Spring 2020 Academic Trade Program Chapter Sampler

Cambridge University Press

SPRING 2020 SAMPLER

Contents Welcome...................................................................... 4 Contact us.................................................................... 5 Becoming Free, Becoming Black................................. 6 Williams’ Gang............................................................. 19 Cracking the Digital Ceiling........................................ 38 Dangerously Divided................................................... 54 Whitelash..................................................................... 68 A Century of Votes for Women.................................. 81 The Caravan................................................................. 98 The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook...................... 116 Female Husbands........................................................ 136 The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success....................... 151

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Welcome Reading important books connects us to the most pressing issues of our time. At Cambridge University Press — the oldest publisher in the world — it’s a honor to have published Charles Darwin, Martha Nussbaum and Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Laureates such as Elinor Ostrom and Angus Deaton. And now, we’re proud to share this ambitious selection of forthcoming titles from our Academic Trade Programme.

Since 2018, we’ve contributed around 40 leading academic titles each year to the ATP with the goal of bringing our most impactful books to a wide audience. These titles present cutting-edge ideas of huge relevance to the way we live and understand our world.

As we approach its centennial, readers will discover the fraught history of women’s suffrage in America and how present-day observers can protect the right to vote. They can dive headlong into black holes, immersing themselves in the science of how cosmology really works, or find hope in solving the climate crisis back here on Earth. They’ll learn about the untold trans history of female husbands, and about the outsize role a charismatic Palestinian cleric played in the global history of jihad.

The titles excerpted here are only a fraction of the vital books we publish. For a more complete list, visit cambridge.org/trade.

Michael Watson, Executive Publisher for Academic Trade

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Becoming Free, Becoming Black Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity.

Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Professor of African and African American Studies, and the Director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University, Massachusetts. He is the author of Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present (2018); Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (2008); and A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (2001).

Ariela J. Gross is the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History and the Co-Director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She is the author of What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (2008) and Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (2000).

January 2020

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$24.95 US / $28.95 CAD £19.99 Hardback 9781108480642

Introduction

I

n 1690, havana resident juan junco gonzalez issued a notarized receipt declaring that his twenty-year-old slave Juana had asked him to “give her freedom,” and that he had “agreed to do it” in exchange for 300 pesos. Juana had already paid half the price, so now, Gonzalez stated, he was “obligated by law to concede her freedom whenever my slave Juana gives me the rest to complete the said 300 pesos.”

Although he presented emancipation (also known as manumission) as a master’s concession (“otorgarle la dicha libertad”), the agreement transformed it into a legal obligation that the slaveholder could not evade.

Through what was known as coartación (from cortarse, to cut up in pieces), Juana had acquired the legal right to become free whenever she completed the payment. In practice this meant that Juana, a coartada, could be sold, transferred, or mortgaged to someone else only on conditional terms: the new owners could not refuse to free her if she came up with the remaining 150 pesos. The contract also specified that Juana, after paying a portion of her price, now owned a portion of her own labor. Any buyer “must grant her half of the time that belongs to her and discount it from her price.” Nor could Gonzalez go back on the agreement. A notarized contract of coartación like Juana’s and Gonzalez’s turned a master’s prerogative into a slave’s right, one that the slave could exercise even against the will of the owner.1 More than a century after Juana achieved coartada status in Cuba, Nanny Pegee made her own claim for freedom in a Virginia chancery court. The basis for her claim, however, did not rest on Iberian contracting arrangements but on her Indian ancestry, as Virginia courts had recently declared that Indians were presumptively free. She brought 1

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BECOMING FREE, BECOMING BLACK

her suit in 1808, just two years after Virginia’s General Assembly had passed legislation decreeing that freed slaves would have to leave the state after their emancipation but had rejected more stringent limits on enslaved people’s freedom suits. In depositions taken in Franklin County, where Pegee brought her claim, Pegee’s witnesses portrayed her as appearing Indian or white, describing her hair as long and straight, “hanging loose down her neck and about her ears,” although some thought it “dark or black” and others “rather fair.” Several of her owner’s witnesses described her as “mulatto Nan,” while others described her as “too white.” One who “never considered [her] any other than a slave” connected his belief to her “exceedingly strong scent – especially when the weather was warm.” Although Pegee’s owner complained to the chancery court of the Western District of Virginia that she was being aided by Quakers “inimical to slavery,” who were “unfriendly” to him, and that the trial had been marked by “unblushing partiality” on the part of the judge, the jury awarded 200 pounds to Nanny and set her free. Pegee won at every level of the state court system, with the Virginia Supreme Court finally deciding that the jury had the right to determine her racial identity and thus her status as free or enslaved. Like Juana, Nanny Pegee made use of the law to win freedom for herself and to carve out a place for herself in the local community of free people of color.2 Nearly four decades after Nanny Pegee won her freedom, Eulalie Oliveau was kidnapped from her home in Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, and sold to slave traders Daniel Long and Zachariah Mabry in New Orleans. In 1852, Eulalie sued Long and Mabry, arguing that she should be free “by prescription,” because her owner, the widow Magdelaine Oliveau Porche, had allowed her to leave her plantation forty-five years earlier to marry Madame Porche’s mixed-race halfbrother, Henri Oliveau, and Eulalie had lived as free ever since. Henri was not taken by the kidnappers, and it was he who secured a lawyer to fight Eulalie’s case. According to Eulalie’s witnesses, Madame Porche had wanted to set all her slaves free at her death but realized “it was useless for her to make any last will in which all her slaves should be set free, because witness knew, that the police Jury [of Pointe Coupée Parish] would never permit its execution.” Eulalie’s case went all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court twice, in 1854 and 1856. When it 2

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INTRODUCTION

1. Nanny Pegee v. Hook. In this document, Nanny Pegee, along with her five children, sued for “trespass assault Battery and false imprisonment,” on the ground that “Nanny is a free person & in no sort liable to be held as a slave.” Pegee v. Hook (1808), Franklin County (VA) Judgments (Freedom Suits), Barcode 7573898, LVA.

came before the court the second time, Louisiana’s legislature had just passed a law requiring that all freed slaves be sent to Liberia.

Nevertheless, Eulalie and her children won their freedom based on an 3

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BECOMING FREE, BECOMING BLACK

article of the Louisiana Civil Code providing that a slaveholder who “suffer[ed] a slave to enjoy his liberty for ten years” could not reclaim possession of the slave. The judges in her case disagreed on whether her status was actually that of a free woman, or if the law required only that her owner not be able to recapture her. Either way, Eulalie and her children became free, and they did not leave for Liberia.3 Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color across the Americas who sought and shaped liminal spaces in the law through which they could claim freedom for themselves and their loved ones and create communities that challenged slaveholders’ efforts to align blackness with enslavement. Although “manumission” should be understood as the prerogative of an enslaver with the power to emancipate those he held in bondage, the cases reveal individuals who were not mere passive recipients of a gift of freedom. Instead, they entered into contracts with their owners, and labored and accumulated property to achieve their ends. Not only did they use the legal tools available to them, but their initiatives shaped the laws of slavery and freedom. The Cuban practice of coartación had its origins in Iberian custom, but people like Juana expanded it and gave it meaning, using it to carve out spaces of relative autonomy for herself even before she became fully free. Eulalie Oliveau, too, drew on a legal tradition that traced its roots to Roman law but remained part of the local knowledge of enslaved and free people of color in Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, after Louisiana became part of the United States. Nanny Pegee challenged her enslaved status through her racial identity, building on a very recent precedent suggesting that Indians could be presumed free. Thus, enslaved people staked their claims through self-purchase arrangements and other efforts to bargain for freedom, as well as through the lawsuits they brought when such arrangements fell through. Enslaved people who found their way to a notary’s office or a courtroom to claim freedom were exceptional in certain ways. The majority of men and women born in bondage remained enslaved their entire lives. Yet those who became free were key to the construction of race in the Americas.

It was not the law of slavery but the law of freedom that was most crucial for the creation of racial regimes in law. The laws regulating manumission and freedom suits determined whether it was possible to 4

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INTRODUCTION

move from slave to free status, under what circumstances, and whether race would become the primary basis for claims to freedom. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights that would be reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

This book challenges traditional perceptions of a contrast between a racially fluid system in Latin America that recognized the slave as a person, and a harsher binary system in the British colonies that saw the slave only as chattel. People like Nanny Pegee, who contested both her racial identity and her enslaved status in the courtroom, give the lie to this comparison, according to which she should never have existed in starkly black-and-white nineteenth-century Virginia. It was not a society’s recognition of slaves’ humanity, nor its racial fluidity, that marked the differences among Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. It was how successfully the elites of that society drew connections between blackness and enslavement, on the one hand, and whiteness, freedom, and citizenship, on the other.

In all three places, slaveholding elites acted to cement the association between African origin and slavery, linking blackness to social degradation. By the early eighteenth century, the legal regimes in all three jurisdictions constituted blackness as a debased category that was equivalent to enslavement. But despite these similar beginnings, by the midnineteenth century the social implications of blackness in each region were fundamentally different. A free man of color in Cuba in the 1850s could marry a white woman, attend public school, and participate in a religious confraternity that gave him opportunities to be part of public life. A free man of color in 1850s Louisiana or Virginia saw his churches and schools being shut down, faced prosecution for marrying across the color line, and ran the risk of being kidnapped, imprisoned and even reenslaved if he remained in the state in which he was born. In Louisiana or Virginia, when a person sought to prove in court that he was not a person of color, he would bring evidence of civic acts, because citizenship and whiteness were so linked in political thought and legal doctrine that it was believed a citizen must be a white man, and only a white man could be a citizen. In Cuba, similar evidence of gentlemanly civic behavior was not necessarily incompatible with blackness.

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BECOMING FREE, BECOMING BLACK

The key to these divergent trajectories of racial differentiation was the law of freedom. It began with legal traditions: in Cuba, the right to manumission was firmly entrenched in the Iberian law of slavery and was not tied to race, a key difference from the law in both Louisiana and Virginia. But it did not end there. The creation of race through law was a long process with many unpredictable twists and turns, not a linear progression. In some ways a more open society than Cuba in the seventeenth century, Virginia became more inimical to free people of color in the early eighteenth century but then witnessed the creation of new legal avenues for freedom in the Age of Revolution, making Pegee’s suit possible. In Louisiana, New Orleans, which had been a mecca for free people of color in the early nineteenth century, was a completely different place by the 1850s. These dramatic shifts in the fortunes of free people of color suggest the power of legal regulation and contestation.

What decided Pegee’s case had less to do with edicts emanating from the capitol than with a law of freedom created from the bottom up, as families of enslaved people across Virginia learned that they could use the identity of a distant ancestor to emancipate themselves, just as Cuban coartados like Juana learned to claim rights that were not formally regulated in any code or statute.

As we explore the effects of local politics and culture, we discover some key differences between Louisiana and Virginia, on the one hand, and Cuba, on the other. The presence of Indians shaped understandings of race, and the legal status of free people of color, in Virginia and Louisiana, whereas in Cuba, indigenous peoples had ceased to be a meaningful presence in early colonial times. In the United States, the “negro race” was defined in contrast to Indian “nations,” as lawmakers sought to prevent black-Indian alliances. Furthermore, as growing restrictions were imposed on free blacks, many “negroes” were reclassified as Indian, melting into mixed-race communities that persisted into the nineteenth century and migrating out of Virginia into the Carolinas and beyond.

The divergent trajectories of race in Cuba and the United States were also the result of political and ideological configurations that grew even further apart after U.S. independence. Although racism flourished in all three societies, only in the United States, divided between a North where 6

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INTRODUCTION

slavery was dying out and a South increasingly dependent on it, did a racial defense of slavery become inextricably linked politically to “white man’s democracy.” As slaveholders appealed to nonslaveholders with the promise of broad citizenship rights for all white men, free people of color became increasingly anomalous, and even dangerous, to the polity. To many, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, the extension of citizenship rights to all white men required the removal of free black people from their midst. That is why colonization efforts that sought to remove free blacks to a distant location in Africa prospered in Virginia and Louisiana but not in Cuba. And that is also why Virginia and Louisiana acted in the nineteenth century, especially in the 1850s, to end the possibility of manumission, self-purchase, or freedom suits.

In the long run, the obstacles that Virginia and Louisiana placed in the way of manumissions, first during the colonial period and again in the antebellum period, produced dramatic results: communities of free people of color attained significant numbers in Cuba, while those in Virginia and Louisiana dwindled. An enslaved person in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba was likely to encounter free people of African descent on a regular basis. Such a prospect was rare in many areas of Virginia and Louisiana. This, in turn, helped to solidify the link between race and enslavement in the United States. Communities of free people of color in Cuba maintained important institutions, such as military units staffed by free black (moreno) and mulatto (pardo) soldiers and officers, that were important platforms for mobility and social standing. Militias of free men of color never took hold in Virginia and they died out in Louisiana by 1834. Communities of free people of color were also key to the expansion of freedom, as they could provide resources and legal knowledge to enslaved people.

Perhaps most important, their members made claims on citizenship that made it difficult to argue that only white people could be citizens.

Gender played a critical role in the demography as well as the politics of racial differentiation. All jurisdictions endorsed the widely observed principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which tied the status of children to that of their mother, regardless of the social and racial background of the father. Because of that principle, women were key to the reproduction of slavery, and of freedom. As the case of Nanny Pegee shows, the racial 7

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identity of a female ancestor constituted a potent basis for a freedom claim. Manumissions were also gendered, as women were able to obtain freedom at much higher rates than men. And when they did, it meant that their progeny, indeed all their descendants, would be forever free.

The predominance of women in manumissions was thus a key factor in the growth of the communities of free people of color across time.

Finally, gender and sexuality played a key role in the creation of a racial order, because much of the policing of racial boundaries involved legal prohibitions against interracial marriage and even sex, particularly targeting the sexuality of white women. Numerous bastardy cases in eighteenth-century Virginia involved white female indentured servants who engaged in sexual relations across color lines. In nineteenth-century Cuba, although interracial marriage remained legal, even destitute white women seeking to marry a man of color frequently encountered the opposition of family members and authorities. In all of these ways, the policing of sexuality, and especially the differing treatment of white woman/black man and white man/black woman dyads, contributed to the construction of legal regimes of race.

The history we tell here builds on decades of important work on slavery and race in the Americas. Mid-twentieth-century comparative historians first traced the contrast between a “Latin” American “slave system” based on a well-established body of Iberian law, with Roman and canonical roots, that conferred legal and moral personality on slaves, and an Anglo-American system in which planters were free to treat slaves as chattel.4 Revisionist historians challenged the sharp contrast between British and Spanish America by deemphasizing the influence of law and religion in favor of demographics and economics. They demonstrated the brutality of Latin American sugar plantations, the persistence of racial hierarchies and inequality in Latin America after emancipation, and the lack of enforcement of paternalist laws about humane treatment of slaves.5 Finally, a new generation of cultural-legal historians has brought law back to the center of inquiry, but working from the ground up, and in microhistories that traverse jurisdictional lines.6 This book returns to early comparativists’ broad questions about the development of regimes of race and slavery. But we bring to bear on 8

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INTRODUCTION

those questions the tools and approaches of cultural-legal history close to the ground. Instead of starting with static legal traditions to trace their effects in law, we look at the way legal practices, emerging not only from doctrines and traditions but also from participants’ own strategies, shaped institutional change. We define “law” broadly, including the codes and royal edicts emanating from the metropole as well as local statutes, trials, and adjudications in which different social actors, including slaves, articulated competing notions of rights. While major codes and royal edicts were steeped in imperial tradition, slaveholders had a hand in drafting local statutes, and multiple local players shaped the outcomes of local adjudications. Slaveholders’ interests were often shared across jurisdictions, different legal traditions notwithstanding, although they were also influenced by different political imperatives, such as the need to appeal to nonslaveholding whites. Our approach assumes the “mutual constitutiveness” of law and culture: legal traditions shape society, as local politics and culture, and the actions of ordinary people, in turn shape the operation of the law.

We have chosen three plantation societies for our study: Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Historians have often paired Cuba and Virginia as exemplars of the Spanish and British colonial systems, respectively; we add a third point of comparison, the hybrid legal system of Louisiana, where we examine how slaves took advantage of shifting legal regimes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to obtain their freedom. By the mid-nineteenth century all three locations were mature Atlantic plantation societies based on slave labor. In each of them, race was a key category of difference, stratification, and social worth; white people widely perceived black people to be degraded and inferior, a perception that had solid foundations in local law.

Furthermore, all three locations were interconnected through Atlantic networks of trade, culture, and finance. Virginia was a major exporter of slaves to New Orleans, the largest slave market in the American South. Cuba and Louisiana were under shared Spanish control for several decades and intense communication between Havana and New Orleans continued well into the nineteenth century. Many of the free people of color of Louisiana could claim ancestors who, escaping from the violence of revolutionary Saint-Domingue, arrived in New 9

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BECOMING FREE, BECOMING BLACK

Orleans by way of Cuba. The ripples of Saint-Domingue, in turn, reached all three societies, where whites constantly feared that a similar insurrection would put an end to their lives and fortunes. Because of these similarities and linkages, comparing the three societies allows us to see the difference that the developing law of freedom made in their divergent trajectories of race.

The first two chapters of the book explore the early colonial period, beginning with the settlement of Cuba in the sixteenth century, then Virginia in the seventeenth, and Louisiana in the eighteenth. Chapter 1 demonstrates that legal and social precedents mattered deeply to the development of these new slave societies, but not in the way traditional comparisons among the competing empires might lead one to believe.

By the time Iberians arrived in the New World, they were familiar with the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and set about immediately to establish a racially based society in Cuba. In Virginia, by contrast, distinctions of race were not systematized in law until slave status was set in stone decades after the colony’s settlement. The French arrived in Louisiana at a much later point in the development of their empire, and they had already written a code for slaves and “noirs.” Across all three regions, colonial legislators established a degraded status for people of African descent, but they did so much more quickly in Cuba and Louisiana.

Chapter 2 looks more closely at two aspects of legal regulation in which Cuba diverged from both Virginia and Louisiana: laws regarding manumission, and the regulation of interracial marriage.

Although seventeenth-century Virginians set no restrictions on the ability of a person of color to become free, or to marry a white person, that began to change toward the end of the century. By the early eighteenth century, manumission and interracial sex and marriage were restricted in both Virginia and Louisiana, unlike in Cuba. This chapter explores that shift, as well as the important effects of this divergence.

Our long view puts the Age of Revolution, the subject of Chapter 3, in a new perspective. Across the Americas, the chaos of war, ideologies of equality and liberty, and, above all, the specter of slave rebellion in Haiti inspired legal claims-making and created new opportunities for 10

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INTRODUCTION

emancipation. Historians have highlighted the ways in which slaves and free people of color seized the moment of upheaval to claim freedom in urban areas as distant from each other (and Haiti) as Baltimore and Rio de Janeiro.7 Yet what made freedom possible was often the unintended consequence of retrenchment and reform, rather than revolution.

Louisiana changed hands from France to Spain. Reforms put in place by the Spanish Bourbons, as well by Virginia legislators, to shore up existing institutions to withstand revolutionary challenges ended up creating openings for enslaved people to make stronger claims. The expansion and legal solidification of customary self-purchase practices, such as coartación, in both Havana and Louisiana were not the products of revolution. Instead, they reflected efforts by Bourbon reformers seeking to shore up the monarchy and raise revenue. In Virginia, two kinds of freedom suits became most important: claims of illegal importation and claims based on Indian ancestry. The claims about Indian identity highlight the central irony of the American Revolution: the nation’s new Constitution and its language of equality and liberty coincided with the massive expansion of plantation slavery and an increasing emphasis on race as the basis of citizenship and freedom. Thus, some enslaved people became free, but only by claiming they were not “negro.” Claims to freedom based on an Indian foremother signaled the salience of race as a marker of legal status.

In Chapters 4 and 5 we explore the growing restrictions on manumission and free people of color in Louisiana and Virginia in the second half of the antebellum era, which stand in contrast to the significant but less successful efforts of Cuban slaveholders to limit the rights of freed people. Chapter 4 compares “colonization” campaigns to “remove” free people of color in all three jurisdictions, as well as the differing trajectories of manumission and freedom suits. Chapter 5 looks most closely at the 1850s, when slaveholders in Louisiana and Virginia sought to shut down the leading institutions of communities of color, churches and schools, and compares trials of racial identity and cases of interracial marriage, in which U.S. courts drew tight connections between whiteness and the possibility of citizenship, whereas Cuban courts held out the possibility that a person of color could also be a respectable gentleman and could marry across the color line.

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BECOMING FREE, BECOMING BLACK

Like their counterparts in Louisiana and Virginia, Cuban slaveholders sought total dominion over slaves and reduced rights for free people of color. Since early colonial times, they had shared a contempt for people of African descent. But as colonial authorities argued in mid-nineteenthcentury Havana, any attempt to curtail African-descended people’s “rights or concessions sanctioned by law” was dangerous and politically unadvisable. Such “rights” and “concessions” had deep colonial roots and owed much to the initiatives of enslaved people themselves. In the pages that follow, we will explore those initiatives.

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Williams’ Gang A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts Jeff Forret

William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades.

Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.

Jeff Forret is Professor of History at Lamar University, Texas. He won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (2015) and has authored Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (2006), among other works.

January 2020

$29.95 US / $33.95 CAD £21.99 Hardback 9781108493031 19

CHAPTER 9

Politics of the Slave Pen

B

orn into poverty in the small village of

Farmington, New Hampshire, in 1812, Jeremiah Jones Colbath grew up with little. When he reached the age of ten, his shiftless, drunken father apprenticed him to a neighboring farmer for whom young Jeremiah toiled, with few opportunities for formal schooling, for the next eleven years. The lad’s unfortunate circumstances nurtured within him a drive and ambition utterly foreign to his father. During his apprenticeship, upon his own initiative, Jeremiah voraciously consumed his master’s books and others he could borrow, and at the age of nineteen he swore off alcohol in an implicit rejection of his father’s intemperate ways. His twenty-first birthday in 1833 brought liberation. Estranged from his family, Jeremiah petitioned the state legislature to cast off the name his parents had given him at birth. The newly rechristened Henry Wilson left Farmington behind, walking the hundred miles to the Boston area.

In Natick, Massachusetts, he took up the shoemaker’s trade, a humble occupation but one that produced a product in high demand. Selfmotivated to a fault, the striving cobbler worked so incessantly and aggressively, albeit carelessly, churning out for market shoes of dubious quality, that his labors took a toll on his health. Taking time to relax and recuperate from a pulmonary ailment, Wilson traveled to the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., in May 1836.1 It was a transformative journey that permanently altered the trajectory of the twenty-four-year-old Henry Wilson’s life. “I didn’t know anybody in Washington, and nobody had any reason to know me,” he later recounted, but what the naïve, wide-eyed Wilson saw made a profound impression. Crossing on to the Island, he gazed upon “the infamous 207

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Williams slave pen, and . . . the poor people marched down to the riverside and shipped off to the ‘far South.’” He also witnessed “men and women, in chains, put upon the auction block for the crime of possessing ‘a skin darker than his own,’ and sold to hopeless slavery.” As a consequence of these spectacles, Wilson stated, “I pledged myself to liberty.” He “thought deeply and sadly of the horrors and aggressions of slavery, its inhuman cruelties, its traffic in the souls and bodies of men, its deliberate trampling upon the political as well as social rights of the nation, and from that day forth the settled purpose of his heart was to make war upon slavery.” The young man returned “to Massachusetts, filled with pity for the hapless bondman, and with defiance to his oppressor.” His interest in politics intensified, Wilson was elected to the Massachusetts legislature at age twenty-eight and occupied a seat in the statehouse from 1841 to 1852. He also edited the Free-Soil Boston Republican newspaper from 1848 to 1851 before moving on to serve in the US Senate from 1855 to 1873. Though not as vociferous, eloquent, or flamboyant as his Massachusetts senatorial colleague Charles Sumner, whose 1856 Crime against Kansas speech prompted the infamous bludgeoning administered by the cane-toting representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, Wilson reliably pursued slavery’s demise. The Yellow House directly contributed to the education of Henry Wilson, the poor farm boy and shoemaker who resigned his Senate seat to become Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president.2 William H. Williams’ slave jail at the corner of Maryland Avenue and Seventh Street garnered frequent mention by observant contemporaries. Shrouded as it was “behind leafy trees” that obscured it somewhat from the public gaze of passersby, the looming hulk of the slave pen was nevertheless unavoidable. “It is a house by which all must go in order to reach the building of the Smithsonian Institution,” remarked Mississippi senator and museum regent Jefferson Davis in 1850. Davis’ eventual Civil War adversary noticed Williams’ private prison as well. Abraham Lincoln remarked that, during his brief stint in Congress, he could see, “from the windows of the capitol, a sort of negro-livery stable, where droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses.”3 208

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The troubling proximity of the slave prison to the US Capitol building earned repeated notice in the abolitionist press and by travelers struck by the incongruity of the juxtaposition. As Henry Wilson put it when he first reached Washington, D.C., “I saw slavery beneath the shadow of the flag that waved over the Capitol.” Abolitionist J. Miller McKim described the relative locations of the US Congress and the Yellow House as an “abomination.”

The slave jail sat “within a short distance of the stars and stripes of the capitol,” he complained with righteous indignation. Approximately five generous city blocks separated the two structures, or “about half a mile,” estimated one newspaper correspondent. Solomon Northup reported that, “looking down from [the] commanding height” of Capitol Hill, congressmen and visitors alike could peer westward and readily identify the Yellow House “within plain sight . . . A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!” Touring the Capitol in 1850, traveler Fredrika Bremer confirmed that Williams’ slave jail “may be seen from it,” “[i]n full view.”4 The sight of slave traders marching bondpeople in coffles through Washington, D.C., ranked as one of the most stinging visual images of the paradox that was American slavery. Enslaved people plodded along in chains “through the Capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we were told, rests on the foundation of man’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!” Solomon Northup exclaimed. “Let it be known to the citizens of America,” declared one abolitionist society in the presidential election year of 1840, “that at the very time when the procession which contained the President of the United States and his cabinet was marching in triumph to the Capitol, another kind of procession was marching another way.” That second parade was no raucous celebration. It was solemn rather than festive, for it “consisted of coloured human beings, handcuffed in pairs, and driven along by . . . a man on horseback!”5 African Americans passing through the nation’s capital in the antebellum decades well understood the fundamental, underlying absurdity of the enslaved condition in an alleged land of freedom. Free black sailor George Henry, upon reaching the Washington Navy Yard in the 1830s, was permitted to “go up to see the Capitol, the centre of this so called free country.” Although unable to partake of all the nation’s fruits, Henry “longed to see” the home of the national government. En route, “under the hill of the building,” he recalled, “we heard . . . screaming and crying” 209

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12 A slave coffle passes the US Capitol.

Source: “The Home of the Oppressed”/“Hail Columbia,” Slave Market of America (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836), Broadside Collection, portfolio 118, no. 26c, Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

emanating from some unknown source in the distance. Continuing on, he and his companions encountered “about two hundred men and women chained together, two and two,” some “as fair as the sun ever shone upon.” They explained to Henry that they were trudging to Alexandria for transport to New Orleans and sale. At that moment, Henry recounted, When I saw that virtue was to be sacrificed to the highest bidder I said . . .

‘Away with your pretended free America, it is all a sham in my eye.’ It was then and there I took an oath against slavery . . . that I would never go to Washington [again], unless I went with an army to take her or burn her down.

Two decades before Henry came face-to-face with the ugly reality of the Washington, D.C. slave trade, a “drove of manacled coloured people” passed the Capitol as several congressmen congregated outside on the street. In a poignant and daring act of social criticism, one member of the coffle raised his enchained arms to the sky and serenaded the gentlemen lawmakers with an ironic rendition of the patriotic song and unofficial national anthem, “Hail Columbia! Happy Land.” (See Figure 12.) The 210

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unmistakable mockery evident in the bondman’s performance may have brought the soloist a fleeting moment of catharsis as he condemned the cruel irony of his situation.6 Frequent complaints of slaves’ visibility in the nation’s capital forced a modification in traders’ practices over time. The offensive sight of slave coffles paraded through Washington’s streets became less common. In 1849, a Washington correspondent for the New York Tribune reported that thirty or forty bondpeople arrived in the capital from Baltimore, bound for Williams’ slave jail. “Seven or ten years ago,” he wrote, “They would have been driven in irons,” by foot, “up the great Federal Avenue to Seventh street . . . Now they are quietly put into seven hacks” and wheeled by horse-drawn coach to the Yellow House. In 1850, Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, who first arrived in Washington to assume national office in 1845, denied having ever set eyes on manacled slaves herded by traders through the city, a recurring scene so vividly described by previous visitors to the District.7 The abolitionist press widely publicized a litany of dramatic, sorrowful, and terrible tales that exposed the brutal realities of slavery, a few of which directly condemned Williams’ pen. “If ever you have been to Washington, you have probably noticed a large yellow house which stands about a mile from the avenue, near the Potomac,” reported a correspondent of the Lowell, Massachusetts, Journal. “That is the slave prison; it is owned by a celebrated slave trader, who has made a large fortune by following his hellish traffic.” Inside the Yellow House, he continued, languished “a colored man . . . whom his master hired to the government to fight in Florida, against the Indians. The poor fellow did the fighting, while his master drew the pay. He is now petitioning the government for freedom and a pension.” In the meantime, he remained in Williams’ “jail until the question is decided.”8 An anonymous “Member of Congress,” later identified as antislavery Whig representative Seth M. Gates of New York, in 1842 related another tragic tale from the “gloomy walls” of the Yellow House. Gates described an unnamed “smart and active female slave” deposited in Williams’ private prison for sale in the southern market, who, the evening prior to her scheduled departure from Washington, “darted 211

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past her keeper,” broke jail, “and ran for her life.” She headed southwest down Maryland Avenue, straight toward the Long Bridge that spanned the Potomac and led to the portion of the District ceded by Virginia. “It [was] not a great distance from the prison to the long bridge,” Gates observed, and on the opposite side of the river lay the Custis estate and its “extensive forests and woodlands” where the fugitive could hide.9 The bondwoman’s flight took the keeper of Williams’ jail, Joshua Staples, by surprise. By the time he secured the other enslaved prisoners and set off in pursuit, the fleeing bondwoman had a sizeable head start.

Also working in her favor, “no bloodhounds were at hand” to track her, and the late hour meant that “horses could not readily be obtained for the chase.” Staples and a small band of men at his immediate disposal would have to overtake her on foot. Although they “raised the hue and cry on her pathway” to summon the public’s aid, the absconded slave breezed past the bewildered citizens of Washington who streamed out of their homes, struggling to comprehend the cause of all the commotion along the avenue. Realizing the scene unfolding before their eyes, some residents prayed for the fugitive’s successful escape, while others joined “the motley mass in pursuit,” too late to meaningfully impede her progress. Fleet of foot and with everything to lose, the bondwoman put still more distance between her and her would-be captors. In this contest of “speed and endurance, between the slave and the slave catchers,” the runaway was winning. She reached the end of Maryland Avenue and made it on to the Long Bridge. All the “poor hunted female” needed to do was cross the three-fourths of a mile expanse of the Long Bridge to secret herself in the Custis woods. Yet just as Staples and his men set foot on the bridge, they caught sight of three white men at the opposite end, “slowly advancing from the Virginia side.” Staples called out to them to seize the runaway slave. Dutifully, they arranged themselves three abreast, blocking the width of the narrow bridge. The unidentified bondwoman “looked wildly and anxiously around, to see if there was no other hope of escape,” but her prospects for success had suddenly evaporated. As her pursuers rapidly approached, their “noisy shout[s]” and threats filling the air, she lost the last shreds of hope that spurred her flight from the Yellow House. The woman then “vaulted 212

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over the railing of the bridge,” plunged into “the deep loamy water of the Potomac,” and sank “forever beneath the waves of the river.”

Apparently concerned that the dramatic tale of the bondwoman’s demise may have sounded apocryphal, Gates insisted that several other members of Congress could attest to the veracity of the story he shared. The suicide, he concluded, demonstrated “the unconquerable love of liberty the heart of the slave may inherit” and offered “a fresh admonition to the slave dealer, of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes.”10 Gates reserved his harshest scorn for Joshua Staples, whom William H. Williams, sitting in the Orleans Parish prison, had installed as jailer at the Yellow House only the year before the bondwoman’s selfdestruction. “This shameless human flesh dealer,” wrote Gates in his anonymous rebuke, “has the use of a private slave prison, standing midway between the Capitol and the President’s House, in the city of Washington, on the lowlands below Gadsby’s.” There, Staples “secures the poor heart-broken captives that he purchases.” Any Washington, D.C., master “who[,] from losses at the gaming table or race course, from extravagance, improvidence, or other cause,” wanted to dispose of one or more slaves knew to do so by “secret sale to Mr. Joshua Staples.”

Gates unleashed a religiously inspired condemnation of all slave traders for their wicked and “damnable traffick” and, in a final moralizing flourish, urged Staples and all who “persist in buying and selling the bodies and souls of thy fellow-men, after being warned of the tendency and cruelty of thy villainous trade,” to repent at the risk of sacrificing their eternal salvation in heaven.11 Slave traders did not much fret over their souls and even mocked those critical of them. In 1841, an English abolitionist and traveler to Washington, D.C., after visiting the US Senate, “drove to a slave-dealer’s establishment, near at hand, and within sight of the Capitol,” no doubt William H. Williams’ slave prison. There, he “looked in upon a group of human beings herded together like cattle for the market, within an enclosure of high brick walls surrounding the jail.” Inside the Yellow House, the informant cast his eyes upon “portraits and caricatures of abolitionists” hanging on the walls of the slave trader’s office. The derisive artwork ridiculed renowned Irish antislavery agitator Daniel 213

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O’Connell, American-born abolitionist Arthur Tappan, founder of both the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American and Foreign AntiSlavery Society, and former US president John Quincy Adams, not an abolitionist per se but long an antislavery gadfly in the House of Representatives. “The young man in charge of the establishment” – probably Joshua Staples, at the time of the visit – “began to explain them, for our amusement,” the traveler recalled. Upon learning that his guest was an abolitionist, Staples turned sheepish, “uneasy,” and eager to see him on his way.12 Slave dealers bolder than Staples directly rebutted their critics, whether Yankee abolitionists or southern slaveholders themselves. Despite the social reality that most slave traders were honorable, respectable businessmen and even community leaders engaged in an entirely lawful occupation, after the rise of radical abolitionism in the early 1830s, slave owners deflected responsibility for the sin of slave ownership by scapegoating the dealers who peddled human commodities. Time and again, masters proclaimed that the dishonest, disreputable, and reviled “nigger trader” was to blame for the scourge of slavery. “We despise the slave-trader,” declared one D.C. slaveholder. “Throughout all the South he is a marked man. The gentleman does not shake hands with . . . the . . . ‘Negro-buyer.’” Kentuckyborn lawyer and one-term Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln understood the discourse and parroted it back to an audience in 1854. “[Y]ou have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the ‘Slave-Dealer,’” he told them: He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the ‘slave-dealers’ children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave dealer you avoid the ceremony – instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family.

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Mississippi senator and slaveholder Jefferson Davis carried the argument one step further. Slave dealers, he declared, “are usually northern men, who come among us but are not of us.” The problem in all of this was that the truthfulness of the rhetoric did not match its ubiquity.13 Richard Hildreth wrote in his antislavery novel, The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive, that practically every slaveholder “pretends to look with a certain contempt on the trader to whom he sells them” and “of whom he buys them,” yet “in what respect the slave traders are less respectable than the slave raisers, or the slave buyers, I am unable to see.” Certainly slave traders such as the Williams brothers acknowledged no dishonor or embarrassment in their occupation. They advertised their services and wants in the public papers and upon request shamelessly took abolitionists on guided tours of their incarceration facilities. One correspondent observed in 1849 that “Col. williams” – likely William H. – “looks and talks like a kind-hearted, benevolent man.” In conversation, Williams “argue[d] that his vocation as a dealer in human chattels is no more cruel or disreputable than working slaves on plantations, and buying or selling them as caprice or wants might dictate.” The amused visitor wrote incredulously, “He eased his conscience of the damning sin by comparison!” It was a tried and true defense. Eight years earlier, a “young man” in charge of Williams’ jail, probably Joshua Staples, informed English abolitionist Joseph Sturge “that he knew of no reasons for condemning slave-traders, which did not equally apply to slaveholders.” The remark struck the traveler as valid. “You will bear in mind,” Sturge recorded, “that this was said within view of the capitol, where slave-holders control your national legislation, and within a few minutes’ walk of that mansion where a slave-holder,” John Tyler of Virginia, “sits in the presidential chair.” As a result, the abolitionist continued facetiously, “the humble slave-dealer of the district should feel himself in honourable company, and really regard his occupation as one of respectability and public utility.”14 The presence of William H. Williams’ slave jail in Washington, D.C., supplied ample fodder for abolitionist critiques of slavery and the slave trade in the nation’s capital and lent urgency to appeals for their termination there. But how to achieve such lofty goals? And who would lead 215

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the effort? Who could display the requisite strength and courage and moral fortitude to stand on principle against the evils of human bondage? Thousands upon thousands of American citizens believed that perhaps such an individual could be found somewhere in the halls of Congress.15 The District of Columbia had been purposefully created from slave territory. No less significant a founder than George Washington preferred a southern home for the nation’s new capital, a location where southern traditions would be respected and the institution of bondage insulated from challenge. And so the District was conjured out of the slaveholding states of Maryland and Virginia, the federal city arising from mosquito-infested swampland. Although southern slaveholders assumed the site of the capital would dissuade agitators from pressing antislavery causes and encourage acceptance of the institution there, some who recognized the incongruity of slavery in the District spoke out. In January 1802, the grand jury for Alexandria County, within the District of Columbia, presented Congress with a statement of grievance about the disgrace of buying and selling bondmen and -women in the new national capital. A proposal in January 1805 to gradually emancipate children born on or after July 4 of that year to enslaved mothers whose masters resided in the District of Columbia failed in Congress by a vote of 47–65.

By the early nineteenth century, the revolutionary era’s momentum in the direction of freedom had stalled.16 Yet despite the waning enthusiasm for extending freedom’s blessings to slaves, in spring 1816, Virginia representative John Randolph of Roanoke made a motion “to inquire into the existence of an inhuman and illegal traffic in slaves, carried on, in, and through the District of Columbia” and to report on the propriety of implementing measures to end it. Article 1, section 8 of the US Constitution empowered Congress to exercise exclusive legislative authority over the District “in all Cases whatsoever,” but that provision posed an immediate threat to southern congressmen’s slaveholding constituents. The United States’ legal participation in the transatlantic slave trade had formally ended in 1808, so, to meet their labor demands, states wedded to slavery necessarily relied on the redistribution of the country’s existing enslaved workforce via the domestic slave trade. As a result, already by 1816, many southern 216

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congressmen viewed any proposition “to prevent the internal trade in slaves” as “an idea well calculated to produce excitement and alarm in the slave-holding States.”17 Nevertheless, petitions from across the country, begging Congress to grapple with the institution of slavery in the national capital, trickled in throughout the 1820s. A few even originated in southern, slaveholding states. In 1822, Congress received a memorial from the Manumission Society of Tennessee, requesting that slaves born in the District of Columbia be freed upon attaining a certain age. The House of Representatives referred the request to a committee, where it died. In 1826, the House Committee on the District of Columbia voted down another effort to gradually abolish slavery in the capital and restrain the slave trade within its boundaries.18 During his two terms in Congress spanning 1825 to 1829, Representative Charles Miner of Pennsylvania emerged as the most persistent, early congressional champion for the eradication of the D.C. slave trade. Slave dealers had made Washington “their headquarters for carrying on the domestic slave trade,” he informed his colleagues. “This traffic, and the views it exhibits . . . are as offensive to the people of the District as they are unjust in themselves, and impolitic in us to countenance.” Miner reviewed the history of attempts to rescind the slave trade in the nation’s capital and then collated and presented the full range of arguments against it. Slave dealers made extensive use of the public jails to house their chattel and also erected their own private prisons, “those secret repositories of misery,” for the same purpose. Traders kidnapped and unlawfully enslaved free blacks, carried away into lifetime bondage slaves scheduled to become free, and drove desperate slaves to kill or maim themselves “from anguish and despair” at the prospect of forced relocation and sale away from family and friends.

The D.C. slave trade inflicted a host of injustices upon the black population, but it also exerted detrimental consequences upon whites and the nation as whole. The spectacle of manacled slaves trudging sullenly through the streets of Washington was offensive to the “moral sensibility of its citizens” and injurious to public morals as the masses became anesthetized to the brutality of it all. Furthermore, the slave trade damaged the US reputation abroad. The US government, Miner explained, stood for “[j]ustice and equal rights” rather than despotism, yet foreign guests – the panoply of 217

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ambassadors, dignitaries, and diplomats from across the globe – congregated in the nation’s capital, only to witness shocking, shameful scenes of slave coffles paraded through the streets. It was a national embarrassment incongruent with American values. The honorable thing for Congress to do was act, Miner concluded, and the time for Congress to act was now.

Otherwise, he cautioned his colleagues, “Your silence gives sanction to the trade.” The House of Representatives agreed to consider Miner’s motion by a vote of 104–70, but southern opposition prevented the passage of any legislation hostile to the commerce in black bodies.19 The emergence of a radical abolitionist movement in the late 1820s and early 1830s accelerated the pace at which petitions calling for legislation to restrict slavery and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., reached Congress. Memorials arrived from Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and other northern states. Indicating “the gross inconsistency of the theory and practice of our Government,” one representative from Pennsylvania presented seven petitions totaling more than one thousand signatures from those who favored a ban on slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.20 Many of the politically active signatories of these petitions bound for Congress were women who, though unable to vote, still voiced their informed opinions. As subordinated members of American society, denied many basic rights, antebellum-era women could sympathize with the plight of slaves in ways that most white men could not, and the well-known traffic in slaves in the nation’s capital captured their attention. In late 1831, Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott and 2,311 “other female citizens of the city of Philadelphia and its vicinity” sent a memorial to abolish the slave trade in Washington, D.C. The House of Representatives also received, in 1835, petitions “signed by eight hundred ladies” from New York and another from “172 females,” among others, “praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.” The next year, a Vermont congressman presented similar petitions from “one hundred females of Cornwall,” Vermont, and an additional 426 women from surrounding Addison County. Female petitioners’ words at times took their male congressional representatives by surprise. When two antislavery petitions arrived from Ohio – one just from women – in January 1836, future president James Buchanan, in his 218

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brief stint as US senator from Pennsylvania, observed that “the memorial from the softer sex contains as much matter of offence, insult, and vituperation, applicable to all the slaveholding portions of their fellowcitizens, as could possibly have been put into a paper of the same compass.” Buchanan found it unbecoming. He disapproved of the women’s bold language and criticized their “fanaticism,” remarking, “They have unsexed themselves.”21 Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, unique among former presidents in returning to the House after stepping down as commander-in-chief, submitted more petitions in favor of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia than did any other congressman. Soon after his return to the House chamber in 1831, Adams presented a batch of fifteen such memorials, not from his own constituents in Massachusetts but from individuals in Pennsylvania who entrusted him with their written sentiments. In January 1836, Adams offered the House a similar petition from four hundred citizens of Indiana and Westmoreland counties, also in the Keystone State.22 From 1835 to 1836, what was once a trickle and then a steady stream of petitions against the D.C. slave trade became a raging torrent. In 1835, the American Anti-Slavery Society launched a mass mailing campaign that sent thousands of abolitionist pamphlets to the South, enraging slaveholders, who responded by burning the incendiary literature and stepping up their vigilance in detecting possible abolitionist agents in their midst. Abolitionists then redoubled their efforts to persuade Congress through a flood of petitions requesting the destruction of the slave trade in Washington, D.C. One estimate placed the total number of signatures over the two-year span from 1835 to 1836 at 34,000. Memorials concerning slavery in the District of Columbia composed a sizeable majority of all petitions submitted to Congress in the second half of the 1830s. Yet in a nation of approximately 15 million people, signers represented less than one-quarter of 1 percent of all Americans. Proslavery defenders took comfort in the fact that, however vocal they were, abolitionists were miniscule in their numbers, with little public support. “The whole number of abolition petitioners scarcely exceeded thirty thousand,” observed Representative Henry Laurens Pinckney of South Carolina, adding dismissively that “one half . . . were females, and it was 219

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confidently believed that a considerable number of the remainder were children.” As he saw it, none of their signatures really mattered.23 Still, southern congressmen vehemently resented the deluge of incoming petitions. Most practically, the onslaught of memorials from out-of-theway places such as Belmont County, Ohio, and some two dozen more from the town of Utica and Oneida County, New York, robbed inordinate quantities of time on the floor that they would rather spend debating other issues. More pointedly, southern senators and representatives believed the petitions an affront to their constituents, their traditional way of life, and their states. Among the arguments political leaders from the South invoked in the 1830s to ignore calls for Congress to interfere with slavery in Washington, D.C., was the fact that almost all of the petitions originated in the North and “came from persons not interested personally in the question of negro slavery.” Moreover, “[c]onsidering that the District of Columbia is composed of cessions of territory made to the United States by the [slaveholding] States of Virginia and Maryland,” reported one House committee in 1831, nothing should be done “until the wisdom of State Governments shall have devised some practicable means of eradicating or diminishing the evil of slavery.” Any action on Congress’s part would violate Virginia’s and Maryland’s implied faith that slavery would be legal in the lands they donated to the District. In addition, members of Congress recognized that any liberation of slaves in the nation’s capital would transform Washington into a haven for runaways from the adjoining states, thereby endangering the security of area masters’ right to their enslaved property. Until Virginia and Maryland developed their own plans to deal with bondage, the committee concluded, “it would be unwise and impolitic, if not unjust . . . for Congress to interfere in a subject of such delicacy and importance as is the relation between master and slave.” By 1836, as the abolitionist petition drive gained increasing momentum, southern representatives more readily denied that Congress exercised lawful jurisdiction over slavery in the District at all. Recognizing that congressional tampering with slavery in Washington set a precedent to meddle with slavery in the western territories, and possibly even in the states, southern congressmen simply rejected altogether the notion that Congress possessed the constitutional authority to legislate on the matter.

To do so, they cautioned, would insult the slaveholding states and 220

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jeopardize the survival of the Union. One southern congressman who adhered to these views was Representative Rice Garland, who in just a few years would be sitting on the Louisiana Supreme Court to deliberate William H. Williams’ fate after importing enslaved criminals into New Orleans.24 The House of Representatives, where the Three-Fifths Compromise from 1787 magnified the South’s political voice by counting slaves, though ineligible to vote, as 60 percent of a free person for purposes of representation, opted to stifle debate over slavery rather than confront the divisive issue head-on. By the so-called “gag rule” of 1836, any petitions to the House on the subject of slavery were received and automatically tabled, precluding their reading, discussion, or printing.

Watching from the gallery the day the “gag rule” first passed was convalescing shoemaker Henry Wilson, visiting Washington from Massachusetts. From his vantage point, he recollected, “I . . . saw the slave masters ‘laying on the table’ the petition[s] of the Christian men and women of the country against the abominable traffic in human beings.” Because it was a resolution and not a standing rule, the gag rule required renewal each legislative session to remain in force. A majority in the House voted to continue it during subsequent congresses, and its 1840 iteration grew more onerous than ever. According to the “21st rule” approved that year, “No petition, memorial, resolution, or other paper praying the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, or any State or Territory, or the slave trade between the States or Territories of the United States in which it now exists, shall be received by this House, or entertained in any way whatever.” The harsh new gag rule did not allow for even the receipt of antislavery memorials. “To receive these petitions would imply the power to grant their prayers,” explained a Georgia representative. As he and his southern colleagues maintained, “Congress has no such power. Hence the absurdity of their reception.” As in the House, antislavery petitions in the 1830s had thrown the Senate into a dither, but after extensive debate that legislative body adopted a policy less stringent than the House’s gag rule, if not much different in net effect. These attempts to silence opponents of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia did not produce the intended outcome, however. To the contrary, energized 221

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abolitionists flooded Congress with more antislavery petitions than ever, some with several thousand signatures, in the optimistic hope that they might be heard.25 For years, Massachusetts’ elder statesman John Quincy Adams led the charge to overturn the gag rule in the House. Although no abolitionist, Adams upheld antislavery petitioners’ First Amendment rights to speak freely and express their grievances to their government. Despite southern representatives’ hostility to those opinions, memorialists still deserved an airing on the House floor, Adams insisted. Marshaling his unparalleled knowledge of parliamentary procedure and its arcane loopholes, acquired through a lifetime of public service in his nation’s government, Adams’ wily tactics and crafty ploys made slavery a frequent topic of conversation in the House, in spite of the gag rule. In 1837, Adams “presented a petition from one hundred and fifty women, [the] wives and daughters of his immediate constituents, praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.” Soon thereafter, he submitted before the House “the petition of nine ladies of Fredericksburg,” Virginia, “to put a stop to the slave trade” in the capital. Because the women lived in a slaveholding state, he assiduously avoided identifying them by name out of fear for their personal safety. Adams barely escaped censure when, perhaps too cleverly, he “attempt[ed] to introduce . . . a petition from slaves, for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.” Appalled House colleagues proposed a resolution stating that Adams “committed an outrage on the rights and feelings of a large portion of the people of this Union; a flagrant contempt on the dignity of this House; and, by extending to slaves a privilege only belonging to freemen, directly invite[d] the slave population to insurrection.” Adams survived the temporary outrage and persisted in his labors. In 1838, he offered for the House’s consideration some 350 petitions bearing a total of between 34,000 and 35,000 names. The next year, he revealed to his colleagues that “he had received a mass of letters threatening him with assassination” for attempting to introduce petitions banning slavery or the slave trade. Despite the intimidation, Adams drew upon his uncanny knack for besting his congressional adversaries to chip away at the 222

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gag rule. It took him eight years to achieve its demise: members of the House finally voted to overturn the measure in December 1844.26 That same year, 1844, also brought the United States its fifteenth presidential election campaign season. Slave pens such as the one belonging to William H. Williams had seen many commanders-in-chief come and go uneventfully, but in 1844 the politics of the slave pen injected themselves into the national contest for president, at least for local voters in and near the nation’s capital. That year, slavery infiltrated mainstream presidential politics to an unprecedented degree, affecting the candidate selection process and the political debates between the two competing major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs. When the Democratic convention opened in Baltimore, former president Martin Van Buren, who served as the heir to Andrew Jackson from 1837 to 1841, appeared the obvious choice to secure the nomination once again. On the first ballot, however, Democratic challengers Lewis Cass of Michigan, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania collectively denied the ex-president the requisite two-thirds majority vote. In subsequent rounds of balloting, Van Buren’s support waned as Cass’ grew, but Cass could not attain the needed two-thirds vote either. James Knox Polk received his first vote on the eighth round of balloting and quickly emerged as the Democrats’ compromise candidate, winning the nomination on the ninth ballot. As one anonymous Democratic contemporary explained, Polk gained preference over frontrunner Van Buren “because he was from [the] slave holding state” of North Carolina (though a legislator in Tennessee) and, more importantly, because he was “positively and absolutely” sympathetic to the “unconditional and immediate annexation” of the slaveholding republic of Texas into the United States. American political observers unanimously understood that, whenever Texas entered the Union, it would augment the tally of slave states. Polk ran for president with vice presidential nominee George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania on an avowedly expansionist platform that would usher slaveholding Texas, as well as other parts of the North American continent, into the Union and shun federal interference with slavery. Polk squared off against three-time presidential nominee Henry Clay, the Whig former senator from Kentucky. Clay announced his opposition to 223

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13 A Polk and Dallas flag from the presidential election of 1844.

Source: The Mark R. and Rosalind E. Shenkman Collection, Shenkman Capital, 461 Fifth Avenue, 22nd floor, New York, N.Y.

the annexation of Texas, which he calculated could earn him antislavery votes in the North despite his status as a slaveholder himself.27 In mid-October 1844, Thomas Williams, presiding over the Yellow House while his brother fought court battles in Louisiana, sparked controversy when he hoisted a flag above the Yellow House with the names of the Democratic ticket of Polk and Dallas inscribed on it. (See Figure 13.) In the last month of the 1844 presidential election, the Polk and Dallas flag that rippled in the wind over the Yellow House became a touchstone for political division. It set off a newspaper war in which the Whig and Democratic presses each labored to impose the onus of the political banner’s placement over Williams’ slave pen on to their political opponents.28 The kerfuffle over the Polk and Dallas flag demonstrated its potency as a symbol of political identity. It began with a report from a correspondent in Washington, D.C., to the New York American, stating that “a tall pole surmounted with a large and handsome flag, bearing in the largest letters the names of ‘Polk and Dallas,’” had been erected inside “the ‘jail’ or ‘pen’” where the city’s “negro traders put their 224

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Cracking the Digital Ceiling Women in Computing around the World Edited by Carol Frieze and Jeria L. Quesenbarry Is computing just for men? Are men and women suited to different careers? This collection of global perspectives challenges these commonly held western views, perpetuated as explanations for women's low participation in computing. By providing an insider look at how different cultures worldwide impact the experiences of women in computing, the book introduces readers to theories and evidence that support the need to turn to environmental factors, rather than innate potential, to understand what determines women's participation in this growing field. This wakeup call to examine the obstacles and catalysts within various cultures and environments will help those interested in improving the situation understand where they might look to make changes that could impact women's participation in their classrooms, companies, and administrations.

Carol Frieze works on diversity and inclusion in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. She focuses on culture and broadening participation in computing. She is co-author of Kicking Butt in Computer Science: Women in Computing at Carnegie Mellon University (2015).

Frieze is winner of the 2016 AccessComputing Capacity Building Award and the 2017 winner of the Computing Research Association's A. Nico Habermann Award.

Jeria L. Quesenberry is an associate teaching professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include cultural influences on IT students and professionals, social inclusion, and broadening participation. She is co-author of Kicking Butt in Computer Science: Women in Computing at Carnegie Mellon University (2015).

January 2020

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$29.99 US / $33.95 CAD £22.99 Paperback 9781108740074

Introduction

In 1882 renowned English scientist Charles Darwin announced that “[t]he chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman” (Darwin, 1871, p. 564). This belief in women’s inferior intellect was not new,1 but as an eminent scientist, Darwin’s proclamations held great sway in his time and place – and since – although nowadays few would admit to this. Or would they? Jump forward to 1992 and we see the arrival of John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which became a phenomenal best-seller (selling more than fifteen million copies globally2), and continues to be so. While the book is not as forthright in saying women’s intellect is inferior, it does explain the many ways in which men and women differ – including the ways they think (Gray, 1992).

The mindset that assumes men and women have different intellectual abilities and capabilities has a strong hold on public thinking in the United States and many parts of the Western world. Such thinking feeds our stereotypes and our biases and is used to explain why men and women “choose” different areas of study, different careers, and hold different aspirations – including how they relate to computing; computer science (CS); informatics, information, and communication technologies (ICTs); information systems (IS); information technology (IT); and related fields.

This book includes a collection of perspectives that challenge the pink brain, blue brain3 myth and provides voices from multiple cultures and countries. Our inspiration and motivation for this book came from working with computer science majors at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the United States and recognizing that for women to be successful in computer science we did not have to change the curriculum to suit “women’s ways of thinking” – women can do the intellectual work as 1

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well as their male peers – but we did need to change the culture (Frieze and Quesenberry, 2015).

Thus, our goal with this book was to collect a range of global perspectives to show that women’s participation in computing4 is largely determined by cultural factors. To accomplish this goal we have brought together a landscape of researchers and educators in this edited volume.

We have included brief summaries and quotes of some of their work throughout this introduction to set a foundational understanding of the topics at hand. In the final section of this introduction we have also included a guide to the chapters and their highlights, to help our readers navigate the organization of the contents.

We showcase the role of cultures, which can vary even within one country, and illustrate how a multitude of cultural factors influence women’s participation in computing. Along with cultural heterogeneity, women and men are not single separate categories – we are all shaped by intersectionality and complex identities including such factors as race and ethnicities, disabilities, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs. Our experiences are subject to the values, attitudes, and behaviors of cultures at large as well as the micro-cultures we inhabit such as our families, schools, workplaces, and peer groups.

WOMEN IN COMPUTING: DATA ON PARTICIPATION

Gender balance in itself can have particular impact on the individual experiences of women in computing. As one Swedish computer scientist explained, being one of very few women “had the quite strange side effect of [me] quickly becoming a familiar face to almost everyone in the program – on good days it felt like being a celebrity, on bad days it felt like being a zoo animal” (Linquist and Melinder, Chapter 11). Being the only woman on the software engineering team, or being the only girl in the computer science class, can mean being seen as representative of all women and not as another engineer or student. It can also lead to feelings of isolation and non-belonging – and at its extreme to leaving the field.

What we find as we explore the data from different countries and cultures is that women are seriously underrepresented in computing in many parts of the world. This would appear to support a commonplace American belief that computing is a boys’ field. Consider that in 2016 in the United States, only 19% of computer science undergraduate degree recipients were female (Zweben and Bizot, 2017) and women held only 26% of computing occupations (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017).

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For minority women the situation is worse. For example, African American women represented just 3% and Latinas 6% as recipients of computer science degrees (Zweben and Bizot, 2017). African American women and Latinas hold slightly less than 10% of computing occupations in the United States (National Science Foundation, 2017).

But now consider this: • 50% of CS majors at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States are women (Frieze and Quesenberry, 2015).

• 55% of CS majors at Harvey Mudd College in the United States are women (Alvardo et al., 2012).

• 59% of students enrolled in CS studies in Saudi Arabia are women (Alghamdi, 2016).

• 50% of engineering graduates in Cyprus are women (UNESCO, 2017) • 55% of entrepreneurs in the Internet industry in China are women (PRCSCIO, 2015).

• 50% of undergraduates in computing at University of Malaya and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in Malaysia are women (Othman and Latih, Chapter 15).

• 40%, 65%, and 50% of students in CS/computer engineering at the undergraduate, master’s and doctorate levels, respectively, in India are women (Huyer, Chapter 2).

While women are seriously underrepresented in computing fields in the United States, and in most of the world, the situation is not universal as the above data, and some of the chapters in this book, illustrate. Additionally, women have shown themselves to be strong participants in many fields that were once closed to them on the grounds of biology and perceived innate characteristics. In the United States and Portugal, we can look to medicine as examples of this change. In both countries there is near gender equality in the medical profession (e.g., AAMC, 2017; Lopes, Chapter 12).

Furthermore, in 2016, 57% of all bachelor’s degrees went to women in the United States, while 50.3% of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees went to women in 2013 (Girls Collaborative Project, 2016; National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). We see a similar picture emerging globally.

For example, in Russia women outnumber men in overall graduation rates, with women gaining 56% of postsecondary degrees (Khenner, Chapter 13).

In Portugal in 2009, 59.3% of the total higher education graduates were women. Similarly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that women earn more postsecondary degrees than men, and a UNESCO analysis of women in science,

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technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields found that women represent 53% of the graduates in tertiary education in bachelors and master’s programs (OECD, 2017; Huyer, Chapter 2). Such data illustrate women’s intellectual potential to succeed in any field and it seems reasonable to suggest that this should include computing. It also suggests that data tell us only part of the story. To get a better understanding we need to pay immediate and close attention to the cultural factors that might be enabling or deterring women’s participation in computing. “Cultural understanding is crucial to an understanding of gender influences and barriers because gender is experienced through culture” (Trauth, Chapter 3).

One of the most interesting discussions relating to data challenges some of our expectations and has serious implications for women in computing in the West. Studies have found that affluent, developed countries that feature highly in gender equality rankings are more likely to have the lowest participation of women in computing (Chow and Charles, Chapter 1).

According to a recent study the gender gap in STEM increases with increasing levels of gender equality (Stoet and Geary, 2018). The World Economic Forum (2016) ranked Scandinavian countries as the most equitable of societies.5 While Scandinavian countries like Norway, Finland, and Sweden are leaders in gender equality they have the largest gender gaps in college degrees in STEM fields (Stoet and Geary, 2018). Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has good representation of women in high school computing and yet very low ranking – 141 out of 144 – for gender parity according to the World Economic Forum (2016).

GENDER THEORIES: ESSENTIALISM, SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM, AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Historically, there are at least three major theoretical perspectives typically used to explain women’s participation in computing: essentialism, social constructionism, and intersectionality theory.

Essentialism is the belief that people have properties that are essential to their composition. This suggests that all members of a particular group (e.g., gender, race, sexual orientation) innately share a common set of fixed, unified characteristics that form the primary components in understanding human actions (Wajcman, 1991). Hence, at the core of essentialism is the belief that since men and women are inherently different in their physical bodies, they are also different in the ways in which they act, behave, and think – and in how they relate to computing.

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The essentialist way of thinking carries serious, negative repercussions for countries where women are poorly represented in computing. In Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men, researchers argue that essentialism is still entrenched in the dominant culture of many advanced industrial countries where a deep-seated belief in gender differences is maintained and supported by a culture that values individual preferences and self-expression (Charles and Grusky, 2005).

Even though such cultures no longer hold that men are better than women, they still subscribe to a belief that men and women are very different. This continuing belief in difference means boys and girls are more likely to follow gendered studies and career paths even in countries perceived as very progressive on gender issues.

Some fascinating research that challenges essentialism and beliefs in intellectual gender differences has emerged from the field of neuroscience. Lise Eliot, professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, debunks the belief that brain differences account for gender stratification in intelligence and capacity for scientific thinking. Eliot’s exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from birth to adolescence is explained in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain. She concluded that there is “surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains” (Eliot, 2009, p. 5). Indeed, the work of Eliot and other researchers has shown that men and women are not as different in their intellectual potential as popular wisdom would have us believe (Barnett and Rivers, 2005; Fine, 2010; Halpern, 2000; Hyde, 2005; Hyde and Linn, 2006).

Social construction is the belief that human behavior is rooted in historical and cultural interaction and practices. The central concept of Berger and Luckmann, explained in The Social Construction of Reality (1966), is that social systems are based on interactions that eventually develop into habitualized norms and roles. Over time these interactions become institutionalized, and, hence, meaning is embedded in individuals and society such that when a woman enters a male-dominated field she is seen as “stepping out of line” in terms of cultural expectations. Sandra Bem’s cognitive theory of schemas explains how social norms start early in life and become entrenched unconscious guides to our behavior and attitudes (Bem, 1981). Bem suggests that gender schemas help solidify cultural stereotypes. They provide an “easy” way of perceiving the world around us while we struggle to identify with gender constructs in the cultures in which we find ourselves.

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Many suggest that a social construction perspective is key to understanding cross-cultural variation in gender roles and expectations.

American-based authors Henry Etzkowitz, Carol Kemelgor, and Brian Uzzi provide a life-course analysis (based on interviews and surveys) of women in the sciences from an early childhood interest, through university, to graduate school, and finally into the academic workplace in their book Athena Unbound. They conclude that despite recent advances women still face a special series of gender-related barriers to entry and success in scientific careers.

Intersectionality theory provides a framework to address the many ways in which women (and men) are not one single separate category. Our identities capture a range of interconnections, similarities, and differences that influence how we experience the world. The term “intersectionality” has been credited to Kimberle Crenshaw in her essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” in which she discusses the multidimensional experiences of black women (Crenshaw, 1989). While women are undervalued generally in our culture, individual factors, such as race, socioeconomics, sexual orientation, and ethnicity, can add levels of further marginalization. The theory also reminds us that identities are not fixed but are subject to the changing situations and micro-cultures in which we live our personal and professional lives. For instance, Trauth (2002) uses the “Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT” to characterize how individual women respond in a range of specific ways to the interplay between individual characteristics and environmental influences.

Intersectionality is particularly important to reflect on in this book of global perspectives, but we have one caveat: we are as guilty as anyone for using the binary terms “women” and “men” in our writings. We are limited by our language and have yet to find a more efficient way to explain our ideas as we address the global situation for women in computing.

The chapters in this book represent a variety of theoretical underpinnings – but common to all the perspectives is the acknowledgment that cultural factors – not innate biological considerations based on sex – play a role in the shaping of gender.

This may be a good time to let our readers know what we are not saying.

We are not saying that men and women are the same – that there are no differences – clearly our bodies indicate this – but we are saying that in some environments there may be more similarities than we realize. Several psychologists have pointed out that “a focus on factors other than gender is

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needed to help girls persist in mathematical and scientific career tracks” (Hyde and Linn, 2006, p. 599). Most importantly we agree that “gender differences are not general but specific to cultural and situational contexts” (Linn and Hyde, 1989, p. 17).

CULTURE

We use the term “culture” to refer to the complex and broad set of relationships, values, attitudes, and behaviors (along with the microcultures and counter-cultures that may also exist) that bind a specific community consciously and unconsciously (Frieze and Quesenberry, 2015; Williams, 1958). This community can be localized in the microculture of a school or department, or as extensive as the culture of a nation.

Culture is bound by context and history and we are born into specific cultures with prevailing values and structures of opportunity.

Gender is first and foremost a cultural issue, not simply a women’s issue, and we need to address the underlying cultures in which opportunities and values are situated. It is also the potential “ordinariness” of culture, rife with implicit gender-difference assumptions that can jeopardize our thinking. Gender-difference beliefs easily become mistaken for deep-rooted characteristics appearing to be completely natural while actually being socially constructed in specific cultures.

A cultural perspective can both broaden and focus our thinking. It can broaden our thinking to encompass learning from different cultures, and it can focus our thinking as we identify specific factors affecting specific situations. Galpin (2002) describes the participation of women in undergraduate computing in more than thirty countries, concluding, “The reasons that women choose to study computing will vary from culture to culture, and from country to country” (p. 94). She also reminds us that when we are “seeking solutions for women’s low participation in computing, it is important to consider all cultural and societal factors that may affect this participation” (p. 94). German professor Britta Schinzel (2002) also looked at female enrollment in CS around the world, reporting it as “culturally diversified” and noting a multiplicity of reasons accounting for higher and lower rates of female participation. As gender is often constructed differently in different cultures, taking a cultural approach allows us to see quite clearly and convincingly that many characteristics ascribed as natural to men and to women are actually produced in a culture.

We acknowledge that our Western worldview and our own cultural experiences have influenced this work. Our perspective for defining

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culture is United States–centric and it is difficult for us to step outside our own cultures, which makes this collection both challenging and riveting.

One of our authors asks us to consider this interesting cross-cultural question: As computing becomes more ubiquitous, when we see similar cultural obstacles for women across nations, are we seeing a branding based on Silicon Valley computing culture? “When the Silicon Valley behavioral cultural frame is applied as a template to other geographic areas, it spreads some of the same problems with regard to opportunities, power, and financial inequality for women and others in the computer industry” (Applin, Chapter 8).

Many of us are impatient for change regarding the participation of women in computing. But history shows us that culture is mutable and dynamic, shaping and being shaped by those who occupy it, in a synergistic diffusive process. We believe it is at the level of culture that the most effective changes can occur and lead to women’s successful participation in computing.

HISTORY

Western history represents a particularly interesting cultural case that clearly shows the importance of context. Historically women have played a very important role in the development of the field of computing, a role largely determined by the culture, social needs, and trends of the times.

Here, we touch on this very briefly (mostly from a Western perspective), and suggest readers refer to the works of specialists (including among others J. Abbatte, D. Gurer, W. Isaacson, and K. Kleiman).

In the early history of computing, Ada Byron Lovelace, a mathematician, played a significant part in the development of the concept of computation, translating a lecture, on Charles Babbage’s design of the analytical engine, from French to English. Lovelace added her own notes, which ended up being more expansive than the original article. The collaboration of Lovelace and Babbage on the difference and analytical engine could be seen as leading to the forerunner of the modern computer. Lovelace developed structures that resemble today’s programming structures. She visualized how to program the engine to calculate and how to store sequences of operations (Gurer, 2002; Matsui and Chilana, 2004).

A big jump forward to the mid-twentieth century shows how wartime often provides us with good examples to illustrate the changing levels of women’s contribution in predominantly male fields. During the 1940s in World War II, women played a major role as code breakers in the

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top-secret efforts going on at Bletchley Park in England. Dr. Sue Black (interviewed in Chapter 10), worked to save this famous landmark when it was in danger of being dismantled. She also had the pleasure of interviewing several of the surviving women code breakers.

In England and in the United States many women worked alongside men on calculating weapons trajectories at a time when people were the “computers.” In 1943 almost all “computers” were women, and, ironically, women were perceived as best for the job: “Programming requires lots of patience, persistence and a capacity for detail and those are traits that many girls have” (Gurer, 2002, p. 176). Gurer suggests that, historically, praise for computer pioneers has tended to focus on hardware (developed by men), while ignoring the early programmers and inventors of programming (women), but she points out that “[t]oday’s achievements in software are built on the shoulders of the first pioneering women programmers” (Gurer, 2002, p. 120). The Hollywood movie Hidden Figures documents another often ignored group – African American female mathematicians and “computers” who contributed to the space race. The movie is based on the non-fiction book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shutterly, which immortalized women such as Katherine Johnson (Shutterly, 2016).

Admiral Grace Hopper was an American pioneer in computing. She designed the first compiler for programming languages and was one of the first programmers for the Harvard Mark I computer, used in the war effort for World War II. Grace Hopper and her team were credited with coining the computer terms “bug” and “debugging,” after discovering a moth stuck in the workings of a computer. Her name and contribution have inspired the greatest global gathering of women in computing: the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing,6 which attracted 20,000 participants in 2018.

A CASE EXAMPLE: THE CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY STORY

Our initial motivation for this collection of perspectives from a wide range of countries and cultures came from observations and studies of undergraduate students in the computer science major at Carnegie Mellon University. This inspired us to challenge the pink brain, blue brain mentality that we believe has become a major obstacle to gender

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balance in the field of computing in the United States and many parts of the Western world.

We found that women are “kicking butt”7 in CS in some environments in the United States. The percentage of women enrolling and graduating in computer science at Carnegie Mellon has exceeded national averages for many years. Indeed, the school hit the news in fall 2017 when an unprecedented 49.7% new women entered the CS major followed by the 2018 entering class with 50% women. But Carnegie Mellon is not alone – other institutions in the United States have also had success in addressing the gender gap. Harvey Mudd College, for example, went from 10% women in CS in 2006, the year Maria Klawe (a highly respected computer scientist) took over as college president, to 40% women in CS by 2012 (Alvarado et al., 2012). Schools that are investing in cultural change may be quite different, and have different approaches, but they share some straightforward practices that have proven to be successful in the United States: they pay attention to the situation; they assess which interventions will work in their particular environments; they have institutional and financial support for diversity and inclusion efforts; they value and believe in women; they are open to change from the status quo; and they have multiple levels of commitment. They are living proof that – as Carnegie Mellon CS professor and Founder of Women@SCS, Lenore Blum says – increasing the participation of women in computing “is not rocket science!”

At Carnegie Mellon the critical strategies for changing the culture were threefold: institutional support (involving deans, faculty, staff, administrators, funding, values, and the school’s philosophy); student leadership through our energetic and creative women’s organization, Women@SCS, endorsed by the school and central to the culture (providing leadership, mentoring, encouragement, and peer-to-peer programs involving both undergraduates and graduates); and leveling the playing field (to ensure women, and others, do not miss out on valuable social, academic, and professional opportunities and experiences). Overall we have strived to take a holistic approach, recognizing that both academic life and social life work together for students to be successful (Veilleux et al., 2013; Walton and Cohen, 2007). Women@SCS has helped provide a strong shield against isolation, a primary factor negatively impacting the experience and performance of women and minorities in computing (Etzkowitz et al., 2000; Smith, 2010; Taylor, 2002).

Since 2002 we have carried out a series of studies to monitor the attitudes, experiences, and perceptions of our CS majors, watching for issues that need attention. What continues to surprise us is how similar

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the men and women are (Blum and Frieze, 2005; Frieze and Quesenberry, 2015). Undergraduate students in the CS environment at Carnegie Mellon show a spectrum of attitudes toward the field. We have found many variables among students’ experiences, attitudes, and expectations, and a complex spectrum of gender similarities and differences that exist among, and between, men and women – but no significant gender divide.

Since 2000 we have learned many valuable lessons about women in CS at Carnegie Mellon. In a nutshell, what stood out to us are the following: for women to be successful in CS we did not need to change the curriculum to be focused on so-called women’s interests in computing but we did need to change the culture and environment (Frieze et al., 2011; Frieze and Quesenberry, 2015). Indeed, gender-difference approaches have not provided satisfactory explanations for the low participation of women in CS, and beliefs in a gender divide may actually be deterring women from seeing themselves in male-dominated fields.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

One of the most interesting and fun elements of working on this book has been the collaboration with authors who bring their perspectives from around the world. We are delighted to include chapters from twentynine experts, practitioners, researchers, educators, and activists who are leaders in understanding how culture shapes women’s participation in computing. The authors also represent a variety of different disciplines – including anthropology, computer science, human–computer interaction, information sciences/systems, informatics, policy, sociology, and statistics – which lends to the richness of the work and to their conclusions. The authors raise interesting questions and use a variety of theories, methods, and interventions in their chapters. You may notice that we purposefully kept the authors’ language and colloquialisms to add to the richness of the analysis and highlight the diversity of cultural context.

Each chapter includes five to ten discussion questions that we hope will continue the conversation and generate ideas for future considerations.

In organizing the book, we cast a wide net to include as many cultural perspectives as possible and we are pleased to include analyses of more than fifty separate countries across the globe. Yet we do not see this as an end in itself. There are many countries and cultures that unfortunately are not represented in this book. Furthermore, our authors bring a diversity of perspectives to their chapters, but they are not speaking for the full community they represent. Their work is derived from and situated in

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their particular cultural community, but by no means is intended to represent a generalization for their entire community. All of our authors faced a tremendous task knowing from our own experience that little global research has been done on women in computing.

Table I.1 gives an overview of the topics covered in each chapter, along with high-level descriptions and keywords. The guide to the chapters includes additional details not summarized in the following paragraphs where we describe the parts of the book and identify themes that are raised among the chapters.

This book is organized in four parts that present perspectives on women’s interest, pursuit, and persistence in secondary schools, postsecondary schools, and careers in the computing field. Part I, “Global Perspectives,” includes research that explores cross-national comparisons of women in computing from more than a single country perspective. In this part, the authors present fascinating data and analyses of the global picture of women in computing ranging from some of the poorest, least developed countries to the highly modernized. We are fortunate to have chapters from authors who have done exceptional research for many years to increase our understanding of women in computing from a crosscultural perspective.

Tiffany Chow and Maria Charles show data that challenge our assumptions as we learn that increased gender equity, higher education, and modernization do not lead to higher rates of women in computing. Sophia Huyer summarizes data from a recent UNESCO report showing that while there are opportunities for women to enter STEM fields, a range of cultural barriers (namely, family and childcare considerations) constrain their participation. Eileen M. Trauth complements the previous chapters’ quantitative findings as she uses qualitative interviews from field studies in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific to explore how individual variations play a role in responding to cultural considerations. We also see that women’s careers often hit obstacles and challenges as they attempt to advance. The reasons for this vary by country but demonstrate how culture plays a central role in the shaping of women’s participation.

Part II, “Regional Perspectives,” includes research that explores crossnational comparisons of women in computing from a regional perspective.

This part includes three chapters that stand alone geographically, but share some of the similarities and differences explored throughout the book. For example, Palma Buttles and Fred Valdez, Jr. argue that women from Latin America and the Caribbean have a shared regional culture, but are still multidimensional and varied. Orit Hazzan, Efrat Nativ-Ronen, and

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Tatiana Umansky explore how regional differences in Israel influence the experiences of Jewish and Arab girls and women in the country. Although their chapter focuses on the country of Israel, we felt the cultural themes they explore between Jewish and Arab girls and women are indicative of varied cultural backgrounds of the region. Sophia Huyer and Nancy J. Hafkin describe how in several African countries childcare and maternity policies are inscribed in a nation’s constitution to contribute to women’s equal opportunities in the workplace. As in several chapters, the significance of representation and stereotypes appears, with examples that serve to reinforce stereotypes, while others challenge our expectations.

Part III, “Cultural Perspectives from the United States and Europe,” includes research that explores country case studies from primarily a Western viewpoint and that of Russia.8 Chapters in this part range broadly, not only by location but also by perspectives. Many of these perspectives emerge from individual interviews and reflections from female pioneers in the computing field. We hear the voices of women who have often been forgotten – women who have played a major role in the history of computing, women with disabilities for whom gender is just one factor in their marginalization, women who moved westward for improved opportunities, women who moved into a culture “branded” by their male colleagues.

This part includes three chapters focused on the United States, yet these chapters highlight various subcultures within the American context.

Monica P. Adya investigates female IT professionals who have overcome a variety of odds with regard to their choice of, and success in, IT careers.

Her analysis compares and contrasts the experiences of South Asian and American women in the United States workforce. Sally A. Applin gives an in-depth analysis of Silicon Valley’s computing culture and its influence on the rest of the world. She identifies cultural biases that have influenced women and speculates as to how these factors will evolve and continue to shape computing worldwide. Brianna Blaser, Cynthia Bennett, Richard E. Ladner, Sheryl E. Burgstahler, and Jennifer Mankoff provide an overview of disability history to highlight the struggles that individuals with disabilities have had with obtaining access to education and careers. They include a discussion with women with disabilities in computing education and careers and found that many of these women feel isolated and marginalized – thus they conclude with steps that can be taken to make the field more welcoming and accessible overall.

Part III also includes several chapters from a European perspective, highlighting four unique country perspectives from the United Kingdom,

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Sweden, Portugal, and Russia. Sue Black discusses her work as a leader for gender parity in computing in the United Kingdom where among her many efforts she started #techmums and the British Computer Society’s Specialist Group BCSWomen, and perhaps is most well known for initiating – and succeeding – in saving Bletchley Park, as the title of her book reflects. Sinna Lindquist and Ingrid Melinder present a history of the Swedish educational system along with facts and figures on gender divergence for different academic tracks and levels. In doing so, they describe the reasons why women might pursue a career in computing. They also share the perspectives of successful women in computing who discuss how their upbringing and background impacted their choice of education and career path. Arminda Guerra Lopes presents two case studies from Portugal (at the secondary and post-secondary levels) that help to explain the motivation for women to study or pursue a career in computer science.

Her analysis concludes that the Portuguese sociocultural influences on women are difficult to overcome and unfortunately do not fully coincide with the concept of a computing professional. Evgeniy K. Khenner provides a detailed overview of the gender imbalance of women in computing in Russia – starting with a summary of the history – and then providing statistics and explanations at the secondary, post-secondary, and employment levels. He suggests that the imbalance is based on both discrimination and female perceptions of “fit” in IT. Part IV, “Cultural Perspectives from Asia-Pacific,” includes research that explores country case studies from an Eastern viewpoint and that of Australia. In this part we include some computing cultures in which women are well represented. Ming Zhang and Yichun Yin describe historical and cultural issues related to women in China’s computing communities. They discuss an interesting situation in that women represent a very small percentage of the Chinese computing industry, yet they represent a relatively high proportion of senior positions and entrepreneurs. Mazliza Othman and Rodziah Latih provide an update on their earlier study of women in computing in Malaysia. In their current study, they continue to find that Malaysian women have a markedly different attitude toward science and mathematics compared with their Western counterparts. They conclude that computing is not viewed as a masculine field by young Malaysians and thus there is no gender imbalance. Joyojeet Pal presents a cultural analysis of the emergence of women as software engineers in Indian Tamil cinema. He suggests that the cinematic representation of women in the workplace has played a positive role, while accommodating traditional values, in shaping the perceptions of women in the Indian

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computing field. Roli Varma adds to the Indian perspective and in doing so presents a case study that shows how the perceptions of computing are welcoming to women in India since the field offers lucrative jobs, high salaries, professional careers, safe office working environments, and economic independence. Yet women still remain marginalized due to patriarchal values. Catherine Lang summarizes the underrepresentation of women in Australia and reflects on why interventions over the last several decades have had little impact on improving the participation rate of women in the computing field. She suggests that educational institutions should empower teachers to be more creative and to build opportunities for computing competence that spans the silos of traditional educational disciplines.

Throughout Part IV we hear about contexts where traditional patriarchal social expectations create barriers to women’s sustained participation. But this is not always the case. In some, despite such challenges, the field of computing opens up new career possibilities for women along with increased confidence and independence. Further, Western stereotypes about the field and perceptions of “fit” are socially constructed and not pervasive in all regions of the world. One important consideration in the part on AsiaPacific is a reminder that the terminology we use and how we name the various fields of computing may have an impact on perception and participation. Furthermore, the stereotypes and perceptions of the computing field are specific to the social context and not a universal problem that many times is generalized in mainstream media and academic literature.

References Alghamdi, F. (2016). “Women in Computing in Saudi Arabia.” In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM-W Europe Celebration of Women in Computing. Retrieved from https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:971716/FULLTEXT01.pdf.

Alvarado, C., Dodds, Z., and Libeskind-Hadas, R. (2012). “Increasing Women’s Participation in Computing at Harvey Mudd College.” ACM Inroads, 3(4), 55–64.

Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). (2017). “More Women than Men Enrolled in U.S. Medical Schools in 2017.” AAMC News, press release, December 18. Retrieved from https://news.aamc.org/press-releases/article/applicant-enroll ment-2017/.

Barnett, R., and Rivers, C. (2005). Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs. New York: Basic Books.

Berger, P. L., and Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.

Bem, S. L. (1981). “Gender Schema Theory: A Cognitive Account of Sex Typing.”

Psychological Review, 88, 354–364.

53

Dangerously Divided How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics Zoltan L. Hajnal

As America has become more racially diverse and economic inequality has increased, American politics has also become more clearly divided by race and less clearly divided by class. In this landmark book, Zoltan L. Hajnal draws on sweeping data to assess the political impact of the two most significant demographic trends of last fifty years. Examining federal and local elections over many decades, as well as policy, Hajnal shows that race more than class or any other demographic factor shapes not only how Americans vote but also who wins and who loses when the votes are counted and policies are enacted. America has become a racial democracy, with non-Whites and especially African Americans regularly on the losing side. A close look at trends over time shows that these divisions are worsening, yet also reveals that electing Democrats to office can make democracy more even and ultimately reduce inequality in well-being.

Zoltan L. Hajnal is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the award-winning books White Backlash (with Marisa Abrajano, 2015), Why Americans Don't Join the Party (with Taeku Lee, 2011), and America's Uneven Democracy (Cambridge, 2009) and has published op-eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He is actively involved in voting rights litigation and local election law reform.

January 2020

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$27.95 US / $ 31.95 CAD £21.99 Paperback 9781108719728

INTRODUCTION This book is the story of Beau and Malik and American democracy. I do not actually know Beau and Malik. In fact, I do not even know their real names. But I do know a lot about Beau and Malik. In 2016, they both provided wide-ranging details about matters such as their race, their economic status, their demographic characteristics, and their politics to the American National Election Survey, a prominent political science survey.

Beau and Malik are similar in many ways. The first and perhaps most important is class. Neither Beau nor Malik has progressed very far along the pathway to economic success. Beau made it only as far as high school graduation. He did not attend college. Malik made it only a little further. He managed to obtain an associate degree. Both earn very little.

In fact, they are both poor, reporting household income of less than $5,000 annually. Both are very much part of America’s disadvantaged working class.

Beau and Malik are similar in other potentially relevant ways.

Both are male – as their names suggest. Both were born in the United States. Both are middle-aged and both are now single. Both live in the South, as residents of the state of Georgia.

Beau and Malik are, however, very different in other ways. Beau and Malik are very different politically. One is a conservative who opposes Obamacare, more restrictions on gun ownership, and allowing more refugees into the country. He likes Trump’s border wall. The other is a liberal who favors Obamacare, greater gun control, and a higher minimum wage. One is a Republican. The other is a Democrat.

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2 / Dangerously Divided Beau and Malik are different in one other potentially, critically important way. Beau is White, as his made-up name is supposed to signal. Malik is Black, as his assigned name is designed to tell you. In this book I contend that race – the fact that one is White and the other is Black – is critical for understanding Beau and Malik and their place in American democracy, and, more broadly, for understanding the nature of contemporary American democracy.

Dangerously Divided Despite their strikingly similar economic circumstances, Beau and Malik have sharply divergent political preferences. The implication is clear. Race, not class, is the issue that divides voters. That premise is a central theme of this book. Yes, of course, class matters.

One cannot have followed the 2016 presidential election without knowing that one of the keys to Trump’s victory was a shift in working-class White votes (Casselman 2017, Cohn 2016, McGillis 2016, Porter 2016). Accounts of 2016 and 2018 also rightly noted the significance of other demographic characteristics such as religion, gender, age, and urbanicity (Chalabi 2018, Gamio 2016, Scott 2018, Velencia 2018). There is no denying that many demographic factors help to explain the vote. But the reality, as I show in these pages, is that race matters far more.

In some respects, this is not a terribly novel story. Racial divisions in American politics are relatively well known (Carmines and Stimson 1989, Kinder and Sanders 1996, King and Smith 2011, Valentino and Sears 2005). Yet because of what this book says about the depth and degree of the racial divide in the vote, the analysis presented here will reveal much that is new. Even those who are well aware of America’s racial divide may be shocked by the degree to which it is a force in virtually all US elections. It is simply not enough to say that race matters. Race certainly does matter – but it matters to such a degree that it overshadows all other important dividing lines in American society. Race is central in contexts where political parties are the principal players, and when parties are peripheral. Race is central when candidates from different racial and ethnic groups face off against each other. Race is even central when all of the candidates are White.

Race is so central it eclipses the economic conditions that many consider the key factor driving our politics. When the vote so closely resembles 56

3 / Introduction a racial census, tyranny of the White majority and racial conflict may not be that far behind. We are, in short, a nation and a society deeply – and dangerously – divided.

America’s Uneven Democracy The division documented in this book represents just the beginning of a broader story. The central focus of this book concerns what happens after the vote. This focus on the outcomes of democracy is relatively new. The bulk of political science research targets the inputs of democracy. Political scientists generally examine question such as: What are the public’s preferences? Who votes? And how are those votes counted?

These inputs are important. But, ultimately, the outcomes of that process matter most. Democracy is not a game played for the fun of it. The outcomes carry immense consequences. A majoritarian democracy, by definition, creates winner and losers. After the campaign ends and the votes are tallied, winners control the levers of power. They control vast economic resources. And they make policy decisions that deeply affect the well-being of every citizen in the nation. On the other side of the contest, losers are left on the outside looking in. Their interests and wishes may be ignored. Their pocketbooks may or may not be filled. Their well-being may be completely disregarded.

This is a normal and perhaps even a healthy aspect of democracy. But what if some win consistently and others lose consistently?

What if those from a particular social class or a specific racial group are losers over and over again? What if the advantaged class or the advantaged race tramples the rights and interests of the disadvantaged class or the disadvantaged race?

In short, with democracy comes the possibility of tyranny of the majority. This is not a new concern. Anxiety about the fate of minorities in this nation extends back to the Founders. James Madison famously declared that, with majority rule, policy can “too often be decided, not according to the rule of justice and the rights of the minor party but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority” (Hamilton et al. 1961:77). America’s electoral system does little to allay these fears.

The fact that almost every election in the United States follows “winnertake-all” majoritarian rules – as opposed to the proportional allocation of seats and power used in many other democracies – only serves to 57

4 / Dangerously Divided heighten concerns about the welfare of losers in American democracy.1 At least in theory, a slim majority of voters could elect candidates and pass laws that a large minority strongly opposes. Tyranny of the majority is a very real prospect.

As old as democracy itself, these concerns are especially relevant today. Concerns about conflict between the haves and the have-nots have only grown with America’s increasing economic inequality.

Moreover, with almost unimaginable quantities of money being funneled into the political process, the political advantages of the economically advantaged may grow, too. This leads to the fear that the rich can now dictate outcomes, while the poor have little say. Do the rich effectively rule America?

Such questions have also grown in importance as America has become more racially diverse. America is poised at a demographic tipping point. America’s White majority is likely to lose its majority status.

A more racially diverse population could encourage greater collaboration and engender greater compromise. But racial diversity could also spark greater conflict and greater upheaval. Racial changes – the possibility of White Americans losing their majority status, the calls by African Americans to address age-old racial inequities once and for all, and the efforts of America’s new immigrants to become full-fledged Americans with equal rights and equal access – raise the stakes for our democracy.

With all of this in mind, the bulk of this book examines people, processes, and outcomes. It starts by looking at candidates for office.

Which kinds of candidates tend to win, and which tend to lose? Does the leadership of the nation mirror the public? The book then moves from candidates to the voters themselves. Which voters wind up on the winning side of elections?

Which voters wind up on the losing side? How do these winners and losers differ? What factors – class, race, or other basic demographic characteristics – determine who is most apt to win and who is most apt to lose? Moving further along the pathway of democracy, the book analyzes winners and losers in the policy process. Whose opinions matter? Whose views are largely ignored? Do our nation’s policies reflect the views and interests of a broad array of the public, including Blacks and other disadvantaged groups? Or is government operating largely for Whites and the privileged few? Next, the book seeks to understand how all of this impacts the economic well-being of

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5 / Introduction individual Americans. Are outcomes for different groups on basic measures such as income, poverty, and employment impacted by who is in office?

The aim of this book is to provide a better understanding of whether the outcomes of American democracy are fair and open, with diverse winners and losers, or whether its outcomes are decidedly lopsided, with winners restricted to one group, one race, or one class, and losers in another.

With this aim in mind, I return to Beau and Malik again, and examine how their experiences exemplify the trends borne out in this book. Despite many similarities between Beau and Malik, the two men diverge sharply in terms of how they fare in American democracy.

Despite a common working-class background, Beau, a White man, and Malik, a Black man, are radically different in terms of how much of a “say” they appear to have in the political arena. By almost all obvious measures, Beau has been a winner in the democratic process.

When he voted in the 2016 presidential election, he favored Donald Trump, the winner. In fact, when he voted in the 2016 election, Beau ended up a winner in every context addressed in the survey. His favored candidate for Congress, Republican Tom Graves, won. His favored candidate for US Senate, Republican Johnny Isakson, won. Given that Beau calls himself a strong Republican, and given that he voted consistently for Republicans in 2016, one can assume that he is happy that both his governor and other US senator are Republicans. Moreover, Beau is not just a winner in the voting booth. He is, by most available measures, a winner on policy as well. Georgia’s gun-control laws are among the least restrictive in the nation; Beau supports this. Georgia favors the death penalty. It executed nine people in 2016, and has an execution rate higher than almost any other state; Beau supports this.

Georgia has among the highest uninsured rates in the nation; Beau, one can assume, is not troubled by this. He opposes Obamacare. (Why should his tax money pay to insure people who ought to work hard enough to pay for it themselves or to find jobs that carry insurance?)

By contrast, by almost every measure, Malik is a loser in American democracy. He lost in every election that the survey assessed.

He voted for Hillary Clinton. He voted for Jim Barksdale, the losing Democratic candidate in the state’s senatorial contest. He voted Democratic in a House district that was won by Republican Bob

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6 / Dangerously Divided Woodward. His straight-line Democratic vote in 2016 suggests that he likely voted Democratic and thus lost again in the state’s last gubernatorial and Senate elections. Malik’s losses extend beyond the candidates themselves. The policies that he favors have not been enacted. He favors increasing the minimum wage, yet Georgia has a minimum wage of $5.15, tied for lowest in the nation. He wants more gun control, yet Georgia allows almost everyone to own a gun, and allows all types of guns; almost everything but a sawed-off shotgun, a machine gun, or a rocket launcher is legal. There is no waiting period. He supports Obamacare. Georgia has done relatively little to support Obamacare or to expand the ranks of the insured in the state.

In short, Beau, the White man, generally ends up on democracy’s winning side, no matter how it is defined, while Malik, the Black man, generally ends up on the losing side. Beau and Malik and their political views are not fully representative of the nation as a whole, but, as the evidence in this book amply demonstrates, their political views and the degree to which Beau and Malik win and lose in the political arena mirror the uneven nature of American democracy. Of course, democracy, by its very definition, means that some people and some ideas win, and others lose. Nevertheless, as the political successes and failures of Beau and Malik suggest, America’s democracy is racially uneven. Whites are likely to end up on the top as winners, and racial and ethnic minorities are likely to end up near the bottom as losers. This discrepancy – between the democracy as experienced by Whites and by minorities – is the main theme of this book.

Time and time again, as the data here reveal, American democracy gives more weight to the views and votes of White Americans than to the views and votes of racial and ethnic minorities. Race – more than class, and more than any other demographic characteristic – determines who wins and who loses in American democracy. This is a deeply troubling feature of American democracy – a democracy that was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that often thinks of itself as color-blind. I am writing this book because this racial pattern is one that every citizen should be aware of, and because it is a pattern Americans can, and should, address.

What Can Drive Change?

Can American democracy be made more equitable? Identifying problems is one thing. Coming up with solutions – let alone solutions that are feasible – is almost always much harder. Fortunately, hidden 60

7 / Introduction beneath the overall pattern of inequality in American democracy is considerable variation in the size of the racial imbalance. There are times when racial and ethnic minorities are deeply disadvantaged, and when their opinions are largely ignored. But there are other times when racial and ethnic minorities win more regularly and their views hold just as much sway as those of White Americans. That variation holds the key to understanding and perhaps even eliminating American democracy’s racial inequities.

As I will show, one factor consistently and powerfully predicts when minorities win and when they lose. That factor is who controls the levers of power. When Democrats control the White House and Congress, all or almost all of the racial imbalance in policy responsiveness fades away.

And these results extend beyond policy. I show that Democratic Party control matters for a deeper, more fundamental outcome – the economic well-being of racial and ethnic minorities. When the nation is governed by Democrats, racial and ethnic minority well-being improves dramatically.

By contrast, under Republican administrations, Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans generally suffer losses. Remarkably, if Democrats had been in power over the last five decades, the data show that most of America’s racial inequality in economic well-being could very well have been erased. It is also worth underscoring the following: a political agenda that advances the well-being of minorities does not lead to a decline in the well-being of Whites. In fact, to the contrary. I find that under Democrats, White wellbeing improves – perhaps even more than under Republicans. The only difference? White gains are not as large as those of racial and ethnic minorities. One could argue that Democratic control actually leads to winwin policies for the electorate as a whole – even though some partisans are unlikely to see it this way.

To many, the greater effectiveness of the Democratic Party will be unsurprising. After all, over the last few decades racial and ethnic minority voters have supported the Democratic Party – usually in overwhelming numbers. They must be doing so for a reason. But many others have been skeptical about how hard the Democratic Party has been working for minorities (Fraga 1992, Frymer 1999, Kim 2006).

There are also some who would argue that the Republican Party’s more conservative, race-blind approach does more for racial and ethnic minorities than the Democratic Party’s liberal, race-conscious agenda (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997). And still others doubt the power of either political party or the government as a whole to sway 61

8 / Dangerously Divided fundamental outcomes such as income and employment (Blinder and Watson 2016, Caughey and Warshaw 2017, Hayek and Hamowy 2011). Unfortunately, despite the obvious importance of the question, researchers have to this point been unable to systematically assess the impact of either party’s control on policy responsiveness to minorities, or its effects on racial and ethnic minority well-being.

Thus, the patterns I uncover are quite novel. Moreover, they could be consequential. Electing more Democrats to office will not be easy. Republicans currently control the presidency, the Senate, and most state legislatures. They will not give up power without a fight. Indeed, just showing that Democratic Party control benefits minorities could galvanize ever larger shares of White America in opposition to the Democratic Party. Electing Democrats also will not be a cure-all. Skepticism about just how much the Democratic Party is currently concerned with the welfare of racial and ethnic minorities, and uncertainty about the future direction of Democratic leadership are both warranted.2 But for those who care about the fairness of American democracy, and for those who care about the well-being of racial and ethnic minorities, these findings do point clearly to a path forward. If Democrats take power and continue to pursue policies that champion minority interests, American democracy can become more equitable, and this nation can begin to eliminate the racial inequality that continues to plague it.

That is the story of this book.

The Case for Class Even those who are well informed about political matters may be surprised at the premise of this book: that America’s racial divide is more profound that its economic divide. Most of the public and most of those who study American politics believe that economic concerns always have been and likely always will be the core dividing line in American politics. America is, after all, a highly unequal society. The top 1 percent of the nation’s households earn almost a quarter of the nation’s income (Piketty 2014). The average employee needs to work more than a month to earn what the typical CEO earns in an hour (Blodget 2013). Disparities in wealth are even greater. The wealthiest 1 percent possesses 40 percent of the nation’s wealth (Stiglitz 2012).

Given these sharp economic inequalities, class must be the defining feature of our politics.

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9 / Introduction Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the importance of class is growing. The nation is in the midst of a period of prolonged, large, and perhaps unprecedented growth in income inequality. Since 1970, the share of income going to the top 1 percent has more than doubled. Since the end of the latest recession, the overwhelming majority of the gains in income have accrued to the top 1 percent (Reich 2012).

For many, this decades-long increase in income inequality is the defining development of the century, the reason why Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president called income inequality “the defining issue of our time” (Borosage 2016).

What do such great and growing economic disparities mean for the political sphere? The single most common narrative stemming from America’s growing inequality is that class has become increasingly central to the nation’s politics. Many scholars and political observers argue that the United States of America has always been a nation divided by economic interests. Those divisions have only been heightened by expanding income inequality (Abramowitz and Teixeira 2009, McCall 2013, McCarty et al. 2007, Reich 2012, Stonecash 2000). The result, according to this view, is that we are now “a society sharply divided by class” (Rhodes et al. 2017).

With the Supreme Court allowing almost unfettered financial influence over campaigns and politics, the fear is that the privileged few run American politics according to their interests, leaving the broader concerns of the masses largely excluded. Those fears, according to an array of recent works in political science, are close to becoming reality (American Political Science Association 2004, Carnes 2013, Gilens and Page 2014, Hacker and Pierson 2011, Jacobs and Page 2005). Gilens (2012) and Bartels (2008), in particular, both convincingly demonstrate that government policy now closely follows the preferences of those in the top one-third of the income scale, while largely ignoring the views of those in the bottom third. Put succinctly by Larry Bartels, one of the central figures in this research agenda, “Rich People Rule” (Bartels 2014).3 From all of this, one might well conclude that class dominates race in the political system.

Why Race Should Not Matter My claim that race dominates class may also seem startling in light of a range of developments on the racial front. Over the last half63

10 / Dangerously Divided century America has become much more diverse. Not long ago, Whites dominated numerically, socially, politically, and in just about every other way. As late as 1950, non-Hispanic Whites represented 88 percent of the population. Today, the nation stands at a demographic precipice.

Half of all babies born in this country are non-White. Racial diversity also has a very different, more complex meaning than it once had. The nation used to be defined by a relatively simple Black-White dichotomy.

Now, Latinos outnumber Blacks, Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial or pan-ethnic group, and multiracial Americans have emerged as a vocal entity.

What do radical shifts in the racial diversity of the nation mean for American politics? Some believe that greater diversity is bringing people closer together. This argument suggests that increasing diversity means increasingly blurred and fluid racial and ethnic lines. Increasing diversity from this perspective has led to dramatic increases in interracial marriage (Bean and Stevens 2003), improved racial attitudes (Schuman et al. 1997, Sniderman and Carmines 1997,), and more malleable racial dividing lines (Hochschild et al. 2012). “Progress,” Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom claim, “is the largely suppressed story of race and race relations over the past half-century” (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997).

Within the political sphere itself, evidence suggests that as the nation has become more diverse, barriers against minority participation are falling, and White Americans are becoming more and more willing to support racial minority candidates (Hajnal 2001, Highton 2004, Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997). All of this, the argument goes, has led to a less-defining role for race in the politics of the nation. The election of Barack Obama was just the last and most recent sign of this increasingly post-racial society. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer put it, “This nation [has] unburdened itself of the albatross of race” (Cleveland Plain Dealer 2008). From all of this one might conclude that race is largely irrelevant.

Why Race Matters My claim that race dominates, however, is not all that surprising in light of much of what has been learned from those who closely study racial politics in the United States. Most experts in this field offer a more pessimistic account of the nation’s recent trajectory on race.

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11 / Introduction These scholars contend that as America has become more racially diverse, it has also become more racially divided. The election of Barack Obama may have raised hopes, but the reality is that it also heightened racial tensions (Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2011, King and Smith 2011, Tesler 2016a, Tesler and Sears 2010). Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency have further amplified racial discord (Drutman 2016, Gimpel 2017, Mutz 2018, Schaffner et al. 2018, Sides et al. 2018). And this tension is likely to grow as America becomes more and more diverse.

Looking more broadly, across the long arc of American history, scholars who express this pessimistic view do not deny that real progress has been made, but they maintain that progress has been uneven, and that the goal of full equality has yet to be reached (Klinkner and Smith 1999). At the end of the day, discrimination continues to be a potent force in American society (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004, Edelman et al. 2017).

Within the political arena itself, barriers to full participation, although less severe than they once were, remain very real (Butler and Broockman 2011, Hajnal et al. 2017, Lerman and Weaver 2014, Terkildsen 1993). And despite shifts in racial views, racial prejudice continues to undergird many of our political choices (Kinder and Kam 2012, Kinder and Sanders 1996). America has been and continues to be divided between racially conservative forces that seek to limit the advancement of racial and ethnic minorities, and racially progressive forces that challenge the nation to live up to its ideals of equality for all (Anderson 2016, Carmines and Stimson 1989, Gottschalk 2015, Hutchings and Valentino 2004, Key 1949, Murakawa 2014, Myrdal 1944). The battle between these “two utterly dissimilar publics” forms the backbone of our politics (Kinder and Sanders 1996: 27).

An Outline of the Book By engaging in a series of rigorous, wide-ranging empirical assessments of American democracy, the rest of this book seeks to test these different perspectives, and to tell us how much race and class do or do not impact our politics. More precisely, I ask and answer three questions: • What politically divides America?

• How do those divisions determine who wins and who loses?

• Can anything make American democracy more equitable?

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12 / Dangerously Divided Each chapter assesses a different stage in the democratic process, and highlights different elements of the overarching stories of race and class in American politics. I briefly highlight key chapters and points here, as follows:

Race Dominates the Vote This book begins at the heart of the democratic process: the voting booth. Elections can be said to hold up a mirror to a society. The decisions made privately on ballots reflect who we are and provide indications of whether the nation is what it aspires to be.

In Chapter 1, I explore many questions about the dividing lines revealed in the voting booth. What is the current role of race in American elections? How has this changed over the last half-century?

Is race receding as younger Americans grow up and become more comfortable with the nation’s increasingly diverse populace? Or, are things deteriorating – as suggested by the racial conflicts, such as those that emerged in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting of an 18year-old Black man by a White police officer? And beyond race, how much is the sustained widening of economic inequality reshaping our politics? Is class likely to replace race as the main dividing line? Or is some other dimension, such as religion, gender, or age, increasingly driving the vote?

Some of these questions have already received significant attention. For example, political science research has looked extensively at racial divides in the vote (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015, King and Smith 2011, Valentino and Sears 2005). Similarly, extensive knowledge exists about how class divides us in the voting booth (Abramowitz and Teixeira 2009, Giedo et al. 2013, Kenworthy et al. 2007, Stonecash 2000). The data are clear that both racial and class divides are large enough to be viewed as significant. But less is known about the relative roles of race and class in shaping our political choices. And even less is understood about how the impact of these two factors compares to that of other demographic factors such as age, gender, urbanicity, and religion. Thus, one of the keys to the analysis in Chapter 1 is to incorporate race and class and other demographic characteristics simultaneously, and to explicitly compare the relative impact of each. What really lies at the root of America’s fault lines?

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13 / Introduction To examine these questions, I analyze an immense amount of data on the vote and party identification in many election contexts and over many periods of time. I look at our choices in Donald Trump’s remarkable presidential contest; I examine votes in local elections for mayor, city council, and the like; and I assess preferences at most levels in between. I focus on patterns in the nation’s most recent elections, and I examine dividing lines in contests up to five decades ago. And in each case, I analyze each contest through the different lenses of race, class, age, gender, religion, and other demographic characteristics.

The data reveal findings that are surprising, disturbing, and insistent. Race is a powerful demographic force dividing Americans.

The candidate that the majority of White America chooses is generally the candidate that non-White America opposes. Race is central, from the highest to the lowest office. Race is central, whether or not political parties are on the ballot. Race is central, whether or not the candidates are from different racial and ethnic groups.

A key aspect of this story is not just that race matters but also that it eclipses the other important dividing lines in American society. We may be experiencing unprecedented economic tumult – with jobs, homes, and economic prospects for the next generation at risk, and those on the top further from those on the bottom than they have ever been – but little of that economic divide seems to be affecting our political choices. When compared to race, class plays a peripheral role in the electorate’s choices.

When it comes to political positions, one’s race is more revealing than is one’s gender, age, region, or sexuality. Race dwarfs all of these other individual characteristics when it comes to explaining who people vote for.

Moreover, this trend is becoming more pronounced over time.

A little over a half-century ago, before the onset of the civil rights movement, neither party was closely associated with a racial group – an irony, certainly, given the overt discrimination and segregation in the public sphere of that day. Today, shockingly, the racial gap among voters has effectively grown to become a racial chasm, even though laws prevent racial discrimination, and, on some levels, American society seems more tolerant and racially mixed. Over the same time period, Whites have become more Republican, and minorities have become more Democratic. The end result is a national party system increasingly and sharply divided by race. The party that is dominant among Whites is overwhelmingly opposed by minorities.

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Whitelash Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box Terry Smith

If post-mortems of the 2016 U.S. presidential election tell us anything, it's that many voters discriminate on the basis of race, which raises an important question: In a society that outlaws racial discrimination in employment, housing, and jury selections, should voters be permitted to racially discriminate in selecting a candidate for public office? In Whitelash, Terry Smith argues that such racialized decision-making is unlawful and that remedies exist to deter this reactionary behavior. Using evidence of race-based voting in the 2016 presidential election, Smith deploys legal analogies to demonstrate how courts can decipher when groups of voters have been impermissibly influenced by race, and impose appropriate remedies.

This groundbreaking work should be read by anyone interested in how the legal system can re-direct American democracy away from the ongoing electoral scourge that many feared 2016 portended.

Terry Smith has spent 25 years teaching at national law schools, most recently as a Distinguished Research Professor. His legal scholarship has been cited by federal courts, and he is the author of the book, Barack Obama, Post-racialism, and the New Politics of Triangulation (2012).

“Smith offers new and creative legal arguments to protect voters from political candidates who use racism and racial stereotyping.”

- Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

Terry Smith

WHITELASH Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box

January 2020

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$24.95 US / c. $28.95 CAD £20.00 Paperback 9781108445467

8 We the People: Fashioning a Legal Remedy for Voter Whitelash

“[A]ll political power flows from the people.”

—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission1

If all political power derives from the people, then the people must ultimately be responsible for the discriminatory exercise of that power. Thus, while Chapter 7 explained the complicity and legal fault of candidates and political parties, this chapter examines the legal culpability of voters themselves and proposes legal remedies and deterrents.

In an ideal world, Congress would pass a law outlawing racial discrimination in voting pursuant to its enforcement powers under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the law would impose penalties for its violation.

Whitelashers, however, hide in the privacy of the ballot box, casting their vote at least in part based on their resistance to progress by people who look different than they. This privacy—to say nothing of First Amendment concerns—makes an edict prohibiting racial discrimination impractical. So when we search for remedies that might mitigate the effects of whitelash and deter people from voting based on race, the most sensible options would target the electoral structures that facilitate whitelash rather than any single voter’s or group of voters’ actions.

That said, the law does influence the way citizens view their civic duty to vote. The Supreme Court has in certain respects licensed the mindset that gives rise to voter whitelash, and this is a moral and jurisprudential failure. For the purpose of fashioning deterrent remedies to whitelash, however, I take the Court as it is: regressive. Still, as I argue below, the Court has left intact important precedents that support remedies to counteract voter whitelash— assuming that the Court stays true to its own precedents and is willing to recognize its own mistakes. Three potential remedies discussed in this chapter 155

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address not just whitelash but also three of the most inequalitarian features of American democracy: the equal representation of states in the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College system, and the partisan gerrymander. The overlap of these anachronisms with the machinations of voter whitelash is hardly coincidental: At its core, whitelash is undemocratic. Most white Americans do not engage in voter whitelash. When their votes are combined with those of people of color, they often constitute a majority of the electorate, as they did in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote over Donald Trump by nearly 3 million votes. Yet the Electoral College denied her the White House. Thus, remedying voter whitelash also gives voice to democratic majorities.

Recall that in Chapter 1 I presented two conflicting lines of Supreme Court precedent regarding when courts should offer remedies for voter whitelash.

I supported the interventionist model as opposed to the self-correcting model of democracy, and I promised to elaborate on why interventionism is vital in a racialized democracy. Focusing primarily on Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder and its aftermath, and on Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, this chapter begins with a robust defense of the interventionist model by illustrating the untoward consequences of leaving citizens to their own devices to check racism in the political process. Recognizing that the reader has consumed a great deal of legal doctrine in the preceding seven chapters, I next synthesize the elements of that doctrine that are most essential to understanding potential legal remedies. I conclude with a discussion of exemplary judicial remedies to counteract voter whitelash.

JUDICIAL INFLECTION POINTS: IN DEFENSE OF THE INTERVENTIONIST MODEL OF DEMOCRACY

Courts sometimes get it wrong. But some wrong decisions are more consequential than others. Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder is one of those decisions because it both dismantled an important structural check on voter whitelash— section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965—and signaled to white voters that their moral obligation to abide by antidiscriminatory norms had expired.

The decision was widely reported in the press and has rapidly assumed a place among the most consequential Supreme Court decisions.2 In earlier chapters, I addressed Shelby County as an illustration of dishonest judicial decisionmaking, but here, in the context of remedies, its symbolic meaning and its aftermath are the most relevant aspects to explore.

The courts of our nation have often faced a choice: to be an accomplice to whitelash or a bulwark against it. In 1880 in Strauder v. West Virginia, the Court chose the former. Although it invalidated West Virginia’s facially

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discriminatory statute that precluded blacks from serving on juries, the Court provided a roadmap for eluding the Fourteenth Amendment when it suggested that pretexts for race, such as property and educational requirements, would be permissible bases to restrict jury service.3 This judicial signposting encouraged evasions of the Fourteenth Amendment such as Louisiana’s century-old machination for diluting the votes of black jurors in felony cases by allowing nonunanimous (10–2) verdicts.4 When the Supreme Court speaks—evenly obliquely—the nation listens, as the South did in 1880, a period known in the region as Redemption from Reconstruction.

The Court’s granting of permission to discriminate is not always as inartful as it was in Strauder. Sometimes refusing to act or withdrawing from an arena in which it had previously allowed action accomplishes the same dog whistle.

The Court’s rejection of the interventionist model of democracy in Shelby County is an example of this approach. Prior to Shelby County, in State of South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the Court upheld the constitutionality of section 5 preclearance under the VRA, which required that states of the old Confederacy seek the federal government’s permission before changing their election laws.5 In upholding the act, the Court recognized the persistent, camouflaging resistance by the South to the Fifteenth Amendment’s command that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” naming grandfather clauses, procedural hurdles, white primaries, improper challenges to voter qualifications, racial gerrymandering, and discriminatory application of voting tests as some of the tactics that had already been struck down.

Contrary to the Court’s ruling in Katzenbach, yet consistent with his simplistic view of equality as a linear progression, Chief Justice John Roberts declared in Shelby County that because “things have changed dramatically,” the coverage formula that subjected states to section 5 preclearance and, by extension, preclearance itself were no longer justified.6 The divide between the conservative majority and the dissenting justices in Shelby County is simply a microcosm of the racial divide about government’s continuing obligations to America’s darker-hued underdogs: Whites consistently believe that blacks and other minorities face less discrimination than minorities themselves believe they face. As a result, except for rare instances of prevailing in individual antidiscrimination lawsuits, people of color are forced to abide self-serving white assumptions regarding the lack of discrimination against them.

Shelby County was decided in 2013. That same year, Gallup polling found that most white Americans (78 percent) believed that the government should

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have a minor role or no role at all in improving the economic and social position of blacks and other minorities.7 A decade earlier, 67 percent of white Americans held this sentiment.8 In contrast, majorities of blacks and Latinos have consistently held the belief that government should play a major role in ensuring their economic and social betterment.9 In 2013, most whites (67 percent) expressed satisfaction with the way black Americans were treated in society; most blacks (52 percent) expressed dissatisfaction with their treatment.10 Thus, Shelby County validated what white Americans were thinking at the time and continue to think today: Americans of color have come far enough.

Noting the increase in the number of black elected officials throughout the South since passage of the VRA in 1965, the Court in Shelby County took this progress as a signal to retreat from, rather than to reinforce, voter protections for blacks and Latinos.11 This defies common sense. White southerners would have no need to fear a powerless black population. Rather, to paraphrase Justice John Paul Stevens, people of color become a threat to white political power “when their common interests are strong enough to be manifested in political action.”12 At the very moment when blacks and other racial minorities began to wield political power, the Supreme Court in Shelby County handcuffed Congress’s attempt to protect that power by striking down the mechanism, section 5 preclearance, that had been undeniably effective in achieving it.

Imagine the message the Supreme Court would have sent to the nation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 if, instead of overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, it had upheld “separate but equal.” Such a ruling would have breathed new life into Jim Crow. By the same token, the Supreme Court’s unwillingness in 2013 to support congressional intervention in the South, where racially polarized voting was rampant and where whites therefore had the greatest incentive to interfere with the minority franchise, encouraged whitelashers throughout the country to vote in line with their racist sentiments. Millions of white Americans demonstrated their moxie three years after the decision in Shelby County, when the country, with the indispensable support of every state in the old Confederacy except Virginia, elected a president who by the midpoint of his term was considered a “racist” by 49 percent of voters.13 Most voters (54 percent) also believed that Trump “ha[d] emboldened people who hold racist beliefs to express those beliefs publicly.”14 Cementing the relationship between the proverbial unshackling of the South in Shelby County and the rise of Trumpism, the Confederate flag itself began to be displayed more widely throughout the country.15 Donald Trump did not object. Instead, in defending Confederate monuments, Trump

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lamented, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” The Confederate flag’s frequent appearances at Trump rallies in 2016 made it an ineradicable symbol of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.16 So much for Justice Roberts’s belief that “things have changed dramatically.” Even if this were true when the Court pronounced it, the widely held perceptions of the leader of the free world as a racist, and the widespread, open embrace of racist symbols previously considered taboo, if not verboten, showed that the nation’s path to racial equality had a dramatic distance remaining. But what Chief Justice Roberts signaled in Shelby County is what the Supreme Court expressly stated in the Civil Rights Cases in 1883, when the Court invalidated a federal law that made it a criminal offense for a private citizen to deny anyone public accommodations on account of race: When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.17

In short, the Supreme Court in 1883 was as fed up with attempts to secure equality for blacks as the Supreme Court was in 2013. And just as the Civil Rights Cases set the stage for 75 years of Jim Crow, Shelby County unleashed America’s racist potential like no other modern decision of the Court. The decision forecasted the age of Trump and has made more imperative than at any time since Jim Crow the need for structural reforms to protect people of color against voter whitelash.

One could have imagined a return to the Jim Crow era upon seeing what occurred in Georgia during the 2018 midterms. When 40 black senior citizens boarded a bus to cast early votes in rural Georgia, Jefferson County Administrator Adam Brett deemed the trip an impermissible political activity that ran afoul of county guidelines simply because the seniors had boarded the bus at a government-run senior center.18 Brett’s intervention came after an anonymous caller reported the planned voting trip. Later, a mayor in Jefferson County accused Black Voters Matter, a nonpartisan organization that promotes African-American political participation and the sponsor of the bus trip, of leading a cult that encouraged black people to “vote for a black candidate just because they are the same color.”19 The mayor’s apparent reference—and apparent fear—was that the 40 black senior citizens, who were ordered off the bus and temporarily prevented from

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voting, would cast their votes for Stacey Abrams, a Democrat running against Secretary of State Brian Kemp to become Georgia’s first black governor. Kemp had won a raucous Republican primary in which he boasted in one television ad that “I’ve got a big truck in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take them home myself.”20 Cognizant of just how crazy this sounded, Kemp immediately added, “Yup, I just said that.” It was crazy enough to get President Trump’s endorsement, which helped Kemp win the Republican runoff by a landslide.

Recall from Chapter 7 that racial appeals and voter suppression have historically gone hand in hand. Kemp was no exception. At a fundraiser, Kemp, referring to Democrat Abrams’s focus on increasing absentee voting, warned: “They have just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote—which they absolutely can—and mail those ballots in, we gotta have heavy turnout to offset that.”21 But Kemp, who as secretary of state oversaw Georgia elections, did more to “offset” Abrams’s voter mobilization efforts than merely turn out his own voters. Georgia is a “use it or lose it” state that allows its secretary of state to purge infrequent voters from the rolls. In July 2017, Kemp purged a total of 107,000 such voters.22 Although the racial breakdown of this group is unknown, because people of color are less likely to vote in general, they are more likely to be infrequent voters.23 In addition to voter purges, Kemp strictly enforced Georgia’s “exact match” voter registration system, which led to the suspension of more than 53,000 voter applications, 70 percent of which had been submitted by African Americans.24 The exact match system allows Georgia to delay processing a voter registration form when even a minor discrepancy appears between the application and information in the Department of Driver Services database or on file with the Social Security Administration.25 Prior to Shelby County, Georgia had been covered under section 5 of the VRA. In 2018, however, its secretary of state had at his disposal the tools to suppress the minority vote to benefit his own election.

Although the tandem of racial appeals and voter suppression is hardly unusual in American politics, it was unusual for gubernatorial candidates, particularly non-border-state candidates like Kemp, to stake their elections on immigration. This reflected Donald Trump’s pervasive racializing effect on American politics. Compared with the 2014 midterm elections, the congressional, senate, and gubernatorial candidates and the major parties ran six times more immigration-related television ads (44,000 versus 280,000) and spent five times more on such ads ($23 million versus $124 million) in 2018.26 Yet, the population of residents living in the U.S. illegally has remained stable from 2008 to 2018.27 Moreover, as fewer immigrants enter the U.S. illegally, the

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share of those residing in the country for a decade or more has continued to increase, in 2014 constituting more than 75 percent of undocumented residents.28 The number of arrests at the southwest border—a figure commonly used to measure the rate of illegal border crossings—was at a 10-year low at the end of fiscal year 2018.29 And far from showing that undocumented immigrants increase crime, available data has demonstrated a negative correlation between numbers of undocumented residents and violent crime rates.30 In short, nothing exceptional had occurred in our nation’s undocumented immigrant population to explain the increased salience of immigration as a political issue—nothing, that is, except the vilification of immigrants by Trump as an electoral strategy. Despite the relative stability of the nation’s immigration system, exit polls showed that immigration was the most important issue for three-quarters of Republican voters during the 2018 midterms.31 Trump’s race-baiting continued to succeed with his not insubstantial political base.

Improbable as it may seem, other candidates rivaled Trump’s racial appeals during the 2018 midterm elections, so much so that The Guardian ran a headline asking, “Is This the Most Racist US Midterms Campaign Ever?”32 A USA Today article noted, “The barrage of racially divisive messaging in the 2018 midterm election cycle was inescapable.”33 Not since the Jim Crow era had Americans witnessed an election marked by such a combination of widespread racist, anti-Semitic miasma and fearmongering about immigrants and people of color. A front-page headline in the New York Times two weeks before election day also captured the zeitgeist of the moment: “Trump and G.O.P. Candidates Escalate Race and Fear as Election Ploys.”34 A Washington Post headline two days before the midterms was equally revealing: “Midterms Test Whether Republicans Not Named Trump Can Win by Stoking Racial Animosity.”35 Both these captions were far removed from the optimism of the Times’s headline following Barack Obama’s election 10 years earlier in 2008: “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls.”36 If Chief Justice Roberts was watching the midterms unfold, then these elections provided on-the-job training to a conservative jurist who appeared not to understand the nature of whitelash when he declared in Shelby County that “things have changed dramatically” with little thought to how elastic such change can be.

Seasons of hatred often reap a bitter harvest. Apparently inspired by Trump’s demonization of his political opponents, a deranged Floridian mailed pipe bombs during the 2018 midterm elections to nearly a dozen of Trump’s Democratic critics, including former President Barack Obama.

A gunman staged a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, a tragedy

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that coincided with pitched Republican criticism of wealthy Jewish Democratic donors. Another gunman with a history of expressing racist and misogynistic views opened fire in a Florida yoga studio. Perhaps no politician can be blamed personally for violence perpetrated by supporters. Yet, it had been nearly a year from these tragedies since white nationalists and neo-Nazis in August 2017 marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, with lit torches. That march, too, ended in tragedy as a white nationalist rammed his vehicle into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one. For Trump, however, there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the clash.37 Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 on building a wall along the southern border to lock out illegal immigrants. Regardless of whether the president ever fulfills this tiresome promise, posterity will judge the wall he has built among Americans of different races and backgrounds as his most notorious legacy. In a democracy with separation of powers, however, no single institution could pull off such a feat. Now, the Supreme Court must confront the racist reality its decision in Shelby County encouraged.

To be sure, Democrats recaptured the House of Representatives in 2018 on the strength of suburban repulsion to Trump. But many of these same voters helped deliver the White House to Trump in the first place. More to the point, Democrats’ success must be taken in the historical context of white voter behavior, which suggests a repeating cycle whose victims are all Americans —people of color, whose march to equality is hindered, and white Americans, who postpone, but can never permanently avoid, a day of reckoning with what true racial equality looks like.

Close examination of the results of the 2018 midterms suggests the durability of whitelash. In Georgia’s high-profile gubernatorial race pitting Stacey Abrams, a black woman, against the Trump-supported Brian Kemp, Abrams managed to take only a quarter of the white vote.38 Consistent with whitelash’s ethos of denial, of those voters who believed no racial group in the U.S. is “favored,” 77 percent supported Kemp. Of those Georgia voters who believed that blacks are “favored” in American society, 87 percent supported Kemp.39 In total, an astonishing 48 percent of Georgians believed in the alternative reality that there is racial equality in America or that, to the extent there is inequality, blacks are favored.

In another jurisdiction formerly covered by section 5 of the VRA, Mike Espy, an African American who was Secretary of Agriculture during Bill Clinton’s presidency, could muster only 15 percent of the white vote in Mississippi.40 White denial was epidemic: a flabbergasting 63 percent of exit poll respondents asserted either that there was racial equality in the U.S. today or that blacks were in fact favored; no less than 78 percent of this group

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supported the Republican candidates opposing Espy in a special election to fill a senate seat left vacant by the ailing Thad Cochran.

Despite Chief Justice Roberts’s belief that the South had changed dramatically, one thing about it clearly had not: from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, white southerners had denied the existence of discrimination against blacks, and they continued to do so in 2018.41 Looking at data from both the 2016 and 2018 midterm elections, Tufts University political scientist Brian Schaffner found a high correlation between those most inclined to deny racism’s existence and those most likely to vote for a Republican candidate.42 Denial of racism is, of course, the principal means of its perpetuation.

Racism in American politics is thriving—again. The lesson of Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, and the post-Shelby County period is that racism will always infect the political process when the Court signals a laissez-faire attitude about racial inequality. Yet, if government cannot assign citizens to either explicit or functional racial categories absent compelling reason, may citizens make such assignments when performing the public function of voting? In other words, may voters discriminate against one another by electing candidates based on racial appeals or voters’ racialized aversion to a candidate or the candidate’s supporters? In the context of redistricting, the Supreme Court has said that the government may not create legislative districts based on the racial stereotype that voters of a given race share the same political beliefs.43 The Court elaborated in Bush v. Vera that “to the extent that race is used as a proxy for political characteristics, a racial stereotype requiring strict scrutiny is in operation.”44 If it is unconstitutional to use race as a proxy for politics, it is likewise constitutionally suspect to deploy politics as a pretextual stand-in for race.

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, however, when defenders of affirmative action called upon the Court to probe the motives of Michiganders who voted to dismantle it, the Court was unwilling to even ask whether white voters’ opposition to affirmative action was motivated by racial antipathy. Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the majority was an embarrassing tautology: “[I]f it were deemed necessary to probe how some races define their own interest in political matters, still another beginning point would be to define individuals according to race. Such a venture would be undertaken with no clear legal standards or accepted sources to guide judicial decision.”45 In other words, to ask about racial motives in an ostensibly political decision is to “define individuals according to race.” This absurd objection would virtually remove courts from the business of enforcing the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

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Moreover, it is not a principle to which conservative jurists are faithful—at least not when whites are the alleged victims. In Ricci v. DeStefano, Justice Samuel Alito flatly accused the City of New Haven of succumbing to black political power—nay, coercion—in tossing out standardized test results that disproportionately denied promotion opportunities to black firefighters.46 The Court’s conservatives made a similar charge in concluding in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. that a minority contract set-aside program implemented by a majority-black city council was simply racial politics.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, stated an axiom that Justice Kennedy completely ignored in denying relief to the plaintiffs in Schuette: “The concern that a political majority will more easily act to the disadvantage of a minority based on unwarranted assumptions or incomplete facts would seem to militate for, not against, the application of heightened judicial scrutiny . . .”47 Why are conservative jurists willing to question the political motives of blacks on the suspicion that such motives are really racial, but reluctant to question white political motives on the same suspicion?

Chapters 1 through 7 set forth copious evidence that white voters, who will remain a majority of the electorate for several years to come, make voting decisions based on “unwarranted assumptions or incomplete facts” about people of color and candidates who are supported by them. It’s helpful to briefly recap some of that data for context. A 2016 Reuters News survey found that, compared with other white partisans, Trump’s white supporters were more likely to view blacks as less hardworking, less intelligent, more violent, and more lawless than whites.48 In 2016, 36 percent of whites described their racial identity as either “very important” or “extremely important.” Another 25 percent described it as “moderately important.”49 The more important that white identity was to a voter, the more likely that voter was to support Donald Trump. Among whites for whom white identity was “extremely important,” Trump enjoyed 81 percent support.50 Trump’s unrelenting attacks on immigration appealed to these white identifiers, who view the country’s changing demography as a net negative and who see whites as the real victims of discrimination.

What does it mean in the twenty-first century for white Americans to embrace white identity, particularly given Justice Kennedy’s assertion in Schuette that the Court lacked “accepted sources to guide judicial decision” about whether groups of citizens are defining their political interests in terms of their race? The “accepted source”—indeed an indisputable one—is citizens themselves. And in the face of changing demographics and economic precarity, many whites are no longer reticent: white identity matters to them.

White identity politics, however, is simply white supremacy by another name.

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Lee Harris, a former legal academic who is now the mayor of Shelby County, Tennessee, put it succinctly: “There is no need for a ‘white race,’ after all, because to be white is to be neutral. Those who would invoke a white race must be extremists.”51 Any supposed moral or intellectual equivalence between black identity politics and white identity politics is, at best, ahistorical. As Justice John Paul Stevens has explained, it is “the vestiges of discrimination that motivate disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups to vote as identifiable units.”52 If Americans cannot distinguish between a race consciousness formed in the blood of slavery and Jim Crow, and a white identity politics arising from resentment over racial change, then we are doomed as a nation to unending cycles of whitelash. The Supreme Court’s inconsistent, often indecipherable race jurisprudence has helped to bring us to the racial purgatory now manifested in our politics. Yet it is in the Court’s own jurisprudence—even in some of its more conservative rulings—where we find potential solutions.

CITIZENS AS STATE ACTORS: A SYNTHESIS OF SOME KEY LEGAL PRECEPTS

When citizens vote in a general election, they are performing a public function; they are the “state,” as surely as a city council, a state legislature, or Congress is.53 Elections are, in the words of the Supreme Court, “traditionally associated with sovereignty” and are therefore a state function.54 To be sure, citizens’ First Amendment freedom to associate politically entails a right not to associate with those with whom they disagree.55 Thus, political parties and candidates may in theory adopt explicitly racist platforms and nominate racist candidates.56 Voters, in turn, are free to support such parties and candidates.

Yet, while voters are free to choose their preferred candidates, the racially polarized voting that may foreseeably ensue from racial politics is not itself protected by the First Amendment. Instead, under both constitutional and statutory vote dilution doctrine, racially polarized voting—that is, the effective denial of electoral opportunity to racial minorities by a consistently cohesive white majority—is a democratic defect that can be corrected by the courts.

Moreover, although voting undoubtedly has expressive characteristics like those protected by the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has held that “[b]allots serve primarily to elect candidates, not as fora for political expression.”57 Indeed, the Court does not even view voting as symbolic speech. According to Justice Antonin Scalia, “[t]here are, to be sure, instances where action conveys a symbolic meaning—such as the burning of a flag to convey disagreement with a country’s policies . . . [b]ut the act of voting

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symbolizes nothing.”58 Thus, judicial remedies to deter race-based voting—or at least to counteract its effects—would run afoul of neither freedom of expression nor freedom of association.

What if segregationist Strom Thurmond had prevailed in his quest for the presidency in 1948? What if pro-segregationist George Wallace had won the presidency in 1968 or 1972? To paraphrase the Supreme Court in Shaw v. Reno, a victory by either of these infamous demagogues would “threaten to stigmatize individuals by reason of their membership in a racial group and to incite racial hostility.”59 If equal protection of the law means anything, it means that citizens are entitled to protection from state-sponsored racial hostility. And if it is unconstitutional for the government to perpetrate such antagonism in the drawing of legislative districts—the issue in Shaw—it is also unconstitutional for citizens, performing the public function of voting, to elect a candidate whose platform is contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment.

Just as voters may not inflict racial harm on a group through direct democracy by, say, voting for a ballot initiative to ban Muslims from their state, so too are they accountable when they elect a president who proposes to ban Muslims from entering the country. What is the difference between voting for a candidate who makes discrimination against members of a minority a centerpiece of his platform, versus voting directly to discriminate against these individuals? What, in other words, is the difference between discrimination mediated through a candidate versus discrimination perpetrated directly by casting a ballot? In each case, racism is on the ballot. To be sure, candidate elections may involve a host of nonracial issues, to say nothing of the influence of the candidates’ personal qualities. But the Fourteenth Amendment has never required that a challenged state action be “unexplainable on grounds other than race.”60 Such cases are rare. Instead, under standard equal protection analysis, if race was a motivating factor among multiple factors for a decision, then that decision violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment unless a defendant—in this instance, the state—can demonstrate that the same decision would have been reached in the absence of the impermissible consideration of race.61 When a candidate for any office predicates a campaign on the stigmatization of racial or ethnic groups, as Donald Trump did in 2016 and as several Republican candidates mimicking Trump did in 2018, it is not difficult to isolate race as a motivating factor in that candidate’s victory.

Although most voters would likely claim to have supported the candidate for reasons other than race, a racist candidate cannot prevail without the tolerance of a majority. The majority’s acquiescence is difficult to distinguish from racism itself.

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A Century of Votes for Women American Elections since Suffrage Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder How have American women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? In A Century of Votes for Women, Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder offer an unprecedented account of women voters in American politics over the last ten decades. Bringing together new and existing data, the book provides unique insight into women's (and men's) voting behavior and traces how women's turnout and vote choice evolved across a century of enormous transformation overall and for women in particular. Wolbrecht and Corder show that there is no such thing as 'the woman voter'; instead they reveal considerable variation in how different groups of women voted in response to changing political, social, and economic realities. The book also demonstrates how assumptions about women as voters influenced politicians, the press, and scholars.

Christina Wolbrecht is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She is author of the awardwinning books Counting Women's Ballots (Cambridge, 2016) (with J. Kevin Corder) and The Politics of Women's Rights (2000).

J. Kevin Corder is Professor of Political Science at Western Michigan University. His books include Counting Women's Ballots (Cambridge, 2016) (with Christina Wolbrecht), which received the 2017 Victoria Schuck Award, and The Fed and the Credit Crisis (2012).

January 2020

$24.99 US / $28.95 CAD £18.99 Paperback 9781316638071 81

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Chapter 8

Women Voters in the New Millennium

Presidential elections in the twenty-first century broke with history in many ways, from the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 vote count to Barack Obama’s barrier-breaking nomination and victory to the unprecedented events of the 2016 campaign. From “W is for Women” to the first major party nomination of a woman candidate for president, women remained front and center in presidential election discourse and debate nearly 100 years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

The defining feature of American politics in the first decades of the new millennium was a ramping up of partisan conflict and polarization in government, as well as within the American electorate. Scholarship confirms what many Americans decry: Party elites in Washington increasingly diverged in their policy preferences and prescriptions, and increasingly were unable or unwilling to compromise or even conduct legislative business. Control of the two chambers of Congress shifted frequently, compared to the longer patterns of stability that characterized early decades. Office holders, citizens, journalists, and scholars lamented the apparent inability of government to function in a state of extreme partisan paralysis.1 By the end of this period, even facts had become partisan, as Republicans and Democrats disagreed sharply about what was, and was not, a problem or reality, as well as on policy solutions.

Women, gender, and women’s issues were not exempt from this sharpening partisan divide. The parties disagreed as to whether or not women’s equality remained a problem: In the wake of the 2016 election, nearly 70% of Democrats agreed that more work is needed to bring about gender equality compared to just 26% of Republicans. In comparison, the gap between women and men on this item was only 13 points; in this era, women’s equality was not a gender divide, but a partisan one.2 Republican and Democratic party elites diverged

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on women’s rights policies such as equal pay and abortion rights since at least 1980. Since at least the early 1990s, surveys found Republicans to be less supportive of women in non-traditional roles than Democrats.3 The salience of and polarization around these issues only increased in the twenty-first century.

In 2016, scholars found, for the first time, that sexism predicted presidential vote choice (for Trump, against Clinton).4 In this final historical chapter, we again review the (recent) electoral context in which women cast their ballots over the five presidential elections from 2000 to 2016. We take stock of the conditions of women’s lives and the continuing interplay of gender and politics. We examine how and why women voted in the tumultuous elections of the 2000s and 2010s. On the whole, women continued to be more likely to turn out and more likely to vote Democratic than men regardless of most other group identities. Despite those shared tendencies, women’s voting behavior was varied and diverse. In the 2016 presidential election, a majority of white women cast their ballots for Donald Trump, while overwhelming majorities of women who were black, Hispanic, and members of other racial minority groups supported Hillary Clinton.

AMERICAN ELECTORAL POLITICS, 2000–2016

Since the earliest voting studies (see Chapter 5), scholars have observed that party identification is closely related to other forms of identity, such as race, class, and religion. The connections between such social identities and partisanship strengthened dramatically in the early twenty-first century, creating a strong and emotional attachment to party among many Americans. Negative partisanship – party identification driven less by support of one’s own party than by opposition to the other – grew considerably. By the end of this period, citizens reported holding strongly negative views about the other party, experiencing high levels of fear, anger, and frustration with opposition identifiers, and preferring not to have other-party partisans as neighbors or potential spouses for their children. The rise of social media and of the partisan press helped encourage personal identification with in-party victory, as well as a strong sense that the out-party was an enemy.5 The presidential elections of the 2000s and 2010s took place within this context of heightened partisanship. Controversy over the first presidential election of the twenty-first century did little to reduce partisan rancor. The 192 83

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Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore, sought to both capitalize on the successes of the Clinton administration while distancing himself from the excesses of Clinton himself. The Republican nomination was nearly a lock for Texas Governor and presidential heir George W. Bush, who ran as a “compassionate conservative” and a results-oriented governor who could reach across the partisan aisle. A disputed outcome in Florida required the intervention of the Supreme Court and delayed the selection of the president-elect for more than a month. Despite his narrow Electoral College victory (and losing the popular vote), Bush governed as a partisan, prioritizing income tax cuts and other conservative objectives. The 9/11 terrorist attacks less than a year into his administration transformed American politics, placing terrorism and homeland security at the top of the political agenda.6 In 2004, Democrats nominated Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts to challenge Bush. Given the prominence of the War on Terror and increasingly unpopular conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan, Kerry emphasized his status as a veteran of the Vietnam War and his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry’s record of military service was attacked by the 527 group Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth, highlighting the growing impact of organizations, ostensibly independent of candidates and parties, on the content and conduct of American elections. Bush defended his record, and his campaign sought to frame Kerry as both too liberal and a flip-flopper. The state of the economy, health care, and moral values were prominent themes in the election of 2004.7 While Bush was constitutionally prohibited from running for a third term as president, the election of 2008 was largely a referendum on his presidency, particularly the on-going War on Terror as well as the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

After a drawn-out Democratic nomination contest with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama became the first African American major party nominee in American history. Arizona Senator John McCain, a Vietnam War POW and a repeat presidential hopeful, wrested the Republican nomination from a crowded Republican field. His running mate, relatively unknown Alaska governor Sarah Palin – only the second female vice presidential nominee in US history – was a media sensation. Her folksy style helped the ticket reach out to the GOP’s socially conservative base. Yet war and the economy dominated the election, and an incumbent party faced long odds during an unpopular conflict and a 193 84

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sharp economic slump. Obama’s rhetoric of change resonated, and Americans elected the first African American president in history.8 In 2012, Republicans nominated businessman and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to challenge incumbent Obama. The political agenda remained largely focused on the state of the economy and recovery, as well as the controversial Affordable Care Act (2010), labeled Obamacare by opponents. In the wake of Obama’s 2008 election, frustrated conservatives organized a grassroots movement known as the Tea Party, focused on opposition to taxes, national debt, and government regulation, particularly of health care. Aided by conservative media and donors, the Tea Party promoted their understanding of Constitutional principles and expressed alarm at social and political change in the United States. Drawing largely from those already identifying as Republicans, Tea Party supporters were distinguished by their strongly conservative views on social issues (such as abortion) and on race and immigration. By the 2010 midterms, Tea Party-associated and -supported candidates were upending Republican primary races and winning congressional seats. By 2012, Tea Party organization was waning but still active, and many politicians, most notably Romney running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI), were linked to the Tea Party movement. Most importantly, the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican party even farther to the right. In Congress in particular, the Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus solidified all-or-nothing opposition to President Obama as the Republican party’s central strategy.9 The last presidential election contest before the centennial of women’s suffrage was without precedent in American history. Democrats selected former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the first woman standard bearer for a major American party. On the Republican side, the candidacy of businessman and reality television star Donald Trump attracted massive press attention in a crowded field of contenders. Trump promised to “Make America Great Again” by ending Obamacare, restricting immigration, and ripping up trade deals. Violating American election norms, Trump insulted everyone from his primary and general election opponents to POWs, other Republicans, the press, prominent political leaders, celebrities, and a range of organizations and policies. Trump’s populist rhetoric featured patriotism, ethnocentrism, racism, and sexism. Despite initial opposition from many Republican leaders, Trump skillfully attracted news coverage and spoke to widespread fears of social (particularly racial and gender) change, all of 194 85

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which helped him secure the Republican nomination. FBI Director James Comey’s revelations about a continuing investigation of Clinton’s private email server as Secretary of State late in the general election campaign, and ongoing accusations of Russian interference with the election, cast a long shadow over the 2016 outcome. Nonetheless, Donald Trump was elected president, becoming the first person without military or political experience to assume the office in more than 100 years.10 Bookended by the contentious 2000 presidential election outcome and the 2016 victory of Donald Trump, the first elections of the twenty-first century offered drama and disruption. Set against a backdrop of extreme partisan conflict and polarization, elections, and especially presidential elections, became all-or-nothing contests between increasingly divergent partisan coalitions.

AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Women’s Lives In the first decades of the twenty-first century, women’s lives continued to evolve in ways that would be consequential for their politics. Women advanced considerably in terms of educational attainment in the new millennium. By the mid-1990s, the percentage of women aged 25 to 29 with college degrees had exceeded that of men. By 2016, a nearly equal percentage of women and men (more than 30%), regardless of age, had earned a bachelor’s degree (see Figure 8.1).11 Women’s family lives evolved as well. Marriages increasingly occurred later or not at all. The median age for first marriage rose to 27 for women and 29 men for men by 2012; in 1960, those figures were 20 and 23. Cohabitation outside of marriage was increasingly common; about a quarter of adults aged 25 to 34 lived with a partner by the second decade of the twenty-first century.12 Families changed in other ways as well. In 1960, nearly three-quarters of children were born into traditional two-parent, first-marriage homes. By 2014, fewer than half were, as children were increasingly born into second marriages (15%), to cohabitating parents (7%), or to single parents (26%), the vast majority of whom were women. Mothers were increasingly the prime breadwinners, not only in single-parent households, but in households with two parents as well.

While all racial and ethnic groups experienced similar patterns, these trends

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Figure 8.1 Women close the gap in college completion and narrow the gap in labor force participation

were particularly pronounced for black women, who were increasingly likely to be single or single mothers.13 Women continued to face challenges in balancing work and family, both the demands at home and the costs of motherhood at work, making this tension a perennial campaign topic.14 Working outside the home had become the norm for virtually all women.

Gender differences in pay continued to narrow, but did not disappear: The earnings ratio between women and men was 64% in 1990 compared to 82% in 2016. Gender segregation in employment persisted, with school teacher, nurse, and secretary the most common occupations for women, compared to truck driver, manager, and retail front-line supervisor for men. Women remained dramatically underrepresented in the top ranks of business, law, and politics.15 Overall, women look more similar to men in the 2000s and 2010s, in terms of college completion and labor force participation, than in any previous era.

Education and employment were factors that shaped voting behavior in earlier periods, but, despite growing similarity in terms of educational attainment, labor force participation, and household roles, politicians and journalists continued to treat women as voters with distinctive political preferences.

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Women and Politics Candidates and the press viewed women – at least some kinds of women – as a key electoral constituency in the first presidential elections of the twentyfirst century. In 2000, Republican standard bearer George W. Bush’s claims of “compassionate conservatism” were widely viewed as directed particularly at women voters alienated by conservative extremism. Claiming “W is for Women,” the Bush campaign focused on education policy as a way to appeal to women, continuing the long tradition of framing women as primarily mothers committed to nurturing young children. Other themes meant to appeal to women included personal morality and work-family balance.16 Democratic nominee Al Gore memorably displayed his commitment to his marriage with a “sustained” kiss of wife Tipper at the Democratic National Convention, visibly distancing himself from Clinton’s infidelities. In his convention speech, Gore spoke about how his own mother worked two jobs to support her family, conjuring the “waitress mom” voter stereotype (low-pay, low-education, low-status employment, hard-working mom) which had emerged in the 1998 midterms: I’ve shaken hands in diners and coffee shops all across this country. And sometimes when I see a waitress working hard and thanking someone for a tip, I see the face of my mother. And I know, for that waitress carrying trays or a construction worker in the winter cold, I will never agree to raise the retirement age to 70 or threaten the promise of Social Security.17

Unlike “soccer moms” who were generally understood as white and relatively privileged, the “waitress mom” frame included low-income and minority women as a target of political appeals and a source of electoral power. While Bush highlighted education, Gore focused on health care, and specifically women’s health care, in his appeals to women voters, as well as women-owned businesses, work-family balance, and child safety (e.g., the V-chip, technology designed to restrict children’s access to inappropriate television content). Both candidates emphasized the impact on women and families when talking about bread-and-butter campaign issues like jobs and taxes as well.18 In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “security moms” were the new frame du jour for women voters in 2004. Both candidates sought to assure women voters that they would keep them and their families safe, with Bush

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pointing to his post-attack leadership and successes, and Kerry critiquing the Republican administration’s approach and emphasizing his own foreign policy expertise. Like Gore in 2000, Kerry often framed his rhetoric about the economy in terms of the challenges faced by mothers and families. While ultimately the 2004 gender gap was fairly unremarkable in historic context, many in the press attributed Bush’s re-election in part to his success in appealing to the fears of “security moms.” Research, however, suggests that women who were parents were no more worried about another terrorist attack than were women who were not parents and married women with children were as likely to vote for Bush as married women without children, casting doubt on the political distinctiveness of security “moms” as commonly framed in the press.19 “NASCAR dads” also were highlighted as a political constituency in 2004.

First identified in the 2002 midterms, NASCAR dads were described as “small town middle-aged white men, typically from the South, who consider themselves Democrats but lean Republican when it comes to the president.”20 In the same way that political “moms” (soccer, waitress, and otherwise) are defined in ways that reify traditional class, gender, and racial stereotypes, the NASCAR dad was typically framed in terms of masculinity, class, race, patriotism, location, and religion. Unlike “moms,” their political interests were rarely conceptualized in terms of fatherhood per se. Analysis of 2004 voting behavior suggested that while mothers as a whole differed from non-mothers on some issues such as social welfare, there were few political distinctions between fathers and non-fathers in that election year.21 Women and gender were at the forefront of presidential politics as the historic 2008 Democratic nomination contest came down to a contest between a white woman and a black man. Hillary Clinton initially emphasized her experience and expertise (in contrast to Obama’s shorter time on the national stage) more than her gender, but media coverage of the contest highlighted both gender and race. Clinton herself increasingly embraced her ground-breaking candidacy, most famously in a concession speech which highlighted the “18 million cracks” her candidacy made in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.”22 Gender continued to be front and center in the 2008 general election when John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. The unconventional choice of Palin helped McCain draw attention away from Obama’s historic candidacy and skilled rhetorical style, and her strong social conservative bona fides helped reassure the GOP 198 89

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base about the Republican ticket. The McCain campaign and observers also framed the selection of Palin as an attempt to attract women voters; both Palin and McCain overtly appealed to disaffected Democrats and Republicans angry over the treatment of Clinton in the Democratic primary. Palin often presented herself in gendered terms, from describing herself a “hockey mom” to highlighting her family at campaign events. Her candidacy led to broad discussions of motherhood and work-family balance. Republicans defended the capacity of a woman to govern and parent, despite their record of favoring traditional gender roles. Palin also heightened attention to abortion, as her son with Down Syndrome was presented by the campaign and candidate as evidence of her strong commitment to the pro-life cause.

Press coverage of Palin was widely criticized as sexist and negative. Palin’s personal style and her ability to care for her children, especially her fourmonth-old special needs son, while carrying out her duties drew widespread comment. Palin embodied a number of gendered stereotypes that are rarely found in presidential politics: frontier woman, hockey mom, and beauty queen, among others. Yet despite a widely praised RNC speech and an initial bump in the polls, there is little evidence that Palin helped attract women voters to the Republican ticket. Research has consistently shown women are not particularly likely to vote for women candidates, all else equal, and vice presidential choices are rarely determinative.23 Anecdotal evidence suggests Palin was appealing to many women voters, but largely conservative and pro-life women unlikely to vote for the Democratic ticket in any case.24 In what had become standard operating procedure for presidential campaigns, both Obama and McCain were described as making efforts to appeal particularly to women voters. Both candidates continued to focus on “security moms,” emphasizing their ability to end the unpopular war in the Middle East and keep Americans safe at home. Obama was viewed as having to assure women voters of his commitment to women after the contentious primary contest with Hillary Clinton. Both Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were frequent surrogates for the Obama campaign. Michelle Obama emphasized work-family balance and her own role as a working mother, while Clinton was viewed as a counter to Sarah Palin’s claims as a pioneering woman in politics.25 Doubling down on gendered appeals in 2012, Democrats decried a “Republican war on women,” highlighting the party’s opposition to abortion 199 90

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and contraceptive coverage, as well as the widely reported controversial statements of several prominent Republicans. In Missouri, Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin defended his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape by explaining, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Later in the Fall, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock also defended his strong pro-life position by claiming “even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen.” The Obama campaign countered these contentious claims by emphasizing his support for abortion rights, contraceptive access, and women’s health.26 Motherhood remained central to the way women voters were framed by the press and appealed to by the campaigns. Both potential First Ladies were highly visible surrogates in 2012. Michelle Obama described herself as “Momin-Chief ” while Ann Romney and her husband highlighted her role and work as the mother of five sons. Even in the economic messages most central to both campaigns, women voters were again moms; in this case, “waitress moms” and “Wal-Mart moms,” lower-income women concerned with supporting their families. Incumbent Obama framed policy debates such as contraception, health care, and pay equity as fundamentally economic issues. Republican nominee and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was mildly rebuked for using the phrase “binders full of women” to describe his efforts to recruit women to high-level government positions. Like Obama, Romney emphasized how his leadership would provide a better economic future for women in particular.27 The 2016 presidential election was widely expected to be a milestone for women in American politics. The nomination of Hillary Clinton – the first woman to run for president at the top of a major American party ticket – was indeed ceiling-shattering and historic. Yet, Clinton’s presidential nomination was only one of the many exceptional aspects of the 2016 presidential election, and the campaign highlighted sex and gender in ways few could have predicted.

The candidacy of Donald Trump was unprecedented in many ways, including his use of misogynistic rhetoric, his tendency to direct sexist insults at opponents and reporters, and multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and assault. During the Republican primaries, Trump insinuated that Fox News’ Megyn Kelly was an erratic debate moderator because of her menstrual cycle. He used a primary debate to assure the American people: “He [Marco Rubio] referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must 200 91

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be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.” Trump dismissed Republican contender Carly Fiorina in an interview, saying “Look at that face!

Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Trump’s behavior toward women during the primaries drew widespread condemnation, but also revealed the apparent willingness of many Republican primary voters to nonetheless select Trump to represent their party.28 Facing the first female major party nominee in American history in the general election, Trump continued to use implicitly as well as explicitly sexist language, language which often harkened back to the arguments against women’s suffrage (Chapter 2). Echoing the long-standing assumption that women are unfit for political leadership, Trump said of Clinton, “Well, I just don’t think she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look.” He further referenced traditional doubts about the capacity of women to meet the physical demands of politics, particularly in national defense, when he claimed that Clinton was “low energy” and lacked “the mental and physical stamina” to confront America’s enemies. Trump criticized Clinton’s attractiveness, saying “The other day I’m standing at my podium and she walks in front of me … and when she walked in front of me, believe me, I was not impressed.” The rhetoric as well as the T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers at Trump campaign events featured overtly sexist slogans and appeals. In the final presidential debate, Trump interrupted Clinton’s response to a question about debt and entitlements to dismiss her as “such a nasty woman.”29 In October a video from a 2005 Access Hollywood interview of Trump by host Billy Bush surfaced in which Trump boasted about grabbing, kissing, and attempting to have sex with married women, all of which he claimed he had license to do because he was famous. The tapes added to Trump’s pre-election record of insulting women as “disgusting,” a “fat pig,” or a “dog.” The tape and Trump’s failure to address these issues satisfactorily set off a storm of controversy, including public critiques from fellow Republicans. By Election Day, more than ten women had accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct and assault. Trump continued to assure voters, “Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody.”30 For her part, Clinton embraced her gender identity and status as a pathbreaker in 2016 to a greater extent than she had in her past campaigns.

After repeatedly claiming she was not running as a woman in 2008, Clinton took a different tack in 2016: “I’m asking for people to vote for me on the 201 92

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merits,” Clinton noted early in the campaign, “I think one of the merits is I am a woman.” Clinton made her positions on issues of particular relevance to women, such as paid leave, equal pay, and childcare, central to her policy agenda. Sexist media coverage – ranging from calls for Clinton to smile more, descriptions of her speech as shrill, and questions about her likability – kept attention on how gender operates in politics. Clinton often treated gendered criticism as a badge of honor, such as when she reacted to Trump’s disparaging comment that she was playing the “woman’s card,” by declaring, “If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in!”31

OBSERVING WOMEN VOTERS

While the use of exit polls and commercial polling near elections was standard practice by 2000, the practice of polling confronted a number of challenges after the turn of the century. The growing use of cellphones and caller identification made it difficult to reach potential voters before elections. Mistrust of polls and the media also reduced response rates, even for exit polls. The notorious election night exit poll mistake that led the television networks to make a preliminary call for 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in Florida led to major changes in the administration of exit polls. Confronted with more absentee and early voting and declining in-person response rates, the major networks hired a new vendor and rebranded the cooperative exit poll effort as the National Exit Pool. We use the earlier Voter News Service (VNS) exit polls for 2000 and NEP data for 2004 to 2012.32 Long-standing academic polls had to adjust to the new reality as well. Faced with increasing costs of administering face-to-face surveys, the American National Election Studies discontinued surveys during midterm elections after 2002. A group of universities teamed with what is now known as YouGov to field the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) in the 2006 midterms, exploiting new web-based strategies to reach voters. With support from the National Science Foundation, the CCES offers a much larger sample of voters than the ANES and conducts these surveys for both presidential and off-year elections, making it possible to study smaller sub-groups and obtain better estimates for state-level measures of vote choice. Our discussion of the 2016 election draws on research that exploits the CCES and we use those data 202 93

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to validate exit poll results by race and to estimate some state-level gender gaps in 2016.33 Observing women voters remains a challenge, 100 years after women entered polling places. New approaches to polling the public did not, and likely cannot, address all of the modern challenges to survey research. The failure of pre-election polls and exit polls to capture the size of the Trump victory in 2016 led to more scrutiny of the way polls are conducted and how raw polling data are weighted to accurately capture the population of potential or actual voters. One particularly notable problem was the over-representation of college-educated voters and under-representation of working-class voters in exit poll samples. This distorted both the perceived composition of the Democratic base and inflated the likely vote for Hillary Clinton.34 Nonetheless, well-designed and implemented public opinion polls remain our best resource for understanding American voters.

Turnout Nearly 100 years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women were consistently more likely to cast ballots than men (see Figure 8.2). The turnout gender gap that emerged in 1980 had become the norm. By 2016, women’s turnout was consistently at least 3 percentage points higher than men’s. While this percentage difference is not large, the greater numbers of age-eligible women in the electorate meant that 127 million women voted in 2016 compared to 118 million men.35 Women Are Not a Voting Bloc Gender was not the only salient identity in the new millennium, not by a long shot. Other forms of identity and experience became only more closely tied to political behavior in the twenty-first century. As in previous chapters, we rely on logistic regression to determine the impact of various factors on both turnout and vote choice for women and men. The relationships we report in the figures and our discussion below is informed by that analysis; that is, we highlight and describe the effects of demographic factors that are persistent when we introduce statistical controls.

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Figure 8.2 Women consistently more likely to turn out than men, 2000–16

Race and ethnicity. Women are more likely to turn out to vote than men across all racial and ethnic categories across the five elections from 2000 to 2016 (see Figure 8.3). The difference is distinctively large in the African American community. Indeed, the turnout of African American women in the new millennium was truly historic. Just 40-plus years after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black women turned out to vote at rates that were not only higher than black men, but also higher than (non-Hispanic) white men. Only (non-Hispanic) white women turned out at slightly higher rates than black women across these five elections. Political scientists for decades have recognized that racial consciousness plays a central role in mobilizing people of color into politics beyond what socioeconomic status disadvantages might predict. Political scientist Lisa Nikol Nealy, for example, argues that strong religiosity and a progressive religious tradition helped enhance the electoral participation of African American women in particular.36 Similarly, political scientist Christina A. Bejarano finds that Latinas were more likely to be involved in community affairs and increasingly responsible for families, both of which may have propelled their electoral engagement.37 204 95

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Figure 8.3 Black women as likely to turn out to vote as (non-Hispanic) white men (CPS), 2000–16

The candidacy of Barack Obama also played a key role. African American women turned out at the highest rate of any group in 2008 and 2012, when Obama was on the presidential ballot. As a result, from 2000 to 2012, the turnout of African American women jumped from 60% to 71%. Black men’s turnout increased as well (from 53% to 62%) but not as dramatically.

Turnout gender gaps among people of color have consequences for the active electorate as a whole: Almost 75% of the growth in the number of eligible women voters since 2000 can be attributed to women of color. As the proportion of the electorate which identifies as white declines (from 86% in 2000 to 81% in 2016), and if these patterns persist, we would expect black and Hispanic voters to help drive the turnout gender gap upward. That black women in particular achieved such high turnout in a period in which voting rights were being rolled back at the state and federal level represents a significant achievement.38 Starting in 1996, the CPS survey includes questions about the birthplace of both respondents and their parents, so it is possible to categorize people as first-, second- and third-generation or later immigrants during the presidential 205 96

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Figure 8.4 The turnout gender gap exists among all but first-generation immigrants (CPS), 2000–16

elections from 2000–16. Consistent with previous research, the likelihood of turnout increased across generations, a pattern that holds for both women and men.39 Interestingly, we find in Figure 8.4 that the turnout gap spans all of these categories, except the most recent immigrants.

Age. The turnout gender gap can be found among all but the oldest voters (see Figure 8.5). The pre-Nineteenth Amendment generation has now passed from the electorate, removing the cohort that has been characterized by the largest turnout gender gap in favor of men since 1920. Yet, men continued to slightly outpace women at the polls among the oldest cohort (now, those born before 1941). We have been attributing the relatively lower turnout of older women largely to socialization; especially in earlier decades, older women were socialized at a time when women’s participation in politics was discouraged and political role models were few. Such dynamics may still be at work here, but we would expect such effects to be less potent across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

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The Caravan Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad Thomas Hegghammer

Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologies of all time. Here, in the first indepth biography of Azzam, Thomas Hegghammer explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam's extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan, telling a Forrest Gump-like story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents, CIA agents, and Cat Stevens. It is, however, also a story of displacement, exclusion, and repression that suggests that jihadism went global for fundamentally local reasons.

Thomas Hegghammer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Universitetet i Oslo. Trained in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and the Sciences Po, Paris, he is the author of the prize-winning book Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, 2010) and is the editor of Jihadi Culture (Cambridge, 2017). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Middle East, including interviews with former militants, and he has testified on jihadism in front of the US Congress and the British Parliament.

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$35.00 US / c. $39.95 CAD £19.00 Hardback 9780521765954

1 Palestinian Abdallah Azzam’s involvement in the Afghan jihad would have been less intriguing if he had been from a quiet corner of the Arab world such as Morocco or Oman. But Azzam was from Palestine, the site of one of the most bitter national liberation struggles of the late twentieth century. He had even been personally affected by Israel’s territorial expansion through his family’s loss of land in 1948 and his emigration to Jordan during the Six Day War of 1967. Why, then, did he fight for the liberation of Afghanistan and not Palestine? Why would any man join a faraway war while his own country is under occupation?

This chapter deals with Azzam’s Palestinian years – that is, from the early 1940s to the late 1960s. We will look at his upbringing on the West Bank, his experiences with the wars of 1948 and 1967, and his thinking on the Palestinian struggle. We will see that Azzam’s Palestinian background was a central part of his identity, and that he remained deeply committed to the Palestinian cause throughout his life.

However, after Jordan’s crackdown on the Fedayin guerrillas in 1970, he lost faith in the idea that Israel could be defeated by paramilitary efforts from outside the territories. He later rationalized his involvement in Afghanistan as a first stage in a long-term strategy to liberate Jerusalem, one that involved building a strong Muslim army in Afghanistan and conquering Palestine by conventional war. In the 1980s Azzam grappled with the dilemma of trying to leverage his Palestinian background for recruitment to Afghanistan while fending off accusations that he had abandoned the Palestinian cause.

Fighting Farmers Abdallah Azzam was born on 14 November 1941 in the village of alSila al-Harithiyya in the northern West Bank, some 10 kilometers northwest of Jenin.1 Al-Sila, as locals call it for short, sits on a cluster of hills on the southern flank of the Jezreel Valley plain, a vast green 11

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expanse of prime agricultural land. Back in the 1940s al-Sila was a community of some 1,800 inhabitants, mostly farmers, who used the southern strip of the plain for grazing livestock and growing apricots, olives, and almonds.2 The Azzam family had deep roots in the area, but few claims to fame.3 Azzam means “very resolved,” and was the name of a man who had come from the Ramallah area and settled in al-Sila when the village was founded generations ago.4 The Azzams belonged to the alShawahina tribe of the al-Rifa‘i tribal confederation that hailed back to the early Islamic historical figure Husayn bin Ali bin Abi Talib.5 The Azzams were one of five branches of the al-Shawahina tribe represented in al-Sila, most of whom lived in a part of the village called the alShawahina district.6 The Azzams were respected in the village; Abdallah’s great-uncle Salih Mahmud Azzam long served as its mayor.

Abdallah grew up in an entirely ordinary household. His father, Yusuf Mustafa Yusuf Azzam (ca. 1901–1990), was a farmer who supplemented his income by running a small butcher’s store on the side.7 His mother, Zakiya Salih Husayn al-Ahmad (ca. 1901–1988) was from another farming family from al-Sila. The family was not poor; in 1957 it had a land holding of 150 decars, a decent plot at the time.8 However, they were far from affluent; when Abdallah went to boarding school in the late 1950s, his father had trouble paying the yearly fee of 30 Jordanian dinars. He would have had to quit after the first year had it not been for his strong academic performance, which made the headmaster agree to waive his fees.9 Moreover, when Azzam was in his early twenties he kept only the bare minimum of his teacher’s salary and gave the rest to his father.

By all accounts Azzam had a happy and harmonious childhood. He was the last addition to the family, born when his parents were both around forty years old.10 As such he enjoyed the care and attention of not only his parents, but also of his two older sisters, Bahja and Jamila.11 As the youngest, he was also less involved in the farmwork than his two older brothers Abd al-Qadir and Abd al-Malik, which probably gave him more time to pursue his intellectual interests. He is widely described as a bookish and well-behaved child, who was particularly close to his sister Jamila and to his mother Zakiya, whose hand he kissed every morning.

Azzam’s home region was bucolic, but also politically charged. The Jezreel Valley plain is one of the most fertile agricultural areas of the

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entire Levant, making it a prized possession for those who control it.12 When Azzam was born the area had been under foreign domination for centuries; first by the Ottomans, then, from 1922, by the British Mandate. The region therefore had a history of resistance activism. In the mid-eighteenth century northern Palestine enjoyed near autonomy from the Ottomans under the rebellious sheikhdom of Zahir al-Umar.

13 In 1799 locals had fought Napoleon’s invading forces on the Jezreel Valley plain.14 In the nineteenth century Ottoman administrators reported difficulties collecting tax from the area.15 During the Arab revolt against the British in the late 1930s, the Nablus–Tulkarm–Jenin region was a centre of resistance referred to by the British as the “Triangle of Death.”16 The Arab revolt was fresh in al-Sila’s collective memory when Azzam was growing up. Residents had been involved in the insurgency; according to one of his Islamist biographers, al-Sila was a “jihad-fighting village” (qariya mujahida) with “a noble role in jihad.”17 Azzam himself later noted that when the 1948 war broke out there were still some hundred rifles left in the village from the 1930s.18 In 1935 the legendary fighter and Palestinian national hero Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam had been killed by British forces near Ya‘bad, just 10 kilometers southwest of alSila. Al-Sila was also the hometown of Yusuf Abu Durra, one of the heroes of the revolt.19 Abu Durra had been a student and companion of Izz al-Din al-Qassam and rose to the top ranks of the resistance in 1936.

Azzam’s family had direct experience with both the vicissitudes of the British occupation and the resistance to it. His father later recounted that “the English tried to burn our house in the past after they beat my uncle before my eyes and broke his ribs. They accused him of supporting the mujahidin, and they demanded that the village pay a fine of 60 pounds.”20 This led Abdallah’s father, who had previously spent time in the Ottoman army, to take up arms: “The English were occupying the land, and when the revolution against them began, I sold my cattle and went on foot to Jordan and from there to Syria to Aleppo and the Peninsula to buy a rifle. I paid 100 Palestinian dinars, a vast amount in those days.”21 We do not know exactly what he did with the rifle; he does not appear to have joined the core of the resistance, but Azzam’s hagiographers were keen to stress that his father had “waged jihad in Palestine.”22

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Losing Land Shortly after Abdallah turned six, war returned to Palestine. On 29 November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved the Partition Plan for Palestine, prompting armed rebellion by Arab Palestinians. Violence erupted in December 1947, and escalated in the spring until, on 14 May 1948, Israel declared independence. The following day, forces from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria invaded in an attempt to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.

The attempt failed, and the armistice agreements of early 1949 drew new borders, known as the Green Line, which gave Israel more territory than the UN plan had envisaged. What remained of the West Bank fell under Jordanian rule. More importantly, the war displaced some 700,000 Palestinians, creating a refugee problem that remains unsolved today.23 Known as the nakba (catastrophe) among Palestinians and the “War of Liberation” among Israelis, the 1948 war is one of the most important events in the modern history of the Middle East.

Abdallah Azzam was not physically affected by the 1948 war; his family was neither harmed nor displaced. There was little if any fighting in al-Sila, although the area immediately to the north, from the Jezreel Valley plain in the west to the town of Beit She’an (Baysan) in the east, saw heavy fighting in April and May 1948. By mid-May the Haganah (the precursor to the Israel Defence Force) had seized the Jezreel Valley plain – Palestinian territory under the UN Partition Plan – and cleared it of Arab inhabitants, some 7,000 in all.24 In late May 1948 the Israeli so-called Golani Brigade moved south to capture Jenin. In the ensuing battle of Jenin (1–3 June) Iraqi forces and local fighters pushed back the Israeli offensive in a rare case of Arab high performance in the war.25 Benny Morris described it as a “nasty defeat; superior IDF forces had been routed by a small number of Iraqis and irregulars.”26 There were no major hostilities in the area during the rest of the conflict.

Although the physical destruction was limited, locals were affected by the war in at least two important ways. One was through loss of land. According to Azzam’s own account, formal ownership of the southern part of the Jezreel Valley plain had fallen into the hands of two Christian families, the Sarsaq and Matran, through bureaucratic maneuvering under the Ottomans.27 Unaware of the legal technicalities, residents of al-Sila continued to till the land as their own, as they had done for centuries. In 1948 Zionists then bought the land from the

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Christian families, and took control of it. Many villagers were affected, and Azzam later wrote: “[The Jezreel Valley plain] included the land of my father and my grandfather and the people in my village.”28 In his memoirs Azzam also writes that Jewish militias committed atrocities against Palestinian farmers who defied the change in land ownership in 1948–1949. “On one occasion,” he claims, “a group of young men went down to reap the wheat that they had sown [earlier that spring]. Then Jewish fighters seized them, cut their stomachs open, filled them with wheat and put the bodies on iron poles as an example to others.”29 It is difficult to find independent confirmation of this story. The historiography of the 1948 war does contain reports of gun massacres, torture, and rape, but not butchery of the kind described by Azzam.30 In any case, the Jewish acquisition of the valley had a psychological effect on Palestinians in the area, if only because the latter had such a clear view of the plain from their hillside homes. As Azzam biographer Husni Jarrar, himself from Jenin, notes: “Wherever the martyr moved as a child, before his eyes was the Jezreel Valley plain, seized by the Jews through international conspiracies . . . He grew up seeing the land of his village occupied and cultivated by the Jews right before his very eyes, as they reaped its fruits and enjoyed its goods.”31 A second important effect of the war was the influx of refugees from neighboring areas captured by Israel. According to Walid Khalidi, Jenin governorate absorbed some 100,000 of the 700,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948.32 Many of the refugees were temporarily sheltered by local families while they looked for new places to live. The Azzams opened their house to a man named Abdallah Awatila and his family, who had been evicted from the village of Umm al-Shuf near Haifa.33 The two families went back a long time, because Abdallah Awatila’s grandfather had lived in al-Sila several decades earlier.34 One of the daughters in the refugee family later wrote, “When Palestine was occupied in 1948, my family fled to Jenin . . . and when [Azzam’s] father and other elders in his family heard this, they went to Jenin looking for them. They brought them to their village and put them up in their houses.”35 The refugee family stayed at the Azzams’ house in alSila for three years before moving to the village of Dayr al-Ghusun near Tulkarm. The Azzams thus felt the human consequences of the displacement of 1948 up close. However, this experience also had some positive consequences, as we shall see below.

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After the 1948 war, Sila residents found themselves right on the border with Israel, as a result of which they would experience conflicts with Israeli farmers and occasional incursions by the Israeli military.

One source of conflict was cattle – now the main resource of many of Sila’s farmers – going astray and being confiscated by Israelis.36 Another frustration was Israeli military patrols, which Azzam said he saw come to his house “on many a night.”37 Azzam writes that he saw a certain Qasim Dawasa being killed by an Israeli patrol right outside the family’s house. He also notes that Jordanian authorities did little to protect al-Sila residents’ interests, often dismissing reports of cattle theft and Israeli incursions.

Something else happened during the war that would influence Azzam’s worldview. One day in the spring of 1948 he noticed some people in the mosque whom he had not seen before and who spoke differently.38 They were Muslim Brothers from Syria and Iraq who had come to fight alongside the Palestinians. The prospect of a Jewish state in Palestine, including in Islam’s second-holiest city, Jerusalem, angered Muslims across the region. Muslim religious leaders declared a jihad to repel the intruders, and Arab regimes cast the issue as a concern for all Arabs. As a result, some 3,000–5,000 volunteer fighters from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq joined the Palestine war.39 The Jewish side also had some 5,000 foreign war volunteers; these were known as the machal, a Hebrew acronym for “volunteers from outside the land.”40 The 1948 war was a highly internationalized conflict for its time, and the volunteers on the Muslim side represent an early precedent for the Islamist foreign fighting of the late twentieth century.

At the same time, the Muslim foreign fighters of 1948 differed from the Afghan Arabs of the 1980s in three main ways. For one thing, most came from territories immediately bordering the war zone, not from faraway places. (There was a substantial contingent of Bosnians, but they were former members of German SS units who were stranded in prisoner camps in Italy after World War II and were recruited to the Palestine war by the Syrian army.)41 Second, the mobilization was largely state organized. Most volunteers fought in the Army of Salvation (Jaysh al-Inqadh), an irregular force created by the Arab League in late 1947. All of its weaponry and supplies were paid for

by Arab League governments, volunteers were enlisted in official recruitment centres, and many were trained at military bases by Syrian and Iraqi officers.42 Third, most foreign fighters in 1948 were

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not especially religious. When the Army of Salvation disbanded in July 1948, its men were allegedly “deserting en masse, getting drunk, firing off their weapons and harassing visiting officials.”43 The Army’s leader, the Syrian officer-adventurer Fawzi Qawuqji, was not an Islamist, nor were the many Druze, Ismailis, and Circassians in the force.44 Fighters were also well paid (18 Palestinian pounds per month) and may thus have been partly motivated by profit.45 As Azzam himself later noted, “True Islam did not enter the battles of 1948.”46 This is not to say that there were no Islamist volunteers. Between 500 and 1,000 Muslim Brothers from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan fought in the war.47 The Brotherhood movement had been an active supporter of the Arab struggle in Palestine since the 1930s revolt, and when the 1948 war approached all the branches launched a volunteer recruitment effort.48 The recruits entered in different capacities. The Syrians, Iraqis, and Jordanian Brothers were part of the Army of Salvation.49 The Egyptian Brothers, on the other hand, fought largely independently in the southern part of Palestine. The Brotherhood contingent was small compared both with the organization’s overall membership and with its fiery rhetoric on Palestine. As Levenberg noted, the Egyptian brotherhood “was able to dispatch no more than a few hundred volunteers for the jihad in Palestine, from a follower mass of hundreds of thousands of people. The explanation must be found in the Society’s unwillingness, rather than its inability, to dispatch many Holy Warriors to Palestine.”50 Still, the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in the 1948 war came to be seen inside the movement as a heroic effort. To subsequent hardliners such as Azzam, the jihad of 1948 was evidence that the Brotherhood’s true calling included warfare and not only peaceful political activism. For Azzam, the 1948 war was a brief golden age when the Islamist movement actually fought for Palestine, before leaving the resistance effort to nationalists and leftists. He also saw the war and its aftermath as evidence of the Arab regimes’ hostility to Islamists.

In 1989 he said: Hassan al-Banna sent four brigades from Egypt. A brigade came from the Muslim Brotherhood from Iraq, led by Sawwaf, Muhammad Mahmud alSawwaf, and a brigade from Syria led by Muhammad al-Siba‘i, and a brigade from Jordan led by Abd al-Latif Abu Qura. But what were the results? They made great sacrifices and demonstrated heroic exploits. The results were that

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Banna was killed! In Egypt. And the youth who had been waging jihad in Palestine in Egyptian tanks were taken and put in prison.51

To Azzam, in other words, the war of 1948 had offered a glimpse of what the Islamist movement could achieve militarily if it was not obstructed by governments and if it collaborated across borders.

School and Family In the spring of 1957, at age fifteen, Abdallah Azzam graduated from al-Sila al-Harithiyya middle school. He then enrolled briefly in Jenin high school, before changing to the Kadoorie Agricultural School in Tulkarm.52 This decision appears to have been a trade-off between Azzam’s academic aspirations and economic realities. At the time there were no universities in Jordan and Palestine, and his family likely had neither plans nor means to send him abroad. The choice, then, was between a regular high school followed by nothing and a vocational one that would give him skills for use right upon graduation.

Besides, Kadoorie was no ordinary vocational school. It was quite prestigious, and probably more competitive than the high school in Jenin. It was one of two schools established in the early 1930s by the Jewish philanthropist Ellis Kadoorie.53 One, in Tulkarm, catered for Arab students, while the other, in Kfar Tavor east of Nazareth, catered for Jews. The latter is well known in Israel due to its prominent alumni, such as former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and former foreign minister Yigal Allon. Kadoorie taught a combination of technical subjects and regular academic ones, including Arabic, maths, and English.

It was a boarding school, but Azzam probably went home at least every weekend, for he was involved with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jenin, as we shall see in the next chapter. He probably spent many an evening in Kadoorie reading the Qur’an, for he was working hard to learn the holy book by heart, a milestone he would only reach in the mid-1960s.54 After graduation in the spring of 1960, he was sent by the school to work as a teacher in the remote Jordanian village of Adir. Kadoorie students were required to spend the first year after graduation teaching in a local school somewhere in Jordan. Azzam had reportedly wanted a placement closer to home, but a dispute with the headmaster reportedly led to him being appointed to a remote school.55 Located near the central Jordanian city of Karak 90 kilometers south of Amman, Adir

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represented a veritable exile for the young Azzam, although probably also an opportunity for more reading of religious books.

In 1961 he moved back to al-Sila, and that autumn he began teaching in a secondary school in the village of Burqin just west of Jenin.56 He taught Islamic education, agriculture, and sciences, although one of his pupils later said that he found ways to talk about Islam in all the classes.57 He also worked as an agricultural supervisor in Burqin, putting his Kadoorie education to use.58 The commute between alSila and Burqin soon proved too time-consuming, so he moved to Jenin, where he rented a room with two friends from the Muslim Brotherhood.59 In this period he also started giving Friday sermons in the local mosque. He would practice his speeches at home, standing on a chair or box and reading them out to himself.60 Now that he had an income of his own, he could start contemplating a university education in Islamic Law.61 At this time no institution in Jordan offered university degrees in Islamic Studies, so the options were Cairo or Damascus.62 Azzam chose the latter, because it had a more active Muslim Brotherhood scene than Cairo at the time. In the autumn of 1962 he enrolled as a student in the faculty of Shari‘a at Damascus University. He would spend the next four years studying toward a license (Bachelor’s degree) in Islamic Law. However, he could not afford to live there as a full-time student, so he stayed in the West Bank and kept his teaching job in Burqin, while going to Damascus every once in a while for exams and other formalities.63 He soon had an even better reason to stay: On 27 July 1965 he married Samira Abdallah Awatila, a daughter of the family who had stayed with the Azzams in May 1948.64 They had become engaged in late 1963, when she was thirteen years old, which was quite early by the standards of 1960s Palestine.65 Samira later described the engagement as follows: “I was born in the house of Sheikh Abdullah’s sister . . . We later left for Tulkarem and he happened to have been there studying.

He visited us once, and three days later, his father asked for my hand in marriage.”66 Azzam himself later said that he had been attracted to her relative conservatism: I searched for a religiously observant girl to marry, and I found a girl who wore a headscarf covering two-thirds of her hair and a robe covering her knees. So I said, “Hold on, this girl is a saint!” [compared with other girls].

I tried to dress her in a long robe to cover the part below her knees, but then

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a battle erupted between me and her mother; fortunately I came out victorious.67

Around 1965, in preparation for life as a family man, Azzam had a small house constructed in al-Sila after designing it himself.68 In late May 1966 the young couple had a daughter, Fatima, their only child born in Palestine. The second child, Wafa, was born in Amman in early August 1967. In early 1969 they had their first son, Muhammad, after which Abdallah and Samira would be known as Abu Muhammad and Umm Muhammad – father and mother of Muhammad – in accordance with the Arab tradition of taking a nickname (kunya) after one’s firstborn son. Over the next fifteen years the couple would have five more children: Hudhayfa (b. 1972 in Cairo), Ibrahim (b. 1974 in Amman), Sumayya (b. 1975 in Amman), Hamza (b. 1977 in Amman), and Mus‘ab (b. 1984 in Islamabad).69 In 1966 Azzam graduated from Damascus University and settled in for what promised to be a fairly quiet life as a teacher on the West Bank.70 He hoped one day to continue his religious studies at the graduate level, but in the meantime he was bound up with family life, teaching, and da‘wa work (proselytizing) with the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Jenin (see next chapter). Indeed most of Azzam’s life choices up until 1967 suggest that he was rather attached to his hometown. He might well have settled for good in the Jenin area, had history not wanted it otherwise.

Fleeing to Jordan In late May 1967, following escalating tensions with Israel, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran, expelled UN peacekeepers in Sinai, and amassed forces on the Israeli border. On Monday 5 June, Israel, fearing an Egyptian attack, launched what it called a preemptive strike on the Egyptian Air Force, prompting Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to engage Israel militarily. However, within six days the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had destroyed the combined Arab air force, repelled the Arab armies, and seized Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Six Day War was a watershed event that changed the map of the Middle East and brought Palestinian territories under direct Israeli occupation.

This time al-Sila would be directly affected. In the afternoon of 5 June a motorized infantry battalion entered the village on its way

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southeast toward Jenin, where Jordanian forces had retreated and would be defeated the next morning.71 Azzam was around at the time. He had been “among the people who observed the events most closely,” and he briefly took up arms together with a group of friends.72 They fired a few shots at the Israeli vehicles with old Lee Enfield rifles before giving up: I was in our village, and the Jewish, or Israeli, tanks entered, near us. Not a single bullet was fired against the tanks. At all. We knew nothing about war, RPGs or that kind of thing. We had an English rifle, I held it, there were a bunch of boys in secondary school, I took them and went down to stand before the tanks. So a Jordanian sergeant came and said, “Guys, come back, come back. The tanks are rolling forward, they will crush you and keep going. What are you going to do with the tanks?”73

Azzam’s hagiographers would later embellish the story, saying that he and his men “stood before the Israeli tanks,” that “some of the sheikh’s followers fell as martyrs in the confrontations with the Jews,” and that their position “was incinerated by an Israeli tank shell” just after they left it.74 There is no evidence, however, that Azzam or any of his friends were physically hurt in the Six Day War.75 Instead of taking up arms, Azzam decided to leave the West Bank for Jordan. In later hagiographies his decision was presented as a purely political one, motivated by an aversion to living under Jewish occupation. However, an important part of the circumstances was that his family was already in Amman on vacation when the war broke out. His wife later said: We were visiting the sheikh’s sister in Amman on 25 May 1967, and I was with him and his father, and after five days I and his father were left in his sister’s house. His visa had expired so he went back to the West Bank to go back to work in the school, and after five days the West Bank was occupied, and we stayed in Amman and he on the West Bank . . . The sheikh only stayed a few days before he fled al-Sila to Jordan on foot together with an old man who knew the roads.76

In any case, Azzam was probably not forced to leave Palestine. Most of his relatives stayed in the village, and no coercive evictions were reported in al-Sila in 1967.77 Generally, forced evictions were less common in 1967 than they had been in 1948. In a survey conducted among refugees in Jordan in 1970, four in five refugee families said that

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they were not evicted by force, while 85 percent reported no casualties in the family.78 This is not to say that Azzam’s departure was a choice of convenience; in the heat of the moment there would have been much uncertainty about what the future would bring, especially since the previous war in 1948 really had brought mass evictions.

The 1967 war was a turning point in Azzam’s life. He was now a refugee – in fact, he would never again set foot in Palestine.

Moreover, the occupation angered him and planted the idea of armed resistance. We have no evidence of Azzam taking part in, or even seeking, weapons training prior to June 1967. From this point, however, “the idea of training and using of weapons to confront the Jews began preoccupying his mind.”79 It would take just eighteen months before Azzam was carrying a Kalashnikov on the Jordanian–Israeli border, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

The Six Day War was also a pivotal event in the history of the modern Middle East. It had several repercussions, three of which were particularly significant for the rise of transnational Islamism.

First, the military defeat delegitimized the Arab republics and their secular ideologies, thereby making Islamism a relatively more attractive ideological product. As Fouad Ajami and others have argued, the war became a catalyst for the emergence of the Islamist Zeitgeist in the late twentieth century.80 Second, the occupation of significantly more Arab territory and all of Jerusalem increased the potency of Palestine as a symbol of Muslim suffering. Finally, the war displaced yet more Palestinians, increasing the size and geographical extent of the Palestinian diaspora. The Six Day War led some 320,000 people to leave the West Bank and Gaza Strip, mostly for Jordan.81 Although this second exodus was smaller than that of 1948, it almost doubled the number of Palestinians living abroad, since two-thirds of the 700,000 displaced in 1948 had resettled in other parts of Mandate Palestine.82 Over the following decades the diaspora would expand geographically as Palestinians sought work and education in new places.

The Palestinian refugee phenomenon facilitated transnational political activism through at least two mechanisms. First, Palestinian networks served as conduits for transnational flows of people and ideas.

The fact that many diaspora Palestinians were highly educated and that many worked as teachers gave these networks even more salience.83 A pertinent illustration of this diaspora effect is that when Azzam arrived in Pakistan in the early 1980s there were already many

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Palestinian students there, several of whom became his first recruits.84 Second, the diaspora produced political entrepreneurs and activists with a more transnational outlook and skillset than non-exiled activists. Palestinian activists in exile had to develop communication and recruitment tactics adapted to cross-border activism. The effects of this transnationalism were first observed on the Palestinian left, whose activities in the 1960s and 1970s were highly transnational; it was notably they who pioneered the use of international terrorist tactics in this period.85 Palestinian Islamist groups would never conduct international operations in the same way, but individuals such as Azzam would become capable transnational activists.

Views on Palestine Although Abdullah Azzam left Palestine in 1967 and became famous for his role in Afghanistan, the Palestinian cause occupied a central place in his mind and strategic worldview. Unlike subsequent Palestinian ideologues of transnational jihad, such as Abu Qatada alFilastini or Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Azzam gave no theological reasons for not fighting in Palestine, only pragmatic ones.86 He deeply resented the occupation of his homeland and wished to take part in its liberation. If he did not personally fight Israel more often, it is because he did not have the opportunity. As late as 1989 he declared, “I am Palestinian, and if I found a way to Palestine and to al-Aqsa, I would fight there.”87 Palestine appears to have been on Azzam’s mind throughout his life.

Both his earliest and last books – notably the Red Cancer (1978) and Hamas: Historical Roots and Charter (1990) – were about Palestine.

The rest of his intellectual production is full of references to the Palestinian struggle, and there are numerous quotes by Azzam on the struggle’s importance.88 Even in the mid-1980s, when Azzam did not publish much on Palestine, he spoke about it in private. As one Afghan Arab recalled: “The sheikh would sit with us in the training camp, and he would always talk about the jihad in Palestine when he was in Sada on the border; about the conspiracies that had befallen the brothers in Palestine since the beginning of the jihad, about how the jihad in Palestine had collapsed after 68–69.”89 For Azzam, the liberation of Jerusalem was an inescapable religious duty. “Palestine is a matter of creed [aqida],” he often said, suggesting

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that one could not be a Muslim and not fight for the liberation of Palestine.90 He often lamented the fact that he had had to leave the jihad in Palestine after Black September in 1970, and declared that “we will not have peace of mind until we return to the jihad in Palestine.”91 For Azzam, Palestine was not just important; it had priority over other struggles in the Islamic world. Even in the midst of the Afghan jihad he stated outright that “Palestine is more important than Afghanistan” (filastin awla min afghanistan), and that “all Arabs who are able to fight in Palestine must do it. Those who are not able to do so must go to Afghanistan.”92 Azzam was thus quite open about the fact that jihad in Afghanistan was not his first choice. As one biographer described it, “the sheikh’s body was in Afghanistan, but his spirit was suspended over Nablus and Jerusalem.”93 Azzam was often accused by other activists of having abandoned his homeland in favor of Afghanistan. One biographer asked rhetorically: “[Azzam’s] talk on the importance of jihad in Palestine lead us to the question that many people ask: How could the martyr Abdallah Azzam leave the land of ribat and jihad around al-Aqsa in Palestine and move his efforts and his jihad to Afghanistan?”94 Another wrote: “Many of those who do not know the martyred imam well and who have not studied his writings think – wrongly – that the sheikh’s heart swerved to Afghanistan and that he forgot Palestine. I heard several of our brothers in Palestine say this in all seriousness.”95 Azzam was conscious of this criticism, and was somewhat defensive about it. For example, he opened one of his many articles on Palestine in al-Jihad magazine by saying: “Our presence in Afghanistan does not mean that we have forgotten Palestine.”96 His defense was to argue that circumstance had prevented him from fighting in the Palestinian Territories, and that the war for Kabul was a means to the long-term end of liberating Jerusalem. He cited two main reasons for why he had not been able to fight more in Palestine. The first was that the armed Palestinian resistance, in his view, had been hijacked by leftists.

Bitterness against the PLO is a major theme in Azzam’s ideological production, as we shall see in later chapters; on no other topic is he as vitriolic and sarcastic (and entertaining) as when he discusses Palestinians leftists. These people, he argues, are responsible for the failure of the Palestinian struggle, because they have turned the Palestinian people away from Islam with their imported ideologies. In Azzam’s view, only a truly Islamic army can defeat Israel. In the late

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1960s, when Palestinians had a window of opportunity to confront Israel, he argued, the Palestinian resistance was dominated by secularists, and the Islamists were too weak to make a difference.

His second reason was that the battlefield had been physically inaccessible since the early 1970s. Not only did Israel guard its borders extremely well; her immediate neighbours Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon prevented prospective fighters from even getting within striking distance of Israel.97 For him personally, it had been even more difficult because he had also been thrown out of Jordan in 1981.98 Azzam was bitter about the role of Arab governments in the Palestinian struggle. In his view, Arab rulers had done nothing but exploit Palestine for their own benefit: “I have not seen an issue with which traders have done more trading, with which the speculators have made more profit, and whose true friends have been oppressed more than in Palestine.”99 Azzam was thus basically saying that he had not had a choice of where to fight. He summed up his trajectory as follows: God aroused in my heart the great hope to taste the sweetness of jihad in Palestine in 1969–1970. Afterwards, the activity of sacrifice was eradicated in Jordan, the borders were closed, jihad waned, and jihadist thinking was forbidden. I thought, “Where is the jihad?” I found a parcel of land called Afghanistan, and I tried getting there. God showed me the way there.100

Thus Azzam came close to describing his own involvement in Afghanistan as mere opportunism. “For me,” he wrote, “Afghanistan is not greater than Palestine, and Kabul is not holier than Hebron, but it was an opportunity I grasped after the oppressors expelled me . . . so I went out to the land in which I found a path for da‘wa and a space to move.”101 The bottom line for Azzam was that it was better to wage jihad in Afghanistan than not to wage jihad at all: We are like a people whose mosque has been destroyed, and who has become exposed to rain and whirlwinds and storms. When the time for Friday prayer has come, are we allowed to drop the Friday prayer with the excuse that our mosque has been destroyed? Or do we go to the mosque in the neighboring village and perform our duty?102

Azzam subsequently articulated a strategic argument according to which the jihad in Afghanistan was a necessary stage in a process that would eventually lead to the liberation of Palestine. “He considered that the jihad in Afghanistan . . . was just a means to the end of jihad in

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Palestine,” as one biographer put it.103 According to Azzam’s pragmatic argument, victory in Afghanistan would strengthen the umma militarily through two mechanisms. The first was morale-boosting.

Afghanistan, he argued, was the umma’s best opportunity since 1948 to build a purely Islamic resistance movement. The Afghan jihad could thus serve as inspiration for the Muslim nation and mobilize it for the eventual liberation of Palestine. The second mechanism was acquisition of territory. The only way to build a Muslim army strong enough to reconquer Jerusalem, he argued, was to have a contiguous piece of territory – a solid base (qa‘ida sulba) – on which to train and equip fighters. The best candidate for such a base was in Afghanistan. He said: “Those who think that the jihad in Afghanistan is a distraction of the Islamic cause in Palestine are confused and misled and do not understand how one prepares leaders, how one builds a movement, how one founds a core around which a big Muslim army can be gathered to cleanse the earth of the big corruption.”104 At a lecture in Germany in the late 1980s, Azzam was confronted by a Palestinian member of the audience, who disapproved of his insistence that people should go and fight in Afghanistan. “I think the priority for us youth should be Palestine, declaring jihad in our homeland. So why has jihad not been declared there yet? I think it is wrong to invite us to Afghanistan; Afghanistan has its own youth and its own people. So let jihad be declared in Palestine.”105 In an unusual loss of composure, Azzam fired back: My brother. Does jihad not require preparation? Sons of Palestine who want jihad – do you not want to train yourselves? Where will you train? In Jordan?

So that they may slaughter you? Are you allowed to carry a bullet in Jordan?

Or in Syria with Hafiz al-Assad? Or with Husni Mubarak? . . . Do you not live in the real world? Are you going to fly from the East Bank to the West Bank?106

Azzam later said the Palestine had been a “cold issue” (qadiya barida) between 1970 and the outbreak of the Intifada in late 1987, but his own interest in the cause did not peter out.107 As a preacher in Jordan in the 1970s, he spoke regularly about the need to fight Israel, “preparing [the students] for the day they would meet the enemy and end the occupation of the Muslim umma in Palestine.”108 In Afghanistan in the 1980s he also talked regularly about Palestine both in public and in private. However, it was only after the outbreak

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of the Intifada – or the “jihad of the Intifada” as he called it – that he got back to more hands-on activism for the cause. In the last two years of his life he wrote extensively on Palestine, fundraised for Hamas, and trained Palestinians in Afghanistan with a view to sending them back to the Territories for operations, as we shall see in Chapter 14.

Of the political actors in the Palestinian theater, Azzam appears to have dealt only with the Muslim Brotherhood and, later, Hamas. He despised the PLO and other Palestinian leftists, whom he saw as godless traitors (although he was happy to subscribe to PLO newsletters for information from the Territories). He also appears to have had few links with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hamas’s smaller sibling on the Palestinian Islamist scene. As far as we know, he was not in contact with Islamic Jihad leaders such as Fathi Shqaqi, few if any Islamic Jihad members went to Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Azzam does not feature much if at all in PIJ publications.109 As we have seen, Azzam’s Palestinian background was less at odds with his involvement in Afghanistan than it might seem. Instead, it may have predisposed or nudged him toward transnationalism in several ways. For one thing, it shaped his thinking. The Israeli occupation constituted a personal grievance which Arab nation-states proved unable to address; he concluded from this that a pan-Islamic effort was the only way forward. For another, his refugee status made him more mobile, because he had already been uprooted, and his residency rights in new host countries were fragile. Had Azzam been an East Bank Jordanian, he probably could not have been expelled from Jordan so easily in 1980, and he might thus not have ended up in Pakistan.

Finally, his Palestinian origin afforded him certain advantages in the transnational arena. Palestine’s status as a symbol of Muslim suffering probably gave him a certain emotional leverage vis-à-vis wealthy Muslim donors. Moreover, Palestinian diaspora networks provided him with logistical support for his travels and with information from faraway places. Of course, Azzam’s Palestinian background does not explain his transnationalism; most other Palestinians in exile did not end up doing what he did. To understand his peculiar path, we must consider other aspects of his background – not least his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood.

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The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook (Or: How to Beat the Big Bang) Luke A. Barnes and Geraint F. Lewis Free yourself from cosmological tyranny! Everything started in a big bang? Invisible dark matter? Black holes? Why accept such a weird cosmos? For all those who wonder about this bizarre universe, and those who want to overthrow the big bang, this handbook gives you 'just the facts': the observations that have shaped these ideas and theories.

While the big bang holds the attention of scientists, it isn't perfect. The authors pull back the curtains, and show how cosmology really works.

With this, you will know your enemy, cosmic revolutionary - arm yourself for the scientific arena where ideas must fight for survival! This uniquelyframed tour of modern cosmology gives a deeper understanding of the inner workings of this fascinating field. The portrait painted is realistic and raw, not idealized and airbrushed - it is science in all its messy detail, which doesn't pretend to have all the answers.

Luke A. Barnes is a postdoctoral researcher at Western Sydney University.

He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney, before undertaking Ph.D. research at the University of Cambridge. He returned to the University of Sydney in 2008 as a Super Science Fellow, before being awarded a prestigious Templeton Fellowship to expand his research on the physics of fine-tuning of the laws of physics for complexity and ultimately life.

Geraint F. Lewis is a Professor of Astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, part of the University of Sydney's School of Physics.

He has published more than three hundred academic papers and is an acclaimed teacher. He also has a significant outreach profile, writing regularly for New Scientist and The Conversation, as well as regularly speaking publicly on all aspects of cosmology and astronomy.

February 2020

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$22.95 US / $25.95 CAD £17.99 Hardback 9781108486705

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UNDERSTANDING SCIENCE

It is necessary to get behind someone, before you can stab them in the back.

Sir Humphrey Appleby Yes, Prime Minister (BBC), 1987 We want to teach you how to overthrow a scientific theory.

That might sound a little “anti-science”, but actually you’ll be doing scientists a favour. We learn something when bad ideas are exposed. Science often progresses by supporting the reigning ideas, but at other times it has been necessary to storm the castle and install a new monarch. That’s how many great scientists rose to fame. Vive la révolution!

But you’ve got to do it right, and that’s what this book is about.

Revolutions fail for attacking the wrong target, following the wrong tactics, and underestimating the old order. Scientific theories are ideas about the natural world. They claim to know what the universe is like and how it behaves. This tells you how to dethrone a scientific idea: take up the weapon of observations and aim squarely at its predictions. Show that it can’t handle the truth.

And be ready with your new monarch when the throne is vacant.

To do all that, you must know your enemy. These wise words from Sun Tzu (or, if you prefer, Rage Against the Machine) are very relevant here: before you can launch a scientific revolution, you need to know the facts, and you need to know the ruling theory and its predictions. Theories aren’t installed on the scientific throne by accident, so do your homework.

This book will hand you the facts, point you in the direction of the castle walls, and wish you the very best of luck. In particular, we’ll be looking at the biggest scientific target of them all.

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This book is about the universe.

It’s about how we observe the universe, either with our naked eyes, or with the many telescopes that now survey the heavens, sensitive to radiation our eyes cannot perceive. But more than that, this book is about how we understand the workings of the universe, from its fundamental properties to its largest features.

It’s about how we put the pieces together.

Current scientific orthodoxy paints a picture of the cosmos that has been built up from many centuries of observation, experimentation, and hard thinking. Great minds through scientific history have laid the groundwork, carefully studying the basic rules of motion, space, time, atoms, light, and gravity, to provide the mathematical tools we need to comprehend the changing heavens. Today, cosmology – the study of the universe as a whole – is hailed as a paradigm of scientific success.

But what a strange picture! Many find modern cosmology completely unbelievable. The universe, we are told, was born almost 14 billion years ago in a hot and fiery event, cheekily named the big bang. At its beginning, everything was compressed into a point of infinite density and infinite temperature.

In the aftermath, the universe is expanding, but it’s not expanding into anything. Space itself is stretching.1 Today, the galaxies we observe in the night sky all appear to be moving away from us. A vast sea of galaxies, stars, and planets fills this expanding space, but because light only moves so fast, most of this universe will be forever beyond the reach of our telescopes, over the horizon.

What about the stuff in the universe? Compiling an inventory would appear to be straightforward, if painstaking: just add up all of the stars, planets, and gas clouds that inhabit galaxies and the spaces between the galaxies. But cosmologists say that there is more to the universe than the stuff that we can see. Much, much more. A dark side of the universe, which we cannot touch or feel, dominates its energy budget and controls its expansion.

Firstly, modern cosmology tells us that there is dark matter.

This stuff pervades every galaxy, holding stars in their orbits with its gravitational pull. But dark matter emits no light of its

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own, and so remains unseen by our telescopes. Stars light the heavens, but dark matter accounts for more than 85% of the mass in the universe. The atoms that make up you and me, stars and planets, are little more than frosting on the cosmic cake.

And then modern cosmology tells us about dark energy, a substance as pervasive yet more elusive than dark matter.

The case for dark energy was made only in the past few decades.

We are told that this substance governs the dynamics of the universe on its largest scales, causing the expansion to accelerate, and driving us towards a cold, dark, dead future.

Why would anyone believe all of that?

A quick internet search turns up plenty of websites, blogs, and videos decrying modern cosmology as wrong, illogical, or even a conspiracy of the scientific establishment that suppresses voices of criticism. Modern cosmology, they claim, is a sham, purposefully distorted and hyped in the hunt for funding. Cosmologists are little more than a self-serving cabal, crushing all opposition.

Maybe, dear reader, you are one of these revolutionary voices, wanting to put science right. Maybe you have ideas about the laws of physics and how they impact our view of stars and galaxies. Maybe you have tried to engage with established astronomers and cosmologists to express your ideas and explain why their view is misguided, but have received a cold shoulder. Why are academics, locked up in their ivory towers, so sure they are right?

Our goal is to explain how physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists developed their picture of how the universe behaves, why they talk about it the way they do, and to tell you what you need to do to confront their strange ideas and begin a revolution. We’ll help you build a strategy to battle modern science on a more even playing field, and to ensure that your voice is heard amongst the scientific din.

Just What Is Science?

Warning: the following discussion is very physics-o-centric!

To an outsider, science can be a difficult beast to understand.

The media – and especially health advertisements – often tell us

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“Science says . . .” and “Scientists have discovered that . . .”, but science is not a single, monolithic enterprise. The scientific community consists of many thousands of individuals who often specialize in a narrow set of fields. Some scientists design experiments, some perform observations, and others wrestle with abstract mathematical theories. All spend far too much time in front of a computer. But what is the goal of science?

We begin with an important point: scientists try to predict the future.

If you are not familiar with the workings of science, this might seem a little strange. A flick through popular science magazines such as New Scientist or Scientific American will reveal stories that focus on big scientific questions such as “What is spacetime really?” and “What is quantum mechanics really telling us about the universe?” But we can’t attack these deeper, foundational issues without some help.

In particular, it will help if we can bring these lofty questions down to a practical level. This is the part of science that plays “what if” games, constructing possible physical scenarios and teasing out implications. What if particles of light (photons) possessed a tiny amount of mass? What if a cloud of matter collapsed under its own gravity? What if I heat some hydrogen to 10 million degrees? Answering such questions requires more than a vivid imagination: we need our ideas to be translated into the language of mathematics. Sometimes, entirely new mathematical ideas need to be discovered and developed.

The goal of this precision is to connect our ideas to data.

Can our new idea account for existing observations of the universe? And, just as importantly, are there any future observations that we could make that would provide further evidence for or against our idea? Can we get one step ahead of nature?

Take gravity as an example. In the 1680s, Isaac Newton published his incredibly successful theory of gravity. With one simple law, he explained how apples fall and how the planets move. Using Newton’s law, Edmund Halley was able to predict the future motion of the comet that now bears his name.

In 1705, he calculated that it would return in 1758. Sure enough,

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on Christmas day, it was spotted by a German farmer. Sadly, neither Newton nor Halley was alive to see it.

However, in the mid 1800s, Newton’s theory was struggling.

Astronomers had discovered that the innermost planet, Mercury, was orbiting slightly out of place, as if pulled by an unseen planet near the Sun. Some even claimed to have observed this newest member of the Solar System, which had been dubbed “Vulcan”. Other astronomers, however, could not confirm this sighting. As evidence evaporated and Vulcan consistently failed to turn up where it was predicted to be, this mysterious shortcoming of Newton deepened into a crisis.

In the early 1900s, Einstein proposed his radical new theory of gravity – called the general theory of relativity – in which space and time themselves warp, stretch, and wobble. While Einstein’s prediction of the orbit of Mercury is only slightly different from that of Newton, that was enough to beautifully align theory with observations. The planet Vulcan was banished to the scientific scrap heap.

Einstein’s explanation of Mercury’s orbit is impressive, but, like Newton’s explanation of the motions of the planets, it comes after the data. We knew about the orbit of Mercury before Einstein proposed his theory. This is sometimes called a “post-diction”.

Is there anything wrong with post-diction? We certainly can’t discard all the evidence we found before a theory was proposed.

Our scientific results would be swayed by something as contingent as what historical order we human beings happened to discover some idea or perform some experiment. That could depend on all sorts of irrelevant factors, like whether Thelma the Theorist took a few days off, or Xavier the Experimenter had a particularly good breakfast.

In principle, prediction and post-diction carry equal weight.

But in practice we want to know whether a theory explains the data naturally, rather than being glued together from makeshift bits and pieces. Sometimes we can judge this simply by examining the assumptions that underlie the theory. But it is not always easy to tell. Predictions dispel a worry: you can’t cook up

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a theory just to explain data if you don’t have the data yet. If a theory correctly predicts the result of an experiment that we haven’t done yet, then that is impressive.

So, when a new theory is proposed, we start asking “what if” questions. With Einstein’s theory in hand, we have a whole new theoretical universe to explore. We look for new opportunities to test whether this Einstein was correct. Einstein predicted that gravity would bend the path of light rays moving near massive objects. Famously, this effect was observed during a solar eclipse in 1919 by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, confirming general relativity’s predictions and propelling Einstein to international fame.

Einstein’s theory continues to make successful predictions.

In 2015, a hundred years after Einstein’s announcement of his new theory, scientists confirmed a hugely important prediction of general relativity: gravitational waves. Space and time can ripple. The discovery of these feeble vibrations, typically swamped by the everyday groans and grumbles of life on Earth, required half a century of effort to build an extraordinarily sensitive detector called the Laser Interferometer GravitationalWave Observatory (or LIGO for short). The results were spectacular, with the first signal revealing the merging of two black holes 3 billion years ago in the distant universe. LIGO has opened up a new window on the cosmos.

While Einstein’s name is synonymous with scientific genius, you don’t need to venture far into the outskirts of the internet to find many people who object to his ideas. Some play the man, rather than the ball, accusing him and the scientific community of outright fraud. Relativity is obviously crazy, they say, but it allows fat-cat scientists to keep feeding off the public purse.

Others will decry the “logic” of relativity, often voicing a dislike of the notion of curved space and time, and even accusing the scientific establishment of wilful blindness to their unrecognized genius.

But science holds onto general relativity, not because of hero worship of Einstein, or because we are part of a secret conspiracy. Rather, we use his theory because it works. Physicists dream

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of proving Einstein wrong; we just haven’t been able to do it. We are devising new ways to draw out predictions, and devising new experiments to test those predictions.

As we said at the beginning of the chapter, the reigning monarchs of science didn’t get there by accident. But they are always vulnerable, because every prediction is a chance to fail.

So, what do you need if you want to revolutionize science? A new monarch. You need a model!

Just What Is a Model?

The word model has several meanings in the English language, and this can lead to some confusion when talking about a “scientific model”. Anarchic comedian Alexei Sayle once said, “my girlfriend’s a model. She’s an Airfix kit of a Stuka dive bomber!”

We can understand the most important thing about a scientific model by thinking of a model house. Everything in the model is to scale, with one-twentieth size windows, doors, rooms, cupboards, and more. The useful thing about this model is that we can use it to answer questions about the real house.

Suppose you want to know whether you can rearrange the living room to incorporate that new sofa you’ve had your eye on. You can answer this question with the model. If we make a onetwentieth scale model of the new sofa, then we can easily rearrange the model room to see if everything fits. For an accurate model, if the model sofa fits into the model house, then the real sofa would fit into the real house.

This is the crucial feature of a model: using the right translation, we can turn a problem in the real world (will the sofa fit in my living room?) into a problem in the model (will the model sofa fit in the model living room?). We then solve the problem in the model. If the model is an accurate representation of reality, then we have also solved the problem for the real world.

In the case of a model house, the translation between the model and reality is simple: it’s just 20 times smaller. For a scientific model, the mathematical framework can be more

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complicated, but the crucial feature is the same: we can translate a question about the real world into a question about the model. Because we can relate between the two, we can make predictions. We can ask questions such as “what if I performed such-and-such experiment?”

Let’s take another look at Newton’s model for gravity. (We’re physicists. We like Newton!) We can express his idea in words: gravity will produce a force between two masses, whose magnitude is proportional to the product of the two masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the masses. That’s interesting, but not much use to a working scientist. To a scientist, the useful form of Newton’s law of gravity looks like this: !

F ¼ �G

M1 M2 ^r r2

If you are not a fan of mathematics, and if this equation looks like little more than gobbledygook, don’t worry too much. We can look at this like a machine, where we input two values for the masses, M1 and M2, and the distance between them, r, and this machine returns the gravitational force between them. The other number in the equation is G, which is known as Newton’s gravitational constant. It scales the numbers so the result has the correct unit (which, for force, is the newton). Finally, ^r (“r” with a little hat) is known as a unit vector; it tells you that the force pulls the masses towards each other. But what can you do with this bit of mathematics?

We turn to Newton’s laws of motion. We can state the idea in words as “forces cause objects to change their speed and direction of travel”. But as we have noted, it’s the mathematical version of the law that allows us to make precise predictions: !

!

F ¼ma

This equation might be familiar from high-school physics; F is the force, a is the acceleration, and m is the mass. Combining these equations, we can start with information about the position and velocity (which encodes speed and direction) of the

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objects in the system at a particular time, and transform it into a prediction about the future of the system. For example, if we know where all the Solar System’s planets are today, and how fast they are moving, we can calculate where they will be at any future time.

The point of all physical models – Newton’s, Einstein’s and anyone else’s – is that we can ask questions about the universe.

Given where I saw the planet Mercury last night, where will I see it tonight? By how much will the path of a light ray bend as it passes close to the Sun? We can ask Newton’s model, and we can ask Einstein’s model, and then we can actually look at the universe to see if either is correct.

The lesson is that if you are going to revolutionize science, you need a mathematical model. Words will not do. As scientists, we regularly get emails and letters espousing new ideas about the cosmos, from theories about fundamental particles to new interpretations of galaxy redshifts and the expansion of the universe.

Surprisingly often, the author confesses that they are unable to express these ideas mathematically. I’m sure my idea is correct, they say, I just need some help working out the mathematics.

To a scientist, and particularly to a physicist, this is a bit like saying “I have a great idea for a symphony; I just need some help with the musical notes” or “I’m sure I could do brain surgery; I just need some pointers on where to start cutting.”

For a physicist, you don’t really have a theory until you can think about it clearly enough to put it in mathematical form.

Without precise predictions, it is too easy to fool yourself into thinking that the data is consistent with your idea. We need to predict measurements and observations, so that we can hold this mathematical model up to nature.2

What Makes a Good Scientific Model?

What does a scientist want in a scientific model? We have emphasized that your model must present a precise, quantitative picture of the universe, one that allows us to predict the results of experiments. But this is not the only criterion that

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scientists use. Historians and philosophers of science, by studying how scientists actually argue for and against theories, have proposed sets of theoretical virtues, that is, traits of a good scientific idea.

Not everyone agrees about all of the virtues, of course, but there is a common core that scientists will recognize. We will look at a recent list of twelve theoretical values (TVs) compiled by historian Mike Keas.3 His list is helpfully comprehensive: while the twelve values overlap somewhat, each pinpoints something important about good scientific theories.

The first three relate to how your theory handles the evidence.

TV1. Evidential accuracy: your theory accounts for or fits the data well.

TV2. Causal adequacy: your theory posits causes that account for the effects we see in the data.

TV3. Explanatory depth: your theory applies to a wide range of scenarios.

Clearly, if your theory is correct, or at least approximately correct, then it should explain the data (TV1). All the data!

Cherry-picking – focusing on the results that your mathematical model can describe, while ignoring those where it fails – is a scientific sin. This is a sure road to being ignored by the scientific community.

But scientists want more from a theory than this. The theory that the continents can move over the surface of the Earth explains why they appear to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

But when it was first proposed, this theory was rightly criticized because it lacked causal adequacy (TV2): it didn’t tell us how the continents moved. Frankly, no one had much of an idea of how something as large as a continent could slide around the Earth’s surface. The theory of plate tectonics added the all-important details.

But the theory of plate tectonics does even more. It has implications for a wide range of facts about the Earth’s surface: how mountains form, how lava comes to the surface in volcanos, and the origin of earthquakes along fault lines. Scientists prefer broad theories that explain a lot about the universe (TV3).

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The next three virtues are about how your theory hangs together.

TV4. Internal consistency: your theory does not contradict itself.

TV5. Internal coherence: your theory’s various parts fit together neatly and naturally, with no internal tension or tacked-on assumptions.

TV6. Universal coherence: your theory sits well with other warranted principles.

Obviously, if one part of your theory contradicts another part, then it has self-destructed (TV4). But more generally, a theory can fail to hang together in a convincing way. It may need too many ad hoc bits and pieces, tacked on for no good reason. The paradigmatic example is epicycles: when the ancient Greeks observed that the planets don’t move in perfectly circular orbits, Claudius Ptolemy proposed that the planets move along “circles on circles”. There is no deep or natural reason for these epicycles. They explain the data, but in a clumsy way. Even Copernicus’s model, which correctly placed the Sun at the centre of the Solar System, needed epicycles. A more coherent model of the Solar System would await the work of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton.

Also, if your theory violates established principles, then scientists are suspicious. Suppose your theory, despite fitting all the experimental facts, fails to conserve energy in certain circumstances. This is reason to worry since conservation of energy is a time-tested principle. We aren’t going to discard, or even grant a few exceptions, to this principle on a whim.

The next three virtues are aesthetic.

TV7. Beauty: your theory strikes scientists as beautiful.

TV8. Simplicity: your theory explains the same facts with fewer starting assumptions.

TV9. Unification: your theory explains more kinds of facts than rivals, relative to its starting assumptions.

TV7 might surprise you, but a long line of important physicists can be marshalled in support. The physicist Paul Dirac went as far as saying, “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations that to have them fit experiment.” Henri Poincare

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spoke of “the intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp”.

In a letter to Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg stated the following: That these interrelationships display, in all their mathematical abstraction, an incredible degree of simplicity, is a gift we can only accept humbly. Not even Plato could have believed them to be so beautiful. . . .

You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.4 Why would scientists – hard-nosed, no-nonsense, just-the-facts people, supposedly – be concerned with something as subjective and nebulous as beauty?

One important reason is found in physics as we know it. Many of the theories of modern physics, when one can fluently speak the appropriate mathematical language, are strikingly elegant, symmetric, and ingenious. Einstein’s general theory of relativity is a great example. The central insight – gravity is the warped geometry of space and time – is a piece of creative brilliance, arguably the greatest single theoretical insight in the history of physics. The connection of this idea to the beautiful mathematics of curved spaces seems almost inevitable; in the appropriate language, the theory is stated very simply, even poetically.

The range of observed data that the theory explains is enormous.

Within one concise equation, sitting innocently on the blackboard, one feels the weight of a million worlds to be explored – expanding universes, spinning black holes, slowing clocks, bending light rays, gravitational waves, and even the possibility of time travel.

But what exactly does a physicist mean when they say that a theory is beautiful? Most physicists, we think, would say that they don’t exactly know.5 As with all experiences of beauty, it is vivid and immediate, but not easy to describe. The other theoretical virtues try to explain a bit more.

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One common feature of mathematical beauty is simplicity.

The scientific enterprise generates an extraordinary amount of data every day. A single night at a large telescope will easily fill a computer hard drive, and that’s just astronomy. One of the lovely things about beautiful theories is how succinctly they can be stated: a few postulated kinds of entities and laws are all you need to explain a mountain of data. It’s like cracking a code or solving a puzzle.

Another important feature is unity. Beautiful scientific theories give a sense of how the whole of nature fits together into one grand picture. Ptolemy, in the second century AD, glimpsed something wonderful in his theory of the Solar System:6 I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.

When a theory unifies our view of nature, it explains many seemingly disconnected facts. It explains how nature holds together. (Part of the reason for the beauty of our scientific laws, of course, is that they describe our beautiful universe.)

The final set of theoretical virtues concern how a theory fares over time, as it is examined, extended, and utilized by the scientific community.

TV10. Durability: your theory has survived testing by new experiments and new data.

TV11. Fruitfulness: your theory has pointed to new discoveries, such as successful novel prediction and unification.

TV12. Applicability: your theory has led to the development of new technology.

If your theory has really peeked into the inner workings of nature, then it should continue to illuminate the way the universe works. It should be able to explain new data that we gather.

As we discussed above, the advantage of prediction – theory first, observation second – over post-diction is that we can be

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sure that the theory wasn’t jerry-rigged to explain the data. It is particularly impressive if (TV11) a new theory suggests an experiment or observation we hadn’t even thought to make.

Physicists love this: it gives us something to do.

One particular form of evidence for a new theory of nature is whether it can be put to technological use (TV12). This isn’t true of all theories, of course: working out how a galaxy makes its stars isn’t going to lead to star-making factories any time soon.

But if we really understand how electrons and gravity work, then this should help us design and build devices that make use of this knowledge. We understand electrons well enough to build CRT televisions, and we understand gravity well enough to put satellites in orbit.

We note again that while these criteria are overlapping, each captures something important about what we expect from a good scientific theory. Our best theories fulfil most of them.

But if your theory is all numerical coincidences and no physical insight, if it lacks unifying principles, if it ignores huge swathes of data, if it is made from an odd assortment of unconnected assumptions, if it is mathematically mundane, if it doesn’t seem to produce new predictions or new ways of looking at the physical world, then scientists will have a sneaking suspicion that there’s something missing.

The Real Process of Science Part 1: Publishing So, now you have your theory. You’ve thought through its foundations, its implications and its applications. You have a clear vision of the real nature of the universe. You’re sure it ticks off enough of the theoretical virtues to be taken seriously.

You’re ready to explain your discovery to anyone who will listen.

How do you make scientists pay attention?

Some advice: writing letters or emails to prominent scientists probably won’t work. They receive too many of those. If well-known scientists responded to all the supposedly revolutionary ideas that landed in their inbox, they’d have time for little else.

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A scientist – even a famous one – might answer a concise question if you’re polite, especially if you open with, “I read your book/paper/article and I have a query.” But your glorious 400-; page unsolicited Word document, with seven different fonts, Microsoft Paint diagrams and ALL CAPS, is headed straight for the trash. We haven’t studied this phenomenon systematically but, in our experience, there is a remarkably strong correlation between how utterly bonkers an idea is and how many fonts are used by its defender. Even too much bold and italics is a red flag. Don’t do this. OR UNLEASH YOUR INNER CAPS LOCK. Or use multiple colours. Or write a webpage that is one enormous paragraph. Good typesetting is subtle. If you really want your document to look scientific, learn to use a program called LaTeX. Raging in internet chat rooms and blog comments won’t achieve much either. In fact, scientists are unlikely to hear of your idea even if you write a book about it; new theories in physics are rarely first published in a book.

Popular culture often talks about the scientific method as an idealistic “wash, rinse, and repeat” procedure: you have an idea, test the idea in an experiment, then accept or reject your idea and start again with a new idea or experiment. Real science isn’t quite this neat. Different fields approach nature differently. But there is at least one key common element to the practice of science: publication.

Publications in a scientific journal are the currency of science.

If you look at the résumé of a scientist, there will be a list of their publications and the journals in which they appear. Why are journal publications so highly regarded? Because this is the first step of peer review by the broader research community.

To get published in an established journal, a manuscript is submitted to an editor. The editor takes the first glance at a paper, just to check that it looks like, well, a paper: is it laid out appropriately, does it present a background, approach, methods, results, and discussion, and does it look like it makes at least a little bit of sense? For articles that overcome this low bar, the editor will then seek comment from external referees.

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If it passes their review, sometimes after a few revisions, then it is published.

Scientists have a choice about which journal they send their paper to. We look for a good reputation, proper editorial oversight, and peer-review by other scientists. The hierarchy of journals is sometimes ranked by something called impact factor, which measures how many times (on average) that a paper in that journal is cited over a particular time period. It’s an awful statistic, strongly skewed by individual papers that are very influential and heavily cited, shining glory onto other articles that share the same pages. This discussion of journals, impact factors and gaming will cause some of our colleagues’ blood to boil. Scientists don’t particularly appreciate reducing their work down to one blunt statistic. Still, impact factor is easy to calculate.

High-impact journals such as Nature and Science cover all of science and reject most papers that they receive. Well, you can’t be exclusive without excluding. They require submitted work to be highly novel and innovative. This doesn’t mean that it is right; in some ways, it means that the work is riskier.

Then there are the “bread-and-butter” journals in a scientific field. In astronomy, for example, most papers are submitted to journals such as the Astronomical Journal, Astrophysical Journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Astronomy & Astrophysics. These journals accept papers from all over the world.

While their refereeing is robust enough to see many papers rejected, they aren’t necessarily looking for the latest sensation.

As well as these larger journals, smaller journals can be found attached to national societies or observatories. These provide a place for less impactful research, conference proceedings, technical reports, or student projects with an interesting result.

The reward for publishing in a higher impact journal is a more impressive CV for a scientist and a boost for their university up the rankings. As a result, it is not unheard of for a paper to be submitted initially to the highest impact journal, only to be rejected and be resubmitted to a lower ranking journal, and so on.

The lesson is that merely getting your paper published isn’t as important as where it is published. Scientists will take note of

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where your paper has appeared, as this will signal the level of refereeing and editorial review it has received. If you claim to have revolutionized cosmology, waving your published paper as evidence, it had better be published in a high-ranking physics or astronomy journal. Appearing in the Bulgarian Journal of Basket Weaving will not garner much attention.

The Real Process of Science Part 2: Peer Review As part of its assessment at a journal, a submitted paper will be sent out to referees: experts in the field who provide detailed comments on the paper, in particular identifying any glaring mistakes. Referees also identify whether the work is interesting, significant, and potentially of use to the scientific community.

Papers must pass this interrogation to be published.

But don’t overestimate the importance of a thumbs-up from a referee. A passing grade does not mean that the paper is correct, or has been accepted as immutable scientific orthodoxy.

What it means is that some scientists have judged that it is not obviously wrong and probably of use to other researchers.

And don’t think that the assessment of an article for a journal by referees is all there is to peer review. It is merely the first step in assessment by the scientific community. Peer review continues long after an article has been published, in the continual assessment of whether the idea is interesting, accounts for new data, and spurs new ideas. The most definitive indicator of scientific impact, craved by scientists and by university bean-counters equally, is the citation.

When scientists list their journal papers, they usually also list the number of times their article has been cited in someone else’s work. Why? Because this means that others in the scientific community have studied their work and found it useful.

Oscar Wilde’s quip that “there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about” is true for scientific papers. The worst thing that can happen to a scientist is that nobody takes notice of your work. At best, no-one has realized its importance yet. This can happen: in 1967,

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Steven Weinberg published a theory in particle physics for which he would later win the Nobel Prize.7 But in the first four years after publication, it was only cited twice. Once his colleagues realized its importance, however, this soon changed.

It has been cited, on average, four times a week for the last 50 years, for a total of 11,000 citations.

But let’s be honest. A lack of citations is more likely to be a sign that it was not an interesting or good piece of work.

Citations are an important measure of scientific impact. Universities and funding bodies are continually assessing the research activities and output of their staff. They are glued to international university rankings like a football fanatic glued to the league table; positioning in the table brings renown and prestige, and with it, better chances at securing research funding and foreign students. Universities and funding bodies want impact to be immediate.

Scientists, however, tend to have mixed feelings about citations. Those of us engaged in so-called blue-sky fields, which study fundamental questions about the structure of matter and the universe at large, know that it sometimes takes a long time for some research to be appreciated and result in scientific impact. Like Weinberg’s paper, plenty of good scientific work in astronomy and cosmology, such as the prediction of gravitational lensing or gravitational waves, or the initial observational clues of dark matter, waited for many decades before its importance was realized.

At this point, we tip our hats to our mathematician cousins.

Physics is grateful for the constant flow of new mathematical ideas that allow us to understand the workings of the universe.

However, advances in mathematics may lie around for centuries before being noticed for what they are. This means that mathematicians can die unrecognized in their lifetime.

The Real Process of Science Part 3: Presentation As well as publishing material in recognized journals, scientists spread the word about their work by presenting at conferences

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and workshops. These are quite varied occasions, some with a handful of people, some with hundreds, some broadly covering some general area of astronomy and cosmology, others focused on very specific topics.

For example, these words are being written on a Boeing-737, winging its way to Cairns in northern Queensland, Australia.

The authors are heading for “Diving in the Dark”, a conference about the dark side of the universe, both dark matter and dark energy. While at the airport, we discovered that Cairns is hosting a second astronomical meeting this week, specifically focused upon the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. At each meeting, astronomers will present, discuss, and argue about the latest research, for new ideas to be shared, and new collaborations to be forged. Walking away from such meetings, an astronomer will have a feel for the latest research in their area, new ideas of where to take their research and, importantly, have promoted their own ideas to the community.

No matter how lucid your writing, you just can’t beat a good audio-visual presentation for conveying the big picture of your idea. Talking about your latest research at major meetings makes it much more likely that other researchers will read your papers. The goal is not just appreciation: you want them to run with your idea, thinking of new implications and new ways of testing those implications. When they write their next paper, they may even give you one of those treasured citations.

As with publications, presentations should be at significant conferences that highlight the latest data and results. Wowing the monthly meeting of your local Quidditch society doesn’t do much for your theory’s credentials. When you’re a young researcher, you may only get 5 or 10 minutes, so have an elevator-pitch version of your ideas ready!

Does this sound like a lot of hard work? It is. And that’s the way it should be. Revolutions shouldn’t be easy!

Most importantly, be prepared to fail. In fact, accepting that you are wrong and moving on is a key attribute of a good scientist. Sticking to your guns when all the data says that your idea is wrong is the stuff of pseudoscience and irrelevance.

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Female Husbands A Trans History Jen Manion

Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of 'female husband' in the early twentieth century. Groundbreaking and influential, Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.

Jen Manion is Associate Professor of History at Amherst College, the author of Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (2015), and a lifelong LGBTQ rights advocate.

April 2020

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$24.95 US / c. $28.95 CAD £17.99 Hardback 9781108483803

Introduction: Extraordinary Lives

I

n 1746, charles hamilton of glastonbury, England found what they were looking for – Mary, a curious young woman who was taken by their charms. With the approval of the girl’s aunt, the pair were joined in marriage and set off on a honeymoon. Hamilton had little money and no family. But they were resourceful, determined, and charismatic. They offered Mary companionship and adventure. As someone who was assigned female at birth, Hamilton became known as a female husband. Nearly one hundred years later and across the Atlantic, the Journal of Commerce ran a story called, “Extraordinary Case of a Female Husband.” Scottish immigrant George Wilson was found passed out on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. A policeman took them into the station. Wilson was just another poor laborer who drank too much after a long day of work. But as someone who was raised as a girl and now lived as a man, they were incredibly vulnerable to harassment, violence, and punishment at the hands of the authorities.

Hamilton, Wilson, and dozens of others like them were designated “female husbands” – a term that persistently circulated throughout Anglo-American culture for nearly 200 years to describe people who defied categorization. Though assigned female at birth, female husbands assumed a legal, social, and economic position reserved for men: that of husband. Female husbands were presented as shocking and controversial figures, often with headlines featuring the word “extraordinary.” By their very existence, they challenged essentialist understandings of sexual difference. They demonstrated by their actions every day that gender was malleable and not a result of one’s sex. In their ability to flirt, charm, and attract female wives, they threatened the stability of the 1

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institution of heterosexual marriage. They lived lives that in contemporary terms might be described as transgender, nonbinary, butch, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual. They were often said to have assumed the “character of a man.”

Female Husbands: A Trans History follows the category of the “female husband” from its origin in 1746 through its demise just before World War I. The book highlights the very fact that people assigned female at birth at birth chose to trans gender and live fully as men, in small towns and big cities, in Great Britain and the United States. They found joy and love in intimate partnerships with women, often entering into legal marriages recognized by the state. These relationships set them apart from the numerous other groups who transed genders for work, war, and adventure. Female husbands were defined by both their marriages to women and their chosen occupations. People persisted in living as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and punishment.

Punishment often involved the forced surrender of one’s gender expression – even if just momentarily until they were in a new town, outside of the gaze of local authorities. When husbands were outed as being assigned female at birth, newspapers were often the first to spread the word throughout the community. The press reported such accounts enthusiastically and frequently, exposing dynamic, contested, and varied stories of love, courage, risk, loss, and sadness. I utilize these accounts to offer a rigorous social history of the lives lived by female husbands as well as a cultural history of the category of the “female husband.”1 Female Husbands shows how the meaning of what seemed like a selfevident category changed over time. Beginning in England in the mideighteenth century, female husbands lived full time as men and entered legal, seemingly heterosexual marriages with women. One of the most celebrated and stable relationships was that of James and Mary Howe who together ran the White Horse Tavern in the Poplar neighborhood of London’s East End for decades. While the couple were held in great esteem by the community and acquired significant wealth for working people, even James shared the same fate of every female husband featured in this book: none were permitted to continue going about their lives in their chosen gender expression once the community determined they were assigned female at birth. Gender 2

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conformity itself was the punishment required by authorities and neighbors alike.

While much was made about why and how people assigned female at birth transformed themselves into men, the female lovers who married them are equally intriguing. Female wives were sometimes portrayed as innocent victims of deception, though they were often active participants who knowingly and happily chose to enter these unconventional partnerships. Sometimes female wives disavowed their husbands, declaring ignorance about their lovers’ sex. Female wives of female husbands are often overlooked and neglected as queer figures of the past. The newspaper record of such relationships has shaped this sexism, as accounts often don’t even include the wives’ names. Despite this public erasure, female wives held a tremendous amount of power in their marriages (especially for the time) because they could publicly denounce their husband’s gender at any time. Wives were known to do this under two circumstances: when they were surprised to find out their husband was female or when their husband denied them a divorce on favorable terms. There is no denying that female wives gave legitimacy and stability to the gender of female husbands in the eyes of co-workers, friends, and society.

Female husbands were primarily viewed through the lens of gender – given their claim to manhood – until the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Around mid-century, views and representations of female husbands began to change. The UK press largely lost interest in such stories, possibly because they occurred less frequently but probably because the concept had run its course as an attention-grabbing headline that sold papers. The US press grew by leaps and bounds during this era and adopted this longstanding British custom as its own. In US newspapers in the 1840s and 1850s, female husbands were seen as a part of the growing women’s rights movement. In the 1870s, they were associated with poverty and vagrancy. By the 1880s, they were cast as a precursor to and legitimizer of same-sex relationships. Accounts of female husbands in the news increasingly emphasized sex over gender – arguing that those assigned female were really women and therefore could not be husbands.

Authorities remained uncertain about how to react to those who transed gender and often struggled to determine if any laws were 3

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broken. Countless people who were arrested for transing gender later explained that they were released because they had not broken any law.

Female husbands presented a particular conundrum for authorities charged with determining the basis of their wrongdoing. Was it because someone assigned female lived as a man? Or because the marriage legitimized sexual relations between the two? Or because two women were not allowed to marry? Even when authorities weren’t clear about the exact wrong committed by a female husband and their wife, they knew it was up to them to get to the bottom of a situation and decide. In this process, they reveal to us how they understood sexual difference and why the social conventions of gender were important to them.

In the 1880s and 1890s, accounts of female husbands exploded in the US, as those assigned female at birth who lived as men and married women were increasingly visible. The press still found these stories newsworthy. The catchy “female husband” headline, however, was used in reference to a wider range of people and circumstances, diluting its meaning. For instance, someone assigned male at birth who lived as a man was accused by their wife of being a “female husband” in an attempt to secure a divorce. Another writer wondered, given the rise of heterosexual married women in the workforce, if in fact “females” made good husbands and could be entrusted with such duties. One-half of a couple who lived openly as women in a same-sex relationship also earned the designation, as the concept lost its association with female masculinity, conflict, and duality. By the turn of the twentieth century, female husband was no longer a clear signifier of manhood and transing. ***** I came out as a lesbian in 1994. It was something I had recently figured out and felt excited about sharing with others. To my surprise, several people said they “had suspected” as much or had “always known.” How could they have known it when I didn’t? It quickly became clear that the basis for their remarks had nothing to do with my sexuality, per se, and everything to do with gender. When I came out as a lesbian, it seemed to explain my lifelong refusal to conform to expectations for people raised

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as girls. For as long as I can remember, I was interested in the activities and clothes that were generally reserved for boys. I was largely met with judgment, shame, and punishment for these tendencies, yet I persisted.

But in 1994, my gender nonconformity was seen as proof or evidence of my homosexuality; I made sense.

The association between gender nonconformity and homosexuality was argued by numerous sexologists around the turn of the twentieth century. They used the phrase “sexual invert” to describe people who were attracted to members of the same sex while also exhibiting gender characteristics of the other sex. It was anchored in a heteronormative framework, presuming that for someone to have same-sex desire, they had to shift (or invert) their gender identification. In this model, as I often tell my students, people like me were seen as “true” homosexuals while those who conformed to gender norms were not seen as homosexuals. Feminine and/or femme women were thought to be victims of circumstance, deception, or seduction.

My students generally find all of this shocking, hilarious, and/or upsetting, for a variety of reasons. When I offer open acknowledgment of my gender in this way, it gives students permission to laugh and sigh; to know what they see, but have been taught not to see. Somewhere along the way, most of them determined that anyone could be gay (regardless of gender expression) and that it was stereotyping and homophobic to equate female masculinity with homosexuality. There is a view that homosexuality transcends – rather than incorporates – gender. Gender conversations are increasingly relegated to self-disclosing transgender and nonbinary subjects.

In the one hundred and some odd years since sexologists fused gender nonconformity with homosexuality, we have learned the limits and bias of this view. LGBTQ organizations now argue that gender is distinct from sexual orientation, one having no bearing on the other.

This allows that transgender people might be straight – or gay, bi, pan, or queer. It allows that people who seem to conform to gender norms can still be queer – or lesbian, gay, bi, or pan. This logic fights against centuries of stereotyping that conflates male effeminacy or female masculinity with homosexuality. It resists the privileging of trans people who identify as

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straight after transitioning over those who identify as gay. Scholars and activists have challenged and shown the flaws in this early research by sexologists. How does this book speak to these questions?

Anyone reading old newspapers with some frequency will eventually run into one or more accounts of people transing gender. For years, friends and colleagues sent me such clippings, knowing of my interest in learning more about gender nonconformity and same-sex desire in the past. I knew there were many such accounts in nineteenth-century newspapers that are filled with contradictions. At the very least, I suspected they would offer ample evidence of a wide variety of gender variant experiences and expressions. I was not sure how sexuality would figure in such accounts, but I knew there was a “pre” story to be told about the argument that gender nonconformity was the sign of same-sex desire in women.

Because most people assigned female at birth had so little access to economic advancement, educational achievement, or legal autonomy, no one was surprised when they claimed the rights and privileges reserved for men – especially white men. This idea was logical to men who believed themselves to be superior to women; they could easily reconcile why – in their eyes – a woman would want to be a man.2 In this equation, being a man meant social, economic, and political power. Some men accepted this, others mocked it, and still others rejected it, but they had a clear framework for understanding why someone assigned female at birth might want to live as a man. This explanation, however, is too simple.

As we shall see, by centering the lives of female husbands and contextualizing them in relation to accounts of others who transed genders, new patterns emerge. In the case of female husbands in particular, it is impossible to isolate economic and social power from gender and sexual freedom. Sexual freedom – including the freedom to have sex with women, to not have sex with men, or to not have sex at all – was at the heart of the vast range of social powers that accompanied manhood. And, tragically, it was a key practice for which female husbands were punished.

Female husband accounts offer us a window into the historic construction of sexual difference as well as precious evidence about what it meant for someone assigned female at birth to live as a husband.3 Female husbands invite us to grapple with what exactly gender is.4 Female 6

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Figure I.1 B. Cole, “A True Representation of a Printing House with the Men at Work,” 1752. The expansion of the popular press facilitated the spread of stories of female husbands.

Image courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

husbands challenged notions of sexual difference, refusing total coherence and stability for both heterosexuality and the categories of “male” and “female.” They exposed what was to remain hidden and revealed the incoherence of something that was supposed to be clear. For this, they were deemed social outliers and marginalized historic subjects.

It turns out that newspapers played a crucial role in the circulation of information about female husbands (Figure I.1). In the eighteenth century, they reported a wide variety of local, regional, and even international news. In choosing the tone, length, and section for any given story, editors crafted narratives that gave meaning to events. The newspaper became even more influential than books or theater in the nineteenth century with the rise of the daily paper. The public life of print culture was expansive, as people shared copies of papers and read stories aloud in pubs, coffee houses, reading circles, boarding houses, boarding 7

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schools, shop floors, and lending libraries. There is no reason to believe that cost presented a barrier to working and poor people’s access to the news, given this very public and collective nature of news consumption.5 By printing news of female husbands, the press asserted the inclusion of this group in civil society. All types of British newspapers reported on female husbands, from late eighteenth-century dailies devoted to advertising, such as Public Advertiser and General Advertiser, to the established papers aimed at middle-class interests, including the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle, and the Standard, to cheap late nineteenth-century weeklies, such as Tit-Bits. The North American press was no more discriminate. Features about female husbands can be found in eighteenthcentury stalwarts the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Packet and in every imaginable local and regional paper amid the mid-nineteenthcentury press explosion. The New York Times ran stories in the 1870s that included more fiction and were less reliable than small-town upstate papers. Though the widely popular men’s sporting tabloid the National Police Gazette began to regularly feature such accounts in the 1880s, they were no more detailed or scandalous than accounts published in mainstream dailies for over a hundred years. The nearly indiscriminate and continuous reprinting of accounts across colonial and national borders signaled both fascination and concern about sexual difference, gender roles, and marriage.6 Beyond newspapers, a variety of print sources made transing gender even more visible and normalized for eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury readers. Books, pamphlets, and dime novels seldom referenced female husbands in particular, but these publications established context for gender transing generally. Political magazines and religious sermons expanded the conversation about acceptable gender by invoking the adjective “masculine” as a slur to criticize women involved in any number of activist endeavors, especially concerning the abolition of slavery and women’s rights generally. Police reports featured those arrested for transing gender, raising broad public awareness of such practices while criminalizing them in the process. Together, these print sources both captured and further advanced a robust public debate about what kinds of gender expressions and rights were desirable, possible, or tolerable.7 8

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For better and for worse, the history of gender and sexuality has been shaped by modern concepts and categories. This has led to an abundance of powerful and important books documenting contemporary LGBTQ communities, especially when the subjects of study concern the post-1950s era. Histories of earlier periods are less legible as explicitly “queer” histories. Our contemporary belief that gender and sexuality are identities that individuals articulate has dramatically skewed our view of the long-ago past. We are less interested in the significance of rebellion against systemic gender norms in the absence of a declaration of selfhood. We are less able to even see such expressions when the words used to describe them do not line up with our current vocabularies.

For this reason, the origins of modern lesbian identities have long been debated. European historians generally point to the late eighteenth century, focusing on women who were sexually attracted exclusively to other women and adopted some “masculine behaviors” so that they might be noticed (think Ann Lister of the BBC/HBO show Gentleman Jack). This “sapphist” paradigm excluded feminine women who also had sexual involvement with men, as well as those who lived as men and were referred to as “passing women.”8 There is no place for female husbands and female wives as queer ancestors in this sapphic paradigm. An important body of work in both British and US history charts intimate friendships between gender-conforming women throughout the nineteenth century as historic antecedents to modern lesbianism.9 Somewhere along the line, it became common practice for scholars to minimize gender differences and to elevate same-sex attraction as the driving force behind such partnerships. If one person was masculine or seemed to embrace men’s clothing and character, this gender expression was seen as a means to an end – a relationship with a woman. The scholarship on female husbands follows this same logic, emphasizing sex and minimizing gender.10 Just where female husbands stand on a lesbian to transgender continuum is unclear and in many ways depends on the particular case. Jack Halberstam wrote, “While it is true that transgender and transsexual men have been wrongly folded into lesbian history, it is also true that the distinctions between some transsexuals and lesbians may at times become quite blurry.”11 In other words, it can be impossible to make accurate generalizations about the border between gender and sexuality or the border between genders.

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Until relatively recently, judges willfully refused to speak of same-sex intimacies, denying us legal verification in cases that were public; diarists and letter-writers self-censored and wrote in euphemisms and analogies, offering us suggestions easily disputed by historians; family guardians and archivists would further purge evidence that might scandalize a reputation when offering papers to a historical society. Records were never meant to provide information about illicit non-procreative sexualities.

The fact that historians continue to argue that the absence of such evidence constitutes its nonexistence reveals the limits of historical method and the lie of objectivity. Maybe it is time that we embrace – rather than continue to fight – the ephemeral nature of sex, especially the way that illicit, non-normative, non-procreative sex eludes the archives’ reach, refusing any notion of certainty or permanence.

Female Husbands attempts to do just that, exploring the complex role played by the female husband in the changing understanding of sexual difference as well as the emergence of heterosexuality as an ideal relationship form. It principally explores the relationship between sex and gender, while examining sexuality secondarily. Throughout, I show that female husbands belonged to a category that was never simply woman or man. It was effectively a trans position, in one way or another, affirmed through accounts that move back and forth between masculine and feminine descriptors and male and female pronouns. Female husbands were put into a political category when they were outed; they did not control the narratives that were crafted about them. Gender is relational, external, and often out of our control. Female husband narratives attest to the importance of external recognition in defining and stabilizing gender.

Accounts of the past nakedly demonstrate this dynamic of external recognition. With each passing sentence about the men of this town or the women of that city, the categories are rendered natural and a simple gender binary is reproduced. Though often qualified by racial, class, occupation, and family status descriptors, man and woman still stand as the solid nouns, further obscuring the multiplicities and instabilities of the past.12 This book aspires to grapple with the challenge of documenting the pasts of those subjects who are beyond categorical recognition and language, embracing the role of gendered 10

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language – from names to pronouns to social groupings – which has taken front and center stage as a critical practice of transgender recognition and affirmation.13 Transgender studies and community practice have revolutionized our understanding and usage of gendered language, offering us a powerful new intellectual toolkit for examining gender in the past.14 Rather than privilege any notion of the sex assigned at birth as a benchmark of gender truth, this book engages the gender that people embraced, negotiated, and became during their lives. Susan Stryker pioneered the notion that transgender refers to “people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth,” offering an expansive and nonidentitarian view that has paved the way for historical research.15 As such I use the concept of “trans” as a verb, a practice most notably brought to life by Clare Sears in their work to redirect the reader “away from the recognizable cross-dressing figure to multiple forms of cross-dressing practices.”16 To say someone “transed” or was “transing” gender signifies a process or practice without claiming to understand what it meant to that person or asserting any kind of fixed identity on them. In this way, we might view the subjects of this book as traveling through life, establishing an ongoing and ever-unfolding relationship with gender, rather than viewing them as simply shifting between two unchanging binaries. Examining lives unfolding over time, we can consider how circumstance, age, and prior experiences with gender influenced their present and future decisions – as well as how others perceived these changes.

What motivated someone assigned female at birth to decide to live as a man remains one of the most elusive dimensions of the stories that fill this book. It is easy for a modern reader to ascribe a transgender subjectivity to the female husbands, given our contemporary notions of gender identity. It might be that simple – that some or even all of the female husbands had a sense of themselves as male and decided to live as men in order to bring their external lives into alignment with their spirits. This is one explanation. But as a historian, it is my mission to try to understand how female husbands understood themselves and were perceived by others in the terms defining gender and sexual difference that were available to them during their own lifetimes. Fellow historian 11

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Joanne Meyerowitz offers the following insight about terminology and self-determination: “Like everyone else, they articulated their sense of self with language and cultural forms available to them.”17 This approach allows for expansive and compassionate inquiry and understanding, something every subject deserves. *** The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, we see the introduction of the concept of the female husband in Great Britain and the definition of two principal tropes: one that focuses on sexual desire and intimacy, another on respectable manhood and patriarchy. Accounts of husbands were read in relation to narratives of sailors and soldiers published at the same time. Together, these texts explained how someone assigned female could live as a man as well as some of the barriers that made this challenging and led to their outing. In the 1820s and 1830s, such accounts shed particular light on the female wives, interrogating these relationships. This recognition of wives was threatening, as seemingly any woman might be drawn to a female husband of their own. While the US press widely circulated these accounts, the husbands featured all lived in the UK. After 1840, there are far fewer instances of female husbands in the British press.

In Part II, we mark the appearance of female husbands in the United States in the 1830s. The issue of work and geographic mobility features prominently in all of these cases, as industrialization transformed home and work for people of all genders on both sides of the Atlantic. Both the British and North American press recirculated modified accounts of earlier female husbands while reporting on accounts of new husbands in the antebellum US. One husband – Albert Guelph – created a bridge across time and place. They were first designated a female husband in 1853 for their marriage in Westminster, England and again for their 1856 marriage in Syracuse, New York. Both US and UK papers were taken with news of Guelph’s first marriage, reprinting it dozens of times, but UK papers showed little interest in Guelph’s second marriage (of which US papers could not get enough). Guelph’s case and others in this era became a focal point for debates over women’s rights and laws regulating dress.

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In the 1880s and 1890s, husbands peaked in the US press. In this period, there were more female husbands noted in the US than ever before. Simultaneously, however, the category lost its meaning as it was used to describe a wide variety of people and relationships.18 Accounts of female husbands in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets were haphazard, contradictory, and unpredictable. They raised questions about everything from sexual difference and intersex conditions to gender identity and women’s rights to marriage and same-sex intimacy. They recognized the legitimacy of husbands and then challenged their manhood. They judged female wives on the basis of their own reputations in the community along with whether or not they claimed to have known that their husbands were female. They provided a critique of women for stepping out of line but also offered instruction for men to be better workers, citizens, and husbands. They reveal important truths about the dominant norms of marital manhood in Anglo-American culture for nearly two centuries.

They asserted the idea that gender was malleable and not linked entirely to sex; just as people assigned female at birth could learn how to be husbands, even people assigned male at birth needed repeated instruction and social reinforcement in their efforts to be men. In trying to narrate the complicated, dynamic, and sometimes surprising accounts of love, adventure, and death involving female husbands, news reports raised all of these possibilities and more. A close reading of these deviations from socially sanctioned gender reveals a great deal about unspoken norms.

Female Husbands is a window into the lives of people in the past who defied simple categorization of gender and sexuality, but also a call for privileging the gender expression and identity asserted by a person over the sex or gender they were assigned at birth. For instance, all of the principal subjects of study in this book are described as being “assigned female at birth” rather than by the category this group was socialized into being: “women.” Gendered language and pronouns are a tremendously powerful force that dramatically influence how we see and understand a person.19 When writing about a female husband in the third person, I use gender neutral pronouns they/their/themself.20 None of the subjects of this book were known to have requested people use “they” to 13

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describe them in the third person. But “they” is a powerful, gender neutral way to refer to someone whose gender is unknown, irrelevant, or beyond classification. By using gender neutral language in writing about their lives, I am acknowledging that gender is “a set of practices” that contains and defines what is possible for any given individual or group of people.21 I aim to minimize my own assertion of this power, recognizing that our gendered language manipulates and limits our view of the past. Using “they” also allows me to minimize disruption and avoid a false sense of stability when writing about a person over a long period of time, marked by varied gender expressions. In so doing I offer a model for people reading, writing, and thinking about the past and present in a more expansive manner, freeing stories and experiences from a telling that has been for far too long reduced to and contained by the gender binary.

It is my fervent hope that Female Husbands will offer a necessary alternative to traditional approaches to the past that render LGBTQ history invisible while nonetheless claiming to be objective and politically neutral. The pages before you do not tell a feel-good story. The lives I reconstruct are based on sources that usually mock and trivialize those who transed gender, and in that way it captures a very painful past. But by reading against the grain and approaching the material and above all the subjects with compassion, we can see the full humanity and vulnerability of those who have gone before us. And in their struggle, courage, and resilience, may we find hope for a better future.

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The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress Mark Jaccard Sometimes solving climate change seems impossibly complex, and it is hard to know what changes we all can and should make to help. This book offers hope. Drawing on the latest research, Mark Jaccard shows us how to recognize the absolutely essential actions (decarbonizing electricity and transport) and policies (regulations that phase out coal plants and gasoline vehicles, carbon tariffs).

Rather than feeling paralyzed and pursuing ineffective efforts, we can all make a few key changes in our lifestyles to reduce emissions, to contribute to the urgently needed affordable energy transition in developed and developing countries. More importantly, Jaccard shows how to distinguish climate-sincere from insincere politicians and increase the chance of electing and sustaining these leaders in power. In combining the personal and the political, The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success offers a clear and simple strategic path to solving the greatest problem of our times. A PDF version of this title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Mark Jaccard is Professor, School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University and has a PhD in energy economics from the University of Grenoble. He has helped many governments implement climate-energy policy, testified before US Congress, and served on the IPCC. Mark's book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels (Cambridge, 2005), won Canada's Donner Prize for best public policy book.

February 2020

$19.95 US / $22.95 CAD £14.99 Paperback 9781108742665 151

CHAPTER 1

The Role of Myths in Our Climate-Energy Challenge

We are all capable of believing things we know to be untrue . . . the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

George Orwell

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n the summer of 1990, as he announced his army’s surprise invasion of Kuwait, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein told his people that the neighboring oil-rich country was rightfully theirs.

Many believed him. When he announced Kuwait’s annexation, as Iraq’s 19th province, they celebrated with patriotic fervor.

Several months later, a US-led military coalition, which included Arab states, threatened to expel the Iraqi occupiers. Undaunted, Hussein assured his people that their army would annihilate its foes in the “mother of all battles.”1 By this time, some Iraqis were probably questioning, at least to themselves, the veracity of Saddam’s claims.

But under his brutal dictatorship there was little they could do. In early 1991, they watched in horror as coalition forces destroyed the fleeing Iraqi army. Thousands of their sons, brothers, and husbands were helplessly slaughtered in the dessert by the massive firepower of the coalition.

As George Orwell said, a battlefield provides a solid reality check on false beliefs.

The US president who led the coalition was George H. W. Bush. His forces could easily have taken Baghdad and overthrown Hussein. Instead, they halted their advance in southern Iraq and then withdrew. They had 1

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achieved their objective of liberating Kuwait – not to mention ensuring that this country would remain a reliable US oil supplier.

Twelve years later, however, Bush’s son, following his father’s footsteps in the presidency, told Americans that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the US homeland, threatening a repeat of attacks like those of September 11, 2001. Most Americans trusted the second President George Bush and supported his 2003 invasion of Iraq. They believed that overthrowing Hussein would ultimately save American lives by establishing a peaceful, democratic Iraqi government allied with the US. Six weeks after the attack, under a banner that read Mission Accomplished, Bush declared the end of the conflict. By this time, many Americans were questioning the veracity of his claims. They could no longer overlook daily news of a growing insurgency against the occupying forces and intensified sectarian violence. In the ensuing chaos, most came to realize that the second President Bush and key members of his executive had overstated the threat Hussein posed to their security, and in the process deluded themselves and fellow Americans about the ability of military intervention to transform Iraq into a stable ally. Eventually, the government quietly acknowledged that it had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In 1991, many Americans were amused at the blatant self-delusion of Saddam Hussein and his followers in the first Iraq war. The term “mother of all (fill in any word)” became a popular joke.

By 2003, however, the tables had turned. Although few were initially willing to admit it, many came to realize that in the second Iraq war it was the US government and most of its citizens who were delusional.

Apparently, even a democratic country like the US, with its educated populace, independent media, separate judiciary, professional intelligence service, and established tradition of political opposition, is vulnerable to collective self-delusion.2 George Orwell’s comment about war’s role in correcting delusion can apply to anyone, not just a people under the heel of a despot.

These contrasting histories of the first and second Iraq wars under the first and second George Bush presidents are a reminder that being selective with the facts cannot be dismissed as a temporary phenomenon 2

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that only began in 2016 with the US election campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. Certainly, many of Trump’s followers seem especially prone to ignore or disbelieve inconvenient evidence, preferring to accept his ‘fake news’ response to media reports of his falsehoods. But were the enthusiastic supporters of the second Iraq war really so different in their eagerness to see a threat, despite independent UN weapons inspectors saying otherwise?

Indeed, to all but the extremely naïve, it should be obvious that we humans have a propensity to delude ourselves and others. And though we can sometimes detect the delusions of others, we’re less good at detecting our own, even when faced with contradictory evidence.

But that seems strange. Surely being incorrect about reality is a detriment to survival, and this must have always been the case. Or was it?

My dictionary defines delusion as “believing a falsehood to be true.”

This sounds like a fault we would want to correct. If we didn’t correct it, surely nature would teach us some hard lessons.

Where survival is at stake, evolution would have forced our ancestors to develop critical thinking skills, to be vigilant for evidence that contradicted their beliefs about the real world in order to correct those beliefs.

Otherwise, they might believe a shaman who prophesied that the prey they were stalking would migrate in one direction when evidence suggested otherwise. Or, they might succumb to the wishful belief that the neighboring tribe had peaceful intentions despite strong evidence to the contrary.

But as I read further in my dictionary, the story gets complicated. For the word delusion is akin to the word myth, which is defined as “a commonly held view about the world that may lack factual basis or historical accuracy.” Anthropologists tell us that myths have played an important role in social evolution. Commonly held views about our origins, and the religious and social rules that govern our obligations to our families and tribes, ensured the social cohesion with which our prehistoric ancestors survived in nature and outcompeted other humans.

Myths about the special powers and authority of individuals and groups among us fostered increasingly effective societal coordination and control, whether for making food or making war.

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Thus, myths are stories about the world that can bind and strengthen us collectively in our competition with others. We are more likely to believe them when told by people we trust. And the people we trust are more likely to belong to our family or to groups with whose survival interests we most closely associate – whether tribal, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, or national. This combination of trust and shared belief enables people to coordinate their actions to mutual benefit.3 Even so, this strength from shared myths does not negate the fact that trusting a deluded leader is risky. Iraqis paid dearly for Saddam Hussein’s delusion about the resolve and capability of countries that would oppose his occupation of Kuwait. Americans paid dearly for the second George Bush’s delusion about the resolve and capability of groups that would oppose his occupation of Iraq.

*** In the 30 years that I have led a graduate seminar in sustainable energy at my university in Vancouver, a mainstay of the first week of class is an exercise in which I ask the students to give their opinion on one of the controversial options to address climate-changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These options include massive expansion of nuclear power, greater use of biofuels like ethanol, widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage at coal-fired power plants, major development of large hydropower dams, and geoengineering of the earth’s climate. Most of the students have strongly negative views of these options, and explain why with detailed, passionate arguments. Being in an environmental program, they usually argue that the only valid options are energy efficiency and renewable energy. And since their views are similar, I watch them nodding in approval as each presents his or her arguments.

Then comes part two of the exercise. I make them reverse their positions. I make them each provide the best possible evidence and argument for an option they don’t like.

At least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. Most of them do a terrible job. They present feeble, easily countered arguments in support of nuclear power, geoengineering, and so on. So I make them do it again.

And again. Eventually, some of them progress. Some even embrace the 4

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exercise, keenly probing for the most convincing evidence and arguments in favor of a position they initially opposed.

Others, however, continue to perform poorly. As Chris Mooney noted in a 2011 essay in Mother Jones, they can’t shift from “thinking like a lawyer to thinking like a scientist.”4 A lawyer is a hired gun, who must focus only on evidence and clever arguments to support the interests of those who hire him or her. In contrast, a scientist can change sides. Indeed, ideal scientists are alert to the best evidence and arguments that counter their current view, and are willing to embrace these. And there is no better way to understand a contrary position than by earnestly presenting it in its best light.

Note that I said ‘ideal scientists.’ I’m not suggesting all scientists behave this way all the time. But the ideal scientific model is to apply critical skepticism to positions one currently accepts, an open mind to positions one currently rejects, and a willingness to change one’s mind after an unbiased assessment of previously unconsidered evidence and arguments. As I tell these graduate students, if they are to do well as academic researchers, they need to be excellent critical thinkers, and they need to apply that talent to their own currently held views.

In my career, I have tried to follow this model. I have pushed myself and research collaborators to know intimately the best evidence and counter-arguments to positions we hold, to even be excited at the prospect of changing our views in the face of new evidence.

This approach has led me to change my mind during the course of my career, sometimes rejecting arguments I once thought irrefutable. One example is the profitability of energy efficiency. In my early days as an academic, I believed we would make money acquiring energy-efficient vehicles, furnaces, appliances, building insulation, light bulbs, industrial equipment, and so on. The higher up-front cost of home insulation, a more efficient furnace, or a high-efficiency light bulb would be compensated by lower energy bills over time. But evidence from leading researchers in top academic journals kept poking holes in this assumption, so I focused my reading on carefully designed research making this case, and even applied some of my research to the topic. Eventually, the evidence compelled me to shift position. For a number of reasons, the unbiased evidence – rather than evidence produced by efficiency 5

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advocates – shows that energy efficiency investments are often far less profitable than they initially appear. Researchers conducting hindsight studies find, for example, that insulating an older house often costs more than expected, while the energy savings are often less than expected. My own experiences over three decades of investing in efficiency in seven different houses, with careful recording of all costs and bill savings, provided supporting anecdotal evidence.

Maybe my position on the profitability of energy efficiency will change again. That would be fine. What matters is that my ideas are consistent with evidence and logic from leading independent research. If not, I should be conducting quality research that slowly compels other researchers to reconsider their views.

Another of my early assumptions was that we were rapidly exhausting our fossil fuel reserves, which would result in continuously rising prices of oil, natural gas, and coal. But contrary evidence undermined that assumption. Leading researchers kept demonstrating that the planet’s fossil fuel resources are plentiful, especially if our estimates include unconventional forms of oil and natural gas, such as the huge quantities of these resources contained in shale rocks. And evidence from periods of high fossil fuel prices showed how quickly the improved potential for profits can trigger innovations and intensified exploration that increases global estimates of the reserves that are economical to exploit. Certainly, on a finite planet, fossil fuels are finite. But their exploitable quantity is enormous compared to what humans have thus far consumed. This means that innovations might at any time drive their cost of production, and therefore their price, down rather than up.

The emerging evidence two decades ago on the higher cost of energy efficiency and the abundance of fossil fuels changed my assumptions on these two issues. But some of my other early assumptions about energy have survived because the research of leading scholars continues to support them.

Many researchers, including me, have long shown how we have the technological capability to transform the global energy system to one with much lower GHG emissions. Although some people with a vested interest in the fossil fuel status quo have questioned this finding, researchers continue to demonstrate that at a moderate cost we can 6

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transition the growing global energy system over several decades. This low-GHG energy system would be dominated by renewable energy, likely in combination with some nuclear power as well as natural gas and coal, where these latter two were used with carbon capture and storage technologies.

This transformation is popularly referred to as ‘deep decarbonization,’ since carbon dioxide is the most significant greenhouse gas.5 Estimates of the cost of this energy transition have changed little since calculations by me and many other researchers decades ago. If realized gradually over several decades, it would cost just a few percentage points of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is equivalent to losing one year of economic growth over a 30-year period of sustained growth. This modest cost should be compared to the far greater cost and planetary chaos from instead continuing on our rising GHG path.

We have known this for some time. Ongoing research helps refine the numbers but does not affect the validity of this widely held view of the net benefit of an energy transition that would dramatically reduce GHG emissions. Thus, while climate scientists have long agreed on the fundamentals of GHG emissions and their effects, most energy-climate economists have held fairly similar views on the costs of deep decarbonization of the global energy system. Their views have a somewhat wider range when it comes to the monetary value of the damages from GHG emissions. But that is to be expected, given the difficulty of estimating the probabilities and impacts of catastrophic events (hurricanes, relentless droughts and wildfires, fast melting of permafrost and ice sheets, reversal of ocean currents), agreed-upon monetary values for biodiversity losses (such as the extinction of polar bears), and the relative weighting of fardistant versus near-term costs (what economists call ‘the choice of discount rate’).

Given this general consensus among climate scientists and nearconsensus among climate-energy economists, our political leaders should have been implementing serious policies at least three decades ago to effect the energy transition, and by now global GHG emissions should be falling. But this did not happen. Instead, while some jurisdictions have recently stabilized and even slowly decreased their emissions, global emissions are still rising.6 Many researchers now admit it is virtually 7

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impossible to prevent global temperatures from rising by at least 2°C; there is too much inertia in the energy system for the rapid transformation required to stay within this limit.

But why did it come to this? Why were we unable to act on the climateenergy challenge three decades ago? Why are we still not acting today at anywhere near the required effort? And what can we learn about our past failures to rapidly reduce GHG emissions?

The longer I have worked on this issue, the more my focus has been drawn from my traditional field of expertise – the modeling of energyeconomy systems – to the disciplines of political science, public policy, behavioral economics, sociology, psychology, and global diplomacy. It seems almost pointless for experts like me to produce yet another study showing how deep decarbonization is achievable and affordable if that finding continues to have negligible effect on the decisions made by individuals, firms, and governments.

I now believe that people with my expertise must learn from these other disciplines so that we might integrate our knowledge of the energyeconomy system with their knowledge of how people make personal and collective decisions, including how they respond to challenges to their worldviews. From this perspective, the psychological research on our alltoo-human propensity to delude is critical.

*** The recent history of the two Iraq–US wars illustrates delusion operating at the level of countries. Sociologists, psychologists, and other social scientists also focus on delusion among individuals and groups. At the individual level, perhaps it’s a friend who denies he has a drinking problem, or a relative who ignores her financially ruinous gambling addiction, or neighbors who insist that their son is an angel when he is a well-known bully. We have all encountered someone who refuses to accept an inconvenient truth that is obvious to those around them.

While we want to help people who are seriously deluded, many false personal views are not easily shed. And it can seem like meddling if we challenge the dearly held illusions of our friends, family, and neighbors.

Sometimes, however, we are forced to meddle. If someone’s behavior threatens not just themselves, but others, we may have no alternative.

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What if the drinker is poisoning his liver, but also jeopardizing innocent people by driving under the influence? What if the gambler is falling deep into debt, but also stealing from you to support her habit? What if the bully’s threats, initially verbal, escalate to physical abuse of your children?

In some cases, events force individuals to acknowledge reality. The threat of divorce motivates the drinker to acknowledge his problem and act to save his marriage. Bankruptcy proceedings lead the gambler to admit her addiction and seek help. The bully’s suspension from school motivates his parents to address his behavior. Indeed, our societies have developed legal and institutional mechanisms to protect people when the delusions of some could harm others. Drunk driving is illegal.

Bankruptcy leads to loss of credit. Physical abuse incurs criminal assault charges.

In the case of individuals, perhaps a trusted friend, relative, or neighbor will intervene before our delusion gets crushed by reality. Because of that trust, we might be willing to listen. But when it comes to groups, the people we trust often harbor the same delusion.

In an oft-cited 1950s psychology experiment, students from two Ivy League schools, Dartmouth and Princeton, were separately shown the film of a previous game between their football teams.7 This had been a controversial match, after which the Princeton team had accused Dartmouth of numerous flagrant fouls. But when each movie viewer was asked to record the number of Dartmouth fouls, Dartmouth students noticed only half as many as Princeton students. Depending on their group allegiance, the students saw different realities.

According to Yale professor Dan Kahan, who today conducts similar experiments, ‘group ties’ are responsible.8 Just as our perception of reality is biased by our individual self-interest, so too is that perception biased by our group self-interest. In the football game, the students’ school loyalty led to a cognitive bias toward evidence that supported the self-interests of their school. And this bias existed not just during the intense emotions of watching the game live in the stadium, but also in the dispassionate setting of a film screening room months later. And it didn’t matter that these students attended elite institutions with reputations for promoting objectivity.

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Watch any sporting event, professional or amateur, and you will see ample evidence of group cognitive bias. Fortunately, with sports the stakes are not high – although don’t try saying that to the parents screaming at the umpire of a Little League baseball game.

Unfortunately, group cognitive bias is strongly evident even when the stakes are high.

During his presidential campaign, many of Donald Trump’s unfounded claims in speeches and on Twitter presented a textbook case of cognitive bias. He treated as factual unfounded insinuations about his political opponents, whether it was the true birthplace of Barack Obama or the US security threat from Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. What is interesting from the perspective of group delusion, however, is the striking difference in how those who voted for and against Trump dealt with evidence about him. He promised transparent and corruption-free government yet would not disclose his income taxes. He said he respected women, yet a video of his confidential comments and testimonials from several women indicated the opposite. He claimed he was an honest and sincere person, yet repeatedly made statements that were blatantly false.

Opponents of Trump have a long list of these indictments. Yet almost half of American voters opted for Trump on election day.

When pollsters asked why, some explained that they didn’t trust Hillary Clinton, so Trump was the lessor of two evils. But many of his supporters said they could not believe bad news about him once they had decided that, as the Republican nominee, he best represented their interests and views. Getting specific facts right didn’t matter.

Salena Zito, writing in 2016 in the Atlantic Monthly, noted that “Trump’s supporters took him seriously but not literally, while the press (and his opponents) took him literally, but not seriously.”9 In other words, the people who ultimately supported Trump came to feel he was more likely than Hillary Clinton to be a member of their group, more likely to be someone who shared their values, faith, views on government, and aspirations for resurrecting American dominance of the world’s economy and politics. And, as they came 10

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to recognize their group affiliation with Trump, these supporters took his intentions seriously, while becoming selective and dismissive of negative evidence about him. This was easier when one’s friends and fellow supporters did the same. And with today’s ideologically segregated media and the echo-chamber effect of social media, it was easy for his supporters to downplay and avoid evidence about Trump. Members of the group reinforced each other’s cognitive biases.

But while Trump’s supporters provide an obvious example, it would be a mistake to think that only one side in the US election campaign was prone to self-delusion. Hillary Clinton’s supporters had theirs, as did supporters of her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders. Many of his supporters believed that, if elected president, he would be able to implement left-of-center policies, like tuitionfree university, nationalized universal health care, and massive tax increases on the wealthy, in spite of the need to garner majority support for such policies from senators and representatives with far different views.

Such manifestations of group cognitive bias in the US 2016 election should not come as a surprise. The election might have been more extreme than usual in US politics (who knows what the future holds?), but the phenomenon is ubiquitous. In politics and elsewhere we favor evidence and arguments that are consistent with the worldview, self-interest and convenience of groups with which we identify, and we put greater trust in people who have a similar worldview and interests.

But being too far out of sync with reality, whether as individuals, countries, or groups, is risky. For, like Saddam Hussein and the second George Bush, we may one day bump up against that reality, causing great harm to ourselves and others. In the case of GHG emissions and climate change, the independent experts agree, and have agreed for a long time, that the reality we are heading toward is an increasingly harsh one of heat waves, hurricanes, floods, forest fires, rising sea levels, species extinctions, acidifying oceans, and mass migrations of people fleeing devastated areas.

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“Smith offers new and creative legal arguments to protect voters from political candidates who use racism and racial stereotyping.”

- Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

Terry Smith

WHITELASH Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box