of an American higher education hijacked by enemies of freedom had been codified and broadcast widely. In June 2017, the Republican-led legislature in Wisconsin, with the support of Governor Scott Walker, put forward precisely the legislation proposed by the Goldwater Institute.80 The bill called for the suspension of students who are found twice to “interfere with the expressive rights of others” and for the state system to set up a reporting mechanism on such incidents. Similar legislation was already being introduced in Michigan, Texas, and California. In March 2019, Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that colleges and universities “uphold free speech”;81 and by July 2019, legislation 80

J. Clara Chan, “As a Free-Speech Bill Advances in Wisconsin, Some Fear a Chilling Effect,” CHE (June 23, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/article/As-a-Free-Speech-BillAdvances/240433.

81 “Executive Order Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities.” See Andy Thomason, “Here’s What Trump’s Executive Order on Free

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mandating “free speech” on campus and punishment for infractions had either passed or been proposed by Republican legislatures in nearly two dozen states.82 In February 2017, Middlebury College in Connecticut witnessed heated, and in one incident,83 physical confrontation as students and faculty objected to plans to invite political scientist and eugenicist Charles A. Murray, co-author of the controversial “bell curve” theory that posits genetic reasons for frequent under-performance by black and other peoples of color in American society.84 Both Murray and the faculty moderator Prof. Allison Stanger were heckled during and after the talk; and Stanger was injured by a student afterwards. Many senior faculty and administrators were unprepared for the confrontation, but other faculty had already warned about, and now joined students in rejecting, the presence of what many saw as a racist spreading his discredited ideas. The incident demonstrated the tensions between the classic separateness of the campus as a place devoted to open discussion and consideration of all forms of ideas and the pressures to reflect more the evolving consciousness of many young people about racial and social inequalities and injustices. It also reflected what many consider students’ oversensitivity to difference and challenges to their world views, whether left- or right-wing. Faculty and administrators pondered what went wrong with preparations and their attempt to instill a sense of open-minded debate in a place apart. Some also mused on the impact that the incident would have for right-wing critics of higher education.

Two of the most highly covered and distorted controversies around campus free speech centered on Yale University. The first involved an incident in October 2015 around a Halloween celebration on campus Speech Says,” CHE (March 21, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/here-s-what-trumps/245943.

82 Katherine Mangan, “More States Are Passing Campus Free-Speech Laws. Are They Needed, or Is the Crisis Talk Overblown?,” CHE (July 23, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/ article/More-States-Are-Passing-Campus/246753.

83 Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz, “What Could Middlebury Have Done to Avoid a Free-Speech Fracas?,” CHE (March 7, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/article/What-Could-MiddleburyHave/239421.

84 Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).

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and a professor’s comments about appropriate costumes.85 The original Atlantic treatment of the incident was quickly picked up and magnified by multiple sites, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearEducation, the fire.org, and medium.com. The second focused on the issue of monuments, institutional memory, and historical responsibility for past social and political evils. Students questioned the naming of one of Yale’s most venerable residence halls, Calhoun College, after John C. Calhoun.

A Yale graduate, US Senator, and the nation’s seventh vice-president, Calhoun was an avowed white supremacist and apologist for slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Among the student demands were that the term “master” for hall moderators be changed since it evoked the culture of slavery. The controversy resulted in many student sit-ins and the arrest and later exoneration of a black custodian for smashing the hall’s stained-glass window depicting black slaves at work on a plantation. In February 2017, the university reversed its decision to retain Calhoun’s name and instead announced the hall’s new naming after Grace Murray Hopper, a Yale Ph.D. who became a noted computer scientist and a US rear admiral. One new hall was to be named after Anna Pauline Murray, a Yale Law School graduate in 1965, a legal scholar, and a civil rights activist. But another was to be named after Benjamin Franklin who, many students noted, was also a slave owner.

Student concerns also included the fact that the Franklin naming came at the urging of a wealthy businessman who had donated $250 million for both buildings. After further protests, that hall was also renamed.

Students stressed that their symbolic demands were part of a far larger dynamic, in which many black professors were leaving Yale and in which less than 3 percent of its humanities faculty were black, while black enrollments totaled about 11 percent of the student body.

The true nature of the controversy, however, was largely ignored by the press, and the impression that the public received was that several spoiled (black) students, “the few activists willing to invest time and

85

Connor Friedersdorf, “The New Intolerance of Student Activism: A Fight over Halloween Costumes at Yale has Devolved into an Effort to Censor Dissenting Views,” Atlantic (Nov. 9, 2015), at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-newintolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810.

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energy into the game,” backed by a permissive liberal faculty, had dictated arbitrary demands around a set of largely meaningless symbols: What [these incidents] had in common was an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical.86

* Given the close attention America has always paid to higher education, and the heightened tension of the campus as a cockpit for social and intellectual innovation and experimentation, off-campus controversies tend to become both magnified and crystallized in the context of higher ed’s devotion to deep scrutiny of issues. Faculty and students engage in a give-and-take of ideas and their criticism. But such oncampus scrutiny of controversies and events can have quite a negative impact on the image of a particular campus and of higher education in general. The consequences of such events on the University of Missouri’s flagship campus at Columbia is another case in point.87 Following the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, MO in the fall of 2015, and in the face of racist slurs on campus, black students began a nonviolent protest by setting up a tent city on campus to call attention to widespread and institutional racism and what they saw as administrative indifference. A graduate student went on a hunger strike, and the school’s football team refused to practice until the school’s president resigned. The protests came both as a result of the Ferguson incident and as part of the rising Black Lives Matter movement. Racist and anti-Semitic posts followed on campus as the school won national attention for hindering free speech after a media-department professor 86

Natalia Dashan, “The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech,” Palladium (August 5, 2019), at https://palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-freespeech.

87 Anemona Hartocollis, “Long After Protests, Students Shun the University of Missouri,” New York Times (July 9, 2017), at www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/university-ofmissouri-enrollment-protests-fallout.html.

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attempted to prevent media coverage of the protests. In the wake of the incidents the university president and chancellor resigned.

Alum and parent concerns were soon amplified by right-wing media as the core narrative became one of a campus out of control and in the hands of violent students and faculty. Both presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump cited the incidents, and Trump labelled black protestors “disgusting” and “disgraceful.” Professor Melissa Click – who took the students’ side – was fired after becoming a right-wing target.88 What followed was a 35 percent decline in new enrollments, of which 42 percent of black students turned away from the school and 21 percent of white applicants sought other campuses and state systems. Overall black enrollments fell from 10 percent to 6 percent. Faculty and other job cuts, cancellation of building projects, a library without a book budget, and fundraising shortfalls followed.

True to the nature of such negative narratives, students already enrolled almost all opted to complete their degrees at the school, a sign that those familiar with the disputes realized their largely nonviolent and free expression. Meanwhile, those remote from the incidents based their decisions on hearsay, negative reporting, and pre-judgments. * But not all controversy over free speech centered around students. In a Trump-era culture, where a new political orthodoxy viewed academic freedom with suspicion, individual professors and their public statements became the target of renewed right-wing hostility and outright threat. In 2017, Jessie Daniels and Arlene Stein reviewed a series of incidents and trends in a Inside Higher Education post.89 These included a commencement speech at Hampshire College by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, who called Trump a “racist, sexist megalomaniac.” Her remarks were picked 88

Tomi Obaro, “Before Syracuse, There Was Mizzou,” BuzzFeed News (Nov. 26, 2019), at www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomiobaro/mizzou-football-boycott-protests-2015racism.

89 “Protect Scholars against Attacks from the Right,” IHE (June 26, 2017), at www .insidehighered.com/views/2017/06/26/why-institutions-should-shield-academics-whoare-being-attacked-conservative-groups.

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up by Fox News, and she was immediately assailed by over four dozen threatening emails from right-wingers, some of which made threats of physical violence. Hampshire College immediately condemned the attacks and supported Taylor.

But not all faculty had the full or immediate support of their schools.

Individual faculty members and departments have also had to reconsider offerings in everything ranging from courses on athletics, to gender studies,90 to race as legislators, donors, religious leaders, and media continued to closely scrutinize “what’s taught” on college campuses. In July 2017, Professor Johnny E. Williams of Connecticut’s Trinity College Department of Sociology was targeted by the online Campus Reform and other right-wing media for supposedly inciting violence against “white” people for sharing an anonymous post in response to a shooting that targeted US Congresspeople. Trinity’s campus was forced to close after threats of violence from right-wing trollers; and Williams and his family were forced into hiding. Trinity’s president soon placed Williams on leave during a review of “the events concerning Professor Williams.”

In early 2018, a classroom dispute at Indiana University of Pennsylvania over civil behavior in a religious studies class discussion on gender led to the expulsion of a right-wing student and the branding of his female professor as an enemy of free speech.91 There followed right-wing media condemnations and personal threats of murder and rape against the professor and the lionizing of the student on Fox News and other media that critics have called the “internet outrage machine.”

Over the professor’s and the faculty’s objections, the university president, fearing bad publicity, allowed the student to return to class. But the public damage had been done. In a March 18, 2018 editorial, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stated: Colleges, universities, and the faculty and administrators who staff them have a sacred duty: To cherish, nourish, and protect free speech and

90

J. Clara Chan, “Can a Single Course Jeopardize an Academic Department?,” CHE (June 8, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/article/Can-a-Single-Course-Jeopardize/240299.

91 Michael Vasquez, “How a Student Got Kicked Out of Class — and Became a Conservative Hero,” CHE (May 31, 2018), at www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-Student-Got-KickedOut/243549.

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academic freedom, and foster a love of these two great freedoms in the minds and hearts of students. . . . Indiana University of Pennsylvania and [the] professor have failed in this duty, by seeking to punish a student for expressing his views.

* One of the most widely known cases is that of Steven Salaita.92 A native of Bluefield, West Virginia, Salaita was an award-winning author who received tenure at Virginia Tech in 2006. In 2013, he published a Salon op-ed against the “support our troops” slogan in the wake of 9/11. Fellow faculty supported his free-speech rights, but the school’s associate VP for PR stated: While our assistant professor may have a megaphone on Salon.com, his opinions not only do not reflect institutional position, we are confident they do not remotely reflect the collective opinion of the greater university community.93

Salaita was then hired as a tenured professor in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But in the summer of 2014 Salaita had tweeted very strong condemnations of both Israel’s policy toward Palestine and against President Benjamin Netanyahu, which appeared to many to have crossed the line of acceptable academic discourse. At the urging of students, faculty, and donors who viewed his comments as anti-Semitic, in August 2014 Illinois’ board of trustees voted eight to one to withdraw Salaita’s job offer over the objection of faculty and forty-one department heads, chairs, and directors. The school’s president stated that “Professor Salaita’s approach indicates he would be incapable of fostering a classroom environment

92

Steven Salaita, “My Life As a Cautionary Tale: Probing the Limits of Academic Freedom,” Chronicle Review, CHE (Aug. 29, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/interactives/08282019salaita-academic-freedom.

93 Peter Schmidt, “Virginia Tech Professors Fault University over Tepid Defense of Colleague,” CHE (November 20, 2013), at http://chronicle.com/article/Virginia-TechProfessors-Fault/143171.

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where conflicting viewpoints would be given equal consideration.”94 A well-publicized scandal around freedom of speech followed. Articles appeared in the Nation, the Atlantic, the Chronicle, and the Huffington Post, as well as in the Tablet, the Jewish Journal, Salon, and other media outlets, both left and right. Salaita sued the university, and eventually won his case and a monetary award in excess of $800,000. As he puts it: More important, dozens of scholarly associations, various committees at the University of Illinois, labor unions, a federal judge, individual theorists of free speech, and the AAUP itself had already declared my case a clearcut violation of academic freedom.

But Salaita’s vindication meant little in academic terms. Even the AAUP reacted suspiciously to his claims of free speech. He went on to the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut for one year but was not renewed. After failing to find a position at any other American college, he eventually found employment driving a school bus. As he summarized his situation: Why? Because academic freedom can do little to alter the fine-tuned cultures of obedience that govern nearly every campus. I cannot venture a comprehensive theory of freedom or know for certain in what spaces freedom may be possible, but it won’t be in selective institutions possessed of wealthy donors, legislative overseers, defense contracts, and opulent endowments. . . . It’s important, then, to avoid treating academic freedom as sacrosanct and view it instead as a participant in material politics.

Academic freedom cannot function without tenure, worker solidarity, and an adequate job market, which are all in decline. “Can academic freedom be saved?” is a less pertinent question than, “Is there any longer a marketplace for academic freedom?” The corporate university is disarming academic freedom by diminishing the circumstances in which it can be effective.

Similar, if less spectacular, incidents of criticism of faculty speech on social media and other fora, mostly from the right, but also sometimes

94

Christine Des Garennes and Julie Wurth, “Updated: UI Trustees Reject Salaita,” NewsGazette (Sept. 11, 2014), at www.news-gazette.com/news/updated-ui-trustees-rejectsalaita/article_d38feb38-4f68-50ea-b748-4a7a87cb27bb.html.

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from the left, have prompted administrations to silence, investigate, or warn faculty at CUNY’s John Jay College, Grand Canyon University, the University of Tampa, Dartmouth College, the University of Delaware, New Jersey’s Essex Community College, Texas A&M, California State at Fresno, Drexel University, and others.95 In August 2019,96 Marquette University saw over a hundred faculty signing an open letter to protest new speech regulations.97 These were drawn up during the summer recess without faculty or student participation by the school’s policyreview committee, which is limited to Marquette’s chief of staff to the provost, assistant VP for human resources, assistant general counsel, and senior associate VP for finance. The group focuses on “operational efficiency,” according to faculty members. To protect “free speech” the new rules would prohibit demonstrations of any kind without prior permission of the dean’s and provost’s offices. The new rules also warned faculty and students that they should expect university personnel [i.e., campus police] to be present for all or part [of demonstrations] . . . to ensure organizers’ own rights are protected and the university’s regular operations and activities are not interrupted. Accordingly, university representatives may film, photograph, or record [demonstrations].

Faculty and students expressed suspicions that the regulations were specifically aimed at preventing unionization drives and to otherwise protect the brand. The faculty letter stated in part: Marquette’s new anti-demonstration policy is an affront to the culture of civic engagement and democratic participation that institutions of higher education should seek to promote. As opposed to the US Constitution and Bill of Rights – which put limits on the government and enumerate

95

“Professors in the Political Cross Hairs,” Special Report, CHE (July 26, 2017), at www .chronicle.com/specialreport/Professors-in-the-Political/129.

96 Megan Zahneis, “‘I Don’t Think We Should Be Afraid of Protests’: Marquette Faculty Members Speak out against Policy Requiring Approval for Demonstrations,” CHE (Aug. 29, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/article/I-Don-t-Think-We-Should/247050.

97 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfHy1yZQezIRNLMgbdIg_ feO3QP28lbZHFGBYBn0vNfd8VYOg/viewform.

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citizens’ rights – this document puts limits on community members and enumerates the powers and authority of the university and its police. This is inconsistent with this university’s tradition of promoting free expression.

TRIGGER WARNINGS

While academics’ rights to free speech and inquiry were being scrutinized from outside the walls of the campus, within the campus a new controversy arose in the mid 2010s over students’ demands for what have come to be known as “trigger warnings.” According to the MerriamWebster Dictionary, a trigger warning is “a statement cautioning that content (as in a text, video, or class) may be disturbing or upsetting.”98 Such meanings grew out of the “triggers” for those suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from battlefield experience, sexual and other attacks, or other forms of bodily or psychological harm. According to a book-length collection of essays and studies published in 2017 and edited

by Emily J.M. Knox,99 opinions about the origins, purposes and efficacy of such warnings vary across the political spectrum but are on the whole, student-, not faculty-, driven. Most faculty who teach in sensitive areas likely to be effected, including gender studies, media, literature, or historical and cultural studies, have accepted the validity of such warnings for a variety of reasons, ranging from the pragmatic to the theoretical, from whatever makes students comfortable in a learning environment to basic steps in dismantling patriarchal systems of oppression. Opposition has risen from attempts to make such warnings mandatory. As early as 2014, the AAUP issued a statement opposing such requirements. It began: A current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything that might trigger difficult emotional

98 99

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trigger%20warning.

Emily J. M. Knox, Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

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responses for students. This follows from earlier calls not to offend students’ sensibilities by introducing material that challenges their values and beliefs.100

Despite their acceptance within academia – and higher ed’s opposition to mandatory implementation – the national media have, by and large, trivialized, dismissed, or condemned them as yet another example of how higher education has turned future citizens into coddled consumers,101 asserting that such warnings were diminishing the public forum and restricting open and free speech. * In the end the controversy over free speech has affected all three elements of academic life: authority, innovation, and separateness. As Daniels and Stein put it: Colleges and universities hire scholars to teach and to produce knowledge.

For many years, being a professor was a job where you got paid to read and think, insulated to some extent from the rough and tumble of the rest of society. . . . Now, “we can no longer hold a position of splendid isolation,” University of California, Berkeley, sociologist Michael Burawoy has said. As the cloistered ivory tower goes the way of the card catalog, we have to rethink what it means to be a professor.

Many of today’s academic humanists pride themselves on being the heirs of Petrarch, Erasmus, or Valla. But would Petrarch’s attacks on the medical profession, Erasmus’ on the Church, or Valla’s on the papacy and its political underpinnings be protected in today’s academia? Or would the majority of academics conclude that such figures were better off in their historical status as “independent scholars”?

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“On Trigger Warnings,” AAUP Reports and Publications (August 2014), at www.aaup.org/ report/trigger-warnings.

101 Jenny Jarvie, “Trigger Happy: The ‘Trigger Warning’ Has Spread from Blogs to College Classes. Can it Be Stopped?,” New Republic (March 4, 2014), at https://newrepublic .com/article/116842/trigger-warnings-have-spread-blogs-college-classes-thats-bad.

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CANONS

A “canon” is defined by the Oxford Dictionaries as “a general law, rule, principle, or criterion by which something is judged.”102 In this sense the historically accepted books of the Bible are judged “canonical.” But such canons can be applied to any collection of books, music, or any cultural production.

As Randal Johnson summarized it in his introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production: During the 1980s the question of the formation and perpetuation of canons [came] increasingly to the fore in Anglo-American literary and cultural criticism. Discussions of the canon inevitably impinge on broader questions of aesthetic, literary and cultural value as well as on the constitution, preservation and reproduction of authority and symbolic power in the field. The literary canon has explicitly become both the site and the stake of contention as different groups have argued for its rearrangement along lines more favorable to their divergent interests and agendas.103

Canons gain their greatest force through a process of credentialing, but institutions insure their standardization and endurance. Of these the academy has been most prominent. Just like the medieval monastery and its preservation of the works of antiquity and its production of new works, the modern academy exerts its authority in defining, preserving, and passing on “the process of canonization” to what it deems to have authority and to bolster its own authority.104 Like the medieval monastery, it innovates by creating new work that then becomes part of the accepted canon. As Bourdieu notes, the modern academic institution that creates canons is “much like the priesthood in the religious order.”105 Like medieval monasteries, “academies . . . are obliged to combine tradition and tempered innovation.”106

102

www.lexico.com/en/definition/canon.

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 19–20.

104 105 106 Bourdieu, Field, 123.

Bourdieu, Field, 243.

Bourdieu, Field, 123.

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Among the most prominent of curricula and syllabi that teach, analyze, critique, and reformulate canon are Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, St. John’s College of Maryland’s Great Books, and Reed College’s Humanities 110. All three began as traditional canonical collections of readings, largely in the Western tradition. But over the decades they have reexamined what the canon means in changing social and political contexts where the student body, faculty, and culture have changed dramatically with new global awarenesses and new perspectives on race, gender, and class.

At Columbia, for example, the core curriculum was launched in 1919 as “Contemporary Civilization” and concentrates on an intellectual tradition beginning with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, progressing through Muslim thought and including early modern and modern thinkers including Kant, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other feminist thinkers, French and American revolutionary writings, Arendt, Woolf, Gandhi, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault. As its description notes: The Core Curriculum is the set of common courses required of all undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major. The communal learning – with all students encountering the same texts and issues at the same time – and the critical dialogue experienced in small seminars are the distinctive features of the Core.107

The core was constantly reexamined, revised, and expanded.108 With the 1960s, first women authors, and then the great works of other global civilizations were added to the core. The courses now undergo a review of content and approach every three years to insure that they remain current and that they reflect the changing outlooks and requirements of various student and faculty constituencies. Columbia University Press published a corresponding series entitled Classics of Civilization, at first focused on Western thinkers, edited by some of the most prominent

107 108

www.college.columbia.edu/core/core. www.college.columbia.edu/core/timeline.

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(Columbia) intellectuals of the time. It has since morphed into a global series.

St. John’s, on the other hand, continues to require its Great Books curriculum, launched in 1937, which remains focused on “Western” civilization. As the college describes it, While the list of books has evolved over the last century, the tradition of all students reading foundational texts of Western civilization remains. The books read at St. John’s include classic works in philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more.109

That list has changed over the decades to insure that one’s view of that civilization remains “diverse, complex, multifaceted and multicultural.” As college president Peter Kanelos says, The works that form our program of study have been in conversation with one another for millennia and represent a radical diversity of experience and perspective. . . . There is little consensus or agreement between the texts we encounter. What we learn is the myriad ways that arguments are made, that truth is sought or rejected, that beauty is defined or denied. We understand that the four years studying these texts does not represent the end point of education, but rather the beginning.

Reed College has offered its Humanities (Hum) 110 since the 1940s as a core requirement. The college describes it thus: Humanities 110 introduces students to humanistic inquiry by considering a range of artistic, intellectual, political, and religious strategies that emerged in different geographical and temporal contexts. The course examines how varieties of human thought interact to produce distinctive ways of life. Recognizing that no community is self-contained, we seek also to interpret texts as artifacts of cultural exchange, influence, and differentiation.110

109 110

www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list. www.reed.edu/humanities/hum110.

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It is intended as an introduction to the humanities in general and the issues of authorship, transmission, reception, and for essential skills in reading, interpretation, criticism, and intellectual discourse. Texts come from far-ranging sources, including ancient Egypt and the Middle East to Europe, and now Central America, and Harlem. The course is generally reviewed and modified every ten years.

Lucía Martínez Valdivia, assistant professor of English and Humanities, teaches a section of the Reed course and describes herself as “female, mixed race, American and Peruvian, gay, atheist and relatively young.” As she puts it, Everything that is now canonical was once innovative. . . . This doesn’t mean that we can’t acknowledge problems, weaknesses, inaccuracies, that we can’t question these works; rather, it means that we should do so productively, in good faith.111

In September 2017, a group of students belonging to the group Reedies Against Racism staged nonviolent sit-ins during Hum 110 lectures. Students claimed that the course was too white, male, and Eurocentric. While the college has a policy of open debate and compromise, instructors and many students objected to what gradually became disruptions and demands for specific changes, and instructors walked out of lecture rooms.

Reed, like Columbia and St. John’s, has been able to change its canon over time and in response to such challenges. Nevertheless, the rightwing media has taken such events as yet further examples of the disarray of higher education. Disregarding the work of faculty, administration, and students in both addressing such grievances and expanding the canon, Business Insider ignored the wall of separateness and authority conservatives themselves insist on for higher ed.112 It adopted the stance

111

Colleen Flaherty, “Occupation of Hum 110,” IHE (September 11, 2017), at www .insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-course-lectures-canceled-afterstudent-protesters-interrupt-class.

112 Daniella Greenbaum, “The Latest Example of Political Correctness Run Amok: A Misguided Revolt at One of the Most Liberal Colleges in America,” Business Insider (April 18, 2018), at www.businessinsider.com/reed-college-humanities-110-coursecontroversy-2018-4?r=US&IR=T.

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of many right-wing media outlets that academia was incapable either of recognizing the problem with student challenges or of adequately responding while preserving their own missions and identities. It editorialized: Identity politics do not belong in the classroom. Reed College is making a mistake by allowing the unfair charge of racism to govern the creation of university curricula . . . if the process at Reed is repeated elsewhere, they may be subverted to the wave of political correctness sweeping campuses across the country.

CULTURE WARS

The dynamic between authority and innovation within higher education is often lost or misinterpreted among its critics. We cannot here fully review the history of the culture wars and battles over canon formation that characterized conflicts in the 1970s through the 1990s. The term “culture war” itself was born in 1870s Germany to describe the conflict (Kulturkampf) between the Catholic Church and the secularizing government of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Contemporary American newspapers anglicized the term into “culture war.” In the 1960s, Richard Hofstadter established that America had a long history of conflict between progressive and conservative forces that often manifested itself as anti-intellectualism. We have already noted Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind and its attack on higher ed. But it was not until the 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter, professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, that the term was applied to American politics to describe a spectrum of areas that the right wing saw as betraying “traditional” American values.113 During the 1992 presidential campaign, conservative candidate Patrick Buchanan declared that, “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural

113

James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

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war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”114 That war raged furiously through the 1990s as many academic disciplines in the humanities adopted new theoretical models, many borrowed from French and German schools; and historians began to incorporate the voices and movements of marginalized American groups, pitting adherents of traditional subject approaches and literary canons against those who would innovate to incorporate new insights and methods.

These insights and methods were often explained, analyzed, and debated in professional terms that made them indecipherable to most Americans.

In a blog post on academic jargon from February 2017, Maximillian Alvarez usefully made the distinction between the “job” academics in the humanities perform and their “role” within the broader society.115 Professional jargon is as necessary in the humanities as it is in the hard sciences for communicating easily and effectively to colleagues in the same fields for “advancing human knowledge, shaping the minds of tomorrow,” and imparting “wisdom.” Yet the language used in the academy both to produce innovation and to enhance authority can often overemphasize the separateness of the profession and its disciplines and sub-disciplines in ways that seem intentionally to exclude the general public – professional and non-specialist – from a clear understanding of what the academy does and the role that it plays in society. As Michael Clune recently noted: How can we distinguish mere authoritarianism from valid professional judgment, judgment that seeks to counter the prejudices and blindnesses of individual experts? How can we know that when an expert tells us Emily Dickinson or Zora Neale Hurston are great writers, she isn’t simply expressing her subjective opinion? One way to assure people of the validity of expert judgments is by making the reasoning behind them transparent.

Yet expertise isn’t generally compatible with the capacity to show just anyone the evidence for our judgment. The opposite is more often the case.116

114

https://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148.

Maximillian Alvarez, “The Poverty of Theory,” in Baffler (February 22, 2017), at https:// thebaffler.com/latest/accidental-elitism-alvarez.

116 “The Humanities’ Fear of Judgment,” CHE (August 26, 2019), at www.chronicle.com/ interactives/20190826-CluneJudgement.

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We have already noted how the distinction between Church authority and individual revelation often reinforced much of American antiintellectualism and its egalitarian disdain for expertise.117 In contemporary America this disdain and antagonism has been secularized and most frequently focuses on what many, inside and outside academia, dismiss as “theory” and its impact on “what’s taught.” It has become part of a narrative, originally constructed by right-wing writers like George Will, that academia has deliberately seceded from the American consensus by adopting foreign ways of analysis and closed, often esoteric, discussion that serve few but intellectual and cultural bi-coastal elites. In the false narrative constructed by Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing Turning Point USA, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto is the most assigned book on college campuses.118 The accusation of left-wing bias among faculty, and of the ideological bias of humanistic disciplines, has become a standard rallying cry among the right-wing.119 This criticism is especially aimed at the catch-all term “postmodernism” and a skewed understanding of its origins, elements, and intent.120 “Foucault” has become symbolic of a wave of foreign – mostly French – thinking that supposedly took over academia in the 1970s and 1980s. This movement, it is asserted, set out deliberately to undermine the foundations of knowledge and truth with a series of relativisms based on subjective theories of language and understanding.

In the 1980s the criticisms of power structures leveled by postmodern theory and those inspired by identity-based perspectives were conflated in the eyes of conservative academics and public critics. The result was a narrative that caricatured higher education as awash in the denial of

117

See Chapter 2, 44XX–47XX. Matthew Boedy, “Debunking Charlie Kirk on the Uselessness of the Humanities,” Medium (April 9, 2018), at https://medium.com/@mboedy/debunking-charlie-kirkon-the-uselessness-of-the-humanities-35337f8890b8.

119 Aaron Hanlon, “Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” CHE (Dec. 7, 2018), at www.chronicle.com/article/Lies-About-the-Humanities-/ 245261.

120 See Andrew J. Perrin, “Stop Blaming Postmodernism for Post-Truth Politics,” Chronicle Review, CHE (Aug. 4, 2017), at www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-BlamingPostmodernism-for/240845.

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facts and of permanent truths and that undermined the rational, scientific basis for both knowledge and the institutions that are based on such fundamentals. Thus the academy’s intellectual innovations were seen as undermining its own authority. * Controversy and debate are fundamental to all intellectual progress and innovation. So too are the experimentation and many of the false starts that inform students’ lives and their learning to discern and judge in a time and space apart. Human institutions grow, mature, and fail with time; and failure is a natural, if unwanted, part of the human condition.

The authority of all human institutions rises and falls with the integrity, proper governance, and reform of their constituent parts. Yet the varieties of scandals that have beset higher education over the recent past – and their increased scrutiny, much of it by hostile parties – have led to the creation of a narrative of an irredeemably failed institution that lacks focus, has lost authority, and has abandoned its mission to preserve and protect both historical traditions and the future – its students – from neglect and abuse.

While the sciences, technologies, medicine, and business were largely exempt from such scrutiny, the humanities – especially literature and language departments, cultural and various other studies and history – have borne the brunt of this criticism. Such attacks fit closely the agendas of powerful right-wing foundations, such as the Olin and Koch, which have seen such studies as inimicable to the values of capitalism. After the election of Trump in late 2016, critics on the left and right saw his new “alternative facts” and Republican “post-truth” politics as the natural result either of leftist intellectuals’ demolition of all certainties or of American populism’s long-held disdain for expertise and elite opinion.

Both represented a significant challenge to long-held orthodoxies of intellectual authority nurtured by the academy. In the next chapter we will examine these changes in belief systems.

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Extinctions Living and Dying in the Margin of Error Michael Hannah

UK / US publication September 2021 9781108843539 Hardback £20.00 $24.95 USD $28.95 CAD

Are we now entering a mass extinction event? What can mass extinctions in Earth’s history tell us about the Anthropocene? What do mass extinction events look like and how does life on Earth recover from them?

The fossil record reveals periods when biodiversity exploded, and short intervals when much of life was wiped out in mass extinction events. In comparison with these ancient events, today’s biotic crisis hasn’t (yet) reached the level of extinction to be called a mass extinction. But we are certainly in crisis, and current parallels with ancient mass extinction events are profound and deeply worrying. Humanity’s actions are applying the same sorts of pressures - on similar scales - that in the past pushed the Earth system out of equilibrium and triggered mass extinction events.

Analysis of the fossil record suggests that we still have some time to avert this disaster: but we must act now.

Michael Hannah is Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He completed his PhD at Adelaide University, specializing in palaeontology and biostratigraphy (the art of dating rocks using fossils). After a brief stint in industry, he took up a position at Victoria University, where he became involved in two major Antarctic drilling projects, helping to decipher ancient changes in climate and the history of the Antarctic ice sheets. Throughout his career he has been fascinated by the story of the evolution of early life and the terrifying consequences of the mass extinctions that are recorded in the fossil record.

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The Anthropocene and the Earth System

   There are no places left on Earth that have not been affected in some way by human activity. Vast areas of the planet are being cleared to provide space both for our ever-expanding cities and for the intensive agriculture needed to support our burgeoning population. Even the supposedly pristine environment of Antarctica has been affected. Ice cores taken from the continent record human events such as the industrial revolution and the dawning of the atomic age. The composition of the very air that we breathe has been altered, largely through the addition of greenhouse gases, which are causing the planet to warm and sea levels to rise. The damage being done to the Earth’s environment is profound, and it’s leading to an alarming loss of the planet’s biodiversity.

In fact, humans started altering our planet’s environment thousands of years ago. The record of human activity is a key feature of what is currently the youngest formally recognised interval of geological time, the Holocene, which is considered to have begun about 11,700 years ago (the full Geological Time Scale can be found in Appendix 1). Starting at, or near, its base, sediments of Holocene age record increasing evidence of human activity. In parallel with the increasing human population, simple villages become cities, and small farms give way to intensive agriculture. Records of changing land use, mining, and evidence of human manufacturing – objects like ceramics and glass – all become increasingly common as we approach the present. Traces of human activity start out in localised areas and at a low level, but as we approach more recent times, they become more widespread and intense, reaching a peak in the present day. 

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  In the early 2000s, an atmospheric chemist, Paul J. Crutzen, suggested that the change from the limited record of human influence over the past 11 thousand years to today’s massive alteration of the environment implied that we have left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch that he called the Anthropocene.1 Both the idea and the name stuck, and in 2009, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (part of the international organisation that oversees changes to the Geological Time Scale) established a working group to formally decide whether the Earth had moved out of the Holocene into a new geological epoch. If they decided that it had, they were to suggest where the base of this new time unit could be placed.

The working group presented its report in 2016. They agreed with Crutzen that the shift in intensity from the low levels of human activity recorded earlier in the Holocene to the level we see all around us today warranted the establishment of a new geological epoch. The Anthropocene had passed its first official hurdle. However, there is continued discussion about where the base of this new time interval should be placed. This is a new geological time unit, so the base needs to be identified using criteria that future geologists will be able to see in the rock record. We are looking for a marker that is easily recognised, unambiguous, global in scope, and reflects an event that occurs everywhere on the planet at the same time. There was a strong push to put the base at the beginning of the industrial revolution. However, that varies from place to place. It began in England during the eighteenth century, then spread through Europe and into North America during the 1800s. Some parts of the globe didn’t become industrialised until the mid to late twentieth century – and even today, there are areas that are not fully industrialised. A boundary like this, which has different ages depending on where you are geographically, is called

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The name comes from the Greek anthropus meaning human, and -cene from the Greek kainos, translated as recent. The use of the -cene ending to an interval of geological time generally indicates that the interval is at the ‘epoch’ level in the time scale hierarchy.

       diachronous, and it is not appropriate for a unit of the Geological Time Scale.

Another suggestion was to place the boundary at the exact moment that the Trinity atom bomb test in New Mexico was detonated. This would mean that the Anthropocene started on 16 July 1945 at precisely 11:29:21 Greenwich Mean Time. This was a good contender as a base because after this event, traces of certain radioactive isotopes that are only produced by the detonation of an atomic bomb start being recorded in sediments. And it certainly was very precise. But there is a problem; for a few years following the test, levels of these isotopes remained at a very low level and are hard to measure. However, their levels started to rise and become much more obvious in the early 1950s. This is also the time, following World War Two, when the level of human activity increased dramatically everywhere, a period referred to as the ‘great acceleration’. The upshot of this is that the date that will be chosen for the beginning of the new epoch is likely to be sometime around 1950.

When, as seems likely, the Anthropocene is finally ratified as a geological epoch and formally included in the Geological Time Scale, who will use it? There are a significant number of geologists who don’t like the idea at all – they either just don’t see the point or object to defining an interval of geological time in advance of it happening – but I suspect that these naysayers are in the minority. As a practising palaeontologist who usually examines fossils from much older sediments, I’ll probably have no need for it in my day-to-day work. Other Earth scientists, particularly those specialising in Quaternary studies, who examine lake sediments and ice cores to understand climates of the very recent past, almost certainly will. However, ultimately it doesn’t matter whether or not geologists use the new epoch, because it transcends what a period of geological time is all about. It isn’t just an interval of time; it is an important signal to humanity. It makes it abundantly clear that we are now living in a world of our own making, and that it is up to us to undo the environmental damage we are causing.

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 

   The increased levels of human activity that are being used to define the Anthropocene are reflected in the serious damage being made to the planet’s entire ecosystem. Thirty years ago, scientists attempting to find strategies to mitigate environmental problems would probably have studied individual parts of the planet’s ecosystem separately.

Physical geographers would look at the land changes, physicists the atmosphere, biologists the biota, and so on. However, so broad are the effects of human activity in recent decades that it was realised that looking at all the different parts of the planet in isolation wouldn’t get us very far, and that a more holistic approach was needed. This has led to the application of what is known as Earth System science.

The Earth System recognises that the planet is made up of a number of reservoirs or spheres, which are linked to each other via complex feedback loops or fluxes that cycle energy, water, and various elements (including those necessary for life, such as carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen) through the reservoirs. These fluxes ensure that a change made in one reservoir will flow through and affect the entire system. I’ve tried to illustrate a very simple model of the Earth System in Figure 1.1. It shows the system as comprising four reservoirs: The atmosphere – the sphere of gases that surrounds the planet;

The hydrosphere – all the water, liquid and frozen, that sits at or near the Earth’s surface;

The biosphere – the Earth’s thin coating of living organisms;

The geosphere – all the rocks and minerals that make up the solid Earth.

There are more complex models of the Earth System where each reservoir is subdivided – for example, the geosphere could be split into the crust, mantle, and core, and the cryosphere (ice sheets, glaciers, etc.) could be split from the hydrosphere, and the relationships between these sub-spheres examined – but we will stick for now with the minimal version. The linking feedback loops are shown by the arrows, and again, in more complex models there are many more of

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      

Atmosphere

Biosphere

Geosphere

Hydrosphere

 . A very simple model of the Earth System. All the reservoirs are labelled. The arrows that join them represent some of the complex feedback loops (fluxes) that operate to maintain constant environmental conditions on Earth.

them. Although composed of separate parts, for at least the past 600 million years the Earth System has operated as a single integrated whole to keep environmental conditions on Earth relatively constant, and these conditions ensure that the planet is able to support life.

The Earth System approach developed out of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. In the mid-1960s, Lovelock suggested that we should consider the planet as a single homeostatic system that worked to maintain conditions on the planet that are suitable for life.

He likened the planet to a single giant superorganism. Unfortunately, some people took this analogy literally and thought that Lovelock was claiming that the Earth was actually alive (which I don’t think he was). And perhaps Lovelock should have stuck with his original name – the Earth Feedback hypothesis. Instead, he named it after a primordial Greek goddess who personified the Earth. A living planet named after the Earth Mother was never going to fly well in the scientific community, and the whole hypothesis quickly became lost in a welter of New Age waffle. But to reject Gaia completely is to

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  throw the baby out with the bathwater: there is no doubt that Lovelock’s hypothesis forms the basis of the Earth System approach.2 The Earth is not a single giant sentient superorganism. Instead, it’s best thought of as a self-regulating machine composed of separate but interconnected parts that automatically maintain environmental conditions. However, Lovelock was right in suggesting that the Earth System does this in a way that is analogous to how a living organism maintains its internal conditions, a process called homeostasis.

A simple example of homeostasis is the way you regulate your body temperature. If your temperature drops, your body responds by reducing your blood supply to exposed areas to minimise heat loss. At the same time, you start shivering, generating heat. If you get too hot, your body will try to reduce your temperature by starting to sweat.

These are automatic responses to a change in your internal environment – you have no control over them. You don’t consciously decide to turn on your sweat glands when you are too hot, but neither can you choose not to turn them on. The Earth System uses an automatic homeostatic-like process to maintain a set of environmental conditions that are suitable for life to exist. It’s important to remember that in the Earth System, the biosphere is not simply a passive player responding to changes in the physical environment. The biosphere actively can and does participate in the alteration of the physical world in order to maintain habitable conditions on Earth.

The Earth System didn’t just suddenly appear as a fully functional mechanism. As we will see, it emerged gradually, in parallel to the evolution of life on Earth. The fossil record contains spectacular examples of how the evolution of life has driven profound physical

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The New Age version of Gaia as a loving Earth Mother caring for the planet has infiltrated the mainstream media. I am writing this, at home, during a lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. I have heard media commentators seriously asking if the pandemic is Gaia’s vengeance for the mess we are making of the planet.

No, it isn’t. For that to happen, the Earth really would need to be a living, thinking organism that instructed a virus found in bats to mutate so it could transfer to pangolins, then ask it to mutate again in order to infect humans. But the planet isn’t alive, and no animal plans its evolution.

       changes to the environment. If evolution makes it clear that all living organisms are connected, descending from a single common ancestor, the Earth System takes this further. It demonstrates that life is intimately connected to the physical world. A complex, fully functional ecosystem has a central role to play in maintaining the equilibrium of the Earth System. To emphasise this, I have put the biosphere at the very heart of my simplified model in Figure 1.1.

The Earth System has, despite purely physical changes such as a steadily brightening Sun and tectonic upheavals, maintained planetary conditions in a state of equilibrium. This means that if it is temporarily perturbed by some sort of physical agency, such as a massive volcanic eruption that alters the environmental conditions, the system will use the automatic homeostatic processes to reverse the change and restore the original conditions. Think of it as a marble sitting at the bottom of a shallow bowl. It is in equilibrium: as long as nothing changes, it will stay right where it is. However, if you push the marble up the side, it is no longer in equilibrium. When released, the marble will try to return to equilibrium by running back down to the bottom of the bowl – in fact, it will overshoot and run back and forwards, but eventually it will settle at the base again.

An equilibrium state can change over time. A long-term perturbation – more properly called a forcing – may change the conditions to such a degree that some tipping point or threshold is exceeded, and the system cannot quickly restore the original conditions. If we go back to our marble example, it’s equivalent to pushing the marble so hard that it tips over the edge and settles down in a new position – a new equilibrium state (it will probably be the floor).

In Figure 1.2, I’m showing a model of an imaginary planet’s climate wobbling around one equilibrium point in response to perturbations, then shifting to another equilibrium state altogether in response to a forcing. The dashed line in the figure tracks the changes in a planet’s environmental conditions through time. It starts on the left-hand side in equilibrium one. As time passes, small perturbations to the environment push the system out of equilibrium, but it quickly

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 

WARMER CONDITIONS

Equilibrium 2.

Hothouse

Equilibrium 1.

Glacial / Interglacial cycles

COLDER CONDITIONS

FORCING

TIME  . A cartoon of a shift in equilibrium in the planetary system. See text for explanation.

returns to its original state. I have shown the system as cycling through periods of cold and warmth; you can think of them as alternating glacial and interglacial conditions, although in my example for most of the time the planet is warm with occasional periods of cold.

Note how the conditions don’t always return to exactly the same state; they wobble around an equilibrium point. The large black arrow is a forcing, some significant environmental shock that pushes the system so far out of its initial equilibrium that it passes some sort of threshold or tipping point and cannot regain its original equilibrium level. In this case, a new equilibrium is established, and, in my example, the new equilibrium results in a more or less permanent hothouse set of environmental conditions. An equilibrium shift like the one shown in Figure 1.2 would cause significant changes in the planet’s environment, which would be accompanied by damage to its ecosystem. In the fossil record, these shifts in equilibrium are usually accompanied by a mass extinction. If the forcing were to be removed, given enough time, the system would probably return to something

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       like the original equilibrium point, resulting in a reduction of the planet’s temperature – but that could take millions of years.

      I can make this more concrete by looking at how the Earth System is operating in the Anthropocene, using the carbon cycle as an example.

This important biogeochemical cycle moves carbon through all the spheres that make up our simple model of the Earth System and is fundamental to maintaining life on Earth. It is also one we are currently altering significantly through our burning of fossil fuels.

Figure 1.3 shows this cycle, albeit in a simple form. The black lines linking the various spheres represent the fluxes that move the carbon – either as carbon dioxide gas or as part of some other molecule – around the system. I have not included any human-induced alterations to the cycle.

Starting with the geosphere, in the absence of humans, the major source of carbon dioxide on Earth is from gases venting from

Atmosphere

Plant growth

Volcanoes

Absorption

Biosphere

Hydrosphere

Geosphere Burial

Shell building

 . A simplified illustration of the relationship between the carbon cycle and the Earth System.

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  volcanoes. The carbon dioxide released from volcanoes enters the atmosphere, and there it plays a significant role in regulating the planet’s temperature. It’s a greenhouse gas, and the higher its concentration, the higher the temperature of the atmosphere. But the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere don’t necessarily continue to grow as volcanoes release additional gas to the system. Plants remove the gas by absorbing it as they grow, and the carbon then enters the biosphere. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is also absorbed into the waters of the world’s oceans. But, as is the case with the atmosphere, the level of carbon doesn’t just continue to build in the oceans; many organisms strip the carbon from the water and use it to build their shells with calcium carbonate. When plants die, the carbon moves into the geosphere as carbon-rich rocks such as coal. Similarly, when the organisms with carbonate shells die, they accumulate on the ocean floor and can be incorporated into the geosphere as limestone – locking all the carbon away.

Under pre-human conditions, the carbon cycle was kept in balance, maintaining a level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that ensured that the temperature on Earth stayed within a range that was suitable for life. If a sudden rise in volcanic activity caused an increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the machinery of the Earth System would begin to operate to reduce the level of the greenhouse gas. This would be accomplished by an increase in both plant growth and shell production, both of which are stimulated by a rise in the carbon dioxide level. Ultimately this would lead to atmospheric carbon being removed and then locked away as coal and limestone.

Once the volcanic activity faded, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would fall, causing plant growth and shell production to slow, and the cycle would return to equilibrium. It’s not a perfect system. There will be lags as the biological activity responds to an increase in carbon dioxide, so its concentration in the atmosphere will never be absolutely constant.

There is one other process associated with the Earth System that, under certain conditions, can strongly affect the amount of

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       carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s not strictly part of the carbon cycle, so I haven’t shown it in Figure 1.3. But chemical weathering of silicate rocks (rocks that contain high levels of silica) can have a profound effect on the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Chemical weathering is a result of carbon dioxide mixing with rainwater to produce a mild acid that attacks the surface of the rocks. As part of the chemical reaction, carbon dioxide is incorporated into the weathering products, which are then washed out into the ocean. This form of weathering can be very effective at drawing down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but the conditions have to be right.

The appropriate rocks must be available at the surface of the planet, and the climate has to be warm and wet. It also helps if the continents are in the right position on the globe. Nevertheless, as we will see, there have been occasions when chemical weathering has played an important role in the history of life.

I said earlier that Figure 1.2 showed the track of an imaginary planet. But it’s actually not too far from what is happening on Earth.

Starting about 2.7 million years ago, the Earth’s climate has cycled through a series of glacial and interglacial periods, much as I showed in Figure 1.2. Massive ice sheets built up during the cold glacial periods and melted away during milder interglacials. The last glacial period ended at the start of the Holocene, about 11,000 years ago, and we are currently living in an interglacial. If conditions had continued as they had for the past 2.6 million years, we might expect that the Earth would cool and slip into another glacial period. But humans have changed all that.

Gathering pace during the Holocene and exploding into the Anthropocene, human perturbation of the system has been growing, and it’s approaching the level of a forcing with the potential of pushing the system through a tipping point. Land clearance, habitat destruction, and forced extinctions are damaging the biosphere, lowering diversity. By burning fossil fuels, we are releasing the ancient carbon that was absorbed by plants and locked away in the geosphere. This has resulted in a rapid increase in the level of carbon

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  dioxide in the atmosphere and, as a result, the globe is warming.

The feedback loops, which under normal conditions would bring the system back into equilibrium, are struggling. Plants cannot use the carbon dioxide fast enough. We are compounding the problem by damaging the biosphere through land clearances. This results in a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, raising the planet’s temperature. Our oceans are absorbing huge amounts of the gas, but as a result their waters are becoming more anoxic and acidic, limiting the ability of shell builders to remove the excess carbon. If we don’t take urgent action to reduce the human-induced forcing and allow the biosphere to heal, we may push the system past a threshold from which there is no going back. If we were to allow an equilibrium shift to occur, it would bring with it an entirely new set of very much warmer conditions and – as we will see later – increase the possibility of a mass extinction.

   So, how much damage are we doing to our biosphere? Some estimates of Anthropocene extinctions suggest that we are losing between 11,000 and 58,000 species annually. Biologists researching these extinctions have established that the primary drivers are habitat reduction through changing land use, and the introduction of invasive species. However, as well as causing extinctions, these twin drivers can cause a reduction in the population size of those species that do survive, putting them under severe threat of extinction. Biologists have coined a new word for what is happening to our biota during the Anthropocene – defaunation. This term is broader than just the extinctions on their own. It includes all the extinctions together with the many species that are under severe threat of extinction.

The estimate of an annual species loss of between 11,000 and 58,000 is extremely broad. Can’t we be more precise? Unfortunately, that’s not possible. It is very hard to pin down exactly how bad the Anthropocene defaunation is. This is a result of our astonishing lack of knowledge about the Earth’s current biodiversity. We don’t even

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       know how many species live on our planet! In this book, I am using an estimate of 8.7 million species alive today. It is, however, only one estimate among many. While most reasonable estimates range from 2 million to 10 million, some outliers get as high as 100 million. This fundamental gap in our knowledge of the planet’s biodiversity is compounded by the fact that only a small fraction of living species – only about 20%, by some estimates – has been formally described.

Because we need to know that a species exists before we can decide whether it’s extinct or threatened, our evaluation of the consequences of the Anthropocene defaunation has to be based on that 20%. One thing we can say, with a fair degree of certainty, is that many species have either gone extinct or are under severe threat of extinction before we had a chance to describe them. We just don’t know how many species are involved – but it does mean that any estimate we make of the scale of Anthropocene defaunation will be an underestimate, probably a large one.

The situation isn’t entirely hopeless; there are some data available. The Red List3 is an attempt to assess the level of the threat of extinction of every species on the planet. Again, we must keep in mind that the conservationists who assess the data for the Red List are limited to published species, and this is usually only a very small percentage of known species. In Table 1.1, I have assembled extinction/threat data on several large groups of animals. The first column lists the number of species that have been assessed for the animal groups, with the approximate proportion of species that have been assessed shown as a percentage. In the case of mammals, birds, amphibians, and cephalopods (a group that includes octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish), just about all of the recognised species have been assessed. In the reptiles, well over half have been assessed, but for the remaining groups the data are poor to very poor. The state of

3

The Red List is an amazing resource. Managed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, it can be found at http://www.iucnredlist.org/

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  Table 1.1 The Anthropocene defaunation See text for details. Data from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN 2020).

Number of species assessed (% of described

Taxon

species assessed)

Mammals Birds

5,899 (91%) 11,147 (100%) 7,833 (70%) 6,892 (84%) 9,793 (1%) 801 (6%) 7,221 (9%) 750 (90%) 864 (40%)

Reptiles Amphibians Insects Bivalves Gastropods Cephalopods Corals

Extinct and extinct in the wild (%)

Extinct, extinct in the wild, and threatened (%)

1.46 1.47

23.48 14.80

0.42 0.54 0.65 4.00 3.89 0 0

18.37 33.56 19.23 29.09 32.54 0.67 26.85

threat for the insects is particularly badly understood, with less than 1% of species assessed.

During the rigorous assessment process used by the Red List, species are assigned to one of a number of categories depending on the level of threat. Categories range from extinct through to under no threat at all. The categories we are interested in here are: extinct – species that we are absolutely confident no longer exist; extinct in the wild – species that only exist in zoos, reserves etc; and threatened, which includes the subcategories of critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable. The second column in Table 1.1 shows the percentage of known species that are either extinct or extinct in the wild. The final column adds the threatened category to the extinct and extinct in the wild column – making it a measure of defaunation.

So, based on the Red List data, how bad is the Anthropocene defaunation? Looking first at the extinct and extinct in the wild

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       column, and even given that the values are almost certainly underestimates, the current situation doesn’t look too dire. Estimates of extinction range from 0% (corals and cephalopods) to about 4% (bivalves and gastropods). But to understand our situation fully, we need to look at the whole picture and include the threatened species.

Then, with the exception of the cephalopods (for which less than 1% of species are under threat), the situation gets a lot worse. In the other animal groups listed, combined estimates of extinct and threatened species range from 14.8% (birds) up to a whopping 33.56% (amphibians). I find it appalling that nearly 20% of insect species are under threat when only about 1% of known species have been assessed.

Should we worry about this level of biodiversity loss? Some people believe that we needn’t. In an opinion piece, entitled ‘We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of Evolution’ (with a subtitle of ‘The only creatures we should go out of our way to protect are Homo sapiens’) published by the Washington Post in 2017, biologist R. Alexander Pyron suggested just that. He argued that we shouldn’t worry about the current wave of extinctions; there have been other mass extinctions in the past, and life made it through. He suggested that the clearing of the ecological deck by a mass extinction could be considered a good thing, allowing evolution to experiment with new forms that would eventually add to biodiversity. Critics wasted no time in telling Pyron that he was wrong, pointing out how important a diverse biota was to the planet.4 In fact, biodiversity has been described as a central component of the Earth’s life support system, underpinning the Earth’s entire ecosystem. Our very existence depends on a healthy level of biodiversity.

Here’s why.

4

Pyron himself later admitted that he was wrong, and in a post on his lab page, he explains that he did sensationalise his argument, and because it was only a short piece, it came out all wrong. He also points out that he didn’t choose the title of the article. In fact, he sets out his strong support for the broad conservation of biodiversity. It’s called ‘Statement on Biodiversity Conservation’, and you can find it at http://www.colubroid.org/

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  While we rely on only a limited number of domesticated plant and animal species for our food supply, they in turn depend upon a host of wild species. Plants, fungi, and bacteria help maintain the soil’s fertility, and many species of insects ensure pollination. In Europe, a decline in the numbers of insect pollinators has been directly linked with a significant reduction in the abundance of some plant species. The loss of some small vertebrate species has resulted in whole ecosystems being damaged. We rely on a diverse biota to maintain the quality of water in rivers and lakes, and it can also help strip pollutants out of the atmosphere. Human health is directly affected, as new medicines are very often derived from a diverse array of plant and fungi species. Future medicines might rely on species that we haven’t even found or described yet, plants and animals that in the meantime might go extinct.

Perhaps more importantly, a fully functioning ecosystem is a key part of the Earth System. Many of the feedback loops that we rely on to maintain the Earth’s environmental conditions cycle elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, all of which are vital for life, through the biosphere. For the biosphere’s key role in the Earth System to be effectively carried out, we need a healthy biosphere supporting a diverse ecosystem. The Anthropocene defaunation is as much a destabilising forcing on the Earth System as the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Beyond the direct physical benefits that biodiversity provides for humanity, there is the simple unadulterated joy of walking through tropical rainforests, diving on a coral reef, or walking along the bank of a stream and seeing a beautiful diverse ecosystem in action. It’s good for the soul.

   The Anthropocene defaunation doesn’t exist in isolation; it is part of a longer history of biodiversity that started some 3.7 billion years ago.

Today we have the tools to extract this history from the fossil record and lay it out in some detail. If we want to avoid or mitigate the worst

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       of the environmental problems facing us, then this history is important. It can shed light on our somewhat precarious position and offer some indication of what the future holds for life on Earth. Through it, we can examine the response of ancient biotas to significant shifts in the Earth System. We can look in detail at ancient mass extinctions.

Do they look similar to the Anthropocene defaunation? Were these extinction events restricted to one specific area or did they affect the entire globe? How does the biosphere recover from a mass extinction?

The understanding we can gain through a detailed look at the fossil record can help us plan for what may happen in the future. We are forcing change onto the Earth System, and the fossil record contains information that shows us just how resilient the Earth System is to change – how far can it be pushed without it shifting to a new equilibrium state, triggering a mass extinction?

However, there are limitations to documenting and understanding this history, most of which are due to the vagaries of our source material, the fossil record. If we are to understand what these limitations are and why the record imposes them, we need to take a short detour and spend some time reviewing the record’s strengths and weaknesses. In particular, we need to understand how fossils provide a record of biodiversity.

The other important issue we need to come to grips with is time. Not the everyday time of daily use, the getting up at 6:30, work by 9:00, home at 5:30 and bed by 11:00 sort of time; I’m talking about billions of years of geological time (I prefer the evocative term ‘deep time’). We will need to understand the way that geologists use deep time and the development of the Geological Time Scale. Dealing with the enormity of deep time does take some getting used to. There are some huge numbers involved. Life appeared on the planet about 3.7 billion years ago.5 This is a staggeringly big number. Even a million is

5

There are geochemical hints that life actually appeared before this, leading some workers to suggest that life reaches back beyond 4 billion years – an even bigger number!

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  hard to grasp – to help get the size of these numbers across to my firstyear classes, I estimated how long it would take me to count to 1 million. The surprising answer was that it would take about 33 days of non-stop counting (no eating, no sleeping) to reach 1 million. To count to 3.5 billion would take around 290 years of non-stop counting.6 I’ll cover both of these topics in the next chapter.

6

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If you’re interested in how I arrived at this estimate, I’ve outlined it in Appendix 2.

After the Virus Lessons from the Past for a Better Future Hilary Cooper Simon Szreter

AFTER THE VIRUS Lessons from the Past for a Better Future

UK publication September 2021 US publication November 2021 9781009005203 Paperback £12.99 $15.99 USD $17.95 CAD

Hilary Cooper; Simon Szreter Why was the UK so unprepared for the pandemic, suffering one of the highest death rates and worst economic contractions of the major world economies in 2020? Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter reveal the deep roots of our vulnerability and set out a powerful manifesto for change post-Covid-19. They argue that our commitment to a flawed neoliberal model and the associated disinvestment in our social fabric left the UK dangerously exposed and unable to mount an effective response. This is not at all what made Britain great. The long history of the highly innovative universal welfare system established by Elizabeth I facilitated both the industrial revolution and, when revived after 1945, the postwar Golden Age of rising prosperity. Only by learning from that past can we create the fairer, nurturing and empowering society necessary to tackle the global challenges that lie ahead - climate change, biodiversity collapse and global inequality.

Hilary Cooper is a former government economist and senior policy maker with expertise in labour markets, children’s services and local development. Her current freelance work examines the challenges of ageing.

She was the joint winner of the 2019 IPPR Economics prize for the essay Incentivising an Ethical Economics, with Simon Szreter and Ben Szreter.

Simon Szreter is Professor of History and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, researching economic, social and public health history. His publications include Health and Wealth, which won the American Public Health Association’s Viseltear Prize, and Sex before the Sexual Revolution, longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. He is co-founder and editor of History & Policy.

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Part I COVID-19 Was alWays a Matter Of ‘When’ nOt ‘If’

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the extraOrDInary hIstOry Of PanDeMIC COntrOl

Everyone who has lived through the COVID-19 pandemic will have had their life changed in some way by it. Certainly, few of us will ever forget it. If COVID-19 has posed existential questions for many at a personal level, how much more powerful are those questions magnified on a global scale? Why did it happen? Had we prepared sufficiently for something like this? Was it our fault? Or someone’s fault? Did we do the right things? Should we have done something different? How do we recover from it? What do we need to change? And, before we let down our guard, what new disaster might be round the corner?

An Ever-Present Threat In this first section of After the Virus we will begin by looking back to the time before the virus to see what answers there might be to some of these questions. In early 2020 we found ourselves on the eve of the greatest threat to public health and the economy in our lifetimes, but in fact what we were facing was what our forebears had grappled with for centuries. Drawing on the rich resources of the past, we will look at just how much we can discover from hundreds of years during which people every bit as clever and ingenious as we are used every possible means they could think of to deal with repeated pandemics, most notoriously plague, that threatened to ravage their populations and for which there was no prevention or cure. We may have better science and technologies today but what

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we will find is that the basic principles of isolation and containment until a pandemic infection is overcome remain the same now as they always have been.

We will show, too, that what happened was not random bad luck. coVID-19 was indeed always a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. By 2020, we had, in our quest for ever-expanding global commerce and trade, created the perfect breeding ground for a new pandemic to emerge as we increasingly disturbed the habitats of other species. and we had also provided it with the perfect conditions to spread. In 2015 Bill Gates – with no special knowledge beyond his own reading of works such as David Quammen’s Spillover – but with a keen appreciation of the global economic implications, tried his best to warn that a catastrophic pandemic was an imminent global threat, and that it would most likely originate in a food market in china. With deadly precision, Gates predicted that with ‘the continual emergence of new pathogens … and the ever-increasing connectedness of our world, there is a significant probability that a large and lethal … pandemic will occur in our lifetime’.1 Before we consider our lack of preparedness for and response to the pandemic, this opening chapter takes us back through history to reveal the fascinating and at times surprising methods our ancestors deployed to protect and control their populations in the face of otherwise uncontrollable disease.

The Myth of Progress The British Isles have not experienced plague on a serious scale since the self-sacrificial village of eyam in Derbyshire allowed themselves to be walled in for months to snuff out the last embers of the 1665–66 outbreak that terrorised london, as graphically recorded in samuel Pepys’ famous diary. Plague had travelled to eyam in cloth sent from london to the village tailor.2 Two hundred and sixty souls

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died, about a third of eyam’s population, including eighteen alone named moreton, the ill-fated family that supplied the last ever recorded death from plague in england on 1 november 1666.

The reason for the absence of plague in the UK after that date is not happy-go-lucky chance. It is – at least in part – because the whole of western europe set up a heavily resourced apparatus of control against it. There is a continuous history of governments and their agents scanning the horizon for signs of approaching disease that in europe goes back to fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy.3 It involved information scouts stationed in the ottoman empire and further east, where plague was endemic. It involved quarantine procedures at all mediterranean ports to stop sailors and goods disembarking from potentially infected ships.4 It even led to the first ‘iron curtain’ in europe, the Militärgrenze. This militarised land barrier over 1,000 miles long operated through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, built by the austro-hungarian empire to close off trade and travel whenever there was news of infection in the ottoman empire.5 Until the opening weeks of 2020, then, one of the most abiding and comforting myths of modern life, at least for the richer half of the world’s population, was that human progress had all but vanquished epidemics and pandemics. economic growth and all the plentiful food, extraordinary science, and medicine that goes with it had, so the story went, extinguished – or at least enabled us to control – all the nasty infectious diseases that used to dispatch so many of us to early graves.

This victory over the perilous past is symbolised by the complete eradication in 1980 of smallpox, a prolific killer, especially of children. and who hears today of rampaging deaths from the plague, which used to kill whole families lying in their agony; or uncontrollable cholera, capable of almost dissolving a person in the street, as their bodily

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fluids suddenly convulsively evacuated? Little Women can be read safe in the knowledge that a favourite sister is not going to succumb to scarlet fever, which was raging at its epidemic height on both sides of the atlantic when louisa may alcott first published her novel in 1868.

If we appeared, too, to have vastly reduced the frequency with which the appearance of novel infections become pandemic global killers, this is in large part because we have both national and global institutions continually monitoring all signals of a possible new disease. as the World health organization (Who) and informed analysts know, the potential for pandemics has been growing as the world economy grows.6 The definition of a pandemic now offered by the celebrated immunologist anthony fauci is of a global disease, with movement from place to place, high attack rates and explosiveness, novelty along with minimal population immunity, severity and lethality of the disease and transmissibility between people.7 sars, mers and ebola could each have become twentyfirst-century pandemics were it not for the painstaking efforts to control and contain them as they emerged. In the case of ebola, active surveillance and control remain very much in force today. on 1 June 2020, even as the world was battling coVID-19, the Democratic republic of congo reported its eleventh outbreak of ebola, with four out of six patients having already died. The World health organization was on the ground immediately overseeing the response. But this efficiency meant that it hardly made the news in the West. Thinking we are protected by science, public opinion has become complacent, content to judge their national governments by their economic growth rates, while leaving global safety to experts working for acronyms: Who, msf (médecins sans frontières), cDc (centers for Disease control). economic progress has without doubt given us a large arsenal of weapons against pandemics, but we should not lose sight of the fact that commerce and trade are

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also a large part of the reason they happen in the first place. spectacular pandemics are not spontaneous natural events. Unlike earthquakes, meteor strikes or total eclipses, pandemics are to a significant degree manmade. Though involving terrible amounts of suffering and death, pandemic events are – unintentionally, of course – produced by human, purposeful activity. a virus, like coVID-19, or a bacterium, like Yersinia pestis, which causes plague, is a necessary element in each pandemic, often as well as intermediary species, such as rats, fleas, bats or wildfowl. But it is large-scale human societies and their economic, trading or military activity that have always created the conditions for pandemic events to occur.

The Black Death of the fourteenth century – a bubonic plague – was the most devastating pandemic to hit europe in nearly 800 years. not since Justinian’s Plague, which may have killed up to half of those it infected in aD 541–49 – and from which the emperor himself had a narrow escape – had there been anything like it. The eight-century gap reflects the absence, after the fall of the roman empire, of the population density and long-distance trading conditions required for a pandemic while europe was living through its subsistence ‘Dark ages’.

But from the eleventh century onwards an era of agrarian prosperity and urban growth began to dawn, its wealth symbolised in that age’s great cathedrals. There was a rising trade with the middle and far east via constantinople and the silk road. It was from this direction, as a result of military clashes with the mongol Golden horde, that the Black Death came west in 1347 from its endemic homeland in central asia. It used to be claimed that this was the result of a spectacular case of bio-terrorism when infected corpses were catapulted into the besieged Black sea port of caffa. The latest research has established that it was in fact a temporary outbreak of peace between the two sides that allowed the resumption of trade across the Black sea to constantinople in 1347 and that the plague arrived

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unwittingly in grain cargoes accompanied by infected rats and fleas.8 The subsequent outbreak of the Black Death killed between a third and a half of the populations it ravaged across europe.9

Image 1. A seventeenth-century illustration of a physician wearing protective clothing, including a mask, as a defence against the plague.

Source: Bettmann / Getty Images

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Thereafter, from 1348 right through until 1680 there would be a plague epidemic in one european city or another in every single year. The city of london, alone, experienced twenty-two separate plague visitations between 1485 and 1665 – an average of once every eight years. no wonder, then, that those tending to plague victims clothed themselves in such elaborate protective garments (see Image 1). In 1564, the year that shakespeare was born, his hometown of stratford-upon-avon recorded 200 deaths from plague, around one sixth of the population, with four children dying on shakespeare’s street alone. holy Trinity church’s parish register contains the record of shakespeare’s baptism, while its burial register at almost exactly the same time notes hic incipit pestis – here begins the plague. Throughout his life shakespeare would have to contend with the disruption of theatre closures due to new outbreaks of plague and the threat this posed to his livelihood. shakespeare’s son, hamnet, who died at the age of eleven, most likely succumbed to the deadly disease. not long afterwards, shakespeare produced one of his greatest tragedies, Hamlet, a masterpiece of reflection on grief.

Plague was a hard taskmaster for european national and civic governments. although early microscopes date from 1590, it was to take almost another three centuries before germ theory was developed. The top medical authorities of the day simply could not pin down its cause, though, as time wore on, the most perspicacious of them, such as charles I’s physician, sir Theodore de mayerne, strongly suspected the transmission role of rodents, unwelcome stowaways on the trading ships of the time.10 While plague was eventually vanquished, the global expansion of trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries soon brought other intensive exchanges of disease. four successive cholera epidemics, each originating in India, the ‘jewel’ in Britain’s imperial and commercial crown, reached Britain for the first time, one outbreak in

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each decade from the 1830s to the 1860s. They provoked fear and panic, including among the property-owning section of society, who increasingly fled with their families to the suburbs and beyond, away from the filth and poverty of the overcrowded urban centres where their wealth was manufactured.11 a few decades later an epoch-making conflict would once again become the merciless facilitator of disease on a pandemic scale. The ‘spanish’ flu of 1918–20, estimated to have killed 50 to 100 million people worldwide, was believed to have at least in part been spread by troop movements in the final phase of the first World War. fast-forward to the present and we have created a far more globally connected economy than ever before in history. It is therefore now also a more globally connected microbial environment. We bring exotic fruit and vegetables from around the world to our tables, hop on planes for recreational breaks (when not in lockdown) and have been permitting deforestation on an unprecedented scale

Image 2. Warehouses were converted during the 1918–20 influenza to keep infected people quarantined.

Source: Universal History Archive / Getty Images

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to feed an insatiable demand for meat, soya and palm oil.

What we perhaps forget is that the other species on the planet do not simply stand still while we humans create our civilisations, multiply in numbers and density and alter the environment in so many ways to suit our needs.12 While we are changing and putting pressure on our environment, other species are adapting and evolving, as they always have, and we humans are part of their environment, too.13 our twenty-first-century nexus of trade, travel and dense urban living is theirs too – viruses, bacteria and parasites can move as rapidly and as far as we can.14 Bill Gates knew this when he made his prediction of a new lethal pandemic. World health bodies and individual governments knew this, too. coVID-19 was no surprise and nor should it have been: sars, mers and ebola had been the heralds. Despite this, the Who issued a report in 2019, A World At Risk, warning that most countries were simply not making appropriate preparations for this near certain event.

How Pandemics Spread Dramatic and deadly diseases threaten most where a population has not previously encountered the infecting organism. The most extraordinary of sudden, mass death events in history are closely associated with moments of contact between two previously separated civilisations, where each plays host to a range of endemic pathogens to which they have adapted over generations. as two such civilisations come into contact, one population’s endemic micro-organism may assume epidemic lethality when it encounters the other ‘virgin’ human population for the first time.

The classic and well-documented example is that of the spanish conquistadors arriving in the americas in the late fifteenth century.15 The smallpox virus was new to the

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Incas and aztecs and indeed to all indigenous peoples in south and north america. The invading and settling europeans hailed the devastation wrought as it felled those opposing their incursion as their christian God’s handiwork. less celebrated in their history books of course is that the europeans in turn took back with them the spirochaete Treponema pallidum pallidum, the source of the scourge of syphilis that spread across europe in the sixteenth century and which european travellers then introduced to the rest of the planet.16 Pandemic diseases are an eclectic mix, some caused by bacteria, like Yersinia pestis (the plague), Vibrio cholerae (cholera) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB); others by viruses, as with influenza, smallpox, coronavirus and hIV/ aIDs; and still others by tiny animal parasites, such as the Plasmodium protozoa injected into the human bloodstream by the mosquito bites that produce malaria. many of these diseases, most notably malaria, cholera and tuberculosis, can still today be considered global pandemics, regularly killing tens of millions of people each year.

These latter three, though, are not diseases that are new to populations, and for many there are effective treatments or vaccinations that would protect those such as babies and children who are most at risk. They spread in conditions of poor sanitation and overcrowding, and in the last half-century have formed an unholy alliance in the world’s poorest populations with hIV/aIDs and the other bacterial sTIs of syphilis and drug-resistant gonorrhoea.

Their heavy mortality burden is not the result of medical incapacity to deal with them. rather it is the unavailability of that medical care to those afflicted. This should be a source of persistent shame on us all: many of the world’s poorest countries had incipient free and universal primary health care systems that were degraded in the 1980s and 1990s by the conditions imposed on their governments by the Imf and the World Bank’s market-oriented structural

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and sectoral adjustment loans, which insisted that health care users should pay fees.17 When an entirely new pathogen such as coVID-19 arrives on the scene, there is of course no vaccination, no immediate treatment beyond palliative care and no previously acquired immunity. While scientists across the world jumped into action to analyse its genetic code and modus operandi, we did not know for sure at the start how rapidly coVID-19 would spread, what its case fatality rate would be and who would be most vulnerable. What we did know is that if each infected person infected more than one other, the pandemic would start to spread exponentially. This infection rate – known as the r rate – measures the onward transmission of a disease from each initial case. The higher the r, the more rapidly cases multiply. only with r below 1 does the disease go into retreat.

In the UK in early to mid-march 2020 the r for coVID-19 was estimated to be potentially as high as 3, with infections doubling around every three days. If you were to start with just fifty-six infected people, the official UK figure on 10th march, that rate of increase would, if left unchecked, produce 896 cases within twelve days, 57,344 within thirty days and getting on for 59 million within sixty days! Worse still for the r rate, scientists found that while a small percentage of the population was highly susceptible to the disease, large numbers, especially young people, were infected asymptomatically, so could be transmitting a potentially lethal disease to their parents and grandparents entirely unwittingly.

The most dangerous of carriers in this situation – and one or two were identified at the start – are the superspreaders, the ‘Typhoid marys’ who infect large numbers of other people without knowing it. The reference is to mary mallon, a cook to several of new york’s most affluent families in the early years of the twentieth century. her alleged poor hand hygiene and much sought-after signature

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dessert – ice cream and frozen peaches – were believed to have been the conduit for her infecting scores of people, a handful of whom died, with the disease that she herself denied ever having had.

The Who declared the outbreak of coVID-19 a Public health emergency of International concern on 30 January 2020. on 11th march it was declared a pandemic, meaning that it had spread worldwide. The only safe initial assumption for authorities to make with such a novel disease was that both its transmissibility and its case fatality could be extremely high. The topmost priority in that scenario would be to identify all those affected and to detain or quarantine them and their contacts as quickly as possible.

It was a race against time, for which some countries were better prepared than others. coVID-19 was to test our twenty-first-century governments every bit as severely as plague had tested those of the past, holding up a mirror to the capacity and resilience of individual states and their leaders.

Pandemics and the Role of the State: From Divine to Human Responsibility along with famine and war, disease, plague and pestilence have challenged rulers from time immemorial. In most early historic civilisations, such as those of egypt, mesopotamia and china, the ruling dynasty was considered to have divine dispensation. all major turns of fortune, good or bad, were explained in terms of religious favour and disfavour, and this could redound menacingly on the ruling dynasty. china’s ‘mandate of heaven’ meant that so long as the emperor appeared able to protect his people from natural disasters, just as from foreign invaders, he was confirming his divine status. If he failed, he was demonstrating that he lacked divinity and must be replaced.

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These kinds of religious or superstitious understandings of what was happening when pandemics struck continued pretty much unabated until the resurgence of plague in europe in the fourteenth century. The Black Death was a cosmology-shattering event, which at the beginning had seen an upsurge in calls to prayer and self-mortification among the faithful across christendom to assuage divine wrath.

In the climate of fear and dread there were equally those who sought astrological explanations for the calamity. notoriously it also resulted in heightened religious paranoia with appalling and brutal persecution visited on Jewish communities. This was despite Pope clement VI (1291– 1352) issuing two decrees in 1348 threatening excommunication, the highest spiritual penalty, for those harming a Jew.

Image 3. Painting depicting a couple suffering from the Black Death.

From the Swiss manuscript the Toggenburg Bible, 1411.

Source: Bettmann / Getty Images

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But there were also some in authority who, alongside the confusion and heightened emotion, began to apply reason and to interrogate evidence. Pope clement VI himself deployed such arguments. he pointed out that Jews were themselves dying from the plague as well as christians and that Jews were absent in many of the communities around the known world where plague raged. With even the Pope emboldened to reason publicly and independently, organised responses to pandemic outbreaks started to rely less exclusively on ritual acts of religious contrition and penance. faced with incessant, repeated threats of further incursions of the bubonic plague, coming hard on the heels of the Black Death, a new philosophy gradually emerged in many of the western states and cities of europe. This had its roots in humanist, renaissance Italy. civil authorities began to talk of a duty to direct fellow citizens to protect their lives. rather than leaving everything to prayer, humanist teaching on epidemics and pestilence stressed that, since reason was a divine gift, it should be actively deployed to overcome such calamities.

It was not in the least surprising that europe’s urban authorities should have cast round in desperation for new ideas to protect themselves from further plague visitations in the centuries following the Black Death. In the space of just a year or two the Black Death had wiped out 30–40 per cent of the entire population across europe. In england, 42 per cent of its 4.8 million inhabitants were cut down, half of them in three short summer months in 1349. almost 50 per cent of london’s populace perished.18 The near contemporary chronicle of henry Knighton of leicester records that ‘throughout the land … sheep and cattle perished in out-of-the-way places amongst the furrows and under hedges from want of a keeper, in numbers beyond reckoning … for there was such a shortage of hands and servants that no one knew what ought to be done.’19

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numbers buried and wills registered tell a similar story in siena, arezzo, Perugia, Pisa; and in florence, Italy’s third largest city after milan and Venice, it is estimated that 50,000 died, fully 60 per cent of the city’s inhabitants.20 In response, over the next half-century, with plague ‘after-shocks’ still repeatedly rearing their ugly heads, Italian civic authorities set about developing a new range of countermeasures, many of which provided the model for plague responses across europe. as Paul slack has put it, ‘europeans came to accept policies and practices for the control of plague which managed to reconcile secular prudence with religious piety … that combination was peculiar to christian europe.’21 Innovative and comprehensive, their solutions included just about everything we saw once again put into operation around the world to combat coVID-19 in 2020: isolation; quarantine; surveillance; identifying, recording, compiling and publicising death rates; tracing contacts; disinfecting; rules and sanctions to govern behaviour and social distancing. This willingness to begin to engage in human plans to thwart what had previously been seen as the will of God is the origin of where we stand today in our relationship with erupting pandemics. as Italian city-states and then many other urban authorities in Germany, france the low countries and, finally, the national government in Britain began to enforce what were often draconian measures, it challenged and changed the relationship between governors and governed. enacted with the force of law, these policies deeply challenged emotional links and support between members of the same community. measures needed to contain disease also placed local livelihoods under severe strain, requiring authorities to devise forms of charity and taxation to support the afflicted, raising funds from the wider community, even as those communities were themselves often under significant pressure.

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A Plague on All Our Houses: Learning to Control Pandemics The first requirement in controlling a pandemic is to know what you are up against. soon after the Black Death many Italian towns began the practice of both international and internal surveillance. city authorities were keen to receive information from merchants and others of plague

Image 4. The title page of a 1665 compilation of the London Bills of Mortality.

Source: Oxford Science Archive / Getty Images

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outbreaks and would then quarantine ships accordingly.

Internally, recording of deaths began to be used to give early warning of unusual mortality patterns. In 1399, the dukes of milan were the first to set up a system of notification for all illnesses and deaths to facilitate this, moving to put death registration on a continuous basis from 1452.22 similarly, in Britain, from 1518 the crown ordered weekly counts in london when plague threatened, with parishes listing burials and attributing those due to plague separately. These were printed and publicly displayed for the first time during the 1592 epidemic.23 from 1603 london’s Bills of mortality could also be compared with those of other towns such as Bristol, norwich, chester, oxford, york and newcastle.24 a forerunner of the late-nineteenth-century notification of Diseases acts, these listings provided the intelligence that authorities needed to stay on the front foot in controlling the disease, just as coVID-19 testing does today. But that intelligence depended on knowing who had actually died from plague. elizabeth I’s Book of Plague orders, issued to all local magistrates in 1578, created the new occupation ‘searcher of the Dead’. as Kevin siena has aptly remarked, ‘If there was an “essential worker” during a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century epidemic, surely this was it. authorities needed to know whether a death was caused by plague or something more mundane. It was the single most important piece of information for managing the crisis.’25 rather than doctors, as one might expect, it was frequently impoverished elderly women who went out to inspect the corpses, sometimes under threat of financial sanction if they didn’t carry out the work, and of course always under threat of losing their life to infection.

The Italian cities were the first to set up designated authorities – secular health commissions – to take active steps to control infection. They set about removing infected persons from their city, even at times burning their

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goods and bedding, stopping entry by those from infected areas, and in some cities restricting the numbers allowed to attend funerals. Venice’s colony ragusa (now the city of Dubrovnik) was the first – as early as 1377 – to institute a thirty-day detention on travellers.26 milan’s hospitals were ordered to manage the sick outside the city, a similar precaution to the later provisions in english Plague orders for designated pesthouses for the sick.

Where an outbreak of plague was starting to escalate, the next stage would be the full-scale isolation of infected (or suspected) individuals or, in extremis, quarantining of a whole community. The word ‘quarantine’ itself comes from the Italian for forty days – quaranta giorni. In the absence of precise medical evidence this became the accepted period of isolation. no doubt this was in part because it was seen to be effective, but it was certainly also because of its broader biblical and symbolic significance as a period of retreat and self-denial.

The authorities recognised full well that isolation and quarantine could not succeed without providing for the basic material needs of those they wished to contain.

When the health board of florence shut the city down for forty days in early 1631, they brought free food and drink each day to over 30,000 people. This apparently included two loaves of bread, half a litre of wine, regular portions of meat, rice and cheese, and fresh salad on fridays, adding up of course to a significant economic burden on the city-state.27 The english Plague orders dealt with the issue even more directly, placing local responsibility on each community for the welfare of the afflicted. household quarantines in england were particularly strictly enforced and the 1604 Plague act made it a felony to be found wandering with an open plague sore. houses were singled out with a painted red cross and watchmen were paid to guard the shut-up household day and night, with locals even bringing the

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watchers food to sustain them.28 To make all this feasible economically, the act insisted that compulsory taxes be raised locally in the parish or more widely in the county to meet all necessary costs and to feed those confined in their households cut off from their livelihoods. This was a bold fiscal innovation by the British state, the compulsion going beyond anything attempted in Italy.29 such compulsory local responsibilities were so novel that they could initially also engender complaints, such as when poor rural parishes in the county of lancashire were called on to support the normally wealthier parish of Preston in 1631, which had as many as 756 of its 887 inhabitants in isolation and needing relief.30 In another wealthy city, cambridge, financial assistance extended in 1625 to its voluntarily paying money to the adjacent infected parish of Trumpington purely to keep their residents from coming into cambridge to work or sell their wares.31 During the quarantine in florence in 1631, citizens were given a little more latitude than the english, being allowed to stand on their balconies and terraces to take the air (and perhaps to sing) and even to hear mass from a distance at portable street altars. But then some were discovered having used the rooftops to climb across to party with friends. although it didn’t happen in florence or Bologna, in both milan and rome punishments for serious infringements of this kind could extend to execution!32 over the centuries, as more was understood about water and airborne transmission of disease, authorities began to tackle issues of sanitation and hygiene. expensive and large-scale sanitation measures in english cities to deal with sewage-contaminated water were critical in containing outbreaks of cholera.33 hamburg, by contrast, was disinclined to go to the expense of upgrading its sanitation system. consequently, the city was the last significant european casualty of cholera in 1892, when its failure to invest in a modernised sand-filtration system resulted in its

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population being, in effect, centrally supplied with choleracontaminated water into their homes.34 In a similar vein, attempts to protect populations during the 1918–20 flu pandemic and all subsequent winter flu outbreaks have required basic public health measures. rules prohibiting public spitting were in place in many Us states (and there were still warning notices against spitting on public transport in the UK in the 1970s and 80s), as was public education on basic hygiene techniques such as hand washing and appropriate ways of containing coughs and sneezes. from the late nineteenth century onwards a sequence of important scientific developments produced major advances in the control of pandemic diseases. anti-toxins (diphtheria sufferers were the first beneficiaries in the 1890s), chemotherapies (the first was neo-salvarsan to treat syphilis in the 1910s), antibiotics (penicillin from the 1940s) and vaccinations (in fact the first one was for smallpox from as early as 1796) have all played their part. Preventative vaccination of course remains the holy Grail. It has led to the total eradication of smallpox and continues to control cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, TB, diphtheria, measles and polio, among others. each year new vaccines are produced to combat the annual mutations of the influenza virus, still a significant killer and one that is monitored and reported weekly in the UK in its official statistics on deaths. however, as with all forms of pandemic disease control, vaccination has been treated with distrust and resistance by some right from the outset. The increasingly stringent British Vaccination acts of 1853, 1867, 1871, 1874, which fined or imprisoned parents who didn’t vaccinate their children against smallpox, provoked many protests, with about 100,000 people involved in the biggest demonstration, in leicester in 1885.35 By 1898, the British government had relented under the pressure, permitting

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‘conscientious objectors’ to vaccines an exemption from the law. for many people the ‘spanish’ flu is now viewed as the last catastrophic global pandemic before coVID-19, killing, as it did, 50 to 100 million people. It is only just out of living memory, as we learned when the UK’s oldest victim of coVID-19 at the time, hilda churchill, died in a care home in march 2020, days before her 109th birthday. hilda herself survived the spanish flu but vividly remembered the day it killed her baby sister.36 coming towards the end of the first World War (whose end it may well have hastened), the misattributed ‘spanish’ flu is believed in fact to have originated in the Usa and to have been initially carried to europe by american troops. as waves of infection hit the Usa, state, county and local authorities were at the forefront of the response. measures including bans on large gatherings, restrictions on weddings and funerals and economic lockdowns of all but essential businesses were variously imposed. Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of resistance to the hardship that this caused. Just as in past plague outbreaks – when the presumed contamination of cloth robbed textile workers of employment and put a stop to the widespread trade in second-hand clothes – so in the Usa businesses railed against closures. Indeed, several theatre owners went so far as to pursue legal action against their state governors.

Using data published at the time, the state-by-state response to the flu pandemic across the Usa can give us some pretty clear insights into the effects of different approaches to social distancing and lockdown. The findings of researchers today looking back at these data are unequivocal: early and sustained intervention reduced subsequent deaths.37 seattle was meticulous in restricting business activity, closing schools and churches and public entertainment and requiring masks to be worn in public. It had one of the lowest death rates on the west

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coast. Philadelphia, by contrast, suffered one of america’s highest death rates when it took little action to prepare for the approaching infection and allowed flu cases to escalate dangerously by permitting a large public parade to go ahead without heeding the risks.38 Despite its place in popular memory as the last great pandemic, the hundred years since the spanish flu have in fact seen many other disastrous global infections, not least from hIV/aIDs. national and international public health institutions now assiduously monitor global signs of new disease, with better-resourced countries springing into action to support local responses, as they did to great effect with ebola. meanwhile across the world public surveillance and control of disease extends to highly developed and, usually, localised systems for catching and stamping out infections before they spread. south africa, for instance, with its experience in dealing with transmissible diseases such as TB and hIV/aIDs, has sophisticated track and trace systems. These countries deploy armies of health workers on the ground who are trained in identifying local outbreaks of infection and managing the response. In asia, the sars and mers coronavirus outbreaks of the early 2000s were aggressively contained using these same techniques, a vital learning exercise that countries such as south Korea, Taiwan and singapore used to great effect in the control of coVID-19.

It would be fair to say that the toolkit for managing pandemic disease continues to encroach ever further into the most intimate areas of life, as the authorities seek to change or modify behaviour. During the second World War, soldiers were routinely issued with condoms as part of their daily rations, in order to protect them from sTIs. In the 1980s, as the hIV/aIDs epidemic began to be better understood, urgent public health campaigns on condom use were promulgated worldwide in an effort to contain

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the disease’s spread. Delicate interventions in the burial practices of West african communities, which were quickly recognised as contributing to the lethal spread of ebola from the corpses of the dead, have had to be brokered. and traditional etiquettes of greeting – the Gallic kiss and even the British handshake – were banished by the social distancing rules of coVID-19. There is, it seems, nowhere the state will not go in the quest to stop the spread of disease.

What all of this history shows us, then, is that before the first vaccinations against coVID-19 were administered in December 2020, all the initial efforts to control the spread and lethality of the new virus – in Britain and everywhere else – drew from exactly the same repertoire of measures developed originally in the fight against the plague and then applied in subsequent outbreaks of pandemic diseases. over 600 years of medicine later we were still pretty much in the same position as the rulers of florence and milan.

But how well did we remember and implement all these hard-won lessons of history? What would our forebears have thought of the world’s response? how would they have judged the world’s surveillance systems, containment rigour, pursuit of infected cases, support for those confined and border controls once the coVID-19 pandemic broke? history should have taught us, too, that to engage in ever more active and intense trading, travelling and commercial activity is to require more, not less, protective and preventative public health infrastructure and personnel. Did we also forget this lesson, lulled into the false notion that we have somehow found a costless, riskfree way of organising our economy and society across porous international borders?

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