We Shall Overcome Together

Imagine watching a mean-spirited white farmer shoot your father dead in the cotton fields shortly after taking advantage of your mother in the shed. Then imagine, after several years of serving as a household servant, walking away into a world unknown, with few possessions, and walking past two black men hanging from nooses on a public street in Georgia. And somehow you first find a job serving affluent white people and ignoring their comments, and then finding your way to a fancy hotel in Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of your boss, who turned down the opportunity, and after several years finding that your performance leads you to the White House to serve as a new butler. By now it is 1957, Dwight Eisenhower is president, and you are a witness to history as he sends federal troops to Arkansas to enforce desegregation of public schools.

That is only the beginning of the story in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the movie my wife and I saw at the theater last night. The violence, however, is not at all gratuitous but instructive about a piece of American history that many would still prefer to forget or ignore. Cecil Gaines served under presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, and lived long enough to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. His wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, lived almost but not quite long enough. Along the way, they witnessed the assassination of John Kennedy and watched their oldest son, Louis, attend Fisk University in Nashville, where he joined the Freedom Riders—against his father’s wishes—survived numerous encounters with the law before the law finally changed, and suffered the death of their younger son, Charles, in Vietnam. He was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, at a time when Cecil and Louis were estranged as a result of Louis’s involvement in the Black Panthers. Louis eventually returned to school, earned a Master’s degree in political science, ran for Congress, and led protests against apartheid in South Africa. His father finally reconciled with him at that time after retiring from his job during the administration of Ronald Reagan, who opposed sanctions against the South African regime. The movie depicts Reagan, as Cecil announced his retirement, wondering whether he was on the wrong side of history with regard to civil rights. As ever, Gaines tried to avoid answering the question. But he proceeded to reconcile with Louis by joining his protest.

Although the pace of such a biopic is sometimes uneven, as would be the case with most movies whose story stretches over nine decades, it is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile contribution to public understanding of where our nation has been with regard to race relations, and how far it has come, and more importantly, how it got from point A to point B. It shows that division of opinion and perspective was every bit as alive and poignant in black as in white America over those many years. We watch presidents and others change their hearts and minds as a result of experience. It is important, in 2013, to remember that awareness of the full range of the American experience was not as prevalent a century ago as now, that we have not always had 24-hour news, whatever that has contributed, and that for many blacks in the Old South, leaving home was a frightening experience because their world had been so narrow. It took real fear and despair to push people northward.

But the sight of those hanging men, the vicious responses to lunch counter sit-ins, and the burning of freedom buses by robed Klansmen helped provide that impetus, along with the sense that there had to be new opportunities elsewhere. But the violence also has long troubled me in another sense.

As a Christian, I have never, ever found it possible to reconcile such behavior by the southern white community with the so-called Bible Belt affinity for religion. I grew up in Ohio, with some distance from the Old South, but I knew of it even as a teenager, watching television news footage of civil rights protests in Alabama and Mississippi. It just did not add up. I am well aware of the tendency to accept the way things are, and tradition and the status quo are not always bad things. But the sheer brutality required to enforce segregation cannot be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus no matter how hard one tries, no matter how desperately one wants to believe in his own privileges in an oppressive system. There is a willful stubbornness about clinging to such beliefs in the face of all the evidence of their unfairness. I am well aware that these things were not limited to the South, though the lynchings largely were.

The reconciliation of father and son in The Butler is the reconciliation of two very different paths to personal and political liberation, and the discovery that Cecil and Louis, coming from two different times and generations, had more in common in the end than either realized during most of their long estrangement. Their conflict is a reminder to us all of the stress imposed on all of us who struggle to find a path to a better world. Both made meaningful contributions, and both were heroes, each in his own way. If this movie has a core lesson to impart, I believe that is it.

Jim Schwab

Venice and the Prism of History

Piazza San Marco in Venice, with the lion, symbol of St. Mark above the stairwell

Earlier this summer, I noted that my wife and I had visited Venice, Italy, as the result of an invitation in late May at IUAV, the Architectural University of Venice. I was asked to speak at a conference on how climate change is changing cities and affecting city planning.

Because Venice is unique in so many ways, it excited my intellectual curiosity. I pulled together four substantial books from the Chicago Public Library, and I eventually completed reading all of them, though not before we flew to Europe. Stealing time night after night, I indulged my habit—I am an unabashed history buff—until I got the job done. I learned one thing about the history of Venice: There are many ways to write the extensive history of even this one small place. The three books I chose on the history of Venice could not have been more different. One other book I will discuss separately because it involves very recent history, dealing not with Venice’s imperial glory but with its current struggle to defend itself against the rising sea.

I started with Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire, the work of Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University who lives in Evanston, just north of Chicago. I have met and known him for many years, though mostly I have simply shared banquet tables with him at Chicago literary events, and on one occasion presented him with the Society of Midland Authors award for biography—for a book about James Madison. If the combination of Madison and Venice gives you any idea of this man’s intellectual range, you are only beginning to understand his achievements, which are staggering. They include the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 for Lincoln at Gettysburg. Those banquet conversations were perennial reminders of his erudition. He has also written on the subject of church and state, and on the current state of the Roman Catholic Church.

Wills takes the reader on an impressive journey through the history of art in Venice, explaining in remarkable detail the ways in which it reflected the imperial logic of the Venetian experiment. We learn, for starters, that medieval Venetians saw nothing untoward about its merchants slipping into Alexandria in the eighth century, stealing the remains of St. Mark, who was martyred there by a mob in the first century, securing them beneath a load of pork that Muslim inspectors would not touch, and spiriting them back to Venice so that they could fulfill a possibly apocryphal angelic prophecy to the apostle that, “Here you shall find rest.” If God didn’t see fit to end Mark’s life in a city that did not yet exist in his time, the Venetians would see to it themselves, and thereafter use Mark as their shield and symbol—in the form of a lion, an image that most likely never occurred to Mark himself in his entire life.

But imperial ventures must be justified in the public realm, and Venice spared little expense in creating its own mythology, including an improbably precise date in the fifth century when the city was officially born (at a time when Italians of the area were building in the lagoon mostly to protect themselves from marauding Lombards on the mainland). Like most ultimately powerful national enterprises, including our own in the U.S., Venice started small and humble but grew steadily and aggressively and needed a solidly aspirational manifesto to motivate its citizens and intimidate its enemies. Divine sponsorship by St. Mark combined with ruthless mercenary skills to produce a Venice that dominated the seas. But manifestos need all manner of effective communication to maintain their appeal, and artists in service to the state, says Wills, provided that backbone to an unabashedly imperialistic city-state. And empires, Wills reminds us in his closing chapter, are inherently predatory.

One of the most appealing aspects of Wills’s book is the liberal use of plates and drawings, combined with his explications of their significance and meaning, to convey the nature and value of all this art, and the important fact that one should not overlook a single detail in mining these works for their nuances and symbolism.

Wills does not spend much time telling us just how predatory such a venture can become because his primary mission is to explore the use of art in service to such a venture, one that distinguished itself repeatedly from the power of the Pope and felt free to defy him. It takes the story-telling prowess of English historian Roger Crowley to pursue such details. In City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, Crowley, a scholar of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, explores precisely that question—how this small city-state built on wooden pilings into a lagoon at the north end of the Adriatic Sea was able to dominate the Mediterranean for centuries until its power was eclipsed by more westerly nation-states building empires in the New World and the Pacific. This is a nation that ruthlessly suppressed rebellions in maritime colonies like Crete and Cyprus. It is also a state that led Crusaders in 1204 to invade and plunder Constantinople in repeated defiance of Pope Innocent III, who had threatened wholesale excommunication if the Venetians launched an attack on another Christian nation—which they did. They solved all problems of Crusaders’ potential fear of excommunication by simply refusing to share the news of the Pope’s communication on this point. This extraordinary achievement against an internally rotting Byzantine Empire not only did terminal damage that set the stage for the eventual Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, about which there are several worthwhile books (including one by Steven Runciman: The Fall of Constantinople: 1453), but freed Venice to acquire and exploit its maritime colonial holdings in the first place. But, like every other imperial system, this too was destined to collapse due to its own weight and that of unforeseen historical forces. By 1798, Venice was an empty shell of its former republican self and fell easily to Napoleon Bonaparte. From that point forward, including its incorporation into modern Italy under Garibaldi in the 1860s, Venice primarily became the artistic playground of European writers, poets, and painters who found its charms timeless and its environment inspiring.

The culture that now makes Venice a world heritage site is the focus of Joanne M. Ferraro, a professor of history at San Diego State University and the author of Venice: A History of the Floating City. Considerably more academic in tone than the other two, her book explores the social and material life of Venetians from the Middle Ages into the post-Renaissance period. Like Wills, she is less focused on the military and political evolution of Venice as a state than on the soul of its people, which she dissects with analyses of everything from cooking utensils to clothing to the ways in which imported spices altered cuisine and the exposure to ship-borne rats ravaged the city with bubonic and other plagues on a periodic basis. It is a very scholarly work, but for those willing to bear with the writing, a nice balance in some ways to the work of Wills and Crowley, who are definitely more engaging as writers.

As I said at the outset, there is no one way to write the history of a city with such a compelling story. The rise of Venice occurred in a power vacuum, in an age when competing powers were few and when its people had a unique ability to advance the cause of commerce in the midst of a continent dominated by feudalism. In hindsight, the days of such an empire were clearly numbered; between the rise of the Ottomans to the east, and the discoveries of new lands to the west, Venice became an anachronism by the 16th century. Nonetheless, Venice took another century or two to realize that its decline had become irreversible. It has been the fate of every great power in world history to look over its shoulder to see who’s gaining on them.

Jim Schwab

Labor Day Special

This is the first time since creating this blog that I have posted twice in one weekend. I have limited my posts to once a week, for the most part, because of the press of other business. This fall, as has been the case since 2008, that includes teaching a University of Iowa graduate class in the School of Urban and Regional Planning, “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery,” on top of existing duties, including extensive travel, with the American Planning Association. I have not wanted to establish a pace I could not maintain.

But I was struck this morning by a headline column in the Chicago Tribune Business section by Rex W. Huppke, titled, “Don’t demean jobless.” Huppke is generally a very well-balanced, thoughtful writer who does not engage in hyperbole. Nor do I believe he does so today. What he does is excoriate certain politicians for their own hyperbolic fulminations. While I was not present to hear the speeches of which he writes, I am fully inclined to accept the veracity of what he reports.

What he reports is that on August 26, in South Carolina, Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, told supporters there that “more than 100 million Americans . . . . are simply not in the workforce” and compared them to stubborn children who refuse to do their chores. Huppke goes on to note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 11.5 million unemployed Americans, with another million that have dropped out of the labor market. That is a tiny fraction of King’s number, which is nearly one-third of the entire American public, children included.

So where does King get such a number?

The only way to do so is to replicate the kind of colossal statistical assumption committed at one point, before a private audience, by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who noted that about 47 percent of the voters were beholden in some way to public handouts and thus likely to vote for his opponent. How so? You include everyone on a public pension, Social Security, unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. There is no other way to compile such numbers, and Romney was quickly taken to task by numerous commentators at the time for the sheer arrogance that underlay his statement. You might think that the response to his comment might have cured others of such foolishness, but apparently not. Stay-at-home parents? Do your chores! Just got laid off when a factory moved overseas? What’s the matter with you?

Now let’s get serious. I know, that’s a challenge in a political environment that actually honors such discourse. If you want to bank on anecdotal evidence, we all know of people, young and old, who never quite learned how to accept responsibility and are happy to live off others. Some are the children of relatively affluent but overly indulgent parents. I know of such people. But I also know that they are a tiny fraction of the people I know because they represent a tiny fraction of the American public as well, nowhere near the numbers people like Rep. King  toss around in such careless speeches. Then there are millions of elderly, living in whole or in part on Social Security, who simply retired because they had reached a point in their life where they were entitled to claim some benefit from the money they had paid into retirement benefits over decades of work. If they are deadbeats—and they must be included to get to King’s numbers—then so are we all, or at least the vast majority of us. So is my wife, a retired school teacher, one among many slowly but steadily being pushed out of the Chicago Public Schools. Me? Healthy and busy for now, but who knows? The day may come when I have to stop. I could become sick or disabled, as can anyone else. But I will certainly not apologize to the likes of King and Joyce if that day arrives. After all, when their constituents tire of them, or they retired, they will have their congressional pension.

And speaking of Congress, it’s time they start doing the chores for which they are already getting paid. That includes doing some honest research before spouting off.

Jim Schwab

A Dose of Good Judgment

It is easy enough to be cynical about government, especially about its response in a crisis. Millions of Americans express such cynicism on a regular basis, if not daily. It takes a bit more fortitude to look honestly at some of the daunting challenges government must face in events like Hurricane Sandy and to conclude that some things actually get done well, and to conclude that leadership is sometimes successful. It takes a certain depth of judgment to conclude that some of that successful leadership can emerge from moments of governmental self-criticism, examining in some depth what works well and what does not, then drawing conclusions about what steps would solve the problems uncovered.

I have just spent the last two weeks pouring over the entire 200-page length of the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy, produced by the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force since last winter and released on August 19. I would like to have blogged on this topic earlier, but I prefer on this site to be a bit more thorough in my reviews and not simply rush to judgment. I did use some material from the report in an August 20 presentation to the Chicago Metro Section of the American Planning Association, and have been seeking to wrap up work on the initial draft of our planned Planning Advisory Service Report on post-disaster recovery planning. But I wanted to be deliberate in reading the full report with its numerous recommendations, and I had plenty of distractions in the days following its release.

That said, on the Recovery News blog on the APA site, we did at least move to post quickly the link to the document without an extensive review. We thought it import ant to alert those readers to the document’s existence and provide easy access to a download. But here I want to comment a bit more on the underlying approach.

What impresses me most about the Rebuilding Strategy is the attempt to confront honestly the many dilemmas government faces in expediting recovery in the face of such a massive event. Although not at the level of Hurricane Katrina, the numbers are still staggering:

  • 200,000 small business closures due to damage or power outage
  • 72 direct fatalities caused by the storm, and 87 others indirectly connected to the storm
  • $1 billion in gas line repairs in New Jersey
  • Eight flooded tunnels, with average commute time doubled
  • Six hospitals closed by the storm
  • 650,000 homes damaged or destroyed

The litany of statistics could go on, but they are primarily associated with the fact that Sandy was the most urban-oriented natural disaster in a long time, perhaps ever, striking one of the most densely populated areas of the United States—New York and New Jersey. That, in turn, posed unique problems not always associated with hurricanes and floods, namely, that there was far less available land to which people in affected areas could be relocated because most of it was already highly developed. Amid all this, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was sending its new National Disaster Recovery Framework to the region on its maiden voyage, where it could work out all the kinks in a marvelous but still somewhat vague design for managing federal recovery assistance in a region containing one huge city, New York, with more planning and administrative resources than any other municipality in the nation, and a host of small townships and villages across Long Island and the New Jersey coast, many of which have only the most limited governmental capacity and require significant help from the state and federal government to begin to sort things out. This is not a recovery management challenge for the faint of heart.

The task force was the creation of President Obama, who appointed U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan as its chair, with a long list of other federal agencies involved. Part of its task was not only to oversee the entire redevelopment process among the many agencies involved, notably including FEMA, but to develop from the experience recommendations for improvements in future federal efforts of this type. That is the focus of my essay here because that is the focus of the report.

There are numerous recommendations, but I find very few with which I would take serious issue. The task force seems, in my view, to have undertaken a very common sense assessment of the most significant issues connected with recovery, and made sober, sensible recommendations in the vast majority of cases. The first group, which may cause heartburn among climate change deniers but undeniably looks to the future with a keen eye, concerns the need to incorporate sea level rise into future risk assessments. This is a necessity, and the report calls for the development and use of appropriate tools to make such assessments, including NOAA’s rollout earlier this year of a new sea level rise tool. It seems foolhardy to continue to build along vulnerable coastlines in ways that fail to anticipate higher storm surge associated with such climate change impacts. Fiscal conservatism would seem to suggest a more cautious approach, even in the face of the never-ending desire to build on the beach. Yes, I know, such development can be immediately lucrative for some local tax coffers and the associated developers, but there must at some point be some public interest asserted for not imposing upon taxpayers the obligation to bail out such development when the next superstorm threatens. It is important that we rebuild our coastal communities in a more resilient fashion. The report includes, as a matter of fact, some additional recommendations for establishing national infrastructure resilience guidelines. The Sandy supplemental expenditure authorized by Congress totaled more than $60 billion. It is important that we spend such vast sums of money wisely when we rebuild.

It is not possible here to detail all the recommendations made. It is the intent to facilitate connecting readers to the report itself for such detail. But I do want to state that the report covers far more than I have just suggested, including measures for effective and timely data sharing between the states and federal agencies, opportunities for enhancing green infrastructure as part of the recovery, green building standards, and a host of good management suggestions for rebuilding affordable housing and assisting in small business recovery, among other subjects treated at some length. It is not necessary for everyone to read the report in the same depth that I did, but I suggest at least glancing through it to get some knowledgeable impression of its breadth and depth and logic. There are a few things here and there that puzzle me, including a definition of hazard mitigation that seems considerably more limited than the one in use by FEMA. I have asked for an explanation of that but not heard back yet. But by and large, I do think it demonstrates that such a task force can take an honest measure of such a large crisis and actually produce ideas that fit the challenge and may very well move the nation forward in its ability to handle such crises in the future. That is no small achievement.

 

Jim Schwab