Index to Primary Source Document Readings

Reading 1: “Address by George Engel, Condemned Haymarket Anarchist” (1886), pp. 4-8

Worker’s complaints about the injustices and inequalities of late nineteenth century America; he was accused of a terrorist act and executed, though there was a lack of evidence.

Reading 2: Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth” (June 1889), pp. 9-17

Carnegie discusses why the wealthy should have the right to keep all of their wealth, but also are encouraged to give much of it away to their favorite charities or causes.

Reading 3: Columbian Exposition of 1893, pp. 18-27

This was a late nineteenth century world’s fair held in Chicago. It was meant to showcase the “cutting edge” technological, artistic, and manufacturing products of major countries—especially the United States. We see here a glorification of Anglo-American and European cultures and the idea of “progress,” with the host city of Chicago held out as an example of the ultimate “modern” city.

Reading 4: Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912), pp. 28-35

Discussion of a Russian immigrant’s experience living in a working-class New York City tenement, and differences in culture between Russia and America.

Reading 5: Contrasts of Booker T Washington (1856-1915): “Speech at the Atlanta Exposition,” 1895; and W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” from The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York, 1903), pp. 36-43

Famous speech of Booker T. Washington affirming the temporary acceptance of racial inequality, while southern Blacks build a base of wealth.

W.E.B. DuBois explains why the African American people will most benefit by encouraging their brightest (upper class) males to enter the most elite U.S. universities, and struggle for true racial equality at the elite level.

Reading 6: Excerpts from Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, pp. 44-51

This turn of the twentieth century work is an exposé on the terrible working conditions of Chicago meat manufacturing plants, and the dangerous foods that were being produced and marketed to unsuspecting Americans.

Reading 7: John Steinbeck, Excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 52-58

This excerpt is from a famous novel about the severely difficult lives of agricultural workers in California in the 1930s Depression Era.

Reading 8: Richard Wright, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow (1938), pp. 59-70

This excerpt, from another famous novel, gives a sense of the dangers of being an intelligent, ambitious Black man in the South in the Jim Crow period.

Reading 9: Working Women in World War II, pp. 71-78

These are excerpts from interviews of women who worked in war-related industries during World War II.

Reading 10: Yoshiko Uchida, “Desert Exile” (1942), pp. 79-82

This excerpt looks at the issue of Japanese American internment during World War II.

Reading 11: Suburbs in the 1950s, pp. 83-91

These two documents give an indication of the reality of the 1950s suburban lifestyle, especially as regards married women with children.

and

Ladies Home Journal, “Young Mother” (1956)

This excerpt, from an interview, shows how the idealized family life of the 1950s often was a mirage. In reality, women were over burdened with family duties, and had no time to develop their own autonomous lives.

Reading 12: John Lewis August 1963 Speech at March on Washington: The Two Versions, pp. 92-96

John Lewis was a young activist in the civil rights movement. He was invited to give a speech at the March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King gave his “I have a Dream” speech. However, King and others pressured Lewis to change certain points in the speech. Here are the versions Lewis wanted to give, and the version he was pressured to give.

Reading 13: Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), pp. 97-99

In contrast to King, Malcolm X emphasized his anger at the injustices of the past against African Americans, and his readiness to turn to violence if the situation continued.

Reading 14: Report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders Summary of Report [Kerner Commission Report], p. 100-114

This government report, written in 1967, explains the causes of the race riots of the late 1960s, the events that occurred during them, and possible remedies for racial inequalities.

Reading 15: “The Cycle of Poverty”: Mexican-American Migrant Farm Workers Testify before Congress, pp. 115-125

They describe here the unacceptable situation of Mexican American migrants, especially their poor treatment by government agencies, which chose to ignore them.

Reading 16: Diana Hembree, “Dead End in Silicon Valley” (1985), pp. 126-133

This excerpt shows how some working-class Americans were not sharing in the prosperity enjoyed by the wealthy in the Regan Era.

Reading 17: Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America,’ pp. 134-147

Osama bin Laden gives his rationale for attacking the U.S. in Sept. 11, 2001.

Reading 18: Governor Palin’s Speech at the “Restoring America” Tea Party of America Rally in Indianola, Iowa (2010), pp. 148-158

Reading 19: “The Coming Generation War,” pp. 159-166

This document is an analysis by a famous historian and a graduate student. It focuses on current and likely future trends in American politics. It explains young Americans’ problems, and solutions advocated by the young, leftist-wing of the Democratic Party [e.g., Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez supporters], Democratic voting patterns, and reactions by conservative Republicans to these changes and challenges.

Reading 20: Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal pp. 167-190

Donald Trump’s most famous book is The Art of the Deal, written in 1987. In it, he reveals various character traits, beliefs, behaviors, and actions, many of which continue to resonate. The document here includes a brief summary of his actions as president that reflect beliefs and actions as related in his 1987 book.

Reading 21: Trump Voters Explain Their Choice, pp. 191-204

These are very short excerpts from online polls, radio programs, websites, and so on, in which

people who voted for Donald Trump for president explain why they did so.

Reading 22: Politics of the Pandemic, pp. 205-220

In this document set, the student reads several articles and charts which show the sharp divisions between Democrats and Republicans in their attitudes towards the 2020 pandemic. Then, he or she will compare and contrast the front page of The New York Times and the Fox News website on a random day during the pandemic. Based on the information given, the student will explain the political views, attitudes, and beliefs that are apparent in the front pages of these news outlets.

Reading 1: Address by George Engel, Condemned Haymarket Anarchist (1886)
Introduction:

A workers’ demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago turned into a riot when a bomb blast killed seven police officers and wounded sixty-six. Labor activists had called the rally after police shot two striking workers the previous day. Eight anarchists stood trial for the bombing and, although prosecutors failed to produce any evidence that could link them to the crime, the suspects were convicted. Four were hanged. Supporters published the speeches that the accused made on their own behalf before the court. Anarchist [a socialist who believes in the need to violently overthrow a corrupt exploitative government run by the rich] George Engel, a German immigrant, explained his hostility to the reigning economic and political system in his defiant remarks.

Thesis Questions:
Why was Engel unsuccessful in his work in Germany—in other words, what was his profession, and how was the economy changing, and how did that affect him?
Was there a similar situation in the United States as well?
What did Engel’s expect from the US before he got here, and in his first days? Why was he so disappointed?

What was Engel’s justification for rejecting the US government as a sham? Why did he think that democracy wasn’t real in the US? What events in his life caused him to think this way?
Because of these views, how did he respond? How did his political views change? What did he do consequently?
Finally, how does he connect his political beliefs to his claim he did NOT act as a terrorist against the police? What evidence can you present for your conclusions?
[Note that anarchism and socialism both seek to eliminate the ruling wealthy elites, and redistribute property to the poor. Socialism wants to retain some sort of strong government; anarchism does not. A small section of anarchists believe that acts of terrorism will destabilize the government, cause it to collapse, and the people will take over. This is a little like the movie V for Vendetta. Socialism is more like the ideas of Bernie Sanders. Oddly enough, these get confused in this text, which appears to believe that they are the same.]
[Do not discuss the specific events of the Haymarket attack, or the events that occurred after the event. We are only interested in the questions above. You can say, of course, that the court didn’t believe Engel’s claims of not being involved, since communists and anarchists were so hated in the United States by the middle and upper classes, and therefore they condemned him to death.]

Text:

When, in the year 1872, I left Germany because it had become impossible for me to gain there, by the labor of my hands, a livelihood such as man is worthy to enjoy-the
introduction of machinery having ruined the smaller craftsmen and made the outlook for the future appear very dark to them-I concluded to fare with my family to the land of America, the land that had been praised to me by so many as the land of liberty.
On the occasion of my arrival at Philadelphia, on the 8th of January, 1873, my heart swelled with joy in the hope and in the belief that in the future I would live among free men and in a free country. I made up my mind to become a good citizen of this country, and congratulated myself on having left Germany, and landed in this glorious republic. And I believe my past history will bear witness that I have ever striven to be a good citizen of this country. This is the first occasion of my standing before an American court, and on this occasion it is murder of which I am accused. And for what reasons do I stand here? For what reasons am I accused of murder? The same that caused me to leave Germany the poverty-the misery of the working classes.
And here, too, in this “free republic,” in the richest country of the world, there are numerous proletarians [working class people] for whom no table is set; who, as outcasts of society, stray joylessly through life. I have seen human beings gather their daily food from the garbage heaps of the streets, to quiet therewith their knowing [severe] hunger….
When in 1878, I came here from Philadelphia, I strove to better my condition, believing it would be less difficult to establish a means of livelihood here than in Philadelphia, where I had tried in vain [unsuccessfully] to make a living. But here, too, I found myself disappointed. I began to understand that it made no difference to the proletarian [working class worker], whether he lived in New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago. In the factory in which I worked, I became acquainted with a man who pointed out to me the causes that brought about the difficult and fruitless battles of the workingmen for the means of existence. He explained to me, by the logic of scientific Socialism [the belief that there should be no wealthy people, but all people should more or less have the same wages and amounts of wealth], how mistaken I was in believing that I could make an independent living by the toil of my hands, so long as machinery, raw material, etc., were guaranteed to the capitalists [owners of large properties, such as factories] as private property by the State….I took part in politics with the earnestness of a good citizen; but I was soon to find that the teachings of a “free ballot box” [voting] are a myth and that I had again been duped. I came to the opinion that as long as workingmen are economically enslaved they cannot be politically free. It became clear to me that the working classes would never bring about a form of society guaranteeing work, bread, and a happy life by means of the ballot….
I … joined the International Working People’s Association, that was just being organized. The members of that body have the firm conviction, that the workingman can free himself from the tyranny of capitalism only through force; just as all advances of which history speaks, have been brought about through force alone. We see from the history of this country that the first colonists won their liberty only through force that. through force slavery was abolished, and just as the man who agitated against slavery in this country, had to ascend the gallows, so also must we. He who speaks for the workingman today must hang. And why? Because this Republic is not governed by people who have obtained their office honestly.
Who are the leaders at Washington that are to guard the interests of this nation? Have they been elected by the people, or by the aid of their money? They have no right to make laws for us, because they were not elected by the people. These are the reasons why I have lost all respect for American laws.
The fact that through the improvement of machinery so many men are thrown out of employment, or at best, working but half the time, brings them to reflection. They have leisure, and they consider how their conditions can be changed. Reading matter that has been written in their interest gets into their hands, and, faulty though their education may be, they can nevertheless cull the truths contained in those writings. This, of course, is not pleasant for the capitalistic class, but they cannot prevent it. And it is my firm conviction that in a comparatively short time the great mass of proletarians will understand that they can be freed from their bonds only through Socialism. One must consider what Carl Schurz said scarcely eight years ago: That, “in this country there is no space for Socialism;” and yet today Socialism stands before the bars of the court. For this reason it is my firm conviction that if these few years sufficed to make Socialism one of the burning questions of the day, it will require but a short time more to put it in practical operation.
All that I have to say in regard to my conviction is, that I was not at all surprised; for it has ever been that the men who have endeavored to enlighten their fellow man have been thrown into prison or put to death, as was the case with John Brown. I have found, long ago, that the workingman has no more rights here than any where else in the world. The State’s Attorney has stated that we were not citizens. I have been a citizen this long time; but it does not occur to me to appeal for my rights as a citizen, knowing as well as I do that this does not make a particle of difference. Citizen or not-as a workingman I am without rights, and therefore I respect neither your rights nor your laws, which are made and directed by one class against the other; the working class.
Of what does my crime consist?
That I have labored to bring about a system of society by which it is impossible for one to hoard millions, through the improvements in machinery, while the great masses sink to degradation and misery. As water and air are free to all, so should the inventions of scientific men be applied for the benefit of all. The statute laws we have are in opposition to the laws of nature, in that they rob the great masses of their rights “to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
I am too much a man of feeling not to battle against the social conditions of today. Every considerate person must combat a system which makes it possible for the individual to rake and hoard millions in a few years, while, on the other side, thousands become tramps and beggars.
Is it to be wondered at that under such circumstances men arise, who strive and struggle to create other conditions, where the humane humanity shall take precedence of all other considerations. This is the aim of Socialism, and to this I joyfully subscribe.
The States Attorney said here that “Anarchy” was “on trial.”
Anarchism and Socialism are as much alike, in my opinion, as one egg is to another. They differ only in their tactics. The Anarchists have abandoned the way of liberating humanity which Socialists would take to accomplish this. I say: Believe no more in the ballot, and use all other means at your command. Because we have done so we stand arraigned here today-because we have pointed out to the people the proper way. The Anarchists are being hunted and persecuted for this in every clime, but in the face of it all Anarchism is gaining more and more adherents, and if you cut off our opportunities of open agitation, then will the work be done secretly. If the State’s Attorney thinks he can root out Socialism by hanging seven of our men and condemning the other to fifteen years servitude, he is laboring under a very wrong impression. The tactics simply will be changed-that is all. No power on earth can rob the workingman of his knowledge of how to make bombs-and that
knowledge he possesses….
If Anarchism could be rooted out, it would have been accomplished long ago in other
countries. On the night on which the first bomb in this country was thrown, I was in my apartments at home. I knew nothing of the conspiracy which the States -Attorney pretends to have discovered.
It is true I am acquainted with several of my fellow-defendants with most of them,
however, but slightly, through seeing them at meetings, and hearing them speak. Nor do I deny, that I too, have spoken at meetings, saying that, if every workingman had a bomb in his pocket, capitalistic rule would soon come to an end.
That is my opinion, and my wish; it became my conviction, when I mentioned the
wickedness of the capitalistic conditions of the day.
When hundreds of workingmen have been destroyed in mines in consequence of faulty preparations, for the repairing of which the owners were too stingy, the capitalistic papers have scarcely noticed it. As with what satisfaction and cruelty they make their report, when here and there workingmen have been fired upon, while striking for a few cents increase in their wages, that they might earn only a scanty subsistence.
Can any one feel any respect for a government that accords rights only to the privileged classes, and none to the workers? We have seen but recently how the coal barons combined to form a conspiracy to raise the price of coal, while at the same time reducing the already low wages of their men. Are they accused of conspiracy on that account? But when working men dare ask an increase in their wages, the militia and the police are sent out to shoot them down.
For such a government as this I can feel no respect, and will combat them, despite their power, despite their police, despite their spies.
I hate and combat, not the individual capitalist, but the system that gives him those
privileges. My greatest wish is that workingmen may recognize who are their friends and who are their enemies.
As to my conviction, brought about as it was, through capitalistic influence, I have not one word to say.

Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth”

Introduction:

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was a massively successful business man – his wealth was based on the construction of iron and steel to the railways, but also a man who recalled his radical roots in Scotland before his immigration to the United States. To resolve what might seem to be contradictions between the creation of wealth, which he saw as proceeding from unchangeable social laws, and philanthropy, he came up with the notion of the “gospel of wealth.” He lived up to his word, and gave away his fortune to socially beneficial projects, most famously by funding libraries. His approval of death taxes might surprise modern billionaires. It is interesting to note that Bill Gates won an award several years ago because he follows Carnegie’s philosophy.

Thesis Questions:

What are the virtues of capitalism, according to Carnegie?

Why does Carnegie believe that capitalism is superior to communism? What is wrong with communism?

What are Carnegie’s categories of what a rich man could do with his money? Why are they flawed?

What should be the goal of the wealthy towards society, according to Carnegie? What in Carnegie’s background would make him think this?

Text:

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized, within the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those of his retainers. The Indians are to-day where civilized man then was. When visiting the Sioux, I was led to the wigwam of the chief. It was just like the others in external appearance, and even within the difference was trifling between it and those of the poorest of his braves. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which has come with civilization.
This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential for the progress of the race [humanity, not individual races], that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor. Without wealth there can be no Mæcenas [a rich patron of the arts]. The “good old times ” were not good old times. Neither master nor servant was as well situated then as to-day. A relapse to old conditions would be disastrous to both–not the least so to him who serves–and would Sweep away civilization with it. But whether the change be for good or ill, it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and there fore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticise the inevitable.
It is easy to see how the change has come. One illustration will serve for almost every phase of the cause. In the manufacture of products we have the whole story. It applies to all combinations of human industry, as stimulated and enlarged by the inventions of this scientific age. Formerly articles were manufactured at the domestic hearth or in small shops which formed part of the household. The master and his apprentices worked side by side, the latter living with the master, and therefore subject to the same conditions. When these apprentices rose to be masters, there was little or no change in their mode of life, and they, in turn, educated in the same routine succeeding apprentices. There was, substantially social equality, and even political equality, for those engaged in industrial pursuits had then little or no political voice in the State.
But the inevitable result of such a mode of manufacture was crude articles at high prices. To-day the world obtains commodities of excellent quality at prices which even the generation preceding this would have deemed incredible. In the commercial world similar causes have produced similar results, and the race [humanity] is benefited thereby. The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had a few generations ago. The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly clad and better housed. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the king could then obtain.
The price we pay for this salutary [healthy] change is, no doubt, great. We assemble thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting-house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is little better than a myth. All intercourse between them is at an end. Rigid castes are formed, and, as usual, mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust. Each caste is without sympathy for the other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard to it. Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and often there is friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor. Human society loses homogeneity.
The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the advantage of this law are also greater still, for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it, as we say of the change in the conditions of men to which we have referred: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race [humanity], because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race [humanity]. Having accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enormous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions. The experienced in affairs always rate the man whose services can be obtained as a partner as not only the first consideration, but such as to render the question of his capital scarcely worth considering, for such men soon create capital; while, without the special talent required, capital soon takes wings. Such men become interested in firms or corporations using millions; and estimating only simple interest to be made upon the capital invested, it is inevitable that their income must exceed their expenditures, and that they must accumulate wealth. Nor is there any middle ground which such men can occupy, because the great manufacturing or commercial concern which does not earn at least interest upon its capital soon becomes bankrupt. It, must either go forward or fall behind: to stand still is impossible. It is a condition essential for its successful operation that it should be thus far profitable, and even that, in addition to interest on capital, it should make profit. It is a law, as certain as any of the others named, that men possessed of this peculiar talent for affair, under the free play of economic forces, must, of necessity, soon be in receipt of more revenue than can be judiciously expended upon themselves; and this law is as beneficial for the race [humanity] as the others.
Objections to the foundations upon which society is based are not in order, because the condition of the race [humanity] is better with these than it has been with any others which have been tried. Of the effect of any new substitutes proposed we cannot be sure.
The Socialist or Anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilization itself rests, for civilization took its start from the day that the capable, industrious workman said to his incompetent and lazy fellow, “If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap,” and thus ended primitive Communism by separating the drones from the bees. One who studies this subject will soon be brought face to face with the conclusion that upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends–the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions. To these who propose to substitute Communism for this intense individualism the answer, therefore, is: The race [humanity] has tried that. All progress from that barbarous day to the present time has resulted from its displacement. Not evil, but good, has come to the race [humanity] from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produce it. But even if we admit for a moment that it might be better for the race [humanity] to discard its present foundation, Individualism,–that it is a nobler ideal that man should labor, not for himself alone, but in and for a brotherhood of his fellows, and share with them all in common, realizing Swedenborg’s idea of Heaven, where, as he says, the angels derive their happiness, not from laboring for self, but for each other,–even admit all this, and a sufficient answer is, This is not evolution, but revolution. It necessitates the changing of human nature itself a work of eons [long periods of time, centuries or even millennia], even if it were good to change it, which we cannot know. It is not practicable in our day or in our age. Even if desirable theoretically, it belongs to another and long-succeeding sociological stratum. Our duty is with what is practicable now; with the next step possible in our day and generation. It is criminal to waste our energies in endeavoring to uproot, when all we can profitably or possibly accomplish is to bend the universal tree of humanity a little in the direction most favorable to the production of good fruit under existing circumstances. We might as well urge the destruction of the highest existing type of man because he failed to reach our ideal as favor the destruction of Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition; for these are the highest results of human experience, the soil in which society so far has produced the best fruit. Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, as these laws sometimes operate, and imperfect as they appear to the idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.
We start, then, with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race [humanity] are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few. Thus far, accepting conditions as they exist, the situation can be surveyed and pronounced good. The question then arises, –and, if the foregoing be correct, it is the only question with which we have to deal, –What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few? And it is of this great question that I believe I offer the true solution. It will be understood that fortunes are here spoken of, not moderate sums saved by many years of effort, the returns on which are required for the comfortable maintenance and education of families. This is not wealth, but only competence which it should be the aim of all to acquire.
There are but three modes in which surplus wealth can be disposed of. It can be left to the families of the decedents; or it can be bequeathed [from verb, “to bequest” or “leave a legacy to” or “leave one’s money and property in a will to”] for public purposes; or, finally, it can be administered during their lives by its possessors. Under the first and second modes most of the wealth of the world that has reached the few has hitherto been applied. Let us in turn consider each of these modes. The first is the most injudicious. In monarchical countries, the estates and the greatest portion of the wealth are left to the first son, that the vanity of the parent may be gratified by the thought that his name and title are to descend to succeeding generations unimpaired. The condition of this class in Europe to-day teaches the futility of such hopes or ambitions. The successors have become impoverished through their follies or from the fall in the value of land. Even in Great Britain the strict law of entail [this means bequeathing property to someone, with the stipulation that they, in turn, do not sell it, but bequeath it to their eldest son. Thus, someone given entailed property is more a manager of its during that person’s lifetime, than the true owner of it] has been found inadequate to maintain the status of an hereditary class. Its soil is rapidly passing into the hands of the stranger. Under republican [democratic, not the political party] institutions the division of property among the children is much fairer, but the question which forces itself upon thoughtful men in all lands is: Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection? Observation teaches that, generally speaking, it is not well for the children that they should be so burdened. Neither is it well for the state. Beyond providing for the wife and daughters moderate sources of income, and very moderate allowances indeed, if any, for the sons, men may well hesitate, for it is no longer questionable that great suns bequeathed oftener work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients. Wise men will soon conclude that, for the best interests of the members of their families and of the state, such bequests are an improper use of their means.
It is not suggested that men who have failed to educate their sons to earn a livelihood shall cast them adrift in poverty. If any man has seen fit to rear his sons with a view to their living idle lives, or, what is highly commendable, has instilled in them the sentiment that they are in a position to labor for public ends without reference to pecuniary considerations, then, of course, the duty of the parent is to see that such are provided for moderation. There are instances of millionaires’ sons unspoiled by wealth, who, being rich, still perform great services in the community.
Such are the very salt of the earth [fundamental], as valuable as, unfortunately, they are rare; still it is not the exception, but the rule, that men must regard, and, looking at the usual result of enormous sums conferred upon legatees, the thoughtful man must shortly say, “I would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar,” and admit to himself that it is not the welfare of the children, but family pride, which inspires these enormous legacies.
As to the second mode, that of leaving wealth at death for public uses, it may be said that this is only a means for the disposal of wealth, provided a man is content to wait until he is dead before it becomes of much good in the world. Knowledge of the results of legacies bequeathed is not calculated to inspire the brightest hopes of much posthumous good being accomplished. The cases are not few in which the real object sought by the testator is not attained, nor are they few in which his real wishes are thwarted. In many cases the bequests are so used as to become only monuments of his folly. It is well to remember that it requires the exercise of not less ability than that which acquired the wealth to use it so as to be really beneficial to the community. Besides this, it may fairly be said that no man is to be extolled for doing what he cannot help doing, nor is he to be thanked by the community to which he only leaves wealth at death. Men who leave vast sums in this way may fairly be thought men who would not have left it at all, had they been able to take it with them. The memories of such cannot be held in grateful remembrance, for there is no grace in their gifts. It is not to be wondered at that such bequests seem so generally to lack the blessing. –
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion. The State of Pennsylvania now takes–subject to some exceptions–one-tenth of the property left by its citizens. The budget presented in the British Parliament the other day proposes to increase the death-duties; and, most significant of all, the new tax is to be a graduated one. Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for – public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.
It is desirable that nations should go much further in this direction. Indeed, it is difficult to set bounds to the share of a rich man’s estate which should go at his death to the public through the agency of the state, and by all means such taxes should be graduated, beginning at nothing upon moderate sums to dependents, and increasing rapidly as the amounts swell, until of the millionaire’s hoard, as of Shylock’s [a loan shark], at least “The other half comes to the privy coffer [government treasury] of the state.”
This policy would work powerfully to induce the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life, which is the end that society should always have in view, as being that by far most fruitful for the people. Nor need it be feared that this policy would sap the root of enterprise and render men less anxious to accumulate, for to the class whose ambition it is to leave great fortunes and be talked about after their death, it will attract even more attention, and, indeed, be a somewhat nobler ambition to have enormous sums paid over to the state from their fortunes.
There remains, then, only one mode of using great fortunes; but in this we have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor–a reign of harmony–another ideal, differing, indeed, from that of the Communist in requiring only the further evolution of existing conditions, not the total overthrow of our civilization. It is founded upon the present most intense individualism, and the race [humanity] is projected to put it in practice by degree whenever it pleases. Under its sway we shall have an ideal state, in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense the property of the many, because administered for the common good, and this wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race [humanity] than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves. Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling [unimportant, small] amounts.
If we consider what results flow from the Cooper Institute, for instance, to the best portion of the race [residents] in New York not possessed of means, and compare these with those which would have arisen for the good of the masses from an equal sum distributed by Mr. Cooper in his lifetime in the form of wages, which is the highest form of distribution, being for work done and not for charity, we can form some estimate of the possibilities for the improvement of the race [humanity] which lie embedded in the present law of the accumulation of wealth. Much of this sum if distributed in small quantities among the people, would have been wasted in the indulgence of appetite, some of it in excess, and it may be doubted whether even the part put to the best use, that of adding to the comforts of the home, would have yielded results for the race[humanity], as a race [human beings], at all comparable to those which are flowing and are to flow from the Cooper Institute from generation to generation. Let the advocate of violent or radical change ponder well this thought.
We might even go so far as to take another instance, that of Mr. Tilden’s bequest of five millions of dollars for a free library in the city of New York, but in referring to this one cannot help saying involuntarily, how much better if Mr. Tilden had devoted the last years of his own life to the proper administration of this immense sum; in which case neither legal contest nor any other cause of delay could have interfered with his aims. But let us assume that Mr. Tilden’s millions finally become the means of giving to this city a noble public library, where the treasures of the world contained in books will be open to all forever, without money and without price. Considering the good of that part of the race [residents] which congregates in and around Manhattan Island, would its permanent benefit have been better promoted had these millions been allowed to circulate in small sums through the hands of the masses? Even the most strenuous advocate of Communism must entertain a doubt upon this subject. Most of those who think will probably entertain no doubt whatever.
Poor and restricted are our opportunities in this life; narrow our horizon; our best work most imperfect; but rich men should be thankful for one inestimable boon. They have it in their power during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage, and thus dignify their own lives. The highest life is probably to be reached, not by such imitation of the life of Christ as Count Tolstoi [a famous Russian author] gives us, but, while animated by Christ’s spirit, by recognizing the changed conditions of this age, and adopting modes of expressing this spirit suitable to the changed conditions under which we live; still laboring for the good of our fellows, which was the essence of his life and teaching, but laboring in a different manner.
This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community–the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.
We are met here with the difficulty of determining what are moderate sums to leave to members of the family; what is modest, unostentatious living; what is the test of extravagance. There must be different standards for different conditions. The answer is that it is as impossible to name exact amounts or actions as it is to define good manners, good taste, or the rules of propriety [proper behavior]; but, nevertheless, these are verities, well known although undefinable. Public sentiment is quick to know and to feel what offends these. So in the case of wealth. The rule in regard to good taste in the dress of men or women applies here. Whatever makes one conspicuous offends the canon. If any family be chiefly known for display, for extravagance in home, table, equipage, for enormous sums ostentatiously spent in any form upon itself, if these be its chief distinctions, we have no difficulty in estimating its nature or culture. So likewise in regard to the use or abuse of its surplus wealth, or to generous, freehanded cooperation in good public uses, or to unabated efforts to accumulate and hoard to the last, whether they administer or bequeath. The verdict rests with the best and most enlightened public sentiment. The community will surely judge and its judgments will not often be wrong.
The best uses to which surplus wealth can be put have already been indicated. These who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race [human beings] is indiscriminate charity. It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown in to the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful [lazy], the drunken, the unworthy. Of every thousand dollars spent in so called charity to-day, it is probable that $950 is unwisely spent; so spent, indeed as to produce the very evils which it proposes to mitigate or cure. A well-known writer of philosophic books admitted the other day that he had given a quarter of a dollar to a man who approached him as he was coming to visit the house of his friend. He knew nothing of the habits of this beggar; knew not the use that would be made of this money, although he had every reason to suspect that it would be spent improperly. This man professed to be a disciple of Herbert Spencer; yet the quarter-dollar given that night will probably work more injury than all the money which its thoughtless donor will ever be able to give in true charity will do good. He only gratified his own feelings, saved him- self from annoyance,– and this was probably one of the most selfish and very worst actions of his life, for in all respects he is most worthy.
In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all. Neither the individual nor the race [humanity] is improved by alms-giving. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance.
The really valuable men of the race [human beings] never do, except in cases of accident or sudden change. Everyone has, of course, cases of individuals brought to his own knowledge where temporary assistance can do genuine good, and these he will not overlook.
But the amount which can be wisely given by the individual for individuals is necessarily limited by his lack of knowledge of the circumstances connected with each. He is the only true reformer who is as careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in alms-giving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue.
The rich man is thus almost restricted to following the examples of Peter Cooper, Enoch Pratt of Baltimore [founded a very large library], Mr. Pratt of Brooklyn, Senator Stanford [founded Stanford University], and others, who know that the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise–parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste, and public institutions of various kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people ;–in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good. –
Thus is the problem of rich and poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race [humanity] which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general good. This day already dawns. But a little while, and although, without incurring the pity of their fellows, men may die sharers in great business enterprises from which their capital cannot be or has not been withdrawn, and is left chiefly at death for public uses, yet the man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away ” unwept, unhonored, and unsung,” no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him.
Of such as these the public verdict will then be: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”
Such, in my opinion, is the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined someday to solve the problem of the rich and the poor, and to bring “Peace on earth, among men Good-Will.”

Reading 3: Primary Source Document: Columbian Exposition of 1893

Background:

The World’s Columbian Exposition was a
World’s Fair
held in
Chicago
in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The fair was an influential social and cultural event. The fair had a profound effect on architecture, sanitation, the arts, Chicago’s self-image, and American industrial optimism.

The Statue of the Republic overlooks the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

The exposition covered more than 600 acres featuring nearly 200 new (but temporary) buildings of predominantly neoclassical architecture,
canals
and
lagoons
, and people and cultures from 46 countries. More than 27 million people attended the exposition during its six-month run. Its scale and grandeur far exceeded the other
world fairs
, and it became a symbol of the emerging American Exceptionalism [America as the greatest country in the world].

In addition to recognizing the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World by Europeans, the fair also served to show the world that Chicago had risen from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire, which had destroyed much of the city in 1871.

The fair was planned in the early 1890s, the
Gilded Age
of rapid industrial growth, immigration, and class tension.

Many prominent civic, professional, and commercial leaders from around the United States participated in the financing, coordination, and management of the Fair.

Towards the end of the decade, civic leaders in St. Louis, New York City, Washington DC and Chicago expressed interest in hosting a fair, in order to generate profits, boost real estate values, and promote their cities. Congress was called on to decide the location. New York’s financiers J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Waldorf Astor, among others, pledged $15 million to finance the fair if Congress awarded it to New York, while Chicagoans Charles T. Yerkes, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Cyrus McCormick, offered to finance a Chicago fair. What finally persuaded Congress was Chicago banker Lyman Gage, who raised several million additional dollars in a 24-hour period, over and above New York’s final offer.

[Note that the author, George Davis, uses a high level of vocabulary—it was expected that his readers would be highly educated. This is unlike the vocabulary used by George Engel, for example, who was not especially educated.]

Thesis Questions:

1. What in the article below, describing the Fair, and in the Fair itself, are examples of American Exceptionalism?
2. What seems to be the most important inventions of the time, according to this author? What effect has those inventions had on the world of the time?
3. What are the symbols of the rapid technological progress of the nineteenth century, and of rapid urbanization, that the author employs in this article?
4. According to this article, what makes Chicago such a special city?
5. How does the author describe women? What does he seem to think are the most notable qualities of women?

Text:

George Davis, “The World’s Columbian Exposition,” The North American Review, Vol. 154, No. 424 (March 1892), pp. 305-318.

When the gallant [heroic] mariner [naval captain], Christopher Columbus, landed from the “ Santa Maria,” October 12,1492, and planted the standard of Spain upon the shores of San Salvador, he little appreciated the extent and significance of his discovery.
At that time nothing was more improbable than the formation of a vast republic in North America stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and sweeping the commerce of both oceans. There were then in the nations of Europe, from which America was to be colonized, absolutely no materials from which such a product could be expected to spring. The democratic element was nowhere developed. Government by the people was an idea that did not even enter the human mind. The nations had scarcely begun to emerge from the darkness and barbarism of the middle ages; dense ignorance was the marked characteristic of the masses of the people. The learning of the times was monopolized by the clergy; the convents, monasteries, and clerical establishments were its repositories. The laity [regular people] were hopelessly illiterate, and even kings were unable to sign their names to state documents, as the records prove. So far from governing in any part of Europe, the people were scarcely emancipated from slavery. They had been for ages bought and sold with the land they cultivated.
At the time of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, England was the only country in which the people enjoyed representation in the national legislation, and there they had a voice merely to legalize and authorize taxation for the benefit of the crown [King] and the nobility. Spain had just been consolidated [unified] into one nation, under the government of Ferdinand and Isabella, and every energy had been strained to the utmost in the struggle for the expulsion of the Moors [Muslims]…
This unequal distribution of learning and political privilege in the nations of Europe would probably have continued indefinitely, had not the discovery of the new world by Columbus suggested to the oppressed people of the old world [Europe] possibilities of emigration and enfranchisement [becoming citizens] from the grievous burdens of the feudal system by adding two continents to the geography of the world—a hemisphere for the overflow of Europe.
However this may be, it is a matter of history that colonists from the old countries [Europe] flocked to America by thousands, and, settling along its eastern shores, laid the foundations of the civilization that to-day invites the nations of the world to the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893…
“We don’t like to be irreverent, but would like to ask, what did our forefathers know? What, for instance, did George Washington know? He never saw a steamboat; he never saw a fast mail train; he never held his ear to a telephone; he never sat for his picture in a photograph gallery; he never received a telegraphic dispatch [message]; he never sighted a Krupp gun; he never saw a pretty girl run a sewing-machine ; he never saw a self-propelling engine go down the street to a fire; he never heard of ‘Evolution’; he never took laughing-gas; …he never attended an international exposition ; ….When he wanted to talk to a man in Milwaukee he had to go there. When he wanted his picture taken it was done in profile with a piece of black paper and a pair of shears [scissors]. When he got the returns from the back counties they had to be brought in by a man with an ox-cart [cart pulled by an ox]. When he took aim at the enemy he had to trust to a crooked-barreled old flint-lock [type of rifle used hundreds of years ago]. When he wrote it was with a goose-quill [ink pen]. When he had anything to mend his grandmother did it with a darning [sewing] needle. When he went to a fire he stood in a line and passed buckets. When he looked at a clam he never dreamed that it was any relation of his [evolution]. …
The remarkable thing about this humorous statement of fact is that had Washington lived half a century longer it would still remain almost equally true. Indeed, the world’s progress since the middle of the nineteenth century has distanced all that had gone before, and the last four decades, beginning with the date of the first world’s fair, have witnessed greater strides than all the previous years of the Columbian epoch [era] combined.
To exemplify this development the world over, in all its details and ramifications [effects], falls within the general scope and design of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 at Chicago. The accomplishments of both sexes and of all ages, the researches of the “Challenger” and the “Talisman,” [exploration ships] of those that have plunged into the gloom of mid-African forests or scaled Himalayan summits or neared the frozen poles, are all included. It aims to present the achievements of mankind in man’s dealings with the products and forces of nature, as by an exhaustive balance-sheet.
The Congress of the United States, deeming it advisable to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America “by an exhibition of the resources of the United States of America, their development, and the progress of civilization of the new world,” provided, in the act of Congress approved April 30, 1890, that such an exhibition should be held, and that it “ should be of a national and international character, so that not only the people of our Union and this continent, but those of all nations, as well, can participate,” and the recognition of its international character and purpose is evidenced in the President’s invitation to foreign nations, and the acceptance of this invitation by nearly all the nations of the world.
There are sixty-two foreign nations and colonies which have already formally expressed a determination to participate in the exposition, and their appropriations approximate four million dollars. So far as it has been possible to comply with their pressing demands, space for exhibits has been assigned to all these countries in the departmental buildings, and sites in the exposition park have been set aside for their official pavilions and government headquarters. The United States Government has appropriated thus far one and a half million dollars, of which four hundred thousand is available for its building alone, in which will be illustrated the functions of the government in peace and war.
The agencies authorized by the act of Congress to determine the plan and scope of the exposition, and make all the necessary preparations and successfully conduct the same, were a National Commission…. the Commission, in fulfilling the requirements of the act, has appointed a Board of Lady Managers. This latter body has been organized with a view to securing a comprehensive, interesting, and instructive exhibit of woman’s work in all lands. This spirit on the part of the managers constitutes a striking commentary, and as gratifying as it is striking, on the change which time has wrought in the condition of women.
The limits of my space forbid an indulgence of the strong inclination I feel to dwell upon this feature of the exposition. A retrospect of some twenty-five centuries presents to view another historic exhibition in [ancient] Media-Persia, lasting, like ours, many days, even a hundred and fourscore days,” of all the nations of the then known world, “one hundred and seven and twenty provinces,” stretching “from India even unto Ethiopia.” What a significant fact that this first of all recorded world’s fairs should furnish the conditions out of which was developed a “lady manager” whose matchless tact and beauty, whose endowments of head and heart, have tinctured [influenced] the poesy [poetry], the song, the romance, the pictorial art of all these intervening years!
The National Commission met and organized in the city of Chicago on June 26, 1890. The Board of Directors of the Illinois corporation finally tendered Jackson Park and the grounds adjoining as the site for the fair, which were accepted by the National Commission.
It early became evident that by reason of the constitution of these two bodies [organizations] and the requirements of the act of Congress a conference between them was absolutely necessary in order to reach an understanding of the powers, limitations, and duties of each. A joint conference committee was therefore formed, consisting of eight members of each body, to take this vital question into consideration. The result of its deliberations [debates] was embodied in a report, afterwards adopted by both bodies in their separate capacities, defining their respective jurisdictions. This compact between the two bodies (the term by which it is generally known) outlines the plan of procedure for the harmonious administration of the affairs of the exposition, and provides that the work of the exposition shall be divided into great departments. It also provides that, to properly administer these departments, the director general shall appoint a head or chief officer for each, and all required subordinates. The appointment of these department chiefs must be confirmed by both bodies.
The departments thus constituted consist of the following: Department A, agriculture ; B, horticulture; C, live stock ; D, fish and fisheries ; E, mines and mining; F, machinery; G, transportation exhibits; H, manufactures; J, electricity ; K, fine arts ; L, liberal arts; M, ethnology and archaeology ; N, forestry ; 0, publicity and promotion ; P, foreign affairs.
Chiefs, or head officers, have been appointed to all these departments, and, with a single exception, have already entered upon their official duties. In selecting these chiefs the importance of securing the best available talent has been kept constantly in view, and they were chosen from amongst the noted men in their respective lines throughout the country at large. The importance of the interests they have in charge may be partially gathered from the plan and scope determined upon for the exposition, by which it was found necessary to erect magnificent and commodious [large] buildings for each exhibit department, in addition to those required for administration offices and for the Board of Lady Managers, covering in the aggregate upwards of one hundred and thirteen acres, and, including stables for live stock, over one hundred and fifty-three acres. This obtains [is the same as] with all the departments, with the exception of the departments of manufactures, liberal arts, and ethnology. These three are joined in one magnificent building covering something over thirty acres.
A brief summary of some of the exhibits designed for a few of the exhibit departments will serve to illustrate the importance of each, and perhaps give a faint conception of the extent of the combined whole.
Take, for one example, the Department of Transportation Exhibits. For the first time in the history of world’s fairs, the science of transportation in its broadest sense will have that attention to which its importance entitles it. The development of modern transportation, having had its beginning within the lifetime of men now in the vigor [youthful] of manhood, has been so rapid that its significance is hardly yet understood. Yet its early history is fading out of sight, and in a fair way to be utterly lost. Judged by its relations to the every-day life of the world, no other industry surpasses it in utility or as a power in the progress of civilization. Considered from the standpoint of the amount of capital invested, it overshadows every other industry. It has been stated by eminent authority that the world’s whole stock of money of every kind —gold, silver, and paper—would purchase only one-third of its railroads. Add to this the shipping of the world and all the means of conveyance from place to place throughout the world, and the interests represented in this department of the World’s Columbian Exposition can readily be imagined. It falls within the plan and scope of this department to exhaustively present the origin, growth, and development of the various methods of transportation used in all ages and in all parts of the world. The means and appliances of barbarous and semi-civilized tribes are to be shown by specimen vehicles, trappings, and craft. Water craft, from the rudest forms to the modern giant steamship; wheeled vehicles, from the first inception of the idea to the latest development of the luxurious palace car [a train car set up like a luxurious apartment], will be illustrated by the machine itself, or, in cases where this is impossible, by accurate models, drawings, plans, and designs.
By keeping the historical feature clearly in view, the greatest exhibition of the actual means of transportation employed throughout the world to-day will stand out by contrast in high relief, and the wonderful achievements of later years will bear testimony to the genius of the age in which we live.
A large number of the leading railways of the world will make exhibits of their roadbed, track, and equipment; and even cities owing their existence to transportation influences will be represented by elaborately-prepared models. Nothing will be overlooked bearing on the subject of transportation, terrestrial, aquatic, or aerial.
The building for the display of the exhibits of this department is located on the western bank of the lagoon surrounding the beautiful wooded island which occupies nearly the center of the exposition. It is surmounted by a cupola [dome] reaching a height of 165 feet. Eight elevators will run from the center of the main floor to the balconies surrounding the cupola, at heights of 115 and 118 feet. The view from the observatory will be beautiful in the extreme, and will give visitors an excellent comprehension of the whole plan of the exposition grounds at a glance. The total floor space devoted to the interests of this department, including the entresol [balcony, mezzanine, half-floor], amounts to nearly nineteen acres. The annex will open into the main building in such a manner as to afford long and striking vistas down the main avenue and aisles.
The giant among the mammoth buildings on the fairgrounds is that devoted to manufactures and liberal arts. Presenting a floor space of thirty-one acres, and including galleries encircling the interior, it will afford in the aggregate some forty-four acres of exhibit space. It is the largest building ever contemplated or erected for similar uses. This vast structure will be covered with an arched roof of steel and glass, affording ample light and ventilation. Broad avenues and other conveniences will be provided generously for the comfort of visitors. Galleries will encircle the interior, overlooking Lake Michigan, the government buildings and grounds, the pier, and the surrounding exhibition. State, and foreign buildings, presenting to the spectator a scene of unparalleled beauty and magnificence.
The exhibit of the Department of Manufactures is destined to be one of the very greatest interest, embracing, as it does, the products of the machine and man’s unequalled handiwork in every form and design. A mere enumeration of the beautiful and useful works to be exhibited here would require a volume, and cannot be attempted. The constantly increasing interest among our home producers, and the ever-growing rivalry of inventive genius in the way of improved machinery, will be amply illustrated, and will form one of the most interesting and instructive features of the exposition.
The field of the Liberal-Arts Department is a broad one, covering nearly every phase of the higher development of the race [humanity]. It includes education, literature, journalism, government and law, civil engineering, public works and architecture, hygiene, sanitation, medicine and surgery, commerce and trade, all processes of precision, research, and experiment, music and the drama.
The importance of these subjects has been recognized in the scheme for this department, which surpasses in scope and range all previous attempts. In this scheme the subject of education naturally takes a leading place; perhaps no single interest in any department is more worthy of adequate showing. Fourteen million pupils and four hundred thousand teachers, four hundred and fifty-two million dollars of school property and capital invested in education, are here to receive due consideration. The most complete showing of the educational system of the country that has ever been attempted is proposed; the program covering the entire field of primary, secondary, and superior [college] education. It provides for an exhaustive illustration of the methods of instruction in all grades, from the kindergarten up to the colleges and universities.
A section of this department of great interest will be that devoted to music. The history and theory of music will be illustrated, showing the music of primitive people, crude and curious instruments, music books and scores, portraits and biographies of great musicians, church music; and the sacred music of all periods will be represented, as well as the ballads, folksongs, and national airs [popular songs] of all lands. The display of musical instruments will eclipse all previous attempts. It will cover everything from the mouth-harp to the pipe-organ.
In addition to the space given to liberal arts in the great building already described, an immense music-hall will be erected for the use of this department, in which will be given concerts, recitals, oratorios [singing], and other entertainments during the progress of the exposition.
The Department of Horticulture will embrace the most elaborate and complete classification of its peculiar interests ever presented, arranged in the most comprehensive manner, to display all rare and choice fruits and plants of the earth. Tropical fruits and berries of the central latitudes will be abundantly exhibited, and varieties or species not obtainable at certain seasons will be represented by wax or plaster-cast imitations. Fruits, dried, canned, glassed, preserved by chemical or cold-storage appliances, manufactured into jellies, jams, or marmalades, will illustrate the most approved means of conserving surplus products. Methods of crushing and expressing juices of fruits will be shown, and literature and statistics will form an instructive feature of the exhibit. So much for the pomological [fruit] group.
Equally interesting will be found the viticultural [grapes and wine], the floricultural [flowers], the culinary vegetable, the arboricultural [trees], and other groups. The floricultural [plants] alone will consist of twenty-five classes, embracing plants and flowers from all countries, and will undoubtedly surpass any previous display of its kind. The orchidaceae [orchids] will be one of the principal features, and, together with the palms, cycads, ferns, aroids, and other tender exotics, will be collected in the magnificently-proportioned Horticultural Hall, while the out-door display will comprise a profusion of beautiful flowers and plants, rhododendrons, roses, and herbaceous plants. Dahlias, improved cannas, gladioli, and irises will play an important part in embellishing the grounds. Examples of unique and beautiful designs in budding plants will be illustrated by artists in this specialty. Superintendents of public parks in most of the large cities at home and abroad have already signified their intention to compete for honors.
In addition to a building one thousand feet long by two hundred and fifty feet wide, surmounted by a dome one hundred and thirty-five feet high, to be devoted to exhibitions of both fruits and plants, the wooded island, the most beautiful natural feature of the exposition park, will be wholly devoted to an out-door display of flowering plants and for many months visiting the galleries of all the nations of Europe, and paving the way for a display which promises a higher degree of excellence than any ever before achieved at any exhibition of fine arts.
American art in every department received a new impulse from the Centennial Exposition of 1876, and it will be a special aim here to show the extent of the advancement made in American art work during the intervening sixteen years. It will be the endeavor to make a retrospective exhibit of American paintings, representing each artist who has achieved prominence by characteristic work, all of which will show the changes in the production and methods of our art and the development of the various “schools” of expression. But however much we might desire to see American art take the foremost position in this great concourse [interchange, relations] of nations, it must be frankly admitted that our guests will stand at the head. Contemporary art will be represented on a scale not at all understood as yet by the nations themselves or by our own public. A single illustration will suffice. At the Centennial the total of wall space devoted to fine art was one hundred and twenty thousand square feet. The government of France alone has applied for and will admirably fill wall space to the amount of seventy-five thousand square feet in the World’s Columbian Exposition.
One leading object of the department is to form a collection of art works which shall be in the highest degree interesting and instructive to the visitor to the exposition—such a collection as will give one a higher appreciation of art and a desire for further knowledge, which may be satisfied by a study of the collection; such a collection, also, as may enable one to become acquainted with the characteristics of the best art of all nations, induce comparison, and develop critical judgment.
Space will not permit further details, but these examples, taken at random, and by no means the most interesting, will serve to give some faint idea of the prospective colossal proportions of the exposition, as a whole.
…Beautiful and imposing as the exposition on the borders of the beautiful Lake Michigan will be, the most interesting feature of the fair, to many, will be Chicago itself. Of all the wonders of the world Chicago stands out alone, unexampled and without a peer, a youthful giant among cities, with its business quarter, its traffic lively beyond description, its wide streets, and colossal palaces built of steel and stone, completely fireproof, and rising ten, twelve, sixteen, yes, over twenty stories—prodigious beehives of earnest humanity.
Men still live who were prominent in founding Chicago, and these men now behold, instead of the open and unsettled prairie of their youth, a city of a thousand streets and a million and a quarter inhabitants. The engineer still lives who surveyed the first line of railroad into Chicago, and now more than forty railroads center in this queen city, situated in the heart of this vast continent, a thousand miles from Hell Gate and twice that distance from the Golden Gate. Chicago is the chief center of the entire railroad system of the United States. Fifty thousand miles of railway, representing capital of over two thousand millions of dollars, are largely dependent upon Chicago, and the history of the building and development of these roads sounds like a fairy tale. On a single one of these tributary systems four hundred and fifty passenger and eight hundred freight trains now move daily. A single corporation controls over seven thousand miles of line —the greatest number of miles of railroad under one management in the world. A single general manager, with headquarters in Chicago, can marshal railway rolling-stock in greater number than the number of men that Grant [General Ulysses S. Grant, leading general of the Union forces in the Civil War] could muster on the left bank of the Mississippi the day he set out on his matchless campaign south of Vicksburg [Civil War battlefield], or that responded to Sheridan’s [a union general in the civil war] rallying trumpet-call at Cedar Creek [Civil War battlefield], or sprang forward at Wellington’s [a British general fighting Napoleon] “up and at ’em” at Waterloo [place of Napoleon’s final defeat].
Chicago is surrounded on all sides by a complexity of navigable rivers, canals, and lakes which connect it with tidewater at widely divergent points, and it is, moreover, the center of a network of railway systems which embrace all portions of the North American continent. Her wide streets cross each other at right angles, looking on the east out upon the broad blue surface of Lake Michigan, and in every other direction leading into splendid parks and wide, shady boulevards which surround the city as with an emerald girdle [belt]. No other city in America can show such a large number of public parks. Space forbids an extended reference to her schools, her churches, her theatres, her elevators, her water-works, her foundries, her rolling mills, her manufactories, her wholesale houses, her stockyards, and other features in endless variety.
And this great central city of the foremost nation of the Columbian [Western] Hemisphere has already provided over ten millions of treasure in aid of the International Exposition designed to fitly commemorate the epic-inspiring and epoch-producing achievement of the peerless discoverer, and to make our government the munificent [generous] host at a peaceful fête [celebration] of nations whose splendors will outshine all that has yet passed into history.

Reading 4: Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912)

Introduction:

The writer Mary Antin described her childhood immigrant experiences in her autobiography. She and her family traveled from Russia to join her father in Massachusetts during the late 1890s.

Thesis Questions:

1. What behaviors, values, and ideas were new to Antin and her parents? What technology was new to her?
2. In what ways was her parents still tied to their cultural identity back in Russia? To their Jewish identity?
3. Describe the process my which Mary Antin was Americanized. What were the key aspects of her Americanization?
4. What were the most important benefits of living in the United States, according to Antin?
5. Why was her father unsuccessful in business? What was their social class?
6. Why was her father unable to successfully Americanize? How did this lack of Americanization hinder him in his job?

Text:

[Mary Antin’s father, Isaac Antin, arrived from Polotzk, Russia, to Boston, Massachussets, three years before Mary Antin and her brother, sister, and mother arrived. Isaac Antin did this to try to build a strong financial base before his family settled in with him. However, he was not able to do so.]
During his three years my father had made a number of false starts in business. His history for that period is the history of thousands who come to America, like him, with pockets empty, hands untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of repression in their native land. Dozens of these men pass under your eyes every day, my American friend, too absorbed in their honest affairs to notice the looks of suspicion which you cast at them, the repugnance [disgust] with which you shrink from their touch. You see them shuffle from door to door with a basket of spools [thread] and buttons, or bending over the sizzling irons in a basement tailor shop, or rummaging in your ash can, or moving a pushcart from curb to curb, at the command of the burly [heavy] policeman. “The Jew peddler!” you say, and dismiss him from your premises and from your thoughts, never dreaming that the sordid [gross] drama of his days may have a moral that concerns you. What if the creature with the untidy beard carries in his bosom [chest] his citizenship papers? What if the cross-legged tailor is supporting a boy in college who is one day going to mend your state constitution for you? What if the ragpicker’s [found rags to sell to make paper] daughters are hastening over the ocean [immigrating] to teach your children in the public schools? …
By the time we joined my father, he had surveyed many avenues of approach toward the coveted [desired] citadel [heights] of fortune. One of these, heretofore untried, he now proposed to essay [try], armed with new courage, and cheered on by the presence of his family. In partnership with an energetic little man who had an English chapter in his history [he was English-American], he prepared to set up a refreshment booth on Crescent Beach [near Boston]. But while he was completing arrangements at the beach we remained in town, where we enjoyed the educational advantages of a thickly populated neighborhood; namely, Wall Street, in the West End of Boston.
Anybody who knows Boston knows that the West and North Ends are the wrong ends of that city. They form the tenement district, or, in the newer phrase, the slums of Boston. Anybody who is acquainted with the slums of any American metropolis knows that that is the quarter where poor immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt [dirty], half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of social missionaries [workers], the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward politicians, the touchstone [most important point] of American democracy. The well-versed [knowledgeable] metropolitan [city person] knows the slums as a sort of house of detention for poor aliens, where they live on probation till they can show a certificate of good citizenship.
He may know all this and yet not guess how Wall Street, in the West End, appears in the eyes of a little immigrant from Polotzk [in Russia]. What would the sophisticated sight-seer say about Union Place, off Wall Street, where my new home waited for me? He would say that it is no place at all, but a short box of an alley. Two rows of three-story tenements are its sides, a stingy strip of sky is its lid, a littered pavement is the floor, and a narrow mouth its exit.
But I saw a very different picture on my introduction to Union Place. I saw two imposing rows of brick buildings, loftier [higher] than any dwelling I had ever lived in. Brick was even on the ground for me to tread on, instead of common earth or boards. Many friendly windows stood open, filled with uncovered heads of women and children. I thought the people were interested in us, which was very neighborly. I looked up to the topmost row of windows, and my eyes were filled with the May blue of an American sky!…
Our initiation into American ways began with the first step on the new soil. My father found occasion to instruct or correct us even on the way from the pier to Wall Street, which journey we made crowded together in a rickety cab. He told us not to lean out of the windows, not to point, and explained the word “greenhorn.” We did not want to be “greenhorns [recent, naïve immigrants],” and gave the strictest attention to my father’s instructions. I do not know when my parents found opportunity to review together the history of Polotzk in the three years past, for we children had no patience with the subject; my mother’s narrative was constantly interrupted by irrelevant questions, interjections, and explanations.
The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them. He attempted to introduce us to a queer, slippery kind of fruit, which he called “banana,” but had to give it up for the time being. After the meal, he had better luck with a curious piece of furniture on runners, which he called “rocking-chair.” There were five of us newcomers, and we found five different ways of getting into the American machine of perpetual motion, and as many ways of getting out of it. One born and bred to the use of a rocking-chair cannot imagine how ludicrous people can make themselves when attempting to use it for the first time. We laughed immoderately over our various experiments with the novelty, which was a wholesome way of letting off steam after the unusual excitement of the day.
In our flat we did not think of such a thing as storing the coal in the bathtub. There was no bathtub. So in the evening of the first day my father conducted us to the public baths. As we moved along in a little procession, I was delighted with the illumination of the streets. So many lamps, and they burned until morning, my father said, and so people did not need to carry lanterns. In America, then, everything was free, as we had heard in Russia. Light was free; the streets were as bright as a synagogue on a holy day. Music was free; we had been serenaded, to our gaping [amazed] delight, by a brass band of many pieces, soon after our installation on Union Place.
Education was free. That subject my father had written about repeatedly, as comprising his chief hope for us children, the essence of American opportunity, the treasure that no thief could touch, not even misfortune or poverty. It was the one thing that he was able to promise us when he sent for us; surer, safer than bread or shelter. On our second day I was thrilled with the realization of what this freedom of education meant. A little girl from across the alley came and offered to conduct us to school. My father was out, but we five between us had a few words of English by this time. We knew the word school. We understood. This child, who had never seen us till yesterday, who could not pronounce our names, who was not much better dressed than we, was able to offer us the freedom of the schools of Boston! No application made, no questions asked, no examinations, rulings, exclusions; no machinations, no fees. The doors stood open for every one of us. The smallest child could show us the way.
This incident impressed me more than anything I had heard in advance of the freedom of education in America. It was a concrete proof—almost the thing itself. One had to experience it to understand it.
It was a great disappointment to be told by my father that we were not to enter upon our school career at once. It was too near the end of the term, he said, and we were going to move to Crescent Beach in a week or so. We had to wait until the opening of the schools in September. What a loss of precious time—from May till September!
Not that the time was really lost. Even the interval on Union Place was crowded with lessons and experiences. We had to visit the stores and be dressed from head to foot in American clothing; we had to learn the mysteries of the iron stove, the washboard, and the speaking-tube [telephone]; we had to learn to trade with the fruit peddler through the window, and not to be afraid of the policeman; and, above all, we had to learn English.
The kind people who assisted us in these important matters form a group by themselves in the gallery of my friends. If I had never seen them from those early days till now, I should still have remembered them with gratitude. When I enumerate the long list of my American teachers, I must begin with those who came to us on Wall Street and taught us our first steps. To my mother, in her perplexity over the cook stove, the woman who showed her how to make the fire was an angel of deliverance. A fairy godmother to us children was she who led us to a wonderful country called “uptown,” where, in a dazzlingly beautiful palace called a “department store,” we exchanged our hateful homemade European costumes, which pointed us out as “greenhorns” to the children on the street, for real American machine-made garments, and issued forth glorified in each other’s eyes.
With our despised immigrant clothing we shed also our impossible Hebrew [Jewish] names. A committee of our friends, several years ahead of us in American experience, put their heads together and concocted American names for us all. Those of our real names that had no pleasing American equivalents they ruthlessly discarded, content if they retained the initials. My mother, possessing a name that was not easily translatable, was punished with the undignified nickname of Annie. Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and Dora, respectively. As for poor me, I was simply cheated. The name they gave me was hardly new. My Hebrew name being Maryashe in full, Mashke for short; Russianized to Maria; my friends said that it would hold good in English as Mary, which was very disappointing, as I longed to possess a strange-sounding American name like the others.
I am forgetting the consolation I had, in this matter of names, from the use of my surname [last name], which I have had no occasion to mention until now. I found on my arrival that my father was “Mr. Antin’’ on the slightest provocation, and not, as in Polotzk, on state occasions alone. And so I was “Mary Antin,” and I felt very important to answer to such a dignified title. It was just like America that even plain people should wear their surnames on week days.
As a family we were so diligent under instruction, so adaptable, and so clever in hiding our deficiencies, that when we made the journey to Crescent Beach, in the wake of our small wagonload of household goods, my father had very little occasion to admonish [chastise] us on the way, and I am sure he was not ashamed of us. So much we had achieved toward our Americanization during the two weeks since our landing…
While we children disported ourselves like mermaids and mermen in the surf, our respective fathers dispensed cold lemonade, hot peanuts, and pink popcorn, and piled up our respective fortunes, nickel by nickel, penny by penny. I was very proud of my connection with the public life of the beach. I admired greatly our shining soda fountain, the rows of sparkling glasses, the pyramids of oranges, the sausage chains, the neat white counter, and the bright array of tin spoons. It seemed to me that none of the other refreshment stands on the beach—there were a few—were half so attractive as ours. I thought my father looked very well in a long white apron and shirt sleeves. He dished out ice cream with enthusiasm, so I supposed he was getting rich. It never occurred to me to compare his present occupation with the position for which he had been originally destined; or if I thought about it, I was just as well content, for by this time I had by heart my father’s saying, “America is not Polotzk.” All occupations were respectable, all men were equal, in America…
And all this splendor and glory and distinction came to a sudden end. There was some trouble about a license—some fee or fine—there was a storm in the night that damaged the soda fountain and other fixtures—there was talk and consultation between the houses [families] of Antin and Wilner—and the promising partnership was dissolved. …We must seek our luck elsewhere.
In Polotzk we had supposed that “America” was practically synonymous with “Boston.” When we landed in Boston, the horizon was pushed back, and we annexed Crescent Beach. And now, espying other lands of promise, we took possession of the province of Chelsea, in the name of our necessity.
In Chelsea, as in Boston, we made our stand in the wrong end of the town. Arlington Street was inhabited by poor Jews, poor Negroes, and a sprinkling of poor Irish. The side streets leading from it were occupied by more poor Jews and Negroes. It was a proper locality for a man without capital to do business. My father rented a tenement with a store in the basement. He put in a few barrels of flour and of sugar, a few boxes of crackers, a few gallons of kerosene, an assortment of soap of the “save the coupon” brands; in the cellar, a few barrels of potatoes, and a pyramid of kindling-wood; in the showcase, an alluring display of penny candy. He put out his sign, with a gilt-lettered warning of “Strictly Cash,” and proceeded to give credit indiscriminately. That was the regular way to do business on Arlington Street. My father, in his three years’ apprenticeship, had learned the tricks of many trades. He knew when and how to “bluff.” The legend of “Strictly Cash” was a protection against notoriously irresponsible customers; while none of the “good” customers, who had a record for paying regularly on Saturday, hesitated to enter the store with empty purses.
If my father knew the tricks of the trade, my mother could be counted on to throw all her talent and tact into the business. Of course she had no English yet, but as she could perform the acts of weighing, measuring, and mental computation of fractions mechanically, she was able to give her whole attention to the dark mysteries of the language, as intercourse [interaction] with her customers gave her opportunity. In this she made such rapid progress that she soon lost all sense of disadvantage, and conducted herself behind the counter very much as if she were back in her old store in Polotzk. It was far more cosey than Polotzk—at least, so it seemed to me; for behind the store was the kitchen, where, in the intervals of slack trade, she did her cooking and washing. Arlington Street customers were used to waiting while the storekeeper salted the soup or rescued a loaf from the oven.
Once more Fortune favored my family with a thin little smile, and my father, in reply to a friendly inquiry, would say, “One makes a living,” with a shrug of the shoulders that added “but nothing to boast of.” It was characteristic of my attitude toward bread-and-butter matters that this contented me, and I felt free to devote myself to the conquest of my new world. Looking back to those critical first years, I see myself always behaving like a child let loose in a garden to play and dig and chase the butterflies. Occasionally, indeed, I was stung by the wasp of family trouble; but I knew a healing ointment—my faith in America. My father had come to America to make a living. America, which was free and fair and kind, must presently yield him what he sought. I had come to America to see a new world, and I followed my own ends with the utmost assiduity [strength, determination]; only, as I ran out to explore, I would look back to see if my house were in order behind me—if my family still kept its head above water.
In after years, when I passed as an American among Americans, if I was suddenly made aware of the past that lay forgotten,—if a letter from Russia, or a paragraph in the newspaper, or a conversation overheard in the street-car, suddenly reminded me of what I might have been,—I thought it miracle enough that I, Mashke, the granddaughter of Raphael the Russian, born to a humble destiny, should be at home in an American metropolis, be free to fashion my own life, and should dream my dreams in English phrases. But in the beginning my admiration was spent on more concrete embodiments of the splendors of America; such as fine houses, gay [pretty] shops, electric engines and apparatus, public buildings, illuminations, and parades. My early letters to my Russian friends were filled with boastful descriptions of these glories of my new country. No native citizen of Chelsea took such pride and delight in its institutions as I did. It required no fife [flute] and drum corps, no Fourth of July procession, to set me tingling with patriotism. Even the common agents and instruments of municipal life, such as the letter carrier and the fire engine, I regarded with a measure of respect. I know what I thought of people who said that Chelsea was a very small, dull, unaspiring town, with no discernible excuse for a separate name or existence.
The apex [height] of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school. That day I must always remember, even if I live to be so old that I cannot tell my name. To most people their first day at school is a memorable occasion. In my case the importance of the day was a hundred times magnified, on account of the years I had waited, the road I had come, and the conscious ambitions I entertained…
Who were my companions on my first day at school? Whose hand was in mine, as I stood, overcome with awe, by the teacher’s desk, and whispered my name as my father prompted? Was it Frieda’s [her sister] steady, capable hand? Was it her loyal heart that throbbed, beat for beat with mine, as it had done through all our childish adventures? Frieda’s heart did throb that day, but not with my emotions. My heart pulsed with joy and pride and ambition; in her heart longing fought with abnegation. For I was led to the schoolroom, with its sunshine and its singing and the teacher’s cheery smile; while she was led to the workshop, with its foul air, care-lined faces, and the foreman’s stem command. Our going to school was the fulfillment of my father’s best promises to us, and Frieda’s share in it was to fashion and fit the calico frocks in which the baby sister and I made our first appearance in a public schoolroom.
…Longing she felt, but no envy. She did not grudge me what she was denied…
…There had always been a distinction between us rather out of proportion to the difference in our years. Her good health and domestic instincts had made it natural for her to become my mother’s right hand, in the years preceding the emigration, when there were no more servants or dependents. Then there was the family tradition that Mary was the quicker, the brighter of the two, and that hers could be no common lot. Frieda was relied upon for help, and her sister for glory. And when I failed as a milliner’s [clothes maker] apprentice, while Frieda made excellent progress at the dressmaker’s, our fates, indeed, were sealed. It was understood, even before we reached Boston, that she would go to work and I to school. In view of the family prejudices, it was the inevitable course. No injustice was intended. My father sent us hand in hand to school, before he had ever thought of America. If, in America, he had been able to support his family unaided, it would have been the culmination of his best hopes to see all his children at school, with equal advantages at home. But when he had done his best, and was still unable to provide even bread and shelter for us all, he was compelled to make us children self-supporting as fast as it was practicable. There was no choosing possible; Frieda was the oldest, the strongest, the best prepared, and the only one who was of legal age to be put to work.
My father has nothing to answer for. He divided the world between his children in accordance with the laws of the country and the compulsion of his circumstances…
…Father himself conducted me to school. He would not have delegated that mission to the President of the United States. He had awaited the day with impatience equal to mine, and the visions he saw as he hurried us over the sun-flecked pavements transcended all my dreams. Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before, had been his application for naturalization [citizenship]. He had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the earliest moment allowed by the law, he became a citizen of the United States. It is true that he had left home in search of bread for his hungry family, but he went blessing the necessity that drove him to America. The boasted freedom of the New World [America] meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only a young man when he landed—thirty-two; and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings. He was hungry for his untested manhood.
Three years passed in sordid [unpleasant] struggle and disappointment. He was not prepared to make a living even in America, where the day laborer eats wheat instead of rye [in other words, is relatively well off compared to Russian workers]. Apparently the American flag could not protect him against the pursuing nemesis [enemy] of his limitations… He had been endowed at birth with a poor constitution [health], a nervous, restless temperament, and an abundance of hindering prejudices [problems]… [He] found himself poor in health, poor in purse [poor], poor in useful knowledge, and hampered on all sides. At the first nod of opportunity he broke away from his prison, and strove to atone for his wasted youth by a life of useful labor; while at the same time he sought to lighten the gloom of his narrow scholarship [knowledge; he was uneducated] by freely partaking of modern ideas. But his utmost endeavor still left him far from his goal. In business, nothing prospered with him. Some fault of hand or mind or temperament led him to failure where other men found success. Wherever the blame for his disabilities be placed, he reaped their bitter fruit. “Give me bread!” [money] he cried to America. “What will you do to earn it?” the challenge came back. And he found that he was master of no art, of no trade; that even his precious learning was of no avail, because he had only the most antiquated methods of communicating it [he knew only sacred Jewish texts, not modern education].
So in his primary quest he had failed. There was left him the compensation of intellectual freedom. That he sought to realize in every possible way. He had very little opportunity to prosecute [continue] his education, which, in truth, had never been begun. His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school; but he lost nothing of what was to be learned through reading, through attendance at public meetings, through exercising the rights of citizenship. Even here he was hindered by a natural inability to acquire the English language. In time, indeed, he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly, and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.
If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them. He could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps even college! His children should be students, should fill his house with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields [heaven] of liberal learning. As for the children themselves, he knew no surer way to their advancement and happiness.
So it was with a heart full of longing and hope that my father led us to school on that first day. He took long strides in his eagerness, the rest of us running and hopping to keep up.
At last the four of us stood around the teacher’s desk; and my father, in his impossible English, gave us over in her charge, with some broken word of his hopes for us that his swelling heart could no longer contain. I venture to say that Miss Nixon was struck by something uncommon in the group we made, something outside of Semitic [Jewish] features and the abashed [unashamed] manner of the alien. My little sister was as pretty as a doll, with her clear pink-and-white face, short golden curls, and eyes like blue violets when you caught them looking up. My brother might have been a girl, too, with his cherubic contours of face, rich red color, glossy black hair, and fine eyebrows. Whatever secret fears were in his heart, remembering his former teachers, who had taught with the rod, he stood up straight and uncringing before the American teacher, his cap respectfully doffed [took off]. Next to him stood a starved-looking girl with eyes ready to pop out, and short dark curls that would not have made much of a wig for a Jewish bride.
All three children carried themselves rather better than the common run of “green” [new] pupils that were brought to Miss Nixon. But the figure that challenged attention to the group was the tall, straight father, with his earnest face and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in gesture, and a voice full of feeling. This foreigner, who brought his children to school as if it were an act of consecration, who regarded the teacher of the primer class with reverence, who spoke of visions, like a man inspired, in a common schoolroom, was not like other aliens, who brought their children in dull obedience to the law; was not like the native fathers, who brought their unmanageable boys, glad to be relieved of their care. I think Miss Nixon guessed what my father’s best English could not convey. I think she divined that by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.

Reading 5: Booker T Washington (1856-1915): Speech at the Atlanta Exposition, 1895,

And,

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” from The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York, 1903).

Introduction:

In 1895 Washington was the only African American invited to address the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. He was introduced as “a representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization.” This speech is sometimes known as the “Atlanta Compromise,” and opinions about Washington differ markedly among different commentators. Many believe that he too readily was willing to cater to white segregationalist demands in order to be accorded the status of the leading African American of his day. Others believe that he was a realist, recognizing the harsh conditions of his time, and trying to improve black life as much as possible under those conditions. His supporters suggest that he was fundamentally right in suggesting that the African American community had to empower itself economically before it could successfully demand political power as well. They also point out that, privately, Washington deplored segregation.

Thesis questions:

How does Washington seek to mollify [calm] White fears of African American demands for equality? What benefits do you think he expected African Americans to gain from this attitude? Does Washington ever hint that the white southerners might very much come to regret not allowing African Americans the freedom to develop their economic strength? W.E.B. DuBois, America’s foremost African American intellectual of the early 20th century, demanded full equality for African Americans, and was especially concerned with developing the ability of the most gifted African Americans. Does Washington seem to agree with, or contradict, DuBois’ goals? Point out those aspects of Washington’s speech which agree with or contradict DuBois. How did whites react to Washington’s speech? How did this benefit Washington? What evidence can you provide to prove your answer?

What is DuBois’ argument? What does he think is necessary for African Americans to flourish? Does he expect all African Americans to climb up into their elite? Why or why not? What seems to be the basis for DuBois’ beliefs on this? Does DuBois believe that African American educated elites should absorb traditional European-oriented learning, or work to develop a distinct, more African-or African-American oriented learning? Whichever it was, why do you think that DuBois held these views? How did white Americans react to DuBois’ ideas? What evidence can you provide to prove your answer?

How does DuBois argument contradict that of Booker T. Washington in the Atlanta Exposition speech? What would they define as the African American “elite.”? Do they differ on this? What does each think is the key to African American success? How do they differ in these beliefs? Which view seems more “democratic,” and which more “elitist.” Why? In what ways are their arguments similar? Which most appealed to the white elite, and why? What evidence can you provide to prove your answer?

TEXT:

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are. ” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”-cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, buildt your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed-” blessing him that gives and him that takes.” There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable:
“The laws of changeless justice bind
Oppressor with oppressed;”
And close as sin and suffering joined
We march to fate abreast.”
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized [sic]. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera- house.
In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind, that, while from representations in these buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.

Source:

From Booker Taliaferro Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895,” The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan et al., vol. 3 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 584-87.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” from The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York, 1903).

Introduction:

W.E.B. DuBois was the first African American to graduate with a PhD from Harvard University. DuBois served for most of his life as a professor of sociology at a number of African American universities, before finally fleeing the United States under accusations of being a Communist in the 1950s. DuBois also was a founder of the NAACP. DuBois demanded that segregation be ended immediately, and African Americans accorded their full civil rights as under the Constitution

Text:

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race need to focus on developing the most talented blacks that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life. . . .
If this be true—and who can deny it—three tasks lay before me; first to show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly, to show how these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly, to show their relation to the Negro problem.
From the very first it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; . . .And so we come to the present—a day of cowardice and vacillation, of strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the Negro people? The “exceptions” of course. And yet so sure as this Talented Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm; “These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime—these are the happy rule.” Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous, crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk. A saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men . . . . Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers have raised themselves? Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; . . .How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land. . . . All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.
This is true training, and thus in the beginning were the favored sons of the freedom trained. Out of the colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase, Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and civilization in the black South. Where ought they to have begun to build? At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth. Aye! truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge, down in the very depth of knowledge there where the roots of justice strike into the lowest soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the normal schools went teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000 others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the alphabet to nine millions of men who to-day hold $300,000,000 of property. If was a miracle—the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of education is first to gather the children and buy them spelling books and hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers, if haply they may find them; or again they would teach men Work, but as for Life—why, what has Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly. . . .These figures illustrate vividly the function of the college-bred Negro. He is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social movements. It need hardly be argued that the Negro people need social leadership more than most groups; that they have no traditions to fall back upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well defined social classes. All these things must be slowly and painfully evolved. The preacher was, even before the war, the group leader of the Negroes, and the church their greatest social institution. Naturally this preacher was ignorant and often immoral, and the problem of replacing the older type by better educated men has been a difficult one. Both by direct work and by direct influence on other preachers, and on congregations, the college-bred preacher has an opportunity for reformatory work and moral inspiration, the value of which cannot be overestimated. It has, however, been in the furnishing of teachers that the Negro college has found its peculiar function. Few persons realize how vast a work, how mighty a revolution has been thus accomplished. To furnish five millions and more of ignorant people with teachers of their own race and blood, in one generation, was not only a very difficult undertaking, but a very important one, in that it placed before the eyes of almost every Negro child an attainable ideal. It brought the masses of the blacks in contact with modern civilization, made black men the leaders of their communities and trainers of the new generation. In this work college-bred Negroes were first teachers, and then teachers of teachers. And here it is that the broad culture of college work has been of peculiar value. Knowledge of life and its wider meaning, has been the point of the Negro’s deepest ignorance, and the sending out of teachers whose training has not been simply for bread winning, but also for human culture, has been of inestimable value in the training of these men. . . . I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount necessity of teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and skillfully; or seem to depreciate in the slightest degree the important part industrial schools must play in the accomplishment of these ends, but I do say, and insist upon it, that it is industrialism drunk, with its vision of success, to imagine that its own work can be accomplished without providing for the training of broadly cultured men and women to teach its own teachers, and to teach the teachers of the public schools.
But I have already said that human education is not simply a matter of schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life—the training of one’s home, of one’s daily companions, of one’s social class. Now the black boy of the South moves in a black world—a world with its own leaders, its own thoughts, its own ideals. In this world he gets by far the larger part of his life training, and through the eyes of this dark world he peers into the veiled world beyond. Who guides and determines the education which he receives in his world? His teachers here are the group-leaders of the Negro people—the physicians and clergymen, the trained fathers and mothers, the influential and forceful men about him of all kinds; here it is, if at all, that all culture of the surrounding world trickles through and is handed on by the graduates of the higher schools. Can such culture training of group leaders be neglected? Can we afford to ignore it? . . . You have no choice; either you must help furnish this race from within its own ranks with thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer the evil consequences of a headless misguided rabble.
I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too. I believe that next to the founding of Negro colleges the most valuable addition to Negro education since the war, has been industrial training for black boys. Nevertheless, I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men; there are two means of making the carpenter a man, each equally important: the first is to give the group and community in which he works, liberally trained teachers and leaders to teach him and his family what life means; the second is to give him sufficient intelligence and technical skill to make him an efficient workman; the first object demands the Negro college and college-bred men—not a quantity of such colleges, but a few of excellent quality; not too many college-bred men, but enough to leaven the lump, to inspire the masses, to raise the Talented Tenth to leadership; the second object demands a good system of common schools, well-taught, conventionally located and properly equipped . . . .Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of civilization, and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools, the carpenter, in order to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls for trade schools. . .
Even at this point, however, the difficulties were not surmounted. In the first place modern industry has taken great strides since the war, and the teaching of trades is no longer a simple matter. Machinery and long processes of work have greatly changed the work of the carpenter, the ironworker and the shoemaker. A really efficient workman must be to-day an intelligent man who has had good technical training in addition to thorough common school, and perhaps even higher training. . . .
Thus, again, in the manning of trade schools and manual training schools we are thrown back upon the higher training as its source and chief support. There was a time when any aged and worn-out carpenter could teach in a trade school. But not so to-day. Indeed the demand for college-bred men by a school like the firmest friend of higher training. Here he has as helpers the son of a Negro senator, trained in Greek and the humanities, and graduated at Harvard; the son of a Negro congressman and lawyer, trained in Latin and mathematics, and graduated at Oberlin; he has as his wife, a woman who read Virgil and Homer in the same class room with me; he has as college chaplain, a classical graduate of Atlanta University; as teacher of science, a graduate of Fisk; as teacher of history, a graduate of Smith,—indeed some thirty of his chief teachers are college graduates, and instead of studying French grammars in the midst of weeds, or buying pianos for dirty cabins, they are at Mr. Washington’s right hand helping him in a noble work. And yet one of the effects of Mr. Washington’s propaganda has been to throw doubt upon the expediency of such training for Negroes, as these persons have had.
Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” from The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York, 1903).

Copyright © 2006 Erik Max Francis. All rights reserved.

Reading 6: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Introduction:

Industrialization brought, among other things, the factory system: big machines in large buildings where thousands of workers did specialized tasks under strict supervision. The factory system vastly increased America’s output of such products as glass, machinery, newspapers, soap, cigarettes, beef, and beer. Factories thus provided innumerable new goods and millions of new jobs for Americans. But factories also reduced workers’ control over their place of work, made the conditions of labor more dangerous and more dull, and played no small part in destroying the dignity of that labor. This excerpt from Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle offers a glimpse into the factory system as it operated in a Chicago meatpacking plant around 1905.

The Jungle caused a sensation when it was first published. The pages describing conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants aroused horror, disgust, and fury, and sales of meat dropped precipitously. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” said Sinclair sadly, “and hit it in the stomach.” President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a congressional investigation of meatpacking plants in the nation, and Congress subsequently passed the Meat Inspection Act. But Sinclair, a socialist, did not seek to inspire reform legislation. He was concerned mainly with dramatizing the misery of workers under the capitalist mode of production and with winning recruits to socialism.

Thesis Questions:

1. Why did Upton Sinclair write this book? What were his goals? Did he succeed? Why?

2. How is the life and working conditions of these poor immigrant laborers depicted in this text? Provide evidence.

3. What does Sinclair think is the fundamental cause of these inhumane conditions? (you will need to do a bit of research to found this out—however, note the similarity to the Engel reading).

4. Sinclair centered his story on a Lithuanian worker named Jurgis Rudkus. In what ways did he make Jurgis’s plight seem typical of urban workers of his time?

5. How and why did the unions help the workers’ gain some degree of power in industry? How did the business owners weaken the unions?

6. In his speech at his trial, George Engel condemned American democracy as a scam. Here Sinclair provides an example of corrupt politics. In this example, what economic group truly controls local politics, and how are they able to do it?

7. Why do you think the novel caused demands for reform rather than converts to socialism?

Text:

One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions. He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting for their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he was told when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question would only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a fool. There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers’ union who came to see Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of Lithuanian, lost his temper and began to threaten him. In the end Jurgis got into a fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it would take more than one Irishman to scare him into a union. Little by little he gathered that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop to the habit of “speeding-up” [making the workers work even faster]; they were trying their best to force a lessening of the pace, for there were some, they said, who could not keep up with it, whom it was killing. But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as this—he could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them, he declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn’t do it, let them go somewhere else. Jurgis had not studied the books, and he would not have known how to pronounce “laissez faire” [allow companies to act without any laws regulating them]; but he had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him holler. ..
Jurgis had made some friends by this time…[including] who was named Tamoszius Kuszleika. Tamoszius explained the situation at Durham’s [Meat Packing Company]… [It was] owned by a man who was trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in the least how he did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as possible. And all the men of the same rank were pitted against each other; the accounts of each were kept separately, and every man lived in terror of losing his job, if another made a better record than he. So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething caldron of jealousies and hatreds; there was no loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a dollar. And worse than there being no decency, there was not even any honesty. The reason for that? Who could say? It must have been old Durham in the beginning; it was a heritage which the self-made merchant had left to his son, along with his millions. ..
It was a striking circumstance that Jonas [another immigrant] …had gotten his job by the misfortune of some other person. Jonas pushed a truck loaded with hams from the smoke rooms on to an elevator, and thence to the packing rooms. The trucks were all of iron, and heavy, and they put about threescore [sixty] hams on each of them, a load of more than a quarter of a ton. On the uneven floor it was a task for a man to start one of these trucks, unless he was a giant; and when it was once started he naturally tried his best to keep it going. There was always the boss prowling about, and if there was a second’s delay he would fall to cursing; Lithuanians and Slovaks and such, who could not understand what was said to them, the bosses were wont to kick about the place like so many dogs. Therefore these trucks went for the most part on the run; and the predecessor of Jonas had been jammed against the wall by one and crushed in a horrible and nameless manner.
All of these were sinister incidents; but they were trifles compared to what Jurgis saw with his own eyes before long. One curious thing he had noticed, the very first day, in his profession of shoveler of guts; which was the sharp trick of the floor bosses whenever there chanced to come a “slunk” calf. Any man who knows anything about butchering knows that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve [give birth], or has just calved, is not fit for food. A good many of these came every day to the packing houses—and, of course, if they had chosen, it would have been an easy matter for the packers to keep them till they were fit for food. But for the saving of time and fodder, it was the law that cows of that sort came along with the others, and whoever noticed it would tell the boss, and the boss would start up a conversation with the government inspector, and the two would stroll away. So in a trice [a second] the carcass of the cow would be cleaned out, and entrails would have vanished; it was Jurgis’ task to slide them into the trap, calves and all, and on the floor below they took out these “slunk” calves, and butchered them for meat, and used even the skins of them.
One day a man slipped and hurt his leg; and that afternoon, when the last of the cattle had been disposed of, and the men were leaving, Jurgis was ordered to remain and do some special work which this injured man had usually done. It was late, almost dark, and the government inspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two of men on the floor. That day they had killed about four thousand cattle, and these cattle had come in freight trains from far states, and some of them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs, and some with gored [wounded] sides; there were some that had died, from what cause no one could say; and they were all to be disposed of, here in darkness and silence. “Downers,” the men called them; and the packing house had a special elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds, where the gang proceeded to handle them, with an air of businesslike nonchalance which said plainer than any words that it was a matter of everyday routine. It took a couple of hours to get them out of the way, and in the end Jurgis saw them go into the chilling rooms with the rest of the meat, being carefully scattered here and there so that they could not be identified. When he came home that night he was in a very somber mood, having begun to see at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his faith in America. …
[In the community around the packinghouses, where most of the workers lived] The first family had been Germans. The families had all been of different nationalities—there had been a representative of several races that had displaced each other in the stockyards. Grandmother Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when so far as she knew there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district; the workers had all been Germans then—skilled cattle butchers that the packers had brought from abroad to start the business. Afterward, as cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the Irish—there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a regular Irish city. There were a few colonies of them still here, enough to run all the unions and the police force and get all the graft [bribery]; but most of those who were working in the packing houses had gone away at the next drop in wages—after the big strike. The Bohemians had come then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks. Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers would find them, never fear. It was easy to bring them, for wages were really much higher, and it was only when it was too late that the poor people found out that everything else was higher too. They were like rats in a trap, that was the truth; and more of them were piling in every day. By and by they would have their revenge, though, for the thing was getting beyond human endurance, and the people would rise and murder the packers. Grandmother Majauszkiene was a socialist, or some such strange thing; another son of hers was working in the mines of Siberia, and the old lady herself had made speeches in her time—which made her seem all the more terrible to her present auditors. …
Meantime Teta Elzbieta had taken Stanislovas to the priest and gotten a certificate to the effect that he was two years older than he was; and with it the little boy now sallied forth to make his fortune in the world. It chanced that Durham had just put in a wonderful new lard machine, and when the special policeman in front of the time station saw Stanislovas and his document, he smiled to himself and told him to go—”Czia! Czia!” pointing. And so Stanislovas went down a long stone corridor, and up a flight of stairs, which took him into a room lighted by electricity, with the new machines for filling lard cans at work in it. The lard was finished on the floor above, and it came in little jets, like beautiful, wriggling, snow-white snakes of unpleasant odor. There were several kinds and sizes of jets, and after a certain precise quantity had come out, each stopped automatically, and the wonderful machine made a turn, and took the can under another jet, and so on, until it was filled neatly to the brim, and pressed tightly, and smoothed off. To attend to all this and fill several hundred cans of lard per hour, there were necessary two human creatures, one of whom knew how to place an empty lard can on a certain spot every few seconds, and the other of whom knew how to take a full lard can off a certain spot every few seconds and set it upon a tray.
And so, after little Stanislovas had stood gazing timidly about him for a few minutes, a man approached him, and asked what he wanted, to which Stanislovas said, “Job.” Then the man said “How old?” and Stanislovas answered, “Sixtin.” Once or twice every year a state inspector would come wandering through the packing plants, asking a child here and there how old he was; and so the packers were very careful to comply with the law, which cost them as much trouble as was now involved in the boss’s taking the document from the little boy, and glancing at it, and then sending it to the office to be filed away. Then he set some one else at a different job, and showed the lad how to place a lard can every time the empty arm of the remorseless machine came to him; and so was decided the place in the universe of little Stanislovas, and his destiny till the end of his days. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, it was fated that he should stand upon a certain square foot of floor from seven in the morning until noon, and again from half-past twelve till half-past five, making never a motion and thinking never a thought, save for the setting of lard cans. In summer the stench of the warm lard would be nauseating, and in winter the cans would all but freeze to his naked little fingers in the unheated cellar. Half the year it would be dark as night when he went in to work, and dark as night again when he came out, and so he would never know what the sun looked like on weekdays. And for this, at the end of the week, he would carry home three dollars to his family, being his pay at the rate of five cents per hour—just about his proper share of the total earnings of the million and three-quarters of children who are now engaged in earning their livings in the United States.
…. [Jurgis] had learned the ways of things about him now. It was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost [last]. You did not give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to you. You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you understood that you were environed [surrounded] by hostile powers that were trying to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with. The store-keepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences by the wayside [street], the lampposts and telegraph poles, were pasted over with lies. The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.
There were many such [dangerous living conditions], in which the odds were all against them….how could they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts—and how was she to know that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other sort was to be had? …
Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and the place where he worked was a dark, unheated cellar, where you could see your breath all day, and where your fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So the old man’s cough grew every day worse, until there came a time when it hardly ever stopped, and he had become a nuisance about the place. Then, too, a still more dreadful thing happened to him; he worked in a place where his feet were soaked in chemicals, and it was not long before they had eaten through his new boots. Then sores began to break out on his feet, and grow worse and worse. Whether it was that his blood was bad, or there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the men about it, and learned that it was a regular thing—it was the saltpeter. Every one felt it, sooner or later, and then it was all up with him, at least for that sort of work. The sores would never heal—in the end his toes would drop off, if he did not quit. Yet old Antanas would not quit; he saw the suffering of his family, and he remembered what it had cost him to get a job. So he tied up his feet, and went on limping about and coughing, until at last he fell to pieces, all at once and in a heap, like the One-Horse Shay. They carried him to a dry place and laid him on the floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poor old man was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the end, he never could get up again. He would lie there and cough and cough, day and night, wasting away to a mere skeleton. There came a time when there was so little flesh on him that the bones began to poke through— which was a horrible thing to see or even to think of. And one night he had a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out of his mouth. The family, wild with terror, sent for a doctor, and paid half a dollar to be told that there was nothing to be done. Mercifully the doctor did not say this so that the old man could hear, for he was still clinging to the faith that tomorrow or next day he would be better, and could go back to his job. The company had sent word to him that they would keep it for him—or rather Jurgis had bribed one of the men to come one Sunday afternoon and say they had. Dede Antanas continued to believe it, while three more hemorrhages came; and then at last one morning they found him stiff and cold.
Now the dreadful winter was come upon them…. in Packingtown… the whole district braced itself for the struggle that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes. All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing machine; and now was the time for the renovating of it, and the replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking among them, seeking for weakened constitutions [health]; there was the annual harvest of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came cruel, cold, and biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or later came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and then, with no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there was a chance for a new hand [worker].
The new hands [workers] were here by the thousands. All day long the gates of the packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came, literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each other for a chance for life. Blizzards and cold made no difference to them, they were always on hand; they were on hand two hours before the sun rose, an hour before the work began. Sometimes their faces froze, sometimes their feet and their hands; sometimes they froze all together— but still they came, for they had no other place to go. One day Durham advertised in the paper for two hundred men to cut ice; and all that day the homeless and starving of the city came trudging through the snow from all over its two hundred square miles. That night forty score of them crowded into the station house of the stockyards district—they filled the rooms, sleeping in each other’s laps, toboggan [sled] fashion, and they piled on top of each other in the corridors, till the police shut the doors and left some to freeze outside. On the morrow [next day], before daybreak, there were three thousand at Durham’s, and the police reserves had to be sent for to quell the riot. Then Durham’s bosses picked out twenty of the biggest; the “two hundred” proved to have been a printer’s error. …
There was no heat upon the [cattle] killing beds; the men might exactly as well have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and such places—and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again, and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great lumps the size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the bosses were not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across the room to the hot-water jets. The cruelest thing of all was that nearly all of them— all of those who used knives—were unable to wear gloves, and their arms would be white with frost and their hands would grow numb, and then of course there would be accidents. Also the air would be full of steam, from the hot water and the hot blood, so that you could not see five feet before you; and then, with men rushing about at the speed they kept up on the killing beds, and all with butcher knives, like razors, in their hands— well, it was to be counted as a wonder that there were not more men slaughtered than cattle. …
The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness. The big packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They had always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for work at seven o’clock, although there was almost never any work to be done till the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some cattle had come over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven o’clock, which was bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack season, they would perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till late in the afternoon. And so they would have to loaf around, in a place where the thermometer might be twenty degrees below zero! At first one would see them running about, or skylarking [playing] with each other, trying to keep warm; but before the day was over they would become quite chilled through and exhausted, and, when the cattle finally came, so near frozen that to move was an agony. And then suddenly the place would spring into activity, and the merciless “speeding-up” would begin!
There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as this with not more than two hours’ work to his credit—which meant about thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general average was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a week; and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the killing bed till one o’clock, or perhaps even three or four o’clock, in the afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the very end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even twelve or one o’clock, and without a single instant for a bite of supper. ..
All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns [companies] cheating; and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity [without punishment]. One of the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the balance of the hour—he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that— though often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to the end of the day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour—for “broken time.” A man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a sort of lottery—a struggle, all but breaking into open war between the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through and the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the bosses for this, though the truth to be told it was not always their fault; for the packers kept them frightened for their lives—and when one was in danger of falling behind the standard, what was easier than to catch up by making the gang work awhile…
One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights. He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the butcher-helpers’ union came to him a second time, he received him in a far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this of the men—that by combining they might be able to make a stand and conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America, he got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase “a free country.” The delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to get every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis signified that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was by, all the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they were quite blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all their troubles….
He never missed a [union] meeting…. He had picked up a few words of English by this time, and friends would help him to understand. They were often very turbulent meetings, with half a dozen men declaiming [arguing] at once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he understood that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his disillusionment, Jurgis had sworn to trust no man, except in his own family; but here he discovered that he had brothers in affliction [suffering], and allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so the struggle became a kind of crusade….
One of the first consequences of the discovery of the union was that Jurgis became desirous of learning English. He wanted to know what was going on at the meetings, and to be able to take part in them, and so he began to look about him, and to try to pick up words. The children, who were at school, and learning fast, would teach him a few; and a friend loaned him a little book that had some in it, and Ona would read them to him. Then Jurgis became sorry that he could not read himself; and later on in the winter, when some one told him that there was a night school that was free, he went and enrolled. After that, every evening that he got home from the yards in time, he would go to the school; he would go even if he were in time for only half an hour. They were teaching him both to read and to speak English—and they would have taught him other things, if only he had had a little time.
Also the union made another great difference with him—it made him begin to pay attention to the country. It was the beginning of democracy with him. It was a little state, the union, a miniature republic; its affairs were every man’s affairs, and every man had a real say about them. In other words, in the union Jurgis learned to talk politics. In the place where he had come from there had not been any politics— in Russia one thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the hail. “Duck, little brother, duck,” the wise old peasants would whisper; “everything passes away.” And when Jurgis had first come to America he had supposed that it was the same. He had heard people say that it was a free country—but what did that mean? He found that here, precisely as in Russia, there were rich men who owned everything; and if one could not find any work, was not the hunger he began to feel the same sort of hunger?
When Jurgis had been working about three weeks at Brown’s, there had come to him one noontime a man who was employed as a night watchman, and who asked him if he would not like to take out naturalization papers and become a citizen. Jurgis did not know what that meant, but the man explained the advantages. In the first place, it would not cost him anything, and it would get him half a day off, with his pay just the same; and then when election time came he would be able to vote—and there was something in that. Jurgis was naturally glad to accept, and so the night watchman said a few words to the boss, and he was excused for the rest of the day. When, later on, he wanted a holiday to get married he could not get it; and as for a holiday with pay just the same—what power had wrought that miracle heaven only knew! However, he went with the man, who picked up several other newly landed immigrants, Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks, and took them all outside, where stood a great four-horse tallyho coach, with fifteen or twenty men already in it. It was a fine chance to see the sights of the city, and the party had a merry time, with plenty of beer handed up from inside. So they drove downtown and stopped before an imposing granite building, in which they interviewed an official, who had the papers all ready, with only the names to be filled in. So each man in turn took an oath of which he did not understand a word, and then was presented with a handsome ornamented document with a big red seal and the shield of the United States upon it, and was told that he had become a citizen of the Republic and the equal of the President himself.
A month or two later Jurgis had another interview with this same man, who told him where to go to “register.” And then finally, when election day came, the packing houses posted a notice that men who desired to vote might remain away until nine that morning, and the same night watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where there was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through all right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home and met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him, offering to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been accepted.
And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery to him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the election was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in. In the stockyards this was only in national and state elections, for in local elections the Democratic Party always carried everything. The ruler of the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little Irishman named Mike Scully. Scully held an important party office in the state, and bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an enormously rich man—he had a hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood. It was Scully, for instance, who owned that dump which Jurgis and Ona had seen the first day of their arrival. Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the brick factory as well, and first he took out the clay and made it into bricks, and then he had the city bring garbage to fill up the hole, so that he could build houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold the bricks to the city, at his own price, and the city came and got them in its own wagons. And also he owned the other hole near by, where the stagnant water was; and it was he who cut the ice and sold it; and what was more, if the men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the water, and he had built the icehouse out of city lumber, and had not had to pay anything for that. The newspapers had got hold of that story, and there had been a scandal; but Scully had hired somebody to confess and take all the blame, and then skip the country. It was said, too, that he had built his brick-kiln in the same way, and that the workmen were on the city payroll while they did it; however, one had to press closely to get these things out of the men, for it was not their business, and Mike Scully was a good man to stand in with. A note signed by him was equal to a job any time at the packing houses; and also he employed a good many men himself, and worked them only eight hours a day, and paid them the highest wages. This gave him many friends—all of whom he had gotten together into the “War Whoop League,” whose clubhouse you might see just outside of the yards. It was the biggest clubhouse, and the biggest club, in all Chicago; and they had prizefights every now and then, and cockfights and even dogfights. The policemen in the district all belonged to the league, and instead of suppressing the fights, they sold tickets for them. The man that had taken Jurgis to be naturalized was one of these “Indians,” as they were called; and on election day there would be hundreds of them out, and all with big wads of money in their pockets and free drinks at every saloon in the district. That was another thing, the men said—all the saloon-keepers had to be “Indians,” and to put up on demand, otherwise they could not do business on Sundays, nor have any gambling at all. In the same way Scully had all the jobs in the fire department at his disposal, and all the rest of the city graft in the stockyards district; he was building a block of flats somewhere up on Ashland Avenue, and the man who was overseeing it for him was drawing pay as a city inspector of sewers. The city inspector of water pipes had been dead and buried for over a year, but somebody was still drawing his pay. The city inspector of sidewalks was a barkeeper at the War Whoop Cafe—and maybe he could make it uncomfortable for any tradesman who did not stand in with Scully!
Even the packers were in awe of him, so the men said. It gave them pleasure to believe this, for Scully stood as the people’s man, and boasted of it boldly when election day came. The packers had wanted a bridge at Ashland Avenue, but they had not been able to get it till they had seen Scully; and it was the same with “Bubbly Creek,” which the city had threatened to make the packers cover over, till Scully had come to their aid. “Bubbly Creek” is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the square mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind [blocked], and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans [sea monsters] disporting [moving around] themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers used to leave the creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather this filth in scows, to make lard out of; then the packers took the cue, and got out an injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it themselves. The banks of “Bubbly Creek” are plastered thick with hairs, and this also the packers gather and clean.
And there were things even stranger than this, according to the gossip of the men. The packers had secret mains, through which they stole billions of gallons of the city’s water. The newspapers had been full of this scandal—once there had even been an investigation, and an actual uncovering of the pipes; but nobody had been punished, and the thing went right on. And then there was the condemned meat industry, with its endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers, and that they were paid by the United States government to certify that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local political machine!
And shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene—and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded into boxcars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.
Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new crimes. [For instance, the packing plant owners] seemed that they must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on “whisky-malt,” the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called “steerly”— which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man’s sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was stuff such as this that made the “embalmed beef” that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards [in the recent Spanish-American War]; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.
….They were regular [chemists] at Durham’s; they advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised “potted chicken,”—…. Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows? said Jurgis’ friend; the things that went into the mixture were tripe [lungs], and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper. And then there was “potted game” and “potted grouse,” “potted ham,” and “deviled ham”— de-vyled, as the men called it. “De-vyled” ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said Jurgis’ informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and “oxidized” it by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards—ostensibly for fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really complied with—for the present, at any rate. Any day, however, one might see sharp-horned and shaggy- haired creatures running with the sheep and yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat’s flesh!
There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might have gathered in Packingtown—those of the various afflictions of the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his own person— generally he had only to hold out his hand.
There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss- crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham’s architects had not built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard! …
The packers, of course, had spies in all the unions, and in addition they made a practice of buying up a certain number of the union officials, as many as they thought they needed. So every week they received reports as to what was going on, and often they knew things before the members of the union knew them.

Reading 7: John Steinbeck, Excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath, pp, 33-

Introduction:

The great writer John Steinbeck here describes the desperate condition of workers in California agriculture during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Note: “Okies” refers to people from Oklahoma or elsewhere in the mid-west, poor farmers fleeing the great drought of the mid-1930s and migrating to California. Okies is a term of derision [an insult].

Thesis Questions:

1. By the 1930s, who in California were doing well economically?

2. What was life like for the “Okies”?

2. How were workers exploited on the farms?

3. What signs are there in this story that it takes place in the midst of the Depression?

4. How did native Californians regard the “Okies”? How were they treated?

Text:

[By the 1930s]… it came about that the owners no longer worked on their farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it. And some of the farms grew so large that one man could not even conceive of them any more, so large that it took batteries of bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss; chemists to test the soil, to replenish; straw bosses [overseers] to see that the stooping men were moving along the rows as swiftly as the material of their bodies could stand. Then such a farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a store. He paid the men, and sold them food, and took the money back. And after a while he did not pay the men at all, and saved bookkeeping. These farms gave food on credit. A man might work and feed himself; and when the work was done, he might find that he owed money to the company. And the owners not only did not work the farms any more, many of them had never seen the farms they owned.
And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless—restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do—to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut—anything, any burden to bear, for food. They kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.
We ain’t foreign. Seven generations back Americans, and beyond that Irish, Scotch, English, German. One of our folks was in the Revolution, an’ they was lots of our folks in the Civil War—both sides. Americans.
They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred. Okies—the owners hated them because the owners knew they were soft and the Okies strong, that they were fed and the Okies hungry; and perhaps the owners had heard form their grandfathers how easy it is to steal land from a soft man if you are fierce and hungry and armed. The owners hated them. And in the towns, the storekeepers hated them because they had no money to spend. There is no shorter path to a storekeeper’s contempt, and all his admirations are exactly opposite. The town men, little bankers, hated Okies because there was nothing to gain from them. They had nothing. And the laboring people hated Okies because a hungry man must work, and if he must work, if he has to work, the wage payer automatically gives him less for his work; and then no one can get more.
And the dispossessed, the migrants, flowed into California, two hundred and fifty thousand, and three hundred thousand. Behind them new tractors were going on the land and the tenants were being forced off. And new waves were on the way, new waves of the dispossessed and the homeless, hardened, intent, and dangerous.
And while the Californians wanted many things, accumulation, social success, amusement, luxury, and a curious banking security, the new barbarians wanted only two things—land and food; and to them the two were one. And whereas the wants of the Californians were nebulous [vague] and undefined, the wants of the Okies were beside the roads, lying there to be seen and coveted: the good fields, earth to crumble experimentally in the hand, grass to smell, oaten stalks to chew until the sharp sweetness was in the throat. A man might look at a fallow field and know, and see in his mind that his own bending back and his own straining arms would bring the cabbages into the light, and the golden eating corn, the turnips and carrots.

And a homeless hungry man, driving the roads with his wife beside him and his thin children in the back seat, could look at the fallow [not currently growing anything] fields which might produce food but not profit, and that man could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children. And such a man drove along the roads and knew the temptation at every field, and knew to lust to take these fields and make them grow strength for his children and a little comfort for his wife. The temptation was before him always. The fields goaded him, and the company ditches with good water flowing were a goad to him.
And in the south he saw the golden oranges hanging on the trees, the little golden oranges on the dark green trees; and guards with shotguns patrolling the lines so a man might not pick an orange for a thin child, oranges to be dumped if the price was low.
He drove his old car into a town. He scoured the farms for work. Where can we sleep tonight?
Well, there’s Hooverville [slum] on the edge of the river. There’s a whole raft of Okies there.
He drove his old car to Hooverville. He never asked again, for there was a Hooverville on the edge of every town.
The rag town lay close to the water; and the houses were tents, and weed-thatched enclosures, paper houses, a great junk pile. The man drove his family in and became a citizen of Hooverville—always they were called Hooverville. The men put up his own tent as a near to water as he could get; or if he had no tent, he built a house of corrugated paper. And when the rains came the house melted and washed away. He settled in Hooverville and he scoured the countryside for work, and the little money he had went for gasoline to look for work. In the evening them men gathered and talked together. Squatting on their hams the talked of the land they had seen.
There’s thirty thousan’ acres, out west of here. Layin’ there. Jesus, what I could do with that, with five acres of that! Why, hell, I’d have ever’thing to eat.
Notice one thing? They ain’t not vegetables nor chickens nor pigs at the farms. They raise one thing— cotton, say, or peaches, or lettuce. ‘Nother place’ll be all chickens. They buy the stuff they could raise in the dooryard.
Jesus, what I could do with a couple pigs!
Well, it ain’t yourn, an’ it ain’t gonna be yourn.
What we gonna do? The kids can’t grow up this way.
In the Caps [one of the slum camps] the word would come whispering, There’s work at Shafter. And the cars would be loaded in the night, the highways crowded—a gold rush for work. At Shafter the people would pile up, five times too many to do the work. A gold rush for work. They stole away in the night, frantic for work. And along the roads lay the temptations, the fields that could bear food. That’s owned. That ain’t our’n. …
Well, maybe we could get a little piece of her.  Maybe–a little piece.   Right down there – a patch.  Jimson weed now.  Christ, I could git enough potatoes off’n that little patch to feed my whole family!
It ain’t our’n.  It got to have Jimson weeds.
Now and then a man tried; crept on the land and cleared a piece, trying like a thief to steal a little richness from the earth.  Secret gardens hidden in the weeds.  A package of carrot seeds and a few turnips.  Planted potato skins, crept out in the evening secretly to hoe in the stolen earth.
Leave the weeds around the edge–then nobody can see what we’re a-doin’.  Leave some weeds, big tall ones, in the middle.
Secret gardening in the evenings, and water carried in a rusty can.

And then one day a deputy sheriff: Well, what you think you’re doin’?
I ain’t doin’’ no harm.
I had my eye on you.  This ain’t your land.  You’re trespassing.
The land ain’t plowed, an’ I ain’t hurtin’ it none.
You goddamned squatters.  Pretty soon you’d think you owned it.  You’d be sore as hell.  Think you owned it.  Get off now.
And the little green carrot tops were kicked off and the turnip greens trampled.  And then the Jimson weed moved back in.  But the cop was right.  A crop raised–why, that makes ownership.  Land hoed and the carrots eaten–a man might fight for land he’s taken food from.  Get him off quick!  He’ll think he owns it.  He might even die fighting for the little plot among the Jimson weeds.
Did ya see his face when we kicked them turnips out?   Why, he’d kill a fella soon’s he’d look at him.  We got to keep these here people down or they’ll take the country.  They’ll take the country.
Outlanders, foreigners.
Sure, they talk the same language, but they ain’t’ the same.  Look how they live.  Think any of us folks’d live like that? Hell, no!
In the evenings, squatting and talking.  And an excited man:  Whyn’t twenty of us take a piece of lan’?  We got guns.  Take it an’ say, “Put us off if you can.”  Whyn’t we do that?
They’d jus’ shoot us like rats.
Well, which’d you ruther be, dead or here?  Under groun’ or in a house all made of gunny sacks?  Which’d you ruther for your kids, dead now or dead in two years with what they call malnutrition?  Know what we et all week?  Milled nettles an’ fried dough!  Know where we got the flour for the dough?  Swep’ the floor of a boxcar.
Talking in the camps, and the deputies, fat-assed men with guns slung on fat hips, swaggering through the camps: Give ‘em somepin to think about.  Got to keep ‘em in line or Christ only knows what they’ll do!  If they ever get together there ain’t nothin’ that’ll stop ‘em.
Rattlesnakes!  Don’t take chances with ’em, an’ if they argue, shoot first.  If a kid’ll kill a cop, what’ll the men do?  Thing is, get tougher’n they are.  Treat ‘em rough.  Scare ‘em.
What if they won’t scare?  What if they stand up and take it and shoot back?  These men were armed when they were children.  A gun is an extension of themselves.  What if they won’t scare?  What if some time an army of them marches on the land as the Lombards did in Italy, as the Germans did on Gaul and Turks did on Byzantium [invasions]?  They were land-hungry, ill-armed hordes took and the legions could not stop them.  Slaughter and terror did not stop them.  How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children?  You can’t scare him–he has known a feat beyond every other.
In Hooverville the men talking: Grampa took his lan’ from the Injuns.
Now, this ain’t right.  We’re a-talkin’ here.  This here you’re talkin’ about is stealin’.  I ain’t no thief.
No?  You stole a bottle of milk from a porch night before last.  An’ you stole some copper wire and sold it for a piece of meat.
Yeah, but the kids was hungry.
It’s stealin’, though.
Know how the Fairfiel’ ranch was got?  I’ll tell ya.  It was all gov’ment lan’, an’ could be took up.  Ol’ Fairfil’ kep’ ‘em in food an’ whisky, an’ then when they’d proved the lan’, ol’ Fairfil’ took it from ‘em.  He used to day the lan’ cost him a pint of rotgut an acre.  Would you say that was stealin’?
Well, it wan’t right, but he never went to jail for it.
No, he never went to jail for it.  An’ the fella that put a boat in a wagon an’ his report like it was all under water ‘cause he went in a boat–he never went to jail neither.  An’ the fellas that bribed congressmen and the legislatures never went to jail neither.
All over the state, jabbering in the Hoovervilles.
And then the raids–the swoop of armed deputies on the squatters’ camps.  Get out.  Department of Health orders.  This camp is a menace to health.
Where we gonna go?
That’s none of our business.  We got orders to get you out of here.  In half an hour we set fire to the camp.
They’s typhoid down the line.  You want ta spread it all over?
We got orders to get you out of here.  Now get!  In half an hour we burn the camp.
In half an hour the smoke of paper houses, of weed-thatched huts, rising to the sky, and the people in their cars rolling over the highways, looking for another Hooverville.
And in Kansas and Arkansas, in Oklahoma and Texas and New Mexico, the tractors moved in and pushed the tenants out.
Three hundred thousand in California and more coming.  And in California the roads full of frantic people running like ants to pull, to push, to lift, to work.  For every manload to lift, five pairs of arms extended to lift it; for every stomachful of food available, five mouths open.
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact:  when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away.  And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need.  And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history:  repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.  The great owners ignored the three cries of history.  The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression.  The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out.  The changing economy was ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.
The tractors which throw men out of work, the belt lines which carry loads, the machines which produce, all were increased; and more and more families scampered on the highways, looking for crumbs from the great holdings, lusting after the land beside the roads.  The great owners formed associations for protection and they met to discuss ways to intimidate, to kill, to gas.  And always they were in fear of a principal–three hundred thousand–if they ever move under a leader–the end.  Three hundred thousand, hungry and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs and all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop them.  And the great owners, who had become through their holdings both more and less than men, ran to their destruction, and used every means that in the long run would destroy them.  Every little means, every violence, every raid on a Hooverville, every deputy swaggering through a ragged camp put off the day a little and cemented the inevitability of the day.
The men squatted on their hams, sharpfaced men, lean from hunger and hard from resisting it, sullen eyes and hard jaw.  And the rich land was around them.
D’ja hear about the kid in that fourth tent down?
No, I jus’ come in.
Well, that kid’s been a-cryin’ in his sleep an’ a-rollin’ in his sleep.  Them folks thought he got worms.  So they give him a blaster, an’ he died.  It was what they call black-tongue the kid had.  Comes from not gettin’ good things to eat.
Poor little fella.
Yeah, but them folks can’t bury him.  Got to go to the county stone orchard.
Well, hell.
And hands went into pockets and little coins came out.  In front of the tent a little heap of silver grew.  And the family found it there.
Our people are good people; our people are kind people.  Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor.  Pray God someday a kid can eat.
And the associations of owners knew that some day the praying would stop.
And there’s the end.
…Then from the tents, from the crowded barns, groups of sodden [wet] men went out, their clothes slopping rags, their shoes muddy pulp. They splashed out through the water, to the towns, to the country stores, to the relief offices, to beg for food, to cringe and beg for food, to beg for relief, to try to steal, to lie. And under the begging, and under the cringing, a hopeless anger began to smolder. And in the little towns’ pity for the sodden men changed to anger, and anger at the hungry people changed to fear of them. Then sheriffs swore in deputies in droves, and orders were rushed for rifles, for tear gas, for ammunition. Then the hungry men crowded the alleys behind the stores to beg for bread, to beg for rotting vegetables, to steal when they could.

Reading 8: Richard Wright, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow (1938)

Introduction:

Richard Wright (1908-1960) was born on a cotton plantation in Mississippi and came to New York City in 1937, just after the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Wright brought to his writings the anger of a man who had known physical punishment and repeated injustice at the hands of whites. In his novel Native Son (1940), the nightmarish story of a poor, young black who kills his white employer’s daughter, Wright examined the ways in which the frustrated search for identity led some African-Americans to despair, defiance, and even violent crime. The novel won Wright immediate acclaim and was rewritten for the New York stage in 1941.

In the autobiographical sketch The Ethics of Living Jim Crow (1938), Wright records with grim frankness the experience of growing up in a racially segregated community in the American South. “Jim Crow,” the stage name of a popular nineteenth-century minstrel performer, Thomas D. Rice, had come to describe anything pertaining to African American racial segregation.

Thesis Questions:

1. What jobs did black work in the South?

2. How were blacks supposed to treat whites, according to various circumstances? What could blacks not do? What was the worst “crimes” blacks could do?

3. What Jim Crow ethics did Wright violate as a young man? How did whites intimidate him? How did whites punish him? Explain the methods used to keep down ambitious black men, during the Jim Crow era in the South.

4. Why would Richard’s mother, and the other members of his community, punish him for trying to step outside of the restrictions of Jim Crow?

5. How was racism different between the small towns and the large cities?

[NOTE: In your paper, do not use the word “negro,” unless you are directly quoting a sentence with it. That was a common word for “black” before about 1970 [the Civil Rights Movement]. We do not use that word today. Remember, you are supposed to use your own words to explain these texts and answer these thesis questions, and your own words means twenty-first century vocabulary. This will be true for all of your classes at UHD.]
Text:
My first lesson in how to live as a Negro came when I was quite small. We were living in Arkansas. Our house stood behind the railroad tracks. Its skimpy yard was paved with black cinders. Nothing green ever grew in that yard. The only touch of green we could see was far away, beyond the tracks, over where the white folks lived. But cinders were good enough for me, and I never missed the green growing things. And anyhow, cinders were fine weapons. You could always have a nice hot war with huge black cinders. All you had to do was crouch behind the brick pillars of a house with your hands full of gritty ammunition. And the first woolly black head you saw pop out from behind another row of pillars was your target. You tried your very best to knock it off. It was great fun.
I never fully realized the appalling disadvantages of a cinder environment till one day the gang to which I belonged found itself engaged in a war with the white boys who lived beyond the tracks. As usual we laid down our cinder barrage, thinking that this would wipe the white boys out. But they replied with a steady bombardment of broken bottles. We doubled our cinder barrage, but they hid behind trees, hedges, and the sloping embankments of their lawns.
Having no such fortifications, we retreated to the brick pillars of our homes. During the retreat a broken milk bottle caught me behind the ear, opening a deep gash which bled profusely. The sight of blood pouring over my face completely demoralized our ranks. My fellow-combatants left me standing paralyzed in the center of the yard, and scurried for their homes. A kind neighbor saw me and rushed me to a doctor, who took three stitches in my neck.
I sat brooding on my front steps, nursing my wound and waiting for my mother to come from work. I felt that a grave injustice had been done me. It was all right to throw cinders. The greatest harm a cinder could do was leave a bruise. But broken bottles were dangerous; they left you cut, bleeding, and helpless.
When night fell, my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet her. I could just feel in my bones that she would understand. I knew she would tell me exactly what to do next time. I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound, then slapped me.
“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh awways fightin’?”
I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her that I didn’t have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn’t a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn’t throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again. And they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle. Didn’t I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn’t kill me.
All that night I was delirious and could not sleep. Each time I closed my eyes I saw monstrous white faces suspended from the ceiling, leering at me.
From that time on, the charm of my cinder yard was gone. The green trees, the trimmed hedges, the cropped lawns grew very meaningful, became a symbol. Even today when I think of white folks, the hard, sharp outlines of white houses surrounded by trees, lawns, and hedges are present somewhere in the background of my mind. Through the years they grew into an overreaching symbol of fear.
It was a long time before I came in close contact with white folks again. We moved
from Arkansas to Mississippi. Here we had the good fortune not to live behind the railroad tracks, or close to white neighborhoods. We lived in the very heart of the local Black Belt. There were black churches and black preachers; there were black schools and black teachers; black groceries and black clerics. In fact, everything was so solidly black that for a long time I did not even think of white folks, save in remote and vague terms. But this could not last forever. As one grows older one eats more. One’s clothing costs more. When I finished grammar school I had to go to work. My mother could no longer feed and clothe me on her cooking job.
There is but one place where a black boy who knows no trade can get a job. And that’s where the houses and faces are white, where the trees, lawns, and hedges are green. My first job was with an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi. The morning I applied I stood straight and neat before the boss, answering all his questions with sharp yessirs and nosirs. I was very careful to pronounce my sirs distinctly, in order that he might know that I was polite, that I knew where I was, and that I knew he was a white man. I wanted that job badly.
He looked me over as though he were examining a prize poodle. He questioned me closely about my schooling, being particularly insistent about how much mathematics I had had. He seemed very pleased when I told him I had had two years of algebra.
“Boy, how would you like to try to learn something around here?” he asked me.
“I’d like it fine, sir,” I said, happy. I had visions of “working my way up.” Even Negroes have those visions.
“All right,” he said. “Come on.”
I followed him to the small factory.
“Pease,” he said to a white man of about thirty-five, “this is Richard. He’s going to work for us.”
Pease looked at me and nodded.
I was then taken to a white boy of about seventeen.
“Morrie, this is Richard, who’s going to work for us.”
“Whut yuh sayin’ there, boy!” Morrie boomed at me.
“Fine!” I answered.
The boss instructed these two to help me, teach me, give me jobs to do, and let me learn what I could in my spare time.
My wages were five dollars a week.
I worked hard, trying to please. For the first month I got along O.K. Both Pease and Morrie seemed to like me. But one thing was missing. And I kept thinking about it. I was not learning anything, and nobody was volunteering to help me. Thinking they had forgotten that I was to learn something about the mechanics of grinding lenses, I asked Morrie one day to tell me about the work. He grew red.
“Whut yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, git smart?” he asked.
“Naw; I ain’ tryin’ t’ -it smart,” I said.
“Well, don’t, if yuh know whut’s good for yuh!”
I was puzzled. Maybe he just doesn’t want to help me, I thought. I went to Pease.
“Say, are you crazy, you black bastard?” Pease asked me, his gray eyes growing hard.
I spoke out, reminding him that the boss had said I was to be given a chance to learn something.
“Nigger, you think you’re white, don’t you?”
“Naw, sir!”
“Well, you’re acting mighty like it!”
“But, Mr. Pease, the boss said . . .”
Pease shook his fist in my face.
“This is a white man’s work around here, and you better watch yourself!”
From then on they changed toward me. They said good-morning no more. When I was just a bit slow in performing some duty, I was called a lazy black son-of-a-bitch.
Once I thought of reporting all this to the boss. But the mere idea of what would happen to me if Pease and Morrie should learn that I had “snitched” stopped me. And after all, the boss was a white man, too. What was the use?
The climax came at noon one summer day. Pease called me to his work-bench. To get to him I had to go between two narrow benches and stand with my back against a wall.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Richard, I want to ask you something,” Pease began pleasantly, not looking up from his work.
“Yes, sir,” I said again.
Morrie came over, blocking the narrow passage between the benches. He folded his arms, staring at me solemnly.
I looked from one to the other, sensing that something was coming.
“Yes, sir,” I said for the third time.
Pease looked up and spoke very slowly.
“Richard, Mr. Morrie here tells me you called me Pease.”
I stiffened. A void seemed to open up in me. I knew this was the show-down.
He meant that I had failed to call him Mr. Pease. I looked at Morrie. He was gripping a steel bar in his hands. I opened my mouth to speak, to protest, to assure Pease that I had never called him simply Pease, and that I had never had any intentions of doing so, when Morrie grabbed me by the collar, ramming my head against the wall.
“Now, be careful, nigger!” snarled Morrie, baring his teeth. “I heard yuh call ‘im Pease! ‘N’ if yuh say yuh didn’t, yuh’re callin’ me a lie, see?” He waved the steel bar threateningly.
If I had said: No, sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you Pease, I would have been automatically calling Morrie a liar. And if I had said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you Pease, I would have been pleading guilty to having uttered the worst insult that a Negro can utter to a southern white man. I stood hesitating, trying to frame a neutral reply.
“Richard, I asked you a question!” said Pease. Anger was creeping into his voice.
“I don’t remember calling you Pease, Mr. Pease,” I said cautiously. “And if I did, I sure didn’t mean . . .”
“You black son-of-a-bitch! You called me Pease, then!” he spat, slapping me till I bent sideways over a bench. Morrie was on top of me, demanding:
“Didn’t yuh call ‘im Pease? If yuh say yuh didn’t, I’ll rip yo’ gut string loose with this f–kin’ bar, yuh black granny dodger! Yuh can’t call a white man a lie ‘n’ git erway with it, you black son-of-a-bitch!”
I wilted. I begged them not to bother me. I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to leave.
“I’ll leave,” I promised. “I’ll leave right now.”
They gave me a minute to get out of the factory. I was warned not to show up again, or tell the boss.
I went.
When I told the folks at home what had happened, they called me a fool. They told me that I must never again attempt to exceed my boundaries. When you are working for white folks, they said, you got to “stay in your place” if you want to keep working.
My Jim Crow education continued on my next job, which was portering in a clothing store. One morning, while polishing brass out front, the boss and his twenty-year-old son got out of their car and half dragged and half kicked a Negro woman into the store. A policeman standing at the corner looked on, twirling his nightstick. I watched out of the corner of my eye, never slackening the strokes of my chamois [polishing cloth] upon the brass. After a few minutes, I heard shrill screams coming from the rear of the store. Later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying, and holding her stomach. When she reached the end of the block, the policeman grabbed her and accused her of being drunk. Silently I watched him throw her into a patrol wagon.
When I went to the rear of the store, the boss and his son were washing their hands at the sink. They were chuckling. The floor was bloody, and strewn with wisps of hair and clothing. No doubt I must have appeared pretty shocked, for the boss slapped me reassuringly on the back.
“Boy, that’s what we do to niggers when they don’t want to pay their bills,” he said, laughing.
His son looked at me and grinned.
“Here, hava cigarette,” he said.
Not knowing what to do, I took it. He lit his and held the match for me. This was a gesture of kindness, indicating that even if they had beaten the poor old woman, they would not be found out if I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and asked no questions.
After they had gone, I sat on the edge of a packing box and stared at the bloody floor till the cigarette went out.
That day at noon, while eating in a hamburger joint, I told my fellow Negro porters what had happened. No one seemed surprised. One fellow, after swallowing a huge bite, turned to me and asked
“Huh. Is tha’ all they did t’ her?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t tha’ enough?” I asked.
“Shucks! Man, she’s a lucky bitch!” he said, burying his lips deep into a juicy hamburger. “Hell, it’s a wonder they didn’t lay her when they got through.”
……….
I was learning fast, but not quite fast enough. One day, while I was delivering packages in the suburbs, my bicycle tire was punctured. I walked along the hot, dusty road, sweating and leading my bicycle by the handle-bars.
A car slowed at my side.
“What’s the matter, boy?” a white man called.
I told him my bicycle was broken and I was walking back to town.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Hop on the running board.”
He stopped the car. I clutched hard at my bicycle with one hand and clung to the side of the car with the other.
“All set?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered. The car started.
It was full of young white men. They were drinking. I watched the flask pass from mouth to mouth.
“Wanna drink, boy?” one asked.
I laughed, the wind whipping my face. Instinctively obeying the freshly planted precepts of my mother, I said:
“Oh, no!”
The words were hardly out of my mouth before I felt something hard and cold smash me between the eyes. It was an empty whisky bottle. I saw stars, and fell backwards from the speeding car into the dust of the road, my feet becoming entangled in the steel spokes of my bicycle. The white men piled out, and stood over me.
“Nigger, ain’ yuh learned no better sense’n tha’ yet?” asked the man who hit me.
“Ain’ yuh learned t’ say sir t’ a white man yet?”
Dazed, I pulled to my feet. My elbows and legs were bleeding. Fists doubled, the white man advanced, kicking my bicycle out of the way.
“Aw, leave the bastard alone. He’s got enough,” said one.
They stood looking at me. I rubbed my shins, trying to stop the flow of blood. No doubt they felt a sort of contemptuous pity, for one asked:
“Yuh wanna ride t’ town now, nigger? Yuh reckon yuh know enough t’ ride now?”
“I wanna walk,” I said, simply.
Maybe it sounded funny. They laughed.
“Well, walk, yuh black son-of-a-bitch!”
When they left they comforted me with:
“Nigger, yuh sho better be damn glad it wuz us yuh talked t’ tha’ way. Yuh’re a lucky bastard, ’cause if yuh’d said tha’ t’ somebody else, yuh might’ve been a dead nigger now.”
…….
Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as this the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.
Late one Saturday night I made some deliveries in a white neighborhood. I was pedaling my bicycle back to the store as fast as I could, when a police car, swerving toward me, jammed me into the curbing.
“Get down and put up your hands!” the policemen ordered.
I did. They climbed out of the car, guns drawn, faces set, and advanced slowly.
“Keep still!” they ordered.
I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and packages. They seemed dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating. Finally, one of them said:
“Boy, tell your boss not to send you out in white neighborhoods this time of night.”
As usual, I said:
“Yes, sir.”
……..
My next job was as hall-boy in a hotel. Here my Jim Crow education broadened and deepened. When the bell-boys were busy, I was often called to assist them. As many of the rooms in the hotel were occupied by prostitutes, I was constantly called to carry them liquor and cigarettes. These women were nude most of the time. They did not bother about clothing even for bell-boys. When you went into their rooms, you were supposed to take their nakedness for granted, as though it startled you no more than a blue vase or a red rug. Your presence awoke in them no sense of shame, for you were not regarded as human. If they were alone, you could steal sidelong glimpses at them. But if they were receiving men, not a flicker of your eyelids must show. I remember one incident vividly. A new woman, a huge, snowy-skinned blonde, took a room on my floor. I was sent to wait upon her. She was in bed with a thick-set man; both were nude and uncovered. She said she wanted some liquor, and slid out of bed and waddled across the floor to get her money from a dresser drawer. I watched her.
“Nigger, what in hell you looking at?” the white man asked me, raising himself upon his elbows.
“Nothing,” I answered, looking miles deep into the blank wall of the room.
“Keep your eyes where they belong, if you want to be healthy!”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
……..
One of the bell-boys I knew in this hotel was keeping steady company with one of the Negro maids. Out of a clear sky the police descended upon his home and arrested him, accusing him of bastardy. The poor boy swore he had had no intimate relations with the girl. Nevertheless, they forced him to marry her. When the child arrived, it was found to be much lighter in complexion than either of the two supposedly legal parents. The white men around the hotel made a great joke of it. They spread the rumor that some white cow must have scared the poor girl while she was carrying the baby. If you were in their presence when this explanation was offered, you were supposed to laugh.
…….
One of the bell-boys was caught in bed with a white prostitute. He was castrated, and run out of town. Immediately after this all the bell-boys and hall-boys were called together and warned. We were given to understand that the boy who had been castrated was a “mighty, mighty lucky bastard.” We were impressed with the fact that next time the management of the hotel would not be responsible for the lives of “trouble-makin’ niggers.”
…….
One night, just as I was about to go home, I met one of the Negro maids. She lived in my direction, and we fell in to walk part of the way home together. As we passed the white nightwatchman, he slapped the maid on her buttock. I turned around, amazed. The watchman looked at me with a long, hard, fixedunder stare. Suddenly he pulled his gun, and asked:
“Nigger, don’t yuh like it?”
I hesitated.
“I asked yuh don’t yuh like it?” he asked again, stepping forward.
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.
“Talk like it, then!”
“Oh, yes, sir!” I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.
Outside, I walked ahead of the girl, ashamed to face her. She caught up with me and said:
“Don’t be a fool; yuh couldn’t help it!”
This watchman boasted of having killed two Negroes in self-defense.
Yet, in spite of all this, the life of the hotel ran with an amazing smoothness. It would have been impossible for a stranger to detect anything. The maids, the hall-boys, and the bell-boys were all smiles. They had to be.
…….
I had learned my Jim Crow lessons so thoroughly that I kept the hotel job till I left Jackson for Memphis. It so happened that while in Memphis I applied for a job at a branch of the optical company. I was hired. And for some reason, as long as I worked there, they never brought my past against me.
Here my Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel. Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live.
For example, it was almost impossible to get a book to read. It was assumed that after a Negro had imbibed what scanty schooling the state furnished he had no further need for books. I was always borrowing books from men on the job. One day I mustered enough courage to ask one of the men to let me get books from the library in his name. Surprisingly, he consented. I cannot help but think that he consented because he was a Roman Catholic and felt a vague sympathy for Negroes, being himself an object of hatred. Armed with a library card, I obtained books in the following manner: I would write a note to the librarian, saying: “Please let this nigger boy have the following books.” I would then sign it with the white man’s name.
When I went to the library, I would stand at the desk, hat in hand, looking as unbookish as possible. When I received the books desired I would take them home. If the books listed in the note happened to be out, I would sneak into the lobby and forge a new one. I never took any chances guessing with the white librarian about what the fictitious white man would want to read. No doubt if any of the white patrons had suspected that some of the volumes they enjoyed had been in the home of a Negro, they would not have tolerated it for an instant.
The factory force of the optical company in Memphis was much larger than that in Jackson, and more urbanized. At least they liked to talk, and would engage the Negro help in conversation whenever possible. By this means I found that many subjects were taboo from the white man’s point of view. Among the topics they did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. The most accepted topics were sex and religion.
There were many times when I had to exercise a great deal of ingenuity to keep out of trouble. It is a southern custom that all men must take off their hats when they enter an elevator. And especially did this apply to us blacks with rigid force. One day I stepped into an elevator with my arms full of packages. I was forced to ride with my hat on. Two white men stared at me coldly. Then one of them very kindly lifted my hat and placed it upon my armful of packages. Now the most accepted response for a Negro to make under such circumstances is to look at the white man out of the corner of his eye and grin. To have said: “Thank you!” would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service. For such an act I have seen Negroes take a blow in the mouth. Finding the first alternative distasteful, and the second dangerous, I hit upon an acceptable course of action which fell safely between these two poles. I immediately-no sooner than my hat was lifted-pretended that my packages were about to spill, and appeared deeply distressed with keeping them in my arms. In this fashion I evaded having to acknowledge his service, and, in spite of adverse circumstances, salvaged a slender shred of personal pride.
How do Negroes feel about the way they have to live? How do they discuss it when alone among themselves? I think this question can be answered in a single sentence. A friend of mine who ran an elevator once told me:
“Lawd, man! Ef it wuzn’t fer them polices ‘n’ them of lynchmobs, there wouldn’t be nothin’ but uproar down here!”

Reading 9: Working Women in World War II

These are transcripts of interviews of six women who worked during world war II. The interviews were conducted and transcribed by students in the Honors English Program at South Kingstown High School in Rhode Island. [http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/]

Thesis Questions:

Examining the patterns of life during the Second World War, as described by these six women, what appears to be the most common experiences that they all (or most of them) had? From this, determine what life was probably like for at least some working women in World War II. How did the war effect their education? What were the working conditions? The living conditions? What effects did the War have on these women? [If you wish to add more advanced elements to your essay, you can discuss the likely class and educational differences between these women, and how this might have affected their perception of the war and their own war experiences.]

Background Information:

Millions of American women have always worked outside the home but never before in the numbers or with the same impact as they did in World War II.

During World War II, widespread male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force. The War Manpower Commission, a Federal Agency established to increase the manufacture of war materials, had the task of recruiting women into employment vital to the war effort. War-related industries also heavily recruited women workers. In movies, newspapers, posters, photographs, and articles, the campaign stressed the patriotic need for women to enter the work force—and they did, in huge numbers. Women were crucial to the war effort, although still not treated the same as men, either at work or (even more so) in the military.

Between 1940 and 1945, the female percentage of the U.S. workforce increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and by 1945 nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home. Therefore, while that is a large increase, it means that women working before the war was very common—most younger American women worked before the war. The true increase was a large jump in the number of married women working during World War II.

Men’s attitude towards women in the work force was one challenge to overcome but, surprisingly, some women’s own ideas about work outside the home had to change as well.

After the war, most women returned home, let go from their jobs. Their jobs, again, belonged to men. However, there were lasting effects. Women had proven that they could do the job and within a few decades, women in the workforce became a common sight. These women had saved much of their wages since there was little to buy during the war. In addition to their husbands’ incomes after the war, this helped serve as a down payment for a new home and helped launch the prosperity of the 1950s.

It should be noted that the interviews below give information on only six women. You can not assume that, because one or two of them had particular experiences, then all American women had such experiences. What you can assume is, that if one or two of these women had a certain experience, then it is likely that at least a large number of women also had a similar experience.

Likewise, you have to be aware that you cannot assume that “women,” meaning “all women,” acted or thought in the same way, or shared necessarily similar experiences. It is important not to exaggerate in this assignment. The use of words like “some women,” “many women,” “most women,” “a large number of women,” “likely a considerable number of women,” “at least some women,” should be used in most cases, in place of the generalized universal word “women,” which is some contexts means “all women.”

For example, one of the women below opposed the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. However, a poll of Americans at the time showed that ninety percent of Americans approved of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. A poll taken just a few years ago showed that eighty percent of Americans today approve of the use of the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II. Therefore, you can’t take the statement from this one women that she didn’t approve of the use of the atomic bomb, and then say that “Women disapproved of the use of the atomic bomb.” That would be grossly inaccurate.

In many of the above situations, just doing less than one minute of research on the internet will give you specific numbers or percentages, which are always preferable to vague statements like “many.” The exact and detailed the (relevant) information is, the better.

Text

Nancy Potter, “Life would never be the same again”

I had been 16 when I went into college and just 19 when I left. It was two years and eight months that I was at Tufts University. We squeezed four years into that time. There were no vacations. We had a day at Christmas and a day at Thanksgiving and that was about it. The idea was to get classes through so that they would be ready for the war.
I did work as a volunteer in a hospital in Boston to relieve civilian nurses. We were very convinced that everyone ought to be tremendously involved in the war effort. I enjoyed the hospital volunteering, but I found the experience absolutely terrifying. I had been sheltered, and I had not realized that there was as much pain and misery in the world. The hospitals were very short staffed and seemed to me that there was always too much to do. I think the responsibility was really too much for me at that age.
There were entertainment centers called “Buddies Clubs” or USO Clubs, which came a little later, and this meant that typically on a Saturday if you were a good patriotic young woman, you would go to a Buddies Club and you would serve doughnuts and coffee, and you would sit and talk with servicemen and sometimes servicewomen. There would be a tremendous opportunity to meet people from very different parts of the country. Servicemen were very lonely, very homesick, and they simply liked to sit and talk with someone. They would like to show photographs of their homes and their parents and their girlfriends and talk about all that.
[Interviewer asks]: What do you recall about the newsreels and how the war was portrayed?
The war was always portrayed as winnable, but important, popular and fought for a just reason. The newsreels were extremely manipulative. We were taught to be more than scornful of our enemies: the Germans and the Japanese. Our enemies were portrayed as dangerous, inhuman, uncivilized, unworthy of any sympathy. The Americans and allies were portrayed as radiant, good, decent, honorable and always fighting valiantly. It took me many years to see this manipulation. All of us went to the movies, partially to see these newsreels since there was no television and newsprint was quite censored, we had the belief that if we saw something there, that we would see it in a more intense dimension. Since we knew servicemen who were flying or were out on ships, we knew that the newsprint news was not accurate. We received letters from people which were censored and we knew that there was another side. We were all very greedy for the news.
I think all of our patterns of life, particularly our romances, our attitudes toward objects, our attitudes toward the future, our attitude toward education, all had to do with the war. I cannot imagine a day that I spent from the time I was 14 until I was 19, that I wasn’t aware of the war for a good part of the day, and it had an impact on everything that I chose to do. There was no point at which, except being asleep, that I wasn’t aware of the war because I had a great number of friends who died.
I had one college classmate whose fraternal twin died. After she got the message, we just simply sat through the entire night trying to think of things to say to her, and we couldn’t come up with anything very extraordinary.
I can also remember coming home from lunch one day into my dormitory room; my mother had sent me a letter, and out of it fell an obituary of a young man who died in Iwo Jima. The report of his death had happened a good two weeks before his family heard about it, three weeks before it was in the newspaper, and a month before I heard about it. It was absolutely terrifying. This was happening all the time. It did have a great impact on our lives.
I exchanged mail with several young men who had been in high school classes. Every time you went to a Buddies Club, there would be billboards with names of service men who needed to be written to. We were constantly writing letters. This was considered to be an absolutely essential activity to boost morale.
[Interviewer asks:] Did you feel that the war was for a good cause?
I never doubted that it was. We talked about the cause a great deal. We believed rather simply that the American involvement in the European theater was an attempt to free those parts of Europe that had been overrun by the Axis [Germany and its allies] forces that had annexed Austria, Poland, France and were busy trying to overrun Russia.
In the Pacific theater we were convinced that the Japanese were going to overrun the entire Pacific and land on the west coast and move over eastward. It takes a little propaganda to convince quick minds that this is true, and the propaganda was extraordinary.
I had actually read Mein Kampf [Adolf Hitler’s autobiography] and hated the sound of the book. I saw it as more than distressing. It was dangerous. I didn’t see how Nazism could be stopped except by the massive military effort.
My enthusiasm about the war began to pause when the [atomic] bomb was dropped. Our sense of the justice and the worth and the rectitude of the war were beginning to be challenged then. As the war went on, people grew tired. They got tired of sacrifice. They got tired of withholding their hopes and expectations of normal life, and they began to chafe a little at the restrictions. Rationing was no longer as much fun as it had been initially. Going without was much less fun. I have to confess, it was harder for me to get psyched up for the worth of the war. We wanted the war to get over and the decision to drop the bomb was a decision to shorten the war and to save a number of people who would have died otherwise. Yet, was it fair to kill perhaps 200,000 people to save the lives of 25, 30, 50,000 American soldiers?
I remember a great number of us sitting there crying because it had been a terrible experience of losing friends and having had this part of what we considered our youth used up by the war, but also because all these Japanese had died whom we’d never get to know. And that seemed very wrong — very wrong.
I think for girls and women, and perhaps boys and men, of my generation, the war forced them to grow up prematurely. It made them far more serious about the bare realities of life: life, death, values. It robbed them, in a sense, of some childhood. Perhaps it was a good thing. But it made us more critical of later generations who seemed to have a somewhat easier time.

Rachel Higgins, “A Pacifist in a Time of War”

I think that the war had a good effect on women in general. I only knew one woman personally who worked, and she was very proud of it. She was a society lady [wealthy], and she went into this factory and did all this mechanical work. When she came out she felt so good about what she’d done. Especially since she’d never done anything like that with her hands. I think the war did a lot for women’s morale, because for once they were needed in the factories and places like that. They could do just as well as a man when they got into it. I think women also gained more self-confidence during the war.
Eileen Hughes, “A teenage Volunteer, too Young to Join the WACS [women’s branch of the army]”

As we got involved in the war, I noticed that many of the movies I saw were geared towards the war, especially after Pearl Harbor. I liked the war movies because they always make it look like we were winning.
After graduating from high school, I went to work at the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point. There were many jobs up there. My mother was a school teacher, and I just walked right into [a job making] one-and-a-half [times the salary] of what she was making. It was incredible. It was because of the war, there were good jobs for us then. It’s an unfortunate thing, but the war brought prosperity.
Of course, then there was rationing. We were just beginning to get used to having a few things more when we got cut back. You couldn’t get sugar, and often we’d have the tickets to get the meat, but it wasn’t available. It was a hardship, but you learned to live with it. Some people found ways of getting around it, but we didn’t do that. We just lived with it.
World War II. I think that probably it gave me more opportunities to do more. It’s a terrible thing to say that a war does that, but I wonder if I would ever really have left Narragansett [Massachusetts] and done what I did, which was the best thing I ever did in my life.

Katherine O’Grady, “What did you do in the war, Grandma?”

[Soon after the war started, I] went to work in a woolen mill, Lister’s, which before the war was just a normal routine job. When the war started they need wool very badly [the soldiers needed woolen blankets] so this was considered a service job. In other words, it was important. I think I go $27 a week, so it did pay more [than the job I had before the war started].
At the mill the government used to send out all the Purple Heart soldiers to talk to us and tell us that we couldn’t take time off, and pushed all this patriotism on us. One particular day I had the day off and they went to my house. I wasn’t home. It would have been embarrassing to have soldier with a Purple Heart on asking why I wasn’t at work.
[Regarding food rations:] Beef was very short. People ate a lot of chicken, and if you could get fish, eggs. Spam was a basic commodity. Everybody ate it. I remember a place downtown that sold horse meat.
We would listen to the radio at night and they would tell you [what was happening in the war]. One particular Sunday night the Germans sunk the Wales and the Repulse which were British ships. It’s very profound to think this is actually happening somewhere in the world and you’re sitting safe in your house.
After the war things changed because women found out they could go out and they could survive. They could really do it on their own. That’s where I think women’s lib really started. So the whole world has changed.
Everybody’s more aware of everything. We were very sheltered up until 1941.
I think it made us more aware. It made me mature.

Josephine Carson, “War sparks a more active role for women”

[When the war started] it was a war in which we all felt that we should go in. It was a wonderful feeling. There was no question that we had to do this. We accepted it and we went ahead with it.
To help with the war effort I joined a group that rolled bandages. Beautiful tablecloths, sheets and even skirts were cut up and rolled into bandages. And we knitted a lot. My sister-in-law was single and so she went to USO’s. Most of the time at the USO’s what the girls did was to provide food, donuts and coffee, and would lend an ear so that the soldiers could talk, and then there were dances.
Gasoline, of course, was rationed. We either walked — we were used to walking — or we took buses. We just didn’t think anything of walking and besides it saved seven cents.
When we first worked there was not such thing, for instance, as a coffee break. And there was no such thing as leaving at five o’clock if there was still work to do. I stayed many a night until six o’clock or two o’clock on a Saturday because the work had to be done. You didn’t get paid for that. There was no such thing as overtime. We were very used to long hours. I was used to working two nights a week until ten o’clock and every other weekend. And if I didn’t work the full weekend, I would work Saturday one week and Sunday another week. So there was no such thing as a five day week.

[Interviewer asks: Was sexual harassment ever a problem at work?]

It certainly was. We had the head of circulation who bothered every single one of us. And when we went to the head of the library he just said that we were all imagining this — that we were just frustrated, hungry females and that it was our fault. We knew we wouldn’t get anywhere going to the head of the library, so we worked out a system in which we warned each other that this man was coming. For instance, when I went down to Biological Sciences, he would come down to see me. Well, one of the girls would pick up the phone and say so and so was coming down. Well that meant “Don’t get yourself stuck in the stacks somewhere” and I wouldn’t. I’d take the phone, and then I’d stay right there at the desk where he couldn’t do anything.
In college we were taught that we should be able to handle both a career and a family. We knew it would be difficult, but we thought we had the brains to work it out, the brains and the energy and the expertise. So I think this was rather a blow after the war ended. I think that women after the war did not want to go home. They wanted a career. They worked during the war outside their homes and then in many cases they were fired and they had to go back to the home because the boys were coming back. They wanted the jobs for the men. I think we were trying to work for economic fairness and social acceptance of women in the work force. And, of course, the women said, “We were okay during the war effort. We’re not now?”

Mildred Chatalian, “An Adventure Despite Hard Times”

Job situations were a dime a dozen [in other words, a lot of jobs] at this time because all the men had gone, and they were trying to get as many women as they could to replace the men in some of these jobs that required quite a bit of knowledge about machines. They were setting up trade schools where women were taught to read blueprints, charts, how to read a micrometer and how to operate a lathe and a drill press.
Then I worked at Habledoff in Providence where I made wire assemblies for what they called depth tanks. Then I worked on Liberty Ships down at Fields Point. I got 91 cents an hour. I went from 82 cents to 91 cents an hour, and that was in 1944.
[In the factories and other war-related jobs, the employees were] Women mostly and from all over — they were all in my situation. They were mostly wives of servicemen that were replacing the husbands in the work effort. All young; not many old ones. Here and there, of course, you had to hire some men to show you how to do your jobs.
On one job I wore bib overalls, and in the machine shops you had to wear what you call denim for aprons because it absorbed the oils and greases and you could wipe your hands on it and be sure it wouldn’t go through to soil your clothing. You also had these wipe rags which were a heavy cotton material. You could wear your own shoes, but you wore the oldest ones because the floors were mostly oily, and you didn’t want that getting on your good shoes.
Money was still scarce, although you had better earnings in those days than at the beginning of the war.

[Note: The following occurred in Germany, where went to live, because her husband, right after the war, worked for the US Occupation Authority in Germany. Therefore, the next paragraphs should not be used in your essay. I just included them because I thought that they were really interesting:]

In those days in Germany there was a lot of black marketing of food. One thing was that the Germans had very little to eat. One time when I first arrived, there was a knock at the door and there was this little girl. She had a cup and saucer in her hand. She asked if I would give her a crust of bread and she would give me the cup and saucer. I invited her inside and I made up a big sandwich. She just couldn’t thank me enough, but she wouldn’t eat it there and I wouldn’t take the cup and saucer. She took the sandwich home to share with her family because they had very little to eat.
My husband took me to a ballgame one time and a lot of the GI’s didn’t finish their bottles of coke and left a sizable portion in the bottle. The German children would go around and pick up these bottles and put the residue into a larger bottle and take it home. Their mothers would boil this down until it got to be quite thick. This they would use as a spread on bread.
I have many more amusing and interesting stories to tell…

Reading 10: Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile (1942)

Introduction:

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an intense wave of anti-Japanese prejudice swept the West Coast, where some 120,000 men and women of Japanese ancestry resided. White Americans questioned the loyalty of Japanese Americans, fearing that they would assist a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. Convinced of the legitimacy of such fears, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a military order authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans to interior relocation camps. The Supreme Court in 1943 upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese Internment. In the following passage, Yoshiko Uchida, then a resident of Berkeley, California, recalls the days leading up to the forced removal from her home. Uchida, born in the United States, was an American citizen. Her father had emigrated to the United States from Japan in 1917. Within days of Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested Uchida’s father and imprisoned him in a detention center in Montana.

Thesis Questions:

How does this account, from one person, reflect the experiences of thousands of Japanese Americans? What restrictions were placed on the author? On all Japanese Americans? What were the reasons for these restrictions? How did they violate basic American rights? How was this author, and Japanese Americans in general, attacked by whites after Pearl Harbor? What evidence can you provide to prove your answer?

Text:
We knew it was simply a matter of time before we would he notified to evacuate Berkeley as well. A five-mile travel limit and an 8:00 a.m. curfew had already been imposed on all Japanese Americans since March, and enemy aliens were required to register and obtain identification cards. Radios with short wave, cameras, binoculars, and firearms were designated as “contraband” and had to be turned in to the police. Obediently adhering to all regulations, we even brought our box cameras to the Berkeley police station where they remained for the duration of the war.
We were told by the military that “voluntary evacuation” to areas outside the West Coast restricted zone could be made before the final notice for each sector was issued.
The move was hardly “voluntary” as the Army labeled it, and most Japanese had neither the funds to leave nor a feasible destination. The three of us also considered leaving “voluntarily,” but like the others, we had no one to go to outside the restricted zone.
Some of our friends warned us to consider what life would be like for three women in a “government assembly center” and urged us to go anywhere in order to remain free. On the other hand, there were those who told us of the arrests, violence, and vigilantism encountered by some who had fled “voluntarily.” Either decision would have been easier had my father been with us, but without him both seemed fraught with uncertainties.
In Montana my father, too, was worried about our safety. He wrote us of an incident in Sacramento where men had gained entrance to a Japanese home by posing as FBI agents and then attacked the mother and daughter. “Please be very careful,” he urged. We decided, finally, to go to the government camp where we would be with friends and presumably safe from violence. We also hoped my father’s release might be facilitated if he could join us under government custody.
Each day we watched the papers for the evacuation orders covering the Berkeley area. On April 21, the headlines read: “Japs Given Evacuation Orders Here.” I felt numb as I read the front page story. “Moving swiftly, without any advance notice, the Western Defense Command today ordered Berkeley’s estimated 1,319 Japanese, aliens and citizens alike, evacuated to the Tanforan Assembly Center by noon, May 1.” (This gave us exactly ten days’ notice.) “Evacuees will report at the Civil Control station being set up in Pilgrim Hall of the First uungregational Church . . . between the hours of 1:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. next Saturday and Sunday.”
This was Exclusion Order Number Nineteen, which was to uproot us from our homes and send us nto the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, a hastily converted racetrack.
All Japanese were required to register before the departure date, and my sister, as head of the family, went to register for us. She came home with baggage and name tags that were to bear our family number and be attached to all our belongings. From that day on we became Family Number 13453.
Although we had been preparing for the evacuation orders, still when they were actually issued, it was a sickening shock.
“Ten days! We have only ten days to get ready!” my sister said frantically. Each day she rushed about, not only taking care of our business affairs, but, as our only driver, searching for old crates and cartons for packing, and taking my mother on various errands as well.
Mama still couldn’t seem to believe that we would have to leave. “How can we clear out in ten days a house we’ve lived in for fifteen years?” she asked sadly.
But my sister and I had no answers for her. Mama had always been a saver, and she had a tremendous accumulation of possessions. Her frugal upbringing had caused her to save string, wrapping paper, bags, jars, boxes, even bits of silk thread left over from sewing, which were tied end to end and rolled up into a silk ball. Tucked away in the corners of her desk and bureau drawers were such things as small stuffed animals, wooden toys, kokeshi dolls, marbles, and even a half-finished pair of socks she was knitting for a teddy bear’s paw. Many of these were “found objects” that the child in her couldn’t bear to discard, but they often proved useful in providing diversion for some fidgety visiting child. These were the simple things to dispose of.
More difficult were the boxes that contained old letters from her family and friends, our old report cards from the first grade on, dozens of albums of family photographs, notebooks and sketch pads full of our childish drawings, valentines and Christmas cards we had made for our parents, innumerable guest books filled with the signatures and friendly words of those who had once been entertained. These were the things my mother couldn’t bear to throw away. Because we didn’t own our house, we could leave nothing behind. We had to clear the house completely, and everything in it had either to be packed for storage or thrown out.
We surveyed with desperation the vast array of dishes, lacquerware, silverware, pots and pans, books, paintings, porcelain and pottery, furniture, linens, rugs, records, curtains, garden tools, cleaning equipment, and clothing that filled our house. We put up a sign in our window reading, “Living room sofa and chair for sale.” We sold things we should have kept and packed away foolish trifles we should have discarded. We sold our refrigerator, our dining room set, two sofas, an easy chair, and a brand new vacuum cleaner with attachments. Without a sensible scheme in our heads, and lacking the practical judgment of my father, the three of us packed frantically and sold recklessly. Although the young peop1e of our church did what they could to help us, we felt desperate as the deadline approached. Our only thought was to get the house emptied in time, for we knew the Army would not wait….
By now I had to leave the university, as did all the other Nisei students. We had stayed as long as we could to get credit for the spring semester, which was crucial for those of us who were seniors. My professors gave me a final grade on the basis of my midterm grades and the university granted all Nisei indefinite leaves of absence.
During the last few weeks on campus, my friends and I became sentimental and took pictures of each other at favorite campus sites. The war had jolted us into a crisis whose impact was too enormous for us to fully comprehend, and we needed these small remembrances of happier times to take with us as we went our separate ways to various government camps throughout California.
The Daily Californian published another letter from a Nisei student that read in part:
We are no longer to see the campus to which many of us have been so attached for the past four years…. It is hoped that others who are leaving will not cherish feelings of bitterness. True, we are being uprooted from the lives that we have always lived, but if the security of the nation rests upon our leaving, then we will gladly do our part. We have come through a period of hysteria, but we cannot blame the American public for the vituperations of a small but vociferous minority of self-seeking politicians and special interest groups. We cannot condemn democracy because a few have misused the mechanism of democracy to gain their own ends…. In the hard days ahead, we shall try to re-create the spirit which has made us so reluctant to leave now, and our wish to those who remain is that they maintain here the democratic ideals that have operated in the past. We hope to come back and find them here.
These were brave idealistic words, but I believe they reflected the feelings of most of us at that time….
The night before we left, our Swiss neighbors invited us to dinner. It was a fine feast served with our neighbors’ best linens, china, and silverware. With touching concern they did their best to make our last evening in Berkeley as pleasant as possible.
I sat on the piano bench that had been in our home until a few days before and thought of the times I had sat on it when we entertained our many guests. Now, because of the alarming succession ot events that even then seemed unreal, I had become a guest myself in our neighbors’ home.
When we returned to our dark empty house, ur Norwegian neighbors came to say goodbye. The two girls brought gifts for each of us and hugged us goodbye.
“Come back soon,” they said as they left.
But none of us knew when we would ever be back. We lay down on our mattresses and tried to sleep, knowing it was our last night in our house on Stuart Street.

From T.H. Breen, editor. The Power of Words: Documents in American History New York: Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 178-80.

Reading 11: Suburbs in the 1950s

This is a set of two documents that discuss suburban life in the 1950s. If you chose to write your term paper on this topic, you must use both documents in your paper.

Thesis Questions

1. What attractions do the new suburbs have for the people living in them, according to Henderson?
2. What generalizations does he make about the economic and social situation of these suburban residents?
3. What does he find most appealing about this form of suburban life?
4. What is the typical marital relationship like in the suburbs, according to these documents?
5. What are the gender roles of suburban families?
6. From these documents, what were these women’s primary concerns? What did they hope for themselves?
7. What were the problems faced by these married women with children? What was it that they did not enjoy? What did they want to have more of?
8. Are these two readings giving the same impression of suburban life in the 1950s, or different impressions? If different impressions, what might be reasons why?

Harry Henderson, “The Suburbs: The New American Dream,” Harper’s Magazine November, 1953.

Introduction:

Between 1945 and 1960, 40 million Americans migrated from the cities to the suburbs. Spurred by government programs designed to encourage home ownership, developers created whole new communities. Many developments, such as those by builder William Levitt, consisted of row upon row of nearly identical mass-produced homes. In the following viewpoint, journalist Harry Henderson examines the lives of people living in these “Levittowns” and other suburban areas. The article, first published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1953, offers a mixed but generally positive portrayal of American suburbia.

Text:

Since World War II, whole new towns and small cities, consisting of acres of near-identical Cape Cod and ranch-type houses, have been bulldozed into existence on the outskirts of America’s major cities. Begun as “veterans’ housing,” and still commonly called “projects,” these new communities differ radically from the older urban areas whose slow, cumulative growth depended on rivers and railroads, raw materials or markets, industries and available labor. They also differ from the older suburbs which were built around existing villages. These new communities are of necessity built on open farmland—to house people quickly, cheaply, and profitably. They reflect not only the increased number of young American families, but an enormous expansion of the middle class via the easy credit extended to veterans.
The best known of these communities, Levittown, Long Island [New York], is also the largest; its population is now estimated at 70,000. Lakewood, near Long Beach in the Los Angeles area, is a close second. Park Forest, some thirty miles south of Chicago—which has significant qualitative differences from the others, in that its social character was as conscientiously planned as its physical layout—now has 20,000 people and will have 30,000 when completed. No one knows exactly how many of these postwar communities exist in all. The Federal Home and Housing Authority, which insured mortgages for nearly all the houses, has no records in terms of communities or even large developments. However, one can safely assume that their combined population totals several million people.
These communities have none of the long-festering social problems of older towns, such as slums, crowded streets, vacant lots that are both neighborhood dumps and playgrounds, or sagging, neon-fronted business districts that sprawl in all directions. Instead everything is new. Dangerous traffic intersections are almost unknown. Grassy play areas abound. Shops are centrally located and under one roof, at least theoretically, with adjacent off-street parking.
Socially, these communities have neither history, tradition, nor established structure—no inherited customs, institutions, “socially important” families, or “big houses.” Everybody lives in a “good neighborhood”; there is, to use that classic American euphemism, no “wrong side of the tracks.” Outwardly, there are neither rich nor poor, and initially there were no older people, teen-agers, in-laws, family doctors, “big shots,” churches, organizations, schools, or local governments. Since the builder required a large cheap site, the mass-produced suburbs are usually located at the extreme edge of the commuting radius. This means they are economically dependent on the big city, without local industry to provide employment and share tax burdens.
Studying the Suburbs
Three years ago I began a series of extensive visits to these new communities to learn what effect this kind of housing and social organization has on people. I was particularly interested in what customs developed, what groups became important, what attitudes and ways of handling problems were created. I wanted to know, for instance, how people made friends, how you became a “big shot,” and how life in these towns differed from that of our older towns.
The notes below are an attempt to describe what I found out, a reporter’s report on a new generation’s version of the “American way.” They are based on interviews and my own observations in six such communities, including Levittown and Park Forest. While each community is different, certain common patterns exist, although their strength varies in accordance with two factors: screening and size.
Screening—or the selection of people by fixed criteria—obviously affects the economic, social, and cultural life. Where screening is based on something more than the ability to make a down payment, the population tends to become a narrow, specialized, upper stratum of the middle class. Size affects the community in another way. The construction of fifty or a hundred new homes on a common plot immediately beside a suburb of 5,000 merely results in their becoming part of that community, adopting its social structure. But when the number of new homes is many times larger than the old, both problems, and new ways of living emerge with greater force. (However, even in small projects some new patterns are present.)
These notes are, of course, subjective and as such liable to personal distortion. Valid statistical data— because of the short time people stay put in these towns, plus a host of other factors—are simply beyond the reach of one man. But, for whatever they are worth, here they are.
Companionship
At first glance, regardless of variations in trim, color, and position of the houses, they seem monotonous; nothing rises above two stories, there are no full-grown trees, and the horizon is an endless picket fence of telephone poles and television aerials. (The mass builder seeks flat land because it cuts his construction costs.)
However one may feel about it aesthetically, this puts the emphasis on people and their activities. One rarely hears complaints about the identical character of the houses. “You don’t feel it when you live here,” most people say. One mother, a Midwestern college graduate with two children, told me: “We’re not peas in a pod. I thought it would be like that, especially because incomes are nearly the same. But it’s amazing how different and varied people are, likes and dislikes, attitude and wants. I never really knew what people were like until I came here.”
Since no one can acquire prestige through an imposing house, or inherited position, activity—the participation in community or group affairs—becomes the basis of prestige. In addition, it is the quickest way to meet people and make friends. In communities of strangers, where everybody realizes his need for companionship, the first year is apt to witness almost frantic participation in all lands of activities. Later, as friends are made, this tapers off somewhat.
The standardized house also creates an emphasis on interior decorating. Most people try hard to achieve “something different.” In hundreds of houses I never saw two interiors that matched—and I saw my first tiger-striped wallpaper. (The only item that is endlessly repeated is a brass skillet hung on a red brick wall.) Yet two styles predominate: Early American and Modem. What is rarely seen, except in homes of older-than-average people, is a family heirloom.
Taste levels are high. My interviews with wives revealed that their models and ideas came primarily from pictures of rooms in national magazines. Nobody copies an entire room, but they take different items from different pictures. At first most women said, “Well, moving into a new house, you want everything new.” Later some altered this explanation, saying, “Nearly everybody is new. … I mean, they are newly married and new to the community. They don’t feel too certain about things, especially moving into a place where everyone is a stranger. If you’ve seen something in a magazine—well, people will nearly always like it.” So many times were remarks of this character repeated that I concluded that what many sought in their furniture was a kind of “approval insurance.”
Asked whom they missed most, women usually replied, “My mother.” Men’s answers were scattered, apt to be old friends, neighbors, relatives. Many women said; “I wish there was some place close by to walk to, like the candy store in the city. Just some place to take the kids to buy a cone or newspaper in the afternoon. It helps break up the monotony of the day.” They considered the centrally located shopping centers too distant for such outings.
Because these communities were built from scratch, they afforded a degree of planning impossible in our older cities, and—depending on the builder’s foresight and awareness of social problems—advantage was taken of this. Planners solved complex problems in traffic flow, space arrangement, play areas, heating problems, site locations to provide sunlight, and kitchen traffic. But nobody thought about dogs.
Initially, city-bred women, accustomed to the constant sights and sounds of other people, suffer greatly from loneliness, especially if their children are as yet unborn. One woman expressed it this way: “Your husband gets up and goes off in the morning—and you’re left with the day to spend. The housework is a matter of minutes. I used to think that I had been brought to the end of the earth and deserted.” Another said, “I used to sit by the window … just wishing someone would go by.”
Domestic Life
This leaves the woman alone all day to cope with the needs of the children, her housekeeping, and shopping. (Servants, needless to say, are unknown.) When the husband returns, he is generally tired, both from his work and his traveling. (Three hours a day is not uncommon; perhaps the most widespread dream of the men is a job nearer to the community, and they often make earnest efforts to find it.) Often by the time the husband returns the children are ready for bed. The husband helps put them to bed; as they grow older, they are allowed to stay up later. Then he and his wife eat their supper and wash the dishes. By 10:00 P.M. most lights are out.
For the women this is a long, monotonous daily proposition. Generally the men, once home, do not want to leave. They want to “relax” or “improve the property”—putter around the lawn or shrubbery. However, the women want a “change.” Thus, groups of women often go to the movies together.
Usually both husband and wife are involved in some group activity and have meetings to go to. A frequent complaint is: “We never get time to see each other”; or, “We merely pass coming and going.” On the one occasion when I was refused an interview, the husband said, “Gee, I’d like to help, but I so seldom get a chance to see my wife for a whole evening…. I’d rather not have the interruption.”
Many couples credit television, which simultaneously eased baby-sitting, entertainment, and financial problems, with having brought them closer. Their favorites are comedy shows, especially those about young couples, such as I Love Lucy. Though often contemptuous of many programs, they speak of TV gratefully as “something we can share,” as “bringing the romance back.” Some even credit it with having “saved our marriage.” One wife said: “Until we got that TV set, I thought my husband had forgotten how to neck.”
These are the first towns in America where the impact of TV is so concentrated that it literally affects everyone’s life. Organizations dare not hold meetings at hours when popular shows are on. In addition, it tends to bind people together, giving the whole community a common experience.
The Coffee Klatsch is an institution everywhere. A kind of floating, day-long talkfest, shifting from house to house, it has developed among young women to help fill their need for adult conversation and companionship. The conversation is strictly chitchat. One woman described is as “Just small talk . . . about what’s new . . . about whose kid is sick … and then about who is apt to get sick.” Yet many women complain there is “too much talk,” and some are very critical of the gregariousness.

“Young Mother,” Ladies Home Journal (1956)

Introduction:

In the 1956 the Ladies Home Journal, a popular middle-class magazine, convened a roundtable discussion to address the “plight of the young mother.” To bring national attention to a system requiring women to work shockingly long hours each week with no help, the Journal invited four “typical” mothers-middle-class residents of single-family houses-to describe their experiences as homemakers in suburbia. In the following excerpt, Mrs. Gould and Miss Hickey are members of the Journal’s editorial staff, Dr. Montagu is another participant, and Mrs. Petry, Mrs. Townsend, Mrs. Erhardt, and Mrs. McKenzie are the guest mothers. Observing conventions of the day, the Journal did not list the mothers’ first names, identifying guests only by their married names.

Text:

Mrs. Gould: As editors and parents we are extremely interested in this whole problem. The welfare of our society depends upon the type of children you young mothers and others like you are able to bring up. Anything that affects the welfare of young families is most crucial, and I do feel that the young mother, any young mother in our day, should get far more general recognition and attention than she does-not so much for her own sake as for society as a whole, or just out of sheer common sense.
Miss Hickey: And understanding. I think there is a lack of understanding, too. Since it would take all day to tell what a busy woman does all day … how about your high points?
Mrs. Petry: I would say in the morning-breakfast and wash time. I put the breakfast out, leave the children to eat it and run into the bathroom-that is where the washer is-and fill it up. I come back into the kitchen and shove a little in the baby’s mouth and try to keep the others eating. Then I go back in the bathroom and put the clothes in the wringer and start the rinse water. That is about the end of the half-hour there. I continue then to finish the wash, and either put them out or let them see one program they like on television, and then I go out and hang the wash up.
Miss Hickey: You put that outside? Mrs. Petry: Yes. Then I eat.
Mrs. Gould: Can you sit down and eat in peace? Are the children outdoors at that time or watching television.
Mrs. Petry: They are supposed to be outside, but they are usually running in and out. Somebody forgot something he should have eaten, or wants more milk, or a toy or something. Finally I lock the screen door. I always read something while I’m eating-two meals a day I read. When my husband isn’t there, and if I am alone, or maybe just one child at the table, I read something quick. But I time it. I take no more than half an hour for eating and reading.
Miss Hickey: You work on schedule quite a bit. Why do you do that?
Mrs. Petry: Because I am very forgetful. I have an orange crayon and I write “defrost” on the refrigerator every now and then, or I forget to defrost it. If I think of something while I am washing, I write it on the mirror with an eyebrow pencil. It must sound silly, but that is the only way I can remember everything I have to do….
Miss Hickey: Mrs. Ehrhardt, your quietest half hour?
Mrs. Ehrhardt: I would say … that when I go out to take the wash in. There is something about getting outdoors-and I don’t get out too often, except to hang out the wash and to bring it in. I really enjoy doing it. If it is a nice day, I stand outside and fold it outdoors. I think that is my quietest hour.
Miss Hickey: How often do you and your husband go out together in the evening?
Mrs. Ehrhardt: Not often. An occasional movie, which might be every couple of months or so, on an anniversary. This year is the first year we celebrated on the day we were married. We were married in June. We always celebrated it, but it might be in July or August.
It depends on our babysitter. If you cannot get anyone, you just cannot go out. I am not living near my family and I won’t leave the children with teenagers. I would be afraid it might be a little hectic, and a young girl might not know what to do. So we don’t get out very often….
Miss Hickey: Let us hear about Mrs. Petry’s recreation.
Mrs. Petry: Oh, I went to work in a department store that opened in Levittown. I begged and begged my husband to let me work, and finally he said I could go once or twice a week. I lasted for three weeks, or should I say he lasted for three weeks.
Mrs. Gould: You mean you worked in the daytime?
Mrs. Petry: Three evenings, from six until nine, and on Saturday.
Mrs. Gould: And your husband took care of the children during that time?
Mrs. Petry: Yes, but the third week, he couldn’t stand it anymore, Saturday and all. In fact, I think he had to work that Saturday, so I asked if I could just come in to the store during the week. My husband was hoping they would fire me, but they didn’t. But I could see that it wasn’t really fair to him, because I was going out for my own pleasure.
Mrs. Gould: In other words, your working was your recreation.
Mrs. Petry: Yes, and I enjoyed it very much.
Miss Hickey: Why did you feel you wanted to do this?
Mrs. Petry: To see some people and talk to people, just to see what is going on in the world….
Miss Hickey: How about your shopping experiences?
Mrs. McKenzie: Well, I don’t go in the evening, because I cannot depend on Ed being home; and when he is there, he likes to have me there too. I don’t know. Usually all three of the children go shopping with me. At one time I carried two and dragged the other one along behind me in the cart with the groceries. It is fun to take them all. Once a man stopped me and said, “Lady, did you know your son is eating hamburger?” He had eaten a half pound of raw hamburger. When corn on the cob was so expensive, my oldest one begged me to buy corn on the cob, so I splurged and bought three ears for thirty-nine cents. When I got to the check-out counter, I discovered he had eaten all three, so he had to pay for the cobs.
Miss Hickey: You go once a week?
Mrs. McKenzie: Once a week or every ten days now, depending on how often I have the use of the car. That day we usually go to the park, too….
Miss Hickey: Tell us about your most recent crisis.
Mrs. McKenzie: I had given a birthday party for fifteen children in my little living room, which is seven by eleven. The next morning my son, whose birthday it had been, broke out with the measles, so I had exposed fifteen children to measles, and I was the most unpopular mother in the neighborhood.
He was quite sick, and it snowed that day. Ed took Lucy sleigh riding. Both of them fell off the sled and she broke both the bones in her arm.
Mrs. Gould: Did she then get the measles?
Mrs. McKenzie: She did, and so did the baby…. My main problem was being in quarantine for a month. During this time that all three had measles and Lucy had broken her arm, we got a notice from the school that her tuberculin test was positive and that meant that one of the adults living in our home had active tuberculosis. It horrified me. I kept thinking, “Here I sit killing my three children with tuberculosis.” But we had to wait until they were over their contagion period before we could all go in and get x-rayed.
Miss Hickey: And the test was not correct?
Mrs. McKenzie: She had had childhood tuberculosis, but it was well healed and she was all right. About eight of ten have had childhood tuberculosis and no one knows it.
Mrs. Gould: It is quite common, but it is frightening when it occurs to you. Were your children quite sick with measles?
Mrs. McKenzie: Terribly ill.
Mrs. Gould: They had high temperatures?
Mrs. McKenzie: My children are a great deal like my father. Anything they do, they do to extreme. They are violently ill, or they are as robust as can be. There is no in-between….
Dr. Montagu: There is one very large question I would like to ask. What in your lives, as they are at present, would you most like to see changed or modified?
Mrs. Ehrhardt: Well, I would like to be sure my husband’s position would not require him to be transferred so often. I would like to stay in place long enough to take a few roots in the community. It would also be nice to have someone help with the housework, but I don’t think 1 would like to have anyone live in. The houses nowadays are too small. I think you would bump into each other. Of course, I have never had any one in, so I cannot honestly give an opinion.
Mrs. Townsend: At the present time, I don’t think there is anything that I would like to change in the household. We happen to be very close, and we are all very happy. I will admit that there are times when I am a little overtired, and I might be a little more than annoyed with the children, but actually it doesn’t last too long. We do have a problem where we live now. There aren’t any younger children for my children to play with. Therefore, they are underneath my heels just constantly, and I am not able to take the older children out the way would like to, because of the two babies.
Miss Hickey: You have been in how many communities?
Mrs. Townsend: I have lived in Louisiana, California, New York, and for a short period in Columbia, South Carolina….
Miss Hickey: Mrs. Petry, what would you change?
Mrs. Petry: I would like more time to enjoy my children. I do take time, but if I do take as much time as I like, the work piles up. When I go back to work I feel crabby, and I don’t know whether I’m mad at the children, or mad at the work or just mad at everybody sometimes.
I would also like to have a little more rest and a little more time to spend in relaxation with my husband. We never get to go out together, and the only time we have much of a conversation is just before we go to bed. And I would like to have a girl come and do my ironing.
I am happy there where we live because this is the first time we have stayed anywhere for any length of time. It will be two years in August, and it is the first home we have really had. That is why my husband left the Navy. I nearly had a nervous collapse, because it seemed I couldn’t stand another minute not having him home and helping, or not helping, but just being there.
Reading 13: John Lewis August 1963 Speech at March on Washington: The Two Versions

Introduction:

In August 1963, John Lewis was the Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was the most important civil rights committee for college students. Lewis was asked to speak at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.  The speech was accidently leaked to the press, and published. When they read it, A. Philip Randolph [the first modern civil rights leader, in the 1930s], Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders saw the draft of his speech, they insisted that he change many points in it. Lewis and SNCC fought over this issue with King and Randolph, but at the last minute he changed it along the lines they wanted.

The first version of the speech is the one Lewis wanted to give. The second version is the one he actually gave at the March. I want you to compare the two, and see how, and why the speech was changed.

Thesis Questions:

1. Which version of this speech is more radical and aggressive? Explain, using examples from each version to show how it changed.

Hint: How old was John Lewis, Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph, when Lewis gave this speech? What were the generational differences between Lewis on one hand, and King and Randolph, on the other? How does age, and generational differences, often affect people’s political ideas? You can mention the affect that generational difference may have had, in King and Randolph wanting certain changes in the speech, and why they wanted those changes.

2. What does the second version emphasize that the first does not? Why do you think that King, Randolph, and the others wanted these changes? What did they want to encourage? What did they want to discourage?

3. Based on the differences in the two versions, what did King and Randolph wish to emphasize at the March on Washington?

4. What political leader is clearly rejected in the first version of the speech, but praised in the second? Why?

5. Why do you think King and Randolph wanted the remarks about Sherman’s March through Dixie taken out?

6. Explain the political context of the speech: how do the following people, ideas, and events (a-c) fit into the speech? In other words, why does Lewis mention these people, these ideas, these events? What points is he trying to make by mentioning these? Why were they important in 1963, why would his audience immediately know who or what he is talking about?
a. Eastland, Javits, Goldwater, Bamett, and Thurmond? Why were they mentioned in this speech?
b. What was a “Dixiecrat”?
c. What does he mean when he says, “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE” is the African cry.”? What was going on historically that he was referring to? What was happening in Africa in the early 1960s that had to deal with voting? He is NOT talking about African Americans, because he says next “It is ours, too.” That means he is differentiating between the two groups.
d.
Do not discuss the specific civil rights violations in both versions of the speech. That is not what we are analyzing here.

First Version

We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all.
In good conscience, we cannot support wholeheartedly the administration’s civil rights bill, for it is too little and too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality.
This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations: This bill will not protect the citizens in Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped up charges. What about the three young men in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?
The voting section of this bill will not help thousands of black citizens who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia, who are qualified to vote but lack a sixth-grade education. “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE” is the African cry. It is ours, too. It must be ours.
People have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to register to vote. What is there in this bill to ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?
For the first time in one hundred years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action.
We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles?” The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party?
In some parts of the South we work in the fields from sunup to sundown for $12 a week. In Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted not by Dixiecrats but by the federal government for peaceful protest. But what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat attorney C. B. King and left him half dead? What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?
It seems to me that the Albany indictment is part of a conspiracy on the part of the federal government and local politicians in the interest of expediency.
I want to know, which side is the federal government on?
The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery. The nonviolent revolution is saying, “We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.”
To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that “patience” is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now. We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence.
We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about. In the struggle, we must seek more than civil rights; we must work for the community of love, peace and true brotherhood. Our minds, souls and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all people.
The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts. Listen, Mr. Kennedy. Listen, Mr. Congressman. Listen, fellow citizens. The black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a “cooling-off” period.
All of us must get in the revolution. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and every hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution is complete. In the Delta of Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in Alabama, Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation, the black masses are on the march!

We won’t stop now. All of the forces of Eastland, Bamett, Wallace and Thurmond won’t stop this revolution. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, WAKE UP AMERICA!

Second Version

We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here, for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars per day, 12 hours a day. While we stand here, there are students in jail on trumped-up charges. Our brother James Farmer, along with many others, is also in jail.
We come here today with a great sense of misgiving. It is true that we support the administration’s Civil Rights Bill. We support it with great reservation, however. Unless title three [Prohibited state and municipal governments from denying access to public facilities on grounds of race, color, religion or national origin.] is put in this bill, there’s nothing to protect the young children and old women who must face police dogs and fire hoses in the South while they engage in peaceful demonstration.
In its present form this bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear of a police state. It will not protect the hundreds and thousands of people that have been arrested on trumped up charges. What about the three young men, SNCC field secretaries in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?
As it stands now, the voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of people who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia who are unqualified to vote for lack of sixth grade education. One man, one vote is the African cry. It is ours too. It must be ours.
We must have legislation that will protect the Mississippi sharecroppers, who have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to register to vote. We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in the home of a family whose total income is 100,000 dollars a year. We must have a good FEPC bill.
My friends let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, politicians who build their career on immoral compromise and allow themselves an open forum of political, economic and social exploitation dominate American politics.
There are exceptions, of course. We salute those. But what political leader can stand up and say, “My party is a party of principles”? For the party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham? Where is the political party that will protect the citizens of Albany, Georgia?
Do you know that in Albany, Georgia nine of our leaders have been indicted, not by the Dixiecrats but by the federal government for peaceful protest? But what did the federal government do when Albany deputy sheriff beat Attorney C.B. King and left him half-dead?
What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King and she lost her baby?
To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually but we want to be free now.
We are tired. We are tired of being beat by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you holler “Be patient.” How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now.
We do not want to go to jail, but we will go to jail if this is the price we must pay for love, brotherhood and true peace. I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until a revolution is complete. We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution. In the Delta of Mississippi, in Southwest Georgia, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation the black masses are on a march for jobs and freedom.
They’re talking about slow down and stop. We will not stop. All of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, and Thurmond will not stop this revolution. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our march into Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.
By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall send a desegregated South into a thousand pieces, put them together in the image of God and Democracy. We must say wake up America, wake up! For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.

Reading 13: Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964)

Introduction:

Malcolm X, a black nationalist and Muslim convert based in New York City’s Harlem, challenged King’s commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience. He spoke for many northern urban blacks frustrated with inner-city poverty and the slow, cautious pace with which white politicians pursued civil rights. On April 3, 1964, Malcolm X delivered the following address before a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) symposium entitled “The Negro Revolt-What Comes Next?” held at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio.

Thesis questions:

1. Why did Malcolm X accuse the government of not caring about Civil Rights when Kennedy and Johnson by 1963 were clearly committed to a civil rights agenda? What arguments does Malcolm X make in favor of violent action to reclaim African American rights? What aspects of Malcolm X’s speech frightened many white people at that time? How did African Americans react to this speech? How did it affect the Civil Rights Movement? Is the speech looked on positively by “mainstream” society today? Provide evidence for your answers.

Text:

So, what I’m trying to impress upon you, in essence, is this: You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we’re faced with a government conspiracy. Everyone who’s filibustering is a senator-that’s the government. Everyone who’s finagling in Washington, D.C., is a congressman-that’s the government. You don’t have anybody putting blocks in your path but people who are a part of the government. The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education. You don’t need to go to the employer alone, it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country. And you should drop it in their lap. This government has failed the Negro. This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro.
So, where do we go from here? First, we need some friends. We need some new allies. The entire civil-rights struggle needs a new interpretation, a broader interpretation. We need to look at this civil-rights thing from another angle-from the inside as well as from the outside. To those of us whose philosophy is black nationalism, the only way you can get involved in the civil-rights struggle is give it a new interpretation. That old interpretation excluded us. It kept us out. So, we’re giving a new interpretation to the civil-rights struggle, an interpretation that will enable us to come into it, take part in it. And these handkerchief heads who have been dillydallying and pussyfooting and compromising-we don’t intend to let them pussyfoot and dillydally and compromise any longer.
How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what’s already yours? You haven’t even made progress, if what’s being given to you, you should have had already. That’s not progress. And I love my Brother Lomax [Louis Lomax of CORE], the way he pointed out we’re right back where we were in 1954. We’re not even as far up as we were in 1954. We’re behind where we were in 1954. There’s more segregation now than there was in 1954. There’s more racial animosity, more racial hatred, more racial violence today in 1964, than there was in 1954. Where is the progress?
And now you’re facing a situation where the young Negro’s coming up. They don’t want to hear that “turn-the-other-cheek” stuff, no. In Jacksonville, those were teenagers, they were throwing Molotov cocktails. Negroes have never done that before. But it shows you there’s a new deal coming in. There’s new thinking coming in. There’s new strategy coming in. It’ll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets. It’ll be liberty, or it will be death. The only difference about this kind of death-it’ll be reciprocal. You know what is meant by “reciprocal”? That’s one of Brother Lomax’s words, I stole it from him. 1 don’t usually deal with those big words because I don’t usually deal with big people. I deal with small people. I find you can get a whole lot of small people and whip hell out of a whole lot of big people. They haven’t got anything to lose, and they’ve got everything to gain. And they’ll let you know in a minute: “It takes two to tango; when I go, you go.”
The black nationalists, those whose philosophy is black nationalism, in bringing about this new interpretation of the entire meaning of civil rights, look upon it as meaning, as Brother Lomax has pointed out, equality of opportunity. Well, we’re justified in seeking civil rights, if it means equality of opportunity, because all we’re doing there is trying to collect for our investment. Our mothers and fathers invested sweat and blood. Three hundred and ten years we worked in this country without a dime in return-I mean without a dime in return. You let the white man walk around here talking about how rich this country is, but you never stop to think how it got rich so quick. It got rich because you made it rich.
You take the people who are in this audience right now. They’re poor, we’re all poor as individuals. Our weekly salary individually amounts to hardly anything. But if you take the salary of everyone in here collectively it’ll fill up a whole lot of baskets. It’s a lot of wealth. If you can collect the wages of just these people right here for a year, you’ll be rich-richer than rich. When you look at it like that, think how rich Uncle Sam had to become, not with this handful, but millions of black people. Your and my mother and father, who didn’t work an eight-hour shift, but worked from “can’t see” in the morning until “can’t see” at night, and worked for nothing, making the white man rich, making Uncle Sam rich.
This is our investment. This is our contribution-our blood. Not only did we give of our free labor, we gave of our blood. Every time he had a call to arms, we were the first ones in uniform. We died on every battlefield the white man had. We have made a greater sacrifice than anybody who’s standing up in America today. We have made a greater contribution and have collected less. Civil rights, for those of us whose philosophy is black nationalism, means: “Give it to us now. Don’t wait for next year. Give it to us yesterday, and that’s not fast enough.”. . .
If you don’t take this kind of stand, your little children will grow up and look at you and think “shame.” If you don’t take an uncompromising stand-I don’t mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you’ve made me go insane, and I’m not responsible for what I do. And that’s the way every Negro should get. Any time you know you’re within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don’t die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander….
If a Negro in 1964 has to sit around and wait for some cracker senator to filibuster when it comes to the rights of black people, why, you and I should hang our heads in shame. You talk about a march on Washington in 1963, you haven’t seen anything. There’s some more going down in ’64. And this time they’re not going like they went last year. They’re not going singing “We Shall Overcome.” They’re not going with white friends. They’re not going with placards already painted for them. They’re not going with round-trip tickets. They’re going with one-way tickets.
And if they don’t want that nonviolent army going down there, tell them to bring the filibuster to a halt. The black nationalists aren’t going to wait. Lyndon B. Johnson is the head of the Democratic Party. If he’s for civil rights, let him go into the Senate next week and declare himself. Let him go in their right now and declare himself. Let him go in there and denounce the Southern branch of his party. Let him go in there right now and take a moral stand-right now, not later. Tell him, don’t wait until election time. If he waits too long, brothers and sisters, he will be responsible for letting a condition develop in this country which will create a climate that will bring seeds up out of the ground with vegetation on the end of them looking like something these people never dreamed of. In 1964, it’s the ballot or the bullet. Thank you.

From T.H. Breen, editor. The Power of Words: Documents in American History New York: Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 219-220.

Reading 14: Report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders Summary of Report [Kerner Commission Report]

Introduction:

This report, by the National Advisory Commission On Civil Disorders, was written in 1967 at the request of President Lyndon Johnson. The shortened form of the commission’s title, “The Kerner Commission,” derives from the name of the chairman of the Commission, Otto Kerner. The commission was tasked with answering the following questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? The Commission’s report was released after seven months of investigation, on February 29, 1968. The report became an instant bestseller, and over two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. It found that the riots resulted from black frustration at lack of economic opportunity. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” [Text from “Kerner Commission,” Wikipedia]

Thesis Question:

1. According to the Kerner Commission Report, what were the causes of these riots?
2. What were the solutions the Commission offered to end rioting and African American anger?

[NOTE: In your paper, do not use the word “negro,” unless you are directly quoting a sentence with it. That was a common word for “black” before about 1970 [the Civil Rights Movement].
We do not use that word today. Remember, you are supposed to use your own words to explain these texts and answer these thesis questions, and your own words means twenty-first century vocabulary. This will be true for all of your classes at UHD.]

Text:

Introduction to the Report

The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation.
The worst came during a two-week period in July, first in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities.
On July 28, 1967, the President of the United States established this Commission and directed us to answer three basic questions:
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What can be done to prevent it from happening again?
To respond to these questions, we have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many witnesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country. .
This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal.
Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.
This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.
To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.
The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society.
This alternative will require a commitment to national action–compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth.
From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.
The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted.
Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The community cannot–it will not–tolerate coercion and mob rule.
Violence and destruction must be ended–in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people.
Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.
What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget–is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens-urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname [Hispanic], American Indian, and every minority group.
Our recommendations embrace three basic principles:
To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems:
To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;
To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.
These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation’s conscience.
We issue this Report now, four months before the date called for by the President. Much remains that can be learned. Continued study is essential.
As Commissioners we have worked together with a sense of the greatest urgency and have sought to compose whatever differences exist among us. Some differences remain. But the gravity of the problem and the pressing need for action are too clear to allow further delay in the issuance of this Report.

PART I–WHAT HAPPENED?

Chapter I–Profiles of Disorder

The report contains profiles of a selection of the disorders that took place during the summer of 1967. These profiles are designed to indicate how the disorders happened, who participated in them, and how local officials, police forces, and the National Guard responded. Illustrative excerpts follow:
NEWARK . . .
It was decided to attempt to channel the energies of the people into a nonviolent protest. While Lofton promised the crowd that a full investigation would be made of the Smith incident, the other Negro leaders began urging those on the scene to form a line of march toward the city hall.
Some persons joined the line of march. Others milled about in the narrow street. From the dark grounds of the housing project came a barrage of rocks. Some of them fell among the crowd. Others hit persons in the line of march. Many smashed the windows of the police station. The rock throwing, it was believed, was the work of youngsters; approximately 2,500 children lived in the housing project.
Almost at the same time, an old car was set afire in a parking lot. The line of march began to disintegrate. The police, their heads protected by World War I-type helmets, sallied forth to disperse the crowd. A fire engine, arriving on the scene, was pelted with rocks. As police drove people away from the station, they scattered in all directions.
A few minutes later a nearby liquor store was broken into. Some persons, seeing a caravan of cabs appear at city hall to protest Smith’s arrest, interpreted this as evidence that the disturbance had been organized, and generated rumors to that effect. However, only a few stores were looted. Within a short period of time, the disorder appeared to have run its course.
. . .
On Saturday, July 15, [Director of Police Dominick] Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.
Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.
The Director of Police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his orders were to keep everyone away from windows.
Spina said he told the soldier: “Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street and every state policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper.”
A short time later more “gunshots” were heard. Investigating, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew “where the firing is coming from?” the man said:
“That’s no firing. That’s fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs.”
By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere looking for a sniper. The Director of Police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsman.
Nevertheless, at six o’clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed were snipers. . . .
DETROIT . . .
A spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold. To riot and destroy appeared more and more to become ends in themselves. Late Sunday afternoon it appeared to one observer that the young people were “dancing amidst the flames.”
A Negro plainclothes officer was standing at an intersection when a man threw a Molotov cocktail into a business establishment at the corner… In the heat of the afternoon, fanned by the 20 to 25 m.p.h. winds of both Sunday and Monday, the fire reached the home next door within minutes. As residents uselessly sprayed the flames with garden hoses, the fire jumped from roof to roof of adjacent two- and three-story buildings. Within the hour the entire block was in flames. The ninth house in the burning row belonged to the arsonist who had thrown the Molotov cocktail. . . .
* *
. . . Employed as a private guard, 55-year-old Julius L. Dorsey, a Negro, was standing in front of a market when accosted by two Negro men and a woman. They demanded he permit them to loot the market. He ignored their demands. They began to berate him. He asked a neighbor to call the police. As the argument grew more heated, Dorsey fired three shots from his pistol into the air.
The police radio reported: “Looters, they have rifles.” A patrol car driven by a police officer and carrying three National Guardsmen arrived. As the looters fled, the law enforcement personnel opened fire. When the firing ceased, one person lay dead.
He was Julius L. Dorsey. . .
* *
. . . As the riot alternately waxed and waned, one area of the ghetto remained insulated. On the northeast side the residents of some 150 square blocks inhabited by 21,000 persons had, in 1966, banded together in the Positive Neighborhood Action Committee (PNAC). With professional help from the Institute of Urban Dynamics, they had organized block clubs and made plans for the improvement of the neighborhood. . . .
When the riot broke out, the residents, through the block clubs, were able to organize quickly. Youngsters, agreeing to stay in the neighborhood, participated in detouring traffic. While many persons reportedly sympathized with the idea of a rebellion against the “system,” only two small fires were set–one in an empty building.
* *
. . . According to Lt. Gen. Throckmorton and Col. Bolling, the city, at this time, was saturated with fear. The National Guardsmen were afraid, the residents were afraid, and the police were afraid. Numerous persons, the majority of them Negroes, were being injured by gunshots of undetermined origin. The general and his staff felt that the major task of the troops was to reduce the fear and restore an air of normalcy.
In order to accomplish this, every effort was made to establish contact and rapport between the troops and the residents. The soldiers–20 percent of whom were Negro–began helping to clean up the streets, collect garbage, and trace persons who had disappeared in the confusion. Residents in the neighborhoods responded with soup and sandwiches for the troops. In areas where the National Guard tried to establish rapport with the citizens, there was a smaller response.
NEW BRUNSWICK
. . . A short time later, elements of the crowd–an older and rougher one than the night before–appeared in front of the police station. The participants wanted to see the mayor.
Mayor [Patricia] Sheehan went out onto the steps of the station. Using a bullhorn, she talked to the people and asked that she be given an opportunity to correct conditions. The crowd was boisterous. Some persons challenged the mayor. But, finally, the opinion, “She’s new! Give her a chance!” prevailed.
A demand was issued by people in the crowd that all persons arrested the previous night be released. Told that this already had been done, the people were suspicious. They asked to be allowed to inspect the jail cells.
It was agreed to permit representatives of the people to look in the cells to satisfy themselves that everyone had been released.
The crowd dispersed. The New Brunswick riot had failed to materialize. .

Chapter 2–Patterns of Disorder

The “typical” riot did not take place. The disorders of 1967 were unusual, irregular, complex and unpredictable social processes. Like most human events, they did not unfold in an orderly sequence. However, an analysis of our survey information leads to some conclusions about the riot process. In general:
The civil disorders of 1967 involved Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society, authority and property in Negro neighborhoods–rather than against white persons.
Of 164 disorders reported during the first nine months of 1967, eight (5 percent) were major in terms of violence and damage; 33 (20 percent) were serious but not major; 123 (75 percent) were minor and undoubtedly would not have received national attention as “riots” had the nation not been sensitized by the more serious outbreaks.
In the 75 disorders studied by a Senate subcommittee, 83 deaths were reported. Eighty-two percent of the deaths and more than half the injuries occurred in Newark and Detroit. About 10 percent of the dead and 38 percent of the injured were public employees, primarily law officers and firemen. The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians.
Initial damage estimates were greatly exaggerated. In Detroit, newspaper damage estimates at first ranged from $200 million to $500 million; the highest recent estimate is $45 million. In Newark, early estimates ranged from $15 to $25 million. A month later damage was estimated at $10.2 million, over 80 percent in inventory losses.
In the 24 disorders in 23 cities which we surveyed:
The final incident before the outbreak of disorder, and the initial violence itself, generally took place in the evening or at night at a place in which it was normal for many people to be on the streets.
Violence usually occurred almost immediately following the occurrence of the final precipitating incident, and then escalated rapidly. With but few exceptions, violence subsided during the day, and flared rapidly again at night. The night-day cycles continued through the early period of the major disorders.
Disorder generally began with rock and bottle throwing and window breaking. Once store windows were broken, looting usually followed.
Disorder did not erupt as a result of a single “triggering” or “precipitating” incident. Instead, it was generated out of an increasingly disturbed social atmosphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in the minds of many in the Negro community with a reservoir of underlying grievances. At some point in the mounting tension, a further incident-in itself often routine or trivial-became the breaking point and the tension spilled over into violence.
“Prior” incidents, which increased tensions and ultimately led to violence, were police actions in almost half the cases; police actions were “final” incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.
No particular control tactic was successful in every situation. The varied effectiveness of control techniques emphasizes the need for advance training, planning, adequate intelligence systems, and knowledge of the ghetto community.
Negotiations between Negroes–including your militants as well as older Negro leaders–and white officials concerning “terms of peace” occurred during virtually all the disorders surveyed. In many cases, these negotiations involved discussion of underlying grievances as well as the handling of the disorder by control authorities.
The typical rioter was a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident of the city in which he rioted, a high school dropout; he was, nevertheless, somewhat better educated than his nonrioting Negro neighbor, and was usually underemployed or employed in a menial job. He was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system.
A Detroit survey revealed that approximately 11 percent of the total residents of two riot areas admitted participation in the rioting, 20 to 25 percent identified themselves as “bystanders,” over 16 percent identified themselves as “counter-rioters” who urged rioters to “cool it,” and the remaining 48 to 53 percent said they were at home or elsewhere and did not participate. In a survey of Negro males between the ages of 15 and 35 residing in the disturbance area in Newark, about 45 percent identified themselves as rioters, and about 55 percent as “noninvolved.”
Most rioters were young Negro males. Nearly 53 percent of arrestees were between 15 and 24 years of age; nearly 81 percent between 15 and 35.
In Detroit and Newark about 74 percent of the rioters were brought up in the North. In contrast, of the noninvolved, 36 percent in Detroit and 52 percent in Newark were brought up in the North. * What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.
Numerous Negro counter-rioters walked the streets urging rioters to “cool it.” The typical counter-rioter was better educated and had higher income than either the rioter or the noninvolved.
The proportion of Negroes in local government was substantially smaller than the Negro proportion of population. Only three of the 20 cities studied had more than one Negro legislator; none had ever had a Negro mayor or city manager. In only four cities did Negroes hold other important policy-making positions or serve as heads of municipal departments.
Although almost all cities had some sort of formal grievance mechanism for handling citizen complaints, this typically was regarded by Negroes as ineffective and was generally ignored.
Although specific grievances varied from city to city, at least 12 deeply held grievances can be identified and ranked into three levels of relative intensity: ‘

First Level of Intensity
Police practices
Unemployment and underemployment
Inadequate housing

Second Level of Intensity
Inadequate education
Poor recreation facilities and programs
Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms

Third Level of Intensity
Disrespectful white attitudes
Discriminatory administration of justice
Inadequacy of federal programs
Inadequacy of municipal services
Discriminatory consumer and credit practices
Inadequate welfare programs
The results of a three-city survey of various federal programs–manpower, education, housing, welfare and community action—indicate that, despite substantial expenditures, the number of persons assisted constituted only a fraction of those in need.
The background of disorder is often as complex and difficult to analyze as the disorder itself. But we find that certain general conclusions can be drawn:
Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it. Negroes had completed fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school. Negroes were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in unskilled and service jobs. Negroes averaged 70 percent of the income earned by whites and were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty. Although housing cost Negroes relatively more, they had worse housing-three times as likely to be overcrowded and substandard. When compared to white suburbs, the relative disadvantage is even more pronounced.
A study of the aftermath of disorder leads to disturbing conclusions.
We find that, despite the institution of some post-riot programs:
Little basic change in the conditions underlying the outbreak of disorder has taken place. Actions to ameliorate Negro grievances have been limited and sporadic; with but few exceptions, they have not significantly reduced tensions.
In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons. In several cities, increasing polarization is evident, with continuing breakdown of inter-racial communication, and growth of white segregationist or black separatist groups.

PART II–WHY DID IT HAPPEN?

Chapter 4—

The Basic Causes

In addressing the question “Why did it happen?” we shift our focus from the local to the national scene, from the particular events of the summer of 1967 to the factors within the society at large that created a mood of violence among many urban Negroes.
These factors are complex and interacting; they vary significantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year; and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, become the causes of the next. Thus was created the “thicket of tension, conflicting evidence and extreme opinions” cited by the President.
Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.
Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future.
White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II. Among the ingredients of this mixture are:
Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing, which have resulted in the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress.
Black in-migration and white exodus, which have produced the massive and growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs.
The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure. Crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare, and bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular are the result.
At the same time, most whites and some Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization. Through television and other media, this affluence has been flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth.
Yet these facts alone cannot be said to have caused the disorders. Recently, other powerful ingredients have begun to catalyze the mixture:
Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.
A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.
The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of “moving the system.” These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan “Black Power.”
A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to “the system.”
The police are not merely a “spark” factor. To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a “double standard” of justice and protection–one for Negroes and one for whites.
To this point, we have attempted to identify the prime components of the “explosive mixture.” In the chapters that follow we seek to analyze them in the perspective of history. Their meaning, however, is clear:
In the summer of 1967, we have seen in our cities a chain reaction of racial violence. If we are heedless, none of us shall escape the consequences.

Chapter 5–Rejection and Protest: An Historical Sketch

The causes of recent racial disorders are embedded in a tangle of issues and circumstances–social, economic, political and psychological which arise out of the historic pattern of Negro-white relations in America.
In this chapter we trace the pattern, identify the recurrent themes of Negro protest and, most importantly, provide a perspective on the protest activities of the present era.
We describe the Negro’s experience in America and the development of slavery as an institution. We show his persistent striving for equality in the face of rigidly maintained social, economic and educational barriers, and repeated mob violence. We portray the ebb and flow of the doctrinal tides–accommodation, separatism, and self-help–and their relationship to the current theme of Black Power.
We conclude:
The Black Power advocates of today consciously feel that they are the most militant group in the Negro protest movement. Yet they have retreated from a direct confrontation with American society on the issue of integration and, by preaching separatism, unconsciously function as an accommodation to white racism. Much of their economic program, as well as their interest in Negro history, self-help, racial solidarity and separation, is reminiscent of Booker T. Washington. The rhetoric is different, but the ideas are remarkably similar.

Chapter 6–The Formation Of the Racial Ghettos

Throughout the 20th century the Negro population of the United States has been moving steadily from rural areas to urban and from South to North and West. In 1910, 91 percent of the nation’s 9.8 million Negroes lived in the South and only 27 percent of American Negroes lived in cities of 2,500 persons or more. Between 1910 and 1966 the total Negro population more than doubled, reaching 21.5 million, and the number living in metropolitan areas rose more than fivefold (from 2.6 million to 14.8 million). The number outside the South rose eleven-fold (from 880,000 to 9.7 million).
Negro migration from the South has resulted from the expectation of thousands of new and highly paid jobs for unskilled workers in the North and the shift to mechanized farming in the South. However, the Negro migration is small when compared to earlier waves of European immigrants. Even between 1960 and 1966, there were 1.8 million immigrants from abroad compared to the 613,000 Negroes who arrived in the North and West from the South.
As a result of the growing number of Negroes in urban areas, natural increase has replaced migration as the primary source of Negro population increase in the cities. Nevertheless, Negro migration from the South will continue unless economic conditions there change dramatically.
Basic data concerning Negro urbanization trends indicate that:
Almost all Negro population growth (98 percent from 1950 to 1966) is occurring within metropolitan areas, primarily within central cities.
The vast majority of white population growth (78 percent from 1960 to 1966) is occurring in suburban portions of metropolitan areas. Since 1960, white central-city population has declined by 1.3 million.
As a result, central cities are becoming more heavily Negro while the suburban fringes around them remain almost entirely white.
The twelve largest central cities now contain over two-thirds of the Negro population outside the South, and one-third of the Negro total in the United States.
Within the cities, Negroes have been excluded from white residential areas through discriminatory practices. Just as significant is the withdrawal of white families from, or their refusal to enter, neighborhoods where Negroes are moving or already residing. About 20 percent of the urban population of the United States changes residence every year. The refusal of whites to move into “changing” areas when vacancies occur means that most vacancies eventually are occupied by Negroes.
The result, according to a recent study, is that in 1960 the average segregation index for 207 of the largest United States cities was 86.2. In other words, to create an unsegregated population distribution, an average of over 86 percent of all Negroes would have to change their place of residence within the city.

Chapter 7—Unemployment, Family Structure, and Social Disorganization

Although there have been gains in Negro income nationally, and a decline in the number of Negroes below the “poverty level,” the condition of Negroes ill the central city remains in a state of crisis. Between 2 and 2.5 million Negroes-16 to 20 percent of the total Negro population of all central cities live in squalor and deprivation in ghetto neighborhoods.
Employment is a key problem. It not only controls the present for the Negro American but, in a most profound way, it is creating the future as well. Yet, despite continuing economic growth and declining national unemployment rates, the unemployment rate for Negroes in 1967 was more than double that for whites.
Equally important is the undesirable nature of many jobs open to Negroes and other minorities. Negro men are more than three times as likely as white men to be in low paying, unskilled or service jobs. This concentration of male Negro employment at the lowest end of the occupational scale is the single most important cause of poverty among Negroes.
In one study of low-income neighborhoods, the “subemployment rate,” including both unemployment and underemployment, was about 33 percent, or 8.8 times greater than the overall unemployment rate for all United States workers.
Employment problems, aggravated by the constant arrival of new unemployed migrants, many of them from depressed rural areas, create persistent poverty in the ghetto. In 1966, about 11.9 percent of the nation’s whites and 40.6 percent of its nonwhites were below the “poverty level” defined by’ the Social Security Administration (currently $3,335 per year for an urban family of four). Over 40 percent of the nonwhites below the poverty level live in the central cities.
Employment problems have drastic social impact in the ghetto. Men who are chronically unemployed or employed in the lowest status jobs are often unable or unwilling to remain with their families. The handicap imposed on children growing up without fathers in an atmosphere of poverty and deprivation is increased as mothers are forced to work to provide support.
The culture of poverty that results from unemployment and family breakup generates a system of ruthless, exploitative relationships within the ghetto.
Prostitution, dope addiction, and crime create an environmental “jungle” characterized by personal insecurity and tension. Children growing up under such conditions are likely participants in civil disorder.

Chapter 8–Conditions of Life In the Racial Ghetto
A striking difference in environment from that of white, middle-class Americans profoundly influences the lives of residents of the ghetto.
Crime rates, consistently higher than in other areas, create a pronounced sense of insecurity. For example, in one city one low-income Negro district had 35 times as many serious crimes against persons as a high-income white district. Unless drastic steps are taken, the crime problems in poverty areas are likely to continue to multiply as the growing youth and rapid urbanization of the population outstrip police resources.
Poor health and sanitation conditions in the ghetto result in higher mortality rates, a higher incidence of major diseases, and lower availability and utilization of medical services. The infant mortality rate for nonwhite babies under the age of one month is 58 percent higher than for whites; for one to 12 months it is almost three times as high. The level of sanitation in the ghetto is far below that in high income areas. Garbage collection is often inadequate. Of an estimated 14,000 cases of rat bite in the United States in 1965, most were in ghetto neighborhoods.
Ghetto residents believe they are “exploited” by local merchants; and evidence substantiates some of these beliefs. A study conducted in one city by the Federal Trade Commission showed that distinctly higher prices were charged for goods sold in ghetto stores than in other areas.
Lack of knowledge regarding credit purchasing creates special pitfalls for the disadvantaged. In many states garnishment practices compound these difficulties by allowing creditors to deprive individuals of their wages without hearing or trial.

Chapter 9–Comparing the Immigrant and Negro Experience

In this chapter, we address ourselves to a fundamental question that many white Americans are asking: why have so many Negroes, unlike the European immigrants, been unable to escape from the ghetto and from poverty.
We believe the following factors play a part:
The Maturing Economy: When the European immigrants arrived, they gained an economic foothold by providing the unskilled labor needed by industry. Unlike the immigrant, the Negro migrant found little opportunity in the city. The economy, by then matured, had little use for the unskilled labor he had to offer.
The Disability of Race: The structure of discrimination has stringently narrowed opportunities for the Negro and restricted his prospects. European immigrants suffered from discrimination, but never so pervasively.
Entry into the Political System: The immigrants usually settled in rapidly growing cities with powerful and expanding political machines, which traded economic advantages for political support. Ward-level grievance machinery, as well as personal representation, enabled the immigrant to make his voice heard and his power felt.
By the time the Negro arrived, these political machines were no longer so powerful or so well equipped to provide jobs or other favors, and in many cases were unwilling to share their influence with Negroes.
Cultural Factors: Coming from societies with a low standard of living and at a time when job aspirations were low, the immigrants sensed little deprivation in being forced to take the less desirable and poorer-paying jobs. Their large and cohesive families contributed to total income. Their vision of the future–one that led to a life outside of the ghetto–provided the incentive necessary to endure the present.
Although Negro men worked as hard as the immigrants, they were unable to support their families. The entrepreneurial opportunities had vanished. As a result of slavery and long periods of unemployment, the Negro family structure had become matriarchal; the males played a secondary and marginal family role–one which offered little compensation for their hard and unrewarding labor. Above all, segregation denied Negroes access to good jobs and the opportunity to leave the ghetto. For them, the future seemed to lead only to a dead end.
Today, whites tend to exaggerate how well and quickly they escaped from poverty. The fact is that immigrants who came from rural backgrounds, as many Negroes do, are only now, after three generations, finally beginning to move into the middle class.
By contrast, Negroes began concentrating in the city less than two generations ago, and under much less favorable conditions. Although some Negroes have escaped poverty, few have been able to escape the urban ghetto.

Reading 15: “The Cycle of Poverty”: Mexican-American Migrant Farmworkers Testify before Congress

Introduction:

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers—primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos—permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers’ lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from a 1969 Senate hearing, migrant farmworkers from Florida and Texas discussed their experiences and problems. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply, increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

Thesis questions:

What obstacles did Mexican American migrant farm workers face, according to this document? How did they expect these obstacles to be overcome? Where they successful, according to historians today? If so, why?

Text:

STATEMENT OF RUDOLFO JUAREZ, OF OKEECHOBEE, FLA.
Mr. JUAREZ. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, I have prepared a statement that I would like to present to you. This statement is based on what I myself lived through since I was old enough to work and became a migrant at the age of 5. Based on my experience and how I continue to see the way my people suffer, in this statement I would like to express my feelings, as well as my opinions, and the feeling and opinions of others that I have worked with side by side in the fields.
Of all the groups living in poverty, the migrant farmworker and his family in general suffer the greatest socioeconomic deprivation. The migrant farmworker and his family travels throughout the Nation, living from day to day, depending upon his luck that the crops are good and that nothing happens, for instance, while he travels on the road.
Him and his family will eat as little and as cheap as he can, for he has very little money to get there. If his car breaks down, the mechanics overcharge him as much as they feel they can get away with. Because of bad weather and the time that laps between each crop, it is impossible for him to save any money—plus the high cost of living, plus the excessive amount of rent that he has to pay for the rat and roach infested pigpen that him and his family are forced to live in while he lives in Florida.
So when crops are over in the State of Florida, there is no way that he can continue to survive, so he migrates. And because of that the migrant farmworkers have had great difficulties in their employment relationships, much of this arising out of exploitation and abuse by irresponsible farmers and crew leaders who sometimes underpay them, short count them, and overcharge them for transportation. Crew leaders on occasions, collect wages from the employers and then abandon the workers without paying them.
His mobility deprives the migrant of many of the basic social services that are available to the local poor such as welfare, medical coverage and care, vocational rehabilitation, and day care for children. More than often his housing does not meet code standards.
Our children are pulled out of schools so that they may help provide for the family in the fields or at home taking care of smaller children so that mothers can work. . . .
Our children suffer regardless of what you do. If he goes to school, often he goes without breakfast—and if you are able to find out about the free lunch program and was able to take the insults or had the courage to fight for it, and find someone to fill out the forms, then your child might get lunch. For there are very few schools who have people who will search for ways to help you and many persons who will search for as many ways possible to keep you from getting such services.
This is also true in some of the Federal and State local agencies. For we have a very discriminatory and humiliating welfare system and unconstitutional residency requirements for receiving welfare and health services. Some of those people, when not able to deprive us from such services on terms of residency, plainly tell us we have no right and that we don’t belong—thus making most of my people mad, never to return.
What this system and our society is going to have to know and understand is that the migrant farmworker, even though tired, uneducated, hungry, and sick, have contributed and sacrificed just as much as anyone else and more than most to this Nation. We have cultivated this earth, planted and harvested all crops for generations in order to provide all the luxuries in food, clothing, and many other items that those of society which surrounds us enjoy today.
My people, the migrants in general, composed of all types of Americans, regardless of race, color, or religion, our fathers, our sons, our kin, have died in wars fighting for the security and peace of this Nation as well as in the fields while harvesting the crops because of irresponsible farmers and their insecticides sprayed in the fields.
Gentlemen, bad working conditions and low wages for generations have maintained a slave labor system which insures that the migrant farmworker’s children will have to live the same way he did and will continue to be slaves to agriculture and business.
Hunger, malnutrition, sickness, and lack of education will continue to exist. Our children will continue to suffer because children cannot study if they are hungry, always ill, and trying to do homework in hot and crowded shacks. And our men today will continue to lack the initiative and power because a hungry man with children who are sick and suffering from malnutrition, who must be constantly struggling to live and keep his family alive will soon tire and if he continues to seek assistance in the traditional government-processed way, and makes no headway, God knows how long he will be patient in his struggle to get his children out of the cycle of poverty that this system, through discriminatory legislation, has kept.
Mr. Chairman, members of this subcommittee, of all things I have said I hope you have paid attention. With all my heart I have presented some of the problems that have existed since past generations and continue to exist to this day. I have lived them, experienced them, and suffered them. This is not hearsay.
I am sure that others have told you the same things I have spoke about. Some of you have seen them with your own eyes. We have no reason to lie for we have nothing to lose for we have never had anything.
Those who have spoken against us, have because of profits, others for their own person gain, some have, because they, too, suffer and really don’t understand who is to blame and because they misinterpret our needs to charity they tend to be against us.
But more and more people are joining together and soon there will be enough people to keep men in power who will make, pass, and enforce laws that will be fair and equal to all Americans, just as there will be enough people to bring down those in power who are favorable to one group only because of personal gain.
Therefore, discriminatory legislation practices should continue no more. The migrant worker should be covered by the National Labor Relations Act with additional favorable rights as well as workman’s compensation laws, unemployment compensation, insurance laws, social security codes must be enforced to improve the conditions of housing provided to him.
Programs such as housing loans, small business loans which the migrant has never heard about until others who have recently come into this Nation.
Let’s stop worrying about other nations and do something about our own. Do something about the migrant so he can pull himself out of this repeating cycle.
The men who are in power must fight hard to make real changes in society and society’s laws. Change all discriminatory laws and attitudes. The men who are in power must help the powerless to gain power and all rights entitled to him. Bad programs of the establishment must be eliminated for good programs. Those which dispute the powers that be and fight for the poor must be maintained and encouraged in their activities.
If the poor are not given extra encouragement and help in gaining power over their own lives and influence into the general society in order to eliminate poverty; if the governments, local and national, do not respond to the real needs of the poor through traditional processes, the poor will find other ways to make their needs known and to gain power. . . .
Senator BELLMON. You mentioned you were sold to a sugar beet company?
Mr. JUAREZ. Yes, sir.
Senator BELLMON. How? Can you explain?
Mr. JUAREZ. Well, through our crew leader, through a person who had a truck who recruited labor who found out that the sugar beet company in Ohio happened to be in need of labor and so he just went around and since he was known to most of the people there, even to my father, these families were talked into coming to Ohio where the word that he gave was you can sweep money with a broom. So this is the way we were sold in the State of Ohio. I remember that it was a little town called Metamora, Ohio. From there, because of the rains we didn’t get to even know what the sugar beets looked like. Then I didn’t even know what sugar beets were. But we were kept there anyway because the man who brought us there just brought us there for what he got and he returned. We never seen him no more.
Senator BELLMON. So you were left in Ohio and it was raining and you weren’t able to work in the sugar beets, right?
Mr. JUAREZ. Yes, and we created a big debt. My father and all the rest of the families got in real bad debt. They split up the families, the company did, and found other various jobs so that they could pay for the food that they had eaten, my father. And my cousin, which was the oldest one in our family, was the one who worked along with him. The job that they got was the railroad company, railroad tracks, working on the railroad. After he paid, after they paid the debt and we were able to make enough money to try to return to Texas, we only made it as far as Osceola, Ark., because while we were there waiting to transfer on the bus, one of my sisters was very sick and then we met another Mexican-American fellow there that told us about the good cotton that was being raised there and we had picked cotton before. So therefore we decided to end our journey there and maybe try to make a little more money and give my sister a chance to get well. So that is where we stopped and then from Arkansas then we traveled into Missouri and from Arkansas and Missouri we started migrating into Durand, Wis., to work with the pea vineries. The only reason we went to Wisconsin was because when I was about, 1 year, there was 1 year, way after we had already started migrating back into Ohio to pick tomatoes and Indiana to pick tomatoes and Michigan to pick cherries. When we went to Duran, it was because I stowed away in a crew leader’s truck and I ran away from home. I was 12 years then. I was able after being tested by the foreman to prove my ability to do the job. I was given a job and was able to save about $200 to bring back to my father and thus told him about the good work over there. Then we started going into Wisconsin.
Senator BELLMON. Mr. Juarez, you mentioned then when you were 12 you became a full-fledged worker on your own, is this right?
Mr. JUAREZ. No, I was working in the fields. I became a migrant when I was 5 and then actually I was about 6 years old when I was working in the fields because that is when we started picking cotton, pulling cotton, chopping cotton.
Senator BELLMON. Do you still make your living as a migrant?
Mr. JUAREZ. No, sir. I don’t. My wife still works out in the field, yes.
Senator BELLMON. What sort of work do you do now?
Mr. JUAREZ. Well, now I am employed by the South Florida Migrant Legal Services. I was lucky enough to get a job there after trying for about 2 weeks without working in the fields so that I could go over and try to get a job because it has been my ambition to get out of the migratory road because I don’t want my children to live the life I did.
Senator BELLMON. Can you tell the subcommittee why migrant workers continue this kind of a life? Why don’t they all get out of it?
Mr. JUAREZ. Why don’t they all get out?
Senator BELLMON. Yes.
Mr. JUAREZ. Power.
Senator BELLMON. Is this the reason they stay and can’t get out?
Mr. JUAREZ. Well, for some it is possible sometimes, but on very few occasions it is possible. For example, the only reason I was able to get out of that system and happened to decide to stay in Florida was because there is a longer period of time where there is work available over there and if I stayed there was only about 3 to 4 months where there wouldn’t be no work, and usually when a migrant tries to stay in one place or he wants to quit the migrant stream, there is a lot of questions that trouble to your mind. For example: Am I going to be able to do this job that I am able to get? If I am not able, they will probably fire me. If they fire me, how am I going to pay my rent? I don’t know anybody here. Who is going to help me? Who is going to lend me any money? Nobody trusts me because I don’t have anything to put as collateral. Thus these questions go in your mind and a lot of them try. They will try for 3 and 4 years, continue to try each time in a place where it might look favorable to them where they see that there might be a job that they might be capable to do. But then there are doubts and, not knowing anyone in the community and then going into town and you get looks, people look at you with a question in their face like, what is this person doing here, where did he come from? Or the police is liable to pick you up for vagrancy if you are just standing out there trying to find a job or be friendly with anyone. If you happen to be broke or are trying to find a friend, the police just picks you up and charges you for vagrancy, and you don’t have any money to hire an attorney. It’s a problem.
Senator BELLMON. Your feeling is that most migrants feel helpless and as if they are sort of trapped in the sort of lives they live, is this right?
Mr. JUAREZ. Yes. Yes; that is true.
Senator BELLMON. They would prefer other types of employment if they felt they could get it?
Mr. JUAREZ. The majority of them, every one of them I believe would like to do something different, you know. Some of them would like to continue and work, you know, but with a decent wage, with a decent wage. . . .
Senator MONDALE. Mr. Juarez, have you ever tried as a migrant either alone or with others to talk to your employers and try to get the salaries up, the wages up, or other working conditions corrected?
Mr. JUAREZ. Yes; a lot of times.
Senator MONDALE. What has your experience been?
Mr. JUAREZ. They have one answer right away, “If you don’t like it, you know where you came from.” And you can’t very well try to get anybody else to protest or protest yourself because you will be thrown out and if you don’t have any money, where are you going to go, and then they consider you a troublemaker. So its very bad, you know, for that. It creates a bad feeling because then they can usually pay somebody else even in the group, for example, to deal with you in many ways.
Senator MONDALE. In your years as a migrant you haven’t found, even though you have tried, evidence that there is power among the migrant workers themselves, at least the way it is now, to correct your own conditions through improved pay or improved working conditions? That has not been your experience?
Mr. JUAREZ. No.
Senator MONDALE. What about political power of the migrant worker? I assume that it is obvious that when you are on the road and in communities in which you don’t reside, you don’t have any political power. You don’t vote there. You are not going to be there to vote in future years, and they all know it.
Mr. JUAREZ. You don’t have any political power anywhere.
Senator MONDALE. What about the place where you stay between crops and over the winter? I think you said you live in Florida. What about the counties and communities in which you reside? Don’t you have large numbers of Mexican-Americans or migrants with other backgrounds who can join together and try to gain some political power?
Mr. JUAREZ. No. Even the police, you know, the experience that the migrant has had with the police is something terrible. He can’t trust a police officer. If he sees a uniform he can’t trust it because the police has had a way with people who don’t belong in that community or who are not from there because as soon as something happens, then those people did it, since they come here it has happened, and usually, you know, like other people may get the benefit of a knock on the door, the migrant gets his door knocked down or opened even at night at 11 or 12 o’clock if they happen to be looking for somebody, they just go over and break the door down and shine the light on people that are sleeping on the floor because there is only room in that, only space enough in that room to put a bed or two and you don’t have enough bedding for all of them in that room.
Senator MONDALE. Take that situation in, say, Collier County. What is your home county?
Mr. JUAREZ. Okeechobee.
Senator MONDALE. There are a lot of migrants and farmworkers in Okeechobee, are there not?
Mr. JUAREZ. Yes.
Senator MONDALE. Suppose the local police do that and they have one system of law enforcement for the powerful in the community and another for the farmworkers of the kind that you are discussing. Can’t you seek a political remedy, in other words, get a new mayor or new county board?
Mr. JUAREZ. How? Who is going to believe you anyway? There are people in here doubting it, you know. I should feel hate, you know, because I can sense people in this room, you know, because I have been sensing it all my life and I have been trained to that, and I should feel hate, you know, but I don’t. I pity them, you know, because they are only sick people. In my way of feeling they are sick in their mind, and they are the ones who are causing this Nation to be in such bad conditions, to be falling apart. . . .
Senator MONDALE. I noticed that there were a good number of Mexican-Americans who had come from Texas who lived in Florida. Many of them had left. You went around, but you finally got to Florida. Collier and Lee Counties are the two places where we saw thousands of Mexican-Americans when we went with the Hunger Committee. Why do they go to Florida?
Mr. JUAREZ. Well, you see the cycle of crops are not always in the same months of time. There is even a cycle of crops in the State of Florida and each group, even though there are very many migrants to this day, follows, each group specializes in certain crops. For example, those who like tomatoes will follow tomatoes until there is no more tomatoes. Then they will do something else. Then they will come to pick cherries. So they can pick tomatoes in Ohio and Indiana. In Texas because of the floods, because of bad weather and the hurricanes that passed over, their crops have been bad, and a lot of the people there know that there is work to be done in Florida. So therefore they migrate into the State of Florida.
Senator MONDALE. Could it be that the rather free supply of unskilled poor farm workers from Mexico who freely cross the border into Texas and California encourages
Mexican-Americans who live along the border to live somewhere else where they might not be as fully exposed to competitive labor?
Mr. JUAREZ. That is right. There are so many of them coming across and because the farmers continue to gripe about shortage of labor and then they are talked into that. For example, I know one man in Florida who was paid for to go all the way into Mexico to try to encourage or to find ways to bring the Mexicans from Mexico even all the way up to Florida.
Senator MONDALE. In Florida about 2,500 workers come in from the British West Indies to work in sugar cane. Now I am told that they are bringing in 2,000 from the British West Indies for citrus this year. What impact will that have?
Mr. JUAREZ. I guess they are trying to starve us. I guess they are trying to do away with us, like the man said, do away with the headache, because we find it awful hard to even find enough jobs for the people that are already there. If they bring in more people, I am scared to think. . . .
STATEMENT OF MRS. ESTHER GUEVARA KRUEGER, OF PHARR, TEX.
Senator MONDALE. You work with the migrant workers along the Texas border, do you not, the Texas-Mexican border?
Mrs. KRUEGER. Yes.
Senator MONDALE. Is it your impression that most of them want to migrate?
Mrs. KRUEGER. No; they would like to settle down. But the problem there is that there is no industry, there is no work, and even the stores in town, the department stores pay only 50 cents an hour.
Senator MONDALE. You live in Pharr, Tex.? How far is that?
Mrs. KRUEGER. From McAllen?
Senator MONDALE. From Mexico.
Mrs. KRUEGER. Twelve miles.
Senator MONDALE. Twelve miles. Do the growers in that area and the department stores and banks and the other employers find it relatively easy to get Mexican labor from across the border?
Mrs. KRUEGER. Yes; very easy. As a matter of fact, some of them know for a fact that some of the Mexican workers are there illegally, but they will just close their eyes because they know that they can have cheap labor.
Senator MONDALE. So that would you say that that supply of labor is almost inexhaustible and employers can get all they want?
Mrs. KRUEGER. Right.
Senator MONDALE. Whatever the details of the present regulations, in fact they can get all the foreign labor they want?
Mrs. KRUEGER. Oh, yes; very much so.
Senator MONDALE. There is no problem there?
Mrs. KRUEGER. There is no problem there.
Senator MONDALE. Meanwhile the U.S. citizen, the Mexican-American, or the resident alien, have to live at U.S. standards.
Mrs. KRUEGER. Right.
Senator MONDALE. But he is exposed to the competition of people living in Mexican standards?
Mrs. KRUEGER. And he is forced to migrate.
Senator MONDALE. That is why he is forced to migrate, because there is not the employment that permits him to live or survive. So that he gets in his car and starts moving.
Mrs. KRUEGER. Right.
Senator MONDALE. What about the political power issue? Along these areas of southern Texas there are many Mexican-Americans, are there not?
Mrs. KRUEGER. Yes, there are.
Senator MONDALE. Why don’t they do a better job of electing sympathetic people?
Mrs. KRUEGER. Well, for one thing I think down in the Valley there is, oh, I am not too good at figures, but I would say there would be about 80 percent Mexican-American population, but the thing is that we as Mexican descendants have feelings, pride, and a feeling of gratitude, and when some of our Mexican-Americans climb up the ladder, if they want to stay over there, they have to take orders from the higher power structure and just not heed the cries of the problems of the others.
Senator MONDALE. What you are saying is that a Mexican-American who makes it, so to speak, and starts getting a better job—
Mrs. KRUEGER. Right, and if he wants to stay there, he just better do what the power structure tells him.
Senator MONDALE. So that he is not likely to continue to be an ally of the poorer Mexican-American?
Mrs. KRUEGER. Right. I am pretty sure that if we, the Mexican-Americans, would be as united as the Negro people have been, we would be in a better position now to fight for our rights, but the thing is that, as I said, our race, we have always been inclined to be humble and just take everything that comes to us. . . .
Senator MONDALE. It is 1 o’clock. We could go on a long time.
Mrs. KRUEGER. Senator, I would like to get this on the record about no protection whatever to a migrant. We had a case in Arkansas that the worker died and he was up there by himself. So the grower shipped the body c.o.d. to Mission, Tex., and I would like to have the people hear this.
Senator MONDALE. When did that happen?
Mrs. KRUEGER. That happened several months ago—October of 1968.
Senator MONDALE. He sent it c.o.d.
Mrs. KRUEGER. Yes.
Senator MONDALE. That was a thoughtless thing to do.
Mrs. KRUEGER. Collect on delivery. Of course, this is another morbid situation that migrants have to be faced with because can you imagine to even have the slap in the face that here comes the body of a beloved person and that the grower didn’t even care to pay whatever the expense was?
Senator MONDALE. I think what you are saying, and this of course comes out every day, is that the migrant is so powerless that he not only has lost the capacity to argue for a better wage and working conditions and housing and health care, but in a strange way they have denied him his humanity—
Mrs. KRUEGER. Right.
Senator MONDALE (continuing). His human dignity, his right to be treated as a person.
Mrs. KRUEGER. Right.
Senator MONDALE. It is probably this final insult that is the most costly and tragic part of the total process. . . .
Source: Congress, Senate, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Powerlessness: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Migratory

Labor of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, 91st Congress, 1st and 2d Sessions on Who are the Migrants? June 9 and 10, 1969, Part 1 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970).

On the “history matters” website, http://historymatters.gmu.edu

Reading 18: Diana Hembree, “Dead End in Silicon Valley” (1985)

Introduction:

Since the 1970s the American economy had begun deindustrializing as thousands of smokestack industries in the nation’s Rust Belt closed. Many hailed high-tech industries as the wave of the future. In 1984, for example, 1,800 electronics firms located in California’s Silicon Valley enjoyed more than $25 billion in sales. But as investigative reporter Diana Hembree of the Santa Cruz Phoenix discovered, the hightech revolution did not offer rewards to the production workers who made it happen. In the following article, Hemhree reports on her three-month experience working in an electronic assembly plant.

Thesis questions:

From this article, demonstrate that the “good times” of the economic boom of the 1980s did not improve the lives of many poorer people. What reasons does the factory manager give for not improving wages for his workers? How were Mexican Americans treated at the factory, compared to Anglo Americans? How has working conditions for workers in similar positions changed in the 21st century? How would George Engels, the Haymarket anarchist you read earlier in the semester, have reacted to this account of the life of working people, one hundred years later?

Text:
It was a cool, cloudless day when I joined the crowd of applicants at Quality Electronic Service, a small company in Santa Cruz, California. Q.E.S. had advertised for electronics assemblers–“No Experience Necessary”–and its lobby was jammed.
From the outside, the plant looked more like a real estate office than a factory. Along with hundreds of other “board shops” in the area, it makes printed circuit boards–the brains and memory banks of computers–for other high-tech firms.
Like most such shops, Q.E.S. starts its assemblers at the minimum wage. Still, with the annual unemployment rate in Santa Cruz sometimes reaching 14 per cent, the company has had little trouble attracting would-be workers.
As we filled out our application forms, I began to feel nervous. What if company officials discovered that I worked for a local biweekly, The Santa Cruz Phoenix? By the time Hilda Hurley, the personnel manager, called me for an interview, I was certain that I’d been rejected. I told Hilda truthfully that I was interested in electronics, and she beamed at me.
“It really is so interesting,” she agreed. Hurley then looked at me sharply. “I trust you have health insurance?”
Startled, I lied that I did.
“Good girl!” she said. “I just like to ask, because Q.E.S. is a training shop and we don’t pay benefits.” She gave me a quick rundown on the job: Pay started at $3.35 an hour and employees would receive no medical benefits or sick leave. Work began at 7:00 A.M. (“Please be prompt”) and let out at 3:30 P.M., with two fifteen-minute breaks and thirty minutes for lunch.
“It may take a little getting used to,” she said, “but I think you’ll find this job a real challenge.”

August 19, 1981

I arrived for work at 6:45 A.M. and found some workers already waiting in the back parking lot. When the warning bell rang, seventy or so employees crowded into the plant’s noisy, windowless rooms. The atmosphere was casual: Most assemblers wore jeans and T-shirts, and rock music blared from a radio in the corner. At the soldering table, workers bantered with friends, and even after the final bell, some carried on muffled conversations.
“So how’s our new girl?” Hilda asked cheerily when she spotted me. She is a small, buoyant, determined woman in her fifties, whose high heels clicked furiously as she rushed to trouble spots in the plant. In five minutes, I was armed with a timecard, shown the coffee room, and assigned to the clipping section.
“Everyone starts in clipping,” Hilda said, adding that I would be there for only a few days. Though harried, she gave me a quick lesson on how to clip the needle-thin wires on the backs of printed circuit boards, which were bound for computers, video games, microwave equipment, and other products. The back of each board looked like a huge silver pincushion. My job was to clip the inch-long wires to between one-sixteenth and one-thirty-second of an inch-a tricky length to gauge with the naked eye. My lead, or floor supervisor, a stolid young woman named Karen, repeatedly warned me that I was clipping too high or too low. My co-workers got the same lecture, delivered methodically in a smooth, impersonal tone.
At first I was so pleased to have persuaded Q.E.S. to hire me that I clipped the tiny wires with unfeigned enthusiasm. But as the morning wore on, my neck and shoulders ached from craning over the boards, my eyes smarted, and I felt drowsy. After what seemed like interminable hours clipping boards, I stole a glance at the clock: only 9:45. I could smell a peculiar chemical odor, but had no idea what it was.
“Sleepy?” asked the older woman beside me when I tried to stifle a yawn. “It’s the freon,” she said confidentially, nodding at a machine a few feet away. “Go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face and arms; that helps a little. Or, if you can’t keep your eyes open a second longer, drop something on the floor and take your time picking it up. That’s what I do.” My partner, Gail, had taken three aspirin and offered me one. She said she always took at least three a shift….
By the end of the day, my head throbbed, my neck hurt, and my eyes felt coated with sand. It was 3:27, and a few employees waited near the door. “Don’t leave your seat until the bell rings!” Hilda shouted from across the room. When it did, employees left in a rush and the parking lot emptied in five minutes.

August 26

Q.E.S. was owned by an executive of Plantronics, a sleek, modern, high-tech plant down the road. The manager was Fred Freiberg, an energetic man in his late thirties. Fred strode through the plant several times a day, conferring with supervisors and occasionally joking with long-time employees. Since he spent much of his time scouring Silicon Valley for customers, he handed over the day-to-day management of the assembly room to personnel manager Hilda Hurley.
Hilda acted like a nursery school teacher, patting employees on the head with “Good girl!” and “Good boy!” praise. She alternately scolded and cajoled us to work faster, and other supervisors followed suit. Some days the assembly room rang with commands reminiscent of junior high school: “I said keep quiet”; “Don’t slump in your chair”; “Wipe that look off your face, young lady.”
“They treat us like kindergartners,” said one eighteen-year-old. “It’s incredible.”
But in general, the supervisors were not harsh or unkind. Hilda herself was sympathetic to employees in trouble. I’d heard that when one inspector left for a week to escape a battering boyfriend, Hilda held her position open until the woman returned.
Still, her behavior was arbitrary. Once, Hilda transferred a new employe who was bothered by freon fumes to another area, confiding to the startled assembler that she had lost her own sense of taste and smell in the industry. But another employee who complained about fumes was summarily fired. “She was only here two days, and she complained in front of customers,” said one veteran employee loyal to Q.E.S.. . .
Last week, I lunched near the chemical drums left over from production and memorized the labels one by one. The chemicals and heavy metals used at Q.E.S. included freon 113, tin-lead solder, acid flux, and isopropyl alcohol. Some research at the state Department of Health library yielded a list of potential effects of exposure:
Freon 113 (At Q.E.S., TMS Plus, or trichlorotrifloroethane.) Dissolves the skin’s essential oils and can cause rashes, drying, and cracking of the skin. Acts as a depressant on the central nervous system: If inhaled at extremely high concentrations, it can cause unconsciousness and even death. Symptoms of acute over-exposure: drowsiness, nausea, giddiness, central nervous system depression, and irregular heartbeats.
Tin-Lead Solder. When heated, releases lead oxide fumes which can be harmful if inhaled. Airborne lead may be absorbed into the bloodstream and stored in tissues. Can cause brain damage, paralysis, colic, miscarriages, and sterility. Symptoms of lead poisoning include fatigue, irritability, headaches, tremors, “wrist drop,” pain in joints, and blue line on gums.
Acid Flux. A corrosive liquid used to clean metal during soldering. When heated, acid flux may release fumes that can irritate the skin and respiratory tract.
Isopropyl Alcohol. Highly flammable. Exposure to fumes can irritate the eyes and inhalation of large quantities can cause vomiting, narcosis, and coma.
In comparison with the hazards found at semiconductor and electroplating plants, the use of toxic chemicals at Q.E.S. was moderate. But the danger was real nevertheless. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had implicated freon 113 in the deaths of two young electronics workers in Santa Barbara, California. And union groups estimated that degreaser accidents in the United States cause ten to twelve deaths a year. Though OSHA recommends that workers handling freon 113 wear impervious clothing, gloves, and safety goggles, supervisors at Q.E.S. didn’t even require washers to wear gloves. And I never heard a supervisor mention the hazards of freon or any other workplace chemical.
“No, we don’t really use any hazardous chemicals in here,” the plant secretary said in response to my question at the job orientation session. “None that could really hurt you.”
This morning, Alicia Rodriguez joined the clipping section to help with a logjam of unclipped boards. Alicia had come from Mexico three years earlier and spoke no English. At forty-four, she had to help support five children and felt fortunate to have the job at Q.E.S. But she was indignant about her salary: After fourteen months at the plant, she was making $3.50 an hour.
“I call it my candy money, because that’s about all you can buy with it,” joked Alicia. “But I’ve been trying to save up for an eye exam.” After months of detailed assembly work, she could no longer read the numbers on the tiny blue-black diodes in the prep room. “I’m putting some of them upsidedown,” she said. “It worries me.”
On break, she and I lined up with other women in the bathroom to splash cold water on our hands and faces. The air in the bathroom was cool and fresh. Waiting my turn at the sink, I noticed that the trashcan near the door was really an empty Lonco chemical drum marked FLUX NEUTRALIZER: DANGER.
The warning on the side read:
D-A-N-G-E-R! THIS CONTAINER CONTAINS CHEMICALS.
DO NOT PUT OTHER MATERIALS IN THIS CONTAINER.
Do NOT RE-USE CONTAINER FOR ANY PURPOSE.
DO NOT PUNCTURE, WELD, DRILL OR EXPOSE CONTAINER TO HEAT OR SOURCE OF IGNITION, INCLUDING DIRECT SUNLIGHT.
DO DISPOSE OF CONTAINER To RECONDITIONERS OR DISPOSAL COMPANY.
The company’s negligent attitude apparently rubbed off on some employees. “Big Bob,” a solder machine operator, smoked near drums of flammable acids and alcohols. In the next room, workers rushed back and forth with open coffee cans of liquid freon, often narrowly avoiding collisions in their haste to refill the degreaser.
“Sure, a few of the guys like to act macho, washing their hands in freon and so on,” my new floor supervisor, Ray Burks, told me during lunch. “But basically it’s ignorance. And even if employees know the stuff is bad for them, what are they going to do? Worrying about chemicals is fine if you have money and options, but compared to being evicted tomorrow if you can’t pay your rent, chemical fumes and skin rashes seem pretty minor.”

September 15

After three -and-a-half weeks of clipping, my eyes were sensitive to sunlight, and it was hard to read for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. Remembering that Hilda said I would be clipping for only a few days, I asked to transfer to the assembly room, but was told that all those positions were full. “We can move employees around, but it depends on their attitude,” my floor supervisor said.
I decided to wait a few more days before asking again. I had noticed that Anglo men were usually transferred from the clipping section to a higher status job within a week. Other employees told me that women and Mexican men may remain in clipping for weeks or even months….
At lunch, some employees walked to a nearby sandwich shop while others met around a splintered picnic table in back of the building. Benchless and narrow, the table faced the parking lot and was only five feet away from a cluster of rusting chemical drums.
“Damn, we need longer breaks,” sighed a machine operator as the warning bell rang.
“What we need is a union,” said one woman unexpectedly. There was a short silence, then a solderer jumped to his feet.
“Union? Did I hear the word union?” He screamed in mock horror and then imitated a police siren. Another co-worker pretended to film us. “Guards, arrest them. Take them away!” she called out as employees entered the plant….
This afternoon, while we assembled rows of circuit boards, Gloria Luna told me about her childhood in a peasant family in Mexico. “We were poor,” she said, “and sometimes at night I’d be so hungry that I’d sneak into the kitchen and eat a handful of flour from the sack.”
Suddenly she stopped talking. After loading a few more pieces, I glanced at Gloria staring owllike into space, her eyes round and dull. She was sleeping with her eyes open. I touched her shoulder, which started her. She blinked at me and smiled.
Gloria, it turned out, was working the night shift in a local cannery. After the closing bell sounded at Q.E.S., she would collect her four-year-old girl from her husband David, who then left for his job at a local tannery. She would feed and bathe her daughter, then drop her off at a sister’s house. Gloria spent the next eight or ten hours sorting brussel sprouts on a conveyor belt, arriving home at one or two in the morning. She was at the electronics plant five hours later.
“Other women at Q.E.S. are working there, too.” whispered Gloria. “We don’t tell nobody, ’cause maybe they’ll fire you for working two jobs.”
Perhaps because of working nights in an unheated cannery, Gloria, four months pregnant, had developed a rasping cough that refused to go away. At lunch, dazed with exhaustion, she stretched out in the back of her old Ford sedan and tried to catch a few minutes of sleep.

December 25

Yesterday was my last day at Q.E.S. Most employees chose to work Christmas Eve rather than forgo a day’s wages. Fred Freiberg provided refreshments for the company party.
“Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m twenty-four,” Gloria told me at break. “Maybe because I’ve been doing the same thing for years and years. I’d like so bad to do something different, a job where you have big windows and do different things during the day.”
As a young girl, she recalled, she was rebellious and liked to run around the hills. “But now,” Gloria said. “I feel old, like an old woman. Why? I used to be so excited about everything. What happened to me?”

Epilogue, 1985

Some time after I left Q.E.S., I called my old boss, Fred Freiberg, to interview him. He seemed startled to learn that a former Q.E.S. employee wanted to write about the plant, but agreed to talk with me.
“I’d like to pay higher wages, but to do so, I’d have to raise my prices,” Fred told me in his office. “And if you charge more for the boards, you don’t get the job: It’s that simple. The trouble is, these Silicon Valley companies want you to work at practically overseas prices.”
Fred was disturbed that some of his former customers were sending their computer boards overseas or to local black-market assemblers. “Frankly, I don’t see the future as bright as I used to,” he said.
Then, changing his tone, Fred went on to praise Q.E.S. as an unusually clean plant with an excellent safety record. “No major accident in twelve years,” he told me, “and if a supervisor isn’t strict on safety, I fire ’em.”
What about employees who complained of headaches and dizziness from fumes? Fred had never heard these complaints. Freon, he said, “is basically a very harmless substance.” He said, however, that he didn’t condone “the electronics shops in Scotts Valley that have people up to their elbows in the stuff, scrubbing boards in metal tubs. And,” he added, “there are a lot of places like that, believe me.”
Fred, who said he was planning on replacing the freon at Q.E.S. with an “organic” cleaner, placed much of the blame for toxic fumes on employee carelessness. “You know,” he said, “we do hire a lot of ‘low-end’ people around here. People with bad attitudes. When employees won’t follow the rules, then of course we have a problem.”
He also discounted the risk of solder fumes. These are not hazardous, he said, “because the body can’t absorb lead.”
As he talked about other chemicals at Q.E.S., describing them as mild and harmless, a missing piece of the puzzle fell into place. Fred, it turns out, had simply learned what the chemical companies had taught him.
“Their salesmen come in here and hold training sessions,” he explained. “They show how to use the chemicals and give you instructions, you know: `Don’t drink it, don’t jump in it . . .’ ”
A while ago, I received an unexpected letter from a former Q.E.S. employee who had moved to Arizona. He had called OSHA about the fume problem at Q.E.S. and asked to see the inspection report. He received it and enclosed a copy, marked “confidential.”
According to the report, the OSHA inspector had conducted a wall-to-wall inspection while I was working at Q.E.S. She found no health or safety violations.

From T.H. Breen, editor. The Power of Words: Documents in American History New York: Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 302-6.

Reading 17: Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ November 24, 2002.

Introduction:

This is one of Osama bin Laden’s many statements, based on questions given to him by a British newspaper.

Thesis questions:

Why does Osama bin Laden hate the west so much? What crimes does he accuse the west of? What historical events does Osama bin Laden refer to? Why does he believe that the United States is corrupt, and has injected its corruption into the Islamic world?

Text:

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,
“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” [Quran 22:39]
“Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan.”[Quran 4:76]
Some American writers have published articles under the title ‘On what basis are we fighting?’ These articles have generated a number of responses, some of which adhered to the truth and were based on Islamic Law, and others which have not. Here we wanted to outline the truth – as an explanation and warning – hoping for Allah’s reward, seeking success and support from Him.
While seeking Allah’s help, we form our reply based on two questions directed at the
Americans:
Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you?
Q2) What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine:
(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.
(ii) It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-Semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed. Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.
When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islam, the religion of all the Prophets peace be upon them. Therefore, the call to a historical right to Palestine cannot be raised against the Islamic Ummah that believes in all the Prophets of Allah (peace and blessings be upon them) – and we make no distinction between them.
(iii) The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.
(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;
(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.
(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.
(iii) These governments steal our Ummah’s wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.
(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.
(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from out fight against you.
(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.
(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.
(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.
(g) You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Under the protection of your weapons, Sharon entered the Al-Aqsa mosque, to pollute it as a preparation to capture and destroy it.
(2) These tragedies and calamities are only a few examples of your oppression and aggression against us. It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!
(3) You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.
(c) Also the American army is part of the American people. It is this very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.
(d) The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.
(e) This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.
(f) Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.
The American Government and press still refuses to answer the question: Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?
If Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace!!! America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.
(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all.
It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honor, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their color, sex, or language.
(b) It is the religion whose book – the Quran – will remained preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it.
(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.
(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.
We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have
reached.
(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:
(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?
(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.
(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.
(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.
Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he ‘made a mistake’, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.
(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools
calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.
(vii) You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.
(viii) And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.
(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and*industries.
(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.
(xi) That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind, is that you have used your force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history; not to defend principles and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits. You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?
(xii) Let us not forget one of your major characteristics: your duality in both manners and values; your hypocrisy in manners and principles. All manners, principles and values have two scales: one for you and one for the others.
(a)The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only; as for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous, destructive policies and Governments, which you call the ‘American friends’. Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them, and to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them – a new lesson from the ‘American book of democracy’!!!
(b)Your policy on prohibiting and forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction to ensure world peace: it only applies to those countries which you do not permit to possess such weapons. As for the countries you consent to, such as Israel, then they are allowed to keep and use such weapons to defend their security. Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.
(c)You are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet you claim to want to selectively punish anyone else who does the same. Israel has for more than 50 years been pushing UN resolutions and rules against the wall with the full support of America.
(d)As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for – you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!! However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape. It will suffice to remind you of your latest war crimes in Afghanistan, in which densely populated innocent civilian villages were destroyed, bombs were dropped on mosques causing the roof of the mosque to come crashing down on the heads of the Muslims praying inside. You are the ones who broke the agreement with the Mujahideen when they left Qunduz, bombing them in Jangi fort, and killing more than 1,000 of your prisoners through suffocation and thirst. Allah alone knows how many people have died by torture at the hands of you and your agents. Your planes remain in the Afghan skies, looking for anyone remotely suspicious.
(e)You have claimed to be the vanguards of Human Rights, and your Ministry of Foreign affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate any Human Rights.
However, all these things vanished when the Mujahideen hit you, and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse. In America, you captured thousands the Muslims and Arabs, took them into custody with neither reason, court trial, nor even disclosing their names. You issued newer, harsher laws.
What happens in Guatanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces – you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?”
(3) What we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves – and I doubt you will do so – to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which you yourself must adhere to.
(4) We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines.
(5) We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.
(6) Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.
(7) We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of sub dual, theft and occupation, and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews because this will result in more disasters for you.
If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: “Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. And remove the anger of their (believers’) hearts. Allah accepts the repentance of whom He wills. Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.” [Quran9:13-1]
The Nation of honor and respect:
“But honor, power and glory belong to Allah, and to His Messenger (Muhammad- peace be upon him) and to the believers.” [Quran 63:8]
“So do not become weak (against your enemy), nor be sad, and you will be*superior ( in victory ) if you are indeed (true) believers” [Quran 3:139]
The Nation of Martyrdom; the Nation that desires death more than you desire life:
“Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive with their Lord, and they are being provided for. They rejoice in what Allah has bestowed upon them from His bounty and rejoice for the sake of those who have not yet joined them, but are left behind (not yet martyred) that on them no fear shall come, nor shall they grieve. They rejoice in a grace and a bounty from Allah, and that Allah will not waste the reward of the believers.” [Quran 3:169-171]
The Nation of victory and success that Allah has promised:
“It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad peace be upon him) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam), to make it victorious over all other religions even though the Polytheists hate it.” [Quran 61:9]
“Allah has decreed that ‘Verily it is I and My Messengers who shall be victorious.’ Verily Allah is All-Powerful, All-Mighty.” [Quran 58:21]
The Islamic Nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil Empires like yourself; the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you.
You are well aware that the Islamic Nation, from the very core of its soul, despises your haughtiness and arrogance.
If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahideen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.
This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?

[From Guardian Unlimited Network, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,845725,00.html]

Reading 18: Governor Palin’s Speech at the “Restoring America” Tea Party of America Rally in Indianola, Iowa (2010)

Introduction:

The following is a comparison of conservative versus liberal ideas, in about 2010. First, you will read a speech by Sarah Palin, who is a leader of the Tea Party (she was the Republican nominee for vice president in 2008). Then you will read a short, edited collection of several articles from a liberal magazine, Mother Jones.

Thesis questions:

On what specific issues were American conservatives and liberals divided about around 2010? What was, essentially, the conservative and the liberal position on each of these issues?

Text

The following is the text of Governor Palin’s speech at the “Restoring America” Tea Party of America Rally in Indianola, Iowa, on September 3, 2011.
Thank you, Iowa. Thank you so much. The sign that says, “Thank you, Sarah,” no, I thank you. You are what keeps me going, keeps so many of us going. Your love of country keeps us going. Thank you so much. Iowa, you are good people. You are all good people who are here. Thank you.
It is an honor to be in the Heartland sharing this Labor Day weekend with you. And I thank you so much for the invitation, to these organizers who put so much work into all this. It’s so good to see the O4P and C4P people here today. Last night was fun – getting to run into some of you at that restaurant and to see so many different demographics represented and so many different states all across our great nation. We got to gather together last night – different demographics, different political parties even represented – and Todd reminded me as we walked out of that room, he said, “See, we’re not celebrating ‘red America’ or ‘blue America.’ We’re celebrating red, white, and blue America.”
So, what brought us here today out in this field? Why aren’t we catching a Cyclones game, or watching the Hawkeyes perhaps, or grilling up some venison and corn-on-the-cob, maybe some caribou with some friends on this Labor Day weekend? What brought us together is a love of country. And we see that America is hurting. We’re not willing to just sit back and watch her demise through some “fundamental transformation” of the greatest country on earth. We’re here to stop that transformation and to begin the restoration of the country that we love.
We’re here because America is at a tipping point. America faces a crisis. And it’s not a crisis like perhaps a Midwest summer storm – the kind that moves in and hits hard, but then it moves on.  No, this kind will relentlessly rage until we do restore all that is free and good and right about America. It’s not just fear of a double dip recession. And it’s not even the shame of a credit downgrade for the first time in U.S. history. It’s deeper than that. This is a systemic crisis due to failed policies and incompetent leadership. And we’re going to speak truth today. It may be hard-hitting, but we’re going to speak truth today because we need to start talking about what hasn’t worked, and we’re going to start talking about what will work for America. We will talk truth.
Now, some of us saw this day coming. It was three years ago on this very day that I spoke at the GOP Convention where I was honored to be able to accept the nomination for vice president that night. And in my speech I asked America: “When the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away….what exactly is [Barack Obama’s] plan?
What does he actually seek to accomplish after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger, and take more of your money, and give you more orders from Washington, and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world.” I spoke of this, but back then it was only my words that you had to go by. Now you have seen the proof yourself. Candidate Obama didn’t have a record while he was in office, but President Obama sure does, and that’s why we’re here today.
Candidate Obama pledged to fundamentally transform America. And for all the failures and the broken promises, that’s the one thing he has delivered on. We’ve transformed from a country of hope to one of anxiety. Today, one in five working-age men are out of work. One in seven Americans are on food stamps. Thirty percent of our mortgages are underwater. In parts of Michigan and California, they’re suffering from unemployment numbers that are greater than during the depths of the Great Depression. Barack Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, and instead he turned around and he tripled it. And now our national debt is growing at $3 million a minute. That’s $4.25 billion a day.
President Obama, is this what you call “winning the future”? I call it losing – losing our country and with it the American dream. President Obama, these people – these Americans – feel that “fierce urgency of now.” But do you feel it, sir?
The Tea Party was borne of this urgency. It’s the same sense of urgency that propelled the Sons of Liberty during the Revolution. It’s the same sense of urgency that propelled the Abolitionists before the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement during the 20th Century. The Tea Party Movement is part of this noble American tradition. This movement isn’t simply a political awakening; it’s an American awakening. And it’s coming from ordinary Americans, not the politicos in the Beltway. No, it’s you who grow our food; you run our small businesses; you teach our children; you fight our wars. We are always proud of America. We love our country in good times and in bad, and we never apologize for America.
That is why the far left’s irresponsible and radical policies awakened a sleeping America so that we finally understood what it was that we were about to lose. We were about to lose the blessings of liberty and prosperity. So, the working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box. And as much as the media wants you to forget this, Tea Party Americans won an electoral victory of historic proportions in November. We the people, we rose up and we rejected the left’s big government agenda. We don’t want it. We can’t afford it. And we are unwilling to pay for it.
That victory, remember friends, was only one step in a long march towards saving our country.
We sent a new class of leaders to D.C., but immediately the permanent political class tried to co-opt them – because the reality is we are governed by a permanent political class, until we change that. They talk endlessly about cutting government spending, and yet they keep spending more. They talk about massive unsustainable debt, and yet they keep incurring more. They spend, they print, they borrow, they spend more, and then they stick us with the bill. Then they pat their own backs, and they claim that they faced and “solved” the debt crisis that they got us in, but when we were humiliated in front of the world with our country’s first credit downgrade, they promptly went on vacation.
No, they don’t feel the same urgency that we do. But why should they? For them business is good; business is very good.  Seven of the ten wealthiest counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Polls there actually – and usually I say polls, eh, they’re for strippers and cross country skiers – but polls in those parts show that some people there believe that the economy has actually improved. See, there may not be a recession in Georgetown, but there is in the rest of America.
Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars.  They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.
So, do you want to know why the permanent political class doesn’t really want to cut any spending? Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed – a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.
It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen this kind of crony capitalism before. It’s is the same good old boy politics-as-usual that I fought and we defeated in my home state. I took on a corrupt and compromised political class and their backroom dealings with Big Oil. And I can tell you from experience that sudden and relentless reform never sits well with entrenched interests and power-brokers. So, please you must vet a candidate’s record. You must know their ability to successfully reform and actually fix problems that they’re going to claim that they inherited.
Real reform never sits well with the entrenched special interests, and that’s why the true voices of reform are so quickly demonized. Look what they say about you. You are concerned civilized citizens and look what they say about you. And just look what happened during the debt-ceiling debate. We’d been given warning after warning that our credit rating would be downgraded if politicians didn’t get serious about tackling the debt and deficit problem. But instead of making the real cuts that are necessary, they used Enron-like accounting gimmicks, and they promised that if they were just allowed to spend trillions more today, they’d cut billions ten years from now. By some magical thinking, they figured they could run up trillion dollar deficits year after year, yet still somehow avoid the unforgiving mathematics that led to the downgrade. Well, they got a rude awakening from the rest of the world, and that’s that even America isn’t “too big to fail.”
When we finally did get slapped with that inevitable downgraded, the politicians and the pundits turned around and blamed us – independent commonsense conservatives. We got blamed! They called us un-American and terrorists and suicide bombers and…hobbits…couldn’t understand that one.
And what is the President’s answer to this enormous debt problem? It’s just spend more money. Only you can’t call it “spending” now. Now you got to call it “investing.” Don’t call it “spending.” Call it “investing.” It’s kind of like what happens with FEMA and some of these other bureaucratic agencies that don’t really want to refer to our centralized federal government as “government.” Now it’s called the “federal family.” Am I too old to ask to be emancipated? Never thought I’d say it, but I want a divorce.
No, the President’s answer to our debt problem is: Incur more debt. Spend more money (only call it “investing”). Make more folks even more reliant on government to supply their every need. This is the antithesis of the pioneering American spirit that empowered the individual to work, to produce, to be able to thrive and succeed with fulfillment and with pride; and that in turn built our free and hope-filled and proud country.
He wants to “Win The Future” by “investing” more of your hard-earned money in some harebrained ideas like more solar panels and really fast trains. These are things that venture capitalists will tell you are non-starters, yet he wants to do more of them. We’re flat broke, but he thinks these solar panels and really fast trains are going to magically save us. He’s shouting “all aboard Obama’s bullet train to bankruptcy.”  
The only future that Barack Obama is trying to win is his own re-election, and he has shown that he’s perfectly willing to mortgage our children’s future to pay for it. And there is proof of this. Just look closely at where all that “green energy” stimulus money is “invested.” See a pattern. The President’s big campaign donors got nice returns for their “investments” in him to the tune of billions of your tax dollars in the form of “green energy” stimulus funds. The technical term for this is “pay-to-play.” Between bailouts for Wall Street cronies and stimulus projects for union bosses’ security and “green energy” giveaways, he took care of his friends. And now they’re on course to raise a billion dollars for his re-election bid so that they can do it all over again. Are you going to let them do it all over again? Are you willing to unite to do all we can to not let them do it again so we can save our country?
Now to be fair, some GOP candidates also raised mammoth amounts of cash, and we need to ask them, too: What, if anything, do their donors expect in return for their “investments”? We need to know this because our country can’t afford more trillion-dollar “thank you” notes to campaign backers. It is an important question, and it cuts to the heart of our problem. And I speak from experience in confronting the corruption and the crony capitalism since starting out in public office 20 years ago. I’ve been out-spent in my campaigns two to one, three to one, five to one. (And, by the way, I don’t play that game either of hiring expert political advisors just so they’ll say something nice about me on TV – if you ever wonder. You know how that game’s played too I’m sure.) But the reason is simple: It’s because like you, I’m not for sale. It’s because we believe in the free market. I believe in the free market, and that is why I detest crony capitalism. And Barack Obama has shown us cronyism on steroids. It will lead to our downfall if we don’t stop it now. It’s a root that grows our economic problems. Our unsustainable debt and our high unemployment numbers and a housing market that’s in the tank and a stagnant economy – these are all symptoms. Politicians are so focused on the symptoms and not the disease. We will not solve our economic problems until we confront the cronyism of our President and our permanent political class.
So, this is why we must remember that the challenge is not simply to replace Obama in 2012. The real challenge is who and what we will replace him with. It’s not enough to just change up the uniform. If we don’t change the team and the game plan, we won’t save our country.
Yes, we need sudden and relentless reform, and that will return power to “We the People.” This, of course, requires deeds, not just words. It’s not good enough for politicians to just be throwing our way some vague generalities, talking about some promises here and there. It’s time that we hold them accountable. It is amazing to me that even some good conservatives run away from being honest and straight up with us about what needs to be done. They don’t want to rock the boat. They can’t hurt future election prospects evidently. They just talk vaguely about cuts and then they move on. They’re too busy saying what they think we want to hear, but instead they should be telling us what needs to be said and what needs to be done. So, let us today in this field have that adult conversation about what needs to be done to restore America. Let’s do that now.
In five days time, our President will gift us with yet another speech. In his next speech he’ll reveal his latest new super-duper “jobs plan.” It will have more lofty goals and flowery rhetoric, more illogical economic fantasies and more continued blame and finger-pointing. But listen closely to what he says. All of his “solutions” will revolve around more of the same – more payoffs for his friends and supporters. His “plan” is the same as it’s always been, and that’s grow more government, increase more debt, take and give more of your hard-earned money to special interests. And this is such a problem. But you know what the problems are. We could go on all day about the problems caused by the status quo in Washington. Status quo I think is Latin for “more of the same mess that we’re in.” That status quo won’t work any more. We could go on all day about the problems, but you know them because you live them everyday.
So, let’s talk about real solutions. I want to tell you what my plan is. My plan is a bona-fide pro-working man’s plan, and it deals in reality. It deals in the way that the world really works because we must talk about what really works in order to get America back to work.
My plan is about empowerment: empowerment of our states, empowerment of our entrepreneurs, most importantly empowerment of you – our hardworking individuals – because I have faith, I have trust, I have respect for you.
The way forward is no more politics as usual. We must stop expanding an out-of-control and out-of-touch federal government. This is first: All power not specifically delegated to the federal government by our Constitution is reserved for the states and for we the people. So, let’s enforce the 10th Amendment and devolve powers back locally where the Founders intended them to be.
Second, what happened to all those promises about staying committed to repealing the mother of all big government unfunded mandates? We must repeal Obamacare! And rein in burdensome regulations that are a boot on our neck. Get government out of the way. Let the private sector breathe and grow. This will allow the confidence that businesses need in order to expand and hire more people.
Third, no more run away debt. We must prioritize and cut. Cancel unused stimulus funds, and have that come to Jesus moment where we own up to the debt challenge that is entitlement reform. See, the reality is we will have entitlement reform; it’s just a matter of how we’re going to get there. We either do it ourselves or the world’s capital markets are going to shove it down our throats, and we’ll have no choice but to reform our entitlement programs. The status quo is no longer an option. Entitlement reform is our duty now, and it must be done in a way that honors our commitment to our esteemed elders today, while keeping faith with future generations. I don’t think anything has irked me more than this nonsense coming from the White House about maybe not sending our seniors their checks. It’s their money! They have paid into Social Security all of their working lives; and for the President to say, “ah, we may not be able to cut their checks,” ah, well, where did all their money go, politicians? It’s like the Commander-in-Chief being willing to throw our military under the bus by threatening that their paychecks may not arrive. But the politicians will still get their checks and their secure retirements, and he’ll still get his posh vacations. Aren’t you just sick to death of those skewed priorities? It’s all backwards. Our seniors and our brave men and women in uniform being used as pawns – I say it’s shameful, and enough is enough. No more.
Fourth, it is time for America to become the energy superpower. The real stimulus that we’ve been waiting for is robust and responsible domestic energy production. We have the resources. Affordable and secure energy is the key to any thriving economy, and it must be our foundation. So, I would do the opposite of Obama’s manipulation of U.S. supplies of energy. Drill here, drill now. Let the refineries and the pipelines be built. Stop kowtowing to foreign countries and dictators asking them to ramp up production and industry for us, promising them that we’ll be their greatest customer. No, not when we have the resources here. We need to move on tapping our own God-given natural resources. I promise you that this will bring real job growth, not the politicians’ phony “green jobs” fairy dust sprinkled with wishes and glitter… No, a hardcore all-of-the-above energy policy that builds this indestructible link between made-in-America energy and our prosperity and our security. You know, there are enough large conventional natural resource development projects waiting for government approval that could potentially create more than a million high-paying jobs all across the country. And this is true stimulus. It wouldn’t cost government a dime to allow the private sector to do these. In fact, these projects will generate billions of dollars in revenue. Can you imagine that: a stimulus project that actually helps dig us out of debt instead of digging us further into it! And these are good-paying jobs, and I know that from experience. For years my own family was supported (as Todd worked up on the North Slope) by a good energy sector job. America’s economic revival starts with America’s energy revival.
Fifth, we can and we will make America the most attractive country on earth to do business in. Here’s how we’re going to do this. Right now, we have the highest federal corporate income tax rate in the industrialized world. Did you know our rates are higher than China and communist Cuba? This doesn’t generate as much revenue as you would think, though, because many big corporations skirt federal taxes because they have the friends in D.C. who right the rules for the rest of us. This makes us less competitive and restrains our engine of prosperity. Heck, some businesses spend more time trying to figure out how to hide their profits than they do in generating more profits so that they can expand and hire more of us. So, to make America the most attractive and competitive place to do business, to set up shop here and hire people here, to attract capital from all over the globe that will lead to an explosion of growth, instead of chasing industry offshore, I propose to eliminate all federal corporate income tax. And hear me out on this. This is how we create millions of high-paying jobs. This is how we increase opportunity and prosperity for all.
But here’s the best part: To balance out any loss of federal revenue from this tax cut, we eliminate corporate welfare and all the loopholes and we eliminate bailouts. This is how we break the back of crony capitalism because it feeds off corporate welfare, which is just socialism for the very rich. We can change all of that. The message then to job-creating corporations is: We’ll unshackle you from the world’s highest federal corporate income tax rate, but you will stand or fall on your own, just like all the rest of us out on main street.
See, when we empower the job-creators, our economy will soar; Americans will get back to work.
This plan is a first step in a long march towards fundamental restoration of a strong and free market economy. And it represents the kind of real reform that we need. And, folks, it must come from you. It must come from the American people. Real hope is in you. It’s not that hopey-changey “stuff” that we heard about back in 2008. We’ve all learned that. And real hope isn’t in an individual. It’s not in a politician certainly. And that hopey-changey stuff that was put in an individual back when Barack Obama was a candidate – that hopey-changey stuff didn’t create one job in August, did it? That’s the first time that’s happened in the United States since World War II. Real hope comes from you. Real hope comes from realizing that we the people can make the difference. And you don’t need a title to make a difference. We can get this country back on the right track. We can do it by empowering the people and realizing that God has richly blessed this most exceptional nation, and then we do something about that realization.
Don’t wait for the permanent political class to reform anything for you. They won’t. They can’t. They can’t even take responsibility for their own actions. Our credit is downgraded, but it’s not their fault. Our economy’s in turmoil, but it’s not his fault. It’s the tsunami in Japan or the Middle East uprising. It’s Irene. It’s those doggone ATM machines.
Folks, the truth is Barack Obama is adrift with no plan because his “fundamental transformation” is at odds with everything that made this country great. It doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t make sense. Unbelievably our President declares that he “believes in American Exceptionalism… just as the Greeks believe in Greek Exceptionalism.” Well, the path he has us on will make us just as “exceptional” as Greece, alright – with the debt crisis and the stagnation and the unemployment and uprisings and all. 
Friends, you are better than that. Our country is better than that. We’ve got to unite. We’ve got to stand together. We can confront the problem and we can achieve lasting reform. And I can tell you from hard-earned experience with bumps and bruises along the way, that the road ahead is not easy. You will be demonized. They’ll mock you. They’ll make things up. They’ll tell you to “go to hell.” But we’ll bite our tongue, we’ll keep it classy, and we won’t respond—as tempting as it is—to anyone who just has such disdain for our free market economy and for individual initiative and responsibility. We won’t say, “No, you go to hell.” No, we won’t say that. You know why we don’t have to say that? Because when we have time-tested truth and logic on our side, we win. And when we refuse to retreat because we know that our children’s future is at stake, we win.
No, the road isn’t easy, but it’s nothing compared to the suffering and sacrifice of those who came before us.
A few weeks ago, after my visit to the Iowa State Fair, I took my daughter Piper and my niece McKinley with us to the World War I Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. And standing in the rain, reading the inscriptions on the Memorial about the honor in one’s dedication to God and country, I thought of all those young patriots who suffered and died so far from home. And revering our vets there with the next generation by my side, there was such clarity – clarity in our calling, patriotic Constitutionalists. We have a duty not just to the living, but also to those who came and died before us and to the generations yet to be born. Our freedom was purchased by millions of men now long-forgotten throughout history who charged the bayonets, and they charged the cannons; they knew they were going to die, but it was worth it for them sacrificing for future generations’ freedom. They’re the ones who prayed in the trenches and suffered in the P.O.W. camps. They gave their lives so that we could be here today.
You and I are blessed to be “born the heirs of freedom.” As President John F. Kennedy said, “We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.” We are the heirs of those who froze with Washington at Valley Forge and who held the line at Gettysburg, who freed the slaves to close a shameful chapter, and who carved a nation out of the wilderness. We are the sons and daughters of those who stormed the beaches of Normandy and raised the flag at Iwo Jima and made America the strongest, the most prosperous, the greatest nation on earth forever in mankind’s history – the greatest, most exceptional nation.
America, we will always endure. We will always come through. We will never give up. We shall endure because we live by that moral strength that we call grace. Because though we’ve often skirted a precipice, a Providential Hand has always guided us to a better future. So, let us seek that Hand once more. Our Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, we will be a nation gone under.” Yes, He shed his grace on thee, America! We will not squander what we have been given! We will fight for freedom. We will fight for America. We are at the tipping point. United we must stand. And we shall nobly save, not meanly lose, this last best hope on earth.
So, God bless you, Iowa! God bless the United States of America!

Stephanie Mencimer, “Snapshots From The Tea Party.” Mother Jones, Sept. 13, 2009.
The problem with people who march in protest of big government and taxes is that they never seem to acknowledge just how much they depend on the very government those tax dollars support. Case in point: I spent several hours Saturday attending the big “9/12” march in DC, brought to you by the same people who organized the Tax Day “tea parties” and rowdy health care town hall meetings. Tens of thousands of conservatives and libertarians fanned out across Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capitol lawn, decrying the federal stimulus package, the bailout of Wall Street, and the “czaring” or America.
All that marching and ranting was apparently too much for some folks; several “patriots” suffered medical emergencies and had to be rescued by paramedics—that is, by big government. Or at least local government. Several children also got lost (perhaps because they all seemed to be wearing camo). But the event organizers failed to see the irony in bashing government as the root of all evil one minute and the next, urging little Johnny to find a policeman (and likely stimulus beneficiary) to help him find his mom. (Some in the crowd did suggest people pray for the little tyke, however.)
This kind of disconnect seemed to infuse one of the larger conservative protests in recent memory. What, exactly, did all these protesters want? Who knows? Their message was as muddled as any Starbucks-vandalizing-World Bank protester’s. Some wanted an end to illegal immigration. Others wanted to abolish the auto czar. A few protested “cap and tax” and carried signs suggesting that CO2 emissions came from the sun. One guy carried a poster with photos of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ben Bernanke, Obama and others, all wearing Hitler mustaches—in protest of the socialism that was taking over the country. More just seemed to hate Obama generally, along with ACORN and Ted Kennedy. (A popular sign: “Obamacare should die with Ted Kennedy.”)
One clever poster featured Obama with an acorn top on his head, smoking a cigarette, and the caption “poster boy for health care reform.” …
[Article notes that there were hundreds of people smoking in the Tea Party protest.] Those same smokers were uniformly incensed that Obama was trying to reform health care, despite the fact that they, and many others at the event, were eventually going to need a fair amount of medical help, if not already. Perhaps it was just all the ambulances, but the tea partiers seemed, on balance, an unhealthy bunch. Not to over-generalize about the attendees, who may have numbered as many as 75,000, but from my vantage point, the people most furious with Obama and health care reform were disproportionately fat, white, and gray. There were a surprising number of sick-looking elderly people in wheelchairs flying flags that read “Don’t tread on me.” I was too chicken to ask any of them what kind of government assistance they were living on….
If the protesters’ message seemed vague, one thing came through loud and clear: The tea party rage stems not from taxes or even Obama, but—no surprise—from the economy. Jeff English came to the march from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with a female companion who was carrying the smoking Obama poster. Neither of them had ever been to a political rally, and this was their first time to Washington. Williamsport, population 31,000, sent five busloads of people to the march, according to English. I puzzled over this and asked him whether the economy there was in particularly bad shape. English shook his head yes and said ruefully that the paving company he works for has laid off 12 people this year and is down to a skeleton crew.
A quick check reveals that Lycoming County, of which Williamsport is the county seat, has an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent, and the poverty rate is nearly 14 percent. While the county has received at least $14 million in federal stimulus money, which presumably has helped keep those numbers from going a lot higher, it hasn’t trickled down to English. His female companion, who didn’t give her name, said they had come to the march to get the government to “stop spending.”
The role of the recession in this populist uprising was best articulated by a speaker named James Anderer, who managed to briefly hush some “liar!” chants by telling the story of losing his Jeep dealership in Lindenhurst, New York. Anderer has become a folk hero among conservatives and talk radio hosts because GM revoked his franchise as part of the government-forced restructuring. “My business, Highland Jeep, was stolen from me, with no compensation,” he said, blaming the Obama administration for violating his constitutional rights. “Now you see why I am an angry American.” People around me shook their heads in quiet outrage. Well, they did for about 30 seconds. Anderer’s spell was quickly broken by the guy in front of me who yelled, “Obama’s on crack!” Everyone laughed and people went back to wondering when the president would shut down Fox News.

http://sarahpac.com/posts/governor-palins-speech-at-the-restoring-america-tea-party-of-america-rally-in-indianola-iowa-video-and-transcript

Posted on September 04, 2011

Reading 19: “The Coming Generation War”

Introduction:

It is well known that the political split in American politics since the 2016 election is widening. Democrats are increasingly the party of the “young,” “people of color,” liberals, and the well-educated. Republicans are increasingly the party of older Americans, whites, conservatives, and the less well educated, and “blue collar” [working class or lower middle class] workers. The following article explains this phenomenon in terms of generational differences.

Thesis Questions:
According to Ferguson and Freyman, what is the relationship of generations to politics? What demographics characterize young people today? What are the problems of young Americans today? What answers to these problems are they tending to find in the “socialist” wing of the Democratic Party? What must Democrats do, or what is helping them demographically, to increase their power? What are the demographics of older Americans? What groups now tend to vote for Republicans? Why are Republicans at a demographic disadvantage? What issues most concern them, and what are their solutions? In terms of winning votes, what are the Republicans strengths? How can they build on these strengths to continue to win elections?

Text:

Niall Ferguson
and
Eyck Freymann
, “The Coming Generation War,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2019.

The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young—and the consequences could be profound….
[We believe] that a generational division is growing in American politics that could prove more important than the cleavages of race and class, which are the more traditional focuses of political analysis.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is often described as a radical, but the data show that her views are close to the median for her generation. The Millennials and Generation Z—that is, Americans aged 18 to 38—are generations to whom little has been given, and of whom much is expected. Young Americans are burdened by student loans and credit-card debt. They face stagnant real wages and few opportunities to build a nest egg. Millennials’ early working lives were blighted by the financial crisis and the sluggish growth that followed. In later life, absent major changes in fiscal policy, they seem unlikely to enjoy the same kind of entitlements enjoyed by current retirees.
Under different circumstances, the under-39s might conceivably have been attracted to the entitlement-cutting ideas of the Republican Tea Party (especially if those ideas had been sincere). Instead, we have witnessed a shift to the political left by young voters on nearly every policy issue, economic and cultural alike.
As [the authors of this article] a liberal graduate student [Freymann] and a conservative professor [Ferguson], we rarely see eye to eye on politics. Yet we agree that the generation war is the best frame for understanding the ways that the Democratic and Republican parties are diverging. The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young, specifically the Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born after 1996). The Republicans are leaning ever more heavily on retirees, particularly the Silent Generation (born before 1945). In the middle are the Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980), who are slowly inching leftward, and the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), who are slowly inching to the right.
This generation-based party realignment has profound implications for the future of American politics. The generational transition will not dramatically change the median voter in the 2020 election—or even in 2024, if turnout among young voters stays close to the historical average. Yet both parties are already feeling its effects, as the dominant age cohort in each party recognizes its newfound power to choose candidates and set the policy agenda. Drawing on opinion polls and financial data, and extrapolating historical trends, we think that young voters’ rendezvous with destiny will come in the mid to late 2020s.
Today, the older generations have a lock on political power in Washington. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are members of the Silent Generation. So are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who lead in nearly every poll of the 2020 Democratic primary. President Donald Trump and the median senator and representative are Boomers. Of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, two are from the Silent Generation and six are Boomers. Yet the median American is 38—a Millennial.
Over the past year, the Democratic Party’s geriatric leadership has begun to feel the ground moving beneath its feet. For decades, moderate Democrats have kept a tight grip on the party’s platform. The 2018 midterm elections were a watershed. Boomers and members of the Silent Generation still make up more than three-fifths of the party’s House members and hold all major leadership roles. But newly elected members—including 14 Millennials and 32 Gen Xers—are driving the conversation on policy, from Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal to a recent resolution to withdraw support from Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.
The Democrats have responded by moving left. In 2013, President Barack Obama signed a bill to cut the budget deficit by slashing hundreds of billions of dollars in spending. But already in 2019, a majority of the House Democratic caucus has co-sponsored a Medicare for all bill. Even those 2020 presidential candidates characterized as moderates, such as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which calls for trillions of dollars of deficit-funded federal spending to transform America’s economy and its energy sector.
If President Franklin Roosevelt was right, and demographics are destiny, then the Democrats are going to inherit a windfall. Ten years from now, if current population trends hold, Gen Z and Millennials together will make up a majority of the American voting-age population. Twenty years from now, by 2039, they will represent 62 percent of all eligible voters.
If the Democrats can organize these two generations into a political bloc, the consequences could be profound. Key liberal policy priorities—universal Medicare, student-loan forgiveness, immigration reform, and even some version of the Green New Deal—would stand a decent chance of becoming law. In the interim, states that are currently deep red could turn blue. A self-identifying democratic socialist could win the presidency.
By contrast, from the perspective of pure demographics, the GOP seems to be playing a losing hand. Unless Republicans can find a way to stop young voters’ slide to the left in the 2020s, the party will survive only if it can pull older voters—Boomers and the remaining members of the Silent Generation—to the right fast enough to compensate for the leftward shift of the young.
Millennials cannot be blamed for concluding that the economy is rigged against them. True, in absolute terms, Americans under 40 carry less debt than middle-aged Americans. But their debt profile is toxic. Nearly half of it comes from student loans and credit cards. In contrast, 72 percent of the debt held by Americans aged 40 to 49 is mortgage debt, which comes with tax advantages and allows debtors to build home equity as they repay their loans.
Meanwhile, the job market has turned a college education into a lose-lose choice for many young Americans. In 2016, a single year of tuition, room, and board at a private college cost 78 percent of median household income. Most American families can barely afford to send even a single child to college without loans, let alone two or three. Yet young workers without a college degree are deeply disadvantaged in the workforce, and more so all the time.
Young people then struggle to stay above water financially after they graduate. The net worth of the median Millennial household has fallen nearly 40 percent since 2007. This is not because they eat too much avocado toast; it is because student loan payments consume the income that they would otherwise save. Headline unemployment figures show that the labor market is humming. It does not feel that way for Millennials, who have never experienced a “good economy.”
It is therefore unsurprising that large majorities of young voters support economic policies that Ocasio-Cortez describes as “socialist.” According to a Harvard poll, 66 percent of Gen Z supports single-payer health care. Sixty-three percent supports making public colleges and universities tuition-free. The same share supports Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to create a federal jobs guarantee. Many Gen Z voters are not yet in the workforce, but 47 percent support a “militant and powerful labor movement.” Millennial support for these policies is lower, but only slightly.
Younger voters are also far left of center on most other economic and social policies. They are particularly opposed to the Trump administration’s handling of immigration. Americans 35 and older are nearly evenly divided on the issue of President Trump’s border wall. Among voters under 35, this is not even a question. Nearly 80 percent oppose the wall.
Gen Z are not a trusting bunch. Students tend to believe that their college or university administration will do the right thing “always” or “most of the time.” Contrary to conventional wisdom, young Americans trust the military and law enforcement more than other institutions. But they take an extremely dim view of Trump, Congress, Wall Street, the press, and the social-media platforms where they get their news: Twitter and Facebook.
When the question is posed as an abstraction, most Gen Zers don’t trust the federal government either. But they favor big-government economic policies regardless because they believe that government is the only protection workers have against concentrated corporate power.
Philosophically, many Gen Zers and Millennials believe that government’s proper role should be as a force for social good. Among voting-age members of Gen Z, seven in 10 believe that the government “should do more to solve problems” and that it “has a responsibility to guarantee health care to all.”
Young voters are also far more willing than their elders to point to other countries as proof that the U.S. government isn’t measuring up. Gen Z voters are twice as likely to say that “there are other countries better than the U.S.” than that “America is the best country in the world.” As Ocasio-Cortez puts it: “My policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.”
Will Gen Z voters moderate their views after they enter the labor force? Probably not. Irving Kristol once joked that conservatives are liberals who have been “mugged by reality.” But the data don’t support this hypothesis. Most Millennials have already been mugged by reality: competing in the job market, paying taxes, and—for those 26 and older—taking responsibility for their own health care. In the process, they have lurched left, not right. On questions of political philosophy, Millennials are far closer to their juniors in Gen Z than to their elders in Gen X.
Even young Republicans have been caught up in this philosophical leftward drift. Gen Z Republicans are four times as likely as Silent Generation Republicans to believe that government should do more to solve problems. And only 60 percent of Gen Z Republicans approve of Trump’s job performance, while his approval among all Republicans hovers around 90 percent.
In short, Ocasio-Cortez is neither an aberration nor a radical. She is close to the political center of America’s younger generations.
Can the Democratic Party convert this tectonic shift into victory at the ballot box? Maybe, but not necessarily. As the party tries to harness its younger, more progressive wing, it faces three interrelated challenges.
The first challenge is the perennial problem of low youth turnout. Democrats have been working for decades to get more young Americans to vote. They have partnered with organizations such as Rock the Vote to make voting cool. They have invested heavily in social-media microtargeting and experimented with mobile apps that use peer pressure to drive up turnout. Yet they have never gotten youth-turnout rates high enough to swing a close presidential election in their favor. Since 1980, the percentage of eligible voters in their 20s who actually vote in presidential elections has held steady between 40 and 50 percent. For Americans aged 45 and up, voting rates have been far higher: between 65 and 75 percent.
History offers Democrats some reason for hope. The closer an American is to middle age, the more likely he or she is to vote. On the other hand, turnout rates are declining across the board, and it is the 30-to-44-year-old age bracket that has seen the steepest decline over the past four decades. Unless Democrats can show younger voters that their votes translate into policy change, they could find themselves trying to mobilize a generation that is permanently apathetic and politically disengaged.
The second challenge for Democrats is that most of the party’s traditional power brokers are older, and many of them consider the youngsters to be radicals, or at the very least political liabilities. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has declined to move forward with the Green New Deal. When freshman Representative Ilhan Omar made comments about Israel policy that were widely criticized as anti-Semitic, the Democratic-controlled House voted to voice its opposition. When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tried to block staffers from joining primary campaigns, Ocasio-Cortez told her followers to stop donating. These squabbles could easily lead to a rupture within the party.
The third challenge is that when young people organize, they do it in their own way and on their own terms. By The Washington Post’s count, between 1.4 and 2.3 million people attended the March for Our Lives in 2018, organized by school-shooting survivors from Parkland, Florida. Democratic candidates embraced the students’ cause and made gun control a central issue of the campaign. That may be one reason why early-voting turnout among 18-to-29-year-olds soared. But it was young people driving the agenda and the party following—not the other way around.
The best way for the Democrats to bridge these divides is to redouble the party’s focus on the issue that unites the coalition across generations: health care. In 2018, 41 percent of voters listed health care as their top issue. Three-quarters of them voted for the Democratic candidate.
However, on most other issues, the demographic trend lines are clear: By the mid 2020s, if a preponderance of young voters support an issue, the Democratic Party will probably have no choice but to make it central to the platform. Today, 43 percent of self-identified Democrats are either Gen Zers or Millennials. By 2024, by our calculations, this figure might rise to 50 percent. If the Democrats are not already the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they will be soon.
Does all this mean that the Republican Party is doomed? Perhaps not. Even as younger voters have moved to the left, Republicans have been sustaining themselves by winning an ever-greater share of older voters. The Silent Generation moved hard to the right under Obama. In 2008, 38 percent of its members identified as Republicans. By 2016, that figure had risen to 48 percent. But the youngest members are now 75, and they will not be around forever. So Republicans are racing against the clock to pull nonaligned Boomers into the coalition. (It doesn’t hurt that Boomers now comprise fully two-thirds of the House Republican caucus.)
But how? Tax cuts are part of this strategy, but as voter reactions to the 2017 GOP tax bill showed, it’s a policy that yields diminishing political returns. A more important gambit was revealed in Trump’s State of the Union address in February, which drew a link between the disastrous regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the emerging Democratic agenda. “We are born free, and we will stay free,” the president declared. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
As a small but growing number of prominent Democrats embrace the label “socialist”—or “democratic socialist,” as Sanders terms it—Republicans smell blood in the water. More than half of young voters may have a positive view of socialism, but sizable strong majorities of all age groups over 30 prefer capitalism. Indeed, voters over 65 feel more positively about capitalism today than in 2010, when Gallup began to ask the question. It remains to be seen whether the 2020 Democratic primary can normalize the word socialist. For now, however, it is clearly a liability for the Democrats in a national election.
Then comes the question of immigration. As we have seen, younger American voters strongly disagree with the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to “build a wall” along the country’s southern border or limit legal immigration from Muslim-majority countries. This reflects the profound difference between the generations in terms of racial composition. Fully 85 percent of the Silent Generation is white; only 12 percent is black or Latino. Among the members of Gen Z, by contrast, only 54 percent are white, and 38 percent are black or Latino. A far larger proportion of Gen Z also identifies as mixed-race. This divide will widen further in the coming years because of immigration, birth-rate differentials [“people of color” in the United States have a much higher birthrate, for various cultural reasons, than does whites Americans] and the fact that white Americans at age 75 have a higher life expectancy than African Americans.
Negative views of immigration are based on more than just the economic argument that newcomers are lowering the wages of native-born workers or exacerbating shortages of housing or public goods. Such views have a significant cultural component, too. Needless to say, Donald Trump specializes in whipping up the anxieties of older voters about what they see as alarmingly rapid social change.
But the Republicans need to find ways of winning over aging Boomers, many of whom are squeamish about being branded as racists. That is why it makes political sense for them to broaden the culture war, making it about much more than immigration.
According to a Marist poll last December, a sizable majority of Americans under 29 want to see the country become “more politically correct.” But voters over 30 oppose the rise of political correctness by a factor of nearly 2 to 1. This is a wedge issue that Republicans will exploit with gusto.
Republicans will be happy to note that middle-aged voters are even more strongly opposed to political correctness—and all that they believe this entails—than retirees. This trend is unlikely to reverse as the Democratic Party, under the influence of the Ocasio-Cortez cohort, brings issues of cultural and social justice closer to the core of its platform. Nor will it resolve itself as these middle-aged voters’ children become teenagers and go to college, where the culture of social justice is most explicitly disseminated.
Liberals may retort that social values can change with surprising speed. Couldn’t PC culture follow the same trajectory as interracial relationships, gay marriage, and legal marijuana—once taboo, now mainstream?
Perhaps it can, but we think it probably won’t. The gay-marriage debate was about the legal status of a minority. The PC debate is about norms of expression that affect everyone. For many older voters—and not just conservatives—campus politics has become a wholly alien parallel world of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and gender-neutral pronouns. That helps explain the president’s recent executive order to cut off federal funding to colleges that fail to uphold free speech. By taking campus politics national, the GOP will try to pry centrist Boomers and older Democrats away from a party more and more driven by the values of progressive academia.
Generational conflict likely won’t swing national elections until the 2020s, depending on turnout rates and attitudinal shifts among the Boomers. In the short run, this is probably good news for the GOP, as Democrats lurch to the left on identity-based issues that turn off older voters.
Yet Trump’s strategy of single-mindedly courting members of the Silent Generation with issues such as immigration, the evils of socialism, and campus free speech is not a long-term solution for the Republican Party. The more the GOP belittles the preferences of younger voters, the more it risks forging them into a left-wing bloc.
In the 2020s, the Silent Generation will fade from the scene. This will happen at precisely the same time that history suggests younger, more left-wing voters will start to vote at higher rates. To attract more Boomers, and some Gen X men, the GOP may paint the Democrats as radical socialists and do all it can to fan the flames of the culture war. To avoid splintering along generational lines, Democrats will likely redouble their focus on health care, a rare issue that unites the party across all age groups.
In short, America’s political future will be determined by the outcome of the generation war. Can the Millennials and Gen Z organize themselves into a cross-party political bloc? If they succeed, they can dominate U.S. politics within the next 10 years, and the Democratic Party will follow them. But if Republicans can persuade enough Boomer Democrats to switch sides by effectively turning politics into a nationwide culture war, Trumpism could prove longer lived than most commentators today assume.
Will there be any areas of common ground in a political future fueled by intergenerational warfare? Not many. But one suggests itself. Even as the rising cost of Social Security and Medicare place growing pressure on the budget, neither side will have much political incentive to fight for deficit reduction. Republicans’ dreams of privatizing Social Security and trimming Medicare died forever with Paul Ryan’s retirement last year. If anything, the two parties might collaborate to expand and shore up welfare programs, ramping up the deficit in the process. The experience of Japan suggests that, so long as interest rates remain low enough and the demand for government bonds high enough, difficult fiscal decisions can be postponed for much longer and public debt accumulated to much higher levels than conventional economics led us to expect.
When FDR [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] spoke of a new generation’s “rendezvous with destiny,” few in his audience imagined that it would take the form of another world war. Democrats who aspire to the presidency are often tempted to talk in similar, uplifting terms. Barack Obama liked to quote Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” though for Obama it became an arc of history, invariably bending his way. Few Democrats, even on the night of November 8, 2016, could conceive that the arc of history might bend toward Donald Trump.
Cyclical theories that seek to explain and predict political change in terms of generational “turns” should be therefore be treated with skepticism. If, as Mannheim argued, generations are shaped by the big events of their youth, then—who knows? —a single black swan could turn today’s kids into Ocasio-Cortez’s worst nightmare: Generation T for Trump. After all, it has been asserted, to the glee of his critics, that the president’s vocabulary is that of a fourth grader. Sure, but that also means fourth graders can understand what Donald Trump says. Today’s fourth graders will be voting in 2028. Perhaps they, too, will be as “woke” as Generation Z currently is. But history teaches us not to assume that.
In 1960, Friedrich Hayek predicted in The Constitution of Liberty “that most of those who will retire at the end of the century will be dependent on the charity of the younger generation. And ultimately not morals but the fact that the young supply the police and the army will decide the issue: concentration camps for the aged unable to maintain themselves are likely to be the fate of an old generation whose income is entirely dependent on coercing the young.” It hasn’t turned out that way at all—a salutary warning that it is much easier to identify generational conflicts of interest than to anticipate correctly the political form they will take.

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Applied History Project. Eyck Freymann is a research analyst at Greenmantle and a Henry Scholar at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge.

Reading 20: Excerpts from Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal, NY: Random House, 1987.

p. 47
…most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.
My father built low-income and middle- income buildings in Brooklyn and Queens, but even then, I gravitated to the best location. When I was working in Queens, I always wanted Forest Hills. And as I grew older, and perhaps wiser, I realized that Forest Hills was great, but Forest Hills isn’t Fifth Avenue. And so I began to look toward Manhattan, because at a very early age, I had a true sense of what I wanted to do.
I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement. I was out to build something monumental — something worth a big effort. Plenty of other people could buy and sell little brownstones, or build cookie-cutter red-brick buildings. What attracted me was the challenge of building a spectacular development on almost one hundred acres by the river on the West Side of Manhattan, or creating a huge new hotel next to Grand Central Station at Park Avenue and 42nd Street.
The same sort of challenge is what attracted me to Atlantic City. It’s nice to build a successful hotel. It’s a lot better to build a hotel attached to a huge casino that can earn fifty times what you’d ever make renting hotel rooms. You’re talking a whole different order of magnitude.
One of the keys to thinking big is total focus. I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re
p. 48
single-minded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channeled into their work. Where other people are paralyzed by neurosis, the people I’m talking about are actually helped by it.
I don’t say this trait leads to a happier life or a better life, but it’s great when it comes to getting what you want. This is particularly true in New York real estate, where you are dealing with some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world. I happen to love to go up against these guys, and I love to beat them.
p. 53
The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.
Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, which is why leverage often requires imagination, and salesmanship. In other words, you have to convince the other guy it’s in his interest to make the deal.
Back in 1974, in an effort to get the city to approve my deal to buy the Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street, I convinced its owners to go public with the fact that they were planning to close down the hotel. After they made the announcement, I wasn’t shy about
p. 54
pointing out to everyone in the city what a disaster a boarded up hotel would be for the Grand Central area, and for the entire city.
When the board of Holiday Inns was considering whether to enter into a partnership with me in Atlantic City, they were attracted to my site because they believed my construction was farther along than that of any other potential partner, in reality, I wasn’t that far along, but I did everything I could, short of going to work at the site myself, to assure them that my casino was practically finished. My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe.
p.56
You can have the most wonderful product in the world, but if people don’t know about it, it’s not going to be worth much. There are singers in the world with voices as good as Frank Sinatra’s, but they’re singing in their garages because no one has ever heard of them. You need to generate interest, and you need to create excitement. One way is to hire public relations people and pay them a lot of money to sell whatever you’ve got. But to me, that’s like hiring outside consultants to study a market: It’s never as good as doing it yourself.
One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It’s in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you. I’ve always done things a little differently, I don’t mind controversy, and my deals tend to be somewhat ambitious. Also, I achieved a lot when I was very young, and I chose to live in a certain style. The result is that the press has always wanted to write about me.
p. 57
I’m not saying that they [the press] necessarily like me. Sometimes they write positively, and sometimes they write negatively. But from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks. It’s really quite simple. If I take a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize a project, it might cost $40,000, and in any case, people tend to be skeptical about advertising. But if the New York Times writes even a moderately positive one-column story about one of my deals, it doesn’t cost me anything, and it’s worth a lot more than $40,000.
The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business. Television City is a perfect example. When I bought the land in 1985, many people, even those on the West Side [of Manhattan], didn’t realize that those one hundred acres existed. Then I announced I was going to build the world’s tallest building on the site. Instantly, it became a media event: the New York Times put it on the front page, Dan Rather [a TV news anchor] announced it on the evening news, and George Will [a conservative writer, now turned independent and deeply anti-Republican/anti-Trump] wrote a column about it in Newsweek. Every architecture critic had an opinion, and so did a lot of editorial writers. Not all of them liked the idea of the world’s tallest building. But the point is that we got a lot of attention, and that alone creates value.
p. 59
[When I get what is meant to be a negative question, I] frame a positive answer, even if that means shifting the ground. For example, if someone asks me what negative effects the world’s tallest building might have on the West Side, I turn the tables and talk about how New Yorkers deserve the world’s tallest building, and what a boost it will give the city to have that honor again. When a reporter asks why I build only for the rich, I note that the rich aren’t the only ones who benefit from my buildings. I explain that I put thousands of people to work who might otherwise be collecting unemployment, and that I add to the city’s tax base every time I build a new project. I also point out that buildings like Trump Tower have helped spark New York’s renaissance.
The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts, People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.
Much as it pays to emphasize the positive, there are time s when the only choice is confrontation. In most cases I’m very easy to get along with. I’m very good to people who are good to me. But when people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very hard. The risk is that you’ll make a bad situation worse, and I certainly don’t recommend this approach to everyone. But my experience is that if you’re fighting for something you believe in — even if it means alienating some people along the way — things usually work out for the best in the end.
p. 61
You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.
Ronald Reagan is another example. He is so smooth and so effective a performer that he completely won over the American people. Only now, nearly seven years later [i.e. the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan], are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.
The dollar always talks in the end. I’m lucky, because I work in a very, very special niche, at the top of the market, and I can afford to spend top dollar to build the best. I promoted the hell out of Trump Tower, but I also had a great product to promote.
Contain the Costs: I believe in spending what you have to. But I also believe in not spending more than you should. When I was building low-income housing, the most important thing was to gel it built quickly, inexpensively, and adequately, so you could rent it out and make a few bucks. That’s when I learned to be cost-conscious. I never threw money around. I learned from my father
p. 63
that every penny counts, because before too long your pennies turn into dollars.
I don’t kid myself. Life is very fragile, and success doesn’t change that. If anything, success makes it more fragile. Anything can change, without warning, and that’s why I try not to take any of what’s happened too seriously. Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what I should have done differently, or what’s going to happen next. If you ask me exactly what the deals I’m about to describe all add up to in the end, I’m not sure I have a very good answer. Except that I’ve had a very good time making them.
p. 71
Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye — I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s dear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very
p. 72
forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists.
I was always something of a leader in my neighborhood. Much the way it is today, people either liked me a lot, or they didn’t like me at all. In my own crowd I was very well liked, and I tended to be the kid that others followed. As an adolescent I was mostly interested in creating mischief, because for some reason I liked to stir things up, and I liked to test people. I’d throw water balloons, shoot spitballs, and make a ruckus in the schoolyard and at birthday parties. It wasn’t malicious so much as it was aggressive.
My brother Robert likes to tell the story of the time when it became clear to him where I was headed. Robert is two years younger than I am, and we have always been very close, although he is much quieter and more easygoing than I am. One day we were in the playroom of our house, building with blocks. I wanted to build a very tall building, but it turned out that I didn’t have enough blocks. I asked Robert if I could borrow some of his, and he said, ‘‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.” I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.
p. 77
in 1964 I flirted briefly with the idea of attending film school at the University of Southern California. I was attracted to the glamour of the movies, and I admired guys like Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, and most of all Louis B. Mayer [the major producers and studio owners of the 1920s], whom I considered great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.
p. 94
A. young man in his 20s, Trump moves out of his parent’s property in Brooklyn and into an apartment in Manhattan. One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in file city and perhaps the most exclusive — like Studio 54 at its height. It was located on East 54th Street, and its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy- five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.
p. 97
[Trump is denied membership in Le Club, which only the wealthy and well known celebrities could join. He attempts to cultivate the owner of the club, to allow him a membership, even though he is as yet unknown. He goes out to dinner with the Presiden, but…]
Two weeks passed, and I never heard from the president. Finally, I called him, and he didn’t even remember who I was. So now I had to go through the whole thing all over again, back to 21 [a bar the club owner preferred], only this time he didn’t drink as much, and he agreed to put me up for membership. He had only one misgiving. He said that because I was young and good-looking, and because some of the older members of the club were married to beautiful young women, he was worried that I might be tempted to try to steal their wives. He asked me to promise that I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My mother is as much of a rock as my father. She is totally devoted to my father — they recently celebrated fifty years of marriage. That’s what I grew up with, and here’s this guy talking about stealing wives.
Anyway, I promised. I was admitted to the club, and it turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally. I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night. Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation. Some were vain, some were crazy, some were wild, and many of them were phonies. For example, I quickly found out that I couldn’t take these girls back to my apartment, because by their standards what I had was a disaster, and in their world appearances were everything. When I finally did get married, I married a very beautiful woman [Ivana Trump, his former wife], but a woman who also happens to be a rock, just like my mother and father.

It was at Le Club that I first met Roy Cohn [Trump’s former lawyer and mentor, since deceased]. I knew him by reputation and was aware of his image as a guy who wasn’t afraid to fight.
p.99
I don’t kid myself about Roy. He was no Boy Scout. He once told me that he’d spent more than two thirds
p. 101
of his adult life under indictment on one charge or another. That amazed me. I said to him, “Roy, just tell me one thing. Did you really do all that stuff?’ ’ He looked at me and smiled. “What the hell do you think?” he said. I never really knew.
Whatever else you could say about Roy, he was very tough. Sometimes I think that next to loyalty, toughness was the most important thing in the world to him. For example, all Roy’s friends knew he was gay, and if you saw him socially, he was invariably with some very good-looking young man. But Roy never talked about it. He just didn’t like the image. He felt that to the average person, being gay was almost synonymous with being a wimp. That was the last thing he wanted to project, so he almost went overboard to avoid it. If the subject of gay rights came up, Roy was always the first one to speak out against them.
Tough as he was, Roy always had a lot of friends, and I’m not embarrassed to say I was one. He was a truly loyal guy — it was a matter of honor with him — and because he was also very smart, he was a great guy to have on your side. You could count on him to go to bat for you, even if he privately disagreed with your view, and even if defending you wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him. He was never two-faced.
Just compare that with all the hundreds of “respectable” guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty. They think only about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite. Roy was the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed, long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.
p. 104
I went to meet Victor [Palmieri, a Manhattan real estate developer], and we got on very well right from the start. He was a very smooth, attractive guy, an Italian who looked like a WASP. I told him how bad the 60th Street yards were, that the neighborhood was in trouble and the city was in trouble, and that I was probably crazy to be interested in the property at all. If you want to buy something, it’s obviously in your best interest to convince the seller that what he’s got isn’t worth very much.
The second thing I told Victor was how incredibly hard it was going to be politically to get zoning approvals for such a big piece of undeveloped land. I pointed out that the community board would fight any development, and that the process of going before the City Planning Commission and the Board of Estimate would be endless.
The third thing I did, and probably the most important, was to sell myself to Victor and his people, I couldn’t sell him on my experience or my accomplishment, so instead I sold him on my energy and my enthusiasm.
Victor banks on people and he decided to take a shot on me. He ended up suggesting that I develop not only the 60th Street yards but also the yards on West 34th Street. In truth, I probably oversold myself to him. I had no other choice. I was twenty-seven years old at the time, and I had never built anything in Manhattan, nor had my father. Much as Victor liked
p. 105
me, I don’t think he could have justified going with me if he hadn’t believed our company was big and powerful. We had no formal name for the company when I met Victor, so I began to call it the Trump Organization. Somehow the word ‘’organization” made it sound much bigger. Few people knew that the Trump Organization operated out of a couple of tiny offices on Avenue Z in Brooklyn.
p. 109
I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win. Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating [speak badly of] your competition.
p. 115
[in the process of negotiating to buy land in Manhattan for a convention center]: Before long, I had everything going for me except the support of a few absolutely key people. Abe Beame was at the top of the list. Once he gave up on West 44to Street, Beame got behind Battery Park, and no matter how many great arguments I came up with for my site, he wouldn’t budge. Another major opponent was John Zuocotti, a deputy mayor under Beame. He began going around town bad-mouthing my site. The reason. I’m convinced, was that he didn’t want to admit that he’d wasted several years of his life and millions of dollars of public money on a location that never made sense in the first place. And that’s exactly what I said publicly. I accused him of being self-serving and petty and a half-dozen other things. He got pretty riled up. The battle received a lot of media attention, and ultimately, I think, it was good for my site. It became just another way to promote my site’s many advantages.
In the end, we won by wearing everyone else down. We never gave up, and the opposition slowly began to melt away.
p. 133
[regarding opposition for Trump to be allowed to take a big tax right-off in New York because of various real estate maneuverings]: I worried about the growing opposition, but publicly my posture was to take the offensive and concede nothing to my critics. When a reporter later asked me why I got a forty-year tax abatement, I answered, “Because I didn’t ask for fifty.”
p. 134
[continuing the discussion on the tax right off]: Two weeks before the Board of Estimate was scheduled for the third time to vote on my plan, an alternative offer finally was made for the Commodore [a hotel Trump sought to buy, with New York City government involved in the deal]. It came from a company that owned a bunch of low-rent hotels in bad neighborhoods. If the city could get title to the Commodore, these people said, they’d be willing to buy it, put up a couple of million dollars toward a renovation, share all profits with the city, and forgo a
p. 135
cap. Because it was a half-baked offer from a questionable group, I think it actually helped my case. The last thing the Commodore needed was a second-rate renovation by a third-rate hotel operator.
The clincher, I’m convinced, came from Palmieri and Penn Central [the current owner, making a deal to sell the hotel to Trump]. The one thing that nobody wanted was to see the Commodore shut down and boarded up. On May 12, Palmieri announced that the Penn Central was going to dose the Commodore permanently in six days — exactly one day before the Board of Estimate [the New York City zoning board] had scheduled, for the fourth time, a vote on my tax abatement [tax break]. Immediately, the critics called the announcement a pressure tactic. I can’t say I was unhappy about the timing, but the fact was that the Penn Central had revealed six months earlier its plans to close the hotel by summer. In the meantime, occupancy had dropped from 46 percent the previous year to 33 percent. Moreover, losses for the full year of operation in 1976 were projected at $4.6 million.
On May 19, all the local papers carried front-page stories about the last tenants moving out of the Commodore, the hundreds of employees who were now looking for work, and the dread that local shopowners were feeling in anticipation of a boarded- up hotel. The stories certainly didn’t hurt me. On May 20, the Board of Estimate voted unanimously — 8 to 0 — to give me the full tax-abatement program I’d sought. Over the course of the forty years, that abatement will save me tens of millions of dollars. The battle was more than worth it.
p. 136
I could have saved millions and millions of dollars just by refurbishing the old Commodore rather than creating a brand-new building- Indeed, almost everyone fought against my spending the extra money on a major renovation. From the day we went public with our plans to cover the Commodore’s brick facade with an entirely new curtain wall of highly reflective glass, critics and preservationists were furious. They were outraged that I wasn’t making some attempt to fit in with the architecture in the rest of die neighborhood- — the classical look of Grand Central Station and the ornamented limestone-and-brick office buildings up and down the block.
In my view, staying with that look would have been suicide. I said to these critics, “Hey, fellas, do me a favor and don’t tell me about these great monuments, because the Chrysler Building is in foreclosure, the neighborhood is a disaster, and it’s obvious something’s not working. If you think I’m going to leave the facade [front] of the old Commodore the way it is, you’re crazy. There’s no way.”
It’s strange how things can turn around. Many of the critics and preservationists who hated the original concept of my building now love it. What they discovered is that by choosing this highly reflective glass. I’ve created four walls of mirrors. Now when you go across 42nd Street or go over the
p. 138
Park Avenue ramp and look up at the Grand Hyatt, you see the reflection of Grand Central Terminal, the Chrysler Building, and all the other landmarks, which otherwise you might not have noticed at all.
p. 146
At the time, I really had no track record. I was trying to get the Grand Hyatt off the ground, and I was still fighting for my convention center site, and nothing had yet gelled. But for whatever reason, Franklin Jarman was willing to see me. We met, and I told him straight out that I would love to buy the Bonwit Teller store and building. I knew this was a tough sell, so I tried to find ways to make the deal sound more attractive. I suggested, for example, that I would build above his store, and that he could keep it open during construction. That’s not really feasible, but the point was that I would have done almost anything to get that piece of property.
p. 157
[Buying property near Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue]: Before very long, Hoving [manager of Tiffany’s], who’d agreed at first to stay on as a consultant, got fed up and left. That just made things worse. As long as Hoving ran Tiffany, for example, you’d never see peddlers out front on the street, selling fake watches and cheap jewelry, blocking pedestrians, and degrading fifth Avenue. Whenever Walter Hoving saw a peddler, he’d go to his people, and he’d start screaming, in his dignified manner, “How dare you let them do that?” And within minutes, the peddler would be gone. But as soon as Hoving left, a dozen street peddlers immediately set up shop in front of Tiffany, and they haven’t moved
p. 158
since. However, I learned a lesson from Walter Hoving. I now employ some very large security people who make absolutely sure that the street in front of Trump Tower is kept clean, pristine, and free of peddlers.
p. 168
[continuing discussion of the Tiffany location]: What the city balked at, from the very start, was the size of the building we were proposing— seventy stories high, with square footage at the maximum 21.6 FAR [floor to area ratio—the size of a building that can be built on a specific piece of land]. As early as December 1978, even before I’d closed my deal with Bonwit, city planning let us know that they considered our proposed building too big. They said they intended to oppose letting us use bonuses to increase our FAR and that they were very concerned about the issue of compatibility with the smaller, surrounding buildings on Fifth Avenue.
Fortunately, by the time I closed my deal in early 1979 and we entered into serious discussions with city planning, I had some ammunition of my own. For starters, I could have chosen to build something called an “as of right” building — one that doesn’t require any variances [permissions]. Much the way I’d done earlier with Walter Moving, I had Der prepare a model of the “as of right” building to show city planning. It was hideous: a thin little four-sided box going straight up eighty stories, cantilevering [towering] over Tiffany’s. We took the position that if the city wouldn’t approve the building we wanted, we were prepared to build “as of right” — and we showed them the model and the renderings. Naturally, they were horrified. I’m not sure they believed we’d ever build it, or even that it was buildable, but there was no way they could be sure.
p. 174
[continuing the discussion]: We began demolition of the Bonwit building on March IS, 1980, and almost immediately I found myself in the middle of a major controversy over the two bas-relief Art Deco sculptures that were a decorative feature of the exterior of the building. All during 1979, long after I’d announced my plans and begun negotiating for zoning, no one expressed any interest in those friezes. No representative from zoning, from landmarks preservation, or from any community arts group ever suggested saving them. Finally, in mid-December of 1979, shortly before I was to begin construction, I got a call from someone at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, asking if I’d consider donating the friezes, and certain iron grill work. I said that if the friezes could be saved. I’d be happy to donate them to the museum.
What happened was that we began the demolition, and when it came time to take down the friezes, my guys came to me, and they said, “Mr. Thump, these are a lot heavier than we thought, and if you want to try to save them, we’re going to have to add special scaffolding for safety’s sake, and it’s going to take at least several weeks.” My carrying charges on the construction loan for this project were enormous — not to mention the extra construction costs of delaying the job. I just wasn’t prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a few Art Deco sculptures that I believed were worth considerably less, and perhaps
p. 175
not very much at all. So I ordered my guys to rip them down.
What I didn’t count on was the outrage this would create. The following day, the New York Times ran a front-page picture of the workmen demolishing the sculptures, and the next thing 1 knew I’d become a symbol of everything evil about modem developers. A Times editorial described the demolition as “a memorable version of cash flow calculations outweighing public sensibilities” and went on to say that “obviously big buildings do not make big human beings, nor do big deals make art experts.”
It was not the sort of publicity you like to get. Looking back, I regret that I had the sculptures destroyed. I’m not convinced they were truly valuable, and I still think that a lot of my critics were phonies and hypocrites, but I understand now that certain events can take on a symbolic importance. Frankly, I was too young, and perhaps in too much of a hurry, to take that into account. The point is that despite what some people may think. I’m not looking to be a bad guy when it isn’t absolutely necessary.
Ironically, the whole controversy may have ended up being a plus for me in terms of selling Trump Tower. The stories that appeared about it invariably started with sentences like: “In order to make way for one of the world’s most luxurious buildings …” Even though the publicity was almost entirely negative, there was a great deal of it, and that drew a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower. Almost immediately we saw an upsurge in the sales of apart-
p. 177
ments. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, and in truth it probably says something perverse about the culture we live in. But I’m a businessman, and I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.
[captions of photos in the book]: Ivana [Trump’s wife at the time] as a top fashion model in Montreal, Canada, 1975.
From day one, we set out to sell Trump Tower not just as a beautiful building in a great location but as an event. We positioned ourselves as the only place for a certain kind of very wealthy person to live — the hottest ticket in town. We were selling fantasy.
p. 182
A lot of people think that we set out to attract celebrities to Trump Tower, or that we hired a fancy public relations firm to promote the building. The truth is that we never hired anyone to do public relations, and every star who bought an apartment — Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, Paul Anka, Liberace, and many others — came to us. Nor did I give any of them special deals. Other developers cut prices to attract stars and celebrities, but to me that’s a sign of weakness. What really means something is when a celebrity is willing to pay full price for an apartment.
p. 183
If any press story about a celebrity helped promote Trump Tower, I suspect it was one about a sale that never actually occurred. Shortly after we began selling apartments, I got a call from a reporter asking whether or not it was true that Prince Charles had purchased an apartment in Trump Tower. It so happened that this was the week when Prince Charles and Lady Diana had gotten married, and they were, at that moment, the most celebrated couple in the world. Out policy was not to comment about sales, and that’s what I told this reporter. In other words, I refused to confirm or deny the rumor. Apparently, the reporter then decided to call Buckingham Palace. By this time, the royal couple had left for their honeymoon and they were out on the yacht Britannia, so the Buckingham Palace spokesman said just what I had: they couldn’t confirm or deny the rumor.
That was all the media needed. In the absence of a denial, the story that the royal couple was considering buying an apartment in Trump Tower became front-page news all over the world. It certainly didn’t hurt us, but I had to laugh to myself. Just a month earlier. Prince Charles had come to New York for a visit, and the IRA [an anti-English group] had come out in force to protest. As Prince Charles walked into Lincoln Center for a concert one evening, hundreds of protestors stood outside, hissing and screaming and throwing bottles. It had to be a frightening experience for him, and I can’t imagine it left Prince Charles with a great desire to take an apartment in New York City.
p. 185
[about renters in Trump tower]: The other new buyers are the Japanese, I have great respect for what the Japanese have done with their economy, but for my money they are often very difficult to do business with. For starters, they come in to see you in groups of six or eight or even twelve.
p. 187
and so you’ve got to convince all of them to make any given deal. You may succeed with one or two or three, but it’s far harder to convince all twelve. In addition, they rarely smile and they are so serious that they don’t make doing business fun. Fortunately, they have a lot of money to spend, and they seem to like real estate. What’s unfortunate is that for decades now they have become wealthier in large measure by screwing the United States with a self-serving trade policy that our political leaders have never been able to fully understand or counteract.
p. 188
One last element helped make the Trump Tower deal a huge home run, and that was something called a 421-A tax exemption. Ironically, getting my 421-A ended up taking me longer than it had to assemble the site and complete the entire construction of Trump Tower. The city enacted the 421-A law in 1971, to encourage residential development. In return for improving a site, developers were entitled to an exemption from real estate taxes over a ten-year period. Every two years the exemption decreased by 20 percent. Everyone who applied for the 421-A exemption got it, almost as a matter of course. Then I came along with Trump Tower. There was no question that I was entitled. I was proposing to take a ten-story building in a state of disrepair and to build in its place a multiuse sixty-eight story $200 million tower. Unlike the tax abatement I’d gotten on the Grand Hyatt, where I was forgiven all taxes, the 421-A program wouldn’t exempt me from taxes currently being paid on the site— but it would exempt me from additional taxes attributable to an increased assessed value on the site. Who could argue that I wouldn’t be improving and better utilizing the site with Trump Tower?
Ed Koch [the New York City mayor] could, for one. And the reason had nothing to do with the merits of my case. It was all politics. Koch and his deputies sensed an opportunity they couldn’t resist: to position themselves as consumer advocates taking on a greedy developer. From a public relations perspective, I was vulnerable. It was quite obvious that Fifth Avenue wasn’t exactly a marginal neighborhood, and that I’d probably succeed with Trump Tower even if I didn’t get a tax exemption.
But in my mind, none of that had any bearing on my legal right to a 42 1A exemption. In December 1980, I applied for a 421-A for the first time. A month later, I met with Tony Gliedman, commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, to make my case in person. In March, Gliedman and the HPD turned my application down.
I called Koch and told him I thought the ruling was
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unfair, that I wasn’t about to give up, and that the city was going to waste a huge amount of money litigating a case I’d eventually win. In April 1981, I filed something called an Article 78 proceeding in state supreme court, seeking to have the city’s ruling overturned. The court found in my favor, but an appellate court reversed the ruling, so I took my case to the state’s highest court, the court of appeals. In December 1982— -nearly two years after my original application — the court of appeals ruled 7-0 that the city had improperly refused me an exemption. But instead of simply ordering the city to expedite my exemption, the court told the city to reconsider my request. They did — and turned me down again.
By now I was so outraged that the cost of the litigation was beside the point. We refiled an Article 78, and exactly the same scenario unfolded. We won in supreme court, got overturned at the appellate level, and ended up again before the court of appeals. My lawyer, Roy Cohn, did a brilliant job, arguing before seven justices without so much as a note. This time, the court again ruled unanimously that we were entitled to our exemption — and ordered the city to provide it without further delay.
p. 196
By this point I had invested a great deal of time in the Commodore deal, and I tend not to give up on something I’ve started.
p.200
In my view, however, that translated into an opportunity. The worst of times often create the best opportunities to make good deals.
p. 214
[Trump is now working with the Holiday Inn Company to build a hotel in Atlantic City, which has a large gambling industry]. Once we’d finished our negotiations, the final step was approval of the deal by Holiday [Inn]’s board of directors. In many situations, board approval of management initiatives is merely a formality. In this case, I worried that Rose might use his board to help him get out of the deal, or at least force changes in it.
Rose [the Holiday Inn CEO] scheduled his annual board of directors meeting in Atlantic City so that the board would have an opportunity to see the proposed site and also to assess our progress in construction. It was the latter that worried me, since we had yet to do much work on the site. One week before the board meeting, I got an idea. I called in my construction supervisor and told him that I wanted him to round up every bulldozer and dump truck he could possibly find, and put them to work on my site immediately. Over the next week, I said, I wanted him to transform my two acres of nearly vacant property into die most active construction site in the history of the world. What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn’t important, I said, so long as they did a lot of it. If they got some actual work accomplished, all the better, but if necessary, he should have the bulldozers dig up dirt from one side of the site and dump it on the other. They should keep doing that, I said, until I gave him other instructions.
The supervisor looked a little bewildered. “Mr. Trump,” he said, “I have to tell you that I’ve been in business for a lot of years and this is the strangest request I’ve ever gotten. But I’ll do my best.”
[The Holiday Inn board comes to inspect the building site]: A few minutes later, another board member walked over to me. His question was very simple. “How come,” he said, “that guy over there is filling up that hole, which he just dug?” This was difficult for me to answer, but fortunately, this board member was more curious than he was skeptical. The board walked away from the site absolutely convinced that it was the perfect choice. Three weeks later, on June 30, 1982, we signed a partnership agreement.
P. 216
The final thing that helped us keep costs down was the state of the construction industry in Atlantic City
p. 217
in the spring of 1982. The only casino still under construction by then was the Tropicana, and thousands of local construction workers were either out of work or about to be. That gave us a lot of leverage with contractors, who had to either cover a certain overhead or go out of business. I wasn’t looking to force these guys to make such bad deals that they’d lose money. On the other hand, I was in a position to negotiate very reasonable prices.
p. 218
One reason that I particularly liked owning the facility myself — rather than with any partner — has to do with the value of depreciation. Depreciation is the percentage of the total value of a building that an owner is permitted to deduct each year from his taxable earnings. The rationale is that money spent to maintain a building — to offset its normal wear and tear — shouldn’t be taxable.
Put simply, depreciation permits you to pay lower taxes on your earnings. For example, if the cost of our facility in Atlantic City was $400 million and we were permitted to depreciate at the rate of 4 percent a year, that would mean we could deduct $16 million from our taxable profits each year. In other words, if we
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earned a pretax profit of $16 million, our earnings, after depreciation, would actually be reported as zero. Most shareholders and Wall Street types only look at the bottom line, which shows a profit reduced by depreciation. As a result, corporate managers don’t like depreciation much. It only makes them appear less successful. But I don’t have to please Wall Street, and so I appreciate depreciation. For me the relevant issue isn’t what I report on the bottom line, it’s what I get to keep.
p. 243
My tone was more hurt than outraged or angry. I can be a screamer when I want to be…
p. 251
The Barbizon-PIaza was a somewhat run-down middle-price hotel earning a modest profit at best. One hundred Central Park South was a building filled with rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments, meaning that the rent roll was barely sufficient to cover the operating costs of the building.
Precisely because of these disadvantages, I was able to negotiate a very favorable purchase price. It helped that the properties hadn’t yet been put up for sale on the open market. As long as there were no other bidders, it was much easier for me to make a case that the buildings’ problems decreased their value.
It probably also helped that the owners were a group of very wealthy men who had decided to sell not because they needed the money but because one of them was getting older and wanted to put his estate in order. I’m not permitted to say what I paid, but the sum wouldn’t be enough today to buy a vacant lot one-third the size in a far less desirable part of Manhattan.
I barely looked at what the two buildings were earning. I was drawn to the real estate value, not the income. I was buying a great location at a modest price, and the way I looked at the deal, there was virtually no downside. Almost immediately I was able to get a mortgage for the buildings, which covered my purchase price. In the worst case, I felt, I could always turn around and sell at a profit. Even in bad times, there are buyers for first-class locations.
Another option was to do a modest renovation of the hotel and raise the rents on the ground-floor stores to market levels as their leases came up. In addition, as tenants in rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments passed away or moved out of 100 Central Park South, I could raise the rents on those apartments. Even by doing these relatively minor things, I could earn at least a modest return on my investment.
But then, “modest” isn’t my favorite word. The way to derive the most value from the site, I believed, was to knock down both buildings and to construct in their place one huge, beautiful modern luxury condominium tower.
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Unlike most developers, I don’t advocate eliminating rent control. I just think there ought to be a means test for anyone living in a rent-controlled apartment. People below a certain income would be permitted to keep their apartments at their current rent. People with incomes above a certain sum would be given a choice between paying a proportionally higher rent for their apartments or moving somewhere else.
The situation at 100 Central Park South is a perfect illustration. Soon after I purchased the building, I did some research into the financial status of the tenants. What I discovered was fascinating but not surprising. There are three distinct groups. The first, who live in the largest apartments, overlooking the park, on the
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higher floors, are generally successful, wealthy, and in some cases quite prominent.
Fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, for example, has a six-room duplex facing the park, for which he is paying $985 a month — about what it costs to rent a one-room studio at market rates. Angelo DeSapto, another wealthy tenant and an architect of some eminence, has the entire seventh floor facing the park- nine rooms for a rent of $1 ,600 a month. Still another tenant owns a beautiful brownstone on 63rd Street worth at least $5 million but also has four combined apartments at 100 Central Park South, with fabulous views of the park from the thirteenth floor and a rent under $2,500 a month. All of these apartments could rent for many times what the current wealthy occupants are paying.
The second group of tenants are what I’d call the yuppies: younger professional people — stockbrokers and journalists and attorneys. While not necessarily millionaires, these people are certainly affluent. A good number of them occupy one- and two-bedroom apartments facing the park.
The third group of tenants live in smaller apartments with tiny kitchens and windows facing the court. Not surprisingly, these people are generally of modest means. A number of them are elderly, living on social security. Their rents are below market, but not nearly to the degree of their wealthier neighbors in the front apartments. A comparable studio in the neighborhood might rent for twice what most of these tenants are now paying.
The leader of the tenants, John Moore, was a man who didn’t quite fit into any group. In his early forties, this gentleman came from a family of money and social standing. His grandfather was a major stockholder in Tiffany & Company before it was bought by Walter Hoving, but he himself had not been very successful. I’ve always been convinced that leading the tenants gave him a way to feel useful and important. Of course, he also had something very valuable to protect: a beautiful two-bedroom park-view apartment for which he paid a very modest rent.
Vacating the Barbizon-Plaza was easy. All I had to do was stop renting hotel rooms. Before I gave up that income, however, I wanted to vacate 100 Central Park South too. Unfortunately, I made a very critical mistake right at the start: I should have gotten involved myself. That’s what I’d always done in the past, and that’s what always worked for me. But frankly, convincing tenants to move wasn’t the kind of work I relished. Instead, I decided to hire a company that specialized in relocating tenants. Citadel Management was recommended to me by several top executives at well-known companies who’d used the firm and vouched for its reputation. I wasn’t looking for tough guys. This was a high-visibility location, and a lot of people were gunning for Donald Trump already. The last thing I needed was to create controversy.
My original plan was very straightforward. We’d let the tenants at 100 Central Park South know that we intended to eventually demolish the building, along with the Barbizon next door. Then we’d offer them
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help in finding suitable new apartments, as well as cash incentives to move.
Very quickly, however, the tenants got organized. They formed a tenants’ association and decided to hire a law firm to represent them. Cost was no object. The wealthiest tenants had the most money to lose, and they were more than willing to underwrite any attorney fees. Several agreed to contribute as much as $8,000 a year to the cause. That was cheap, after all, compared with the $10,000 a month they might have to pay for a comparable apartment elsewhere.
The firm that the tenants chose had been somewhat successful representing tenants facing eviction. They made a better living than most landlord attorneys. Their approach was to resist eviction on every front and the things up in court for as long as possible, perhaps hoping to make as big a settlement as possible with the landlord.
I felt confident that I had every legal right to vacate 100 Central Park South for the purpose of building a new and larger building in its place. To evict the tenants who lived in non-rent-controlled apartments, all I had to show was my plans to demolish the building and put up a new one in its place. To evict the tenants under rent control, I had to meet stricter standards but none that seemed insurmountable.
First, I had to demonstrate that my new building would provide at least 20 percent more housing units than the old one. That was easy enough, since it was obviously in my interest financially to put up a bigger building. Second, I had to prove that the old building
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was earning a profit, after expenses, of less than 8.5 percent of its assessed value. By virtue of rent control, the assessment was a paltry $1.5 million, meaning the city got almost no taxes from the building. And although I wasn’t permitted to include my debt service as part of my expenses, the building still didn’t come close to earning an 8.5 percent margin. If my debt service was included. I was actually losing a substantial amount of money. Either way, if the city ruled purely on the merits, I was convinced they’d have to approve our demolition application and order any remaining tenants out.
When Citadel took over management of the building early in 1981, I gave them two instructions: the first was to try to find new apartments for as many tenants as possible; the second was to continue to provide all essential services to the tenants.
It happens to be very easy to vacate a building if, like so many landlords, you don’t mind being a bad guy. When these landlords buy buildings they intend to vacate, they use corporate names that are difficult to trace. Then they hire thugs to come in with sledge-hammers and smash up the boiler, rip out the stairways, and create floods by cutting holes in pipes. They import truckloads of junkies, prostitutes, and thieves and move them into vacant apartments to terrorize holdout tenants.
That’s what I call harassment. I wouldn’t have done that sort of thing for moral reasons, nor would I have done it for practical reasons. I buy buildings in my own name, and I have a reputation to uphold.
p. 263
Nothing generated as much controversy as my offer to provide housing for the homeless at 100 Central Park South. By the summer of 1982 — about a year after I took over the building — the problem of the homeless in New York was beginning to get a lot of attention. One morning, after passing several homeless people sleeping on benches in Central Park, I got an idea,
I had more than a dozen vacant apartments at 100 Central Park South. Because I still planned to demolish the building, I had no intention of filling the apartments with permanent tenants. Why not, I thought, offer them to the city for use by the homeless, on a temporary basis? I’m not going to pretend that it bothered me to imagine the very wealthy tenants of 100 Central Park South having to live alongside people less fortunate than themselves for a while. At the same time, I genuinely felt it was a shame not to make use of a few vacant apartments when the streets were filled with homeless people.
Almost immediately, the columnists and editorial writers criticized my offer. City officials, sensing a potential controversy, told me “No, thanks.” It didn’t help make my offer seem sincere when one columnist wrote a story saying that I’d refused a subsequent plea by a group representing Polish refugees seeking to use the apartments. In fact, by then I’d had second thoughts about the whole concept. My attorneys had researched the situation and determined that if I permitted anyone to move into the apartments — even on a temporary basis— I’d have a very hard time ever getting them out legally. That was all I needed.
p. 264
Saying so publicly, however, might just have made a bad situation worse. Instead, I said nothing, which wasn’t much better. It was not one of my best experiences with the media, but it taught me something. You don’t act on an impulse — even a charitable one — unless you’ve considered the downside.
p. 316
[The New York City government versus Trump, in regards to renovating an ice skating rink near Trump Tower]: Leadership is perhaps the key to getting any job done. There wasn’t a single day when I didn’t check on the progress we were making on the rink. Most days, I visited the site personally. I’d given myself six months to finish, and based on the city’s record [they had worked on the skating rink for six years, with no results], meeting that deadline would be a minor miracle. By my own calculations, however, six months actually left me a cushion of a month, in case anything significant did go wrong. If absolutely everything went right, I felt it was possible we’d finish the job in four months.
p. 317
All I could report was that everything was proceeding right on schedule and that we expected to be open by December. That was enough. The next day there were stories in every newspaper with headlines like trump has an ICE SURPRISE FOR SKATERS and TRUMP PUTS THE ICING ON WOLLMAN [name of the skating rink] CAKE.
There were those who said I went a little overboard holding press conferences about Wollman Rink. Perhaps they’re right, but I can only say that the press couldn’t get enough of this story. At least a dozen reporters showed up for every press conference we held.
Nor did the story of the rink generate just local attention. Dozens of newspapers as far away as Miami, Detroit, and Los Angeles ran long pieces about the Wollman Rink saga. Time magazine devoted a full page in its “Nation” section to the story. It was a simple, accessible drama about the contrast between governmental incompetence and the power of effective private enterprise.
p. 318
During most of the construction, the city stayed out of our way — in large part because I instructed my men
p. 319
to keep park officials off the site* When they did try to interfere, it invariably turned into disaster. As an example, after we’d finished the rink, a crew from the Parks Department showed up carting a small tree, which, they announced, the city wanted to plant in my honor. It wasn’t enough for one or two guys to handle the job, A crew of perhaps a half dozen men came, among them a park horticulturist to supervise the job. The tree itself was transported in a tractor with a back-hoe loader.
By total coincidence, I walked up to the rink just as the men were beginning to plant the tree. It happened to be one of the ugliest, scrawniest little trees you’re ever likely to see, I could have lived with that. What got me absolutely nuts was the way they were planting the tree. Just the previous day, we’d planted beautiful specimen sod all around the perimeter of the rink. It had rained the night before and the ground under the newly planted grass was soft. What do these men do but drive their tractor right over the new grass, completely trampling it. In a matter of minutes, these six men— most of whom weren’t needed in the first place — managed to totally destroy a beautiful planting job that had taken two days to complete and now would require three months to grow back in.
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I know from my own experience that the only way to get even the best contractor to finish a job on time and on budget is to lean on him very, very hard. You can get any job done through sheer force of will — -and by knowing what you’re talking about. As it is now, a contractor will come in and say to a city official, ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve run into this problem, and we’re going to need another one million or two million dollars to finish the job.” No one argues back, because virtually no one in city government knows anything about construction.
Worst of all, no one in the city government bureaucracy is held accountable for failure. I’ll give you what I consider the classic example. Back in 1984 — by which time the city had already spent four years trying to rebuild Wollman Rink— a man named Bronson Binger held a press conference. At the time, Singer’s title was assistant parks commissioner, and his primary responsibility was the renovation of Wollman Rink. Binger made a bold, confident announcement to the reporters who showed up. If the Wollman isn’t ready to reopen in time for next season, he told them, then he’d resign his job.
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A year passed, the rink obviously didn’t reopen, and Binger was true to his word. He resigned. There was just one catch. A short time later he was named deputy commissioner in charge of prison construction for the State of New York, I don’t know much about building prisons, but one thing is certain: renovating ice rinks is a lot easier You don’t reward failure by promoting those responsible for it, because all you’ll get is more failure.
The one group that does benefit from the city’s incompetence are the contractors who do the work. When a subway project or a new highway or a bridge goes over budget by millions of dollars, contractors clean up. You won’t read the names of these people on the Forbes Four Hundred and they may not all speak perfect English, but I’ll guarantee you this: many of them have become immensely wealthy working for New York City. They earn vast sums from huge, unwarranted cost overruns that city officials approve — and taxpayers underwrite.
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[Building a new NBC building on the West Side of Manhattan, which would become, he hoped, the world’s tallest building]: My second challenge was to find a way to immediately capture the public imagination with my project. The more awareness and excitement I could create early on, the easier it was going to be to attract buyers down the line. A lot of developers build first and promote later, if at all.
[Various groups and individuals, such as architecture critics, generally dislike Trump’s idea]: I felt certain I’d get far better reviews from Paul Goldberger and certain other critics simply by cutting my buildings in half and making them look more like the better-known prewar buildings on the West Side. The problem was that my project would no longer be majestic or distinctive, and it wouldn’t sell. It irritates me that critics, who’ve neither designed nor built anything themselves, are given carte blanche to express their views in the pages of major publications, whereas the targets of their criticism are almost never offered space to respond. Of course, I can be irritated all I want and it won’t do any good. So long as a critic writes for a newspaper like the New York Times, his opinion will continue to carry great weight— whether I like it or not.
p. 360
[Trump is now trying to buy the Resorts International hotel chain]: Right around the same time, I happened to be at a fabulous party in California thrown by Merv Adelson and Barbara Walters, and a reporter asked me about Marvin Davis’s bid for Resorts [in other words, someone else trying to buy the same company]:. Kiddingly, I said that Davis, who happens to be terribly overweight, should focus on losing 200 pounds instead of wasting time trying to break my deal with Resorts. I heard later that Davis was incensed by my remark, but I can’t say I felt bad. I don’t go out of my way to be cordial to enemies.
p. 363 [The following is a discussion of various Trump projects in progress when the book was written, in 1987]:
Mar-a-Lago
The pool and the tennis court are finished, and both are as beautiful as I’d hoped they would be. As little as I’m interested in relaxing, I enjoy Mar-a-Lago almost in spite of myself. It may be as close to paradise as I’m going to get.
p. 365
Moscow Hotel
In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: “It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.” It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow. On July 4, I flew with Ivana, her assistant Lisa Calandra, and Norma to Moscow. It was an extraordinary experience. We toured a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square. We stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, and I was impressed with the ambition of the Soviet officials to make a deal.
My Apartment
The renovation on my apartment was finally finished in the fall of 1987. I could afford to take my time, and I’m happy that I did. There may be no other apartment in the world like it.
Airplane
I finally found a plane. I happened to be reading an article in Business Week in the spring of 1987 about a troubled, Texas-based company named Diamond Shamrock. The article described how top Shamrock executives were enjoying incredible perks, actually living like kings. Among the examples cited was a lavishly equipped company-owned 727, which executives flew around in at will.
I sensed an opportunity. On Monday morning, I called the office of the Diamond Shamrock executive who had been pictured on the cover of the Business Week article. It turned out that he was no longer there and a new chairman, Charles Blackburn, had just been named. I was immediately put through to him, we talked for a few minutes, and I wished him well. Then I said that I’d read about the company’s 727, and that if he had any interest in selling, I was interested in buying. Sure enough, Blackburn said that as much as they all loved that plane, selling it was one of the first
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things on his agenda. He even offered to send it up to New York, so that I could take a look at it.
The next day I went out to La Guardia airport for a look. I had to smile. This plane could seat up to two hundred passengers, but it had been reconfigured for fifteen, and it included such luxuries as a bedroom, a full bath, and a separate working area. It was a little more plane than I needed, but I find it hard to resist a good deal when the opportunity presents itself.
A new 727 sells for approximately $30 million. A G-4, which is one fourth the size, goes for about $18 million. However, I knew that Diamond Shamrock was hungry to sell, and that not very many people are in the market for 727s.
I offered $5 million, which was obviously ridiculously low. They countered at $10 million, and at that point I knew I had a great deal, regardless of how the negotiation ended. Still, I haggled some more, and we finally agreed to a price of $8 million. I don’t believe there is any other private plane in the sky comparable to this one.
What’s Next
Fortunately, I don’t know the answer, because if I did, that would take half the fun out of it.
This much I do know: it won’t be the same.
I’ve spent the first twenty years of my working life building, accumulating, and accomplishing things that many said could not be done.
[on the back cover of the book]: An ardent philanthropist, Trump is involved with numerous civic and charitable organizations. In June 2000 he received his greatest honor, given to him by the UJA [United Jewish Appeal] Federation: He was named the Hotel and Real Estate Visionary of the Century.

Reading 21: Trump Voters Explain their Choice

Introduction:

The following are quotations from interviews and emails of people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
The numerous grammar flaws are in the original text and have not been corrected. All vulgar terms have been removed or replaced, but indicated in the text.
Note that the four articles have been placed in chronological order; the first is before the election, the second after the election but before President Trump took the oath of office, and the final articles were written during the first year of Trump’s presidency. If you chose to write your term paper on this document set, take into consideration this timeline when constructing your analysis.

Thesis Question:

What are the various categories of reasons why the people below voted for Donald Trump? How did they justify his election because of each reason? Overall, what were the most important reasons these voters supported Donald Trump?

Text:

Taylor Kate Brown, Teniola Ayoola and Max Matza, “Election 2016: Trump Voters on Why They Backed Him,” BBC News, November 9, 2016.

When Donald Trump announced he was entering the race for the White House in June 2015, few gave the businessman a chance.
Defying repeated predictions of his political demise, he marched through the primary contests, and has won a decisive victory in the general election.
But he has also been a hugely controversial candidate, accused of divisiveness for his hardline attitude to immigration and national security.
Throughout the campaign, his supporters told the BBC why they are so attracted to him and his message.
Here is what they said.

They are angry with politicians

Why they love Trump: ‘He’s not a politician’
“Donald Trump is very real and very sincere. We’re tired of being cheated. The more they try to attack him, the more we love him.” – Sandra Stone, Florida, March 2016
“The other politicians are controlled by their handlers. He’s not.” – Vern Engel, Kansas City, August 2015
“He’s brought energy back to the people. They want somebody that’s not connected with the government.” Linda Callahan, Florida, November 2015

They like that ‘he tells it like it is’

Why they love Trump: ‘He says what we’re thinking’
“I backed Trump from the beginning. Because he calls things out. He does not allow lies to live. He just exposes things. Pastors sometimes need to be politically correct, and Donald Trump is not politically correct, and I love that about him” – Crystal Myers, California, May 2016
“He’s outspoken. Other candidates wouldn’t tell you how it is, but he does.” – Betty Tully, August 2015
“I like that he’s over the top. My president needs bravado… somebody who is big and loud, strong and powerful.” – Victoria Wilen, Orlando, Florida, November 2015
“He doesn’t hold back. You get what he really believes in, even if everything that he says isn’t what is the right thing exactly.” – Nicholas Poucher, Florida, December 2015

They value his business experience

Why they love Trump: ‘A successful businessman’
“Passionate, driven, confident, motivated….I think I’ve seen him really successful as a businessman, so I’d like to see how he’d be as a leader of the United States.” Taylar Martin, a 19-year-old student at American University in Washington DC.
“I think he’s really someone who understands economics and international finance on a global level in many ways beyond just theory but real first-hand experience ” – Issac Eves, Florida, March 2016
“He has so much money but he’s waking up every morning to campaign. He deeply cares about America,” John Friedlander, Washington DC, May 2016
“He’s the epitome of a business success… he’s got contacts in all these countries.” John Hikel, New Hampshire, January 2016

They agree with him on Mexicans and Muslims

Why they love Trump: The ‘wall’ and Muslim ban
“We need to close the borders… It has to be done the right way and they can’t just come into our country and expect us to take care of them, take our jobs, and then for us to have to support them, and all the things America has to do to help them out.
“That’s not being ugly about anybody or not liking people or not wanting to help people. It’s just that it needs to be done the right way. We have so many people in our country that we need to help as well.” – Peggy Smith Shortt, South Carolina, May 2016
“My ancestors were immigrants from Ireland in the 1700s, and I support legal immigration in the way our forefathers intended it to be. The current immigration system is broken and millions are taking advantage of it, while having a negative impact on the entire US.” – Nascar driver David Ragan, May 2016

They want to ‘Make America Great Again’

Why they love Trump: ‘Making America Great Again’
“Trump has instilled hope in people. If he does what he says he’s gonna do, we would be less fearful. We fear the federal government very much.” Robert Sandifer, South Carolina, January 2016
“In the bigger picture he does have a lot to learn, but we all know he’s an excellent manager and very, very bright. I have faith that he will learn and develop the policies that will make America the superpower that we want it to be.” – Kathy Baker, Virginia, December 2015
“I don’t see that America [of 30 years ago] anymore. So when Trump says make America great again, I fully agree with him.” – Jesse Singh, Maryland, March 2016
“I’m 66 years old. Our country is in trouble and we need to do something.” – Mary Faulk, Virginia, December 2015

Hamilton Nolan, “Trump Voters Explain Themselves,” The Concourse, January 3, 2017.

Last week, I asked people who voted for Donald Trump to write in and explain why they made that choice.
We got dozens of emails from Trump supporters telling us why they voted the way they did, and I have grouped selections of them into general categories below. Though this is not a scientific sample, it covers the bases pretty well.
So: Why did you vote for Donald Trump?
Against Hillary/ The Democrats
The point of me writing to you is to explain how Trump got elected. People in the middle of the country feel marginalized and forgotten. Had the Democratic party put someone up without the baggage of Clinton. Or someone that had even then remote clue of how to speak to the middle of the country. Or someone with a bit of personality and or charisma, ie Obama. This election wouldn’t have even been close. I think many people voted against another Clinton.
A multitude of reasons. Putting America first probably being the biggest. As far as I’m concerned there was only one choice. I think Hilary Clinton is a criminal. I believe the Podesta sex ring to be a fact. I’m not buying that this is ‘fake news’, because we know what people in power can do to cover things like this up (Catholic Church).
I am a trump supporter. Was he the perfect candidate? Not by a long shot. Did he say some reprehensible things that can’t be excused? Sure. There are some legitimate grievances to have with Donald trump. Him being a sexist racist homophobe is not one of them.
Had you bothered to pay any attention to what was really going on instead of just living In Your echo chamber you’d know he talked about ILLEGAL immigrants. NOT ALL Mexicans. There’s nothing wrong with people trying to come here the right way and the legal way…
Taxes on small businesses, mandating that Christians have to pay for someone else’s abortion, forcing people to buy healthcare with exorbitant premiums, Making dangerous deals with Iran, and constantly calling people sexist racist homophobic transphobic are some of the many reasons why people voted for trump. And it wasn’t just all racist white people. If you look at the numbers there’s no way that Trump could have one without the vast majority of people who voted for Barack twice and felt screwed.
Because the only other candidate was HRC [Hillary Clinton]. She wasn’t briefed on Fed Gov Security Rules? Of course she was. I worked for the Government. Everyone has to go through that briefing at least once a year. She lied about that. She lied about Benghazi [A terrorist attack on the US embassy in Libya ca. 2010]. She lied about her server. She obstructed justice by deleting thousands of emails. And that’s only the past 3 or 4 years. Three decades of HRC and … [President Bill Clinton’s] scandals, and you and LA and NYC can’t see it?
Now I’m a deplorable? Let’s look at her husband. He got Monica [Lewinski, Bill Clinton’s mistress in the late 1990s] a paid position after the unpaid intern was relocated away from the White House. Her paid position? She was brought back to the White House to give him his daily …[sexual act]. He lied, got caught, no one really cared even though he was impeached. And there were other accusations from other women as well. Are all of them false? Poor Bill Cosby [actor accused of numerous rapes]. The Clintons are disgraceful as a whole and Bill is a adulterous rapist. DJT [Donald Trump] said some things about women. [President Clinton]… DID some things TO women with his enabler, HRC [Hillary Clinton], at is side, lying for him and disparaging the victims.
BTW, I’m a Vietnam era veteran, one fortunate enough not to have been sent there. HRC [Hillary Clinton] and Obama have no regard for the armed services or the police. Read some of the books written about her and her treatment of the very people paid to protect her.
You said Obama is a Christian. Going to a Christian church doesn’t make one a Christian. His latest moves against Israel makes me wonder if he isn’t a Muslim after all.
I was part of the anyone but Hillary. She is a deplorable person, and how anyone could look at her as a role model is beyond me. If my sister (or any woman that I respected) was in a marriage like that I would be beside myself. What goes on in peoples private lives is their own business, but how anyone could respect that “woman” is beyond me. I also found her lazy and entitled. She was real quick to hang out on the UWS [Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City, an extremely wealthy area known for its liberal views] with her fellow liberal millionaires, but it was obvious that she didn’t care about the average Jane and Joe. I also think Trump doesn’t give a [care]… about me (or almost anyone else) but at least he made the effort to be among the people. Hillary was such a flawed candidate, I still have no idea how so many people thought she would be a good choice. She was probably the only candidate that Trump stood a chance against.
I voted for him for the same reason a lot of people voted for Hillary, because I absolutely was not going to vote for the person on the other side. The Clinton family has made a ton of money off of something that was supposed to not be allowed to make people rich…politics. Specifically while under the guise of “helping those in need”. I’m not going to sit here and say that Obama or the Clintons haven’t done some really good things because that would be ignorant. They have, but there is something shady and off about them (in my own personal opinion and I have nothing to really substantiate it, just a feeling).
Because I like Trump
These are the basic reasons I voted for Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton:
Trump is the lesser of two evils. Clinton would continue to drive the country into the ground with her leftist, socialist policies.
Trump actually likes America and wants to see us all succeed.
Clinton is divisive. She prefers to point out our differences and pit groups of people against each other.
Trump says he will tighten the border controls and deport the illegal aliens. Clinton wants to welcome illegal aliens.
Trump is pro 2nd Amendment rights. Clinton would make all guns disappear if she could.
Clinton has multiple personalities that she uses to cater to her audience. She is not believable or trustworthy. Trump, for good and bad, has only on personality and he seems to mean what he says.
I like the fact that Trump is not a professional politician. All of the other Republican candidates seemed slimy.
Clinton tries to ally herself with the “common folk,” but she comes of as pandering and fake. Trump does it too, but at least he seems real, especially when he is eating KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken].
Guns
I was on a service call for work near my parents’ house on election night so I stayed with them vs. getting a hotel room. Rural NE [Northeast] Ohio. My mom and I were talking late into the night when she mentioned my father had voted for trump “because Hillary was gonna take his guns away”.
I yelled “WHAT THE [expletive]!” loud enough to wake him off the couch, he blinked a few times and stared at me like “why’d you wake me up?” I looked at him and said, “Hillary was going to take your guns away?!” He nodded and said, “yeah, that’s what they were saying!”
Political Correctness
I am increasingly frustrated with the, for lack of a better term, “[vulgar term/replace with ‘weakening’]” of America. And that includes the crippling political correctness that has intensified under Obama. Just by saying I don’t understand transgender people doesn’t make me a bigot. Because I don’t like a black person because that particular person is a [vulgar term/replace with dislikable], doesn’t make me racist. And heaven forbid a devout Christian says they believe marriage to be only a man and woman they are demonized and called an intolerant religious fanatic. But Muslim religious fanatics that literally want us dead must be respected and loved.
I think our country has turned into a place where if you don’t like something there is a label to shame you for it, given to you by the people who supposedly hate labels. It’s become a very weak, overly emotional, place. America is essentially a 3 year old child. While the rest of the world is preparing for WW3 [World War III], we have adults in college (they are over 18, they’re [expletive] adults) who need “safe spaces” because of an election they don’t agree with? What in the honest [expletive] is that?
Taxes
I voted for Trump because of taxes. I own a small business, I prefer his tax policies.
My family moved from Canada because of the horrors of socialism. Over half of my Father’s income went to the federal government. Hillary wanted to expand socialistic policies, that terrified me. Also Hillary seems to loathe most people.
Am I fired up about Trump? Of course not, but he beats the alternative.
Immigration
The primary policy that I was behind was his immigration policies, including the pledge to build a wall on the southern border. Importing people who are net takers from our country, as opposed to net contributors is an unsustainable predicament…
People can recognize patterns. They aren’t naive enough to not notice that when some new mass murder/terrorist attack occurs, the media (see Chris Hayes after the German market attack most recently) will lecture us to wait to cast judgment. We already know. The culprit is a Muslim. I’ll give you 5/1 odds on the next one. Many people don’t think it’s crazy that we stop accepting people from countries that want to do us harm. You can call it racist, but many people will just call it common sense.
Pure Self-Interest
I voted Trump for several reasons that include policy points, my negative attitude toward an increasingly centralized government, and my status as a self-interested voter who, along with my family and community, will benefit from a more business-friendly (especially in regards to the energy sector) administration…
The policy points that Trump has put forth will result in a decrease on taxes for myself and my family. I was concerned about the direction some democrats are proposing in regards to closing certain tax loop-holes that I have benefitted from (such as the “trust fund” loop-hole), and I have seen no evidence that a Trump administration will threaten that (whereas Obama directly did, and it seems like Clinton would have continued such a direction). Along those lines, I do not like the policy direction Democrats seem to take on taxation (for example, Obama stated that paying taxes is one’s “patriotic duty”, and I am extremely averse to such arguments because it calls for a sort of dogmatic attitude toward patriotism). Again, in regards to the office of president, I do not believe specifics do or should matter.
I felt that my family was worse off under [President] Obama, mostly due to his terrible health care plan. My costs skyrocketed. Now whether that was due to loopholes in his policy, or just the general greed of Big Pharma [pharmaceutical companies], well we can debate that. But I felt like under Clinton, and Dubya [President George W. Bush], my family was doing much better. I felt Hillary [Clinton] was more [President] Obama than Bill [President Bill Clinton], and would lead us further into an area where my family wouldn’t do well. That was essentially what made me pull the trigger and vote for Trump. I think everyone should do what they feel is best for their family.
Populism
I’m a Democrat. But unfortunately the party abandoned me and my state and my Midwestern ‘nation’. Had Elizabeth [Warren, a liberal Senator from Massachusetts] run I could have cast a vote for a nationalist, a populist, a thoughtful and honorable person who carries with her no sense of superiority or pretension. She is noble in her actions and usually in her words. Hell, she wrote a personal finance book that is still working its way through my mind.
Trump was the next best thing. He is a populist (I hope), he is candid (we need a new term for his level of candor lol), he projects victory and pride and most like Warren he speaks to the ‘little guy’ as opposed to VOTER DEMOGRAPHIC GROUP 3216-T.
I voted for Trump for one reason only. I am tired of the members of the government caring about themselves first and not governing. I do not believe most of the crap that comes out of politicians mouths. I feel like the only reason we have two main parties is so they can disagree with each other on purpose! Gay rights? Gun control? Health Insurance? Abortion? Taxes for the rich? Welfare for the poor? It don’t matter. Once these politicians pick red or blue they need to go with the company line….no matter what they really think inside. Its all bullshit. Nobody can agree on anything. What would be the point of that? You aren’t going to get (re)elected by agreeing. Every year we talk government shutdown. It’s a joke. All these guys care about is being reelected, not rocking the boat, and toeing the company line. I hate it and it disgusts me.
Do I think Trump is a good guy? No. Did I feel dirty voting for him. Yes…
I did like Trump for one reason though. He was not part of the plan. He was not part of the machine. He ran as a republican, but I do not consider him one. I have lost so much faith in the government as a whole that it was great to see this buffoon, this by all purpose unfit for president man say “[expletive] you” to the system.
The Economy
First of all it pained me to vote for Trump. I had no clue which of the two I would vote for on Election Day. I finally decided to vote for Trump.
First of all, at the time I had unemployed for over a year and no longer counted on the unemployment statistic. The under 5% quite frankly did little to give me a great feeling of the economy. Let’s face it, if things are going great in your life then statics that prove mean far more then when you see major discrepancies in said statistics because of what you are living. I turned down plenty of work in my one year “vacation.” I did not want a part time role or worse contract, which is what the vast majority of work I found. Also I believe fact check discussed the Obama job creation and found well over 50% of new employment was of the contract or part time variety. This left me with a choice, vote for the candidate at least talking about trying something new or the candidate that wants to keep the 8 years going to 12 or more. In my situation, which should I have chosen?
I voted for Trump as the lesser of two evils: or specifically, I voted for evil and against Satan. I come at this as someone who leaned Marxist in my college days but who then discovered Ayn Rand [a conservative writer] and hold her ideas to be largely dead-on correct. So I favor laissez-faire [libertarian] capitalism, with government out of pretty much everything aside from: defense, courts, police. Separation of economy and state; health care and state; education and state. I do not subscribe to your personal feelings regarding wealth inequality, it is inherently neither good nor bad, what matters is how it was created and obtained. In fact one of many reasons why I am repulsed by the losing candidate and her party is that they exploit class envy to their benefit, promising more and more free stuff at the expense of the few. (Not that the winning party and candidate provide a clear-cut alternative in this regard.)
The Supreme Court
Some of us voted for Trump, holding our noses, knowing he wasn’t our “choice”. Given that I could NEVER vote for Hillary, I had to look at the long view, aka the Supreme Court… If Hillary had been elected, I would expect more of the same activist thrust. With Trump, who the [expletive] knows, but I’m pretty certain it won’t be someone who sides with larger government, entitlement, etc.
The Liberal Media
-voted for trump mainly to see liberals lose their [expletive]
Hamilton Nolan: why not vote for Hillary to see conservatives lose their [expletive]?
-liberals losing their [expletive] is more entertaining.
check out the NY Times editorial page.
Reading Charles below, you’d think Trump is planning on setting up concentration camps in Texas
Because he was able to speak over the top of the media and directly into the listeners ear… I know you’ve heard it all before, but the kicker for most people like me, really was the dismissive nature of the “cool” people like you. That somehow we don’t know our own country. That we have to obviously be stupid or bigoted to reject Hillary Clinton and the general ideological foundations of the Democratic party.
I honestly didn’t like either candidate. After reading your blatant hate for Trump, I decided to vote for him.
The article about Trump “getting his [vulgar term] kicked” actually made me proud to vote for him. I understand the sites bias and the staff is obviously entitled to it, but the articles just came across as grossly condescending.
Seeing the writing staff freak out days after the election was well worth the vote.

28C: Dick Meyer, “How’s He Doing? What Trumpers Think So Far,” Decode DC, March 2, 2017.

In a column a few weeks ago, I asked supporters of President Donald Trump to email me their views of how he is doing so far. They did, and I thank everyone who took the time to write…
After the sorting, I selected roughly 200 emails from Trump supporters that were thoughtful, civil and articulate. Here is an unscientific sample of that unscientific sample (I have corrected obvious typos, some bad grammar and spelling errors):
“Is Trump coarse and excessive and all the other even more derogatory negatives you wish to ascribe to him? In a great many ways, of course he is. And we do see that and know that. But … he still speaks to and for those of us who wish for America to REMAIN America. … Time will tell if Trump was the right choice, but to us our country’s salvation is worth the try.”
· Duke B.
“I have become a huge fan of President Trump. I say ‘I have become’ because he was not my first and not even my second choice for the Republican. … Every day I see a potential terrorist detained at the border, every day I see an illegal felon being deported, I feel safer.”
· Tom K.
“I am a small-business owner who supports Mr. Trump. I employ 130 Americans, manufacturing products here in the USA, all the while under siege by a flood of Asian imports. … After eight long years of being demonized as selfish, ignorant rubes by a former president who espoused open borders and global interests at the expense of American interests, we had no choice but to rebel. … President Trump has begun to deliver exactly what he promised. Clearly, mistakes in execution have been made.”
· Daryl C.
“I voted for Trump mostly because I am afraid of Clinton continuing to let more and more illegal immigrants into the country. … I have nothing against anyone wanting to be part of our country, but they need to do it legally. Trump was the most likely to do that, and I hope that in the process of being president he doesn’t destroy our country. He is a total jerk with no clue.”
· Bill C.
“It is demoralizing listening to you and all the Democrats spew out hate that is making our country divided and weak in the eyes of the world. We need to help our President Make America Great Again after the last eight years (when) Obama was given a pass just because he is black.”
· WSReis
“I love the fact that President Trump is trying to keep his campaign promises! I love that he cares about all of us in middle-income America. We are the hardworking people who have supported this country and all of its giveaway programs. We are tired of it and want a break! President Trump and Vice President Pence are bringing God back to the US. I am thrilled!!!”
· Susan P.
“There are many things about Trump I do not care for, but he has a chance to lead our country out of the abyss. Before we can get back on the right track there are many people who need to leave government and institutions in Washington that must be destroyed.”
· Field R.

John O’Brien and Ahlaam Ibraahim, Transcript: “Ask a Trump Voter: Six Voters Explain Themselves,” KUOW Seattle Radio, May 5, 2017.

As Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president came to an end in April, KUOW gathered Trump supporters and opponents together for an “Ask a Trump Supporter” event in Bellevue. The goal was to start a dialog across the political divide — and for deep blue Seattleites to understand what led some to vote for Trump.
Trump supporters answered questions from Trump opponents in six-minute interviews. Here are excerpts from those conversations.

Olga, a Christian Trump voter, told Jennifer that Trump was her 17th choice in the primaries (meaning dead last) — but she didn’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton. Jennifer asked her what role she thinks religion should play in government.

Jennifer: Do you want to see more, like, role of religion or Christianity in the rule of the country?

Olga: Oh, not necessarily. I just think that Christian values aren’t respected anymore. I think that if we all lived our lives and held to our Christian values, we would have a much better society.

Jennifer: Values such as?

Olga: Working, supporting yourself, being responsible for yourself, not living off the system, not being dependent on government assistance. I know it’s necessary and some people, you know — it’s there for a reason. But I think it’s grossly abused.

Jennifer: I’m not Christian, but I like the value of charity. And I wish that people could be more — have more charity in general.

Olga: Yeah. And Christians are very charitable.

Later in their conversation, Olga said she believes government assistance is a key motivator for immigration.

Olga: I don’t like that people come over here expecting to live off the system. And I experienced a lot of that living in Texas.
I worked at a hospital there where women would go into labor from across the border, and they would hang out in the parking lot until they were crowning because if they came into the emergency room too soon, they would be put in an ambulance and sent back across the border. So they would sit out in the parking lot and labor and wait, because if they waited long enough, their child was born here, and they had access to welfare, food stamps, the whole nine yards.
And that to me is just wrong.

Jason asked Hossein, who voted for Trump, if he thinks the president is trustworthy.

Jason: Do you trust Donald Trump?

Hossein: You know, he is running for office to make America a better place. He’s not running to gain fame. He’s not running to make money. So, what’s in it for him? There’s nothing more than serving this country. So, for that reason — yes, I do. In fact he’s going to fall behind in his own business doing this.
I think he’s going to use that ingenuity, that vision, that charisma that he’s gained running a business, running a financial empire. So let’s hire him — and we already did — let’s put him to work to make America great again.”

Trump-supporter Casey answered questions from Natasha. He said the Republican Party is divided — primarily on religion.

Natasha: What are the non-negotiables to you?

Casey: Those issues revolve around large government. A government that is overregulating.
I watched the government, from within the healthcare system, basically destroy a healthcare system to put in a system that benefits 20 million people or so — in a country of 323 million people or so. That really has hurt the middle class massively.
My two big points are healthcare and education. So I’m pro women’s rights. I’m pro religious or theological freedom. So, whatever you want to believe, whatever you want to do in your personal life, I am completely cool with that. And there’s actually a large section — a rather large majority of Republicans — who are that way.

Scout ask Trump-supporter Connie what she thinks of the president’s attitude about women.

Scout: Do you think that Donald Trump is a sexist? Or do you think that’s something that media has portrayed him as?

Connie: I believe the media has been pumping that up. I was in New York from ‘74 to ‘86, and I worked in the construction trades — administrative. But he was just, he sold more newspapers because he had the good life, he was doing all these things, what have you.
But I do believe just the way he’s taken care of — like, the whole Miss Universe thing. And she’s come out and said, ‘Wait a minute, everyone’s taken this out of context. He actually helped me by pointing out that I’m not going to succeed in what I want to do. And he helped me try to make myself a success.’ He has a lot of women who work for him. All of these things.
He’s married — I mean, two out of three of his wives are fairly classy. I’m not sure about Marla Maples, but their daughter was surprisingly very well spoken. She’s obviously done something with her education. She’s no dummy. I think that, you know, he likes to surround himself with neat women.

Erika talked with Bob, a lobbyist from Olympia and Trump supporter, about immigration and the president’s ban on refugees.

Erika: How did you react to Trump’s travel ban on refugees who had already been screened for resettlement in the United States?

Bob: I was actually just talking to my son about that this morning. Specifically micro-wise, that’s very disturbing. On a macro level — a larger level — I think it’s the right thing to do. For the last eight years or more, this country has been a mess in terms of immigration. And a lot of debate going on, a lot of people coming in.

Erika: I mean refugee resettlement, not immigrant.

Bob: Well, I think it’s all mixed together. Because those refugees are coming and they end up staying in the United States, right?

Erika: Refugees are forced to flee violent conflicts in their native land, so I was just curious when he put the ban out, these were refugees who had gone through the screening process, if you had any sort of gut reaction to that.

Bob: Gut reaction is yes, it’s disappointing. But I think it is connected to the immigration issue. And we need to be concerned about people coming in unfettered, uncontrolled into our country. 

Karen (a Trump supporter from rural Washington) talked with Cindy about whether Trump should run the country like a business. Karen said she liked everything about the president’s first months in office.

Cindy: Is there one thing in particular that you really like that he did?

Karen: I really like that he met with a lot of CEOs in his first couple weeks in office, and got their input about what to do, and to bring back the pride of made in America.

Cindy: Do you think that the goals of a large corporation and the goals of the government are similar?

Karen: No.

Cindy: Do you think you can apply all of the skills that a CEO would know to a government-type of position, or do you think there are additional considerations you have to learn about?

Karen: If businesses ran their businesses like the government does, nobody would be in business, because you can’t go out and print money — you have to follow a budget. The first thing is getting a balanced budget that makes sense, and we’re, what, at $20 trillion or whatever it is right now?  It’s ridiculous. We’re giving away more money, no one’s paying it back, and taking away money where things need to be spent and giving money where it’s really a waste of time.

Reading 22: Politics of the Pandemic

Introduction:

In the Donald Trump era, more than ever before in twentieth-century, Americans are politically divided along clearly defined lines over a plethora [great number] of issues consistent with their identities as liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans (usually). The Coronavirus Pandemic and the accompanying recession or depression is no exception. As you will see, conservative Republicans tend to clearly have certain beliefs about the seriousness of the pandemic, the likelihood that they personally will be seriously harmed by it, the relative importance of health and safety concerns, versus economic catastrophe concerns, the degree of success of Donald Trump and Republican governor’s management of the crisis, and the extent to which one can or should believe news media that seems to support the liberal Democratic position.
The following documents, charts, and graphs from the spring of 2020 illustrate this political divergence. You will use these materials as information to compose an essay on the following thesis questions:
Both The New York Times and Fox News are generally considered to represent opposite ends of the political spectrum. In this essay, you are to determine:
1. Which media outlet represents what political viewpoint?
2. Does the news on the front page of each, from May 14, 2020, cover the same topics, and/or with the same emphases, and/or with the same political message embedded in or underlaying that the news story?
3. Knowing that there are sharp differences in the news coverage of their front pages on that day, and intimating [realizing] that number 2, above, must be answered in the affirmative, your detailed thesis question is:
What characteristics, attitudes, issues, and viewpoints are evident in the liberal newspaper and the conservative website you are comparing and contrasting here? Do they cover the same topics? If so, do they give the same emphasis to each topic (size of font, position on the front page?). Do they use the same facts, evidence, and quotations in conveying their viewpoint? Explain how these news medias’ approach to several of the key stories of the day (naturally one of them is the impact of the coronavirus) reflects their political values, concentration on certain issues, and political goals? [Of course, their endorsement of different candidates for the 2020 presidential election is a prime political goal. One of these mediums supports President Trump, one does not.] Note that you should use the article headlines, and the one sentence summary underneath, as a subtopic or parts of a subtopic. After reading the documents below, and reviewing the charts and graphs, you can simply from the title of the article and the one sentence summary anticipate the political slant of the article. Then, using the various documents (analytical and expository articles, and statistics, charts, and graphs), that I have provided you, explain why a conservative or liberal news medium would take the viewpoint evident in their articles. Also, consider which topics are highlighted on the front page, which are minimized, and which don’t appear at all. How do the front pages of these news media reflect their political viewpoints? Further, how do the fundamental values of liberals and conservatives reflect their response to each topic, as reflected in these headlines and sentence summaries? In this document set are several short readings which will help explain any topic and viewpoint you might not be familiar with. They are all meant to have a neutral, objective tone, meant to inform, rather than advocate.

Example:

Here is a short, informal outline of a possible paper:

Introduction: [You briefly explain that American politics are very polarized in 2020, and adherents of the different political parties read news media of dramatically different political leanings. You explain that your paper will utilize the front pages of The New York Times and the Fox News website to illustrate this, by examining the topics covered, the importance given to each topic, the apparent political bias of the article from its title and short summary, and how liberal Democratic or conservative Republican values and beliefs inform [form the foundation of, are reflected in] that article.
Your paper would possibly be something along these lines of the short paper I quickly wrote as an example, below. I am not at all suggesting that you follow this outline or wording: however, it should give you an idea of what I think is a good way to present your thesis:
On May 14, 2020, Fox News and The New York Times devoted the most space on their front pages to coronavirus-related issues. However, their coverage was dramatically different. This is clearly shown by the titles of the articles on their front pages. The articles’ titles suggest how deadly the disease is; how much public protection against it is justified, including government-ordered measures versus individual freedom to do what one wishes; it these protective measures are necessary and are working; if the virus is increasing in strength, staying steady, or decreasing; and how serious the health impacts and mortality rates of the virus are on the American people, versus how much economic catastrophe public preventive measures are causing. Furthermore, it is possible to discern the deeper beliefs about society and government held by liberals and by conservatives, through consideration of the news coverage of these issues.
For example, In The New York Times, one headline, at the very top of the front page, reads [?]; its summary emphasizes [what?] This suggests that [what?]. The Fox News website, on the other hand, only discusses that issue [where?], with a much [larger, smaller?] typeset for the article title. There are [number?] other articles on the same general theme: [title 1, title 2, title 3]. Altogether, these suggest that [what?]. This is in sharp contrast to The New York Times, which clearly takes the opposite attitude: that [what?]. These viewpoints are consistent with the values of each political ideology. While liberals tend to emphasize [what?] at one of the fundamental purposes of government, conservatives take the view that [what?] is the most important purpose of the government, and so [what?]
The coverage of the “Flynn Unmasking Affair” is also radically different. This “Affair,” which is strongly emphasized at the top of the front page of [which?] centers on the accusations by [whom?] that [what?]. This implies that President Trump [did what?] and is therefore [what?]. On the other had, the [which?] doesn’t even [what?] That’s simply because [why?] and hence is seen to not be news at all.
In conclusion, while both news mediums emphasize [what] on their front pages, their coverage on this issue, and they degree of importance they give it, are radically different. Because of [what?], liberals tend to think [what?] about the virus. The front page of The New York Times makes this clear in [how many] articles: one suggests [what?]; another is based on [what?]; and another accuses [who of what?]. The [which?], while recognizing it as a serious problem, nevertheless stresses that [what?], and even suggests that [what?] is more important than [what?]. Clearly, this accords with President Trump’s history of [what?], and the forty percent or more of Americans who agree with him.
A half century ago, Americans of different political ideologies still generally agreed that government should [what], and it was its duty to [what?]. [What?] was much less important. However, the political divergence of liberal and conservatives over the past half century is apparent in the news media. While, fifty years ago, all Americans watched the same news programs and read the same newspapers, today news media has bifurcated, and taken on starkly opposing political views. Their audiences, which have a much greater range of information sources today, have gravitated towards their closest ideological news media, and believe that others are simply [what?], and not to be trusted. Whereas Americans would have been told that [what?] about the coronavirus across almost every news outlet they watched or read, now there are two bitterly opposed ideological extremes that can’t even agree on a consensus on the [what?].

Texts:

This will be copies of the headline stories from the front pages of The New York Times and Fox News Online. Which day is yet to be determined.

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