The Washington Post National Weekly. February 9, 2020

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2020

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly

No easy answer to how America atones A family whose story includes slavery and internment grapples 8 with reparations PAGE 12

Politics A chaotic Iowa caucus 4

World Britain’s plan after Brexit 10

5 Myths The Senate 23

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KLMNO Weekly

the fix

Impeachment’s partisan politics BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

P

resident Trump’s four-month-long impeachment saga is over. He was acquitted by the Senate on Wednesday on both charges, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Trump will forever have an asterisk next to his name as the third president to be impeached by the House, but he’ll remain in office. Now we’ll see a president for the first time in modern history seek reelection while carrying that asterisk.

The most important political takeaway from the Senate vote is how partisan it was.

Not a single Democrat voted to acquit the president, not even the senators representing Trump-friendly states. Only one Republican voted to convict him, Mitt Romney of Utah, after no House Republicans supported impeachment.

But Romney’s lone vote changes how Trump can talk about his impeachment going forward.

He can no longer technically say his impeachment was solely driven by Democrats. One Republican voted to convict him.

Romney voted to acquit Trump on the second charge of obstruction of Congress. His conviction vote on the first charge was historic though: He’s the first senator in an impeachment trial to vote to convict a president of the same party.

Here are some takeaways from the entire impeachment process.

1. Impeachment is politically driven Sure, there were some House Democrats who put their careers at risk by voting to impeach Trump even though their districts had supported him. Romney said he expected to be “vehemently denounced” by some in his party for his decision. But by and large, law-

KLMNO Weekly

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was the only Republican to vote to convict the president.

makers voted with their political futures in mind, rather than the facts.

That’s because you can’t take the political calculus out of Congress. In fact, impeachment was designed to have an inherent contradiction. The nation’s founders set up a check on the executive, but they gave a political body — and not a court — the ultimate say on this.

2. Trump’s greatest asset was his party’s loyalty At one point during impeachment, former Arizona Republican senator Jeff Flake told reporters he thought there would be “at least” 35 Republican senators who would vote to convict Trump if the vote were private.

We don’t know if that was true, and it obviously didn’t bear out in a public vote. But Flake got at the fundamental dynamic within the Republican Party, which is many lawmakers privately disagree with the president on policy, politics and character, but have decided their political futures rest on standing by Trump.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2020 The Washington Post / Year 6, No. 18

Party loyalty is not abnormal politics, but the degree to which Republican lawmakers have defended the president is.

By the end of the trial, some Republican senators were forced to acknowledge that Trump did do the things the House accused him of. But they were in the minority of their party and, save Romney, still voted to acquit the president.

3. We don’t know how this will affect the 2020 reelection In fact, it’s possible it doesn’t have much of an impact. From the beginning of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry in September to the end on Wednesday, the nation has been divided on whether Trump should be removed from office. And — surprise — Americans’ opinions on impeachment are baked into their political views.

Precisely because of that partisanship, it has seemed difficult if not impossible for Democrats to peel off supporters from the other side, and vice versa. The independents are also split down the middle.

4. The investigation into what Trump did is not over There will be more revelations about what Trump’s intentions were when he paused Ukraine’s aid and asked Ukraine’s president to investigate the Bidens, whether they come from former national security adviser John Bolton’s book, or from others who resisted House subpoenas speaking out, or from witnesses called by House Democrats.

Already, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold E. Nadler (D-N.Y.) has said Democrats will subpoena Bolton. Other lawmakers cautioned that decision hasn’t been made yet. They are likely aware of how political it will look to continue investigating Trump’s actions on Ukraine after impeachment is over. n

Contents Politics The Nation The World Cover Story environment Books Opinion Five Myths

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

On the cover Mitsuo “Mits Yamamoto and his wife, Jayne, seen in a family photo, met after they were held at internment camps during World War II. Their daughter Ginny married Robert Syphax, whose ancestors were enslaved at Mount Vernon.

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KLMNO Weekly

Politics

A speech fit for a campaign rally BY

A SHLEY P ARKER

H

e didn’t hurl insults, lead “Lock her up!” chants or stride onto the dais to the opening thrums of “God Bless the U.S.A.” blaring from speakers. But President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night amounted to a more subdued version of one of his raucous campaign rallies.

He boasted that his accomplishments were like nothing ever seen before, promoted divisive policies and added realityshow flourishes to the speech he delivered in the House chamber.

He goaded the Democrats, began the evening with an apparent snub of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and offered a boastful accounting of the previous three years that could easily double as the campaign promises he plans to deploy in the coming one.

And if Trump at least made a listless effort to channel some of the presidency’s soaring rhetorical rhythms, the lawmakers in the ornate chamber didn’t even pretend to try to rise above the bitter partisanship that has riven the presidency, Congress and the nation.

Republicans cheered divisive lines, some Democrats walked out while Trump spoke, and Pelosi punctuated the night by tearing up the president’s speech while standing over his left shoulder as he wrapped up his remarks.

The president entered the House chamber to Republican cheers of “Four more years,” his party helping to set the tone for an address largely delivered as written, from the teleprompter.

Trump touted his fulfilled promise to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, newly signed into law, and he crowed about his creation of the Space Force — the newest branch of the U.S. armed forces. He spoke of pushing NATO allies to pay their “fair share.”

And he went on an extended riff about illegal immigration, rhapsodizing about the “over 130

Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post

Trump’s State of the Union touts achievements, goads Democrats and gives reality-TV theatrics legislators in this Chamber” who he said favored “providing free taxpayer-funded health care to millions of illegal aliens” — as Pelosi shook her head behind him and mouthed, “Not true. It’s not true.”

In other moments, he was even more overt, making two distinct references to socialism — a notso-veiled attack on the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party and primary field, which Trump and his allies have worked to paint as radical leftists.

“Socialism destroys nations,” Trump said at one point, after introducing Juan Guaidó, the Venezuelan opposition leader who was one of his and first lady Melania Trump’s special guests.

“But always remember: Freedom unifies the soul.”

Later, talking about health care, Trump again returned to the same theme, exalting: “To those watching at home tonight, I want you to know: We will never let socialism destroy American health care!”

Trump tugged at his lapels as he walked onto the dais, a more restrained version of the peacocking he often does before launching into a speech on the campaign trail. And he did not shake — seemingly deliberately — Pelosi’s outstretched hand, prompting her to withdraw it with a surprised gasp and a smile.

The Democrats, meanwhile, could barely contain their resentment.

When Trump urged lawmakers to send him a bill to lower prescription drug prices, promising he would “sign it into law without delay,” some Democrats leaped to their feet and, holding up three fingers, began chanting “H.R. 3!

H.R. 3!” — a reference to a Housepassed bill that would help do just that.

Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House Democrat, at times slumped in his seat, and even refused to clap when Trump recognized in the audience Charles McGee, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen,

President Trump, flanked by Vice President Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (DCalif.), delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday on Capitol Hill, where he entered to Republican cheers of “Four more years.”

the first black fighter pilots. The president announced his promotion of McGee, who had recently celebrated his 100th birthday, to brigadier general.

Pelosi, too, seemed aggravated at moments by the spectacle unfolding before her. At one point, when Trump exhorted, “We must always remember that our job is to put America first,” the House Democratic leader clapped, then shook her head and half-lifted her arms, as if to wonder aloud how, exactly, she was supposed to act when Trump said something seemingly innocuous and patriotic — “put America first” — that also happened to be a campaign refrain and controversial foreign policy dictum.

Despite the decorous setting, Trump also managed to imbue the evening with some realityshow theatrics.

After introducing a single mother from Philadelphia hoping to get her fourth-grade daughter into a better public school, Trump declared, “I can proudly announce tonight that an Opportunity Scholarship has become available, it is going to you, and you will soon be heading to the school of your choice!”

He lauded Rush Limbaugh — the controversial and conservative talk radio host who was just diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer, and who attended the speech as a guest of the Trumps — and announced he was giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

And then Trump asked Limbaugh, looking on from the House gallery, to stand so the first lady could adorn him with the medal, right there on live television.

Toward the end of the speech, Pelosi had Trump’s written remarks laid in front of her in four piles, and as he finished, she picked up each pile and ripped it in half.

Four rips.

“It was the courteous thing to do considering the alternative,” Pelosi told reporters as she exited the chamber and headed to her office. n

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Politics

KLMNO Weekly

Some in GOP push new climate stance BY

S TEVEN M UFSON

B

ruce Westerman, a Republican congressman from Arkansas, has a plan to help save the planet — one he thinks may also help save his party.

His proposal, which calls for planting a trillion trees to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, was warmly received this past month when House Republicans gathered to discuss their policy agenda heading into the 2020 elections.

After years of denying that the planet was growing hotter because of human activity, an increasing number of Republicans say they need to acknowledge the problem and offer solutions if they have any hope of retaking the House.

In poll after poll, large numbers of young and suburban Republican voters are registering their desire for climate action and say the issue is a priority. And their concern about climate change is spreading to older GOP supporters, too.

Almost 7 in 10 Republican adults under 45 said that human activity is causing the climate to change, according to a poll last summer by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Republicans “can’t win the majority back [in the House] without winning suburban districts, and you can’t win suburban districts with a retro position on climate change,” said former South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican who is pushing his party to craft a climate plan.

Westerman said a few weeks ago that the notion of tree planting is proving popular among constituents. “The reaction I’ve been getting from my colleagues has been positive,” Westerman said. “Several of them told me they heard good things back home in their districts last week.”

The GOP is still hammering out details, but some critics say the new Republican approach to climate change looks a lot like the old one. In addition to trees,

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post

As more Republican voters voice their concerns, lawmakers are seeing a need to take action senior Republicans are said to be considering tax breaks for research, curbs on plastic waste and big federally funded infrastructure projects in the name of adaptation or resilience.

Three weeks ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump surprised many when he pledged that the United States would join an international tree planting campaign.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) told the news outlet Axios that a new set of policies would cut taxes on companies that export “clean energy” such as liquefied natural gas, expand an existing tax credit to encourage carbon capture and storage, sharply increase research-and-development funding for energy and plant a whole lot of trees.

What’s missing? There are no taxes or tax revenue. There are no regulatory standards to boost automotive fuel efficiency or con-

tain methane emissions. And there are no limits on fossil fuels.

Moreover, Republicans have no taste for a proposal that leading economists say is the fastest, most powerful way to cut carbon emissions — a $40-per-ton carbon tax on polluters, promoted by George Shultz, secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, and James A. Baker, Reagan’s treasury secretary and secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush. Money raised by the tax would be returned to taxpayers in the form of dividends.

“I’m for incentive-based methods versus punitive methods,” Westerman, a former engineer and a graduate of Yale University’s forestry school, said in an interview. “I’m for reducing emissions, but I’m for doing it in a way that doesn’t deliver a gut punch to the economy.”

Much of the impetus for a new Republican posture on climate change has come from McCarthy and Graves.

When House Speaker Nancy

Young climate activists outside the White House in September.

Almost 7 in 10 Republican adults under 45 said that human activity is causing the climate to change, according to a poll last summer

by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) created the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis last year, Graves told McCarthy the party needed to change its position on climate change or risk being left behind by its voters and awash in a worsening series of floods and fires.

McCarthy was receptive. In October, he told the Washington Examiner that the GOP would introduce several free-marketbased bills in response to the Green New Deal, a sweeping set of policy proposals backed by some Democrats that would aim to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero over 10 years.

Still, some Republicans have paid a political price for urging action on climate change. Consider the swift downfall of California state legislator Chad Mayes. In July 2017, Mayes, then the State Assembly’s Republican leader, joined Democrats in supporting a climate-change program called cap-and-trade.

A month later, Republican activists in the assembly’s 25-member caucus stripped Mayes of his leadership position.

He went on to form a group called “New Way California,” but that, too, was attacked. Two months ago, Mayes quit the Republican Party and filed to run as an independent.

Democrats and middle-of-theroad politicians are wary about the GOP’s recent climate buzz.

“I think they’re caught on the politics,” said Ben Finzel, president of a public relations firm, RenewPR, and a former Hill staffer. “The challenge is they want to get stuff done but also want to beat up the Dems.”

Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said he thinks there is meaningful change underway.

“The fact that Leader McCarthy is publicizing his intention to put out a Republican climate solution matters a lot,” Grumet said.

“The details will be embraced and ridiculed like every other climate plan. But that gives tremendous license for the Republican Party to get in the game.” n

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Environment

KLMNO Weekly

The end of wine as we know it BY

L AURA R EILEY

T

he prospect of hotter summers, warmer winters, drought and violent weather events have caused experts to warn of coming wine shortages, price increases and dire predictions of the extinction of some wines altogether.

Maybe there’s a fix, says a research paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists’ computer models show that if we do nothing, global warming of 2 degrees Celsius would wipe out 56 percent of current wine-growing land; increase that to 4 degrees and an estimated 85 percent of grapes will not be viable.

This team of researchers investigated whether using more heattolerant grapes would allow vineyards to adapt. They found that by reshuffling where certain grape varieties are grown, potential losses at 2 degrees of warming could be halved, and cut by a third if warming reached 4 degrees.

The researchers, led by Ignacio Morales-Castilla at the University of Alcalá in Spain and Elizabeth Wolkovich at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, focused on 11 varieties of wine grapes including cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, merlot, pinot noir, riesling, sauvignon blanc and syrah, as well as lesser-known varieties chasselas, grenache, monastrell (also known as mourvedre) and ugni blanc. Together, these account for a third of the total area planted to wine grapes and represent important parts of the wine industry in France, Australia, New Zealand and Chile.

The team used vintner and researcher archives to build a model for when each would bud, flower and ripen in wine-growing regions around the world under three different warming scenarios. Then it used climate change projections to see where those varieties would be viable in the future.

“Each variety has a different sensitivity to the climate,” says

Tamara Merino/Bloomberg News

As climate change affects where grapes can thrive, researchers are at work on how growers can adapt Ben Cook, one of the study’s authors and a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Basically, replacing varieties with more climatically suitable varieties, called cultivar turnover, increases resilience to climate change. It’s a story of mitigation and adaptation.”

In the study’s modeling, the biggest losses are in Spain, Italy and parts of California that are already quite warm. But there are winners in warming scenarios: In Germany, northern Europe and the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where in some years they struggle to get enough sun hours to facilitate budding, fruit set and ripening, a warming trend might produce dramatically better wines.

Cook says that changing out grape varieties isn’t the only solution to pushing back against the effects of climate change. Many vineyards are topographically

complex and will allow microclimates, especially if vineyards move to higher ground. Moving vineyards to north-facing slopes might also slow the effects. And in France, Cook says, where irrigation is not utilized, watering could be employed.

“We wanted to give a different perspective on all those apocalyptic takes,” Cook says. “Winemakers are becoming more interested and aware of climate change and a lot of them are really concerned.

They are seeing things they haven’t seen before, with storms and heat waves. But what you do about it is a complicated thing.”

Geoff Kruth, the president of GuildSomm, an international organization for sommeliers, says wineries are understandably concerned about the uncertainties of climate change, “but it’s important to remember that there are dozens of human decisions — rootstocks, trellising, timing of vineyard work, etc. — that have significant impacts on how a vine reacts to a climate.”

Workers prune plants at a research vineyard in Chile.

Among the lines of study are developing varieties more resilient to climate change.

Many wine industry experts have pointed to increased ripeness in grapes and higher alcohol levels as indications of climate change.

“The real reason wines got riper is that people wanted them to get riper. Generally, if you look at wines from the 2000s, you see more sugar in the grapes and more alcohol in the wines,” Kruth says. “People have been quick to associate this with climate change, when in reality it was conscious human decisions. Now you see the alcohols are dropping. It’s a consumer trend. The grower and winemaker have a strong hand in all of these things.”

Mike Heny, a longtime Virginia winemaker who makes wine for 15 vineyards in the state, points to steps that already have been taken around the world to address climate change.

“It’s a multipronged approach,” Henry says. “In Napa, people are removing the primary grape cluster so the secondary one is the one that gets turned into wine so you can push off ripening, which allows for lower potential alcohol and greater physiological maturity so you get greater flavors. People are leaving a bit more canopy, carrying a bigger fruit crop to delay ripening, picking earlier.”

Champagne is looking at England as a new venue for highquality sparkling wines. In July, Bordeaux allowed a number of new grapes to be planted, he says. It was previously illegal to plant anything but the five main historic grapes. And in Italy, a new VCR program is working to breed traditional vinifera grapes such as merlot with hybrids that are hardier and exhibit more resistance.

The question for Heny and other winemakers is whether consumers will be amenable to these changes.

“A mutt is better than a purebred when the going gets tough,” Heny says. “But people aren’t into drinking the mutt wines as much.

At the end of the day, we have to make wines that people love.” n

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KLMNO Weekly

Nation

Decline in hunting hurts conservation F RANCES S TEAD S ELLERS in Stevens, Pa. BY

T

hey settled, watchfully, into position — a retired couple armed with a longnosed camera and three men with shotguns.

Tom Stoeri balanced the hefty lens on his half-open car window, waiting to capture the Canada geese as they huddled on the frozen lake, fluttering up in occasional agitation before they launched into flight.

A little more than a mile away, John Heidler and two friends scanned the skies from a sunken blind, mimicking the honking and hoping their array of decoys would lure them within range — until, Pachow! Pachow! Pachow!

Public lands such as these at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area are a shared resource, open to an unlikely mix of hunters and hikers, birdwatchers and mountain bikers.

“It’s a symbiotic thing,” said Meg Stoeri, Tom’s wife and fellow photographer.

But today, that symbiosis is off kilter: Americans’ interest in hunting is on the decline, cutting into funding for conservation, which stems largely from hunting licenses, permits and taxes on firearms, bows and other equipment.

Even as more people are engaging in outdoor activities, hunting license sales have fallen from a peak of about 17 million in the early ’80s to 15 million last year, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data. The agency’s 2016 survey suggested a steeper decline to 11.5 million Americans who say they hunt, down more than 2 million from five years earlier.

The resulting financial shortfall is hitting state wildlife agencies.

In Wisconsin, a $4 million to $6 million annual deficit forced the state’s Department of Natural Resources to reduce warden patrols and invasive species control.

Michigan’s legislature had to dig into general-tax coffers to save some of the state’s wildlife projects, while other key programs, such as protecting bees and other

Kyle Grantham for The Washington Post

The traditional funding model for wildlife aid depends on game licenses, permits and taxes pollinating creatures, remain “woefully underfunded,” according to Edward Golder, a spokesman for the state’s natural resources department.

Here in Pennsylvania — where the game commission gets more than 50 percent of its revenue from licenses, permits and taxes — the agency had to cancel construction projects, delay vehicle purchases and leave dozens of positions vacant, according to a 2016 report, even as it tackled West Nile virus and tried to protect rare creatures such as the wood rat.

“That’s what keeps me up at night,” Robert Miller, director of the Governor’s Advisory Council for Hunting, Fishing and Conservation, said of the inadequacies of the user-pay, user-play model that has funded conservation for decades.

A national panel has called for a new funding model to keep at-risk species from needing far costlier emergency measures. The crisis stands to worsen, with as many as

one-third of America’s wildlife species “at increased risk of extinction,” according to a 2018 report published by the National Wildlife Federation. In December, environmentalists and hunters united in Washington behind two bipartisan bills aimed at establishing new funding sources and facilitating the recruitment of hunters.

Many states are devising ways to reinvigorate hunting culture and expand the sport’s appeal to women, minorities, and the growing number of locavores — people who seek locally sourced food.

Colorado has a Hug a Hunter campaign to raise awareness of wildlife management and outdoor recreational opportunities.

Pennsylvania, where the number of licensed hunters has dropped from 927,000 to 850,000 over the past decade, is trying to stall the decline with “R3 activities” — efforts to recruit, retain and reactivate hunters.

A few states are bucking the

Nick Semanco, left, and Adam Saurazas set up their blind in the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Stevens, Pa., in January. The number of licensed hunters in Pennsylvania has dropped from 927,000 to 850,000 over the past decade.

trend. New Mexico, where the number of licensed hunters grew nearly 10 percent over the past four years, credits its successes to R3 strategies such as making license applications available online and reaching out to Latino residents.

Many national hunting advocacy groups, such as Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, have made cultivating interest among people who have had little exposure to the outdoors key to their missions.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation is seeking to turn what its research suggests is about two and a half million “aspiring hunters” into actual hunters.

But revamping the federal funding model has proved tough.

A proposed tax on outdoor gear, for example, was killed by resistance from retailers and manufacturers.

The link between hunting and conservation dates back more than a century to when gunmen all but blasted the bison population to oblivion and finished off North America’s most abundant bird, the passenger pigeon.

Small wonder that hunters were asked to curb — and pay for — their excesses. Avid outdoorsmen such as Theodore Roosevelt put their stamp on an enduring ethos that combined sport with conservation and led to the 1937 passage of the Pittman-Robertson Act, which imposed an 11 percent excise tax on the sale of firearms that is apportioned annually to state agencies for conservation.

In December, Congress modernized Pittman-Robertson as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Act, giving states greater discretion in their use of federal dollars for recruitment. House legislators also took bipartisan steps to advance the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would provide states and tribes with $1.4 billion annually from the general fund to restore habitats and implement key conservation strategies. The bill now heads to the House floor for a full vote.

“It’s exciting to see sportsmen’s groups working with greener groups,” O’Mara said. n

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NATION

KLMNO Weekly

Out of Wuhan and into quarantine

BY S IOBHÁN O ’ G RADY, L ENNY B ERNSTEIN, A NNA F IFIELD AND W ILLIAM W AN

T

he airport was a 16-hour overnight vigil of lines and paperwork and stress and delays, of squawking children and worried travelers, all trying to board the same two planes.

Ningxi Xu’s name was on the list. But until the converted cargo plane was rising into the sky over Wuhan, China, she could not be certain she would be one of the lucky Americans to escape the center of the coronavirus outbreak and make it back home.

With a blue band fastened around her right wrist, she became passenger 199, took her seat with her government-issue boxed lunch and face mask, and left on one of the two flights that landed in California on Wednesday.

One flight delivered 178 people to Travis Air Force Base outside Sacramento. The other landed there, then went on to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, where about 170 people exited. Two more flights are leaving Wuhan and arriving in the United States on Thursday.

An additional 195 people who arrived Jan. 28 are quarantined at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif.

Wednesday’s evacuees face 14 days of quarantine in hotels on the military bases, as authorities wait to see whether anyone has the virus.

“At this point, I’m just happy to be in the States,” said Chunlin Leonhard, a law professor from New Orleans who is quarantined at the Travis base. “I haven’t thought about much else.”

Each flight appeared to have at least one sick person aboard.

On Leonhard’s plane, officials said, a small child with a fever was isolated in the rear of the craft in an area blocked off with plastic sheeting. Xu said she saw a woman in a similar place on her flight. The woman did

Denis Poroy/Reuters

Americans escaping China face an organizational nightmare and a 14-day hold to get back home not appear to be aboard for the final leg to Miramar.

Wearing protective suits and masks, government workers moved about the planes during the 12-hour flight, taking the passengers’ temperatures twice.

They were also screened before they boarded and again as they left the planes.

This is the first quarantine ordered by federal health officials in more than 50 years, and the CDC is having to improvise.

Each family has a private room but is being told to keep some distance — at least six feet — from other families.

With many employees of the U.S. Consulate in Wuhan previously evacuated, Wednesday’s travelers said they were left on their own to secure a seat on the flight, make their way through locked-down Wuhan to the airport, and find the flight in the confusion there.

For Ken Burnett’s family, it was just the latest harrowing chapter in a month of worry. It

started as a getaway vacation for his wife, with Burnett staying behind in San Diego to work while Yanjun Wei took 3-yearold Rowan and Mia, 1, to visit her family in Wuhan for the Lunar New Year. Burnett was supposed to join them later in Hong Kong and they would fly back to­gether.

Then the coronavirus struck, and Wuhan came to a standstill.

Wei and the children were trapped in a relative’s apartment with her Chinese parents for a month.

The U.S. government originally promised Wei and the children seats on a chartered plane that was supposed to leave that Saturday, but that flight was canceled at the last moment.

To make Wednesday’s flight, Wei had to find her way through multiple checkpoints and police roadblocks.

Burnett said his wife later told him that she reached a breaking point on the plane and sought help from other passen-

An aircraft chartered by the State Department to evacuate Americans from the Chinese city of Wuhan arrives at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego on Wednesday.

gers and medical staff.

Leonhard and another American took an eerie four-hour drive from Songzi City to Wuhan airport to get out. For hours they were the only car on the freeway, she said, with trucks taking supplies to the idled city. She was in China on a Fulbright grant during a sabbatical from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. She was told to be at the airport by 6 p.m. Tuesday for a 10 p.m. flight. She arrived early, determined not to miss her chance. The plane did not take off until 8 the next morning.

With no U.S. officials to guide them, the evacuees organized themselves over the WeChat app. moving from place to place with each rumor of where they should be and when they might leave. At one point, they were divided in half by the first letter of their last names, which caused chaos when it separated families. Chinese children don’t always have the same last name as both of their parents.

“It was pretty chaotic,” Leonhard said. “The embassy did not have enough people. It’s clear that they didn’t have the crowdmanagement team on hand, and it was clear they didn’t think through the crowd management.”

Xu said: “People didn’t really want to talk to strangers because they didn’t want to risk contagion. I was just really frustrated.”

“It’s actually more dangerous to be there than outside in the street,” she added, noting that there were hundreds of people “sitting there next to each other.”

Finally they boarded and took off for two weeks as guests of the U.S. government. The evacuees must keep a log of their temperatures and will be taken to hospitals if they develop symptoms.

“It’s going to be a long 14 days,” Burnett said of his wait to see his quarantined family. “But at least now I know they’re safe. It’ll be an easier 14 days than the past 14, for sure.” n

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COVER STORY

Ginny Yamamoto Syphax, left; her mother, Jayne; her father, Mits; and her daughter, Robyn. Opposite page: Charles Syphax and grandson William B. Syphax, and wife Maria Carter Custis Syphax.

Photos by Melina Mara/The Washington Post

9

SUNDAY, February, 9, 2020

Tom Parker/National Archives

The reparations debate in one family

H

er mother’s parents were imprisoned during World War II for being Japanese American. The Yamamotos lost everything — their home, their leased strawberry farm, their dignity — after the government labeled them “the enemy.”

Her father’s ancestors were enslaved at Mount Vernon. Unlike the vast majority of enslaved African Americans, the Syphaxes became landowners, though it took an act of Congress to gain full recognition of their property rights.

The impacts of government-sanctioned racism course through both branches of Robyn Syphax’s family tree. That uncommon lineage shows how even token BY

compensation for historical wrongs can reverberate through generations, affording a chance to heal.

Japanese Americans received reparations — a presidential apology and a $20,000 check — more than four decades after their captivity. African Americans have not.

For Robyn, reparations are a meaningful way to acknowledge the loss that both sides of her family have experienced — the “loss of being able to live a normal life.”

“Whether they were families that were uprooted from Africa and brought here as slaves or families that were put in internment camps, they did not have the same opportunities that everyone else had at the time,”

T RACY J AN in Sacramento

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Cover Story

the 28-year-old said. “The government should say, ‘I’m sorry,’ just like they did for Japanese Americans. This is the only way to start the healing process.”

But her family’s experiences defy simple conclusions about the role of reparations in making amends.

For Robyn’s grandfather, reparations made it official: The internment of Japanese Americans was a historic injustice.

For her mother, reparations helped crack open the door to her parents’ painful past, though no amount of money could compensate for their losses.

But for her father, slavery was too long ago to determine who should benefit from reparations, and he is skeptical of how cash payments would lift African Americans into prosperity.

And for her uncle, the plot of land bequeathed to his family before the Civil War seeded their wealth after enslavement, effectively becoming a form of reparations he said other black families deserve today.

Now, more than 150 years after slavery was abolished, congressional Democrats, most of the party’s presidential candidates and Japanese American civil rights leaders are mobilizing around reparations for African Americans.

Supporters anticipate a House vote on the issue this year, as well as its inclusion in the Democratic Party platform.

It is the biggest push for reparations since 1989, when then-Rep. John Conyers Jr. (DMich.), inspired by the law authorizing redress for Japanese Americans, began introducing H.R. 40 — numbered to reflect the “40 acres and a mule” that the U.S. government promised enslaved people after the Civil War (and later rescinded).

17 acres For Robyn and her family, the attempts to reckon with history began in Arlington in 1825.

Robyn’s great-great-great-great-grandparents were Maria Carter Custis Syphax and Charles Syphax.

Maria was the daughter of Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, and one of his enslaved maids, Arianna Carter, according to historical accounts. (Martha and George Washington, her second husband, had adopted Custis after his father died.)

Custis freed Maria in 1825 — 40 years before slavery ended — and gave her a 17-acre triangular plot on the edge of the Custis family’s Arlington plantation after she married. Her husband, Charles, remained enslaved as the chief butler on the estate.

Maria’s white half sister, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, married Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. The federal government confiscated the 1,100-acre Arlington estate from the Lees for nonpayment of taxes after they fled during the Civil War. The Syphax land was confiscated, too, because Maria did not have a deed to her 17 acres.

Nevertheless, she and her family continued living on the property.

In 1866, Maria’s eldest son, William Syphax, who became chief messenger of the Interior Department, petitioned Congress to pass a bill returning the 17 acres to his family, and the Syphaxes reclaimed their plot.

Subsequent sales of the property gave Maria’s descendants the means to pursue education and professions in law, government, medicine and business, according to Robyn’s uncle Scott Syphax.

“Our family is actually a case study in what would have happened if people had gotten their ‘40 acres,’ ” said Scott, whose brother, Robert, is Robyn’s father.

Scott and Robert’s great-grandfather, Charles Sumner Syphax, became a Howard University dean and mathematician. Their grandfather, Charles Sumner Syphax II, became a doctor after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1924. Their father, Charles Sumner Syphax III, became one of the first African American developers in Detroit in the age of redlining.

The Syphax land, adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, was acquired by the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. Individual #22034D On the other side of the country, Robyn’s grandparents were being rounded up for internment.

Her grandfather, Mitsuo “Mits” Yamamoto, was 16 in 1942 when notices began to appear in Sacramento ordering everyone of Japanese

Above: Robert Syphax, right, discusses reparations with his daughter, Robyn, at his brother Scott’s home in Elk Grove, Calif.

Opposite page: Photos from the Syphax and Yamamoto families in Sacramento. For Robyn, reparations represent a way to acknowledge the losses that both sides of her family faced.

ancestry out of the West Coast. Her grandmother, Jayne Yamamoto, was just 10.

U.S.-born citizens like Mits and Jayne, as well as their immigrant parents, were given just days to report to “assembly centers.”

Mits’s parents left their belongings at their landlord’s barn and a makeshift warehouse recommended by the War Relocation Authority. His father sold his new pickup truck for next to nothing.

As their landlord drove them to the train station, Mits looked back at the farmland his parents leased — acres of ripe, red strawberries ready to be picked.

“I can’t imagine what was on my folks’ minds — working all year for one crop and having to leave in the middle of it,” said Mits, now 93.

Japanese Americans lost as much as $6 billion in property and income because of their forced removal and incarceration, according to a 1983 federally commissioned study that adjusted for inflation and interest. The government froze bank accounts, labeling them “enemy alien assets.” Speculators took advantage of wartime prejudices to buy land for a fraction of its value.

Other losses were less tangible, though still deeply felt. After boarding the train under armed guard, Mits became “Individual #22034D” — the letter “D” denoting he was the fourth person in the family, after his parents and older sister.

Over the next three years, the Yamamotos were held in three prison camps — spending the most time at the “Jerome Relocation Cen-

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Cover Story ter” in Arkansas, which incarcerated more than 8,000 Japanese Americans at its peak.

Mits’s family was assigned to a barrack in Block 2, closest to the barbed wire perimeter where military police atop sentry towers pointed their rifles inward.

Because of the wartime labor shortage, Mits was eventually granted permission to seek seasonal jobs in Chicago and Sarasota, Fla. — after answering a loyalty questionnaire in which he swore “unqualified allegiance” to the United States and affirmed his willingness to serve in combat for the U.S. armed forces. And in those travels, he encountered raw discrimination — paid less than white Americans performing the same jobs, detained by police while shopping and denied service at a roadside diner.

“In California, although we were called ‘Japs,’ we were recognized at least,” Mits said.

“Then, we became nobody. Not black. Not white.”

Mits was 19 when his family was freed in 1945, given $25 each and one-way train fare.

They returned to Sacramento to find their farm had been leased to someone else and their belongings missing from the warehouse. “ ‘I’m sorry, too bad,’ was the answer we received,” Mits said. “We never saw any of those items again.”

His father, then 70, was too frail to farm.

Mits, who had graduated from high school while imprisoned at Jerome, skipped college to help support the family. “We had to start from scratch,” he said.

Despite prejudice against Japanese Americans, Mits found work in a hops field and also pruned grapes. But like thousands of other Japanese American families who had dominated fruit and vegetable farming in California, Oregon and Washington, the Yamamotos never got back into the farming business.

In 1949, Mits was hired at Campbell Soup Co., packing cans for $1.20 an hour. His mother picked strawberries on someone else’s farm.

His father got a live-in job tending to the garden of a white family.

They would never be fully compensated for the loss of their farming operation. Other Japanese American families received some restitution from the United States soon after the war, but the government paid out only a quarter of the claims for damaged or lost property filed under a 1948 law, according to a federal report decades later.

But life went on. Mits met Jayne through his best friend, who happened to be Jayne’s brother. They married in 1952 and had four children, including Robyn’s mother, Ginny.

For decades, the couple buried their experiences, rarely speaking of their internment.

Government resettlement policies discouraged Japanese Americans from congregating in public, speaking Japanese or living next door to other Japanese American families. And the Yamamotos urged their own children to assimilate.

“They have a saying, ‘shikata ga nai’ — you know, ‘it cannot be helped,’ ” said Jayne, now

“I don’t think you can put a dollar amount on it. It’s not just financial loss. It’s also emotional loss.”

Ginny Yamamoto Syphax, whose parents were held in a prison camp during World War II

87, who had been incarcerated at Tule Lake in California. “They said it was something we had to endure, and we did. We kept quiet. Our generation never said nothing.”

An apology Meanwhile, younger Japanese Americans, or third-generation known as Sansei, began responding to their parents’ silence about their wartime experiences with political activism.

Momentum for reparations gathered in the 1980s. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians held public hearings around the country, allowing the older Nisei generation to speak out about their mistreatment for the first time.

But Mits and Jayne did not participate. They still could not bring themselves to share details of their imprisonment with their children, let alone the world.

The commission determined that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order to incarcerate Japanese Americans was spurred by racism and wartime hysteria — not military necessity — and recommended that reparations be paid to survivors.

Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, with black lawmakers backing redress.

But legal scholars said the law was narrowly framed so as not to serve as a precedent for any other kind of reparations claim. Only Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps and still alive when the bill passed would be compensated — not their

KLMNO Weekly

children or grandchildren.

Some in the black press decried Japanese American redress, with the New Pittsburgh Courier declaring it “the latest slap in our Black faces by white America.”

Some 82,210 former prisoners — out of 120,000 — received reparations checks and an apology from President George H.W. Bush and, later, President Bill Clinton. The rest, including Mits’s and Jayne’s parents, had already died.

At first, Mits did not think he deserved to be compensated. It was his parents — not him — who had suffered the most, he said. “They had something, and they lost it.”

Mits and Jayne gave half of their combined $40,000 in reparations to their four adult children “so they could get a better head start” — a symbolic transfer of wealth after everything that had been taken away.

Their daughter Ginny Yamamoto Syphax, then 30, married to Robert Syphax, and raising Robyn’s older brother, Ryan, put her share of the reparations, $5,000, into an investment account Mits had opened for her as a child.

It would take another 30 years — and a pilgrimage to the Jerome internment camp — before the full weight of her parents’ experience would feel real to Ginny.

During the trip last April, her father pointed out the spots on a map where his barracks once stood, and the barn where a fellow prisoner had hung himself in despair.

“The floodgates hit me — just pure sadness for my parents and grandparents,” said Ginny, now 61. “That was when I just totally realized the injustices.”

She does not think the government payout is enough for what Japanese American families lost.

“I don’t think you can put a dollar amount on it,” Ginny said. “It’s not just financial loss. It’s also emotional loss. You’re being uprooted from a place that, for my grandparents, was the land of opportunity. You come and work your tail off, and then to lose that sense of security of having a home — suddenly it’s all gone.”

At his kitchen table, Mits fought back tears, grateful to the younger generation who had pushed for reparations.

“The young people — they made things happen,” he said. “Thanks to them, our history wasn’t just swept under the rug.”

Cash compensation made the government apology feel more sincere, Mits said. He considered his black in-laws and the healing potential that redress for slavery could bring.

“You should pay for your mistakes,” he concluded.

Still waiting In 1989, with the government poised to disburse $1.6 billion to Japanese American survivors of wartime incarceration, Conyers, the Michigan congressman, introduced his bill to create a commission to study reparations proposals for African Americans living with the legacy of more than two centuries of slavery and subsequent segregation.

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It drew only two dozen sponsors. Conyers reintroduced the bill every legislative session until he resigned from Congress in 2017. Each time, the bill failed to move beyond the House Judiciary Committee. And while the House and Senate apologized for slavery in 2008 and 2009, the symbolic moves did not accompany action on reparations. Conyers died in October of 2019 at age 90.

But for Scott Syphax, Ginny’s brother-in-law, compensating African Americans for the stolen wealth that their enslaved ancestors generated — as well as the government-sanctioned discrimination in employment, housing, lending, education and policing — just makes sense. Even the promises of the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, which helped lift white Americans into the middle class, were never fully realized for black Americans.

“It’s like the equivalent of a very layered cake of actions and laws that have led to the economic disparity that we have today,” said Scott, a retired chief executive of a real estate development firm who now runs a foundation to diversify corporate boards.

“When we were freed, not only did black people not receive anything,” he said, “there were active pieces of discrimination — both cultural and statutory — that blocked us from being able to create enough in assets to transfer onto successive generations.”

The net worth of a typical white family is nearly 10 times that of a typical black family, according to Federal Reserve data.

Homeownership, one of the most important ways for families to build wealth, has remained virtually unchanged for African Americans in the 50 years since housing discrimination was outlawed.

Over wine and cheese at his home last fall, Scott, who also hosts a political talk show on local television, and his brother, Robert, a retired IT manager for the state of California, ran calculations of what cash reparations could mean for African Americans.

In one scenario, they divided $500 billion — an amount proposed by former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson — by approximately 48 million black Americans, yielding roughly $10,000 per person.

“You kind of look at that number and say well, okay, will $10,000 actually move someone into permanent prosperity?” said Scott, 56.

“I don’t see how you pay a segment of society that large the kind of money that would be required to improve anyone’s position,” said Robert, 61.

While he felt cash compensation was the best way to acknowledge how the government had wronged his Japanese American in-laws, Robert said reparations checks would do little for young African Americans segregated in neighborhoods devoid of jobs, education, even basic infrastructure. The money, he said, should instead be invested in educational opportunities and community programs for systemic change.

Then there are the questions that commonly come up when discussing reparations: “How would it actually work?” Scott asked. “Should

Tom Parker/National Archives

Africans who came over, you know, 40 years ago get a piece of this? Who gets this?”

Their mother’s family had been sharecroppers on a Mississippi cotton plantation. Their grandfather migrated to Detroit at 17 to work in the auto factories — never having had the option of pursuing an education.

“Who knows who he would have become had his family had access to the 40 acres and a mule that were promised?” Scott said. “That side of my family deserves reparations.”

“Right now,” he said, “there’s a crack in the door in that there’s at least a beginning of a discussion — one that’s happening in more areas than just black dining tables.”

Top: Children leave school at the Jerome internment camp in Arkansas.

Above: Prisoners prepare drainage ditches in front of Block 7 mess hall.

New momentum Thirty years after Japanese Americans began receiving reparations checks, their descendants around the country are beginning to unite behind redress for slavery.

“One of the things people say about African American reparations for slavery is the same thing people said to us when we were fighting for redress: ‘You should just get over it,’ ” said Susan Hayase, 63, a third-generation Japanese American who fought for reparations in the 1980s. But petitioning the government for redress of grievances is “the most American thing — a basic right guaranteed by the Constitution,” she told civil rights activists gathered recently in San Jose’s Japantown.

Public support for reparations has doubled since 2002, when just 14 percent of Americans believed the government should make cash payments to black descendants of slaves, according to polling by Gallup. In 2019, 29 percent of Americans supported reparations — with black Americans accounting for most of the increase.

Georgetown students voted last year to pay additional fees as reparations for the university’s participation in the slave trade. Cities are debating their own version of reparations for redlining, predatory lending and discriminatory policing, with the Chicago suburb of Evanston recently agreeing to create a reparations fund with a tax on recreational marijuana.

The House reparations bill, now sponsored

by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), has drawn more than 120 co-sponsors, a record, according to Keenan Keller, Conyers’s longtime aide and a Democratic counsel on the House Judiciary Committee.

“Sometimes facts take a long time to penetrate, and the issue of reparations took that very long journey,” Jackson Lee said. “People are recognizing that the healing that is necessary will not occur with just the passage of time.”

One afternoon at Mits and Jayne’s ranchstyle home, Robyn unearthed a box of blackand-white family photos from the hall closet.

Tucked inside was a Manila envelope containing the official apology from President Bush — a two-paragraph letter dated October 1990, 45 years after her grandparents’ imprisonment.

Robyn examined the embossed presidential seal and read the blue type for the first time: “A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories; neither can they fully convey our Nation’s resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals. We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.” Robyn contemplated the weight of those words, reflecting on both sides of her family.

Internment — like slavery — had been sanctioned by the government and accepted by most Americans as normal, she said. “But only one side of the story has an ending.” n

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Opinions

Why China’s response to coronavirus was a failure David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column

The “Chinese model,” as enthusiasts sometimes describe Beijing’s autocratic system for dictating policy, can look eerily successful — until you consider catastrophic events such as the recent coronavirus outbreak. ¶ China’s response to the epidemic that began in Wuhan nearly two months ago shows some advantages of its police-state approach, and some severe disadvantages: Chinese authorities can commandeer resources to build a hospital in 10 days. But by stifling bad news and even arresting vigilant doctors, they create deep distrust at home and abroad, risking their ability to be effective.

Chinese people simply don’t believe their government. They know that government health data is suspect, just like China’s official economic numbers. And just as all success is attached to President Xi Jinping, so is every failure. China may be racing into the future, but its bungled response to the coronavirus outbreak is a reminder of how suddenly it can stumble.

The public’s distrust of the government emerged in interviews conducted this past week by an American business executive who worked in Shanghai for three years and who shared with me conversations with former colleagues there. These Shanghai residents expressed deep skepticism about official data, which as of Thursday showed more than 28,000 cases and 560 deaths.

“I personally doubt the numbers are accurate. I believe there are lots of missing cases, especially in rural area,” said one of the Chinese residents. “I think there are definitely miscounted numbers as some people died before there were cases diagnosed,” said a second.

“Don’t trust the official numbers,” cautioned a third.

This third Shanghai resident expressed a widely shared fear that the authorities didn’t learn from the SARS outbreak in 2003: “Seventeen years after SARS, they are still making the same mistakes, nightmare mistakes, that’s my deepest despair. From holding back the truth, to [inadequate] preparations for disaster, to [slow] speed of reaction, to chaotic supply distributions.

Those are all repeated mistakes.”

A dramatic example of how China’s police-state tactics backfired is the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital. In late December, Li noticed cases of a virus that resembled SARS. He posted a warning to other doctors on Dec. 30, advising them to wear protective clothing. On Jan. 1, the Wuhan Public Security Bureau, the local equivalent of the FBI, summoned Li to sign a statement that he had made “false comments” that “severely disturbed the social order.”

Xinhua News Agency joined the public shaming of Li and other doctors who had posted warnings. “The police call on all netizens not to fabricate rumors, not spread rumors, not

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Workers arrange beds in a convention center that has been converted into a temporary hospital in Wuhan, China.

believe rumors,” the story said, but instead to “jointly build a harmonious, clear and bright cyberspace.”

Three weeks after Li had tried to sound the alarm, China declared the virus outbreak a national emergency. The Supreme People’s Court later denounced the arrests of Li and others and said: “Rumors end when there is openness.”

[On Thursday, China announced Li had died after coming down with the illness.]

But China can’t have this openness when authorities work so diligently to control negative information — about disease or anything else. The New York Times gathered some chilling examples: Hong Kong journalists who went to a Wuhan hospital in mid-January were detained and told to delete their footage. A Hong Kong television reporter who had covered the SARS epidemic posted an article about the new virus, but it was quickly deleted. A military doctor who helped expose the seriousness of SARS was later pilloried for harming interests of the nation.

Xu Zhiyuan, a Chinese journalist who decried Beijing’s actions in suppressing the SARS outbreak, wrote later about the costs of censorship. The Times

quoted his social media post: “The system is successful in that it destroyed the people with integrity, the institutions with credibility and a society capable of narrating its own stories.”

The financial cost of suppressing information and letting coronavirus spread in its early weeks could run to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Goldman Sachs estimated in a forecast for clients Tuesday that a severe outbreak could reduce China’s gross domestic product growth in 2020 by more than a full percentage point. Already, Chinese financial markets have taken a huge hit.

China’s command economy, managed by a one-party dictatorship, has achieved miracles in recent decades. In comparison, an open and contentious democracy like the United States can sometimes seem like a losing proposition.

But we’re now witnessing a striking reminder of the need for open sources of information and public officials who aren’t cowed by political pressure.

Xi thundered on Monday that Chinese officials who “lack boldness” in responding to coronavirus will be punished.

Perhaps he will dictate that patients who don’t get well quickly will be jailed, too. n

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books

KLMNO Weekly

Loading the bases with nostalgia

Fun, sun and a financial disaster

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

R

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REVIEWED BY

K AREN H ELLER

ejoice. The mythic major league Los Angeles Lions have arrived in Scottsdale, Ariz. for spring training. In Emily Nemens’s protean debut novel, “The Cactus League,” rather than hope springing eternal and all that, the season seems suspect before it’s begun.

A house desecrated by squatters, an arrest rooted in abject stupidity, a body ravaged by an undisclosed illness, a team-defeating trade sparked by closeted jealousy, marriages busting up all over the place. So many secrets.

Splendid for fiction, not so much for forging a victorious team.

Jason Goodyear — there’s a prophetic last name — is the novel’s ostensible hero though Nemens, editor of the Paris Review, has crafted a panoramic portrait, centered on multiple characters in chapters numbered as innings.

Goodyear is the team star, “the best left fielder since Ted Williams,” model handsome with a golden arm, a generous heart and a withering addiction for the gaming tables. Does Nemens describe Jason as having “a Tom Cruise smile and Paul Newman eyes”? Yes, I’m afraid she does.

Though, Jason’s remote character and outsize talent evoke Robert Redford in “The Natural.” Jason even uses his rocket of an arm to smash a towering light, albeit with a stone, not a bat and ball.

Nemens has written a story of baseball, topography and some architecture, the rare novel that ties the sport to Arizona’s tectonics and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose winter retreat Taliesin West figures prominently in the story. “Remember how I said this was a long game?” a baseball scribe directly asks the reader. He gets his say, in boldface type, in occasional chapters. “Let’s put it in perspective, consider the history of this place in geological time.

Take a look at Salt River Fields’ cleat-pocked outfield and imagine this: the ground under Goodyear’s feet was once a sea, shallow

and warm and dotted with coral reefs, clusters of orangey calcium deposits spread like neon inkblots across the sea floor.”

The year is 2011. Why? Never explained except to ruminate, occasionally, about the housing bust and Obama as president. Perhaps Nemens intended to root her story in the past, even the recent past, to make “Cactus League” appear the stuff of history. Her reporter sounds straight out of “The Front Page” or Damon Runyon, a hard-boiled exterior but a center that’s all goo for the game.

“That ‘no crying in baseball’ line is nice, but a load of bull: plenty of us walk around on the verge of tears. Goodyear, strong man that he is. . . . He’s on the brink of it every damn morning this spring actually, every time he wakes up and finds himself alone.” An agent refers to a grown woman as “kid.”

A batting coach worships at the altar of Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. Nostalgia, not chew, is the sport’s dominant vice.

Nemens’s adoration of the game is infectious, and her novel is packed with winning details.

On the aesthetic sell-by date of baseball wives: “These women are like friends from summer camp — rambunctious, beautiful girls who were briefly the most important people in the world but are now remembered in dull colors and with vague edges.”

Characters assume center stage — or home plate — for a spell, only to return for cameo turns. It’s a challenging approach to pull off, done more successfully in Julia Phillips’s glorious “Disappearing Earth.” I would have gladly read an entire novel about dyspeptic agent Herb Allison, who seems more present than self-thwarting Jason. It’s as though, like his position in the ballpark, Goodyear remains at a distance, always out there in left field. n Karen Heller is a Washington Post staff writer.

O The Cactus League

By Emily Nemens Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

288 pages. $27.

Bubble in the Sun The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

By Christopher Knowlton Simon & Schuster.

411 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

M ANUEL R OIG- F RANZIA

n the causeway that stretches from downtown Miami to the beach, there’s a little sign that diverts the elite to one of the wealthiest enclaves in the United States.

At this invitation-only exit, the fortunate few board a car ferry that takes them to a spot called Fisher Island, a conspicuously geometrical hunk of land south of Miami Beach. Fisher Island is an invention of human ambition, a place created in the early 20th century when the Government Cut shipping channel was dredged, lopping off the dangly end of a barrier island that later came to be known as Miami Beach.

This amputated limb of an island, fortified and smoothly edged by dredged soil, takes its name from Carl Fisher, an auto enthusiast, bicycle racer and real estate titan of boundless ambition, who imagined a resort paradise on the shore in South Florida. Like many of the other grand dreamers in Christopher Knowlton’s “Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression,” Fisher would come to ruin, serving as a cautionary tale for those who can’t stop when they’re ahead.

Knowlton, a former London bureau chief for Fortune magazine who grew up spending spring breaks at his grandmother’s home outside Vero Beach, has produced a lively and entertaining chronicle of the visionaries, rascals and hucksters who transformed Florida. There’s Addison Mizner, a real estate savant who was often accompanied by a monkey. And George Merrick, the riches-to-rags founder of swanky Coral Gables, who was derided during his great fall from acclaim as having had a “halo of hokum” above his head.

Unfortunately, Knowlton seeks to do much more than tell the rollicking tale of modern Florida’s roots. He also posits that the bursting of Florida’s 1920s land bubble “triggered the nationwide epi-

demic and social trauma that followed” and is the reason it lasted “so long and was so devastating.”

Knowlton starts his romp through Florida history with the calamitous 1926 arrival of the Prinz Valdemar, a hulking, 241foot sailing ship that was meant to provide emergency housing during an epic construction frenzy.

The ship crashed into the harbor instead.

Many of Florida’s moguls kept building even as signs were pointing to trouble ahead. In the months after the wreck, as building supply shipments stalled, Florida’s real estate barons — including Mizner, Fisher and Merrick — expanded their holdings, “leveraging themselves to ever-greater heights.”

In that sense, they were not unlike most Americans, who had become accustomed to taking on personal debt and were going into hock to buy goods from houses and cars to refrigerators and popup toasters.

The problem with Knowlton’s premise is that he keeps undercutting his arguments by pointing out that Florida had much in common with the rest of the country. Banks began failing in Florida; but they were also failing in New York and Chicago. All across America, not just in Florida, people started spending less on stuff like dishwashers, sewing machines and cars. Knowlton argues that “it simply took time for the decline in real estate values in Florida to spread like an infection across the suburbs and cities in the rest of the country,” but he never convincingly explains why Florida is patient zero in the contagion.

This mostly engaging book might have been better served if the title had stopped at “Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s” and left it at that. n Roig-Franzia is a feature writer in The Washington Post’s Style section, where he profiles national figures in the worlds of politics, the law and the arts.

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KLMNO Weekly

Five Myths

The Senate BY

K ATHY K IELY

President Trump’s impeachment trial put international focus on the U.S. Senate, an institution that ordinarily attracts far less attention than the one it is meant to keep in check at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. During the many lulls in the constitutional drama, the media focused on the Senate’s storied history and quirky customs as filler chatter in their commentary. That creates a reassuring sense of continuity — a picture of Congress’s upper chamber as a steady, if eccentric, guardian of the people’s freedoms.

But the Senate has changed. Understanding just how much requires cutting though a fog of nostalgic mythology.

Myth No. 1 The Senate is the world’s ‘greatest deliberative body.’

Often attributed to President James Buchanan, this description has been parroted by senators in speeches and editorials, and made it onto the chamber’s official website.

The problem is that debate is a participatory sport, and most senators simply aren’t engaging: C-SPAN daily reveals the embarrassing sight of Congress’s nearly empty upper chamber.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the impeachment spectacle is that it has brought all the members of the Senate into the chamber at the same time.

The Senate’s reputation as a great debating society has largely been based on the rules that give its 100 members unlimited time to discuss whatever topic they choose, as longtime congressional historian Ray Smock has noted.

But the only way you’re likely to see one of the Senate’s fabled talkathons these days is by rewatching “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Myth No. 2 The Senate is the ultimate inside-the-Beltway club.

The upper chamber of Congress has enjoyed a reputation as a chummy place where personal relationships

trumped political differences: Think of then-Sen. Joe Biden (DDel.) delivering a 2003 eulogy for former senator Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.); or the odd-couple friendship of Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Ted Kennedy (DMass.).

Now each party has hardened into ideological silos, and within those silos exist jealously guarded personal brands. For senators such as Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), their most important relationships are with their passionate political bases.

Myth No. 3 The Senate is old-fashioned and genteel.

Yes, 48 of the chamber’s wooden desks date to 1819. Yes, the Senate has an official Doorkeeper’s office whose staff members discreetly inform members of breaches of etiquette: jackets for men, no sleeveless dresses or open-toed shoes for ladies, and no electronics on members’ desks. Rules of procedure enforce a quaint formality. Senators refer to one another in the third person: “the distinguished senator from New York” or “my friend from Alabama.”

But none of this should promote the sentimental fantasy that courtliness still reigns. Along with large brass spittoons on the

Samuel Corum/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Senate was once known for the bonds among its members, but those relationships have frayed as lawmakers focus more on their political bases and their personal brands.

floor, the Senate has satellite dishes on the roof, and members regularly avail themselves of everything technology has to offer to inflame passions. Just this past month, the nation’s newest senator, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, lobbed a zinger via Twitter at fellow Republican Mitt Romney after the Utahn suggested he might support calling witnesses in the impeachment trial.

Myth No. 4 The Senate serves as a check on executive power.

The Senate of late has made some moves toward reclaiming its Article I constitutional powers as a check on the executive branch, with a bipartisan effort to debate a new war powers resolution and a repudiation of the Trump administration’s continued overtures to Saudi Arabia.

But research shows that for the most part, senators are hardly stalwart checks on executive authority. Most Republican senators vote with the current

president more than 90 percent of the time, as the website FiveThirtyEight has documented.

According to Roll Call, when Barack Obama was president, Democrats did the same thing.

Myth No. 5 The Senate is a representative body.

The Senate was never designed to be as democratic as the House.

Since every state, regardless of its population, gets two votes in the Senate, it is the nation’s only legislative branch not organized along the principle of “one person, one vote.” The U.S. population continues to concentrate in urban and coastal areas, so the political imbalance grows. States representing 18 percent of the population now elect a majority of the Senate, as the Cook Political Report has pointed out. n Kiely, the Lee Hills chair in free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, spent more than three decades covering Capitol Hill.

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