The Washington Post National Weekly - December 17, 2017

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Brothers in arms Four siblings wrote hundreds of letters to each other during World War II. The story they tell of service, sacrifice and trauma was hidden in an abandoned storage unit — until now. PAGE 12

Politics Parties rethink 2018 4 Nation Housing for millennials 9 Parenting Kids don’t need more stuff 23

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

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THE SWITCH

End of the line for net neutrality BY

G EOFFREY A . F OWLER

L

et’s talk about the end of net neutrality in terms everyone knows: airport security lines.

The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to repeal its net neutrality rules, which since 2015 had prohibited Internet providers from blocking or slowing particular websites. Washington treats it as a partisan issue, but it’s not. A survey by the University of Maryland shows 83 percent of Americans — including 75 percent of Republicans — support keeping the existing rules after being presented detailed arguments on both sides.

It’s really about what happens to the smallest players in our economy. So picture another place where the little guy gets hosed: a busy airport. Imagine Verizon and Comcast are running the security lines — and websites and services are the ones trying to get through. With net neutrality, all those sites pass through at the same speed.

But of course, airport security is all about a pecking order. There’s regular security and there’s the faster “TSA Pre.” Then at many airports, if you pay extra there’s a “Clear” line, a “priority” line for pilots and first-class passengers, and even a super-fast celebrity line.

Without the neutrality rules, Internet providers could set up their own fast lanes — meaning certain websites could buy first-class treatment, while others are stuck in cattle class. Providers could sell Internet service in packages, like cable-TV bundles. Service providers would also have the right to set up their own no-fly lists, blocking certain websites that they don’t like or compete with their own business.

For you, certain websites could slow to a crawl. Or perhaps they wouldn’t show up at all.

The problem isn’t what happens to Silicon Valley companies who can afford special treat-

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ment. It’s hard to shed a tear for Facebook or Google fighting with the cable guy over who gets to swim around in the largest pile of money.

See it from the perspective of Kyle Wiens, the co-founder of a website called iFixit.com that helps people repair their own electronics.

He gets 10 million visitors each month and provides a great public service, but it’s a small business selling replacement parts and tools.

Already, his biggest expense is bandwidth.

AARON P. BERNSTEIN/REUTERS

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says access concerns are overblown.

“I am worried that there will be a fast lane we don’t have access to for any price because we’re just not big enough,” Wiens says.

Slower speeds aren’t just an annoyance for his readers. Google search results give lower rankings to slower sites. So if iFixit’s pages slow down, its instructions for replacing an iPhone battery could lose their audience.

Small businesses from craft sellers on Etsy to online video stars have raised the same concerns. It crosses the political spectrum: Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of conservative news outlet Newsmax, has asked the FCC to make sure providers can’t block or throttle content, particularly news content, according to the trade publication Multichannel News.

Supporters of ending the neutrality rules,

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 email 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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 10

including FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, say the concerns are overblown. Pai says ending the Obama-era net neutrality rules would bring back “light touch” regulations from a previous era when providers mostly stuck with neutrality ideas anyway. He says much of the fuss about net neutrality is really about Silicon Valley giants trying to “cement their dominance over the Internet economy.”

It’s true there may be public interest to create fast lanes for certain data — such as a telemedicine connection for a doctor.

And we don’t know whether telecom companies would actually make equivalents to TSA Pre, Clear or that celebrity lane. Comcast, America’s largest Internet provider, says it isn’t interested in blocking or throttling sites, though it hasn’t closed the door entirely on asking them to pay for priority service (which might feel more like a dedicated service).

But providers would have the ability to set up traffic lanes, and probably business incentive to do it. AT&T, which is trying to buy Time Warner, might want to give priority to streaming HBO. Already, it streams its DirecTV Now service to AT&T customers without counting towards their data caps.

What happens if providers do start making service less useful or more expensive? The Federal Trade Commission might be able to intervene, but it has much less power than the FCC at present. Otherwise, we’d have to count on the market to punish bad providers. Too bad 50 million U.S. homes have either zero or just one Internet provider offering 25Mbps speeds.

The deepest impact will be invisible: small businesses such as iFixit stuck in the slow lane.

Multiply that impact by thousands of sites, and we could lose what makes the Internet so useful in the first place. Without net neutrality, many new ideas just won’t ever take flight. n

©The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY BOOKS OPINION PARENTING FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 18 20 23 X

ON THE COVER Letters sent by Frank, John and Ralph Eyde, three of four brothers who sent one another letters during World War II. Photographs of letters by BILL O’LEARY, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

A new playbook for both parties

JOHN BAZEMORE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After Alabama, both sides of the aisle are rethinking plans for midterm elections in 2018

BY MICHAEL SCHERER, ROBERT COSTA AND JOSH DAWSEY

A

labama’s surprising election outcome upended the expectations in both parties for next year’s midterm campaigns, with Democrats emboldened by signs of a resurgent voter base and Republicans sensing new vulnerabilities.

The victory Tuesday by Demo-

crat Doug Jones to represent that heavily conservative state in the Senate was the latest example in a string of elections this year that Democratic leaders think represent a growing backlash against President Trump — and a potential building wave for 2018.

“People know that this is a political earthquake,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who is running the Democrats’ 2018 Senate campaign efforts. “And what this does is pro-

vide a real shot in the arm for Democrats across the country.”

From elections last month in suburban communities outside New York City and Philadelphia and the battleground of Virginia to last week’s stunner in Alabama, Democratic candidates exceeded the party’s past performance among key voting groups. Black voters, for instance, turned out as a slightly greater share of the electorate Tuesday for Jones, who

Sen.-elect Doug Jones (D-Ala.) and his wife, Louise, wave to supporters before speaking during a watch party on election night in Birmingham, Ala.

is white, than they did in 2008 and 2012 to elect Barack Obama.

Republicans, who on Wednesday sought to push for speedy passage of their massive tax-cut bill, were buzzing about how their hopes of retaining power on Capitol Hill after 2018 suddenly looked dimmer.

No Republican “should feel safe about anything” Sen. Lindsay O. Graham (R-S.C.) said Wednesday.

“Our party is in turmoil.”

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POLITICS In several cases, the Democratic victories have been driven by a potent combination of motivated base voters and wavering moderates who have been wooed by Democratic candidates seizing the political middle ground, in both style and substance.

“Democrats have a chance to occupy the center of the electorate in no small part because Republicans have vacated the center in such a dramatic way,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who helped Democrat Ralph Northam win the Virginia governorship in November.

The fuel for the emerging Democratic confidence is the rejection of Trump, his disruptive nature and the Republican policy proposals that have been coming out of Congress, political analysts say.

In past years, low presidential approval — Trump’s stands at a historically low 37 percent in polling averages — predicts major losses for his party in the midterm elections.

In some polls, a majority of the country disapproves of the Republican tax plan working its way through Congress, compared with about 1 in 4 who support it.

In addition to high black turnout in Alabama on Tuesday, exit polls showed that women went sharply for Jones, by a margin of 57 to 41, in a race that featured a Republican candidate, Roy Moore, who was accused of sexual misconduct. Self-described moderates broke for Jones 3 to 1, a far higher rate than Obama enjoyed in the state during his presidential races.

The results have raised Democratic hopes of retaking the House next year and making a run at winning a Senate majority. Democrats need to flip at least 24 seats to take the House, including a halfdozen seats rated as leaning toward the Republican candidates.

To win the Senate, Democrats will have to hold 10 seats in states won

by Trump and pick up two others, most likely in Arizona and Nevada.

Democrats are cheered by their ability in several of these races to put forward candidates who are able to rise above the daily political combat, implicitly contrasting their political styles with the pugilism of Trump and his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who backed Moore in Alabama and is looking to back anti-establishment candidates in GOP primaries next year.

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Stephen K. Bannon, right, President Trump’s former adviser, supported unsuccessful GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore, left. Some Republicans worry that Bannon could become the face of the party.

CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

FROM LEFT: Dorothy McAuliffe, wife of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Virginia Gov.-elect Ralph Northam, his daughter, Aubrey, and his wife, Pam, at his election-night party at George Mason University in Fairfax.

“If you noticed, Doug wasn’t just talking about sexual harassment issues. He was saying this is bad for business in Alabama,” said Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio). “That was a nice way to bring it all back to the economic issues which are so important and where Democrats can do well.”

Jones, who holds liberal views on social issues such as abortion and gay rights that put him out of step with many Alabama voters, won by casting himself as a bland “center-of-the-road” former federal prosecutor of high moral character, a message that implicitly contrasted him with Moore and allowed him to mobilize his base while winning over moderates.

His strategy replicated that of

Northam, the mild-mannered governor-elect of Virginia, who won on a message of collaboration that drove near-record Democratic turnout.

It’s a tough formula for Republicans, who find themselves struggling to turn out their own voters as Democrats beat them among independents and Republican leaners. “Sky-high Democratic enthusiasm and a Democratic candidate who attempted to look as anodyne as possible — those are two assets that Democrats were able to exploit,” said Steven J. Law, a Republican strategist working on 2018 Senate races.

Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster involved in the Alabama race, said the takeaway from re-

cent elections is that internal Democratic divisions have been dissipating in the era of Trump.

“There is a lot of chatter about 2020 and the Hillary wing versus the Bernie wing, and all this kind of stuff,” he said. “But I think generally what we have seen in these special elections is that those ideological gradations have not been that relevant. Any decent candidate can harness the antiTrump sentiment.”

The lessons also have big implications for the struggle taking place within the Republican Party.

After the Alabama results came in, Bannon privately groused to others that the blame should be placed on the Republican National Committee for being outperformed on the ground and on Senate leaders for withdrawing money from the race after the sexual misconduct allegations came to light.

Other Republicans think the embrace of a base-first strategy by Bannon and Trump is increasingly pushing the party to a wipeout in 2018. “If Bannon becomes the face of the Republican Party, that would be a disaster,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.). “I grew up with a lot of loudmouths in Queens who were like Bannon.

None of them ever ended up in the position Bannon was.”

Still others are hopeful that the recent results will prove to be exceptions rather than rules, driven by the particular personalities in each case. “When I look at Alabama, I don’t think you can take anything away from that,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.).

“That was not about national politics, or deficits or debt or health care. That was a unique election, and it’s over with.”

The next staging grounds for this fight are contested Republican primaries in Arizona and Nevada, where Bannon is pushing more disruptive candidates to face middle-of-the-road Democratic nominees in the general election.

“Clearly capturing that grassroots energy and reaching out to moderate Republicans is something we saw in both the Alabama race and the Virginia race,” Van Hollen said. “In both campaigns, the candidates were not chasing after the latest Trump tweets.”

In two races, it is a formula that has worked, and Republicans have yet to find a strategy for counteracting it. n © The Washington Post

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“When I look at Alabama, I don’t think you can take anything away from that. That was not about national politics, or deficits or debt or health care.

That was a unique election, and it’s over with.”

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.).

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POLITICS

Irish eye GOP tax plan — and shrug Experts, workers doubt Trump’s push to lure U.S. business back home

BY S HAWN P OGATCHNIK AND H EATHER L ONG

Dublin

P

resident Trump has singled out Ireland for its extraordinarily low corporate tax rate, making the case that the United States must overhaul its own tax code to win back American investment and jobs.

“For too long, our tax code has incentivized companies to leave our country in search of lower taxes,” Trump said late last month.

“Many, many companies, they’re going to Ireland. They’re going all over.”

But Irish government officials, accountants and highly skilled workers say the U.S. tax overhaul poses little threat to Ireland, a preferred European home for the United States’ top tech and pharmaceutical companies for a generation. They expect American companies to keep investing unabated in Ireland, with little incentive to move back to the United States.

The Emerald Isle’s collective shrug when faced with the prospect of a lower U.S. corporate rate underscores why many experts are forecasting that the GOP tax plan will do little to alter the forces that drive American industry overseas.

If anything, some argue, U.S. moves could make Ireland an even more attractive landing spot for members of the Fortune 500 in Europe.

The GOP tax plan moved closer to becoming law Wednesday after Republican negotiators in the House and Senate agreed on how to reconcile most of their differences. The goal is to send legislation to Trump this week.

The plan seeks to unlock the potential of $2.6 trillion that U.S. corporations have built up offshore for decades, many of them waiting for the United States to lower its unusually high rate of 35 percent on corporate profits.

While most developed countries already tax the global profits of their homegrown companies, the United States long has allowed its multinationals to keep their income earned overseas and tax it

AIDAN CRAWLEY/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Facebook established its European headquarters on Dublin’s Southside, within a mile of other tech companies, such as Twitter, Google and LinkedIn.

only if they bring the funds home.

The proposed changes would slash the tax rate on U.S.-generated corporate profits to 21 percent, much more in line with international norms, and would slap immediate tax assessments on stockpiled overseas wealth, with a roughly 14.5 percent levy that would have to be paid within eight years. Future overseas profits would face a new rule requiring companies to pay a minimum of 10 percent on global profits, a measure that could take a slice from the money mountains sheltered in zero-tax Caribbean havens. As the theory goes, no longer able to avoid tax anywhere, U.S. corporate giants would feel liberated to invest those foreign gains on home soil.

But skeptics say the GOP tax bill is unlikely to change corporations’ calculus about where they invest their money — for two reasons.

Why go home?

The first is that companies already have plenty of cash in the United States but may be choosing not to invest it because, according to many metrics, the U.S. economy is already near full capacity. So they will look for opportunities to invest abroad.

The second is that lawmakers have crafted the tax overhaul in

ways that still create many incentives for keeping money abroad, particularly in places such as Ireland, which taxes companies at a rate of just 12.5 percent and admits foreign workers much more easily than the United States does — a particular attraction to firms looking for high-skill workers.

Tech workers taking lunch breaks on Dublin’s Silicon Docks, so named because of the cluster of top U.S. social media and software companies lining the Grand Canal, articulate Ireland’s appeal in a cacophony of languages. Here, workers are recruited seamlessly from throughout the 28-nation European Union, their entry requiring no work visas and meriting no hostility to immigrant labor. Facebook workers on the waterside chortled at the notion that their operations might relocate to the United States, given the need to keep expanding their sales and support teams from inside the E.U.’s single market.

“Every week, the list of new openings grows. We cannot hire people quickly enough,” said Jan, a Danish worker for Facebook — which, like Twitter, Google and LinkedIn, established its European headquarters on Dublin’s Southside, within a mile of all the others.

“This idea that Trump will

somehow change the rules, and Facebook will be forced to airlift us to America, is not the real world,” said Jan, who declined to give his last name because he did not have his employer’s permission to speak to the media.

Facebook plans to expand its 2,200-strong Dublin workforce to 3,000 next year. Facebook and Google are actively seeking more Dublin space, while LinkedIn and Twitter have just moved into glitzy new Irish headquarters. They are among the most high-profile of more than 700 U.S. multinational corporations in Ireland that employ 150,000 people and generate more than 20 percent of the nation’s economy, according to the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland.

A new boon possible Ironically, Ireland — the only developed country Trump has singled out by name as undermining American competitiveness with its tax code — may turn out to be a winner if the tax plan takes effect.

“The Trump plan to make U.S. multinationals pay a minimum rate of tax on overseas holdings will take some of the pressure off Ireland to act like the tax policeman of the world,” said Joe Tynan, who directs the 500-strong corporate tax team at PwC Ireland. “The E.U.’s been arguing that nobody has been taxing them properly.

Well they will be now.”

While the careers site of every U.S. multinational corporation in Ireland testifies to the thriving recruitment of techies, creatives and linguists from throughout the E.U. and beyond, the chief executives at some of these Irish offshoots say that they are not keen to spotlight rapid growth.

“We can’t be seen to be taking a single job out of the United States, given the climate there,” said one managing director of the Irish office of a leading American financial firm dedicated to servicing U.S. clients, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities of Ireland taking U.S. jobs or money.

“We keep hiring. Quietly.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

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POLITICS

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Trump attack on Gillibrand draws ire

BY J OHN W AGNER, E D O ’ K EEFE AND A SHLEY P ARKER

P

resident Trump attacked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) last week in a tweet widely criticized as being sexually suggestive, sparking outrage at a time when the nation is reeling from a wave of accusations about improper behavior by powerful men — including Trump himself.

In his Tuesday tweet, Trump referred to Gillibrand as a “lightweight” and a “total flunky” and said that, when he was a New York real estate developer, she “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions” and “would do anything for them.”

The tweet, targeting a female senator who has called on Trump to resign for his past behavior, came as the president faces renewed scrutiny of claims of sexual harassment and assault that surfaced during the campaign.

Trump has denied all the claims, accusing the women of lying.

His attack on Gillibrand prompted a swift backlash on social media and on Capitol Hill, where Democratic calls increased last week for Trump to either resign or face congressional investigations of his actions.

Gillibrand, who is often mentioned as a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, called Trump’s tweet “a sexist smear attempt to silence my voice.”

“You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak out about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office,” she said in reply to Trump on Twitter, later reiterating to reporters her call for Trump to resign.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders disputed the characterization of Trump’s tweet as sexually suggestive, telling reporters that “there’s no way this is sexist at all” and later adding: “I think only if your mind is in the gutter would you have read it that way.”

Sanders said Trump was trying

JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President’s tweet about the female senator was criticized as sexually suggestive and demeaning to make a point about the corrosive nature of money in politics and characterized Gillibrand as “a wholly owned subsidiary of people who donate to her campaign.”

“He’s used that same terminology many times in reference to men,” Sanders said of the language in Trump’s tweet.

By Tuesday afternoon, six Democratic senators had called on Trump to step down, and more than 100 House Democrats had signed onto a letter calling for a congressional investigation.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) called the president “a misogynist, compulsive liar, and admitted sexual predator.”

“Attacks on Kirsten are the latest example that no one is safe from this bully,” Hirono added.

“He must resign.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) was among the other Democratic senators to rally around Gillibrand, asking Trump on Twitter whether he was trying to “bully,

intimidate and slut-shame” Gillibrand.

A Republican consultant close to the White House declined to defend the content of Trump’s tweet, but said it was drafted with the aim of becoming the watercooler conversation of the day and diverting attention from his accusers.

“It’s a better conversation for him than for the women who are accusing him to be dominating the conversation,” said the consultant, who spoke on the conidition of anonymity to speak more candidly.

Gillibrand was attending a bipartisan Bible study Tuesday morning when Trump’s tweet landed, and her phone was immediately filled with supportive and befuddled messages, wondering just what the president was thinking, a Gillibrand aide said.

In his tweet, Trump offered no evidence to support his claim that Gillibrand had gone to him “beg-

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., attends a news conference last week on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Gillibrand says President Trump’s tweet about her Tuesday was a “sexist smear” aimed at silencing her voice.

Democratic calls for the president to resign or face a congressional investigation increased last week.

ging” for campaign donations “and would do anything for them.”

According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit website that tracks campaign contributions, since 1996, Trump has donated $8,900 to Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and $5,850 to Gillibrand.

Gillibrand met with Trump once in 2010, the Gillibrand aide said, and Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who has tried to cast herself as a champion of women, attended the meeting as well.

Asked about her interactions with the president, Gillibrand told reporters that Trump was “just a supporter — a supporter of my first campaign.”

Tuesday afternoon, Gillibrand cited the president’s tweet in an email solicitation to raise money for her 2018 reelection campaign.

Trump’s attack plays right into her portfolio. Her reelection campaign has drawn no serious opponent, and with speculation that she will renege on her vow not to run for president in 2020, the attack may do her more political good than harm. And it coincided with a previously scheduled event Tuesday led by 59 female House Democrats, who formally called on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to launch an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by the president. The oversight panel has the broadest subpoena power and investigatory mandate of any congressional committee. The female lawmakers had requested the investigation in a letter to the committee Monday.

Besides Gillibrand and Hirono, four male senators have called on Trump to resign: Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to say whether Congress should investigate the allegations against Trump, saying that “we’re focused on the Senate” and that his chamber’s ethics committee can investigate only allegations against senators. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Students’ new normal after Newtown

BY K ATIE Z EZIMA AND S USAN S VRLUGA

drills that are tailored to each age group, said Dan Rambler, the district’s director of student support services and security. Parents are invited to watch training videos and give input.

Some states and districts are allowing staff members to carry weapons at schools. At least eight states allow concealed-carry permit holders to have a firearm at a K-12 school, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

In Argyle, Tex., signs outside schools say staffers are armed and “may use whatever force is necessary to protect our students.” It was a decision, Wright said, that stemmed directly from Sandy Hook.

C

oy Ferreira stood inside a rural California classroom, more than a dozen 5- and 6-year-olds huddled in the corner as a gunman sprayed bullets at the school and tried to break his way in. Ferreira was terrified that people would die.

But the doors were locked and all of the children were inside, part of a school plan the staff and students had practiced in drills and knew by heart. They barricaded the school in just 47 seconds that morning last month, probably saving the lives of countless people at Rancho Tehama Elementary School.

“They all knew what to do,” said Ferreira, who was dropping his daughter off at school when they heard a gunshot nearby. “No one stumbled. No one was hiding.

They just ran to their classroom, like they had been told to do.”

The near-flawless response to what could have been a bloodbath during a deadly shooting rampage on Nov. 14 came almost exactly five years after 20 children and six teachers were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. That attack, which involved a mentally unstable man using an assault-style rifle, shattered the sense of security felt in the nation’s elementary schools.

The massacre on Dec. 14, 2012, led to calls for gun control, as families mourned the loss of their innocent children. Five years later, little about the nation’s federal gun laws has changed. But the Newtown shooting forever altered the way American schools approach safety and assess risk, ushering in an era in which schools feel particularly vulnerable to the threat of shootings and students must know what to do in case one happens.

The result is that for America’s students, lockdowns like the one that helped save lives at Rancho Tehama Elementary and activeshooter training are now as commonplace as fire drills. Buzzers and locks have fortified school doors that were once left wide

Drills and good fortune LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary has led to lockdowns and active-shooter drills at schools open. The sight of police officers, even in elementary schools, is now common. And some districts allow staff members to carry weapons at school for what they believe is an added layer of security.

“There was something about Sandy Hook,” said Telena Wright, superintendent of schools in Argyle, Tex., whose district has stepped up security measures since that shooting. “It was such a massacre that I think it captured the attention of school employees and school administrators and police officers that work in schools across the nation.”

One of those places was the Corning Union Elementary School District, which includes Rancho Tehama Elementary, an hour northwest of Chico in northern California.

Era of lockdowns The era of the school lockdowns started in 1999, after two students killed 13 people and themselves at Columbine High School in Little-

ton, Colo. High schools started drills where doors are locked and windows are secured — actions meant to be replicated should there be an emergency.

After the Newtown shooting, lockdowns became a regular part of school for younger children. So, in some places, did armed officers in elementary schools. Sandy Hook also created a new, controversial approach to school safety: the armed-assailant drill, when schools run a scenario involving a mass shooter, sometimes including police in the exercise. The practice has drawn scrutiny, some criticizing it as being potentially traumatizing for students, especially those in younger grades.

In Akron, Ohio, schools started active-shooter training around the time of the Sandy Hook attack.

The shooting also spurred the district to retrofit some schools with secondary doors, buzzers and thick glass.

The district now runs activeshooter drills four times a year,

Mark Barden, shown in 2013 in his home in Newtown, Conn., which has pictures of his 7-year-old son, Daniel, who was killed by a gunman in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.

Barden has cofounded a group to teach organizations the warning signs of potentially violent people, and many schools are teaching active-shooter lockdown drills.

At Rancho Tehama Elementary, officials credit their drills, quick action by staff and parents and a measure of good fortune for ensuring that no one was killed in the November attack.

When the school secretary heard two more bangs, she announced a lockdown.

A teacher called for everyone to get inside. Ferreira heard a crash, as the gunman’s truck smashed into the elementary school’s gates.

He told his daughter to run and urged other children to get inside.

The children didn’t move or make a sound. Just as they had practiced.

Ferreira thought about Sandy Hook and the teachers who died to protect children. He thought maybe he could use the fire extinguisher as a weapon if the shooter got through the door.

The gunman left the school, unable to get in. In those few seconds that day, the children followed the drill they had practiced. The adults knew what to do.

If not for the lessons of Sandy Hook, if not for their plan, parents and school officials shudder to think what might have befallen Rancho Tehama.

“He would have caught us all outside,” Ferreira said. “He would have had free range.” n

© The Washington Post

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

9

NATION

Search for ‘missing middle’

ISTOCK

Urban planners say condos, duplexes, rowhouses can keep millennials in cities

BY

K ATHERINE S HAVER

C

ities and close-in suburbs looking to the future see a troubling trend: The millennials who rejuvenated their downtowns over the past decade are growing older and beginning to leave.

The oldest are hitting their mid30s, with many starting to couple up and have children. Meanwhile, the sleek high-rise apartment buildings built for them as single young professionals are no longer practical or affordable as they seek to buy homes with more space and privacy.

“There’s been this huge wave of people in cities all over the country. Then they grow up. Then what?” asked Yolanda Cole, who owns a Washington architectural firm and chairs ULI Washington, part of the Urban Land Institute, a research organization dedicated to responsible land use.

In an effort to retain these residents, some urban planners, developers and architects are reviving the kinds of homes that might be more familiar to millennials’ great-grandparents: duplexes, triplexes, bungalows, rowhouses with multiple units, and small buildings with four to six apartments or condos.

It’s the kind of housing that fell out of fashion after World War II, when young families and others fled cities for the houses, driveways and ample yards of the burgeoning suburbs. Planners and architects refer to it as the “missing middle.” It hits the middle in scale — larger than a typical detached

single-family home but smaller than a mid- or high-rise — and typically serves people with middle-class incomes.

Daniel Parolek, an architect based in Berkeley, Calif., who coined the term in 2010, said the need for more missing middle housing is hardly limited to millennials. But as they grow older, he said, questions have been raised about how cities will continue to evolve if many of the generation are priced out once they want to put down roots.

“In particular with this generation, that played an important role in revitalizing cities,” Parolek said, “I think keeping them in cities is a major conversation.”

Cities from Des Moines to Atlanta to Nashville are turning to the missing middle as a way to try to hold on to millennials as they age. Rather than requiring or subsidizing it as they typically do to produce more low-income housing, local governments are trying to encourage developers to build more missing middle housing by removing barriers in zoning laws and building codes.

Some cities have rezoned their single-family neighborhoods to allow duplexes, triplexes and other multiunit structures that look like single-family homes from the outside, particularly in areas near transit lines. To allow more homes per lot, others are considering relaxing requirements on yard sizes and setbacks, the distance required between properties. Some are beginning to allow bungalows clustered around courtyards by chang-

ing long-standing requirements that front entrances be on a street. “[Millennials] said ‘We don’t want big yards, but we don’t want to be in a big apartment building.

We want a duplex or a triplex or townhouse,’ ” said Lee Jones, a city planner in Nashville, which has made similar changes.

A big question is what sales prices will be considered “affordable” by for-profit builders, particularly in areas where land values have skyrocketed. Another potential hurdle: opposition from residents who say their neighborhoods and schools can’t absorb the additional traffic, parking and children that higher-density housing brings.

Some planners say millennials’ sheer numbers — they recently surpassed baby boomers as the largest living American generation — will force developers to provide more of the missing middle.

“It’s a huge wave,” said Gil Kelley, planning director for Vancouver, B.C. “They’re demanding a place in the cities and housing that’s affordable to them.”

Vancouver, which ranks among the most expensive cities in North America, has begun to allow more duplexes and “stacked” townhouses with two units.

“I think it’s very significant that we’re understanding people want to live in the core of urban areas again,” Kelley said. “We’re reversing a 60- to 70-year trend of people moving out to suburbs. . . . This is not just a fad for a decade. This is a multi-decade shift.”

Experts say it’s too early to

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know how many urban millennials will try to stay vs. follow the well-worn path to the suburbs.

The ULI Washington study found nearly two-thirds of those 30 and older said they planned to continue living inside the Beltway in the next three years. But nearly half of that age group also didn’t have children and didn’t expect to in that time. The survey also found 58 percent of millennial renters believed they would need to move outside the Beltway to buy a home.

Developers say many millennials don’t want to move to the suburbs and “drive ’til you qualify.”

They say the fact that many have shared group houses or lived in micro-units and other small apartments as young singles shows they’re willing to trade space to live near transit and in walking distance to restaurants, shopping, parks and other amenities.

Some developers are planning townhouse projects that will squeeze as many as twice the number of homes onto the same tracts of land as traditional developments, often by shrinking bedrooms, tucking parking underneath and providing shared patios rather than private yards. Doubling the number of homes, they say, can cut prices in half.

Planners in some urbanized suburbs say they, too, are exploring ways to provide more missing middle housing in walkable areas near transit — not only to hold on to millennials but to ensure more of those heading their way don’t add to traffic congestion.

Gwen Wright, planning director for Montgomery County, Md., said more homes in the missing middle would serve as a transition needed between the high-rises of growing downtowns like Bethesda and surrounding neighborhoods of single-family houses.

Home buyers of all ages need more options in a county where a starter home can command up to $900,000, she said.

“I think we can provide what millennials are looking for — being close to transit-oriented areas but having the same benefits of a single-family house, even if not in a traditional sense with the yard and picket fence,” Wright said. “My sense is millennials are looking for more than that half-acre. They’re looking for community and walkability. They’ve gotten used to those” in cities. n ©The Washington Post

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The rise and fall of a Trump aide G RIFF W ITTE Athens BY

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brass band played, fighter jets streaked the clear blue sky and a red carpet adorned the airport tarmac on the day in May 2016 when Russian President Vladimir Putin came to Athens for a visit.

“Mr. President, welcome to Greece,” the Greek defense minister, Panos Kammenos, said in Russian as he smiled broadly and greeted a stone-faced Putin at the base of the stairs from the plane.

Kammenos, a pro-Russian Greek nationalist who bragged often of his insider Moscow connections, would receive a second key visitor that day, but with considerably less fanfare.

Not yet 30 years old, George Papadopoulos had been unknown in Greece — and everywhere else — only two months before.

But suddenly, just as Putin arrived, he was in Athens, quietly holding meetings across town and confiding in hushed tones that he was there on a sensitive mission on behalf of his boss, President Trump.

This October, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his extensive efforts to connect Trump’s presidential campaign with senior Russian officials. Trump has since dismissed Papadopoulos as a “low level volunteer.”

But in his ancestral homeland, the man whom Trump had named in March 2016 as one of five top foreign policy advisers and an “excellent guy” was regarded as a critical interlocutor, first to the Trump campaign and later to the incoming Trump White House.

He may have carried on like “a second-rate actor in a political thriller,” as one acquaintance described his manner. But when he bragged that he had helped Trump win the presidency, many here believed it.

Before his spectacular fall, he was lavishly wined and dined by local business kingpins, celebrated in official tweets and rewarded with the perks of a favorite Greek son. He also received access to

ALEXEI DRUZHININ/TASS/GETTY IMAGES

Before guilty plea, adviser at center of Russia probe found close ally in ancestral homeland officials at the highest levels of the Greek government, many of whom shared links to Russia and sympathies that would be unusual in other Western capitals. Kammenos, in particular, stood out both for his pro-Russian views and his determination to forge a bond with the young Trump adviser.

Although Papadopoulos’s plea deal focused on his contacts with an obscure and mysterious Maltese professor who claimed Russian ties, Greek politicians and analysts say his best and most obvious path to Moscow would have run through Athens.

“If I were in his shoes, I would have thought, ‘Can my Greek friends help me make the Moscow connection?’ ” said Thanos Dokos, director general of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. “It would make sense.”

Whether that’s how it happened may be a subject for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who continues to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence last year’s presidential election. Former national security adviser Michael

Flynn’s Dec. 1 guilty plea — also for lying to the FBI, about Russia — suggests that Mueller is looking at an array of possibilities.

But in Greece, the connection between the officials Papadopoulos cultivated and his vigorously pursued campaign objective — to build up relations with the Kremlin, and ideally broker a meeting between Putin and Trump — is hard to miss.

Even in the relatively intimate world of Greek and Greek American international relations experts, Papadopoulos was a mystery. The few who had met him said he was earnest — he showed up to casual get-togethers in suit and tie — and ambitious. His aim, he told associates, was to get a job on a U.S. presidential campaign and to work in the White House.

Less than two years later, after a short stint with the Ben Carson campaign, Papadopoulos was in Washington to meet Trump and join the team of the man who would become the nation’s 45th president.

It is not known whether Papadopoulos met any members of Putin’s entourage in May 2016, when both were in Athens and the presi-

Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, third from left, escorts Russian President Vladimir Putin in Athens in May 2016.

Kammenos raised the Athens profile of George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign aide who was trying to broker a meeting between his boss and Putin.

dent was accompanied by his foreign minister, plus state oil and gas executives.

Kammenos did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article. Attorneys for Papadopoulos said they would not comment on his meetings with Greek officials.

Kammenos was not Papadopoulos’s only important link to Greek power circles. Soon after Papadopoulos was named to Trump’s campaign, he contacted the Rev. Alex Karloutsos, a senior official with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and an influential player in the Greek American community. Karloutsos, who said he has visited the Oval Office under every president since Jimmy Carter, helped Papadopoulos make some early contacts in Greece. But he soon noticed that the young adviser was prone to exaggerating his own importance as a conduit to Trump.

“He was caught up in the euphoria. ‘No one knew me, then everybody knew me,’ ” Karloutsos said. “He loved being in the limelight.”

When prominent Greeks and Greek Americans gathered at Washington’s Metropolitan Club for a party the night before Trump’s inauguration, Kammenos and Papadopoulos were both there to celebrate. Eight days later, Papadopoulos was interviewed by the FBI — and lied, according to his plea agreement, about the timing and nature of his interaction with the Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud. There would be no White House job. In both Athens and Washington, Papadopoulos virtually disappeared from view.

Karloutsos, the priest, said he called and emailed Papadopoulos to express concern but never heard back. He now lights a candle each Sunday for the 30-year-old.

Papadopoulos’s story, he said, is an old one.

“The Greeks create their gods, then they destroy them,” Karloutsos said. “It’s called hubris. It’s called an Icarus complex.

“He flew too close to the sun.” n ©The Washington Post

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U.S. Embassy plan angers Christians L OVEDAY M ORRIS Jerusalem BY

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ome of the festive cheer was missing recently at a public Christmas tree lighting near the site where Christians believe an angel proclaimed Christ’s birth to local shepherds.

“Our oppressors have decided to deprive us from the joy of Christmas,” Patriarch Michel Sabbah, the former archbishop and Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, told the crowd in the town of Beit Sahour in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “Mr. Trump told us clearly Jerusalem is not yours.”

The Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy there has provoked widespread opposition among Christians across the Middle East. When Vice President Pence arrives this week on a trip touted as a chance to check on the region’s persecuted Christians (a trip that was delayed to keep Pence close to Washington during tax bill negotiations), he will be facing an awkward backlash.

The pope of the Egyptian Coptic Church, who leads the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East, called off a scheduled meeting with Pence in Cairo. The Chaldean Church in Iraq warned that the White House move on Jerusalem risks sparking regional violence and extremism and demanded that the Trump administration respect U.N. resolutions on the city.

In the West Bank city of Bethlehem, which is about 12 percent Christian and was a scheduled stop for Pence, religious leaders turned off the city’s Christmas tree lights last week to protest the White House announcement.

In the city, the writing is on the wall: “Mr PENCE you are not welcome,” someone scrawled in spray paint on the 26-foot-high concrete Israeli security barrier that separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

On Sunday, demonstrators staged a sit-in outside the Church of the Nativity, built on the site thought to be the birthplace of

MUHAMMAD HAMED/REUTERS

White House faces awkward backlash in the Middle East over its Jerusalem announcement Jesus.

While the news has been badly received among Christian communities in the Middle East, the move was in part a political gesture aimed at Christians: white evangelical voters, who backed Trump overwhelmingly in last year’s presidential election.

American evangelical Christians — who believe that the right of the Jews to Jerusalem is enshrined in the Bible and that their presence there will usher in Judgment Day — were a powerful lobbying force behind the decision.

Palestinian Christians complain that Christian evangelicals’ support of Israel doesn’t take into consideration the rights and needs of Christians in the homeland of their religion.

“This is where it all started,” said the Rev. Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem. “The Bible originated in Palestine, not in the Bible Belt, but people in the Bible Belt read the Bible in a way that really makes our lives difficult.”

Trump received about 80 percent of the evangelical vote, according to exit polls, more than any other recent Republican presidential candidate.

The White House recognition of Jerusalem went ahead despite warnings from Pope Francis; the archbishop of Canterbury, who heads the Church of England and is a leader for Anglicans worldwide; and the heads and patriarchs of various churches in Jerusalem. Egypt’s Coptic Church said the decision had disregarded the feelings of millions of Arabs.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has canceled his meeting with the vice president following the decision, making it unclear whether Pence will still visit Bethlehem on a tour that was meant to include Jerusalem, the West Bank and Egypt. A spokeswoman for Pence said she could not share details of changes to his schedule at this time.

The White House has repeatedly said it is seeking to better protect Christians in the Middle

Christians in Amman, Jordan, protest President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. Embassy will move to Jerusalem and that the city will be recognized as Israel’s capital.

East. Christians are estimated to make up less than 2 percent of the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, a shrinking but influential minority. Most are Greek Orthodox, but they also include Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans. The evangelical community is a tiny minority.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that only Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem can ensure freedom of access to the city’s holy sites, sacred to Jews, Christian and Muslims.

Jews were expelled from Jerusalem’s Old City in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and synagogues were ransacked and destroyed.

During that same war, many Palestinian Christians fled or were expelled from areas now under Israeli control; like other displaced Palestinians, they are denied the right to return.

In reaction to Trump’s announcement, Netanyahu said there would be “no change whatsoever” to the status quo of the holy sites.

There have been regular clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinian protesters in the wake of Trump’s declaration, with violence erupting in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Hebron and other West Bank towns, in addition to the Gaza Strip.

Trump said his announcement didn’t mean the United States was taking a position on whether Israel ultimately had sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, but Palestinians were not reassured.

“Of course everyone is upset about it. This is a political issue,” said Theophilos III, the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, which he called “a city for the whole world, two people and three religions.”

But evangelical Trump supporters have gushed with praise for the decision. “We and the millions of Christians we represent will never forget your courageous act,” Christians United for Israel said in a full-page ad in The Washington Post last week thanking Trump. n © The Washington Post

COVER STORY

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

F o ur b ro the rs wr o te h un dr e d s o f l e t te rs t o e a ch o t he r d ur i ng t he Se c o n d Wo r l d w a r .

Whe n a st o ra ge un i t w as o pen e d, t h e i r h i s t o r y c am e a l i v e .

The

BY DAN LAMOTHE in Meza, Ariz.

storage unit’s corrugated metal door slid upward, revealing 100 square feet of mostly empty space. Not very promising, thought Joe Alosi, a businessman who bid on units, sight unseen, when tenants stopped paying the rent. Several plastic bins sat in the middle of the floor, and dust billowed as Alosi peeled off the first lid. ¶ Inside, tightly packed, were rows of envelopes. Alosi opened one, and then another, and then another. The Marine Corps veteran felt a slight chill. ¶ The mostly handwritten letters, on tissue­thin paper, dated from World War II and were penned mostly by the members of a single family — the Eydes of Rockford, Ill. Three brothers were in the military: one in the Marine Corps, one in the Army and one in the Army Air Forces. ¶ There were hundreds of letters, stretching over four years of war and beyond. They captured the horrors of combat, contained pejorative references to Japanese and German forces, and offered warm reminiscences of childhood and exchanges about everything from the movie “Casablanca” to the brothers’ beloved Chicago Cubs. ¶ Back at his kitchen table, Alosi, joined by his wife and children, continued to pore over the correspondence. They took turns reading the letters aloud. ¶ Alosi wondered how such an intimate and gripping collection had ended up in a storage locker, whether any of the brothers had children, and if there was anyone left who would care to see them. ¶ “I’ve seen multiple times the way people leave things, you know?” Alosi said.

“And when they leave them in a certain way, it’s like they don’t plan on coming back.” ¶ What remained was the story contained in the letters. continues on next page

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from previous page

The war begins “We have been called out on air raid alarms the last few days, but you know as much about what was happening as I do, the radio is the only dope we get as well as you about them Japs and Nasty Germans. Bastards are what they are, raiding without warnings, sneaking up at night and such wrong methods of a clean fight.”

— Frank Eyde, in a letter home, Dec. 10, 1941.

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orentz Eyde and Margaret Larsen separately came to the United States from Norway and married in Rockford in 1908.

He was a cabinetmaker, she a homemaker, and they settled in a small three-bedroom home on tree-lined Fremont Street.

Frank, the eldest child, graduated from Rockford Central High School in 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became German chancellor. Frank had a wide smile and thick, dark hair, and worked as a traveling soap salesman for Procter & Gamble. His three younger brothers called him “The Salesman,” even though the career didn’t stick.

Frank enlisted as a Marine in October 1939 at age 26, shortly after Germany invaded Poland.

Two years later, Frank’s younger brother, Ralph, quit his factory job at George D. Roper Corp. to enlist as an Army infantryman at age 23.

In a stroke of good luck, both brothers were stationed in California — Frank with the 2nd Marine Division’s 2nd Tank Battalion at San Diego’s Camp Elliott, and Ralph with the 32nd Infantry Regiment of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, a sprawling installation near Monterey.

Conflict in Europe and Asia seemed far away.

“All this falseness of war, it’s hooey!” Frank wrote home in November 1941. He had just been to Los Angeles and spotted Hollywood stars Margaret Lindsay, Betty Grable and Claire Trevor. “Could have dated your choice if I had the dough, say me,” he boasted.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. U.S. troops up and down the California coastline began pulling patrols to watch for enemy bombers, as well as preparing to deploy to the Pacific.

“No telling when I’ll go home now,” Ralph wrote to his brother John, the youngest sibling, on Dec. 18. “Won’t even get Christmas off. Stood five and a half hours of straight guard last night.

Shoot anyone suspicious lurking around in wee hours of morning.”

Frank described the changes in San Diego.

“All the shops are putting black paper on their windows and when the alarm goes, all lights will have to go out except those on the inside that can’t be seen from the street,” he wrote four days after the attack. “There is talk of 4,000 Japs organizing along the Mexican border and the paper says fishing boats bring some in dock to be searched.”

In Rockford, the other two brothers — Sanford, the second oldest, and John — considered what they might do in the military. Sanford, 26 when the war began, worked at the Woodward

Governor factory as a carpenter, and received a deferment.

Ralph urged John, 21, who ran a lathe at Roper Corp., making aircraft parts for the military, to enlist but avoid a job in the combat arms.

“If you want my true thoughts on your best bet, it’s the aviation mechanical line on airplane motors. Best pay, course you study while you work + when you get out, you’ve a high paying trade,” Ralph wrote. “That’s my advice, John.

Stay out of the infantry with your keen mechanical mind. No pay, too much danger, learn nothing valuable for civilian life.”

The Battle of Tulagi “What I saw I will never forget. I was on a guncrew that shot down a Jap bomber coming right at us about 20 feet off the water and about 25 feet from our boat. In all, our ship shot down five bombers coming right close to the ship, trying to crash into it.” — Frank Eyde, in a letter home in summer 1942.

COURTESY OF VICKI VENHUIZEN

A photo of Frank Eyde’s platoon in boot camp in November 1939.

Frank, a former salesman who had enlisted in the Marine Corps, is shown fourth from right in the second row from the bottom.

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rank became a section chief for an intelligence unit in 2nd Tank Battalion, overseeing 18 men. He told his father in a letter home in May 1942 that he had learned how to do everything from changing the treads on a tank to using a 37mm antitank gun that was pulled by a Jeep.

“Wherever I am, I know how to take care of myself and you know my speed, so watch them babies fall when I get that gun working, rolling at speeds over the sands,” Frank wrote.

He deployed to the Pacific by transport ship in June, not knowing his destination. Ralph informed their parents of Frank’s departure. “Don’t worry about him,” he wrote. “He knows all the tricks. I was hoping to see him, but that’ll have to wait for a while, I guess. It won’t last so long the way the U.S. fleet is beating the Japs in the Pacific.”

Frank’s unit sailed to the Solomon Islands.

U.S. commanders launched a multipronged attack there on Aug. 7, 1942, placing Marines and sailors ashore under fire on the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, Tanambogo and Guadalcanal. Frank’s unit was deployed to Tulagi, where hundreds of Japanese soldiers fought to the death on a strip of land about three miles long and a half-mile wide.

“High bombers overhead dropping eggs all around us,” Frank wrote home in the summer of 1942. “At night a real battle was on. I saw tracers blast from our ships . . . heavy fires all around.

We can’t talk about the losses of the war, so I guess all I can say is we won the battle. It was sure a 4th of July and it happened eight months after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Frank’s unit withdrew from Tulagi relatively quickly, moving to the New Hebrides, a group of tropical islands off the east coast of Australia now known as Vanuatu.

“I am doing fine and feel all right,” Frank wrote to his mother that September. “We have a guard tonight and have had quite a few hikes to keep in condition. I can’t say much about the Island outside of that it is not so bad and has plenty of advantages for protection. I went to

PHOTO COURTESY OF JOE ALOSI

An undated photo shows Frank, Sanford, Ralph and John Eyde during boyhood in Rockford, Ill.

John Eyde served in the Army Air Forces with a B-29 unit.

Ralph Eyde battled from the Aleutians to Kwajalein.

Frank Eyde fought in the pivotal campaign for Guadalcanal.

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LETTERS FROM WAR church here at camp, and enjoyed the outdoor sermon. We train to keep in shape and when they need us to do a job we will be ready. It’s good training here as all our fighting will be done in the same kind of islands.”

In February 1943 Frank contracted malaria and jaundice, and the Marines sent him home from the South Pacific.

Ralph is wounded “As long as you know now that it was only a slight head wound + nothing more it’s okay by me. It was plenty close but I was never out of the 18 straight days of action nor in any hospital or rest camp. Too many fellows worse off than myself at the time so I had it dressed the following day while eating my field ration (was hit the same day I landed — shell landing 15 feet away while pushing ahead). But all this a thousand times over never held up this outfit.” — Ralph Eyde, in a letter written home Sept. 28, 1943.

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July 11, 1943

Frank writes to his mother from a hospital

Dear Musha: I am still here at the U.S. Naval Hospital being watched over by some experts in the art of bringing one back to normal. I am feeling fine and dandy and wish I was with you and the boys being so close, but it won’t be long now, I hope. I needed a short rest for my nerves were kind of jittery. I have been looking to the bright side of life and everything is going to turn out all right. Where there is a will there is a way.

Is Dad still kicking those chubby legs around and smoking his five cent cigars? How is Sandford’s garden coming along I wish I could taste some of them victory garden vegetables of his. Let’s hear from you all.

Love — Frank.

alph wrote John in April 1943 that he was preparing to deploy, as part of “one of these outfits who make beach landings in the middle of the night on the roughest coastlines possible and seize airports, railroads, cities, and enemy coast defenses.”

It was possible, Ralph wrote, that the division would be sent to “Japan itself,” underlining the two words for emphasis.

“If I want to write some secret dope,” he wrote, “I have to do it now.” But he warned his brother John not to “tell anyone out of family what our outfit has been doing cause all this training could be worthless if a pack of subs got ahold of us and all were sent to the bottom in Mid-Ocean.”

In April 1943, Ralph left San Francisco on a transport ship, traveling under the Golden Gate Bridge, and then heading north to Alaska.

Japanese soldiers had landed unopposed in the Aleutian Islands in June 1942, taking control of the islands of Kiska and Attu and raising fears that they could use them to launch attacks on the continental United States.

The Battle of Attu began May 11, 1943, with Ralph’s unit landing on muddy shores as part of Operation Landcrab. Over the next three weeks, in frosty, miserable conditions, 15,000 American and Canadian troops battled about 2,300 well-fortified Japanese soldiers. All but about 30 Japanese soldiers fought to the death.

Ralph suffered a head wound from a shell early in the battle but shrugged it off and stayed in the fight. The battle did not conclude until the remaining Japanese fighters made a “banzai” charge through American lines that resulted in furious hand-to-hand combat.

“If the people back home ever have any doubts about the fighting caliber of its soldiers, they want to see this outfit in action and I can assure you that all their doubts would be erased,” Ralph wrote in a letter home dated Aug. 5, 1943. “It was a rugged struggle and all the weather in the world couldn’t hold us back.”

He and four other soldiers from his company

of a few hundred received a Purple Heart, which he sent home to Rockford and called a “real honey of a medal.”

U.S. accounts of the battle state that 549 Allied troops were killed, 1,148 more were wounded and, 1,814 suffered through coldweather injuries and disease.

“It was plenty tough + rugged going with the weather against us + Jap snipers harassing us all the time,” Ralph wrote in another letter that August. “But we blew them from their foxholes + they all ended up 6 foot under. I think they’ll be good fertilizer — they’re sure not good for anything else.”

Frank struggles at home “I am still here at the U.S. Naval Hospital being watched over by some experts in the art of bringing one back to normal.” — Frank Eyde, in a letter to his mother from a hospital, July 11, 1943.

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hile Ralph remained on Attu, Frank returned to San Diego. He initially appeared upbeat, writing his brother Sanford in June 1943 that he had just arrived “from the other side” and was looking forward to a 30-day furlough in Illinois.

“It takes a little time to get things straightened out but it won’t be long before I can see the Cubs get out of the cellar,” Frank wrote. “I am feeling fine and looking to the day I can see you all again.”

But Frank had begun a long downward spiral. Traveling back to Rockford, he experienced a paranoid episode on Chicago’s Navy Pier on July 7, 1943, believing people were watching him, according to military documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Authorities found him confused and restless, prompting the military to admit him to the Great Lakes military hospital north of the city for observation rather than allowing him to continue home.

Frank played down his problems. “I am feeling fine and dandy and wish I was with you and the boys. Being so close, but it won’t be long now, I hope,” he wrote to his mother four days later. “I needed a short rest, for my nerves were kind of jittery. I have been looking to the bright side of life and everything is going to turn out all right. Where there is a will there is a way.”

Frank was diagnosed with combat fatigue — often considered a precursor to the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder — a few weeks later. By mid-August, doctors reported that he had improved.

“He wishes to return to duty, but does not believe that he is well enough for combat duty at this time,” a hospital report said.

Frank continued to struggle. He was transferred in September to a Navy base in Crane, Ind., where he could be closer to home, but was court-martialed in December 1943 after an unauthorized absence from the base. He was demoted from sergeant to corporal, with Marine officials pointedly noting that he had a continues on next page

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from previous page

drinking problem, according to military documents.

Ralph gets wounded again “When dawn broke and the sun was shining brightly, the dead Japs were piled in lines where our machine guns had been mowing ’em down all night.” — Ralph Eyde, in a spring 1944 letter to Frank.

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y January 1944, following jungle-warfare training in Hawaii, Ralph was back on the high seas. U.S. commanders sent his division to assault the Marshall Islands, on which the Japanese had several airfields.

Allied forces launched Operation Flintlock on Jan. 31, 1944, with soldiers from the 7th Infantry Division coming ashore on Kwajalein Atoll.

The Army caught the Japanese underprepared, but they still fought fiercely. On Feb. 4, Ralph and his comrades found themselves facing Japanese soldiers who screamed wildly as they made a final, furious charge under cover of darkness.

“Wham! Shell just misses us. Wham! Another right behind us,” Ralph recalled later in a letter to John. “The machine gun let go with a roar, mowing down some Japs several yards away. My machine gun keeps mowing them down all night.”

The battle continued until after dawn, when Ralph was hit by a Japanese shell and blown 20 feet out of his foxhole, with shrapnel wounds to the lung. Ralph was dizzy from his concussion and wounds, he wrote, but continued to throw hand grenades.

Ralph’s machine-gunner lost an eye, but both men survived. Ralph later boasted to Frank that American soldiers would beat “the tricky and cunning Jap” anytime.

“He’s a tough little fanatic and no one in this outfit underestimated his fighting ability,” Ralph wrote. “Lost some of my buddies in this campaign and their heroic deeds against harassing snipers, pillboxes, and block houses will never be forgotten.”

The Battle of Kwajalein ended with 142 American troops killed, two missing and another 845 wounded. The Japanese lost more than 4,300 men.

“Golly, you sure get your share of battle, don’t you?” John wrote Feb. 11, not knowing that Ralph was wounded and being shipped to Hawaii for treatment.

By then, John was a member of the Army Air Forces, and training for a deployment to the Pacific with the 505th Bombardment Group at Wendover Airfield in Utah.

“Be a soldier like you use to pitch Ralph, and you’ll be O.K. — and you know I’m always on your side, howling it up for you and thinking about you all the time — so give them Japs hell,” John wrote.

The Eydes learned that Ralph had been “seriously wounded” on Kwajalein in a telegram on

Ralph Eyde in a letter to Sanford and John

Feb. 16, and received a letter from a general confirming the news the following day. Sanford wrote his younger brother immediately.

“It could have been worse, and it was with that thought in mind that I told Musha and Borsk not to worry,” Sanford wrote, using nicknames the brothers had for their parents. “I said that any guy who can pick other guys off second base like you did one after another was plenty quick moving. Your ability in sports has been to your advantage in your most recent encounter.”

A few days later, when he heard Ralph had been wounded, John wrote that he had “bawled like a baby! — and right in front of everybody!”

Frank is discharged; John deploys “Japan hasn’t seen 1/100 of blastings she’s going to in the near future.” — John Eyde in a letter home, July 1945.

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rank’s situation continued to worsen. He was ordered from his base in Indiana to the naval hospital in Charleston, S.C. where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

“It is the opinion of this board that this patient is unfit for service; that his condition did not exist prior to enlistment and that he will be a menace to himself and the public safety; and that further hospitalization is indicated,” said one hospital document dated March 31, 1944. “It is recommended that he be transferred to the National Naval Medical Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland for further observation, treatment and disposition.”

Another document dated the same day said that he often secluded himself and was prone to “bizarre behavior.” He believed others could potentially control his thoughts, and recalled seeing a large figure in the sky a few months prior “that could have been God.” Doctors in Charleston also reported that Frank told them he had several sexual encounters with men while drunk and regretted it afterward.

As his mental condition worsened, his letters got shorter and shorter, usually touching only on the weather and baseball. Frank was transferred in April to Bethesda. Doctors there found him “dreamy and preoccupied but in good conduct,” but also said that he “smiles fatuously and inappropriately.” Institutional care, they determined, was still necessary. Frank was transferred to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Southeast Washington.

Sanford, meanwhile, was rejected by the military in 1944: Doctors declared him “4F,” meaning he was not suited for the service.

Sanford traveled to Washington in June to visit Frank, reporting back to the family in a letter that his brother had gained weight and looked “like his good old self at 190 pounds.” By the end of July, Frank was discharged from military service.

John deployed late in the year to an airfield on Tinian, which Allied forces had seized that summer in a week-long battle. The island, part of the Mariana Islands, was viewed by the

Dear Sanny + John: Rec’d your fast letter of June 1st last night + thought it a good time to answer it right after a good breakfast.

Thanks a million for the $45 in cash + I have enclosed my gov’t check endorsed. Put it in all-weather cause it’s part of the payment for my Gulf Bill which you so kindly took care of.

Glad to hear that your door + window sales are going good, Sarge, and keep up the good work. You fellows sure sounded good on the phone last week + the next time I call will be from L.A. in about 5 months.

The time is going by very good and everything is fine with me. Thanks for keeping my whereabouts a secret and that is a good way to describe my movements - “in and out” all the time. Ha, ha. I hope that you + Phil Samuelson had a lot of luck on the auction. Whatever you realize from it – put it in All-Weather + keep hustling. Thanks for thinking of me but you can use that penga better than I. Keep losing weight + you will be down to that 175 lbs. Watch your diet. I sure wished I could see your wonderful yard, Sanny. You have done marvels with those flowers + everyone sure admires them.

I see where both Detroit + the Yankees are only 3 ½ games out of first place – with the White Sox

holding a 1 ½ game edge over Cleveland. What a race!! That was the standings after yesterday’s Sunday games (Saturdays games in the States). Quite a few double headers today in the States. It was a little hot yesterday but the breezes have returned again + that makes for pleasant weather. Hope all is well with Frank and that he is getting a good hold on himself with an aim in life. The quicker he quits drifting + dreaming + buckles down to brass tacks – then the happier he will be.

He needs something to do. And he should quit all the bull-sh--!

That has always been his downfall.

The summer months should pep him up. Yes, sir, I’ll be back in the States about Nov. 1st and that will be a great feeling. We can figure out something.

It would be a good idea to paint the house this summer. It can sure use it.

I am going to make this a quick letter – but I want to say many thanks again for your promptness on the $45 in cash + also for sending out the enclosed check. I’ll write again soon.

Say hello to Frank + stay in there pitching, fellows. I have everything I need – thanks anyway. Hope your June days are fine + not too rainy.

Adios + lots of luck.

Love to you all, Ralph

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Soldiers get ready to embark on landing craft for the invasion of the Aleutian island of Kiska. It was retaken after the battle for Attu, in which Ralph Eyde and his Army division fought in Arctic conditions.

United States as a key base from which B-29 Superfortress bombers in John’s unit could wage an aerial assault against Japan.

“I can’t tell you where I am at present due to censorship,” John said in his first letter home.

“The plane ride was smooth and quite swift and I enjoyed the trip immensely. The vegetation on this place is good and most anything will grow, including bananas.”

He urged his brothers to savor their status as civilians.

“Maybe by the time you get this, you’ll have yourself a good job, how about that?” John wrote.

“Also you Frank — should get yourself a good position. I know it’s hard to get adjusted to your new civilian life, but you’ll soon get used to it! And Sanny, you’re quite adjusted already, heh, heh.”

John stayed abroad for another eight months, working on the electrical components of airplanes.

“The British Lancasters and Lincolns will soon be over and with their 11 ton bombs they should be able to push disaster on any underground factories that may be in Japan,” he wrote in July 1945. The following month, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Within days, the war was over.

John had already been thinking about life after the war. He suggested to Ralph that they open a sporting goods store.

Postwar “Thanks for keeping my whereabouts a secret and that is a good way to describe my movements — “in and out” all the time. Ha, ha.” — Ralph Eyde in a June 1959 letter to Sanford and John.

U.S. COAST GUARD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A landing craft packed with Marines approaches an island in the Kwajalein Atoll in March 1944. Ralph Eyde’s 7th Division also fought in the campaign, and he was wounded for the second time.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

A troubled Frank Eyde spent time at the then-new National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

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rank continued to struggle for many years after the war, unable to hold a steady job.

In March 1954, John wrote to Ralph that “Frankie boy” was recently freed after serving 20 days in jail.

“We don’t worry about him here at all and he doesn’t come around here at all — he’s over 40 and can live his own life as he sees fit,” John wrote. “I’ve never heard him say he was wrong or apologize to anyone. He’s just not all there or extremely a self-worshiper and a stubborn, selfish, liar and bullslinger.”

But he outlived John and Sanford and died in 1996, aged 83.

John, who opened a window installation business out of his childhood home after the war, fell ill in 1962, dying from a brain tumor at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Madison, Wis. Sanford, who continued to work at Woodward Governor, died in 1971 at age 56.

Ralph’s life took more unusual turns. He briefly stayed home in Rockford, but then took a job with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, witnessing the testing of nuclear bombs in South Pacific in the 1950s.

He continued to work for the government for decades, in a somewhat clandestine fashion, writing his family from everywhere from Africa

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to Asia, with many years in Europe during the Cold War. He thanked his brothers repeatedly for not revealing where he was to others, saying in a May 1959 letter that keeping quiet would prevent him from having to “answer a lot of dumb questions.”

Ralph was assigned to perform work on a Navy construction contract in Saigon in 1967, according to a copy of his travel orders obtained by The Washington Post. He wrote letters through at least 1970, as the Vietnam War raged around him. But he did not describe his work. Ralph’s family suspected that he was in the CIA. When he died in 2003, aged 85, his obituary said he had served in the agency.

The CIA, asked whether Ralph served either as an officer or as a contractor, declined to comment.

A mystery solved or eight years, Alosi sat on the letters he had found in a storage unit, unable to find relatives, before contacting The Washington Post, which located distant relatives. The closest surviving family member is Vicki Venhuizen, a second cousin of the Eyde brothers who said she remembers them as young men. None of the brothers married or had children, she said, and many of the other cousins who were close to Ralph have died.

Venhuizen, of Mesa, Ariz., said that in Ralph’s later years, he settled in Rockford and collected the family correspondence, which he stored in plastic bins, along with a collection of vinyl records.

A now-deceased cousin of Venhuizen’s, Darwin Backer, grew close to Ralph and listened to many of his stories, she said. Backer took care of Ralph’s affairs when he died, including his obituary. He turned over the letters to Vicki’s half sister, Judith Jones Ellis, who served as an unofficial family historian.

“I was with her when she picked them up,” Venhuizen said. “They were in Darwin’s basement, and he felt like they had no use for them.”

Ellis took the letters back with her to Arizona, where she also lived, Venhuizen said. Ellis died a few years later, and it’s likely that family members in Arizona did not realize the significance of the letters or what they detailed, she said. Somehow, they ended up in the storage unit.

Venhuizen expressed gratitude to Alosi for not throwing them away. She considers the Eyde brothers her heroes, but believes the letters are Alosi’s now.

“I would like to read them,” she said. “It would be wonderful if they ended up in a World War II museum somewhere, if Joe donated them. That would be a great last stop.”

Alosi said he’s still uncertain what to do with the letters.

“I’ll talk to her and we’ll figure it out,” he said.

“I’m just really excited that people will get to hear about these guys.” n

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© The Washington Post

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BOOKS

The disparate founders of a nation N ONFICTION

I FRIENDS DIVIDED John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

By Gordon S. Wood Penguin Press. 502 pp. $35

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REVIEWED BY

E DITH G ELLES

t doesn’t give away too much to mention that this book begins and ends with the unlikely same-day deaths of its two protagonists on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document for which they, more than any others, were responsible. Nor does it spoil the story to reveal the book’s theme: that one of them, John Adams, informs Americans who we actually are as citizens, while the other, Thomas Jefferson, explains how we would like to see ourselves. This magisterial double biography recounts not only the lives of these two greatest Founders but also the creation of the republic. It is a book about ideas as represented by two philosophical statesmen, and it makes political history and philosophy exciting.

Gordon S. Wood, emeritus professor of history at Brown University and undisputed dean of 18thcentury-America historians, returns in “Friends Divided” to topics that have burnished his career with many honors, among them the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes. Wood offers a fresh account and discerning insights about the contingency of our founding era and how two seemingly ordinary men emerged to represent its conflicts and resolution. In Wood’s hands, Adams and Jefferson become Shakespearean in stature. An early chapter titled “Independence” assesses the notion that “all men are created equal” through an 18th-century lens, holding up to the light Adams, the New Englander whose family “never owned a slave,” as he claimed, and Jefferson, the wealthy slave-holding Virginian who occasionally argued for the liberation of slaves. Both men grappled with the significance of “equal” when it came to issues of race and class (but never gender); the categories were viewed differently in that era.

Adams was ever conscious of

JOHN ADAMS; ASSOCIATED PRESS

his lower-class origins, born of a father who was a farmer and shoemaker, though his mother descended from the higher-class Boylstons of Massachusetts. Deciding early to eschew the clergy, he first taught school before settling on a law career, rising eventually, in his own estimation, to become the most successful lawyer in Boston. Jefferson, who always knew that he was a gentleman, grew up surrounded by slaves, inherited several plantations and married a rich widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, daughter of another plantation owner. Like Adams, he eventually studied law, but unlike Adams, he was never dependent upon its practice for his livelihood. Both men had capacious minds, read widely and deeply, and collected libraries of classical and modern thinkers.

Jefferson, according to Wood, had the more inquiring and versatile mind and had an imagination that was probing and experimental. Adams was more penetrating and sensitive, with a deep appreciation for nuance and for understanding human character and motivation. Moreover,

THOMAS JEFFERSON; ASSOCIATED PRESS

and perhaps because of their divergent upbringings, they differed in personality and persona.

Despite their differences, for some years the two men shared a commitment to the radical agenda of separation from the British Empire and the creation of a new nation.

The French Revolution caused a rift between Adams and Jefferson. Jefferson — who had lived in France, loved its culture and style, and never wavered from his optimistic belief that the revolution and subsequent bloodletting would lead to a better world — couldn’t have been more different from Adams. Over the years, Adams became more suspicious of human nature, reverting, perhaps, to his Puritan origins in his belief that rulers would become dishonest and corrupt. “You,” he told Jefferson, “are afraid of the one — I of the few. . . . You are apprehensive of Monarchy, I, of Aristocracy.” The election of 1800, after “the most vicious and scurrility-ridden” political campaign in American history, confirmed their estrangement. Adams retired to Quincy, Mass., and Jefferson, after his presidency, to Mon-

ticello, and for 12 years they did not communicate. Then, following a reconciliation in 1812, the two elderly statesmen resumed an amazing correspondence.

Over the past two centuries, Woods concludes, “Jefferson’s star has remained ascendant while Adams’s seems to have virtually disappeared from the firmament.”

There is no monument to Adams in the nation’s capital. As the two Founders agreed in their final correspondence, no one but they could ever write an accurate history of their times. Wood comes close.

But like so many historians of the period, he seems to give Jefferson a pass on his slave ownership. Jefferson’s contributions to the nation’s founding and beautiful, eternal language he crafted as America was born seem to absolve him from lasting responsibility. Wood rightfully cites the sentiments Jefferson embraced in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” and other writings — that black people were inferior in terms of physical attributes and mental reasoning; that female slaves were most valuable as breeders — but it seems appropriate that a hero’s life be measured against his conduct overall.

In the end, history must judge between words such as “Jeffersonian democracy” and behavior that led two generations later to more than a half-million deaths on the battlefield and to Jim Crow and its current incarnations — not an insignificant portion of the American story. And monuments should honor the prophet who told the truth about who we are as well as the optimist who advanced a more sanguine picture of our system of beliefs. n Gelles is a senior scholar at Stanford’s Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the author of “Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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A funhouse mirror of conspiracies

Foods that built the British empire

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

N EELY T UCKER

esistance takes many forms, particularly in the current political climate.

Few methods of protest are as cheerfully strange and purposefully bizarre as “The Obama Inheritance.”

This collection of 15 short stories, inspired by right-wing conspiracy theories about the 44th president, take aim at the freak-show realities of the 45th. Talents such as Walter Mosley, Robert Silverberg and Kate Flora start with the right-wing delusions that Barack Obama was a closet Muslim, a Kenyan, a socialist or just the creator of death panels — and spin them out to their (illogical) conclusions.

Edited by the crime novelist Gary Phillips, this science fiction literary act of resistance aims to be a “thrill ride of weirdo, noirish, pulpy goodness.”

The big idea is a nod to the pulpy sci-fi mags of the early to mid-20th century. For pennies to the pound, sweaty-palmed readers could indulge their paranoia in tales of the weird, the fantastic, the alien and the just plain disturbing.

The subtext of horror today is not the Red Menace or the atomic age, but racism, Islamophobia and ham-fisted greed. Some stories in “The Obama Inheritance” feel like they are one degree from reality; others are a good pole-vault from it.

Thriller writer Flora gets things started with “Michelle in Hot Water.” The first lady joins a group of vigilante-minded women who camouflage their meetings as the Tall Girls Book Club. The crew kidnaps big-pharma execs, injecting them with a solution that renders them impotent, incontinent and bald. The profit-hungry honchos can get the antidote when they lower drug prices for critically ill children to a “reasonable” level.

Flesh-eating lizard people terrorize a right-wing radio host in Eric Beetner’s “True Skin,” which might be my favorite.

“Mr. Obama, I want to see your real skin!” roars Russ, the one-

named host, into his microphone one afternoon. “Your lizard skin.

You and all your liberal, lizardpeople cronies in Washington, in Wall Street, in Hollywood. One day, as God is my witness and with one hand on the Holy Bible and the other on the Constitution, I will unmask you and your kind.”

Russ probably was not expecting the resulting visit from, well, lizard people. Flesh-eating chaos ensues.

In “I Know They’re in There,” Travis Richardson takes us into the mind of gun-toting Lloyd, who just knows the Affordable Care Act has “death panels,” because Sean Hannity said it on TV, Rush Limbaugh said it on the radio and Breitbart wrote Web stories about it. (Yes, I know; this hardly qualifies as “fiction.”)

Mosley kicks in with “A Different Frame of Reference,” which follows an unusual member of a Klan-like group in Ohio. And in Anthony Neil Smith’s “I Will Haunt You,” rogue fishing boats roam the decimated Gulf of Mexico after the new administration kills regulations of the trade. The unnamed president who set this into play “died of a massive heart attack on the golf course . . . before his son-in-law executed the vice president for treason and took over the Oval Office himself.”

One of the purposes of fiction is to address reality in a slightly reflected light, like a funhouse mirror, in which we see ourselves in a new way. These tales finish as an entertaining, if uneven, look at the world we live in. Phillips worries the collection might not be weird enough, given the sitting president “tweets out mind-numbing pronouncements derived from alt-fact sources and [puts] people in charge of federal agencies who are the antitheses of what those agencies are supposed to do.”

He may be right. n Tucker’s most recent novel is “Only the Hunted Run.” This was written for The Washington Post.

C THE OBAMA INHERITANCE Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir Edited by Gary Phillips Three Rooms Press.

312 pp. Paperback, $19.95

THE TASTE OF EMPIRE How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

By Lizzie Collingham Basic. 367 pp. $32

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REVIEWED BY

B ONNIE B ENWICK

lickable interest in food tends to range from how fast the stuff can be deposited at one’s doorstep to how conveniently it can be transformed into dinner. But some of us still have an appetite for historical context. In this book, which is as thick as a double-cut pork chop, the author sees trade in sugar, spice, rice and tea as the reason the British were so keen to command sea routes dating from the 16th century. That Britain’s merchant marines and its East India Company did much to expand the empire has long been accepted as fact. In “The Taste of Empire,” historian Lizzie Collingham makes the case that acquisition of goods, not land, ruled the day.

Her comestible-based thesis begins with salt cod drawn from North America — or rather, the genetic tracking of its bones discovered in a Tudor warship wreck of 1545. Did the British armada’s buildup increase demand for the preserved fish, which was a key source of vitamins and protein for sailors’ long journeys? Or did the cod become a fixture in British cuisine because it provided welcome relief from the tyranny of “boyled” meats?

The fact was, England was plagued by food shortages around the time that salt cod production in Newfoundland kicked into high gear. The fish quickly became a cheap alternative to roast beef at home, and English trade brought it to southern Europe, where salt cod became a major commodity and remains a popular ingredient.

Subsequent chapters each introduce a character or a place that relates a particular foodstuff with empire building. The tactic smacks of a writerly device, yet it achieves the desired effect — drawing in the reader via narrative arc. The result is the stuff of lively cocktail party conversation among the geekiest food lovers, right down to the occasional recipe for mock turtle, rum punch and leftover-turkey curry.

If you’re curious about why Africans became reliant on industrially processed grains and sugar, rest assured that Collingham has done the research. The author, an associate fellow of Warwick University, says Western eating habits were most prevalent in sub-Saharan cities in the 1800s, since it was much easier to cook with white flour and imported rice than with indigenous grains. She cites reports of young members of the Bemba people in Rhodesia relishing canned, imported sardines with their breakfast porridge.

Britain’s role in the export of rice is one of global success. British settler Nathaniel Johnson is credited with being the first to grow the crop in South Carolina in the late 1600s and early 1700s, thanks to the agricultural prowess of his many African slaves. East India Company ships brought Asian varieties to the New World and hauled Carolina rice — via London, where a re-export tax was applied — to the West Indies and to the Netherlands and German states, where it helped fill bellies in winter when supplies of legumes and grains ran short.

Proceeds from rice and tea, of course, enriched Britain’s coffers and, in turn, gave rise to improvements in food processing that kept the nation’s seafarers able-bodied and well quenched, as Collingham’s story of pale ale proves.

There is “barely anything at all that was British about a cup of tea,” the author writes, “and yet it became a symbol of national identity.”

The end of the book seems to sprint through what Britain’s farflung soldiers ate and drank during World War II and looks dispassionately upon the rise of the localfood movement in the country.

Better, maybe, to have not ventured further than that Christmas pudding, symbolic of a premium cultural blend. n Benwick is the deputy editor and recipes editor of The Washington Post’s Food section.

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OPINIONS

Trump should be nervous about Alabama results DAVID VON DREHLE writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post.

Let’s be honest: Doug Jones is likely to be a three­year senator.

I don’t want to rain on the winner’s parade. The former U.S. attorney, lifted from hopeless to victory by the accumulating flaws of his opponent, is the first Democrat in a generation to win a Senate seat in Alabama. That’s an achievement. Jones showed enough discipline to avoid a gaffe that might have saved his self­defeating opponent, Roy Moore, a cosplay cowboy and scofflaw who says life was better when we had slavery and women couldn’t vote.

Jones recognized the political maxim: When your opponent is digging his own grave, don’t grab the shovel.

But his victory is not about him. On one level, it’s about his bizarre opponent. Even before we learned about the mall police who allegedly kept an eye out for him approaching teenage girls by the Orange Julius, there was something badly off about Moore. He had weird obsessions and a messianic complex. He put the creep in creepy.

The entire vibe was on display as Moore capped his disastrous campaign by riding to the polling place Tuesday on a horse. That might be a good idea for a candidate who can ride a horse.

Ronald Reagan might have won some votes by riding up to the polls, after a career in Hollywood.

But Moore looked like Billy Crystal’s incompetent understudy for “City Slickers.” He looked like the rodeo clown who pretends to know how to ride a horse. What gets into a man’s mind to think: I would look strong riding a horse, so I will — even though I don’t know how to ride one?

And the Jones victory is about a rising tide of Americans who won’t swallow the bilge President Trump is pushing. Make no mistake: If Trump and his wouldbe Pygmalion, Stephen K. Bannon, can’t sell their mix of cultural resentment and

paranoia in Alabama, they will be hard-pressed to sell it anywhere.

I say this with love: Folks in Alabama do loyalty and clan as well as anyone in America. That’s a virtue — up to a point. They would go over the falls in a barrel with George Wallace.

But they hopped onto the shore when Moore asked them to strap in, and that ought to give pause to the polarizer in chief.

Doug Jones’s victory is not a big deal because of Doug Jones.

It’s a big deal because Alabama is a one-party state. Pretty much always has been. For generations going back to Andrew Jackson, it was “yellow dog Democrat” country — meaning Alabamians would vote for a yellow dog over a Republican. The realignment wrought by the civil rights era and the culture wars has reversed the picture.

For a Democrat to win here says nothing about the Democrat and everything about the

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Sen.-elect Doug Jones (D-Ala.) speaks to supporters during his election night gathering after defeating Republican candidate Roy Moore.

Republican. You can go too far.

There’s a point where decent people step off the crazy train.

Bannon — the angry populist from Goldman Sachs, Hollywood and Washington — thought he could blow past that point with a head of steam from the Demagogue Express.

Now he’s off the rails.

Even one-party states have their limits. There was a Louisiana politician in the politically incorrect days of 1983, a man equal parts corrupt and quotable named Edwin Edwards, who said the only way he could lose an election “is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Horrible. Pushed to the wall, Alabama Republicans responded with Moore’s Law: Getting caught with live girls is fatal, too.

Congressional leaders should feel nervous. After responding with appropriate disgust to the first reports of Moore’s mallwalking, they waffled and quailed in the face of Trump’s supreme amorality. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who seems not to realize he is fighting for his life against Bannon and only aggressive moves will win —

backed away from his initial condemnation of Moore. They have been placating the right wing, and the danger to Republican majorities appears to be bubbling in the other direction.

And Trump should be nervous.

A scandal playbook dating back to the 1990s has lost its magic.

When faced with his “Access Hollywood” tapes, Trump went to school on Bill Clinton. And when Moore’s teen-stalking became public, he followed in step. Moore’s bald denial (“I do not know Miss Corfman”) was a perfect echo of Clinton’s (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”).

The Clintonistas blamed “a vast right-wing conspiracy” while the Mooreists demonized “a liberal establishment” and “deep-state RINOs.” Deny and attack didn’t work in Alabama. And if it doesn’t work there, it might not work anywhere. Jones may not get much done in three years as a senator, but his victory Tuesday can accomplish something important — if we let it. We’ve been asking ourselves: Where do we hit bottom and start back up?

This can be it. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

What Puerto Ricans need now LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA the creator of the Broadway musicals “Hamilton” and “In the Heights,” is a composer, playwright and actor. This was written for The Washington Post.

Since Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico almost 90 days ago, my Uncle Elvin hasn’t had electricity. You read that right. Almost 90 days without being able to turn on a light, or stock a refrigerator, or take a hot shower. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans on the island cannot do the simple things we all take for granted. Add to this lack of power the destruction of thousands of homes, rural areas still isolated, small businesses not operating and an ever-increasing migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland. It will take a long time for Puerto Rico to be totally functional again under the best of circumstances.

The federal government’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been painfully slow and not commensurate with the hurricane response in Texas and Florida. It reminds me of Ricky Martin’s 1995 song “María.” He sang, “un pasito pa’lante María, un dos tres, un pasito pa’tras.” That’s the reality in Puerto Rico — one step forward, one step backward.

We rejoiced when the first package of $5 billion in aid was approved by Congress. But then the House included a 20 percent import tax on products manufactured in foreign jurisdictions in the tax-reform bill it passed in November. Because Puerto Rico would be considered a “foreign jurisdiction” under the bill, this tax would deal a mortal blow to the island’s fragile economy, costing up to 250,000 jobs.

There’s no shortage of compassion and goodwill for Puerto Rico among the American people. But it must be matched by the recognition of our government that the American citizens of Puerto Rico need, demand and require equal treatment.

I’m much more comfortable writing a song than a political opinion column. Calling members of Congress, knocking on their doors and asking you to do the same is strange territory for me. I can already imagine the online comments: “Stick to entertainment.” I wish I could. But the news is full of scandals and tragedies, and every day is a struggle to keep Puerto Rico in the national conversation.

Puerto Rico needs a lifeline that only Congress and the Trump administration can provide. The list of needed actions is short,

straightforward and agreed upon

by Puerto Ricans of all political stripes. First, drop the crippling 20 percent excise tax on Puerto Rican products. Given that the tax doesn’t exist yet, it can simply be removed from the tax-reform bill being finalized in House-Senate negotiations.

Then, let’s take care of the health of 3.4 million Americans on the island. Puerto Rico receives only a small portion of the Medicaid funding that it would qualify for as a state. The island’s hospitals and health centers are struggling in the wake of the storm. With the health of so many at risk, let’s provide Medicaid parity while streamlining enrollment to many who are not working and need health care.

Next, move quickly on the $94 billion aid package requested by the Puerto Rican government. I was last in Puerto Rico in November; the massive need is not an invention. Alongside the Hispanic Federation, we’ve worked to raise money to purchase and distribute millions of pounds of food and millions of gallons of water. We have made waterfiltration systems available to schools as part of the American Federation of Teachers’ Operation Agua. These partnerships, made possible by the generosity of everyday Americans, have been

incredible. But they’re not enough.

Finally, Puerto Rico cannot pay its debt to creditors. President Trump said it best during his rocky visit, before his administration walked his comment back — “wipe that out” and move on. Investors do this every day. On Broadway, I’ve seen many invest in what they hope will be a successful show, only to lose their investment. Puerto Rico’s creditors should do the right thing and walk away. It is the only way forward. Anything short of full debt forgiveness would be a brutal form of economic punishment to a people already suffering.

The past few months have been trying for Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora. More Puerto Ricans join us on the mainland every day. These are soon-to-be voters, moving to Florida, to Texas, to South Carolina, to Pennsylvania, just in time for midterm elections. It’s becoming increasingly clear that helping Puerto Rico is not just the right thing to do, it’s also the politically smart thing to do.

I remain in awe of the generosity of everyday Americans toward their fellow citizens.

Congress, meet the American people where they already are. My uncle Elvin and so many others wait in Puerto Rico. n

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OPINIONS

BY BAGLEY FOR THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Creeping toward the precipice E.J. DIONNE JR. writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog.

Our democratic republic is in far more danger than it was even a few weeks ago.

Until this point, there was an underlying faith in much of the political world that if Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian collusion in the election turned up unmistakably damning material about Donald Trump, Republicans in Congress would feel obligated by their commitment to the country’s well-being to accept Mueller’s findings and challenge the president.

We would often hear recollections of how Republicans during Watergate decided that the smoking guns were too smoky and that Richard Nixon had to go.

Surely, said the optimists, we have not drifted so far from decency that this sort of patriotism is beyond us.

Well, it sure seems to be. The apotheosis of Republican congressional collusion with Trump’s efforts to hang on at all costs came at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. One Republican after another attacked Mueller and the FBI as if the latter should be placed on a new compendium of subversive organizations.

The occasion was testimony before the committee by Christopher A. Wray, the Trumpappointed FBI director. It was heartening to see Wray stand up

for his colleagues, which made you wonder if Wray may soon go the way of his predecessor, James B. Comey.

Deserving an Academy Award for the most striking imitation of a member of the old House UnAmerican Activities Committee was Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.).

He went through a roll call of investigators, name by name, asking Wray if each had shown political bias. Wray defended every one of them he knew and wryly smiled when he was unfamiliar with one of the five names on Gohmert’s hit list.

Gohmert might as well have echoed the favored question of the congressional inquisitors of the early ’40s and ’50s: “Are they now or have they ever been . . . supporters of Hillary Clinton?”

When Republicans are FBI haters who are sidetracking probes into

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Russian subversion, the world truly is turned upside down.

Note also the statement of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that if every member of Mueller’s team who was “anti-Trump” were kicked off, “I don’t know if there’d be anyone left.” The implication is that even if Mueller’s investigation produced unassailable evidence of wrongdoing by Trump, we should ignore the truth, because Mueller’s team should have been vetted to exclude anyone who had a smidgen of doubt about the president.

The rationale for this GOP assault is that Peter Strzok, an FBI agent involved in the investigation, exchanged texts critical of Trump and favorable to Clinton with an FBI lawyer. But even if Strzok played some role in developing material that ultimately hurts Trump or proves Russian collusion, are Americans supposed to brainwash themselves? Trump’s allies want us to say: Too bad the president lied or broke the law, or that Russia tried to tilt our election.

This FBI guy sending anti-Trump texts is far more important, so let’s just forget the whole thing.

Really?

Because we are inured to extreme partisanship and to the political right’s habit of rejecting inconvenient facts, we risk overlooking the profound political

crisis that a Trumpified Republican Party could create.

And the conflagration may come sooner rather than later, as Mueller zeroes in on Trump and his inner circle.

Only recently, it was widely assumed that if Trump fired Mueller, many Republicans would rise up to defend our institutions. Now, many in the party are laying the groundwork for justifying a coverup. This is a recipe for lawlessness.

We also assumed that Mueller’s findings would be respected because of his deserved reputation for fairness and independence. Now, pro-Trump politicians feel free to contradict anything they said in the past and to dismiss what they once saw as legitimate authority if those who hold it threaten their power. This is a recipe for autocracy.

Trump himself told us plainly on a recent night in Pensacola, Fla., that he will do whatever it takes to hold power, and he should be taken seriously. “There are powerful forces in Washington trying to sabotage our movement,” he declared. “These are bad people, these are very, very bad and evil people. . . . But you know what, we’re stopping them. You’re seeing that right now.”

We are far closer to the edge than we want to think. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

ON PARENTING

Teach children to let go of stuff BY

C HRISTOPHER W ILLARD

M

y son’s first sentence was “thank you,” confirming our suspicions that we were the parents of the century.

His next phrase, however, was “I want that,” followed soon after with “I don’t want that,” usually rendered in an earsplitting scream. We quickly realized that we’d created a human being with desires and dislikes after all. Whether babies or adults, we want what we want when we want it. And in our current culture, many of us can get the things we want when we want them.

As a result, we’re swimming in stuff.

Despite smaller families, we now own bigger houses, we drive bigger cars, and our kids have more toys than ever before. With the rise in cheap labor, prices have dropped on almost everything, from toys to clothes and more. We can get almost anything we desire delivered to our doorstep with the click of a button. Despite having enormous houses, Americans now spend billions on storage space. New technologies offer us instant access to entertainment anywhere we go.

All this “freedom of choice” actually makes us more stressed and lonely, less happy and less motivated. As our options as consumers grow in the Western world, our happiness dwindles. In fact, Western cultures lead the world in depression, anxiety and mental illness at all ages.

Today, any 30-minute TV show includes at least eight minutes of advertisements, and much of the television programming for kids is rarely more than a 22-minute commercial for tie-in toys or other merchandise. Making it even harder to resist, corporations spend $17 billion a year marketing to kids — an almost 200-fold increase over the past 30 years.

Considering all we’re up against, what can we do?

For starters, we can explain to kids what marketing is and how it’s designed to fool our brains. (Check out the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood for some helpful ideas.)

Next, we can set limits on buying toys and reserve gifts only for special occasions. This gives children something to look forward to (as opposed to expecting it), builds patience, enhances their appreciation and makes them happier.

Third, we can serve as healthy models by not overly engaging in retail therapy. If we regularly send the message to our children that stuff buys happiness, we can’t expect them to learn otherwise.

ISTOCK

Kids need mastery of their toys, not superficial relationships with as many possessions as possible. You probably noticed early on in your child’s life that kids want the same books and games over and over again. The repetition might drive us adults crazy, but it’s actually critical for a child’s cognitive development.

Studies show that when kids have too many toys — even more than five at once — they are less able to focus enough to learn from and master them. You’ve also probably witnessed

Before the holidays, discuss with your kids what you do and don’t need in your life.

how creative and engaged kids become when they have to invent new toys and games out of virtually nothing. If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps boredom is its father.

In the bestseller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” Marie Kondo offers some simple advice for letting go of material things. She suggests asking yourself, “Does this item spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, express your gratitude for the purpose that thing once served and wish it a fond farewell. We can practice this with our children by regularly sorting through old toys and clothes.

Yet letting go is hard. Humans have been wired through evolution to believe that having more will make us safer and happier, even when we have more than enough. Remember, parents: Aim for the middle path. Before the holidays, start by becoming aware and discussing with your kids what you really do and don’t need in your life.

To organize and let go of stuff before the new-toy onslaught, there are a few ways you can involve them in the process: l Consider engaging kids’ imagination and natural compassion. For example, for younger kids, ask which toys are lonely and might be happier, and might bring happiness, in a new home. Imagining the story of that toy’s next journey can help make the thankyou and goodbye that much easier. l Set up a toy swap or a donation drive.

Entrepreneurial kids can sell their old toys and spend the money on something new, or donate that money to a good cause. Sometimes the motivation for letting go can be as simple as helping others. l When your kids make their gift list for the holidays, consider offering them experiences instead of things. Research shows that experiences do more for our happiness and our relationships than objects do. We can also encourage sharing and compassion by giving our children gifts to share, which has the added benefit of the family ending up with less stuff.

Some degree of simplification doesn’t have to mean becoming an ascetic. But keep in mind that less is more — more space, more time, more money, more creativity, more gratitude, and more harmony and happiness. n Willard is a clinical psychologist and consultant specializing in bringing mindfulness into education and psychotherapy. He is the author of “Growing Up Mindful,” and the new book “Raising Resilience: The Wisdom and Science of Happy Families and Thriving Children.” Willard teaches at Harvard Medical School.

This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2017

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Foothills Magazine presents its 6th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine. Photos must have been shot during the 2017 calendar year. Entries will be judged in two categories — human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2018

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