The American Prospect #300

Chain Gang:

The Quandary of Paying Prisoners for Their Work

BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

Urban Revolt:

T X E N E H T

N A I T S I R H C E S U

U B A X SE

L A D N A C S ON A S I N O S D S GRAN OTESTANT ’ M A H A R R BILLY G UADE P S R E P TO N. MISSION TO COME CLEA ES CHURCH OYCE J HRYN T A K BY

Are Cities the Future of American Liberalism?

BY HAROLD MEYERSON

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contents

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 3 MAY/JUN 2014

PAGE 30

PAGE 40

PAGE 56

NOTEBOOK 7 RETHINKING ZERO TOLERANCE BY BRYCE WILSON STUCKI 12 HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU BY HAL MAYFORTH 14 THE CONVERSATION MELANIE THERNSTROM & KEITH WAILOO

FEATURES 16 BY GRACE ALONE BY KATHRYN JOYCE 30 THE REVOLT OF THE CITIES BY HAROLD MEYERSON 40 THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF PROSPERITY BY ROBERT KUTTNER 50 FOR THE U.S., ISRAEL, AND PALESTINE, WHAT’S PLAN B? BY MATTHEW DUSS 56 THE GREAT AMERICAN CHAIN GANG BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

CULTURE 67 BIG, NOT STRONG BY DAVID CAY JOHNSTON 70 KARL POLANYI EXPLAINS IT ALL BY ROBERT KUTTNER 77 WHAT WAS THE OFFICE? BY JOHN LINGAN 81 THE OBSCURE HEROES BEHIND CONGRESS’S GREAT MOMENT BY DAVID J. GARROW 85 FOOD TV’S SADISTIC GLEE BY ROXANE GAY

COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS MOVING LEFT TO THE CENTER BY PAUL STARR 88 COMMENT WHY YOU CAN’T KILL ELECTION REFORM BY ABBY RAPOPORT Cover source photo by Steven Gaertner /Fotolia; art above by Trekandphoto /Fotolia, Victor Juhasz, Nicole Hill /Getty Images, and John Cuneo

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contributors

BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL is a freelance journalist.

She spotlights the “virtual slave labor” in American prisons. “I once read,” she says, “that if you included prisoners in the jobless rate, the percentage of young black men with limited education who are unemployed rises 15 percentage points to 50 percent. Then I thought, wait a minute, inmates aren’t jobless.

It’s just no one is counting their jobs.”

BRYCE WILSON STUCKI’s writing has appeared in The Nation and Bicycle Times.

He writes about the movement to reform discipline in city schools.

“For more than a decade, civilrights groups have argued that excessive suspensions are counterproductive,” he says. “More and more schools are now switching to a rehabilitative approach. The improvements in safety have been very encouraging.”

HAL MAYFORTH is an artist whose work has appeared in many national publications. His two-page illustration focuses on the country’s paradoxical obsession with privacy and surveillance. “I draw in my sketchbook every morning and never know where it’s going to take me,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a struggle, but other times things click. Those are the times that make the whole thing worthwhile.”

ROBERT KUTTNER is a Prospect founding coeditor. He writes an appreciation of economist Karl Polanyi and, in a separate article, calls for a World War II–scale commitment to address the global climate emergency. “What links the pieces,” he says, “is a recognition that markets got us into the mess of an unequal, unsustainable economy and only engaged, democratic government can get us out.”

KATHRYN JOYCE is the author of The Child Catchers and Quiverfull. She writes about Christian-led investigations into institutional evangelical child sex abuse. “The emergence of GRACE ,” she says, “an organization led by Billy Graham’s grandson and mandated to address Christian sex abuse, is a transformative development in evangelicalism.”

MATTHEW DUSS is a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. He looks at the failure of the United States to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. “In efforts to reach a final agreement,” he says, “the Obama administration has repeatedly said that the status quo is ‘unsustainable.’ Yet it persists. Is it time to consider new ways to change that status quo?”

ROXANE GAY is the author of the novel An Untamed State and the essay collection Bad Feminist. An avid watcher of shows like Chopped, she explores the history of competitive cooking television and what these shows featuring both competition and the preparation of beautiful food offer viewers.

“Some kind of hunger is being fed,” she says.

BRIAN STAUFFER’s artwork has appeared in more than 300 publications worldwide. He illustrates Kathryn Joyce’s feature on sex abuse in the evangelical community. “I was intrigued,” he says, “by this story’s uncovering of the abuses by those in power who conceal and silence the victims behind a wall of bureaucracy. I hoped to convey that second abuse in my illustration.”

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

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Reclaim the Promise of America Decades of increasing economic and social inequity have undermined the public services, healthcare systems, higher education institutions and public schools that have been ladders of opportunity and anchors of our democracy.

Throughout the country, in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, members of the American Federation of Teachers and our community partners are using the month of May to mobilize for public education and economic opportunity for all.

Visit www.aft.org to see how the AFT and many others are working to make our schools, communities and country places where opportunity abounds for all.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: twitter.com/rweingarten

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We Need Explorers When we send our children off to school, we want them to be explorers and critical thinkers who can make connections and interpretations all their own.

That’s why nearly every state has chosen to adopt the Common Core State Standards, a set of consistent, gamechanging standards that will better equip students for college and careers in the global economy—no matter where they live.

Join the educators of the National Education Association in supporting the Common Core State Standards and their common-sense implementation.

So every student will have the chance to succeed.

nea.org/CommonCore Great Public Schools for Every Student

Prospects

Moving Left to the Center

BY PAUL STARR

T

he Democrats are now cursed in three ways that they can overcome only with a new boldness and determination.

Ever since the mid-1990s, we have been writing in this magazine about an “emerging Democratic majority” as a result of demographic and generational change.

That support has materialized.

Votes from Latinos and other growing minorities, as well as the young more generally, have contributed to Barack Obama’s victories and rising hopes for the future.

But those groups are also the source of the first curse facing the Democrats: Their new majority comes from low-turnout constituencies. When voting participation drops, as it typically does in midterm elections, the decline tends to be especially sharp among minorities and the young. While Republicans are blessed with a reliable base, Democratic turnout depends on their voters’ fluctuating interest and enthusiasm.

The Democrats’ second curse stems from Republican entrenchment in the states and the Supreme Court. The 2010 midterms, dominated by older voters, gave Republicans unified control of key swing states, which they have since used to change voting laws, gerrymander legislative districts, weaken unions, and in other ways keep themselves in office. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has removed barriers to money in politics and eliminated federal checks on state voting-rights abuses. The combination may sustain Republican power in Congress and state legislatures at least through the rest

of the decade and give historic importance to the 2020 election, which will affect redistricting after the decennial census that year. It’s a common pattern: Those who hold power based on past majorities often use it to entrench themselves when their future grows uncertain, and the Republicans are doing exactly that in the states and the courts.

The third curse afflicting the Democrats results largely from the preceding two: The party lacks the necessary power to deliver on promises of economic revival and social justice to the groups whose enthusiastic support it needs.

Republican control of the House has stymied the Obama administration on economic policy and even on immigration reform. The Supreme Court’s decisions on campaign finance also make the Democrats more dependent than ever on fundraising among the wealthy.

Even if Democrats had a free hand and the willingness to use it, the economic challenges would be difficult. Throughout the advanced economies, growth rates have been slowing and inequality has been rising for 40 years as a result of structural changes mainly due to technology and globalization.

With every recession since 1980, recoveries have taken longer. But national policies do make a difference, and even when Democrats cannot carry out a program on behalf of working people, they need to advocate policies that make as loud and stark a contrast as possible with those of the Republicans.

Call this approach “moving left to the center.” Obama’s belated emphasis on raising the minimum

wage and increasing overtime pay are good examples of the approach. Taxing the 1 percent to finance broadly distributed benefits also fits this description. If the Democrats are going to convince their supporters it is worth the trouble to vote, they need to draw unambiguous distinctions on economics with Republicans.

What used to be centrist only seems populist now.

Such policies will predictably be described as class warfare. But, to use a well-worn phrase, this is about saving capitalism from the capitalists. The objective is actually to get back to an income distribution more like the level that prevailed in the Eisenhower administration. The entire political and legal spectrum has been moved so far to the right that what used to be centrist only seems populist. The purpose of moving left to the center is ultimately to move the center back closer to where it used to be.

In highlighting the Democrats’ three curses, I don’t mean to suggest any reason to envy the Republicans’ position. Gallup recently published two analyses of age and politics: One claimed that the elderly have “realigned” with the Republicans, while the other argued that the young have moved further

toward the Democrats. That divergence will help Republicans in 2014, but they should be nervous about its long-term implications.

The shift among the young, the Gallup data show, does not stem only from the growing numbers of Latinos and nonwhites, up from 29 percent to 45 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds between 1995 and 2013. Young non-Latino whites have also shifted toward the Democrats. Since 2006, Gallup reports, Democrats have averaged an 18-point edge among young adults overall (though some data on the youngest of that group suggest recent slippage).

Meanwhile, over that same period, seniors have become more Republican. But no group depends more than the aged on federal expenditures that the GOP is determined to slash. Routinely, Republicans criticize Obama and the Democrats for failing to cut Medicare and Social Security and the next day run TV ads warning seniors that Obama and the Democrats are cutting Medicare and Social Security. That gambit may work when Republicans are out of power, but if they have to govern, they will need to choose between the ideological and demographic parts of their base.

In the next few elections, the Democrats’ three curses may prevent them from reaping the full advantages of generational and demographic change. But in creating a political future, it is better to be cursed with youth than blessed with age. With a little courage, Democrats should eventually be able to turn their rising prospects into a governing majority. 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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Rethinking Zero Tolerance A new approach to discipline seeks to keep kids in school and, ultimately, out of prison.

BY BRYC E W I L S O N S T U C K I

j es se l en z

B

efore 2006, when Debora Borges-Carrera became the principal at Kensington Creative & Performing Arts High School (KCAPA) in north Philadelphia, the school was the scene of pandemonium. Not a day seemed to go by without a fight in the concrete stairwell. Kids sent to the principal’s office for disrupting class roamed the hallways. During one visit from the superintendent, a riot broke out in the cafeteria, with students climbing on tables and

chucking their meal trays across the room. In Borges-Carrera’s first year on the job, the school—where about 90 percent of students are Latino or black and 100 percent are below the poverty line—reported 76 incidents of student misbehavior, more than four times the state average, including 13 aggravated assaults on staff members.

Under KCAPA’s “zero tolerance” policy—since the late 1990s, the prevailing approach to discipline in schools across the country—the

typical response to student misbehavior was harsh punishment.

“Any behavior that got a student sent to the principal’s office almost automatically resulted in suspension,” says Erin Smith, a teacher at the school since 2004. Under the district’s vaguely worded discipline policy, students were routinely transferred for possession of a “weapon,” which could be anything from a gun to a butter knife. With an estimated 200 outof-school suspensions, according

to the School District of Philadelphia, and a student body of just under 400, it was clear the system wasn’t working.

Within months of coming on the job, Borges-Carrera replaced KCAPA’s existing policy with a set of practices collectively known as restorative justice. Rather than punishing students who are out of line, restorative justice aims to help them rebuild their standing in the school community and repair the harm they have caused. The practices vary— peer-mediation programs, empathy training for offenders—but the basic idea is that strong interpersonal and community ties work better than fear of retribution.

The cornerstone of KCAPA’s program is the “restorative circle.”

Drawing inspiration from the

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American Indian practice of the talking circle, in which a totem is passed around to signal the opportunity to speak, these meetings are convened for all kinds of reasons, from gauging students’ moods to addressing acts of serious misbehavior like assault or vandalism. In those more serious cases, all affected members of the community—parents and teachers, police officers, kids from other schools, as well as the perpetrator and victim—are invited to attend. One at a time, without interruption, each participant talks about how the offense has affected him or her. Then the group comes up with a plan to repair the damage. It may sound hokey or mundane, but the results are often striking. “You get kids where at first glance you think, ‘Wow, OK, you seem very hard-core’—full-on crying,” says Thalia González, a professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles who studies restorative justice. Many students from neighborhoods with a history of violence, she says, long for a safe environment where they can express themselves. “With restorative justice, school suddenly becomes a place where you can do that.

It changes how you view yourself. It changes how you view each other.”

Borges-Carrera also instituted a peer-mediation program to resolve conflicts before they escalate. Teachers who come across or hear about students not getting along—an argument in the hall, rumors of an upcoming fight—send them to speak with

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a designated peer who encourages them to talk out the problem. When the program began, students mostly ended up in mediation by referral, but over time, they have come to recognize its value for themselves. “I’ve had kids say, ‘I really want to fight today,’” Smith says. “They’ll ask for a mediation slip, and I’ll be like, ‘For who?’

And they’ll be like, ‘For me.’”

Borges-Carrera says the students feel attached to one another and their school in a way they didn’t before. “For a lot of our kids, we are the only stable family they have,” she says. That carries over after they leave; Smith recalls one young man who had graduated from KCAPA a year earlier walking into the school lobby bloodied and badly beaten. He asked to see his 12th-grade English teacher. “I didn’t know where to go,” he said. “Can you help me?”

By the 2009–2010 school year, four years after the transformation began, KCAPA was a different place. The number of serious incidents of misbehavior had plummeted 60 percent, even with enrollment up by more than 150 students. The 200 out-of-school suspensions per year were down to between 30 and 40. Arrests had decreased by two-thirds.

Spurred in part by the results at KCAPA , the School District of Philadelphia announced it would implement restorative-justice pilot programs in ten schools starting in 2013. If the two-year experiment is successful, the district will likely expand the program

Four years after Kensington Creative & Performing Arts High School implemented its

RESTORATIVE-

JUSTICE program,

serious incidents of misbehavior were down

60

PERCENT and arrests had decreased by

TWO-THIRDS.

across the city. Philadelphia isn’t the only metropolis to try this approach— since the late 1990s, Los Angeles, Denver, and San Francisco have also run pilot programs—but it’s a bellwether.

If restorative justice works in Philadelphia, widely known for rampant problems with violence and for one of the harshest zero-tolerance policies in the country, other major school districts will be encouraged to follow its lead. The most serious obstacle is one faced by local governments everywhere: funding. Governor Tom Corbett removed close to $1 billion from Pennsylvania’s education budget shortly after taking office in 2011. Schools like KCAPA have been forced to lay off staff members in droves, leading BorgesCarrera and others to worry that Philadelphia’s experiment could be cut short before it’s had a chance to demonstrate that restorative justice works better than punitive discipline. stability, violentcrime rates began to shoot up starting in the 1960s but escalating in the 1970s and 1980s. Juvenile crime rose in tandem. The percentage of high-school seniors who reported being the victim of a serious assault rose by 18 percent between 1984 and 1994. Overall, arrest rates for violent crime among youth between 10 and 17 jumped 70 percent.

The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 solidified the public consensus that drastic measures were needed to keep children safe.

The first federal measure to implement “zero tolerance” in schools was the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, which mandated a one-year suspension for students who brought a firearm to school. Across the country, districts expanded on Congress’s obligatory punishments to include possession of drugs and alcohol; many began to require one- or tenday suspensions for minor offenses like cursing or lying to an administrator. The suspension rate soared 87 percent between 1973 and 2006.

For the 2009–2010 school year, the most recent for which the Department of Education has released national estimates, more than two million secondary students—one out of nine— were suspended at least once. Most AFTER DECADES OF

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suspensions are for minor infractions; the California Department of Education reported that between 2011 and 2012, more than half the state’s suspensions fell under the vague category of “defiance.”

Punishments are not doled out evenly. In the 2009–2010 school year, 24 percent of black and 12 percent of Latino kids were slapped with a suspension at least once compared with only 7 percent of white students. This is not because minority students misbehave more than their white counterparts. A 2008 study found that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately suspended for the same behavior as their white counterparts.

In the past decade, academic research has come to show what administrators and teachers already know: Suspension may put troubled kids out of sight, but it doesn’t alter their conduct. “It’s not effective at changing the behavior, and it often

Under principal Debora Borges-Carrera, above at an open house for prospective students and their parents, KCAPA has moved away from zero tolerance.

contributes to higher dropout rates, higher arrest rates, because they’re not supervised,” says New York University sociologist Pedro Noguera, a leading advocate of restorative justice. Suspension often marks the beginning of a familiar pattern: Left on their own, kids get arrested, convicted of a crime, and end up incarcerated, feeding what researchers and advocates now call the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

Here again, the racial disparities are stark: According to a 2009 study from Northeastern University, nearly one in four male African American dropouts between 16 and 24 were in prison. For Latinos, the rate is 6.1 percent, and for whites, it is 6.6 percent.

Even as most school districts across the country were cracking down in the mid-1990s, a different approach was being tried in Minnesota. Alarmed by data showing that most in-school fights ended with a referral to law enforcement, state education administrators

implemented a restorative-justice pilot program in 1995. Schools began to use talking circles after fights and replaced suspensions with peer mediations. The results were impressive: Lincoln Center Elementary School in St. Paul saw violent incidents decline from seven per day to fewer than two, while South St. Paul High School had out-of-school suspensions drop from 110 to 65 in one year. By 2001, half of all school districts statewide were using the approach.

As Minnesota’s pilots showed promising results, social-justice groups started pushing for restorative justice. The Advancement Project was among the first civil-rights groups to focus on school suspensions. Partnering in Denver with grassroots group Padres y Jóvenes Unidos (Parents and Youth United), the Advancement Project produced a report in 2005 showing that African American and Latino students in the district were 70 percent more likely to be disciplined

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than white students. Denver started restorative justice in four schools that same year; suspensions were reduced almost by one-third, while attendance went up. Educators across the country began to adopt restorative justice. The San Francisco Unified School District instituted restorative-justice practices in 2009 and saw expulsions fall by 28 percent. The Oakland Unified School District adopted the approach in 2009, which is now in 27 schools; the Ralph J. Bunche Academy, which serves students with behavioral issues, cut suspensions in half in just one year. Newark Public Schools trained its principals in restorative justice last summer, and the Los Angeles Unified School District began to transition to restorative justice in 2012.

The approach has its critics. Chief among them is Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta and author of Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice. Assailing restorative justice as the product of “new-age thinking,” Acorn argues that it takes for granted that the offender is truly sorry rather than just playing along to avoid punishment. Worse, restorative practices can retraumatize victims by mandating further contact with the perpetrator. “You have these really wonderful, moving, sentimental stories about how the victim explains their pain and the perpetrator feels so sorry,” Acorn says. “We have this whole veneration of this dramatic, selfless forgiveness, and it’s so compelling.

It’s difficult for victims to say, ‘I don’t really want to participate in that.’”

Other critics simply think the approach is too soft. Shortly after Philadelphia announced it would be incorporating restorative-justice practices, Philadelphia teacher Christopher Paslay wrote on his blog that it marked “the day discipline officially died in Philadelphia”; without suspensions, Paslay argued, unruly students would be impossible to control.

While they say it’s more effective than zero tolerance, supporters acknowledge that the approach can’t fix every problem of student behavior.

“It’s not a panacea,” Pedro Noguera says. That’s partly because schools are powerless to address the root causes

of student misconduct—generational poverty, abusive or neglectful families, gang activity.

Nationally, zero-tolerance policies are still the rule. In 2009, Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, introduced the Restorative Justice in Schools Act, which would allow administrators to use federal education funds to train teachers in the method, but the bill never reached the floor for a vote. In 2012, Congress held its first hearing on the school-toprison pipeline. Earlier this year, both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice recommended that districts consider restorative justice rather than zero tolerance, although the recommendation was nonbinding. None of these efforts, however, has resulted in any change of federal policy, leaving the work of reform up to the states.

But in states like Pennsylvania, budget cuts have endangered districts’ ability to dedicate and train staff in new approaches to discipline. Thirtyfour states will spend less this year on education than they did before the recession. The School District of Philadelphia lost $300 million for the 2013– 2014 year and had to close 23 schools and fire almost 4,000 staff members,

Academic research has shown that suspension may put troubled kids

OUT OF SIGHT, but it doesn’t alter their conduct.

including all its assistant principals, more than 250 counselors, and more than 600 teachers. The district’s projected shortfall is estimated to rise to $320 million next school year.

Restorative-justice programs don’t cost a lot to implement—two-year training for faculty runs between $50,000 and $60,000—but they do require schools to have sufficient staff. The support staff on which the programs rely—counselors, assistant principals, restorative-justice coordinators—are often the first to go when budget cuts hit.

At KCAPA , much of the staff who assisted with discipline, including two counselors, an assistant principal, and two coordinators, were laid off before the 2013–2014 school year began. “September was bumpy, it was really bumpy,” Borges-Carrera says.

“We probably had more fights in September than we’ve seen the past two years.” But Borges-Carrera says she and KCAPA are making do. Students are performing the duties of laid-off staff, assisting with peer mediation.

Teachers have stepped up to train one another in restorative-justice practices. “We may be dysfunctional at times,” Borges-Carrera says. “But we are family nonetheless.” 

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HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU BY HAL MAYFORTH

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The Conversation MELANIE THERNSTROM and K E I T H WA I L O O

I

n the spring of 1992, as the contentious Democratic primary ground to a close, Bill Clinton was speaking at a rally in New York City when an AIDS activist accused him of ignoring the ongoing HIV epidemic. Uttering four words that epitomized his campaign style, Clinton told the activist, “I feel your pain.”

Clinton’s remark was widely mocked by conservatives who believed that bleeding-heart liberal policy, under the pretext of compassion, was creating a culture of dependence. In his new book, Pain: A Political History, Keith Wailoo argues that over the past 60 years, sparring over what constitutes pain, who can judge pain, and how the government should mete out treatment has elevated our maladies into fraught political concerns. Pain resists measurement, raising questions about whether sufferers can be trusted to evaluate their own distress. Conservatives worry that chronic pain is a symbol of underlying social maladjustment, while liberals seek to put the means of relief into patients’ hands. Should pain count as a disability?

Does relief encourage fraud and addiction? Wailoo, the Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, contends that the politics of pain has morphed beyond rhetoric into an enduring partisan divide.

In 2010, Melanie Thernstrom wrote about physical suffering in The Pain Chronicles, a book that is simultaneously a memoir of her own experience of chronic pain, an exploration of the scientific foundations of pain, and an expansive record of pain’s cultural meanings. She explores the paradox of pain: Impossible to articulate, it is a defining and unifying element of humanity. “Pain is the most vivid experience we can never quite describe, returning us to the wordless misery of infancy,” she writes.

Whose pain is real—and whose pain can be cured—are questions that have reverberated for generations.

Wailoo and Thernstrom’s exchange has been edited for concision and clarity. —AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX

Melanie Thernstrom: Your book traces the evolving politics of pain, suffering, and disability—how we as a society evaluate people’s pain, whether it’s real and worthy of treatment and social support, beginning with the story of wounded veterans from World War II. How do we think about pain in a political sense? What is the “liberal” or “conservative” attitude toward pain?

Keith Wailoo: You can begin to understand that divide through caricatures that have developed over the years. Liberals believe in compassion toward others—they believe that subjective claims about pain ought to be taken seriously and endorse broadminded approaches to relief. Conservatives believe in stoic, grin-and-bear-it approaches to pain. They

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believe people should push through pain despite discomfort in order to get back to work. They also tend to critique this bleeding-heart, overly compassion-­oriented society as lacking objective criteria for judging the pain of others, which leads society in a terrible direction of increasing dependency and welfare.

To some extent, these caricatures hold up. Liberal eras like the 1960s and 1970s did produce innovations like patient-­controlled analgesics, which essentially said, regardless of whether you believe a patient is in pain, just hand them a morphine drip and have them determine what level of relief they deserve.

But then sometimes they don’t. You have President Dwight Eisenhower, who’s a Republican and signs the first disability act within Social Security in 1956. Or you have President Jimmy Carter’s attempts to roll back the growth of disability benefits.

It’s a hard issue because pain is such a subjective state. Often, there are no objective criteria to tell how much pain someone is in.

But most health-care providers will tell you that you have to approach patients in good faith. You write about how under President Ronald Reagan, there was a vast purge of the disability rolls because of the perception that many of the people who were receiving disability were cheating. The fear was that people were fabricating pain instead of working, because they could be paid almost as well for staying home and being disabled.

It seems like the best way to address pain-related disability is not to focus on eliminating fraud but to

think about how best we can treat the pain itself.

Some pain, of course, isn’t treatable, but other forms of pain can improve or even be eliminated. Some of the people I interviewed for my book had this catch-22 that they couldn’t work unless their pain was treated, but they couldn’t afford health insurance without working.

You’d think that this is exactly what Medicaid should be able to address, but in some states, Medicaid has been designed so that it’s not enough to be poor. You also have to have a minor in the home. So there’s this social message that poor people’s pain and suffering doesn’t matter unless they’re parents.

Some of what you’re talking about is happening on the clinical level, too. Over the course of the last 50 years, physicians have internalized anxieties about drug addiction and the overuse of painkillers, with OxyContin as the most recent manifestation of that. Physicians are under surveillance because of these political concerns that carry over into criminal justice, and they routinely undertreat their patients as a result.

That doesn’t seem like it’s a wholly bad thing. Painkillers come with a tremendous cost. There are many harmful side effects, and the research shows that there are other modes of non-drug pain treatment like physical therapy that are more effective—they’re just more expensive and time consuming for the doctor. So if the goal were actually to help people in pain, then nonopioid solutions should be the focus of pain treatment.

But if politicians—mostly conservative politicians—

don’t want to spend a lot of money on health care, then you get a system where patients, and especially poor patients, can’t get a more effective treatment.

I agree that paying more attention to the actual people in pain would be a first step to resolving these problems. In politics, the issue of pain takes on a life of its own when liberals caricature conservatives as lacking compassion and conservatives see liberal “I feel your pain” policy as flawed. The debate increasingly moves away from people’s experience.

It needs to be reconnected to these questions of experience.

Your book has done an extraordinary job of laying out those complexities.

I was reviewing it, and it seemed to me that on every other page, I found an observation that pivots from the world of people in pain to the world of the politics of pain. At one point, you say that pain brings out the best and the worst in people. You mean it to describe the experience of living with pain, but politically, that’s also true. It produces extreme compassion but also extraordinary skepticism and judgment.

And that makes sense, those connections, because pain is one of the most salient and terrible facts of human life. I became fascinated with ancient Mesopotamian writings on pain when I was researching my book, and although we now often read religious texts about pain as spiritual and emotional, it’s clear that when you look at these writings, they’re obsessed with physical pain. There was a Babylonian god of toothache and a demon of

notebook

stomachache. Trying to figure out how we should cope with pain is just so central to human life. It’s also a mirror for larger social attitudes. In the Victorian era, there was what could be described as a “great chain of being,” where the highest members of society—like upper-class women—were considered the most pain sensitive. At the bottom of the chain, slaves and Native Americans were thought to be insensate. Current studies show that minorities’ pain and women’s pain is still undertreated, even when they have the exact same complaints that men or white people have. It’s still society saying whose suffering matters to us.

Yes, it evolves with the times. In the 1950s, after Alaska became a state, there were questions about Eskimos and how they feel pain. There were these dramatic stories in the news—which are obviously apocryphal—of how people living in the wilds of Alaska could cut off a gangrenous foot without any anesthesia. Then in the late 1960s, there was an ethnography of patients in a veterans’ hospital called People in Pain. On the one hand, it’s a wonderful book pointing out that Jews and Italians and Irish and Anglo-Americans all talk about pain differently. It may also be read today as the crudest form of ethnic stereotyping. Jews tend to complain about pain.

The Irish are very presentoriented in their pain—that is, if pain is present, they feel it, but as soon as it goes away, it’s as if it didn’t happen. And of course the Anglo-Americans are the classic stoics; that is to say, they rationalize pain,

they think about it intellectually. They’re considered to be the best patients because of that.

One interesting reversal from the stereotypes—that liberals are compassionate and conservatives aren’t— that you write about in the book is the conservative notion that a fetus can feel pain during an abortion.

It’s hard to believe that this position can get anywhere, because there’s a strong scientific consensus that a fetus doesn’t experience pain in the way that people do. The parts of the brain like the limbic system that allow humans and other higher mammals to generate an experience of pain and suffering haven’t developed in a fetus.

So much of the discourse surrounding pain has limited scientific foundation, and the question of fetal pain is one of the best contemporary examples.

That contention—that the fetus feels pain—is extraordinarily politically powerful. In conservative religious states, part of the effort to roll back access to abortion involves these requirements that women be told that the fetus can feel pain before they can proceed with the abortion. In the book, I explain where the idea of fetal pain originated. It goes back to the Reagan years. A film released in 1984 called The Silent Scream argued that the fetus screams— and feels pain—during an abortion. It’s that political contention that drives the fetal-pain debate. Certainly based on what we know about fetal development, neurological development, and the physiology of pain, there is no scientific basis for this claim. But little of this cultural politics of pain

revolves around actual science. Here was a president who was being bashed by liberals for ignoring people in pain, and this allowed him to say that he did feel compassion for a particular class of “person” and a particular kind of pain. It became an important and effective political argument regardless of the scientific underpinnings.

There is a paradox here.

Pain is the No. 1 complaint that brings patients to the doctor, and yet it’s still marginalized as a field. Why do you think that is?

Part of the problem is

Thernstrom

Wailoo

that pain cuts across disease categories. We divide up the problems of health into organ systems or particular ailments; we don’t think about disease according to the experience that people have. It exemplifies how widespread the problem is but also how difficult it is to gain any attention for people in chronic pain, because pain is embedded in so many different illnesses.

You talk about Rush Limbaugh in the book—how this influential conservative commentator claimed to have severe pain and became addicted to pain medicine.

It seems like it could have been an opportunity for a

conservative to shed light on the problem.

That’s a great question. What happens if you have a conservative who believes in deregulation— who frequently criticizes this kind of “bleeding heart” attitude—become dependent on drugs?

It’s especially interesting because with OxyContin, you have one of the places where liberal/conservative divides start to break down. People who were interested in broadening the scope of relief and people who wanted more deregulation embraced the rise of prescription painkillers that became so central to the national conversation we had about OxyContin—it’s a world liberals and conservatives made together.

When Limbaugh first admitted he was addicted to OxyContin, there was a hope, mostly articulated by liberals, that he might become a voice for people in pain. The hearings surrounding his case reveal some of the nuance. But on the radio, he framed it very much in keeping with the conservative script—as a problem that he overcame.

Then he moved on.

So what is the answer?

Can we hope for improvement in pain treatment and pain management? The Affordable Care Act originally included funding for paintreatment education, but then Congress slashed that funding. All that was left in the bill was the money to commission a report on pain by the Institute of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. I was one of the authors of the report, and we concluded that there needs to be sweeping change on the research and the treatment front because pain is

both poorly understood and poorly treated. That report, not surprisingly given the political climate, didn’t get much traction. What do you think has to happen to translate those recommendations into action?

One possibility for change comes simply from the continuing aging of society. Chronic pain is inevitably associated with many degenerative diseases, and that means that pain will only rise in prevalence and importance. To be honest, I think we came very close with that provision in the Affordable Care Act. We could have created a kind of public-awareness campaign, akin to what you might find with AIDS awareness, to begin to shape the national conversation about the character of chronic pain. When the funding got cut, that was a missed opportunity to have a public dialogue about these issues, perhaps a “pain summit” with the goal of depoliticizing pain care. Because I’m also concerned that physicians continue to be woefully undereducated about this issue.

It seems like physicians would be a great potential audience for your book.

Yes, if there’s one thing I think we should start doing, it’s pushing medical schools to embrace a more robust and sustained commitment to actually teaching doctors about pain as a widespread health problem. In the absence of a stable medical and scientific base, it’s likely that pain will continue to be politicized. Of course, it would be valuable for politicians, policy-makers, and people living in pain to understand the political battles that often make relief so hard to find. 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

By

Grace Alone

As sex-abuse allegations multiply, Billy Graham’s grandson is on a mission to persuade Protestant churches to come clean.

B Y K ATH RYN JOYCE ILLL USTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER

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n November 2012, Bob Jones University, the longtime flagship institution of fundamentalism, announced it had hired GRACE (short for Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), an independent group of evangelical lawyers, pastors, and psychologists, to investigate the university’s handling of sexual-abuse and -harassment reports. Bob Jones officials said they were taking the step after watching the pedophilia scandal unfold at Pennsylvania State University the previous year. They vowed to ask forgiveness of any students they may have “underserved.”

In truth, the origins of the investigation were closer to home. In 2011, an abuse scandal from years before had become national news with a 20/20 report. Tina Anderson, a 15-year-old who lived in New Hampshire, was raped and impregnated in 1997 by one of her church’s deacons, then in his late thirties, while she was a babysitter for his family. When Anderson and her mother told their pastor, Bob Jones graduate Chuck Phelps, what had happened, Phelps had Anderson stand before the congregation while he read a confession of her pregnancy. She was then sent to a family in Colorado until the baby was born and given up for adoption. Anderson’s rapist, a registered sex offender, was made to confess as well—but to adultery, not rape—and he remained at the church for years. Phelps, who’d gone on to be president of the fundamentalist Maranatha Baptist Bible College in Wisconsin, maintained close ties to Bob Jones, serving on its board of trustees as well as on its missionary and youth-camp boards.

Students and alumni had already begun to agitate online against the school’s lack of academic and student freedom, as well as its response to reports of sexual abuse. Anderson’s story highlighted what these critics—dismissed by the school as disaffected “detractors”— saw as a pattern in how Bob Jones stigmatized students who reported rape or sexual assault. A senior named Christopher Peterman started a Facebook group and website called Do Right BJU, which aimed to remove Phelps from the board and called for a range of reforms; he organized the first campus protest in the university’s history to raise awareness of

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sexual abuse. Phelps resigned from the board of trustees in December 2011, just days before the rally. But then a few months later, on the eve of graduating, Peterman was expelled for watching Glee, among other violations.

The story continued to grow. Peterman and alumni groups active on Facebook began to hear from more and more students who claimed they had been poorly treated when they reported sexual abuse to school staff. Over the following months, alumni pressured the university to update its policies and investigate the school’s handling of abuse reports. They urged the university to hire GRACE , which had investigated allegations of sex abuse in two Christian missionary groups. To almost everyone’s surprise, seven months after the 20/20 report aired, Bob Jones announced that it had listened.

“People were shocked, elated,” Peterman says. “Victims who lived in silence for so long

Tina Anderson’s rape at age 15 by a church deacon was covered up by her pastor, a Bob Jones University alumnus and board member.

thought that they were finally going to be able to have a voice.”

It’s hard to overstate the significance of the hire. Bob Jones, founded in 1927, isn’t just any conservative Christian college; it’s the de facto center of the national Independent Fundamental Baptist network, which functions almost as a denomination unto itself, with thousands of affiliated churches, feeder schools, and businesses including Bob Jones’s textbook company, radio station, and music publisher. Outsiders call the school the “mother ship” of fundamentalism; the university prefers another moniker, “the fortress of faith.”

To call Bob Jones insular doesn’t quite cover it. On its compound in Greenville, South Carolina, once surrounded in part by barbed wire, faculty children were, until recently, born at the on-campus hospital, raised in the K-12 Bob Jones Academy, educated at the university, then sent out into the world armed with a list of approved churches (mostly those that send the school students or money and that are often pastored by Bob Jones “preacher boys” like Phelps). Until the early 2000s, faculty were paid minuscule wages—hovering around $15,000 a year for a full-time professor—in exchange for subsidized living and the commitment that the school would care for them into old age (a retirement plan called “The Promise”). Rules for students are infamously strict—no TV, no holding hands, no Christian contemporary music, and, until 2000, no interracial dating.

By 2012, though, the fortress no longer seemed inviolable. While Bob Jones was for decades the choice destination for conservative Christian students, enrollment at the school was dropping: down about 10 percent in the last decade and nearly 25 percent since its heyday in the early 1980s. Alumni blogs published pictures of what used to be an overflowing chapel, now left with hundreds of empty seats; two dorms are scheduled to be demolished this summer. Leaked minutes from a recent faculty meeting noted that Christian colleges are closing across the U.S. but that Bob Jones might find salvation in China and South Korea, where “the opportunity for Christian education” is still “unbelievable.” The school has begun selling off assets: the radio station, the music publisher, the

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I

I. The Calling

hospital. “The Promise” to support retiring faculty has been rescinded.

Even so, the idea that Bob Jones would reach outside itself for help was stunning— especially considering to whom it was reaching out. GRACE was founded by a member of evangelical royalty: Boz Tchividjian (“rhymes with religion,” he likes to say), a former prosecutor who teaches law at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Jerry Falwell’s legacy school, and who is the grandson of “America’s pastor,” Billy Graham. Before he came to fame, Graham was a Bob Jones University dropout who Bob Jones Sr. said would never amount to more than a “poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.” Though the two later became friends, they split again in 1957 over Graham’s revival crusades—in particular, a crusade at Madison Square Garden that Jones, who’d warned Graham to avoid cities and politicians, con-

churches. … When are evangelicals going to wake up and say we have a massive problem in our own churches?”

For years, Protestants have assumed they were immune to the abuses perpetrated by celibate Catholic priests. But Tchividjian believes that Protestant churches, groups, and schools have been worse than Catholics in their response. Mission fields, he says, are “magnets” for would-be molesters; ministries and schools do not understand the dynamics of abuse; and “good ol’ boy” networks routinely cover up victims’ stories to protect their reputations. He fears it is only a matter of time before it all blows up in their faces and threatens the survival of powerful Protestant institutions.

In the past couple of years, Tchividjian has begun to look prophetic. Reports and allegations of sex abuse, rape, and harassment—and a culture that has badly mishandled them— have become more and more frequent. In fall

Boz Tchividjian

c h r i s t o p h e r b r e e d lo v e

For years, Protestants have assumed they were immune to the abuses perpetrated by celibate Catholic priests. But Tchividjian believes that their response to sexual abuse has been worse. demned as too ecumenical and accommodating to modern society. The quarrel between the two men led to a rift between fundamentalists and evangelicals that persists today, as evangelicals seek to win souls by engaging mainstream culture and fundamentalists retreat from it. When Jones’s great-grandson Stephen Jones, now president of the university, appealed to Graham’s heir, it seemed like a transformative moment. Perhaps the fortress was raising its gates at last.

It was momentous for Tchividjian and GRACE as well. Tchividjian had become convinced that the Protestant world is teetering on the edge of a sex-abuse scandal similar to the one that had rocked the Catholic Church.

He is careful to say that there’s not enough data to compare the prevalence of child sex abuse in Protestant and Catholic institutions, but he’s convinced the problem has reached a crisis point. He’s not alone in that belief.

In 2012, Christian radio host Janet Mefferd declared, “This is an epidemic going on in

2012, former members of Sovereign Grace Ministries, a “family” of about 80 conservative churches from various theological traditions, filed a class-action lawsuit against the ministry for failing to report allegations of sex abuse in the 1980s and 1990s—including abuse perpetrated by church leaders’ immediate family members—and discouraging victims and their families from going to law enforcement. (The lawsuit was dismissed last year because of expired statutes of limitations and jurisdictional questions, but an appeal and criminal investigations are under way.) This spring, an exposé in The New Republic revealed that Patrick Henry, the college of choice for evangelical homeschoolers, has covered up alleged campus rape and sexual assault, thanks largely to its victim-blaming emphasis on women’s purity.

Allegations of similar practices soon surfaced against other Christian colleges, including Pensacola Christian College in Florida and Cedarville University in Ohio. A documentary released in February, No Place to Call Home,

recounts the systematic sexual abuse of children in the 1980s at Jesus People USA , an evangelical commune in Chicago. The empire of Bill Gothard, founder of the fundamentalist Institute in Basic Life Principles, crumbled earlier this year after bloggers revealed dozens of sexual-harassment and molestation claims against him.

Common threads run through the stories: authoritarian settings where rule-following and obedience reign supreme; counseling techniques that emphasize victims’ own culpability; male leaders with few checks on their power; and, in the eyes of many Christians including Tchividjian, a perversion of the Bible to justify all three. “When you have this motley group of many denominations, this independent environment, and then this distortion of scripture, that’s an environment where abuse can flourish,” Tchividjian says.

“But we’ve never been forced to deal with it on a Protestant-wide basis.”

This will be a challenge. The Protestant

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world includes tens of thousands of denominations, plus thousands more nondenominational churches, ministries, mission boards, and subcultures. Unlike the Catholic Church, there is no Vatican, no shared leadership connecting, say, Calvary Chapel’s 1,600 churches with the Southern Baptist Convention’s 46,000. No common standards apply but the authority of scripture, which is interpreted differently from church to church, school to school, mission to mission.

Even with its tightly controlled hierarchy, the Catholic Church has responded abysmally to sex abuse. “The Catholics have been forced through three decades of lawsuits to address this issue,” Tchividjian says. “The first decade, they gave it lip service, but after three decades, hundreds of millions of dollars lost, and publicity that devastated the Church, they were forced to begin addressing it. It’s my prayer that we’ll deal with it without being forced to.”

years later, the victims’ family had been asked to leave the church and the Sunday school volunteer was about to go on trial.

The pastor’s mishandling of the case touched a nerve with Tchividjian, who had seen similar dynamics play out many times.

When he’d started working in the district attorney’s office, criminal cases had been distributed to prosecutors “like a deck of cards,” each prosecutor getting a mix from grand theft to molestation. Tchividjian saw how his colleagues shuddered at the sex-abuse cases and tended to plea them out quickly, as though the facts were too awful to bring to court. “It was almost too painful for them to grasp,” he says. When Tchividjian requested to take on all the district’s child sex-abuse cases, the other prosecutors happily obliged. In time, he established a sex-crimes unit that handled hundreds of cases over eight years.

All too often, he says, a pastor would come

educating Protestant churches about sex abuse and the ways in which religion can be used to sweep abuse under the rug.

They started speaking at conferences, urging Protestants to take child sex abuse seriously and support survivors rather than blame them. Tchividjian wrote a booklet for the World Reformed Fellowship, a cross-denominational network, on “Protecting Children from Abuse in the Church.” Today GRACE , which still has no full-time staffers, offers prevention seminars for churches, along with consultations when abuse allegations arise.

On a snowy Saturday afternoon in January, in a converted shopping plaza north of Philadelphia, Tchividjian stood before several hundred staffers and volunteers at Calvary Chapel of Central Bucks County. Though he’d be hard to pick out of a crowd, with his close-cropped brown hair, glasses, and blazer-and-khakis uniform of a Baptist college professor, when

Churches are havens for abusers. 93 percent of convicted sex offenders describe themselves as religious. Offenders who report strong church ties abuse more often, with younger victims.

GRACE’S MISSION GREW out of a phone call

that Tchividjian received from a reporter in the summer of 2003. Now in private practice, Tchividjian for eight years had prosecuted child sex-abuse cases as a district attorney in northeastern Florida. The reporter was looking for perspective on a story. In a Pentecostal church in Wisconsin, a convicted sex offender who’d been allowed to volunteer in Sunday school had allegedly abused two sisters, ages 8 and 12.

When the girls told their parents, their father went to the pastor, who advised a sit-down with the volunteer. During this meeting, Tchividjian says, “the perp did what perps usually do: cry and ask for forgiveness, so happy he was caught.” The pastor said it sounded like repentance to him and that the accused could prove it by staying active in church life. Would that be enough to allow the father to forgive him, the pastor asked, and to forgo reporting the accused to “man’s authority”? The father said OK, if that’s what God wanted them to do. By the time the journalist called Tchividjian, six

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to court in a supportive role, almost always sitting on the perpetrator’s side of the aisle, not the victim’s. The Wisconsin case made Tchividjian think back on those pastors. He began to realize that he had a calling of his own: to teach the Protestant church to be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. “I was encountering survivors who were absolutely eviscerated as a result of disclosing abuse in the Protestant church,” Tchividjian says, “and the long-term damage is sometimes more from how the church responded, or failed to respond, than the abuse itself.”

He contacted people he’d met over the years, advocates for abuse survivors he suspected were Christian, like Victor Vieth, former head of the Gundersen National Child Protection Training Center, and Diane Langberg, a Pennsylvania psychologist who specializes in trauma, including child abuse. Together, in 2004, they pulled together a board of lawyers, pastors, and therapists and formed GRACE . To their knowledge, this was the first group dedicated to

Tchividjian gets going—as his talks escalate from campus lecture to closing argument to full-on sermon—you can hear and see a flash of the fiery young Billy Graham.

As he always does, Tchividjian delivered a scary set of facts: If general statistics apply— a quarter of U.S. women and a sixth of men have been sexually abused before age 18— Calvary Chapel’s 1,000-member congregation might easily include 200 victims. But even that doesn’t get at the scope of the problem, he said. Congregations need to understand that churches are targets and havens for abusers. One study has found that 93 percent of admitted sex offenders describe themselves as religious. Offenders who report strong church ties abuse more often, with younger victims.

That’s not because Christians are inherently more abusive, he said, but because they’re more vulnerable to those who are. Tchividjian repeated what one convicted sex abuser told clinical psychologist Anna Salter in her book Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex

photo courtesy bonnie cheshire

Offenders: “Church people”—always looking to see the best in people, to welcome converts, to save sinful souls—are “easy to fool.”

Tchividjian rattled off ways in which Christians’ openness can allow abuse to go unchecked: Perpetrators tend to use scripture to coerce, justify, and silence. If they’re clergy, they will exploit their positions; if they’re laypeople, they will take advantage of a church hungry for volunteers and rely on the trust given to members of a church family. “The reason why offenders get away with what they do is because we have too many cultures of silence,” Tchividjian said. “When something does surface, all too often the church leadership quiets it down. Because they’re concerned about reputation: ‘This could harm the name of Jesus, so let’s just take care of it internally.’

“Jesus doesn’t need your reputation!” Tchividjian declared. “When somebody says that, it’s a lie. Keeping things in the dark and allowing souls to be destroyed by abuse, that shames the Gospel. Jesus is all about transparency.”

Calvary Chapel’s pastor John Hessler, who preaches frequently about his own imperfect past as someone who enjoyed the 1960s, wants his church to be vigilant. “In the old days,” Hessler says, “if you had a pulse or could fog a mirror, you could serve in children’s ministry.”

By the time Calvary Chapel was founded 15 years ago, holding its first services in a barn, insurance companies had begun to require that churches conduct background checks on all volunteers. Hessler has made those checks increasingly rigorous, but even in the church’s young life, he has run into a number of troubling situations. There was the middle-aged congregant who would drift out of service to linger around the Sunday school and who angrily quit the church when asked to stay away from the kids. There was one of the congregation’s most straitlaced members, an eager would-be missionary, whose daughter alleged at 16 that he’d been molesting her for eight years. So when GRACE came to Philadelphia for a training session in 2013, Hessler sent several staff to attend. After the staff came back shaken, Hessler invited Tchividjian to address his church.

“It’s a balancing act,” Hessler says. “We don’t want to live skeptically. How do you live in such a way that you’re not suspecting that everybody

is a dangerous person but are realistic enough to create boundaries so that a person who is a would-be perpetrator would find this too difficult an environment to operate in?”

It’s a challenge for Tchividjian, too. Years of investigating abuse cases—“we spend our days swimming in Christian cesspools,” he says— has left him hypervigilant. Megachurches with thousands of volunteers unnerve him, and after working on too many cases where girls were molested by someone in their best friend’s family, Tchividjian and his wife no longer let their daughters spend the night at friends’ houses, let alone church camps or “lock-in” churchbasement sleepovers. “But for my wife,” he says, “I don’t trust anyone 100 percent—I’ve seen too much, too many scenarios. What I have to wrestle with is how do I deal with that? How do I balance that tension, between not trusting anyone and knowing that we have to function in life? You have to figure that out for yourself.

But know this: Offenders exploit trust.”

II. The Missions In 2009, as invitations from church groups were multiplying, GRACE was tapped for a new kind of work. A Florida-based group, New Tribes Mission, was in trouble, as now-adult

children of its missionaries were speaking out publicly about sex abuse at a New Tribes boarding school years earlier. Another phone call to Tchividjian, from out of the blue, led him from preaching prevention to once again investigating perps.

With more than 3,000 missionaries across 20 countries, New Tribes members have been described as the “Indiana Joneses of the missionary world.” Founded by a Los Angeles missionary in 1942, New Tribes sends its staff to remote locales, from rural West Africa to the Arctic, to evangelize communities that don’t have translations of the Bible.

Children of the missionaries are known in Christian shorthand as “MKs,” for missionary kids. About five years ago, a group of MKs whose parents were stationed in Senegal during the 1980s and 1990s started exchanging stories about the abuse they say they’d suffered.

New Tribes had some 20 or 30 couples spread across Senegal, embedded with villagers they were trying to convert. New Tribes culture (though not formal policy) dictated that children, when they reached six or seven, were sent to a central mission boarding school so their parents could focus on evangelizing.

In Senegal, the school was in the city of

The playground at the Fanda boarding school where children of New Tribes missionaries were sent in the 1980s and 1990s and allegedly subjected to widespread sexual and physical abuse

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photo courtesy bonnie cheshire

Fanda. The children lived there under the field directors, they were told that they were grounded in the conviction that Christians supervision of untrained and usually reluc- gossiping and that their “slander” would are saved “by grace alone”—that is, by their tant New Tribes “dorm parents”—some of “destroy another man’s ministry.” The kids say profession of faith and not by their actions. them missionaries who’d failed in the field— they were told that their complaints would con- Abuse victims often describe the communiand saw their biological parents infrequently demn Africans to hell, because their parents ties they came from as legalistic: isolated and until graduation. The dorm parents and the would no longer be there to save souls. The authoritarian bodies that placed obedience missionaries were themselves overseen by parents of the MK who alleged statutory rape and rules above all else, where no one was field leaders, whose power and control, GRACE were sent back to New Tribes’ “boot camp” and allowed to make small mistakes and where would later write in its investigative report, eventually expelled from the field. crimes had to be covered up to protect the “paralleled that of a pastoral staff, a congreIn 1988, Brooks left Senegal for a medical fur- cause of Christ. gational board of Elders, a set of church Dea- lough. In late 1989, while he was on leave in the New Tribes’ school in Fanda closed in 1997, cons, an employer, a local civil government, United States, additional allegations of abuse officially because of security concerns as civil and a family chieftain, all in one.” Former staff emerged from Fanda. Brooks made a partial war raged within the country but unofficially members are more blunt. They describe field confession to New Tribes administrators and because so many missionaries withdrew their leaders as despotic. children from the school that there The dorm parents—whom the were no longer enough students to MKs were taught to call aunts and maintain it. That same year, New uncles, and to see as representatives Tribes conducted an ill-conceived of God—were permitted to spank internal investigation into the abuse the children, and MKs describe claims. Mission officials sat in on spankings that were more like beatmissionary kids’ interviews, and ings, leaving children with welts in the end, all but one of the abuse after minor infractions like failing victims declined to testify. Conseto sleep at naptime. Some say they quently, New Tribes identified just were subjected to cruel and bizarre two perpetrators and cast the abuse punishments like being forced to that occurred at Fanda as an excepeat their own vomit. “The culture at tion. New Tribes continued to operschool was one of fear,” says Bonnie ate schools in other countries it was Cheshire, a 34-year-old MK who was evangelizing. sent to Fanda at age 7.

In 2008, Kari Mikitson, another In the mid-1980s, one of the dorm Fanda MK who claims to have been fathers, David Brooks, who oversaw abused, contacted New Tribes lookthe “Little Dorm” for the youngest ing for answers: What had the mischildren, allegedly began sexually sion known about the alleged abuses Kari Mikitson, center, and Bonnie Cheshire, right, outside the Fanda school abusing girls, including Cheshire. while they were being perpetrated, The missionary kids say he would come to their was asked to resign the following spring. But and what actions had it taken to ensure it beds at night under the guise of comforting New Tribes never notified U.S. or Senegalese would not happen again in other New Tribes them and touch them inappropriately. They say authorities, and he was never prosecuted. schools? The mission board and lawyers met he taught them to masturbate and he encourNew Tribes’ Senegal mission exemplifies with Mikitson and Cheshire to offer an apology aged the girls to take pictures of one another what Tchividjian and GRACE call “spiritual and ask for forgiveness. That wasn’t enough. in the shower and to play games that involved abuse”—wielding religious authority to per- Mikitson and other MKs founded a website, finding objects hidden in his or other girls’ suade the victims that they were responsible fandaeagles.com, to publicize the alleged bathing suits. Another dorm father allegedly for what happened to them. They say such abuse. The site has had 3.6 million views and punished girls by holding them down and kiss- abuse is often the by-product of “legalism,” a shows up on Google searches right below the ing them. One allegedly groped a missionary catchall term for rigid, rule-oriented Christi- New Tribes Mission website. New Tribes subkid’s breasts. The wife of a New Tribes mission- anity wherein the state of your soul is reflected sequently conducted a second cursory review ary allegedly had sex with a male MK. In all, by the length of your skirt or how you disci- of the Fanda allegations. When the MKs kept seven staff members at Fanda were accused pline your children. “Legalism” is often used up the pressure, the mission agreed to hire a of sexual abuse. by moderate Christians to decry the petty neutral party to investigate.

MKs’ letters home were censored, but when obsessions of fundamentalists. But the term The missionary kids were initially skeptical of some of the girls told their parents what was also ref lects a seminal theological debate yet another group promising a “Godly response,” occurring, and when parents told New Tribes within Protestantism, which was originally as GRACE did. “This was the same terminology

used against us by New Tribes to justify both the abuses and the cover-ups,” Mikitson says.

“In evangelical-speak, ‘Godly response’ to abuse means using any means necessary to protect the institution’s bottom line, while piously pretending their real concern is protecting the name of Jesus.” But GRACE offered to fly Mikitson to Florida to observe one of its church trainings.

She went prepared to “cross GRACE off the list” but instead heard such a staunch defense of victims’ rights that she became convinced that the group was right for the job.

GRACE took New Tribes’s commission with two conditions: that the investigation would be independent and that its final report would be provided to MKs and their families, with New Tribes only learning the results after GRACE’s investigators completed their confidential interviews.

Their report wouldn’t lead to criminal charges, because the alleged abuses had taken

process to take a few weeks. Instead, it lasted more than a year, culminating in a 66-page report. The abuse turned out to be far more widespread and severe than anything even a former prosecutor could have imagined. “We lost a little bit of our soul on that investigation,” Tchividjian says.

The investigators began by sending a confidential questionnaire to all the Fanda students from the 1980s and 1990s whom they could find. Fifty-six of 108 MKs responded (compared to a 3 percent rate when New Tribes tried), and GRACE’s team interviewed 21 in person or by phone, taking written statements from a dozen more. They also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of mission records and interviewed nearly 40 New Tribes staff who had been associated with the Fanda school.

Released in August 2010, the report identified more than 20 victims of alleged sexual abuse and documented dozens more phys-

Tchividjian and the other investigators spent a day going through the report with New Tribes’ board of directors. They prayed together, and New Tribes agreed on the spot to most of the recommendations. The mission’s CEO, Larry Brown, told the conservative Christian World magazine that the board was “ashamed” by what GRACE had found and acknowledged that Fanda’s authoritarian atmosphere and theology—specifically its culture of “legalism”—was to blame. He pledged to find out what had happened at the other schools.

“It seemed very clear to us that they got it,” Tchividjian says. But that was the immediate response. “The long-term response,” Tchividjian says, “was that New Tribes pulled back significantly from us. I think what was happening was other institutions were looking at them thinking, ‘Why in the world would you hire a group to do what they did? They dragged you through the mud.’”

Abuse victims often describe the communities they came from as authoritarian bodies that placed obedience and rules above all else, where crimes were covered up to protect the cause of Christ. place so long ago and outside the United States.

Instead, GRACE aimed for another sort of reckoning. Tchividjian shies away from comparisons to truth and reconciliation commissions like South Africa’s, because of how the word “reconciliation” is often used in a Christian context: as an end point to be reached as expeditiously as possible, as code for cheap grace.

True reconciliation, Tchividjian maintains, is the prerogative of the harmed; beyond that, it’s up to God. Instead, GRACE aimed for radical truth-telling. Its report would give New Tribes a factual accounting of how it failed the MKs so that it might confess, repent, and change its practices. “From day one,” Tchividjian says, “we thought the objective should be to demonstrate authentic repentance, to know where you’ve failed and to be transparent about it.”

GRACE board members, including theologians and pastors, volunteered to serve on the investigative team along with former prosecutors Tchividjian and Victor Vieth and psychologist Diane Langberg. They expected the

ical and emotional abuse allegations. The victims of spiritual abuse at Fanda, GRACE concluded, “may well include almost the total school population.” In addition, missionary kids from other New Tribes boarding schools around the world had gotten in touch with GRACE , with some reports going back to the 1950s, and it recommended that New Tribes investigate those claims as thoroughly as those from Fanda. “We have seen what the devil does with silence and inaction,” the investigators concluded, “and we reject it as the sin that it is.”

The report offered a checklist of ways that New Tribes could demonstrate repentance: Establish a $1 million fund for victims’ and their families’ care; terminate 14 former dorm parents and supervisors; notify the abusers’ current churches; cooperate with future lawsuits; and, for those Fanda and New Tribes leaders who had ignored the abuse, require a penalty tithe of 10 percent of their paychecks for the victims’ fund.

New Tribes soon announced new investigations of alleged abuses in at least nine other schools in eight other countries—but this time, it wouldn’t be hiring GRACE . The mission hired a new coordinator to administer investigations under the project name IHART, or Independent Historical Abuse Review Team. New Tribes has told the missionary kids that whatever information the research turns up “will be stored at a law firm,” accessible only through “a legal process.” (New Tribes leaders declined repeated requests for comment on the investigations and to answer questions about whether it has implemented the recommendations in GRACE’s report.)

“I think what happened with GRACE and the Fanda report is they took New Tribes by surprise, and it was a huge blow to them when it came out,” says Rachel Steffen, a former New Tribes missionary who says that her two daughters were sexually abused by a dorm parent in the Philippines. “I think they vowed that they would never lose control like that again.”

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

Nearly four years later, only one of New Tribes’ subsequent investigations has been completed, for a school in Brazil, and the results have not been released.

IN 2011, AS THE INITIAL PROMISE of GRACE’s

first investigation turned to disappointment, another embattled missionary group came calling. The Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) was founded in 1927 by a splinter group called “Regular Baptists” to promote a “militant, missionary-minded, Biblically-separate haven of Fundamentalism.” Thanks in part to its insular culture, the group remains obscure even in conservative Christian circles— GRACE’s leaders had never heard of it—but ABWE is hardly marginal, with around 900 missionaries in 60 countries, backed by some 5,000 supporting churches. Here was a second chance to establish GRACE’s model of redemption in a group

headquarters in Pennsylvania. A staff psychologist, Russell Lloyd, flew to Indiana with Ketcham’s supervisor, Russell Ebersole, to determine whether Julia was telling the truth.

Once convinced, Diana says, they compelled Julia, who was just shy of her 14th birthday, to sign a confession stating that she had “participated in a physical relationship” with the doctor and that what she did was “very wrong.”

The ABWE officials then flew with Julia to Bangladesh. Julia’s parents were made aware of her “confession” but never told that their daughter had said she had been raped. Julia was made to ask her family’s forgiveness.

Lloyd and Ebersole confronted Ketcham, who left the mission field and returned to his home state of Michigan. ABWE sent a vague notice to the churches that sponsored Ketcham’s missionary work, stating that he’d been let go for “immoral conduct”—a phrase that most read as adultery. Ketcham estab-

morning feeling hazy and nauseated, unable to recall what happened the night before. At a 2002 ABWE reunion, a group of now-adult Bangladesh MKs confronted the mission’s new president, Michael Loftis, about Ketcham.

They went away expecting the mission to launch an investigation, or at least report Ketcham to the Michigan Board of Medicine.

But ABWE offered only to help pay for victims’ counseling. Little happened until 2011, when Julia spoke out publicly. After finally telling her family about her alleged rape, she co-founded a website, BangladeshMKsSpeak, with another missionary kid, Susannah Beals Baker. The site detailed Julia’s story and published testimonies from other victims. In the first week it was live, BangladeshMKsSpeak attracted thousands of comments and scores of other stories.

ABWE was forced to respond. The mission reported Ketcham to Michigan’s medi-

The missionary girls remember being alone with the doctor in the hospital or his home, and then waking up mornings hazy and nauseated, unable to recall what happened the night before. that was struggling with its past sins.

In 1988, one of ABWE ’s missionary doctors in Bangladesh, Donn Ketcham, allegedly began sexually abusing and raping a 12-year-old missionary kid who asked not to be named; we’ll call her Julia. Ketcham, then in his late fifties, was a beloved figure with deep ties to ABWE; his Baptist-preacher father had helped found the General Association of Regular Baptists. He was charming and charismatic and alleged to have had serial affairs with younger female ABWE staff, more than once resulting in the woman’s dismissal.

Julia’s sister Diana, a 41-year-old pastor’s wife in Colorado who alleges that Ketcham groped her in Bangladesh, told the Prospect the story she and Julia shared with GRACE .

In July 1989, the sisters were back home visiting an adult sister in Indiana when Julia, who hadn’t revealed what had occurred to anyone in the family, told their pastor what Ketcham had allegedly done. Instead of informing the family, Diana says, the pastor phoned ABWE

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lished a family medical practice where local church members sent their children, and where he continued to work for more than 20 years. (ABWE did not reply to repeated interview requests for this story; attempts to reach Ketcham, now in his eighties, through his daughter yielded no response.)

Julia struggled with eating disorders and repeatedly attempted suicide. By the time the family left Bangladesh in 1991 to get her better counseling, Diana says that the alleged rape had “forever altered her life.” The family wouldn’t hear her whole story for another 20 years.

More than a decade after Julia’s family returned to the United States, stories about Ketcham began to surface. At least two MKs allege they were raped, and five others allege being groped under the pretext of unnecessary breast or pelvic examinations. Another six or seven missionary kids accuse Ketcham of drugging and abusing them. They remember being alone with Ketcham at the ABWE hospital or in his home and waking up in the

cal board; within a year, he surrendered his license. On its website, ABWE published a confession of its own, acknowledging that Ketcham should have been fired years earlier and that the vagueness of its dismissal letter had allowed the doctor to conceal his alleged acts.

The letter pleaded with the MKs to “please, please forgive us.” ABWE president Michael Loftis was let go. By mid-April, at the missionary kids’ urging, GRACE had a new job, investigating Ketcham and ABWE’s response.

GRACE went to work in June 2011. It soon became clear, however, that ABWE was not enthusiastic about being investigated. The mission failed to produce documents GRACE requested, Tchividjian says, and in early 2012, ABWE began a separate investigation of all its missions. The result was a brief website notice stating that a handful of abuse cases had been confirmed, that unnamed offenders had been identified, and that none was still working in the field. Some allegations were not reviewed, ABWE said, because “the victims

did not consent to pursuing an investigation.”

While GRACE’s investigation continued, Diana says the mission tried to undermine it: ABWE leaders offered compensation for Julia’s treatment in what struck the family as an attempt to buy her future silence. They said no.

In January 2013, after more than 100 interviews, GRACE announced, in a routine update on its website, that its investigation was nearly complete. Three weeks later, ABWE fired GRACE , alleging that the investigation was “fatally flawed” and “would not find the truth.”

For survivors and their families, this was devastating news; it meant, under the terms of

published a 15-page, point-by-point rebuttal on GRACE’s website. Their process wasn’t like a courtroom’s, they said, because this wasn’t a legal proceeding. The investigators recorded some testimonies, but not all, because they allowed interviewees to ask that they not be tape-recorded for fear of reprisal from ABWE . There were no court-grade transcripts because hiring court reporters would be exorbitantly expensive, and the mission had balked at paying even a fraction of previous transcription costs. GRACE pointed out that all interviewees, both survivors and mission staff, had been given drafts of their transcripts

New Tribes investigations, was founded by a Mormon couple, one of whom runs an image-­c onsulting firm. The company’s website emphasizes that “the client suggests the scope of work initially.” In a brief statement responding to questions from the Prospect, Pii CEO Linda Davis characterized its work for ABWE and New Tribes as “totally independent investigations following investigative procedures, very thorough in nature.”

Beyond that, she had no comment.

In a section for frequently asked questions on its website, ABWE promises that in its “desire for transparency,” it “intends to pub-

p h oto co u r t e s y ta m a r a r i c e

Above: A teenage Tamara Rice on a train in Bangladesh, where she alleges she was abused by missionary doctor Donn Ketcham. Right: Julia (front center) and her sister Diana (right) allege they, too, were abused by Ketcham.

its contract with the mission, that GRACE ’s report could not be released.

The public criticism of GRACE put its fledgling reputation on the line. ABWE claimed that the missionary kids’ testimony was tainted by their exposure to one another; that the investigators weren’t using the evidentiary standards of a courtroom and had not recorded the interviews; and that eight interviewees had complained that GRACE had asked leading questions and excluded positive recollections about ABWE from their interview summaries.

ABWE claimed that one unnamed interviewee said she felt “revictimized” by GRACE .

Tchividjian and his fellow investigators

and asked to correct them however they saw fit. Fond memories of the Bangladesh mission, the investigators noted, were not what they’d been hired to find. “When placed in the context of ABWE’s conduct over the past 20 months,” GRACE concluded, the termination “strongly suggests ABWE is unwilling to have itself investigated unless the investigation is within your control.”

A BW E replaced GR ACE w ith Professional Investigators International (Pii), which said it was conducting not an investigation but “research” into the Bangladesh hospital where Ketcham had worked. Pii, which is also handling at least one of the

licly release the unedited report, when it is completed.” The Bangladesh missionary kids are dubious. When Pii contacted Tamara Rice, an MK, for an interview last November, she says the investigators refused to say how her answers would be used or whether her identity would be kept confidential. She, like other MKs, has refused to speak with the new investigators under those conditions.

“ABWE accused GRACE of building a case against them in their investigation,” Rice says.

“I feel there’s a good chance that what ABWE is doing now is building a defense case against future lawsuits—that really these interviews are lining the walls of their lawyers’ office.”

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

Left: Bob Jones University likes to call itself the “fortress of faith.” Above: Longtime Dean of Students Jim Berg has been accused of silencing and shaming abuse victims at the school.

Opposite: An alumni group, Do Right BJU, staged the first protest in campus history in 2011 to raise awareness of sexual abuse.

III. The Fortress By 2013, a decade after Tchividjian felt called to spread the word, sex abuse had become a topic that Protestants could no longer ignore.

Since 2004, GRACE had trained more than 150 churches and ministries, consulted with dozens more on prevention policies, and helped implement abuse-awareness programs at six Christian colleges. Despite the disappointments, the New Tribes and ABWE investigations had shed new light on the problem. So had a fast-growing network of survivor websites publishing accounts of abuse.

Two major evangelical foundations, children’s mission ministry OneHope and relief organization Samaritan’s Purse (run by Tchividjian’s controversial uncle, Franklin Graham), had asked GRACE to help them develop and implement abuse-prevention and response policies.

Tchividjian, Langberg, and others on the GRACE board were regulars on Christian media. The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant body, had passed a resolution calling on member churches to report suspicions or allegations of sexual abuse to law enforcement.

Then as the ABWE investigation was unraveling, Bob Jones University turned to GRACE. It appeared that the school was ready to open itself to change. Bob Jones revised its sex-abuse policies, held its first campus-wide

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awareness training, and sent a sizable delegation to a GRACE conference. Meanwhile, alumni and staff members were telling their stories to GRACE .

While Tchividjian would not comment about their ongoing investigation, the Prospect interviewed eight Bob Jones alumni who say they’ve given testimony. Their accounts offer a glimpse of what GRACE is likely to find: a cloistered atmosphere in which abuse victims have been discouraged from coming forward, and in which those who do are routinely blamed and discouraged from reporting it to family members and police.

Katie Landry, now 31, left her homeschooling Mennonite family in Ohio and matriculated at Bob Jones when she was 19, two weeks after she says she’d been raped by a co-worker back home. “When that happened to me,” she says, “I didn’t have the word rape in my vocabulary. I knew that there was a word called fornication, when an unmarried person has sex, and I knew there was adultery, when a married person has sex outside marriage. But there wasn’t anything in my life that said sometimes sex happens when you don’t want it and you didn’t ask for it.”

Landry acted out her freshman year, which in the context of Bob Jones meant she left campus without permission to get pizza with a few friends. She says she was suspended for a

semester and came back to intensive disciplinary counseling. When she finally told her counselor what had happened, she was taken to see Jim Berg, a powerful campus figure who was Bob Jones’s dean of students for nearly three decades, from 1981 to 2010. Landry says she told Berg how she’d struggled since the rape to understand where God had been and why He hadn’t intervened.

“I was hoping he’d say that he’d help me get help, help me tell my parents, maybe even help me call the police,” Landry says. “And I was hoping that he’d tell me it wasn’t my fault.”

Instead, she says Berg’s first response was to ask whether she’d been drinking or smoking pot the day she was raped. He then suggested, she says, that her rape had a spiritual root. “He said that under every sin is another sin; that there is a sin in your life that caused your rape, and we have to find out what that sin was,” Landry says.

She recalls running out of Berg’s office, terrified she’d be expelled. Landry says that neither Berg, who now teaches counseling, nor the dorm counselor she’d first told ever checked back with her. At the end of the next semester, Landry withdrew from Bob Jones, returned home to Ohio, and married a childhood friend, reasoning that no other man would ever love her. The marriage was short-lived. For three years, Landry never told anyone else about her

found the LGBT alumni group BJUnity, grew up in the Bob Jones system in the 1970s and 1980s. Hoffman alleges he was molested as a young boy at the Bob Jones Academy by a university faculty member who came into his shower stall in a gym at a nearby Bob Jones– affiliated church. Hoffman says his molester offered to counsel him to overcome his samesex attraction in what seemed both a comeon and a threat. Hoffman did not tell anyone what had occurred until years later, afraid he wouldn’t be believed.

On three occasions, the Prospect requested interviews with Bob Jones leadership— specifically requesting to speak to Berg and President Stephen Jones—but was refused.

“Bob Jones University will not participate in an interview,” replied university spokesperson Randy Page, adding, “We do not want BJU to be mentioned in the profile you are writing about GRACE .” (Shortly before press

photo courtesy christopher peterman

Tchividjian and GRACE have faith that powerful institutions like Bob Jones University will imperil their existence for the sake of doing right—radical sacrifice through radical truth. rape, and she didn’t again seek treatment for another five years. “I already had a plate full of shame when I walked into Dr. Berg’s office,” she says, “and he put more shame on that, more than I could bear.”

When Camille Lewis was a student at Bob Jones in the late 1980s, a roommate told her that her father had molested her for years.

Lewis urged her to talk to someone and arranged an appointment with Dean Berg.

He didn’t tell the roommate that it was her fault, Lewis says, but he did warn her not to go to the police. Over time, Lewis began to detect a pattern. She became a speech and rhetoric professor at Bob Jones, where she worked from 1990 to 2007, and says that during her two decades at the school, 11 other women told her they had been sexually assaulted, raped, or molested—8 on campus, and 3 off. She knew others, she says, who were sexually harassed as students or employees. But when they sought help from the school, Lewis says, the response was the same as the one her roommate and

Landry had received. “The metaphor they used in the olden days was a ‘show window,’ that they were setting up a show window to sell God and didn’t want anything marring it,” she says.

“That’s why it’s perfect for predators, because they just hide behind Bob Jones’s silence. It’s built into the system.”

Cathy Harris came to Bob Jones’s nursing school in the mid-1990s. She says she was already struggling with PTSD from being abused as a child. Dean Berg counseled her not to take medication, she says, and he suggested she was complicit in her abuse. After she attempted suicide in 1996, Harris says, Berg sent her expulsion letter to the hospital. Two other former students who sought counseling for childhood physical or sexual abuse told the Prospect they were expelled or “asked not to return” when university staff became aware of psychological problems or self-harming behaviors that may have stemmed from abuse; two of these cases occurred within the past four years.

Jeffrey Hoffman, who would later help

time, Page sent a link to the university’s online statements about GRACE .)

By this January, when they announced that the final report would likely be ready for release in March, GRACE’s investigators had conducted more than 100 interviews.

Then days before GRACE was set to conduct its final interviews, school administrators sent it a termination notice. The letter was full of praise and thanks for GRACE’s work but said that changes at the university—Stephen Jones had just announced that he would retire in the spring—had convinced the institution to sever the contract. The university asked to meet with GRACE as soon as possible to draw up a new contract, writing, “We think that it is in the best public interest of both GRACE and BJU to meet and reach a new agreement that will enable us to accomplish our objectives.” The letter specified no reason for firing GRACE and gave no indication of what new terms the school wanted to negotiate.

GRACE e-mailed the interviewees to let them

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

know what had happened. Then it posted the For those who had participated in the GRACE schools, so too does each new headline story— termination notice online, and the story went investigation, the termination sparked more about Patrick Henry’s poor handling of campus viral. When the relatively small and separat- than outrage. Three witnesses told the Prospect sexual assault, about Sovereign Grace Minisist ABWE had fired GRACE, few people outside that the move had thrown them into depression tries’ alleged culture of abuse—prompt more the worlds of fundamentalism and conservative or panic attacks; one said she had contemplated survivors to come forward, from myriad minisChristianity knew or paid attention. But this suicide. Two others worried that it was their tries and churches. Even if all implicated instiwas Bob Jones University, America’s fortress of testimony that had caused the trouble when tutions decided to trust GRACE to investigate fundamentalism. The story was reported in The Bob Jones’s leaders somehow got wind of it. “I them, the workload would be far more than New York Times and The Washington Post, and wanted so badly for this to come out, but not the group could handle. the firing was condemned on websites from the because I hate Bob Jones,” Katie Landry says.

That’s one reason Tchividjian wants to liberal Wonkette to The American Conservative. She expects that her nieces and nephews will establish a National Grace Center at a Chris“Bob Jones University will not get away with one day attend the school. “If something hap- tian college, possibly California’s Pepperdine this cowardly move—thank God!” wrote Ameri- pens to them, and they seek help, I want them to University, where he says conversations have can Conservative columnist Rod Dreher, who get actual help,” she says, “and not more shame.” been ongoing for months. The center would derided the school’s decision as “a textnot only expand GRACE’s capacities but book example of institutional cover-up.” also equip a small army of investigaBob Jones had long grown accustors to take on the work GRACE cannot tomed to dismissing its secular critics do. Tchividjian also envisions the Grace and ignoring its alumni “detractors”; Center serving as a resource for churchthe school has endured decades of bad es and groups and for prosecutors workpress and protests over policies like the ing on cases involving religion. It would ban on interracial dating. But officials launch a research institute producing seemed unprepared for the fury of their child-advocacy and abuse-awareness loyalists, who flooded the school’s Facecurricula for seminary students, and book page with denunciations and calls a training center to educate future to reinstate GRACE . Rumors proliferchurch leaders on prevention. “I want ated online: that Stephen Jones’s hand the church to become one of the safhad been forced by a more conservaest places for children and abuse survitive board; that a recent South Carolina vors,” Tchividjian says, “and sadly today, Supreme Court ruling, which expandit’s one of the least-safe places.” ed institutional responsibility for sex Complicating that objective and abuse, could mean that GRACE’s findunderlying the tensions that have Camille Lewis, who studied and taught at Bob Jones for two decades, says ings would expose the school to lawsurfaced in GR ACE ’s investigations she knew a dozen women who reported sexual assault to school officials. suits; that certain stories had been so is the long and sometimes bitter split horrible the school felt it had to suppress them. ON FEBRUARY 25, A MONTH after firing its between fundamentalists and evangelicals.

In a speech to students, Stephen Jones investigators, Bob Jones announced an about- Some abuse survivors see speaking out as a offered only a vague explanation, saying that face. The university was rehiring GRACE under step in their religious evolution, moving from GRACE had “diverged from our original under- its original contract. In subsequent statements rule-based forms of Christianity to “gracestanding.” The termination, he said, was a on its website, school leaders told survivors oriented” churches. Many of GRACE ’s supmeans to sit down with the GRACE team and they were sorry for “surprising” them with porters see the group’s work as a challenge to get the process back on track. Bob Jones, he what they now described not as a termination fundamentalism’s legalistic culture. That could insisted, was committed to finishing the inves- but a “temporary suspension.” be a recurring problem with the investigatigation, either with GRACE or another group.

It’s uncertain when GRACE will issue its tions: Fundamentalist institutions may view More quietly, some people associated with the report. In early April, the group said it had GRACE’s work as rooted in a core theological school’s leadership wrote on social media that been contacted by new complainants after difference, as yet another example of evangeliGRACE had been “heavy-handed” with vic- Bob Jones’s firing and rehiring; the group now cals criticizing their estranged cousins. tims and that there may have been breaches expected to finish new interviews and begin Tchividjian rejects that critique. “I don’t in victim confidentiality. However, the eight writing up findings in early May. like terms like ‘evangelical’ and ‘fundamentalBob Jones alumni or former staff with whom This much is clear: The findings will have ist,’” he says. “I’m not even sure I know what the Prospect spoke said the process had been implications far beyond Greenville. Just as they mean.” The mishandling of sex abuse positive—“the best I’ve ever been treated by GR ACE ’s New Tribes report sparked calls stems less from theology, he says, than from Christians,” in Cathy Harris’s words. for investigations at nine other New Tribes an authoritarianism that can develop in any

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culture, elevating leaders beyond accountability, leaving victims’ rights to their whim, and sidelining critics who challenge their rule.

He points to the abuses that allegedly took place at Jesus People USA—the Chicago-area evangelical commune, which was no bastion of stringent rules—as an example. “Whether we label it fundamentalist or evangelical, I’ve seen it span the spectrum,” he says. “I never thought of New Tribes as fundamentalist. But I’d say there was that concentration of authority, and often that concentration morphs into legalism.” But Tchividjian says GRACE doesn’t exist to challenge legalism, either. “Our job is not to go and assess the theology of the groups we’ve been asked to investigate. Our job is to investigate the alleged abuse and, obviously, as part of that investigation, you assess the culture and assess whether that culture plays at least a part of the problem in determining whether the abuse is systemic. But I’d never

are not brave enough to retain GRACE when your survivors request them, then you are a disgrace. And you aren’t fooling anyone—you are hiding skeletons.”

That’s a hard case to make to churches and missions facing lawsuits and public scrutiny.

“One of the dynamics of any institution is to survive, to protect itself,” Diane Langberg says.

There is no question that GRACE poses risks to the institutions that hire it for investigations.

The publication of GRACE’s findings—the first gesture of repentance—ensures that not only will damaging accounts appear in the media but that some supporters and donors will flee.

Over the next few years and decades, Protestant institutions of every kind—fundamentalist, evangelical, and mainline—will be increasingly faced with a stark choice. One option is to follow the example set by the Catholic Church more than a decade ago: Fight back fiercely, not giving an inch when it

Catholic Church is still bringing down on itself.

GR ACE ’s evangelical truth commission could also help ease the financial hits to come.

Most abuse survivors, Tchividjian says, don’t want a settlement. But when they are confronted with institutions that lawyer up at the first hint of allegations, and that refuse even small gestures of acknowledgment or repentance, lawsuits often result. “Usually the lawyers are the last offices they go to,” he says.

Even so, following GRACE’s path will be painful. That is what’s so audacious—sometimes to the point of being unrealistic—about it. GRACE is challenging Christian institutions to live up to their teachings, to “expend themselves, even to the point of death, to demonstrate love for a very hurt soul,” as Tchividjian says.

“If you think about it in the Christian context,” he continues, “God did his most powerful work when Jesus, his son, was at his most transparent and vulnerable, on the cross. So

photo courtesy camille lewis

“If you think about it in the Christian context, God did His most powerful work when Jesus was at his most vulnerable, on the cross. So why do we approach all these things differently?” say our mission or role is to address legalism.”

However, the New Tribes report explicitly criticized the mission’s legalism, as did New Tribes leaders themselves in their initial mea culpa. Tchividjian consistently argues that a less legalistic culture would help groups deal with the sins of their past. “It would mean a church is OK with being transparent, and acknowledging failure,” Tchividjian says. “As a Christian, I tell institutions, your value and your reputation aren’t based on your accomplishments. If it is what you’ve communicated to the world through the gospel, your reputation has been secured for you by Christ.

That should liberate you to be transparent, to acknowledge failure.”

To survivors, that logic is clear. “GRACE is not hired by the weak, the self-protective, the blasphemous institutions who invoke the name of Jesus in their cover-ups,” says Kari Mikitson, founder of Fanda Eagles. “There are very few Christian organizations out there who want the truth at all costs. If you as an organization

comes to admitting you may have been wrong.

Everyone knows how well that has worked.

The other option is represented, thus far, by GRACE alone: Churches, schools, and groups can heed Tchividjian’s call to make themselves vulnerable, to admit what they’ve done wrong, and—hardest of all—to allow that truth to come to light.

As Bob Jones University learned this February, allegations are bound to become public no matter what the institution does. The findings of GRACE’s report will make news, and the news will be ugly. But if the school forthrightly confronts the findings and pursues repentance and reform, it could not only save itself but revive itself. Working with GRACE has given the university an opportunity to transform its national reputation as the quintessence of all that is pinched and patriarchal about fundamentalist Christianity. That would make Bob Jones a different kind of model—a positive one for Protestants hoping to avoid the reputational devastation the

why do we approach all these things differently? If I’m a Christian, why am I not driven by the fact that if we mess up as an institution, then when we’re most transparent and vulnerable, that’s when God can do his most powerful work? I’ve seen that in churches: When they do respond that way, it’s pretty powerful what results in the lives of survivors.”

There’s a quixotic quality to Tchividjian’s crusade. Surely he’s tilting at windmills to think powerful institutions, which reap hundreds of millions in donations and employ thousands of Christians—an entire faith-based economy—will willingly jeopardize their own survival. But the persistence of Tchividjian and GRACE is itself a statement of deep faith: the belief that churches, schools, and missions will imperil their existence for the sake of doing right—radical sacrifice through radical truth.

So far, it still amounts to faith in things unseen.

But whether in Cape Town, or as Tchividjian might say, on Calvary, such things have manifested before. 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

THE REVOLT

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OF THE CITIES DURING THE PAST 20 YEARS, IMMIGRANTS AND YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE TRANSFORMED THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF URBAN AMERICA. NOW, THEY’RE TRANSFORMING ITS POLITICS AND MAPPING THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM.

BY H AR OL D ME YE R S O N

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

‘‘P

Peduto has sought funding to establish universal pre-K education and partnered with a Swedish sustainabletechnology fund to build four major developments with low carbon footprints and abundant affordable housing. Even before he became mayor, while still a council member, he steered to passage ordinances that mandated prevailing wages for employees on any project that received city funding and required local hiring for the jobs in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ new arena. He authored the city’s responsiblebanking law, which directed government funds to those banks that lent in poor neighborhoods and away from those that didn’t.

Pittsburgh is a much cleaner city today than it was when it housed some of the world’s largest steel mills. But, like postindustrial America generally, it is also a much more economically divided city. When steel dominated the economy, the companies’ profits and the union’s contracts made Pittsburgh—like Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago—a city with a thriving working class. Today, with the mills long gone, Pittsburgh has what Gabe Morgan, who heads the local union of janitorial and building maintenance workers, calls an “eds and meds” economy. Carnegie Mellon, the

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University of Pittsburgh, and its medical center are among the region’s largest employers, generating thousands of well-paid professional positions and a far greater number of low-wage service-sector jobs.

Peduto, who is 49 years old, sees improving the lot of Pittsburgh’s new working class as his primary charge. In his city hall office, surrounded by such artifacts as a radio cabinet from the years when the city became home to the world’s first radio station, the new mayor outlined the task before him. “My grandfather, Sam Zarroli, came over in 1921 from Abruzzo,” he said. “He only had a second-grade education, but he was active in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in its early years, and he made a good life for himself and his family. My challenge in today’s economy is how to get good jobs for people with no PhDs but with a good work ethic and GEDs. How do I get them the same kind of opportunities my grandfather had? All the mayors elected last year are asking this question.”

They are indeed. The mayoral and council class of 2013 is one of the most progressive cohorts of elected officials in recent American history. In one major city after another, newly elected officials are planning to raise the minimum

p h o t o s p r e v i o u s pa g e : k at ya c o n s ta n t i n e ; s e a n pav o n e ; ya n m i n g z h a n g ; h e n r y k s a d u r a ; o l e k s a n d r d i b r o va ; b a s t o s / f o t o l i a

ittsburgh is the perfect urban laboratory,” says Bill Peduto, the city’s new mayor. “We’re small enough to be able to do things and large enough for people to take notice.” More than its size, however, it’s Pittsburgh’s new government—Peduto and the five like-minded progressives who now constitute a majority on its city council—that is turning the city into a laboratory of democracy. In his first hundred days as mayor,

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wage or enact ordinances boosting wages in developments that have received city assistance. They are drafting legislation to require inner-city hiring on major projects and foster unionization in hotels, stores, and trucking. They are seeking the funds to establish universal pre-K and other programs for infants and toddlers. They are sketching the layout of new transit lines that will bring jobs and denser development to neighborhoods both poor and middle-class and reduce traffic and pollution in the bargain. They are— if they haven’t done so already—forbidding their police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in the deportation of undocumented immigrants not convicted of felonies and requiring their police to have video or audio records of their encounters with the public. They are, in short, enacting at the municipal level many of the major policy changes that progressives have found themselves unable to enact at the federal and state levels. They also may be charting a new course for American liberalism.

New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has dominated the national press corps’ coverage of the new urban liberalism. His battles to establish citywide pre-K (successful but not funded, as he wished, by a dedicated tax on the

wealthy), expand paid sick days (also successful), raise the minimum wage (blocked by the governor and legislature), and reform the police department’s stop-andfrisk policy (by dropping an appeal of a court order) have been extensively chronicled. But de Blasio is just one of a host of mayors elected last year who campaigned and now govern with similar populist agendas. The list also includes Pittsburgh’s Peduto, Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges, Seattle’s Ed Murray, Boston’s Martin Walsh, Santa Fe’s Javier Gonzales, and many more.

“We all ran on similar platforms,” Peduto says. “There wasn’t communication among us. It just emerged organically that way. We all faced the reality of growing disparities. The population beneath the poverty line is increasing everywhere. A lot of us were underdogs, populists, reformers, and the public was ready for us.”

On December 13, 2013, President Obama met with newly elected mayors, including (across from the president, from left) Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges, Los Angeles’s Eric Garcetti, New York’s Bill de Blasio, Boston’s Martin Walsh, and Pittsburgh’s Bill Peduto. Twenty years ago, half of the nation’s dozen largest cities had Republican mayors; today, only one does.

THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME that America’s cities have

collectively shifted their political identities. As political journalist Samuel Lubell documented in his 1951 study The Future of American Politics—most particularly his chapter “Revolt of the City”—the New Deal coalition was

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

prefigured by the change in urban voting patterns during the 1920s. Since the end of the Civil War, the cities of the industrial Midwest and the West Coast had tilted Republican. In 1920, GOP presidential nominee Warren Harding carried the nation’s 12 largest cities by a margin of 1.54 million votes. In 1928, however, Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith carried the same 12 cities by a margin of 210,000 votes. Smith was a Catholic—the only Catholic presidential nominee until John Kennedy ran in 1960— whose speech and manner stamped him unmistakably as a product of New York’s Lower East Side. His candidacy brought to the polls for the first time millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants—predominantly Catholic, Jewish, and Eastern Orthodox—who had transformed

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the composition of American cities during the preceding 40 years but who had never before voted in large numbers.

Four years later, they voted in still greater numbers, sending Franklin Roosevelt to the White House and cementing the nation’s major cities in the Democratic column for decades to come. At the municipal level, cities long controlled by Republican machines shifted either to control

by Democratic machines or by progressive reformers like New York’s Fiorello La Guardia.

This pattern of demographic transformation is now repeating itself. New coalitions and the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama have brought millions of Latino, Asian, and African immigrants and the millennials to the polls, remaking the politics of cities in the process.

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IN PITTSBURGH, THE NEW ALLIANCE OF JANITORS’ AND HOTEL WORKERS’ UNIONS, ENVIRONMENTALISTS, AND YOUNG PROFESSIONALS PROVED TO BE BETTER WARD HEELERS THAN THE DEMOCRATIC MACHINE.

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Even as the wave of non-European immigrants since the mid-1980s has reshaped the United States—whose white share of the population was down to 63 percent in 2012—it has reshaped its cities even more. In New York, which was 53 percent white in the 1980 census, the white share of its population dropped to 37 percent in the 2010 census. During the same 30 years, Los Angeles saw the white share of its population drop from 48 percent to 29 percent, Houston from 53 percent to 26 percent, Phoenix from 78 percent to 47 percent, San Diego from 69 percent to 45 percent, Dallas from 57 percent to 29 percent, Columbus from 76 percent to 59 percent, Boston from 68 percent to 47 percent, Seattle from 79 percent to 66 percent, and Denver from 67 percent to 52 percent.

It’s not just the racial makeup of cities that is changing; it’s also their generational profile: Cities have seen a marked increase in their share of 20-somethings. These changes in demographics have coincided with the change in economics. With both manufacturing and unions in steep decline, major cities have come to be characterized by levels of economic inequality—reinforced by levels of racial inequality—the nation has not experienced since before the New Deal.

In America, politics follow demographics: Voters of color and millennial voters stand well to the left of their white and older counterparts in their support for government intervention to counter the market’s inequities and for Democratic candidates generally. The voting habits of major cities ref lect these transformations. For example, Barack Obama’s share of the vote in the 2012 presidential election outpaced Walter Mondale’s share of the vote in the 1984 presidential election by 10.5 percent nationally, but the difference was far greater in cities.

Obama outperformed Mondale by 20 percentage points in New York City, by 26 points in Los Angeles, 20 in San Diego, 24 in Dallas, 27 in Columbus, 22 in Seattle, and 24 in Denver.

At the level of municipal politics, the change is even starker. Twenty years ago, half of America’s dozen largest cities had Republican mayors. Today, only San Diego is governed by a Republican, and he was elected in a lowturnout special election held to replace disgraced Democrat Bob Filner. Indeed, of the nation’s 30 largest cities, just four (San Diego, Indianapolis, Fort Worth, and Oklahoma City) have Republican mayors, and even they have to swim with the urban tides. Mayor Greg Ballard of Indianapolis supported increased federal aid to mass transit and opposed his state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Not every Democratic mayor is progressive, as the record of Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel makes clear. Demographic recomposition has proved a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for urban political change. The newcomers

to America’s cities also have had to come together as an effective political force. With few exceptions, the cities that have elected left-populist governments have first reconfigured their power structures by building coalitions dedicated to greater economic and racial equity. Aided in some instances by liberal foundations, these coalitions consist chiefly of unions, community-based organizations in low-income minority neighborhoods, immigrants’ rights groups, affordable-housing advocates, environmental organizations, and networks of liberal churches, synagogues, and mosques.

The unions that have been key to the formation of these new coalitions—it’s labor, after all, that has the capacity to provide the lion’s share of funding for these ventures— generally aren’t the municipal employee locals that have a bargaining relationship with elected officials that can limit their freedom of political action. They tend, rather, to be unions of private-sector workers—janitors, hotel housekeepers, hospital orderlies, supermarket clerks. Their members and potential members are often overwhelmingly minority and substantially immigrant. Indeed, the growing importance of these unions coincides with the growth of immigrants’ rights groups in most major cities. Their constituencies stand to gain the most from city policies that raise wages, create affordable housing, and establish community-based policing.

The new urban coalitions develop common strategies, register voters, regularly canvass their respective communities, groom candidates, research issues, propose policies, lobby elected officials, run their candidates’ campaigns, and walk precincts. New York’s Working Families Party— the organization that defined the issues and mobilized the constituencies for the campaigns that elected de Blasio and a progressive near majority on the city council—has proceeded furthest down the path to becoming a permanent social democratic and green political force. But many of the cities that went left last year have coalitions that have begun their own way down this path as well.

PITTSBURGH, MINNEAPOLIS, Phoenix, and Seattle are

among the cities that have incubated new labor-­community coalitions over the past decade. In Pittsburgh, the coalition began to take shape during the revitalization of the city’s affiliate of SEIU’s Local 32BJ, the East Coast regional local of janitorial and building-service workers. Along with Pittsburgh’s union of hotel workers, 32BJ supported the city’s main African American community organization’s campaign to make inner-city hiring a condition for the city council’s approval of the new Pittsburgh Penguins sports arena. In turn, the community group backed the unions’ effort to persuade the council to enact an ordinance guaranteeing the jobs of fast-food and other

PITTSBURGH MAYOR

BILL PEDUTO On the city council, he authored the city’s prevailingwage law and an ordinance requiring the city to deposit its funds in banks that loaned in poor neighborhoods.

As mayor, he’s brought in a Swedish technology fund to help build energyefficient affordable housing.

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

BETSY HODGES On the city council, she authored an ordinance for a pilot project that required police to wear body cams. As mayor, she’s scaling up that project and establishing health-care and development programs for infants and toddlers.

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demographics and economy have been transformed. The white share of the city’s population declined from 86 percent in the 1980 census to 64 percent in 2010. Minneapolis is home to the largest Somali community of any city except Mogadishu and the largest Hmong community outside Laos. “We’re ahead of any other state in equitable income and health—if you’re white,” says Dan McGrath, who heads TakeAction Minnesota, a progressive political organization of 45,000 members, which, like New York’s Working Families Party, functions chiefly as an electoral organization. “Minnesota’s way down the list when you include people of color. Four out of ten Minneapolis residents are people of color. We won’t have an economy 30 years from now if only half our minority students graduate high school.”

Nearly a decade ago, several local progressive organizations, including the one established by Paul Wellstone, decided to merge into a single group, TakeAction Minnesota. At the same time, the city’s SEIU–affiliated janitorial union and its chief affordable housing organization, ISAIAH, entered a period of rapid growth. The groups, along with the city’s ACORN chapter, which was the main community-based organization in the African American community (and which has since reconstituted itself as Neighborhoods Organizing for Change), and CTUL , an organization of worker centers serving the Latino immigrant community, began meeting together regularly. In 2011, when the national SEIU decided to fund local coalitions in 17 cities across the country, the one in Minneapolis was the only such alliance to prove both effective and enduring—in part because its member groups had already forged such tight bonds.

“We’re grounded in a common experience and analysis,” McGrath says. “Our problem is not just Republicans.

Our problem is the extraordinary imbalance of wealth, unbridled corporate power, and structural racism.” The commonality of perspectives was augmented by the integration of the groups’ members and staffs—attending retreats together, merging their efforts on various campaigns. “The groups had to acknowledge that none of them could get anything done just by themselves,” says George Goehl, the executive director of National People’s Action, a network of community organizations with which TakeAction Minnesota is affiliated. “They now have so deep a collaboration that when you go to one of their meetings, you can’t tell who works for whom.”

With the power of their combined numbers, the groups in the alliance—named Minnesotans for a Fair Economy— have waged a joint campaign to pressure Target, the locally based retail giant, to stop asking job applicants if they’ve been convicted of a felony, to cease the wage and hour violations inflicted on their largely immigrant janitorial

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MINNEAPOLIS MAYOR

franchise workers in city-owned facilities even if the franchise changed hands. These campaigns divided the city’s unions—the building trades wanted to construct the arena regardless of who was hired to work inside it—but united the minority communities and the service-sector unions.

In time, the alliance grew to include liberal clergy and groups devoted to cleaning Pittsburgh’s air and water, particularly in working-class communities.

Initially, the coalition’s sole council ally was Peduto, but that was soon to change. A group of young professionals who’d come together on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign set out to elect other progressives to the city council. “We didn’t know the old ways of campaigning,” says Matthew Merriman-Preston, the political consultant who has managed Peduto’s campaigns and those of every other progressive council member for the past decade, “so we made it up as we went along. We had people on the ground talking to their neighbors year after year.”

In 2009, Natalia Rudiak, a Pittsburgh native who had studied at the London School of Economics and done economic-development work in Africa, decided to run for council in a district she describes as “the most socially conservative in the city.” In a city whose politics long had been dominated by middle-aged and elderly men, Rudiak, then 29 years old, wasn’t taken seriously by the Democratic establishment. But Rudiak came with multiple ties to union leaders (her father ran a publicemployees local) and had spent time on campaigns with Merriman-Preston. Peduto’s prevailing-wage bill was pending in the council during her campaign, and she stumped for it everywhere she spoke. In return, 32BJ flooded her district with precinct walkers, as did environmental and feminist groups. Shortly after her upset victory, the council passed the bill.

Rudiak’s victory was just one of several that reshaped the council between 2007 and 2013. Neither Rudiak nor Peduto received endorsements from the city’s Democratic Party organizations, but the machine wasn’t delivering city service as it once had. “It had kept the trains running on time and the streets plowed,” Rudiak says, “but with the growing financial constraints on the city, particularly after the 2008 crash, it couldn’t keep doing even those things.”

In the city’s older working-class neighborhoods, the new alliance and its candidates proved to be better ward heelers than the machine.

Minneapolis is a city with a richer history of progressive activism than Pittsburgh. In 1948, Mayor Hubert Humphrey presented that year’s Democratic National Convention with its first civil-rights platform plank. For decades, Minnesota came closer to an American version of Scandinavian social democracy than any other state.

In recent decades, however, both the city’s and state’s

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MINNEAPOLIS’S PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZATIONS HAVE FORGED “SO DEEP A COLLABORATION,” SAYS ONE LIBERAL LEADER, “THAT WHEN YOU GO TO ONE OF THEIR MEETINGS, YOU CAN’T TELL WHO WORKS FOR WHOM.” workforce, and to hire local residents for maintenance jobs at the company’s new headquarters. Target agreed to drop the question about felonies and to adopt a local hiring policy; talks continue about the unionization of their janitors. The alliance waged a successful long-shot campaign against a 2012 ballot measure that would have required state voters to provide photo IDs at their polling places. And last year, the alliance provided the staff and precinct walkers to put one of their own—Council Member Betsy Hodges, who had been the executive director of one of the two groups that merged to form TakeAction Minnesota—into the Minneapolis mayor’s office.

Hodges, who is 44 and describes herself as a “sociologist by training,” was the council’s acknowledged authority

on budget and funding matters. She ran on the issue of reducing the city’s racial disparities. “I said the same thing in every room I spoke in,” she told me when we met in her office in the cavernous city hall. “I said, ‘In Minneapolis, we have the biggest racial gaps of any city by any measure. It is a moral imperative that we end that, but it’s also an economic imperative.’” Hodges talked explicitly about white people, people of color, and racial disparities—terms that most campaign consultants would urge their clients to shun—and defeated her opponent, the chair of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, by an 18-point margin.

“A whole lot of white people thought the issue she was addressing was our principal challenge,” McGrath says.

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

“That’s remarkable.” It’s a testament to Minneapolis’s enduring egalitarianism, but it’s also a consequence of the door-knocking and issue campaigns of the city’s liberal coalition. “There’s been a lot of political space created by progressive strategic organizing here in the city,” Hodges says. “It was hugely helpful to me as a candidate, but it will be even more helpful to me as a mayor. We have to make sure that everyone is at the table as we work on growing the city, and having people organized really facilitates that.”

The projects on which Hodges has embarked include a “cradle to kindergarten” program of infant health care and universal pre-K. As a council member, she initiated a pilot program to provide “body cams” for police officers to

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monitor their encounters with the public; she now wants to mandate the cameras for the entire department. She’s also seeking to route proposed transit lines to better connect minority communities to neighborhoods with jobs.

No city government may be more at odds with its governor and legislature than that of Phoenix. In 2010, Arizona enacted SB 1070, which encouraged police to stop and frisk Latinos and if they lacked documentation, to hand them over to federal agents for deportation. In response, the New York–based Four Freedoms Fund financed a massive voter-registration campaign in Phoenix’s Latino communities. The backlash against SB 1070 also fueled the successful efforts of an alliance of Latino and immigrant organizations and unions to elect Greg Stanton mayor in

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DESPITE THE CITY’S TECHIE IMAGE, SEATTLE’S COUNCIL RESTRICTED BUSINESS LICENSES FOR SUCH CAR SERVICES AS UBER AND LYFT OUT OF CONCERN FOR THE CITY’S ETHIOPIAN IMMIGRANT CAB DRIVERS.

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2011. Stanton campaigned for union rights and marriage equality and against SB 1070. Five of the city council’s other eight members—three of whom are now Latinos— share Stanton’s politics. The council has directed Phoenix police not to hand over detainees to immigration agents for deportation and instructed the city’s lobbyist in Washington to support immigration reform.

Seattle’s leftward movement commenced when local unions of janitorial, health-care, supermarket, and warehouse workers formed a labor-community-environment alliance to win a living-wage ordinance. The regional tech boom has brought thousands of young professionals to the city, who have proved supportive of the coalition’s campaigns. “They’re open to human rights and environmental issues, of course,” says David West, who heads the alliance, “but they’re also not tax-averse and are strongly in favor of raising the minimum wage.” Going into last year’s city elections, Seattle already had a law for paid sick leave and one of the highest municipal minimum wages in the nation. A successful SEIU–led campaign to raise the hourly minimum to $15 in the small suburban community of SeaTac, adjoining Seattle’s airport, made raising the city’s own minimum to $15 the major issue in November’s mayoral campaign. Both candidates supported the raise, and the issue also swept a Trotskyist candidate onto the city council. The city’s new mayor, Ed Murray, who was chiefly known for his successful effort as a state legislator to legalize same-sex marriage, is negotiating the specifics of the raise.

Seattle’s pro-labor liberalism has trumped what many might view as its infatuation with all things techie. The city council capped the number of business licenses for such car services as Uber and Lyft after a campaign that cast the issue as a contest between outside investors and local Ethiopian-immigrant cab drivers. Last year, Murray’s predecessor blocked the construction of a Whole Foods market because of the chain’s anti-union stance.

The city’s ability to thwart the coming of a Whole Foods illustrates the often-circuitous ways in which municipalities are able to leverage their power to win the social outcomes they seek. Seattle was able to block Whole Foods by exercising its power over streets, since building the new market would have required the elimination of an existing alley.

“Even when they’re fiscally constrained, cities can set their own rules,” Pittsburgh’s Peduto says. By leveraging their power over contractors and developers who’ve received city assistance—or who may merely need city approval to close off an alley—municipal progressives are following the lead of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), the group that pioneered the practice of requiring living wages and community hiring. Such

measures are intended to accomplish indirectly and, at times, ingeniously what the federal government could accomplish directly, say, by raising the minimum wage, rewriting labor law, establishing stronger environmental safeguards, or legalizing undocumented immigrants. In the absence of such national legislation, cities are doing what they can.

The fiscal constraints to which Peduto alluded, though, are real. New York’s de Blasio had to secure the funding that establishes pre-K education in his city from the state—a revenue stream the city doesn’t control. Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and Republican state senators blocked de Blasio and his city council allies from setting a municipal minimum wage in New York City, though living expenses there are far greater than they are in the rest of the state. A number of states have enacted laws forbidding their cities from raising wages or passing living-wage ordinances.

SHORTLY AFTER NOVEMBER’S city elections, President

Obama invited 16 of the newly elected progressive mayors to a meeting at the White House. Peduto, Hodges, Murray, and de Blasio were among those who attended.

Obama talked about his proposal for universal pre-K, which was languishing in Congress. At the federal level, it would obviously take some time to get such a measure enacted, Obama continued, or he could find 20 innovative mayors and get it done tomorrow. Provided they can scrape up the dollars.

Even within those limitations, it’s in blue states and cities—certainly not in Congress—that Obama’s agenda is being enacted. While increasing the minimum wage remains stymied on Capitol Hill, legislatures in Democratic states are hiking it to the level that Obama proposed, while cities have either increased theirs even more (Washington, D.C., raised its minimum to $11.50) or are considering it (San Francisco, like Seattle, to $15).

While congressional Republicans resist legislation to combat global warming, cities are demanding strict energy-­efficiency standards in their new buildings. While Republicans oppose legalizing undocumented immigrants, cities are ordering their police departments, in effect, to minimize deportations.

What’s happening in cities can be described as Obama’s agenda trickling down to the jurisdictions where it has enough political support to be enacted—but it’s also the incubation of policies and practices that will trickle up.

With considerable creativity and limited power, the new urban regimes are seeking to diminish the inequality so apparent in cities and so pervasive nationwide. They are mapping the future of liberalism until the day when the national government can bring it to scale. 

SEATTLE MAYOR

ED MURRAY In the state legislature, he authored and steered to enactment the bill legalizing same-sex marriage. As mayor, he has pledged to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, the highest in the nation.

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

40 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2014

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF PROSPERITY

In the crisis of World War II, the nation made the political choices that created the robust egalitarian economy of the next 30 years.

Can we respond to the climate crisis with similar policies to rebuild the middle class?

BY RO BERT KUT T NER IL LUST RAT IO N S B Y V IC TO R J U H A S Z

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

F

or most Americans, the central economic fact of the past four decades is the stagnation and decline of earnings. Yet this shift is not the central political fact. Why hasn’t the system’s brutal turn against the working and middle class risen to a first-tier public issue?

The raw material is surely there. Americans are far from satisfied with the deal they are getting. Polls show that large majorities believe that the top 1 percent takes too much, that the income distribution is too unequal, that their children are likely to be worse off than they are, that job security is precarious, and that the middle class is at risk.

Two big factors prevent these issues from assuming center stage. First, the public is increasingly skeptical that government can do much to change things for the better.

The sense of resignation and cynicism plays to the ideology of Republicans—the claim that government doesn’t have a big part to play in the economy and that we’re all on our own. Conversely, resignation harms Democrats, whose core ideology is that government exists to help ordinary people. Republicans have done their best to prevent Democrats from delivering on the vision of activist government.

Second, persistent divisions of race as well as a nativist backlash against immigrants undermine a common politics of uplift for working Americans generally. The New Deal/Great Society formula of tax, spend, benefit, and elect has been sundered by stagnation of working-class earnings and fears that government aid would only go to “them”—the undeserving poor. That fear explains much of the opposition to the Affordable Care Act. It sheds light on why victims of the subprime bust were not the objects of broad public sympathy. Racial division has been the standard Republican playbook since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, intensified by Ronald Reagan and redoubled by the Tea Party. The more that working families are economically stressed, the less help that government delivers, and the more the tax burden tilts away from the top, the more credibility the right has.

In recent years, with Republicans intensifying their strategy of total blockade, the Obama administration’s economic policies have been reduced mostly to a politics of gesture. Increases in the minimum wage, modest educational reforms, orders for the Labor Department to crack down on overtime abuses, tweaks to the tax structure— such policies will help around the edges but not transform the structure of an economy that delivers increasing inequality and insecurity. The Affordable Care Act, a legislative success that was more than a gesture, was so bungled in its execution that, on balance, it raised more doubts about the place of affirmative government and its steward,

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the Democrats. The 2009 stimulus was a limited success, but it was too small to alter the deeper dynamics of the economy.

How to break out of this vicious circle? How to make the economic plight of working families the core concern that it ought to be? How to restore constructive government to a leading role in that project? The obstacles to reclaiming a fairer society have little to do with immutable characteristics of the new, global, digital economy. They are mainly political.

LEARNING FROM THE GOOD WAR

One vivid, positive experience in our collective memory suggests how the economy could be drastically different.

World War II, even more than the New Deal, profoundly altered the economy in ways that generated a more equal society, with more opportunity and security, than the one we have today. These structural changes reinforced one another and affirmed government as friend of the common person.

The war was, first, a massive macroeconomic stimulus.

Unemployment was still more than 14 percent in 1940.

Thanks to more than $100 billion of war-production orders in the first six months of 1942—more than the entire gross domestic product of 1939—joblessness vanished. The war also recapitalized industry that had languished during the Great Depression, and it gave government a central place in developing science and technology. The war was not just a huge jobs program but an unprecedented jobtraining program. President Franklin Roosevelt also chose to use war production to increase the power of unions as full social partners. A company that wanted defense contracts had to recognize its unions. So the war transformed labor markets.

Second, the war altered incomes. Steeply progressive income taxes with marginal rates as high as 94 percent, limits on executive compensation, and strict controls on the bond market led to a compression of the income distribution that lasted more than a quarter-century. The need to finance the war led to emergency measures pegging the rate on government bonds at a maximum of 2.5 percent. The Federal Reserve simply bought whatever quantity of bonds the war effort required. This meant that a major category of financial industry profit—buying, selling, and speculating

in Treasury bonds—was eliminated, at the expense of the rentier class. Economists even have a name for this process: repression of finance. We could use some of that today.

A side effect of the Good War was enhanced social solidarity, which in turn reinforced political support for egalitarian policies. On the home front, people from diverse walks of life joined in scrap drives, served together as civil defense wardens, and waited in line together for ration coupons. A famous survey showed that white soldiers who served together in units with blacks came out less prejudiced than ones who had not. Much of the enhanced propensity for civic action that social scientists such as Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol have found in the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s was the result of their wartime experience.

All of these structural and attitudinal shifts did not abruptly end in 1945 with V-E and V-J day. They had a long half-life and continued to contour the American economy for at least another generation. To a far greater degree than is understood, the broadly shared prosperity of the postwar boom was a child of the war. It’s also important to appreciate that many of these shifts reflected not fortuitous side effects but deliberate political choices. Franklin Roosevelt could have made war-production planning mainly a business responsibility as Woodrow Wilson had in World War I, but he chose to make it a substantially public affair. He did not have to use defense contracting to strengthen the labor movement, but he chose to. Wilson, in World War I, did nothing to help organized labor.

Thanks for the history lesson, you might say, but what does all this have to do with the present-day economy?

Thomas Piketty, in one of the year’s most celebrated economics books, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, demonstrates that the tendency of wealth to concentrate is an inherent characteristic of a capitalist economy. But, Piketty adds in passing, the exception is national emergencies such as wars.

Today, we do not have a war, but we do have an existential emergency of climate change. The risks of disastrous floods, droughts, extreme weather, and new forms of pestilence are compounded by the dismal condition of our infrastructure. A program of public investment aimed at resilience as well as a green transition could produce many of the same distributive benefits as the Good War. It could restore a sense of our common fate as Americans and reclaim faith in democratic government.

That, of course, will take far more political leadership than we’ve seen lately.

BAD ADVICE FROM ECONOMISTS

Much of the sense of mass resignation is reinforced by the mainstream of the economics profession. It was Lawrence Summers, then President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, who called for a smaller rather than larger economic stimulus in early 2009, urged a bailout rather than a restructuring of Wall Street, and then promoted the president’s disastrous turn to austerity economics in 2010.

We also hear from many leading economists and pundits that today’s widening extremes reflect irrevocable trends in capitalism and that the best we can do is strive for a better-educated population.

Thomas Friedman famously wrote in The World Is Flat that when he was a child, his parents used to tell him to finish his dinner and to think of the hungry children in China, adding, “I am now telling my own daughters, ‘Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.’”

Friedman did not explain how his daughters, even if they received straight A’s for their homework, might compete with Chinese wages.

Mainstream economists offer a few basic stories about what accounts for the failure of the economy to generate broadly shared prosperity. The leading candidates include technology, increasing rewards to skills not possessed by ordinary workers; a long-term shift in the share of income going to capital as opposed to labor; “winner take all” effects that deliver super-rewards to entrepreneurial and entertainment superstars; and the inevitable consequences of a globalization that otherwise adds to the economy’s efficiency. The subtext of all of these overlapping accounts is that there’s not much we can do other than improve our schools.

One of the most persistent claims is that the economy is rewarding skills more intensively now than in years past. This is espoused by such prestigious economists as Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s David Autor, who also call for more education as the remedy. The trouble with this view is that there is no good evidence that the economy is demanding skills at a rate above historic trends.

Other moderately liberal economists, such as Harvard’s

THE OBSTACLES TO RECLAIMING A FAIRER SOCIETY HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH IMMUTABLE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NEW, GLOBAL, DIGITAL ECONOMY. THEY ARE MAINLY POLITICAL.

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Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin, in their book The Race between Education and Technology, contend that we can solve much of the income-distribution problem with enough education. Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute counters that the timing of recent trends contradicts the education and technology account. The very period of most intensified growth of the digital economy, the middle and late 1990s, was one of increasing equality, because it was also a period of full employment. Macroeconomic factors turn out to be more important in raising earnings, as they were during World War II. If jobs exist, people will be trained to take them.

As Paul Krugman has pointed out, a true skills shortage describes only a small fraction of the labor market. There are good reasons to have a better-educated and -trained citizenry and to turn out more graduates in math and the sciences. But that remedy by itself will not solve the problem of inequality or stagnant wages for the vast majority.

Some of our most highly skilled citizens were the Wall Street fraudsters who crashed the economy. Many highly skilled professionals have difficulty finding decent employment, and increasing numbers of college students are performing jobs that only require a high-school diploma.

Summers gave an influential presentation late last year in which he suggested that the economy is vulnerable to financial bubbles and excessive consumer borrowing to sustain demand because it is not structurally capable of growing fast enough to generate adequate jobs. The economist’s term for this disease is secular stagnation. That was the sort of argument made in the late 1930s, until the wartime spending demonstrated otherwise.

A number of influential economists blame machines. In their recent and well-reviewed book, The Second Machine Age, MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee describe how digital machines are displacing people at an accelerating rate. But machines have displaced people throughout the history of industrial capitalism. The practical policy question is how the fruits of all that new productivity are to be distributed. Like others, these authors call mainly for more and better education, but they do suggest some useful redistributive mechanisms such as a national mutual fund, more investment in infrastructure, government jobs programs, and vouchers for basic necessities.

A far more plausible account, told by such economists as David Weil of Brown University, David Howell of The New School, and legal scholar Katherine V. Stone of the University of California, Los Angeles, law school is that the labor-market institutions of the postwar era, which

defended the labor share of the total national income, have been drastically weakened, with predictable results.

A companion trend is the liberation of financial capital from the salutary shackles of the war and postwar period, giving super-elites the ability to capture far more of the social product than they in any sense earn.

It’s true that the globalization of manufacturing and the use of far-flung supply chains reaching into low-wage countries widen income inequality at home. But there is more than one brand of globalization. We could just as well have a version with decent labor and social standards. One of the effects of World War II was that America was able to emphasize domestic production and rebuilding without being charged with the sin of protectionism.

Tinkering with education and training or even a higher minimum wage will not restore good earnings for the working and middle class.

But the wartime experience demonstrates that a different structure of a capitalist economy, rooted in public investment and full employment, is possible. The current failure to spread productivity gains has little to do with technology, skills, or even globalization—and everything to do with our failure to constrain great private wealth, empower labor, and creatively use democratic government for national purposes.

WORLD WAR II, EVEN MORE THAN THE NEW DEAL, ALTERED THE ECONOMY IN WAYS THAT GENERATED A MORE EQUAL AND SECURE SOCIETY THAN THE ONE WE HAVE TODAY.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM THE ROOSEVELTS

For many of us, the history of modern liberalism begins with Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, it begins with his Republican fifth cousin, Teddy. As Doris Kearns Goodwin points out in her recent book, The Bully Pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to use activist government as a vigorous instrument of the collective good and a counterforce to constrain the power of financial elites.

Several aspects of TR’s presidency illuminate our current situation. Significantly, there was no deep economic crisis, and no war. There was, however, a set of robber barons with unprecedented concentrations of wealth. With indignation and passion, Teddy rallied his countrymen to right the imbalance. He did not fully succeed—that was left to his cousin. But he made a good start.

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Interestingly, too, the reforms of the first President Roosevelt were aimed mainly at abuses at the top, not conditions at the bottom. His prime targets were “malefactors of great wealth” in his superb phrase—railroads, banks, the Standard Oil trust—and other economic concentrations whose price-gouging harmed the middle class and led to excessive political power. TR supported a progressive income tax more to break up the malign influence of wealth than for its revenue potential.

Only around the edges did the era of Teddy Roosevelt address the working class. For example, Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a cause that TR enthusiastically championed. But even this crusade, which Sinclair intended as a battle against wretched working conditions, ended up gaining middle-class support mostly out of concern for tainted meat.

“I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair later wrote, “and by accident, I hit it in the stomach.”

TR was a middle-class reformer.

Except for a handful of formative experiences, such as his visit to a wretched tenement cigar factory that won him over to the cause of better labor standards, the plight of the working class did not figure much in his program. He had little use for trade unions, much less for socialists. Yet Teddy Roosevelt did put the federal government squarely on the side of the common people against what today would be called the 1 percent.

In a sense, this emphasis was not surprising, because the first decade of the 20th century was not a period of especially high unemployment (though late in his presidency the panic of 1907 did produce a short and sharp depression leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve). Nonetheless, despite the absence of war or broad economic crisis, TR’s two terms marked the most activist period of government until Franklin’s presidency. The first Roosevelt shared with the second a jauntiness, a joy in struggle, a delight in naming his enemies, and a capacity for rallying the people.

The partial reforms of TR and later Woodrow Wilson

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laid the groundwork for the New Deal. Many of the middle-­ aged officials of FDR’s administration had been young activists during the Progressive Era. There was an agenda of unfinished business, as well as a large cast of competent reformers, to draw on. They included not only people in the governments of TR and Wilson but activists of the settlement-house movement, the labor movement, and other causes outside government. When FDR staged his signing ceremony for the Social Security Act in 1935, he gave a prominent part to the aged Jane Addams, feminist, pacifist, labor activist, and leader of Chicago’s Hull House, which she founded in 1889 when Teddy Roosevelt was a young civil-service commissioner in Washington, D.C. The half-century marshaling of support for public purposes gave government the credibility for its greatest achievement in World War II.

PUBLIC PURPOSE AND THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY

The reformism of the Progressive Era and the solidarity of World War II may seem like ancient history. But it is becoming ever harder to deny the climate emergency, and its twin, the infrastructure shortfall. A recent estimate of the American Society of Civil Engineers is that the United States has a backlog of deferred basic infrastructure spending of $3.6 trillion. The Civil Engineers’ report card doesn’t even include the urgent need to provide a 21st-century “smart grid” or world-class Internet service.

America’s fastest and cheapest Internet system happens to be offered by a municipally owned utility in Chattanooga, the descendant of public power courtesy of Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority. For $70 a month, a resident receives service 50 times faster than in most of the U.S., comparable to that of the world’s fastest system in

Hong Kong. The local public power company used a grant from the 2009 Recovery Act to build its fiber-optic system.

The city uses its ultra high-speed Internet as an economicdevelopment tool to attract technology companies.

The Chattanooga achievement suggests the broader potential of massive infrastructure investment. It could provide macroeconomic stimulus, good middle-class jobs, and employment in design and engineering and make America more productive and friendly to development.

The strategy could also accelerate the transition to a sustainable, resilient economy and moderate climate change.

Suppose we had an infrastructure program of $500 billion a year for ten years, or $5 trillion. That’s just over 3 percent of GDP. It would cover the deferred maintenance bill for basic infrastructure for such uses as water and sewer systems, roads, bridges, rail, public buildings, and the like,

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

as well as state-of-the-art public Internet systems. The investment could be financed two-thirds with bonds and one-third with surtaxes on the wealthy. As during and after World War II, the higher growth rate would retire the debt.

A social-investment strategy also addresses the downward pressure of globalization without resorting to protectionism. The wartime economy required us to set national goals, limit private finance, and use national investment and production for America’s purposes. The climate crisis exists on a global scale, and there will need to be treaties to reduce carbon; but a strategy linking repair of climate damage to a commitment to full employment, public investment, and good jobs must be achieved nationally and will produce mainly domestic production and employment.

The stakes of this struggle go well beyond the income distribution and the health of the middle class. At issue is what kind of democracy we have. In recent years, concentrated economic power has led to concentrated political power.

The alternative is a broadly based and broadly legitimate government, where the challenges of climate change become the basis for restoring shared prosperity and more democratically accountable government. Belatedly, Americans will surely demand that government protect them from rising seas, parched farmland, and weird storms. If the government that provides that protection is a narrow, corporate-­ dominated elite, then we will go even further in the direction of an authoritarian state.

SOONER OR LATER, THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT THAT WE ALL FACE—CLIMATE CHANGE—WILL LEAD TO THE MOBILIZATION OF GOVERNMENT RESOURCES AND THE RESTORATION OF PUBLIC PURPOSES.

A RENDEZVOUS WITH POLITICS

The practical question becomes how on earth to make this vision of a World War II–scale transition into plausible politics. Reform eras are always a dance of social movements and inspired presidents. Movements can push for frame-breaking ideas, but only a president can make them mainstream. As Doris Kearns Goodwin points out, great presidents are always pushing out the boundaries of the political agenda. Both Roosevelts surely did that, with social movements prodding them. “Teddy loved to be in

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the middle of a fight,” Goodwin says. “Not every president does. It’s partly a temperamental thing.”

As the history of the two Roosevelts suggests, today’s missing ingredient is leadership. In the fall of 2008, when I was harboring hopes of a transformational Obama presidency, I happened to be on a panel with Cass Sunstein, who described his friend and former University of Chicago colleague as a “visionary minimalist,” by which Sunstein meant that Obama liked highly ingenious but modest approaches to public problems. This turned out to describe Obama’s presidency all too well—and it turned out to be too weak a politics or a set of policies for a crisis that required more.

In a country in which voters reject even token increases in the tax on gasoline, coal remains king, and hydrofracking is widely held to be energy salvation, it takes political nerve to lead on climate change. Yet, as weather weirding ceases to be an abstraction, the opportunity arises for profound shifts in public sentiment.

Historians may well look back at the past decade as a series of false starts. Under a different president than George W. Bush, the attacks of September 11 might have produced a resurgent sense of shared destiny and reliance on democratic government. Instead, they produced an obsessively secret government and a deeply divided polity. Under a bolder progressive than Barack Obama, public investment might have been sold as something more momentous than a “timely, targeted, and temporary” fiscal stimulus, the slogan of the 2009 Recovery Act. As consciousness of climate change has increased, there have been several missed moments, such as Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, where more inspired leadership might have defined the common threat and the need for public remedy.

For many young Americans, today’s urgent issues are the twin risks of global climate change and depressed economic horizons. For some in the green movement, reduced material consumption is salutary—because it is necessary to reduce the environmental toll. But after six years of belt-tightening, more austerity for the young is no rallying cry. A more stirring prospect is the use of public investment in technology to allow good living standards at a much lower cost to the planet.

Sooner or later, the existential threat that we all face will require a vast mobilization of public resources and a restoration of public purposes. A rendezvous is waiting to happen between the climate emergency and the need for good jobs and careers. Perhaps new social movements will make this dream a mainstream cause. Possibly the next president will. 

The Great Retirement Robbery Why It’s Time to Retire the 401(k) • Average 401(k) balances for those approaching retirement are too small to generate more than $4,000 in annual retirement income.

• 401(k)s produce lower rates of return than traditional pensions or Social Security.

• 401(k)s are more expensive for employers and employees than traditional pensions.

• There are fiscally sustainable alternatives to 401(k)s.

“A hair-raising look at the dire retirement prospects of tens of millions of Americans.”

—Publishers Weekly (named a spring 2014 Top 10 book in Business and Economics) “Essential reading for anyone who works for a living—from millennials to boomers—James Russell’s Social Insecurity explains what you lost and who benefited from it.”

—Charles r. Morris, author of The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown “Will enrage citizens of all ages and political persuasions and illuminate them about the organized robbery of their economic futures by the financial services industry.”

—NoMi PriNs, author of All the Presidents’ Bankers “The book explaining how we all got sold on the ridiculous notion of do-it-yourself retirement savings and why it was never, ever going to work for anyone but the financial services sector.”

—helaiNe oleN, author of Pound Foolish

Igniting Hearts and Minds | www.beacon.org | blog: www.beaconbroadside.com

The status quo is unsustainable.

The status quo is unsustainable.

E

L

Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained.

I

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S

R

A

For the U.S., Israel, and Palestine:

What’s Plan B?

BY M AT T HE W DU S S

pa b lo m a r t i n e z m o n s i va l s , e va n v u c c i , lu i s m . a lva r e z / a p i m a g e s

I

f the Obama administration’s view of the Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict could be summed up in a sentence, it is this: The status quo is unsustainable.

“The status quo is unsustainable for all sides. It promises only more violence and unrealized aspirations,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual Washington policy conference in March 2010.

“The status quo is unsustainable, and Israel must too act boldly to advance a lasting peace,” President Barack Obama said in his May 2011 speech at the State Department, laying out his vision of the U.S. role in the Middle East after the Arab Awakening.

“Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained. It’s not sustainable,” Secretary of State John Kerry told the Munich Security Conference in February. “It’s illusionary. There’s a momentary prosperity, there’s a momentary peace.”

Although the Obama administration may have coined the phrase, the sentiment is not new. Every president since Jimmy Carter has, in some fashion, recognized that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict creates costs for the United States in the region and that the U.S. has an interest in resolving it. In the words of General David Petraeus, the conflict “foments anti-American sentiment … limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments

and peoples in the [region], and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”

Since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, the historic set of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization aimed at securing a peace treaty between the two sides, a strong international consensus has formed behind a two-state solution to the Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict. Yet even in the face of this consensus, the status quo persists, year after year, defying the efforts of the world’s most powerful country to change it. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all put considerable effort into reaching a deal that would end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Obama made achieving this goal a priority, appointing a special envoy in his first week as president in 2009, and yet now, five years later, Secretary Kerry is working overtime just to keep the parties at the table, never mind hammering out a final agreement.

One of the ironies is that, as a concept, the two-state solution is more broadly accepted than ever, even as achieving it seems more remote. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s adoption of the two-state solution in his 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech may have been so heavily qualified as to make it almost meaningless, but the fact remains that he recognized the need for making the speech.

Even though polls of both Israelis and Palestinians over

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the past decade have consistently shown majority support for a two-state solution, rejectionist factions—hard-line Israeli settlers, Palestinian extremists—have managed to wrest control of the process at key moments and play a spoiler role. Still, the two-state solution remains the most favorable one: Plan A. Its broad outlines have long been understood, and even many of its most difficult details have been hashed out in exercises like the Geneva Accord, in which a group of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators signed a model final agreement, and in negotiations between President Mahmoud Abbas and then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as journalist Bernard Avishai reported in 2011.

sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach,” the president said, “then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.”

But beyond these warnings of consequences, which have also been echoed by Secretary Kerry, there has been little discussion of what the U.S. policy response might be to the loss of faith in a two-state solution. How would the U.S. contend with the heightened international criticism and isolation that would likely be directed at Israel when its control of the West Bank became formalized?

With growing calls for divestment and boycott of settlement products in Europe, how would the U.S. respond to its European partners’ developing a more independent approach, as they have been hinting at doing for years?

For understandable reasons, it’s difficult to get currently serving officials to respond to questions like these. “Talking about Plan B kills Plan A,” is how one Israeli official put it. That may be true for those closest to the negotiations. But for others, it’s worth thinking about.

The separation barrier in the West Bank town of Abu Dis

Still, it’s only responsible to consider a Plan B in the event that Plan A remains elusive.

In a recent interview, Obama nodded toward some of the costs that would accrue to Israel in the absence of a two-state deal. The Palestinians have made clear that if talks break down, they will escalate their campaign to gain membership in various international organizations, a move strongly supported by the Palestinian public. President Abbas took a step in this direction in early April, responding to Israel’s reneging on its commitment to release prisoners by signing documents joining 15 international conventions. These efforts could create an enormous headache for Israel, forcing it to play a game of diplomatic whack-a-mole as it tries to head off challenges in various international venues, and it could become increasingly costly for the U.S. to provide diplomatic cover. “If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous,

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cence to draw down its presence in the West Bank must reckon with the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising that erupted after the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit, which saw numerous terrorist attacks inside Israel.

Confronted with a violent campaign, and with President Bill Clinton’s blaming Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the summit’s failure, many Israelis decided that the Palestinians were not interested in peace. Although a solid majority of Israelis continue to support the two-state solution, they remain cautious about steps, such as withdrawing troops from the West Bank, that, even if necessary to achieve such a solution, could result in a return of attacks.

Addressing those security requirements has been a primary focus of U.S. efforts. One of the most successful American initiatives in Palestine has been the work to stand up a Palestinian security force capable of acting against terrorist groups in the West Bank. Established by the Bush administration in 2005, the Office of the U.S. Security Coordinator (USSC) has two goals: First, to build a key institution of an eventual Palestinian state, a competent security force. Second, to prove to the Israelis that they could withdraw from the territories with an expectation that calm would be maintained.

Lieutenant General Keith Dayton served as U.S. security coordinator from 2005 to 2010 and was hailed by Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans as doing a tremendous

m a h f o u z a b u t u r k / a pa / l a n d o v

ANY ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND Israel’s reti-

job. But he warned that a lack of meaningful diplomatic progress would eventually cause the cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis to collapse. “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state when you’re not,” he said in 2009.

In Ramallah in 2011, I spoke with Jerry Burke, a retired Massachusetts state police major who had trained officers in Iraq and Afghanistan and was working with the USSC in the West Bank. “The longer [the occupation] goes on, the less chance there is of a Palestinian state,” he said.

“Most Palestinians will tell you the two-state solution will never happen.”

Burke doesn’t see an outbreak of organized violence as likely: “The second intifada wasn’t that long ago. They don’t want to go back.” Palestinian security forces are dedicated and work hard, he said, but “most of them don’t think they’ll ever see a Palestinian state.” Asked to guess at likely outcomes, he says, “I’d say we’re headed toward an American Indian model, with Palestinians on reservations” amid a sea of settlements and Israeli security zones.

“There is no irreversible moment for a two-state solution,

keep. While this option has been discussed for years, it recently acquired urgency when Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, raised the idea in a February interview with The Times of Israel: “If we declare our borders, that creates a de-facto situation of two nation states recognized by the UN. … We would be one of dozens of pairs of countries in the world that have a border dispute.”

Right-wing Israeli journalist Caroline Glick has an even more extreme plan. Glick recently published The Israeli Solution, in which she calls for the country to annex all of the West Bank and offer the Palestinians living there a “path to citizenship” (a path, one imagines, that would be quite arduous). In response to concerns that Israeli Palestinians would eventually outnumber Israeli Jews in such an arrangement, Glick insists that, without Gaza, this new Israel would still safely retain a two-thirds Jewish majority.

Some alternatives are baroque. In a 2008 piece for Tikkun, scholar Russell Nieli proposed an arrangement that he called “Two-State Condominialism”: a two-state confederation in which Palestinian Israelis “would be

As a concept, the two-state solution is more broadly accepted than ever, even as achieving it seems more remote. except such developments like Israel annexing the occupied territories, which I don’t see coming,” says Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist and editor of +972 Magazine, a leftleaning Israeli Web magazine. “[But] at a certain point a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital won’t be a very plausible option anymore, because you will have to either evacuate so many people or build such a complicated system of bypassing roads, tunnels, and bridges, that the solution itself becomes a problem.”

But what are the solutions? A number have been offered, but they’re all problematic in different ways.

Some people, most prominently the Palestinian American activist Ali Abunimah, have called for a single democratic state of all its citizens, a vision that is slowly but steadily gaining allies. In 2011, former Knesset speaker and Peace Now activist Avraham Burg declared the twostate paradigm finished—“So enough of the illusions,” he wrote in Haaretz, “there are no longer two states between the Jordan River and the sea”—and called on the Israeli left to cease giving cover to the right by pretending that outcome was any longer in the offing.

For a number of conservatives in Israel, an acceptable alternative would be to withdraw unilaterally from parts of the West Bank and annex the parts it intends to

required to transfer their citizenship, national identity, and national voting rights—but not their residence—to the new Palestinian state.” These Palestinians “would retain their permanent right to live in Israel and they would also retain their current benefits under the Jewish welfare state, but it would be required that they become citizens of—and permanent voting members of—the Palestinian state, not Israel.”

A much more pessimistic proposal was offered by Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh in his 2011 book-length essay What Is a Palestinian State Worth? Reflecting on the failure to create a state, Nusseibeh asked the reader to consider what a state is for in the first place—securing the rights of those within it. To this end, Nusseibeh proposed “that Israel officially annex the occupied territories, and that Palestinians in the enlarged Israel agree that the state remain Jewish in return for being granted all the civil, though not the political, rights of citizenship.” In other words, Palestinians accept second-class status, rather than continuing to fight an apparently unwinnable battle against the Israeli occupation.

Recognizing his own proposal as “so objectionable that it might well generate its own annulment, either by making all parties see the need to find a tenable alternative or, if

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

indeed adopted, by serving as a natural step toward a single democratic state,” Nusseibeh nevertheless insisted that such a plan would provide Palestinians with “a far better life than they have had in more than forty years under occupation or would have under another projected scenario: Israeli hegemony over scattered, ‘autonomous’ Palestinian enclaves.” Even though offered as a “thought experiment,” such a proposal coming from a longtime supporter of two states like Nusseibeh is a sign of the Palestinian intelligentsia’s exhaustion with endless rounds of negotiations.

That exhaustion is shared broadly among the younger generation. Two Palestinians at opposite ends of the establishment spectrum—the first an activist leader in the West Bank, the second a young Palestinian official close to the negotiations over the past several years—illustrate a fundamental shift in views. The activist is done with two states, with Oslo, and with the Palestinian government created under its auspices. “I don’t want a Palestinian Authority representing me that hasn’t had elections since 2006,” she told me. “It’s time to get people out of thinking about land and into thinking about rights. I’m tired of arguing about

GIVEN THE MASSIVE INVESTMENT in diplomatic efforts

over the past decades, it’s difficult to imagine that U.S. policy can be redirected toward a solution beyond two states.

But American policy is going to have to confront openness to other answers on the part of Israelis and Palestinians.

The logic of the Oslo process that created the Palestinian Authority was that it was a transitional period leading to the creation of a Palestinian state, in which the Palestinian people would enjoy sovereignty and self-­determination.

Because the occupation was nearing its end, the thinking went, it was better to focus on the ultimate goal and not get distracted arguing about the daily challenges that Palestinians face. After almost 47 years of occupation, that thinking may need to change.

“We may be entering a ‘nonsolution’ era,’” says Palestinian official Husam Zomlot. “It doesn’t mean renewed conflict, but it means we need to ditch the idea that our peoples’ daily needs must wait for a solution.” Finding a solution remains paramount, Zomlot stresses, “but in a scenario of a nonsolution, then what? The people of Gaza should remain under siege? The people of the West Bank

Exhaustion with endless rounds of negotiation is shared broadly among a younger generation of Palestinians. land. I want my rights.” The Palestinian official confessed to me that, after years of being at negotiations, “I never thought I’d say this, but I care less about a state than I do about being treated with dignity. Give me an Israeli passport, but don’t humiliate me at checkpoints.”

These sentiments were echoed in a recent New York Times article on growing frustration with the two-state solution among younger Palestinians, including the son of President Abbas. “If you don’t want to give me independence, at least give me civil rights,” Tareq Abbas told the Times. “That’s an easier way, peaceful way. I don’t want to throw anything, I don’t want to hate anybody, I don’t want to shoot anybody. I want to be under the law.”

Still, no one has articulated a plausible process for how that could happen. “There’s no exact model, but there’s no exact situation like Israel-Palestine anywhere else in the world,” says Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, a Washington-based nonprofit that does educational and humanitarian work on behalf of the Palestinians. “I think there are lessons that can be borrowed from the outcomes in different places that can help us move in a different direction in Israel-Palestine, but we have to always remember that it is a unique situation, and so unique solutions have to be thought about.”

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should continue to see their land being robbed by the day?

We cannot afford any longer to continue behaving as if everything has to wait until a solution is struck.”

Noam Sheizaf believes it is time to change the terms from a struggle for statehood to a struggle for human rights. “When one addresses the occupation as a humanrights issue, and I believe this to be its true essence, attitudes change, even dramatically,” he says. The existing reality in the West Bank, Sheizaf says, is “two different legal systems in the same territory, access to resources based on ethnicity, the lack of due process which is an inherent part of the occupation. All of these are so foreign to the American ethos.” Heightening the focus on that reality, he argues, rather than on a diplomatic process that has proved incapable of changing it, could be more constructive.

If the current negotiations effort by the U.S. fails, it’s unlikely that any measure of trust between the sides will be preserved for the next president to have another go at the issue. In such a scenario, the U.S. will find itself in a situation in which it remains deeply implicated but seems to have even less ability to influence the course of events.

The time is now to start talking about Plan B, if only to give greater urgency to Plan A. 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

Punching Out: Prisoners in Arizona line up to sign their time cards after a day of farmwork.

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THE GREAT

AMERICAN

CHAIN GANG Why can’t we embrace the idea that prisoners have labor rights?

B Y B ET H SCH WA RTZA PFEL

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

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these workers, almost 700,000, still do “institutional maintenance” work like Hazen’s. They mop cellblock floors, prepare and serve food, mow the lawns, file papers in the warden’s office, and launder millions of tons of uniforms and bed linens. Compensation varies from state to state and facility to facility, but the median wage in federal and state prisons is 20 and 31 cents an hour, respectively.

Because inmate workers are not considered “employees” under the law, they have none of the protections that word implies. No disability or worker’s compensation in the event of an injury. No Social Security withholdings, sick time, or overtime pay. In three states— Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas—they work for

THE MEDIAN WAGE IN FEDERAL AND STATE PRISONS IS 20 AND 31 CENTS AN HOUR, RESPECTIVELY. IN 3 STATES, PRISONERS WORK FOR NO PAY. free. In Texas, where inmates are required to work under threat of punishment, most do maintenance tasks, but some are assigned to “field force” jobs designed to be demeaning.

“It wouldn’t be an ideal job,” says Jason Clark, Texas Department of Criminal Justice public information office director. “Someone may have had disciplinary issues, so they end up in the field force, doing various things including clearing fence lines. They’re out under armedguard supervision, using their labor.”

If that scenario sounds familiar, it should.

“Thousands of prisoners toil in the hot sun every day and make nothing,” says Judith Greene, director of the nonprofit group Justice Strategies. “Prison guards on horseback, ten-gallon hats, prisoners in their uniforms.

It looks like what it is: plantation labor all over again.”

Critics trace the current system back to convict-leasing, what journalist Douglas Blackmon calls “slavery by another name.”

From the time of Reconstruction until the early to mid-20th century, prison inmates— almost all of them black, many convicted of fabricated crimes like “false pretense” or “selling cotton after sun set”—were routinely leased out to private companies to work on plantations and in coal mines and factories.

There, they “were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion,” as Blackmon writes.

Conditions in most prison workplaces today are nowhere near as brutal, but the legacy is hard to ignore. Since prisoners are so far removed from the free market, and since their work is barely recognized as such by government agencies that regulate labor, they have little recourse and few protections. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is one safeguard they do have—federal and some state inmates doing work “similar to that outside prisons” can file an OSHA complaint if their workplace is unsafe—but it’s toothless.

Unlike in a free-world workplace, OSHA has to notify prisons in advance of inspections.

A 2010 report by the Office of the Inspector General skewered the federal prison system for purposefully hiding from OSHA dangerous practices at electronics-waste recycling plants where hundreds of inmate workers and officers were exposed to toxic dust.

Despite the conditions and the pay, most inmates want to work. A job gives them a safe place to be for hours each day, provides a break from the monotony of prison life, and—in most states—puts a few dollars and cents in their commissary account. “I was happy to work,” Hazen says. “It made me feel like I wasn’t so much in prison. It gave me a minute by myself to get away from the craziness, time to think and reflect and figure out what I wanted to do with my life.” What the job didn’t provide was a wage sufficient to support her son and accumulate some savings for post-prison life, or job training that would help her pursue the goals

p h o t o p r e v i o u s pa g e : n i c o l e h i l l / the christian science monitor via get t y images

L

aurie Hazen has bad taste in men.

“They’re my downfall,” the 41-yearold jokes in her Massachusetts accent. “I have to really stay single.”

An ex-boyfriend first introduced her to prescription drugs, she says, a habit she maintained through the course of another relationship, with another addict, and through two stints in prison, most recently in 2012 for writing fake prescriptions.

When she arrived at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Framingham, Hazen left behind a job as a records manager for a fiber-optics company. Her $14-an-hour salary had covered food, utilities, and rent on the modest apartment she shared with her boyfriend and her teenage son. She would have been putting some money away, too, if her paycheck hadn’t also been covering the couple’s drug habit. As it was, like many inmates, she went to prison with no savings and, because her boyfriend was also locked up, no one on the outside to send her money. Her son went to live with his dad.

After two weeks in prison, Hazen could apply for a job. Because her sentence was less than a year, she wasn’t eligible for Framingham’s highest-paying job at $20 per week, stitching American flags, and she had to choose between washing dishes in the kitchen and cleaning bathrooms. Hazen took the kitchen job so she could eat a little extra before and after her shifts. She earned $2 a day collecting inmates’ dirty trays and loading them into the dishwasher during breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The cramped room where she worked had no windows and routinely filled with steam from the 200-degree dishwasher. There was one tiny fan. “It was pretty much slave labor,” she says, “but there was nothing I could do about that.

I needed stamps to write to my child. I needed hygiene products.”

About half of the 1.6 million Americans serving time in prison have full-time jobs as Hazen did. They aren’t counted in standard labor surveys, but prisoners make up a sizable workforce: 870,000 working inmates, roughly the same number of workers as in the states of Vermont and Rhode Island combined. Despite decades’ worth of talk about reform—of giving prisoners the skills and resources they need to build a life after prison—the vast majority of

t y w r i g h t / b lo o m b e r g v i a g e t t y i m a g e s

The American Way: Less than 4 percent of prisoners, including these flag-making inmates at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, work in “correctional industries” that teach job skills.

she established in that dish room: to study psychology and one day open a domestic-­ violence shelter. After six months of work, Hazen left prison the way most people do— with a criminal record, no meaningful job experience beyond what she went in with, and $43 in savings, not even enough to buy a suit for a job interview.

Study after study has found what common sense would suggest: Prisoners who gain professional skills while locked up, and those who earn a decent wage for their work, are far less likely to end up back behind bars.

But require prisons in America, with the world’s highest incarceration rate, to pay minimum wage—let alone the prevailing wage—and they couldn’t keep operating. If inmates like Hazen weren’t washing dishes

in Massachusetts prisons, the state’s corrections department would spend an average of $9.22 to hire someone else to do it (the mean hourly wage for a dishwasher, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). That’s 30 to 45 times what inmates make for performing the same service. As a result, prisons—and taxpayers—save hundreds of millions of dollars each year on labor costs, according to the Government Accountability Office, by paying prisoners next to nothing.

“If our criminal-justice system had to pay a fair wage for labor that inmates provide, it would collapse,” says Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News, an independent magazine that promotes inmates’ rights.

“We could not afford to run our justice system without exploiting inmates.”

IF PAYING INMATES PENNIES looks like sav-

ings to corrections officials, it translates to additional costs for everyone else. Consider, for starters, that more than 1.2 million prisoners have a minor child—2.7 million kids in all.

About half of these parents were, like Laurie Hazen, their family’s primary breadwinner before they went to prison. Not surprisingly, their families often turn to social safetynet programs to compensate for the missing income. Families with an incarcerated parent are far more likely to use Medicaid and SCHIP, and twice as likely to use food stamps.

For most, the situation doesn’t improve upon release. Even as state and federal governments pour hundreds of millions of dollars into reentry initiatives with the aim of easing the transition home and slowing the “revolving

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

door” between prison and the community, they’re undermining successful re-entry by burying inmates in fees and fines while paying them next to nothing for their work. It costs money to be locked up in America, more and more of it all the time: court costs and fees when you’re tried, booking fees when you’re processed in jail and then prison, and supervision fees while you’re out on parole. Restitution costs, child-support arrears, and, in some states, “room and board” costs pile up during long prison terms. A state-sponsored study of the impact of legal fees in Washington found that the average inmate owes $2,540 per conviction in fees and fines.

Once a prisoner is released, debt compounds another financial problem: a felony conviction makes job-hunting notoriously difficult. That’s

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especially true if you’re black, which almost 40 percent of prisoners are. In a seminal 2003 study, only 5 percent of black applicants to entry-level jobs got callbacks if they had a criminal record, one-third as many as black applicants without a record. (Whites with a criminal record were still more likely to be called back than blacks without one.)

The combination of debt and poor job opportunities can lead recently released prisoners right back to prison—neither a costeffective outcome for the state nor a desirable outcome for, well, anyone. Sometimes people land back behind bars because of their debts alone; the American Civil Liberties Union and New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice documented hundreds of cases in which people were reincarcerated as a result

of their inability to pay criminal-justice debts.

In one Ohio county, more than 20 percent of all jail bookings stem from a failure to pay fines—a Dickensian situation that critics liken to modern-­day debtors’ prisons.

Harvard sociologist Bruce Western is currently conducting a small study on re-entry, following 135 people in Boston’s urban neighborhoods during the first year after they’re released from Massachusetts prisons. More than half of the people in his sample have not worked a single day in the months since they’ve been released. They survive instead on $200 a month in food stamps. If they have no friends or family to stay with, they are homeless. “How do you live on zero income?” Western asks.

“People appear to be doing that.”

For many, the only way to dig out of debt is

andrew burton / get t y images

Not Cleaning Up: Most prison jobs are like Ronald Baker’s dishwashing gig at California’s Valley State Prison. They offer no marketable skills, no health-and-safety protections, and little pay.

to continue to break the law. New Yorker Glenn Martin was 22 in 1995 when he was sentenced to six years for armed robbery of a jewelry store. In prison, he earned $10.50 per 30-hour workweek as an administrator at the facility’s college program—approximately the same pay as Laurie Hazen earned washing dishes but with the benefit of providing productive job experience. “I learned how to use computers.

I kept spreadsheets, helped people register for classes,” he says.

He was released in 2000 and took the bus back to Manhattan. With just $230 in his pocket, he was lucky he could move in with his mom. Then he got a break: A nonprofit specializing in job placements for people with criminal records helped him land a job as a receptionist at a law firm. It paid $16,000 a year—a far cry from the thousands per day Martin says he used to make “ripping and running the street.” But, he says, “I was committed to turning my life around.”

When Martin had gone in, his son was six months old, and Martin was paying $50 a month in child support, an amount he naïvely thought would remain fixed, making paying it off doable. But later he learned that the judge had issued a default order, increasing his payments to $100 per week plus 9 percent interest. Now he owed $53,000 in arrears, plus the ongoing weekly payments, plus $5,000 in court fees and fines. “It’s insurmountable pressure,” he says. “Either I do something wrong to pay off the fines and fees, or I relegate myself to a debtors’ prison or a lifetime of poverty.”

Locking Martin up for six years cost New York taxpayers approximately $360,000. The most cost-effective outcome would be for him to live a lawful life and not be incarcerated again. Yet Martin felt cornered. “I committed crimes,” he says. “The statute of limitations are over, so I think I can say it out loud: I broke the law.” Martin says he brought in about $30,000 committing crimes like selling counterfeit designer handbags on eBay—enough to help pay off his debts as he continued to build what has become a successful career. Until recently, Martin oversaw a $1 million budget as public policy director of the Fortune Society, a service and advocacy group for former prisoners. (He left last December to found his own prisonreform group, JustLeadershipUSA .)

“The system creates this weird situation where it tells you to do the right thing and turn your life around,” he says, “and then actually incentivizes future violations of the law—even if you’re inspired to do the right thing.”

Lately, everyone from Attorney General Eric Holder to Senator Ted Cruz has called for reforms to just about every aspect of the system: how we target people for arrest, how we arrest them, how we try them, sentence them, incarcerate them, release them, and supervise and support them once they’re home. But no one is talking about prison labor.

In 1985, as “tough on crime” policies were sweeping the country, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote presciently: “When

IF PAYING INMATES PENNIES LOOKS LIKE SAVINGS TO CORRECTIONS OFFICIALS, IT TRANSLATES TO ADDITIONAL COSTS FOR EVERYONE ELSE. our country is embarked upon a multibillion dollar prison construction program, it is fair to ask: Are we going to build more expensive human ‘warehouses,’ or should we change our thinking and move towards factories with fences around them, where inmates can acquire education and vocational training and then produce marketable goods?” History has answered Burger: warehouses. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

What would happen if Americans decided to treat prison workers like, well, workers?

IT’S A NOISY WEDNESDAY at the Brown Creek

metals plant in Polkton, North Carolina. The plant’s approximately 55 workers make fire rings for state parks, industrial sinks for school cafeterias, contraband lockers for the

police. Some are experts in computer-aided design. Others are journeyman welders. A 44-year-old man named Joshua* assembled the plant’s plasma burn table from a pile of mail-order parts. Before he went to prison for sexual assault in 1999, Joshua made $15 an hour as a machinist making automobile cylinders; now he makes $15 a week operating the plasma cutter, creating custom metal piecework. During his downtime at work, he uses leftover scrap metal to design and build grandfather clocks. One sits next to his workstation, pendulum swinging, marking his time in custody: 15 years down, 8 to go.

This plant and 31 others like it compose the North Carolina Correction Enterprises program, which puts inmates to work producing goods for sale to “tax-supported entities” like municipal or county governments. Every state, along with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, runs a similar program in which inmates learn skilled work that can ease their transition to the outside. Modern-day correctional industries date back to the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the support of a reluctant American Federation of Labor to create Federal Prison Industries (FPI), with the dual aim of rehabilitating inmates and easing the burden on the taxpayer. “If we send men to prison, and don’t let them work, the taxpayer must foot the entire bill,” the Federal Prison Bureau director told The New York Times in 1936. FPI— now more commonly known as Unicor—sells products exclusively to the federal government, with the aim of minimizing competition with private-sector companies. State correctional industries follow similar rules.

A hybrid between a for-profit business and a rehabilitation program, correctional industries are typically self-supporting: Program revenue, not taxpayers, pays for equipment, supplies, inmate wages, and staff salaries, and profit is rolled back into the program.

But the idea is to train workers, not to compensate them; pay is only slightly higher than for prison-­maintenance jobs.

“Joshua” is a Still, even the savings Joshpseudonym. The ua has wrung from his $15 a North Carolina Deweek has made some differpartment of Corence, he says: “I send my kids rections requested that inmates’ real money orders and buy them names not be books. I’ve sent them several used in this story.

*

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

hundred dollars over the last couple years. I wish I could send them more.” But he has no complaints about the work: “I love making useful things. I do take pride in my work. I do like learning. I would wilt and die if forced to do some job such as folding sheets or slopping trays day in, day out for years.”

The iconic prison job, making license plates, is typically a correctional industries job. Inmates also do telemarketing and data entry. They build office furniture, fill eyeglass prescriptions, manufacture cleaning supplies, and produce clothing—including, in North Carolina, their own uniforms and those of the correctional officers keeping watch over them.

Prisoners gentle wild horses in Wyoming, raise water buffalo for mozzarella cheese in Colorado, and build motorcycles in Nevada. A men’s prison in Chino, California, runs a commercial dive school for inmates, training them to work as commercial divers, underwater welders, and heavy-construction riggers—highly specialized jobs that pay upward of $50,000 per year.

Their recidivism rate is less than 7 percent, compared to 64 percent of the state’s general prison population.

“When we can see a guy come in here with no marketable job skills—the only job he’s probably had is street pharmaceuticals—and he learns a skill and takes that skill out when he’s released, that’s the most rewarding part for me,” says Clayton Wright, the plant manager at Brown Creek. The warm metal makes the shop smell like a toaster oven, and the din is so loud that Wright is shouting. “I’ve been in my office and got phone calls from past inmates: ‘I got a job making 30 bucks an hour. I’m so happy.’ I’ve also gotten calls from employers, who ask, ‘Do you have any more like so-and-so? He’s one of my best.’ We’re so proud of that.”

Programs like North Carolina’s are designed with a certain amount of intentional inefficiency, aiming to employ as many inmates as possible for as many hours as possible. During downtime at the factory, Wright encourages the men to experiment with the materials and equipment; that’s how Joshua came to make grandfather clocks.

“What we want to do is, when they’re released, for them to feel unnatural not to be working,” says Mike Herron, who heads up

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correctional industries in Indiana. “For you and I, if we go a long period of not working, something’s wrong. But they have not lived their life that way. We’re trying to change that habit to where they need to work, mentally, just as much as you and I do.” Herron’s program stands out because almost every job—from cabinetmaker to electrician to housekeeper—comes with a Department of Labor apprenticeship, including one through the Library of Congress in which inmates produce Braille books for state-run schools for the blind. Apprentices leave prison with documented bona fides that help to counterbalance the difficulty they’ll face in job hunting. “These guys are felons, so paper helps

INMATES WITH SKILLED WORK ARE 35 PERCENT LESS LIKELY TO RETURN TO PRISON. BUT ONLY A FRACTION OF PRISONS OFFER THOSE JOBS. them get in the door when they get outside,” Wright says.

Research bears him out. One Washington state study found that working in correctional industries significantly reduces future crime rates and that the state saves $6 for every $1 it spends to launch the programs. In Tennessee, the state’s correctional industries program, TRICOR , estimates that taxpayers save $3.3 million each year by giving 1,500 inmateemployees a productive way to occupy their time. On the federal level, inmates who have worked in correctional industries are 35 percent less likely to land back in prison; a decade later, recidivism in this group was still substantially lower.

But correctional industries, all told, employ

only about 60,000 inmates—less than 4 percent of America’s prisoners. Why does a program with proven results remain so marginal? Largely because private-sector companies see inmates doing work that they do, at a fraction of the labor costs, and cry foul.

The thicket of laws and regulations meant to alleviate that complaint—prohibiting most inmate-made goods from being sold across state lines or in the open market—limits correctional industries’ customers and inhibits their growth, but it doesn’t address the root problem. “If the government would otherwise be buying its pencils from a private vendor,” the fact that they get them from prisoners still means that a private pencil vendor is out of a sale, notes Noah Zatz, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who studies nontraditional employment.

American Apparel, an Alabama manufacturer of military uniforms (not affiliated with the retailer of the same name), says it had to lay off 150 workers in 2012 when it lost a contract to Unicor. “We pay employees $9 [per hour] on average,” American Apparel’s Kurt Wilson told CNN Money. “They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans, and paid vacation. Yet we’re competing against a federal program that doesn’t pay any of that.” Last year, Alpine Steel, a Las Vegas company, became the target of competitors’ ire when it paid Nevada inmates minimum wage for work that on the outside would pay $18 or $19 per hour. “Competing against prison labor reduces the number of jobs available in our industry and hampers our businesses from expanding,” read a petition from competitor XL Steel and a half-dozen other local steel companies.

Alpine Steel was participating in the one prison work program that does pay competitive wages—at least in theory. The Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE) was created in 1979, over labor unions’ strong objections, after high-profile prison riots convinced politicians and the public that prisoners needed something useful to do. For the first time since convictlease programs were outlawed, for-profit companies were permitted to set up factories inside prisons with inmates as employees. In 38 states, inmates do mostly factory-style work like packaging products, assembling

pat r i c k t. fa l lo n / b lo o m b e r g v i a g e t t y i m a g e s

Diving For Dollars: In Chino, California, inmates train to become commercial underwater divers. Only 7 percent return to prison, compared to 64 percent of the state’s inmates overall.

clothing, and building circuit boards. Unlike correctional industries goods, these products can be sold on the open market. To avoid undercutting private-sector wages, companies must pay “prevailing wage” for their particular industry, although in practice this often means minimum wage or less; then the prison can deduct up to 80 percent of pay for “room and board,” victims’ compensation, and mandatory savings. Still, even with these enormous deductions, PIE jobs are the highest paid in prisons; the top of the pay scale is $16.95 per hour before deductions, according to the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), an industry group charged with auditing PIE programs.

The PIE program accounts for fewer than 5,000 jobs—less than 1 percent of working

inmates. Still, the direct link between corporate profit and prison labor—and, by extension, the potential for profit-driven exploitation— has made it a target for criticism.

Proponents of prisoners’ and workers’ rights point to a push by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, to expand federal prison industries in several states. Known for its “model legislation” crafted in partnership between right-wing legislators and powerful corporations, ALEC drafted a model Prison Industries bill in 2004. It was similar to a 1997 law passed in Texas that was written by ALEC ally Ray Allen, a state representative.

Labor unions would normally be an obvious advocate for exploited workers like these.

But they have traditionally been either openly hostile or uncomfortably silent when it comes

to prison labor, since inmate workers are seen as undercutting wages and competing for work with free-world union members. Neither the AFL-CIO nor the Service Employees International Union has an official position on prison labor. While the AFL-CIO’s deputy policy director Kelly Ross says that “clearly we are in favor of raising standards for prison workers in terms of wages and working conditions,” neither union has organized on behalf of inmate workers. Union workers in trades and manufacturing, two of prison labor’s primary industries, are already struggling in post-industrial America. Many see prison workers along with sweatshops in China as a threat to their wages and their jobs.

“Jobs are already under attack because of low-cost imports,” said Ann Hoffman of the

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Down On The Farm: In Arizona, some inmates are paid $2 an hour to pitch watermelons for a private business, ultimately benefiting megacorporations like Wal-Mart.

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times of employment,” says Gina Honeycutt, executive director of the NCIA .

And ’round and ’round the argument goes.

When the a priori assumption is that inmates should not compete for free-world work, the argument is narrow: Opponents say that inmate labor displaces competitors on the outside, while supporters say it doesn’t.

But the back-and-forth debate elides a larger question: So what if it does? We may all agree that by committing certain crimes, people forfeit their right to be free, at least for a time.

Must that also mean they forfeit their right to fair pay for their work? Ultimately, does it serve justice—or benefit the economy—to have so many people released from prison with sizable debts, no job skills, and nowhere to turn but to crime or the government safety net?

THOSE WHO CLAIM, as many do, that “every

job a prisoner has is a job a person in the free world does not have” misunderstand how economies function. Economists who study the issue say we should think of these jobs not as a one-for-one swap—there’s only one position, and either I have it or you have it—but rather as a spiral. They call it a “multiplier effect”: Unemployment begets unemployment. Communities with high rates of incarceration don’t just lose the workers who go to prison. They lose the money those workers (and their families) spend at the local grocery, banks, restaurants, and shops. The impact is felt through generations; studies show that having a parent in prison hampers a child’s prospect of upward economic mobility. If the law required that inmates be paid wages

nicole hill / the christian science monitor via get t y images

textile workers’ union UNITE at a 1997 congressional hearing. “Our workers cannot afford to compete with the wages and the lack of benefits that exist in the prisons.”

Unicor and proponents of state correctional industries argue, of course, that they’re not stealing jobs or suppressing wages. Lockdowns and other prison-related drags on productivity more than make up for the wage savings, NCIA officials say, and besides, they purposefully do a diverse array of work so as to limit their impact on any one industry.

Before launching a new program, corrections programs collaborate with state and local agencies to make sure they’re not displacing existing jobs. “In times of high unemployment like we’ve had the last few years, Correctional Industries is even more careful than in good

comparable to those for similar work on the outside—what the PIE program is supposed to do—their jobs would have the opposite effect.

When the inmate sent his income home, he’d help create additional jobs.

Paying inmates a prevailing wage would eliminate the complaint by free-world competitors and labor unions that prison shops are undercutting wages, since the wages would be the same on the inside and on the outside.

It would help inmates make amends for their crimes, too, by allowing them to pay restitution to victims. And it would help them to accumulate some savings so they can rebuild their lives when they’re released.

But prisons have no incentive to pay inmates better—to the contrary. Unlike workers in the free market, who (theoretically, anyway) can weigh factors like pay, working conditions, and other benefits when deciding where to work, inmates do not have a choice between employers. If they need the money, or the experience, they must take or leave what the prison is offering. “Prison is a deadening, horrific experience, and people line up for these jobs, whether they’re safe or unsafe, exploitative or not,” says Heather Ann Thompson, a Temple University historian who studies labor history and criminal justice.

There is one way to change the system fundamentally: Bring prison jobs under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets minimum standards for wages and working conditions.

Don’t count on it happening anytime soon.

Prison administrators say that paying real wages for real work would make them go bankrupt. Correctional industries administrators say the same thing: If inmates received the minimum wage, “we wouldn’t exist,” says Indiana’s Mike Herron. “Security costs and other costs are so high.” Even with the rising public and political recognition that America’s massive prison system is an expensive, counterproductive mess, it’s inconceivable that lawmakers—who would be assailed by labor, business, and tough-oncrime holdouts—will take such a radical step anytime in the near future.

Genuine prison-labor reform would almost surely have to come through the courts. For decades, inmates have been asking the judiciary to step in and require that prisons treat

their inmate employees like employees. Countless judges, both state and federal, have held that inmate workers need not be offered the same rights or protections as free-world workers. But from one ruling to the next, they can’t agree on why.

Some dismiss the claims on their face, concluding, as the Ninth Circuit did in 1985 and again in 2010, that “the Thirteenth Amendment does not prohibit involuntary servitude as part of imprisonment for a crime.” Other judges have grappled with the nature of the work, for instance whether the work is being done inside the prison or outside, as in workrelease programs. But as UCLA’s Zatz points out, “you can have a call center in a prison

PAYING INMATES A PREVAILING WAGE WOULD ELIMINATE THE COMPLAINT THAT PRISON SHOPS ARE UNDERCUTTING FREE-WORLD WAGES. that’s competitive with other call centers.

It’s sort of irrelevant, physically where it’s located.” Some judges zeroed in on who is buying the goods—the distinction between public and private customers that correctional industries officials are so careful to make.

“Each of these is a kind of attempt to draw a boundary between the world of the prison and the world of the market,” Zatz says. “None of them really makes any sense. But you see courts constantly grasping for these kinds of explanations as a way to separate out inmates from regular workers.”

Employment law lays out various tests to determine whether two people are engaged in an employee-employer relationship. Prison jobs easily meet most, if not all, of them. “The

puzzle,” Zatz says, “is the way in which courts have a strong instinct: No, there’s something different here. And then they run around in circles trying to figure out what that something different is.”

The something different is a moral judgment: Inmate workers are seen as less deserving of a decent job or a competitive wage. The courts, in this sense, are reflecting public sentiment. It’s why the idea that “law-abiding citizens … need jobs worse than inmates” (in the words of one recent Nevada editorial page) resonates the way it does. It’s the same reason people with felony convictions have such a hard time finding a job, why in so many states they’re barred from voting, why a criminal record can prevent you from living in public housing or securing student loans, and why political candidates have long won more votes with punitive rhetoric than with compassion or talk of prevention. In America, breaking the law has become more than just an occasion to be punished or even rehabilitated. It has become a permanent mark of who you are and what our country thinks you’re entitled to earn and do and be.

For one brief moment, in 1992, prisonlabor reform looked possible. Since the late 1970s, a group of inmate workers in Arizona and their lawyer, Michael St. George, had pursued a case further and further up the courts, finally convincing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Hale v. Arizona, that the Fair Labor Standards Act should apply to them. It appeared as though Arizona prisons would have to start paying inmates minimum wage. The ripple effect would have been enormous: Americans would have been forced not only to rethink their views of prisoners’ rights but to reconsider the prison system altogether. The country could not afford to incarcerate 1.6 million people if they all had workers’ rights.

But it never came to that. The state appealed the decision, the Ninth Circuit reheard the case with 11 judges instead of the original 3-judge panel, and the court overturned its own ruling the following year. Why? When you ask St. George to explain the court’s logic, his voice carries decades’ worth of weariness: “The Ninth Circuit decided,” he says, “that the Fair Labor Standards Act didn’t apply to those inmates, because they were prisoners.” 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 65

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Big, Not Strong Nomi Prins’s new book traces America’s propping up of banks since the robber barons. BY DAVID CAY JOHNSTON B

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rom Andrew Mellon’s nearly 11 years as Treasury secretary under Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover to our time, when Timothy Geithner went from financial regulator at the New York Federal Reserve to Treasury secretary to investment executive, journalists

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have often employed the image of a revolving door to describe the flow of bankers between Wall Street and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. But few know that the White House and the Treasury are, arguably, a single building. A tunnel connects 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue with 1600. Presidents

use this passageway to slip visitors in and out of the Oval Office.

Nomi Prins, in her new history All the Presidents’ Bankers, does not say it in so many words. But she shows that the tunnel from the White House to the Treasury extends, metaphorically, for 226 miles to Lower Manhattan. Prins

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digs into presidential libraries and national archives and mines a shelf of books. She also knows Wall Street from the inside. Equipped with degrees in mathematics and statistics, she worked at Chase, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and finally Goldman Sachs, where she was a managing director. Prins created something of a sensation eight years ago with one of her earlier books, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America.

Prins’s story begins in the ’80s— the 1880s. Science, engineering, and mass production were transforming what had been an agricultural nation into an industrial one,

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creating private fortunes that would have been beyond imagining before the Civil War. Rivers of cash flowed to titans of the Gilded Age. The rise of the Rockefeller fortune was crucial. The bounteous profits that John D. Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil, generated through business acumen and suppressing competition grew larger than could be put to use in his own enterprise. So Rockefeller “began investing in banks, insurance companies, copper, steel, railroads and public utilities.” Rockefeller did all this, Prins shows, with the help of James Stillman, president of National City Bank (the forerunner of what is now Citigroup), while drawing on investments made through Chase National Bank, known today as JPMorgan Chase. Prins writes of marriages of interests—not European royals sealing diplomatic ties but banking royalty cementing business alliances.

She recounts, for example, the 1902 marriage of James Stillman’s daughter Elsie to a Rockefeller. That merger produced James Stillman Rockefeller, who went on to become National City Bank’s president and later chairman in the 1950s and 1960s. The intertwined interests among heirs to the early generations of robber barons have proved to be as strong as a spider’s web, able to trap huge sums and sustain fortunes through good times and bad.

Prins notes that the bankers who mattered a century and more ago and the bankers who matter today have consistently numbered six, a group small enough to cooperate or collude during a crisis. On the overcast Thursday morning of October 24, 1929, the day of the crash that launched the Great Depression, Charles Mitchell of National City Bank, Al Wiggin of Chase, Seward Prosser of Bankers Trust (later bought by Deutsche Bank), and William Potter of Guaranty Trust (now part of JPMorgan) strolled to 23 Wall Street to meet with Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan and George Baker of First National Bank (later Citi), who had come in through a side door to avoid reporters. In 20 minutes, the six agreed to prop up the collapsing market; Lamont, standing in for J.P. Morgan Jr., who was in Europe, announced the plan.

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Easy profits mislead us into believing

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is the source of prosperity.

When bad decisions threaten banks, we must pay up, or else.

In the 2008 banking collapse near the end of the George W. Bush administration, it was again the Big Six banks that set the terms. They met on September 12 and soon wrested from Congress more cash than the Defense Department spent that year. The banks’ champion was Bush’s Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, who before serving in that office had run Goldman Sachs, the country’s biggest investment bank.

Even those who have read Secrets of the Temple, William Greider’s massive and brilliant 1987 exposé of the Federal Reserve, will find Prins’s book worth their time. She presents a new narrative, one that shows how the changing cast of six has shaped America’s fortunes under presidents in both parties. President Harry Truman’s four-point plan to restore the world economy, for example, created new opportunities for American banks. In 1950, Truman chose young Nelson Rockefeller, a nephew of Chase Bank chairman Winthrop Aldrich, to chair an international development advisory board just as Chase Bank’s international operations blossomed.

Prins details how another man—John McCloy, chairman of Chase for seven of the Eisenhower years—tied together interests of big banks, oil, law, and diplomacy. McCloy was a top adviser to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, helping create what is now the CIA; he ran the World Bank after World War II, later served on the Warren Commission, and became perhaps the most powerful partner at the law firm hired by Rockefellers and Kennedys alike—Milbank Tweed—representing the “seven sisters” oil companies in Washington and Riyadh and their bankers. From Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, he enjoyed remarkable White House access.

As one of the “six wise men” of American foreign policy early in the Cold War, McCloy signaled to the Eisenhower administration that it must not take too literally the powers of the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. The law required bankholding companies to sell nonbank investments and limited each bank to one state. In theory, Prins writes, the act was supposed to check expansion of the biggest banks by requiring

Fed approval. But the Fed, by far the friendliest of the bank regulatory agencies that include the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, applied the law in ways that helped Wall Street banks, which grew through acquisitions, while thwarting an upstart rival then based in San Francisco: Bank of America. Clever bankers, Prins observes, made the Fed into more ally than regulator (a tradition that continued decades later, during Geithner’s tenure as president of the New York Fed from 2003 to 2009). The regulations and policies the bankers persuaded the Fed to adopt in the 1950s effectively defeated measures designed to rein in their power—especially antitrust laws that would have forced competition. In practice, it was through the very mergers the law was supposed to corral that Chase Bank grew and grew.

No matter who has been in the White House, Wall Street banks have had access, though often in ways not obvious to the average bank customer.

Big bankers exploited every opportunity, including the pending impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Prins writes that as the body politic argued over a husband lying about how a blue dress got stained, “bankers welcomed the media and political frenzy as a distraction while they focused on their own houses.” Early in 1998, Sandy Weill of Travelers Insurance proposed a corporate marriage to Citibank, headed by John Reed. The creation of Citigroup just six weeks later represented a landmark violation of the Glass-Steagall Act, a New Deal law that had required retail banking, investment banking, and insurance to be performed by unconnected corporations.

In the 35 years from 1960 to 1995, fewer than 10,000 bank mergers took place. In the last half of the 1990s, when Clinton was occupied with impeachment, more than 11,000 bank mergers were consummated. Lobbyists ran up invoices, corporations and executives poured in campaign contributions, and most journalists accepted the meme that Glass-Steagall was outdated. The loophole that allowed Travelers and Citi to merge required the killing of Glass-Steagall by 1999.

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The inherent conflicts of interest Glass-Steagall had prevented, which few lawmakers or journalists understood, were now enabled. This in turn, Prins shows, fueled the unsound banking practices that were later to sink Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the whole economy. Meanwhile, in the early aughts Geithner proved a sightless sheriff at the New York Fed, ignoring accounting tricks, falsified warranties on mortgage securities, and weakened underwriting standards. He was told in 2005 that Fed supervision of Citigroup was inadequate but did nothing to strengthen it.

In late summer 2008, banking practices that Glass-Steagall would have barred combined with lax regulation to produce the worst financial disaster since 1929. Citigroup ended up getting a bailout of almost half a trillion dollars. The sum of money required to make good on all the bad bets and misconduct came to $12.8 trillion, Bloomberg News calculated— not much less than the output of the entire economy in 2009.

In contrast to the conviction of more than 1,000 high-level executives following the savings-and-loan scandals of the early 1990s, bankers not only avoided prosecution but turned this disaster into a boon. One major beneficiary was Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. His 2013 pay package came to $18.5 million, a 74 percent increase over 2012.

He owns bank stock and options worth north of $400 million at today’s prices.

Chase continues in the routine business of retail banking, taking paychecks as deposits and issuing credit cards and loans. It also underwrites stocks and bonds while selling insurance, thanks to the absence of Glass-Steagall.

Chase still places huge bets in the casino game of swapping derivatives, too.

In spring 2012, gambling by a Chase trader known as the “London whale” lost more than $6 billion, resulting in a $920 million fine. But what does Dimon need to worry about? These risky bets are placed with the implicit backing of taxpayers should anything go wrong, as it surely will again.

PRINS NOTES THAT the six big banks

agreed to $80 billion in fines following the 2008 disaster. That sounds like

President Calvin Coolidge, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1924

ALL THE PRESIDENTS’ BANKERS: THE HIDDEN ALLIANCES THAT DRIVE AMERICAN POWER

BY NOMI PRINS

Nation Books

a lot. She points out that the amount equals eight-tenths of 1 percent of their assets, the kind of insignificant penalty that The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson dismisses as the equivalent of a rounding error.

Instead of busting up these banks, as the great reformer Theodore Roosevelt once called for because “malefactors of wealth” were holding back the economy, Washington today props them up. The zero-interest-rate policy of the Fed and its buying of tens of billions of dollars of bonds held by banks each month is a subtle subsidy that an International Monetary Fund paper shows comes to $83 billion per year.

That is more than the cost of food stamps. The intent of zero interest is to boost the economy, and many progressives support the policy, but it also savages the savings of retirees and raises the costs of pensions.

Attorney General Eric Holder has said he is afraid to prosecute the biggest banks because doing so may upset the economy. In effect, Holder defends looking the other way at frauds documented by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, whose report detailing Wall Street criminality Congress instantly tossed in the round file.

America has nearly 7,000 banks.

Just two of the biggest—Citigroup and Chase—hold $4.3 trillion in assets, or more than 30 cents out of every banking dollar. Banking—from retail lending and the underwriting of securities to insurance, trading, and derivatives gambling—accounts for more than

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40 percent of corporate profits, which are at record highs and rising. Historically, the figure was half that or less.

The growth in money made from handling money comes at the expense of other activities. Banking, after all, is a facilitator, the oil that lubricates the engines of production. Banking is crucial, but bankers accumulate money from wealth created by others. Tom Wolfe wrote about this in The Bonfire of the Vanities: Wall Street bakes golden cakes, and bond traders, like the fictional Sherman McCoy, grow rich by selling and reselling slices of these cakes, pocketing the golden crumbs that fall off in the process.

Prins quotes Teddy Roosevelt saying in 1905, “This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country.” The easy profits in banking mislead us into believing finance is the source of our prosperity; when bad decisions threaten the banks, we must pay up, or else. Prins shows how six banks that should have been allowed to fail got their bailouts and how the new regulatory law, Dodd-Frank, is weak gruel, damaging the economy going forward. Now that the regulations that ensured sound banks are gone, presidents (and Congresses) must tap the taxpayers, or the economy really can fall into a disaster much worse than the Great Recession.

“America operates on the belief that if its biggest banks are strong, the nation will be too,” Prins concludes.

But the banks are only big, not strong.

Indeed, the “stress tests” to determine if the banks can withstand another financial shock are designed to test only for minor upsets, rigging the game in favor of the Big Six, which all engage in unsound practices, especially trading in derivatives. They remain big because of bad laws and enablers like Geithner and because politicians desperate for campaign donations listen to the pleas of bank owners more than those of customers. So the bankers live in grand style, lavished with subsidies that cost us more than food stamps for the poor.

In return for this largesse, the bankers savage our modest savings. 

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Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Polanyi, with the benefit of nearly a century’s worth more evidence, has a surer sense of how markets interact with society. More humanist than materialist, Polanyi did not believe in iron laws. His hope was that democratic leaders might learn from history and not repeat the calamitous mistakes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Polanyi lived long enough to see his wish fulfilled for a few decades. In hindsight, however, the brief period between the book’s publication and Polanyi’s demise is looking like a respite in the socially destructive tendencies of rampant markets.

In seeking to understand the dynamics of our own time, we can do no better than to revisit Polanyi.

Want to understand our market-crazed era?

Rediscover the 20th century’s most prophetic critic of capitalism. BY ROBERT KUTTNER B

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n November 1933, less than a year after Hitler assumed power in Berlin, a 47-year-old socialist writer on Vienna’s leading economics weekly was advised by his publisher that it was too risky to keep him on the staff.

It would be best both for the Österreichische Volkswirt and his own safety if Karl Polanyi left the magazine.

Thus began a circuitous odyssey via London, Oxford, and Bennington, Vermont, that led to the publication in 1944 of what many consider the 20th century’s most prophetic work of political economy, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Polanyi, with no academic base, was already a blend of journalist and public intellectual, a major critic of the Austrian School of free-market economics and its cultish leaders, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Polanyi and Hayek would cross swords for four decades—Hayek becoming more influential as an icon of the free-market right but history increasingly vindicating Polanyi.

Reluctantly, Polanyi left Vienna for London. Two of his British admirers, the Fabian socialist intellectuals G.D.H. Cole and Richard Tawney, found him a post at an Oxford-­ sponsored extension school for workers. Polanyi’s assignment was to teach English social and economic history.

His research for the course informed the core thesis of his great book; his lecture notes became the working draft. This April was the 70th anniversary of the book’s publication and also the 50th anniversary of Polanyi’s death in 1964.

Looking backward from 1944 to the 18th century, Polanyi saw the catastrophe of the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of laissez-faire taken to an extreme. “The origins of the

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cataclysm,” he wrote, “lay in the Utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.” Others, such as John Maynard Keynes, had linked the policy mistakes of the interwar period to fascism and a second war. No one had connected the dots all the way back to the industrial revolution.

The more famous critic of capitalism is of course Karl Marx, who predicted its collapse from internal contradictions. But a century after Marx wrote, at the apex of the post– World War II boom in both Europe and the United States, a contented bourgeoisie was huge and growing.

The proletariat enjoyed steady income gains. The political energy of aroused workers that Marx had imagined as revolutionary instead went to support progressive parliamentary parties that built a welfare state, to housebreak but not supplant capitalism.

Nations that celebrated Marx, meanwhile, were economic failures that repressed their working classes.

Half a century later, the world looks more Marxian. The middle class is beleaguered. A global reserve army of the unemployed batters wages and marginalizes labor’s political power.

Even elite professions are becoming proletarianized. Ideologically, the view that markets are good and states are bad is close to hegemonic.

With finance still supreme despite the 2008 collapse, it is no longer risible to use “capital” as a collective noun. The two leading treasury secretaries during the run-up to the 2008 financial crash, Democrat Robert Rubin and Republican Henry Paulson, were both former CEOs of Goldman Sachs. If the state is not quite the executive committee of the ruling class, it is doing a pretty fair imitation.

Yet Marx, for all of his stubbornly apt insights about capitalism, is an unreliable guide to its remediation.

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, writ-

THE POWER OF MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM: KARL POLANYI’S CRITIQUE

BY FRED BLOCK AND MARGARET R. SOMERS

Harvard University Press

ten for a broad audience, is witty and passionate as well as erudite. The prose is lyrical, despite the fact that English was Polanyi’s third language after Hungarian and German.

Contrary to libertarian economists from Adam Smith to Hayek, Polanyi argued, there was nothing “natural” about the free market. Primitive economies were built on social obligations.

Modern commercial society depended on “deliberate State action” by and for elites. “Laissez-faire” he writes, savoring the oxymoron, “was planned.”

Libertarian economists, who treat the market as universal—disengaged from local cultures and historic time—are fanatics whose ideas end in tragedy. Their prescription means “no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”

Like Marx, Polanyi begins in England, the first fully capitalist nation. In Polanyi’s telling, the slow shift from a post-feudal to a capitalist economic system accelerated in the 18th century, when the enclosure movement (“a revolution of the rich against the poor”) deprived the rural people of historic rights to supplement incomes by grazing domestic animals on common land, and the industrial revolution began to undermine craft occupations.

For a time, social cushions left over

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from feudalism sheltered ordinary people from the turbulence of markets. “England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures,” Polanyi wrote, because protections guaranteed by the Crown could “slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable.” Conservatives understood this better than economic liberals. Polanyi invokes the views of Lord Canning, a Tory who served as foreign secretary and later prime minister, that the poor laws— traditional relief payments that protected the rural working class from periodic destitution—“saved England from a revolution.” But in the early 19th century, the rising merchant class, the emergent Liberal Party, and the ideology of laissez-faire together produced a social order based on a self-­regulating market.

The old poor laws were abolished in 1834 in favor of the poorhouse, an institution designed to be so degrading that workers would accept the dismal labor-market wages in William Blake’s dark, satanic mills. Meanwhile, free trade became the norm, meaning lower grain prices in the short run (and depressed wages) but increased volatility in the price of food. In the same period, the rise of a rigidly enforced gold standard limited the state’s ability to temper periodic downturns.

An economy oblivious to social consequences had to engender backlash.

The sponsors of protective measures were often conservatives concerned about social stability, such as the English Tory Benjamin Disraeli and the Prussian Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. “The [English] Ten Hours Bill of 1847,” Polanyi writes, “which Karl Marx hailed as the first victory of socialism, was the work of enlightened reactionaries.” But by the late 19th century, periodic financial panics and depressions menaced both society and the market system. This got displaced into nationalism, culminating in World War I. After that war, the victorious nations tried to restore the trinity of free trade, the gold standard, and

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title Full Employment in a Free Society. At Bretton Woods, also in 1944, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White were inventing a postwar international financial system that made room for domestic social democracy freed from the pressures of gold and deflation. A few months after Polanyi’s book went to press urging that “rights of the citizen hitherto unacknowledged must be added to the Bill of Rights” including “the right of the individual to a job,” Franklin Roosevelt delivered his “Second Bill of Rights” speech in January 1944, calling for exactly that. Polanyi was not part of the run-up to Bretton Woods; he does not cite Beveridge, nor could he have known about FDR’s coming speech. But in the aftermath of depression, dictatorship, and war, the shared vision of managed capitalism was in the air. Nobody gave it context and gravitas better than Polanyi.

For three decades, the success of a social settlement between labor and capital seemed to vindicate both Polanyi’s critique and his hopes. But the compromise did not stick. The path of capitalism since the 1970s has repeated the 19th-century hegemony of the market and is beginning to resemble the darker history of the 1920s and 1930s.

Karl Polanyi

unprotected labor markets. Obsessed with sound currency, market ideologues and bankers demanded austerity policies leading to both mass unemployment and episodes of hyperinflation. Given the legacy of war debts and dislocations, all this was more than the economy or society could bear. Market institutions, Polanyi writes, “broke down in the twenties everywhere—in Germany, Italy, or Austria, the event was merely more political and more dramatic.”

In a few places, politics produced a third way—neither the hegemony of the turbulent market nor the grim security of the total state. Socialdemocratic Sweden and New Deal America devised a mixed economy that civilized the brute energy of capitalism. At the time Polanyi was writing, others converged on the same aspiration. In Britain, Lord Beveridge was composing his blueprint for a postwar welfare state. Part II, published in 1944, carried the Polanyian

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at a time when events vindicate his vision, one is struck by the eerie contemporary ring.

HOW DID KARL POLANYI become the great non-Marxian synthesizer of the tragic interplay of markets, society, and politics? He was born in Vienna in 1886 during a short era known as the “Great Generation,” when the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire was a center of intellectual and political enlightenment. His Hungarian father, Mihaly Pollacsek, with a Swiss engineering degree, was a designer of Vienna’s rail system. The family’s surname, of Polish-Jewish origin, was magyarized in the 1890s to Polanyi, and the family ceased identifying as Jews. Polanyi grew up mostly in Budapest, where his Russian-born mother, Cecile, ran a literary and political salon, and he attended the elite Trefort Street Gymnasium. The illustrious family included his younger brother Michael, a chemist who became a libertarian political philosopher, and Michael’s son, John, who

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 71

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won the Nobel in Chemistry, as well as the artist Eva Zeisel.

Expelled from the University of Budapest in 1907 after a brawl in which anti-Semitic right-wingers harassed a popular socialist professor and Polanyi and his friends rushed to her defense, he repaired to the provincial University of Kolozsvar (today Cluj in Romania) to finish a doctor of law degree. While still a student, Polanyi helped found the left-wing Galilei Circle, serving as its first president and editor of its magazine. After a flirtation with Marx, Polanyi was drawn to the more temperate Socialism of Robert Owen, Richard Tawney, and G.D.H. Cole and the British Fabians. In today’s language, he was a social democrat.

Polanyi served in the world war as a cavalry officer. He contracted typhus and came home to find Budapest torn between nationalist right and far left.

At the time of the aborted Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919 (which he opposed), Polanyi left Budapest for Vienna. His war experience, illness, and the destruction of liberal Budapest left him frail and emotionally exhausted. But in 1920, he met the love of his life, a petite firebrand named Ilona Duczynska. Her biographer called their union “a marriage between an anarchist world revolutionary and a reclusive liberal scholar.” Ilona was expelled from the Communist Party that year for her independent views. The couple had their only child, Kari, in 1923.

Though he had been a student organizer and secretary of the Hungarian National Bourgeois Radical Party, Polanyi seems to have been happiest at home with his wife and daughter or in a library. Soon, Polanyi was contributing to local journals and running an informal economics seminar from the family apartment on the Vorgartenstrasse.

To provide a counterweight to neoliberal dystopia, Polanyi believed the working class needed to be mobilized politically, in a robust democracy. He arrived at this conclusion not merely from theory but from his workereducation efforts at the Galilei Circle and by living in one of the most successful social-democratic epochs of

Polanyi hoped democratic leaders might learn from history and not repeat

CALAMITOUS MISTAKES of the past.

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF OUR TIME

BY KARL POLANYI

Beacon Press

the European experience, Red Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s—red as in social-democratic, not communist.

There, after World War I, socialist municipal governments in power for 15 years built model low-rent housing financed by taxation. Parents received kindergartens, day care, and a family allowance in the form of a “clothes package.” Gas, water, and electricity were provided by publicly owned utilities. Taxes on the wealthy included surcharges on the use of servants. Generous unemployment insurance strengthened workers’ bargaining power.

Polanyi viewed Red Vienna as a hopeful counterpoint to the Dickensian poorhouse on one extreme and fascism on the other. The perverse reforms of early-19th-century England were products of the weakness of the working class, he wrote, but Red Vienna was a badge of its strength: “While [English poor-law reform] caused a veritable disaster of the common people, Vienna achieved one of the most spectacular cultural triumphs of Western history.” But as Polanyi appreciated, an island of municipal socialism could not survive larger market dislocations and rising fascism. Four months after he departed Vienna in 1933, the right took over.

The nature of the times caused Polanyi and his wife Ilona to be twice separated, first when he moved to England and she stayed behind as part of the anti-fascist underground until 1936 and again for more than a year, when Polanyi backed into a wartime stay in America. He had been on a lecture tour of U.S. colleges, his third such visit. Peter Drucker, a friend from Vienna and later an influential theorist of corporate management, invited Polanyi to spend the summer of 1940 in southern Vermont with him and his wife. With the support of Drucker and another émigré scholar and friend, economist Jacob Marschak, then teaching at the New School, Polanyi applied for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to stay at Bennington to complete his book.

Among his references were prominent London acquaintances, including a young war correspondent named Edward R. Murrow.

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In the 1944 catalog of publisher Farrar & Rinehart, the entry for The Great Transformation appropriately compares it to Keynes’s succinct 1919 classic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. But while Keynes’s book was a best-seller, turning its author into a celebrity, The Great Transformation sold just 1,701 copies in 1944 and 1945.

The New York Times reviewer, John Chamberlain, was savage: “This beautifully written essay in the revaluation of a hundred and fifty years of history adds up to a subtle appeal for a new feudalism, a new slavery, a new status of economy that will tie men to their places of abode and their jobs.” If that sounds just like Polanyi’s nemesis, Hayek, it was for good reason. Chamberlain had just written the foreword to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, also published in 1944. While Hayek’s book was adapted in Reader’s Digest and became a best-seller, Polanyi’s languished.

By 1946, however, Polanyi had been reviewed, mostly favorably, in major newspapers and social-science journals, and he was slowly attracting a following. At 61, Polanyi was offered his first real academic job in 1947 at Columbia, where he taught until 1953.

But in the Cold War chill, the State Department refused to give a permanent visa to Ilona, and she relocated to Canada. After attempting to commute from Toronto, Polanyi spent his final years settled there, returning to an early scholarly interest in economic anthropology.

Temperamentally, he was both a work obsessive and a romantic. His habit of phoning former students at odd hours to discuss arcane ideas was part of his charm. Polanyi’s letters to his wife and daughter are filled with tenderness. One of his great essays is on Hamlet, and his last work, published in 1963, was a jointly edited book with Ilona, The Plough and the Pen, with an introduction by W.H. Auden, on the struggles of modern Hungary as rendered by Hungarian poets and essayists.

FRED BLOCK AND MARGARET Somers,

both economic sociologists, have been Polanyi admirers for more than

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three decades. In The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, they aim to reintroduce him in an era of resurgent laissez-faire and political blockage that he could have scripted. “Our focus,” they write, “is on the rebirth in the 1970s and 1980s of the same free market ideas that were widely assumed to have died in the Great Depression.”

Block and Somers provide a thorough reprise of Polanyi for readers new to him and careful analysis for specialists. The best part of their book is its introductory chapter, a well-­integrated and brisk summary of the man and his ideas. Other chapters provide useful discussions of what Polanyi’s social history gets right and slightly wrong, as well as astute comparisons of Polanyi with Keynes and Marx.

Unlike Marx, Polanyi viewed the transformation of a more balanced commercial society into a marketdominated one as neither natural nor inevitable. For Polanyi, as Block and Somers observe, “progress could only come through conscious human action based on moral principles.”

Though there was a logical pattern to capitalism’s overwhelming social structures, we were not doomed to repeat our mistakes. Polanyi was a huge fan of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he saw as the sane alternative to laissez-faire dystopia on the one side and totalitarian anti-politics on the other. “The eclipse of Wall Street in the 1930s,” he wrote, “saved the United States from a social catastrophe of the Continental type.”

Polanyi rejected both Marxists and economic libertarians for their shared premise that the state should or could wither away. Marxists assumed the state would be redundant after the workers’ revolution. Libertarians saw (and see) the state as interfering with the genius of the market. Polanyi embraced democratic politics, both as an end in itself and as the necessary precondition for taming the economy.

Despite his gloomy rendering of history, Polanyi remained an optimist.

Block and Somers also re-examine Polanyi’s research. A key section of The Great Transformation pivots on a local English ordinance known as the Speenhamland law, which

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Friedrich Hayek

Polanyi treats as an emblematic shift in emergent capitalism. Approved by the justices of Berkshire County at a May 6, 1795, meeting, Speenhamland increased the worker protections of the old Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. With wages falling, pauperism spreading, unrest increasing, and the English gentry all too aware of revolutionary events across the Channel in France, the law provided that any worker who could not earn enough to feed his family was entitled to supplemental relief from the local parish tied to the price of bread— “a minimum income should be assured to the poor irrespective of their earning.”

But the law, like a badly designed modern welfare program, backfired. Many employers reduced wages, knowing that the parish would make up the difference. Some workers, disdaining the wretched pay on offer, became idlers. Costs to taxpayers increased.

The dysfunctional system led to outcries from welfare reformers of the day, culminating in the infamous report of the 1832 Royal Commission, which, in turn, led directly to the reform of 1834 and the poorhouse.

Block and Somers find that Polanyi overstated the ubiquity of the Speenhamland system. In practice, poor-relief formulas in England varied widely. What Polanyi did not overstate was the dislocation of the working poor—first by the enclosure movement, then by the industrial revolution—and the perverse response of economic liberals.

A weakness of the Block-Somers book is that several chapters are based on published journal articles, insufficiently blended into a new whole.

As a consequence, the tone is uneven, and the book has a fair amount of

repetition. Nor do Block and Somers offer much on Polanyi’s personal journey. They include just four pages of summary on his life. The British social scientist Gareth Dale, author of the fine 2010 book Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, and Berkeley Fleming of Mount Allison University in Canada are currently working on the first comprehensive Polanyi biographies.

Fortunately, a good deal on the connection between Polanyi’s life and his work has already been written by his daughter and literary executor, Kari Polanyi Levitt, an emerita professor at McGill University in Montreal.

In Polanyi Levitt’s most recent book, From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization, she provides fascinating new material on Polanyi’s debate with Mises and Hayek. From the time he worked at the Österreichische Volkswirt in the mid-1920s, Polanyi engaged Mises and Hayek both ideologically and technically, arguing over pricing mechanisms under democratic socialism and the emergent dangers of the libertarian system then strangling Europe’s postwar recovery.

Polanyi viewed Mises and Hayek as modern counterparts of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, punishers of the poor in the name of market incentives. “Inside and outside England,” he wrote in The Great Transformation, “from Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant [free-market] liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism.”

Hayek contended in The Road to Serfdom that even democratic forms of state planning were bound to end in the totalitarianism of a Stalin or a Hitler. But 70 years later, there is not a single case of social democracy leading to dictatorship, while there are dozens of tragic episodes of market excess destroying democracy.

“The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism,” Polanyi wrote, “can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions.” Polanyi surely had the better of the argument. But Hayek had more influence

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over prevailing ideology and practice.

Polanyi and Marx might converge on the inference that Hayek’s views were more useful to the ruling class.

THOUGH SLOW TO WIN recognition,

The Great Transformation became a modern classic. After the neoliberal assault on the grand compromise of the late 1940s, Polanyi seemed not just prescient but prophetic. Because he was a political organizer, journalist, self-taught historian, and economist, Polanyi, in moral philosopher Albert Hirschman’s metaphor, could be a trespasser across academic disciplines.

Though Polanyi is one of the most cited of social scientists, he is not widely read among economists. The mainstream of the profession has largely stopped teaching the history of economic ideas.

Nor do most economists today study the relationship of economics to politics and social history.

Like other free spirits such as Hirschman, Joseph Schumpeter, or John Kenneth Galbraith, Polanyi had relatively few graduate students, and there is no formal Polanyi “school.”

Rather, a wide spectrum of thinkers found their way to him. He’s prized by social historians and economic sociologists, and his brand of inquiry fits squarely into the tradition of American institutional economics associated with John R. Commons and the great debunker of free-market cant, Thorstein Veblen. Since 1988, thanks to the efforts of his daughter Kari and her colleague Marguerite Mendell, there has been an active Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, which holds regular conferences, including an anniversary event planned for this fall.

A 1982 article by the internationalrelations scholar John Gerard Ruggie helped rekindle interest in The Great Transformation. Ruggie, paying homage to Polanyi, refers to the great postwar social compromise as “embedded liberalism,” meaning it squared the circle of a basically capitalist (liberal) economy with plenty of social protections (embedded). A few social scientists of the first rank, including the late sociologist Daniel Bell, political historians Ira Katznelson and Jacob Hacker, and economists Joseph Stiglitz, Dani Rodrik,

and Herman Daly, explicitly cite their intellectual debt to Polanyi. Paradoxically, Polanyi also appeals to some Burkean conservatives, with their regard for the social order. John Gray, a recovering Thatcherite and author of the best-selling critique of neoliberalism False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, is effusive in his praise of Polanyi. Martin Anderson, advising Ronald Reagan on welfare reform, drew extensively (if misleadingly) on Polanyi to warn that the wrong sort of poor relief backfires.

Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, author of notable books on the failures of grandiose state projects, said in a 2010 interview that he read The Great Transformation the summer before starting graduate school, “and I think it is, in some ways, the most important book I’ve ever read. … The struggle that Polanyi points to is a struggle that we’re still engaged in.”

At the same time, many public intellectuals working in the tradition of Polanyi don’t have him on their conceptual maps. Michael Walzer’s classic Spheres of Justice, on necessary boundaries between market and non-market institutions, is quintessential Polanyi, but Walzer never mentions him. Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist whose work on strategies to avoid environmental catastrophe—the modern tragedy of the commons—made her among the first non-economists to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, echoes Polanyi but doesn’t invoke him. In reading the works of Galbraith, the consummate historical and institutional economist of the 20th century, one searches in vain for Polanyi.

As more of us are having second thoughts about the second coming of the primal market, it is as if Polanyi is somewhere in the ether. Rereading Polanyi at a time when events vindicate his vision, one has to be struck with the eerie contemporary ring.

Polanyi is startlingly 21st-century in addressing how the private rule of global finance puts public policy in a straitjacket. Back in the era of the gold standard, if a government tried to combat unemployment, Polanyi wrote, “any governmental measure

Though slow

TO WIN RECOGNITION,

The Great Transformation became a modern classic.

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that caused a budgetary deficit might start a depreciation of the currency.”

That analysis could describe contemporary Argentina or Indonesia, except that the discipline of today’s bond market is even more relentless than the classical gold standard.

Polanyi also sounds like today’s news when he explains how the state’s doing the bidding of private capital (rather than providing a democratic counterweight) undermines politics.

In the 1830s, he explains, the British state served the interests of the rising merchant class. The result, he wrote, was “the hatred of public relief, the distrust of state action, the insistence on respectability and self-reliance” on the part of the English working class.

He could be describing members of the Tea Party, the same demographic that once voted in large numbers for FDR, and the tendency of citizens throughout the West to give up on governments in the pockets of the rich.

The European Union’s austerity follies are recapitulating the perverse policies of the 1920s and inviting the same brand of know-nothing backlash. In the upcoming elections to the European Parliament, voters disgusted with the failure of politics to remedy the prolonged recession are poised to deliver big gains to nationalist far-right parties. In Polanyi’s beloved Budapest, where he and Ilona are buried, the right already governs.

His discussion of the influence of ideas, likewise, is all too contemporary. In the 1920s, as in the 1830s, the intellectual dominance of free-market economists gave elites pseudo-­scientific cover to pursue brutal and perverse policies, with a studied myopia about real-world consequences. In our own time, market fundamentalism is again the dominant ideology. The latest great transformation, from a balanced social market economy to a dictatorship of the invisible hand, has weakened the power of the polity to restore balance and undermined the confidence of the working and middle classes in the use of the democratic state to counter market excess. One must hope, with the optimistic Polanyi, that capitalism can be fixed. 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 75

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What Was the Office?

Our artless workspaces have been the twisted end result of utopian thinking. BY JOHN LINGAN B

gr aphica artis / corbis

P

icture Leonardo DiCaprio heading stolidly to work at the start of two of his most alliterative movies. In Revolutionary Road, set in 1955, he’s Frank Wheeler, a fedora’d nobody who takes a train into Manhattan and the elevator to a high floor in an International-style skyscraper.

He smokes at his desk, slips out for a two-martini lunch, and gets periodically summoned to the executive den where important company decisions are made. Wheeler is a cog, but he is an enviable cog—by appearances, he has achieved everything a man is supposed to want in postwar America.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, set in the late 1980s, DiCaprio is a failed broker named Jordan Belfort who follows a classified ad to a Long Island strip mall, where a group of scrappy pennystock traders cold-call their marks and drive home in sedans. His office need not be a status symbol, since prestige for stock traders is about domination,

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not conformity; if you become a millionaire, who cares if you did it in the Chrysler Building or your garage?

Watch these films back-to-back, and you’ll see DiCaprio traverse the recent history of the American workplace.

A white-collar job used to be a signal of ambition and stability far beyond that offered by farm, factory, or retail work. But what was once a reward has become a nonnecessity—a mere company mailing address. Highways are now stuffed with sand-colored, darkwindowed cubicle barns arranged in groups like unopened moving boxes.

Barely anyone who works in this kind of place expects to spend a career in that building, but no matter where you go, you can expect variations on the same fluorescent lighting, corporate wall art, and water coolers.

In his new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, Nikil Saval claims that 60 percent of Americans still make their money in cubicles, and

CUBED: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORKPLACE

BY NIKIL SAVAL

Doubleday

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93 percent of those are unhappy to do so. But rather than indict these artless workspaces, Saval traces the intellectual history of our customizable pens to find that they’re the twisted end result of utopian thinking. “The story of white-collar work hinges on promises of freedom and uplift that have routinely been betrayed,” he writes.

Above all, Cubed is a graveyard of social-engineering campaigns.

Saval, an editor at n+1, traces the modern office’s roots back to the bookkeeping operations of the early industrial revolution, where clerks in starched collars itemized stuff produced by their blue-collar counterparts. Saval describes these cramped spaces as the birthplace of a new ethic of “self-improvement.” A clerkship was a step up from manual labor, and the men lucky enough to pursue it often found themselves detached—from the close-knit worlds of farming or factory work and even from their fellow clerks, who were now just competition. In Saval’s telling, this is where middle-class anxiety began.

The new class of workers also gave shape to the modern “vertical” business structure of discrete departments. Since railroads were the main means of commercial shipment, the most sensible way for a 19th-century company to expand was to build satellite factories, which required their own clerking staff and attending managers. Paperwork begat paperwork, expansion begat franchising, and suddenly “business” was the province of middlemen, ever hungry for higher company positions.

Around the turn of the century, Frederick “Speedy” Taylor, an engineer whose obsession with efficiency led to stints as a consultant for businesses like the Bethlehem Iron Company, pioneered the critical study of individual workers. His true innovation, Saval writes, “was to take knowledge away from workers and install it in a separate class of people.” Taylor required managers to monitor each employee, preaching a clerk-like ethos of self-betterment to the unionized workforce while promising higherups that his mathematical fanaticism (the “moneyball” of its day, Saval calls it) would improve the bottom line.

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Taylorism, the gospel of so-called scientific management, was employed first in factories, then by railroad companies. Its ultimate effect was to expand nonlabor office staff: Taylor’s vision required ever more white collars to study the blues. It also tended to sequester the actual labor force. As the 20th century went on, corporations began expending more effort and attention on managing and perfecting work than on work itself.

The white-collar explosion largely drove the midcentury architectural boom in major cities, as seemingly everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier attempted an office project, and hundreds of lesser-known architects stacked offices high enough to call them skyscrapers. Saval argues that the office also facilitated women’s lib and the sexual revolution, since the structured environment “made it possible for men and women to meet—if certainly not as equals, then at least on a terrain outside the fraught, unobserved world of the home.” Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 best-seller Sex and the Office posited the workplace as a forum for female empowerment through flirtation and interpersonal cunning.

Few of the efficiency-minded dreamers who succeeded Taylor got the revolution they intended. Take art professor Robert Propst, hired in the late 1950s by the Herman Miller office-furniture company to broaden its scope. “In one hour, he would reinvent the world,” said a designer who worked with him.

Propst’s R&D for a new workplace model included interviews with hundreds of employees, psychologists, and doctors. After six years of planning, Herman Miller unveiled Propst’s “Action Office” in 1964. Deemed “a mind-oriented living space,” it was a triumph of ergonomic, adjustable parts and ostensibly intuitive features like a disorienting lack of drawers. (Propst preferred to let ideas spread out organically on his “movable display surface” until completion.) Propst wanted the Action Office to be a vehicle for greater human achievement. The nation’s CEOs were more practical: The model didn’t sell. Several of its innovations and those of 1968’s Action Office II, such as movable walls, did shape the workplace for decades, however, though few would

78 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2014

The pop culture of our moment doesn’t have the luxury of simply ridiculing cubicle work.

thank Propst for his inadvertent legacy, the cubicle.

It was precisely this desire for forced efficiency that Silicon Valley set out to destroy with radically new open-office plans in the 1980s. Tech companies like Apple or the shorterlived Rolm Corporation took the notion of “fortuitous encounters”—the mythical coffee-break run-in between engineer and designer that conjures a creative breakthrough—to its extreme, doing away with hierarchies and encouraging everyone to mix work and recreation by sleeping in the office or playing basketball at an inhouse court. Silicon Valley’s blend of countercultural ideals with cutthroat competition was thought to herald the latest oncoming reinvention of the American workplace; instead, it left us with the costly, cushionless Aeron chair and no privacy.

Propst and his California successors were hindered by the same oversight.

“Office planners and architects tend to imagine that the setup of their own offices should be the way that everyone should work,” Saval writes. But human behavior, including cheapness, has its own inertia. To inaugurate the kind of changes Propst wanted, you need CEOs willing to underwrite a philosophy in furniture and employees who consider their jobs a fundamental expression of self. For most of us, a job is a job. Time and again, what starts as groundbreaking becomes repressive, since each new design idea is just a means of herding people.

MY FIRST OFFICE JOB started in the

summer of 2007. I’d just graduated from college, and I took the light rail to the outer suburbs of Baltimore and walked half a mile to my desk.

The McCormick & Company factory was nearby, so each day smelled like a different spice. In that half-mile (sidewalk-free, of course), I passed three other corporate campuses and rarely saw anyone coming or going. I worked in a cubicle of blue fabric and glass partitions and reported to the manager with the nearest window. For team meetings, we’d head into a room with a laminate-oak table and a whiteboard. If it was warm, I’d take lunch at a wooden picnic table in the parking

lot, the only object for miles that looked like weather could affect it. In my sensible shoes and flat-front khakis, I’d listen to the murmur of Interstate 83 from just over a tree-lined highway barrier, the air smelling faintly of cumin or allspice. This was not a sad scene, but it was an empty one, and I was jolted back to it when I read Saval’s assertion that post-skyscraper office design “had to be eminently rentable. … The winners in this new American model weren’t office workers or architects, not even executives or captains of industry, but real estate speculators.”

Freelancers are expected to account for 40 percent to 50 percent of the American workforce by 2020.

Saval notes a few responses to this sea change, such as “co-working” offices for multiple small companies or self-employed people to share. But he never asks why the shift is under way or why nearly a quarter of young people in America now expect to work for six or more companies. These are symptoms of the recession, and the result of baby boomers delaying retirement to make up for lost savings.

But they’re also responses to businesses’ apparent feelings toward their employees. It’s not so much the blandness of corporate architecture, which can have a kind of antiseptic beauty; it’s the transience of everything in sight, from the computer-bound work to the floor plans designed so that any company can move right in when another ends its lease or bellies up.

When everything is so disposable, why would anyone expect or want to stay?

Saval cites fictional depictions of the early office—stories like Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” with its “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable” clerk protagonist—as primary sources on the history of office work. His contemporary equivalents strangely stop with Dilbert and Office Space, 1990s relics of a time when the office’s worst offense was its meaninglessness. I wish he had contended with something like the recent TV show Enlightened, in which protagonist Amy Jellicoe is demoted from the well-lit top levels of her suburban–L.A. corporation to the building’s IT bowels. Only after her banishment from the managerial cocoon does she realize how corrupt

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the company is and how unglamorous many of her unseen co-workers’ lives are. Therapy supplies Amy with a social consciousness, and she starts to dream about bringing the company down—not just for revenge but for a vague greater good. The glassensconced but otherwise nondescript office building in Enlightened is a symbol of normalized evil; Amy’s company is indeed a menace to public health, but her co-workers are more or less resigned to that. Watching the show, I didn’t think about design theory, but I thought a lot about the frustrations and moral compromises inherent in modern work. Even the smallest businesses rely heavily on tech, banking, and real estate; so on some level, unless you sell vegetables at a roadside stand, your employer probably enables some of the most clandestine or bubble-prone industries in the world.

The most sought-after jobs in America right now are at Google’s famously luxurious headquarters, even as concern grows about the company’s mining of users’ private information. As it happens, Mike Judge, the writerdirector of Office Space, has a new HBO series, Silicon Valley, set in this milieu.

The heroes are young programmers living at a would-be mogul’s house and designing apps while working at Hooli, a Google-like corporation whose campus is replete with “bike meetings,” surfboard coffee tables, and other ostentatiously “innovative” features. It’s a complete change from the workplaces in Judge’s earlier movies (including 2009’s underrated Extract), but Judge captures what makes the new paradigm unbearable. Rather than a mere boring cubicle warehouse, Silicon Valley is a place where insane wealth and greed combine with a smug mantra of “making the world a better place.” The pop culture of our moment doesn’t have the luxury of simply ridiculing cubicle work. We can’t assume that a creative environment means the work will be meaningful or that a company professing social goodwill means anything by it. Mergers, bankruptcies, and buyouts happen so often that there’s little chance our jobs or offices will be around when and if we retire.

So who cares about the planning and theory that went into our chair? 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 79

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The Obscure Heroes behind Congress’s Great Moment How Midwestern Republicans, not just an arm-twisting LBJ, helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 BY DAVID J. GARROW B

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n Tuesday July 2, 1963, Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall caught an early-morning flight to Dayton, Ohio. Six days before, Marshall’s boss, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had appeared before a House Judiciary Subcommittee to present the newly introduced civil-rights bill that his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had committed himself to enacting during a powerful nationwide television address on June 11.

The Kennedy brothers’ outspoken attachment to advancing racial equality was entirely newfound. For the first two years of the Kennedy administration, civil-rights activists had been repeatedly disappointed by the brothers’ unwillingness to live up to the promises John Kennedy had voiced during the 1960 presidential campaign. Only the horrific violence visited upon interracial groups of “Freedom Riders” in May 1961, as they sought desegregation of interstate bus stations, and white racists’ attacks upon federal officers during the October 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi had forced the Kennedys to take decisive yet shortlived action to support racial change.

In May 1963, civil-rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama—or, more precisely, city Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor’s use of high-pressure fire hoses and snarling police dogs against them—put Southern segregationist violence on the nation’s front pages and evening news broadcasts day after day as never before. Until then, neither Kennedy brother had shown any serious interest in putting forward significant civilrights legislation, but within the space of a few weeks first Robert and then John changed his thinking, and the president’s June 11 televised speech conveyed the depth of that change to civil-

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rights supporters and opponents alike.

After Marshall landed in Dayton on July 2, a young man drove him 30 minutes north to the small town of Piqua, where his father-in-law kept a law office. The father-in-law was U.S. Representative William McCulloch, a 61-year-old conservative Republican who for 15 years had held a safe seat and had risen to be the ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee. Marshall and the administration’s other leading civil-rights strategist, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, appreciated that any chance of passing the Kennedy civil-rights bill depended upon two Republicans: McCulloch and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois. That understanding was what had led Marshall to Piqua. McCulloch was a veteran of Congress’s passage of two largely innocuous civil-rights bills in 1957 and 1960, when stronger House measures had been watered down in order to achieve Senate passage and win supposed Democratic victories. Those painful experiences led him to voice two simple demands.

McCulloch would support the administration’s muscular bill so long as Marshall promised that what the House approved would not again be traded away in the Senate and that if the bill did become a law, the Kennedy brothers—with the next presidential election just 16 months away—would give Republicans equal credit. Marshall readily agreed, the two men shook hands, and Marshall headed back to Washington.

The most important day trip in American history, as Marshall’s excursion might be called, set the stage for a presidential signing ceremony that took place 365 days later: On July 2, 1964, John Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil

Rep. William McCulloch

Rights Act of 1964 into law. The bill’s most famous provision, Title II, mandated the immediate desegregation of all public accommodations, including restaurants, motels, and stores. Two other provisions, Titles VI and VII, would within several years’ time force the desegregation of Southern public schools and the integration of industrial workforces across the South.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME: TWO PRESIDENTS, TWO PARTIES, AND THE BATTLE FOR THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

BY TODD S. PURDUM

Henry Holt and Company

THE BILL OF THE CENTURY: THE EPIC BATTLE FOR THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT

BY CLAY RISEN

Bloomsbury Press

THE UNDEVIATINGLY bipartisan path

through that pivotal year had been sealed in Piqua. Marshall and Katzenbach knew that McCulloch, along with House Minority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, another conservative Republican, would be more crucial allies than aging Judiciary Committee chair Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn or the distant House speaker, John McCormack of Massachusetts.

Onlookers unaware of the MarshallMcCulloch pact, including The New York Times’ congressional correspondent and the Senate Democrats’ top staffer, opined that there was virtually no chance of Congress passing a powerful desegregation bill. Even after the March on Washington occurred on August 28, 1963, with a quartermillion upbeat participants and nary a hitch, conventional wisdom continued to dismiss the bill’s chances.

Most narratives of the bill’s progress move next to the immediate aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, but Clay Risen’s valuable history of the law’s passage,

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 81

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The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act, draws attention to two conferences in support of the bill that the National Council of Churches (NCC) convened in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Des Moines, Iowa, in early September 1963. Many accounts of 1960s congressional politics cite both NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell and Leadership Council for Civil Rights and United Auto Workers attorney Joseph L. Rauh, an irrepressible liberal, as significant behind-thescenes players, but both Risen’s book and Todd Purdum’s An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rightly credit the NCC and other affiliated religious activists as being far and away the most important voices calling upon members of Congress to act.

Their importance was rooted in the political fact that conservative Midwestern and Great Plains Republicans would be decisive to the bill’s fate in the House and even more so in the Senate. With a significant proportion of congressional Democrats hailing from Southern states whose racially discriminatory voter-registration practices meant that elected officials answered to almost entirely white electorates, majority coalitions to support the bill would require dozens of Republicans. That reality led Marshall and Katzenbach to oppose civil-rights proponents’ efforts to strengthen the bill in Celler’s committee beyond what could pass on the House floor and in the Senate. When President Johnson used his initial speech to a joint session of Congress to declare that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest passage of the civil-rights bill for which he fought so long,” the measure’s national prominence was further elevated, and within weeks crucial Republican support fell into place in the House.

On February 10, 1964, with William McCulloch as the floor general, the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 290 to 130. More instructive than the overwhelming margin, however, was the composition of the majority: 138 Republicans

backed the bill along with 152 Democrats; only 34 Republicans joined 96 Democrats in voting against it.

From there the measure moved to the Senate, where Katzenbach and Marshall’s closest ally, liberal Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey, shared their appreciation that the key was Republican Minority Leader Dirksen. Humphrey also understood that civil-rights lobbyists Mitchell and Rauh had to be kept at arm’s length and that the most influential outside pressure would come from the church groups and clergy members, especially those from the home states of conservative Republicans.

Everett McKinley Dirksen was a vain, florid, and hard-drinking politician, but above all he was a politician aware of how history would judge him, and even before John Kennedy’s death he had intimated to Katzenbach that in the end, the bill would receive his backing. Many Senate aides were unable to imagine how the 67 votes necessary to shut down the segregationist senators’ inevitable filibuster could be obtained, but on April 21 Dirksen privately told Humphrey that, with some changes, the bill had his support. Intensive private negotiations between Dirksen, Katzenbach, and various aides took place in early May, and on May 26 Dirksen introduced the revamped bill, whose modest changes reflected Dirksen’s ego rather than substantive alterations.

With the bill on the Senate floor, all eyes turned toward whether enough conservative Republicans, plus a handful of conservative Western Democrats, would vote to end debate on the bill, or for “cloture” in the Senate’s unique parlance, thus effectively passing the bill. Nationally obscure senators like Iowa Republican Bourke Hickenlooper held the balance, and in case after case the religious groups’ ardent support for racial equality proved decisive. When the penultimate vote for cloture was called on June 10—with CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd providing a nationally televised vote-by-vote tally from just outside the Capitol—proponents prevailed with four votes to spare, 71 to 29. Only six Republicans voted no, including the party’s upcoming

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presidential nominee, Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, whose opposition would contribute heavily to his landslide November loss to Lyndon Johnson.

On July 2, 1964, with congressional proponents and civil-rights leaders in attendance, Johnson signed the act into law. Title II’s prohibition of segregated facilities took immediate effect, and across the South compliance was widespread though not instantly unanimous. Several years later, when McCulloch’s declining health forced him to announce his retirement from Congress, a most unlikely correspondent wrote to praise him for what she called “the shining gift of your nobility.” Presidential widow Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was never known for overt political involvement, yet she told McCulloch that “I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation” that she, like the rest of the world, viewed as her late husband’s most indelible legacy.

Risen accurately terms the 1964 act “the single most important piece of legislation passed in twentieth-­century America,” but the law’s passage must be seen as a triumph of historically minded bipartisan cooperation as much as a landmark victory in the struggle for a nondiscriminatory world. As the 50th anniversary of the signing approaches, praise and recognition for McCulloch and Dirksen will be replete—as it should be too for Katzenbach, Marshall, Humphrey, and Halleck. But the most obvious comparison cannot be avoided: How, 50 years from now, will history judge House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, or for that matter House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid? By the McCullochDirksen standard, all four not only pale into insignificance but merit large, boldface stamps as “failures.” McCulloch and Dirksen, with their eyes on the historical future, rose above partisan loyalties and parochial limitations to serve the national interest irrespective of short-term political considerations.

THE MOST POWERFUL lesson of these

two remarkably similar books is how superior the quality of Washington political leadership was 50 years ago

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U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy with advisers, from left: Burke Marshall, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Norbert Schlei

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis told Congressman Bill McCulloch, “I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible” for the act’s passage.

compared to today. Risen rightly calls the 1964 act “an example of what the country’s legislative machinery was once capable of,” and if every member of Congress, plus Barack Obama and various presidential staffers were required upon pain of imprisonment to read one or the other of these books, perhaps the looming light of history’s judgment would dawn on even the dimmest of political bulbs.

Risen’s and Purdum’s accounts do not differ on the fundamental lessons we should draw from 1964’s grand triumph. Risen correctly emphasizes that the conventional wisdom about the law’s passage overstates Lyndon Johnson’s direct involvement and the credit due him. “Johnson’s contribution to the bill’s success was largely symbolic,” Risen writes, and “there is little evidence that he did much to sway many votes.” Purdum disagrees, asserting that “Johnson did indeed help round up crucial votes for cloture,” but that discord is modest in the extreme. Risen’s is, by some margin, a more acute and energetic chronicle than Purdum’s, yet Risen can

intensely frustrate an attentive reader when he repeatedly violates chronology in narrating some portions of the story: In 1963 he cites events that occurred on April 23, April 19, May 3, May 9, May 6, June 11, May 4, June 2, May 28, and May 7—in that order! He also misstates the first names, home states, or political leanings of at least five different members of Congress.

Yet both books present a challenge not to our historical memory but to today’s national political leaders, and indeed one that directly echoes the pointed message of former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’s powerful recent memoir, Duty: Are you, John Boehner, or you, Harry Reid, or you, Barack Obama, personally capable of rising above selfish, short-term, partisan calculations, as Bill McCulloch and Everett Dirksen so famously did, particularly if you stop and ponder how history, 50 years from now, will judge your time in office? That’s the question that the bipartisan legacy of the 1964 Civil Rights Act poses to today’s Washington. I’m not holding my breath. 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 83

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Food TV’s Sadistic Glee Competitive cooking shows and our yearning for what we dare not eat BY ROXANE GAY F

s h i z u o k a m b aya s h i / a p i m a g e s

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am competitive. I try to keep this to myself, but oh, in my heart of hearts, I want to win anything that can be won. As a child, I needed to earn the highest grades and offer, when called upon, the most astute answers, the better to impress teacher.

Yes, I was that girl. I have a national Scrabble ranking, though it is not impressive. When I sit across from other word nerds, I want to destroy them. I feel competitive when driving on the interstate, when following the career arcs of other writers, when reading a book and the Kindle

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tells me I have eight hours left. That is a throwing down of the gauntlet. I determine to finish in six.

When we compete, we try to prove we are excellent. When we win, we say, “I have mastered this endeavor, and I am excellent.” The rush is seductive.

I am not alone in craving that rush, and perhaps that is why contests have become the mainstay of so many cultural pursuits that don’t seem conducive to them. Spelling bees and poker and bridge tournaments—nothing too surprising. But then we start to get further afield—eating, arm wrestling,

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Quidditch, running with the bulls, even rockpaper-scissors championships. No matter how exotic or mundane the arena, someone wants to be the best.

It is perhaps inevitable that we have ended up here, in a robust age of cooking television, privy to a lineup of increasingly complex tests that will reveal once and for all who is the best chef in the land. These shows feed the insatiable cultural appetite for reality television while offering more than a parade of pretty people through potentially humiliating or harrowing circumstances.

We want a spectacle, but sometimes we want it imbued with a sense of purpose. Food is also delicious, and we get a masochistic thrill watching it lovingly prepared but knowing we are unlikely ever to taste such delights.

This madness began Iron Chef, 1997 20-odd years ago when Iron Chef debuted in Japan in 1993 and was later picked up by the Food Network and aired in the United States, at first replete with dubbing reminiscent of Godzilla movies, then as an Americanized knockoff. The premise was both simple and elaborate. A man named Chairman Kaga enjoyed hosting battles in a “kitchen stadium” decked out with modern equipment and a full pantry. The iron chefs, masters of their craft, were challenged in each episode by upstart chefs of varying renown.

Contestants were tasked with using a mystery ingredient to prepare the FROM SCRATCH: most impressive dishes they could INSIDE THE to determine “whose cuisine reigns FOOD NETWORK supreme.” One more twist—the chefs

BY ALLEN SALKIN had an hour. Nothing brings out the Putnam thrill of competition like an artificial time constraint.

This doesn’t sound like a promising premise, but the show’s play-by-play commentary and slow-motion shots

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 85

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of, say, food dropped into a fryer made it seem like something real was at stake. It was always interesting to see what each chef would do with ingredients that have been over the years, at times, bewildering—Asyura oyster, blue-foot chicken. Judges exhaustively narrated their experience eating the dishes. At home, we watched this delectation and wanted more.

In the years since, televised competitive cooking has become a bustling industry. Much of the current interest was spurred by the debut, in 2006, of Bravo’s Top Chef. Each season, a gaggle of chefs converge with knives sharpened in an American city (New Orleans, New York, Miami, Chicago, Seattle). The contestants live together— cloistered, as so many reality-­television participants are. But for the most part, Top Chef is about cooking. Episodes start with a “quickfire” challenge, often with a celebrity guest judge. Contestants, or chef-­testants if you will, have to create the perfect omelet or the perfect hamburger or the perfect amuse-bouche using convenience-­mart ingredients like pork rinds and a prepackaged ham-and-cheese sandwich.

Quickfire winners earn not only the flush of victory but an advantage in the subsequent elimination challenge, whether it is first choice of ingredients or extra prep time.

The elimination round is the show’s centerpiece. The chef-testants prepare a meal for a celebrity, a healthy but delicious lunch for schoolchildren, or hors d’oeuvres for festivalgoers.

As with Iron Chef, Top Chef makes it seem like something greater than prize money and career opportunities is being fought for. This is, you might say, about culinary honor.

Top Chef has succeeded because it is reality television with a veneer of mannered restraint. Certainly, drama arises among the chefs. But food is the point, and pornographically so. In addition to seeing each dish prepared in the show’s crucible, we see it beautifully plated and watch the judges eat and wax rhapsodically (or not) about its merits.

Not all cooking-competition shows are so well behaved. Brash British chef Gordon Ramsay reigns over Hell’s Kitchen, which originated in the U.K.

The prize is, purportedly, a head-chef position at a fine restaurant. The format is curious. Early in the season, the contestants are divided into teams and given one job—to manage a successful dinner service. Spoiler alert: They rarely do. Ramsay is something of a kitchen tyrant, lording it over the contestants as they try to prepare beef Wellington and soufflés and other dishes. It’s fun to hear Ramsay shouting, “I need three risotto, please,” in his gruff and staccato voice while the contestants fail, miserably, at tasks they have long been doing professionally, beyond the glare of reality television.

THOUGH OTHER NETWORKS try their

hand at competitive cooking shows, the Food Network is still at the forefront. In his recent book From Scratch, Allen Salkin charts the network’s rise to prominence. By the late aughts, its personality-driven shows like Emeril Live and Molto Mario were proving expensive to produce and waning in ratings. In one of the book’s more charming anecdotes, Salkin reveals the origins of an entry into the competitive genre, Chopped, whose backstory is stranger than you might think. The show was pitched with the setup of a “tycoon” planning to throw a dinner party in his castle.

Salkin writes, “His butler, a snooty John Cleese type, would find four sous chefs who would compete in the castle kitchen for the privilege of cooking the dinner. The competition covered three rounds: an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert. After each round, one chef would be eliminated by a panel of judges. The food of each eliminated chef would be scraped into a dog bowl and fed, on camera, to the butler’s ravenous Chihuahua.”

Alas, during the taping, the dog, Pico, was a problem. If he had been fed throughout the day, he would get sick. The strange elements didn’t come together—too much affect. What did work was the four contestants taking everything so seriously—“these chefs [were] dying to play this game and compete and prove they made the right choices in their lives,” said Linda Lea, a Food Network producer. What gripped the audience was the chefs in their pursuit to be excellent, to be the best.

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I am always mesmerized by Chopped, now in its 20th season— Food Network seasons are notoriously abbreviated so that multiple seasons can appear in a calendar year. At the beginning of each course, we feel a giddy moment of anticipation as the chefs grapple with the secret basket of ingredients they are given and instructed to highlight. In one early episode’s opening round, the chefs had to work with baby octopus, bok choy, oyster sauce, and smoked paprika.

They moved on to duck breast, green onions, ginger, and honey. Finally, the two chefs left standing wrangled prunes, animal crackers, and cream cheese into a dessert. There is a sadistic glee in the composition of many of the baskets, which become puzzles that must be solved in 20 minutes—a culinary Rubik’s Cube.

The judges, renowned chefs, take the proceedings seriously. From their deliberation table, they offer commentary and wisdom as the competing chefs toil over hot stoves. As time winds down, a judge will often say, “Just get it on the plate,” or “Grind it out.” Though they will decide the chefs’ fates, they make it seem like they want nothing but the best for the chef-testants.

Chopped has spawned redemption episodes in which losing chef-testants return and try to, well, redeem themselves. Besides a now-traditional celebrity edition of the show, a new Chopped cookbook has arrived. The book encourages people to “use what you’ve got to cook something great” and “focuses on ingredients most Americans tend to buy every week at the supermarket.” The recipes and tips treat preparing dinner like a more realistic version of working with basket ingredients. We are armed, the book implies, with the potential for greatness by using this cookbook and supplies in our kitchens. We no longer have to lust for food we cannot have.

We can satiate ourselves.

Competitive cooking shows have become increasingly and intriguingly convoluted as the market crowds. In Food Court Wars, two teams vie for a year’s lease in a food court. Guy’s Grocery Games sends chefs racing through aisles of food products.

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Chopped contestants improvise a dish from a secret basket of ingredients—a culinary Rubik’s Cube.

In Chopped ’s original premise, the eliminated chef’s meal was fed to a butler’s chihuahua.

THE CHOPPED COOKBOOK: USE WHAT YOU’VE GOT TO COOK SOMETHING GREAT

BY THE TELEVISION FOOD NETWORK

Clarkson Potter

Cutthroat Kitchen, hosted by Food Network mainstay Alton Brown, eggs chefs on to bid for nefarious obstacles they can bestow upon fellow competitors; things quickly get out of hand. In Sweet Genius, pastry chefs enjoy their moment, with strange and flummoxing ingredients sent to the chefs on a conveyor belt. Worst Cooks in America pits against each other people who have no business being in a kitchen.

The entire United States is the stage for The Great Food Truck Race, in which entrepreneurial-wannabe teams compete to win their own food truck. Let us not forget Extreme Chef, in which contestants cook MREs in the galley of a Coast Guard cutter, or in a desert using the indigenous tools of Native Americans, or on a mountain after trekking up with supplies to prepare a meal.

What is it about food television that captures our imagination? While we are in an age of competitive cooking, we are also in the age of slow food and locally sourced, organic ingredients.

The middle classes, at least, have new ways to think about food and unprecedented opportunities to consume better food.

Food is not simply sustenance; it is a significant part of a growing cultural conversation, albeit a privileged and fanciful one. In addition to watching

people compete, we feel like if we watch these shows, we might absorb some culinary excellence.

In one season of Top Chef, a contestant talked about preparing a velouté, a soup or sauce made of chicken, veal, or fish stock and cream and thickened with butter and flour. I loved the sound of “velouté,” so sensuous off the tongue, and even though I am a vegetarian, I became obsessed with the idea, deploying the word whenever I could. I found vegetarian velouté recipes and used the technique to prepare sauces. I cannot say I achieved any kind of greatness, but I certainly expanded my repertoire.

I cannot help but feel these shows speak to a need, a yearning for that which we dare not eat. There’s no denying that we have a fraught relationship to food. We have these bodies, and they must be fed. Our bodies, however, can only be fed so much before they become unruly. Beyond these shows, we are inundated by commercials for diet products and sensible snacks. We read about weight loss in glossy magazines.

We fret over cellulite and count calories. Perhaps we watch these shows to attempt to satisfy a hunger that never will be satisfied. Perhaps we watch these shows to consume beautiful food without consequence for our delicately human bodies. 

MAY/JUN 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 87

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Why You Can’t Kill Election Reform

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

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ver the past few years, given the bad news that just keeps coming their way, America’s campaign-finance reformers have started to look like eternal optimists. They’ve pretty much had to be.

Take the one-two wallop they suffered early this spring.

First, Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York state legislators killed reformers’ best chance of a breakthrough in 2014—a public-financing program in which small-dollar donations would be matched or multiplied by public funds. (New York City already runs its own “matching” program.) The idea was to give less-wealthy donors a bigger voice in legislative and gubernatorial races while decreasing the clout of those with deep pockets.

Instead, reformers ended up with a microscopic pilot program for the state comptroller’s race. A few days later came much worse news: In McCutcheon v. FEC, the Supreme Court threw out the limit that Congress had put on the total amount wealthy donors can give to campaigns and political parties. While there are still caps on how much donors can give to a specific candidate, now anyone can give to as many campaigns as he or she pleases.

As they reeled from their latest setbacks, clean-election advocates tried to find a reason to be hopeful. Ian Vandewalker, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which

advocated for the New York proposal, told me that in the wake of McCutcheon, “public financing is the most promising thing that’s left.” But McCutcheon illustrated just what makes the Roberts Court so pernicious when it comes to money and elections; slowly but steadily, decision by decision, the justices are decimating every legal justification for reform.

Underpinning the Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United ruling was the belief that giving less-wealthy donors more of a voice in elections is not a good enough reason for Congress to regulate political money. A year later, in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, the Court struck down a public-financing program that tried to decrease the power of wealthy “self-funded” candidates. The Arizona law offered grants to those who agreed to spend only $500 of their own money on their campaigns and agreed to debate their opponents.

The funding increased as opponents and independent groups spent more; the idea was to prevent less-affluent candidates from being disadvantaged. The Arizona decision threw similar state programs into legal limbo.

The Court decided the program was unfair to candidates who chose not to participate; in other words, candidates with more money to spend have a constitutional right to overwhelm their competition. “Some people might call that chutzpah,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent.

Even so, the Arizona decision left room for reformers to argue for a different kind of publicfinancing system in the interest of quelling political corruption.

McCutcheon put an end to that.

Slowly but steadily, the Supreme Court is decimating every legal justification for campaign finance rules.

The Court ruled that Congress and the states cannot justify limits on campaign donations because of concerns about corruption. In other words, if there isn’t a guy with a suitcase full of cash trading it for a lawmaker’s vote, it’s none of lawmakers’ concern.

The blow from McCutcheon has dire implications for American democracy. But it should not mark the end of the reform movement. While continuing to pursue reforms that haven’t yet been quashed, activists and legal scholars now must step back and cook up new laws, and new justifications for those laws, that could pass muster with the Court.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has been on a mission to fight originalism with originalism. The conservative justices base their decisions on a reading of the Founding Fathers’ original intent in writing the Constitution, so Lessig has been combing through the records of the framers, citing every use of the term “corruption” and showing how the Founders used the term to mean much more than “quid pro quo” bribery. Lessig writes that “corruption” encompassed “improper dependence” on the powerful as well. Trying to persuade the justices to change their minds may be an uphill struggle, but Lessig’s work may prove useful when new campaign-finance laws are defended in court.

Reformers’ fondest hope now lies with disclosure laws—a form of regulation the Supreme Court majority endorsed in Citizens United. Laws to make tax-exempt “social welfare” groups, which spend billions on elections, disclose their donors are percolating in the states. And in a demonstration of how un-killable the idea of reforming elections can be, some activists have come up with a new twist: If some groups are allowed to keep their donors’ names secret, why shouldn’t their political ads be required to say so? The idea is that when voters hear the words “This advertisement is sponsored by a group that does not disclose its donors,” it would make shadowy political groups look, well, shadowy. 

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 3. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published bi-monthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1710 Rhode Island Ave., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2014 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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