Andrew Aoyama | The Atlantic

250 Years of the American Experiment

2026-02-24T10:00:00-05:00

Sign up for T he Unfinished Revolution, our newsletter course in which Atlantic writers and editors explore 250 years of the American experiment.

In 1796, in the waning months of his presidency, George Washington traveled to Germantown, Pennsylvania, to sit for a portrait by the artist Gilbert Stuart. Stuart had painted the president before, and Martha Washington was so entranced by the result that she persuaded her husband to pose for him again, on the condition that she would ultimately be able to own the completed work. Stuart never kept his promise: Recognizing that he could make a fortune selling copies of the portrait, he filled in the details of Washington’s face but left his canvas otherwise unfinished. He called the painting his “hundred-dollar bill,” referring to the price he charged Washington’s many admirers for a print.

Today, Stuart’s unfinished painting, known as the Athenaeum portrait, has become one of the most memorable images of America’s first president. (The painting, in a surprising instance of deflation, later came to adorn the one-dollar bill.) In ways Stuart perhaps never intended, the blank corners of his canvas call attention to the unfinished nature of Washington’s lifework, to an expanding nation that was still deciding what it wanted to be.

In our November 2025 issue, The Atlantic revisited Washington and his associates, amassing a team of 24 journalists, historians, and critics to fill in the blank corners of American history and add texture to the parts of its canvas one might think they know well. Our newsletter course The Unfinished Revolution explores this special issue and features original conversations from around our newsroom.

The issue’s five chapters take up the Revolution in all of its complexity and contradiction. Rick Atkinson reveals a new side of King George III. Caity Weaver fires a musket. Ned Blackhawk considers how Native nations shaped the American conception of self-government. John Swansburg revisits the country’s founding folktale. And as the American experiment endures a moment of particular challenge, David Brooks argues that the country needs a mass movement.

“You will see that we are not simplistic, jingoistic, or uncritical in our approach,” editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in his introduction to the issue, “but we are indeed motivated by the idea that the American Revolution represents one of the most important events in the history of the planet, and its ideals continue to symbolize hope and freedom for humankind.”

We hope you’ll join us. Sign up to begin the course here. You’ll receive one edition every week for five weeks, with each edition focused on a different chapter of our special issue.

Like Stuart’s portrait of Washington, the project of the United States “is still unfinished, and troubled,” Goldberg concludes. “But it remains a project worth pursuing.”

Edward Burtynsky’s Warning

2025-11-09T10:00:00-05:00

Photographs by Edward Burtynsky

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has built a career documenting what he calls “altered landscapes”—tangled highway overpasses, sprawling oil refineries, mountainsides pockmarked by human exploitation. In 1999, he visited a tire-disposal site outside Modesto, California. It was surreal, he told me, almost sublime. He felt as if he had entered an entirely synthetic world: millions of tires stacked some five stories into the air, rubber hedgerows stretching to the horizon.

A few months later, the tire pile was struck by lightning and burst into flames. The fire burned as hot as 2,000 degrees and filled the sky with a thick black smoke. After a month, it was at last extinguished, but the tires had melted into more than 250,000 gallons of molten oil that risked seeping into the soil and local water supply. Despite their unlikely beauty, Burtynsky’s altered landscapes have always functioned in part as a warning.

Edward Burtynsky / Howard Greenberg Gallery NY

Shell Beach #4; Shark Bay, Australia, 2025

But since 2012, Burtynsky has tried to dedicate time each year to photographing “pristine landscapes,” capturing images of nature that inspire something more like hope. Earlier this year, he traveled to Shark Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site at Australia’s farthest-western point. The bay is famous for the stromatolites studding its shore, layered rock structures formed over thousands of years by microorganisms that grow, die, and calcify with sediment into marine mushroom caps. Stromatolites are considered the oldest-known fossils on the planet, a living record; some in Shark Bay would have witnessed a time before humans invented the tire—or the wheel. Burtynsky viewed the stromatolites and the rest of Shark Bay’s coastline only from the air, angling his camera out of the passenger window of a Cessna 210. The ground, he left untouched.

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “Wheels Up.”

No Parents Allowed

2025-08-12T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Adrienne Salinger

In the 1980s and ’90s, Adrienne Salinger photographed American teenagers in their natural habitat: their bedroom. Salinger was fascinated by the way these spaces reflected the personalities of their inhabitants. In an era before smartphones and social media, teenagers used the walls of their room to demonstrate their good taste in hair bands and hip-hop groups, commemorate their accomplishments, and construct their identity. These spaces, Salinger wrote in her 1995 book, In My Room, were “the repository for our memories and the expressions of our desires and self-image.”

Tracy, 15, Seattle, Washington, 1984

Jeff, 16, Fayetteville, New York, 1990

Salinger’s book, reissued this month, features portraits of dozens of teenagers. The images capture an inflection point between childhood and adolescence: Her subjects pose among stuffed animals and pinups, dolls and drug paraphernalia. In one image, a girl named Ellen stands beside a neat bookshelf, clutching a violin. On the wall behind her is a poster of James Dean astride a motorcycle—just below it, a brochure from Brown.

Ellen, 17, Fayetteville, New York, 1990

Christina, 15, Seattle, Washington, 1984

Most of the rooms Salinger visited—of rich and poor teens alike—were illuminated by a single light fixture at the center of the ceiling. She brought her own studio lights, which would frequently blow a fuse. As she set up her equipment, she and her subjects would talk, often for hours. Then she would take a photograph, and the teens would see their room—and themselves—in a new light.

Photos courtesy of Adrienne Salinger / D.A.P. This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “No Parents Allowed.”

He Spent His Life Trying to Prove That He Was a Loyal U.S. Citizen. It Wasn’t Enough.

2025-07-09T08:00:00-04:00

Joseph Kurihara watched the furniture pile higher and higher on the streets of Terminal Island. Tables and chairs, mattresses and bed frames, refrigerators and radio consoles had been dragged into alleyways and arranged in haphazard stacks. It was February 25, 1942, two and a half months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. Navy had given the island’s residents 48 hours to pack up and leave.

An industrial stretch of land in the Port of Los Angeles, Terminal Island was home to a string of canneries, a Japanese American fishing community of about 3,500, and, crucially, a naval base. A week earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to designate areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” The order made no mention of race, but its target was clear: people who were ethnically Japanese.

FBI agents had already rounded up and arrested most of Terminal Island’s men, leaving women to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. Kurihara watched as children cried in the street and peddlers bought air-conditioning units and pianos from evacuating families for prices he described as “next to robbery.”

“Could this be America,” he later wrote, “the America which so blatantly preaches ‘Democracy’? ”

Before long, the chaos Kurihara witnessed on Terminal Island was playing out elsewhere. In March, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the head of the Western Defense Command, began using Roosevelt’s executive order to exclude all people “of Japanese ancestry” from large swaths of the West Coast. The Japanese, DeWitt reasoned, were racially untrustworthy, and thus even people like Kurihara, an American citizen who had joined the Army and deployed to the Western Front during the First World War, posed an espionage risk. “A Jap is a Jap,” DeWitt told newspapers. The military forced Kurihara and more than 125,000 others from their homes, confining them to a circuit of remote prison camps.

Many Japanese Americans attempted to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States through stoic acceptance of the government’s orders. Some even volunteered to fight for the country that had imprisoned them: The 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion, a segregated Army unit of Japanese Americans, became the most decorated military unit in American history (relative to its size and length of service), fighting the Nazis through Italy and into France. Scouts from the unit were among the first troops to liberate one of Dachau’s camps. In the years after the war, their feats helped burnish a legend of Asian American exceptionalism; their sacrifice affirmed their belonging.

This was the narrative of “Japanese internment” that reigned among my father’s generation. When my grandmother was 20, she and her family were uprooted from Los Angeles and sent to a barbed-wire-enclosed camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, for nearly a year; my grandfather volunteered for the 442nd from Hawaii and was wounded by a grenade fragment in northern Italy. I grew up understanding the 442nd’s success as a triumphant denouement to internment, which in turn obscured the suffering of the period. I didn’t have to think too hard about what had happened at Terminal Island or Heart Mountain, or what either said about America.

Kurihara, though, was unwilling to ignore the gap between his country’s stated principles and its actions. He had always believed in democracy, he wrote, but what he saw at Terminal Island demonstrated that “even democracy is a demon in time of war.” During the years he spent incarcerated, shuttled through a succession of punitive detention sites, his doubts festered. He had already served in a war for the United States, and still the country accused him of disloyalty. Kurihara became a scourge of the Japanese Americans urging acquiescence, a radical who for a time openly embraced violence. If America had no faith in him, why would he have faith in America?

The care package, it seemed, had meant a lot. “I hereby most sincerely thank you for the generous package you have sent us Soldier Boys,” Kurihara wrote to the Red Cross chapter of Hurley, Wisconsin. It was 1917, the era of the original I WANT YOU poster, and the 22-year-old Kurihara had volunteered for the Army. Stationed at Camp Custer, in Michigan, he was the only nonwhite soldier in his 1,100-man artillery unit. “By the name you will note that I am a Japanese,” his letter continued, “but just the same I’m an American. An American to the last.”

Kurihara was born in Hawaii in 1895. His parents had emigrated from Japan as plantation workers, joining a cohort that came to be known as the issei, or first generation of the Japanese diaspora. Kurihara and his four siblings were nisei, members of the second generation. After Hawaii was seized by the United States in 1898, Kurihara and others born in the islands were granted U.S. citizenship.

[From the January 2025 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on what America owes Hawai‘i]

In 1915, he moved to California alone, in hopes of eventually attending medical school. There, his biographer, Eileen Tamura, notes, he was shocked to discover widespread antipathy toward Asians. Once, as Kurihara walked through central Sacramento, a man approached and kicked him in the stomach. Elsewhere in the city, children pelted him with rocks. The word Jap, he wrote in an unpublished autobiography, was almost a “universal title.” But Kurihara seemed to believe that this was the bigotry of individuals, not of the country itself.

A friend told Kurihara that midwesterners were more tolerant, so he moved to Michigan. Not long afterward, he enlisted. On July 30, 1918, Kurihara’s division deployed to the Western Front and prepared to drive into Germany, but its planned assault never occurred: On November 11, the armistice ended the war. The following September, Kurihara returned to the United States and was discharged in San Francisco. On a streetcar in the city, still wearing his Army uniform, he heard a man spit “Jap.”

After the war, Kurihara settled in Los Angeles, working as an accountant and then as a navigator on fishing boats. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was more than 3,000 miles south of California, plying the waters off the Galápagos Islands for tuna. The ship returned to San Diego Bay just after daybreak on December 29 and found a country at war.

Fishing vessels belonging to Japanese Americans at Terminal Island, 1942 (Buyenlarge / Getty)

Soon after, Kurihara’s captain informed him that government officials had banned him from serving as the ship’s navigator. Suddenly out of a job, he sought work that might aid the war effort. But at shipbuilding and steel yards, he was rebuffed for being Japanese. He returned to Los Angeles just in time to see Terminal Island depopulated.

Kurihara wanted to fight DeWitt’s removal orders. But nisei leaders in the Japanese American community were taking a different tack. At a meeting of a group affiliated with the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), an ardently pro-American civil-rights organization, Kurihara heard Mike Masaoka, the group’s national secretary, tell the attendees that he had met with DeWitt and urged that they comply with his orders. Kurihara was furious. “These boys claiming to be the leaders of the Niseis were a bunch of spineless Americans,” he wrote.

Japanese Americans of my grandparents’ generation tend to refer to the period that followed as “camp”—just “camp”—cloaking it in a protective shield of euphemism. Academics refer to the relocation centers with the more charged term concentration camps, borrowing the language used by Roosevelt and his administration. Regardless of their name, though, the sites had a clear function: They were open-air prisons.

Kurihara’s was called Manzanar. Built on 6,200 acres of desert at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California, Manzanar held about 10,000 Japanese Americans at its peak. They were crammed into 504 plywood barracks, fenced in by barbed wire and guard towers. Families each received a 20-by-25-foot room; bachelors like Kurihara were assigned roommates. Everyone shared the latrines.

Kurihara was among the first at the camp, arriving in March 1942. The government needed workers to construct the facility, and Kurihara’s priest had encouraged single, able-bodied men to sign up, so that it might be livable by the time families arrived. Aware that he’d wind up there anyway and tempted by the promise of work, Kurihara reluctantly agreed, helping build the camp that would imprison him.

[In Focus: World War II internment of Japanese Americans]

Construction was still ongoing when incarcerees began to arrive in April. That summer, a group of nisei aligned with Masaoka and the JACL created the “Manzanar Citizens’ Federation,” hoping to prove the community’s loyalty to the United States and assert a leadership role at the camp. Kurihara, rankled by the suggestion that he had anything to prove, was determined to undermine them.

At meetings held during the summer of 1942, Kurihara delivered a series of speeches—“dynamites,” he later called them—meant to “bomb the Manzanar Citizens Federation out of existence.” To one rapturous crowd he exclaimed, “If we must prove our loyalty to enjoy the full privileges of American citizens, then why and for what reasons are the Japanese American veterans of World War I doing here? Have they not proven their loyalty already?” The people at Manzanar were incarcerated not because they were “unloyal,” he argued. “It is because we are what we are—Japs! Then, if such is the case, let us be Japs! Japs through and through, to the very marrow of our bones.”

Being incarcerated at a place like Manzanar convinced Kurihara that America—both its people and its government—held DeWitt’s view that “a Jap is a Jap”; nothing could ever prove his loyalty. Kurihara wasn’t alone. In her book Impossible Subjects, the historian Mae Ngai argues that the experience of internment ultimately fostered in many Japanese Americans what the removal orders had been meant to contain: disloyalty.

Manzanar, July 3, 1942 (Corbis / Getty)

Tensions between supporters of the JACL and dissidents like Kurihara exploded on December 5, 1942, when masked men entered the barrack of Fred Tayama, the president of the organization’s Los Angeles chapter, and beat him with clubs. Tayama identified Harry Ueno, an ally of Kurihara’s, as one of his assailants. Ueno was arrested by camp authorities, though he was widely perceived as innocent.

The next day, thousands of Ueno’s supporters rallied outside the mess hall, where Kurihara accused Tayama and other JACL leaders of informing on incarcerees deemed insufficiently pro-American to camp administrators and the FBI. “Why permit that sneak to pollute the air we breathe?” he asked, referring to Tayama. “Let’s kill him and feed him to the roving coyotes!”

When negotiations with camp administrators over Ueno’s release collapsed, a crowd mobilized to free him from the camp’s jail and hunt down Tayama and the others Kurihara had condemned. At the jail, military police deployed tear gas to disperse them. Amid the smoke, two soldiers fired live rounds. Two young men were killed; 10 others were wounded.

The shooting ended what became known to some as the “Manzanar Uprising,” and to others as the “Manzanar Riot.” The men Kurihara had threatened were removed from the camp and eventually resettled throughout the country; their status as his targets was apparently sufficient proof of their loyalty. Kurihara, it turned out, was correct—Tayama and the others he’d identified had been reporting “pro-Japanese” incarcerees to camp administrators and the FBI. Kurihara, Ueno, and other “troublemakers” were arrested and moved through a series of “isolation centers” for dissidents. Finally, they landed at a camp called Tule Lake, in remote Northern California, where they were initially held in a stockade.

[The Friendship Files: Two Boy Scouts met in an internment camp, and grew up to work in Congress]

Devastated by the deaths of the two men, Kurihara swore off camp politics and spent most of his time alone, reading his Bible and studying Japanese, a language he’d never mastered. Regardless of the war’s outcome, he had decided that as soon as he could, he would leave America forever.

On December 8, 1945, as an American bomber circled overhead, Kurihara and some 1,500 other Japanese Americans stepped off a naval transport ship at Uraga, a port on Tokyo Bay. The bomber was a reminder of what Japan had endured over the preceding months: The United States had firebombed Tokyo in March, destroying much of the city and leaving more than 1 million people homeless; in August, it had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered not long after.

As the war had stretched on and the American government’s legal authority to incarcerate Japanese Americans had worn thin, Congress had passed a law to allow them to renounce their citizenship; the government had greater leeway to detain and even deport noncitizens under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Only a small minority of those incarcerated took the government up on its offer. Kurihara was among the first and asked to be on the first ship to Japan.

From Uraga, Kurihara traveled to the village of Oshima, where his older sister Kawayo had relocated from Hawaii in 1920. Oshima was about 36 miles across a bay from Hiroshima; on August 6, Kawayo may have felt the shock wave from the first atomic bomb.

Not wanting to burden her family, Kurihara moved to Sasebo, a city in the Nagasaki prefecture about 30 miles from where the second atomic bomb had been dropped. As in Hiroshima, the bomb had destroyed nearly every structure within a mile and a half of its point of detonation; even a month later, a U.S. naval officer reported that the city was suffused with “a smell of death.” Lacking employment options, Kurihara took a job with the occupation forces, working for the country he had grown to despise. The U.S. military needed interpreters and recruited Japanese Americans off the docks as their ships arrived. These jobs offered relatively high pay—and guaranteed access to food.

It’s unclear whether Kurihara lingered on the irony of his position. In his correspondence back to the United States, he acknowledged no regrets. “Here I am in Sasebo, working for the Occupational Forces and am doing exceedingly well,” he wrote in a 1946 letter to Dorothy Thomas, a sociologist he had met at Tule Lake. In a Christmas message to Thomas later that year, he requested a pair of black dress shoes, size 7E.

[Morgan Ome: What reparations actually bought]

His time working for the military proved short-lived. The occupation needed people who could translate complex legal documents; Kurihara’s abilities were likely insufficient. After a year in Sasebo, he moved to Tokyo and resumed work as an accountant. He and other repatriates stuck out in postwar Japan. Many were referred to by a racial epithet Kurihara likely never would have heard directed at him before: keto, Japanese for “white man.”

In April 1949, David Itami, a fellow nisei who had also worked for the occupation, wrote a letter to Dorothy Thomas to see if something might be done on Kurihara’s behalf. Kurihara, he said, “does not belong here and does not deserve to be left forgotten.” Kurihara had struggled to adapt to life in Japan; he longed to return to Hawaii. But he hadn’t forgiven the United States.

In the fall of 1962, Kurihara wrote a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, then the attorney general, asking why the U.S. had not reached out to renunciants to restore their citizenship. A lawyer at the Department of Justice replied, noting that, thanks to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, renunciants simply had to apply to get their cases reviewed. Indeed, among the 5,589 renunciants Kurihara was one of the only ones who by the 1960s had not had their citizenship restored. The Justice Department lawyer failed to grasp what Kurihara demanded: that the U.S. government make the first move. Kurihara remained principled—or imperiously stubborn—to the end. He never returned to Hawaii. He died of a stroke in Tokyo on November 26, 1965.

Mike Masaoka and the JACL seemed to win their debate with Kurihara. Not long after Pearl Harbor, Masaoka had proposed that the Army create a “suicide battalion” of nisei volunteers to fight for the U.S. while their parents were held as hostages in the camps. The Army declined, but the 442nd wasn’t functionally all that different from what Masaoka had suggested. He became its first volunteer, and over the course of the war, the unit earned more than 4,000 Purple Hearts and 21 Medals of Honor.

Speaking at its discharge in 1946, President Harry Truman suggested that the 442nd had affirmed that “Americanism is not a matter of race or creed; it is a matter of the heart.” He continued: “You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice—and you have won.”

Pronouncements like Truman’s bolstered a narrative of internment as America’s “worst wartime mistake,” as the Yale Law professor Eugene Rostow argued in Harper’s in 1945. Remembering it as a mistake, rather than as the result of decades of policy that had excluded Asian immigrants from public life in America, allowed those who had experienced it to move on and ascend into middle-class life. If they shared Kurihara’s sense of betrayal, they didn’t express it and instead worked to rebuild their lives in the United States. My grandfather kept his Purple Heart tucked away in his sock drawer; my grandmother never spoke of her time at Heart Mountain.

As historians came to question the triumphalist story of Japanese American history and activists lobbied for redress from the U.S. government, some came to celebrate Kurihara as a resistance icon. Roy Sano, writing a column in 1970 for the JACL’s newspaper, the Pacific Citizen, called him “a hero for the 1970s.” He continued: “Every JACL banquet which has a special table for veterans should leave an open seat for Joe Kurihara.”

Others couldn’t look past the death threats he made at Manzanar. Writing in the Japanese American newspaper Hokubei Mainichi in 1983, Elaine Yoneda, who had been incarcerated with Kurihara at Manzanar, called him “an embittered manipulator who helped turn some camp residents’ frustrations into a pro-Japan cause.” Kurihara had named her husband a “stool pigeon”; on the night of the Manzanar Uprising, Yoneda and her son had barricaded themselves in their barrack, fearing for their lives. His rhetoric, she argued, “meant and still means plaudits for the rapists of Nanking and Hitler’s butchers.”

Harry Ueno, though, continued to defend his ally. Ueno had renounced his citizenship, but when he heard about the dire conditions in Japan, he fought to remain in the U.S. He and Kurihara kept in touch until Kurihara’s death. “Deep in his heart,” Ueno wrote, “he cried a hundred times for the country he once loved and trusted and fought for.”

In February, I traveled to Washington, D.C., with my parents and two of my siblings to see a book, called the Ireichō, that lists every Japanese American who had been incarcerated. Its creators had invited descendants to mark their relatives’ names with a small stamp, in the hope that all of the 125,284 people in the book might eventually be acknowledged. Gathered in its pages were those who had renounced their citizenship alongside those who had volunteered for the 442nd. Tayama, Yoneda, Ueno, and Kurihara, together just as they had been at Manzanar.

In a small room off the Culture Wing of the National Museum of American History, we placed a neat row of blue dots beneath my grandmother’s name—Misao Hatakeyama—and that of her brother, Kimio, and parents, Yasuji and Kisaburo, and a neighbor my father had grown up with in L.A., and her brother, who had been killed in Italy with the 442nd in April 1945, only days before Germany’s surrender. I thought of those names when, just a few weeks later, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate the deportation of Venezuelan migrants, the first time the law had been used since it helped provide a legal framework for internment.

I wonder what my grandmother might have thought of Kurihara, or if my grandfather would have welcomed him at the veterans’ table. I have no way of knowing. I imagine they would have disapproved of his tactics and his choice to leave America. But I think they might have understood his anger at the country that had broken his trust, that had practiced values so different from the ones it proclaimed.

This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “The Expatriate.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Who Counts as a Hillbilly—And Who Gets to Decide?

2025-02-27T15:09:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

At the close of his RNC speech accepting his party’s nomination for vice president in July, then-Senator J. D. Vance lingered on the specific patch of earth where he hoped he would one day be buried.

“Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law-school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said, recounting how he had proposed to his wife, Usha. If they were to eventually be interred there, he explained, they would mark the sixth generation of his family buried in the region he called his “ancestral home”: Appalachia.

Since the release of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s ties to Appalachia have been a perennial topic of discussion. His connection to the region, some assumed, conferred credibility to speak on behalf of Americans who felt they had been left behind, in Appalachia and elsewhere; many saw in his book’s depiction of poverty and addiction an explanation for why the “white working class” had fled the Democratic Party and backed Donald Trump in such great numbers. Others pointed out that Vance had in fact grown up in Middletown, Ohio, about 200 miles away from his family’s “ancestral home” and burial plot; they bristled at his bootstrap politics and claimed that Hillbilly Elegy didn’t reflect the Appalachia they knew.

In advance of the 2024 election, the debate over Vance’s identity returned with heightened stakes. Donald Trump had picked Vance as his running mate at least in part because his “hillbilly” credentials could appeal to the voters his book purported to represent. Then, of course, there was the factual matter: Appalachia, many assumed, was a region like New England or the Pacific Northwest; you were either from there, or you weren’t. The day after Vance’s nomination-acceptance speech, the New York Times standards desk weighed in, issuing guidance to its staff that clarified that he was not “from Appalachia.” The memo, obtained by the reporter Justin Baragona, concludes by cautioning journalists against “anything that suggests he grew up there or is a son of Appalachia.”

But ever since it was first defined as a region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has always existed as much in myth as in literal geography. A simple adjudication of Vance’s ties overlooks a complicated history of what “being Appalachian” really means in America.

The term Appalachian America is believed to have been coined by William Goodell Frost, an Ohio educator who served as president of Kentucky’s Berea College from 1892 to 1920. Berea had been founded by an abolitionist and was intended to function as a racially integrated, coeducational liberal-arts college, the first in the South. But after a 1904 Kentucky law required that schools in the state be segregated, Frost pivoted the college’s mission toward educating the population he had called, in an 1899 Atlantic essay, “our contemporary ancestors”—the white inhabitants of Kentucky’s mountainous east. In his article, Frost recounts traveling through the area and being shocked by how its inhabitants lived. With their rudimentary homes and blood feuds, the mountain folk were, in his words, “an anachronism.” “Appalachian America may be useful as furnishing a fixed point which enables us to measure the progress of the moving world!” he wrote. He had invented a region, one principally defined not by its place on a map but by its position in history: the past.

Over the next decades, Frost’s conception gelled in the American mind. Appalachia came to represent an area spread loosely across the mountain range of the same name—portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee—but distinguished (at least in the eyes of outsiders) by its backwardness. In one 1929 Atlantic story, the writer Charles Morrow Wilson suggested that the region remained trapped in Elizabethan England, with a dialect and social mores that were centuries out of date. And in the 1960s, the Kentucky lawyer Harry M. Caudill turbocharged Frost’s ideas with a series of Atlantic articles and best-selling books that helped make the region synonymous with poverty.

Caudill, not unlike Vance, became an overnight celebrity. The success of his books, his son James told me, drew visitors from all across the country and even abroad; they were eager to see the desperation he described up close, and an obliging Caudill led “poverty tours” through the valleys around Whitesburg, where he lived. Caudill’s writing fleshed out stereotypes for the people Frost had diagnosed as backward: They were poor but scrappy, suspicious of outsiders but fiercely loyal to their families, unsophisticated but endowed with a certain sort of folk wisdom.

Driven in part by Caudill’s writing, Congress finally affixed Appalachia to a map in 1965, creating the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and tasking it with disbursing federal funds across a list of counties deemed sufficiently Appalachian. With money up for grabs, states wanted in. Included in the commission’s charter are decidedly mountainless counties in northern Mississippi; an advocate for the state had even submitted a doctored map as evidence, drawing in mountains with a fine-point pen. The ARC’s list of counties, which stretches from Mississippi into upstate New York, constitutes America’s “official” definition of Appalachia today.

It’s true that Vance’s hometown isn’t included in the ARC’s charter, which the Times memo references to justify classifying Vance as not “from” the region. But the charter’s list is so expansive as to be meaningless. In a 1981 survey of college students in and around the ARC’s definition of Appalachia, fewer than 20 percent identified New York and Mississippi as part of the region.

Perhaps whether or not Americans consider someone to be “from” Appalachia has less to do with where that person grew up on a map than with their embodiment or rejection of the myths we associate with the region—and, at least in some cases, with how those myths can serve our political priorities. One popular T-shirt in support of the Trump-Vance ticket read “It’s Gonna Take a Felon and a Hillbilly to Fix This,” as if the experience of Appalachian hardship afforded Vance a unique ability to tame inflation. But to strip from Vance his Appalachianness is to make a political argument, too—that his perspective is closer to that of the Silicon Valley billionaires with whom he associates than an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia.

At the RNC, Vance invoked his Appalachian burial ground to challenge the notion that America was built on an idea; instead, he argued, you were an American if your ancestors had been buried in America, and if, over generations, they had fought and died for America. “That’s not just an idea, my friends; that’s not just a set of principles,” he said. “That is a homeland—that is our homeland.” He used his ties to the land to make a political argument of his own, to advance a nationalism rooted in the soil of a cemetery plot and the bones of the people buried there. His rejection of America as a nation of ideas was itself based on an idea—that of Appalachia.

The Road Dogs of the American West

2024-11-26T15:30:00-05:00

Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat

Drive far enough into Texas from the Louisiana border, and you’ll see the ground dry, the earth crumble into dust. Eventually, the photographer Bryan Schutmaat told me, the strip malls fade into the rearview mirror, the landscape opens, and the American West begins.

Schutmaat has long been fascinated by the West; as he toured with punk bands in his teens and early 20s, he felt himself drawn to the region and its open space. His new book, Sons of the Living, documents a decade’s worth of more recent journeys through the West and features the hitchhikers and “road dogs” he met along the way.

First in a Subaru Forester and then in a Toyota Tacoma pickup, Schutmaat would set out from his home in Austin and drive toward California. He’d weave from Interstate 10 onto the more isolated two-lane blacktop highways snaking into the remote reaches of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. When he sensed he was encroaching on the sprawl of Los Angeles, he’d turn around. All told, he spent more than 150 days on the road; many nights, he slept in his car.

At truck stops and campgrounds, Schutmaat would shoot portraits of people he encountered and offer to ferry them from one place to the next. Behind the wheel or over a shared meal or beer, he’d listen as they told their stories: One man, Tazz, had taken to the road after he’d been released from prison and struggled to find work. He had drifted far from his childhood in Maine, and his thick Down East accent clashed with his surroundings. He claimed to have once played childhood pranks on Stephen King’s home; later, he told Schutmaat, he committed more serious transgressions. Schutmaat spent several hours talking in a New Mexico Denny’s with another man, Walker, a tall traveler with resplendent facial hair; Schutmaat took his portrait in the light of a gas-station pavilion, Walker’s beard swaying in the breeze.

[From the September 1896 issue: Frederick J. Turner on the problem of the West]

Schutmaat’s work challenges a mythology of the West that has long maintained a hold on the American imagination. Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the country’s democratic culture was forged from its pacification of the western frontier; the novelist Wallace Stegner called the region “a geography of hope.” But like the Depression-era photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Schutmaat complicates rosy views of the region and its promise. The newspaper editor Horace Greeley is said to have encouraged one of his charges to “Go west, young man, go west and grow up with the country.” Sons of the Living makes clear that the West contains no guaranteed redemption.

Instead, Schutmaat’s photographs reveal what happens when a country grows old and fractured, its citizens isolated. The travelers Schutmaat photographed—widowers and addicts, migrant workers and survivalists, drifters and divorcées—are resilient, but not exactly hopeful. In Schutmaat’s images of abandoned billboards and collapsing towns, there’s a feeling not of humanity taming the wilderness, but of the wilderness steadily reasserting itself over a crumbling human presence.

When Schutmaat was traveling, he’d pull over on the side of the road at nightfall and hike up the highway embankment. He’d set up his camera somewhere elevated and leave the shutter open for five, even 10 minutes. Through his lens, the sparse sets of headlights on the road below would melt into a river of light: the road erased, a wildness restored.

These photos appear in Bryan Schutmaat’s new book, Sons of the Living.

Arthur Miller Explains Death of a Salesman

2024-02-28T07:00:00-05:00

In April 1948, the 32-year-old playwright Arthur Miller set out to build a 10-by-12-foot studio—two windows, clapboard walls, a desk fashioned from an old door—on land he’d bought in rural Connecticut. Once it was done, he sat down and began to write. By the next morning, he had completed the first act of what would become his most famous work; he’d known only its opening lines, he said, and that it would end in the calamity presaged by its title, Death of a Salesman. The play was finished in six weeks, and it debuted 75 years ago, on February 10, 1949. Death of a Salesman was the first play to sweep all three major drama awards—the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, and the Tony.

Eight months into the play’s Broadway run, Miller answered a letter from Barbara Beattie, a junior at the University of Richmond who had reached out as part of an assignment for a journalism class. Beattie’s daughter discovered Miller’s letter while helping her mother, now 94, move out of her home. Miller was diligent about his correspondence, according to Julia Bolus, the director of the Arthur Miller Trust and the playwright’s former assistant, but a reply of this length was exceptional. Beattie received an A in the class.

Oct 5, 1949

Dear Miss Beattie;

If there is a formal genesis of Death of a Salesman it certainly is in the Elizabethan drama, particularly Shakespeare. From the point of view of form I have long felt that the spaciousness of his plays had been forfeited for a physical concentration which contradicts life itself. I have learned from him, if you will, that words themselves are the best scene setting; that it is not necessary to devise elaborate plot machinery in order to “set” a scene which itself can explain itself—in short, to proceed to the meat of a scene at once and to make it happen where and when it logically would happen, and not where a stationary setting forces it to happen.

[From the March 1979 issue: Arthur Miller on his travels in China]

As well, my form is one which permits time for what in effect are soliloquies. As I see it, the force of the Elizabethan form lay in its ability to follow the mental processes of its protagonists wherever they might lead. The same may be said of mine. This cannot be said of the “realistic” form, called Ibsen’s, which itself imposes upon the story and the characters instead of following them, making way for them. In such plays incredible ingenuity, and much time, is wasted in the mere effort to justify the simple meeting of two characters. One may fairly say that in our day this form has come to be a word game in which the confrontation of characters is made to seem “natural” or “real”. Of course it is actually a severe form of stylization whose utter unreality and unnaturalness is shrouded by sets with windows that work, rugs on the floors, and so forth. Thus the means employed actually stand as an obstruction between the vision of the playwright and the emotional receptivity of the audience. For we do not dream or inwardly think in such terms but otherwise. We dream in scenes, don’t we. But the preparation for these scenes is direct, immediate, and contained in the scenes themselves. There is no maid who enters and talks to a butler who between them inform us that our father is about to return home after a year’s absence. We suddenly see our father, and in what he does and says lies all relevant information about his situation. Plays written in this fashion therefore proceed with true naturalness, from relevancy to relevancy, without sparring about.

Concerning the idea of Elizabethan tragedy and my own, I could speak for many hours. Central to Shakespeare’s tragedy is the idea of the Fall, which implies social stature of a royal level. I too see the Fall as a critical aspect of tragedy, but our world has changed, and it is no longer possible to think of the Fall as that of a socially elevated person exclusively. But social status, to my mind, was and is only a superficial expression of a deeper Fall, so to speak, namely, the destruction of a man’s idea of what he is by forces opposing him. Any class is thereby given entrance to the precincts of the tragic, and so it is in a democratic society. Under Elizabethan feudalism this notion was unthinkable if only because none but the royal had the alternatives of seemingly absolute choice, the liberties of the masses being hedged about by all sorts of rigid proscriptions. Today we are all “free” to aspire to any height, we have the hero’s necessary alternatives. My moral object, therefore, is to attempt to direct the efforts of men toward the clear appreciation of reality, exposing the illusory in order that man may realize his creative potentialities. In another context, Shakespeare was attempting the same thing, as in the history plays where the catastrophe derives from the impossible ambitions of the monarch or those of the subjects against the monarch. A certain ideal order is therefore implied as having been violated in his work, and in mine. His ideal was feudal; it supposed that life would be good when men behaved in accordance with their social position and neither lapsed into a lower level, (Prince Hal), nor created havoc by attempting to crash into one above them, (The King in Hamlet ). My ideal order is less easy to formulate if only because it does not yet exist, while he was writing within a society whose theory was sufficient for him. I see man’s happiness frustrated until the time arrives when he is judged, given social honor and respect, not by what he has accumulated but by what he has given to his society. This ideal is posited not for itself, but because I know that the frustration of the creative act is the cause of our hatred for each other, and hatred is the cause of our fears. We reward our dealers, our accumulators, our speculators; we penalize with anonymity and low pay our teachers, our scientists, our workers who make and do and build and create. And so the urge that is in all of us to give and to make is turned in upon itself, and we accept the upside-down idea that to take and to accumulate is the great good. And whether we succeed in that or not, we are sooner or later left with the awareness of our emptiness, our inner poverty, and our isolation from mankind. When a man reaches that knowledge and has the sensitivity to feel the loss of his true self deeply, he is a tragic figure; but not unless he tries to find himself despite the world can he raise up in us the actual feeling that something fine and great and precious has been discovered too late. The history of man is his blundering attempt to form a society in which it pays to be good. The tragic figure now, and always, is the man who insists, past even death, that the stultifying combinations of evil give way before the outpouring of humanity and love that is bursting from his heart. This is why tragedy endures, and this is why it has really never changed excepting in its superficial aspects of rank etc.

I hope some of this has been clear. I write at such length because there are not many who have taken the trouble to examine the matter at all.

Sincerely yours,
Arthur Miller

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline “Sincerely Yours, Arthur Miller.” Letter used by permission of the Arthur Miller Trust, in the care of the Wylie Agency LLC. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A Memorial at the Barn

2023-12-18T11:30:00-05:00

From the graveled bend on Drew Ruleville Road, the barn is barely visible. A knot of trees obscures its weathered cypress panels; a driver could easily miss the structure from across the bayou. There is no indication that this is the place where Emmett Till was beaten and tortured.

That is about to change. In the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic, Wright Thompson reflected on the barn’s history and what its erasure says about how Mississippi remembers the lynching of Emmett Till. His story caught the attention of the television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes, who today announced a donation to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which will buy the barn and convert it into a permanent memorial.

“The murder of Emmett Till was the real fire that lit the civil-rights movement,” Rhimes told Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts this morning. Thompson’s article, she said, “changed the course of how I was thinking about charitable giving; it changed the course of how I was thinking about even preserving history.”

[From the September 2021 issue: Wright Thompson on what we still don’t know about Emmett Till’s murder]

Till was 14 when he was abducted by two white men, Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam, and brought to the barn, rented at the time by Leslie Milam, another of Bryant’s half brothers. There, he was savagely beaten; most historians believe that at least seven people were present. Investigators believe that he was then shot in the head, and the men dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Till’s murder brought national attention to the resurgence of lynching in the South, but in Sumner, Mississippi, an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, the only two men charged with Till’s murder. Protected by the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause, they later confessed to the crime in a magazine profile that neglected to mention Leslie Milam or his barn. The site faded from public memory.

After Till’s murder, the owner of the property sold the land and turned out Leslie Milam. A series of families cycled through it, either not knowing or not paying attention to what had occurred there. The property was purchased in the 1990s by Jeff Andrews, a dentist. When Thompson first visited, in 2020, Andrews was using the barn to store Christmas decorations, a lawnmower, and a boat motor.

Rhimes’s donation may at last guarantee that the barn receives the attention it deserves.

“I’m just overwhelmed,” Reverend Willie Williams, the chair of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center’s board of directors, told me. Williams was born in 1955, the same year Till was murdered; he grew up not far from where Till was kidnapped. “I think it’s going to really enhance this journey that we are on, to allow people to learn and allow people to heal, and hopefully we’ll be a better community and a better nation.”

[Read: Vann R. Newkirk II on Emmett Till and the ghosts of the Mississippi Delta]

In July, the Biden administration declared a new Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument comprising three places: the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, the site of Emmett’s open-casket funeral; Graball Landing on the Tallahatchie River, where many believe his body was recovered; and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Bryant and Milam were tried and acquitted of his murder. Past markers meant to commemorate places associated with Till’s lynching have been stolen, shot up, and destroyed. The new national monument is managed by the National Park Service.

Gloria Dickerson, a Sunflower County supervisor and local community organizer, told me she hopes that a memorial at the barn will help revitalize the surrounding area. Dickerson is the daughter of sharecroppers, and in 1965, she and her siblings were the first students to integrate the public schools of Drew, Mississippi. When she moved back to the community after retiring, in 2009, more than half of all children lived below the poverty line. Dickerson thinks that a memorial will bring not only visitors and jobs to Drew but also, most important, she said, pride. Growing up, her mother, active in the struggle for civil rights, made sure she knew Emmett Till’s story. “The Mississippi Delta is really the ground zero for the civil-rights movement,” Dickerson said. “In order for us to move along and to heal and to do good, we need to know where we come from.”

“My hope is that this story never gets lost,” Rhimes said. “History is always told by the victors. I think it’s important that the Till family is the victor in this story.”

C. J. Rice’s Conviction Is Overturned

2023-11-28T11:57:00-05:00

Updated at 3:06 p.m. ET on November 28, 2023

Last Thursday, C. J. Rice celebrated his 30th birthday at State Correctional Institution–Chester, a Pennsylvania prison just southwest of Philadelphia. Rice has been incarcerated since he was 17, when he was charged with a crime he insists he didn’t commit. But because of a decision yesterday in federal court, he may be free by the time he turns 31. Such an outcome is exceedingly rare in cases like Rice’s.

Rice was the subject of The Atlantic’s November 2022 cover story, “This Is Not Justice,” by Jake Tapper, which investigated the circumstances of his conviction and the numerous shortcomings of his court-appointed attorney. Rice was arrested for a September 25, 2011, shooting that left four people injured. No physical evidence tied him to the crime, and the single eyewitness who ultimately identified him as its perpetrator had told police on three previous occasions that she didn’t know who had shot her. She later changed her story.

[From the November 2022 issue: Jake Tapper on the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment]

Compelling physical evidence pointed to Rice’s innocence: On September 3, only three weeks earlier, he had been shot three times in a separate incident. Bullets had ripped through his abdomen and fractured his pelvis; emergency-room doctors had made an incision from his sternum to his navel to extract them. One bullet remains lodged in his pelvis; Rice said last year that he can still feel it sometimes on rainy days.

After the shooting, Rice was bedridden for days. When he visited his pediatrician on September 20, he could barely walk. That doctor was Tapper’s father, Theodore. When Dr. Tapper learned days later that his patient was accused of a crime in which he allegedly ran from the scene, he was shocked. “I don’t think it would have been physically possible,” Tapper’s father told him. “He could not have run away.”

Yet Rice was found guilty on four counts of attempted murder and related charges. In 2013, he was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.

A competent lawyer could have used his injuries and the questionable eyewitness account to undermine the prosecution’s circumstantial case. But Rice’s family was unable to afford private counsel; instead, the court appointed a defense attorney named Sandjai Weaver. Weaver promised to subpoena Rice’s phone records, which he said would prove that he was nowhere near the site of the shooting; no subpoena was ever filed. She promised to send him his discovery files as he awaited trial in jail, unable to afford bail, so that he could use the time to help prepare his case; when she finally did send him something—months after he had already been found guilty—it was a different client’s paperwork.

In court, Weaver failed to sufficiently challenge the sole eyewitness tying her client to the crime and allowed the eyewitness to misstate basic facts about the crime scene’s layout—evidence, Rice believes, that Weaver herself never took the time to visit it.

Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania found that one of Weaver’s errors was so severe that her performance was constitutionally deficient, violating Rice’s “right to counsel” under the Sixth Amendment. Rice’s conviction was overturned, leaving the Philadelphia D.A.’s office six months to decide whether to retry his case. Should the office decline to do so, he will immediately be free to leave prison.

The issue was this: As the trial began, Eric Stryd, the prosecutor, moved to introduce a theory that one of the victims of the September 25 shooting may have been the person who shot Rice on September 3—providing a motive for Rice to retaliate. The trial-court judge, Denis Cohen, questioned whether such a theory could be admissible, because it lacked definitive support—a fact that even the district attorney’s office acknowledged privately at the time. In email correspondence among assistant district attorneys recently made public in Rice’s appeals, Stryd explained that he wanted to claim that the victim and the defendant were members of rival gangs engaged in tit-for-tat shootings, but acknowledged that he didn’t “have any hard evidence of this,” just the claims of anonymous criminal informants.

“If you don’t have specifics about your sources,” another A.D.A. replied, “then it looks like you lack foundation (i.e. it’s all rank hearsay.).”

Weaver objected to the suggestion that her client was a member of a rival gang, but she nevertheless allowed Stryd to introduce his unsubstantiated retaliation theory. Trial transcripts suggest that they had had a brief conversation outside the courtroom the morning that Stryd began presenting his case, and that Weaver had assented to the introduction of the theory, despite the judge’s concerns. Weaver died in 2019; her motivations for this or any other decision she made in Rice’s case are impossible to know.

In December 2022, Karl Schwartz, a Philadelphia defense attorney, filed a writ of habeas corpus on Rice’s behalf, a petition in federal court challenging the legality of his incarceration. (Theodore Tapper helped Rice find Schwartz and may be paying for his services, though Dr. Tapper has not confirmed this.) At the time, other lawyers described Schwartz’s effort as a moonshot. A 2007 study by the legal scholars Joseph L. Hoffmann and Nancy J. King found that of the 2,384 noncapital habeas petitions they sampled, only seven received relief—a success rate just shy of .3 percent.

[From the January/February 2018 issue: Can you prove your innocence without DNA?]

In Rice’s case, though, the state, with the support of the Philadelphia D.A.’s office, conceded that Rice had been denied effective assistance of counsel by Weaver and agreed that his petition for habeas relief ought to be granted. Stryd’s retaliation theory, the state acknowledged, was “prejudicial,” and Weaver’s decision to allow him to admit it was “objectively unreasonable.” Evidence otherwise tying Rice to the crime “wasn’t strong.” A magistrate judge accepted the state’s concession, and yesterday, District Court Judge Nitza I. Quiñones Alejandro affirmed Rice’s petition, overturning the conviction.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said that the D.A.’s office was “pleased” with the district court’s order vacating Rice’s conviction. His case, they said, will now move to the D.A.’s Sentencing Review Committee, which will solicit the input of homicide prosecutors and the victims of the 2011 shooting, and evaluate whether to proceed with a retrial.

In his original story, Tapper argued that the Sixth Amendment’s “right to counsel” had become an empty guarantee. At the time of Rice’s trial, Philadelphia’s court-appointed attorneys received low flat fees for their work. The meager rates created a perverse incentive to maximize one’s caseload and minimize time spent preparing for trial—as appears to have been the case for Weaver. Despite the turn in Rice’s case, the circumstances that led to his conviction remain the rule, not the exception, including in Philadelphia, which still pays court-appointed lawyers flat fees.

“C. J. has been locked up for 12-plus years for a crime he didn’t commit, because he had a lawyer who was grossly incompetent,” Theodore Tapper told me. “That’s the crime.”

Crystal Cooper, Rice’s mother, celebrated his birthday with a three-hour visit at SCI–Chester on Thursday evening, Thanksgiving. Rice had brownies from a vending machine, the closest thing they could find to a cake. Cooper was shocked to hear the news that his conviction had been overturned. When I reached her this morning, I asked what she’d want to do if her son is released. “I’ve got some chores for him,” she joked. Cooper hopes to plan a big family party and a memorial service for Rice’s father, who died while he was incarcerated. She wants to take a pasta-making class together on Arch Street.

“He can start living his life. He can get his applications in and go to school,” she said. “So much was taken away from him these past 12 years.”

This article originally miscalculated the percentage of successful habeas petitions.

Appalachia’s Quiet Time Bombs

2023-04-17T20:18:00-04:00

Updated at 7:30 p.m. ET on April 18, 2023

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The people who live and work in Appalachian coal country tend to be viewed as climate-change villains rather than victims. But the deadly floods that swept a pocket of eastern Kentucky last summer challenge common preconceptions about which Americans are vulnerable to environmental disasters, and what—or who—is to blame.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The Weight of the Rain

To understand how a freak summer rainstorm could kill 44 Appalachian residents and leave thousands more displaced across eastern Kentucky, you could consider the moment in the early morning hours of July 28, 2022, when the floodwaters that swelled from local creeks darkened from muddy brown to charcoal gray, rising high enough to loosen mobile homes, trucks, and trees from their perches and hurl them through the valleys like missiles. You could recall how the weight of the rain forced families to seek shelter in the hills and watch as their communities washed away down the hollows.

Or you could read an Atlantic article from April 1962. Written by a Kentucky lawyer named Harry Caudill, “The Rape of the Appalachians” was a broadside against a relatively new method of coal extraction—strip mining—and it managed to predict precisely the environmental catastrophe that befell eastern Kentucky this past summer.

“By a process which produces huge and immediate profits for a few industrialists, the southern Appalachians are literally being ripped to shreds,” Caudill wrote. “Eventually every taxpayer from Maine to Hawaii will have to pay the cost of flood control and soil reclamation.”

Traditional mines had been dug downward in the search for coal deposits, then outward along their seams, allowing a team of miners to descend into mountains, chip away at the fuel, and cart it up to the surface. Strip-mining operations, by contrast, deploy bulldozers to clear timber from a ridge’s surface in horizontal streaks, then blast into the mountain’s side with explosives, exposing a seam to the open air. This allows for more efficient extraction of coal but eliminates the forests that help drain and slow runoff from rainstorms. So when the thunderstorms began in late July 2022, water rushed down the mountains unabated, destroying a Breathitt County community called Lost Creek, a small collection of homes gathered down the mountain from a strip mine.

Ned Pillersdorf, a lawyer in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, put it in simpler terms. “If you pour a gallon of milk on a table, it will run off all at once,” he told me. “If you put some towels down, it drips off.” By blasting away soil and timber, strip mining has the effect of ripping towels from the table. As a result, strip mines, he explained, are “time bombs.” When the storms came, water flooded the screened porch where Pillersdorf watches baseball, but he and his family were otherwise unaffected. In Lost Creek, though, nearly every single home was destroyed, Pillersdorf said. Two residents died. “On July 28,” he continued, “one of the time bombs went off.”

Today, Pillersdorf is leading a lawsuit on behalf of many of the residents of Lost Creek against Blackhawk Mining, the company that operates the strip mine, and a subsidiary of Blackhawk, Pine Branch Mining. In an argument not unlike Caudill’s, he alleges that the company’s failure to “reclaim” the mine, by reforesting the area and maintaining silt ponds to prevent excessive runoff, aggravated the flooding. (In a response to his legal complaint, lawyers for Blackhawk and Pine Branch denied all of Pillersdorf’s allegations; the flood, they claimed, was an act of God.)

“I’m not a person that hates the coal industry or anything like that,” Gregory Chase Hays, one of Pillersdorf’s plaintiffs, told me. Like many people in the area, Hays has benefited from coal extraction at various points throughout his life; his grandfather and stepfather were both employed in the coal industry. But he’s come to question how the industry treats the communities around mines: Not long after midnight on July 28, Hays watched as his neighbor’s home floated through his yard. That night, he and one of his sons carried his mother-in-law to higher ground through waist-deep floodwaters. When they were at last able to return to their home, Hays found a notice from one of the local coal companies announcing that it intended to continue blasting away in the mountains nearby. It was posted on the bottom of their door; their stoop had been swept away.

The July floods displaced thousands of people. Some lived in tents for months. Hays, whose HVAC system was destroyed, had his air-conditioning fixed only this past Wednesday.

A February report from the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center estimates that it will cost $450 million to $950 million to rebuild the approximately 9,000 homes damaged by flooding. As of early March, FEMA has provided just more than $100 million. In keeping with Caudill’s grim prediction that mining would enrich only a few industrialists, the counties most exposed to the potential hazards of strip mining are also among the most impoverished in the United States: Without significant assistance, many families won’t be able to rebuild.

And as global temperatures continue to rise, storms like those that flooded eastern Kentucky and devastated the community of Lost Creek are likely to become more and more frequent. Across Appalachia, each has the potential to unleash a similar catastrophe.

Related:

Today’s News

Violence in Sudan has continued for a third day as rival generals fight for control of the northeast African country. Millions of residents are hiding in their homes, and the toll of civilian deaths and injuries continues to rise.
A grand jury in Summit County, Ohio, decided not to charge police officers in the death of 25-year-old Jayland Walker, a Black man shot by police in 2022 after an attempted traffic stop.
Two Kenyan runners were champions in today’s Boston Marathon—Evans Chebet for a second consecutive year in the men’s race and Hellen Obiri in the women’s race.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on what they believe is the best cuisine on earth.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

Why Does Contact Say So Much About God?

By Jaime Green

“As I imagine it,” Carl Sagan once said, “there will be a multilayered message. First there is a beacon, an announcement signal, something that says, Pay attention. This is not some natural astronomical phenomenon. This is a signal from intelligent beings … Then, the next layer is one that says, This message is directed specifically to you guys on Earth. It isn’t directed to anybody else. And the third part of the message is the real content, which is a very complex set of data in a new language, which is also explained.”

He was describing his novel, Contact, a 370-or-so-page answer, literally or in spirit, to every question we can ask about how finding alien intelligence might go. Yes, there’s conflict and strife—acts of terrorism, government obstruction, frustration and loss and death—but at its core the story promises an inviting cosmos. A door opening to a galactic community. We’re not only not alone but also welcomed. This hope is central to the idealistic origins of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), to Sagan’s motivations as a scientist and communicator. It also makes it especially weird that the novel ends with its heroine finding proof that God is real, but we’ll get to that.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

A24

Read. “Argument With a Child,” a poem by Katie Peterson.

“Plant your eyes on that place mat of the world / you love and don’t / move them until it stops hurting.”

Watch. Aftersun, available to rent on multiple platforms, is a film to watch—and to weep over—alone.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been fascinated by Harry Caudill since I first reported on his life and legacy for a photo essay featuring the work of the documentary photographer Stacy Kranitz. The success of “The Rape of the Appalachians” gave the lawyer a national platform, and in a series of follow-up articles and books, Caudill became a spokesperson of sorts for Appalachia and its plight. Today, his book Night Comes to the Cumberlands is credited in part with spurring the War on Poverty. But a dark undercurrent ran through much of his work: Caudill blamed Appalachians themselves—his neighbors—for their misfortune, and had little faith that they could change their circumstances. His writing brought billions of dollars of aid to the region but also engrained an enduring stereotype of Appalachia as a poverty-stricken backwater. Later in life, he embraced the theories of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned eugenics advocate William Shockley and attempted to establish a program to offer cash bonuses to Appalachians who volunteered to be sterilized. (It never took off.)

If you’re interested in learning more about Harry Caudill’s meteoric rise and rapid fall from grace, I highly recommend the Lexington Herald Leader’s excellent five-part series by John Cheves and Bill Estep, published for the 50th anniversary of Night Comes to the Cumberlands. I also encourage you to spend some time with Stacy’s striking photography; in addition to her work subverting Caudill’s stereotypes of Appalachia, her images have appeared alongside reporting on Tennessee’s abortion ban and the state’s efforts to expel Justin Pearson and Justin Jones from its legislature.

— Andrew

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

An earlier version of this newsletter mischaracterized the Lost Creek residents' lawsuit.

The Photographer Undoing the Myth of Appalachia

2022-12-20T08:00:00-05:00

Photographs by Stacy Kranitz

If you wanted to understand why flipping through Stacy Kranitz’s recent photography book, As It Was Give(n) to Me, feels like plunging your head into ice water, you could ponder the omission of captions that might have contextualized her images of Appalachia. You could dwell on the dissonant chord struck by mixing beauty pageants, burning cars, and bloody teeth together on the page.

Or you could consider a moment in January 1944, when a lanky Kentucky soldier disembarked from a requisitioned passenger ship and stepped foot for the first time in French-mandate Morocco.

“The Arabs were a never failing source of amazement,” Harry Caudill wrote, recording his impressions in a column for his hometown newspaper, Whitesburg, Kentucky’s Mountain Eagle. “Most of the men carry long keen knives beneath their robes, and one would doubtless stab at his brother for a pair of shoes,” he continued. “They are indescribably filthy.”

Though his regiment eventually deployed to Italy, Caudill chose to focus a significant portion of his column on his peregrinations in Casablanca. Other soldiers had written about the battlefields of Europe; Caudill could claim a niche by representing Morocco, at least as he imagined it. His descriptions—of wily men and their hordes of veiled wives, of a constant chorus of braying donkeys and mournful flute notes—evoke the tropes of what Edward Said would later call “Orientalism.” Never mind that few of his details withstand serious factual scrutiny; Caudill could define Morocco and its people for the readers of The Mountain Eagle however he pleased.

After the war, Caudill returned to Kentucky and finished a law degree. Years later, he resumed writing, now about an area closer to home: Appalachia. His work, published in The Atlantic and in a series of best-selling books, forced the United States to pay attention to the region, and established Caudill as its unofficial spokesperson. In his reports from Appalachia, Caudill adopted the same authoritative tone and looseness with facts that he had wielded in his writing on Morocco; this time, though, it was his own neighbors whom he cast as exotic.

These days, Caudill is less of a household name than he once was, but his portrayal of Appalachia has stuck. Journalists and photographers flooded into the region in the 1960s, drawn in part by his writing. The photos and news segments they mined from the mountains galvanized efforts to improve standards of living across the United States—but they also ingrained in the American imagination an understanding of Appalachia as a poverty-stricken backwater. The widespread acceptance of Caudill’s representation had a redemptive effect for the rest of the country: Americans could congratulate themselves on their relative tolerance and sophistication by viewing Appalachia with both pity and disgust, treating it as impoverished and backward, racist and regressive.

In As It Was Give(n) to Me, Kranitz consciously tangles with the image Caudill constructed. The book’s title calls attention to both the power of stereotypes (the myth, as it was given to me) and the demand for something deeper (as it actually was, give it to me). Kranitz’s photographs—of a man throwing a chair at his home, of coal trains, cross burnings, and cloud-shrouded hills—are too discordant to offer a coherent alternate narrative. Instead, her work takes aim at the act of narrative construction itself.

Kranitz was born in Kentucky and grew up in California and Florida; she isn’t, strictly speaking, “Appalachian.” She arrived in the region in 2009 to work as a photojournalist but quickly grew frustrated with how she saw it depicted in news coverage. She decided to stay, settling in a small town in Tennessee, just on Appalachia’s official borders.

But you don’t really need to know her biography to understand her work. The person she’d much rather talk about is Harry Caudill.

It all began in a dreary coal-camp schoolhouse, just northeast of Whitesburg.

By 1960, Harry Caudill was a well-established lawyer in eastern Kentucky, and he had been invited to deliver an address to the graduating eighth graders of Millstone Creek. By Caudill’s telling, a mining accident had left one child orphaned, and the parents of three other children were jobless. As rain streamed through gaps in the roof, the students performed a glum rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

Caudill came home furious. He paced his living room, ranting to his wife, Anne, about how his region had fallen into poverty. Anne sat down at her typewriter and began to transcribe. Soon they had a manuscript.

World War II had fueled an unprecedented demand for coal, and Caudill had returned from military service to a thriving Kentucky. But it didn’t last: By 1948, the boom had waned, and many of Caudill’s coal-mining neighbors were left unemployed and struggling to get by.

Caudill traced the leaks in the schoolhouse roof to the advent of strip mining. Where traditional mines had dug downward in search of coal, this new technique used explosives to blast away a mountain’s face. Mining in eastern Kentucky was backed by broad-form deeds—exploitative legal agreements that let landowners keep their rights to the surface but granted mining companies all the mineral resources below. By destroying the land, strip mining rendered the rights that landowners retained functionally meaningless and allowed mining companies to extract wealth from the region while those who lived there saw little benefit.

Caudill’s diagnosis was in some ways accurate: Strip mining had ruined the environment, leaving communities vulnerable to catastrophic flooding, and the broad-form deeds had enriched mining companies at the expense of locals.

But he erred in his assessment of how it had impoverished the region. What made strip mining especially devastating was how the process disempowered the region’s labor unions, which for decades had used their unique political position as a check on the deeds, ensuring that a portion of the mines’ wealth remained in Appalachia. Strip mining required fewer workers than older methods of extraction. Thus, even as coal output soared, mining employment in Appalachia fell by more than half from 1950 to 1964. The unions withered. The region’s economy sank.

Instead of blaming the mining companies for cutting jobs and depressing wages, though, Caudill directed much of his ire at Appalachians themselves. Essential to his theory of Appalachian poverty was the notion that the mountaineer forebears who signed away their mineral rights were “putty in the hands of eastern capitalists” and that their descendants were both too dull to innovate and content to survive on welfare (those who were smarter or more ambitious, he wrote, emigrated from the mountains). Appalachians were, according to Caudill, at least a little bit dumb—pitiable, certainly, but responsible in part for their plight.

In April 1961, friends in Louisville sent a copy of Caudill’s manuscript to A. Whitney Ellsworth, then an associate editor at The Atlantic. Ellsworth liked what he saw. He fashioned Caudill’s submission into an excerpt, eliminating an extended riff on “America the Beautiful” from its opening and changing the headline from “The Appalachian Horror” to “The Rape of the Appalachians.” In February of the following year, Ellsworth sent Caudill proofs for review. The article was published in the magazine’s April 1962 issue. Buoyed by the article’s success, Ellsworth connected Caudill with Little, Brown, which developed his manuscript into a book, published the following year as Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area.

[From the April 1962 issue: Harry Caudill on the destruction of the Appalachian mountains]

“All of a sudden, all hell broke loose,” Caudill’s son James told me, recalling the period following publication. “We had people coming from the ends of the earth, all over this country and a whole bunch of foreign countries as well.”

Readers were especially interested in the book’s lurid detailing of poverty. A spate of journalists and TV crews came to witness the desolation described in Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and Caudill served as their fixer, leading “poverty tours” that confirmed his assessments. He came to befriend the New York Times reporter Homer Bigart, whose front-page coverage of Appalachia’s plight brought Caudill’s book to the attention of staffers at the White House.

In April 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson helicoptered into Martin County, Kentucky, where, from the porch of an unemployed mill operator, he promoted his new slate of social legislation. Appalachia became the War on Poverty’s first front. The photographers and members of the press Caudill showed around dutifully extracted portraits of hardship from the mountains, fuel for Johnson’s initiatives. A Life photo essay centered on the region was titled “The Valley of Poverty.”

But Johnson’s proposals fell short of what Caudill had envisioned—a Tennessee Valley Authority–style program that would totally wean the local economy off coal. Highly skeptical of traditional welfare programs, Caudill told Michael Murphy, who wrote the text accompanying “The Valley of Poverty,” that “the agencies have turned all of eastern Kentucky into paleface reservations, changing sturdy mountaineers into human vegetables that come alive only at election time when they are trotted out to vote.”

His caustic assessment of his neighbors may have shocked admirers, but the same disdain whispered throughout much of Caudill’s work.

“As the more intelligent and ambitious people moved out of the plateau the percentage of mental defectives relative to the total population rose sharply,” Caudill wrote in Night Comes to the Cumberlands. “But such disability as they may suffer does not prevent them from procreating, and they beget great gangs of children who tend to inherit or soon to acquire the shortcomings of their parents and to become Welfare beneficiaries as soon as they are born.” (His most strident claims were largely absent from his writing for The Atlantic, though a 1964 article titled “The Permanent Poor” repeats his description of eastern Kentucky as a “paleface reservation.”)

[From the June 1964 issue: Harry Caudill on the permanent poor]

Over time, the bitterness of his rhetoric only calcified. The War on Poverty sent billions of dollars to Appalachia, and by some estimates it reduced poverty in the region by 7.6 percent. Still, widespread poverty lingered, and to explain it, Caudill searched for the root of Appalachians’ plight in the personal qualities that he believed made them distinct from other Americans. In the 1970s, he became fascinated with “dysgenics”—the scientifically baseless claim that less intelligent people were “outbreeding” their smarter peers, driving down the overall quality of the gene pool. Convinced that dysgenics explained Appalachia’s predicament, Caudill contacted the Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned eugenics advocate William Shockley and invited him to Whitesburg; there, they and others patched together a plan to administer intelligence testing and offer cash bonuses to Appalachians who volunteered to be sterilized. It never took off.

Facing an advancing case of Parkinson’s disease, Caudill died by suicide in 1990.

In her flowing, floral gown, Stacy Kranitz was a difficult figure to miss. “She immediately caught my eye,” Derek Henry, now a friend of Kranitz’s, told me. The two first crossed paths at the 2012 Rainbow Gathering—an annual countercultural assembly—held that year at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where Kranitz’s dress had drawn a gaggle of admiring onlookers.

Her outfit, she told them, was inspired by Catherine Marshall’s 1967 novel, Christy, the story of a young woman who comes to Appalachia as a schoolteacher only to find her stereotypes of the region dismantled by the people she encounters (Christy was later adapted into a popular 1990s CBS drama). Henry pressed forward in the crowd. He knew Christy well; Cocke County, Tennessee, where he’s lived most of his life, served as the novel’s setting. Henry and Kranitz agreed to keep in touch, and eventually Kranitz traveled to Newport, Henry’s hometown.

CNN had recently published a series of Kranitz’s photos under the headline “Life in Appalachia”—but many Appalachians felt that the editors’ selected images, of cross burnings and snake handlers, reduced them to a stereotype, much as Life magazine had 50 years prior. “My advice to her was to lean into that controversy, to not run away from it, to not be afraid of it,” Henry told me.

“There’s a lot of beauty here,” Henry said. “But hatred and backwardness—that is here too.” To counter Harry Caudill’s negative image of Appalachia with an overly sanitized one would be equally reductive—and too easy. Unlike “The Valley of Poverty,” Kranitz’s body of work isn’t interested in shaping a single narrative about the region. Her photos don’t sand down Appalachia’s rougher edges, but they don’t leer at them either.

Kranitz has remained close friends with many of the people she’s met in the region, several of whom, including Henry, appear in As It Was Give(n) to Me. “I’m one of her favorite models,” Henry joked.

“I’ve always respected Stacy for coming into some of the darkest corners of these areas and documenting whatever she sees from a modest perspective and with a completely open mind,” Colby Dotson, who is also a favorite model, told me. The photobook is dedicated to Dotson, Henry, and another of Kranitz’s friends.

Christy serves as an important touchstone for Kranitz’s work: Scattered throughout her book are a series of self-portraits in which Kranitz dresses as Marshall’s protagonist, reminding viewers who get the reference that, like Christy, she is an outsider, hampered by biases. Those who don’t, though, could easily assume that the floral-gown-clad Kranitz is a “genuine” Appalachian, wearing a dated dress simply because she’s been lost to time. That’s the point.

“They’re a ‘fuck you,’” Kranitz told me of the self-portraits. “You’re on this journey thinking that what I’m giving you is this very earnest perspective of this place,” she said, “but actually, it’s really just my fantasy colliding with the reality I’m experiencing.” In that collision, Kranitz often finds her views dismantled.

“That’s why I do this work,” Kranitz said, “to be completely undone by the people that I engage with.”

Science Fiction Got Surveillance All Wrong

2022-11-04T10:00:00-04:00

As a journalist contacting sources incarcerated in Pennsylvania state prisons, I must send letters to a warehouse hundreds of miles away in Florida, where they’re digitized and kept indefinitely by a company called Smart Communications—it’s never clear how many people read them. Smart Communications earns millions of dollars from prisons and jails across the country each year, highlighting a bizarre contradiction in how the United States thinks of privacy: There are some people whose surveillance we hardly ever think about. And the literature we reach for to understand government scrutiny rarely takes them into account.

Revelations that the National Security Agency was reading troves of Americans’ communications prompted outraged allusions to George Orwell’s 1984. But despite how frequently the book is deployed to explain our reality, it isn’t that apt: The novel’s “Party” is totalizing, affecting everyone, the author Noah Berlatsky argues, and that’s not how surveillance functions in the United States. The so-called right to privacy, so often violated these days, has always been a luxury good, Sarah E. Igo writes in her review of Seek and Hide, Amy Gajda’s history of privacy in American law. And in On the Run, Alice Goffman documents how the burden of police monitoring weighs most heavily on poor communities of color, shaping how some men live their lives.

Orwell considered invasions of privacy a threat to liberty. Newer works have complicated the science-fiction genre by also considering surveillance a threat to justice. Books by Namwali Serpell and Pola Oloixarac, Lily Meyer argues, provide revised perspectives by comparing it to colonialism. In a period of renewed censorship and rising authoritarianism, new literary comparisons that take stock of government snooping will prove particularly important—because the authors whom Connor Goodwin finds are most affected by book bans also tend to be those most affected by surveillance. To understand who’s watching whom, we’ll need to update what we read.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

(Virgin Films)

Stop comparing the NSA to 1984 (and start comparing it to Philip K. Dick)
“Using Orwell to understand NSA spying, then, ends up functioning as a distortion by metaphor. It suggests that all of us are equally targeted, and that the problem is that all of us are equally targeted—that middle-class non-marginal people are going to be stomped by Big Brother. The truth, though, is that the NSA data will likely be used primarily, as it always has been, against the androids and the Zhangs—which is why we need to try to find a metaphor that addresses not just liberty, but justice.”

📚1984, by George Orwell
📚The Trial, by Franz Kafka
📚The Muslims Are Coming, by Arun Kundnani
📚Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
📚China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen F. McHugh
📚The War of the Worlds, By H. G. Wells

(Rodrigo Corral)

The price of privacy
“We live in a world where daily, continuous—and often unfelt and unseen—intrusions are the rule, the work not just of traditional media but of tech companies, data-analytics firms, entertainment systems, financial industries, and state agencies seeking unfettered access to our information. Each of us now navigates competing claims of transparency and privacy every time we swipe a credit card, download an app, or pass through a smart home. Focusing on individual violations and litigation in the courts, a strategy that once served to protect (some) Americans’ privacy, is insufficient in the present. For a shot at privacy in the digital age—to say nothing of the coming metaverse—we will need to envision privacy as a collective social good in need of collective solutions: strong public regulation that systematically reins in the parties who trample it.”

📚 Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy, by Amy Gajda

(Tim McDonagh)

The society of fugitives
“The police, in Goffman’s portrayal in On the Run, are at full-fledged war with residents. They beat up people under arrest, steal from suspects, smash up homes while serving warrants, and use the results of surveillance to turn lovers or family members against one another. Such behavior shocks Goffman, at least at first. But the neighborhood’s longtime residents are more resigned. To them, police raids are like thunderstorms: take cover if you can, and don’t go back outside until it stops raining.”

📚On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, by Alice Goffman
📚Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, by Victor Rios

(Soho Press)

Science fiction’s preoccupation with surveillance
“In this way, The Old Drift enters territory that Dark Constellations leaves untouched. Both writers’ works highlight how easily surveillance can masquerade as progress, and expose the subtle ways colonialism persists in contemporary political life.”

📚The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell
📚Dark Constellations, by Pola Oloixarac

(Getty; The Atlantic)

The banned books you haven’t heard about
“The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has a telling statistic: It estimates that a staggering 82 to 97 percent of book challenges go unreported on. That means these books, the overwhelming majority, don’t even make it beyond the school-board minutes and into the local paper. And, as it turns out, this question of how much attention a book gets—either because it’s already well known, like The Bluest Eye, or because the banning itself generates big news—is a crucial factor. It makes all the difference in whether censorship helps or hinders a book’s chances of landing in a reader’s hands.”

📚The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
📚Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe
📚The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Andrew Aoyama. The book he’s reading next is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans.

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C. J. Rice’s Narrow Path to Freedom

2022-10-19T07:00:00-04:00

Last week, The Atlantic published its November cover story, “Good Luck, Mr. Rice,” in which Jake Tapper investigates the case of a Philadelphia teenager who was convicted of attempted murder after a 2011 shooting that left four injured. C. J. Rice, now 28, has maintained his innocence. No physical evidence tied him (or anyone) to the crime, and the single eyewitness who identified him as the perpetrator had told police three times that she did not recognize the shooter before ultimately changing her story. Rice’s pediatrician, who happened to be Tapper’s father, Theodore, contends that his involvement would have been physically impossible—Rice himself had been seriously injured in a separate shooting three weeks earlier.

A skilled lawyer would have emphasized these holes in the state’s case. But Rice’s court-appointed attorney, Sandjai Weaver, was not up to the task of zealously defending her client. Overworked and underpaid, she failed to prepare alibi witnesses, challenge the credibility of the eyewitness’s testimony, or even introduce his medical records as evidence. “Rice lacked legal representation worthy of the name,” Tapper argues. “And as he has discovered, the law provides little recourse for those undermined by a lawyer. The constitutional ‘right to counsel’ has become an empty guarantee.”

Rice first appealed his conviction in 2013. At the time, an older man gave him what he calls an “athar,” a prison adage imparted from inmate to inmate (athar may derive from the Arabic athara, meaning “transmit” or “pass along”). The appeals process, the man said, was like a boxing match: Each time you get knocked down, it will be harder to get back up. If Rice wanted his freedom, he would have to shake off the disappointments, drag himself to his feet, and keep fighting.

That initial appeal, and another challenging Weaver’s competency, have since failed. Rice has struggled, at times, to rouse himself after a defeat. But in each of the letters we’ve exchanged, he’s assured me that he’s “just taking things one day at a time.” It’s a difficult coping strategy for someone facing 30–60 years in prison.

His appeals exhausted, obtaining a commutation from the governor is likely Rice’s only path to freedom. (In Pennsylvania, those currently incarcerated must have their sentence commuted before seeking a pardon.) Commutation is a complicated and lengthy process. Unlike his counterparts in many other states, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf cannot commute sentences unilaterally. The state constitution prevents the governor from acting without the approval of a five-member Board of Pardons, composed of the lieutenant governor and attorney general as well as a medical expert, corrections expert, and victim representative. The petition process requires painstaking attention to detail—one man I spoke with said his petition was rejected because of a single mistyped date—and great patience. It usually takes about three and a half years to unfold.

On Friday, Rice and a team of lawyers at an organization called the Reform Alliance began that process, sending a petition for commutation to the Board of Pardons. The success or failure of Rice’s petition will depend on the underlying facts of his case, but also on the members of the board and the political pressures they face.

Though the board was created in the 19th century to forestall favor granting and horse trading, the process has hardly been insulated from politics. Two of the current board members, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman and Attorney General Josh Shapiro, are in the final weeks of competitive campaigns for elections that are of national significance—Fetterman in a race that could determine control of the U.S. Senate, Shapiro in a race against a gubernatorial candidate who denies the results of the 2020 election. For Fetterman, past votes in support of commutation applications have proved to be potent attack-ad fodder for his opponent, the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. Shapiro’s opponent, as well, has cast him as soft on crime, linking rising rates of certain crimes to Shapiro’s tenure as attorney general. Both Fetterman and Shapiro declined to comment on Rice’s case, claiming they were hesitant to weigh in on an application that could come under their review.

Rice’s petition is unlikely to be reviewed before November’s elections, however, after which the composition of the board will shift. Voters will decide the political futures of Fetterman and Shapiro and whether the two men will pay a price for their choices as board members. The candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general will undoubtedly be watching. The lessons they learn from the experiences of their predecessors will shape the outcome of Rice’s last attempt to secure his freedom.

A commutation petition requires a detailed account of the applicant’s personal and criminal history. When the board receives an application, it solicits supplemental materials and feedback from the department of corrections as well as the district attorney and president judge for the county where the crime occurred. It then votes on whether to allow an applicant’s case to proceed. If the applicant wins the requisite number of votes—a simple majority in C.J.’s case—they receive an interview with the board and a public hearing. Afterward, the board votes again: If an applicant wins the support of enough members, the board recommends their case to the governor. Only at that stage can the governor decide to issue a commutation.

Though the creation of the board was intended to make the clemency process less subjective, its members lack a definitive set of factors for determining whether to recommend an applicant. Its mandate, former board members told me, is simply to “show mercy.”

I reached out to former board members to ask about how they would view a case like Rice’s. John Wetzel, who served as Pennsylvania secretary of corrections and sat on the board as its “corrections expert” from 2007 to 2011, expressed disbelief at the facts of Rice’s case. “I’ve been working 32 years inside corrections,” Wetzel said. “There are still moments that shock you.”

Members of the board serving in elected positions may share Wetzel’s view, but their calculus is complicated by the realities of Pennsylvania politics. The positions that Fetterman and Shapiro currently hold are common launchpads for higher office; over the past century, more than a quarter of Pennsylvania governors have at one time served as either lieutenant governor or attorney general.

Decisions made while serving on the Board of Pardons can come back to haunt an elected official. In 1992, a man named Reginald McFadden, who had been convicted of murder at age 16, petitioned the board to have his sentence commuted. Having received enthusiastic recommendations from his prison warden, the secretary of corrections, and the judge who had ordered his sentence, the Board of Pardons, then chaired by Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel, voted 4–1 to recommend McFadden’s commutation to then-Governor Bob Casey Sr. McFadden was released from prison in 1994.

That year, Singel was running as the Democratic candidate to succeed Casey as governor. A month out from Election Day, he maintained an eight-point lead over his Republican opponent, Tom Ridge. Then, on October 6, less than three months after his release, McFadden was arrested in New York and later convicted of the murder of two Long Island residents and the rape of a third.

The arrest turned the governor’s race upside down. Ridge went on the offensive, characterizing Singel as soft on crime. Ridge ultimately won the gubernatorial race by nearly 200,000 votes.

In 1997, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a constitutional amendment that required a unanimous vote of the Board of Pardons for the governor to commute a life sentence or the death penalty. Between his election in 1994 and the end of his term, Ridge did not commute a single prisoner’s life sentence.

For members of the Board of Pardons with political ambitions, the lessons of the Reginald McFadden case were clear. One wrong vote could sink an entire career.

After the 1997 constitutional amendment, commutation for those with life sentences became virtually impossible to obtain. From its passage through 2018, the board has been able to muster unanimous votes for only 12 life-without-parole applicants. At least eight others would have qualified for a recommendation under the old rules; the amendment functionally condemned each of them to die in prison. Commutations for people like C. J. Rice, serving long sentences for violent crimes, have been nearly as hard to secure.

As lieutenant governor, John Fetterman has prioritized revitalizing the clemency process. Fetterman made criminal-justice reform a central tenet of his 2018 campaign and has sought to redefine the Board of Pardons as a final fail-safe in cases where courts have declined to act.

In April 2019, Fetterman appointed Brandon Flood as the board’s secretary. Flood had himself been incarcerated and successfully applied for a pardon. He brought to the role a litany of ideas for reforming the process. Facing a backlog of cases from the ’90s and early aughts, he wanted to impose a minimum eligibility requirement to ensure that the board focused its efforts on those who had served the most time; he pushed to clear administrative red tape and reduce and remove filing fees. The fear of recidivism that dominated the board in the shadow of the McFadden case was unmerited, he argued. According to a study Flood helped commission as secretary, of the 3,037 pardon applicants in the state of Pennsylvania from 2008 to 2018, only two were convicted again of a violent crime.

Together, Fetterman and Flood dramatically increased the number of applicants that the board recommended to Governor Tom Wolf. Wolf, for his part, tended to follow the board’s recommendations, issuing more than 100 pardons each year of his term. In 2020, he granted 551. (A spokesperson for Wolf said that “the governor has made criminal justice reform a top priority throughout his administration” but declined to address Rice’s specific case.)

Fetterman was especially passionate about the case of Lee and Dennis Horton, two brothers convicted of second-degree felony murder in 1994. The Hortons were identified by an eyewitness in a “show-up” procedure that is now commonly regarded as likely to induce bias—similar to the way an eyewitness later identified C. J. Rice. Their clemency application failed when Shapiro voted against it. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fetterman then met with Shapiro and threatened to run against him in the 2022 Democratic gubernatorial primary unless he changed his vote on theirs and other applications. The brothers got a new hearing, and Shapiro voted to recommend them for commutation. When they were released from prison, Fetterman hired them as field organizers for his campaign. (Fetterman declined to comment to the Inquirer on private conversations with Shapiro. A spokesperson for Shapiro denied that the encounter ever happened and said Shapiro’s votes had nothing to do with politics.)

Once Fetterman’s term on the board expires, the reforms that he and Flood enacted may prove fleeting. “There’s a lot of stuff you can do administratively or that you can do through executive order, but it’s not durable policy,” Flood, who resigned from the board in 2021, told me last week. “After you leave in January, whoever the next person is can say, ‘I don’t like this shit,’ roll it back, and that’s it.”

The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, Carrie DelRosso, has been mum on what she would do as pardon-board chair, telling the Delaware Valley Journal that she is “very pro–law enforcement” and would “listen to the experts.” Though she and Doug Mastriano, the party’s nominee for governor, diverge on many issues—candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run on separate tickets in Pennsylvania primaries, and Mastriano had endorsed a less moderate candidate for lieutenant governor—neither has much of an incentive to continue Fetterman’s reforms if elected.

The Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, Austin Davis, has also been vague. Asked whether he would use the lieutenant governor’s office “as a bully pulpit for criminal justice reform and clemency,” as Fetterman has, Davis told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star that he is “very concerned that Pennsylvania communities are safe.” “I believe there isn’t an and-or situation when it comes to safety and the work of the Board of Pardons,” he said.

Flood told me he’s met with both lieutenant-governor candidates about the pardons board. Neither DelRosso nor Austin knew much about how the executive-clemency process worked, he said, but they were willing to learn.

Still, even if the next lieutenant governor were to fully share Fetterman’s sympathies, they may be hesitant to replicate his approach to the board, having seen its effects in his own campaign for Senate.

Recently, Mehmet Oz’s campaign reportedly paid actors to dress in prison jumpsuits and carry signs that read Inmates for Fetterman. Seizing on his hiring of the Hortons, the campaign has demanded that Fetterman “fire the convicted murderers on his staff.”

Accurate or not, Oz’s attacks appear to be resonating: Though Fetterman once maintained a healthy lead, polls have tightened in recent weeks, leaving the outcome of the Senate race unclear.

For now, Rice remains at State Correctional Institution–Coal Township. As his case proceeds, he’ll sit in his cell and try to remember his fellow inmate’s athar. “I’m not bitter,” he told me in March. “I see what that does to people in here, people who are locked up for stuff that they didn’t do.” He sighed. “People really lose their mind in this place.”

Rice has little choice but to wait out the results of the 2022 election from the prison and watch as two newly elected politicians fill Shapiro and Fetterman’s vacated seats on the Board of Pardons. Ultimately, his fate will be decided by that board, by the political pressures that shape its decisions, and by how its members evaluate who deserves mercy.

The Reginald McFadden case still casts a shadow over Pennsylvania’s pardon process. So long as an elected lieutenant governor and attorney general serve on the board, so long as their positions launch careers in higher office, the board’s actions will be circumscribed by fears of making a similar mistake

In 2017, former Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel reflected on his decision to recommend McFadden for commutation in an essay published by America, a Jesuit monthly. “As much as I regret that fateful decision, I cannot accept the alternative: a government and a society that looks with cold indifference at those who have turned their lives around and who languish in our overcrowded prisons,” he wrote. “For me, mercy and compassion are more than personal options,” Singel continued. “They are the underpinnings of what can make America not only great but good.”

Modern Men Are Still Figuring Out Fatherhood

2022-08-05T10:00:00-04:00

A stomach-twisting thrill animates the Taken movies. As bullets fly across each progressively more ridiculous sequel, Liam Neeson kicks down the door to the pantheon of cultural Super Dads and asserts himself as its king. Here is a paragon of fatherhood, the films suggest; here is a dad endowed with “a very particular set” of parenting skills, a man who may struggle to connect with his daughter emotionally but can unleash a hail of violence each time she encounters a band of licentious kidnappers.

If today it’s hard to watch Taken without at least some disgust at the glorification of Neeson’s bloodshed, perhaps it’s because the traditional conception of fatherhood his character embodies has begun to fall out of step with shifting understandings of masculinity.

Discipline was for generations the father’s domain, and righteous anger gave fatherhood meaning. A rage like Neeson’s could be justified as defining a family’s realm of acceptable behavior. But in Raising Raffi, the journalist Keith Gessen’s memoir of his first years parenting his son, discipline becomes a “quicksand of confusing implications,” Daniel Engber writes, “where the angry dad exerts control but also loses it.”

As Gessen and his generation search for solid ground on which to define fatherhood, they explore alternative sites of meaning divorced from anger: Chris Bachelder’s 2011 novel Abbott Awaits follows a father embedded not in the epic struggles of an action hero but the tedium of raising an un-kidnapped toddler—sitting in a parked car, cleaning vomit, scraping raisins from the creases of a high chair. The photographer Rashod Taylor captures with his camera the vulnerability inherent to raising a Black son in contemporary America. And the comedian John Hodgman ponders how his attempts to appear relatable and approachable leave his son seriously disturbed.

But children are often more thoughtful than those who care for them assume, Elissa Strauss argues. If fatherhood’s future foundations are ambiguous, no longer grounded in anger, violence, and discipline, perhaps they ought to be decided alongside the little philosophers. Unlike Liam Neeson, modern men don’t need to go it alone.

Every Friday in The Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

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What We’re Reading

(20th Century Fox)

The Taken series is every father’s fear—and fantasy
“The appeal of Taken is Mills the superdad honoring all those ‘I’d take a bullet for my kid’ promises by making others take bullets for threatening his kin. The result is high in entertainment value for dads and non-dads alike—the Taken series has made $600 million worldwide and counting for a reason. As with most action movies, there’s something cathartic about seeing unambiguously bad people get their comeuppance, but the franchise goes about it in a much more unsavory and emotionally manipulative way.”

🎥 Taken
🎥 Taken 2
🎥 Taken 3

(Pablo Delcan and Río Delcan La Rocca)

Why is Dad so mad?
“His book proceeds as so many dad books don’t: with a father’s careful, piercing introspection, and a deep analysis of anger. ‘You’re a bad dada and I’m never going to listen to you again!’ his 3-year-old son says to him in one scene, after getting yelled at during bedtime. ‘I felt he was right,’ Gessen says. ‘I was not a good dada. But I didn’t know what else to do.’”

📚 Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, by Keith Gessen
📚 Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, by Michael Chabon

(Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty)

The book that captures my life as a dad
“[Chris] Bachelder’s short but indelible novel spills forth with kitchen-sink wisdom; it was exactly what I’d been missing as a young father, struggling to make sense of my irrevocably changed existence. For all the profundity that one experiences when becoming a parent—the primordial love; the humbling wonder—there’s also a lot of dullness and mundanity. Child-rearing is an immense task consisting of many mind-numbing moments. Among the reasons Abbott Awaits is remarkable is because it collects these moments and pulls them to center stage. It makes the everyday aspects of middle-class parenting objects of study, of tender observation.”

📚 Abbott Awaits, by Chris Bachelder
📚 Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
📚 The Information, by Martin Amis

(Rashod Taylor)

The life of a little Black boy in America
“In my photo Deep Sleep, it looks like my son is sleeping, and it’s beautiful. But for me, the image also has this postmortem look. It reveals my fears of him not coming home one day and having to bury him, like so many other Black parents have. There are things I am already teaching him that other kids his age are not thinking of. Like, Hey, we probably shouldn’t wear a hoodie at night. At the same time, he’s just a little boy in the United States.”

📷 Little Black Boy, by Rashod Taylor

(Doug McLean)

Cujo’s unexpected lesson about parenting and art
“[John] Hodgman takes unlikely comfort from Stephen King’s novel Cujo—and not just because the book features a haunting, astoundingly insightful passage about the way parents imprint children with their flaws … Hodgman explained what the book’s masterful characterization and radical formal decisions taught him about parenting and art: that doing something well requires risking terrible mistakes. Accept it, and loosen up.”

📚 Vacationland: True Stories From Painful Beaches, by John Hodgman
📚 Cujo, by Stephen King

(Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty)

Want to understand Socrates and Sartre? Talk with your kid.
“Let us not ignore the radical nature of this. A philosopher, a man, has written a whole book arguing that the setting of the home and the daily act of parenting can lead to profound philosophical insight and debate.”

📚 Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy With My Kids, by Scott Hershovitz
📚 The Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Andrew Aoyama. The book he’s reading next is Gideon’s Trumpet, by Anthony Lewis.

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Learning How to Grieve in Public

2022-06-03T10:00:00-04:00

To insist, as the journalist John Gunther did, that Death Be Not Proud deserved to be published was to insist that the boy it memorialized deserved to be remembered, not only by his family but by the world. As his 17-year-old son, Johnny, died of cancer, Gunther drafted a candid portrait of his grief. When it was published, in 1949, his level of disclosure was still considered uncouth, and Gunther knew it. But Death Be Not Proud was a success, resonating with a United States shocked by the tragedy of the Second World War. By moving his anguish from the private sphere to the public one, Gunther inaugurated an enduring genre: the grief memoir.

The United States is grieving, again, as it reckons with both the acute tragedies of more mass shootings and the extended trauma of a pandemic that has left millions unable to properly mourn. With funerals for 19 children and two teachers under way in Uvalde, Texas, perhaps books like Gunther’s can offer Americans a lesson in grieving in public, together, instead of shouldering the burden alone.

Years after the death of Johnny Gunther, a falling brick struck and killed Jayson Greene’s daughter. Literature helped him find words to describe losing a child, culminating in his memoir, Once More We Saw Stars. Clemantine Wamariya puts an entire community’s loss on the page in The Girl Who Smiled Beads, a memoir of the Rwandan genocide (written together with Elizabeth Weil) that resists leaving readers with a facile sense of uplift. Grief, it suggests, isn’t made easier by survival. On this point, Philippe Lançon, a journalist wounded in the 2015 shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, agrees. Laced with humor, Le Lambeau recounts Lançon’s recovery and his effort to reclaim his life.

These narratives resonate, the author Deborah Cohen argues, because they move beyond the “celebration of the ‘I’” commonly associated with memoir and “attempt to heal the collective ‘we.’” Not all writers manage to bring that “we” together, to be sure. Joyce Maynard’s The Best of Us, for example, misses the mark: Caitlin Flanagan writes that the memoir fails to escape the shadow of its author’s narcissism. (In a response to The Atlantic, Maynard disagreed.) But the genre can offer readers connection—and instruction. “Thank God there are people like you who still realize the infinite value of one soul when the world is devising new means of mass killing,” one reader wrote to Johnny’s mother. The best grief memoirs remind us of that value.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What We’re Reading

The book that unleashed American grief
“The battle between Johnny’s fine mind and the savagery of the tumor was like the fight [Gunther had] witnessed in fascist Vienna and Berlin: ‘A primitive to-the-death struggle of reason against violence, reason against disruption, reason against brute unthinking force.’ To insist on the value of a single existence was to strike back at that shocking disregard for human life.”

+ 1997: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on John Gunther and the writing of Inside U.S.A.

📚 Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther

Doug McLean

The purgatory that comes after losing a child
“You slowly learn to believe in your child’s ongoing existence. Their future begins to take shape in your mind ... [But] what happens to this sense when your child is swiftly killed by a runaway piece of your everyday environment, at the exact moment you had given up thinking that something could take all of this away at any moment?”

📚Once More We Saw Stars, by Jayson Greene
📚 The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri

Crown

The Girl Who Smiled Beads defies easy uplift
“Forget raw and pure: Wamariya’s quest is to create some semblance of moral and emotional coherence out of a life that too often feels like a self-corroding performance.”

📚 The Girl Who Smiled Beads, by Clemantine Wamariya

Sebastien Micke / ‘Paris Match’ / Getty

The queen of oversharing
“Fredelle Maynard once published a book about parenting in which she averred that the most important gift to give a child was the certainty that ‘never since the beginning of time has there been anybody just like you.’ It is this lesson (perhaps the ultimate Boomer credo) that animates Joyce’s collected essays and memoirs.”

+ Read Maynard’s response to Flanagan’s review.

📚 The Best of Us, by Joyce Maynard

Fred Lancelot / Reuters

What the November 13 attacks taught Paris
“Of all these books that touch on the attacks of 2015, the one that is most affecting—for the beauty of its prose, the complexity of its emotions, its sense of irony and humor and pain, its ability to exist in the moment and to transcend it as a universal testimony—is Le Lambeau.”

📚 Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, by Philippe Lançon

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Andrew Aoyama. The book he’s reading next is The Ambassadors, by Henry James.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

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What Will Become of America’s Veterans’ Halls?

2021-11-11T10:45:35-05:00

Photographs by Maureen Drennan

A sign in the entrance of the Michael A. Rawley Jr. American Legion Post advertises the space as “members only,” but the Brooklyn-based photographer Maureen Drennan has warned me in advance to ignore it. Drennan has often entered these establishments unannounced: Since 2018, she’s photographed American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts across the northeastern United States, drawn in by what she calls their “lonely poetry.” The Rawley post, an 1860s brownstone in Gowanus that was once a church, is only a few blocks from Drennan’s apartment. Inside, wood-paneled walls shimmer in the glow of incandescent bulbs, the old kind; a crowd of about a dozen packs the bar, their shoes squeaking against vinyl floor tiles. I’ve crashed the birthday party of a favorite bartender.

Charlie O'Connor, who served in the Army in Kuwait and Iraq, seated in the Michael A. Rawley Jr. American Legion Post in Brooklyn

From left: Lauren Williams, 38, the first female commander of the Jennings Willets American Legion Post, in Germantown, New York. Photographs of veterans at the Germantown post. David Willis Sr., vice commander, outside the Bridesburg-Lawton VFW Post, in Philadelphia. Willis served in the Navy in the Great Lakes, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam.

Two of the oldest veterans’ organizations in the country, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion operate a series of outposts across the United States, gathering places for service members and their families that offer privacy and exceptionally cheap drinks (a pint of Budweiser at the Rawley post costs only $3). “It’s a great place to sit and talk with people, or not,” Ron Mironchik told Drennan at a VFW post in New Paltz, New York. In her photo of Mironchik, a Vietnam War veteran and the post’s former elected “commander,” he sits with his wife, Kathy, at the bar, while his son Andrew, an Iraq War veteran and the post’s current commander, serves drinks. Andrew and Kathy bartend on a volunteer basis, working for tips—the bartenders and commanders who staff American Legion and VFW posts typically receive no salary. “There’s a bonding that comes from being in a place with other veterans, people who have been through it,” Ron said. “It’s like a vibration.”

Andrew Mironchik, the current commander of VFW Post 8645 in New Paltz, New York, stands behind the bar.

If the vibration he identifies buzzes through the Rawley post, though, I can observe its hum only as an outsider. I’m not a veteran, and Drennan isn’t either. There’s a touch of voyeurism in the experience of viewing her photos, in peering through the windows that they offer into a community neither of us can fully understand. In one, Charlie O’Connor, a sanitation worker from Staten Island who deployed to Kuwait and Iraq, sits with his hands clasped in front of a painting of a tattered American flag. In another, Lauren Williams swells with pride, the first woman elected commander of American Legion Post 346, in Germantown, New York. To meet their gaze in these private portraits feels like ignoring a members-only sign.

Annie Hande at VFW Post 260 Prince Wynn Auxiliary in Queens

In the years that have followed 9/11, the U.S. military presence has simultaneously expanded abroad and become less and less visible at home. A bipartisan reliance on Special Forces and drones has kept American casualties down and U.S. military activity around the world—not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Syria, Yemen, Niger, Colombia, and more than 150 other countries—out of the front-page news. Against this backdrop, some service members have found ironic comfort in a common expression of frustration: “We’re at war while America’s at the mall.” Even if civilians rarely step inside, the VFW chapters and Legion posts that dot American communities are at least conspicuous, physical reminders that the United States is a nation at war.

[From the May 2018 issue: Phil Klay on the plunging morale of America’s troops]

Left: Instruments at the Colonel Charles Young American Legion Post in Harlem. Right: Trenton Brown, the post’s commander.

Today, however, the future of these organizations and their spaces is uncertain. In the past two decades, the American Legion’s membership has declined by nearly 23 percent; since 1992, the VFW’s has declined by almost half. Even the vibrant Rawley post has reason to worry: Raymond Wrigley, the post’s commander, told me that his older members—veterans of World War II and the Korean War—are dying faster than new members can join. The restaurants, bars, and sought-after apartments of Park Slope have begun to bleed westward toward Gowanus. To the immediate right of the post is an empty lot, listed for sale; next over is a new housing development.

Members gather for the monthly pancake breakfast at the Jennings Willets American Legion Post in Germantown.

Wrigley speaks with pride of the Maryland militiamen who died fighting the British in the Battle of Brooklyn, among the bloodiest of the Revolutionary War, pointing out their various memorials around the post. Local legend suggests that their sacrifice allowed George Washington to escape from Brooklyn to New Jersey, and that they were buried by the British in an unmarked mass grave not far from the Rawley post (though historians have cast doubt on this claim).

From left: A veteran’s jacket. Danny Bowe, who served in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the Bridesburg-Lawton VFW Post, in Philadelphia. A memorial outside the Bridesburg-Lawton post.

Should the post close, either for want of members or beneath the weight of the forces that have already erased so much of Brooklyn’s history, the “lonely poetry” distilled in Drennan’s images will fade from the present tense. The wood-paneled walls and the cheap drinks, the vinyl floors and the vibration felt only by those with a shared experience—these reminders of the United States’ global entanglements will fade too. But the nation will keep sending its citizens abroad to fight, and Americans at home will keep going to the mall.

VFW Post 260 Prince Wynn Auxiliary, Queens