unchecked capitalism and massive inequality

How unchecked capitalism and massive inequality made America a bully nation

A guide to the systemic origins of America's bully culture.

Charles Derber and Yale Magrass / University Press of Kansas Alter-Net

The following is an excerpt from the new book Bully Nation by Charles Derber & Yale R. Magrass (University Press of Kansas, 2016):

On October 1, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that a Burger King franchise in Ferndale, Michigan, near Detroit, had bullied a part-time worker, Claudette Wilson, by sending her home two hours early for not positioning pickles correctly on her burgers. As Judge Arthur J. Anchan put it, the company illegally sent Wilson home for failing to “put pickles on her sandwiches in perfect squares.”

Such absurd but intimidating and humiliating bullying of a very low-paid worker was retaliation aimed at intimidating Wilson from continuing her efforts to organize low-wage Burger King workers. A few days earlier, she had stopped at the store to ask workers coming off their shifts to fill out a questionnaire about their wages. A manager had written her up for violating the store’s “loitering and solicitation” policy, something that Judge Anchan also said was “protected activity” and thus illegal. Wilson said she had not done the pickles quite perfectly because of her anger about the earlier unfair treatment.

The story gets bigger because Wilson was one of several workers, including Romell Frazier, who were members of a group called D15, part of the Fast Food Forward Network trying to unionize Michigan Burger Kings. Wilson’s “pickle problem” was really part of a larger and more serious pickle faced by the workers. The Michigan Burger King franchisee was systematically going after workers who were part of D15 and threatening them with sanctions, including firing.

Frazier, for example, had talked up a union and had spoken about striking to his fellow workers. A manager told him that “if he was talking about striking again, he’d soon be picking up his paycheck,” a clear threat intended to bully any workers who were engaged in organizing others. The company claimed that it had the right to prohibit workers from talking about unionizing on the job, but such activity is actually “protected, concerted activity” under the law. It’s against the law to punish any workers for discussing unionizing or other forms of organizing. And as Judge Anchan underscored in his decision, the workplace is the “particularly appropriate place” for such talk and distribution of material because it’s “the one place where employees clearly share common interests”; further, he said, “this is particularly true in the instant case where some of the workers are lower paid individuals who commute to work via bus.”

The pickle gets even bigger because the incident took place during a nationwide organizing campaign for fast-food workers. D15 and the Fast Food Organizing Network were partly funded by the nation’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The union was a leading supporter of the grassroots organizing spreading like a prairie fire among workers not only at Burger King but also at McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other fast-food chains. As the workers organized for unions and a higher minimum wage, the big companies were striking back. The threats and retaliation aimed at workers such as Wilson and Frazier might be called “capital bullying”—a type of bullying that is built into the DNA of corporate capitalism and that occurs at workplaces everyday, much like the pervasive bullying happening daily in schoolyards.

Capital Bullying: Capitalism, Competition, and Winners versus Losers—How the Rich Bully the Poor

Though the bullying of vulnerable kids in schools gets a lot of attention, the bullying of vulnerable workers usually is ignored. If the mass media mention it at all, they typically parrot the corporate view that the agitating workers are troublemakers who deserve punishment. The failure of scholars in the “bullying field” to see even illegal (not to mention legal) corporate threats, intimidation, and retaliation as bullying is another profound failure of the psychological paradigm that views bullying only as a “kid thing” in schools. Such scholars are blind to the adult and institutionalized bullying that is endemic to our economic system.

We refer to the bullying against workers such as Wilson and Frazier, whether pertaining to something as small as Wilson’s pickle bullying or as big as being fired en masse, as capital bullying, meaning bullying inherent to Western and especially American capitalism. We must move from the micropsychological to the macrosocietal paradigm to discuss capitalism as a bullying system. Only a macroanalysis can analyze capital bullying and help create structural changes to reduce it, a deeply destructive type of bullying carried out mainly by corporations. The bullying problem at Burger King and all the big fast-food firms is not a result of the personal psychological problems of the managers; rather, it is something that is systemically dictated and enacted no matter what the psychology of management.

Any economic or social system based on power inequality creates potential or latent bullying that often translates into active bullying, by institutions and individuals. So this is not a problem exclusive to capitalism; bullying was brutally manifest in systems claiming to be socialist or communist, such as the Soviet Union, and it is also obviously a major problem in China today. But capitalism is the dominant system currently and has its own, less recognized, institutionalized bullying propensities. They are not discussed in the academic bullying literature, but they are directly or indirectly responsible for much of the bullying we see in American schoolyards and among both kids and adults.

In many cases, corporate institutional bullying should not be viewed as personal bullying because the managers involved, though they are threatening and harming workers, are being required to act as agents of the company. As individuals, they may not deliberately be seeking to humiliate or harm their workers. Such “decent” or “nice” managers may cut wages or fire workers, but in doing so, they are carrying out institutional imperatives and orders rather than fulfilling personal motives to dominate, intimidate, and humiliate.

The greatest early critic of capitalism, Karl Marx, firmly believed that unequal power is inherent in capitalist systems—and that this creates power hierarchies and market structures that require institutional bullying.

Capitalism puts ownership of capital into the hands of one small group—the “capitalist class,” often dubbed“ the 1%” today. Most of the rest of the population is part of a huge underpaid working class or a growing poverty-stricken and jobless group, with no or very little capital or power. Marx argued that this unequal class power is the essential capitalist ingredient for profit, enabling capitalists—and specifically their corporations—to bully workers into accepting the wages and working conditions dictated by the owners. Put another way, workers have to accept their inferior position, a hallmark of bullying on which the entire system depends.

Thomas Piketty, in his blockbuster best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has spread public awareness of capitalism as an inequality machine. In his book, Piketty presents data about the distribution of capital ownership in more than twenty countries over the last three centuries. He finds that capitalism, with only one exception in the last 300 years, has created wide, sustained, and often extreme inequalities of both income and wealth. Piketty argues that this does not reflect markets gone wrong; rather, it is the way capitalist markets are designed to work.

Piketty is very explicit about this: “Specifically, it is important to note that [inequality] has nothing to do with any market imperfection. Quite the contrary: the more perfect the capital market (in the economist’s sense), the more likely” that inequality will be created and grow. There are no self-correcting market mechanisms to limit inequality, he argues, but only political interventions that are difficult to achieve. “It is possible,” he says,“to imagine public institutions and policies that would counter the effects of this implacable logic: for instance, a progressive global tax on capital. . . . It is unfortunately likely that actual responses to the problem—including various nationalist responses—will in practice be far more modest and less effective.”

Put simply, inequality in wealth and power is baked into capitalist systems, and it is fundamental to structural and institutional bullying. But why does this inequality lead capitalists to bully workers and the poor—and also other groups, such as consumers, and even other capitalists? The answer has less to do with the psychology of executives than with the structure of the capitalist marketplace.

Capitalism is a ruthlessly competitive system in which all capitalists— whether corporations or individual entrepreneurs—have no choice but to compete furiously. Karl Marx argued that capitalists who do not compete with the ferocity of sharks, going for the kill, will be destroyed by rivals who are committed to the economic battlefield and to winning at all costs. This is an economic version of militarism, and it also mirrors the ethic of the schoolyard bully—dominate or die.

This systemic competition incentivizes even so-called nice or “socially responsible” capitalists to bully workers, consumers, and fellow capitalists. Corporations that do not bully workers—by paying low wages, breaking unions, and constantly harassing those who seek to challenge the power of the companies—will typically be at a competitive disadvantage compared to those that do; this is because the bullying leads to high corporate profits, as in McDonald’s and other fast-food giants, and thus attracts more capital from the financial markets. Investors follow the money, just as sharks follow blood in the water. Corporations that do not bleed their workers by cutting wages and benefits—and intimidating those who challenge their degradation—will tend to see reduced profits and lose out to their competitors in the capital markets. A failure to bully workers into accepting low wages and the loss of other benefits also reduces profits, since increases in wages and benefits are drains on profit. This is a structural reality faced by all capitalists, whatever their personality, and it demonstrates the need to move from a psychological paradigm to one focusing on structural imperatives.

The same logic leads capitalists to compete intensely even with giant rivals in the 1%. The system will not be kind to competitors who are unwilling to threaten, undermine, and destroy their rivals; they are vulnerable to being put out of business. This results in bullying within the capitalist class; it is, we show, both similar to and different from the cross-class bullying of workers that is class warfare. In both cases, the strong must defeat competitive rivals, and they can win only by devouring the weak.

Structural competition in the marketplace encourages other types of capitalist bullying, including bullying of the unemployed, of consumers, and of politicians. These bullying relations, too, are structurally dictated by the marketplace. As on the bully schoolyard, nice guys finish last.

Before moving forward, we must illustrate the generic way in which competition in most capitalist societies leads to the rich (the winners) bullying the poor (the losers). This is particularly true in the United States, where the competition is harsh and the ideology of winners and losers conveyed in a particularly bullying discourse. At least since the nineteenth century, American capitalists have seen the competitive process as a form of social Darwinism, in which the strong overcome the weak and the best triumph. Thus, the rich deserve all their wealth and blessings, whereas the poor deserve their low station and misery. Since the market is seen as a Darwinian selection process, it is only natural and good that the rich—those who have proved their worth—assume control over the society as a whole. The system will not function unless the poor learn that they deserve their fate; workers must be bullied until they embrace this Darwinian view that they are inferior and deserve their fate.

This view emerged in early American Puritanism, where competitive success was seen as a sign of God’s grace. The winners proved themselves a higher order of being, entitled to deference and special power and status. Competitive failure in the markets was, to the Puritans, a sign of being damned, in this life and the next. The degree of loss was a measure of the degree of worthlessness; it justified the winners treating the losers as drags on the social order who had to be controlled and kept in their place. Workers who didn’t accept their inferiority as losers would be bullied until they did so. This sense of inferiority is a “hidden injury of class, the enduring trauma of capital bullying.” This ancient Puritan view has survived in various forms to the present day, with the wealthy winners seeing their success as a sign of virtue—and seeing the poor as losers whose nature is inferior and parasitic. In the 2012 presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney made his famous comment about makers and takers, expressing perfectly his view that the poor were parasites leeching off the wealth created by capitalists like himself. He claimed that 47 percent of Americans were takers, thus condemning much of the population to the status of dependent moochers on the body politic. The implication was not hard to fathom: people in Romney’s class would have to take charge of society and take control of the takers, through political and sometimes coercive means, in order to maintain a prosperous and virtuous social order. They had to bully the takers to embrace the view that the makers deserved to be in power and legitimately claimed their wealth.

This is, of course, a bullying view of society, in which the winners of capitalist competition must assume control over the losers to preserve social well-being. To offer help to the losers—through welfare or other social benefits—is to divert resources to the undeserving and encourage their dependency and parasitism. Politically, this leads to austerity policies that are designed to be punitive to the poor and maintain the “natural” and “fair” unequal order that the competitive selective process has established. All people deserve their positions in the hierarchy, and those who question this primal assumption must be bullied into accepting their inferiority. Austerity has become the contemporary policy most clearly symbolizing capitalist bullying, in which the worthy rich threaten and withhold benefits from the unworthy masses, who in turn recognize their own inferiority.

This bullying perspective was articulated lucidly by the writer Ayn Rand, who turned it into a broad philosophy about the morality of capitalism. Rand divided the population into the strong and the weak, the worthy and the unworthy, the productive or “creative” and the moochers. The virtue of capitalism was that the free, competitive market provided a sure way of distinguishing these two orders of people, and it ensured that the worthy would triumph over the unworthy, the makers over the takers. To intervene and seek to reverse that order by helping the losers was immoral and would lead to social decline. Society thrived only when it allowed—indeed forced—the strong to dominate the weak in the Darwinian world, structured and managed through the market.

Rand is useful because she so clearly described the bullying philosophy and practices that govern US capitalism and its basic social Darwinism. The idea that the strong must dominate the weak is central to the schoolyard bully. The bully is strong and a winner and therefore entitled to control the weak, who are seen as sissies, cowards, and losers. The weak must accept the definition of themselves as inferior. The bullies in school essentially enforce their own austerity on the out-crowd—the loser kids deserve the humiliation, injury, and ostracism administered by the winner kids in the in-crowd.

Bullying for Profit: Robber Barons Show How to Bully Workers and Make a Mint

In 1892, one of the most famous American strikes took place at a Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Andrew Carnegie had been known as one of the less ruthless tycoons of the era, but when the union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, organized a strike at the Homestead plant to increase wages, Carnegie decided to break their will and destroy the union for good. Before things were over, workers were threatened and attacked, and some were even killed; proud workers who asserted their right to earn a living wage and enjoy basic American rights were ruthlessly bullied into submission and defeat. The Homestead tragedy is an iconic symbol of capitalist bullying, whereby, in the name of property rights, profits, and prosperity, employers threaten and harm workers who seek a degree of workplace power and decent wages.

As early as 1889, the union had effectively taken over the plant and established work rules to limit management’s absolute power to control every detail of the work. A series of negotiations ensued, and Carnegie, who had nominally accepted unions, decided enough was enough. He instructed his man on the scene, Henry Clay Frick, to lock out the workers. Frick sealed the plant, built a high barbed wire fence, installed cannons capable of spraying boiling liquid, and turned the site into an armed camp.

On July 20, 1892, the Strike Committee resisted the intense bullying pressure that Carnegie and Frick imposed, issuing this defiant proclamation:

“It is against public policy and subversive of the fundamental principles of American liberty that a whole community of workers should be denied employment or suffer any other social detriment on account of membership in a church, a political party or a trade union; that it is our duty as American citizens to resist by every legal and ordinary means the unconstitutional, anarchic and revolutionary policy of the Carnegie Company, which seems to evince a contempt [for] public and private interests and a disdain [for] the public conscience (commemorated on a plaque at the pumphouse of the plant).”

Such open resistance by the bullied was unacceptable. Frick responded by calling in the Pinkerton guards, an armed private security service that would attack the striking workers while helping bring in new, nonunion employees. Fighting broke out when workers refused to leave, and several of them were shot dead. As the fighting continued over the next few days, the union tried to defuse the situation, but Carnegie and Frick were not ready to concede anything. They turned to Pennsylvania’s governor, Robert E. Pattison, a politician who had been elected as part of the Carnegie political machine and was in no mood to tolerate workers confronting his corporate patron. The governor immediately ordered 4,000 soldiers to surround the plant—and within a day, the strikers were dispersed. Some of them were bayoneted to death by state militiamen.

The strike ended, and the plant reopened with nonunion workers. The union collapsed. The consequences were disastrous for workers across America. In the next several years, Carnegie and his fellow robber barons destroyed unions at steel and other plants across the country. By 1900, there was no unionized steel plant left in Pennsylvania, and the labor movement was effectively destroyed.

Homestead is a symbol of the capital bullying that has kept workers weak and intimidated up to the present day. Carnegie called himself a pacifist and had been seen, as noted earlier, as the most compassionate of the robber barons. He had given hundreds of millions of dollars (billions in today’s money) to build public schools and libraries, and he so opposed the expansion of the American militaristic empire that he offered to pay $20 million to “free” the Philippines. But the crisis at Homestead proved that wages and profits require a bullying system that keeps workers disorganized and submissive, with military force being used when necessary. This is true whatever the personality of the managers, with Carnegie exemplifying a “benign” capitalist pulled by the imperatives of market competition into bullying. The regime change of the New Deal led to a peak of about 36 percent of US workers being organized in unions, yet the Reagan revolution decades later resurrected the work Carnegie and the other robber barons began; as of 2014, some 94 percent of private sector workers had no union.

The minimum wage workers at Burger King and other fast-food companies, as well as at huge businesses such as Walmart, are struggling to create a new labor movement to help prevent the return of Gilded Age conditions. They are beginning to see that without the countervailing power of unions, corporate bullying—keeping wages low and workers submissive— will never end and that American workers will be like the bullied weak kids in the schoolyard. Corporate employment in capitalist societies creates latent or active bullying against all employees, including unionized ones. To work in America is to inevitably experience substantial structural bullying, and those on the lower end of the totem pole suffer the most and yet somehow must learn to view it as a fair situation—much like the kids who are far down on the totem pole of power and “coolness” in school.

Reproduced with permission of the University Press of Kansas, Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society by Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass.

Innocent Lives Lost in the Post-9/11 Wars

Nick McDonell Counts the Innocent Lives Lost in the Post-9/11 Wars

IDEAS From Time Magazine

Matt Gallagher is the author of the novel Youngblood, a finalist for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Conflict journalism tends to attract a type: seekers willing to risk a violent, premature death and clean worldview in the pursuit of something as amorphous and unknowable as “truth.” Reconciling the power of bearing witness with the futility of the same takes a strange comfort with ambiguity. The pursuit for truth in wartime is fraught on its best days. On its worst, there’s nothing but darkness.

Nick McDonell has spent the past decade going in and out of war zones across the Middle East. He’s a conflict journo, through and through, with a background interesting in a whole different way—he began his career as a teenage novelist who wrote about privileged Manhattan youth. He’s found a lot of darkness there, but also something else, something much more important yet so often dismissed by an American society numb to foreign war: life. The everyday lives of Afghans and Iraqis caught up in that war, a war that is anything but foreign to them.

These civilians – we called them “locals” in the Army, a bit dehumanizing, perhaps, though far better than some alternatives – often serve as backdrops in contemporary war literature. McDonell brings them to the forefront in his dark and electric new book, The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars.

The Bodies in Person braids together personal testimonies from survivors of our post-9/11 wars (generating what McDonell calls “the power of specificity”) with his own journey through the byzantine American military bureaucracy to find an answer to a very simple question: just how many innocents is it okay to kill while pursuing enemy? It’s both a legal and moral query, and one to chew over like a piece of rotten fruit. But chew it over we must. Part-Dispatches odyssey, part-Behind the Beautiful Forevers exploration of justice and inequality, the book works because of McDonell’s restraint. He doesn’t condemn. But he also refuses to equivocate. He shows, and tells. And shows and tells. And shows. And tells. Until it hurts.

A subject like this needs to. What’s a little mental anguish in the face of so much ruin?

The Bodies in Person grew from a case of a falsified ambush that McDonell blamed himself for, for years. (More on that below.) In its pages, we meet Lieutenant Colonel Rabih Ibrahim Hassan, whose civil defense team carries out the stark, holy work of pulling bodies from the rubble of West Mosul. We go to Sar Baghni, a rural village in Afghanistan, a decade-plus after a massive airstrike still not publicly acknowledged by Coalition Forces. We meet Sara, a darling, pigtailed seven-year old Iraqi girl who becomes collateral damage in a strike on a purported ISIS house across the street. In the aftermath of her death, her father Nazhan can only wonder, “Is one life worth more than another?”

Ahead of his book’s publication, I sat down with McDonell – who is a friend – at a pub in Greenwich Village in New York. Here is an excerpt of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

You begin the book with the line, “I didn’t always think this way.” How did you used to think?

McDonell: The truth is, I didn’t used to think that much about the problems I talk about in this book … I didn’t used to think about the direct relationship between my own country and the lives of everyone else in the rest of the world. It did not occur to me before I started running into it and looking at it, that the things that we do as citizens, here in this country, have very direct, sometimes life-or-death consequences for people elsewhere.

That’s not an idea that sits constantly on my head now as I walk through my life every day. But it’s also an idea that does not dissipate. And once I engaged with that idea, it changed the way I thought about many other things.

McDonell: In the late winter of 2007, I went to Sudan and traveled for a little while around Darfur. I arrived in Baghdad in 2009 and went to Afghanistan later that year. I’ve been back and forth fairly consistently since then, to Afghanistan more so.

I didn’t understand in the beginning how long these wars would go on and I didn’t understand how they sit in a continuum. I didn’t understand the history behind them yet, and for that reason I did not understand that the most important part of being an outsider in them is humility. I admire very much the policymakers, the development thinkers, the writers and the soldiers and anyone who approaches these wars with the idea that change and improvement must be incremental. And, well, humble.

I realized when I started doing this book that if I didn’t speak the languages fluently I was never going to understand what was going on. The epiphany, such as it was, was to record and translate exactly everything that happened around me. To make the kind of book that I wanted to make and to have the understanding the sort of understanding that I was aiming for, I realized that it had to be recordable, able to be played back, so I would be comfortable saying that “This is What Happened” … Often times, the tapes would go through several rounds of translation to be as correct as possible.

What was the spark to explore these murky, ugly questions of collateral damage and “acceptable” civilian casualties? What compelled you to keep coming back to it?

McDonell: Broadly, it was the idea that all of this is being done in my own name … in all of our names, as Americans. There are many people responsible for these wars. To greater and lesser degrees, everyone on the street here who’s an American citizen is responsible. Which is an empowering idea, in a way … the flipside of that is that we also all possess the opportunity to improve the situation, however humbly [we can] through the flawed experiment that is our government.

The particular genesis of this came out of a story that I was trying to report in Baghdad in 2009 that’s partly in the book. I was going to interview a basketball team – I thought – and then didn’t, and was told that this team had been ambushed and killed. This led to me to thinking about responsibility as a reporter and unintended consequences. One of the most interesting things about American foreign policy, to my mind, are unintended consequences, which have the unlovely name “blowback.” Blowback is an interesting way of looking at the foreign policy of this country in my own lifetime … it turned out, those guys on the basketball team not only didn’t get killed, they didn’t exist. When I’d figured that out, the idea of unintended consequences was stuck.

So for seven years you lived with the possibility that you were in part responsible for multiple young people’s deaths. You write that in 2009 you “never saw the bodies, but believed what I was told, and carried the weight of those deaths heavily.” Then, seven years later, you spent months digging into the story only to learn that the man who arranged the meeting with the fictitious team was nothing but a serial liar. Was relief instantaneous? Was anger there?

McDonell: Both of those things. They were combined with an awareness of how big and complex these problems are. That’s a throwaway thing to say – that these wars are complex, that these problems are complex – but it happens to be true. To dive into a single problem like the basketball team is to reveal that complexity. And that was revealed to me big-time. I was so wrong for so long about this thing, and it was such an important thing to me. I carried it, for years.

You end the section about the basketball team with “Our limited ability to know the past only illuminates the profound cruelty of killing innocent people in the name of an unknowable future.” That is the heart of the book, to my mind, along with an idea that comes later: “Killing innocent people to increase our own security is cowardly.” I agree, but I also happen to be an angry war writer. What would you say to someone like the public affairs colonel in the book who might ask, after reading it, “What would you have us do instead?”

McDonell: I would have you not kill innocent people to increase our own security. The binary – the choice – is not a real choice. The idea that these people must be sacrificed to make it worth it, somehow, that is not even a construction anyone makes explicitly. That is the construction that is implicit in the existence of these [casualty cutoff] numbers. As soon as you are able to make that construction explicit, it falls apart.

Many, many soldiers I spoke with were troubled by the idea that you would sacrifice a civilian to achieve an end. I would say most of them, actually. How could you not be? Even the ones who argued for the idea were bothered by it …

There’s a philosopher I reference in the book, Thomas Nagel. He draws it out. He says that while you are not going to escape the possibility of utilitarian calculus in the government of large numbers of people, and decision-making on that scale, nonetheless we must try to maintain our absolutist values as a check on the darker impulses. That’s a fairly complicated way of saying something most people understand very instinctively: you can’t know the future. And so risking someone else’s life for a future you don’t know is not right.

The book’s first scene takes place with Lieutenant Colonel Hassan and his civil defense team in West Mosul. Why lead with them? I found myself struck by both their courage in sector but also their banter in the house as you all take shelter … 

McDonell: Those guys are compelling guys. Many of them are heroic, and therefore inspirational for the rest of the book … the moment the bomb falls, and the moment after it falls, are dramatic, and they seize our attention, I hope. They illustrate tangibly the consequences of this particular way of waging war. Those moments are the pointy end of the problem I’m exploring and the U.S. military is confronting.

As for the civil defense men … there’s a tender banter they have, that you see elsewhere in war writing, too, and it’s always a little surprising to see and hear yourself. There’s almost a feedback loop between the representation of war and the way people wage war. Like Ya Sattar (the Iraqi military pop song and music video). It’s become the de facto army song that Iraqi soldiers sing to in nightclubs, and then sing on the front line. In the video, there’s guys in martial poses, and then in the martial situations, people imitate the guys from the video.

You started your writing career as a teenage novelist, and had published three books by the time you were 25. Why in the world become a war reporter?

McDonell: Initially, I took a class in college called “Complex Humanitarian Emergencies in Africa” taught by Alex de Waal, who’s a scholar of the Horn of Africa. I was fascinated by the class, and by him. So the first piece of long journalism I ever did was following him there and reporting on it …

I keep at it because I care about what’s being done in my name. And I make good friends while I’m there.

two lightly comic and quietly touching tales of magic

For the disenchanted: two lightly comic and quietly touching tales of magic

Michael Dirda Washington Post

How many of us live lives of quiet desperation? To adapt a line from Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” the world goes by our cage and never sees us. Lonely, unhappy, we yearn for romance or personal fulfillment or simple appreciation. Dressed in the “dull null/ Navy I wear to work, and from work and so/ to my bed, so to my grave,” Jarrell’s protagonist desperately cries out, “Change me! change me!”

This ache for transformation runs throughout modern fiction (and life), but takes an unexpected turn in two gently comic and unjustly forgotten British literary fantasies: Stella Benson’s “Living Alone” (1919) and Gerald Bullett’s “Mr. Godly Beside Himself”(1925). In both, the main characters are changed by an encounter with magic.

(Dodo Press)

Benson’s novel begins with a satirical portrait of a World War I committee devoted to good works. Its most prominent member, Lady Arabel Higgins, “had not yet long been a social worker, and had not yet acquired a taste for making fools of the undeserving.” The most important figure for the story, however, is Sarah Brown, a mousy clerical worker who suffers from wretched health and has “seen Love and the Spring only through the glass of a charity office window.” In an observation that will resonate with many Washingtonians, Benson concludes that “when your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of committees you might as well be dead.”

Before this ladies’ sodality can get down to new business, a Stranger comes racing into the room, hides under the table and breathlessly pants “They’re after me.” She is dressed, we are told, in clothes appropriate to “a decayed gentlewoman.” Asked her name, the Stranger declares herself to be Hazeline Snow, later announces that she is really Thelma Bennett Watkins, and later still calls herself Angela. In her bag she carries little packets labeled “Magic.”

The Stranger — whose real name we never learn — turns out to be a somewhat dotty witch, who rides a broomstick called Harold and manages a shop on Mitten Island that specializes in “Happiness and Magic.” Attached to it is a small hostelry called the House of Living Alone. No one pays rent to reside in its monastery-like cells, but one must agree to spend at least 18 hours out of 24 entirely alone.

Sarah Brown decides to move in, soon growing friendly with the only other guest, a young Cockney woman named Peony, who “showed unnatural energy even in repose, and lived as though she had a taxi waiting at the door.” Sarah Brown also comes to know Lady Arabel’s soldier-son Richard, a wizard who shrouds his powers and owns both Living Alone and a farm in Faerie. To reach the latter “you follow the Green Ride through the Enchanted Forest, until you come to the Castle where the Youngest Prince — who rescued one of the Fethersonhaugh girls from a giant and married her — used to live.” The field workers are fairy folk, the overseer a talking dragon.

Much else happens in this short novel, most notably a battle in the clouds between our English witch and a German witch leading an airstrike on London. Following a number of madcap, Keystone Kop-like shenanigans, the book concludes with Sarah Brown sailing to the United States and starting a new life.

In the first chapter of “Mr. Godly Beside Himself” a commonplace, middle-aged businessman is edging toward suicide. Mr. Godly hates the dull routine of his meaningless existence. Above all, his lukewarm but “inconvenient affection” for his wife, Florence, “seemed to him a monstrous folly, a tragic weakness of character, which prevented his seeking and finding, in the ardent eyes of some other woman, that romantic intoxication of the spirit for which he thirsted as parched land thirsts for rain.”

Recently, though, the Mercantile Hope Corp., Ltd., has hired a new typist, Miss Maia M’Gree, with whom Mr. Godly has grown pathetically infatuated: Otherwise conscientious, the marine insurance executive “would have cheerfully sunk every ship on the sea if thereby he could have afforded her a moment’s pleasure.” When Maia sits down for dictation, a bumbling Mr. Godly timidly reveals his hitherto unspoken desires. To his surprise, this stunning young woman seems willing to offer him what he regards as “the impossible.”

“Seems” is the operative word. Following a sinister dinner during which Mr. Godly encounters the typist’s supposed father (who turns out to be a goat-footed satyr), as well as a winged child and two preposterous rival admirers, the enigmatic, nymph-like Maia conducts our hero “over the hills and far away.” As Mr. Godly unsuspectingly crosses into Faerie, he notices a figure virtually identical to himself proceeding in the opposite direction, back toward our world. Soon thereafter Maia disappears. While searching for her, the confused Mr. Godly finds himself caught up in a civil war between Faerie’s two political parties, one favoring the ancient ways of magic and easy love, the other copying the restrictive morals and clothing of the possibly mythical Yewman Beans. He learns much from the crotchety Old Fairy Fumpum and even meets a little boy who might be the child he never had. When Mr. Godly finally rediscovers Maia, naked, glorious, immortally beautiful, she grants him a single kiss.

Meanwhile, back in London, our hero’s fairy doppelganger has been reawakening joy in Florence while sowing chaos at the marine insurance office. What will happen when a somewhat wiser Mr. Godly and his look-alike finally return, as they must, to their respective worlds and their old lives?

Stella Benson (1892-1933) and Gerald Bullett (1893-1958) both wrote a great deal and their work is often tinged with fantasy. Still, their masterpieces, minor but well worth rediscovering, remain these lightly comic and quietly touching fairy tales for the disenchanted. Try one, try both.

LIVING ALONE

By Stella Benson

MR. GODLY BESIDE HIMSELF

By Gerald Bullett

Runaway Slaves Helped Fuel the Civil War

How the Dispute Over Runaway Slaves Helped Fuel the Civil War

Sean Wilentz NY Times

An 1850 print protesting the Fugitive Slave Act.Library of Congress

An 1850 print protesting the Fugitive Slave Act.Library of Congress


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THE WAR BEFORE THE WAR

Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul From the Revolution to the Civil War
By Andrew Delbanco
Illustrated. 453 pp. Penguin Press. $30.

The Civil War began over one basic issue: Was slavery, the ownership of human beings, a legitimate national institution, fixed in national law by the United States Constitution? One half of the country said it was, the other said it was not. The ensuing conflict was the chief instigator of Southern secession, as the secessionists themselves proclaimed. It was thus the chief source of the war that led to slavery’s abolition in the United States.

The struggle over property in slaves focused largely on the fate of the Western territories, but it also inflamed conflicts over the status of fugitive slaves. Pro-slavery Southerners insisted that the federal government was obliged to capture slaves who had escaped to free states and return them to their masters, and thus vindicate the masters’ absolute property rights in humans. Antislavery Northerners, denying that obligation and those supposed rights, saw the fugitives as heroic refugees from bondage, and resisted federal interference fiercely and sometimes violently. Even more than the fights over the territories, Andrew Delbanco asserts in “The War Before the War,” the “dispute over fugitive slaves … launched the final acceleration of sectional estrangement.”

Delbanco, an eminent and prolific scholar of American literature, is well suited to recounting this history, and not just because fugitive slaves have been a subject of American fiction from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison and beyond. A traditional critic in the historicist mode, Delbanco has always thoughtfully rendered the contexts in which his writers wrote. He has offered fresh interpretations not only of how national politics shaped the writing of, say, “Moby-Dick,” but also of what Melville’s tragic awareness and moral ambiguities tell us about the temper of a nation hurtling toward civil war. Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, as well as Melville, Stowe and numerous lesser artists and thinkers of the time, all had pertinent if sometimes cursory and not always pleasing things to say about fugitive slaves. Delbanco’s incisive analyses of their observations — and, just as important, of their failure to observe — form one of his book’s running themes.

Delbanco’s skills as a literary critic also illuminate the contributions fugitive slaves made to the growing antislavery movement. Although the number of fugitives was relatively small — according to an 1850 survey, only about 1,000 per year reached the North — they disproportionally aggravated the sectional divide. In part, Delbanco argues, the runaways were a continuing symbolic insult to the slaveholders’ honor, as their flight contradicted Southern claims that slavery was a benevolent, paternalist institution. (He might have added that the fugitive slave issue became an effective and distracting wedge for pro-slavery extremists, who deployed it to appeal to conservative Northerners by provoking antislavery radicals to violent paroxysms while playing the victim themselves.) More important, scores of fugitive slaves either wrote or dictated their personal experiences in widely read narratives, most famously the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” which awakened Northern whites to the enormity of Southern slavery.

To his credit, Delbanco does not inflate the literary merits of the slave narratives. Often filtered through the sensibilities of collaborating abolitionists, they amounted, Delbanco writes, to “more than propaganda and less than literature.” (Douglass’s narrative was an exception and two or three others were at least partial exceptions.) But there is no denying the sensation they caused amid the political emergencies of the 1840s and 1850s, “giving voice to people long silenced,” and assailing the pro-slavery propaganda that sustained Northern white complacency.

Delbanco’s literary judgments aside, “The War Before the War” is mainly a straightforward account of events that, although familiar to professional historians, ought to be known by anyone who claims to know anything about American history. In 1787, Southern delegates to the federal Constitutional Convention obtained a fugitive slave clause that called for (albeit vaguely) the capture and return of successful runaways. Over the following six decades, persistent slave escapes tested the ramshackle machinery put in place to halt them. In time, alarmed but emboldened Northern free blacks and their white abolitionist allies formed vigilance committees to ward off slavecatchers, while Northern legislatures began approving so-called personal liberty laws to shield the fugitives.

In 1850, responding to slaveholders’ outcries, Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act that strengthened the federal mandate for arresting and returning escapees. In a series of shocking confrontations, antislavery Northerners intervened, either to prevent the capture of fugitives or liberate those already in custody. The uproar of these pitched battles — Delbanco’s war before the war — helped turn Northern moderates into abolitionists and temperate Southerners into fire-eaters; at its height in 1854, it prompted President Franklin Pierce to order 1,500 federal troops to escort a single fugitive in Boston named Anthony Burns back into slavery in Virginia. Enforcing the fugitive slave law put the federal government emphatically on the side of slavery over freedom, which hastened the collapse of the national political system, the rise of the antislavery Republican Party and the coming of the war.

Delbanco aims to balance his antislavery allegiances with caution about the smugness that can come with historical hindsight. In some of his earlier writings, this wariness has led him, by my taste, to be a little too charitable to revisionist interpretations that present the Civil War as a product of political failure, a catastrophe, instigated by malcontents, that a more responsible national leadership could have prevented. This view has arisen from an admixture of pacifism and an insistence on diminishing the moral as well as political disaster of slavery; and it has sometimes led its advocates to demonize the abolitionists as the chief fomenters of an unnecessary war. As Delbanco admires the abolitionists, and slights slavery’s terrors not at all, his occasional revisionist musings seem to stem from his horror at the military slaughterhouse, his wonder at whether it could have been avoided and his wariness of sanctimony, including Yankee sanctimony.

In this book, though, Delbanco sticks to viewing the war as the ghastly but necessary price for abolishing slavery — what Abraham Lincoln described in his Second Inaugural Address as cruel justice meted out by the Almighty. Delbanco now dispels sanctimony differently, by reviving forgotten figures such as the St. Louis minister and educator William Greenleaf Eliot — not coincidentally, T. S. Eliot’s grandfather — who hated slavery but tolerated the fugitive slave law and, until the bitter end, held out hopes for a conciliatory gradual emancipation. History usually plows such people under as equivocators and worse. Delbanco restores to them their moral seriousness in brutally uncertain times.

Over all, Delbanco’s account is accurate as well as vivid (although I wish he hadn’t garbled the details of the adoption of the fugitive slave clause in 1787, the book’s most serious lapse). He makes a strong case for the centrality of the fugitive slaves to the sectional crisis; indeed, by emphasizing the symbolism of the issue, he may have slighted the importance of its political and legal aspects. Without question, he has once again written a valuable book, reflective as well as jarring, concerning the most violent and enduring conflict in American history.

Sean Wilentz teaches at Princeton. His latest book, “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding,” was published in September.