360 Review

Energy, Agriculture, Finance, Culture & Faith on the Northern Great Plains

SPRING/SUMMER 2017 • VOLUME 1.3 • UNIVERSITY OF MARY

United States Military Academy (West Point) Cadet George Armstrong “Autie” Custer, circa 1859. In four years at West Point, Custer had one of the worst personal conduct records in West Point history and came close to expulsion on several occasions. He graduated last in his class in 1861. Custer distinguished himself in battle in the Civil War and was called “The Boy General” in the press because of his promotion to Brevet Brigadier General at 23 years of age.

360 REVIEW magazine covers energy, agriculture, finance, culture and faith on the Northern Great Plains. 360 Review presents in-depth inquiry, analysis and reflection on important issues, trends and events happening in and affecting this region. There is a special focus on North Dakota, where we are located. More stories about surrounding states will published in future issues.

“Magazine” derives from makhazin, the Arabic word for “storehouse,” which also soon gained military application as a “store for arms.” The world’s first print magazines began publication in England in the 18th century and sought to provide a storehouse of information and intellectual armament. 360 Review joins that tradition with the Christian, Catholic and Benedictine tradition of the University of Mary, which exists to serve the religious, academic and cultural needs of people in this region and beyond.

As a poet once wrote: “The universe is composed of stories, not atoms.”

360 Review strives to tell some of these stories well—on paper (made of atoms, we presume), which is retro-innovative in a world spinning into cyberspace.

There is also a digital version, available at: www.umary.edu/360.

Publisher: University of Mary Editor-in-Chief: Patrick J. McCloskey Art Director & Photographer: Jerry Anderson Contributing Editor: Karen Herzog Media Relations: Tom Ackerman Illustrators: Tom Marple, Eric Syvertson Research Assistant: Caleb Dusek Editorial Offices: 360 Review, University of Mary, 7500 University Drive, Bismarck, ND 58504 Signed articles express the views of their authors and are intended solely to inform and broaden public debate. They are not intended to aid or hinder legislation before legislative bodies at the municipal, state or federal level.

© 360 Review at the University of Mary Printed in Canada

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The University of Mary is a private, co-educational Catholic university that welcomes students of all faiths and backgrounds. The university has its origins in the St. Alexius College of Nursing, opened by Benedictine Sisters in 1915. In 1947, these Sisters established Annunciation Priory in Bismarck, a monastic community independent of the original motherhouse in St. Joseph, Minnesota. Meanwhile, the nursing college evolved into a two-year women’s junior college, and in 1959, the Sisters founded Mary College as a four-year, degree-granting institution. Full university status was achieved in 1986. The University of Mary has been accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools since 1968, and continues under the sponsorship of the Benedictine Sisters of Annunciation Monastery.

Since its beginning, the University of Mary has sought to respond to the needs of people in this region and beyond. Enrollment grew quickly from 69 students to more than 3,000 students today. The university offers 54 undergraduate majors, 14 master’s degree programs and three doctoral degrees. Classes are conducted at the main campus and other facilities in Bismarck; online; at satellite locations in Arizona, Montana, Kansas, Minnesota and North Dakota; and at campuses in Arequipa, Peru and Rome, Italy.

The University of Mary educates the whole student for a full life, characterized by moral courage and leadership in chosen professions and service to the community. Every aspect of academic and social life is infused with the Benedictine values of community, hospitality, moderation, prayer, respect for persons and service.

Already one of the most affordable, high-quality private universities in the nation, the University of Mary now offers “Year-Round Campus,” a unique college-career option that enables students to earn a bachelor’s degree in just 2.6 years and a master’s degree in four years. This greatly reduces costs and allows students to begin their careers much sooner. The University of Mary offers exceptional educational value, as well as outstanding scholarship and financial aid opportunities. Within six months of graduation, 95 percent of graduates are working or pursuing additional education.

Student athletes at the University of Mary participate in 17 varsity sports in NCAA Division II. Go Marauders!

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There are only two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Table of Contents

Albert Einstein

Hunting Illustrated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 [History] At the Heart of the World: Reflections on Mandan History & Culture . . . . . . 6 [Energy] Shale Wars: Oil Prices & Saudi Arabia’s Big Bet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 [Religion & Society] North Dakota Mosque a Symbol of Muslims’ Long Ties in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 [Politics & Technology] Democracy in the Time of Choleric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 [Politics] Pell Mell vs. Pall Mall: The Unpopular Origins of Populism . . . . . . . . . . . 36 [History & Art] Warriors’ Last Stand: Little Bighorn Survivors & the Miller Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 [Business] Leadership’s Future Tense: Organizational Culture, Growth & Succession . . 52 [Numeracy] What Are the Odds That What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas? . . . . . . 58 [Economic Diversity] Five Generations of Leadership & Innovation: Building a Dynamic, Employee-Owned Company in North Dakota . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 [Art] Rust, Sky & Prairie: John Lopez Welding an Artistic Life on the Northern Great Plains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 [Society] Of Milk Cartons, Tadpoles & Stars: Parenting in the Age of Fear . . . . . . . . . 82 [Morality] It’s Not Wrong If It Feels Right, Right? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 [Religion] A Jewish Journalist’s View of Catholic Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 [Commentary] Faith-Inspired Public Schools? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 [Higher Education] Where the Boys Are(n’t): Alarming Trends in Male College Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 [Geopolitics] Command & (Losing) Control: Nuclear Weapons & the Always-Never Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 [Movie Review] Western Film Roundup: Makes, Remakes, Flakes & High Stakes . . . . 124 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 [Book Preview] Future War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 3

Hunting illustrated

E CO N O M I C I M PAC T O F A R M S & A M M U N ITI O N I N D U S TR I E S * North Dakota: $127.5 million Region: (ND, SD, MT, MN, WY): $3.6 billion National: $51 billion 4

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E CO N O M I C I M PAC T O F H U N TI N G & TA R G E T S H O OTI N G * * North Dakota: $228 million National: $110 billion *Direct and Indirect impacts including wages and benefits **Total multiplier effect

H U N TI N G F U N D S CO N S E RVATI O N

HUNTING CULTURE IN NORTH DAKOTA

• Hunting supports over 700,000 jobs in the U.S.

• The first hunting licenses issued in the U.S. were in North Dakota and Michigan in 1895.

• Hunting generates $12 billion each year in local, state and federal taxes, which support wildlife agencies and conservation.

• 82,000 people hunt in North Dakota each year.

• 796,000 days are spent hunting in North Dakota each year.

• Hunting generated more revenue ($38.3 billion) than Google ($37.9 billion) or Goldman Sachs Group ($36.8 billion) in 2011.

• The average North Dakota hunter spends nearly $1,800 a year.

1907

THEN & NOW

41,000

White Tailed Deer Population

100,000

Ducks / Waterfowl Population

12,000

1,100,000

TODAY

50

YEARS AGO

44,000,000

Pronghorn Antelope TODAY

FEW

7,000,000

TODAY

Wild Turkeys TODAY

500,000 32,000,000

1,000,000

TODAY

Rocky Mountain Elk

NATIONAL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION

Data from the National Shooting Sports Foundation 5

History

At the Heart of the World Reflections on Mandan History & Culture Joseph T. Stuart, PhD, Associate Professor of History, University of Mary

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Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (Hill and Wang, 2014) Elizabeth Fenn

s early as the 16th century, Mandan Indians lived in villages on both sides of the confluence of the Heart and Missouri Rivers, near the present-day cities of Bismarck and Mandan, North Dakota. The Mandan referred to this area as “the heart of the world” because the Heart River (Natka Passahe or “river of the heart”) runs for 180 miles through the middle of their territory. Here, they believed, First Creator had made the world. Mandan villages, which are very near the geographic center of the North American continent, functioned as the hub of a vast trading network, extending west to the Pacific coast, south to the Gulf of Mexico and north into Canada. People from many other tribes traveled long distances to trade food, flint, furs, beads, shells and, after 1750, horses and guns.

The Mandan people and their culture are beautifully portrayed in Elizabeth Fenn’s book, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for history. This concept of the “heart of the world” emerges in Fenn’s book as an important interpretive key for understanding Mandan culture.

Cultural Continuities Corn fields covered the Missouri River bottom just as today. Mandan women stored corn in cache pits holding up to 70,000 bushels for each village. Food surpluses attracted traders, just as Bismarck today draws shoppers from as far away as Canada.

Commodities fluctuated in price, then as now. For example, a steep decline in the price of beaver pelts after 1825—when Londoners started wearing silk instead of felted hats—killed the Mandan fur trade. In response, the Mandan diversified their economy by exporting bison hides, which were used to make the belts that drove the machinery of the early Industrial Revolution.

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"Mih-Tutta-Hangkusch, a Mandan Village," 1833. Artist Karl Bodmer traveled North America with the German explorer Prince Maximilian as his official artist. Bodmer documented the prince’s journey through the Great Plains along the Missouri River.

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"Sih-Chida and Mahchsi-Karehde," Mandans portrayed in their robes by Karl Bodmer.

Important Mandan values persist to this day. The Mandan were known for their generosity of heart toward others, for example, sharing meat after a successful hunt. North Dakotans continue this tradition, as exemplified often hilariously in Marc de Celle’s book, How Fargo of You: Stories from the Northern Prairie That People Who Haven’t Been Here Will Never Believe.

The Mandan believed that unity made survival possible in a harsh climate— certainly a contemporary value, too.

During the Missouri River flood in 2011, my first spring in Bismarck, people volunteered for days to help total strangers fill sandbags to protect their homes. Busloads of people from around the state arrived to offer assistance. I marveled at the mass cooperation unfolding miraculously in response to this crisis. In Grand Forks and Fargo, people respond the same way when the Red River floods.

The Mandan cherished stability. While tribes such as the Cheyenne transitioned from farming to herding after acquiring horses, the Mandan—who also owned and traded horses—chose to remain in their homeland at the heart of their world. Fortunately for us today, this means we know a lot about them through archeology. Nomadic tribes leave almost no trace. But the Mandan lived at Double Ditch Village just north of Bismarck for nearly 300 years and left behind plenty of artifacts to study.

Today, stability also characterizes the multiple generations of families still living throughout the state. This is a healthy culture for raising a family, and even small towns such as Mott or Wishek are attracting young people again.

River Valley Civilizations The Mandan created a “river valley civilization,” or at least a proto-civilization, just as peoples of more famous river valleys have done, such as along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, 8

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the Yellow River in China, the Indus in India and the Nile in Egypt. Water transportation by bull boat (featured in the painting on page 7), trade, fortified towns, food surpluses and craft specialization characterized the Mandan, just as they did the Sumerians and Egyptians.

The remains of Mandan villages, while not as grand as the Giza pyramids, still connect our lives on the Northern Great Plains to the “heart of the world,” to the primordial experience of the rise of human civilization. The evolution of settled, urban life was the most significant change in global history—made possible by food surpluses. The Mandan were thought by traders and explorers to be the “most civilized” people of the Northern Great Plains.

As other civilizations had to contend with nomadic tribes, so the Mandan struggled to defend their villages against the onslaught of the roaming Sioux.

The Mandan, however, did not succumb to the Sioux. Instead, most Mandan died from smallpox during several deadly outbreaks of the disease.

In 1837, the virus arrived on the steamship St. Peters with devastating effect.

The Mandan proclivity for trade and their compact village life created perfect conditions for an epidemic. Fr. Jean de Smet, a Jesuit missionary on his first trip through North Dakota in 1840, recorded seeing bodies of the dead still wrapped in buffalo hides and tied up in the branches of trees along the Missouri River, as was Mandan custom. The Mandan were reduced to less than 300 survivors and the tribe never recovered.

In 1975, Mattie Grinnell, the last full-blooded Mandan, died. In the 2010 census, 365 people identified themselves as primarily Mandan.

Many of them are enrolled among the 15,000 members of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara) at the Fort Berthold Reservation along the banks of the Missouri River (now man-made Lake Sakakawea).

Mattie Grinnell in 1942.

Photograph courtesy of the Archives of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 0039-0075.

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"Bull Dance, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony," oil painting by George Catlin, 1832, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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The “Culture-Process” at the Heart of the World Anthropologically speaking, culture is simply the common way of life of a people. The English historian of culture Christopher Dawson (18891970) described the four universal categories of culture and corresponding elements of community, as shown in the list at the top of the opposite page.

Each cultural category and its elements are connected to the others. Change one, such as by acquiring horses and guns, and the rest of the culture might change too. Dawson called this the “culture-process.”

Culture Community Ideas (I) Thought & Belief Folk (F) People & their Folkways Work (W) Workways (e.g. growing corn, trading) Place (P) Location

For example, consider the Mandan adaptation to the Missouri River bottom. Here they found wood for the interior supports of their earth lodges and fires, as well as saplings and cottonwood bark for winter-feed for their horses. Here they planted corn, squash, beans and sunflowers. They also fished and sought shelter from the wind (bison sought shelter, too, and could then be more easily hunted). The river provided transportation and defense from the Sioux, as well as water for drinking and irrigation.

The Missouri River brought the world to the Mandan. They responded with openness to strangers and built sophisticated, multilingual business relationships with other tribes, and with the French, British and increasingly, Americans after the Lewis and Clark Expedition overwintered with them in 1804. Remarkably, as Fenn points out, when Mandan chief Sheheke traveled south on the Missouri with Lewis and Clark to eventually reach Washington, D.C., the new nation’s capital contained fewer residents than the combined Heart River Mandan villages of Sheheke’s youth.

The power of nature constantly surrounded the Mandan. Thunderstorms, hailstorms, blizzards, floods, droughts and grass fires made life challenging.

Temperatures on the Northern Great Plains can plunge to minus 40 F in winter and soar to 105 F in the summer. But the Mandan, through the culture-process, adapted remarkably well to local resources and conditions.

While researching “Encounters at the Heart of the World,” I learned patience and humility. As my Mandan friend Cedric Red Feather taught me about the Okipa ceremony, my ego and impatience hindered my understanding.

Not until six months before I submitted the final manuscript did I grasp what Cedric meant. Thus, Encounters took a long time to write. But time made it better.

Elizabeth Fenn

Okipa Ceremony: The Spiritual Heart of Mandan Culture Culture has both inner (I) and outer (F, W, and P) dimensions. It is both spiritual and material. “Our true nature is spiritual,” Cedric Red Feather, a living Mandan priest, told Fenn. This posed a challenge. “I do not have a religious bone in my body. Gods and spirits do not inhabit my world.

But I respect their place in the worlds of others,” she wrote. “[H]ow can I understand the Mandans I am writing about when they inhabited a world so different from my own? Every historian faces this problem.”

Working for years as an auto mechanic helped Fenn gain the empathy needed to understand people very different from herself. She immersed herself in this region through camping, biking and hours of interviewing Native Americans who helped her break through the cultural and chronological barriers. The book became a “mosaic” presenting the story of the Mandan and Fenn’s personal journey of getting to know them.

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Like-a-Fishhook Village in 1878. This village of earthen lodges and log cabins was established in 1845 by the remnants of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes.

Non-Indian traders lived there too. It was abandoned in 1880. This image was taken by Orlando S. Goff, one of the early photographers of the West and one of Bismarck’s pioneer residents. Photograph courtesy of the Archives of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 00088-00023.

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This literary journey involved conveying the essence of traditional Mandan life, its central cult or worship: the Okipa ceremony. Each Mandan village was built around a plaza with a barrel-shaped shrine made of wooden planks called the Ark of the Lone Man. This sacred object was the focus of the annual, four-day Okipa ceremony involving dancing, fasting and physical suffering, which embodied the virtue of sacrifice for others.

Lone Man, a semi-divine creature who helped First Creator make the world from the heart of the world, from the confluence of the Heart and Missouri Rivers, handed down the Okipa ceremony to the Mandan at Eagle Nose Butte, which is about 20 miles south of the city of Mandan. This butte is an example of “sacred geography” in the lives of the Mandan, of the cultural process linking religion and place (I and P), in Dawson’s terminology.

The Okipa was the central rite of world renewal that united the Mandan people in a common vision. The rite involved a re-enactment of Mandan history, enculturating the next generation into their people’s identity. This bound generations together, creating a society, which, as English political thinker Edmund Burke wrote, is “a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.” The Okipa conveyed a living tradition that could adapt while preserving identity. Mandan identity was fluid.

The spiritual heart of the Okipa was personal sacrifice. In the ancient Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda, sacrifice is described as the “navel of the universe.” A navel connects a fetus to nutrients and waste removal through

The destruction of the temples marked the end of traditional Mandan culture, but not of its people or the possibility for renewal of its culture.

the mother’s bloodstream, which is powered by her heart. Metaphorically, sacrifice in world religions is meant to ensure the reception of needed “nutrients” from the gods and the “waste removal” of sin, evil or misfortune.

Sacrifice expresses the religious economy of give-and-take along the umbilical cord of sacred rites. In the Okipa, young Mandan men sacrificed blood as they were suspended from the beams of the earth-lodge overhead by cords piercing their chests. At the end of the ceremony, the entire village sacrificed by throwing some of their edged tools into the Missouri River.

To a 19th century outsider, the Okipa might have appeared meaningless.

As Dawson notes in his Harvard lecture, “The Nature of Culture,”: While the native is performing his great rites of world renewal, the outsider “sees nothing but a group of dirty savages prancing round with uncouth gestures and unintelligible sounds.” Since Mandan culture was only fully intelligible to itself, it was vulnerable to the forces of change and globalization.

As Dawson explains: For a culture is a very fragile thing and the delicate balance of its social structure is destroyed as soon as its spiritual limits are broken and its individual members lose their faith in the validity and efficacy of its moral order. The alien power may be a humane one: it may be careful to respect the lives and property of the natives. But in so far as it introduces its own law and destroys or disregards the traditional moral values of the people, it cuts the vital roots of their culture and undermines their social vitality.

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Fortunately, American artist George Catlin witnessed the Okipa in 1832 and penned the first account. Catlin also made sketches and later, oil paintings of the Okipa, as well as chronicles, drawings and paintings of Native Americans for the next four decades.

Soon, however, the Mandan were overwhelmed by change. In 1887, a visitor to Like-a-Fishhook Village—the last earth lodge village on the Upper Missouri River, occupied by Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara peoples— described the village’s Okipa lodge as “roofless and ruined.” The “spiritual limits” of the culture were broken with the destruction of the last temple and the end of the Okipa cult. The federal government forced the remaining Native Americans out of Like-a-Fishhook to take up the lives of Americanstyle farmers. Like-a-Fishhook now lies under the waters of Lake Sakakawea.

Double Ditch Village is desolate, windy and magnificent …

If I believed in ghosts, they would abound here. Alas, I do not.

But my mind’s eye still populates the the town with hazy human fiqures, domed earth lodges, raised drying scaffolds and yapping dogs. I picture women in hide-covered bull boats on the river below, ferrying firewood from afar.

How full of life this place was. How quiet it seems now.

Elizabeth A. Fenn

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Preserving Culture After Catlin, a second key moment of preservation came in 1906 when Gilbert Wilson, a Presbyterian pastor turned anthropologist, met Buffalo Bird Woman (1839-1932). Their intercultural friendship resulted in a series of ethnological books providing a wealth of information for today’s historians and anthropologists, and for Native Americans to learn about traditional Mandan culture. “[T]here is a dynamic element in human culture which is capable of breaking down the barriers that divide men from one another and of creating increasingly wider areas of communication,” Dawson wrote. “This is the process of civilization which began in remote prehistoric times and is still incomplete.” Buffalo Bird Woman and Gilbert Wilson represented this “dynamic element” in human culture when they collaborated to expand communication and preserve culture. This is “civilization” in the best sense.

Fenn’s book Encounters at the Heart of the World also contributes to this communication. The destruction of the temples marked the end of traditional Mandan culture, but not of its people or the possibility for renewal of its culture.

Perhaps there is something universal, something at the heart of every culture, that is capable of transcending even violent historical ruptures to form the basis for renewal. Today, Amy Mossett, a Mandan-Hidatsa, historian and cultural interpreter, continues the work of translating Mandan culture to the outside world, as in a recent talk on “Women in Mandan Society” at the North Dakota Heritage Center. She spoke about enculturating her three daughters, clad in blue jeans, into the ancient ways of Mandan gardening.

Mossett’s love for her Mandan heritage, for what is real at the heart of the world, was infectious. Perhaps Mandan history and culture remind us today, in our increasingly digital civilization, of more immediate and enduring ways of being fully human. ±

Detail from "Interior of the Hut of a Mandan Chief" by Karl Bodmer. Shields, lances and medicine symbols of the chief hang from the pillars.

Various utensils and containers are scattered around the floor.

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Energy

Shale Wars Oil Prices & Saudi Arabia’s Big Bet Mark P. Mills, Author, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute & Faculty Fellow, Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering When I first started paying $4 for a gallon for gas, I thought I was getting better gas.

Stephen Colbert

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S

o far it has cost Saudi Arabia something like $200 billion to undertake one of the most expensive experiments of all time. The Saudi government has been draining its massive $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund to cover revenues lost from the petroleum price collapse over the past couple of years.

What we’re witnessing is a two-part test. The first question is how much damage have low oil prices caused America’s shale industry. Then the second and far more critical part of the test: As oil prices rise, will the shale industry limp or roar back? If it roars back, high oil prices are history. Odds are now that in 2017 we will witness—along with the oil princes of Arabia—the outcome. However it goes, the economic and geopolitical implications are enormous. And the outcome has more to do with technology than with politics.

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Nothing is Bigger Than Oil

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A price drubbing achieved only modest production declines and did nothing to slow and arguably accelerated the radical technology gains in the cost-effectiveness of shale drilling.

ut before delving into all that, some underlying realities: This is no small battle. Oil is the world’s biggest traded commodity, bigger than all the minerals and metals combined, bigger than agriculture. And despite decades of hype, hope and subsidies, petroleum fuels 95 percent of the machines used to move all people and all goods for all purposes, trade included. The world today uses more oil than at any other time in history and every forecast—including a recent lamentation about this reality from the International Energy Agency—predicts demand will increase for the usefully foreseeable future. And of deep geopolitical relevance, of the world’s five economic regions that account for 75 percent of global GDP—Europe, China, India, Japan and North America—four of them will see rising dependency on petroleum imports. North America, especially the United States, is the outlier with exactly the reverse trend.

As for the Saudi experiment, it distills to answering a basic question: Was the astonishing growth in American shale oil production a one-time artifact of high oil prices then and new ‘discoveries’ (i.e., a bubble), or was it the sign of a permanent secular shift in petroleum technology? If the first answer is correct, those who hope for, or need, a world in which oil is expensive will take comfort. That camp includes the oil producing oligopolies and kleptocracies around the world as well as many Western governments, some businesses and green lobbies that are betting on alternatives to oil (from biofuels to batteries) that can only compete at high oil prices.

The first part of the experiment, to see how many of America’s new shale producers could survive a financial drubbing, began in 2014. Oil started its collapse from a $105 a barrel peak in that summer, triggered by the fact that American shale producers added more oil to world markets in a shorter time than at any time in history, creating a several million barrel per day over-supply. In the oil-trading world, getting wrong the over- or under-supply by just one million barrels per day can rock markets. Then late in 2014 with prices down 40 percent—a decline that represented a $400 billion annual loss for OPEC—Saudi Arabia increased its oil production by nearly one million barrels per day to drive prices even lower, rather than try to shore up prices by cutting output. Prices went into free-fall, bottoming out briefly just below $30 at the beginning of 2016.

Big Gambles, Big Risks

This big gamble by the Saudis made sense considering that, unlike the traditional oil business, the shale hydrocarbon industry is so new, barely a decade old, and there is no history to go on for predicting price-response behavior. And because the shale ecosystem is made up of thousands of small and mid-sized enterprises, the biggest of which are a fraction of the size of the 18

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super-majors, there is no easy way to get “into the heads” of the operators to predict behavior, unlike the long history of generally predictable responses from big-company executives.

The results of the first part of the experiment are now known. Over the 30 months of declining prices, the number of shale drilling rigs in operation collapsed nearly four-fold, and about one-third of the companies in the shale business went bankrupt or became seriously financially distressed. And shale oil production did decline; but so far only about 12 percent off the 2015 peak.

Meanwhile, even during the glut-induced financial storm, shale technology just kept getting better. Average productivity—the amount of oil produced per rig—was up 20 percent last year alone, while drilling costs stayed flat or declined slightly.

The lesson from the first half of the experiment is thus clear: A price drubbing achieved only modest production declines and did nothing to slow and arguably accelerated the radical technology gains in the cost-effectiveness of shale drilling. Put another way, the Saudis have seen that the amount of money needed to add more American supply keeps shrinking and is moving monthly closer to the Middle East’s vaunted low-cost advantage. At the current tech-driven growth rate, output per rig will double every 3.5 years.

That kind of progress is normally seen in Silicon Valley. For consumers it’s exciting, but not so much for shale’s competitors.

Pad drilling has enabled the oil industry to employ factory-like economies of scale to shorten cycle time and increase rig productivity so that hydrocarbons are brought to market more quickly and in greater volume.

Bounce Back in Shale Production Now comes part two of the experiment. As prices creep back up—an inevitability as world demand keeps growing, while global investments in production have everywhere pulled back in the face of low prices—just how quickly will American shale production rise this time? We know the answer: fast. We’re about to find out just how fast. The number of oil rigs nationwide 19

Mark P. Mills

Mills Named 2016 Energy Writer of the Year by AES Mark P. Mills was named the 2016 Energy Writer of the Year by the American Energy Society (AES), a non-partisan network of professionals from every energy sector. “[W]hat sets Mark apart is his ability to make difficult topics in energy more accessible, his extraordinary skill capturing scale, his grasp of technological innovation, and his ability to step back and provide critical context,” said Eric Vettel, AES president. Mills picked the article he wrote in the Summer/Fall issue of 360 Review, “Drone ‘Coinzidenzas:’ Marilyn, Reagan & North Dakota” as his featured article.

Mills is the co-author of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste and Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy (Basic Books, 2005), which Bill Gates called “the only book I’ve seen that really explains energy, its history, and what it will be like going forward.” The book reached the top of Amazon's ranking of math and science titles.

Mills is a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School and a partner at Cottonwood Venture Partners, a new boutique venture fund focused on digital oilfield technologies. He writes for Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS and The Daily Show.

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peaked in October 2014 at 1,609 and then fell rapidly to 316 in May 2016 as oil prices collapsed. The number of drilling rigs then increased by 150 percent to 789 by March 17, 2017. Given how much more productive today’s rigs are, it won’t take much more of a rig count rise to produce world-shaking results.

Given what we know from very recent history, it’s reasonable to think that the shale industry today could grow again at least as fast as it did from its inception, circa 2005, when shale companies went on to more than double U.S. production in a handful of years.

And that happened using technology that was literally half as good as what exists now, and with operators who then had to learn on-the-fly to use techniques for which there was no prior experience. That industrial ecosystem now has fantastically better technology, deep experience and a pre-built infrastructure. One might pay attention to what shale pioneer Harold Hamm, Continental Resources founder and CEO, said earlier this year about U.S. oil production: “We’ve doubled it. We can double it again.”

At the core of the experiment is a test of the four key characteristics of shale that differ radically from the traditional oil business and that account for shale’s past and future velocity: • Individual shale wells are tiny compared to traditional megaprojects and can be put into operation in weeks or months instead of years, and for a few millions of dollars, not billions. While each well is a relatively small producer, when tens of thousands of such wells are drilled, the collective output moves global markets. In addition, the scale, diversity and rapid cycles are well-suited for trying and adopting new technologies.

• America’s shale ecosystem is financed by the world’s most liquid and reactive financial

market. Half of the capital comes from thousands of individual investors, many local to the businesses that operate in nearly a dozen states, not just from Wall Street.

• Shale wells have a natural ‘throttle’ because, unlike standard oil wells, they’re drilled in two stages, each accounting for about half the costs: the first stage involves installing the subsurface horizontal pipes and the second involves “stimulating” the rock to produce (the hydraulic fracturing). If prices soften, operators can easily wait to spend on the second stage, keeping that production in the ‘bank.’ These so-called DUCs—drilled uncompleted wells—now number over 5,000, including 806 in North Dakota, and can be brought on-line rapidly.

Without drilling a single new well, turning ‘on’ all of America’s DUCs would add as much production as the country of Mexico.

• Shale reserves are not defined by exploration risk. When time and motivations warrant, new prospects in the well-known shale-fields can be mapped out and characterized. The U.S. Geological Survey recently reported that the Wolfcamp shale (one part of the Texas Permian Basin) has 20 billion barrels of oil. That kind of number used to be associated with nation-level resources.

Sand and data are the greatest drivers of oilfield innovation and value in the 21st century. Without sand, or more generally proppant as displayed in the bottles above, there is no hydraulic fracturing, and without hydraulic fracturing there is no opening of tight oil and gas plays like the Bakken region in North Dakota.

With modern well logging techniques drillers can mine massive amounts of data faster and in more detail to find statistical correlations among huge datasets in the blink of an eye.

Shale 2.0 Boom?

The bottom line? We, and the Saudis, will witness in 2017 the dual-edged sword of the new shale dynamics. Oil prices are on track to creep back to the $60 to $70 range next year. At those prices shale activity will start to resemble a stampede rather than the cautious tiptoe back that’s already underway at today’s about $50 price point. But the resulting bump in output will oversupply markets again, even more rapidly than last time. That will 21

North Dakota Oil Production + Average Domestic Crude Oil Prices

Millions of Barrels and $/Barrel Inflation Adjusted to August 2016 400

$102

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0 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

The world will keep gushing oil, not only from the U.S., but everywhere. The U.S. will become a regulator, which will keep a lid on the price. This is good for jobs because we will produce them, and good for consumers, but bad for the bad guys who want highprice oil.

Mark Mills interview on The Wall Street Journal’s “Opinion Journal” TV show.

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push prices back down again. In short, the world is now entering a long period of fast-cycling relatively low oil prices.

Consumers are the winners in producer price wars—provided the marketplace of suppliers doesn’t contract to the point of leaving a monopoly or oligopoly with the power to engage in predatory pricing once the competition has been cleared out. So far, the oligopolists haven’t managed to eliminate the shale competition. That’s where politics intersects markets.

The Saudis have behaved quite rationally by any business standard. It’s an ancient practice to use price discounts to gain or retain market share. It is an equally old practice to use (sometimes honestly and publicly engineered) price manipulation to try and drive competitors out of business. But, as they say, politics can make strange bedfellows. It is fair to observe that environmentalists and oil oligarchs (a.k.a. the actual “big oil” guys) have the same interest in stifling a shale 2.0 resurgence. Look no further than the high-profile, anti-shale protests over the Dakota Access pipeline, which is intended to carry Bakken shale oil to markets. On the other side are consumers around the globe who benefit from the new world oil order, not to mention the millions of Americans whose jobs are associated with the shale boom, and the collateral economic benefits and trade spillovers.

The wild cards now: Will anti-shale forces, through protests, lobbying and legal actions, successfully stifle a shale 2.0 boom? Or will President Donald Trump, through regulatory relief and favorable tax and trade policies, help those thousands of producers crank open the spigot? We will see the answer and the outcome of the grand Saudi experiment in the coming months. ±

Story of North Dakota Oil Still Being Written

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orth Dakota’s first oil well began producing steadily in April 1951 near the town of Tioga. Over the next decades, North Dakota’s oil production has soared and dropped, dependent on new field discoveries, the profitability of production and advances in oil extraction technology.

Economies like North Dakota’s, heavily tied to major commodities—in North Dakota’s case, agriculture and now energy—find their prosperity and population starkly impacted by the cost of production versus the market price.

Before the discovery of oil west of the Missouri River, North Dakota remained an agrarian, socially homogenous society, settled late in U.S. history and in many ways insulated from social upheavals and the rapid urbanization of the rest of the country.

North Dakota began steadily losing population via drought and depression in the 1930s, and then by the steady consolidation of farms into larger and larger acreages run by fewer and fewer operators. The state was mostly unprepared for that trend to abruptly reverse in the mid-2000s when hydraulic fracturing made oil extraction more profitable in the state’s immense Bakken oil fields. This influx of oil workers and money brought about seismic changes in the traditional culture of this rural, sparsely populated state. Small schools, two-lane roads and small towns were inundated with oil workers, tanker trucks and soaring rents due to demands for worker housing.

The state’s revenue also grew greatly with the oil extraction taxes that poured in after the oil boom, which began in 2006. The state legislature, which meets biennially, has struggled since to find a balance between spending on urgent infrastructure needs, demands for tax relief and more state services, while setting aside a healthy ‘rainy day’ fund for the future. As oil prices rise and fall, the state must find a new nimbleness and future-mindedness to thrive in uncertain markets.

North Dakota’s oil story began on that April morning in 1951 and is still in its first chapters. How the state adapts to the cascade of reverberations from its new position near the top of the nation’s energy producing states will test its reputation for inventiveness and adaptability in the face of challenge and opportunity. ±

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Religion & Society

North Dakota Mosque a Symbol of Muslims’ Long Ties in America Samuel G. Freedman, author and former New York Times columnist This article was first published in the New York Times on May 27, 2016.

Reprinted with permission.

He is with you, where you may be; and Allah is seeing your deeds.

Al-hadid: 4

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R

ichard Omar drove his pickup truck through the cemetery gate and pulled to a stop in sight of the scattered headstones. As he walked toward a low granite monument, his running shoes crunched the dry prairie grass and he tilted forward into an unrelenting west wind.

“These are my parents,” he said beside a carved granite marker. Then he fixed bouquets of fabric flowers into place with metal stakes, hoping they would last until next spring.

Mr. Omar, a retired electrician, was engaged in an act of filial obligation and something larger, as well: the consecration of a piece of American religious history. This cemetery, with the star-crescent symbol on its gate and on many of its gravestones, held the remains of a Muslim community that dated back nearly 120 years. Up a slight hill stood the oldest mosque in the United States.

The original mosque, erected by pioneers from what are now Syria and Lebanon, had been built in 1929. After it fell into disuse and ruin, the

descendants of its founders and the Christian friends they had made over the generations raised money to put up a replacement in 2005.

It is a modest square of cinder blocks, perhaps 15 feet on each side, topped with an aluminum dome and minarets. Several hundred yards off the main highway, on the outskirts of a town with barely 200 residents about 60 miles west of Minot, the mosque and cemetery exist much as they always have, surrounded by fields of wheat and corn and grazing lands. In this spot, all the industrial clamor of North Dakota’s fracking boom feels immeasurably distant.

Though the mosque is rarely used for religious ritual, even during the holy month of Ramadan, which begins June 5, it remains a powerful emblem of Muslim heritage and pride. And in this particular election year, when Muslim immigrants have been made a polarizing part of the political discussion, this obscure mosque in an isolated stretch of a rural state serves as a

The original mosque fell into disuse and ruin and this mosque was built in 2005. This mosque, about 15 feet on each side, is topped with an aluminum dome and minarets. The grain elevators of the small town of Ross, ND, rise over the horizon.

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reminder that Muslims have been part of the American mix for a long time, and not only in populous hubs like Brooklyn; Dearborn, Michigan; and Chicago’s western suburbs.

Some, like Mr. Omar’s father, arrived in the almost mythically American form of homesteaders and farmers. By 1920, perhaps 200 had made their way to Ross and surrounding Mountrail County, which then had 8,500 people spread over its 1,900 square miles.

“I think it was just over there,” Mr. Omar, 66, said as he indicated some furrowed acres on the far side of 87th Avenue Northwest, which was nothing but a dusty gravel track. “He had a team of horses. He’d take the rocks out of the soil for the other farmers.”

The elder Omar had come to America from the village of Bire in the Bekaa Valley, in what is now Lebanon, under his birth name, Abdallah Ayash. After making some money in one of Henry Ford’s auto factories, he moved to Ross, acquiring 120 acres on June 19, 1911. By then, he had changed his surname to Omar, which seemed to him more American. Before long, he dropped Abdallah in favor of Albert.

“Years ago, when all these people came over, they came over for a new life,” Richard Omar said as he walked through the cemetery, pointing out adjacent farmsteads. “Right up there used to be Allay Omar. And over there, Sam Omar. No relation to me.”

The graves that he passed spoke of patriotism and assimilation. Amid the many Juma and Omar headstones, marriage had brought to this Muslim cemetery people with the last names of Miller and Horst.

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The original mosque fell into disuse and ruin and was rebuilt in 2005 (as shown in the photo on p. 25). This mosque, about 15 feet on each side, is topped with an aluminum dome and minarets and is now rarely used.

The marker for J. D. Benson, the husband of a woman raised in a Muslim family, featured a photograph of the two on horseback. The stone for Alex Asmel gave his military service from World War I: private in the 108th Infantry. Abraham Omar (1933-2004) was represented with a photograph of him with long sideburns, a ducktail haircut and a black leather jacket. It could fit into a scene from “Grease.”

Inside the mosque, a prayer rug lay on the floor, pointing east toward Mecca. Photographs of the community’s early residents, including Mr. Omar’s father, rested on an easel. Mr. Omar took a broom to sweep cobwebs from the corners.

Maybe simply by being there, simply by existing in their undeniably concrete way, the mosque and the cemetery, though little used, serve a purpose. Amid a presidential campaign in which one party’s presumptive candidate calls for a ban on Muslim immigration, a campaign that has coincided with a rising number of bias crimes against Muslim people and institutions, this little plot is a reminder that Muslims were here as far back

Opposite: Richard Omar stands in the doorway of the mosque. The prayer rug on the floor points east toward Mecca.

Above: Ross, ND, the mosque and the cemetery are located in an area of tilled fields, pasture and prairie marshes.

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Richard Omar at the gate of the site of the oldest mosque in the United States, near Ross, N.D.

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as the Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, Finns, Poles and Jews among whom they settled.

It was not always easy. “Prairie Peddlers,” a book about the Syrian and Lebanese immigrants to North Dakota, notes that they were sometimes called “black,” unwillingly conscripted into America’s binary form of racism.

Several local Muslims who tried to serve in World War I, the book notes, were discharged for supposed disloyalty because their ancestral homeland was then part of the Ottoman Empire, an enemy in that global conflict. But over time, those who seemed strange became familiar.

“These are community people,” said Kenneth Halvorson, a high school classmate of Mr. Omar’s and the sheriff of Mountrail County. “They are part of our community. They sometimes find themselves in a situation where their nationality or whatever causes them problems. But not here. We know that they’re good, hardworking people.”

For the occasional American Muslim who learns of this bit of history, the mosque here is touchstone and affirmation. Aman Ali, 31, is a professional

storyteller who grew up in an Indian immigrant family in Ohio. During Ramadan in 2010, he decided with his friend Bassam Tariq, a filmmaker, to try to visit a different mosque in a different state for each of the 30 holy days.

Even with GPS, they could not find the Ross mosque. A local pastor introduced them to Lila Thorlakson, a daughter of one of the Omar families and the volunteer caretaker for the mosque.

Setting foot there, praying inside, Mr. Ali said, changed his life.

“Learning that Muslim communities have been in this country since the 1800s, it made me realize I am the latest chapter in a book that’s being written about our beautiful community,” he wrote in a recent email. “It was the first time I felt like I actually belonged here.”

In March 2015, an oil-rig hand named Kobby Nai Sowah died in a car crash across the state line in Montana. He was a Muslim born in Ghana and raised in Florida. The funeral home arranged to have him interred at the cemetery in Ross, in a plot near three pine trees to blunt the incessant wind.

In Mr. Omar’s folder of records for the Assyrian Moslem Cemetery, its official name, he keeps pages with neat charts of the available grave sites. Realistically, though, few will ever be filled. Sarah Omar Shupe, who was buried here in 2004, was the last community member to regularly speak Arabic and read the Quran.

Ever since the Dust Bowl days, a steady stream of local Muslims have been moving to cities for better economic prospects. Many of those who stayed here died or converted to Christianity in marriage. Mr. Omar’s wife is from Scandinavian stock, and he can barely remember a time when he practiced Islam.

He is not even sure he will be buried in the cemetery that he so tenderly tends. ±

Samuel G. Freedman

Freedman Awarded 2017 Goldziher Prize Samuel G. Freedman won the 2017 Goldziher Prize for his coverage of Muslim Americans in his “On Religion” columns in the New York Times from 2010 to 2016—including the one reprinted here. The Goldziher Prize is awarded by the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, in collaboration with the William and Mary Greve Foundation.

Freedman worked as a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. He wrote for “On Education” columns, which won first prize in the Education Writers Association’s annual competition, from 2004 through 2008. Freedman began writing the “On Religion” column in 2006 and recently retired from the New York Times.

“In my decade of writing the ‘On Religion’ column,” said Freedman, “one of my primary goals was to be a voice against Islamophobia, and to be that voice by bearing witness to the actual lives and history of our fellow citizens.”

From 2005 through 2009, Freedman was also a regular columnist on American Jewish issues for the The Jerusalem Post. He has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Salon, Tablet, The Forward and BeliefNet. 29

Politics & Technology

Democracy in the Time of Choleric Interview with TheChisel.com

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TheChisel is an online tool to empower American voters by informing them about major issues and enabling them to engage with experts in developing bipartisan solutions.

n the age of group-think and deep political division nationwide that characterized the recent presidential election and its aftermath, any project aimed at finding common ground seems doomed. Yet what could be more important as the country faces critical domestic and foreign challenges going forward?

This call is being answered via an online platform, theChisel.com, which facilitates voter participation in crafting proposals, co-authored by experts from both sides of the political aisle.

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor last June, Michael Gerzon highlighted TheChisel.com as a leading innovator in Civic Tech 3.0’s “touchscreen democracy,” which “turns voters into policy makers.” As the author of The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide (published in February 2016), Gerzon’s endorsement was significant. As he noted, TheChisel.com is not a mere feel-good exercise in building “consensus-driven solutions” but works with participating organizations to send proposals to Congress.

360 Review sat down recently with Deborah Devedjian, TheChisel’s Founder and Chief Citizens’ Officer (her coinage), to explore this intriguing new direction in healing the nation’s cultural and political divide in an angry era that the ancient Greeks, who birthed democracy, would describe as choleric.

Devedjian is a graduate of Yale University who earned an MBA at Harvard University. She worked for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and launched the Education & Training Investment Group at Warburg Pincus, one of the world’s largest global private equity firms. Devedjian consulted for the Boston Consulting Group and founded Copernicus Learning Ventures. Also, she served as president of the Marple Newtown (Pennsylvania) Board of Education and as a Fellow at the U.S. Army War College.

360 Review: What is TheChisel and who is your audience?

DLD: TheChisel is an online tool to empower American voters by informing them about major issues and enabling them to engage with experts in developing bipartisan solutions. Our audience is everyone—all Americans. We’re

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0.5% of eligible voters made 65% of individual campaign contributions in 2014.

Source: Center for Responsive Politics. Š More Perfect Union, Inc. All rights reserved.

all in this together, from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or to a homemaker with young children. Each proposal is accessible to everyone.

360 Review: How does TheChisel work?

DLD: We find the most promising and innovative policy proposals from leading think tanks and research groups. All proposals go through a vetting process to ensure bipartisanship, credibility and rigorous analysis. We host proposals only from nonpartisan organizations or bipartisan coalitions of experts. TheChisel is about finding common solutions, not recreating the stuck debates on Capitol Hill.

Second, our skilled team presents the proposal on TheChisel.com in a fun and easy-to-understand way. All our proposals can be read in a few minutes.

Then TheChisel’s groundbreaking technology allows unprecedented discussion and collaboration to refine these proposals. Citizens interact with each other but also with the proposal’s experts. The experts constantly review com-

Infographic providing background information about theChisel's campaign finance reform proposal in the website's "Elections" discussion section.

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The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness.

You have to catch it yourself.

—Attributed to Benjamin Franklin

ments and modify the proposal as they see fit—but only if all experts agree to the change. Lastly, users vote on the proposal and if the majority votes ‘yes,’ TheChisel works to garner media attention for the proposal to get passed in Congress.

Politics is a jungle— torn between doing the right thing and staying in office.

John F. Kennedy

360 Review: So, what kind of proposals are on TheChisel?

DLD: TheChisel launched with four very different proposals on corporate income tax, campaign finance, farm subsidies and redesigning the $10 bill.

Upcoming proposals concern healthcare for veterans, infrastructure, student debt, guns, family leave, carbon tax and prisons.

In the case of campaign finance, we introduced authors from Take Back our Republic (conservative) and U.S. PIRG (liberal). They created TheChisel’s first campaign finance proposal—tax credits for small donors.

Experts from the American Enterprise Institute (conservative) and Brookings/Urban Tax Policy Center (liberal) presented their joint corporate income tax reform proposal for public online discussion. The public feedback enabled them to improve the proposal, and version 2 is now posted on our website.

360 Review: What other content does TheChisel offer?

DLD: A proposal on the desk of a lawmaker is an end goal, but informing voters is just as important. So we created ChiselBits—short, easy to understand infographics that chisel away the media frenzy and political poppycock to present information readers can trust.

Our government does such a poor job communicating that most Americans don’t understand our own political system. During the presidential primaries, we released ChiselBits on “Superdelegates” and “Contested Conventions.”

360 Review: How does technology influence democracy?

DLD: Before America was founded, the printing press allowed our Founding Fathers to spread free speech across America. Benjamin Franklin used

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The Pennsylvania Gazette to inform Americans, free of British propaganda.

Franklin’s iconic “Join or Die” cartoon inspired the 13 states to work past their differences.

The Internet is a continuation of the printing press. Politicians spend billions of dollars on ad campaigns to assert their version of the truth, but the Internet allows everyday Americans to come together for virtual town hall meetings to find collective solutions to our country’s issues.

360 Review: How does TheChisel function as a leader in “Civic Tech 3.0”— whatever that is?

DLD: Civic tech is about harnessing the power of technology to allow citizens to rule themselves. Civic Tech 1.0 gathered citizens in large numbers, with things like teleconferencing. Civic Tech 2.0 allowed citizens to interact with policy makers on platforms such as “PopVox.” Civic Tech 3.0 turns voters into policy makers. That’s what TheChisel is at its core.

Government is too big and important to be left to politicians.

Chester Bowles

360 Review: How did you come up with the name for your company?

DLD: TheChisel is a tool. It metaphorically cuts away the media and politicians’ noise, jargon, yapping, confusing or purposefully misleading information, and weak analysis. The chisel sculpts a proposal down to its core with different people chiseling away, polishing it from different perspectives.

360 Review: For a topic like firearms, how do you “chisel” all agendas away to find objective information? Is it even possible?

DLD: Creating ChiselBits requires loads of time, energy and scrutiny. We scour every primary source from every angle of the debate, using a series of methods to determine their bias. With a topic like guns, it’s almost impossible to find neutral sources. But two sources with diametrically opposed agendas can have very similar information underlying them.

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence ranks states by how “smart” their gun laws are. Gunsandammo.com ranks the best states for gun owners. Both are unabashedly one-sided, but their rankings are almost the exact same— 33

Guns are used in twice as many homicides as all other weapons combined % of all homicides 68% Firearm 13% Knife / cutting instrument 9% Beating (with or without instrument) 2% Suffocation / gases / drowning 1% Drugs / poison 8% Other

Infographic from Chisel Bits, which are informational presentations on theChisel.com.

just in reverse order. Our analysis found their methodologies to be virtually identical, and both very credible. It’s about keeping a strict balance between both sides.

360 Review: How do bipartisan proposals developed on TheChisel get to Congress or to state legislatures?

DLD: We work with think tanks whose experts might already have relationships with members of Congress or legislators. Other times, our vast network of advisors, experts, media and other civic leaders have connections. The media is increasingly picking up on our work—and media coverage draws attention from lawmakers.

360 Review: What made you start TheChisel?

DLD: Many people view the world as a zero-sum game. Whether it’s family squabbles or international diplomacy, there are always groups with different perspectives. But there’s usually a unifying goal. The trick is fusing the best ideas from each group into a consensus-driven solution.

360 Review: Easier said than done.

DLD: Yes, it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle and not knowing what the picture is.

Our nation can’t wait for people in power to do the right thing. Congressional incumbents get reelected 90 percent of the time, even though Congress has a 14-percent approval rate. I wanted to empower voters to transcend our broken political system and have a direct say in policymaking.

Take the recent presidential debates. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, the League of Women voters hosted the debates. In 1988, the two major parties

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% of all gun homicides Handguns (pistol / revolver) 90% Rifle 4% Shotgun 4% Other 1%

took control of the questions. Since then, it’s been usurped by the “Commission on Presidential Debates” controlled entirely by the Democratic and Republican parties. Every question is carefully selected to avoid embarrassing either party. It’s a complete dog and pony show.

Note: 2014 data. “Other” includes fire, pushed or thrown out of window, explosives and unknown.

Firearm percentages exclude cases where the firearm is unknown.

Percentages do not total 100 due to rounding.

360 Review: When both sides present completely incompatible information, what then?

Note: 2014 data. “Other” includes fire, pushed or thrown out of window, explosives DLD: We evaluate their methodologies. Then the experts from both sides and unknown. Firearm percentages exclude cases where the firearm is unknown. Source: National Archive review the materialPercentages to make sure haven’t something. Let’s take of Criminal Justice Data. do notwe total 100 duemissed to rounding. © More Perfect Union, Inc. unemployment. One organization says unemployment is at 5 percent, while Source: National Archive of Criminal Justice Data All rights reserved. another says it’s 18 percent. TheChisel establishes a common ground of defiSpecial thanks to Lauren nitions and assumptions so that our users can engage in meaningful discusBeltramo, Patrick Cremen, sions.

Brielle DeMirjian, Lisa 360 Review: Have you rejected any proposals?

DLD: Yes, sometimes an organization says, “It’s my way or the highway.” That attitude violates the spirit of open-mindedness and critical thinking. Most of the proposals that we turn down are too vague.

Forgang, Brandon Hilfer, Grace Kim, Emma Mehler, Claire Kopsky, Othman Lanizi, Marco Sampellegrini and Tseren Zurganov for research for the graphics in this article.

360 Review: Ben Franklin is your “Chief Inspiration Officer.” Why is that?

DLD: Benjamin Franklin is the consummate American: entrepreneur, international statesman, inventor, scientist and publisher. He founded the University of Pennsylvania and our postal service. Franklin was also the only Founding Father to sign each of our country’s four founding documents.

We want to “be like Ben” who brought people together from opposing perspectives, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Franklin wasn’t pushing a political agenda, nor are we pushing one. He optimized consensus decision-making, which made economic and moral sense, to forge a prosperous, equitable and secure democracy. Franklin was a catalyst and facilitator— exactly what we aspire to be. ± 35

Politics

Pell Mell vs. Pall Mall The Unpopular Origins of Populism Jesse Russell, PhD Assistant Professor of English, University of Mary

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Andrew Jackson was an American soldier and statesman who served as the seventh president of the United States and was the founder of the Democratic Party.

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n March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as the seventh president of the United States. Following a new American tradition, Jackson hosted a reception at the White House. As well as the usual suspects of Washington’s high society, Jackson invited the frontiersmen and hillbillies who had helped sweep him into the White House. After losing a bitterly contested election in 1824, Jackson drew on the support of the American people and ran again in 1828, defeating John Quincy Adams, a fixture of the newly minted American political establishment.

At the reception, Jackson’s jubilant supporters paraded into the White House, drinking voraciously and acting raucously, and famously trampling cheese into the White House carpets. Traditionally called “the People’s Day,” by historians, this pell-mell, redneck rampage was met with disgust by the Washington elite who were more comfortable playing “pall mall,” an early form of croquet on manicured lawns, which was popular among elites.

(When the game went out of fashion in Europe, the long narrow lawns became shopping areas or “malls.”)

While Jackson is despised by many today because of his very un-populist support for slavery, his election provides a window into our current political situation, showing that populism is as American as proverbial apple pie.

This fall, the victory of one of America’s prominent political families, the Clintons, seemed inevitable to most pundits. In October, the New York Times predicted that early voting would assure Hillary Clinton’s victory. On November 6, the LA Times confidently predicted that she would win a whopping 352 electoral votes. However, most reporters and commentators misunderstood the power of populism’s appeal in America.

Donald Trump won the election because, for better or worse, he was a man of the people. His rallies dwarfed Hillary’s since she lacked the popular appeal that had ensured her husband’s electoral success. Hillary garnered the backing of various elites and most registered Democrats, but she failed to gain wide popular support because she is not a woman of the people. Hillary, unlike Bill Clinton, was much more pall mall than pell mell.

Bill Clinton, despite being a Yalie, Rockefeller protégé (Clinton famously said in a 1998 address to the Council on Foreign Relations that the only two people who believed he could be president were his mother and David Rockefeller) and a Rhodes scholar, always appeared to the average American as just “Bill.” While his wife became known as just “Hillary,” the common usage of her first name was more a matter of distinguishing her from her husband than connoting a warm, “down-to-earth” personality.

Like Donald Trump, Bill liked to eat fast food. He famously took reporters on jogs to McDonald's. There was a classic Saturday Night Live skit in which Phil Hartman as Clinton ravages the food of other customers at a Micky-Ds. As Andrew Jackson before and Trump after him, Bill was a regular guy in public, who used expressions such as, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Ironically in the 2016 election, Bill wanted Hillary’s campaign to appeal to the working class in counties like Monroe, Michigan, which flipped from Obama to Trump by 23 points, and to rural voters in areas like the Arkansas

Party Like a President, by Brian Adams, illustrated

by John Mathias (Workman Publishing).

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On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. …

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans.

The reality of economic insecurity does.

The Great American [Economic] Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

Nicholas N. Eberstadt

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Ozarks that Hillary lost to Trump. In fact, if Bill Clinton had run for president in 2016, he might have won the White House by being more a man of the people than Trump. In the long run, “it’s always the voters, stupid.”

In his famous article “Pell Mell,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 2007, American novelist Tom Wolfe captured this quintessentially American political culture. Wolfe dates the birth of “the American idea” to December 2, 1803, when a disheveled Thomas Jefferson broke diplomatic protocol by hosting a disorganized dinner party without assigned seats at the dinner table. This encouraged a mad, pell-mell dash to the table where the quickest, rather than the most important guest, got the best seating. This offended the very pall-mall British Ambassador Anthony Merry.

The same reckless pell mell aided Trump’s election bid more than it hurt, because it made him a man of the people. Prior to the campaign, Trump was known best by most Americans for his tagline—“You’re fired!”—on the reality show “The Apprentice.” The spectacle of Trump shaving the head of Vince McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, in the ring during a match, endeared the Donald to ordinary men and women nationwide.

This idea of the everyman politician is endemic in American history. North Dakota’s adopted son Theodore Roosevelt, known as much for his moustache and game hunting as his foreign policy, boasted about the wild energy of American politics. “We are a vigorous, masterful people, and the man who is to do good work in our country must not only be a good man, but also emphatically a man,” Roosevelt (also known as just “Teddy”) said in a speech given outdoors to a large crowd in Redlands, California in 1903. “We must have the qualities of courage, of hardihood, of power to hold one’s own in the hurly-burly of actual life.”

This pell mell of American populism surfaces regularly during election cycles. As a graduate of humble Whittier College and then Duke University’s law school—neither of which are Ivy League colleges—Richard M. Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 because of the rise of the “silent majority” of Americans who had come to detest what Tom Wolfe called the “radical chic” elitism of the post-Lyndon Johnson Democratic Party.

Then in 1976, the Democrats, after losing two elections, caught onto populism’s importance and nominated the unpretentious Jimmy Carter. While Carter’s cabinet included a smorgasbord of elite members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Carter remained the mild-mannered Baptist farmer from Georgia. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won precisely because he was a charismatic actor from California with populist appeal. Reagan was best known for movies such as “Bedtime for Bonzo,” just as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role in “The Terminator” helped him become the governor of California in 2003.

Even the Bush family had to shed their WASP Episcopalian heritage for Texas accents and evangelical Christianity to win the new Southern and

Christian Republican voters in 2000 and 2004. George W. Bush’s seeming difficulty pronouncing three-syllable words didn’t gain him votes in Boston, but certainly didn’t lose votes in Alabama. “W” learned from the mistakes of his one-term presidential father who famously revealed his pall-mall Ivy League roots when he asked for a “splash” of coffee at a New Hampshire truck stop in 1991. Barack Obama, a graduate of Columbia and Harvard Universities, often sheds his necktie and struggles through baseball analogies. He deliberately uses un-Ivy League terms, such as “folks” to describe average Americans.

What has frustrated so many members of Washington’s political establishment, on both sides of the aisle, is the naïve expectation of what political scientist Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.” In a 1989 academic article, Fukuyama predicted the ultimate end of global conflicts after the termination of the Cold War and the emergence of a peaceful utopian global order. Fukuyama’s thesis was shattered by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Then the Obama administration and its supporters, unfazed by what the German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel called “the cunning of history,” envisioned an endless parade of progressive victories after the passage of Obamacare and the Obergefell v. Hodges triumph. That thesis was destroyed on November 9, 2016, by the election of Donald Trump, which in reality is neither the end of history nor the end of the world. And if Trump’s White House succumbs to pall-mall isolation from the nation’s pell mell, another politician will capitalize on the disconnect.

As the gumshoe work of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks has revealed—much as the leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times during the Vietnam War—many conspiracies and machinations of powerful pall-mallers are true. Government for the people, by the people, will continue to prevail as long as the sometimes unruly American pell mell survives. ±

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

H. L. Mencken

"The News Reaches Bogota" political cartoon, depicting Theodore Roosevelt building the Panama Canal—and shoveling dirt on Colombia. New York Herald, December 1903. Author W. A. Rogers (Credit: The Granger Collection, NY).

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History & Art

Warriors’ Last Stand Little Bighorn Survivors & the Miller Collection Jerry Anderson, Art Director, University of Mary Patrick J. McCloskey, Author, Editor-in-Chief, 360 Review

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he Battle of the Little Bighorn has fascinated historians, military strategists, writers and readers since the afternoon of June 25, 1876 in southern Montana, when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men died. Decades later, David Humphreys Miller was growing up in a family of artists in smalltown Ohio. He discovered that Custer also grew up in Ohio and became intrigued by the general’s mystique. Miller read everything he could find about Custer’s Last Stand. At 16 years of age in 1935, he got permission from his parents to set out in the family’s Plymouth Coupe with $100 to search for warriors who survived the battle.

Miller believed that available historical accounts were biased and he was determined to find the native version of the conflicts.

He drove to the Pine Ridge Reservation and then to other Sioux and Cheyenne reservations in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and Oklahoma. Armed with sketchbooks, brushes and pencils, Miller sketched, painted and interviewed surviving warriors and U.S. army scouts.

Miller interviewed 72 warriors in their 70s, 80s and 90s who had taken part in the Custer fight: 54 Sioux, 16 Cheyennes, one Arapaho and one Assiniboine. “I questioned them in their own languages and found, with very few exceptions, that none of them had ever before told their stories to a white man or had their portraits painted,” Miller wrote in an article in American Heritage in 1971.

Above: One of Miller’s field notebooks with an interview of Drags the Rope, who saw Custer’s troops approaching and warned his people of the impending attack. The notebook, together with a large collection of Miller’s art, artifacts and research, is currently exhibited at the Wrangler Gallery in Great Falls, MT. Opposite: Miller sketching Joseph White Cow Bull on the Pine Ridge Reservation, S.D., c. 1937.

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Warriors & Their Families

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fter his first visit in 1935, Miller returned to the reservations in the summers while studying American anthropology at the University of Michigan and then art at New York University. He learned Native American sign language and became fluent in several Indian languages. Miller was adopted by Black Elk, who named him Chief Iron White Man, prompting him to take “a solemn oath to tell the truth about [Black Elk's] people.”

“Black Elk was one of the most famous Indians that ever lived,” Miller wrote in his field notes after interviewing Black Elk. “At the age of 13 he became a warrior, taking his first scalp in the Custer fight in 1876. Well known in later years as a chief, it was as a medicine-man and spiritual leader that he earned wide renown while still a young man. He became a prophet of the Ghost Dance, which touched off the last great Indian uprising in 1890.”

From 1942 to 1946, Miller served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, converting aerial photographs into drawings to help guide pilots. After the war, he returned to the reservations to continue his artwork and research. There were only 20 living Bighorn survivors then, including Dewey Beard, who lost his parents, several siblings, and his wife and daughter at the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. After Black Elk died in 1950, Dewey and his second wife, Alice, adopted Miller. Four years later, when Miller married Jan, Dewey attended the wedding at 98 years of age in a feather headdress and full buckskin attire. He and Alice presented the Millers with their courting robe (included in the Miller collection).

Left: Nicholas Black Elk, c. 1939, Miller’s “first adoptive Indian father,” foremost priest of the Ghost Dance and narrator of Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt.

Top Right: Dewey Beard, c. 1941, who initially was named Iron Hail, then changed his name to Beard.

After he met Admiral Dewey, he took “Dewey” as his first name.

Bottom Right: c. 1938, Olivia One Bull, wife of Chief Henry Oscar One Bull, rendered as a topography of her people’s woes.

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Mystery of Who Killed Custer, Solved?

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fter Miller sketched Joseph White Cow Bull (in the photograph on page 36, and the drawing is below) in the late 1930s, the elderly warrior related how he might be the one who killed Custer. As the Battle of the Little Bighorn started, White Cow Bull joined several warriors at a ford on Medicine Tail Coulee just before a column of over 200 mounted troops of the 7th Cavalry charged down the coulee en route to attack the native village from the north.

“One white man had little hairs on his face [a mustache] and was wearing a big hat and a buckskin jacket. He was riding a fine-looking big horse, a sorrel with a blazed face and four white stockings,” White Cow Bull recounted. “The man in the buckskin jacket seemed to be the leader of these soldiers, for he shouted something and they all came charging at us across the ford … . [T]he

Above: Joseph White Cow Bull, c. 1937, Oglala Sioux warrior, was 28 years old at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He died in 1942, aged 94.

Opposite: Sitting Bull’s life mask.“[Sitting Bull] had vision before battle of warriors coming down from sun with heads down, horses feet up,” Miller wrote in typed notes from One Bull interview. “Meant many soldiers would come, all would be killed.”

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soldier chief was firing his heavy rifle fast. I aimed my repeater at him and fired. I saw him fall out of his saddle and hit the water. Shooting that man stopped the soldiers from charging on. They all reined up their horses and gathered around where he had fallen. [Then] I saw the soldiers do a strange thing. Some of them got off their horses in the ford and seemed to be dragging something out of the water.”

That “something” was the buckskin-clad leader.

Surprisingly, the soldiers retreated instead of attacking the village. Custer’s plan was to take the women and children hostages and parley, which would have secured victory. Most of the warriors were occupied fighting Major Marcus Reno’s troops, who had attacked from the south.

The retreat reversed the battle’s momentum, and Custer’s and Reno’s soldiers were never able to join forces, which could have changed the outcome.

Losing Custer at this point would explain the sudden disarray among his troops. Also, as Miller wrote in Custer’s Fall (book cover on page 46), the lieutenant colonel’s men would have recovered his body to prevent desecration.

Ironically, that morning White Cow Bull went looking for Monahseetah, whom he called Meotzi, a Cheyenne woman he wanted to marry. She had a seven-year-old son fathered by Custer who “had killed her father, Chief Black Kettle, in a battle … and captured her.”

As Custer’s soldiers retreated, White Cow Bull was joined by hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. “I kept riding with the Shahiyelas [Cheyenne],” he recalled, “still hoping that some of them might tell Meotzi later about my courage.” After the battle, Meotzi identified Custer’s body, which White Cow Bull recognized.

Miller found his account more credible than other warriors’ claims, and White Cow Bull’s story was supported by Bobtail Horse who fought with him at the coulee. If true, Custer was one of the first soldiers to fall at the battle.

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Miller as Author & Artist

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iller documented the Indian way of life and historical deeds in print as well as art. He wrote two books from the Native American viewpoint: Custer’s Fall, published in 1957, and Ghost Dance, about the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, published in 1959. Custer’s Fall enjoyed wide distribution as a Book of the Month selection. Miller hoped to publish a third book about his experiences interviewing and painting the Little Bighorn warriors. He didn’t finish that book, but his sketches, photos and notes are in the collection at the Wrangler Gallery.

Miller’s research corrected historical details, for example that the Little Bighorn battle started at midday and lasted “the time for the sun to travel the width of the shadow of a teepee pole across the ground,” which equals 20 minutes.

From interviews with John Sitting Bull, the adopted deafmute son of Sitting Bull, Miller [Miller] preserved for recounted how the bloodshed at the Lakota people their Wounded Knee, South Dakota, stores and portraits started accidentally. John was from life, which is trying to comply with U.S. Army orders to disarm when troopers of great value to the approached him from behind and Lakota people of today. spun him around—unaware of his Eddie Little Sky, Hollywood disabilities—as he was laying down motion picture actor who his rifle. The weapon discharged, grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation precipitating the massacre.

Miller sketched his portraits with charcoal and pastels (colored chalk), applied skillfully to textured paper. From 1951 to 1954, Miller worked with the Atomic Energy Commission illustrating reports from the Pacific Testing Grounds. Later, Miller completed mural commissions at Mount Rushmore (now in the Civic Center in Rapid City, South Dakota) and a series of murals at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina.

Miller also served as president of the Hollywood Author’s Club in the 1950s and early 1960s. For his article “Echoes of the Little Bighorn” in American Heritage, Miller was awarded the 1973 Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Top: Book cover for Ghost Dance.

Middle: David Humphreys Miller’s acting head shot.

Bottom: Cover for Custer’s Fall: The Indian Side of the Story.

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Left to right: Sherman Sage, Benjamin Black Elk (Black Elk’s son), David H. Miller and Henry Fonda. Miller is teaching Fonda how to deliver some of his lines in Arapaho, which his character in the film speaks.

Miller Brought the Real West to Hollywood

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fter World War II, Miller and his wife moved to Rancho Santa Fe, California, and he worked in Hollywood as a technical advisor on Native American language and culture for at least 25 films. He also had small acting roles in many of the movies, such as “How the West Was Won,” which starred Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck and John Wayne. Other movies included “Cheyenne Autumn,” “Stagecoach” and “Tomahawk.” Miller was an advisor for the “Daniel Boone” TV show.

Miller often brought surviving warriors from the reservations and their grown children to work as extras and make badly needed cash. John Sitting Bull, for example, was cast in “Tomahawk.”

In “How the West Was Won,” Miller helped save one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, in

which a group of Indians stampede a buffalo herd through a tent village. “When they let the buffalo out of a big corral, the lead cow headed right for the Indians on the set who were supposed to be chasing them,” recounted Brad Hamlett, owner of the Wrangler Gallery, in an interview. “That shoot didn’t work, so Miller talked to the Indian extras and found among them an elderly man who had actually hunted buffalo on horseback as a youth.

He told the actors how to initiate the chase correctly and the scene was a success.”

It is no small irony that in the Westerns Miller worked on, there are real warriors—and their children who grew up hearing the stories firsthand—who defeated Custer and participated in other battles.

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Little Bighorn Warriors’ Last Sit-Down

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trategically, Custer’s Last Stand was an insignificant defeat for the U.S. Army. A few thousand Indians from various tribes had gathered at the Little Bighorn River, hoping to preserve their traditional way of life. There weren't hundreds of thousands of mounted warriors ready to sweep down from the Northern Great Plains like 13th-century Mongol hordes.

For the Native American tribes, the victory was Pyrrhic. It was June 25, 1876—days before the centenary celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Custer’s rout was embarrassing and turned public opinion completely against Native Americans. Custer was a hero of the Civil War and Indian Wars. Final defeat for the tribes came 48

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swiftly, followed by generations of shameful treatment.

In 1948, Miller organized the last reunion of remaining Little Bighorn survivors (pictured above) in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Five survivors also attended the dedication of the Crazy Horse Memorial on June 3 that year. Crazy Horse was an Oglala Sioux war leader who fought at the Little Bighorn and was killed a year later while in custody. The memorial is located in the Black Hills, and work on the rock carving will continue for decades. When completed, it will dwarf the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

What Miller penned in his field notes about interviewing John Strange Owl, who was 78 and died

soon after, best describes the demeanor of these warriors: “He sat for his portrait with such grace.

We spoke in Cheyenne, his only language: ‘I am tsis-tsis-tsas (Cheyenne). This is our land.

We have been here many years. Nobody bothered us until Long Hair (Custer) came charging.”

In 1955, Dewey Beard, the last survivor, whom Miller called “my second father,” died.

After Miller passed away in 1992, his ashes were scattered on Mount Coolidge in the Black Hills between Custer State Park and Black Elk Peak.

Above: Last photo of survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, taken September 2, 1948, by Bill Groethe. Left to right: Little Warrior, Pemmican, Little Soldier, Dewey Beard, John Sitting Bull, High Eagle, Iron Hawk and Comes Again.

Right: John Sitting Bull at the reunion. Sitting Bull was 14 years old in 1876 and participated in early phases of the Little Bighorn battle.

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The Miller Collection at Wrangler Gallery

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he Millers kept almost their entire collection together throughout their lives. Since they had no children, Jan, who passed away in 2006, bequeathed the collection to close friend Sandy Solomon. The Solomon family's foundation then placed the collection at the Wrangler Gallery in Great Falls, Montana. The Miller collection was appraised at $3.5 million in a down market in 2007 and is available now for $3.8 million, with one proviso. It was Jan’s express wish that the collection remains intact to honor her husband’s legacy.

In total, there are about 125 framed pieces of art, consisting of Miller’s drawings and paintings (as shown on the left). Also included are depictions of several of Custer’s Indian scouts. The portraits cover several walls, and often descendants have traveled to view the renderings and left saying gratefully that they never knew what their ancestors looked like.

There are also thousands of photographs and negatives of Native Americans and their way of life.

These include Indian ceremonies and pageants, which Miller helped organize. Also available are several filing cabinets of Miller’s field notes and research. The collection includes many artifacts, for example, a soldier’s meat storage tin from the battlefield, and feather objects, such as a trailing war bonnet and Black Elk’s ceremonial staff with eagle feathers. By law, these cannot be sold but could be donated to a properly licensed institution.

The Wrangler Gallery is owned by Brad Hamlett, a local fifth-generation rancher who has also served as a Montana state senator and now representative since 2009. The gallery’s director is Sherry Gallagher, an accomplished regional artist. Hamlett says the collection would be perfect for a museum, public art gallery, university or corporation that could house, curate and display the works and artifacts. It would be a great public service, he notes, to make the collection available for scholarly research.

For further information, please contact Hamlett or Gallagher at WranglerGalleryArt.com. ±

Opposite: Brad Hamlett with some of Miller’s framed art at the Wrangler Gallery in Great Falls, MT. Below: envelopes containing never-printed negatives of photographs Miller took on the Indian reservations in the 1930s through 1950s.

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Business

Leadership’s Future Tense Organizational Culture, Growth & Succession Vern Dosch, CEO of National Information Solutions Cooperative 52

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Left to right: Andrew Cooper, Technical Systems Engineer; Keith Horntvedt, Sr. Manager Professional Services; Rachel Eggebrecht, Paralegal Specialist; Greg Jahner, Sr. Manager Professional Services; Cindy Levi, Team Lead Member Support; Shanon Bogren, Professional Services Consultant.

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ome industry analysts might argue that establishing a technology company in the Midwest is not the best long-term decision.

After all, given the numbers of IT employees who are retiring now and in increasing numbers over the next 15 to 20 years, no one expects to find a surplus of IT experts in small- to mediumsized cities in our region.

That view is shortsighted. Knowing what I do now about connectivity and the work ethic in the Midwest, and about National Information

Solutions Cooperative’s (NISC) history of growing our employees into leadership roles, I would found a technology company here today without hesitation. We get to live where we want, and we also get to be part of a fastpaced, cutting-edge technology industry.

Founded in the 1960s as North Central Data Cooperative in Mandan, North Dakota, we started out providing software and IT services for two rural electric cooperatives and one telecommunication cooperative.

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n 2000, North Central Data Cooperative merged with Central Area Data Processing in Missouri to become NISC. For the next two years, we got to know each other and worked on turning our former rivalry into teamwork.

Today, NISC has grown to serve 14 million end users in 50 states or territories and in Canada. Our member-owners—main customers—are mostly utility cooperatives and telecommunications companies. NISC provides integrated IT solutions for consumer and subscriber billing, accounting, engineering and operations, and many other leading-edge IT solutions.

NISC employs 1,132 workers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Lake St. Louis, Missouri; Shawano, Wisconsin; and Mandan, where 465 of our employees work.

A truly unique component of our shared values is that NISC employees created them, defined them and, every day, live by them.

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Succession planning Because of our company culture, NISC’s overall turnover is just 4.5 percent, less than half the industry rate of 11 percent.

Fifteen employees retired from NISC in 2015, and another 15 in 2016. We anticipate 12 retirements in 2017. In sum, about 1 percent of workers retire per year, and we expect this to remain constant for the next five years.

At first glance, it seems NISC isn’t seriously affected by baby boomer retirements.

But don’t be fooled—for every 10 retirees with an average of 25 years of service, your organization loses 250 years of knowledge and experience—longer than the United States has been a country. Even with solid succession planning, the gap left by just one seasoned employee is a real issue.

Larry Estal, NISC’s former national sales manager, is one of those seasoned employees. Estal, who retired at the end of 2014 Larry Estal at the 2010 after 45 years of service, brought enormous TechAdvantage Conference in value in the relationships he formed with Atlanta, GA. NISC customers. I’ve never met anyone who could recall names and personal information about others like Estal. He flawlessly modeled ethical behavior and was always available to mentor employees.

A talented national sales manager is critical to a company’s success, so we began planning for Estal’s succession four years before he retired. Although we understood we couldn’t replicate Estal’s gift with people, we could have him train rising leaders to emulate his appreciation and respect for others.

Estal took regional business managers to meet prospective clients, as well as customers with whom he had long, established relationships. He made

introductions and made everyone comfortable enough to let the employees he was mentoring take the lead in client discussions.

Estal’s replacements were young enough to be his children and, in some cases, his grandchildren. He treated them as family and when he had medical issues, they picked him up at home and brought him to the office.

Building Culture through Shared Values When I became CEO of NISC in 2002, I had reservations about the value of ‘company culture’ because it seemed to be a soft science with little bearing on our bottom line, innovative software design, or the satisfaction and engagement of our employees and customers.

I soon discovered NISC’s bottom line is positively affected by that company culture. From 2001 through 2016, NISC’s target annual revenue growth rate was 5 percent. Our actual rate ranged from 6 to 10 percent. [Please note that as a cooperative, we approach revenue from a cost management perspective, rather than maximizing prices. Typically, we build a 5-percent margin into our pricing model for products and services. Sales revenue growth above 5 percent, therefore, precisely reflects business expansion.]

The formation of NISC’s shared values was part of building the culture that allows us to see results like these. Following our merger, front-line employees, not management, were asked to identify company values that would make them proud to work for us. This was risky since we weren’t sure whether senior leadership or the board of directors would support the committee’s recommendation. A no-confidence vote would reverberate throughout the entire organization.

At the end of three days of meetings, the committee proposed six shared values for NISC to embrace: integrity, relationships, innovation, teamwork, empowerment and personal development.

In this rapidly evolving industry, companies must reinvent themselves every five years. This requires a recurring, steep learning curve, as employees reinvent themselves to accord with company objectives and personal aspirations.

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.

John Cleese

Creating a Learning Organization For senior leaders, this evolving culture shifted our mindset from being people-managers to being team coaches. Like many businesses, our performance review process had become so complex that employees began to feel it was punitive rather than supportive. I remember clearly the day I ran into one of our rising stars following her annual performance review. She was dejected because her score had dropped from a 4.66 to 4.65 out of 5. This focus on a hundredth of a point made me realize we needed customized coaching rather than one-size-fits-all management.

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In response, we brought Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership® II training to all supervisory staff. Within 18 months, our employee engagement scores increased by 5 percent and then by 13 percent over the next three years.

We initiated other best practices. For three months every year, we instituted an intense learning period, the Employee Learning Quarter. As catalysts for growth, we offer Abstract, the world’s largest library of business book summaries. We provide access to Pathways Learning Management System and to Linda.com, an online resource with over 4,000 courses taught by experts in business, technology and creative skills. NISC also provides tuition assistance for employees to enroll in graduate degree or certification programs.

Many of NISC’s decisions are guided by quarterly employee surveys on topics such as engagement, satisfaction and relationships with supervisors. We are now ‘best in class’ (in the top 10 percent) out of 7,000 companies nationwide in 80 percent of measured categories.

Servant leadership is by nature an oxymoron that challenges the predominant view of leadership in today’s business culture.

Vern Dosch

Growing Our Employees Unlike most IT companies, NISC doesn’t outsource services, nor do we ship projects overseas. In the short term, it would be easier and more economical to have software developed overseas. But that would literally disconnect our products from our customers. From idea to installation, NISC employees do the work, which enables customers to have input at every stage of development.

As a result, customer satisfaction rates consistently average 98 percent and employee satisfaction ranks almost as high. Our customer attrition rate is less than 0.5 percent per year, compared to the industry average of 20 percent. We invest for the long term in growing our employees. Tomorrow’s leaders are being trained in-house today to meet all the needs of NISC’s customers.

Servant Leadership at the Office Servant leadership has been integral to the evolution of NISC’s corporate culture. My exposure to servant leadership began in the 1970s as an undergraduate and then again in the 1990s as a graduate student at the University of Mary. Sister Thomas Welder, then university president, spoke to our classes about the humble authority of servant leadership, which she models.

This resonated with me as it did with NISC’s senior leadership team, four of whom also completed degrees at the university—as it resonates for more than 75 of our Mandan employees who studied there.

We find that employees who embrace the Benedictine value of leading by serving others become leaders in tune with NISC’s shared values.

Accordingly, we recruit with a candidate’s character, values and motives for applying in mind.

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There is no ‘servant leadership’ line item on a balance sheet, yet I believe customers and visitors feel its influence in how our employees welcome them, respect their input and honor their presence. It’s not coincidental that what we measure—revenue, retention and recruitment—remains consistently high.

50th Anniversary & Beyond NISC commemorates its 50th anniversary in February 2018. When it started a half-century ago, the average cost of a new home nationwide was $14,250, the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and computing was confined to massive mainframes.

When Keith Horntvedt, now Sr. Manager Professional Services, started working at NISC in 1981, IBM released its first personal desktop computer.

By the time Cindy Levi, now Team Lead Member Support, joined NISC in 1990, Microsoft began shipping Windows 3.0.

In Andrew Cooper’s first eight years at NISC, for example, there has been no need to ask senior leadership about MS-DOS programming tricks. But Cooper has inherited a legacy from senior leaders in the embrace of mentoring, the five-year reinvention cycle, the vast repertoire of organization and customer knowledge, and the modeling of NISC’s enduring shared values, together with the 1,500-year-old Benedictine tradition of servant leadership.

And now it’s time for Cooper and other budding leaders to instill our culture in newer colleagues. ±

Andrew Cooper, a Technical Systems Engineer in charge of Cloud operations, works in his cubicle. This is his eighth year at NISC, which Cooper says is “a great company to work at. We don’t get stuck in red tape while trying to implement innovations.

Things are very lateral here. I’m not afraid to walk into Vern’s office to ask a question or propose an idea.”

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Numeracy

What Are the Odds That What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas?

Travis Wolf, PhD, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Mary

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ane Hewitt, MD, has a problem. Ever since she read George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda in high school, she’s had a fascination with playing roulette.

Yet whenever she plays, she loses—just like the novel’s heroine, Gwendolen Harleth. Dr. Hewitt promised her husband, Victor, she would never play roulette again, and in return he promised to completely stop smoking.

The problem is that she’s 35,000 feet in the air on a passenger jet flying to Las Vegas to present a pa-

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per at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology. Dr. Hewitt can afford to lose a few hundred dollars at the roulette table—but there’s that promise. And if she breaks it, Victor has threatened to change their last name to “Blewitt.”

The next day, Dr. Hewitt’s presentation, “New Transmission Modes for Hansen’s Disease,” goes very well. The ballroom at the Bellagio Hotel is filled with 2,000 dermatologists and related health professionals. Many colleagues congratulate Dr.

Hewitt afterwards and invite her to dinner. She agrees to meet several friends who flew from India where they are treating a recent upsurge in leprosy (Hansen’s disease).

On the way back to her room, Dr. Hewitt walks through one of the Bellagio’s casinos, which can’t be avoided, and soon spots a roulette table. She slows down and magically, her shoes glide towards the spinning roulette wheel.

‘Surely,’ she thinks, ‘there’s no harm in watching for a while.’ Placing a bet is a young woman with tattoos on her left shoulder and down that arm. The inked animals catch the doctor’s interest, since tattoo needles can act as disease transmission vectors.

More interesting to Dr. Hewitt is another young woman—without a dragon tattoo. She exudes the naïve excitement of a newbie gambler as she puts a $10 chip on number 7 on the roulette table.

‘Could number 7 really be lucky?’ Dr. Hewitt wonders. The roulette wheel includes numbers 1 through 36, as well as 0 and 00, in non-sequential order. Each time the wheel is spun, there is one winning and 37 losing numbers, making the odds in favor of winning 1 to 37 (or 1:37). Hence the odds against winning are 37:1.

Dr. Hewitt considers outcome probabilities for treatments in her daily medical practice, so she automatically converts these odds to a probability.

With each spin of the wheel, the probability of a 7 being the winning number is determined by dividing 1 by 38, since there is only one winning number out of 38 total numbers. This equals approximately 0.026 or 2.6 percent. Dr. Hewitt’s patients would not find such a small chance of succeeding—which translates to a 97.4-percent likelihood of failure—very reassuring.

The croupier spins the roulette wheel clockwise and then rolls the ball in the opposite direction.

The spinning of the wheel and ball in contrary motion mesmerizes everyone around the table— until the ball falls into the number 18 slot, which

no one picked.

‘Is there a better bet?’ Dr. Hewitt asks herself.

The woman without the dragon tattoo could wager that one of the red or one of the black numbers will win. After all, there are 18 black and 20 non-black numbers (18 red and two green numbers [0 and 00]). Thus the odds in favor of winning a bet on a black number are 18 to 20.

This can be reduced to 9:10, which makes the probability of winning 9/19, or about 47 percent.

It seems the tattoo-less woman is thinking likewise. She places a $10 bet on the black numbers.

This time she wins and beams with joy as she collects chips equaling $20.

‘If she keeps betting that way,’ Dr. Hewitt realizes, ‘at least she can stay at the table a long time.’

If she came with $1,000 and places that same bet 100 times, she can assume she will win 47 of those times, since the probability of winning on a single roll is about 47 percent. On those 47 wins, she will collect $940 in chips (since a winning bet earns double), so in the end she will only lose $60 total.

But the young woman does something extraordinary. She bets $20 on red and when she wins again, she bets the $40 on black.

“What if her streak continues?” Dr. Hewitt whispers as she draws closer to the table, her

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hands itching to join in. Instead, she takes out her iPhone to make several calculations. “If she wins 10 times in a row, putting all her winnings into each wager, she will earn $10,240.”

The young woman wins and puts $80 on black.

“At 14 wins, she will collect $163,840,” Dr. Hewitt says to a man who joins the onlookers, “and the 15th time will earn her $327,680.”

“What are the odds of that happening?” he asks.

“Good question,” Dr. Hewitt replies and quickly calculates. “The probability of winning 14 times in a row, with each separate bet having a 0.47 chance of success, is (0.47)14. This equals 0.000029 or about three out of 100,000. The likelihood of winning 15 times in a row would be one chance in 100,000.”

The man asks another question but Dr. Hewitt is too preoccupied with her desire to sit down at the roulette table and join the fun. “What are the odds my husband would find out?” she whispers, not loudly enough for anyone else to hear, but the question thunders through her conscience.

Dr. Hewitt looks around the casino and recognizes two dozen colleagues from the convention.

It’s a big casino, she realizes, and she never met most of the medical professionals at her talk. Since all of them would recognize her, she determines it would be safe to assume that at least 100 people here would recognize her—especially as the crowd continues to grow around the roulette table.

The problem is that Victor Hewitt is a pharmaceutical salesman with a major firm and will likely visit the offices of two-thirds of the 100 dermatologists who would see her playing roulette.

She asks herself the ultimate question, ‘But would they say anything to my husband?’

People either talk or they don’t; some are chatty and others say as little as possible beyond the business at hand, Dr. Hewitt reasons. So she assumes there’s a 50-percent chance that any given doctor who speaks to her husband on his visit will mention that he or she saw her. This means the probability that the first doctor her husband sees will not 60

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say something is ½, which equals 0.5 or 50 percent.

The probability that neither of the first two doctors he sees will say something is (½)2, which equals 1/4 or 25 percent.

So the odds that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” when Victor visits the first doctor are even (1:1). The situation is similar to flipping a coin, where the outcome is either Heads (H) or Tails (T), with Heads as the outcome “the doctor will say something to my husband about this” and Tails as the outcome “the doctor won’t say anything about this.” Then the odds that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” on the first two visits are 1:3, since if two coins are flipped, there are four possible outcomes: H-H, H-T, T-H, T-T. Only T-T equates to neither of the two doctors saying something.

So far the odds that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” seem reasonable. Dr. Hewitt edges towards the roulette table, just as the young woman wins for a third time in a row and immediately bets all her winnings on red.

A man and a woman on the other side of the roulette table wave at Dr. Hewitt. She waves back, recognizing them from medical school. They are also Victor’s clients who, she reminds herself, will visit about 67 doctors who would take notice if she starts gambling.

Now the numbers get intimidating, she realizes.

The probability that none of these 67 doctors will say something about her is (½)67. Dr. Hewitt recalls that the probability the first doctor Victor sees will not say something is ½, which equals 50 percent. It’s a coin flip. The probability that this outcome will be the same 67 times in a row is ½ x ½ x ½ … (67 times in total). The first step in making this calculation is to determine 267, which equals 147,573,952,589,676,412,928, or almost 150 quintillion.

That’s a big number—so big it’s about the same as the number of grains of sand on planet Earth.

However, instead of heading to the beach with a sifter, Dr. Hewitt knows this is part of a frac-

Now the numbers get intimidating, she realizes.

1:147,573,952,589,676,412,927! tion: 1/147,573,952,589,676,412,928 or 1 divided by almost 150 quintillion, which amounts to 0.000000000000000000678 percent—a really small number that also indicates how massively unlikely it is that none of the 67 doctors will mention her.

Thus, the likelihood that at least one of the 67 doctors will mention that they saw Dr. Hewitt is 99.99999999999999999932 percent. The odds that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” are 1:147,573,952,589,676,412,927, the likelihood of which approaches an impossible event.

Doing one last computation—certainly one of the most important—Dr. Hewitt reasons that if she simply doesn’t play roulette, the probability that no one will tell her husband is 100 percent.

“Too bad Gwendolen Harleth didn’t realize the odds were stacked against her before losing her fortune in the George Eliot novel,” Dr. Hewitt says as the roulette wheel spins. A loud “Oh no” from the crowd sounds as the ball lands on black, meaning the young woman just lost all her winnings.

“The Casino, Monte Carlo,” by Christian Ludwig Bokelmann (1844–1894). Bokelmann was a German genre painter in the realistic and naturalistic styles.

He met an unlikely demise after falling off a ladder in his studio, while attempting to hang a laurel wreath that had been given to him by his students on the occasion of his 50th birthday. What are the odds?

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” is one of the most famous taglines in advertising history, which was initiated in 2003. Las Vegas is proud of the fact that this ad campaign has succeeded in attracting millions of visitors to “Sin City.”

Mathematically, however, “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” is only true if nothing happens in Vegas.

Dr. Hewitt walks away from the roulette table toward the elevators to her room. She wants to call Victor before dinner to tell him how the talk went. Dr. Hewitt was nervous all week and her husband kept reassuring her that it wasn’t a coin flip. She worked so hard on her paper, he said, that success was certain. ± 61

Steve D. Scheel in his office at SCHEELS headquarters in Fargo, ND. Behind him is a photographic portrait of his father, Frederick Scheel.

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Economic Diversity

Five Generations of Leadership & Innovation Building a Dynamic, EmployeeOwned Company in North Dakota Andrea Gleiter, BA English, University of Mary, 2016

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ens, paper and pencils jumped a full inch when Frederick Scheel’s fist hit his desk. “Sporting goods are the first thing people can do without,” he shouted at his son, Steve.

It was 1977 in Fargo, North Dakota, and Frederick was the CEO of the family’s 14 hardware and homeware Scheels stores in the area. At 30, Steve D. Scheel was in his fifth year working full time for the family business. For his first major assignment, he was put in charge of opening a store in Sioux Falls, the company’s first in South Dakota. Steve proposed making the new venue into an all-sporting goods store.

Steve’s father had always told him that “change is good,” and Steve took the concept to heart. Frederick was less than enthusiastic about this particular change—at first.

The idea of creating the first all-sporting goods Scheels store evolved into the first of three major business ideas that would define the company’s future.

Great leaders always seem to embody two seemingly disparate qualities. They are both highly visionary and highly practical.

John C. Maxwell

Roots & Change Steve’s great-grandfather was a German immigrant and potato farmer near Sabin, Minnesota, about 10 miles southeast of Fargo. He used the $300 he earned from his first potato harvest as a down payment ($600 total cost) on a small hardware and general merchandise store, which he opened in Sabin in 1902.

In 1919, Steve’s grandfather took over the business after returning from World War I, where he served in the U.S. Navy. In the following decades, the family opened Scheels stores in and around Fargo on both sides of the Red River Valley.

In 1946, Steve’s father, Frederick, returned from serving as a U.S. Marine pilot in World War II and took over the family business. Frederick was also 63

an accomplished photographer, who studied with photography legends such as Ansel Adams. He published several books of photography as well as a book of poetry.

Sporting & Outdoor Goods as the Future

Outside of business, Frederick Scheel had a lifelong love of photography—both in appreciating the art and creating it himself, such as this simple but powerful study of a prairie sunflower.

In 2007, Scheel gave more than 600 prints to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Fred saw pattern and form—a sense of order— in the world,” said Colleen Sheehy, director of Fargo’s Plains Art Museum. “He helps us see the beauty all around us.”

Photograph

by Fred Scheel.

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As early as the 1910s, Scheels stores began carrying a small sporting goods selection, which intrigued Steve as a youngster in the 1950s helping out at the stores. After graduating from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, with a triple major in economics, political science and history, Steve served in the U.S. Army as a combat engineer for two years. In January 1972, he started working full time at Scheels.

“I took a $500 a month cut in pay and came to work for Dad because he’s such a good salesperson,” Steve said in an interview.

By the late 1970s, big box chain stores such as Lowe’s were opening nationwide, precipitating steep competition in hardware and homeware. Steve had a growing sense that the Scheels company’s future would be in sporting goods. After Home Depot was founded in 1978, any doubts were erased.

Large sporting goods stores such as Dick’s were also proliferating, but there were no sports superstores in North Dakota and few in this area of the Midwest. At the time, the profit margin for hardware and sporting goods was about the same, but since sporting goods average a much higher item cost, making a $5 profit on a baseball glove adds up far more quickly than making 5 cents on a handful of nails.

Also for Steve, an avid cyclist, “sporting goods are more fun,” he said at a talk he gave last October at the Lunch & Learn Series at the University of Mary’s Gary Tharaldson School of Business, co-sponsored by the Bismarck-Mandan Chamber of Commerce.

Nevertheless, Steve’s father saw hardware items as necessities and sporting goods as luxuries, and considered his son’s first major business idea very risky since the original model had worked so well for almost 80 years in the area’s agriculturally based economy.

But Steve negotiated with his father to allow him to incorporate a larger sporting goods selection in the Sioux Falls location. This proved immediately successful. Three years later, in 1980, Steve converted the Sioux Falls

store into an all-sporting goods store—without his father’s approval. Sales at that location increased by 30 percent, in contrast to the average annual sales growth of 2 to 4 percent at the other stores.

Frederick applauded the results of his son’s clandestine move and began converting other stores to the new model. In 1989, the first all-sports superstore was opened in Grand Forks, and new stores followed suit. Currently, there are 25 Scheels All Sports (or SCHEELS) stores in 11 states—North Dakota, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah and Kansas—and one remaining hardware store in Fargo.

The first Scheels Hardware and General Store in Sabin, Minnesota opened in 1902.

Disneyland of Sporting Goods Stores The new SCHEELS all-sports stores were being built progressively larger to accommodate a vast range of sporting goods from hunting to camping to golfing to skiing and so on—along with each sport’s clothing and footwear.

At the same time, Steve realized that customers were spending an average of 20 minutes in a store, just enough to complete a transaction. So Steve’s next big idea was “to make SCHEELS an attraction rather than just a retailer.”

In 2007, Sports Illustrated for Kids chose SCHEELS as the best sporting goods store. “You can buy a baseball glove anywhere,” the magazine wrote, “but SCHEELS flagship stores might be the only places where you can buy a

I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.

Estée Lauder

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The atrium of the Fargo SCHEELS features a replica of a company floatplane diving from the glass-enclosed ceiling.

baseball glove, ride a Ferris wheel and snack on an ostrich sandwich.”

Stores hold galleries, aquariums, vast atriums with suspended airplanes, restaurants, children’s rides, shooting galleries and bowling alleys. The average customer visit now lasts more than 90 minutes.

Bigger, Biggest & Almost Bust When the first SCHEELS in Grand Forks opened in 1989 at 30,000 square feet, it was the company’s largest venue by far. It soon became clear that more room was needed. A new 50,000-square-foot store opened in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1995 and was too small within six months.

A year later, the Fargo SCHEELS opened at 60,000 square feet. Then in 1998, a new SCHEELS opened near Iowa City, Iowa, this time with two stories, which doubled the location’s retail space to 105,000 square feet. In 2002, another store opened in St. Cloud, Minnesota, at 128,000 square feet.

The new store in Omaha, Nebraska opened in 2004, boasting 177,000 square feet. Six months later, SCHEELS 23rd superstore opened in Des Moines, Iowa—2,000 square feet larger.

The bigger-is-better model worked so well that Geno Martini, the mayor of Sparks, Nevada, called Steve in 2005 to propose that SCHEELS build the world’s largest sporting goods store in this affluent suburban city bordering

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Reno. After investing $60 million, Steve presided over the opening of the Sparks venue, which at 295,000 square feet has the same acreage as five-and-a-half football fields.

Two arched 16,000-gallon aquariums at the Sparks location are stocked with brilliantly colored fish and an atrium with a 65-foot Ferris wheel. Shooting galleries and sports simulators let customers test their skills. Thirty flavors of fudge are served at Gramma Ginna’s restaurant, named after Steve’s grandmother.

The Sparks megastore opened on September 26, 2008. One month later, the Great Recession began and retail sales plummeted nationwide.

With a third less revenue than expected, the Sparks store was in trouble. Also, since the store was such a huge investment, the downturn put the entire company at risk, along with the employee retirement plan.

Stop Managing Employees, Start Leading People These troubled times endangered Steve’s third innovative business idea.

By the late 1980s, Steve had become concerned about his biggest ongoing problem: employee turnover. Steve found an intense dislike of management to be a common theme in employee exit interviews.

While his managers had expert knowledge about products, they had never received formal training in leadership. Steve decided that employees needed to be led, not managed, and that the ability of the sales staff to deal with customers as individuals is ultimately what distinguishes a retail outlet.

Steve saw clearly that customer loyalty in an increasingly competitive retail environment would determine the level of SCHEELS’ success and even its survival.

“If we can turn out the best leaders in retail,” Steve said, “we don’t have to worry about the competition.”

In 1990, Steve again approached his father to make a fundamental change to the company’s business model. “It seems we should be managing processes and things like inventory,” Steve began. “But we should be leading people.”

Frederick wasn’t sure what to make of this vision but this time, he trusted his son and said, “If you think there’s a difference, go for it.”

How do leaders earn respect? By making sound decisions, by admitting their mistakes, and by putting what’s best for their followers and the organization ahead of their personal agendas.

John C. Maxwell

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Leadership Training

The front entrance of SCHEELS in Fargo, ND, which also houses company headquarters and training facilities.

A year later, Steve became president, CEO and chairman of the board of SCHEELS. Steve believed then and even more strongly now that leaders can be made as well as born, and leadership is key to business success. He instituted mandatory monthly readings for store leaders from the many books he has read, such as John C. Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. The readings also pertain to specific strategic goals Steve has set company-wide for that year. It is then up to the store leaders to train the company’s 480 assistant store leaders via weekly meetings on site and by modeling the lessons articulated in the readings.

Steve also prepares the lessons and questions for the weekly staff meetings, which the store leaders lead at each venue. Most importantly, through observation and interactions on visits to every store, Steve works on reinforcing the lessons, believing that repetition matters.

Today, Steve’s son, Steve M. Scheel—the fifth generation of Scheels in charge—is CEO, while Steve remains board chairman and readings’ director.

At 70, Steve D. still bursts with energy and smiles often. He is soft-spoken but a forceful presence. He makes a point of being friendly with all staff and treating mistakes as learning opportunities. For decades, he has worked long hours and traveled frequently among stores, which he still enjoys.

Hiring for Character With developing leadership as the top priority, Steve focused on becoming very selective in the hiring process. He realized that too often absorbing information didn’t translate into treating colleagues or customers well. In response, he implemented high standards for prospective employees that focused on character qualities rather than on skill sets.

“We hire for attitude and train for skill” became the hiring mantra at SCHEELS. To advance, employees go through an evaluation process twice yearly. If these are favorable and consistent, then the employee can advance to the next level of leadership.

The leadership team at each venue is responsible for hiring, managing systems and growing revenue. The store is run almost entirely in-house, rather than from a distance. This enables managers and sales staff to estab68

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lish fruitful long-term relationships with customers. Turnover is now at the lowest rate in the industry: from 14 to 16 percent per year, occurring mostly in an employee’s first year or two of service.

The bottom line at SCHEELS, Steve continually emphasizes, is that employees are people first, and not mere company assets.

“When I listen to a concern employees have about business or their home lives, I ask a few questions,” Steve recounted. “Then I can really help them become a better person at SCHEELS. Trust is the bedrock of leadership.”

He teaches leaders how to get to know their employees by “asking about hobbies, knowing the names of their spouses and children and finding out what’s going on in their lives.” On the store floor, it is important for leaders to smile and always acknowledge a job well done.

Steve models this approach as essential to SCHEELS corporate culture, and he expects store leaders to do the same.

Steve D. Scheel, an avid cyclist, works the floor in one of his favorite areas, the bicycle shop.

Leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders.

Tom Peters

Product Knowledge SCHEELS prides itself on having the best-informed sales staff in retail.

The company runs four product-training centers, including one focusing on camping and firearms near Lanesboro, Minnesota. In Cedar Shores, South Dakota, sales associates are trained in fishing equipment and water sports.

The “Scheels University System” is headquartered in Sioux Falls, and much 69

of the training about clothing and footwear lines takes place in Fargo.

Sales staff spend a full week at the appropriate training facility. They are tested on product knowledge when they arrive. During the week, top product instructors from Trek Bicycle Corporation and Callaway Golf Company, for example, train SCHEELS employees in how to use the products properly and improve their skills. At week’s end, another test is given and sales staff must score 95 percent at minimum before they are authorized to sell the products at a SCHEELS store.

Aesop’s ESOP

The Wall of Excellence at Fargo headquarters honors achievement in sales and service.

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

James C. Collins

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As the moral for an Aesop fable puts it: “He (or she) who shares the risk ought to share the prize.” As SCHEELS converted its business model to an all-sports retail chain, Steve also worked with his father on converting the family-owned company into an employee-owned corporation via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), which was created in 1982.

Steve and his father wanted to both acknowledge the sacrifices SCHEELS employees make and ensure they can retire comfortably. SCHEELS has about 7,000 employees, and anyone who is 21 years of age and works at least 1,000 hours a year becomes vested in the plan.

There are three major benefits to an ESOP. First, as employees realize that they are in fact the owners of the company, their attitudes evolve into an ownership mentality.

Secondly, the ESOP enables all employees to retire with a much larger package than they might otherwise. A long-time associate, for example, retired recently at 52 years of age with $3 million in her SCHEELS ESOP. She began her career at SCHEELS as a high school student and became the first full-time product buyer. The next year her husband retired from Scheels after a similar career path; Steve wrote him a check for over $4 million.

Thirdly, the plan encourages employees to continue working at SCHEELS. The prospect of retiring as a multi-millionaire in one’s 50s is an attractive goal that few other companies offer to anyone beyond top management.

Steve budgets $45 million a year for ESOP payouts and writing those large checks is his favorite part of the job.

Back to Forward As Aesop noted, there is risk in life. The ESOP grows only insofar as SCHEELS prospers. If the company or the nation’s economy falters, the ESOP likewise suffers. The advantage of sharing risk is that everyone who works full time at SCHEELS becomes dedicated to the company’s long-term success.

This certainly played a role in weathering the 2008 recession. The relationships and trust SCHEELS sales staff had established with customers eased the decline in sales revenue. As a result, there were no layoffs or downsizing.

Giving back to the community is also a vital company commitment.

Every SCHEELS store must donate 5 percent of profits to local charities and organizations. In good years, store donations double. As well, the Scheels All Sports Foundation donates about $5 million per year to local communities.

Tremendous success continues to follow the Scheel family belief that “change is good,” that innovation and sensible risk bring high rewards. On September 29, 2017, SCHEELS will open a 250,000-square-foot store in Johnstown, Colorado. The same sized store will open in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2018. The next year, a new SCHEELS at 240,000 square feet will open in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. And in Colony, Texas (near Dallas), a new SCHEELS will open in 2020, which at 300,000 square feet will become the next SCHEELS version of the world’s largest sporting goods store.​±

Steve D. Scheel speaks at the Lunch & Learn series, sponsored by the Gary Tharaldson School of Business and the Bismarck-Mandan Chamber of Commerce.

“When I sincerely listen to a concern employees have about business or their home lives, I ask a few questions.

Then I can really help them become a better person at SCHEELS. Trust is the bedrock of leadership.”

Steve Scheel 71

Art

Rust, Sky & Prairie John Lopez: Welding an Artistic Life On the Northern Great Plains Karen Herzog, Editor-in-Chief, Momentum Magazine, University of Mary Patrick J. McCloskey, Author, Editor-in-Chief, 360 Review Opposite: "Maverick, the Longhorn" in Lopez’s studio on his ranch near Lemmon, is pure Texas.

Viewers can discover a Lone Star, guitar and fiddle cutouts and images of the Alamo and Sam Houston.

Behind Maverick is the miniature version Lopez works from. Lopez often incorporates these maquettes into full-sized pieces.

The John Lopez Studio is where it belongs, near the source of Lopez’s journey towards becoming an artist—the Grand River, the prairie and its people.

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I

f artists are formed by the world they inhabit, for sculptor John Lopez the umbilicus of that realm is the Grand River as it winds through the grasslands of South Dakota. This is a place so vast that under the prairie sky’s immense dome, a lone man is merely a dark pebble. But that immensity also spreads out as a wide-open canvas upon which an artist can play.

Lopez’s life has been spent among horses and cattle, corrals and pastures, which have melded into a deep knowing of place.

Lopez’s massive western-themed bronze sculptures have been installed throughout the Dakotas and have been commissioned by collectors in Kentucky, New Hampshire, Texas, California, and Montana.

In time, Lopez became inspired by the iron and steel relics abandoned in barns and pastures into taking an inventive artistic detour.

Lopez’s hybrid metal art cleverly fuses found objects—tools, machinery parts, oddments of forgotten purpose—with pieces of his traditional bronze work to create figures of delicious ingenuity open to a multiplicity of interpretations.

To Lopez, these ‘foundlings’ are not rusty discards but objects with soul, made sacred by their useful and life-giving functions.

Prehistoric and contemporary inhabitants of the West—dinosaur, bison, plow horse, longhorn, pronghorn, grizzly—are imagined as composed of the implements of the West — plowshares, wheel casings, wrenches, heavy chain, cable wire, molded sheet metal, sickle guards, pitchforks. Integrated into these assemblages are traditional bronze elements such as the faces of Sitting Bull and Custer, cottonwood leaves, an eagle, wheat heads and often, Lopez’s repurposed miniature models from other pieces.

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Lopez rendered the tensile strength of the plow horse, "Black Hawk," in the strain of the horse’s bent head and the angle of the legs. The details of the great horse include plow discs, chain, shovel heads and an iron potbellied stove medallion. Black Hawk’s home is Eastman’s Corner Farmers’ Market near Kensington, New Hampshire.

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Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?� The answer, of course, is nothing.

Land, sky, and the everchanging light.

Kathleen Norris Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

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"Dakotah," above, is a bison bull, the iconic symbol of the Plains. The massive, one-ton animal is fashioned from draped chains, sheet metal curls, sickle guards and hunks of cable wire ‘hair.’ Within this composition, viewers can find a stylized bald eagle, and atop Dakotah’s hump, the four faces on Mount Rushmore.

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Below, Little Big Horn combatants Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and Chief Sitting Bull face off with each other as two bulls fighting head to head. These two pieces embody the historical conflicts of western expansion, Lopez said.

A

fter earning a two-year commercial art degree at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Lopez moved to Sturgis, South Dakota, to work for Dale Lamphear, who was doing art pieces that combined cast metal and fabricated sheet metal.

Lopez finished his four-year commercial art degree at Black Hills State University, and credits Dallerie Davis with helping him find professional connections to exhibits and projects. With her help, Lopez was commissioned in 2000 to create life-size bronzes of U.S. presidents for a public art project. Lopez’s intensive decade-long work culminated in 12 bronzes, which were placed on street corners in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Traditional bronze figures such as these might have continued to be Lopez’s artistic trajectory. It was the tragic death of his beloved Aunt Effie in a car accident that rerouted both his life and his art.

When Effie’s husband, Geno Hunt, decided that she would be laid to rest in the prairie nearby, Lopez decided he would create the best cemetery for her. He began by fencing off the area. Since a fence requires a gate, Lopez used materials at hand to fashion a cross and an angel from oil well pipe, rake teeth, scrap tin, nails and a ball hitch. This project provided a fertile field in which to imagine using these raw materials in a new artistic style.

Above: "Red Wrench Pony" is Lopez’s play on minimalism. Crafting the horse’s bust as an armature, he left the remainder to suggestion. Digging into a bucket of donated discards, Lopez chose moving parts, such as a plumb bob, for people to touch. The pony’s mane is composed of chain and a smaller horse’s head becomes part of the larger horse’s neck.

Next page: In welder’s gloves and mask, Lopez welds together the complexity of pieces forming "Maverick the Longhorn," whose life began as a miniature (foreground). The initial model for the massive sculpture was delicately created with dental tools and sculpting wax.

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ach of Lopez’s massive sculptures begins life as a miniature. These small clay maquettes are then scaled up to create the full-sized pieces.

The supporting interior framing is built from stainless steel tubing that won’t rust away with the years. From there, the exterior begins to take shape as the creative process works its way with the artist.

“Basically, I just go with what I feel,” Lopez says.

“I might find one piece for the neck that just blows your mind, and collect a bunch of stuff. If I hold it up and it seems like it will work, each one reacts to the next one. There’s no way to plan what it is going to turn out as.

“You don’t know what the next piece will be.

Somebody might donate a box of silverware the next day and I might throw that in there and it will totally change it.

“I work from feeling … and have to use my mind’s eye. I think I could do it in different media but the magic is in the lining up of the stars of the scrap iron. And I’ve learned that if there is a piece that is interesting and motivates me, I’ll wait to put it on at the end, because you’ve got to get the form, the proportion right. If you don’t have that right, I’m just a guy welding scrap iron together. Does it really stick to your ribs? Do you remember it?”

The Custer-Sitting Bull sculpture (page76) will be installed in Lopez’s permanent collection at the Kokomo Gallery in Lemmon, SD. The gallery will celebrate its grand opening July 6-9, 2017.

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Most animals show themselves sparingly. The grizzly bear is six to eight hundred pounds of smugness. It has no need to hide. If it were a person, it would laugh loudly in quiet restaurants, boastfully wear the wrong clothes for special occasions, and probably play hockey.

Craig Childs

Inspired by the real-life story of Hugh Glass, who in 1823 survived a mauling by a grizzly bear near the Grand River, this piece contains coils of cable, metal cutouts of the explorers Lewis and Clark, a cottonwood tree silhouette, and in a wink to Glass, a bear trap.

The grizzly now stands in front of MacKenzie River Pizza, Grill & Pub in Bismarck, North Dakota.

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Wheel rims, steel cable and bent iron form a pasture gate at Lopez’s ranch. Overhead, a cowboy forever chases a herd of wild horses.

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The Lopez family photo, taken in 1904 in one of the most remote parts of Colorado, includes John’s grandfather, Albert, far left. Albert came to South Dakota in 1923 with the Diamond A Cattle Company. He and his wife had four children, including John Lopez’s father, Lee.

Lopez family reflects the rich heritage of the West

J

ohn Lopez is the seventh of nine children, a family in which the rich heritage of the West converges. Among Lopez and his extended family the predominant Spanish, Native American and Anglo ancestry of those who inhabited the Plains is represented.

Lopez’s mother Elizabeth, daughter of a clergyman, came from New York City to the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota as an Episcopal missionary. She brought with her a love of art, painting and photography that made a huge impact on her son. She had six children with her husband, Theodore Strong Heart. After his death in a horse riding accident, she married Lee Lopez. John is one of their three children. ± 81

Society

Of Milk Cartons, Tadpoles & Stars Parenting in the Age of Fear Karen Herzog, Editor-in-Chief, Momentum Magazine, University of Mary

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Jerry Anderson’s brother Doug at Pokegama Lake near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, on a family vacation. “Mom made sure we all had swimming lessons," Jerry said. "She watched but didn’t hover. She was the ‘repairer’ of constant skinned knees and probably bought Band-aids by the gross.”

The photos in this story are from the family archives of photographer Jerry Anderson and writer Karen (Rempfer) Herzog.

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n 1927, aviator Charles ‘Lucky Lindy’ Lindbergh became a worldwide celebrity, adored by millions, when the pilot with all-American looks and a shy smile made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

His fame was such that in 1932, when Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., 20 months old, the son of Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was abducted from the family home in Hopewell, New Jersey, it dominated the news of the day.

The child’s body was found 72 days later in the woods nearby. And America, to whom Lucky Lindy felt like a beloved son, was horrified at the crime.

In 1935, when Bruno Hauptmann was convicted of the crime after a trial that riveted the nation, Lindbergh historian Ron Cheskoski estimates that newspapers had printed 11 million words and assigned 500 reporters to the trial. In addition, newsreel cameramen shot footage that was sometimes shown between features at a nearby theater.

In 1936, Hauptmann was executed by electrocution.

Kidnapping thereafter became a federal offense.

On the 4th of July when my kids were little, I was the mom nervously clutching a fire extinguisher, cringing every time one of them would light a firecracker.

I feared I would be rushing a finger to the emergency room to be sewn back on, or that someone for sure would lose an eye. I struggled with what I should let them do. Fireworks

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

William Faulkner

My love for cottonwood trees has been lifelong. This perch was near our house in Monango, ND. Whoever lifted me up apparently had no fear that I would fall. I continued to climb hospitable cottonwoods all during my childhood to enjoy the high view.

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are not a necessity, but they do create wonderful, lifelong memories of fun.

Parents are confronted daily with the same question: How much risk are you prepared to tolerate for your children?

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

G.K. Chesterton

As a parent, you discover that it’s temporarily possible, by sheer naked imposition of authority, to prevent your kids from doing something you fear will hurt them. If you want to endure their tears and begging, you can lock them in the house while all their friends are out in the street lighting fireworks. Or you issue an exhaustive blizzard of warnings and allow them to dip their toe into it with as much safety as possible.

Being a parent means being forced to navigate situations in which you assess the possibility of them getting hurt versus the possibility of turning them into safe, pale houseplants.

If things go right, you are grateful that they had fun, which involved some risk. If things go wrong, you wish to God you had encased them in bubble wrap and kept them locked up. The wrenching dilemma of parenthood is that when you make a decision, you never know until after the fact if it will turn out badly or well.

Paradise Found, and Lost As a small child, I remember little of winter. Instead I remember summer trees—high interlaced canopies with shards of sunlight glittering through the leaves.

The prairie around our little town, for eons a vast undulation, was being rapidly drawn and quartered into acres of checkerboards, section lines and 84

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railroad tracks. Our little Dakota town was also laid out in the usual geometric grid of blocks and streets, but the prairie’s primeval undulations lived on in the other town—the tree-town—that floated above the rooftops.

Canopies formed their own geography overhead—dim, shaded tunnels thinning out to spotty archipelagos, then to open oceans of sunny lawns. The intense prairie sun, so oppressive in the open, was sieved soft through the enveloping golden-green ambience.

Tucked under the deepest shade and moated by lilac hedges, little houses held elderly couples, young families, mysterious singletons, ancient widows.

We little children ran free in a gaggle from morning until twilight. Under the trees, we were small creatures, innocent, safe and protected, at play in a summer world.

All the adults in town were distant but watchful presences who lapped us around in an invisible bath of security. We called them Mr. and Mrs. or Miss, Grandma or Grandpa; we had never heard their first names or even considered that they had them.

However, we traveled a circuit of houses where ladies in housedresses and aprons reliably produced cookies at their front doors.

That was our Eden, a theater of invention for our games and our pretending. If we felt bored, we soon learned not to say so, since parents’ remedy for that was finding a chore that needed doing.

There’s a solid argument to be made for what Tamara El-Rahi called “the benefits of boredom,” that is, giving kids solid blocks of unstructured time away from television and video screens, to tone up their self-directed creative muscles. El-Rahi, an online subeditor for MercatorNet, lists positive results of down time for kids, such as fostering curiosity, perseverance, playfulness, confidence, inventiveness, observation and concentration.

But if we challenge our kids to turn boredom into opportunities to learn to entertain themselves, we need to take on a challenge to ourselves as parents as well — not to use the television or video screen as a tempting default babysitter for our own convenience.

Above: playing ‘dressup’ gives children a chance to practice being grown up by emulating what they see in the adult world. Little girls looked to their mothers to understand what a lady wore by dressing up in her no-longer-used finery.

Opposite: Doug Anderson was already enchanted with Big Iron, his first John Deere, at his great-grandmother Hoaglund’s farm north of Anamoose, ND, during a summer visit. Doug now owns his own tractor, which he uses at his home in the mountains of northern Montana.

Play It Again, Sam Continually reminded of the risks to children—from injuries to abductions—we are almost literally leashing them to our sides, never out of sight, never out of contact. It is not ludicrous to imagine a near future when it’s the norm to chip our children, as we do now with our pets.

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A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him.

Pablo Neruda

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We are more conscientious about safety than ever before, from improvements to child car seats to playground equipment.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Free Range Kids, which has garnered a slew of attention for her assertion that parenting has gone too far in attempting to remove every possible risk from children’s lives. She believes that in doing so, we are damaging our children’s ability to develop independence and learn important coping skills.

A 2014 Atlantic magazine article titled “The Overprotected Kid” by Hanna Rosin explores the evolution of today’s ‘safe’ playgrounds in the 1980s, when children’s playgrounds and equipment began to be revamped on the basis of the fear of liability and lawsuits.

Rosin asks penetrating questions about the vital role of play in child development: In our efforts to make playgrounds completely safe, have we created play spaces that are sterile, predictable—in short, no fun? Do children need a certain amount of risk to thrive and grow? Is an element of freedom in play essential in the development of the coping skills and problem solving necessary to forming independent adults?

It’s too soon to know the answers to these questions, but we do know that play is a child’s job, an irreplaceable factor in the development of healthy adults. In play, children learn the rules and consequences of life. In play, they learn to negotiate, cooperate and compete. In play, children feel the joy, the power, and at times, the pain, of their bodies.

Our school playground, to today’s eyes, would seem the graveyard of some ratty carnival.

At recess, our small city block of playground could hold two softball games and a couple of long lines of Red Rover. There were a few pieces of ancient playground equipment.

The merry-go-round was anything but merry. An octagonal contraption of wooden seats and steel pipes, it could nevertheless achieve truly terrifying speeds. Fourth-grade boys, heads bent low, pushing against the crossbars like horses circling a grindstone, built up enough velocity to spin off 2nd-graders, who could only cling to the inner rails for dear life, and when the momentum finally slowed down, jump off and bumble dizzily away.

Gaggles of the little 1st-graders clambered onto one of the three ancient

Above: This was a long, scary, wonderful slide in the city park in Ellendale, ND. The bottom looked a long way down, but the excitement of feeling like you were flying was strong enough to tempt you to take the plunge.

Opposite: Jerry Anderson at his childhood home in north Fargo, ND. He’s dressed correctly for the weather in boots, hat and snowsuit, because mothers sent their children out to play even in the winter.

Lingering indoors around the TV was strongly discouraged.

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Jerry, left, and Ken, right, pose with their youngest brother, Doug, likely at Christmas, since the boys, in white shirts and bow ties, are proudly displaying the handmade toy guns crafted by their father, while Doug bounces joyfully on his riding horse.

I remember my own childhood vividly...

I knew terrible things.

But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.

Maurice Sendak 88

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seesaws [or teeter-totters] for a game one wag dubbed ‘rickety cars.’ As many as six kids could sit astride each side of the plank, which was loosely bolted to a cast-iron pipe. As one side rose, children on the descending side held out their legs to hit down hard on the ground, giving the airborne side a solid jolt. Or the down side would conspire to abandon ship together, leaving the upside in free fall and in for a great thump.

In the winter, at the playground’s single slide, on each rung of its iron ladder children in coats and snow pants clung, waiting their turn. Each upturned mitten cupped a handful of snow to plop down on at the top to sit on. By this little trick of friction reduction, we found we could ramp up the speed of the ride to launch us a good six feet straight out of the bottom of the chute.

No teachers hovered nearby. It was not thought necessary to closely monitor children when their parents could be fully relied upon to add an extra measure of punishment to any reported infraction.

Few kids tattled. This was playground life; minor injuries were simply part of the day. Risk in life was simply assumed.

Strangers To Each Other We often see America’s past through a sunny Norman Rockwell lens, when neighbors knew each other, talked over the back fence and looked out for each other’s kids. We feel it was a safe place.

That feeling of safety has been shaken severely since the 1980s, for a myriad of reasons.

For example, in 1967, the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of mothers were stay-at-home moms. Today, that figure is 29 percent. One effect of the economic and social forces pressing on families to have two working adults is that streets are empty of adults during the workday.

Others point fingers at the disruptive effect of American mobility on stable neighborhoods, the anonymity of our increasingly urban society— even the vanishing front porch, upon which neighbors once became acquainted—as causes of the slackening of neighborly links that once buttressed parents’ confidence in their children’s safety.

In a dark parody of the once-watchful neighborhood, parents today who allow their children some of the freedoms they enjoyed in childhood risk being reported by onlookers as neglectful and irresponsible.

Because we are afraid, we can’t allow our children the unfettered childhood we had; we give them the best substitutes we can find—structured, supervised and planned.

In the safety of our homes—the only places we believe are completely safe from stranger abduction—boisterous play is suppressed in favor of … what ? Gazing into screens for hours on end, hours of precious developmental time passively consuming vicarious adventure through virtual characters.

Watching action instead of taking action.

But those of us who have experienced childhood freedom fear there is a vast divide between a paradise that is manufactured and one that is grown and green.

And that seems, gazing backward, like a Paradise Lost.

Have You Seen This Child?

Barring the real dangers of concussion, dealing with kids’ playground injuries such as broken arms and skinned elbows are normal experiences of parenthood—stressful but quite survivable.

It’s the other contemporary horror story—the missing child—that drives a primal fear for our offspring.

The 24-hour news cycle never sleeps and is perpetually hungry for ratings. The media’s talking heads recap each horrific child abduction story again and again, feeding a parental state of high alert of horrified ‘what-ifs.’

So parents issue protective warnings and strict cautions, feeling apprehension when children are out of sight, worrying about them even on their own streets and in their own backyards, and telling children never to approach cars or strangers.

Even knowing that the odds of stranger abductions are much rarer than we may imagine, every parental instinct revolts against throwing the dice where their children are concerned.

My cousin, Pam, and I loved our Uncle Bill and Aunt Leona Meyer’s farm west of Monango, ND. We played with kittens and calves, picked bachelor’s buttons from Aunt Leona’s garden, and hung upside down from an unlikely pair of gymnastic rings attached to the clothesline.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 89

The Boy On The Milk Carton

Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them.

They remember what you are.

Jim Henson

In 1979, Etan Patz, age 6, disappeared in New York City. His picture was the first to appear on a milk carton in what became the missing children ‘milk carton’ campaigns of the early 1980s.

Every trip to the grocery store dairy case was a reminder of a parent’s worst catastrophe—de facto billboards bearing the caption “missing,” and sketch artists’ approximations of what this child might look like at 16 or 18 or 20.

And then Americans began to see these kinds of stories with sickening regularity: Adam Walsh, age 6, abducted and murdered in Florida (1981); Mary Kellerman, age 12, dead of potassium cyanide poisoning in the so-called Tylenol murders (1982); Jacob Wetterling, age 11, abducted and murdered in Minnesota (1989); Jaycee Dugard, age 11, abducted in California (1991); Amber Hagerman, age 9, abducted and murdered in Texas (1996); JonBenet Ramsey, age 6, found dead in Colorado (1996); Elizabeth Smart, age 14, abducted in Utah (2002).

And these cases can be drawn out for agonizing years. Etan’s remains were never found and he was declared legally dead in 2001. Legal proceedings against a suspect were underway in 2016—37 years later. A suspect in Jacob Wetterling’s case confessed in 2016—27 years later.

The number of children abducted in “stereotypical kidnappings” (kidnapped by a stranger for ransom or for sexual purposes and/or transported away) in 1999, the most recent year for which the U.S. Department of Justice has statistics, was 115. The vast majority of these were girls between the ages of 11 and 12. Of those, approximately 50 are killed by their abductor—accounting for less than 0.5 percent of all murders in America.

So while these DOJ numbers tell us that murder of children by stranger abductors is extremely rare logically—emotionally, what parent is willing to gamble with the safety of their child?

Parents walk a swaying tightrope, carrying their children along while trying to find the best balance between safety and freedom. But the day comes when they get too big to carry and we must carefully place their feet on the same tightrope and encourage them to find their own balance.

We hold our breath because we know the risk.

But we overcome the impulse to hold on to them too long because we understand there’s risk in that as well. It’s a risk more subtle: It’s the danger of diminishment, the risk of stunting a young life.

Because eventually, our children will want to drive a car, leave home.

Grow up. And when that happens, we want them to have built up some navigational competence. The only way they can do that is with trial runs, small freedoms along the way. Step by step, they must learn to assess risk and

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reward the way we’ve taught them.

Watching our children head off to a place where we can’t run interference for them can be scary.

But we know that time will come, and wise parents want their children to be well prepared to handle the big world outside.

They might be scared, too. But parents understand that it’s imperative to help children cope with their fears if they are to attain true adulthood.

The hard and thorny question: How can we manage our children’s fearfulness of the unknown if we are paralyzed by it ourselves?

A needful beginning is to acknowledge and deal with our fears and phobias, lest we transmit irrational terrors left over from our childhoods.

Then we must listen to their fears without shaming them or dismissing their anxieties. We can offer them the benefit of adult knowledge and teach them strategies for dealing with real-life dangers.

Parenting is hard. We run risk analyses on each milestone of child development. We must decide at what age they are prepared to walk to school by themselves, start dating, drive a car, sleep over at friends’ homes, travel alone.

We don’t lie to them about danger, but we don’t overwhelm them with life’s brutal truths without also giving them tools to cope. If we talk to them about ‘stranger danger’ and playground safety, we must remember to balance warnings with assurances that the world is full of joy as well as risk.

As important as teaching them to navigate life’s treacheries, is to show them the beauty of the world, of play, of friendship, of music and books, science and art, of the wonders of tadpoles and stars. ±

Jerry as a 10-year-old, making the stone path trek across the headwaters of the Mississippi River near Lake Itasca State Park in Minnesota.

His father snapped a photo of the location that boasted, ‘you could walk across the Mississippi without getting your feet wet.’ Jerry’s attempt was unsuccessful, but he survived.

Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.

Ivan Doig

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Morality

It’s Not Wrong If It Feels Right, Right?

Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD Director of Education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the University of Mary

M We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation of the Commonwealth

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any people today believe that moral judgments and values are merely expressions of sentiment. They deny that moral values are fixed or universally true, and instead, argue that we have changing emotions that might or might not correspond to the moral feelings of those around us.

This can play out in various real-life situations when people say, for example, “You can’t really know what it’s like to have an unexpected pregnancy if you haven’t been in the situation yourself, so you can’t tell me it’s wrong to get an abortion.” The morality of terminating a “problem pregnancy,” according to this view, depends on “being in the moment,” and experiencing the mother’s desperation, fears and sentiments.

Most of us, in fact, have probably granted our emotions leeway to trump our better moral judgment somewhere along the line. We can relate to stories of friends who make various solemn declarations, like: “You don’t know how hard it’s been for me in this painful marriage, and you don’t understand how it feels to fall in love with somebody who really cares for you, so you can’t say it’s wrong for me to be in a relationship with someone else.”

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre notes that this emotive approach to moral thinking has gained broad societal approval: “To a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be. Emotivism has become embodied in our culture.” In light of our tendency to try to justify our misdeeds, it can be appealing to imagine that ethics are always “first person”—from my vantage point—and to suppose that no one else can identify moral obligations regarding another’s situation. “How do you feel about it?” becomes the guiding principle, and leads to the view that morals are relative, context dependent, and subject to emotional confirmation. Reducing ethics to feelings, however, is a seriously deficient approach to thinking about right and wrong. It also, in the final analysis, doesn’t work.

Imagine what would happen to the practice of medicine if physicians could treat patients only if they personally experienced and felt the diseases their patients had. Consider the miscarriage of justice that would occur if judges

ruled only when they could feel and experience everything the perpetrator felt and experienced at the time the crimes were committed, and had to decide cases in line with those feelings. Such sentimentalism completely misses the objective foundations and concerns of morality.

Those objective foundations begin with the recognition that all men and women have a shared human nature, so whatever is always morally bad for one of us will also be bad for any of us. If it is immoral for me to steal the electronics out of your house, it will likewise be wrong for you to rob me or anyone else; and it will be equally wrong for the president of the United States or the pope to do so. If I rob others, it is objectively bad because it harms others by depriving them of their goods, and it transforms me into a thief, the kind of person who cheapens his humanity and degrades his integrity by stealing the goods of others. Even those who believe in a “feelings-based” morality are quick to decry certain actions as always wrong, at least when it comes to their own vehicles and homes being plundered, irrespective of whether the robbers might have moral sentiments favoring the practice.

To think clearly about morality, we need to start by acknowledging that certain moral duties do not depend on context or emotion, but are universally binding on us, having even a “commandment-like” quality.

Professor William May, a remarkable teacher of moral theology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, had a penchant for choosing clear and memorable examples when he lectured.

He used to tell his students that we all know certain actions are wrong, regardless of circumstances. One of his most graphic examples, recounted by his students even decades later, was his undeniable assertion that we all know barbecuing a baby is wrong. Similarly, he stressed that everyone recognizes the wrongness of adultery, an act, so often shrouded in secrecy, that attacks the good of our spouse and seriously violates an important and defining personal commitment we have made.

Even if something “feels right” in the moment, it can be very wrong for us to do. Quite apart from the context or circumstances, certain kinds of acts, without exception, are incompatible with human dignity because, by their very nature, they are damaging and destructive to ourselves and to those around us. ± 93

Juniors Sherina Elibert, and Benedicto Gil, directly behind her, in math class at Cristo Rey Brooklyn High School in Brooklyn, NY. The Cristo Rey Network consists of 32 private Catholic secondary schools in 21 states and Washington, DC. These schools provide students from economically disadvantaged families with a rigorous college preparatory program together with four years of work experience.

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Religion

A Jewish Journalist’s View of Catholic Service Samuel G. Freedman, author, professor and former New York Times columnist

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ne humid morning early in the summer of 2008, I drove through the mottled hills of northeastern Iowa toward the notorious hamlet of Postville. This afterthought of a place, with its single somnolent main street, had grown disproportionately infamous over the preceding several years for its meat-packing plant, Agriprocessors.

The Hasidic Jews who had journeyed from Brooklyn in 1987 to buy the former Hygrade facility and retrofit it to kosher standards had run up a tawdry record of exploiting immigrants on pay, overtime and workplace safety. Their first wave of victims, mostly from the remnants of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, had mostly moved up and out by the time of my visit.

Their replacements were Hispanics, many from Mexico and Guatemala, a large portion of them undocumented. That precarious status left them especially vulnerable, fearful of reporting their abuse to any governmental authorities. Indeed, federal immigration officers had swept through Postville about two months earlier, rounding up 400 men who were now in detention and awaiting deportation.

My exact destination that morning was St. Bridget’s Roman Catholic Church. The women and children left behind, some of them required to wear ankle bracelets as a form of house arrest, had taken shelter and sought solace there. And the church had responded.

Its former pastor, the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk, had come out of retirement at age 75 to help the parish administrator, Sister Mary McCauley, and the Spanish-speaking lay pastor, Paul Real, reckon with all the human damage.

Father Ouderkirk hired four temporary staff members to help track the court cases and distribute food and financial aid to the affected families.

Along with other religious leaders around Iowa, he prepared for a march in defense of immigrants’ rights. St. Bridget’s parish, with only about 350

St. Bridget of Sweden, patroness of Sweden and one of the six patron saints of Europe.

After the death of her husband, she joined the Third Order of St. Francis and devoted herself to prayer and caring for the sick and the poor.

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This is my commandment: Love one another as I love you.

John 15:12

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members, was spending $500,000 in the relief effort. One month after the raid, St. Bridget’s held a Mass in remembrance of the detainees. The name of every one was recited from the altar, and after every 20 names, a candle was lighted, usually by a persona con brazalete—the phrase referring to the mothers and wives with ankle bracelets.

“I came to the church because I feel safe there, I feel secure,” said Irma López, the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, who was arrested along with her husband, Marcelo, after they had worked at Agriprocessors for six years. “I feel protected. I feel at peace. I feel comforted.”

My formal duty in Postville was to write about the St. Bridget’s efforts in my “On Religion” column for The New York Times, and I fulfilled my professional responsibilities. Journalistic detachment aside, however, I felt doubly humbled by what I had seen in town. As an observant Jew who keeps a kosher kitchen at home, I was repulsed by the revelation that one of the largest kosher meat companies in the nation dealt with human beings far less morally than with cattle or chickens. (As a matter of fact, in the wake of the Agriprocessors scandal, a principled rabbi in St. Paul, Minnesota, Morris Allen, tried for many years to alter the system of kosher certification to consider how employees, as well as animals, were treated.)

I was simultaneously moved—awed, really—by the profoundly moral work being done by the clergy and congregants at St. Bridget’s. And it seemed very evident to me that the efforts of Father Ouderkirk and the rest spoke to a larger truth I had seen in my years of writing about American religion, and have continued to see in the eight years since my morning in Postville. That constant is the luminous model of Catholic service.

In my roles as a columnist and author, I’m not supposed to take sides or play favorites among denominations. And just about every religion I have covered has a word or phrase for its ethic of doing for others—“good works,” in the Protestant lexicon, tzedakah for Jews, zaka for Muslims. Because I am drawn to writing about the positive role that religion can have in the real world, especially because organized religion is so commonly criticized in the secular quarters of journalism, I have seen laudable examples across the spiritual landscape. There were Muslims who helped families rebuild after Hurricane Sandy, evangelical Christians who repaired cars for single mothers free of charge, African-American churches building affordable houses in once-blighted neighborhoods, the aforementioned Rabbi Allen embodying the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, repairing the world.

Yet when I was giving a workshop on religion journalism in 2014 to the staff of Tablet, an award-winning Jewish webzine, I found myself blurting out an impolitic and even heretical opinion: Catholics did social justice better than Jews. The more I thought about my momentary, almost involuntary

declaration over the succeeding weeks and months, the more I came to believe that Catholics did social justice better than any denomination I knew.

In saying so, I have no data to offer, no metrics. I cannot prove that the outcomes for Catholics are superior to those for Mormons, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Protestants, Greek Orthodox, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Wiccans or humanists to name the religious (and atheist) communities I have covered in my column. But I do have an admittedly broad-brush argument for why I have arrived at my conclusion.

To be extremely general—and yet also, I think, defensible—the motives for social-justice work and voluntarism in many other faiths are limited either by reach or motive. Orthodox Jews and Muslims practice “in-reach,” addressing needs that lie largely within their own communities. Mainline Protestants and non-Orthodox Jews impressively extend aid outside their boundaries, but too often with the condescension of the privileged pitying their lessers. Mormons and evangelical Christians employ goodwill as a means of winning converts.

Starting with the very lexicon, the Catholic version differs. The preferred word is not “charity,” with its aroma of noblesse oblige, but “service.” Charity is a vertical act, handed down from above, from the comfortable to the afflicted, who are perceived only in terms of affliction. Service is a horizontal

Matt Fava teaching 4th grade at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic School in San Antonio, TX. Since 1983, the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) has been supporting under-resourced Catholic schools nationwide with professional services, and with teachers and administrators who simultaneously complete graduate degrees at Notre Dame. ACE’s long-term goal is to help provide a Catholic education to children from all low-income families who desire it.

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Our honor, sisters, must lie in the service of God. St. Theresa of Avila

A Sister of Mercy tends to a wounded Union soldier in a tent hospital in Vicksburg, MS during the Civil War. This detail is from a painting reputedly commissioned

by Abraham Lincoln.

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concept, a meeting on level ground between giver and receiver that, if it is done correctly, reinforces the human dignity of both parties.

I am reminded of a story told by my friend and fellow author, Nicholas Lemann. In The Promised Land, his epic book about the Great Migration of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North, Nick wrote extensively about a woman named Ruby Haynes, who had left sharecropping in Mississippi for the promise of factory work in Chicago, only to wind up living for decades in the Robert Taylor Homes, a public-housing complex so horrific it was ultimately razed. By any objective standard, Haynes was abjectly poor. She resided in a census tract with the lowest per capita income in the nation, or close to it. Yet when Haynes read The Promised Land, she had one complaint for Nick: “You made me sound like poor folks.”

For a contrast, I think of the Cristo Rey and Nativity Network schools that have revived Catholic education in some of the poorest and most violent inner cities in America. These schools require every student to make some contribution— often in the range of $1,000 annually—to his or her own tuition. That system makes a principled partnership out of what otherwise would be only charity. And it reminds me of the sacrificial way that African-American churches have self-funded even in statistically impoverished neighborhoods.

The second key attribute of the American Catholic model, at least from my perspective, is its demographic range. These days, “diversity” has been overused to the point of being cliché and meaningless. But the large-scale immigration of Hispanics to the United States (in which I include Filipinos as well as Central and South Americans) has markedly changed the color, language and culture of the Catholic polity here. Catholic leadership on immigration reform and in the sanctuary movement is the public-policy application of that transformation. And Catholic schools, especially in cities, educate vast numbers of non-Catholic students. The goal for those schools is not evangelism but service in the form of offering a lifeline toward college in places where the public schools rampantly fail.

Thirdly, Catholic service forms part of a consistent theology, what the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin famously called a “seamless garment of life.” That garment holds together positions nominally ascribed to the political right

(against abortion and same-sex marriage) and identified with the political left (opposed to the death penalty, in favor of a preferential option for the poor).

As a result, I tend to think, Catholic service exerts a hold on the faithful who, in the privacy of the voting booth, would otherwise cleave into red and blue factions. Importantly, the “seamless garment” of Catholic social teaching makes service an explicit element of religious belief—not, as is often the case with liberal Jews and Protestants, just a good value to have.

Now, it could be that I’m just predisposed to appreciate Catholicism by several accidents of my upbringing. (When I once mentioned to a priest that I was a philo-Catholic, he quipped back, “Better than being filo dough.”)

During my 4th-grade year, my family moved from one side of my New Jersey hometown to the other, which put me in a different elementary school district from all my friends. So my mother took grateful notice when a new family with a boy just one year older than me moved in across the street.

The Lyons family, I soon discovered, was something like Catholic America circa 1965 under one roof. The parents had what then qualified as a mixed marriage—he Irish, she Italian. Mr. Lyons taught in a labor-education program at Rutgers, while Mrs. Lyons, née D’Eustachio, oversaw a brood of five children. (Lucky thing for them that the Italian parent did the cooking …). Those kids ran the gamut from an anti-war activist to an officer in the Strategic Air Command to a nascent environmentalist to a diehard Notre Dame football fan.

While Jimmy, my peer and friend, was naturally enough my direct link to the family, it was the oldest child, Arthur, who had the most lasting effect on me. By the time the Lyonses became my neighbors, Artie (as everyone called him) was a Jesuit seminarian who was deeply involved with Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union during its epic lettuce boycott.

Having grown up the child of secular, left-wing Jews, who rarely used the noun “religion” without preceding it with the adjectives “sectarian and materialistic,” I saw in Artie my first example of idealistic action predicated on religious belief. Even after he left the Jesuits before ordination to marry a former nun, he remained personally observant and politically motivated by his faith as he took on issues of racial discrimination and income inequality in Chicago.

Then, while in college at the University of Wisconsin, I started working on the school newspaper and made a tight-knit group of friends among its sportswriters. Over the decades since then, two of those friends left respected journalism careers on big-city dailies to enter the priesthood. The last I knew, one was based on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, the other in Rome—quite the Catholic spectrum. The mere fact of knowing these two, Father Pete and Father Jay, put an accessible face on the priesthood. That

[W]e are all one in Christ and bear an equal burden of service under one and the same master ... .

Only for one reason we are distinguished in His sight: namely, if we are found to be eminent in good works and in humility.

Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia

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Service is a horizontal concept, a meeting on level ground between giver and receiver that, if it is done correctly, reinforces the human dignity of both parties.

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may not sound like something important, but when the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal broke, it was valuable, as both a journalist and a citizen, to be familiar with some of the overwhelming majority of priests who did not abuse children.

Just to be clear, as a journalist and a parent and a citizen, I am grateful for the investigative reporting (indelibly portrayed in last year’s Oscar-winning film “Spotlight”) that exposed the church’s pedophile priests and those bishops and archbishops who had tried to protect the perpetrators. Those disclosures helped put the larger issue of sexual abuse onto the public radar, both within and outside religious bodies, and in some way contributed to the subsequent disclosures about the Orthodox Jewish rabbis Baruch Lanner and Mordecai Gafni, the Zen Buddhist master Eido Shimano Roshi, and Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky.

Yet the sexual scandal of the Catholic Church got a lasting traction in the media and the popular culture that none of the other examples did. The church’s scandal began to seem less like a narrative of American Catholicism than the narrative. As a columnist, and as a product of my personal history, I felt compelled to capture the many other elements of the Catholic story.

That search took me in October 2012 to Tucson, Arizona, to write about the intentional community house occupied by eight recent college graduates. All were teaching in high-needs parochial schools there as part of the Alliance for Catholic Education program, better-known by the acronym ACE. Founded by the University of Notre Dame, ACE is often described as a Catholic version of Teach For America. But I found that comparison severely lacking. Over its 25-year history, Teach For America had gradually shifted its recruiting pitch from the idealistic to the transactional, emphasizing how good a two-year stint there would look on an application for law school or a McKinsey analyst’s job. Here was social justice work reduced to a resume item.

I had never heard any such rhetoric around the ACE program. It was a direct outgrowth of Catholic social teaching, and in some ways it harked back to the origins of the faith. The ACE teachers lived together under almost literal vows of poverty—each one’s monthly stipend of about $1,000 was on par with the federal poverty level. The night I visited with the teachers, they swapped tips of successful lessons, and they also prayed together. The previous night, the Rev. Nathan Wills, a former ACE teacher, had said Mass in the intentional house.

“It’s a reflection of the disciples,” he told me later. “This is what the apostles did when Jesus sent them to teach. They set up communities in the midst of difficult circumstances.” ±

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Commentary

Faith-Inspired Public Schools?

A Charter School in Chicago’s Wild West Might Have the Answer Patrick J. McCloskey, Author, Editor-in-Chief, 360 Review If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan

A nation that is ignorant and free, is a nation that never was or will be.

Thomas Jefferson

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nce there was an educational elevator that lifted underclass and working-class families into the middle and even upper classes with astounding efficiency. That elevator—faith-based (mostly Catholic) and neighborhood public schools—began breaking down in the 1960s, leaving many minority families on the ground floor. Catholic schools started closing and inner-city public schools began to fail.

Today, on the South Side of Chicago—the nation’s murder capitol—the founders of Catalyst Maria High School and the adjacent Maria Kaupas Center believe they have found the solution to both of these dilemmas. If so, this model could precipitate an entirely new educational movement that would solve fundamental issues in both systems.

Triumph & Then Loss Beginning in the mid-19th century, Catholic dioceses built schools at a furious pace in response to the poverty and social dysfunction of the nation’s first underclass, Irish immigrants. By the mid-1960s, almost half of Catholic school-aged children—5.2 million in total—attended the nation’s 13,292 Catholic elementary and secondary schools. The other half of Catholic children attended neighborhood public schools with a significant proportion of Catholic-educated teachers and administrators. The once-despised Irish surpassed every group other than Jews in per capita income and education.

This was the most profound story of social transformation in human history, which was repeated for successive waves of Catholic immigrants—making Catholicism into the nation’s largest, most powerful denomination.

Then Catholics moved to the suburbs at the same time as the teaching religious orders withdrew from the schools. Since 1965, half the nation’s Catholic schools have been shuttered and over 60 percent of students have

Sr. Elizabeth Ann Yocius, SSC, teaches introductory and intermediate sewing to Catalyst middle and high school students at the Maria Kaupas Center. These middle-schoolers are learning how to operate a sewing machine. Sr. Elizabeth Ann taught at Maria High School for 18 years before it was transformed into a charter school.

been lost. Catholic education’s disintegration has been especially acute in the neighborhoods where African American and Hispanic immigrants moved—and were most needed. Minority families had little ability to pay tuition as Catholic school costs increased relentlessly, pushing up tuition.

Public Education’s Breakdown Simultaneously, public educators abandoned what they had learned from the teaching religious orders: Students from low-income families need a highly disciplined, faith-infused environment with a strong emphasis on basic academic skills.

As a result, urban public schools have languished for decades. Consider the 2015 Nation’s Report Card (by the National Assessment of Educational Progress). In Chicago, 12 percent of black students scored at or above proficiency in 8th-grade math and 14 percent in 8th-grade reading. If only

African American students from poor families are included, their scores would mirror outcomes in Detroit where 4 percent of black students scored at or above proficiency in math and 5 percent in reading. Far too many urban minority students leave school, with or without a diploma, functionally illiterate into job markets where education has become increasingly important.

School Choice Paradox In response, public educators implemented a parade of reforms aimed at improving minority student outcomes, which haven’t made a significant difference. This precipitated the school choice movement that promotes various ways of getting students out of failing public schools and into high-performing private and public schools. There are two main ways: vouchers (and tax credits), which pay the tuition at private and mostly 103

looms. Both the new education secretary and President Trump favor school choice strongly.

Pushing fiercely in the opposite direction are the teachers’ unions, one of the country’s most powerful political lobbies. The likely outcome will favor charter school expansion, similar to the results of school choice battles since 1990.

Faith-Inspired Charter Schools

Every student who participates in MKC programming is invited to add his or her handprint—symbolizing interconnectedness—to the center’s hallway walls.

Catholic schools (since these constitute most of the non-public schools in inner-city neighborhoods) or charter schools, which are fully public but enable innovation by relaxing teachers’ unions regulations and restrictions.

While vouchers and tax credits help fund Catholic education indirectly, charter schools often supplant them. A study by Abraham Lackman, the Government Scholar in Residence at the Albany Law School, showed that for every charter school that opened from 2000 to 2010 in New York State, a Catholic school closed. The state’s parochial schools lost 34 percent of enrollment, resulting in 200 shutterings.

This pattern repeats nationwide. In North Dakota, however, fewer Catholic schools were built, and the same demographic shifts didn’t occur. Nor are charter schools permitted yet.

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Seeing the proverbial writing (no longer in Latin) on the wall, several dioceses experimented with transforming schools, destined to be closed, into charter schools. They hoped to retain essential characteristics of Catholic education in the new secular setting. But the teachers and administrators were soon discouraged by public education’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, excessive documentation and emphasis on test preparation. The inability to pray in the classroom undermined the remaining Catholic ethos and sense of community.

In the early 2000s, several Lasallian Christian Brothers took an innovative approach to this dilemma. They translated their educational philosophy and experience into secular terms and founded the Catalyst Schools network. It’s worth remarking that the Lasallians were the first educators to teach the poor and today educate 800,000 students in 80 countries, where government restrictions on religious instruction are common.

Currently there are two Catalyst schools, both in Chicago’s high-crime, high-poverty neighborhoods: Catalyst Circle Rock (K-8) on the West Side, which opened in 2007, and Catalyst Maria (K-12) on the South Side, which opened in 2012.

“The Catalyst school mission is to provide a holistic education expressed through the Lasallian tradition, where the teacher plays a critical role in relationship to students by creating a sacred space where learning can happen, where there’s intentional effort to develop informed character,” said co-founder Br. Michael Fehrenbach, in an inter-

view. “We are creating school culture in the context of the five core Lasallian values: faith, but not doctrine; respect; inclusive community; academic excellence; and a preferential option for the poor.”

The key to implementing this is for teachers and administrators to model these values and integrate them into the curriculum, classroom management and relationships with students.

On visits to the Catalyst Maria and to the Circle Rock campuses, I can attest to the ongoing realization of the Lasallian charism. Student behavior in the classrooms and hallways, their demeanor towards teachers and staff, the camaraderie they display to peers all reminded me of the Catholic high school in Harlem, New York, about which I wrote a book (The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, University of California Press). There are no metal detectors at the entrances, and students move freely without fear of being attacked—in stark contrast to many public high schools.

Test score results at Catalyst Maria don’t seem impressive. The average composite score on the American College Testing (ACT) assessment is 16.8 out of 36, which falls below the national average (21). The ACT measures college readiness in English, math, reading and science. However, all of Catalyst Maria’s juniors take the ACT, versus 60 percent at schools nationwide.

In a recent assessment by Chicago Public Schools, Catalyst Maria’s elementary students demonstrated learning growth in reading and math far above national averages for all students.

A school’s true impact is measured in how much student learning improves.

Forty-six percent of Catalyst Maria’s students are African American and 53 percent are Hispanic.

More than 95 percent of students come from low-income families. Remarkably, 93 percent of students graduate high school on time and 77 percent enroll in post-secondary institutions.

Maria Kaupas Center The central challenges for “faith-inspired” public schools involve the severe restrictions imposed by the legal separation of church and state in many state constitutions, including Illinois.

In response, the Lasallians worked with the Sisters of St. Casimir, who founded Maria High School, to establish the Maria Kaupas Center (MKC), named after the religious order’s founder.

The center is located in the south wing—that is, literally separated from the charter school. The center operates as an after-school program that is both voluntary and free.

After last period, about 60 students per day from various middle and high school grades, and evenly split between boys and girls, enter the center through a door on the second floor.

They are greeted by Amy Eckhouse, the center’s program director, who invites them into the chapel where they form a circle around the altar.

Eckhouse then leads the group in prayer, reflection and thoughts for the day. Several students ask the group to pray for a relative or a friend.

In contrast to the busy hallway, the chapel is quiet and calm. The wooden pews and marble altar seem infused with the meditations and soulful whispers of generations of students and nuns from Maria High School, which operated from 1952 to 2013 as an all-girls Catholic academy.

The service has a relaxed but respectful tone and is non-denominational. Eckhouse has no idea which students are Catholic, Protestant, other or entirely unchurched. The prayer gathering lasts about 15 minutes after which the students file out of the chapel and are free to take one of the classes, for example in sewing, drama and writing, or just hang out in the recreation area. Some students do homework while others play pool or miniature basketball with friends.

In interviews with students, several themes were common. Most cited was “peace” as the reason 105

they come to the center. In 2016, there were 4,368 shooting victims and 786 homicides in Chicago.

Most of the violence was gang-related and almost all the victims and perpetrators were black or Hispanic. The murder rate is almost 7.5 times that of New York City and concentrated in neighborhoods around Catalyst Maria and West Chicago.

So far in 2017, the murder rate is even higher.

It doesn’t take a clinician to see that many students at Catalyst Maria are traumatized. MKC offers hope and healing as “a place where you can hang out with friends,” said an African American male junior in a group interview. “You can’t really do that around here because of the gangs and violence.” A black female classmate said, “Miss Eckhouse tells us that violence is not the way and God has a plan for us all. She says everything will be O.K.” A Hispanic senior added, “She makes you know you’re loved.”

Most students live in single-parent households where poverty and destructive influences present challenges. MKC operates as a haven and healing oasis, the value of which cannot be overstated.

Spiritual But Not Religious?

No religion classes are offered at the center, and there’s the rub. “The center is not overtly religious, it’s about love,” explained Eckhouse. “I can bring spirituality and relationship with God without catechesis.” Eckhouse and other full- and parttime staff members exude much-needed tenderness, caring and nurturing.

But is that enough? Eckhouse was educated in Catholic schools and taught high school theology for 27 years. When she approached local parishes, the pastors clearly didn’t want her to do any sacramental preparation at the center. “They want these kids to grow up in their parishes,” she explained.

About 70 percent of Hispanics are Catholic, so there are significant numbers at the school.

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sters and teens in religion, it seems shortsighted to prioritize ownership over evangelization.

The majority of the school’s students, Catholic or non-Catholic, know little about the faith of the Lasallian founders. Eckhouse has offered to teach World Religions to high-schoolers, but to no avail.

Religion can be taught as an academic subject in public schools and is necessary to understanding history, art, culture, science and politics.

It is also crucial to provide staff with comprehensive, ongoing Lasallian (in secular translation) formation. This is underway but must be more than one among many competing priorities.

Teaching 1,100 at-risk students involves daily crises and taxing workloads that can obscure the school’s living faith foundation.

Fizzle or Fire?

Catalyst charter schools might be just another flash on education reform’s tumultuous landscape.

Yet bishops, pastors and religious orders in several dioceses are interested in this direction to salvage beleaguered schools. Instead of struggling to finance operational deficits, diocese and religious orders would secure income streams from renting buildings to the charter school. As well, the buildings receive long-overdue renovations. It's no coincidence that collectively Catholic schools are the largest user of duct tape in the U.S. But once these fiscal pressures are resolved, will the Church support MKC and other similar programs? The question is not whether the Catalyst Maria model is better than traditional Catholic schools from the Church’s perspective, but what to do as these schools disappear.

Catalyst Maria might present a practical alternative. At this point, it is an experiment.

To succeed, MKC needs consistent and much increased funding to become a robust service for more than a quarter of middle- and high-school students. Fortunately, space to expand is available.

Certainly, supporting MKC and similar centers elsewhere is far more doable for dioceses and religious orders than financing entire schools in low-income neighborhoods.

Also, public funds could be dedicated to MKC since most of its activities, including conflict resolution for in-school disputes, fit within the parameters of a secular after-school program. Most activities, therefore, warrant public support.

How to incorporate the faith dimension, as more than a Catholic veneer, into public education is a question that will be resolved differently in different states and school districts. Where the line will ultimately be drawn between church and state depends on state law, which varies, and how politicians and public educators interpret these laws.

Chicago Public Schools deserves praise for collaborating enthusiastically with Catalyst officials.

Ultimately the success of the Catalyst Maria model—and other similar models that could be developed by different Catholic groups and different denominations—depends on how vigorously people of faith fight to include the religious ethos in public education and the public square.

Could the Catalyst Maria and MKC model catalyze an educational movement? There are

Catalyst Maria high school students enjoy cooking classes and a family feast with MKC Program Director Amy Eckhouse and cooking instructor Mary Prete, a retired business executive.

Catholic Newman Centers at non-Catholic universities across the U.S., including Arizona State University where the University of Mary—in an unprecedented collaboration with a public university—has a campus offering degrees in theology and Catholic studies. The original aim of MKC's founders was to create a Newman-like center to anchor Catalyst Maria in Catholic spirituality.

If the prime aim of public schooling is the education—rather than control—of children, then incorporating the lessons of Catholic education, especially in elevating disadvantaged students and entire communities, should be pursued.

Intrinsic to these lessons is the religious tradition that gives them life, which makes faith-based centers such as MKC vital to the long-term success of American education. At MKC, students “learn about themselves and their relationships with God and others,” said Sr. Margaret Zalot, SSC, an MKC board member and former principal at Maria.

Given the large number of former Catholic school buildings nationwide, replicating Catalyst Maria and MKC at scale is entirely possible. ± 107

Higher Education

Where the Boys Are(n’t) Alarming Trends in Male College Outcomes Brenda Werner, PhD, Graduate Education Chair, University of Mary Girls and women are the privileged sex in education. From preschool to graduate school, and across ethnic and class lines, women get better grades, they win most of the honors and prizes, and they’re far more likely to go to college.

Christina Hoff Sommers

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n North Dakota, as in other rural states, there is a severe shortage of math and science teachers. As a university education professor, I recently applied for a grant to support preparing education students to teach math and science in high-needs schools. One criteria I was asked to address on the application form was how to draw females more effectively into the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field. Often, grant money goes to programs designed to give girls a leg up. But the notion that girls underperform and are underrepresented at college and in careers has been outdated for decades. Except for a relatively few technical fields, the data shows strongly that since the early 1970s, young men have been on an alarming downward trend regarding academic performance—which, as the mother of two sons in college, I find especially distressing. Largely ignored in higher education and the media is the glaring fact that male students are falling miserably behind their female peers.

The predominance of men in higher education had been true since Harvard University, the nation-to-be’s first college, was founded in 1636.

Prior to the Civil War, few post-secondary institutions accepted women.

Notable exceptions included Hillsdale College, founded in 1844 in Spring Arbor, Michigan. Profound social changes over the next century eliminated one barrier after another for women. In 1945, for example, Harvard Medical School admitted females for the first time. Between 1895 and 1925, 43 Catholic colleges for women were established and this increased to 116 by 1955. Then as the number of Catholic colleges for women approached the number of men’s colleges (by 1970), Catholic colleges and universities were beginning to become co-educational institutions, which almost all are today.

In 1960, the gap between males and females attending and graduating from university nationwide was still substantial. This gap provides an important part of the context for the film “Where the Boys Are,” released that year. The fictional movie is set in Fort Lauderdale, where the female college students

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwilling to school.

William Shakespeare “As You Like It,” Act II, Scene vii.

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seek mates—and most desirably, an MRS degree—among an abundance of college boys on spring break. At the time, 54 percent of male high school graduates went to college compared to just 37 percent of females. Also, dropout rates were higher for women. Men earned 64.7 percent of bachelor’s degrees.

Where the Girls Are An education system failing a generation of boys is going to produce unprecedented human misery for children, for women and for the men themselves. Are we women enough to do something about it?

Maggie Gallagher

From 1960 to 1980, the percentage of high school graduates going to college increased as the nation’s population grew. However, the proportion of females attending college increased much faster. By 1980, female enrollment drew almost even with men’s, and the next year women earned 50.3 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Women currently earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees.

This phenomenon is also true in North Dakota’s public and private fouryear colleges and universities. Among public universities, women currently earn 56.5 percent of bachelor’s degrees. At the University of Mary, female students earn 67 percent of undergraduate degrees. Female enrollment at the University of Mary has always been higher because it was founded as an all-female college built on nursing and education programs. Despite becoming coeducational in 1961 and expanding to 54 undergraduate majors and 17 graduate degrees over the past half-century, nursing and education majors still comprise almost a quarter of the students. Seventy-two percent of education students are female and 91 percent of nursing students are female.

College Enrollment In 1960, 756,000 males graduated from high school and 54 percent of these went on to college. The number of male high school graduates increased to 1.4 million in 2014, but only 48 percent attended college. This 11-percent decrease shows that the gap reversal is not simply because more females are attending college today. Among 1.45 million female high school graduates in 2014, 53 percent were college bound. That’s 10 percent more than boys and an increase of more than 15 percent since 1960, when 38 percent of female high school grads went on to college.

Recently, policymakers took notice when enrollment at American colleges and universities declined for the fourth straight year. Enrollment at degreegranting, post-secondary institutions peaked at 21 million students in 2010, but by 2015 there were more than 1 million fewer students—the steepest decline in half a century, despite the large number of initiatives aimed at increasing the number of Americans earning college degrees.

The two factors most often cited for low college graduation rates and falling enrollment are high costs and low college readiness skills. While these factors are important, Suzanne Fields, columnist for the Washington Times, mused 110 3 6 0

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that as educators and policy makers anguish over how to increase the number of Americans earning college degrees, they are missing the elephant in the room. “Little attention is given to the quantitatively vastly more important reason why the proportion of Americans with degrees is not growing faster: the substantial underrepresentation of men on college campuses.”

Perhaps because of fear of being perceived as sexist or narrowly focusing on race and socioeconomic status, policy makers are ignoring the impact of declining academic performance among young males.

“If males graduated from college in the same proportion as women,” noted Fields, “there would be about 14 percent more college graduates each year— over 2 million more over a decade.”

Early Predictors, Later Results Male underperformance begins as early as preschool when boys naturally lag behind in language development, which is reflected in reading scores.

There is a biological basis in brain development that enables girls to process language with greater facility through childhood and adolescence.

But boys catch up by the time they enter college—unless they have become disengaged from education.

Normally boys should still be able to read on grade level, but if not by 3rd grade, the likelihood of graduating high school by age 19 is four times less, according to a Hunter College study. Unfortunately, boys are falling further behind, rather than catching up throughout elementary, middle and high school. Reading woes affect performance in many other academic areas since learning often depends on reading proficiency.

While boys dominated in math and science for centuries, girls seem to be taking over. At the high school level, girls are now more likely to take Advanced Placement classes in every subject area except physics. Dr. Michael Thompson, author of the book Raising Cain, notes that while girls now outperform boys at every level through graduate school, boys are far are more likely to be involved in disciplinary procedures, more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities, more likely to be medicated for Attention Deficit Disorder, and more likely to drop out of high school and college.

Three years after starring in “Where the Boys Are,” Dolores Hart (far left) entered the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT. Since 1970, Mother Delores Hart, OSB, has served as the Abbey’s Dean of Education. In 2012, HBO released an Oscarnominated documentary about her life, titled “God is the Bigger Elvis.” She had made her screen debut in 1957 as Elvis Presley’s sweetheart in “Loving You.” 111

After high school, a lower percentage of men go to college, a higher percentage dropout and fewer earn bachelor’s degrees. Sadly, it’s no better elsewhere in higher education. Men earn less than 38 percent of associate’s degrees, 40 percent of master’s degrees and 48 percent of doctorates.

“Officials … are helplessly watching as their campuses become like retirement villages,” wrote author Christina Hoff Sommers in The Atlantic in 2013, “with a surfeit of women competing for a handful of surviving men.”

If the movie cited above were remade today, the title would have to be changed from “Where the Boys Are” to “Where Are the Boys?”

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Victor Hugo

Men at Work?

If men aren’t in college, they must be working, right? Surprisingly, no.

While the labor force participation rate for females 20 to 24 years of age has declined by only 4 percent from 1980 to 2013, the rate for men has fallen by 14 percent. For men in their prime working years (25 to 54 years of age), the workforce participation rate “has been falling for more than 60 years and today stands at 88 percent.”

In 1964, workforce participation rates for prime-age males with different educational levels were within 1 percentage point: 98 percent with a college education and 97 percent with a high school degree or less. By 2015, these rates declined for all education groups and most dramatically for men with less education, as shown below.

Year

Less than high school diploma

High school graduates

Some college

Associate’s Degree

Bachelor’s Degree

2015

79.5%

84.8%

87.3%

91.6%

93.9%

In total, 23 percent of prime-aged Americans (male and female)—almost 30 million people—are not employed now. Of these, three out of four have given up even looking for a job. There are now what has been coined “ghost legions” of men—7 million strong (or weak)—who do almost nothing. They spend as much time watching TV or surfing the Internet as working men spend at their jobs.

In a recent report, “The Long-term Decline in Prime-Age Male Labor Force Participation,” the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers concluded: This long-term trend is worrisome, since it indicates that American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are increasingly disconnected from the labor market, lowering potential gains in productivity and economic growth. Although many higher-income economies have also experienced long-term declines in prime-age male labor force participation, the decline in the United States has been noticeably steeper, leaving our labor market—a crucial engine of growth—operating below its potential.

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Americans Earning Bachelor’s Degree

2,000,000

Data from National Center of Education Statistics

1,500,000 Total Americans 1,500,000

Women Men

500,000 Millions of graduates

0 1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

2026

Year

It should also be noted that males are also more likely to be imprisoned.

The Federal Bureau of Prisoners reported that in 2016, males made up 93.3 percent of the prison population in contrast to 6.7 percent for females. Male predominance in jail has always been true since men are naturally more aggressive. However, there has been a massive increase in male incarceration rates. In 1960, there were 725 male inmates per 100,000 residents in the U.S. By 2014, that number jumped to over 2,200 per 100,000 residents. There are currently over 2 million men held in custody in state and federal prisons and in local jails. Another 4.3 million men are on probation and parole.

Where the Boys Will Be Nationwide, the preponderance of females earning bachelor’s degrees is projected to continue increasing to more than 58 percent by 2026—unless colleges and universities find ways to attract and retain male students.

One obvious point is that science and technology programs have always attracted male students. In response to the need throughout North Dakota and beyond for engineers, the University of Mary initiated an engineering program in September 2016 in partnership with the University of North Dakota. One likely side benefit of this program will be an increase in male students at the University of Mary.

In future issues of 360 Review, I will report on the causes of and solutions to the problems challenging male students in K-12 and post-secondary education. There are promising innovations in Australia, Canada and the U.K., as well as in the U.S., to investigate. ±

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that cannot read them.

Mark Twain

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Geopolitics

Command & (Losing) Control Nuclear Weapons & the Always-Never Dilemma Joseph T. Stuart, PhD, Assistant Professor of History, University of Mary

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B-52 60-0007 (Icer 1) takes off from Royal Air Force Fairford station, U.K., heading back to Minot Air Force Base, ND, in June, 2016.

Photo by Rob Reedman

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n September 18, 1980, Senior Airman David F. Powell dropped the nine-pound socket that he was using with a wrench to unscrew a Titan II missile pressure cap. Although Powell was only 21 years old, he was already an experienced Titan repairman. But it had been a long day and he was tired. As the socket bounced on the work platform, he tried to catch it. Powell missed and the socket fell through the gap between the platform and the missile. It plummeted 70 feet, ricocheted off the thrust mount and pierced the skin of the missile. Rocket fuel began to spray into the silo, which was located near Damascus, Arkansas.

When the fuel— highly flammable aerozine-50—is mixed with an oxidizer, it explodes with enough power to send the U.S. military’s largest intercontinental ballistic missile as far as 6,000 miles. The Titan II missile carried a W-53 thermonuclear warhead with a yield of nine megatons—about three times the force of all the explosives dropped during World War II, including atomic bombs.

Powell’s dropped socket created an emergency that eventually caused a tremendous explosion, killing one worker and wounding many others. Tons of concrete were blown into the air and the missile’s warhead popped off like a cork, soaring 1,000 feet overhead.

Launch complex 571-7 is all that remains of the 54 Titan II missile sites that were on alert across the United States from 1963 to 1987. The 103-foot-long Titan II missile could deliver a 9-megaton nuclear warhead to a target 6,000 miles away in 30 minutes.

Photograph by Steve Jurvetson 115

This is how Eric Schlosser opens his book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, which was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in history. Schlosser is an investigative journalist with academic degrees in British imperial and American history from Princeton and Oxford Universities. In 2001, he gained notoriety with the publication of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. In Command and Control, Schlosser argues that even the most unlikely of events involving nuclear weapons can happen, despite technological sophistication and the command-and-control system governing the nukes, because humans are fallible. As a result (and a precaution), we need humility in our use of centralized “expert systems.”

“I wrote the book to tell a story, to honor the heroes of the Cold War and to inform the public,” said Schlosser during a presentation in Bismarck in September 2016, sponsored by the North Dakota Humanities Council, “so that we as a nation can decide to either get rid of nuclear weapons or invest in the necessary precautions to take care of them to minimize the risk of accidental detonation.”

The book illustrates the dangers of technologically sophisticated command-and-control structures with implications for all power structures, not just the U.S. military. Civil governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations also rely on structures connecting the executive authority of a centralized network to the institution’s body.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, (Penguin Press) Eric Schlosser

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Contingency The story begins with the dropped socket, which is an example of contingency, a key historical concept meaning that history is shaped by unforeseen variables of human choice and events outside human control. Little things can make a huge difference, such as a wrong turn by Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s driver that led to his assassination, which in turn set Europe on course toward the Great War. There are many contingent factors involved in any event, but if even one changes, the outcome often changes too. The past does not inevitably lead to the present. History is not governed by fate, but is instead a drama of surprises in which individual human judgment, heroism and fallibility play key roles.

There are many examples of contingency in relation to nuclear accidents in Schlosser’s book. In 1964, at a Minuteman missile site near Ellsworth Air Force Base (AFB) in South Dakota, a worker fixing the security system forgot to bring a fuse puller and instead used a screwdriver. This caused an electrical short, and a rocket fired on top of the missile, causing the W-56 warhead to fall off, bounce against the sides of the silo and hit the bottom of the silo. Fortunately it did not explode.

In 1965, a high-pressure hydraulic line ruptured, possibly due to a welding mistake, in a missile silo near Searcy, Arkansas, leading to a fire that killed 53 repairmen. The missile survived. It was refurbished and relocated to the silo near Damascus, Arkansas. And it was the same missile on which Powell would drop his socket 15 years later.

In 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs flew a routine mission near Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. The co-pilot had put foam rubber cushions under the instructor navigator’s seat to make it more comfortable, not realizing this blocked a vent. The cushions caught on fire, which no one could put out. The crew ejected and the plane crashed, causing a huge conventional explosion that spread plutonium dust over many acres. Fortunately, again, the nuclear weapons didn’t explode.

On September 15, 1980—three days before the dropped socket incident—someone at Grand Forks AFB forgot to screw a nut on a fuel strainer in the engine of a B-52 loaded with eight short-range nuclear missiles and four hydrogen bombs. During a drill that day, a fire started as the plane sat on the runway where strong wind gusts turned it into a giant flamethrower. The crew jumped clear and ran. The fire burned for almost three hours as phone calls to Strategic Air Command (SAC) and Boeing proved fruitless. No one in command knew what to do. Then the Grand Forks fire chief telephoned Tim Griffis, a civilian fire inspector on base who had a wife and small children. He knew the inside of B-52s intimately and had helped put out fires on them before. When he got to the plane, paint was peeling as fire hoses tried to keep the bomb bay cool. Tim ran to the B-52 and jumped inside. He switched on the emergency battery, which activated the fire suppression handle, cutting the fuel supply to the fire, which went out immediately. Everyone cheered. Griffis received a Civilian Medal of Valor.

Had Griffis not known what to do and acted with such alacrity, the bombs would certainly have exploded in a conventional detonation and blanketed the city of Grand Forks in plutonium dust. It was also theoretically possible that a nuclear explosion would have been triggered. Had the plane been facing the other direction, the wind would have blown the flames across the fuselage, killing the crew as they tried to escape and rapidly causing a blast. Socket, screwdriver, hydraulic line, foam cushion, missing nut, wind direction—all are examples of unexpected contingencies in the management of America’s nuclear weapons, and all of them contributed to emergency situations that the command-and-control network could not defuse. Only in Grand Forks did a man on the ground prevent an explosion.

[W]e escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.

(Schlosser, p. 457) General George Lee Butler, Commander, Strategic Air Command (1991-92), Commander United States Strategic Command (1992-94)

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Command & Control

Bureaucracies are progressive, meaning they have a burning fear that someone, somewhere, is doing something without permission.

Jerry Pournelle

All military operations rely on “command and control”—an expert system by which a commander exercises authority toward the accomplishment of a mission. The paradox at the heart of nuclear command and control is the “always-never dilemma [that] still plagues us,” said Schlosser in a 2014 interview for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The Pentagon wants to deploy nuclear weapons that are always available for immediate use but will never be stolen, used without proper authorization or detonated by accident.

The administrative and technical means necessary to ensure the ‘always’ part of the equation often conflict with those necessary to ensure the ‘never' part.”

SAC was established in 1947 to govern a defense system involving hundreds and then thousands of nuclear warheads. These warheads were meant to always be ready for delivery via bomber or intercontinental ballistic missile (such as the Titan II), but never explode accidentally or turn up missing. This paradox lies at the heart of nuclear weapons design, which together with its mission of deterrence, made SAC one of history’s most powerful military organizations.

To fulfill this mission, SAC required the best command and control possible. Decisions had to be made quickly, and a breakdown in command could lead to a mistaken nuclear launch or annihilation. This required advanced technology that would make communication fast and computation powerful—needs that led to the first electronic computer. Thus, Schlosser notes that the computerization of war was an important step toward the computerization of society. The need to automate early warnings of incoming Soviet bombers and to communicate with antiaircraft missiles and fighter-interceptors during a nuclear war created the first computer network as the ancestor of the Internet. By the early 1960s, the Air Force’s demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems inside missiles led to the miniaturization of computers and integrated circuits, which became the building blocks of the modern electronics industry.

The Temptation of Power Command and control technology had to be protected from possible Soviet nuclear attack. In 1957, SAC moved into new headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. A command bunker three floors underground could house 800 people for several weeks when necessary. There was a wall, Schlosser described, about 20 feet high and almost 50 yards long, covered in charts, graphs and a map of the world showing the flight paths of SAC bombers. Eventually, this information was projected onto movie screens, giving the underground command center a “hushed, theatrical feel, with rows of airmen sitting at computer terminals beneath the world map and high118

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ranking officers observing it from a second-story, glass-enclosed balcony.”

That was the feel of the power of a central headquarters keen on exerting influence over events and people from a distance.

The “fascinating-terrifying” sensation of atomic power was also present when Brig. Gen. Thomas Farrell held the plutonium core of the first atomic bomb to be tested in New Mexico in 1945. It was the size of a softball with the weight of a bowling ball. “So I took this heavy ball in my hand and I felt it growing warm,” Ferrell recalled. “I got a sense of its hidden power.” After the explosion, he wrote, “Thirty seconds after [an intense light], the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.”

These experiences of power create two temptations. The first is akin to our deep attraction for magic, which J.R.R. Tolkien defined in On Fairy Stories as “not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.” This fascination with the pursuit of power can become an end in itself, as evidenced in Schlosser’s account of how the U.S. built many more thousands of nuclear weapons than needed for national defense. We built them because we could and, at some point, stopped asking why.

Secondly, there is the temptation to think that one can master situations from afar through hidden forces that can be monopolized, as did Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Another example is the natural magic of the Renaissance when “scientific magicians” strove to understand how material bodies act upon one another through hidden forces such as magnetism.

“Knowledge itself is power,” wrote Francis Bacon, who pursued alchemy to unveil the secrets of the universe and place them at the disposal of the centralizing English state.

Today, it is electronic and digital technologies that create unique temptations toward the centralization of power from afar. In 2004, Lt. Comdr.

George Franz wrote a paper for the Naval War College, titled “Decentralized Command and Control of High-Tech Forces,” arguing that improvements in information and communications technology entice commanders to increasingly exercise more centralized command and control. For example, the helicopter command posts of the Vietnam War gave commanders the illusion of having perfect knowledge of the situation on the ground. This technology led them to directly influence fighting on the battlefield rather than letting subordinates do their jobs. President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara personally selected targets during their Tuesday lunch meetings from almost 9,000 miles away.

Similarly, Gen. Lloyd Leavitt, Jr., Vice Commander-in-Chief of SAC in

Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.

Why Bilbo Baggins?

I don’t know. Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.

Gandalf, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

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“WarGames” is a 1983 Cold War thriller about a top-secret military computer in control the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal that almost starts World War III. “WarGames” stars Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.

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1980, monopolized decision-making authority on the night of the Damascus incident from SAC headquarters 500 miles away, even though he had no experience with Titan II missiles. His decisions led to a catastrophe.

Lt. Comdr. Franz pointed out that in the name of efficiency, such centralization can lead to many inefficiencies. Automating processes and centralizing judgment detach leaders from reality, making effective decision-making difficult. This is an ancient truth, which the British experienced prior to the American Revolution as they tried to govern unruly colonists from the center of the Empire in London, 3,000 miles away. In his great speech on conciliation with the American colonies in the House of Commons in 1775, the statesman Edmund Burke said, “I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government; nor of any politics in which the plan is to be wholly separated from the execution.” The naïve belief in control from afar collapsed only a month after Burke’s speech as the battles of Lexington and Concord ignited the American Revolution.

Too much trust in centralized expert systems can be very dangerous in a nuclear context. On November 9, 1979, the computers at the Colorado headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD, created in 1958) said that the U.S. was under attack by Soviet missiles and that warheads would begin to hit U.S. cities in five or six minutes. Bomber crews ran to their planes and fighter interceptors took off. As the minutes passed it became clear that the U.S. was not actually under attack. A technician had put the wrong tape into NORAD computers. The tape was part of a war-game training exercise that simulated a Soviet attack.

Centralized command-and-control systems tempt us to distrust human judgment and trust machines. The deputy commander of the Damascus silo immediately grabbed the fire checklist when his console lit up, indicating a problem soon after the socket fell from Powell’s hands. A technician started going through checklists, too. But the problem was: Which checklist applies?

What is the actual nature of the problem at hand? Here the human component comes clearly into view. Machines can solve many problems, but only humans can determine the kind of problem they are faced with. That sort of judgment, Matthew Crawford remarks in Shop Class as Soulcraft, demands a concern for the truth that depends on personal knowledge rooted in experience.

Rather than depend on experienced personnel at the scene in Omaha, SAC’s command tried to control the situation from headquarters. Gen. Leavitt took over the approval process for each step of the checklist being developed in response to the leaking fuel. Col. Ben Scallorn, who had worked on Titan II missiles for many years, objected to Gen. Leavitt’s plan for venting the Stage-1 fuel tank. “Scallorn,” Leavitt replied, “just be quiet and stop telling people what to do. We’re trying to figure this thing out.” As

Schlosser noted, “It was an awkward moment. Nobody liked to hear one of SAC’s leading Titan II experts being told to shut up.”

Meanwhile, Jeff Kennedy, perhaps the best missile mechanic at nearby Little Rock AFB, proposed opening the silo door, which would vent the vapor, lower the temperature and relieve the pressure on the Stage-1 tank.

This idea was relayed up the chain of command, and Kennedy was told to wait and do nothing without Gen. Leavitt’s approval. Kennedy was disgusted and stymied, unable to act quickly and decisively as Tim Griffis did at Grand Forks AFB a few days earlier.

Nearly six hours after Kennedy’s proposal, the explosion occurred, throwing Kennedy 150 feet to land against the silo’s fence along with burning debris, alive but severely injured. Tragically, an airman was killed. The silo was completely destroyed and, thankfully once again, the missile’s safety features prevented a nuclear detonation.

The real heroes in Damascus weren’t distant authorities but the men on the ground trying to save the missile, rescue the wounded after the explosion and find the missing warhead, which they did a few hours later in a nearby ditch.

Losing Control It is the human element that holds complex command-and-control systems together, especially in emergencies. This was illustrated dramatically in 2009 when Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, a former fighter pilot, landed his passenger plane safely in the Hudson River across from midtown Manhattan after losing both engines after striking a flock of Canada geese. All 155 people on board survived the controlled ditching, which was termed a “unique aviation achievement” by the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators.

The pilot’s judgment, rooted in considerable experience, saved the day.

Centralized authority worked well in Operation Neptune Spear that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, as Schlosser points out. Army, Navy, Air Force and CIA commanders communicated secretly in real time. But outcomes are radically different in an unforeseen emergency, such as Damascus, or when we are the target of a covert operation. The 9/11 Commission Report chronicled the confusion and miscommunication regarding the terrorist attacks at the very highest levels of government. Schlosser notes that, “A command-and-control system designed to operate during a surprise attack that could involve thousands of nuclear weapons—and would require urgent presidential decisions within minutes—proved incapable of handling an attack by four hijacked airplanes.”

A culture of denial and secrecy made the situation in Damascus worse.

The Air Force kept insisting everything was under control, but a white cloud rising from the silo told local sheriff Gus Anglin that the opposite was true. SAC refused to confer with state and local officials, leaving everyone

They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

But the man that is shall shadow The man that pretends to be.

T. S. Eliot, chorus from The Rock

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The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.

Eric Schlosser

wondering who was in charge. Anglin ordered an evacuation of everyone within a mile of the missile silo. His initiative served to check the decisions made, and not made, at the top of SAC’s bureaucracy.

The ability to gather and process massive amounts of data gives those at the top an information superiority at headquarters. This hidden or “occult” knowledge creates the impression of mastering a local situation and tempts leaders to exert tighter authority from afar. But Lt. Comdr. Franz pointed out that the sheer volume of raw data might actually reduce understanding and delay decision-making, as with the Damascus accident. Tighter control from the top means subordinates have fewer opportunities to make decisions and gain experience, often demoralizing them. “The commander who reaches down to exercise command and control at subordinate levels,” Comdr. Franz writes, “will lose the support of his men and women.”

Mission-Tactics & Subsidiarity Perhaps the ancient Catholic principle of subsidiarity provides guidance.

Subsidiarity means that as a matter of justice, lower levels of government or any organization should have the freedom to pursue their own ends.

However, subsidiarity also implies that higher levels have the authority to lead, in order to provide an overall framework within which lower levels can act safely and effectively. In a military context, this means that decentralized command and control, which is termed “mission-tactics” or “mission command,” allows subordinate commanders to freely respond to situations developing on the ground, as long as they understand the commander’s overall intent.

For effective mission-tactics, top leadership must provide a clear strategic objective. When that vision is lacking, mission-tactics don’t work, as in Afghanistan. In The Killing of Osama bin Laden, Seymour Hersh quoted a special operations consultant saying, “It’s all about tactics and nobody, Republican or Democrat, has advanced a strategic vision. The special ops guys are simply carrying out orders, like a dog eager to get off the leash and run into the woods—and not thinking about where it is going. We’ve had an abject failure of military and political leadership.” The same was true in Vietnam where the U.S. military achieved almost 100-percent tactical success, while the entire intervention was doomed by strategic failure.

Humility & Humanity Schlosser’s book reminds readers of the need for humility and humanity.

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explosion. Then they spoke by radio to the team chief who relayed information to the colonel standing next to him near the silo’s gate. In turn, the colonel spoke by phone to another officer at the command post in Little Rock, who then talked with SAC headquarters in Omaha. “[H]opefully … nothing would be garbled or misunderstood,” Schlosser comments wryly.

Technological sophistication could not save the day. In the end, humble humans and their judgment had to decide and act.

Dangerous systems certainly require standardized procedures and judicious central control during normal operation. But in an emergency, “those closest to the system, the operators, have to be able to take independent and sometimes quite creative action,” Schlosser concludes, quoting sociologist Charles B. Perrow. Subsidiarity in mission-tactics, which strikes a balance between centralized and decentralized decision-making, is needed to protect institutions from the over-centralization so tempting in the information age.

Humility and humanity—and the humanities in education to provide proper leadership formation—protect us from hyper-rationalism that cuts us off from the real world of contingency, unpredictability and mystery. ±

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein

T

he Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site near Cooperstown, North Dakota, is one of only three once top-secret Minuteman sites in the nation open to the public.

The site was part of the 321st Missile Wing, a cluster of 165 intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites dispersed over a 6,500-square-mile area in eastern North Dakota and supported by Grand Forks AFB. The 321st was decommissioned in the late 1990s. Today, 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic

missiles remain fully operational and ready-to-launch in North Dakota. These missiles are dispersed around and supported by Minot AFB. Mark Sundlov, now a director at the North Dakota Heritage Center, served for several years as a Missile Combat Crew commander and helped open the Cooperstown site in 2009. Sundlov made many helpful comments on this essay. The missile site is open to the public daily from Memorial to Labor Day. For more information: http://bit.ly/2iJaMM5 123

Movie Review

Western Film Roundup:

Antoine Fuqua’s “The Magnificent Seven” features a diverse cast in a very familiar storyline: Left to right, Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawk), Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), Sam Chisholm (Denzel Washington), Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).

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Marek R. Dojs Assistant Professor of Communication University of Mary

W

estern films have been made since the beginning of cinema, yet the genre was not taken seriously until the 1950s when film critics took a deeper look. André Bazin, a French film theorist, placed the Western on a celluloid pedestal far above mere entertainment, in his article, “The Western: or the American Film Par Excellence.” The Western transcends the galloping horses and gunfights, Bazin wrote. “[Those] formal attributes by which one normally recognizes the Western are simply signs or symbols of its profound reality, namely the myth.” This

Makes, Remakes, Flakes, High Stakes

specific myth is rooted in medieval chivalric tales and the primal story of good versus evil: “[T]he great Manicheism which sets the forces of evil over against the knights of the true cause.” Indeed, one of the most common traits of the Western is the clear identification of good and evil, usually by the color of one’s hat.

While the Western has not been popular in recent years, several Western movies were released in 2016, most notably “The Magnificent Seven” and “Hell or High Water,” as well as an impressive HBO series called “Westworld.”

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Will Rogers

A Classic & the Re(re)make

Many Hollywood movies are remakes of previously successful films, mostly to ensure financial return. This often takes precedence over bold and 125

Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” (1954) was innovative in establishing the now-common plot scheme of a band of heroes joining forces to accomplish a high-risk goal.

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fresh new stories. Still, there is something attractive about remakes. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia audiences feel for the movies from their youth.

Sometimes films are remade to appeal to a different audience. The samurai movies of famed Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa were difficult to appreciate culturally by general audiences in North America and Europe until several were made into Westerns. In 1960, for example, Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” was remade by John Sturges into the first iteration of “The Magnificent Seven.” Then in 1964, Sergio Leone transformed “Yojimbo” into “A Fistful of Dollars.” Even more remarkably, parts of Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” was remade by George Lucas into “Star Wars.”

Then this fall, a new version of “The Magnificent Seven” was released with the same title. The remake of the remake stars Denzel Washington and is directed by Antoine Fuqua, who also directed Washington in his Academy Award winning performance in “Training Day,” the 2001 neo-noir crime thriller.

Many critics labeled Fuqua’s “The Magnificent Seven” as a post-racial Western. In an UPRoxx.com interview, Fuqua said he had no interest in telling a racial story. Instead he just wanted “to see Denzel on a horse.” Washington performs well in the role of Sam Chisholm, and he looks impressive

framed against the open landscapes, twirling his gun and riding his horse in shots with lens flares that would make director J.J. Abrams proud. However, regardless of Fuqua’s attempt to avoid a racial story, race is hard to miss. And this goes beyond the race of the film’s leading man.

Fuqua also cast Korean film star Byung-hun Lee as the knife expert Billy Rocks, Mexican star Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the outlaw Vasquez, and Martin Sensmeier, who is of Tlingit, Koyukon-Athabascan and Irish descent, as Red Harvest, as an outcast Native American warrior. The white actors, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke (who played opposite Washington in “Training Day”) and Vincent D’Onofrio, play the remaining three Magnificents.

To some extent, the casting of minorities as the majority of lead actors seems a direct response to the #Oscarsowhite controversy around last year’s Academy Award ceremony, based on complaints that the Academy had nominated only white actors for two straight years.

In the movie, set 14 years after the end of the Civil War, there is no racial controversy. The predominately white people of Rose Creek take no notice that the man hired to help them, Sam Chisholm, is black. Ironically, the only characters who acknowledge race are the Magnificent Seven themselves.

Billy Rocks mentions he has had problems with white men. Later, when Chisholm introduces Vazquez to the group, Josh Faraday (an Irish gambler played by Chris Pratt) quips, “we got us a Mexican.” After several awkward moments, Jack Horne (a white mountain man played by Vincent D’Onofrio), who once collected Native American scalps for reward, is shocked when he learns that Red Harvest can speak English.

Worse, if the film aims to be post-racial, it stumbles on stereotypes: The Mexican is an outlaw, the Native American is a warrior complete with face paint, and the Asian remains mysterious and seems to have been trained in an ancient martial art.

Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories.

They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.

Roger Ebert

Flake of a Remake

“The Magnificent Seven” is not about diversity but cooperation in diversity, which is presented as the highest American ideal. Unfortunately, the film fails at the one thing that so many action adventure superhero movies fail at: a deeper diversity vis-à-vis plot and character development.

To begin, the story is recycled without adding value. The basic story is the foundation of almost every superhero movie today. Listen to the plot summary: The members of the “The Avengers,” I mean “The Magnificent Seven,” are a ragtag group of immensely diverse men with very specific powers skills brought together by psychic Professor Xavier Warrant Officer Sam Chisholm. Chisholm is hired by a recently widowed young woman to free her town, Rose Creek, which has been forcibly taken over 127

Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?

Josey Wales (played by Clint Eastwood) in “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”

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by the Galactic Empire evil Bartholomew Bogue, a corrupt capitalistic and environmentally destructive industrialist who also murdered the young woman’s husband. The X-Men band of heroes are brought together to capture the Death Star plans fight Bogue and his army of darkness. Many fall in the defense of Rose Creek, but victory and justice ultimately prevail.

“Seven Samurai” is an innovative film, famous for initiating the above common plot scheme of a band of heroes gathering to accomplish a risky goal. For a remake to succeed, the plot must be refreshed. For example, the stock love story that animates “Slumdog Millionaire” was made intriguing by the combination of flashback odyssey and the game show contest.

Nothing ingenious is attempted in Fuqua’s “The Magnificent Seven.”

Still a much-used plot can be rescued through character development.

This is no easy feat. It is a challenge for a director to introduce a single character and then provide depth and nuance over the next two hours.

Developing seven characters presents a monumental challenge. Fuqua gives Chisholm the most screen time; therefore the audience connects most strongly to him and his story. Faraday ranks second in screen time but provides little more than comic relief, which facilitates only a superficial connection with the viewer. The when Faraday (SPOILER ALERT) sacrifices himself for the cause, the audience doesn’t see why he would do so—or care. The only other character with depth is Goodnight Robicheaux, who struggles with PTSD after the Civil War. But this character dimension is not allowed to ripen.

As Bazin would appreciate, however, “The Magnificent Seven” does a terrific job of presenting evil. Peter Sarsgaard’s performance as Bartholomew Bogue provides a clear embodiment of malevolence throughout the film, albeit somewhat stereotypical.

“The Magnificent Seven” struggles with what plagues most action adventure movies today: overloading the audience’s senses with stunning imagery and deafening sound. Although the movie was successful ($93 million in domestic returns), the action eye candy fails to evoke genuine drama. Instead, audiences experience waves of glamorized violence highlighting the fighting skills of the seven heroes without regard for the consequences of their actions. One nameless foe after another falls, without a sense of how this advances the protagonists towards their goal.

In “Seven Samurai,” Kurosawa makes a point of showing the number of enemies, their deaths and the reduction of their number. The audience sees the enormity of the task, action towards victory and the consequences of that action. Kurosawa succeeds where Fuqua fails: presenting the clear articulation of narrative through action.

Law, Justice & the Moral Grayscale

Playing out on morality’s grayscale, in contrast, is the plot of David Mackenzie’s “Hell or High Water,” a contemporary Western set in rural West Texas. The move away from a clear delineation between good and evil in Westerns started in the 1960s. Some filmmakers, often foreign, began to tinker with the presentation of good and evil. The tension that often exists between law and justice enabled these directors to create morally ambiguous characters. In Sergio Leone’s trilogy, which popularized the term Spaghetti Western (directed by Italians, such as Leone), Clint Eastwood— wearing a brown hat—played The Man with No Name, who acts outside the established boundaries of the law and conventional morality to dispense justice, usually to the benefit of the disenfranchised.

This equivocal “code of the West,” pitting law against justice, is central to “Hell or High Water.” The movie starts with two masked men robbing a small, rural bank. The audience soon learns that the robbers are brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard (played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who are targeting branches of a regional bank that will soon repossess the family ranch. Several months before, the bank convinced the boys’ mother to take out a reverse mortgage on the property. Now over $40,000 is owed in back

Texas Rangers Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) play classic roles as lawmen in David Mackenzie’s “Hell or High Water.”

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Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) follow their homemade sense of justice by robbing branches of a bank that took advantage of their mother.

payments and fees, and not only will the brothers soon lose their heritage, but oil was recently discovered on the ranch.

Seeing an opportunity to break generational cycles of poverty in his family, Toby concocts the scheme: Pay back the bank with money that he and his older brother, an experienced criminal who has been out of jail for only a year, will steal from the same bank. This homemade sense of justice is challenged when two Texas Rangers, Marcus Hamilton (played by Jeff Bridges) and Alberto Parker (played by Gil Birmingham) begin investigating the robberies, which raises the question whether the law will prevail instead.

Neo-Western

“Hell or High Water” has several elements in common with the traditional Western, such as the storyline of a bank threatening a farming or ranching family. The leading character roles—the cowboy(s) and the Indian—are the most classic, but the presentation of these types in “Hell or High Water” move the film towards what critics call a neo-Western.

The lawmen are two Texas Rangers modeled after Tonto and the Lone Ranger. Just weeks from retirement, Marcus Hamilton is “lone” because he is the last of a dying generation, clinging to a vision of the West that the

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world has little time or room for. Working as his trusty companion is Ranger Alberto Parker, who is half Native American and half Mexican. Ranger Parker has assimilated into the white man’s world as much as he can. Even his last name is Anglo. Even so, he still suffers Hamilton’s playful abuse, who treats Parker as a moron (the meaning of “tonto” in Spanish), accusing him of dressing like him—which is ridiculous because the Rangers all wear the same uniform—and reminding him of his Native culture.

The two Texas Rangers, iconic images of the old West, are good men who also represent surrender to a changing world. As they stake out a local bank waiting for the brothers to attempt a robbery, Hamilton needles Parker about his Indian n the first 60 years of film, the Western roots, saying, “Maybe your people lived in was by far the most popular film genre. caves.” Parker finally responds to Hamilton’s racial comments, saying, “Your people did In its heyday in the 1950s, the number of too.” Then Parker points out that HamilWestern films produced outnumbered all ton’s ancestors suffered the same fate as the other genres combined. The Western mystique Indians: “[S]omeone came along and killed ranged far beyond film and publishing, greatly them and broke them down and made you into one of them.” influencing the mediums of television and Parker’s assimilation is old news. He is popular music, as well as American fashion, just as much a Texas Ranger and cowboy cuisine, politics—every aspect of American as Hamilton, albeit a very polite version.

Now it’s the true cowboys who are at risk. life. Though the Western has shown a steady Throughout the film, we see cowboys who decline in popularity over the past four recognize an end is coming. “I wonder why decades, its significance is still clear today, my kids refuse to do this,” one tired cowboy, who is driving cattle, laments sarcastically. In because—as yet—no other distinct national another scene, when a young boy discovers mythology has risen to take its place. he is going to inherit a ranch, he asks, “What From The Psychology of the Western: am I going to do with a ranch?”

How the American Psyche Plays Out on Screen Also standing against the forces of change

By William Indick are the robbers, Toby and Tanner Howard.

Soon after his mother’s death, Toby Howard finds himself underemployed, divorced and behind on his child support.

His only inheritance, the family ranch, is about to be repossessed by Texas Midlands Bank. Like the strong, quiet cowboy heroes so often seen in Westerns, Toby is forced into a role he is very reluctant to take—not for his gain, but for that of his children. Toby recruits his outgoing and impulsive brother Tanner as his “Kemosabe.” Even though Tanner is white, he identifies with the Comanche which, according to a warrior he meets in a casino, now means “enemies forever.”

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Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Woods), one of many highly advanced robotic hosts, meets The Man in Black (played by Ed Harris) on the streets of Sweetwater, the main town in Westworld.

Other than Tanner, the only one who knows Toby’s plan is his attorney.

When asked why he is helping, the lawyer replies, “To see you boys pay those bastards back with their own money; well, if that ain’t Texan I don’t know what is.” There is no doubt what the law says, but justice transcending legalism prevails. Still there is a sense that this is a Western to end all Westerns.

“Hell or High Water” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jeff Bridges), Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing.

High Stakes Western

“Westworld” is a darkly fascinating sci-fi Western series that won two awards at the 2016 Critics Choice Awards and received three Golden Globe nominations. The dramatic series is based on the 1973 Michael Crichton movie of the same name, starring Yul Brynner. Set in the near future, Westworld is a Western-themed amusement park where wealthy patrons pay thousands of dollars to escape the restrictions of contemporary life, where they can “live without limits.”

In frontier towns and roaming through the vast wilderness, guests 132

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encounter the “natives”—a population of highly advanced robotic hosts who play all the typical roles in Western movies and are programmed to fulfill a guest’s every desire. While some guests are attracted to saloons and gunfights in town, others head for the open plains where outlaws and Indian warriors abound. These Western scenarios are convincingly realistic, but meant more as a pretext for living “free of rules, laws or judgment.” This means the worst of what the viewer can imagine but happily is spared from seeing in graphic detail.

The ultimate showdown for each guest’s Westworld experience is between good and evil, as is fundamental to traditional Western mythology. In this sense, “Westworld” is both a sci-fi and retro-Western.

The moral drama plays out not only among moral, amoral and perhaps downright evil human selves, but more significantly regarding the emergence of artificial intelligence, memory and even self-consciousness among the robots. Abusing machines is not illegal, although sometimes or often immoral from a traditional moral perspective. But what happens when robots develop sentient selves?

The technological world envisioned in “Westworld” is fast approaching.

While it is unknown how far artificial intelligence will progress, already we are experiencing mass computerization, the Internet of Things, pervasive automation and the proliferation of robots, including sexbots. And then there’s cyber-human integration that blurs the man-machine border.

“Westworld” challenges the audience to reflect not only on the ongoing technological revolution, but more importantly on our moral character. In the eyes of Westworld’s cyber-hosts, humans are the savages, and it’s only a matter of time before robots ascend as moral heroes.

“Westworld” is either a well-crafted wake-up call to humanity to have humanity, or a Western to end all people. ±

Machines will be singing the song, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better; I can do anything better than you’.

Nils Nilsson, PhD

The 2016 short film “You Beautiful Crazy Blind Cripple” is a 30-minute romantic comedy written and produced by Daniel Bielinski, and directed and edited by Marek Dojs (both professors at the University of Mary). The film stars K.K. Moggie and Daniel Bielinski, and was shot near New Salem, North Dakota. The year before, Beilinski and Dojs released a short, titled “The Good Father,” which was shot in Bismarck and Mandan. The film won several awards, including a Gold Remi from the Houston International Film Festival and the Best Short Drama award at the South Dakota Film Festival.

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Contributors u Jerry Anderson is the Art Director at the University of Mary. He earned a Bachelor of University Studies from North Dakota State University and a BS in Design from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Anderson has published photos in many publications, including the New York Times, US News & World Report and Newsweek.

He has also published photos in numerous books, including Every Place with a Name (State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1976) and North Dakota 24/7 (Penguin Random House, 2003).

is a documentary filmmaker whose work has been screened at national and international venues. In 2008, Dojs won a grant from the Southwest Alternative Media Project’s Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship Program and completed a documentary titled, “Return to Stolowicze,” which was screened at Encuentro Bicultural De Cine Migracion in Mexico City and broadcast on PBS.

u Vern Dosch is the President and CEO of the National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC). He earned a BS and an Masters in Management degree from the University of Mary.

Dosch began working in the electrical u Deborah L. Devedjian is the cooperative industry in 1975 and founder and Chief Citizens’ Officer of served as a financial analyst, busiTheChisel.com. She earned a BA from ness manager and general manager Yale University and an MBA from before becoming NISC’s CEO. Dosch’s Harvard University. Devedjian served awards include the 2007 North Dakota in leadership positions with CoperniChamber of Commerce Community cus Learning Fund and Consultants, Warburg Pincus, RoundTable Partners, Leadership Award, in recognition of the economic and community advancethe European Bank for Reconstrucment he brings to the Bismarck-Mantion & Development, and The Boston dan. Dosch also serves as a board Consulting Group. Long committed member for the Bismarck State College to education and inquiry as the basis Foundation, the North Dakota Unifor democracy, she weaves together versity Roundtable, Starion Financial more than 20 years of experiences in Board, Cooperative Business Council the private, public and not-for-profit sectors to maximize learning, collabo- and CHI St. Alexius Medical Center. He rative decision-making and stakeholder serves on the North Dakota Workforce value. Devedjian has chaired or served Development Council and as chairman on the executive committee of more of the Light of Christ Capital Campaign than 20 not-for-profit boards, including and the God’s Child Foundation.

Polytechnic University, the Commisu Samuel G. Freedman is the author sion of Independent Colleges and of seven books, a former columnist on Universities, and the Harvard Business religion and education for The New School Club of New York.

York Times, and a tenured professor u Marek R. Dojs is an Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Mary. Dojs earned a BA in History and Communications from the University of St. Thomas and an MFA in Radio, Television and Film (focusing on Documentary Production) from the University of North Texas. He 134

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of journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Freedman was named the nation’s outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s

book-writing seminar has developed more than 75 published authors.

Freedman’s most recent book, Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights, was published in 2013 to remarkable critical acclaim. Freedman’s first book, Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School, was a National Book Award finalist, and The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority Moved from Left to Right was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. u Andrea L. Gleiter earned a BS in English with a minor in Catholic Studies from the University of Mary in 2016. She is originally from the Northern Illinois, where she worked in public relations for the Diocese of Rockford.

Gleiter served as the social justice coordinator for the University of Mary’s student ministry team. Currently she works as the administrative assistant to the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Mary. u Karen Herzog has been a working journalist for more than 30 years, including 20 years as the faith and religion reporter for the Bismarck Tribune. As well as covering religious issues in-depth for two decades, she has written in areas including opinion, legislation, feature stories, breaking news, multipart series, and the social, historical and cultural issues of the Northern Great Plains. She has served as a newspaper editor and writing coach and continues to be a columnist for the Tribune. She was the recipient of the Mark Kellogg Award from the Lee Enterprises newspaper chain for her work on “New Directions for News.”

Herzog’s stories have won numerous awards from the North Dakota Newspaper Association, including for “Beyond Control,” a news series examining the impact of Missouri

River flooding, and for “Living History,” a series of memoirs of North Dakotans who served in World War II. In 2006, Herzog accompanied veterans on the state’s Roughrider Honor Flight to Washington, DC. Herzog earned a BA in English from the University of Jamestown. Currently, she is the editorin-chief of Momentum Magazine at the University of Mary. u Thomas Marple is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Communications at Bismarck State College.

Marple earned a Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc) from North Dakota State University. Prior to BSC, Marple worked as a Conservation Engineering Technician for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He also volunteers for the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska. u Patrick J. McCloskey is the Director of Research and Publications at the University of Mary and serves as the editor-in-chief of 360 Review.

He earned a BA in Philosophy and English from Carleton University and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. McCloskey has written for many publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Post and City Journal. He also served as the press secretary for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. In 2009, the University of California (Berkeley) Press published his non-fiction narrative book, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, to enormous critical acclaim. u Mark Mills is a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, a Faculty Fellow in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University and a partner at Cottonwood Venture Partners, a new boutique venture fund focused on digital oilfield technologies. He writes a tech column for Forbes and

co-authored a book titled, The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, 2006). Mills has written for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and New York Times Magazine. Early in Mills’ career, he was an experimental physicist and development engineer in the fields of microprocessors, fiber optics and missile guidance. Mills was also a partner at a boutique venture fund and co-authored a tech investment newsletter. Mills served in the White House Science Office under President Ronald Reagan. u Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD, serves as the Director of Education at The National Catholic Bioethics Center and is an Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the University of Mary.

Fr. Pacholczyk earned a doctorate in neuroscience from Yale University and did post-doctoral research at Harvard University. He often does media commentaries for major media venues, including CNN International, ABC World News Tonight, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

of St. Andrews and a PhD in Modern Intellectual History from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Stuart has published articles in numerous academic publications, including The Newman Rambler and Logos. u Eric Syvertson is an artist and arts educator at Sheyenne High School in West Fargo, ND. He earned a BFA in Art Education from Minnesota State University Moorhead and an MFA in Drawing and Painting at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He has served as a board member and president of Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists.

In his spare time Eric assembles and rides custom motorcycles.

u Brenda Werner, PhD, is the Director of the Graduate Education Program at the University of Mary.

She earned a BS in Secondary English Education and K-12 Health/Physical Education from Minot State University, an MS in Teaching from Fort Hays State University, and a PhD in Secondary Education and Administration from the University of North Dakota. After u Jesse Russell, PhD, is an Assistant 11 years teaching English at Bismarck Professor of English at the University of High School, Werner was named the Mary and co-chairs the campus URead 2012 North Dakota Teacher of the Year. program, the yearly campus-wide book In 2014, Werner traveled to China as discussion at the University of Mary. a member of the National Education Russell earned a BA in English and Phi- Association’s Global Fellowship losophy from Franciscan University of Program.

Steubenville, an MA in Philosophy also u Travis Wolf, PhD, is an Assistant from Franciscan, an MA in English in Professor of Mathematics at the UniverRenaissance Literature from Catholic sity of Mary. He earned a BS in MathUniversity of America and a PhD in ematics from the University of North Comparative Literature from Louisiana Dakota in 2007, and an MS and PhD State University. in Mathematics from the University u Joseph Stuart, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of History and Catholic Studies at the University of Mary.

He earned a BA in Humanities from Franciscan University of Steubenville, an AAS in Surveying Technology from Ferris State University, an MLitt in Modern History from the University

of Iowa in 2008 and 2013, respectively.

Wolf was named a Project NExT Fellow (a professional development program for recent PhDs in the mathematical sciences, sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America) in 2013.

Wolf serves as the primary advisor for the University of Mary Math Club.

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Future War

Preparing for the New Global Battlefield

By Robert H. Latiff Published by Knopf September 26, 2017 ISBN 9781101947609

U

SAF Maj. Gen. (Ret) Robert H. Latiff, PhD, cowrote an article in the Summer/Fall 2016 issue of 360 Review, titled “Closer to the Robo-Rubicon: Robots, Autonomy and the Future (Maybe Not) of You” about seismic moral questions posed by emerging military weapons systems. On September 26, 2017, Latiff ’s book, Future War, will be published by Knopf. Here is an excerpt from the publisher’s description: In Future War, Latiff maps out the changing ways of war and the weapons technologies we use to fight them, seeking to describe the ramifications of those changes and what it will mean in the future to be a soldier. He also recognizes that the fortunes of a nation are inextricably linked with its national defense, and how its citizens understand the importance of when, how, and according to what rules we fight. What does the changing face of war mean to the average American? Are our leaders sufficiently sensitized to the implications of the new ways of fighting? How are the attitudes of individuals and civilian institutions shaped by the wars we fight and the means we use to fight them? And of key importance: How do the new ways of war affect how soldiers themselves think about war and their roles within it?

Decrying what he describes as a “broken” relationship between the military and the public it serves, Latiff issues a bold wake-up call to military planners and weapons technologists, decision makers, and the nation as a whole as we prepare for a very different future. A new, complex world of conflict and technology demands that we pay more attention to the issues that will confront us, before it is too late to control them. ±

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“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Zitkala­Sa (Red Bird), also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born four months prior to the Battle of the Little Bighorn on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was mixed race and lived and worked in both cultures.

Zitkala­-Sa attended Earlham College in Indiana and played violin for the New England Conservatory in Boston. She authored the songs and libretto for first Native American opera, published collections of Native American legends, and wrote articles for Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly.

Much of her writing is autobiographical, focusing on the tension between assimilation and her traditional Sioux culture.

There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.

George Armstrong Custer

US $13.95

Canada $17.95

ISBN 9780998872803

Detail from “The Custer Fight� (1903)

By Charles Marion Russell

9 780998 872803

51395 >