American Eugenics

Being conversant with Italian-American history, I had heard of the Immigration Bill that in 1924 had cut off Italian immigration to the U.S. almost overnight. I had also heard of the ‘Know Nothings’ and of Madison Grant’s infamous screed, The Passing of the Great Race. But before reading Daniel Okrent’s superb study of these matters in The Guarded Gate, (Scribners: 2019), I had never guessed at the depth of the racial loathing and hatred, the panicked white supremacy that operated in the years leading up to 1924. Now, however, with this book, I and everyone else can see the long history of the movement that even now has been given new life by the presidency of Donald Trump. And see that much as Trump would like us to think of his movement as unprecedented, it has a long and sordid history in these United States, including the manipulation of so-called ‘science’ to serve racial bias.

            Okrent begins his story with a series of Boston Brahmins—chiefly Senator Henry Cabot Lodge—who were all horrified at the ‘race-mixing’ that was threatening to dilute the alleged purity of America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. As early as 1891, Lodge introduced a law that would demand a literacy test of all immigrants to “sift the chaff from the wheat” (52). But his literacy provision failed, at least partly due to resistance from the steamship companies; they were doing a banner business shipping immigrants to America (it cost them $1.70 to ship an immigrant whom they charged $22.50 in fare, a handsome profit when they could squeeze 2000 of these wretched souls into steerage.) But Lodge’s failure wasn’t the end of it by a long shot. Such great icons as Teddy Roosevelt was also worried that whites were being out-reproduced by these immigrant hordes, and harangued Anglos to do their ‘reproductive duty’ (have lots of kids) rather than commit what he called ‘race suicide.’ And then came one Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote a tome called The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), in which he popularized the term that would shortly become lethal—“Aryan.” He wrote, “Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right…the lords of the world” (90). He added that not only Dante, but Marco Polo, St. Francis of Assisi and Galileo were also Germanic. In that same year, William Z. Ripley in his The Races of Europe added his scholarly heft to this nonsense by categorizing Europeans into three basic groups he called ‘races’: Teutonic (tall, blond, blue-eyed), Alpines (shorter and darker), and Mediterraneans (slim and darker still). As to those Mediterraneans (such as the more than 2 million Italians who would immigrate by 1910), a Washington Post editorial writer would say in 1906 that 90% of them were “the degenerate spawn of Asiatics” who had invaded the Mediterranean years before, and were now coming to America to “cut throats, throw dynamite, and conduct labor riots and assassination” (99). Prior to that, in 1894, three Harvard graduates, Prescott Hall, Joe Lee, and Robert Ward, all Boston Brahmins, had formed the Immigration Restriction League (IRL). Taking their credo from Francis Galton and the American biologist Raymond Pierce, they subscribed to the “new science of eugenics”—a ‘science’ devoted to selectively breeding better men to “elevate the race by producing higher types” (117). Hall’s publication, Eugenics, Ethics and Immigration made their main case: eugenics should be applied to immigration because “wars and pestilences no longer eliminate the unfit as formerly” (118). Such a pity we no longer have those helpful plagues to weed out the unfit!

            When Charles Davenport took over the Cold Spring Harbor research facility, and managed to convince Mary Averell Harriman (the richest woman in America) to fund his institute, eugenics was well on its way to becoming mainstream ‘science’ in America. Davenport quickly opened the Eugenics Records Office, with the uncredentialled Harry Laughlin in charge. Laughlin proceeded to compile mountains of data on the genetic histories of the unfit—imbeciles, epileptics, the insane and the criminal—all assembled in a Trait Book to allegedly study inherited characteristics that should be eliminated. It was useless material, based on the erroneous idea that complex traits like memory or shiftlessness were determined by a single unit character or gene (science at this point had no good idea what the gene was). Still, this and other eugenics work played right into the hands of lawmakers seeking a basis for limiting immigration. Nations like England, Australia, and Canada soon imposed immigration restrictions, and in America, restrictions based on certain categories like anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, and lunatics were soon in place along with restrictions on people with syphilis or even ‘poor physique.’ Davenport himself was moving closer to a position favoring marriage restrictions (indeed, the 1907 Expatriation Act had mandated that any American woman who married a foreign national automatically lost her American citizenship thereby):

“Unless conditions change of themselves or are radically changed, the population of the U.S. will, on account of the great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality and less given to burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy than were the original English settlers!” (147). 

In short, Davenport feared that battalions of short, musical rapists (e.g. Italians) were poised to invade the United States and intermarry, displacing those good drunken Anglos. Nor was he alone; by 1912, seven American states had enacted laws calling for the involuntary sterilization of some wards of the state, particularly those convicted of sex crimes. 

            In 1913, Lodge tried the literacy test again but the legislation failed when President Taft vetoed it. But the momentum to restrict immigration picked up new steam when sociologist Edward Ross wrote in his book, The Old World and the New, that the Mediterranean people were “morally below the races of northern Europe” and furthermore that immigrants from southern Italy, especially Neapolitans, were “a degenerate class…infected with spiritual hookworm,” and displaying “a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins…and backless heads” (188). He concluded by noting that these immigrants promised “an unthinkable future: a mingled, degraded America” (189). But despite these warnings, literacy test legislation failed once again in February 1915, when President Wilson vetoed the bill and the House sustained his veto. 

            However, the most serious challenge to immigration from southern and eastern Europe was about to emerge. Madison Grant, famous for his conservation work as a protector of California’s redwoods, was also the creator of the Bronx zoo. This made him a savior of trees and animals, but when it came to actual people, real immigrants, he went off the rails. He it was who conjoined the two toxic elements of his time, eugenics and xenophobia, to produce the most toxic amalgam of all—scientific racism. He described what he called Nordics: “a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats” who dominated other races by right. As to the Mediterraneans, they might be great artists, but since Italy’s Nordic invaders had “absorbed the science, art, and literature of Rome,” it was they, not the Italians, who could be given credit for “the splendid century that we call the Renaissance.” Indeed, all that was of value in Italy, according to Grant, was due to those Nordic invaders: “Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci were all of Nordic type” (211). He even said that “Columbus, from his portraits and busts, whether authentic or not, was clearly Nordic” (208). The arrogance and stupidity of this drivel is breathtaking. And yet The Passing of the Great Race was published by Scribner’s, with the great Max Perkins as its editor, and touted as a pathbreaking book by an author it called a “scientist, savant, traveler, and trained observer exceptionally qualified for this work.” The Nation magazine praised Passing as embodying the “truths of racial evolution which as a whole is unanswerable.” Not all were fooled, however. The great Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas wrote a review in the New Republic titled “Inventing a Great Race” that pilloried Grant’s book as one built on “fallacies,” which it was. Its concept of heredity was “faulty,” wrote Boas, its evidence “haphazard” and its opinions “dangerous”—as the world was soon to learn. Nonetheless, with Grant’s book as support, the literacy test for immigrants was reintroduced in1916, and vetoed again by President Wilson; but this time Congress overrode the veto, and passed the literacy test in February of 1917.

            World War I intervened, but even that horror was used to support the need for eugenics-based immigration restrictions. Edward Ross, in preparing his eugenics text, lamented the war as an “immeasurable calamity that has befallen the white race,” because it had killed off “more than 2 million British and German soldiers” (230), the flower of Nordic manhood. And Grant assured his readers that the barbarous conduct of modern Germany was due not to Nordics but to a population that had been polluted by Alpine or Asiatic blood. Later, Lothrop Stoddard in his book The Rising Tide of Color, described World War I as “the white civil war” that threatened “race suicide” and “mongrelization.” The intelligence testing that was introduced during the war was likewise used to support restrictions. Testing immigrants at Ellis Island, Henry Goddard concluded that “the intelligence of the average ‘third class’ (steerage) immigrant is low, perhaps of the moron grade” (239). And it is dismaying to note that Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, fully supported the eugenics movement. In a 1921 piece for Birth Control Review, she wrote: “the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of Eugenics” i.e. to breed a race of thoroughbreds (244-45). 

            By this time, eugenics was in full flower in America. Harry Laughlin, of the Eugenics Records Office, made a report to the Breeders Association about the ways to cut off the supply of human defectives and degenerates that included sterilization, a system of matings, polygamy, and euthanasia. His report’s central conclusion: “Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not solely to the individual (i.e. immigrant) who carries it” (274). Sounds a bit like some of the more rabid right-to-lifers of our own day.

             By 1921, the movement to control ‘bad’ immigration was too strong to be stopped. In May of that year, President Harding signed an Emergency Immigration Act into law. It set immigration quotas for individual nations—based on the number of immigrants from that country already in the U.S. in 1910. No more than 3 per cent of those already here were allowed. This immediately cut immigration from Poland by 70 per cent, from Yugoslavia by 74 per cent, and from Italy by 82 per cent. By contrast, Great Britain’s quota numbered 77,342, but due to a lack of those seeking to immigrate, 35,00 slots were left unfilled. And still the restriction bandwagon rolled on. At the Second International Conference of Eugenics hosted by Fairfield Osborne on Sept. 22, 1921 at New York’s Natural History Museum (with Madison Grant as co-chair), Count Vacher de Lapouge, author of The Aryan and His Social Role, intoned, “America, I solemnly declare that it depends on you to save civilization and to produce a race of demigods!” (303). Not long after, President Harding signed a two-year extension of the 1921 Emergency Immigration Act. And still the hits kept coming, almost too numerous to mention. The NY Times Book Review featured a review of Charles Gould’s book, America: a Family Matter, with the title, “Failure of the Melting Pot;” and the redoubtable Harry Laughlin provided “data” for a Congressional hearing which asserte that Romanians were 41 per cent more likely than average Americans to be criminal; that Italians were 57 per cent more likely to be insane; and that Russian and Polish immigrants were twice as likely to be tubercular. Whereupon Kenneth Roberts, editor of The Saturday Evening Post, warned: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southeastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in return” (319). Shortly thereafter, Secretary of Labor James Davis told an audience in Pittsburgh that 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior” (320).

            With the heat against immigrants at the boiling point, new and stricter plans began to emerge. One John Trevor (a wealthy zealot) presented his National Origins quota plan. Quotas would be based on all immigrants with roots in in a given country. But Roy Garis of Vanderbilt University went him one better. In his plan, quotas were to be based not on the 1910 but on the 1890 census because—as the Saturday Evening Post put it—that was the year “Nordic immigration was still strong and the low-grade stuff hadn’t begun to come to us in volume” (320). For Italians, this meant that quotas were drastically reduced—from an allotment of 222,496 before the 1921 quotas to 45,159 in 1921, to 3,912 per year with the new law. Senator David Reed was quite satisfied; “I think” he said “the American people want us to discriminate” (331). But not everyone was so pleased. Herbert Jennings, professor of zoology and genetics told his colleagues that the true aim of these measures was “Nordic propaganda.” And Emanuel Celler, then a 34-year-old congressman from Brooklyn, called Laughlin’s study “a vicious report redolent with downright and deliberate fallacies” while Madison Grant’s work was “dogmatic piffle.” He condemned the restrictionists’ intent as “the rankest kind of discrimination…set up against Catholic and Jewish Europe” (340). But Celler’s was a lone voice. When the final vote was taken, the House passed the new bill 308-62; the Senate vote was equally decisive, voting 69-9 in favor. With that, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 became the law of the land, and in 1925, a mere 2,662 immigrants from Italy were allowed to enter the United States.

            The eugenics movement had not only contributed its vicious creed to the immigration debate. It had more direct effects as well. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law, with Justice Holmes writing with the majority his infamous opinion that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” (350). Due to that opinion, at least 60,000 people were sterilized by 1970. But the worm was beginning to turn. Saner minds were beginning to attack eugenics. H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury attacked eugenics as “a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, full of emotional appeals to class prejudice, solemnly put forth as science” (351). And especially after Hitler came to power in Germany and praised America and its eugenicists as having inspired him, it became a little embarrassing to carry the eugenics banner. This was especially true after the 1946 Nuremburg Doctor’s trial, where several Nazi defendants actually used the Buck v. Bell decision in their defense, as well as Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Nor did they just use the excuse that they were following orders; they said they were following Americans (392). Even so, Charles Davenport never publicly disavowed his ‘scientific racism;’ neither did Fairfield Osborne or Madison Grant or Harry Laughlin. But eventually, all were, one way or the other, publicly disgraced, as well they might be.

            As for the infamous law they helped to pass, it too was revoked, this time by another Johnson. In October 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, at the Statue of Liberty, signed into law a new Immigration and Nationality Act. Written by the same Emanuel Celler who had vainly protested the 1924 bill, it abolished national quotas—too late for many, but a victory for fairness and equity in immigration nonetheless. At least for a time. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Stroke

I am waiting to go home. My son Gavin and I are sitting in my hospital room at Marin General Hospital for a wheelchair to wheel us down to the car after five days here for what appears to have been a mild stroke (some 795,00 people a year suffer a stroke, according to the Mayo clinic). But suddenly, I am woozy and dizzy and when Gavin sees me slumped in my chair, my eyes rolled back, he yells for help. He tells me much later that they called Code Blue, but all I remember is dozens of nurses and docs huddled around me and asking if I’m all right (which I’m clearly not) and then wheeling me downstairs rapidly for my second CT-scan. They want to check for blood on the brain, but find none. Still, my near-breakout is clearly over. I’m transferred downstairs to a unit that’s one step below ICU, to be watched carefully. Next morning first thing, I’m wheeled down for another hateful MRI (they had pushed to do it Thursday, but I refused). I endure the fierce machine-gun rattling of the MRI and the results show that my original stroke has ‘extended,’ meaning that now the affected area of my left pons is larger, with the result that I have now lost function on my right side: I can’t move my right arm or hand, and my right leg is floppy and no longer under my control. Where just a day earlier I was walking freely around the ward, now I can barely move with a walker. I’m here for another week at least.

            This all started a week before. I had done my usual routine on both Saturday the 10^th of August and Sunday the 11^th, noticing only some tiredness on Saturday and then, while watching the 49ers, that my speech, when I complained aloud about a play, sounded a bit slurred to me. I figured I’d go to the Bolinas clinic on Monday (why do these things always happen on weekends?) and be fine. Then next day I did my usual routine and cooked breakfast, but when I was typing, noticed more mistakes than usual. Hmm. And when I tried to write longhand, it was nearly impossible to control my pen. More hmm. At that point I still figured a Monday visit to the clinic would suffice, but, to be sure, I decided to call my sister Elaine in New York. I had hardly said two words when she said “Hold on; I’m calling Laura to have her come right over” (my sister-in-law lives next door). Before I knew it, Laura had arrived, heard me speak, (I thought she’d just drive me to Marin General, but my niece Amber wisely advised getting emergency help) and called 911. Within minutes, my tiny kitchen was bursting with several huge guys from the firehouse taking my blood pressure and vitals, and then three more EMT’s doing the same thing and urging me, despite the good signs I was exhibiting, to go to the emergency room. I didn’t think it was necessary, and resisted at first, but finally yielded to the consensus. 

            At Marin General’s emergency unit, it was the usual wait, and then a CT-scan. My son Gavin then arrived (he’d just gotten back to Berkeley from San Diego for son Nicolas’ soccer tournament and rushed over), and agreed that I should be admitted to be safe. I said ok, figuring I’d be out in a day or two, but my blood pressure kept hovering around 200 and the docs insisted they had to get it stabilized. I complained that my soaring BP was mainly ‘white coat syndrome’ but they argued that that can maybe account for a few points, but not this much. So, under protest, I stayed. Walked around the ward freely; squeezed every doc’s hand to demonstrate strength in my limbs; admired some of my nurses and the therapists for their empathy and dedication. And was relieved when, with more meds than I’ve ever taken, my BP went down to 122 and I was discharged the Thursday after I arrived. Hallelujah.

            Then Code Blue and calamity. My right side was gone. Almost no function in the right leg or the right arm, with fingers mostly paralyzed, and swallowing difficult, strange. My speech was also more slurred though, thankfully, my cognitive function (such as it is) remained mostly intact so I could generally express what I wanted to say. It was the motor functions on my right side that had mainly been compromised. And I only learned later that my stroke (the extension that caused the damage) was not ischemic (caused by a blood clot as the initial one seemed to be), but rather hemorrhagic—caused by leakage of blood in the brain. The only positive thing about this is that those brain cells, as I now understand it, don’t die from lack of oxygen, but are knocked out temporarily by the accumulated blood, which has to drain out. They then have to heal from what doctors call ‘bruising’. It takes time, but they can come back. 

            So there I was in the hospital for another week, while the docs tried desperately to stabilize my BP. This has taken me way beyond my usual pattern of minimal use of drugs. Right now I could be a drug commercial. I’m taking high doses of losartan and metropolol (which I’m used to in low doses) and at least two more drugs for blood pressure (now pretty well controlled by the way)—hydralazine and chlorthalidone. In addition, I’m on Plavix as a blood thinner, and Lipitor for cholesterol (I’ve never had a problem with the latter, but it can apparently be an added risk factor for stroke.) I’m also taking my usual aspirin, and Miralax to keep me regular, and Melatonin at night to help me sleep, and a diuretic to reduce the edema in my feet. Whew. How long this regime will last is anybody’s guess but for now I’m accepting it for the simple reason that I will do just about anything now to avoid further damage to my brain. 

            After a week and some helpful physical therapy, the docs told me that I was ready for intensive rehab. We were given three choices for sites, and we chose CPMC (California Pacific Medical Center), even though its location in San Francisco might represent some access problems for my son in Berkeley. But it seemed the oldest and best, and it is. I was driven there in another ambulance on Friday, the 23^rd of August, and taken up to my room,  a private room with spectacular views of the city (not that any of that mattered at the time). I met Eliano, a big, muscular nurse’s assistant who became my good friend. He was one of several workers there who provided yeoman service way above and beyond the call of duty: all three of my therapists, about whom more later, and some exceptional nurses—Tina, who fixed my impacted self in the early days when I was painfully constipated; Manny, the best night nurse I encountered, and with whom I shared some medical humor; Tryva, an always helpful nurse who has to drive from her East Bay home at 4:30 in the am to get to work; Chrystyn, who always made me laugh while she took care of every need; Helen, who tended to me as if I were her own Asian father ; and Patrick, who emigrated from the Phillipines at 19, but whose English was so perfect because, he told me, everyone there knows English—it’s our second language (thank you, American imperialism.) Angels of mercy, all. 

            Then there are the therapists—the heart of the place. I was assigned three: Holli, my occupational therapist; Jen, my physical therapist; and John, my speech therapist. They were all first-rate, though that doesn’t really express it. More than doctors, who are usually perfunctory when they drop in briefly to see that you’re alive and breathing, these therapists give you hour-long sessions where they push you to engage muscles and patterns that you’ve never given a thought to and think will never work again. Try walking these stairs. Are you sure? Today, you’ll take a shower; yes, you can get dressed yourself afterwards. With only one arm? Yes, you can do it. But I can’t. Don’t say ‘can’t’; it discourages the brain; say ‘not yet.’ Try balancing on this riser. Are you kidding? You can do it; the muscles remember how; you just have to get the brain firing again. So today, you’re going to cook yourself lunch—don’t you often have a fried egg and avocado sandwich? Yes, but. Ok, here’s the egg; what are you going to do first?  (My brother and sisters came to visit that day and saw me finishing up, incredulous that I was actually cooking my own meal!) And on and on through the most elemental re-learning: how to put on socks; how to put on a t-shirt with one hand; how to stand with a wobbly, out-of-control leg; how to swallow pills without choking because it takes seventeen different movements to swallow. Who knew? Who knew moving one’s fingers to simply grasp a spoon took so many muscles and tendons, and a trained brain controlling them all? Only someone who suddenly loses the ability that babies master. I could easily have yielded to despair: how the fuck am I going to re-learn all this? But Holli and Jen and John were there nearly every day to insist that I could and I was, a little bit each day; up to and including, towards the end, actually making an outside trip into the community and down a steep San Francisco hill to visit a café, order tea and pastry, and sit there like a real person, enjoying it. To describe each tiny victory would be tedious. But what I really want to convey is the special dedication of each of my therapists and all three collectively. It wasn’t just that they were competent, which they were. It’s that they gave more of themselves than anyone, I, had any right to expect. You can feel it. They’re not just doing a job; they’re connecting on some level that’s hard to describe but is clearly there. And at the end, one feels—I felt—a personal bond to each of them that I won’t soon forget. Little bodhisattvas they are, doing work that saves the world. And that work includes telling you—me—that it’s time to leave; you’re ready. But I’m not ready; my son’s not ready; we need a couple more days so I can get stronger and he and my daughter-in-law can get my room prepared. Nope. You’re ready now; any more time here can only feed dependency. And they were right; and we left on Friday the 6^th of September as scheduled, and I have been at my son’s, cozy as can be in the sick room they set up (we’ve always called it ‘the sick room’—my mother convalesced here, as did my brother Edmond, and my wife and Gavin and now me) in their Berkeley home ever since. 

             I could tell you more—about the home therapists I have now, about how I can now cook my usual oatmeal for breakfast; about how we went out for dinner last night for exceptional Chinese and that I was able to button my regular pants myself which I absolutely could not do when I went to the café—but I won’t. What I will do is try to convey what this all means. For one thing, it means that I am now forced to be slow and patient for the first time in my life. It’s not just slowing down either, as when it takes me four or five minutes to get my compression socks on or my shoes, when before it was a matter of seconds. Or when I have to make five trips back and forth to the table when I’m preparing cold cereal because I have to get the dish to the table first, then get Tracy’s help to open the package of cereal, then more help to open the plastic container of cantaloupe, then slice it and carry it separately to the table, then go to the frig and get the quart of milk and carry it to the table, then get my wheat germ out of the freezer and also to the table, then realize I don’t have the sharp knife to cut the cantaloupe and the banana, or the spoon to eat with so I have to get up again to get those (I only have one lame arm to use--which in itself is a great leap forward--because the other one holds my cane), then put it all in the bowl with the four almonds I also put in, and finally, take a bite and settle in. No it’s not just that. 

It’s that my sense of who I am has had to be drastically altered. I’m not the quick one who could do anything in seconds or minutes (when I was young, I took pride in being able to play Chopin’s Minute Waltz in just about a minute), the fastest learner in the west. I’m slow now, and people have to wait for me to make my slow, halting, cane-aided way across the room or down the stairs. They have to help me, and I’ve always hated asking for help for I was the one who could. But not anymore. Now I’m the one who can’t…yet. I’m the one wo has to ask my granddaughter to cut open a package of chips, or my grandson to open the damn container of sauce, and on and on. And at one time, it would’ve been humiliating. But not anymore. Now it’s the current me. Now I’m among the ‘differently abled.’ And that, perforce, evokes a different image or ‘self model,’ as Thomas Metzinger puts it. 

But it’s more than that, something more fundamental still. We are all addicted to the illusion that we are independent, all under the spell of the notion that to be a real human being, we must strive, from almost the moment we take our first steps, to be self-sufficient. “I can do it myself. I don’t need any help.” And we are encouraged in this by our parents, our teachers, our western culture. ‘The measure of a man is the extent to which he can support himself with no help from anyone or anything.’ Just as the measure of a people or a nation is the degree to which they are self-sustaining and self-sufficient: “We are beholden to no one.” By contrast, to be dependent—on others, on charity, on the state—is to be diminished in both the eyes of others and of oneself. But is this alleged independence, this total self-sufficiency ever the case? Even where one attains that American ideal, the absolute freedom of the billionaire? Or is it our great and sustaining, and ultimately damaging delusion?

I am reminded of an article that appeared in my alumni magazine not long ago. It was written by one of the great athletes to come out of the college, a world-class skier, mountain climber, trek leader. Until one day he was doing some heli-skiing I think it was, and he crashed, nearly killing himself. After agonizing recovery, he ended up a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair. He spent a couple of terrible years depressed, but then began giving talks about what was still possible, and along the way came up with a term which still haunts me: he said of people with all their functions intact, people we call ‘normal,’ the temporarily abled. In other words, those who still have the full use of their bodies and minds will have them, do have them only temporarily. Age, or sickness, or accident are sure to intervene to show them just how temporary their ‘able-ness’ really is. And even before that, every single healthy person on this planet, no matter how healthy at any given moment, is, from the beginning, utterly dependent upon the functioning of billions of creatures—in the soil, in our guts, in our cells, in the trees and plants and creatures that sustain us, and without which we could not survive for even one second. And that doesn’t even get to the countless people in our lives who make us possible. This is so for everyone, without exception. 

In light of this, is it not an illusion to think otherwise? Is it not the greatest delusion to think of our normal healthy selves as self-sufficient, as beholden to no one or no thing? I have to admit this is pretty much what I have been striving for. I have lived alone for much of the past thirty years. I have pursued a writing career that has become more and more independent—to the point that I can now design my own books, which are written on my own computer with most research done on that same computer, and now even the printing done via print-on-demand publishers who can print however many or few books I need without my ever having to get out of my chair. Self-sufficient with my own imprint, in almost every way. But then along came a little thing called a stroke, and suddenly I can’t tie my own shoes. Can’t cut my fingernails, or trim my mustache. Struggle to put on my pants or socks, or climb stairs with the ease of my two-year-old grandson—suddenly dependent on “the kindness of strangers,” as Blanche Dubois puts it. And astonishingly, I have been able to see this as not some catastrophe that has ‘disabled’ me (though it has done that), but rather as something that was inevitable, and in some quirky way, just. To see that contrary to what I’ve always liked to think, I have not been exceptional so much as ‘temporarily abled.’ Living the great human delusion that somehow, I could escape the great denouement. But none of us can, and more, none of us, even from the beginning, ever has. We are all entangled in what Mahayana Buddhists call the “net of Indra”—all of us connected by invisible strands to all else—and I mean all else, from the meanest bacterium to the grandest rainforest. All jewels in the net of being we are, reflecting and reflective of all else so that whatever happens to one of us ultimately happens to us all. Always. And now, this has been demonstrated for me in the most immediate, powerful way; and strangely, I am, if not fully content, at least ready to stay open to whatever follows. 

For what else could one, unable to tie his shoelaces, do? Or be? Even if it’s only temporary.

Lawrence DiStasi

Sicko at the top; Sickos at the bottom

As the light follows the day, verbal attacks from leaders leads to violence below. And our Agent Orange in the White House has been particularly keen in recent weeks to do just that. He’s called out four Congresswomen of color (Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayana Pressley) and suggested that they ‘go back where they came from,’ oblivious of the fact that three are U.S. born, and all four are U.S. citizens. He’s attacked Elijah Cummings not only as a person, but as representative of his city of Baltimore—a “rat-infested place where no one would want to live.” Read that as a racist attack on all black inner cities, not just Baltimore. Others have charted the consistency of this racism from the moment Agent Orange announced his intention to run for President.  

Now we have had, in the last few days, two mass shootings, notable even for an America where mass shootings have become almost a national pastime. Both were by young white men, the one in El Paso by a 20-year-old who seems to have had an animus against immigrants from Mexico whom our Agent Orange has been flaming about for the past two years. So he shot up a shopping center and killed at least twenty innocent people. The shooting in Dayton, Ohio is still being investigated but it’s notable that this young white man shot and killed nine people, apparently at random, six of whom were black—which is not so random. A few days earlier, another white youth managed to sneak an illegal (in California) assault weapon into the Gilroy Garlic Festival and shot dozens, three of whom died. 

            In sum, the slaughter of innocents goes on, unabated, and egged on by our own Agent Orange in the White House. The man is poison, both on an individual and an environmental scale. 

            And in case anyone doubts that the administration is complicit in the domestic terrorism that has resulted from both its words and its policies, consider this from George Selim, formerly of the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Council. Selim wrote an op-ed in today’s USA Today titled “White supremacist terror is rising, and Trump’s policies kneecap our ability to fight back.”  Here’s part of what he wrote:

When I worked at DHS and the National Security Council, I ran a number of programs to confront these growing dangers. My office had a budget of more than $21 million and 16 full-time employees. But in the past three years, the office has been gutted, the name changed twice in this administration, the budget reduced to $3 million, and the staffing reduced by at least half. 

Selim, who now works at the Anti-Defamation League, added these stats: 

The numbers don’t lie. At the Anti-Defamation League, our experts have been tracking these trends for decades. In 2018, we found that of the 50 murders committed by extremists, 49 of those came at the hands of right-wing extremists, with white supremacists alone accounting for 39 of those murders. And from 2009 to 2018, right-wing extremists have been responsible for 73% of the extremist murders in the United States...

            So here we are folks. A sicko at the top refusing to combat or even name domestic terrorism, and lots of sickos at the bottom drinking the white supremacist koolaid, and the United States still NUMBER ONE—not in health, or security, or well-being, or equality, but in its mass murder rate, which dwarfs that of every other advanced industrial nation (and most non-industrial ones too) known. 

            What else is there to say?

Lawrence DiStasi

How Respond to a Racist/Fascist?

We live in strange times. Dangerous times. Despite the fact that there are no large-scale shooting wars at present, there still exist several ‘hot spots’ of contention between the United States and its many adversaries, most prominent of which is the Persian Gulf where Iran has recently shot down a US drone and seized a British ship, among other flareups. And of course, there are the residual ‘hot spots’ in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya while others in the south China Sea, India and Pakistan and North Korea percolate merrily. Not to mention the always roiling occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, where the temperature is raised periodically by Israeli air strikes to demonstrate its dominance in the region. 

            But perhaps the strangest and most dangerous sign of our times is the fact that the most powerful nation on earth is headed by a lunatic. I am speaking, obviously, of Donald Trump, who last week sent the political world into spasms with his racist comment (followed up by “doubling down” and then exploding the whole thing at a political rally of rabid supporters in North Carolina) that the “squad” as he calls Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Presley, should ‘go back to where they came from.’ Of course, this ignores the stubborn fact that three of the four are American-born (is Presley supposed to go back to Boston?), and all, including the Somalia-born Omar, are American citizens. But facts have never stopped Trump. What he wants to do, always, is rile up his base (and they are among the most base, i.e. lowly and ignorant, of Americans—though, thanks to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, they think they’re quite smart!) by invoking the basic idea that some people—and those of a darker hue are the most prominent of examples—just don’t belong here. Hitler did this successfully, to the world’s horror. Now Trump is following the same playbook in the United States, having first won the presidency in 2016, and now seeking to win re-election using the same scare-and-scapegoat tactics so dear to all fascists. 

            The punditry in America has reacted more or less predictably, though this time the restraints seem to be put aside, with almost everyone from the PBS Newshour to CNN to the entire press of the left to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling Trump’s words “racist.” And despite the pathetic attempts of Republicans like Mitch McConnell to turn the tables and call those who call out “racism” (or “fascism”) the “real racists,” the alarm has kept building—especially after the Nuremberg-style rally Trump held in North Carolina where his minions took up the chant, “send her back.” Among the commentaries has been this one from Sarah Abramsky in Truthout: 

The most powerful man on Earth is now using his platform to unreservedly preach the gutter politics of the purge, of the pogrom, of the race war. We cannot let Trump and his supporters enact his fascistic gospel. We cannot let history repeat itself. (Truthout.org, 7.19.19) 

Others, though, have tried to moderate the reaction, observing that Trump is notHitler and Trumpism is notNazism. Which is very true. It is also true that history does not repeat itself, though it often rhymes. And so the question becomes, does the current mode of fear-based populism which some have called “illiberalism” rhyme well enough with fascism to set off alarm bells, and more? Are we really entering an age where the fascist leader will be perceived by frightened masses (either racist whites in America terrified that they are becoming a minority, or Europeans fearful of being overrun by refugees from Syria and north Africa, or nationalists everywhere anxious that global warming is making so many places on earth uninhabitable that no nation will be able to accommodate all the refugees streaming from them) as the only safeguard against inundation? It is certainly possible—witness the proto-fascist leaders in India, Hungary, the Philippines, and countless Middle-East nations where leaders like Al Sisi and Mohammad bin Salman are our ‘good friends.’ But what I am concerned with here is the near-term situation in this country. How seriously are we Americans to take the ravings of the lunatic we now have in charge? Is it time to activate the big guns to combat creeping fascism in the United States? Should we on the left be thinking of mass demonstrations and other mass actions that go beyond organizing for the next presidential election? Or has the situation gotten even worse, gotten beyond conventional politics? 

            Years ago, I had a neighbor who was a political scientist, and one of his projects involved looking at the situation in Nazi Germany as Hitler was rising to power. And his question was: at what point does a target population have to conclude that the situation is beyond repair and thus so dangerous that it is time to leave? In short, when should a German Jew have concluded that all hopes for amelioration of the political situation were gone, and that the only means of survival was to get out fast? Though the situation has not reached that point in the United States, and the alternatives are not flight but rather how serious the political fight should become, the question remains. When should one conclude that conventional modes of opposition will no longer work, that the established ruler and his party have too powerful a grip on the electoral reins and the support of a fanatic base, and that the time has come for truly serious counter-measures? 

            The problem is always that we don’t know. And what we don’t know, primarily, is how seriously we should take Trump’s increasingly fascist rhetoric. This is always the dilemma that citizens of a democracy face. Are Trump’s tweets just racist bombast from an ignorant narcissist? Or is there a calculating mind whose intentions are leading to actual violence? Or even further, does the expression of such destructive language lead, inevitably and regardless of intent, to violent actions to back it up? This is what we don’t yet know. The record, for Trump at least, is that he often seems to enjoy making threats, but then, when he sees the reaction, backs down. In short, he’s the coward that usually lurks beneath the surface bully. Even with the racist remark about the four Representatives, he has doubled down and backed up, and insisted that he didn’t really like what his minions in North Carolina were shouting and tried to talk over it (until the videotape of the rally showed him preening in the glory of it for at least 15 long seconds while the ugly chant went on), but then came back to saying he really liked it, though it wasn’t that he was a racist (he hadn’t a racist bone in his body, the president insisted), it was that Ihan Omar had criticized Jews and Israel and if she didn’t like them or like it here, she should go back to her own country. And take her hijab-wearing, terrorist-supporting compatriots with her. Which, as anyone could see, was classic racism and xenophobia.

Of course, if it were only racism at issue, we might get by that, since it’s an old story in this country. But we have the international antics and use of intemperate language (some have called those “fascist”) as well. Consider the case of North Korea. There, early on, Trump actually did use very harsh language, talking about raining down ‘fire and fury’ upon the North Koreans, and prompting many people to expect a shooting war very soon. But then he reversed course completely and began a wooing of the North Korean leader that has continued to this very day, to the disgust of many experienced observers who wonder about his apparent affection for absolute dictators like Kim Jong Un. Who could like such guys? Must it not be that Trump sees himself (if only the American system would allow it) as a kindred spirit? someone who could really make some advances in the world if only it weren’t for that pesky thing called democracy, for constitutional separation of powers? One has to think so. Because even after several putative ‘red lines’ were crossed by the North Korean nuclear program, Trump kept insisting that he and Kim had a real personal relationship, and would come to an agreement eventually. And the world could only hope and hold its breath. The same situation holds with Iran. In spite of Trump’s violent rhetoric promising that Iran would soon be regretting its rash action in shooting down a U.S. drone, our Fuhrer is said to have recalled planes that were already in the air on a bombing mission to Iran. And we are left wondering: what prompted him to reverse course and call off the mission everyone expected? Was it a failure of nerve? A reversion to type (i.e. Trump fits the type found in many bullies—being all talk and no action, being, in fact, when confronted by someone of strength, a coward at heart.) And this is not to even mention his groveling before his pal, Vladimir Putin, at Helsinki. 

All of this, then, makes it difficult to decide just how dangerous this faux-president really is, or might be. He loves violent rhetoric, to be sure. A narcissistic braggart, most definitely. Threatener-in-chief: no doubt about it. But does he actually doanything? Will he actuallydo anything? Is he threatening just to uphold some image of himself that he’s been taught to revere and maintains to prop up his always shaky and often collapsing self-image? Or is he threatening to goad an adversary into some rash action that he can then use to justify a punitive and perhaps nuclear strike? We don’t know yet. 

            And so we’re left with this seriously defective man—defective intellectually, defective emotionally, defective psychologically—with a seriously defective base of supporters just dying for something to rescue their ruined and empty lives, and an equally defective Republican party behind him cynically willing, for reasons of maintaining their flimsy grip on power, to either remain silent in the face of his idiocies or provide rationales for their ‘sensible patriotism,’ propped up by a right-wing media juggernaut that maintains that all his rational opponents constitute an empire of “fake news”—all of which empowers this lunatic in the White House, against all odds and reason, to keep up his lunatic antics and drag his country and the world to no one really knows where or how far. 

            Though what we do know is that the behind-the-headlines actions he has already taken could have far more serious consequences than the ones indicated by his surface posturing and rhetoric. And here may be the area of most danger represented by this racist-fascist lunatic. Global warming, for example. He keeps insisting, in the face of scientific and even mounting public opinion, that it’s all a hoax. Opposing his idiocy regarding global warming, in fact, seems to be what he most holds against the “squad”—they’re all heavily promoting the Green New Deal to take climate change seriously and fight vigorously against it. And that would sink all of Trump’s attempts to maintain a carbon-spewing, record-setting economy. So his appointments, to the EPA, for instance, have resulted in the scuttling of most EPA regulations instituted by his hated predecessor, to the joy of his corporate cronies. The damage, if this continues for much longer, will be unimaginable. The countless judges he’s appointed represent a parallel and comparable threat, judges who can be expected to render some of the most destructive decisions this nation has ever seen. Add this to the encouraging of his fanatic and violent minions—many of whom would be happily fascist in their thuggery if they’re given half a chance to at some point break out of chanting and sign waving to become literal stormtroopers breaking the heads of those hated ‘coastal elites.’

            Well, you know the story. So we come back to the original premise. Just how dangerous is the situation we’re in, just how dangerous is this maniac who now lords it over us like some wannabe Mussolini? I mention the latter because for all the damage the Italian leader did to his nation and its people, he seemed basically reluctant to get into a realworld war until Hitler made it impossible for him to avoid it. So the inventor of fascism, a nasty thug to be sure, wasn’t, on his own, fully committed to implementing that viciousness we attribute to fascist rule. For his domestic enemies, in fact, Mussolini instituted the practice of force-feeding them castor oil; but giving one’s enemies debilitating diarrhea is somewhat different from roasting millions of them in specially-built ovens. And when it comes to Trump, though his actions may ultimately cause more damage than all the fascists combined (I’m referring to the planet-destructive consequences of ignoring global warming), it is my guess that he doesn’t really have enough intelligence to understand these consequences. And that’s where we end up, I think. The one saving grace for our fascist moment may be that Donald Trump isn’t smart enough to be an evil genius. Deep down, he actually wants to be liked, adored. And though I think Bandy Lee is correct in pointing out that this makes him quite dangerous, it’s not clear whether he represents the ultimate danger he, or his fanatic, out of control minions, may blunder us into. 

            And therein may lie our best hope. Trump might soon be blundered, or mocked, or voted out of office. Made to endure that which he can least tolerate: mockery, and laughter, and ridicule, and failure. He uses these weapons often, we notice, and the reason is that he knows these are the areas where he himself is most vulnerable. I think the term that applies here is projection: we project onto others that which we fear most in ourselves. And so that is what might be done at the highest levels. Confront this asshole with what he actually is: a fool and a buffoon and a loser who has stumbled into his position by a combination of blunders (he actually expected that he had lost the election as it was happening) and fortuitous interferences by the Russians, and the Republican party’s Machiavellian manipulations and gerrymandering in those swing states, and Hillary Clinton’s blunders and overconfidence, and make him what he (and most dictators) fears most to be—what he actually already is—the failed laughingstock of the world. And, thereby, be rid of him before the damage he does becomes lethal. 

            If we are lucky, this will happen. If we are not, all bets are off. Because as has been pointed out before, even with a lunatic, things can, of their own momentum, get so out of control that we could all be plunged into a conflict or a protracted dissolution of all government safeguards that could take us to Armageddon. And it would be an even bigger shame if the one who leads us there were to be this fraud, this idiot huckster who pollutes and degrades and debauches everything he touches.

Lawrence DiStasi

Over the Moon

Last night, and for the last three nights, I’ve watched Chasing the Moon, the PBS/American Experience documentary that traces the lunar landing of 1969 from its inception with Pres. John F. Kennedy’s pledge to reach the moon by the end of the Sixties, through all the trials and difficulties of putting such an enormous project together, to the culmination on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped from his spacecraft and onto the moon’s surface and declaimed: 

            That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

For a breast-beating project like this, I found myself, surprisingly, riveted by most of the documentary. Robert Stone put together both ample quantities of rare footage, both of the rocket launches and public appearances, and also of more private footage such as showing the agony experienced by the wife of Astronaut Frank Gorman when he (and Lovell and Anders) were on the first shot to leave earth’s orbit to circle the moon, and make it back. Indeed, it was this first moon shot, Apollo 8, that, to me, conveyed the greatest emotional and intellectual impact. This was partly because of the clear difficulty of the maneuver: making sure to inject the space capsule at the very right moment to get it free of earth’s gravity and simultaneously into the moon’s gravitational sphere where it could circle the moon a couple of times, and then return to earth’s orbit for the return trip. Partly it was also due to the fact that, along the way, the orbit vehicle was hidden behind the moon and thus completely out of contact with the control center in Houston for several hours. Watching the faces of the ground crew in Houston (and the faces of the wives in Borman’s home), every one lined with worry about whether the astronauts and their little capsule would reappear, was high drama in the best sense of that word. This was made even more dramatic by what had been shown just before: the lightning-like fire in the capsule that killed the astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee as they awaited the ignition for Apollo 1, almost ending the Apollo mission on its first try. If anyone needed it, this initial tragedy made achingly clear the dangers inherent in riding an atomic blast into space—though the fire’s cause had nothing to do with rockets, but rather with oxygen in the cockpit set ablaze by a faulty wire. In addition to one’s consciousness of the ever-present peril in these early launches, though, the most iconic image ever captured—for me—took place on this trip: the image of Earth-rise, the blue and white half-globe of Earth rising up from the surface of the Moon. That is the image that reverses and upends the image of ourselves that humans have had since forever: we are the ground, and the moon is this magical, heavenly disc that rises regularly in the east, always changing shape, and dominating both our night sky, our mythologies, and our imaginations. Here, by contrast, the Moon is the ground, and the earth is what science had been telling us it is, but which we had never really beheld before: a fragile, lovely blue-and-white marble floating in black space—one that contains a homing appeal that we can never truly express, but that strikes us deeply, cosmically in heart and mind when we see it. 

            The other thing that Robert Stone did surprisingly well was to make us aware of the parallel political dramas that were going on at this time. In fact, one of the reasons this documentary proved so revelatory for me—even though I was quite alive and active when it was all happening—was that my attention, and that of most of my contemporaries, was focused on the high-energy politics of the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the protests against it were getting hotter and more deadly by the minute; the Civil Rights movement was accelerating with each piece of legislation and with each urban riot; and the cultural upheaval known as The Sixties was moving toward what seemed an apotheosis. All this aside from the deadly series of assassinations that took the lives of a President, a civil rights leader, and the President’s brother seeking to be president himself. In light of all this, the Apollo program to reach the moon seemed like an ironic sideshow, not to mention a colossal waste of money that could have been better used for social betterment. Stone shows this in several ways. He focuses on the only black candidate for the program, Edward Dwight, who somehow never gets selected. To make this understandable, Stone tells us that the head of Astronaut training, Chuck Yeager, simply told the other astronauts, all white, to ignore (i.e. ostracize) Captain Dwight, both professionally and socially, and within a short time, he would quit. When Dwight failed to be selected by NASA to be an astronaut, he rightly attributed it to “racial politics” and, proving Yeager right, resigned from the program and the Airforce in 1966. Stone also shows how surprised the Apollo 8 crew members were when, on their publicity tour of college campuses after their success, they were either ignored or booed by college students outraged at all programs having to do with a government that had come to seem the enemy. And he shows us Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who came to the launch of Apollo 11 to protest what he called the misuse of government funds, but was then appeased by the invitation of a NASA big-wig to enjoy a front-row seat to observe the launch. Finally, he points up the irony of having the climax of a program set in motion by the Democratic visionary John F. Kennedy and pushed and continued by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, being celebrated by the most mawkish and hawkish of all presidents (until recently, that is), Richard Nixon. Indeed, he lets us know that far from wanting to focus attention on the accomplishment as one not of a single nation or single human being, but rather of humankind as a whole, Nixon pushed to play up the cheap chauvinism even more: he urged that The Star-Spangled Banner be played when the astronauts took their first steps on the moon and planted the U.S. flag. We find ourselves thanking god that such a ham-handed display of “we’re number one” was suppressed by wiser minds. 

            All this being said, this viewer looked with great anticipation at the third episode of the program, the actual moon landing of Apollo 11. Strangely, it turned out to be anti-climactic. It is not fully evident why this should have been so—except in the long run. But in the short run, the drama of the big launch had already been demonstrated in previous missions. So had the real fear attendant on a major accident (the wife of Astronaut Ed White, we were told, actually committed suicide after her husband’s fiery death). So we were left with the technical feat—which was, it must be said, impressive if not amazing. The huge hurdle, that is, was what had to happen after the mother ship left earth’s orbit. That is, the mother ship—a rocket on its own—had to get into orbit around the moon, but not just by itself; it had to carry the lunar landing craft, equipped with its own power. Once in orbit around the moon, ship and lander had to separate and the spidery lander had to drop miles from space onto the moon’s surface, making sure that it did not (as the Russian lander, at about this same time, apparently did) descend too rapidly and crash into the moon’s surface. If this happened (and several newspapers had already prepared headlines announcing that the astronauts were stranded), the outcome was certain, and very public death. As the lander descended, in fact, we were told how much fuel was left: I think it made it with 19 seconds of fuel to spare. Drama. Then—and this strikes me as the most amazing technical accomplishment of all—the lander had to use its own mini-rocket power (apparently a source separate from the one that had braked it down to the surface) to fire itself off the moon and back up into an orbit precise enough to then link once more with the mother ship manned by the third astronaut, Michael Collins, for the home journey. This is truly ‘rocket science,’ physical calculation, and engineering of the highest order. Even the slightest error could have doomed the whole project. 

            Mirabile dictu, and against all inside expectations (Houston engineers truly thought that the first landing would not work and they’d have to try again), the whole thing worked flawlessly. Armstrong and Aldrin made it to the moon’s surface, planted their flag, cavorted a little for the cameras, and climbed back into the lander and rocketed back into orbit and connection with their mother ship. Then the three astronauts rode home unscathed to the cheers of an entire world—the TV broadcast seen worldwide was said to be the biggest ever up till that time. And well it should have been. The entire feat was stupendous. As for this writer, I and my then-wife had taken LSD that day, and what I remember most is the acid-driven strangeness (it would have been strange in any case) of seeing shadowy men cavorting on the moon in a way no one could ever have predicted, and at the same time running outside and looking at the moon in reality—and trying to comprehend the incomprehensible fact that two Americans, human beings, were at that very moment walking on its surface. Nothing prepares us for putting those two images together. It is simply too surreal. 

            And yet. The documentary ends on a rather disappointing note. It is hard to say exactly why, but that is the fact. And aside from easy answers such as—the first time is always the most anxious and therefore thrilling; after that, everything becomes routine—one can only speculate. For me, the answer is close to what we in the sixties thought at the time: once you’ve gotten to the moon, there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nothing to gain (aside from Tang, the astronauts orange drink) from getting there, or even getting to Mars, for that matter. We are products of our earth, our atmosphere, and thus, inescapably linked to this planet and its air we breathe and its nourishment we depend on. No other planet that we know of, indeed no other planet in other star systems or other galaxies, has yet proven to harbor life, plants, oxygen. Without those basics of existence, we might visit other planets like Mars, but could not survive there without enormous constructions of artificial environments, the cost to maintain which would be stupendous, if not stupid. 

So what is the outcome of the moon landing? What is the next step to develop from it? We still, despite the enormous outlay of time, money and lives, have not answered those questions. And meantime, we have to answer the far more urgent question of how to survive our own foolish depredations on this planet, our apparent determination to poison the only living planet we know for sure exists. Until we do that, indeed, until we prove we can do that—beginning of course with climate change—space journeys might provide little blips of excitement and satisfaction and wonder, but little else. And documentaries about them must end with an unexpected letdown, and the inevitable question: OK Humans, What Now?

Lawrence DiStasi

War Over Fugitive Slaves

No person held to Service or Labor in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due. 

The above quote comprises a part (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3) of the United States Constitution—that ringing call for freedom, unity and Republican government we have all been taught to revere—that contains several things worth noting. First, though it is known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” is ever mentioned. We see the word “person” and we see the words “Service of Labour” but we don’t see “slavery” either here or elsewhere in our founding document. This indicates, as Andrew Delbanco in his new book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul Before the Civil War(Penguin: 2018), emphasizes, that there was a certain delicacy or reticence (shame?) on the part of the Founding Fathers where slavery was concerned. That’s probably because of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, no less than 25 of them were slave owners, including those great fathers of freedom, Washington and Jefferson. So, as Washington himself knew (during the revolution, he had asked for help tracking down his own wayward slaves, worried that Tories would take his escaped slaves with them to the British side), the problem for southern states especially, in their decision to join the Union, was whether or not they could recover that mobile “property” that made up so much of their wealth. In fact, more than ½ million of the new nation’s 3 million people were slaves, and in the five southern colonies, “slaves accounted for two in every five persons” (45). Moreover, Delbanco quotes historian Eric Foner to the effect that by the 1850s, the economic value of “enslaved men, women and children when considered as property exceeded the combined worth of all the banks, factories and railroads in the United States” (26-7). So when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, there wasn’t much argument or even discussion about the Fugitive Slave clause, nor about notprohibiting “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” (Art. 1, Sect. 9, Clause 1), i.e. importing more slaves, nor about the now-infamous three-fifths compromise—which provided that representation for those slave states could be padded by adding to the number of “free” persons “three-fifths of all other persons.” Because even though the “persons” in question were considered to be equivalent to cattle where their rights and well-being were concerned, they were still numerous enough for the slave states to want to use them to achieve “fair” representation. And this gets to a wonderful distinction (or contradiction) discussed by James Madison: that though slaves may be “classed with those irrational animals which fall under the legal denomination of property,” at the same time “in being punishable himself for all violence committed against others, the slave is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society…as a moral person, not as a mere article of property” (87). Which meant not only that slaves were held accountable to the law for their actions, but that slave owners were exemptfrom responsibility for what their “property” did, since that “property” was considered fully capable of exercising free will—which was human. 

            Of course, the problem with these “properties who were human” was that they also had the disturbing inclination to want to be free. And so, many escaped from their bondage in the southern states to the north (though it should be emphasized that northern states were nearly as racist and discriminatory towards Africans as their southern neighbors; hence (128) “Connecticut restricted the franchise to white males in 1818, a year earlier than Alabama”). And this was the problem that southern states fretted and fumed over, insisting on the passage of several additions to the Fugitive Slave Clause to make it easier to reclaim their “property.” The first was the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, signed by Washington himself.  It authorized a slave owner’s agent to “seek rendition of his property in federal or state court” and fined anyone who obstructed with this return of a runaway (20). But this didn’t stem the tide, especially when several northern states enacted “personal liberty laws” to help protect the fugitives who increasingly sought safety there. These laws—in states from Vermont to Pennsylvania, from Michigan to Wisconsin—allowed escaped slaves to contest their capture not just physically, but in jury trials, a process that slave owners ringingly denounced as “unconstitutional.”  And so, the issue ultimately came to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Joseph Story in March 1842, ruled in the case of Margaret Morgan, a slave who had fled in 1832 to Pennsylvania to join her free black husband. This induced, in 1837, a white woman from Maryland who had inherited both Margaret and her children, to hire Edward Prigg to arrest Margaret as her property and take her back to Maryland with her children. But since Pennsylvania’s personal liberty law allowed the state to charge Prigg with kidnapping, he was arrested, tried and convicted, and it was this case that made it to Justice Story’s court. Faithfully following the Constitution, Story ruled that Pennsylvania’s (and therefore all) personal liberty laws were unconstitutional, and affirmed the right of slave masters to recover their escaped slaves from free states. But he left a little loophole: those northern states could make laws forbidding their authorities to assist slave catchers, thus making the recovery of fugitive slaves much more difficult, if not impossible. 

            This is how the situation stood just before the Civil War, though several more fugitive slave cases, and several books—notably Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of his life, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—added fuel to the fire. So did the continual addition of new states in the West, particularly that of Texas, which in late 1845 was approved for entry as a slave state, the 16^thslave state out of 28 states overall. So, too, did the waiting states “acquired” by the U.S. after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican War in February of 1848—which added to the United States “an area almost twice as large as the Northwest Territory” in an expansion that comes to no less than 30% of the present-day United States. Whether those states entered as slave or free mattered critically to the expansion of the South’s “peculiar institution” because raising cotton so depletes the soil that new lands for cultivation, and thus slavery, were constantly required. Seeing the writing on the wall, the great abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, called for the immediate dissolution of the American Union, a union he said was based “on the prostrate bodies of three millions of the people, and cemented with their blood” (218). On the other side, of course, was John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senator and a former vice-president, and he had a theory which he claimed justified slavery—the “mud-sill” theory. Here’s how Calhoun put it: 

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government;and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand(240; emphasis added).

I think that’s very cute. So, obviously, did many southern gentlemen, who continued to press for slave states to be admitted, and continued to press for laws making it easier to return their fleeing slaves. They managed to get yet another Fugitive Slave Act passed, this one in September of 1850, which denied whatever was left of the Bill of Rights to escaped slaves: denied habeas corpus; denied them the right to testify in their own defense; denied them trial by jury; denied them presenting exonerating evidence such as having been raped by their masters; criminalized sheltering a fugitive; required local authorities to help in their capture and return; and gave the power to extradite them to Federally-appointed commissioners. 

            Still, slaves kept escaping and abolitionists and freed slaves in the north kept increasing their commitment to defending them, and even attacking those who tried to apprehend them. Cases like that of Margaret Garner only added to their commitment, for the pregnant Garner, having escaped from Kentucky over the Ohio River in 1856 with her husband and four children, was so desperate when slave catchers and U.S. Marshals tracked them all down that she “took a kitchen knife and cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter, then slashed at her 3 surviving children, trying to kill them too rather than leave them to the life of degradation she had known” (319). No matter: the judge ordered her rendition back to Kentucky, whereupon she was sold, and died in Mississippi two years later. She was later immortalized in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved.What her case and other cases made clear was that the values of emancipation of slaves held by much of the north, and the continuation of chattel slavery held by the south could never be reconciled peacefully. They could only be settled by war. 

            Yet thought the pre-war years brought a kind of de facto emancipation, President Lincoln still clung to the hope that “border states would join the Union, and therefore, no emancipation would be needed” (363). Indeed, Lincoln in March of 1862, with the war imminent, even sent a message to Congress “recommending a program of compensatedemancipation,” intending to compensate slave owners for their financial losses of slaves, to resolve the situation. Delbanco quotes the reaction to this recommendation by the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who derided it as “the most diluted, milk and water gruel proposition…ever given to the American nation” (366). Which indeed it was. No matter. Within days, Lincoln signed on to the article of war introduced into Congress, and added the penalty of court-martial for any officer who sent fugitive slaves back to their owners. Then, once Lincoln had the cover of a major victory for the Union troops (which came at Antietam Creek), he issued his formal Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. By the end of the war, more than 400,000 former slaves were being protected by Union troops, and on June 28, 1864, the Fugitive Slave Law was finally repealed by Congress. 

            Still, Delbanco is passionate about what slavery meant and still means to this nation. In one of his most moving passages, he writes:

There is no calculating the unsettled debts of slavery. Since the Civil War, black Americans have been subjected to more than a century and a half of ingenious variations—if not quite replications—of the lethal assault to which they had been subjected by slavery itself. There is no enumerating them (385).

‘No enumerating them,’ Delbanco says, but he tries, and they include “the forced labor system that took hold after Reconstruction in the South…chain gangs, uncompensated workers into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories.” They also include the “millions excluded from social welfare programs after the Great Depression…de jure and de facto segregation…the gross disproportion of young black men languishing in prisons…and daily insults to self-respect delivered to black Americans for no other reason than the fact of their blackness” (ibid). We might add the not-so-hidden evidence in our current political climate of an enduring and pervasive racism that has animated the Right and even average Americans desperate to revive their precious world of white privilege. But perhaps it is not necessary to add anything more. The War Before the War makes the sickening case quite well. So well that every American should be required to read and absorb what it says.  

Lawrence DiStasi

The Delayed Fruits of War

Though the book by Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,Harvard U Press: 2018, focuses mostly on the time period from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and ends with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, its relevance to today is quite clear both from her last chapter and her Epilogue. So let’s take that last chapter first. It recounts the horrifying events of April 19, 1995 when a Ryder rental truck “filled with fertilizer exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City” (211). The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children in the day care center, and wounded more than 500. Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, was quickly found, tried and convicted, and sentenced to death. McVeigh took pains to claim that he did it on his own, though a few others were found who had helped him. But the press took him at his word, characterizing McVeigh as a “lone madman,” who therefore could be dismissed, along with his action, as outside any organized plot or movement. He fit the profile of those, like Lee Harvey Oswald, whose fevered, wounded brain led him, on his own, to a crazy, violent act. 

            Here is where Kathleen Belew’s whole book and thesis comes into play. She immediately counters the accepted version as follows:

However, in no sense was the bombing of Oklahoma City carried out by one man. The hell McVeigh described represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing. McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell organizing. The plan for the bomb came directly from The Turner Diaries, the book that had structured the activity of the white power movement since the late 1970s (210). 

Belew goes on to point out that, in fact, the Murrah Building had previously been cased by members of CSA (the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord), who then attempted and failed to blow it up with rocket launchers in 1983. But wouldn’t the FBI have known this? In fact, they did, but given the horrible publicity they had garnered for the killing of Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge (more on this later), and the deaths of 76 people at Waco, TX in the fire that concluded the long siege against Branch Davidians there, government agents were “reluctant to portray the Oklahoma City bombing as the work of a movement,” so the FBI decided not to pursue movements of white power violence, but only “individual actors” (211). The result, as seen in Belew’s Epilogue: the white power movement was allowed to grow explosively and fester while the federal government kept its distance and focused almost exclusively on “crazy” individuals—leading, almost inexorably, to the movement’s encouragement by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and its prodigious growth under his leadership. Indeed, to read the entire book by Belew is to begin to better understand how a fraud like Donald Trump could be elected and supported by his “base,” many of whom no doubt support white power’s aims. 

            But to get back to some of the stunning particulars amassed by Belew—let us go back to the Vietnam War and its aftermath, for in Belew’s telling, the alleged failure of the U.S. in that war, coupled with racist remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, led directly to the white power movement—most of whose members were, in one way or another, veterans of that war. One such character was Louis Beam. A Viet war veteran and member of the Klan, Beam was a gifted speaker and writer (Essays of a Klansman), who saw the Vietnam War as “emblematic of all that had gone wrong” with the country: shortage of jobs, no welcome for vets when they came home, stagflation, and a host of other ills that marginalized them. Beam openly called for violence to cure these ills. In 1982, he wrote: “You’re damn right I’m mad. I’ve had enough! I want these same traitors to face their enemy now, the American fighting man they betrayed, all three million of us” (31). He mentioned the tools available to such vets to fight their war in the homeland: “ an M-16, three sticks of dynamite taped together, a can of gas,” adding “Over here, if you kill the enemy you go to jail. Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they gave you a medal. I couldn’t see the difference” (35). Beam began by forming his own Texas chapter of David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), training recruits in paramilitary violence. One of their first targets were Vietnamese refugees who had settled in Galveston Bay as shrimp fishermen, often outcompeting locals. Along with neo-Nazis, Beam’s group began to intimidate the Vietnamese outsiders, firebombing homes, beating shrimpers, and firing guns at boats in the Bay. White power publications characterized the refugee influx as a “flood” and tried to characterize the alleged invasion of Galveston Bay as a kind of rape: “Galveston Bay is just like a fine woman…If you rape her, she’s never good anymore” (44). White activists also alleged that Vietcong spies had infiltrated the fishermen, thus justifying them to fight against ‘communist infiltration into the U.S.’ Eventually, a lawsuit in Texas led to an injunction against such Klan militarism, and the forced disbanding at Beam’s Camp Puller and elsewhere in Texas.  But Beam was by no means finished:  claiming that he was going to Idaho on vacation, he linked up with Aryan Nations members there, and focused much of his efforts with several white power groups, setting up his “cell-style” strategy of “leaderless resistance.” He became a leading member of The Order, seeking to make the Pacific Northwest their center of white power, and eventually a separate nation. 

            Meantime, neo-Nazis and Klansmen elsewhere were proving that, to some extent, they could be immune to the law because much of America supported their racist aims. An action in Greensboro, North Carolina illustrates this dramatically. A group called the Communist Workers Party (CWP) in November 1979 decided to stage a “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project. Having heard about this, neo-Nazis and Klansmen formed a caravan and headed to Greensboro to confront the rally. These confrontations had been increasing in the years leading up to Greensboro, with both sides making clear their intention to fight, with arms if necessary. In Greensboro, the Klan’s car caravan arrived loaded with armed men, and after some initial screaming and racial slurs, Mark Sherer, hanging out the window of a pickup truck, fired the first pistol shot into the air. More shots were fired, fighting broke out at an intersection, and then shotguns, rifles, and semiautomatic weapons were distributed to the fourteen Klansmen, one of whom, Jerry Paul Smith, dropped to one knee and fired into a now panicked crowd. Others followed suit, one bragging “I got three of ‘em,” another with a 12-gauge shotgun claiming “I hit four of the five that were killed and wounded six more” (63). Within minutes the Klansmen and neo-Nazis drove off, and well after that, the police arrived to find five protestors dead, and many more wounded. The local DA pressed charges against fourteen of the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who had been arrested. In the trial, begun on Aug. 4, 1980, the defense alleged that the attackers were “fighting communism,” and only fired in “self-defense.” And with peremptory challenges allowed in North Carolina, all black jurors were dismissed, so the jurors were white and Christian and sympathetic to any fight against commies and/or blacks. 

Perhaps predictably, on Nov. 17, 1980, the Greensboro jury unanimously delivered a not-guilty verdict. As Belew summarizes it, “a court had effectively condoned the intentional killing of communists” (71). And because of the Iran hostage crisis, news coverage was spotty enough that few, including this writer, ever heard of the Greensboro Fourteen (as they were christened by the white power movement, which took the acquittal as a green light for more violence) until reading about it here. Two more Greensboro trials followed, one in 1984 under civil rights laws in federal court, the other by widows of those slain seeking monetary damages. In the first, though FBI informants proved that “self-defense” was nonsense due to foreknowledge of the caravan’s intent, the defendants were again exonerated, this time of the charge that their action was racially motivated. The court ruled their action not racial but political, and they were freed. In the second case, several gunmen were found jointly liable for one of the five deaths, but the City of Greensboro paid the settlement, covering costs for both Klansmen and neo-Nazis. 

Up until this point, Belew makes clear that the rationale for white power activists was defending their country against outsiders, radicals, communists. Many even joined mercenary armies and fought against alleged ‘commies’ in Rhodesia, Central America, and the Caribbean, partly to redeem the American defeat in Vietnam. But in 1983, all that changed. In what Belew calls a “tectonic shift” for the movement, the white power movement declared war on the state. They would now fight for a “white homeland,” trying to destabilize the federal government which seemed to protect outsiders, and waging revolutionary race war (104). Three major figures led this new anti-government movement: the aforementioned Louis Beam, Richard Butler and Robert Miles (both of whom claimed to have fought in WWII). All three were talented speakers and writers and in their publications outlined the white power movement’s new strategy of “cell-based organization” with no leaders. This, first, made it more difficult for provocateurs to infiltrate, and second, would protect leaders like Beam, Butler, and Miles who could no longer be charged with giving orders for actions. Henceforth, as Beam wrote, “all members of phantom cells or individuals will need to react to objective events…No one need issue an order to anyone” (108). Why? Because all individuals would hold common ideas and values, most of them laid out in the aforementioned Turner Diaries. First published serially, this novel literally worked as a “how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war”. It actually presents 

“the use of nuclear weapons to clear first the United States and then the world of nonwhite populations…At various moments, the novel describes the forced migration of all people of color out of California (the all-white home after the revolution), the genocide of Jews, the nuclear bombing of high-density black populations in the South, and the public lynching of all people in interracial relationships (110). 

In real life, Beam and his associates hoped that a campaign of violence could “sway a white public in their favor,” allow them to implement movement objectives from a “white homeland in the Pacific Northwest…to a white world secured by the annihilation of all people of color” (113). Shortly thereafter, in November 1984, another major step was taken when The Order was founded at Hayden Lake, Idaho by Robert J. Mathews. Steeped in paramilitary training, and funded by robberies and counterfeiting, the Order’s ultimate goal was the familiar one: create a white separatist nation in the Northwest, and later the entire north American continent excepting Mexico. Order members “pledged themselves to race war until victory or death” (116). At about the same time, the Order’s Declaration of War against the government named “congressional betrayal of soldiers in the Vietnam War as a key justification of their violent campaign” (117). Needless to say, one of their major efforts involved amassing arsenals of all kinds of weapons. Another was amassing money with which to buy weapons (those they didn’t steal), land, and publicity. Their main effort was armed robbery. The first caper was a porn shop that netted them only $369, but they soon aimed at banks, one in Seattle netting them $25,000, and then the big hit, also in Seattle, of an armored car from which they stole more than $500,000. Assassination was also on their agenda, the most famous of which was the killing of Alan Berg, a Denver talk-show host for KOA-AM radio. Berg was a Jewish liberal who spoke out against white power. On June 18, 1984, an order member named Bruce Pierce fired a machine gun at Berg standing in his driveway, cutting him to pieces (123). 

            The FBI tracked several members of the hit squad. First they raided the house of Gary Yarbrough in Sandpoint, Idaho, finding the MAC-10 machine gun that had killed Berg, plus assorted weapons, 100 sticks of dynamite, and a shrine to Adolf Hitler. They then tracked him and Mathews to Portland, and took Yarbrough, though Mathews escaped to a safe house on Whidbey Island in Washington. Agents finally found him there, he chose to fight, and died when the house caught fire after illumination flares from a helicopter ignited the house, with him in it. Yarbrough was tried and convicted in 1985, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The following year, he and other members of the Order were convicted of racketeering charges due to armored truck robberies, and Yarbrough got another 60 years added to his sentence. He died in a hospice center in Pueblo, CO in 2018. 

            Finally, another trial, this one in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1987, fits the paradigm outlined earlier. After failing to produce a case that could net the leaders of the white power movement, the government finally initiated Operation Clean Sweep that culminated in the April 21, 1987 Fort Smith trial alleging that “the white power movement had attempted to overthrow the government through outright revolution” (171). This was the only real try at prosecuting white power as a movement. Fourteen men were indicted on charges that ranged from conspiracy to manufacture of illegal weapons to conspiracy to murder federal officers. Among them were Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Robert Miles, plus Richard Snell (who blew up a natural gas pipeline and killed a state trooper), and Order members Pierce, Lane, Barnhill, Lane and Scutari. Two apprehended members of CSA testified forthe government under plea bargains. In the face of the indictments, Louis Beam decided to flee the country, though, before fleeing, he married a 19-year-old, Sheila Toohey, his fourth wife. Together, they took up residence in Chapala, Mexico, until agents apprehended Beam, while his wife looked on from their house. Claiming that she thought her husband was being robbed, she used her husband’s rifle to shoot a Mexican officer three times. While her husband was extradited to the U.S., Sheila Beam was tried, but a Mexican judge found her not guilty by reason of self-defense, and deported her to the U.S. Her story, as a frail white woman needing a white male to defend her, but willing to kill for him and their child, greatly affected the trial’s outcome. In the trial, Beam defended his actions and ideas as a vet having come home from war believing it was his duty to kill enemies. He also made it clear that he would continue his fight, including killing “if so directed.” Then, after three days of deliberation, the jury delivered “not guilty” verdicts for all fourteen defendants accused of trying to overthrow the government. All the men were not only free, but the judge ordered “the firearms in question returned to the person who turned them over to the government” (183). 

The entire white power movement celebrated yet another court victory. The FBI agent in charge, Jack Knox, by contrast, resigned from the FBI in frustration. This, and the negative publicity about the FBI’s handling of both the deaths at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and the Waco, Texas assault, led directly to Timothy McVeigh and his deadly bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. 

            The conclusions of Kathleen Belew’s riveting book are clear. First, the fallout from the Vietnam War has proven to be far more lethal than even those who protested it thought. That is, to the carnage in Vietnam itself must now be added the roots of a lethal movement of returning vets bringing the war home that still operates in the white power movement. Second, though evidence has piled up for decades that this movement is highly organized and deadly serious, the courts and American juries seem generally unable to take it seriously and instead have consistently demonstrated sympathy for white defendants and their rationalizations for murder and plans for mass murder. Third, due to the parallel militarization of government forces in combating white power, the public’s sympathy, especially after the deaths at Ruby Ridge and Waco, has remained with the perpetrators rather than with law enforcement. And finally, the successful characterization of violent perpetrators like Timothy McVeigh as “nut cases acting alone” has meant that no organized government response has been able to put a halt to what can only be seen as organized white terrorism. In short, there is no doubt about the aims of this movement: the writings and testimony and actions of its leaders are crystal clear. What is in doubt is how long it will take the U.S. government to take organized and serious action against it. This is especially so since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and his comments about the organized mayhem and murder that took place in Charlottesville in August of 2017. Any look at the hyper-drive that organizing and a huge internet presence for white supremacy received from such comments should persuade anyone of that. What is needed is for Americans to become more aware of the threats that still remain—and a reading of Bring the War Homeis almost a must here—and make it clear to their elected representatives that racism, Nazism, and white supremacy may once have been acceptable in some regions of this country, but can have no place at all in a genuine democracy. Period. 

Lawrence DiStasi