The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet—and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.

Substack, founded in 2017, has terms of service that formally proscribe “hate,” along with pornography, spam, and anyone “restricted from making money on Substack”—a category that includes businesses banned by Stripe, the platform’s default payment processor. But Substack’s leaders also proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ, albeit with spotty results, to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

[Adam Serwer: Why conservatives invented a ‘right to post’]

Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.  

Some authors, I should note, reject the toxic label Nazi even as they ostentatiously deploy Nazi and white-supremacist language and themes. This is true of Spencer—as The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood documented in a 2017 profile titled “His Kampf.” Spencer later claimed to have disavowed white nationalism, but his Substack features content such as a recent post, written by a contributor, that begins: “Geniuses, in their most consequential forms, appear predominantly among Aryans … orbited by successful Jews.” That statement combines at least two Nazi tropes: the portrayal of Jewish people as schemers and the pseudoscientific fantasy that white Europeans are descended from a genetically superior ancient race.

Other Substacks amplify anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including the century-old forgery known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as well as more modern ones that accuse Jews of “occupying” the U.S. government and taking advantage of COVID-19. (A newsletter called Turning Point Stocks offers this choice headline: “Vaccines Are Jew Witchcraftery.”) One overtly Nazi newsletter called The Tribalist recently published a fawning interview with Billy Roper, a former skinhead who led the most prominent American neo-Nazi organization in the 1990s. Roper is infamous for celebrating 9/11 because, as he put it, al-Qaeda had set out to “kill Jews.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has called him the “uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.” The post’s lead image is a photo of neo-Nazis giving a Hitler salute.

In August, Rolling Stone reported that a group calling itself the People’s Initiative of New England—a barely concealed front for the neo-Nazi organization NSC-131—had published a manifesto advocating “separation from the United States of America” for the purpose of creating a white ethnostate in the Northeast. That manifesto was published on the group’s Substack.

The platform has shown a surprising tolerance for extremists who circumvent its published rules. Patrick Casey, a leader of Identity Evropa, a defunct neo-Nazi group, had been banned from Twitter and TikTok and suspended from YouTube after running afoul of those platforms’ terms of service. (Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, subsequently announced an “amnesty” that restored Casey’s account, among others.) Perhaps most damagingly to a content creator, Stripe had prohibited Casey from using its services.

But Substack was willing to let a white supremacist get back on his feet. Casey launched a free Substack newsletter soon after the 2020 election. Months later, he set up a paywall, getting around Stripe’s ban by involving a third-party payment processor. “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling,” he wrote on his Substack in 2021. “The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Casey’s newsletter remains active; through Substack’s recommendations feature, he promotes seven other white-nationalist and extremist publications, one of which has a Substack “bestseller” badge.

Nazis and other violent white supremacists are “opportunists,” Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, told me. “Even if you’re pushing them off of one platform … they’re going to find a space that gives them the ability to do what it is they want to do.” And in Substack, she said, “they have found a safe space.”

Moderating online content is notoriously tricky. Amid the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza, Amnesty International recently condemned social-media companies’ failure to curb a burst of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic speech, at the same time that it criticized those companies for “over-broad censorship” of content from Palestinian and pro-Palestinian accounts—which has made sharing information and views from inside Gaza more difficult. When tech platforms are quick to banish posters, partisans of all stripes have an incentive to accuse their opponents of being extremists in an effort to silence them. But when platforms are too permissive, they risk being overrun by bigots, harassers, and other bad-faith actors who drive away other users, as evidenced by the rapid erosion of Twitter, now X, under Musk.

In a post earlier this year, a Substack co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, implied that his company’s business model would largely obviate the need for content moderation. “We give communities on Substack the tools to establish their own norms and set their own terms of engagement rather than have all that handed down to them by a central authority,” he wrote. But even a platform that takes an expansive view of free speech will inevitably find itself making judgments about what to take down and what to keep up—as Substack’s own terms of service attest. For all his bluster about open expression, Musk has been willing to censor posts on behalf of foreign governments, including Turkey and India.

[Jeffrey Rosen: Elon Musk is right that Twitter should follow the First Amendment]

Ultimately, the First Amendment gives publications and platforms in the United States the right to publish almost anything they want. But the same First Amendment also gives them the right to refuse to allow their platform to be used for anything they don’t want to publish or host.

“Substack is a platform that is built on freedom of expression, and helping writers publish what they want to write,” McKenzie and the company’s other co-founders, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement when asked for comment on this article. “Some of that writing is going to be objectionable or offensive. Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes—like incitements to violence—but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.” Still, some decisions seem obvious: If something that bills itself as “a National Socialist website” doesn’t violate Substack’s own policy against “hate,” what does?

I myself am a Substacker. I started my newsletter in 2019, at a time when the platform was known for hosting freelance journalists and bloggers, many on the left and center-left, attracted by the promise of a new way to scrape together a living amid the collapse of the journalism industry. McKenzie, in fact, personally encouraged me to join Substack. Along the way he offered suggestions about possible names for my newsletter and topics I could cover, and facilitated introductions to other journalists on the platform. I didn’t get any money up front from the platform, but for one year in the middle of my tenure, the company provided me with a part-time editor and podcast producer.

In the past few years, Substack has sought to appeal to more contrarian and conservative authors, such as Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, and to readers disenchanted with mainstream publications. The company also began positioning itself more overtly as a fervent supporter of free speech—a laudable goal. But in practice, Substack’s definition of that concept goes beyond welcoming arguments from across a wide ideological spectrum and broadly defending anyone’s right to spread even bigotry and conspiracy theories; implicitly, it also includes hosting and profiting from bigoted and conspiratorial content. As far-right commentators have flocked to Substack, the company has refused to engage with the distinct challenges that these extremists pose to a platform that claims to prohibit hate speech.

In April, when Substack launched its microblogging service, Substack Notes, to compete with Twitter, Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge, asked Best if the company would permit a hypothetical post that said, “We should not allow as many brown people in the country.” Best refused to answer, calling Patel’s question “gotcha content moderation” and saying: “We have content policies that are deliberately tuned to allow lots of things that we … strongly disagree with.”

Facing widespread criticism from many Substack creators—some of whom were threatening to follow previous outflows of writers who quit in protest—McKenzie insisted that “aggressive content moderation” didn’t work. “Is there less concern about misinformation? Has polarization decreased? Has fake news gone away? Is there less bigotry? It doesn’t seem so to us,” he wrote. (Though he added: “Now, this doesn’t mean there should be no moderation at all, and we do of course have content guidelines with narrowly defined restrictions that we will continue to enforce.”)

Since then, the company has tried to market itself in two contradictory ways. To nominally apolitical creative writers—poets, fiction authors, memoirists, and so on—it is billing itself as a “new economic engine for culture.” The platform has a growing roster of celebrity authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert, George Saunders, and the musicians Patti Smith and Jeff Tweedy. This effort was embodied recently by a strange new ad, created to market the redesigned Substack phone app, in which raging denizens of a burning cartoon dystopia beat one another in the streets, while more cultured readers take refuge in a tranquil bookstore called “Substack.”

To a different audience, the site’s leaders market themselves in the opposite way: by “leaning into politics.” In a recent post on the official Substack blog titled “In the 2024 U.S. elections, vote for Substack,” McKenzie declared that in the coming cycle, “the cable news channels, public radio stations, YouTube shows, and podcasts will all turn to Substack to find informed and opinionated writers to book for their programs. More and more, politicians and interest groups will look to Substack writers to help make their case for their policies and positions.”

Both of those marketing ploys are undercut by the co-founders’ willingness not only to accommodate but to promote writers with a history of making inflammatory racist comments. In June, McKenzie hosted the Substack writer Richard Hanania on the platform’s flagship podcast, The Active Voice. On Twitter the previous month, Hanania, a political scientist with a law degree from the University of Chicago, had described Black people as “animals” who should be subject to “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance.”

[Adam Serwer: The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again]

Soon after Hanania’s appearance on the podcast, HuffPost outed him as having written under a pen name in the early 2010s for several white-nationalist outlets, including Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com. In some of his older posts, Hanania called for the forced sterilization of those with “low IQ”—a group that he argued included most Black and Latino people. Hanania responded to the exposé with a Substack post in which he disavowed his past views, but in terms that raised significant doubts about his sincerity. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort,” he declared in the post, “is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.”

Nevertheless, Chris Best, who is also Substack’s CEO, hailed Hanania’s non-apology as “an honest post on a difficult subject.” Within weeks, Substack was promoting Hanania yet again, trumpeting in one of its newsletters that his new book, The Origins of Woke—in which he calls for gutting the Civil Rights Act—“is in hot demand from reviewers,” and providing a link to preorder it. (One of those reviewers, writing for The Atlantic, observed: “Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one.”)

In McKenzie’s recent post about “leaning into politics,” the Substack co-founder enthusiastically and prominently recommended a lesser-known Substacker, Darryl Cooper, as among the “up-and-comers” in political writing. Cooper’s podcast featured a complimentary interview with the white-nationalist magazine editor Greg Johnson—who, incidentally, published some of Hanania’s pseudonymous, more explicitly racist writings. Cooper has also used his personal Twitter account to claim that “FDR chose the wrong side in WW2.” (That tweet and the interview with Johnson were subsequently deleted.)

What should Substack do with the writers who are using it to spread Nazi ideas? Experts on extremist communication, such Whitney Phillips, the University of Oregon journalism professor, caution that simply banning hate groups from a platform—even if sometimes necessary from a business standpoint—can end up redounding to the extremists’ benefit by making them seem like victims of an overweening censorship regime. “It feeds into this narrative of liberal censorship of conservatives,” Phillips told me, “even if the views in question are really extreme.”

Yet, as she also noted, Substack isn’t just making decisions about whether to take posts down; it also has the choice of which writers to promote. “There’s a big difference between a platform hosting content and then maybe not co-signing what they’re saying, but giving them a microphone in an institutionally approved way: ‘I am inviting you onto my podcast and I’m going to let you speak.’”

The problem, Phillips said, is not that stumbling onto Nazi newsletters will magically turn anyone who reads them into a National Socialist. “The thing that is particularly concerning is, how is it going to take an already intense thinker about Nazi ideas and give them more of a community, more of a sense of belonging, more of a reinforcement of those beliefs, rather than creating the beliefs out of nowhere?”

The question is what kind of community Substack is actually cultivating. How long will writers such as Bari Weiss, Patti Smith, and George Saunders—and, for that matter, me—be willing to stake our reputations on, and share a cut of our revenue with, a company that can’t decide if Nazi blogs count as hate speech?

When Victoria Gray was still a baby, she started howling so inconsolably during a bath that she was rushed to the emergency room. The diagnosis was sickle-cell disease, a genetic condition that causes bouts of excruciating pain—“worse than a broken leg, worse than childbirth,” one doctor told me. Like lightning crackling in her body is how Gray, now 38, has described the pain. For most of her life, she lived in fear that it could strike at any moment, forcing her to drop everything to rush, once again, to the hospital.

After a particularly long and debilitating hospitalization in college, Gray was so weak that she had to relearn how to stand, how to use a spoon. She dropped out of school. She gave up on her dream of becoming a nurse.

Four years ago, she joined a groundbreaking clinical trial that would change her life. She became the first sickle-cell patient to be treated with the gene-editing technology CRISPR—and one of the first humans to be treated with CRISPR, period. CRISPR at that point had been hugely hyped, but had largely been used only to tinker with cells in a lab. When Gray got her experimental infusion, scientists did not know whether it would cure her disease or go terribly awry inside her. The therapy worked—better than anyone dared to hope. With her gene-edited cells, Gray now lives virtually symptom-free. Twenty-nine of 30 eligible patients in the trial went from multiple pain crises every year to zero in 12 months following treatment.

The results are so astounding that this therapy, from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, became the first CRISPR medicine ever approved, with U.K. regulators giving the green light earlier this month; the FDA appears prepared to follow suit in the next two weeks. No one yet knows the long-term effects of the therapy, but today Gray is healthy enough to work full-time and take care of her four children. “Now I’ll be there to help my daughters pick out their wedding dresses. And we’ll be able to take family vacations,” she told NPR a year after her treatment. “And they’ll have their mom every step of the way.”

The approval is a landmark for CRISPR gene editing, which was just an idea in an academic paper a little more than a decade ago—albeit one already expected to cure incurable diseases and change the world. But how, specifically? Not long after publishing her seminal research, Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier for their pioneering CRISPR work, met with a doctor on a trip to Boston. CRISPR could cure sickle-cell disease, he told her. On his computer, he scrolled through DNA sequences of cells from a sickle-cell patient that his lab had already edited with CRISPR. “That, for me, personally, was one of those watershed moments,” Doudna told me. “Okay, this is going to happen.” And now, it has happened. Gray and patients like her are living proof of gene-editing power. Sickle-cell disease is the first disease—and unlikely the last—to be transformed by CRISPR.

All of sickle-cell disease’s debilitating and ultimately deadly effects originate from a single genetic typo. A small misspelling in Gray’s DNA—an A that erroneously became a T—caused the oxygen-binding hemoglobin protein in her blood to clump together. This in turn made her red blood cells rigid, sticky, and characteristically sickle shaped, prone to obstructing blood vessels. Where oxygen cannot reach, tissue begins to die. Imagine “if you put a tourniquet on and walked away, or if you were having a heart attack all the time,” says Lewis Hsu, a pediatric hematologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. These obstructions are immensely painful, and repeated bouts cause cumulative damage to the body, which is why people with sickle cell die some 20 years younger on average.

Not everyone with the sickle-cell mutation gets quite so sick. As far back as the 1940s, a doctor noticed that the blood of newborns with sickle-cell disease did not, surprisingly, sickle very much. Babies in the womb actually make a fetal version of the hemoglobin protein, whose higher affinity for oxygen pulls the molecule out of their mother’s blood. At birth, a gene that encodes fetal hemoglobin begins to turn off. But adults do sometimes still make varying amounts of fetal hemoglobin, and the more they make, scientists observed, the milder their sickle-cell disease, as though fetal hemoglobin had stepped in to replace the faulty adult version. Geneticists eventually figured out the exact series of switches our cells use to turn fetal hemoglobin on and off. But there, they remained stuck: They had no way to flip the switch themselves.

Then came CRISPR. The basic technology is a pair of genetic scissors that makes fairly precise cuts to DNA. CRISPR is not currently capable of fixing the A-to-T typo responsible for sickle cell, but it can be programmed to disable the switch suppressing fetal hemoglobin, turning it back on. Snip snip snip in billions of blood cells, and the result is blood that behaves like typical blood.

Sickle cell was a “very obvious” target for CRISPR from the start, says Haydar Frangoul, a hematologist at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, who treated Gray in the trial. Scientists already knew the genetic edits necessary to reverse the disease. Sickle cell also has the advantage of affecting blood cells, which can be selectively removed from the body and gene-edited in the controlled environment of a lab. Patients, meanwhile, receive chemotherapy to kill the blood-producing cells in their bone marrow before the CRISPR-edited ones are infused back into their body, where they slowly take root and replicate over many months.

It is a long, grueling process, akin to a bone-marrow transplant with one’s own edited cells. A bone-marrow transplant from a donor is the one way doctors can currently cure sickle-cell disease, but it comes with the challenge of finding a matched donor and the risks of an immune complication called graft-versus-host disease. Using CRISPR to edit a patient’s own cells eliminates both obstacles. (A second gene-based therapy, using a more traditional engineered-virus technique to insert a modified adult hemoglobin gene into DNA semi-randomly, is also expected to receive FDA approval  for sickle-cell disease soon. It seems to be equally effective at preventing pain crises so far, but development of the CRISPR therapy took much less time.)

In another way, though, sickle-cell disease is an unexpected front-runner in the race to commercialize CRISPR. Despite being one of the most common genetic diseases in the world, it has long been overlooked because of whom it affects: Globally, the overwhelming majority of sickle-cell patients live in sub-Saharan Africa. In the U.S., about 90 percent are of African descent, a group that faces discrimination in health care. When Gray, who is Black, needed powerful painkillers, she would be dismissed as an addict seeking drugs rather than a patient in crisis—a common story among sickle-cell patients.

For decades, treatment for the disease lagged too. Sickle-cell disease has been known to Western medicine since 1910, but the first drug did not become available until 1998, points out Vence Bonham, a researcher at the National Human Genome Research Institute who studies health disparities. In 2017, Bonham began convening focus groups to ask sickle-cell patients about CRISPR. Many were hopeful, but some had misgivings because of the history of experimentation on Black people in the U.S. Gray, for her part, has said she never would have agreed to the experimental protocol had she been offered it at one of the hospitals that had treated her poorly. Several researchers told me they hoped the sickle-cell therapy would make a different kind of history: A community that has been marginalized in medicine is the first in line to benefit from CRISPR.

Doctors aren’t willing to call it an outright “cure” yet. The long-term durability and safety of gene editing are still unknown, and although the therapy virtually eliminated pain crises, Hsu says that organ damage can accumulate even without acute pain. Does gene editing prevent all that organ damage too? Vertex, the company that makes the therapy, plans to monitor patients for 15 years.

Still, the short-term impact on patients’ lives is profound. “We wouldn’t have dreamed about this even five, 10 years ago,” says Martin Steinberg, a hematologist at Boston University who also sits on the steering committee for Vertex. He thought it might ameliorate the pain crises, but to eliminate them almost entirely? It looks pretty damn close to a cure.

In the future, however, Steinberg suspects that this currently cutting-edge therapy will seem like only a “crude attempt.” The long, painful process necessary to kill unedited blood cells makes it inaccessible for patients who cannot take months out of their life to move near the limited number of transplant centers in the U.S.—and inaccessible to patients living with sickle-cell disease in developing countries. The field is already looking at techniques that can edit cells right inside the body, a milestone recently achieved in the liver during a CRISPR trial to lower cholesterol. Scientists are also developing versions of CRISPR that are more sophisticated than a pair of genetic scissors—for example, ones that can paste sequences of DNA or edit a single letter at a time. Doctors could one day correct the underlying mutation that causes sickle-cell disease directly.

Such breakthroughs would open CRISPR up to treating diseases that are out of reach today, either because we can’t get CRISPR into the necessary cells or because the edit is too complex. “I get emails now daily from families all over the world asking, ‘My son or my loved one has this disease. Can CRISPR fix it?’” says Frangoul, who has become known as the first doctor to infuse a sickle-cell patient in a CRISPR trial. The answer, usually, is not yet. But clinical trials are already under way to test CRISPR in treating cancer, diabetes, HIV, urinary tract infections, hereditary angioedema, and more. We have opened the book on CRISPR gene editing, Frangoul told me, but this is not the final chapter. We may still be writing the very first.

After an acrimonious split with the company in 2014, the 45-year-old returns at an event in Chicago.

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition.

[David Leonhardt: The hard truth about immigration]

Robert F. Kennedy emerges as an unlikely hero in this telling. Although Kennedy was a committed supporter of civil rights, he recognized that Democrats were alienating their working-class base. As a primary candidate in 1968, he emphasized the need to restore “law and order” and took shots at the New Left, opposing draft exemptions for college students. As a result of these and other centrist stances, Kennedy was criticized by the liberal press—even as he won key primary victories on the strength of his support from both white and Black working-class voters.

But Kennedy was assassinated in June that year, and the political path he represented died with him. That November, Nixon, a Republican, narrowly won the White House. In the process, he reached the same conclusion that Kennedy had: The Democrats had lost touch with the working class, leaving millions of voters up for grabs. In the 1972 election, Nixon portrayed his opponent, George McGovern, as the candidate of the “three A’s”—acid, abortion, and amnesty (the latter referring to draft dodgers). He went after Democrats for being soft on crime and unpatriotic. On Election Day, he won the largest landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. For Leonhardt, that was the moment when the New Deal coalition shattered. From then on, as the Democratic Party continued to reflect the views of college graduates and professionals, it would lose more and more working-class voters.

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radically new economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes. At the same time, Reagan’s message tapped into genuine shortcomings with the economic status quo. The Johnson administration’s heavy spending had helped ignite inflation, and Nixon’s attempt at price controls had failed to quell it. The generous contracts won by auto unions made it hard for American manufacturers to compete with nonunionized Japanese ones. After a decade of pain, most Americans now favored cutting taxes. The public was ready for something different.

[Eric Posner: Milton Friedman was wrong]

They got it. The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

Today, we seem to be living through another inflection point in American politics—one that in some ways resembles the ’60s and ’70s. Then and now, previously durable coalitions collapsed, new issues surged to the fore, and policies once considered radical became mainstream. Political leaders in both parties no longer feel the same need to bow at the altar of free markets and small government. But, also like the ’70s, the current moment is defined by a sense of unresolved contestation. Although many old ideas have lost their hold, they have yet to be replaced by a new economic consensus. The old order is crumbling, but a new one has yet to be born.

The Biden administration and its allies are trying to change that. Since taking office, President Joe Biden has pursued an ambitious policy agenda designed to transform the U.S. economy and taken overt shots at Reagan’s legacy. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden quipped in 2020. Yet an economic paradigm is only as strong as the political coalition that backs it. Unlike Nixon, Biden has not figured out how to cleave apart his opponents’ coalition. And unlike Reagan, he hasn’t hit upon the kind of grand political narrative needed to forge a new one. Current polling suggests that he may struggle to win reelection.

[Franklin Foer: The new Washington consensus]

Meanwhile, the Republican Party struggles to muster any coherent economic agenda. A handful of Republican senators, including J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, have embraced economic populism to some degree, but they remain a minority within their party.

The path out of our chaotic present to a new political-economic consensus is hard to imagine. But that has always been true of moments of transition. In the early ’70s, no one could have predicted that a combination of social upheaval, economic crisis, and political talent was about to usher in a brand-new economic era. Perhaps the same is true today. The Reagan revolution is never coming back. Neither is the New Deal order that came before it. Whatever comes next will be something new.  

I’ve heard of three Thanksgiving plans that got canceled because of disagreements over the Israel-Gaza War. In one case, over the past few weeks, a guy watched as his brother’s wife posted pictures of cease-fire rallies on Facebook. Finally he texted her: “So you love Hamas now?” She was horrified. After doing Thanksgiving together for two decades, they will not be continuing the tradition this year.

I could give you more examples of unproductive fights that ended plans, friendships, relationships, but we’ve all been there. In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, we focus less on the substance of any of those disagreements. Instead, we talk about how to disagree, on things big (a war) or small (how to load the dishwasher). Our guest is Amanda Ripley, the author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, and her suggestions work equally well in the personal or political arena.

We also talk with Utah Governor Spencer Cox about his Disagree Better initiative. In 2020 Cox ran an unusual political ad in which he appeared alongside his opponent, noting that they have different political views but agreeing they would both “fully support the results of the upcoming presidential election regardless of the outcome.” Cox, a former trial lawyer who says he is inclined “towards conflict when presented with opposing views”, is a rare politician trying to work with opponents in a different way.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. Today is Thanksgiving, a time for families to get together and, often, to disagree, in an era when a lot of us have totally lost the art of disagreeing well.

I could explain or give you so many examples, but I think you probably know what I mean. One of our presidential candidates just called his opponents “vermin.”

So today we’re going to have a conversation about learning to disagree better. And I know that there are some people out there who hear that and think I mean we need to be quiet or to stop protesting or just to be more polite. But it’s not that. It’s about how to talk to people you disagree with—not in a polite, avoidant way, but in a way that’s more effective, that lets everyone get something done.

Now, we’re going to hear from two people. One is a prominent politician—maybe one of the few who is actively trying to change how political opponents talk to each other.

From him I want to know from him how productive disagreement actually works, in the wild, given the high level of vitriol out there.

But before we get to him, we’re going to hear from Amanda Ripley. She’s a journalist who wrote a book called High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.

A couple of months ago, Amanda and I did a live event together where she explained the ideas in her book, ideas that once I absorbed them, they changed how I digest the news and also how I talk to almost everyone in my life.

Here’s our conversation.

Hanna Rosin: Let’s start by saying why, why are we here? Why write a book or talk about high conflict right now at this moment?

Amanda Ripley: Well, I went into this, I spent about five years following people who were stuck in really toxic, awful conflicts—political, you know, gang conflict, civil war, all different kinds of conflicts.

And I was really obsessed with, like, how do you get out? How do you get out of conflict? And then I realized that is the wrong question, because conflict is our greatest asset. Conflict is how we get stronger, how we push each other, how we get pushed.

So we need conflict, with an asterisk, which is the right kind of conflict. The kind really matters, it turns out. It is the fastest shortcut to transformation, right? For a company, for a family, for a country. So that, I think, is why we’re here: How do we use conflict for good?

Rosin: Amanda had suggested we start small and personal. She wanted us both to talk about a fight we’d had with our partners so she could dissect it. I went first.

So here we go. Example 1: The Toxic Croissant.

Rosin: So I was talking to my partner on the phone yesterday, and she says the innocuous sentence: “Yeah, I think we ate pretty healthy this weekend.”

Now, we don’t really talk about food, whatever. It’s not, it’s not a big deal. But the first words that flashed up were: “No, we didn’t.”

And then I could hear the tension on the phone. This is so dumb and meaningless. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t care how we ate, but I did say it. And then felt my brain kind of go into a mode and I actually had the thought—I can’t believe I had this thought. Amanda, I can already—I’m not even going to look at what your face is doing right now. But I had the thought, like, Prove it. Like, Do the food log. I’m right.

Ripley: So you were like, Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go to the mat.

Rosin: Let’s go to the mat. Immediately. What, do you think a croissant is healthy? Like, what is wrong with me? I don’t care what we ate. I genuinely don’t care at all about any of it. But that’s the place that I went.

Ripley: And then how did she respond?

[Laughter]

Rosin: She got angry.

Ripley: So, am I right to say that you felt, like, a sudden, overwhelming urge to argue this?

Rosin: Yes. Yes.

Ripley: Is that right?

Rosin: And to prove to her that I was right.

Ripley: To, to win?

Rosin: To win. A hundred percent.

Ripley: I’m assuming it didn’t end in a super—you didn’t feel better off for having had this conversation.

Rosin: No. No.

Ripley: Okay.

Rosin: No, it ended just everybody feeling worse.

Rosin: And yeah, so that’s the petty mystery we started with. Why did I so instinctively feel the need to be right about something I actually didn’t care about, and which another version of me knew was going to ruin a perfectly pleasant interaction? What was I getting from that?

Example 2: The Wolves.

Now it was Amanda’s turn.

Ripley: So, this is so cliché, but every night I have to reload the top rack of the dishwasher because my son and husband are just throwing stuff in, almost like a wolf or something. Like an animal.

And I can argue the facts of that forever. I could be like, The water cannot reach the stuff. The surfaces are all covered with Tupperware. And will happily engage in that with a ferocity.

Rosin: Everyone, hold in your mind that feeling, like, that thing that happens immediately when you’re like, You’re wrong. I’m right. Like, it’s just like you’re possessed.

Rosin: This is an important insight. High conflict is a very specific state of mind, different from annoyed or angry. It’s more like being possessed by some combination of fury and logic. And it’s not pleasant, exactly, but it is a kind of high.

Ripley: Has anyone ever had that feeling? Raise your hand. (Crowd laughs.) Okay, so you were not alone.

Rosin: Yes.

Ripley: Anyone here have no idea what we’re talking about? Okay. All right. So we’re not alone.

Rosin: Conflict is not just croissants and dishwashers, though. Often the stakes are way higher, like in politics, which is built on disagreement. How do you know when conflict is productive?

Ripley: When I said the kind of conflict you’re in really matters, there is a kind of conflict that I like to call “good conflict,” like “good trouble,” like John Lewis called it. Good conflict is—and we can see it in the research, in the data—with good conflict, questions get asked, there’s anger, there’s frustration, there’s sadness, and there’s flashes of curiosity and humor, even, and understanding and then back to anger and frustration. It’s like a galaxy of emotions. And there is movement. [With] high conflict, you’re stuck. You feel it, right? You feel it in your chest or your stomach.

Rosin: Yes. That’s like going through sludge.

Ripley: Yeah. And there’s nowhere to go.

Rosin: Yeah.

Ripley: Like, it just feels like a trap.

I have shifted my goal in conflict, and I’ll throw this at you, and you see what you all think. I’m not interested in resolving it. I’m also not interested in avoiding it, although I would like to sometimes. My goal, as a journalist and as a human, is if I can do one of three things: Can I, myself, understand the other person, the problem, or myself a little better through this encounter?

Rosin: Understand, even if you disagree.

Ripley: Totally. Continue to disagree. That’s great.

Rosin: Okay, let’s pause. What Amanda is suggesting is that you should engage in a conflict with no intention of resolving it. In fact, if you have that intention, you will probably make the conflict worse.

That’s hard.

And what she is proposing seems straightforward, except it’s tricky because understanding might mean, in some cases, giving a lot of airtime to a person who quotes false statistics or spreads conspiracy theories, and that’s especially tricky if this person has power.

Rosin: Why does the person who you think is harmful deserve your understanding? What is the point of that exercise? Why is that putting good in the world, for you to take the trouble to understand someone who you feel is doing harm?

Ripley: Because we have kids together.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ripley: It’s a lot like divorce. Like, you can get divorced, but you’ve got kids together. You still have to work together, as we keep seeing. You cannot get jack done in this country.

Rosin: The kids being genuinely a next generation of America.

Ripley: It’s always the people who suffer the most in high conflict, whether it’s in Colombia or Northern Ireland or South Africa or Chicago, it’s always kids.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ripley: Or a divorce.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: A high-conflict divorce. So high conflict, the phrase, actually comes from family law. A quarter of American divorces can be termed high conflict because they’re stuck in perpetual cycles of blame and hostility.

And it’s conflict for conflict’s sake, and that’s what high conflict is. It takes on a life of its own. And any intuitive thing you do in high conflict to get out, arguing the facts, makes it worse. So your only option, and this is really hard, is to do counterintuitive things.

Half of what people want in conflict is to be heard.

There’s a listening technique that I’m talking about called looping. That’s like, I’m going to prove to you that I heard you, because I’m going to distill it into my own language.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: And I’m going to play it back.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: And I’m going to then—this is the thing that people, the piece that usually we forget—I’m going to ask if I got it right.

Rosin: Ooh. Can you give me an example of when you’ve employed them? We’re coming back to the beginning in a personal space. You want to try the dishwasher one?

Ripley: Sure, sure, let’s do that. Okay, great. So, every conflict has the thing it seems to be about that we argue about endlessly, and then what it’s really about. That’s the most interesting part. That’s where I think journalists can do their best work. If we can get to that, which is, like, the understory of the conflict.

Rosin: The understory?

Ripley: The understory. Like, what is it really about? Do you ever listen to Esther Perel? Does anyone know Esther Perel’s podcast?

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah.

Ripley: She’s basically reduced the understory to six possible options, there’s just a handful of them in every conflict she’s seen: Care and concern. Respect and recognition. Power and control.

Rosin: Care and concern.

Ripley: Care and concern.

Rosin: Respect and recognition. Power and control.

Ripley: Yeah. So, if you think back—let’s use the dishwasher example. For me, it is clearly about respect and recognition. Obviously.

Rosin: You mean because you’ve told those wolves a thousand times?

Ripley: Yeah, it’s like, it feels like it’s not important because it’s somehow women’s work.

Rosin: I see.

Ripley: Like, this is just like, I’ll just throw this bowl in there, because I’m a man. Do you know what I mean? (Crowd laughs.)

I’m 100 percent sure they would disagree. Right? Like, they’re just not putting that much thought into it. But for me it feels like, Now I’m spending my time correcting all of your mistakes.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: Because my time is worth half of your time, apparently.

Rosin: Wow. That’s the understory.

Ripley: Okay. So, now, wouldn’t it be better if I could say to them, Look, this may sound irrational to you, and maybe it is irrational, but when I see, like, 400 dishes piled up in the top rack of the dishwasher, it feels like you don’t actually respect the need to take care of our stuff, and that it’s somehow on me to do that.

Is that the story? That’s the story I’m telling myself. Is that the story? Is that right? For sure they’re going to be like, What?! (Crowd laughs.) Right? But if they could then show me they hurt me, they’re like, Wow! So when you see this dishwasher we’re looking at, you see, like, disrespect. Is that right? If they could loop me.

Rosin: And they don’t have to agree that it’s disrespectful?

Ripley: No!

Rosin: Or that they’re the patriarchy or anything like that? (Crowd laughs.) Or that they’re dirty animal wolves destroying things? They just have to hear you and do it.

Ripley: Prove it though. Prove you heard me by distilling it into your own language and playing it back to me and checking if you got it right, which my husband now does better than I do, by the way, because he’s heard enough of this.

Rosin: And it really doesn’t matter that they don’t have to adopt your view of the thing?

Ripley: No!

Rosin: That’s actually, like, a small and radical idea.

Ripley: It’s radical.

Rosin: They don’t have to see it the way you see it or adopt that same prism. They just have to know that you have that prism, and respect that prism, and everything quiets down.

Ripley: Right. Like, literally saying that takes all of the energy out of my body. It’s like, Yes, exactly.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: Right? So if you loop someone and they say, Exactly, then you know you got it.

What percentage of the time do you think people feel heard in their day-to-day lives, on average?

[Crowd murmurs]

Five percent? That’s great. Yeah, 5 percent, okay. So a lot of the conflict that we’re seeing right now that is unhelpful comes from that. People just don’t feel heard. And the research on listening shows that when people don’t feel heard, what does it lead you to do?

Shut down or talk louder. (Crowd noise.) Yes, yes. And so we see in the research that when people don’t feel heard, they tend to say more and more extreme things. They wash away all the complexity and internal doubt. And they say more and more violent, extreme things. So think about what that means for journalism.

Rosin: Welcome to America. Exactly.

Ripley: But if they do feel heard, they admit to more internal uncertainty, they admit to being torn about certain things, they reveal vulnerability, and they will listen to you.

Rosin: Let’s show people examples of good conflict, because Amanda has seen a lot of it, and I want to leave you all with, you know, positive vibes.

Ripley: Yeah. So this is just a small example of trying to step out of the dance. Remember I was saying you gotta do something counterintuitive? So this is a little ad in the governor’s race in Utah—Spencer Cox, a Republican, and his democratic opponent—and this ad went viral, to much of their surprise.

So let’s watch this.

[Political ad]

Spencer Cox: I’m Spencer Cox, your Republican candidate for Utah governor.

Chris Peterson: And I’m Chris Peterson, your Democratic candidate for governor.

Cox: We are currently in the final days of campaigning against each other.

Peterson: But our common values transcend our political differences, and the strength of our nation rests on our ability to see that.

Cox: We are both equally dedicated to the American values of democracy, liberty, and justice for all people.

Peterson: We just have different opinions on how to achieve those ideals.

Cox: But today, we are setting aside those differences to deliver a message that is critical for the health of our nation.

Peterson: That whether you vote by mail or in person, we will fully support the results of the upcoming presidential election regardless of the outcome.

Cox: Although we sit on different sides of the aisle, we are both committed to American civility and a peaceful transition of power.

Peterson: And we hope Utah will be an example to the nation.

Cox: Because that is what our country is built on.

Peterson: Please stand with us on behalf of our great state and nation.

Cox: My name’s Spencer Cox.

Peterson: And I’m Chris Peterson.

Both: And we approve this message.

Rosin: What does it say about either me or America that I’m like, Where’s this SNL skit going?

[Laughter]

Rosin: After the break, we’ll hear from Spencer Cox himself. The now-governor of Utah heads something called the Disagree Better initiative, and, to him, this topic is nothing to laugh at.

Cox: I absolutely believe that that’s where we’re headed, to complete collapse of our democratic institutions, our republic. And if we can’t have productive conversations, we won’t be able to save this incredible gift that we’ve been given over 240 years ago.

[Music]

Rosin: As chair of the National Governors Association, Spencer Cox tours the country evangelizing what he calls “Disagree Better.” Now, the term can sound cute, or vague, so I asked him what he meant by it, because politicians appeal for civility all the time. And his answer echoed a lot of what Amanda and I talked about.

Cox: It absolutely is not just another civility initiative. It’s not just being nice to each other. It’s actually about healthy conflict. In fact, I think having zero conflict may be as bad and sometimes worse than having bad conflict. I just think it’s very unhealthy for us as a society. Our form of government, our Constitution, was founded on profound disagreement. We have to be able, in a pluralistic society, to disagree.

Rosin: Cox has field-tested Disagree Better in Utah, which is arguably a low-risk place for him to start. Utah is a solidly red state, and when he ran that political ad in 2020, he was already ahead in the polls. Of red states, Utah also generally seems more open to this kind of message. Donald Trump is of course popular there, but Utah is also the place that sent Trump critic Mitt Romney to the Senate.

Rosin: Are you trying to change people’s minds? Like, is that part of it, or not really? It’s just sort of defending your own position, because I feel like people, you know, debate about that. If you go into a conversation thinking you’re going to change someone’s mind, that’s already a bad start.

Cox: It is a bad start, but here’s the key: It’s a bad start because if you go into a conversation trying to change someone’s mind, you’ll never change their mind.

Rosin: You mean, like, you can’t start that way because it’s arrogant or righteous or something?

Cox: Yes, it immediately puts people in a defensive position, right? And again, it’s not just about changing people’s minds. To me it’s about solving problems. And if I’m interested in what you have to say, legitimately interested, like really trying to understand where you’re coming from, the odds of you being interested in where I’m coming from go up significantly.

Rosin: Before he was a politician, Cox was a trial lawyer, and that’s a profession that argues in order to win, not to understand the other person. And now as a public figure, Cox does not always control his tongue, which I asked him about.

Cox: I’m practicing this. I believe in it. I had already launched my initiative, or I was about to launch my initiative, and I’m at a press conference and I get asked about immigration. And I’ve been asked, you know, 75 times about immigration.

And so, I was frustrated with something Congress had done, and I said, “You know what?” I just kind of lost it for a second. I said, “You know what? Congress is, they’re all imbeciles, and they should all lose their jobs.”

Rosin: I saw that. I saw that. I was going to ask you. So is that, like, We’re all human?

Cox: Well, very much human, and I think it is human nature. There’s no question that we’re all craven political beasts. That moment, I knew as soon as I was done. And sure enough, it led every headline from my press conference. Every newspaper, every media organization covered it. Within 20 minutes, it was out there.

I started getting texts from people all over, people I hadn’t heard from in years, like, Yes, you’re right. So proud of you. Thanks for speaking up. Thanks for saying that. You’re right. They’re all imbeciles. And I apologized an hour later because it was against everything I believe in. But that’s the incentive structure: The one thing I got the most credit for was the thing I shouldn’t have been doing.

Rosin: Is the problem your language? Is it because you call them imbeciles? You essentially make them defensive and then the conversation shuts down.

Cox: Yes. So this is my point. Did any member of Congress read that and think, You know what? He’s right. I’m an imbecile. I should resign. And, and, you know, did any of them think, You know, let’s go solve immigration because that governor thinks we’re imbeciles? Like, no, it doesn’t, it didn’t help anything.

Rosin: It’s not going to work.

Cox: It didn’t, it didn’t work. And again, not only that, but I’m dehumanizing people. I’m othering them, right?

I’m very frustrated. I could have said that, right? I think this is a mistake. I think what they’re doing is wrong, and here’s why. Yes, we should point out the things we disagree with, the things that are wrong—things they’re doing wrong. But I don’t need to call them imbeciles to do it.

My nature, and I think the natural human being in most of us, is towards conflict when presented with opposing views.

Rosin: Totally.

Cox: We fight back. That’s what we do. We’re fighters.

So that’s, that’s been my journey. It’s something I still have to work on every day. My staff reminds me when I head into what’s going to be a tense situation to go 65 miles an hour, because I can go from zero to a hundred very quickly. So I have to constantly keep it at 60, keep it at 65, you know—keep it, keep it toned down.

Rosin: Do you think that Donald Trump embodies the principles of Disagree Better?

Cox: Of course not. And I think Donald Trump would be the first to tell you that he doesn’t embody the principles of Disagree Better.

Rosin: You’re a Republican governor. Donald Trump is the nominee. How do you handle that scenario? It’s a genuinely difficult scenario.

Cox: It’s impossible. It’s an impossible scenario. And every governor, every Republican governor, every Republican member of Congress, we’re all trying to navigate this, and people are choosing different ways to do that. Some just pretend it doesn’t exist. Some people try to nuance it. Some people, you know, push against it.

Has it gone great for most of those people?

Rosin: No. So what’s your choice? Like, you’re the face of Disagree Better, and this is your nominee. So what do you personally do? Like, somebody’s going to ask you the question, Are you endorsing? You know, Are you endorsing Donald Trump?

Cox: Yeah, I get asked that. Sure. Sure. You get asked it all the time.

Rosin: You get asked it all the time. So what’s the answer?

Cox: Yeah, and right now I’m focused on hoping someone else gets out there. It’s this crazy time where—

Rosin: So you don’t say yes. You just say, like, maybe the wishful thinking, like, magical thinking.

Cox: Yeah. Yeah. We’re all doing the magical thinking thing right now. And I’m admitting that. What I can do is try to offer a different approach, a different vision and hope. I’m not just trying to convince other governors and other candidates that this is the right thing to do for our country, although it is the right thing to do for our country.

And I think we are further down that road of complete failure than most people understand.

Rosin: Complete failure of what?

Cox: Of our democratic republic. If you look at other failed democracies, other failed states, we’re checking all of the boxes.

I mean, we really are in a very, very dark place.

And our tolerance for that type of rhetoric and for actual political violence has gone up significantly, which is scary. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing.

Rosin: I just had one last question for Cox. It’s a question Amanda always advises to ask, which is: Does the person you’re talking to have any regrets or doubts about their position or about something they’ve done? Because doubts are a place where opponents can find common ground.

And Cox did share one big doubt. It was about when he signed a controversial congressional map back in 2021. This new map split the biggest Democratic-leaning county in the state and divided it among the state’s four districts, which faced immediate accusations of gerrymandering.

Rosin: If you look back on your last few months, all these divisive issues, is there one that you wish you’d handled differently or that you are like, Did I do the right thing on that one?

Cox: Yeah. I think if I look back, the one that I worry about is the gerrymandering piece, for sure. As I look back, because I think that’s one issue that probably did drain some trust out of the system, because that’s changing boundaries, right, in a way that feels like now your voice is being neutered even more.

And I also push back and say to most of my Democrat friends, What you really want us is to gerrymander for you. You want a Democratic district in a state that is overwhelmingly Republican. It’s just not going to happen. The numbers are just not in your favor. So go out and change the numbers and then you have something to argue about.

But I want to give them credit in saying, like, I understand. That to me is a valid argument, that gerrymandering does impact trust in the system, that it does make it harder for someone’s voice to be heard, for someone to get someone that they believe in elected.

And so I think there is—

Rosin: And you feel like you didn’t get that across?

Cox: I feel like I didn’t get that across, and I understand why people are angry about that. And that’s one where I have had some second thoughts over the course of the past couple of years.

Rosin: Okay. I see your people waiting for you.

Rosin: The governor’s people were waiting outside the studio to take him to his next thing.

And before I say my goodbye to you—and Happy Thanksgiving, while I’m at it—I wanted to return for a moment to my conversation with Amanda Ripley.

We wrapped up by circling back to my argument about the croissant and figuring out the real reason why I reacted the way I did.

Ripley: Now, going back with this food argument about whether you ate healthy, which of the understories is it? Care and concern. Power and control. Respect and recognition.

Rosin: I think it’s respect and recognition.

Ripley: Okay, same one.

Rosin: Because—actually, I think it’s just my mother.

[Laughter]

Rosin:

We’re not gonna go there. I think it’s a sense, like, I get really freaked out when people—like, in truthiness. Like, when people just adopt strong stories that I feel are not related to what happened on this earth, I get real panicky.

Ripley: So there’s something dangerous about it?

Rosin: There’s something dangerous about people. Like, it doesn’t matter what the subject is. If somebody had said we watched this thing on TV, and we didn’t and I couldn’t get through to them, I would get really panicky and angry. It’s not about the food.

Ripley: So it’s maybe control as well. Like, if you could, yeah, if you can kind of keep tabs on what actually happened—

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ripley: Then things are less chaotic? Is that right?

Rosin: Yes. Like, and I’m not forever trapped under, like, this false idea, and I have to agree with it when I know it’s not true. That makes me feel crazy, you know?

Ripley: Yeah, okay.

Rosin: Yeah.

Ripley: So do you think you could tell your partner that tonight on the phone?

Rosin: Just that?

Ripley: Yeah.

Rosin: Yes, I can. Yeah, I will.

I will. Yes.

Yes. Absolutely.

[Applause]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend, with editing from Claudine Ebeid. It was fact-checked by Isabel Cristo and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is our executive producer, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Thank you to the See Change Sessions for giving us the audio of my talk with Amanda.

Thank you all for listening, and happy Thanksgiving. If you’re at the table and you’re overcome with that feeling that you’re about to fight, do it right. Good luck to you. And see you next Thursday.

On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The teachers, police officials, social workers, hiring-department personnel, and others who gathered that day in April had simply run out of ideas about what to do about them.

“Education does not have importance to these people as it does to us,” observed one schoolteacher. “They work for a day or two, and then you see them no more,” grumbled an employer. “Some don’t want modern facilities—if they have a bathtub, they don’t use it,” another meeting attendee claimed. And the charges they leveled only descended from there: “They let their children run wild.” They left their trash in the street and refused to go to the doctor. They misspent what little money they had. They fought and drank with abandon. Some were even rumored to disregard “laws here, such as it being a felony to have sexual relations with a member of their own family or with a girl who consents.”

Marshall Bragdon, the long-serving executive director of an advisory commission to municipal government known as the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, had conceived of this daylong “Workshop on the Southern Mountaineer in Cincinnati,” as the gathering was billed. Though he did not like what he heard, he was hardly surprised. A key objective of the workshop, Bragdon would explain, was to “de-stereotype the city man’s and urban agency’s views of and attitudes toward hill folks,” so that they might be better able to assist this growing population of poor rural newcomers to the city. As the litany of complaints poured forth during the workshop’s opening bull session, it was clear that there was much de-stereotyping to do.

[Michael Powell: A Democratic senator defends ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’]

The 1954 Cincinnati workshop is a little-known episode in 20th-century American history, yet it would prove to be extraordinarily consequential. In its aftermath, municipal coalitions in a host of midwestern cities that were likewise on the receiving end of an influx of white migrants from the Appalachian South were inspired to take similar action. The workshop introduced new and influential ways of thinking about poverty in the postwar city, which would circulate broadly within liberal policy-making circles and, before long, would even come to shape the development of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

This essay was adapted from Max Fraser’s new book.

At the same time, the Cincinnati workshop also revealed a yawning cultural divide separating the middle-class professionals in attendance from the white working-class objects of their reform-minded concern, one that was replicated throughout the region and in Washington, and that would only grow deeper and wider over the decades to come. Although none of the workshop participants was overheard talking about a “basket of deplorables,” the resonance between their descriptions of their new hillbilly neighbors and that more recent political malapropism—which might have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election—is unmistakable. Then, as now, liberalism found itself confronting a white working-class problem at least partially of its own creation. The sequence of events set in motion by the 1954 workshop offers important insights into our current political impasse—and into the lessons the modern Democratic Party has failed to learn for more than half a century.

In the two decades that followed World War II, when the great 20th-century migrations out of the rural South were at their zenith, the “hillbilly ghetto” appeared as a suddenly ubiquitous and more and more problematic feature on the landscape of the urban Midwest. In neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill in Cincinnati, Uptown in Chicago, Stringtown in Indianapolis, Briggs and the Cass Corridor in Detroit—and in similar neighborhoods in smaller cities and towns across the region—growing clusters of poor southern white newcomers alarmed longer-term residents and amplified concerns about an onrushing crisis of the American inner city.

Residents of these hillbilly ghettos, as they were commonly referred to by public officials and in media accounts at the time, stood out for their rural mannerisms and regionally alien cultural markings, for being, as Cincinnati’s director of health education put it, “different—different in speech, in dress, in culture, in habits and mores, in education, in social status, in work experience, and in health.” The neighborhoods themselves, meanwhile, were marked by rates of unemployment, housing insecurity, poverty-related medical issues, and crime and policing that more closely resembled predominantly Black urban neighborhoods such as Avondale, Paradise Valley, and Bronzeville than the postwar era’s growing middle-class suburbs.

That the inhabitants of the hillbilly ghetto were white confounded many of their mid-century contemporaries, who struggled to reconcile them with their more familiar bigotries. “The so-called hillbillies, who now constitute a major slum problem in several midwestern cities … are about the only sizable group of white, Protestant, old-line Americans who are now living in city slums,” opined a columnist for Fortune. “The trouble with the latter, as with the rural Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, is that they simply don’t know how to live in cities.”

Marshall Bragdon may have felt more sympathetic to Cincinnati’s Appalachian migrants, but otherwise he largely agreed with that assessment. The 1954 workshop was intended to focus the city’s attention on what Bragdon called “the struggle for urban adjustment,” which, as he saw it, had left Cincinnati’s rural newcomers ill-prepared to succeed in the industrial city and was turning neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill into intractable and dysfunctional pockets of poverty.

Believing that most city agencies “don’t know how to help the migrants,” Bragdon invited Roscoe Giffin, a sociologist based at Berea College, in Kentucky, to help set the workshop attendees straight. In his talk, Giffin explained that the “pathological quality” of the city’s hillbilly ghettos could be attributed to a series of “culturally determined patterns of behavior which the Southern Mountaineers bring with them when they come to live north of the Ohio River”—among them a low regard for “formal education,” an instinctual emphasis on fulfilling “immediate” needs and desires, a “clannish” hostility toward outsiders, and a “fatalistic” resignation to present conditions. These behaviors, Giffin noted, had originated as natural and even rational adaptations to their impoverished rural circumstances. But they became counterproductive and self-defeating “when such people came to live around Liberty and Sycamore Streets of Cincinnati.” The solution, Bragdon and Giffin counseled the assembled city representatives, was time, understanding, and, above all, patient instruction in the expectations of modern urban society. “The basis of all human-relations work with all people,” Giffin reminded his audience, “is that you have first to accept them as they are before they are willing to modify their behavior.”

The workshop proved to be a hit. The Cincinnati residents in attendance appreciated their new insights into the root causes of hillbilly pathology (“It gave me the positive side,” one social worker remarked; “my previous observations of them had been only on the negative”) and were further gratified to be reassured that it was the migrants’ behavior, and not the city itself, that was in need of “modification.” News of the workshop spread quickly through networks of municipal officials, and soon copycat workshops were being staged in other cities across the region, many featuring Roscoe Giffin as an invited speaker.

“Urban adjustment,” meanwhile, became the prevailing paradigm for addressing the overlapping issues of migration, poverty, and inner-city decline. In 1957, Chicago created a Committee on New Residents—the first public body of its kind in the country—“based on a recognition of the adjustment problems presented by the migration to Chicago of Southern Whites, Negros, Puerto Ricans and American Indians seeking increased economic opportunity.” Detroit followed suit with its own Committee on Urban Adjustment shortly thereafter, designed “to try to change some of the values, attitudes, and behavior patterns … of the existing and continually arriving members of the rural lower class.”

The Ford Foundation picked up on the urban-adjustment framework as well. Ford was then at the leading edge of the behavioral revolution in mid-century social-science research (its Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences opened at Stanford the same year the Cincinnati workshop was held), and Bragdon and Giffin’s focus on the more psychological and attitudinal ramifications of rural-to-urban migration struck a chord. Ford would agree to fund an expanded version of the Cincinnati workshop at Giffin’s home institution of Berea College in the summer of 1958, which brought representatives from seven midwestern cities down to Kentucky for three weeks to “study the mountaineer migrants in their native habitat.”

The Berea workshop became, in the words of Ford’s Director of Public Affairs Paul Ylvisaker, “the first real entry point” for the foundation’s growing programmatic engagement with the complex of issues surrounding “community disorganization” and the unfolding urban crisis. The Berea workshop was restaged annually for the next nine years, during which time delegates from more than two dozen cities would attend. Subsequent initiatives spearheaded by Ylvisaker’s Public Affairs Division at the beginning of the 1960s, such as the Great Cities School Improvement Program and the Gray Areas Program, would funnel tens of millions in foundation dollars toward a variety of municipal efforts aimed largely at “citifying the in-migrant population” clustered in the country’s declining urban core. “I had the sense that we were dealing with people problems, not bricks and mortar and not power-structure problems so much, and that we were witnessing the vast migration into the central city—and I shifted at that point, to a concern with the migrant flows and what could be done about that,” Ylvisaker would reflect in a later interview. “Appalachia gave us a chance to touch off the concern with the whole process.”

By the time Ylvisaker was tapped to sit on the White House’s Task Force on Poverty, convened in early 1964 to begin drafting the legislative foundations of a massive federal campaign to eliminate poverty, it was undeniable just how far and wide the ideas first introduced a decade earlier in Cincinnati had resonated. Ylvisaker’s Gray Areas Program—in its spatial focus on inner-city ghettos populated overwhelmingly by poor rural migrants, and in its programmatic emphasis on replacing deficient migrant cultures with more efficacious forms of “community action”—was the clearest prototype for what became the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, signed into law by Johnson that August. “A lot of the ideas that ended up actually in the legislation,” noted William Capron, who worked on the task force with Ylvisaker and oversaw domestic spending in Johnson’s Bureau of the Budget, “really were developed out of the Ford experience.”

As unlikely as it may have seemed when Bragdon first convened his skeptical colleagues in the spring of 1954, the hillbilly ghetto had helped set in motion a series of events that had culminated in the enactment of one of postwar liberalism’s most ambitious social-policy experiments.

There were always other ways to think about the issue of urban adjustment, of course. Southern Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati, like other groups of rural migrants and low-income residents in the city, were also contending with limited employment options, predatory slumlords, and overcrowded and under-resourced public schools—not to mention an openly hostile police force, which by the middle of the 1950s was arresting white Appalachian natives at roughly four times the rate they appeared in the city’s general population. In Detroit, 10 years after pouring into the Arsenal of Democracy in search of wartime defense work, migrants from the rural South made up fully half of the population crammed into the city’s blight-ridden downtown core, an area already riddled with “thousands of dwellings in various stages of decay and deterioration, the majority of which are utterly unfit for human habitation,” according to the city’s charitable agencies. In Uptown—“seedy, dreary, congested, despairing,” as the Chicago Daily News would describe it, “Appalachia in Chicago”—more than one in four apartments lacked adequate plumbing, and residential overcrowding was exceeded only in the poor Black neighborhood of Lawndale. By the time the Johnson administration was rolling out the War on Poverty, fewer than half of Uptown’s adult residents were able to secure full-time work.

In its focus on “culturally determined patterns of behavior” as opposed to structural factors such as these, the urban-adjustment framing introduced at the Cincinnati workshop consistently mistook the symptoms of the postwar urban crisis for its causes. Instead of recognizing the already accelerating flight of jobs and tax revenues to the suburbs as an early preview of larger-scale disruptions to come, officials used urban adjustment as a rationale for blaming rural poor people for their inability to adapt.

In this way, urban adjustment also anticipated the notion of a separate and self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” first introduced by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959 and then widely popularized by the journalist and social critic Michael Harrington over the next few years. Lewis developed his influential theory in ethnographic studies of poor families from Mexico and Puerto Rico. But the catalog of pathological behaviors and attitudes that he identified among his subjects—“a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence and inferiority”; “a lack of impulse control, a strong present-time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism”—in many cases directly echoed Giffin’s portrayals of maladjusted Appalachian migrants.

Before long, a distorted and punitive version of Lewis’s ideas would win both liberal and conservative adherents and find its way to the very center of postwar social policy, first as a means of explaining why certain groups of people became dependent on social assistance and then as an argument for curtailing or altogether eliminating those very forms of public support. As it did, the urban-adjustment framework’s earlier focus on the cultural habits of the rural poor, broadly defined, gave way to the culture of poverty’s near-singular association with the more and more distressed Black inner city.

The consequences of that shift would reverberate to the present. For poor Black communities, the racialized discourse around poverty would be an unmitigated disaster. The slow death of federal poverty-reduction programs begun under Richard Nixon, the massive expansion of a racially targeted war on urban street crime during the 1970s and ’80s, and the culminating assault on welfare “as we know it” during the Clinton years would all be executed under the logic of eradicating a culture of poverty that was said to be the defining hallmark of a new Black underclass.

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

The new preoccupation with race would also further obscure the one redeeming feature of the urban-adjustment framework. In its focus on the common circumstances confronted by populations of the rural dispossessed clustered around the margins of affluent society—Black, white, Hispanic, and otherwise—urban adjustment held out the prospect of a more materially grounded kind of analysis, one that might have seen beyond the cultural or racial explanations for poverty and grasped the larger social and political forces beginning to undermine the postwar economy. The window for turning the language of urban adjustment into a multiracial, bottom-up politics of the poor, though, was always small. By the end of the ’60s, it had been shut for good.

As a final consequence of all this, the white poor and working classes would come to occupy a more marginal position in the worldview of Democratic liberalism over subsequent decades. After playing a crucial role in catalyzing liberal attention to the social effects of the postwar urban crisis, the hillbilly ghettos of the urban Midwest largely disappeared from view after the formal launch of the War on Poverty. Meanwhile, as deindustrialization, automation, off-shoring, and new waves of import competition brought ever-widening devastation to the blue-collar workforce of the country’s industrial heartland, professional-class interests elevated by the new knowledge-and-service economy moved to the center of the Democratic Party’s agenda. These “New Democrats” offered the occasional promise to retrain out-of-work miners and factory hands as computer programmers—but in downwardly mobile white working-class communities throughout the region, precious little came of it. Instead, right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump would find a rich soil in which to plant the seeds of populist resentment, creating one of the more consequential class realignments in modern American political history.

Hillary Clinton had these voters in mind, back in 2016, when she wrote off “half of Trump’s supporters” as a “basket of deplorables.” Whatever truth there was in her description of the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” nature of Trump’s base—and subsequent events would indicate that there was clearly some truth to it—it was the wrong message for the moment, easily construed as casually elitist and politically tone-deaf. Rightly or wrongly, Clinton seemed more interested in modifying the behavior of these voters than in trying to understand the material foundations of their grievances. When about a quarter of white working-class Obama voters forsook Clinton for Trump in that fall’s election, it was hard not to attribute the results at least in part to Clinton’s failure to convince that portion of the electorate that the party had anything to offer them beyond condescending disregard.

If anybody seems to have learned the lessons of Clinton’s faux pas, it is Joe Biden. Since entering the White House, Biden has done more than any Democratic president of the past 75 years to reinvigorate American industrial policy, all while steering its focus toward those parts of the Midwest and South that suffered the effects of deindustrialization most acutely and where the Republican Party has made the most gains among working-class voters. Might this be enough to overcome liberalism’s decades of pathologizing poor and working-class whites? Recent polling suggests that Biden faces an uphill battle among these voters in crucial midwestern swing states. But to paraphrase Roscoe Giffin, a party has to first understand where it’s gone wrong before it will be willing to change its behavior.

This essay is adapted from Max Fraser’s book Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class.

This article originally appeared in longer form in bioGraphic.

Every spring, as the daylight lengthens and the weather warms, rivers of birds flow north across the Midwest. They fly high and at night, navigating via the stars and their own internal compasses: kinglets and creepers, woodpeckers and warblers, sparrows and shrikes.

They come from as far as Central America, bound for Minnesotan wetlands, Canadian boreal forests, and Arctic tundra. They migrate over towns and prairies and cornfields; they soar over the black tongue of Lake Michigan in such dense aggregations that they register on radar. Upon crossing the water, many encounter Chicago, where they alight in whatever greenery they can find—office parks and rooftop shrubs and scraggly street trees and the sparse landscaping outside apartment-complex lobbies.

And, as they linger and forage in Chicago’s urban canyons, they collide with glass.  

To us humans, glass is ubiquitous and banal; to birds, it’s one of the world’s most confounding materials. A tanager or flicker flying toward a transparent window perceives only the space and objects beyond, not the invisible forcefield in its way. The reflective glass that coats many modern skyscrapers is just as dangerous, a shimmering mirror of clouds and trees. Some birds survive collisions, dazed but unharmed. Many don’t, done in by brain injuries and internal bleeding. Per one 2014 analysis, glass kills as many as 1 billion birds every year in the United States alone.

[From the July/August 2022 issue: How animals perceive the world]

Chicago, among the largest and brightest cities within North America’s midwestern flyway, is especially lethal—both during spring migration and again in fall, when the survivors fly south. The artificial lights that glow across the Windy City present as a galaxy of false stars, confusing migrant birds that orient themselves by starlight and potentially enticing them toward the glassy buildings below. In 2019, researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology ranked Chicago the country’s most perilous city for birds.

The city’s residents aren’t blind to the tragedy. Some architects and building managers have taken measures to protect birds, and politicians have tried to alleviate the crisis through laws and regulations. But progress has been fitful, and new glass monoliths sprout every year. Chicago thus epitomizes both the severity of the U.S.’s glass problem and the difficulty of summoning the will to redress it. “We have so much urban lighting, so much glass, it just puts all the wrong things together for birds,” Annette Prince, the director of a conservation group called the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, told me. “Chicago is the perfect storm.”

One morning at the outset of spring migration, I found myself pacing Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago, waiting to join Prince as she scoured the city for birds. I shivered in the predawn damp, the sky the pearly gray of a chickadee’s wing. Everywhere around me loomed glass, geologic in its permanence and grandeur: towers of glass, spires of glass, bluffs and fins and ravines of it, a million deceptive facets of sky glittering overhead.

Before long, Prince arrived—a compact, competent-looking woman in a fluorescent raincoat.

She took me on a walk through the city, canvassing storefronts and alleys where birds might be lying, stunned or dead. Elsewhere in Chicago, other volunteers searched their own neighborhoods. This was the monitors’ 20th year in operation; Prince, a retired speech pathologist and avid birder, has been part of the group nearly since its inception. Each morning during spring and fall migrations, its volunteers peruse the street for victims and respond to reports that members of the public call in to a hotline. Injured birds go to the Willowbrook Wildlife Center, a sanctuary outside the city, to receive treatment and eventually be released. Dead ones go to the city’s Field Museum to enter its collection. Most mornings, the dead outnumber the living three to one.

Every year, the monitors collect about 7,000 birds, doubtless a tiny fraction of the unknowable number that die every year. Some days the work is constant: One recent October morning, the monitors scooped up about 1,000 birds at McCormick Place, a convention center abutting Lake Michigan whose massive glass facade makes it a particularly egregious hot spot. Prince joked that the volunteers measured their busyness in Valium gulped. “People call and say, ‘Hey, is there some kind of disease outbreak going around?’” she said wryly. “No, it’s just architectural design.”

Prince’s phone rang: a bird reported to the hotline, in a neighborhood without a monitor. We got into her car and tore off, Prince weaving through traffic with a cabbie’s reckless surety. When we arrived at the building—a preschool and hotel fronted by sheer glass—we found a female yellow-bellied sapsucker, her eyes sunken and legs gone stiff.

“Every building has its own pathology,” Prince had told me earlier. Here, it was easy to diagnose. Mirrored glass reflected a few scrawny trees outside the building, creating a faux, fatal forest: an optical illusion perfectly designed to slaughter birds. “You can see what a fun-house mirror this city is,” Prince said as she stuffed the sapsucker into a bag—a plastic one.

The sapsucker’s death was tragic both for the individual bird and for all of avian kind. Since 1970, according to one large-scale synthesis of national bird surveys, U.S. bird populations have declined by close to 30 percent, a loss of nearly 3 billion animals. The culprits are many—especially habitat loss and climate change—but glass is among the most catastrophic of direct, human-related killers, second only to cats, according to one 2015 study. Certain bird species are unusually susceptible, according to a 2020 analysis, including wood thrushes, yellowthroats, black-throated blue warblers, and sapsuckers. That may be because these forest-dwelling migrants are accustomed to darting through tree-canopy gaps. For these and other vulnerable species, glass poses an unignorable threat.

[Read: The quiet disappearance of birds in North America]

Moreover, whereas cats or hawks often take out weaker or less wary animals, glass is an undiscerning predator, as apt to eliminate healthy migrants as sick ones. Our dead sapsucker was a hale breeding female who would have reared chicks this summer and likely for several to come. No longer. “What we’ve done here is killed one of the strongest members of her species,” Prince said with a disgusted shake of her head. “We’re incrementally taking away their future.”

For as long as buildings have sported glass, birds have likely collided with it. In an 1832 ornithology textbook, the naturalist Thomas Nuttall related the tale of a young male hawk that, while “descending furiously and blindly upon its quarry,” smashed through a greenhouse. Miraculously, the hawk was “little stunned,” though his “wing-feathers were much torn.”  

In Nuttall’s day, glass was comparatively rare: Windows tended to be small and set within brick or granite. Today it’s everywhere—particularly in Chicago, the longtime home of the mid-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose preference for vast glass facades still influences the city’s aesthetic. His purpose, he once said, was to fuse nature, humans, and structures in a “higher unity.” The virtue of glass was that it connected indoor spaces with outdoor ones. The irony is awful: We prize a material that kills birds, because it makes us feel closer to nature.

Yet even a perilous building can be made safer. One day, I took a self-guided tour of the Chicago area’s bird-friendly architecture. I started in Evanston, home of Northwestern University, which had retrofitted a couple of particularly deadly buildings in response to data from local bird monitors. Most problematic was the Kellogg Global Hub, a business-school headquarters as colossal and vitreous as an airport terminal. In 2018, Northwestern had coated part of the Kellogg’s facade with a translucent, dot-patterned film designed to make the building visible to birds. The dots, which were so faint that human passersby were unlikely to notice them, were spaced about as far apart as the width of my palm. Any wider than that, and birds would attempt to fly between the dots, as they flit through dense twigs and leaves. (A single hawk decal on a big pane? Essentially useless.)

The film seemed to be working: Collisions at the Kellogg hub had declined precipitously, and for 20 minutes I watched red-winged blackbirds alight easily on its railings and roof. Even better, at the nearby Frances Searle Building, whose windows the university had covered with faint horizontal stripes, bird deaths dropped dramatically. Still, the projects had been neither cheap nor perfect. Retrofitting existing buildings is crucial, no doubt; Chicago isn’t about to dismantle its existing skyline for the sake of birds. But “the best solutions are the ones that are designed into the building from the beginning,” Claire Halpin, an architect who sat on the board of the Chicago Ornithological Society until her recent death, told me later.

Few architectural firms do that better than Halpin’s former employer, Studio Gang, the firm behind some of Chicago’s bird-friendliest mega-structures. I visited two of them, starting with the Aqua Tower, an 82-story monolith frilled with curvaceous balconies, as though the building has sprouted shelf fungi. The terraces lend the tower “visual noise,” warning birds that this otherwise reflective structure is in fact a solid object. The studio applied similar principles at Solstice on the Park, an apartment complex whose glass panels are angled toward the ground. The lobby’s windows are also subtly covered with dashes—a material known as “fritted” glass with markings printed on the pane rather than added retroactively. Both buildings, I noticed, incorporate enormous expanses of glass, yet they possess a visibility that other Chicago towers lack.

[Read: These birds got a little too comfortable in bird houses]

What’s more, avian safety doesn’t always require structural overhauls. During migration season, the FBI swaddles its Chicago headquarters in fine black mesh, off of which birds harmlessly bounce. At the Blue Cross Blue Shield tower, numerous birds used to die while trying to reach a potted ficus stationed invitingly in the lobby. Prince said that at her suggestion, the building’s managers moved the plant away from the window and the collisions virtually ceased.

Chicago’s bird advocates are also attempting to influence policy and compel widespread change. In 2021, Illinois began to require new state-owned buildings to incorporate netting, screens, shutters, and other bird-friendly features. Even more promising, in 2020 Chicago passed an ordinance mandating that new buildings limit their use of transparent and reflective glass, use patterned glass in high-risk areas, and reduce the interior lighting that can lure birds to their death. The city’s Department of Planning and Development is continuing to implement the ordinance.

This progress hasn’t been greeted with pleasure by all developers, some of whom fear that patterned glass will jack up construction costs and deter retailers from renting space. As one put it to Landscape Architecture Magazine, “There is a real big bird that this ordinance is going to kill: the biggest bird in town, the goose that laid the golden egg in real estate.”

Yet many advocates say the notion that protecting birds harms business is largely a myth. For one thing, because most bird collisions happen in the lowest hundred feet, architects don’t need to treat entire high-rises with bird-friendly glass. For another, glass represents a small portion of construction costs. In a 2022 report, Daniel Klem, an ornithologist at Muhlenberg College who’s studied window collisions since the 1970s, found that bird-safe glass adds less than four-tenths of a percent to the cost of a typical building. (An $8 million office tower, for example, would only pay an additional $30,000 or so.) Moreover, Klem argued, as pro-bird ordinances drive up demand for bird-friendly glass, glass manufacturers are likely to produce more of it and lower their prices.

“Right now, the majority of developers and architects don’t have this issue on their radar, but many are changing,” Klem told me. Years ago, he said, a magazine had branded him the “Rodney Dangerfield of ornithology,” referencing the comedian whose trademark joke was that he never got the respect he deserved. Within the past decade, however, respect for bird collisions has arrived, if belatedly. “Members of these key constituencies are joining the cause of saving more lives from windows,” Klem said. “These are innocent creatures that need our help.”

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The Supreme Court’s new ethics code is a nod at the public pressure the court is facing. Beyond that, it will do little to change the justices’ behavior.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Hillary Clinton: Hamas must go. Sphere and loathing in Las Vegas The plight of the eldest daughter The meaning of “sir” and “ma’am”

An Unstable Structure

Don’t worry, the Supreme Court said to America yesterday. Though it may not be enforceable, the Court at least has a formal code of conduct now. The Court has been facing an onslaught of public pressure after reports that justices, particularly Clarence Thomas, had engaged in behavior that an average person could deem improper for representatives of the highest court in the land, such as receiving undisclosed gifts from wealthy conservatives. This code, the first in the Court’s history, is signed by all nine justices, and lays out “rules and principles” for the justices’ behavior. Its publication is an acknowledgment that the public is dissatisfied with the Court, but beyond that, it is more symbolic than anything else.

The 15-page document opens with a paragraph-long statement emphasizing that the rules contained within it are largely not new. Their codification is an attempt to “dispel” the “misunderstanding that the justices of this court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” The code does not explicitly restrict any of the activities, such as undisclosed gifts and travel, that have been drawing attention to the justices in recent months, and its guidelines on recusals in the event of potential conflicts of interest are vague. (A progressive group noted that the document includes should 53 times and must just six.) It also doesn’t acknowledge the existence of any current or past misbehavior, Noah Rosenblum, an assistant law professor at NYU, told me. But the introduction of the code, he said, “does suggest that, in fact, the pressure is getting to the Supreme Court, which, if you believe that the Supreme Court has gone rogue, is a really useful and important thing to know.”

The Supreme Court has long operated, as the justices explain in the opening statement of the code, according to “the equivalent of common law ethics rules,” using guidelines derived from a variety of sources, such as historical practice and the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary. The idea of the Court formalizing its ethics guidelines had been percolating for a while. Back in 2019, Justice Elena Kagan said at a budget hearing that John Roberts was exploring the idea of establishing a code of conduct for just the Supreme Court. In 2022, a group of legal scholars wrote an open letter to Justice Roberts urging the Court to adopt such a code. “We simply believe that a written Code, even if primarily aspirational, would have a broad salutary impact,” the professors wrote.

But public pressure, including from lawmakers in Congress, picked up starting in the spring, when ProPublica released the first in a series of stories about Clarence Thomas’s close relationship with the Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Other outlets soon published reports on the lavish gifts and trips Thomas received from wealthy businessmen and donors. As Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, told me, Thomas is seen as the “violator in chief.” But, Dorf noted, other justices’ behavior has been called into question as well. Those wishing to present this as a bipartisan issue, Dorf said, have also pointed to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose staff reportedly urged libraries and colleges to buy her books. And conservative Justice Samuel Alito took a luxury fishing trip with Paul Singer, a billionaire who had cases before the Court in following years. (The Supreme Court responded that it works with Sotomayor and her staff to ensure compliance with ethics guidance during book events. Alito said that he never discussed Singer’s business and that he was unaware of his connection to the cases.)

My colleague Adam Serwer, who covers political and legal issues for The Atlantic, told me that “much of the conduct that has exposed the justices as partisan actors” would not seem to be prohibited by these guidelines. The code is not a move toward stricter ethics rules; rather, Adam argued, it might have the opposite effect: “It is an attempt to remove any motivation for Congress to impose restrictions on the Court that have actual teeth.” Adam added that the only apparent punishment for breaking the rules will be public shame—of which the Court has seen plenty lately. As Adam reminded me, “public outrage and tarnishing of the Court’s prestige” is why the justices likely felt pressured to adopt the code in the first place.

The American public has soured on the Court in recent years, in the midst of ethics scandals and controversial decisions on topics such as abortion, student loans, and affirmative action. According to a Pew Research Center poll from July, voters are more likely to see the Supreme Court as conservative than they were a few years ago, and just 44 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Court—the lowest since the survey began, in 1987. The new code of conduct is not likely to change things. For those concerned that the justices’ behavior compromises the integrity of the Court, “there’s nothing in this code of ethics that should reassure them,” Rosenblum told me.

The Supreme Court is an anomaly in America’s justice system; other judges have to adhere to strict, enforceable ethics rules. To understand the ethics mechanisms ruling most American judges, picture a three-legged stool, Rosenblum suggests. Leg one is a code of conduct, leg two is an advisory body, and leg three is an enforceable disciplinary procedure. The Supreme Court has long had no such stool. Now, with its new code of conduct, it has one leg. That does not make a very stable structure.

Related:

The Supreme Court just keeps deciding it should be even more powerful. The care and feeding of the Supreme Court justices

Today’s News

The House passed a short-term funding bill to successfully prevent a government shutdown. Al-Shifa Hospital says that it has buried more than 170 people in a mass grave. According to the United Nations, only one of 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip is reportedly operational. A “March for Israel” took place in Washington, D.C., to protest rising anti-Semitism and demand the release of hostages taken by Hamas.

Evening Read

Painting by Debra Cartwright. Source: University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.

How Black Americans Kept Reconstruction Alive

By Peniel E. Joseph

The Civil War produced two competing narratives, each an attempt to make sense of a conflict that had eradicated the pestilence of slavery.

Black Americans who believed in multiracial democracy extolled the emancipationist legacy of the war. These Reconstructionists envisioned a new America finally capable of safeguarding Black dignity and claims of citizenship. Black women and men created new civic, religious, political, educational, and economic institutions. They built thriving towns and districts, churches and schools. In so doing, they helped reimagine the purpose and promise of American democracy …

Black Reconstructionists told the country a new story about itself. These were people who believed in freedom beyond emancipation. They shared an expansive vision of a compassionate nation with a true democratic ethos.

Read the full article.

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Many students who think they’re protesting against Israeli policy are actually engaging in anti-Semitism, spewing hatred in a way that will change them as people and alter their lives.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump isn’t merely unhinged. America is getting lonelier and more indoorsy. That’s not a coincidence. Why is America afraid of Black history

Moral Rot

Many of America’s college campuses are enduring a wave of anti-Semitism. Campus anti-Semitism is not new; this most recent round was spurred by the outbreak of war after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. But this new eruption of hatred in educational institutions is especially alarming. The students engaging in it are not only poisoning their campuses; they are embracing a moral stain that they will find, in later life, they can never expunge.

I have taught many college students, in multiple institutions and in a variety of settings, over the almost 40 years of my academic career. I know from experience how much they want to be involved in the Big Issues of the Day, a natural extension of living in an environment percolating with ideas and opinions and where they are immersed in learning new things. But I will admit that I never thought much of campus demonstrations, despite having seen many as both a student and a professor; I am by nature distrustful of the emotion that sweeps over mass events, and though I think public actions are essential to democracy, I believe they should be rare, targeted, and powerful. (I worry that campus protests, in particular, invert the relationship between the students and the university, encouraging students to be inexperienced teachers instead of learners. But that’s a subject for another day.)

After so many years on campuses, I am not shocked by protests against Israel. I have seen many; most of the students protesting now are too young to remember the lionizing of Yasser Arafat and demonstrations supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization in an earlier era, for example. The protests in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, however, seem different to me. Many of them are sharply defined by a juvenile viciousness, a paradoxical mixture of childish exuberance and evident—and growing—menace.

The Boston Globe in an editorial last week compiled a list of anti-Semitic incidents at Northeastern University, Cooper Union, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Tulane, and other campuses across the United States have been subjected to venomous attacks. At the University of Maryland, for example, someone chalked “Holocaust 2.0” on the pavement during a rally organized by the pro-Hamas Students for Justice in Palestine. When confronted by local reporters, one of the organizing members of the University of Maryland’s SJP, who of course wished to remain anonymous, said the “Holocaust 2.0” writing “was likely taken out of context.” “‘It’s referring to what is happening in Gaza,’ he said, adding that it’s not the most accurate parallel and that SJP members came over to cross it out after the picture had been taken,” the local-news report notes.

Not the most accurate parallel. That student has a bright future in public relations.

To understand the kind of rhetoric overtaking some American campuses, this was how the National SJP almost immediately described the October 7 attack.

Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. Catching the enemy completely by surprise, the Palestinian resistance has captured over a dozen settlements surrounding Gaza along with many occupation soldiers and military vehicles. This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.

Other universities have had their concerns about SJP, and understandably so. In the past few weeks, Brandeis has kicked the group off campus and Columbia has suspended it along with another group, Jewish Voice for Peace, but SJP has chapters all across North America.

Meanwhile, at George Washington University, activists projected pro-Hamas slogans on the sides of buildings, including “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a call for the eradication of Israel. Spare me the sophistry—most recently plumped by Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—that “From the river to the sea” is merely an anodyne call for freedom and equal rights, or that it somehow can be detached from Hamas’s genocidal meaning. As the University of Illinois international-relations professor Nicholas Grossman wisely observed last week, it’s difficult to square “years of left-wing arguments that society should be hunting for any possible racist implication of words and symbols, even if unintended today, with the claim that ‘from the river to the sea’ must be judged only by what the speaker says is in their heart.”

Good for Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, for denouncing this slogan (despite immediate campus backlash for doing so); better late than never. Some protesters insist—and many with undeniable honesty—that they are objecting only to Israeli policy. But even the sincerest among them often resort to the backbreaking mental gymnastics required to dismiss the obvious anti-Semitism that is woven into so many of these protests.

The emergence of so much racist, bullying trollery shows how deeply the thrill of self-actualization has tempted young people into a decadent waltz with an ancient and hideous hatred. This behavior is all the more appalling because it comes disproportionately from a privileged class of young men and women who are rationalizing their moral destitution for the sake of a transitory sense of self-satisfaction.

In the short term, I am concerned for the safety of students. (And I mean all students, because there have also been Islamophobic assaults on campuses; these are intolerable racist attacks, even if fewer in number and less organized.) Some students will claim that their behavior is protected by freedom of speech. I agree: I would object to any agency of the United States government stopping these students from speaking their minds, and I defend the right of any American to speak without being subjected to threats of violence from bullies and brutes. But speech, and how we express ourselves, carries deep social (and, one day, professional) consequences. In the long term, I am concerned that students who think they are merely engaging in an energizing campus protest do not realize the damage they are doing to their community—and the moral tumor they are implanting into their developing character.

Anti-Semitism is not a cause that can be dismissed as a youthful indiscretion. It is not some innocent blemish that can be backspaced out of a résumé. Chanting “From the river to the sea” after a terrorist onslaught isn’t something that can be rinsed away later merely by adding “But I meant it in the good way.” Ripping down posters of missing children is a hateful and cowardly act, not some gallant moment of defiance (and not a life lesson any of us should want to impart to our own children). It is no defense to support a terrorist organization that calls for the eradication of the State of Israel while adding that you mean only the state itself, with no harm intended for the Jews who actually live there.

Anti-Semitism, even if adopted stupidly or indirectly, is a moral rot that today’s students will one day have to either recant or endure. Many of them, I wager, will eventually feel shame about what they thought were righteous actions. And I worry that they (like many of today’s extreme right-wing voters and activists in America) will find themselves so far up the tree of rationalizations that they will never be able to climb back down. After enough time serving the insidious impulse to defend the indefensible, they will find themselves changed people.

For years, I waved away student protests mostly as a rite of passage, like the first flunk or the first night in a dorm. Not this time. Students are young adults. They need to know that some actions will damage them forever—even when committed behind the comfortable walls of a college campus.

Related:

Students for pogroms in Israel When anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic

Today’s News

Israeli tanks have taken position at the gates of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where thousands are sheltering. The head of the World Health Organization stated yesterday that the hospital is struggling to provide health care after three days without electricity or water. Los Angeles faces a transportation emergency after a large fire resulted in the indefinite closure of a major freeway over the weekend. Yesterday, the U.S. retaliated against attacks on its bases with precision air strikes on Iran-backed facilities in Syria, the third round of such strikes since October 26.

Evening Read

Diana Ejaita

This Ghost of Slavery

An original play by Anna Deavere Smith

For her work as an actor and a playwright, Anna Deavere Smith has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a two-time Tony Award nominee, a MacArthur-genius-grant honoree, and a recipient of the 2012 National Humanities Medal. She is known for her performances on popular TV series such as The West Wing and Black-ish, in movies such as Philadelphia and The Human Stain, and in stage plays and one-woman shows, on and off Broadway.

In the 1990s, Smith was credited with advancing a distinctive form of theater: She reports her story out, conducting scores of interviews, and then transforms the transcripts into dramatic art. For her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, about the Rodney King riots, she interviewed more than 300 people, composing the script entirely out of material from those conversations.

With This Ghost of Slavery, Smith once again deploys her signature use of contemporary interviews, including with people who have been absorbed into the criminal-justice system, many of whom she has interviewed for her Pipeline Girls Project, which examines how proximity to the carceral system affects young women. She has also interviewed activists and social-justice workers, many of them associated with a nonprofit organization called Chicago CRED, which seeks to reduce gun violence and help young people ensnared in gangs or the juvenile-justice system. But this time she has also supplemented these interviews with primary-source historical materials. She has mined 19th-century archives, transcripts, and diaries, and woven dialogue from these sources into the play.

Read the full play.

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Photo-illustrations by Gabriela Pesqueira

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

One of the treasures of Black history is preserved in a plain gray box, stashed away in a quiet room. In Nashville one morning, as the Fisk University campus shimmered in the summer heat, I walked into the archives of the Franklin Library to see it: a collection of papers from just after the Civil War about the founding of the university and others like it. I put on a pair of white cloth gloves to handle the pages. The stories I read in the collection were real, but they also felt to me like cosmology, recounting the beginnings of Black institutions I love and the arduous labors and journeys of the people who made them. The world described in the archive seemed especially malleable: open to possibility, and open to being shaped according to the hopes of the Black people in it.

One story in particular stood out, from the diary of a young woman named Ella Sheppard. In the summer of 1871, she was stuck waiting for a train home, in a hotel somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. She was traveling with a group of students, also Black, back to Nashville after singing at a concert in Memphis. Traveling in the South was dangerous for any Black person, let alone for a coed group of students making their way through the state where the Ku Klux Klan had recently been founded.

According to Sheppard’s diary, the presence of the Black singers did indeed attract attention. A mob of local white men, engaged in what another source euphemistically described as “electioneering,” began to threaten the students. As Sheppard recalled in her diary, the troupe left the hotel with the mob still in tow and walked to the railroad stop, where the choir began to sing a hymn. The mob melted away. As the train approached, Sheppard wrote, only the leader of the mob remained. He “begged us with tears falling to sing the hymn again.”

The group did not yet have renown or even a name, but the encounter at the train stop was an omen. In time, the choir would become the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the diary written by Sheppard, who served as the group’s pianist and composer, preserves its origin story. Beyond that, the diary, and the other documents in that gray box, offer a founding story of the university itself. And they explain how the Negro spiritual went from being “slave music” to one of the most popular genres in America. Considered solely as cultural artifacts, the collection at Fisk—the delicate manuscripts, the brittle newspaper clippings, the photographs, the musical arrangements—is a marvel.

In my hands, I also held crucial insights into the radical possibilities of Reconstruction, a period of American history that has been purposefully warped and misunderstood for generations. In the process of revealing and restoring—and understanding—the actual truth about that era, we might also glimpse a new opportunity for ourselves. We might even again pick up the project of reshaping the world.

In his foundational work, The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois devotes the last essay to “sorrow songs,” or Negro spirituals. He describes spirituals as radical folk music, their very existence a rebuttal to the notion that Black people were too primitive to hold political rights. Du Bois was himself a proud alumnus of Fisk University, and no stranger to the archive. In the essay, he provided a capsule history of “the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.” It began shortly after the train-stop incident.

The year 1871 was a crucible. Six years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the true terms of peace were still being negotiated—especially insofar as freedpeople were concerned. By 1871, Republicans in Congress had managed to have the states ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The 11 rebel states had been readmitted to the Union. Buoyed by the votes of Black men, five Black representatives held congressional seats. Congress had created a Department of Justice and given it a mandate to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Fisk and dozens of other institutions, many of them supported by the Freedmen’s Bureau, had sprung up to educate Black students of all ages. They formed the nucleus of what we know today as historically Black colleges and universities. (My father recently served as the president of Fisk.)

But the revolution was faltering. Many northern white Republicans had grown weary of the constant federal oversight required to protect the rights of Black people in the former Confederate states. Their attention, and the nation’s, had turned west, to the country’s expansion and the bloody dispossession of the Indigenous people who lived there. The Freedmen’s Bureau would come to a formal end in 1872, but its efforts were already effectively exhausted. Meanwhile, former Confederates tallied rolling successes in their “redemption” of southern governments—restoring themselves to power through violence and fraud.

It was in this environment that Fisk University’s choir—10 students, ranging in age from 14 to their early 20s—took to the road. Several singers had been born into slavery; one, Benjamin Holmes, had read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud to those imprisoned with him in a slave pen in 1863.

They’d undertaken their journey in order to save their fledgling school. Fisk University had been founded in 1866 with the support of the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist organization that turned its energies to educating freedpeople after the war. But, with the primary objective of abolition met, donations dwindled. Fisk was one of several normal schools and universities that the AMA was now struggling to support. Campus conditions were miserable. Sheppard recalled in her diary that, in cold weather, students shivered through the night in substandard housing, with barely any protection from the elements. They subsisted on food that was nearly inedible. The situation at Fisk was a microcosm of Black life in the South: unprecedented promise and potential oblivion living under the same crumbling roof.

George L. White, a white former Freedmen’s Bureau official and Fisk’s treasurer, was aware of the dire circumstances. The future of the institution was in peril—as was the entire project of educating freedpeople in the South. But White had an idea: He believed that the small choir he’d founded could help save Fisk. He and Sheppard had constantly drilled the singers, taking time to practice whenever the group’s studies allowed. The concert in Memphis had showcased their talent, and perhaps the performance at the train stop had ordained their purpose.

White proposed a tour through the North, hoping to raise a sum of $20,000—about $500,000 today. Most of the prospective audiences for these benefit concerts would be white: The director hoped to astonish them with the choir’s polish, and to rekindle the abolitionist fervor that had financially supported Fisk in its infancy.

Fisk’s faculty, and the parents of its students, thought White’s scheme was ridiculous. They called it a “wild-goose chase” and pointed to the real dangers that a group of young Black students would face on the road. The AMA actively discouraged the tour, worried that a poor showing might, in fact, impede fundraising efforts. In an act of disobedience, White drew funds from the school’s meager treasury, and the singers set out for Ohio.

The word reconstruction first brings to mind the idea of reconstituting what was, exactly as it was. Buildings may be reconstructed after disasters to the same specifications as before, defying the calamities that felled them. Ultimately the South was reconstructed in this way, with racial domination and labor exploitation as its foundation.

But reconstruction can mean something else, too. The word can connote taking the old and making it new, taking rupture and rubble as opportunities to fix fundamental faults, or to create new edifices altogether. For the span of just over a decade, America tried this definition on in starts and stops, attempting to fashion a truly new nation from the wreckage of the Civil War. The Fisk University singers were part of that effort, attesting to the truth that Reconstruction was not and never could be ended by the hand of the federal government.

As Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, and as Sheppard recounted in her diary, the early going for the singers was miserable, and dangerous. Lynchings and wholesale pogroms of Black communities were so common as to be unremarkable in the South, and threats of violence did not stop once Black people arrived in the North. According to the Fisk history, the students also faced the ire of white people who “spelled negro with two g’s.” White crowds often ridiculed the singers, and the group was regularly denied accommodation in white establishments. As the Fisk history has it, “The world was as unfamiliar to these untraveled freed people as were the countries through which the Argonauts had to pass; the social prejudices that confronted them were as terrible to meet as fire-breathing bulls or the warriors that sprang from the land sown with dragons’ teeth.”

The singers tried to take things in stride. It was never lost on them that every tour stop was history made. When Sheppard was an infant, her own mother had been bound to the land, and was sold away from her like nothing more than livestock. The fact that, at 20, Sheppard could freely take a train to the North was at once ordinary and revolutionary.

For their early performances—in Nashville, Memphis, and Cincinnati—the singers mostly pulled from a repertoire of standard popular songs designed to showcase their equality with white choirs and to impress any sophisticates in the audience. This was no small thing. The belief in the intellectual, moral, cultural, and evolutionary inferiority of freedpeople was pervasive among even white liberals in 1871. Just three years earlier, the editors of the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Magazine had argued against the proposition that “the negro, in his native state, knows what music is,” and ascribed any facility in music among Black people to clever mimicry or traces of white ancestry. According to Andrew Ward, the author of Dark Midnight When I Rise, a history of the Fisk University singers, the main interaction that most white northerners had with what they believed to be Black culture was the buffoonery of minstrelsy, mostly performed by white entertainers in blackface.

The choir found itself caught between white apathy and white hostility. At several venues, the singers barely sold enough tickets to cover their costs. In Chillicothe, Ohio, where George White used to teach, they drew enough of a crowd to instill hope of earning some money. But before they performed, they learned that the Great Fire, on October 8, had destroyed much of Chicago. They donated all of their proceeds from that night—less than $50—to victims of the fire.

The autumn stretched on. White prayed for deliverance. He declared that the singers should take the name Jubilee after the year in the biblical cycle whose arrival was celebrated by the manumission of slaves and the absolution of debts.

A new way forward for what was now the Fisk Jubilee Singers presented itself during a concert one night in Oberlin, Ohio. Mostly in private, the singers had been practicing a new repertoire, songs that the majority of white people had never heard. They cobbled together snatches of work songs and “sorrow songs” that many of the students, or their parents, had learned in the fields while enslaved. The minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson had written in the pages of this magazine about his experience of the Negro spirituals sung by Black soldiers during his time as a Union officer, calling them “a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven.” But, for the songs they sang, there were no songbooks to work from. White, Sheppard, and the singers wrote much of the music down for the first time, helping formalize the genre as they went.

[From the June 1867 issue: Negro spirituals]

Sheppard noted in her diary that the singers harbored a deep ambivalence about even practicing spirituals in private. The songs “were associated with slavery and the dark past, and represented the things to be forgotten,” she wrote. Spirituals were imbued with the pain and the shame of bondage, which several of the Fisk singers knew firsthand. The songs were also considered sacred. To some, putting lyrics to paper or accompaniment meant stripping the spirit from the spirituals. Even in front of the small, mostly Black crowds that the choir had entertained before setting out on tour, the spirituals had been mixed in sparsely.

Ella Sheppard, the pianist and composer for the Fisk Jubilee Singers (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Source: New York Public Library.)

But that night in Oberlin, the Jubilee Singers did something different. As guests of a meeting of the National Council of Congregational Churches, they were given an opportunity to perform. Among the songs that they chose was “Steal Away,” one of the spirituals in their repertoire. The song begins with a plaintive call to “steal away,” which is then echoed by the choir. The song’s quiet opening lyrics eventually swell with force to deliver “the trumpet sounds in my soul.” The Jubilee Singers had announced themselves with thunder. As The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer wrote on November 17, “They sung with such effect that the scrip was as abundant as the applause, a market basket full of money being taken for the University.”

The praise from the choir’s Oberlin performance helped them earn the notice of Henry Ward Beecher, an immensely influential abolitionist and preacher who had once sent rifles to John Brown’s antislavery guerrillas in Kansas. Beecher invited the group to sing for his congregation in Brooklyn.

Traveling to the event, the singers knew that it would likely be their last chance to prove themselves and save the university. They expected Beecher’s congregation to be a friendly crowd. The same church had backed Beecher’s most extreme forays into abolition and had hosted escaped and former slaves before. But the singers also knew that even the expectations of friendly crowds could be misshapen by prejudice.

They chose to begin the Brooklyn concert with a dramatic innovation: singing from the church balcony, obscured from the crowd by a curtain, their spectral voices filling the nave. And they chose to lead with “Steal Away,” the spiritual that had gotten them to Brooklyn in the first place. According to Fisk’s account of the Jubilee Singers, “So soft was their beginning that the vast audience looked around to see whence came this celestial music. Gradually louder and even louder the voices rose—to a glorious crescendo—and then back down to a mere whisper, ‘I ain’t got long to stay here.’ ” As they sang, the curtain was pulled back to reveal their faces. The audience’s reception was rapturous: “They clamored for more—would not let the singers cease.” Donations poured in. Beecher blessed the spirituals, though with an unfortunate image: “Only they can sing them who know how to keep time to a master’s whip.”

Ultimately, the Jubilee Singers became one of the most famous performing acts in the world. They toured through 1872, capturing the attention of both Black and white audiences. Their domestic success launched them abroad. They sang for Queen Victoria and for Kaiser Wilhelm I. In the end, George L. White’s “wild-goose chase” raised not $20,000 but almost $100,000.

The tour saved Fisk University. But more than that, it preserved an art form. Spirituals such as “Steal Away” became the core of the Jubilee Singers’ performances, and this expanding repertoire became the basis for the songbook of standards that still graces Black churches today. The spirituals captured the imagination of post-abolition literati. Mark Twain became something of a Jubilee Singers groupie, attending several shows to experience the music that he called “the perfectest flower of the ages.”

Some white listeners came just for the music; some came for the spectacle; some claimed that the Jubilee Singers’ spirituals had made them more sympathetic to “the plight of the Negro.” But their reactions were secondary to what the new prominence of the form meant for the people who’d made it. After one show in Washington, D.C., the Jubilee Singers were thrilled to have an audience with Frederick Douglass, then the most famous Black man in America. He told the singers: “You are doing more to remove the prejudice against our race than ten thousand platforms could do.” He was so taken by the young people from Fisk that he sang for them “Run to Jesus,” a spiritual that he’d learned as a child. The singers transcribed his song on the spot, adding it to the songbook. In a playbill for a later concert, promoting the new song, the Jubilee singers wrote: “Thus, under the influence of this song, he at last gained his freedom, and the world gained Frederick Douglass.”

The golden age of the Jubilee Singers was brief. Sheppard, the pianist and composer, had endured chronic illness even before the tour. Exhausted by the group’s barnstorming, White and several other members also took ill. As white supremacists in the South steadily destroyed Black civil rights, and as the North lost interest in protecting those rights, traveling as a Black coed group grew too dangerous. In 1877, when Congress officially ended Reconstruction—ratifying the deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency and effectively withdrew federal troops from the South—the goings-on at Black universities were no longer considered by most liberal white people to be matters of their concern. With the coming of Jim Crow, institutions such as Fisk would form a network of care for Black folk—places where the true possibilities of Reconstruction could be preserved, even if neglected by the rest of America. The Jubilee Singers have been part of this effort; they still perform at concerts across the country.

But Negro spirituals went on to change the country as a whole. In America’s fragmented antebellum culture, before the advent of true mass media, the closest thing to “national music” had been the traveling farce of minstrel shows. Yet during Reconstruction, both the live performance and sheet music of Negro spirituals exploded in popularity. Spirituals prefigured the rise of the blues—a direct successor—as the first truly national popular music. The Black writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1925, called spirituals “America’s only folk music and, up to this time, the finest distinctive contribution she has to offer the world.”

Through the efforts of the freedpeople themselves, the songs that had sustained them in the fields became a national art form. This transformation was not without cost. It wouldn’t be long before Black music was co-opted by white musicians and consumers. The early radio recordings of spirituals were often performed by white singers, and marketed to white audiences. For much of white society, the spiritual was the music of the freedpeople—minus the freedpeople.

For this reason, many radical Black scholars later considered the preservation and proliferation of the spiritual to be the ultimate capitulation—a sacred piece of Black culture saved only by performing it for people who largely thought that Black culture was unworthy.

Maybe there is another conclusion. After all, the spiritual was always meant to be performed in public, in full view of the overseer’s watchful eyes. But beneath the surface, the lyrics and rhythms of spirituals carried messages among the enslaved about kinship, about love, about daily life, about the freedom of the “promised land,” and even about rebellion. Insubordinate messages persisted precisely because, like the editors of Lippincott’s Magazine, the overseers believed that Black culture was counterfeit, and that the people chopping cotton in the fields could not turn words into effective weapons. The insurgency of the spiritual always relied on white consumption. It was the poison in the master’s tea.

Today, the legacy of Reconstruction most often surfaces in its legal consequences. The Fourteenth Amendment, in particular, has been the subject of major recent Supreme Court rulings on voting rights and abortion rights—the concept of equal protection under the law has never ceased being contentious. But the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers shows that the Constitution was not the only aspect of America subject to renegotiation during Reconstruction. The singers had set out to perform popular white music, in the main, but they soon found purpose in remaking American music in their own image. The same was true of every other element of life into which freedpeople entered. Throughout Reconstruction, societal assumptions—about labor relations, gender roles, the makeup of families, the means and ends of education, and much else—were in flux across the country, driven by the efforts of emancipated Black people in the South.

Experiments in new ways of living propagated wherever Black people pressed feet to earth. “Freedmen’s towns” flourished across the South, with all manner of governance. Would-be utopias winked in and out of existence. In coastal South Carolina, freedpeople soon became the majority of farm operators on the Sea Islands. There, they resisted guidance from the Freedmen’s Bureau (and the hopes of their former enslavers), rejecting the local market economy in favor of building spontaneous pastoral communes out of former plantations, and growing crops for subsistence instead of the market.

Across the South, freedpeople reconstituted families pulled apart on the auction block, but did so along much looser kinship lines than the nuclear family unit. In Savannah, Georgia, Black women amassed tracts of land in their own names to pass on to their children. Many freedpeople forsook the surnames of their enslavers, or even the first names they’d been given. Renaming was often an act of both radical purpose and plain descriptiveness: Freeman remains a common last name today.

In music and otherwise, it was clear that the main goal of Reconstruction—as it existed in the hearts and minds of the people being reconstructed—was not to leave the country as it was, but to shake the foundations of possibility. It was in this pliable reality that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began to make their mark.

The potency of spirituals and their insurgent history were clear to Du Bois. He tried to make his case, often writing in publications that endorsed the bigotry—sometimes clothed, sometimes naked—of his white contemporaries. In 1901, as a young scholar still relatively new to the white literary scene, Du Bois wrote for a series on Reconstruction in The Atlantic. Alongside skeptical essays from the historian William A. Dunning (who founded the school of American history that claimed the policy of making Black people citizens was a mistake) and Woodrow Wilson (who argued that freedpeople had not been fit to vote), Du Bois wrote, “The granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race.”

[From the December 2023 issue: What The Atlantic got wrong about Reconstruction]

In his essay, Du Bois helped begin a slow reckoning with history that continues today. He did so not merely through his own insight and intellect, but through the revolutionary act of taking the freedpeople and their ambitions seriously—by describing what they wanted from Reconstruction.

For most of the past century, that history of possibility and Black self-determination during Reconstruction was considered too dangerous to teach. Du Bois’s own work on the topic was ignored by white historians as long as he lived, and textbooks inspired by Dunning littered classrooms in the South (and the North) even during my own childhood. To this day, the most famous and widely seen depiction of ostensible Black life during Reconstruction might be the racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, the D. W. Griffith epic that portrays Klansmen as heroes saving the South from Black savages and was endorsed by Wilson during his time as president. That fact suggests just how much the real story of Black Reconstruction has been obliterated from the public eye.

A growing movement on the right today again finds the history obscured by Wilson, Dunning, and the rest to be too inconvenient or perilous for schools and libraries. Agitation against depictions of Black history and agency is often grounded in the claim that it unfairly makes white people of the present feel guilty for the sins of the past. But that might just be cover for the real reason. Perhaps the true danger of Black history—especially of the era when the formerly enslaved seized and shaped their freedom—is that it shows us that there are more and better possibilities than the present.

That was the fundamental message of most spirituals, and of the sacred code of the promised land. That message is kept in a box of documents in a campus library. Even when salvation seems beyond reach, it may still be in our own hands.

In late August 2022, I walked into a building full of people in Drew, Mississippi. Folding chairs had been crammed everywhere they could be crammed, from the bathroom hallway to the front doors. We had all gathered there for a belated memorial service for Emmett Till, the boy brutally lynched in that very town by white men in 1955. Local citizens, dignitaries, schoolchildren, journalists—everyone was packed together.

After the processional, after the greetings and prayers, the Valley Singers of Mississippi Valley State University took the floor. They began a rendition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, in 1900. The first two verses of the song evoke the trials of Blackness in the past and present. The choir sang Johnson’s lyrics with triumph, their voices filling the space.

Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871, the same year the Jubilee Singers set out on their tour. Their story inspired his own work cataloging and interpreting spirituals; he dedicated his first book on spirituals to “those through whose efforts these songs have been collected, preserved, and given to the world.” The history of the Jubilee Singers had been important to him. The lyrics and composition of his own anthem were inflected by the spirituals they rescued.

To Johnson, the revival of the spiritual “marked a change in the attitude of the Negro himself toward his own art material; the turning of his gaze inward upon his own cultural resources.” In his view, those cultural resources were themselves the power to build, and not just imitate—to shape a world. The song we all heard in that hot room in Mississippi was a tribute to a legacy that allowed us to be there in the first place.

Sweat dripped down my face as the singers brought the song home. The final verse slowed down to a quiet, piercing prayer. And then, a final, exulting march: “Shadowed beneath Thy hand / May we forever stand.” Even in that room, blanketed in Mississippi heat, I felt chills.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Years of Jubilee.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.