Beacon Broadside

After the Fire: Improvements for Some Workers, But Not All

The 1911 Triangle Waist Factory fire elicited an outpouring of sympathy and helped humanize eastern European immigrant industrial workers in the eyes of affluent white Americans, but reforms aimed at bakeries demonized the workers who the country's single most important food. In today's post, Aaron Bobrow-Strain, chair of the Department of Politics at Whitman College and author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, looks at how reforms in food safety did little to help the workers in that industry, and how fear continues to adversely affect workers in today's food chain.

Last weekend, thousands of people attended events commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of Triangle Waist factory fire, which killed 146 young immigrant garment workers just off New York's Washington Square Park. The centennial commemorations, coming at a moment when worker organizing is vilified and under attack across the country, were a chance to remind Americans of the suffering and struggle it took to win basic workplace protections that we take for granted (at least for now).

Child labor laws, workplace safety regulations, sprinkler systems in office buildings, and limits on the length of the work week can all be traced back, at least in part, to the outpouring of anger and sympathy that followed the Triangle fire. As David von Drehle notes in his classic account of the fire and its aftermath, key provisions of the New Deal can even be traced to the tragedy of March 11, 1911. Union workers and non-union workers alike, we all owe a debt to the women who died in the Triangle fire and the labor reformers who took up their cause.

But there is also a lesson in the Triangle fire for millions of Americans who care about working to make a better food system. And, sadly, it is not so inspiring.

After the fire, 400,000 people—almost one in ten New Yorkers—took to the streets, joining a funeral procession for the fallen workers. In the weeks and months that followed, union and upper class social reformers demanded action. Pressure built on the government and businesses to do something to prevent similar tragedies. Charges were filed, blame circulated, and blue ribbon investigatory committees were appointed. Of all the inquiries, the most far-reaching was conducted by the newly created New York Factory Investigating Committee.

Garment factories figured prominently in the Committee's investigations, of course, but the Committee extended its mandate to include other industries—particularly small neighborhood bakeries. This focus might sound a little strange today, when we associate small local bakeries with community, pleasure, and authentic eating. But the reality then was a bit different.

Poorly capitalized and facing cutthroat competition, small immigrant bakeries slashed any cost possible. They stretched and whitened cheap flour with plaster of Paris, borax, ground bones, pipe clay, chalk, alum, and other nefarious compounds. They sold underweight loaves, and they worked laborers as hard as they could. Immigrant bakery employees typically worked 14+ hours a day during the week and 24 hours on Saturday. And they worked underground in damp, super-heated and unventilated cellar bake rooms. As the lyrics of an 1884 union anthem from St. Helen, Oregon, asked, "Full eighteen hours under the ground, Toiling and making bread! Shut off from air and light and sound, Are we alive or dead?"

Beginning in the 1870s, labor organizations were able to bring these abuses to light and raise public outcry about "Slavery in the Baker Shops." Sensational descriptions of unventilated and pestilent cellar bakeries filled local newspapers and echoed through the city's lecture halls. Sanitary inspectors painted pictures of dark, vermin-infested caves with raw sewage dripping from pipes into dough mixing troughs, street dust and horse manure blown onto dough, bread cooling on dirt floors, and whole families sleeping on rag piles in bakeries, alongside their chickens. In the worst cases, bakers worked ankle-deep in water and sewage when storms backed up city drains.

But the outcry was not what unions had hoped for. Rather than rousing sympathy for exploited workers, unions and their allies succeeded in focusing the country's outrage on dirty bread and the dirty hands that made it. By the time of the Triangle fire, small local bakeries were terrifying symbols of physical and social contagion in the minds of middle and upper class consumers.

Thus, although social reformers like Frances Perkins hoped that the tragedy's aftermath would spur changes for immigrant food workers, the Committee had other ideas.

When it came to garment factories and other industrial workplaces, the Committee worked to protect workers. When it came to bakeries, the Committee worked to protect consumers—often at the expense of bakery workers who were consistently reviled as the cause of New York's bread problem, rather than its biggest victims.

With a few exceptions, committee members darted around witnesses' appeals for workplace safety regulations, restating the bakery problem as a question of how best to control immigrant workers. One public health doctor who testified before the committee observed that nearly 100 percent of New York immigrant bakery workers showed signs of tuberculosis, bronchitis, and other lung infections. But the Factory Inspection Committee took this as evidence of bakers' poor hygiene, not unsafe working conditions. As city Health Commissioner Ernst Lederle argued, "cellar bakeries themselves were not the problem," the problem was that "the people were dirty and careless."

Anxiety about small bakeries was a gift to the country's growing number of large industrial bread manufacturers, and they fanned the flames of fear, running advertising about the risk of catching typhus and tuberculosis from immigrant bakery bread. But were small local bakeries really that unsafe for consumers?

Probably not—and this is what makes it interesting. Reading pages of testimony and the reports of sanitary inspectors one thing comes clear: while many other pieces of the American food supply—like milk and meat—were, in fact, threatened by germs, bread was fairly sanitary. Sensationalist reports of contaminated bread were just that: sensationalist.

Affluent New Yorkers were not really anxious about bread, they were anxious about unfamiliar immigrants touching food. The bread coming out of small local bakeries wasn't really a public health threat—at least not a threat to consumers.

But, as Frances Perkins argued at the Factory Investigating Committee hearings, bakeries were a threat to the health of bakery workers. Fixated on a potent combination of fear of germs and fear of immigrants (two things that often go together in America), social reformers had a hard time seeing this, however, even amidst the upwelling of sympathy following the Triangle fire.

While young female immigrant garment workers could be portrayed as helpless innocents (despite their active involvement in strikes and struggles to win rights), "swarthy" male bakery workers could not be allowed to touch the nation's food.

In the end, prompted by the Factory Investigating Committee, New York and jurisdictions around the country passed laws regulating sanitary conditions in small bakeries. The laws, designed to ease consumer anxieties, in some cases made life harder for immigrant bakery workers. For example, many cities passed sanitation regulations making it illegal for workers to sleep in bakeries, but didn't address the 14-18 hour workdays that prompted bakers to grab whatever sleep they could, wherever they could.

What lessons can we draw from this story today? As hard as it's been for American workers to win work place safety protections, it's been harder for food chain workers. It shouldn't be that difficult to see that improving conditions for food workers can only increase the safety of food for consumers, but racialized fears of immigrant hands touching the nation's sustenance often get in the way.

Photo by liberalmind1012 on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

A Year of Celebrations for the Peace Corps

Stanley Meisler is the author of When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years. Meisler was a foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for three decades. He was also deputy director of the Peace Corps’s Office of Evaluation and Research in the mid-1960s. Meisler, who lives in Washington, D.C., has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Smithsonian, and periodically posts news commentaries on his Web site.

March 1st marked the 50th birthday of the Peace Corps, but the anniversary celebrations are continuing for another six months, culminating in September when thousands of former Volunteers descend on Washington to lobby Congress, exchange memories, discuss the future, and party.

In a sense, the half year of celebration parallels the gestation of the Peace Corps 50 years ago. President John F. Kennedy signed the executive order creating the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961. But the Peace Corps was no more than an idea and a hope then. The President gave his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, the enormous and complex assignment of molding a new agency out of an exciting but cloudy idea.

A madcap six months followed. Shriver hired a staff (preferring those who broke the bureaucratic mold like mountain climbers and sea captains), and the team sifted thousands of applications, selected potential Volunteers, rushed them to universities for high-speed training, and dispatched them overseas. The crucial job of persuading foreign presidents and prime ministers and royalty to invite the Volunteers, of cajoling Congress to approve and fund the new agency, and of sustaining the American public’s enthusiasm fell on the charming, irrepressible, idealistic Shriver.

On August 30, the first contingent of Volunteers landed in Ghana in West Africa.  On September 21, Congress passed the Peace Corps Act by overwhelming votes. President Kennedy signed it into law the next day.

There are now more than 200,000 former Peace Corps Volunteers (who prefer to call themselves “returned Volunteers”), and many belong to associations based on where they now live like Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers or where they once served like Friends of Cameroon. These associations are sponsoring celebrations throughout the 50th anniversary year. Some like the early Ghana and Philippines Volunteers have published books about their experiences during the first year of the Peace Corps.

Universities, especially those with large numbers of Peace Corps alumni, have already staged symposiums, exhibitions and ceremonies in honor of the 50th anniversary. These include the University of Michigan, UCLA and the University of Wisconsin. Others joining them in the months ahead include Portland State University, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Bowdoin and Boston College.

In mid-summer, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which celebrates different ethnic cultures for a couple of weeks every year, will honor the Peace Corps this year by featuring crafts, foods, music and drama from groups helped by the Volunteers overseas.

The National Peace Corps Association, the main organization of former Volunteers, usually sponsors a national celebration in September every five years. There was one exception: The 40th anniversary events had to be postponed for a year because of the shock over the terrorism of 9/11 in 2001.

The association has scheduled a varied program in Washington September 21-25 including a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill, a symposium on the future of the Peace Corps, the laying of a wreath at the grave of President Kennedy in Arlington Cemetery, and a formal Gala with television news commentator Chris Matthews (a former Volunteer in Swaziland) as emcee.

Aside from the official activities sponsored by the National Peace Corps Association, there are a host of other events including separate reunions of Volunteers from many of the Peace Corps countries, a luncheon at the Library of Congress honoring Peace Corps authors, and pre-game ceremonies at the baseball park of the Washington Nationals.

It is a full anniversary year.    

View all of the videos included in this post and more in our When the World Calls YouTube Playlist.

The First Fifty Years of the Peace Corps

Stanley Meisler, author of When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years, discusses the Peace Corps, its history, and its diminished presence today. Watch here or on YouTube.

Your Inner "Hysteric" May Just Be Right

Laurie Essig teaches at Middlebury College and is the author of American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards and Our Quest for Perfection. This post originally appeared on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm Blog.

When I was in grad school, in my first incarnation as a Russian Studies type, I made money all summer by working as a tour guide and interpreter. Not a bad gig. Sometimes I could make $5,000 for a few weeks and spend the rest of the summer on research. One summer I was asked to lead a group of nuclear scientists from Chernobyl and Three Mile Island around the TMI plant for a trans-national exchange about the two worst nuclear disasters in history. The money was good, the timing was right, and off to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania I went.

Needless to say, no amount of money could have made that experience worth it.  The nuclear scientists from both sides of the Cold War were an unruly lot. They drank themselves sick every night and tried to push themselves into my hotel room or just stood outside calling my name, demanding that I let them in. During the day they were worse. They forced me to translate more misogynist and homophobic jokes in those few weeks than I had heard in my entire life previously. They mocked my ridiculous “nuclear phobia” as irrational and uninformed. This got much worse after a TMI exec handed me a pretty orange jumpsuit and told me to put it on since they were going into the contaminated area and needed me to translate. He was so shocked when I refused (seriously, radiation exposure was not in my contract) that he insisted I translate to everyone why I wouldn’t do it and then listen to their “rational” explanations as to why I was being “hysterical” and an “idiotic girl.”

I bring up this time of interpreting nuclear disaster because like everyone else I am glued to my screen, watching the disaster take place in Japan and wishing there were something, anything, I could do. This sense of being utterly useless is made more poignant by the fact that I am an academic, a status synonomous with superflous, isolated, and in no way, shape, or form relevant.

As I feel the weight of the Japanese disaster and my isolation in the Ivory Tower this week, I am simultaneously spending an inordinate time at work—my useless, unimportant, irrelevant work—helping to run a conference on feminism. Ah the irony. At the moment of feeling most academic, I am engaged in the seemingly most academic of projects: epistemology and knowledge production through feminist theory.

And yet, I am struck by how feminist theory might have changed both TMI and Chernobyl and how it might still save the United States from a similar nuclear disaster. In both America and in Japan, there has been a willingness to ignore the many groups warning of nuclear catastrophe. For instance, in both countries states and industry have decided to leave spent fuel rods near the reactors and this turns out to be creating a much larger disaster in Japan than had to happen. It might, in the future, happen here. In both the U.S. and Japan, a certain sort of voice was heard saying “don’t worry,” “stop being hysterical,” and “nuclear power is rational.” For instance, over at Slate, William Saletan calls us “nuclear overreactors” and says that fear of nuclear power is not based in fact, but feeling.  According to Saletan, the rational thing to do is study what went wrong and fix it since

If Japan, the United States, or Europe retreats from nuclear power in the face of the current panic, the most likely alternative energy source is fossil fuel. And by any measure, fossil fuel is more dangerous. The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last 40 years, Chernobyl, directly killed 31 people. By comparison, Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

As rational as that seems and as much as we’d all like to have the voice of authority explain to us how to interpret the nuclear disaster happening in Japan, I think feminism might have more important answers to give us.

First and foremost, feminism is a situated knowledge. By that I mean that feminism doesn’t pretend to have a view from above, looking down at the world imagining that some sort of scientific method removes it from power. Indeed, power is everywhere—what we write, how we write it, what we claim to know, and what we claim not to know. What would have happened differently at TMI, at Chernobyl, and in Japan if scientists understood that their knowledge was not perfectly objective, but perfectly human? What would happen if feminist nuclear scientists had insisted that their particular form of knowledge also stopped them from considering nuclear power from other forms of expertise and therefore limited how they imagined everything from how the plants were built to whether building them was a good idea in the first place.

The hubris that is “rational science” is built on those forms of knowledge that claim to be outside the bodies producing that knowledge. This hubris is rooted in gendered (and raced and classed) power. They are “objective” and the rest of us are “biased.” If only nuclear physicists were required—as any feminist theorist is—to consider the limits of knowledge, the very human messiness of its production, and the deadly consequences of dismissing your critics as hysterical.

(A&A illustration derived from photos by Flickr users bagalute and Will Hart)

 

Texas College Converts Football Field to Organic Farm. Is Nothing Sacred?

Mark Winne is the author of Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture.

Highland Hills is one of those down-and-nearly-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large and shining across the hazy north Texas horizon and is linked to this poverty-plagued neighborhood by a seven-mile ribbon of light-rail steel. Ledbetter Avenue crosses the train line passing by vacant buildings, vast stretches of empty parking lots, and a dizzying array of “For Sale,” “For Lease” and “For Jesus” signs. Named for the renowned guitar picker Lead Belly who did time in these parts – both in and out of prison – the Avenue speaks little in the way of promise, but wails the blues of poverty loud and clear.

Like cockroaches in a post-nuclear winter, the neighborhood’s only commercial survivors appear to be pawn shops, Dollar stores, and fast-food joints. One supermarket, a Minyard whose cinder-blocked and windowless façade is about as inviting as the entrance to Stalag 13, is the only retail food source in the several surrounding miles of food desert. But a lifeline from an unlikely source has been tossed Highland Hills’s way by a group of innovative academics. Paul Quinn College, a historically black college that sits just off Interstate 45 at the neighborhood’s eastern edge, is committed to lifting its neighboring community’s physical and economic health with a combination of food, farming, and servant leadership.

There’s no little irony in this partnership. To drive by the Paul Quinn campus is to, well, keep on driving. There are no signature ivy-clad buildings or tree-shaded quads to invite college-shopping families for a leisurely tour. In fact, the first roadside buildings you see are in various states of demolition, reflecting, in part, the plunge in student enrollment from 600 to 100 (it’s now climbed back to 200) and the school’s loss of accreditation (it’s been able recently to earn back probationary status). At first glance anyway, and like the adjoining neighborhood it wants to help, Paul Quinn appears to be hanging on to life by no more than a pea tendril.

But first glances are deceiving, and pea tendrils are stronger than they look. And when your back's to the wall and nobody, even your own government, will help you, you fight like hell, you do the unexpected, and you take risks.

In Paul Quinn’s case, not only did the college take risks, it committed a grievous sin, at least by Texas standards – they terminated their football program and turned their field into an organic farm. Yes, in the shadow of the Super Bowl, with the specter of Tom Landry looking down, and the holy glare of Friday night lights forever dimmed, Paul Quinn ripped up its sacred turf where football cleats once tread, and planted – goalpost to goalpost – peas, lettuce, carrots, strawberries, and more, lots more.

While the roar from the football stands may have subsided, it doesn’t mean that the field has fallen silent. When Andrea Bithell, the farm manager, announced to student and staff volunteers that the kohlrabi had gone in last week, everyone cheered. Showing a group of farm visitors where the corn would be planted later this spring evoked a round of applause from several students who proclaimed their love of its sweet kernels. Indeed the competitive spirit and enthusiasm so much a part of college athletics is hardly lacking at “Food for Good Farm,” the name chosen to denote it’s larger mission of education, community service, and healthy food for all. Sounding more like a coach than a farmer, Andrea uses words like hustle to describe her student crew’s hectic effort to plant and seed the two-acre field. When the volunteers complained about working in the cold and the rain, they were reminded that football games are played in all kinds of weather. Even the plants are forced to compete in a set of 12 trial beds located in the field’s south end zone. Here students will test different growing methods and evaluate their potential financial rate of return.

Elizabeth Wattley, Paul Quinn’s Director of Service Learning, proclaimed with pride that the farm’s tomatoes were better than anything she’d ever bought in a grocery store (she confessed that until her introduction to the farm during its first spring in 2010 she had been afraid of dirt). One student, biology major Symphonie Dawson, giggled when she described the farm’s mascot emblazoned on their t-shirts. “It’s the ‘Fighting Okra,’ an image of the vegetable wearing boxing gloves. We chose it because last year’s okra crop seemed to go on forever.” The “Rah-rah, Go Team, Go!” energy previously reserved for football games has been channeled into the end-zone to end-zone planting of 1,500 strawberry plants, 6,600 onions, a new asparagus bed, and dozens of varieties of vegetables. “The farm is the light of the college,” is the assertive way Elizabeth put it.

For a school that was on the ropes, Paul Quinn has gained a reprieve by discovering the multiple benefits of farming while also turning its attention outward to the community. One prominent need that the farm is already addressing is healthy living and eating, no small concern on today’s college campuses, especially one that is surrounded by a food desert. “Before their work on the farm, students wouldn’t eat carrots unless they were smothered in Ranch dressing,” noted Andrea. But by getting their hands in the dirt – a task that usually took two or three visits to the farm to get past the “yuck” declaration – students started eating carrots right out of the ground, dirt and all. “They actually taste,” said Elizabeth, pausing for a moment to find the right adjective, “carrot-tee.”

By engaging students enrolled in the school’s biology and social entrepreneurship courses, the farm gives scores of people in their late teens and early twenties a chance to get hands-on laboratory experience at the same time they get their hands in the dirt. Even the students who don’t care to venture into the world of bugs and compost get a taste of the farm’s output. Paul Quinn’s cafeteria now offers a monthly feature designed to showcase the farm’s harvest and introduce students to food that is healthy, tasty, and oh-so local.  But Jasmine Wynn, a freshman legal study major, may have summed up the farm’s health benefits best. “I’m a city girl from Dallas, and for me the farm was something new. I liked being out there. I also started getting serious about my diet last year and decided that organic food is better for you. It’s just part of a healthier lifestyle, and I want to stick around for a long time.”

The lack of farming experience or a farm background has not been a deterrent to anyone’s participation, including Paul Quinn’s President Michael J. Sorrell. With public policy and law degrees from Duke University, his stellar resume indicates he has represented American Airlines and Morgan Stanley, served on numerous prestigious commissions including an assignment at the White House, and was selected in 2009 as one of the 10 Best Historically Black College and University presidents.  Notably lacking from Dr. Sorrell’s career synopsis, however, are any agricultural credentials, and ironically, his business achievements include representing top-flight athletes like Utah Jazz All-Star Deron Williams. So why did he eliminate the football program and then have the audacity to convert the field to a farm?

A big part of the answer no doubt lies in his personal commitment to the concept of servant leadership, which, like the farm, he brought to Paul Quinn. With such simple but difficult to live by ideas like putting others before self, leaving the world a better place than you found it, and maintaining a spiritual faithfulness, Dr. Sorrell not only preaches what he practices (he personally teaches a freshman course in servant leadership), he practices what he preaches. And the farm is at the center of that practice.

Isaiah 58: 9-12 gets prominent mention on the College’s website which also touts the school’s Christian underpinnings. The scripture admonishes us (some would say “teaches us”) “to pour yourself out for the hungry…then shall your light rise in the darkness…and you shall be like a watered garden.” Holding aside the self-interest in doing good (and why not?), The Food for Good Farm has its heart and mind set on serving the hardscrabble community that surrounds it. Though a share of the harvest goes to the school’s cafeteria, 10 percent goes to a local food pantry, a sizeable share is also sold on a weekly basis to the community from the field’s former hot dog stand, and just to preserve some historical symmetry, the Dallas Cowboys buy a small share of the farm’s organic veggies, which, if sustained over time, will no doubt catapult “America’s Team” into a Super Bowl.

The school’s initial attempt to solve the community’s food access problem was to offer free land to any supermarket that wanted to build a store there. But there were no takers in a marketplace where nearly 40 percent of the residents lived in poverty. So like in days of old when the nearest general store was 100 miles away, and your only choice was to shoot or grow your dinner, Paul Quinn took to farming. The “adaptive re-use” of the football area has been impressive under Andrea’s and Elizabeth’s leadership. Not only are the hash stripes gone but so are the top four inches of sod and dirt that were replaced by dump truck loads of pure organic matter. Reflecting the program’s absolute commitment to organic farming, there was simply too much distrust of the chemical residues from years of maintaining a perfectly green gridiron. The goalposts remain as do the blocking sled, scoreboard and the entire set of bleachers running the length of both sides of the field. But the former press box is about to be turned into a chicken coop and Elizabeth retains some hope that the bleachers can be retrofitted as a greenhouse. Acres of adjoining and nearly vacant land are already being eyed for farm expansion, especially if a recently applied for federal grant comes through. On the day this reporter visited, a local apiarist was scouting out locations for nearly a dozen beehives. And according to Symphonie, the campus’s coolest guy, a very sharp dresser from Brooklyn, NY, wants to join the “bee program.”

None of this extraordinary progress has come cheaply. Elizabeth estimates that well over $100,000 in capital expenditures have been required to accomplish this conversion, and the on-going operating costs –Andrea is on the payroll half-time as is a variety of students who receive some compensation, especially during the summer season – are only marginally offset by farm sales. An upcoming April fundraiser featuring urban farming rock star Will Allen will hopefully swell the coffers sufficiently to enable the farm to buy its own tractor (it now pays for contract equipment services).

But the rapid development of the farm and the rising fortunes of Paul Quinn College have come with a price – small or large depending on your perspective. The Good Food Farm is the result of a fifty/fifty partnership between the college and PepsiCo’s Food for Good Initiative. The college makes it clear that this is an equal partnership and that PepsiCo has not placed any strings on their giving. While Elizabeth acknowledges some inherent contradictions – yes, Pepsi and other soda manufacturers have contributed more than their fair share of calories to America’s obesity crisis – she feels their support has been entirely above board. Other than cleaning up its tarnished image, one cannot detect either covert or overt sinister motives in PepsiCo’s support. Yet, with 11 teaspoons of sugar in each 12 ounce can of Pepsi-Cola and their ferocious attempt over the years to hook children with their iconic brand, one can’t help but confront the ethical contradictions: where does the greater good lie, and when does one begin to slide down the slippery slope? Though the Bible offers little in the way of guidance when dealing with the PR strategies of modern corporations (obesity, for instance, having not appeared on the world stage for another 2000 years), the college might choose to at least make the topic grist for future classroom discussions.

In the meantime, it’s hard to argue with the outcome of the Paul Quinn/PepsiCo partnership. Texas has one less football field and one more organic farm, clearly a net gain for humanity. Students from the captain of the basketball team to entering freshman are eating better, getting over their aversion to bugs, and getting their hands in the dirt (Symphonie noted that her nails look much healthier now that she regularly jams them into the soil). And the Highland Hills neighborhood is enjoying the health and aesthetic benefits of living adjacent to Dallas’s closest farm.

Under Dr. Sorrell’s able leadership Paul Quinn is rising from the ashes, or should we say compost pile. Elizabeth and Andrea are guiding the growth of what would be considered an ambitious venture at a major university let alone a college as small as Paul Quinn. And the Fighting Okra, well, they just might be on their way to a national championship.

Photo of farm from Snacks.com.

Watch video of the farm under construction at YouTube.

Enter to Win a Dropkick Murphy's CD and Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls

Dropkick Murphys collaborate with Michael Patrick MacDonald to bring the story of Cornelius Larkin to life

Win signed copies of Dropkick Murphys' latest CD Going Out in Style and Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls! See Beacon.org for details.

On March 1, 2011, Dropkick Muphys released their seventh full-length studio album, Going Out In Style. The songs take the band's own personal experiences and family folklore and roll them into the story of one fictional character, Cornelius Larkin. Fueled by fiery riffs and unforgettable choruses, Going Out In Style traces Larkin's journey, whether it's the Irish immigrant's first person account of his own wake or the band's in depth interpretation of his life and lineage throughout the album's lyrics. Ken Casey (lead vocals and bass guitar) reveals, "Cornelius has passed on to the other side, and the album becomes a retrospective of his life. He's one of those guys who immigrated to America at 16, got drafted into the Korean War, married young, had lots of kids, worked hard, and lived a full life rife with different characters, ups and downs, and trials and tribulations. Some of the stories are fictional, but most are odes to our grandparents, friends, and loved ones."

The Dropkicks felt that there was no way to tell a man's whole story in just thirteen songs. In order to round the story out, the band called on their friend, best-selling author Michael Patrick MacDonald (All Souls, Easter Rising). MacDonald wrote an eloquent obituary for Cornelius Larkin in the album's liner notes, along with the beginnings of a more extensive narrative about the album's main character for listeners to delve into. MacDonald became immensely engrossed in the character's development, particularly as Cornelius began to take on elements of MacDonald's own family history. At that point, the story grew into a much longer saga that is available on the band's and MacDonald's websites in conjunction with the album release.

"Collaborating with the Dropkick Murphys is, for me, a family affair," says MacDonald. "Cornelius Larkin represents all that we come from. And this story is about embracing the good, the bad, the ugly and beautiful that we all come from; ultimately learning to work with all of it. Past is truly prelude."

Casey elaborates, "I wrote an outline which began leading to songs. At the same time, I wanted the obituary to have that author's flair, a little more description, a more detailed narrative, and a deeper story. Michael listened to the songs we'd written, and he fleshed out the story and really put a name and a face on the character. It's a new approach and a unique partnership, especially in this day and age. The songs inspire the story, and the story inspires the songs. It's a deep record, and it celebrates a life."

Read "The Resurrection of Cornelius Larkin." And enter to win signed copies of Dropkick Murphys' latest CD Going Out in Style and Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls! See Beacon.org for details.

Postcard from Japan: Disability and Disaster

Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan, and now lives in Tokushima Prefecture, Japan with her husband and two children. She is fiction editor for the popular e-zine Literary Mama, and edits and publishes the literary magazine Yomimono. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a special mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/​Wingspan Fiction Contest. She is the editor of Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

Whenever I case a new location, look at friends' vacation photos, or watch travelogues, I wonder about wheelchair accessibility. I wondered the same thing on Friday afternoon, watching disaster coverage on TV with my eleven-year-old daughter in Japan.

An hour earlier, when I went to pick her and her wheelchair up from school – the school for the deaf, which is housed in an aging four-story building with no elevator – her principal rushed out to my car to tell me to hurry home. He told me that a tsunami warning had been issued for Tokushima Prefecture. Although we live around 500 miles from Miyagi Prefecture, the scene of the greatest devastation, the deaf school is right next to an tributary of the Yoshino River, not far from the inland sea, and our home is just on the other side of the levee. It seemed like a good idea to get away from water.

As I listened to the sirens coming from across the road, warning people to leave the riverside, my daughter and I watched footage of people scrambling up hills as their houses, cars, and livelihoods were washed away. I couldn't help thinking about how hard it would be to get a wheelchair up that hill - and later, seeing photos of the aftermath, of how hard it would be to push through that debris.

It's not especially easy to get around with a wheelchair at the best of times. There are many restaurants near our house that we can no longer visit as a family because they are accessible only by steps. At the local McDonald's, the Happy Meal display blocks the wheelchair ramp, and the toilet stall is too narrow for my daughter and her wheelchair. Last summer, she and I went by train to a small town an hour west of here for the funeral of one of her teachers. In order to board a "barrier-free" train car in Tokushima City (pop. 264,764), I had to carry her wheelchair up steps to the platform. There was no ramp. And of course there were no wheelchair ramps in the little towns we traveled through, nor at our final destination. I found out later that I could have called for assistance in advance, but it seemed like a lot of trouble. Why not just pour a little concrete?

After living in Japan for 23 years, I've come to understand that along with the capacity for endurance, much vaunted by the foreign press these past several days, and a sense of fatalism encompassed by the oft-repeated phrase "shikata ga nai" (it can't be helped), the Japanese can be characterized by an aversion to meiwaku (being a burden) In other words, no one wants to make trouble. This, I believe, more than a sense of shame, is why people with disabilities are sometimes reluctant to venture out, and why people don't like to complain.

Last week, I discussed these issues with a nurse that I've been teaching privately for the past couple of years who is writing a dissertation on accessibility. This week, we talked about the earthquake. She told me that she had grown up in Miyagi, where over a thousand bodies were found in the sea, and that her grandmother's house in Fukushima has been irreparably damaged. She told me that as a nurse, training in Chiba, one of the shakier cities in Japan, she learned to wrap patients in a sling made of sheets for easy transport. (It takes too much time to get patients to wheelchairs and gurneys.) She said that she could do this in three minutes flat.

Japan is arguably the most disaster-ready nation on earth. Earthquake drills are held regularly at my children's schools. Outside my daughter's classroom – and every other classroom - there is a backpack with emergency supplies. My kids – and every other kid in Japan – have padded, fireproof hoods near their desks. This past week, my daughter has been practicing for earthquakes every day. Her teacher tells me that although at first she dawdled, she is getting faster at crawling under her desk. But her classroom is on the first floor of an old building that still bears cracks from the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995.

I am relieved when I see people in wheelchairs among the evacuees on TV. They made it out alive, in spite of their disabilities. Meanwhile, I am reminded of that great law of nature – sometimes only the fittest survive. One woman who escaped the flood confessed that she couldn't save her elderly parents. In order to live, she had to let them go.

Photo by rachelcreative on Flickr. Used under creative commons.

Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities

Steven Hawley makes a powerful argument for why dam removal makes good scientific, economic, and environmental sense—and requires our urgent attention.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Snake River and its wilderness tributaries were once some of the world's greatest salmon rivers. As recently as a half century ago, they retained some of their historic bounty, with millions of fish returning to spawn. Now, due to four federal dams, the salmon population has dropped close to extinction. Efforts at salmon recovery through fish ladders, hatcheries, and even trucking them over the dams have failed.

Steven Hawley, journalist and self-proclaimed "river rat," argues that the best hope for the Snake River lies in dam removal, a solution that pits the power authorities and Army Corps of Engineers against a collection of Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen, and river recreationists. The river's health, as he demonstrates, is closely connected to local economies, fresh water rights, energy independence-and even the health of orca whales in Puget Sound.

The story of the Snake River, its salmon, and its people raises the fundamental questions of who should exercise control over natural resources and which interests should receive highest priority. It also offers surprising counterpoints to the notion of hydropower as a cheap, green, and reliable source of energy, and challenges the wisdom of heavily subsidized water and electricity.

This regional battle is part of an ambitious river restoration movement that stretches across the country from Maine's Kennebec to California's Klamath, and engages citizens from a broad social spectrum. In one successful project, the salmon of Butte Creek rebounded from a paltry fourteen fish to twenty thousand within just a few years of rewilding their river, showing the incredible resiliency of nature when given the slightest chance.

Recovering a Lost River depicts the compelling arguments and actions being made on behalf of salmon by a growing army of river warriors. Their message, persistent but disarmingly simple, is that all salmon need is water in their rivers, and a clear way home.

Listen to an interview with Steven Hawley about attempts to save wild salmon.

Read an excerpt of Recovering a Lost River here or on Scribd.

Recovering a Lost River, Excerpt

Maria Shriver Interviews Mary Oliver

Maria Shriver is guest editor of O Magazine's April Issue, a special Poetry Month edition of the magazine, which features a rare interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. Shriver has long admired Oliver's work, and writes, "I was overjoyed when—after politely declining my invitations for six straight years—Mary finally agreed to read at my annual Women's Conference in California last fall, joining speakers like Michelle Obama and Eve Ensler." 

In the interview, Oliver talks about writing, reading, the loss of her life partner Molly Malone Cook, and finding the courage to speak about personal trauma. Here's a short excerpt from this revealing and delightful discussion:

Maria Shriver: One line of yours I often quote is, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"* What do you think you have done with your one wild and precious life? 
Mary Oliver: I used up a lot of pencils.

Maria Shriver: [Laughs.] 
Mary Oliver: What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy. And I learned to consider my life an amazing gift. Those are the things.

Maria Shriver: You have lived a very unique life, a life really individual and fearless. 
Mary Oliver: Well, it was never a temptation to be swayed from what I wanted to do and how I wanted to live. Even when Molly got ill, I knew what to do. They wanted to take her off to a nursing home, and I said, "Absolutely not." I took her home. That kind of thing is not easy. I used to go out at night with a flashlight and sit on a little bench right outside the house to scribble poems, because I was too busy taking care of her during the day to walk in the woods. 

* The poem referenced here is "Wild Geese," which can be found in New and Selected Poems, Volume One. 

Read the whole interview here. Read more about Mary Oliver and her work at the Mary Oliver website. You can also Like Mary Oliver on Facebook for updates on readings and news. 

(In a bit of Beacon Press trivia, Maria Shriver is the daughter of Sargent Shriver, founder of the Peace Corps and a prominent figure in When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years.)

Summer, 1964. Photo by Molly Malone Cook, from Our World (Beacon Press, 2007).

Selected Beacon Press titles by Mary Oliver 
 A complete list of her books is available on the Mary Oliver website.

Swan

“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” writes Mary Oliver, and certainly joy abounds in her new book of poetry and prose poems. Swan, her twentieth volume, shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly: the acorn that hides within it an entire tree; the wings of the swan like the stretching light of the river; the frogs singing in the shallows; the mockingbird dancing in air. Swan is Oliver’s tribute to “the mortal way” of desiring and living in the world, to which the poet is renowned for having always been “totally loyal.”

Available from: 
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Amazon 
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Barnes and Noble 
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Independent Bookstore

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Evidence

Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” Evidence is a collection of forty-seven new poems on all of Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance she draws from their gifts. Ever grateful for the bounty that is offered to us daily by the natural world, Oliver is attentive to the mysteries it imparts. The arresting beauty she finds in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness permeates her poems. Her newest volume is imbued through and through with that power of nature to, in Oliver’s words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought.”

Available from:
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Amazon
Amazon Kindle
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NOOKbook
Independent Bookstore

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New and Selected Poems, Volume One

When New and Selected Poems, Volume One was originally published in 1992, Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award. In the years since its initial appearance it has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty poems published for the first time in this volume, as well as selections from the poet’s first eight books.

Available from:
Beacon Press
Amazon
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Independent Bookstore

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New and Selected Poems, Volume Two

New and Selected Poems, Volume Two, an anthology of forty-two new poems—an entire volume in itself—and sixty-nine poems hand-picked by Mary Oliver from six of her last eight books, is a major addition to a career in poetry that has spanned nearly five decades. Now recognized as an unparalleled poet of the natural world, Mary Oliver writes with unmatched dexterity and a profound appreciation for the divergence and convergence of all living things.

Available from:
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Amazon
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To Bigotry, No Sanction

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Ph. D., founded and directs The Shalom Center, a prophetic voice in Jewish, multireligious, and American life that brings Jewish and other spiritual thought and practice to bear on seeking peace, pursuing justice, healing the earth, and celebrating community. He edits and writes for its weekly on-line Shalom Report. He is author of many books, including Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays, and co-author of The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The hearings planned by Congressman Peter King to isolate American Muslim communities as hotbeds of terrorism evoke two memories from Jewish life - one from two centuries ago, in America; the other, far more distant, about 35 centuries ago in Egypt:

"Now there arose a new king over Egypt. And he said to his people, "Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly against them, lest they multiply and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and rise up over the land.. So they made the Children of Israel subservient and embittered their lives." (Exodus 1: 10-13)

In the other, it was August 17, 1790. The new Constitution had been in effect barely more than a year, and the Bill of Rights - including the First Amendment's forbidding Congress to invade freedom of religion - had not yet been adopted. But President George Washington had just received a letter from the "Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island," asking what the role of Jews and Judaism would be under the new government.

Washington was no great writer, no great speaker. Yet he wrote back perhaps the most eloquent and ringing words of his life. Though it is clear that his behavior as a slaveholder was ignoble, yet this letter bespoke nobility:

"To bigotry, no sanction;
To persecution, no assistance."

"May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid..."

In the minds of Americans in 1790, "the stock of Abraham" meant the Jewish community. Yet two centuries later, millions of American Muslims also look upon themselves as "the stock of Abraham," and for them Washington's promise is in jeopardy.

Shall American government and society today lean toward Washington's or Pharaoh's vision of society, when it comes to behavior toward American Muslims?

There have been virulent attacks by radio talk "hosts" with millions of listeners against Islam as a religion. Local governments have tried to use zoning laws to prevent the construction of mosques in neighborhoods where churches were warmly welcomed. And where local governments have supported such efforts (as in New York City and the plans to create a Muslim community center/mosque in Lower Manhattan), political vigilantes have whipped up a storm of fear and rage.

Yet the most egregious of these acts of bigotry is the decision by the new chair of the House of Representatives Committee of Homeland Security, Congressman Peter King of Long Island, to hold hearings on American Islam as if it were a hotbed of terrorism.

Leave aside Congressman King's own hypocrisy: He used to support the Irish Republican Army, twin culprits with the Ulster nationalists in terrorizing Northern Ireland for three decades. Leave aside the real question about homeland security: Why is it taking so long to secure American ports against the clandestine import of high explosives, even nuclear weapons, for use against civilians? Leave aside why the Committee is not looking urgently into the network of incitement against "homeland security" that led to the near murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the actual murder of her staff and supporters and a Federal judge - an event that one might think should occupy the thoughts of another Member of Congress.

Leave all that aside, and we still must ask ourselves what it means for the Congress to be inciting bigotry and inviting persecution of an entire religious community.

In two sorts of crises in the past - wars and economic depressions - some Americans have reacted with scapegoating of "the other" and attacks on freedom. These moments include passage of the Alien & Sedition Acts in the 1790s during the half-war with France, the "draft riots" that killed hundreds of Blacks in NYC during the Civil War, the "Red Scare" deportations led by J. Edgar Hoover in 1919, the wave of anti-Semitism during the Great Depression, the imprisonment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the hounding of artists and professors and actors and activists by Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee early in the Cold War.

Afterward, almost all Americans have felt deeply ashamed of these behaviors. But during each episode, some political forces in America benefited from inciting bigotry.

Now, we are in the midst of both mass disemployment and an endless, unwinnable war. For those modern analogues of Pharaoh who rule and support centers of great undemocratic power and wealth while stripping others of public services and servants - teachers, nurses, social workers - indeed, while some lose jobs, homes, lives, and limbs - it is convenient to make scapegoats, just as Pharaoh did.

Indeed, as we look around today we notice that the same political forces that are trying to smash unions, to undermine the health of low-income women by defunding Planned Parenthood, to weaken even the mildest milieux of independent public discussion by defunding NPR, to risk global scorching and the pollution of the drinking water of millions of Americans and the imposition of unprecedented droughts in Russia and unprecedented floods in Pakistan - all for the sake of enormous profits - are the same forces trying to scapegoat Hispanics and Muslims, so as to distract those who are suffering in the present economic, political, and cultural crisis in the US and the world.

This analysis of our situation suggests that addressing bigotry directly is a necessary but not sufficient response to the wave of bigotry. It is crucial to address as well the need to end the endless wars and the economic depression that are exacerbating Americans' sense of insecurity and anxiety that make scapegoating attractive.

In the present American crisis, there is an even more precise political use for anti-Muslim scapegoating. The second most progressive ethnic voting bloc in the US, second only to African-Americans, is the Jewish community. Efforts to use anti-gay or anti-immigrant or anti-abortion rhetoric to divide various progressive blocs and nullify their progressive instincts have been shrugged off by almost all American Jews.

But anti-Muslim bigotry, because it evokes fears of Muslim and Arab hostility to the State of Israel, has won more support in parts of the Jewish community than any of these other forms of bigotry. At the same time, still other parts of the Jewish community have responded out of strong memories of the treatment of Jews as outsiders, pariahs, and traitors, from the time of Pharaoh to the time of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin.

The best of Jewish wisdom, Jewish values, and Jewish historical experience all accord with the best of American wisdom, American values, and American historical experience to teach us that America will "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," as the Constitution promises, if we choose the path of shalom and tzedek -- peace and social justice - and the path of President Washington, not the path of Pharaoh as in our generation it is echoed in Congressman King's diatribes against Islam.

Race, Education, and Democracy

A Simmons College / Beacon Press Lecture and Book Series

In the spring of 2006, Beacon Press and Simmons College inaugurated a lecture and book series that we hope will reinvigorate a crucial national public conversation on race, education, and democracy. Each year, the series will bring to Boston prominent public figures to deliver a series of lectures that will become the basis of a new trade book published by Beacon.

Frederick Douglass, who famously lectured in Boston around the time Beacon Press was founded, called education the “pathway from slavery to freedom.” This new series aims to reestablish in the public imagination that historically felt connection between public education and the possibility of a robust democracy, against the backdrop of the realities of race today in America. We are delighted to have Beverly Daniel Tatum launch the series. We look forward to publishing many equally important books in the seasons to come.

This year's lectures will be held March 15-17 at Simmons College. Get details at Beacon.org.

2011 Lecture Series

Follow Dr. Morrell on twitter.

Dr. Ernest Morrell Powerful Teaching: Towards a Pedagogy for the Global City Dr. Ernest Morrell is associate professor in the Urban Schooling Division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was recently appointed Professor of Arts and Humanities and Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College/Columbia University, positions he will assume July 2011. Drawing on the everyday lives and experiences of urban adolescents, for almost two decades, Dr. Morrell has worked to develop curricula that promote the development of academic literacy and civic engagement. For the past 12 years, working with high school students in Los Angeles, he has served as Director of the Council of Youth Research, a project that involves youth in researching issues in their communities and schools. He has also worked with teachers throughout the country on the infusion of youth media production into standards-based curricula across discipline areas. In an assessment-driven educational climate, Morrell's innovative approach to teaching transforms how teachers reach students as they navigate what it means to be a reader, writer, and engaged citizen in the 21st century. Read more about Dr. Morrell at Beacon.org.

Tucson Festival of Books: Dispatches from the Borderland

Margaret Regan, author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands, will once again appear at the Tucson Festival of Books. Her appearance at the 2010 festival was broadcast on BookTV; you can watch it on YouTube.

Regan will be a panelist in two different sessions. For "Borderlines," Regan will join Phil Caputo, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and a novelist (Crossers),and Thomas Cobb, novelist whose Crazy Heart was turned into the Oscar-winning film, for a session on writing about the border. The panel will meet at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, March 12, in the Catalina Room of the UA Student Union.

Regan will also be speaking at 4 p.m., Saturday, in Gallagher Theater in the UA Student Union, in the session "Dispatches from the Borderlands: Human Rights, Personal Stories." Moderated by journalism professor Jay Rochlin, the panel also includes authors Sam Quinones (Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream) and Kathryn Ferguson, Norma Price and Ted Parks (co-authors of Crossing with the Virgin). The session will be broadcast live by CNN's Book TV.

In December, Regan's book was named a winner in the 2010 Southwest Books of the Year Best Reading competition run by the Friends of the Pima County Public Library. Judge Margaret Loghry noted, "All concerned citizens should read this collection to better understand the issues in the borderlands today." The Unitarian Universalist Church also selected The Death of Josseline as a Common Read, to be read and studied by congregations nationwide.

 

Courtney E. Martin: Reinventing Feminism

TED posted Courtney E. Martin's engaging talk about her generation's brand of feminism. Martin is the author of Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.

It's Not Just Unions: Scott Walker is Busting Planned Parenthood, Too

Today's post is from Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us. Joffe is a professor in the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.

Interested in reading some good books in honor of International Womens Day? Check out our recommended reading at Beacon.org.

"(I am proud of) trying to defund Planned Parenthood and make sure they didn’t have any money, not just for abortion, but money for anything."

This is gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker speaking to Wisconsin Right to Life last April, boasting about his record as a state legislator. And for this constituency, now-Governor Walker has come through. His recently released budget proposes to repeal Wisconsin’s “contraceptive equity” law which stipulates that that health insurance plans in the state that cover prescription drugs cover contraception. The budget also eliminates the state’s participation in the Title V Maternal and Child Health program, which provides family planning services as well as other health services for both men and women, including prostate and cervical cancer screenings. Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin argues that such a move would mean the loss of four million dollars (of both state and federal funds) affecting 50 health centers in the state (PP receives about one quarter of Wisconsin’sTitle V funds).

Scott Walker’s actions in the short time he has been governor (he took office in January) were supposed to serve as a template for the newly energized Republican governors and state legislators who came to power as a result of the November 2010 “shellacking.” That is, please your religious right base by going after birth control services in general and Planned Parenthood in particular, and please economic conservatives by offering generous tax breaks to corporations, massively cutting social programs, and  greatly weakening, if not destroying, public sector unions.

As a fascinated country has seen for the past several weeks, that part about destroying the unions hasn’t played so well.  Walker’s poll numbers are tanking. The Republican leaning Rasmussen poll recently found that nearly 60% of Wisconsin likely voters now disapprove of Walker, with 48% “strongly disapproving.”  Observing Walker’s situation, a number of other Republican governors have backed off from earlier plans to similarly combat public sector unions in their states.

Thus far, however, neither Republicans in Congress or in state houses show signs of retreating from the harsh and increasingly bizarre war they are waging on abortion and contraception. In Congress, Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) voted to defund Planned Parenthood and Title X, a program that funds family planning and other basic reproductive health services, and passed legislation that permits hospitals to deny lifesavingabortions. At the state level, several states are considering legislation that has been interpreted as making the killing of abortion providers “justifiable homicide,” Georgia is considering a “prenatal murder” bill that would make miscarriages  suspect  unless a woman could “prove” she did nothing to cause it,  and S. Dakota has decreed that before a woman can receive an abortion she must first go to a blatantly antiabortion “Crisis Pregnancy Center” for counseling—and then wait three days before seeking an abortion.

But there are signs that the American public is noting with alarm these fanatical measures. Just released data from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press shows a “movement toward a liberal position on abortion.” While much has been made of a 2009 poll that showed the public evenly divided on the question of whether abortion should be legal, Pew reports that “support for legal abortion has recovered” and now stands at 54%, with 39% opposed. Similarly, two recent polls show voter disapproval of the defunding of Planned Parenthood, with particularly strong opposition among women and younger respondents.

Though both the right and the left have tended to treat economic issues, including the fate of labor unions, and reproductive rights as separate phenomena, with two different constituencies, in the real lives of working people, these issues are very much connected. Hardly surprisingly, in difficult economic times people try to control their childbearing. This was true during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it is true today. The Guttmacher Institute released a report, at the height of the current recession  that showed that many women did not feel they could afford another child and that they they were committed to using birth control more consistently. Yet the report also showed that one in four respondents put off a visit to a family planning center because they could not afford it.

It is too soon to know the significance of the poll numbers cited above, or of the nation-wide demonstrations in recent weeks in support of both labor unions and Planned Parenthood. Possibly, though, this political moment may mark a serious pushback against the Right’s extraordinary overreach, since the 2010 election, in its eagerness to abolish both the workplace conditions and health care services needed  by so many.

Photo by mrbula on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons. 

A Tribute to John Hay (1915-2011)

The naturalist and writer John Hay, whom Annie Dillard called, "One of the world's handful of very great nature writers," died February 26 at the age of 95. Beacon Press published three of Hay's books: In the Company of Light, A Beginner's Faith in Things Unseen, and a 40th anniversary edition of his first book, The Run. Hay was the author of eighteen books over a career that spanned half a century. He was co-founder of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and spent much of his life in Brewster, MA, where he eventually acquired 50 acres of land which is now under conservation protection. He was also the subject of David Gessner's book The Prophet of Dry Hill. 

David Gessner is also the author of Soaring with Fidel, Sick of Nature, and The Return of the Osprey. Gessner's next book, My Green Manifesto, will be published by Milkweed Editions this summer. He blogs at Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour.

The great writer, John Hay, died on Saturday in Bremen, Maine. I have not yet had time to organize my thoughts but here are some sentences adapted from my book about John:

If you were to suggest to the fishermen and carpenters who had lived down the street from John Hay that he was one of the great artists and original thinkers of the latter part of the 20th century you could forgive them if they rolled their eyes. The old guy in the baseball cap, baggy khakis, and flannel shirt who grumbled about traffic and tourists didn’t exactly look the part of environmental prophet. Just another salty Cape Cod crank.

On the other hand, while he lived on Dry Hill more than a few neighbors penetrated his disguise. I once had a conversation with his gardener, Jess, who off-handedly mentioned John’s work.

“I didn’t know he was a writer at first, and I’m glad,” Jess said. “If I knew how brilliant he was I wouldn’t have been able to talk to him.”

Jess’s opinion is more or less in line with that of environmental critics. The editors ofThe Norton Book of Nature Writingcall John Hay “one of the most innovative and daring of contemporary writers in the genre.” James Dickey, the poet and author ofDeliverance, went a little further: “If all of humanity were to read Mr. Hay’s work, it is not unlikely that Darwin and St. Francis of Assisi would come back and join hands.”

No matter that the octogenarians who frequent the East Dennis post office, where John used to mail his packages, might frown at the sight of those two dead men holding hands, and no matter that not quite all of humanity has read John Hay’s work. The point is that the old man who lived up on Dry Hill had, unbeknownst to most of his neighbors, played a significant role in the development of American environmental thought and literature.

Another thing the neighbors didn’t know was that John Hay was born a child of privilege in 1915, and grew up roaming the wilds of Manhattan. The names of his predecessors were sprinkled, not just through the society pages, but through the history books. For instance, his grandfather, with whom he shared his name, was an elegant diplomat, and popular poet, who served as Lincoln’s personal secretary during the civil war and, forty years later, as Secretary of State under Teddy Roosevelt. A refined, charming and dapper little man-- he stood 5’2″-- John Milton Hay had been equally at ease while negotiating for the Panama Canal as when composing a sonnet. Near the end of his life, Hay’s wit and elegance served as subtle counterpoints to Roosevelt’s brash boisterousness.

The diplomat’s son, Clarence Hay, worked as a curator of archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Throughout John’s childhood Clarence was often heading down for archaeological expeditions to the Yucatan, and John grew up fascinated by the Mayan artifacts his father brought home, and by the paintings of birds and the stuffed snowy owl in the hallways of the Hays’ summer home in Lake Sunapee. The Sunapee land had been purchased by his famous grandfather, and it was in the woods around that New Hampshire lake that John first experienced the mystery of nature. He would later write that those days were his earliest glimpse behind the veil at another type of life, a wild life different from the proper one he’d learned in the city. In Sunapee he piloted the lake in the houseboat he made, with his pet goat and airedale as first mates, and he camped along the shore and stared up at the stars, and listened to Indian stories. At night he read J. Fenimore Cooper and heard rumors of wolves, and in this time before television, his love of books grew, rivalling his love of the woods. “We didn’t have radio for a long time and obviously we didn’t have television,” he said once. “So I read a great deal. It was books, books, books.” John was shipped off to prep school as a young man, and later to Harvard. His love of books deepened, especially of poetry, while he almost failed math. He was a dreamy adolescent, nicknamed “Foggy Hay” at school. It would come as a surprise to everyone in the Hay family when John eventually ended up writing about science.

John would write in the environmental tradition of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, of course, was the fountainhead of this tradition, and it would be hyperbolic to suggest that John was as original and germinative as his great predecessor. But John both preserved and expanded Thoreauvian thought. He was both a radical and a traditionalist, going back to old ways, grounded ways, but simultaneously, using empathy to throw himself into new worlds beyond the human world.

And just as important, to me at least, was that John lived a life that kept time with a different type of clock. A life in tune with more elemental movements and ritual, a life of ceremony. I now live a thousand miles away from Cape Cod, on the edge of a city full of strip malls and Southern accents. But I also still live on the edge of the ocean, a place that, if not my home beach, is a beach nonetheless. It is in the ocean that I see possibilities and can begin to imagine making a life here. Every day I try to get out to the edge of the sea, confident that this will change my life in ways I can’t quite put into words. In spring and fall I watch the migrations, hoping these movements will become part of me, part of my blood. I hope to follow the year’s journey, absorbing its rhythms. I dream of living an elemental life.

Most often I fail.

Gessner and Hay at the herring run.

But I try. And while the concept of learning from elders is hopelessly outdated, I am happy to have had a predecessor, an exemplar, someone who walked out ahead to show me it can be done. Not a perfect character-- hardly. But someone who had made a journey out of his time on earth. Someone who had, in his own words, tried to “go farther afield, from one man’s center.”

* * *

“People connect to the land as their imaginations allow,” writes William Least Heat Moon. John’s imagination allowed for no less than a lifelong, passionate love affair with the world. When I think of John now, with some distance, I no longer shy away from calling him a “prophet.” Granted prophecy is a big word, a grand archaic word that understandably scares people off. But it is also, I’ve come to believe, the right word. Here is a man who had his vision and then spent his life trying to articulate that vision. Part of that articulation was attempting to convince people that the things they valued were not the things of greatest value, that there was a whole secret life available to them if they only re-ordered their priorities. In this sense John fit all three major definitions of a prophet: he had had his divine vision, he was a leader of a movement, and he presented a vision of the future.

That vision–of cancerous development and growth, of the disregard for and uprooting of local people, animals, and places–was, like most prophetic visions, somewhat apocalyptic. This is nothing new. Apocalyptic language has always been a tool of the prophets: descriptions of the apocalypse were made in hopes of preventing it. “We create images of doom to avert doom,” wrote Lawrence Buell, “that is the strategy of the jeremiad.” Or, as E.B. White put it: “A seer a day keeps Armageddon away.” Of course foresight– that isvision--is the prophet’s first tool and John began issuing warnings about the world before anyone knew what the hell “ecology” was. This half-blind old man saw clearly both where we had come from and where we were going, and he didn’t like it one bit.

Like the biblical prophets, John Hay went to his hill to find his vision, and, sure enough, certain universal truths were revealed to him on his mountaintop. And like the prophets he tried to deliver this unwavering vision to an often unbelieving and uninterested public. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” said Thoreau. John believed that the best human lives are those connected to wildness on an intimate and daily basis, and that this basis affects human lives in ways they can’t understand or explain. Was it any surprise that wild animals had larger brains–and more creative responses to the world–than their domestic cousins?

John had spent a lifetime fighting to both live inside and preserve that wildness, and it was often a depressing fight. He watched the things he loved about Cape Cod be defiled, and watched the rest of the country head in the same direction. Though people paid lip service to loving nature, they just didn’t seem to take its destructionpersonallyenough. Worse John had been consistently ignored and misunderstood, labelled impractical and airy and snobbish. This hurt, but it didn’t stop him. He had, in fact, become more and more passionate in his belief in the wild.

Jeremiah, for one, knew the impossibility of trying to deliver a message of cataclysm in an affluent time and, like John, was often greeted with some variant of the question “What’s the fuss?” Trying to describe just what the fuss was was central to John’s life work. Jeremiah himself had been labeled a traitor, and there was no doubt there were some people these days who would label John as un-American for his consistent belief that less was better than more. But even those not inclined to thinking in terms of the apocalypse couldn’t help but see that something close to cataclysmic seemed to be coming: world-wide extinctions, global warming, rampant habitat loss. To change any of that John believed we had to first enact the most rigorous transformation of all: changing our own minds.

* * *

John Hay's studio.

John’s ideas, I believe now, were–andare–subtly radical. Primary among these ideas, the one imbedded everywhere in his work, is the notion that human beings may not be so central to the world after all. There are human consequences, of course, to seeing the world as more than human-centered. These involve radical shifts in what one values in this life. If what truly matters is respecting the earth and preserving the diversity of ecosystems, then it follows that traditional ways of seeing land for what one can “get” from it are discarded.

These ideas are of course antithetical to a culture that always keeps half an eye cocked toward the mirror; to a people who spend their time primping and fixing their hair. For fifty years John insisted that we should be looking, not in the mirror, but out and through the window. By focusing always inward and seeing the outer world only through our own inner constructs, the eyes are kept prisoner to the brain. And, as it turns out, the brain is a lonely place. By never making the leap out of self we are left isolated, cold and blind. But ultimately, if we follow our better instincts, we can climb right out the window, and it is there–outside of ourselves–that we will find things that will expand our definitions of ourselves.

Unlike most of us, John spent his days training himself to look outward. In fact it is this outward focus, this still-active love affair with the world not the self, that most defined John Hay.

“Strange to have come through the whole century and find that the most interesting thing is the birds,” John said to me during our very first walk together. “Or maybe it’s just the human mind is more interesting when focusing on something other than itself.”

In this insistence on looking outward John Hay ran entirely against the prevailing culture. He didn’t believe that salvation of the self was to be found within the self. In fact he saw this proposition, one of our culture’s central tenets, as essentially neurotic and crippling. “The answers to life can’t be found by trying to solve things in our brains,” he said, “But by stepping out of our brains entirely.” We can expand ourselves only by looking outward toward the source, toward the mystery, and by joining the ritual of the natural year we can join that mystery. The good news is that the reflections we see of ourselves in our beloved places will be cleaner ones than the ones we see in a mirror. By focusing inward without reference to the world we make islands of ourselves, but by looking outward we re-invent and expand ourselves. I had come to John Hay to write a book about him, not to seek “lessons.” But if there is one thing I took with me from his home on Dry Hill it is this: inwardness only means so much. What we need to learn is to get out of our own way. Yes, inward tunnelling counts for something and something important, but there is so much more outside. If we look for it we will find that there is a whole world waiting for us. And it is in that world that we, not seeking it, will find a sort of salvation.

Read John Hay's Obituary on Wicked Local.

Fighting Fear in Wisconsin

Today's post is from Kim E. Nielsen, an award-winning educator, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities We the People stipend, a Fulbright lecturer, the author of many journal articles, and frequent public speaker. She is the author of Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller. She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin where she is Professor of History & Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

I'm afraid to turn on my television. Really, it terrifies me. This is not based on a fear of alien mind-melt, a fear of governmental snooping, or a fear of the little people who live inside the box (no flat screen at my house).

I fear clicking the remote control because I live in Wisconsin. Click: teachers are sucking the state dry. Click: public employees are lazy bums. Click: those guys who plow my street again and again and again (and now once more) are just selfish. Click: collective bargaining rights, the right to help shape our own workplaces, are an unnecessary privilege exploited by the spoiled. Click: it's just petty of people with disabilities to think transportation is necessary to get to work. Click: let's pay everyone as little as we get can get away with. Click: education, the essential core of any democratic society, the best grounding for healthy human beings, the cause to which I've dedicated most of my waking hours since I was five years old, doesn't have to be that good and really isn't very important. Mediocrity, indeed, is just fine.

Really, I'm terrified to turn on my television.

Fear, however, is not helping me out. Fear doesn't make for happy people, fear doesn't lead to quality and transformative teaching, fear hinders parenting, and fear certainly obstructs good policy decisions. For my college students, fear is not a place from which good learning happens. Fear is just no fun. And because I'm a historian, and it's secret requirement of the Ph.D. that I quote FDR (don't tell anyone that I told you), "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Courage, I tell myself, courage despite fear. Courage to spite fear. At 8 a.m. I will walk before a classroom of students. I will convey to them that they can transform their lives, their family's lives, and their world for the better—and that an education is their tool to do so. That is, of course, why they are in my classroom.

My students, it turns out, have plenty of courage. Most of my students are of the first generation in their families to attend college. They fear not finding employment. They fear that their parents will lose the family home. They fear the loss, or the continued absence of, healthcare. They fear sitting in the classroom while being haunted by memories of rape, of military combat, of things they can't identify. They fear each tuition bill. They fear, more than anything, the loss of hope. They, however, are brave enough to show up in my classroom. And they need, they need, they need me to have hope.

Professor Nielsen, one announces proudly, I got a B on my biology exam. Another student emails me after class, thank you for your concern and I'm sorry I walked out of class but too many of my friends have been raped and I can't even think about these issues. Professor, says a particularly quiet young man, I worked harder on this paper than I've ever worked before. Another student stops by my office… for no stated reason at all, for the third time. One boisterous student who calls me Dr. Kim is thrilled because she just spoke to a state legislator for the very first time. Another cries because her mom attempted suicide, and at nineteen she has to care for her younger brother. One amazed student tells me over and over again that she just can't believe how cool the suffragist Alice Paul was. Amidst all of this, they bolster their courage, they try to study, and they seek meaning.

This morning I woke dispirited, but I need courage for my students and I need courage for me.

Over the last several weeks I've encountered tens of thousands of courageous Wisconsinites. A 12 year old gave her first public speech with a bullhorn, before 5,000 people, in the state capitol rotunda. I love my teachers, she proclaimed, and they deserve more money—not less. Off duty police officers, with signs proclaiming "cops for labor," handed out water to the chanting protesters circling my state capitol as we thanked them for their presence. A wonderful, gruff retired steelworker told me that he didn't think he'd have lived this long without the basic protections his union provides. I laughed along with an animated high school senior, who refused to be cowed by a Republican legislator who threatened to call her truancy officer after she'd spent a day protesting peacefully. She stood proud, proud of herself and of her many teachers who had laughed and hugged while insisting that they deserved the basic human right of collective bargaining. A man who cleans public buildings shows up at our local rallies and sings to the protesters. Assembly Representative Peter Barca, who guaranteed his constituents continued access to him by moving his desk to the cold Wisconsin outdoors after Governor Scott Walker locked the capitol building despite a court order, makes me smile and cheer (send that man wool socks). And the Wisconsin 14 –those wonderful, courageous state Democratic senators who reportedly are braving the wilds of Illinois—are my heroes (especially Dave Hansen, my local Green Bay senator).

The labor rights of the people of Wisconsin, and of the rest of the nation, matter and their loss will impact all of us. My students and the quality of their education matter. The man who plows my street matters. The disability activists who staged a sit-in at Wisconsin Republican Party headquarters matter. Frankly, I and my colleagues matter. And it is unconscionably immoral to have the goal of paying people as little as one possibly can. Most importantly, however, the emerging labor alliance of nurses, social workers, snow plow drivers, fire fighters, college professors, electricians, janitors, ship builders, teachers, and police officers are pivotal to the future economic and social health of this nation. We are the future—not the Koch brothers and not Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker.

Photo by Mark Riechers, shared under Creative Commons. See original.

Rashid Khalidi: "The Arab Spring"

Rashid Khalidi, author of Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, and Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, writes about events across the Arab world in the current issue of The Nation. Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.

Suddenly, to be an Arab has become a good thing. People all over the Arab world feel a sense of pride in shaking off decades of cowed passivity under dictatorships that ruled with no deference to popular wishes. And it has become respectable in the West as well. Egypt is now thought of as an exciting and progressive place; its people’s expressions of solidarity are welcomed by demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin; and its bright young activists are seen as models for a new kind of twenty-first-century mobilization. Events in the Arab world are being covered by the Western media more extensively than ever before and are being talked about positively in a fashion that is unprecedented. Before, when anything Muslim or Middle Eastern or Arab was reported on, it was almost always with a heavy negative connotation. Now, during this Arab spring, this has ceased to be the case. An area that was a byword for political stagnation is witnessing a rapid transformation that has caught the attention of the world.

Three things should be said about this sea change in perceptions about Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners. The first is that it shows how superficial, and how false, were most Western media images of this region. Virtually all we heard about were the ubiquitous terrorists, the omnipresent bearded radicals and their veiled companions trying to impose Sharia and the corrupt, brutal despots who were the only option for control of such undesirables. In US government-speak, faithfully repeated by the mainstream media, most of that corruption and brutality was airbrushed out through the use of mendacious terms like “moderates” (i.e., those who do and say what we want). That locution, and the one used to denigrate the people of the region, “the Arab street,” should now be permanently retired.

Read the rest of the article on TheNation.com

The Feel of Peace in Sri Lanka

Today's post is by Adele Barker, author of Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka. She has taught at the universities of Arizona and Washington. Most recently, she received a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to teach and write in Sri Lanka.

The war in Sri Lanka has been over for almost two years. I've been back to the island twice in that time. My most recent trip took me up to Trincomalee on the northeast coast this past December where I was doing some volunteer work at a home for girls. I also wanted to see how the city and its people were putting the pieces of their lives back together again since war's end. Government propaganda aside, no one on this island believes that this is going to be an easy process. Ethnic distrust and hatreds between the Tamils and the Sinhalese; 300,000 civilians forced into IDP camps after the war; families separated from one another; civilians used as human shields in the last days of the conflict-- these are memories that are not dislodged easily.

This was my second trip to Trincomalee. My son and I had been there during a short-lived cease fire in 2002 and had witnessed a city nailed shut by war. I remember how silent it was. This December, Trinco, as it is known here, had shaken off war's stupor and come to life again. The sounds of buses, trishaws, and cars competing for one square lane in the center of town told me that there was petrol again. I was plunged into a shopper's paradise. Plastic Santas, Christmas tree ornaments, and toys all hung outside the Muslim shops, and the downtown area was marching to the beat of shoppers and bala music. Religion wasn't a factor here. Christmas was an excuse to celebrate. For Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims, it was a time to eat, dress up, give gifts, and visit with family and friends. People were cleaning their houses and cooking in preparation for the festivities.

Along with everyone else in Trinco, I went down to the open air market in the center of town and bought vegetables and curry leaves. But mainly what I bought were mangoes. Lots of them. Jaffna mangoes to be precise. They are known as karatacolomban . I knew about them because for the better part of 20 plus years, no one south of the war zone could get hold of them. Roads were closed. Trains had stopped. Commerce between north and south had come to a standstill. Someone had told me "You'll know when the war is over when the Jaffna mangoes appear again."

And they had!

I made a little fist of victory with my hand, stuffed them into my straw basket, and headed back to the orphanage. In my other bag I had a kid's badminton set, a couple of stuffed animal, two puzzles, some Bombay sweets, and lots of hair clips.

Make no mistake. War's residue remains part of the daily fabric of life in the northern part of this island. And it will be that way for years, if the present is any barometer. The final bloodbath in this civil war took place in Mullaittivu, less that 100 kilometers north of Trinco. Fishermen displaced from their homes in the last weeks of the conflict still wait in Trinco to be allowed to return to their villages. Half an hour inland sit Sinhalese villages that were overrun by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). The villagers are in the process of moving back to their land that was razed and burned, their homes destroyed. Many are still trying to find family members from whom they were separated in the final weeks of the conflict. Others, newly released from the IDP camps, come home to houses with no people in them, or to no home at all. The wounded wait for the government to deliver on its promises of rehabilitation. Tamil fruit sellers in town worry that the Sinhalese have retained control over the market. And almost two years after war's end, roads that scream for repair are still lined with Sri Lankan Military, young Sinhalese soldiers in bunkers bearing rifles. The aftereffects of war linger with stunning tenacity.

There is also the small matter of several very large waves that destroyed 900 lives on Dec. 26, 2004. This December, on the day after Christmas and under a driving rain, Trincomalee stopped and remembered. The Buddhist temples held special ceremonies, the Hindu kovils special poojas. We took the girls from the orphanage out onto the beach and organized an impromptu ceremony of our own. From there we went inside and lit candles in memory of the victims. I looked at the girls standing there. Some were too young to have much of a memory of what had happened. Others had lost family members that day, a moment in time that explained why they were standing in front of me now.

Part of recovery from war's trauma, from any trauma, is the process of re-finding the life and the person you were before the trauma. This past Christmas, the people in Trincomalee did just that. The women got out their saris, wrapped themselves in elegance and set off bearing fruits and cake to see friends and relatives. A friend went to buy a new shirt. We had cake and chicken at the orphanage, swam at the beach and dove between each other's legs. It was all part of the process.

There is much still to do on this small island of twenty one million people. Part of that long, slow journey towards recovery begins with a cake, a pot of something boiling on the stove, a new shirt and a bala dance. Sometimes the rest can wait for another day.

50 Years of the Peace Corps

On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps. The idea for the Peace Corps came from an impromptu speech made a few months earlier by then-Senator Kennedy at the University of Michigan, in the final few weeks of his presidential campaign. At about two in the morning on the steps of the Michigan Union, he presented an idea to a crowd of restless students for an organization that would rally American youth in service. Though the speech lasted barely three minutes, his germ of an idea morphed dramatically into Kennedy's most enduring legacy. From this offhand campaign remark, shaped speedily by President Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, in 1961, the organization ascended with remarkable excitement and publicity, attracting the attention of thousands of hopeful young Americans.

Watch President Kennedy's announcement made fifty years ago today.

President John F. Kennedy Announces The Executive Order to Form Peace Corps (YouTube)

Of course, what transpired in those months between an inspiring speech and the establishment of a transformative institution-- not to mention what has happened in the fifty years since-- is a fascinating story, one you can now read in When the World Calls, the first complete and balanced look at the Peace Corps's first fifty years. Revelatory and candid, Stanley Meisler's engaging narrative exposes Washington infighting, presidential influence, and the Volunteers' unique struggles abroad. Meisler deftly unpacks the complicated history with sharp analysis and memorable anecdotes, taking readers on a global trek starting with the historic first contingent of Volunteers to Ghana on August 30, 1961.

The Peace Corps has served as an American emblem for world peace and friendship, yet few realize that it has sometimes tilted its agenda to meet the demands of the White House. Tracing its history through the past nine presidential administrations, Meisler discloses, for instance, how Lyndon Johnson became furious when Volunteers opposed his invasion of the Dominican Republic; he reveals how Richard Nixon literally tried to destroy the Peace Corps, and how Ronald Reagan endeavored to make it an instrument of foreign policy in Central America. But somehow the ethos of the Peace Corps endured, largely due to the perseverance of the 200,000 Volunteers themselves, whose shared commitment to effect positive global change has been a constant in one of our most complex-and valued-institutions.

This past weekend, the LA Times published an essay by Meisler about the legacy of the Peace Corps:

Fifty years on, what has the Peace Corps accomplished? It's possible to cite the pounds of fish sold or the pounds of honey produced under volunteer projects. But how do you measure the influence of an inspiring teacher? Or the effect on an impoverished teenage boy such as Alejandro Toledo, who, with volunteers' help, goes on to college and becomes the president of Peru?

But there is no difficulty measuring the impact of the Peace Corps on the United States. Half a century after Kennedy's call, the Peace Corps' greatest achievement may be the volunteers themselves.

Peace Corps alumni include two U.S. senators — Chris Dodd of Connecticut and the late Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts — and nine members of the House of Representatives, as well as governors of Wisconsin and Ohio and the mayor of Pittsburgh. One Cabinet member was a volunteer: Donna Shalala, Health and Human Services secretary in the Clinton administration and now the president of the University of Miami. Ten other volunteers are presidents of universities and colleges.

More than 20 have served as ambassadors or assistant secretaries of State; others went on to become teachers, doctors, economic development specialists. The novelist Paul Theroux heads a long list of Peace Corps writers, and the roster of journalists includes Chris Matthews of MSNBC and George Packer and Peter Hessler of the New Yorker. The founders of Netflix and the Nature Co., and the board chairs of Levi Strauss and the Chicago Bears, were also volunteers.

In all, some 200,000 Americans have lived, often in the remotest of villages, in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Pacific and Eastern Europe — places most other Americans can't find on a map. We would not have this enormous asset today without the Peace Corps. That is surely worth a birthday celebration.

This Thursday, Meisler will appear at the John F. Kennedy Library at a forum celebrating the anniversary. Register to attend here or watch the live webcast on the JFK Library website.

Read an excerpt from When the World Calls here or at Scribd. Did you or someone close to you serve in the Peace Corps? Please share your memories in our comments.

When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years, excerpt