Discovering Appalachia Through Fiction

The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between. – Barbara Kingolver, Demon Copperhead 

Kafka once wrote, “In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.” In most avenues of life, this is depressingly true, for there are so many things beyond our control. Our life trajectories are mostly determined by the circumstances of our birth, the places we live, and the people we encounter along the way. It is not surprising, then, that these experiences and the cultural influences around us also shape how we perceive people and cultures that are different from our own.

For each of the past 35 years, I have driven by car to visit my mom (and dad until he died in 2015), in western North Carolina. When my dad retired in the early 1990s, my parents relocated from the DC suburbs of northern Virginia to the towns of Etowah, and then Fletcher, in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains, a part of the Appalachian mountain range. It is a region of majestic beauty, with mountains and trees all around that surround small towns and villages, each with their own quaint character. To get there from Pennsylvania, I drive south on I-81, through a small slice of West Virginia, the Maryland panhandle, and the entire length of Virginia, finally weaving through northeastern Tennessee until I cross over the border of western North Carolina.

Most of the drive is in Appalachia, and as I pass through southwestern Virginia and cross into Tennessee, I witness the rugged beauty of the physical landscape. Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of trailer parks, rundown farmhouses, and pockets of poverty nestled into the mountainsides and valleys below. The people here speak with a rural, southern accent, and there is no doubt that some folks I have interacted with at gas stations and mini-marts along the way have historically had the terms “hillbilly” and “hick” applied to them.

For years, this scenic drive provided a brief respite from my busy, more cosmopolitan life in Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, and I often looked wistfully and admiringly at what seemed like a simpler lifestyle in this part of the world. But, if truth be told, I have occasionally harbored pre-conceived and unflattering notions about the people of rural Appalachia, prejudices reflected in snide remarks by an “educated” friend or colleague (or myself) that painted southern rural culture as backwards, bigoted, and unsophisticated. Indeed, if you pay close attention, you will frequently hear such sentiments reflected throughout American higher culture.

Conversely, the educated elites of coastal America are frequently disdained and perceived as arrogant snobs by people from other social classes. It is a stone that flies both ways, a vicious cycle that feeds misunderstanding and America’s political and social divides. But the more you get to know people, spend time with them, and learn about their struggles and life challenges, the more you understand that these stereotypes and assumptions are often false and tell you nothing about the character of the individuals involved.

I have written previously about how an artfully crafted book can help us “experience life from someone else’s shoes. To understand where other people come from, to learn of their dreams and aspirations, their hopes and fears, [and] expose our common humanity.” (See “An Act of Quiet Contemplation: Why Reading Matters”). Concerning Appalachia, I can think of no better example than Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2022).

The Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which is modeled after Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, explores themes of child poverty in rural America, the scourge of opioid addiction fueled by the pharmaceutical companies in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the economic and social challenges faced by the people of Appalachia following the decline of the coal industry, tobacco farming, and the timber trade. Kingsolver tells the story brilliantly with great humor and heartbreak. It is one of the best novels I have ever read, and has opened my eyes to the struggles, resilience, and resourcefulness of the people of Appalachia.

Kingsolver’s novel dives deep into the heart of Lee County, in the far southwestern corner of Virginia, which along with parts of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, make up a section of the country that many have derisively called “flyover country” where the uneducated, uncultured “hicks” of America congregate. Before becoming one of the “cultural elite” as a successful author of ten critically acclaimed novels, Kingsolver was herself born and raised in a small Appalachian town in eastern Kentucky. She understands viscerally the people and culture of the region and knows first-hand the wide-spread and subtle prejudices people from other parts of the country entertain about the people she grew up with (and currently live among).

The protagonist and narrator of Demon Copperhead is Damon Fields, born to a single, teenage mother in a trailer home. We learn quickly that Damon, who everyone calls “Demon,” began life way behind the starting gate, his mother struggling with opioid and alcohol addictions and his father having died by accidental drowning in a local watering hole months earlier. Kingsolver sets Demon’s trajectory early in the novel, describing how Demon was born, fighting his way from his mother’s womb as she lay passed out on the bathroom floor of her mobile home. Demon’s narration implies we should not be surprised how this story progresses:

…If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, non-using type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

In his early years, Demon spends time with the Peggots, the kind family next door who take Demon in and provide him with stability until his mother recovers sobriety. Later, when Demon is back with his mom, she has married Stoner, a mentally and physically abusive trucker who makes Demon’s life miserable until Demon’s mother dies of an oxycontin overdose. The rest of Demon’s childhood is a tale of survival and neglect; of an overburdened child protection agency that places him in exploitative and abusive foster homes, his case assigned and re-assigned to social service workers who are underpaid and overworked and who lose files and don’t conduct proper follow-up. “I thought my life couldn’t get any worse,” he says at the age of ten. “Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.”

Demon’s first placement is at Creaky Farm, owned by a cranky and neglectful tobacco farmer who takes in foster kids for the $500 monthly payments from the state, which he uses to pay his debts while barely feeding the kids and making them work for free (and miss school) tending to his small tobacco farm, a dangerous and backbreaking form of hard labor that I knew nothing about until reading this book. A year later, the state places Demon with the McCobbs, a neglectful family that has Demon sleep in the dog’s room in the basement. Mr. McCobb insists that Demon must help with expenses (he is eleven), and he finds work for Demon at a local gas station, whose owner lets Demon snack on the junk food and hot dogs in the station mini-mart. But Demon’s labor is needed for the garbage disposal business run behind the station. Demon’s job is to dig through the dirty, filthy trash bags in the dumpsters to salvage anything that could be useful or valuable for the operators of a suspected meth lab next door. When Demon later discovers that his foster parents have been keeping all of Demon’s money earned at the gas station, he steals the money back and runs away.

Although much of the story is dark and depressing (made more so because you really care about and root for Demon), it contains doses of wry humor. In an implicit nod to David Coppefield, Demon references Charles Dickens, an author he discovered in school. Dickens, he says, is “one seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”

And there are moments of hope and uplift when Demon is finally getting his life on track. When he runs away from the McCobbs, he makes it (after being robbed along the way) to Murder Valley, Tennessee, the birthplace of his father,  whom he never met and knew little about. There, we meet Demon’s paternal grandmother, Betsy Woodall, a hardy, no-nonsense woman who lives with her disabled brother Dick, a kind and wise man who bonds with Demon. Betsy passionately believes in education and, upon learning of Demon’s circumstances, contacts the football coach of the Lee High Generals, who agrees to take Demon in and look after him. So, back to Lee County Demon goes. Although Coach is a flawed man and struggles with alcoholism, he has a nice house with a housekeeper and recognizes Demon’s potential as a football player.

High school football, as anyone who knows anything about America, is all the rage in southwestern Virginia (and throughout the south and Midwest), and for a brief couple of years, Demon becomes the star tight end for the high school football team. He is no longer society’s loser. He becomes popular and, for once in his life, is someone who counts. But when Demon severely injures his knee playing football during his sophomore year, the team doctor puts him on oxycontin to help with the pain. “What’s an oxy,” Demon asked the doctor. Back then, Big Pharma was marketing oxy as a shiny new miracle drug.

OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.

Before long, Demon becomes addicted to pain killers, an addiction not at all helped by his girlfriend, Dori, whom he met while working at her father’s farm store. What starts out as a sweet high school romance soon develops into a darker story of mutual addiction, as Dori’s own abuse of fentanyl and other drugs propels Demon in an even worse direction, until they are both hard core drug addicts. For me, this was where I had to put down the book occasionally, as Kingsolver credibly describes the sickness and suffering an addict goes through, and the resulting desperation to do what is necessary (i.e., finding a new supply of pills) to alleviate the sickness and pain. The drug high becomes irrelevant and leads eventually to tragic consequences.

Somehow, Demon survives against the odds, for buried within his soul was a hint of optimism: “I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.” And that may be the most inspiring aspect of the novel, a tale of resilience, resourcefulness, and survival. Demon, who could have given up and drowned in the ocean of neglect, abuse, addiction, and self-inflicted wounds, somehow stays afloat, reaches shore, and lives to talk about it.

Throughout the story, Demon’s biggest obstacle in life is his lack of self-esteem. “You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless,” he says at one point in the novel. “Mainly by getting there first yourself.” He considered himself a “low life” in part because he had heard messages all his life telling him that he and others like him were society’s losers. When people call you a “hick” and “redneck” and laugh at you enough times, you begin to believe it. “You get used to it, not in the good way,” says Demon, as the world oftentimes feels “like a place where you weren’t invited.” But Demon offers a word of advice: “This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes. …We can actually hear you.” 

Although Demon correctly perceives America’s condescending derision, he is wrong about his own worth. Fortunately, there are people at various points in Demon’s life who see his full potential as a human being and try, with differing degrees of success and failure along the way, to help him. The novel introduces us to terrific characters that show the rich diversity of Appalachia. Demon gains the notice of two teachers, Lewis and Annie Armstrong, an interracial couple who take a liking to him. Lewis Armstrong is a highly educated Black man from Chicago who teaches middle school English. He first came to Appalachia as part of the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program, where he met Annie, a “hippie” high school art teacher who recognizes Demon’s exceptional talents as a comic sketch artist. Ironically, Mr. Armstrong attempts to teach the middle school kids about the history of the region (one tidbit I did not know: Lee County fought for the Union during the Civil War) to help them counteract the stereotypes and ridicule that are societally apportioned to Appalachia’s mostly poor, white students. Annie, meanwhile, nurtures and develops Demon’s gifts as an artist, and recognizes his potential for greatness.

We also get to know the coach’s daughter, Angus, a wise soul who avoids all the bad temptations and influences of the high school while taking her education seriously, and she offers Demon positive encouragement and support, becoming his most trusted friend. There is also Tommy Waddell, a fellow orphan who Demon first meets at Creaky Farm, a kind and gentle boy who reads books and shows Demon what resilience and self-reliance are all about, eventually becoming a copy editor at the local newspaper. Finally, the conscience of the novel is the Peggots’ daughter, June Peggot, an intelligent and resolute nurse who resists the irresponsibility and criminality of the pharmaceutical industry’s drug pushing and the medical establishment’s complicity. June has witnessed far too many overdoses, suicides, and fatal accidents as an emergency nurse in Lee County and repeatedly warns, mostly to deaf ears, about the dangers of opioids.

Kingsolver writes credibly about the horrific struggles of opioid addiction and the troubled state of child protection services, with overworked and underpaid case workers. The system’s failures result in thousands of children in need overlooked and forgotten, and nobody seems to care. These are real problems that continue to persist today. She explains how Purdue Pharma targeted and exploited Appalachia to push OxyContin and fentanyl, intentionally taking advantage of a region where people were frequently injured and in pain due to work-related injuries from mining coal, farming tobacco, and other back breaking labor.

But Kingsolver also helps us better understand a region that values community, resourcefulness, and neighbors who look after each other. When someone dies, neighbors chip in, make meals, and give shelter to those in need. Women get together and make quilts for girls who are pregnant. Everyone knows everyone else, and for all its bad connotations, they know when someone is hurting.

In David Copperfield, Dickens’ protagonist had asked “whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life.” In Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver suggests that, when you are a child born into a life without choices, being a hero consists simply of surviving against all odds. In the end, Demon Copperhead is a hopeful story, best summed up by Demon’s resilience:

I've tried in this telling, time and time again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.

It would be difficult to imagine anyone coming away from this book without a heightened sense of empathy and compassion for those born without the advantages that many of us take for granted. Although a piece of fiction, Demon Copperhead allowed me to feel more connected to the common humanity all of us share. The need for empathy to better understand and relate to the people of Appalachia applies equally to the struggling poor of our inner cities, to the undocumented immigrants trying to survive in a version of America hostile to their existence, and to the many broken communities throughout the United States that have lost their way, victimized by globalization, the loss of manufacturing, rising inequality, and all of the things that leave some people behind while the rest of us go on with our lives. Before we judge others too harshly, we should strive first to understand from where they come, the challenges they face, and the struggles they have overcome.

The Age of Optimism: Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society

Lyndon Johnson at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964

For most of my life, I have been optimistic about America. Born at the end of the Eisenhower administration, I grew up in the prosperous 1960s, when American abundance seemed unlimited. American ingenuity and achievement since the end of World War II had made us the world’s most successful economy and superpower, and from my privileged, middle class vantage point it seemed there was nothing we could not do in science, medicine, education, engineering, and technology if we set our minds to it. I watched Americans walk on the moon in 1969 and shared the confidence of most Americans in our ability to solve whatever problems lay before us.

During the 1970s and 1980s, as I became more interested in politics and American history, attended college and law school, and pursued a career as a young prosecutor in Washington, D.C., I was inspired by the idealism of John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier. In high school and college, I read and re-read Robert Kennedy and His Times (Ballantine Books, 1978), Arthur Schlesinger’s brilliant biography of JFK’s younger brother who fought organized crime and corrupt union bosses as Attorney General and became a passionate advocate for the poor and disenfranchised during the final years of his life. To me, the Kennedys represented public service at its best, full of lofty ideals and an aspirational vision of America. Back then, I paid little tribute to Lyndon Johnson, who was less eloquent, more brash than intellect, and responsible for expanding America’s unforgiveable incursion into Vietnam in a war I believed then (and continue to believe) was immoral and wrong.

As I have grown older and had the opportunity to study, read, and reflect more deeply on twentieth century American history, I have come to appreciate the extent to which Johnson’s presidency contributed to my deeply engrained optimism in the American spirit. His foreign policy blunders notwithstanding, LBJ transformed American society for the better.

For as long as I can remember, I have believed in government as a force for good. It was a view reinforced by my father’s social justice leanings as a Lutheran pastor in New Jersey, and from reading about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. At a low point in American history, when the world was in a Great Depression and one in four Americans were out of work, the newspapers filled with stories about bread lines and bank failures, FDR and his administration provided jobs and public support to millions of Americans who had lost hope. From public works programs that put people to work building roads, bridges, schools, and parks throughout the United States, to Social Security Insurance that provided economic security to elderly Americans, the New Deal showed that American society was not at heart cruel and compassionless.

The federal government under Roosevelt established disability and unemployment insurance, the minimum wage and 40-hour work week, the federal school lunch program, fair employment practices, improved child labor laws, labor union rights, soil conservation programs, rural electrification, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which alleviated economic hardship and poverty in the rural south. The New Deal brought integrity to Wall Street through the Securities and Exchange Commission and eliminated the risk of another great depression and more bank failures through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. When I was born, all these things were firmly entrenched in American life.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was an acolyte of FDR, a fervent believer in the New Deal and the power of the federal government to aid ordinary citizens in ways that strengthened the American economy and served the good of the people. But Johnson understood that, although the New Deal benefitted huge segments of American society, it did not address the injustices of Jim Crow or the racism and discrimination that deprived millions of Black Americans and other minorities equal rights under the law, the right to vote, and the opportunity to pursue work and education, buy or rent a home, or to participate in most aspects of American life free from discrimination. Although hardly a champion of civil rights as a senator from Texas, soon after becoming president in November 1963, Johnson sought to extend the New Deal to include all segments of American society.

Johnson as president did what the more erudite and sophisticated John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts failed to do – pass the two greatest civil rights laws in American history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations, authorized the Justice Department to file lawsuits to enforce desegregation of public schools, prohibited state and local governments from denying access to public facilities on account of someone’s race, and outlawed employment discrimination on account of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and other measures designed to prevent racial minorities from voting, and it instituted strong enforcement measures and extensive federal oversight to ensure that all Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Although there was much work to be done, these two laws overnight made the United States a more democratic and racially just society. As a matter of law, the foundations of Southern apartheid were abolished, along with legal segregation, Jim Crow, and America’s shameful legacy of legalized bigotry and prejudice. I have previously written about Johnson’s political skills in getting those bills through Congress (see “Lyndon Johnson and the American Promise”), but it also took many dedicated and intelligent public servants, lawyers, and judges to leverage the authority of the federal government to successfully desegregate public accommodations and institutions and overcome resistance to voting rights throughout the American south.

Equally remarkable was Johnson’s success in enacting all the other components of the Great Society and War on Poverty—Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to elementary and secondary education, college work study programs, highway beautification and wilderness preservation, environmental measures to protect air and water quality, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, Head Start, community health centers, legal services for the poor, fair housing legislation, food security for tens of millions of impoverished children and adults, special education for children with disabilities, federally-funded medical research, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to name only a few programs.

As noted by former Johnson speechwriter Richard Goodwin in Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Harper & Row, 1988), Johnson’s legislative achievements attested “to the possibility of devising a practical, tangible response to the most intractable difficulties of our society, when the turbulent energies of a whole nation seemed bursting with possibilities – conquer poverty, walk on the moon, build a Great Society.” Within a period of five years, Johnson’s Great Society, of which the War on Poverty was only a small part, transformed the federal government’s relationship to ordinary citizens on a scale that matched or exceeded Roosevelt and the New Deal.

I recently finished reading two books focused on Johnson’s achievements during the Great Society, both of which reinforced the authenticity and genuineness of Johnson’s commitment to expanding civil rights and improving the quality of life for all Americans. In Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House (Viking, 2018), writer and historian Joshua Zeitz provides a well-balanced account of LBJ’s inner circle, which included Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, Joseph Califano, Harry McPherson, Horace Busby, and many other talented policymakers who designed laws and programs that applied practical solutions to long-neglected problems in American society. And in Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (Basic Books, 2016), Randall B. Woods, Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, provides a comprehensive history of the Great Society, including a nuanced examination of its breathtaking achievements and visionary politics, as well as its social and political limitations.  

Woods notes that Johnson’s brain trust included “a collection of men whose pragmatic liberalism was tinged with the theological realism of Reinhold Niebuhr,” a theologian who “attacked the materialism, complacency, and conformity that seemed to permeate postwar America.” Niebuhr believed that human beings were called to love the world and assume responsibility for its problems. Some of Johnson’s closest advisors were contemporaries of Niebuhr and “very much aware of the pervasive influence of evil in the world—racial prejudice, economic exploitation, political oppression, hunger, disease.”

They also were men influenced by the Social Gospel movement, which sought to apply liberal Christian ethics to issues of social justice, especially poverty and inequality, environmental degradation, inadequate housing, poor schools, and other injustices. Bill Moyers, who developed a father-son bond with Johnson until he departed the administration in 1966, had as a young man attended the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he studied under the liberal theologian Thomas Buford Matson, a Yale scholar, disciple of Reinhold Niebuhr, and “outspoken advocate of racial justice and a champion of labor unions.” Johnson’s long-time aide Horace Busby shared a commitment to reform and believed that government should be “committed to the welfare of the common man rather than special interests.” LBJ’s close confidant and friend, Walter Jenkins, a devout Catholic, believed “that to whom much was given, much was expected” and that it was “incumbent upon America, a land blessed with genius and abundance, to help those who could not help themselves and to provide for the average hard-working person a degree of physical comfort and security and the means to provide food, shelter, health care, and education for his or her child.” And Johnson’s press secretary, George Reedy, combined social gospel influences with political reality.

Johnson’s personal religious sensibilities, Woods notes, were influenced by his mother, Rebecca Baines Johnson, a Christian social activist who believed that if everyone acted and lived as God intended, “it would be impossible for millions to walk the streets in search of food and for thousands of children to die each year from lack of adequate health care.” As a young congressman, Johnson was deeply moved by John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about a poor, industrious Dust Bowl family overwhelmed by environmental and socioeconomic forces beyond their control. In a speech before the Southern Baptist Leadership Seminar in 1964, Johnson said, “I am not a theologian. But in more than three decades of public life, I have seen first-hand how basic spiritual beliefs and deeds can shatter barriers of politics and bigotry. Great questions of war and peace, of civil rights and education, the elimination of poverty at home and abroad, are the concern of millions who see no difference in this regard between their beliefs and social obligations.” In a later speech, Johnson said that what “really makes a great nation is compassion. We are going to have strength and solvency and compassion, love for thy neighbor, compassion and understanding for those who are less fortunate.”

It was based in part on Johnson's appreciation of liberal Christian ethics and social justice, and his belief that Americans were fundamentally decent, that he would declare an “unconditional war on poverty.” Johnson believed that his anti-poverty programs were the key to social justice, to quelling urban unrest, and to proving to the world that capitalism was superior to communism. He established Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, a series of after-school programs and extracurricular activities, and the Office of Economic Opportunity, which provided job training and adult education, among other programs.

Another important item on Johnson’s agenda was fair housing. In 1966, when posthumously awarding the Medal of Honor to Private First Class Milton Olive II, the first Black Medal of Honor winner to have served in Vietnam, Johnson pleaded: “If Negroes can give their lives for their country, surely a grateful nation will accord them opportunity to live in any neighborhood they can afford, and to send their children to any school of their choice to be educated and developed to their fullest capacity.” Although by the end of his presidency he was facing growing resistance to his agenda and white backlash to civil rights and affirmative action programs, Johnson finally succeeded in passing the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed racial discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing and remains a crucial law that ensures equal housing opportunities across the United States.

The Great Society was the most comprehensive effort in history by the federal government to permanently improve the social and economic landscape of the United States. It sought to make kindergarten-through-college education available to all, eradicate poverty in urban ghettos and rural Appalachia, clean the environment, provide medical care for the nation’s elderly, outlaw discrimination in employment, housing, and the nation’s immigration system, expand opportunities for all Americans, and publicly support the nation’s arts and humanities. In the richest and most affluent country on earth, Johnson envisioned the federal government caring for those who could not care for themselves, providing education and training opportunities for the disadvantaged, and ensuring social justice for everyone without taking from one group of citizens and giving to another.

At a time when it was still possible, Johnson was a consensus builder, a politician who sought (and mostly achieved) bipartisan support. He exploited a strong economy and a spirit of American optimism, believing we could grow a larger pie for everyone without redistributing any of it. And he mostly succeeded.

Medicare and Medicaid radically improved the lives of American families. The elderly no longer had to go without health care and middle-class families no longer had to choose between providing medical care for their grandparents and sending their children to college. In the first three years of Johnson’s presidency, the unemployment rate dropped from 5.7 percent to 3.7 percent, industrial production rose 25 percent, Gross National Product increased by 17 percent, and the average American’s real income rose by 14 percent. As explained by Woods, “While four million Americans moved above the poverty line, both profits and wages had increased. Medicare had helped three million elderly Americans to obtain access to health care, eight million new workers were covered by the minimum wage law, and Jim Crow was on the run in the South.”

But any credit Johnson deserved or received, and whatever bipartisan consensus he had pieced together, were short lived, ripped apart by liberal dissent on the Vietnam War and white backlash caused by racial resentments and urban rioting. The New Deal coalition that had held together the Democratic Party—labor unions, urban ethnics, liberal intellectuals, farmers, and the South—became a relic of the past. Long-standing conservative opposition to both the New Deal and Great Society grew stronger as the Republican Party began shifting in a radically rightward direction.

Johnson’s Great Society programs were challenged by the American ethic of individualism and self-reliance that tended to blame the poor for their problems and attacked government largesse as counterproductive and “creeping socialism.” On the left, the civil rights coalition fell into disarray with the rise of the Black Power movement and a crop of young militant activists. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and others became the voices of the dispossessed. They rejected the non-violence of Martin Luther King and the traditional civil rights establishment, questioned the value of integration, and condemned Johnson for not doing enough to address systemic racism and inequality. Following the Watts riots of 1965, King began focusing on the entrenched poverty, joblessness, family disintegration, and hopelessness within the ghettoes and slums of America’s major cities and began a more radical critique of American society, focused on economic justice and inequality.

As Joshua Zeitz explained in Building the Great Society, Johnson was concerned with “poverty and quality of life, not economic inequality.” The Great Society did not attempt to redistribute income but “sought to equip Americans with skills and resources to lift themselves above a certain income level—the poverty line—and enjoy the blessings of an affluent society.” The criticism Johnson and the Great Society faced from both the Right and the Left grossly understated “the central role that the Great Society programs have played—and continue to play—in reducing poverty, alleviating the suffering of those who live in it, diminishing systemic racial discrimination, enriching the nation’s cultural life, and enshrining consumer and environmental protections in the law.” While Great Society programs did not eradicate poverty in America, they sharply reduced it:

Food stamps, school breakfasts and lunches, and Head Start programs minimize food insecurity for millions of poor children and their parents each day. Medicaid and Medicare amount to the difference between life and death for 119 million Americans—or roughly 37 percent of the country’s population. . . . [T]oday, most people cannot fathom a world in which African Americans are denied service at hotels, restaurants, and hospitals, explicitly excluded from the workplace or the housing market, or barred from voting or holding office strictly on the basis of their race. It is equally difficult to envision a country without laws governing clean air and water, consumer labeling standards, federal aid to public schools, or public television and radio.

Zeitz’s book was published in 2018, so he can be excused for not fully anticipating what is happening in 2025. With Trump in the White House for a second time, Republicans are finally making good on their long-stated desire to undo the Great Society (and much of the New Deal) and denigrate the progress America has made over the past sixty years. Led by Russell Vought and his disciples within the Heritage Foundation, the administration is working to sharply restrict Medicaid, privatize Medicare, reverse advances in civil rights and voting rights, gut environmental and consumer protections, abolish federal aid for the arts, humanities, and public broadcasting, and eliminate food stamps and anti-poverty assistance. Trump and his team are intent on repealing any laws and programs founded on concepts of social justice and expanded opportunities for all.

The Great Society did not achieve all it set out to do. No government programs are perfect, and sometimes programs need to be revised and reformed. But to ignore the successes of the Great Society is to reject the idealism and optimism that enabled America to come close to achieving its promise that all men and women are created equal. Johnson’s War on Poverty sought not to console the poor but to give them the means—through job training, educational opportunities, and civil rights protections—to lift themselves out of poverty and enjoy the blessings of America to which all of us are entitled. The genius of the Great Society was that it put in place the tools to achieve a more just and equitable society. Whether we have the will and the wisdom to sustain that vision is up to us.

The Great Society sought to create a country in which all could share in the abundance of America. It was a time of hope and optimism when the government promised everyone not success or wealth or material goods, but the opportunity to achieve the limits of one’s potential. George Washington stated that the fate of democracy and liberty were “staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Today, we confront a turning point in the American experiment. For America to overcome the stormy present may depend on whether we can restore the spirit of optimism that has defined America for nearly 250 years, whether we can reawaken the strength of imagination and hope that was the Great Society, and whether we care enough, and truly believe in, the promise of justice and liberty for all.

Is the Golden Age of American Science Ending?

Vannevar Bush - American scientist, inventor, and administrator

“…basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress.” – Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier

On November 17, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, recognizing the importance of scientific research in the American war effort, wrote to Vannevar Bush, Director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), requesting that he develop a post-war national science policy. Roosevelt sought recommendations on how America’s success in applying scientific knowledge to wartime problems could be carried over into peacetime. Bush was the right person to ask.

As director of OSRD, Bush oversaw the U.S. military’s research and development efforts during the war, which included important developments in radar technology, the mass production of penicillin, and the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt and Bush understood that the wartime partnership between science and government was crucial to winning the war. They also understood that scientific progress was essential to the future health, security, and prosperity of the United States.

On July 5, 1945, Bush presented his report, "Science: The Endless Frontier," to President Harry S. Truman. Bush contended that “[t]he most important ways in which the Government can promote industrial research are to increase the flow of new scientific knowledge through support of basic research and to aid in the development of scientific talent.” Moreover, the report noted, America’s research talent existed in its universities. Five years later, President Truman signed legislation that implemented Bush’s vision and created the National Science Foundation (NSF), thus laying the foundation for the present-day partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities.

Under this compact, the federal government funds basic scientific research at the nation’s colleges and universities—research driven not by profit motive or private corporate interests, but by curiosity and discovery. For the past 75 years, this system has worked immensely well for the United States. It has been the Golden Age of American Science.

Government-supported university research has been an integral part of U.S. science policy since the end of World War II. It has contributed to post-war economic growth and greatly enhanced modern American life, leading to biomedical and technological breakthroughs, including, among other things, the development of lifesaving medicines and surgical procedures, advances in commercial agriculture, the blossoming of GPS technology, and the evolution of smartphones. A recent report of the Federal Reserve of Dallas confirmed that nearly a quarter of American productivity growth over the past eight decades is attributable to non-defense government-funded research. Investing in science and innovation has improved the health and quality of life for all Americans. As noted by Karin Fischer in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The internet started as a defense-funded college network of computers. Google, a company now worth $2 trillion, spun out of a $4-million grant to Stanford to build digital libraries. Of the 356 new drugs approved over the past decade, 354 received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest supporter of biomedical research.

Even an area of science as seemingly blue-sky as quantum mechanics is the basis for the development of lasers, grocery-store checkout scanners, and the tiny semiconductor crystals that light television screens and computer monitors.

The partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities has allowed the United States to build the world’s most productive scientific enterprise and helped American higher education become the world’s leader in science, engineering, and medicine. American universities dominate global university rankings, produce the most Nobel laureates, and graduate more PhD’s in science and engineering than any other country. It is why American universities attract so many international students, many of whom choose to stay in the United States and become doctors, college professors, research scientists, and high-tech entrepreneurs. Four in ten doctoral students in the sciences are from overseas. Indeed, attracting talented international students is partly what makes American research the envy of the world. And it is why many countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East have sought to emulate the U.S. model and compete directly with the United States for those foreign scholars.

Unfortunately, the past eight decades of U.S. scientific and research dominance will soon come to an end if the Trump administration has its way. By waging a war on higher education to score ignoble political points against transgender athletes, DEI programs, and a woefully misguided effort to combat alleged antisemitism on college campuses, Trump has wiped out billions of dollars in previously approved federal grants and awards to America’s top research universities. Although much of this unitary executive action is being litigated in federal court, the Trump administration has successfully eliminated or frozen funding for thousands of research projects. Trump has also ordered restrictions on awards from the NSF and NIH, cut funding on any projects he does not like, and clawed back research grants based simply on institutional affiliation, affecting thousands of grants to Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and other universities Trump believes are too “woke” and elitist for his tastes.

These funding cuts (made even worse by the arbitrary budget slashing of DOGE) are not only absurd and misguided, but they are moving with a swiftness and scale that will destroy and reverse America’s historically dominant role in science and education. It reflects an unhinged contempt for science and the institutions that conduct scientific and medical research. And it is being irrationally combined with Trump’s overzealous and racist immigration policies. The impact is already being felt on many American college campuses, with some of the most talented professors and international students transferring to more welcoming foreign universities.

Any question as to the impact on America’s research capabilities in the future can be answered by history. In April 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power in pre-war Germany, the German government ordered the dismissal of all civil servants and college faculty who were “not of Aryan descent.” All Jewish academics were terminated from their positions. As a result, German universities lost 15 percent of their physicists and 20 percent of their mathematicians, including physicists Albert Einstein and Max Born, chemist Otto Meyerhof, eleven future Nobel laureates, and a large segment of their most gifted researchers. Not only did many of these emigrated scholars help defeat Germany in World War II, but according to University of Munich economics professor Fabian Waldinger, the negative impact on Germany’s scientific and research establishment by the dismissal of Jewish scholars in the 1930s was nine times more destructive to the future of German science than was the wartime bombing of Germany’s universities, and it was felt for generations. (Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2025, at 21).

Since the inception of the Nobel Prize, the United States has produced almost three times the number of Nobel laureates as all other countries combined, with the majority awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, and medicine. Do we really want this to change? What policies and values are the Trump administration promoting when it cancels university research grants in support of medical, health, and scientific research? Depriving a university of a federal grant in support of cancer research because it has not taken a harder stance against pro-Palestinian protestors or banned transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports makes no sense. There is no correlation between those things, and the harm caused is immeasurable. It does nothing to fight alleged antisemitism and, in fact, causes harm to many Jewish graduate students and professors. And it is a wrongheaded effort to implement destructive policies designed to reverse considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion in college decision making.

The harm caused by each grant cancellation is something the administration has apparently not even considered. Patients’ lives are at risk when clinical trials are disrupted. Graduate education is in turmoil. Even if the policy changes are reversed and the federal funding restored, one cannot simply flip the “on” switch for groundbreaking research projects that have been cancelled or halted midstream. As Karin Fischer notes in The Chronicle, “Grants must be rewritten, graduate students recruited and postdocs hired, labs rebuilt.” Even if the courts ultimately determine that these executive actions are illegal and unconstitutional, as they appear to be, the damage is already done.

In his 1945 report to President Truman, Vannevar Bush understood the importance of curiosity-driven research with people working on “subjects of their own choice.” He also understood that private investment alone could not compete with the powerful collaboration of a government-university research partnership, and that private companies would by necessity limit their R&D efforts to advance the companies’ profit-making endeavors. Curiosity-driven research that to the layperson’s eye may not have obvious application can yield breakthroughs that advance the national interest in profound and lasting ways. Take, for example, a couple of scientists in Yellowstone National Park collecting samples from its hot springs in an attempt to identify the bacteria growing in them. This may not at first seem worthy of federal funds until one learns that their discoveries contributed to more effective genetic testing, better forensic analysis of crime scenes, and innovative disease-fighting drugs. Similarly, NIH-supported research has transformed the American health care industry, improving the lives of millions of Americans and establishing the United States as a global leader in research for an industry that constitutes nearly one-sixth of the American economy.

By congressional mandate, decisions on what research is funded are to be based on the scientific and health needs of the nation, with research projects approved according to long-standing scientific principles and a rigorous, academic-based peer review process. This includes the processes by which federal agencies award, manage, and if necessary, terminate grants. Grant applications are highly competitive and require multiple layers of scientific review. Grant proposals take several months to complete and require detailed information about a project’s objectives, methodology, significance, and budget. Many grant applications require a great deal of time and institutional resources in support of the process.

Trump’s en masse termination of thousands of federal grants for his own political agenda is not only arbitrary and capricious but violates long-standing principles of science-based decision-making and threatens every aspect of the U.S. research foundation. His top-down directives eliminating the research projects at issue involve no individualized inquiry and cite no scientific justification. Many NIH-funded projects critical to understanding human health and disease have been cancelled. Trump’s mass terminations and funding cuts have disrupted research and shut down clinical trials testing potentially life-saving treatments for breast and cervical cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, HIV and sexually-transmitted infections, suicide risk and prevention, opioid addiction, Covid-19, alcohol-use disorder, and many other areas of vital concern to public health.

The Executive Branch has the right to pursue policy objectives that differ from previous administrations. But changes to government policy must be implemented pursuant to the law, established regulations, and the scientific principles that have always governed the funding decisions of the federal agencies that oversee and implement America’s scientific research. Trump’s unlawful and politically-vindictive approach is doing immense harm to the United States and the nation’s scientific-research capabilities. Indeed, this administration has put the future of the entire American research enterprise in jeopardy.

Science: The Endless Frontier is a powerful reminder that American scientific progress depends on the close partnership that has existed for 75 years between the scientific community and the federal government. This arrangement has provided tremendous returns on our investments in everything from public health and scientific exploration to engineering and physics, national security, environmental protection, and clean energy. Originating with a commitment to America’s postwar responsibilities and ambitions, the government-academic compact has set the standard for the world. It is a key reason the United States has always been capable of addressing the planet’s greatest challenges.

Science is not a static enterprise. Knowledge evolves. Universities are best designed to nurture and sustain life-saving, ground-breaking research. The purpose of science and research is to advance knowledge and improve the well-being of everyone, regardless of political affiliation. Investing in American scientific and medical research should never be a partisan exercise. The Trump administration’s massive cuts to federally funded research are causing widespread chaos, creating a lost generation of scientists and a major brain drain from America. It goes way beyond bad policy. It is completely and utterly stupid.

When Time Stands Still: The Joy of Bookstores

Old Rizzoli Bookstore, 57th Street, Manhattan (circa 2014)

Whenever I journey to a new town or city, one of my special pleasures is finding and spending time in a local bookstore. I love to while away the time tucked in rows of highly stacked shelves of books on history and politics, literature, religion and philosophy, and if time permits, art and music. It matters not whether the shelves are filled with new or used books, stacked in an orderly and well organized manner or chaotically piled in all directions. Perusing the shelves of a well-stocked bookstore is a uniquely enjoyable experience. Once ensconced in the cozy confines of a bookstore, my sense of time falls away.

I can spend hours of uninterrupted time in a good bookshop as I pull from the shelves any book that offers a fresh perspective on an interesting topic, a memoir by a famous editor or writer, a novel I have always wanted to read, or a book about a period of history I know little about. Any book that captures my attention is fair game. You never know what gems you might find. Every bookstore can surprise you with an unexpected treasure. A special few call you back again and again.

Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C.

In the mid-1980s, a few years after I moved to Washington, DC, to attend law school, I discovered Politics & Prose, a wonderful independent bookstore then owned by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade, two politically minded book lovers who had the crazy idea to start a bookstore full of books that they would want to read. When it opened in the fall of 1984, Politics & Prose was a small shop in a narrow, cozy, one-story unit on Connecticut Avenue. Its small inventory of books was dominated by serious nonfiction and its shelves were filled with high quality books worth reading. There were no romance novels or beach fiction. You were more likely to stumble across an esoteric university press title.

Along with a selection of classic English and American literature, the store was filled with political treatises and biographies, history, religion, philosophy, psychology, and art history. I wanted to read every book in the store. There was no wasted space, no coffee table books, games or puzzles. Only books full of good writing, challenging ideas, new and interesting perspectives. Within five years, the store’s inventory expanded to 15,000 titles and it moved across the street to its current, much larger location. The store became a community hub where top-shelf authors came to speak each night. It was staffed by doctoral students and people who knew and loved books. To this day, whenever I visit DC, I try to spend a little time there before heading home.

Bookstores are powerful spaces. A good bookstore shapes our thinking, influences our tastes, and contributes to our intellectual and spiritual development. It affects our thoughts, creative imagination, and understanding of the world around us. Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s first publishers and booksellers, believed that reading was an underutilized activity in the American colonies. Franklin believed the rise of bookshops and libraries made reading more fashionable, and he would later credit increased reading as one of the inspirations of the American Revolution.

As explained by Evan Friss in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking Press, 2024), Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, published in January 1776, helped radicalize the colonists in their journey toward independence. Friss, a professor of history at James Madison University, notes that Common Sense “argued forcefully for independence at a time when many were still undecided.” The pamphlet sold throughout the colonies and was read aloud in churches, coffee shops, and bookstores. Paine’s writing, “and that of other Enlightenment thinkers who promoted republicanism and attacked the monarchy and aristocracy, built an intellectual foundation for the Revolution, an event premised on a new way of thinking spelled out in books, pamphlets, and newspapers.” Printing and bookselling, writes Friss, thus “shaped education, intellectual life, and the means by which colonists consumed information and developed new ideologies, including revolutionary ones.”

The literature written and published during the Revolution not only inspired a nation, but it also led to the creation and growth of the modern American bookstore. With the help of Franklin and other intellectual leaders of the early American republic, books and bookshops became an important and influential force in American life. “Books hold ideas. Ideas hold power,” notes Friss. The bookstore developed into “a de facto public space, a meeting space, a communal space that wasn’t a house or church or political hall. In those cramped quarters, readers, writers, and literature gathered. It was intimate. It was far reaching. It was alive.”

The rise of the American bookstore also led to the art of browsing, lingering, and loitering among the rows of books. The pleasures of book browsing should not be undervalued. Browsing sometimes leads to sitting in a chair placed conveniently in the corner, close to the owner’s ten-year-old cocker spaniel sleeping on the floor a few feet away. Soon, you lose track of time as you become absorbed in the book that has caught your attention. This eventually gives rise to more browsing, and then to a conversation with the bookstore staff, before you wind up in the coffee shop next store with a newly purchased book in hand.

In many of the great independent bookstores across the United States, the owners and employees who stock the shelves and attend the front desk love books as deeply as the most avid readers. They know where each book is hidden away and have a knack for recommending just the right book at the right moment. People who love books love to talk about books, and it is these conversations that inspire new discoveries and innovative ideas. Bookstores have the power to alter lives. Their influence extends far beyond the shelves of the bookshop and into the lives and minds of readers, writers, and customers.

In The Bookshop, Friss introduces some of the great bookstores of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, including the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, which sat on the corner of Washington Street and School Street. It was owned by James Fields and William Ticknor, who published and sold books from their bookshop but did not always make good business decisions. In 1854, as the buyer for the bookshop, Fields rejected a manuscript for a story written by Louisa May Alcott. “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write,” Fields told her.

Fortunately, although Fields and Alcott remained on friendly terms, and Fields even loaned Alcott forty dollars, Alcott did not listen to Fields’ sage advice. After she published Little Women years later to great fame and fortune, she returned to Old Corner, handed Fields the forty dollars he had lent her, and said, “I found writing paid so much better than teaching that I thought I’d stick to my pen.” Fields laughed and admitted his error in judgment. He and Alcott remained friends.

Ticknor and Fields exercised better foresight in 1860 when they bought the rights to Harriet Beecher Stow’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that sold exceptionally well and spread antislavery sentiment throughout the United States. Even in parts of the South, where the book was banned, Uncle Tom’s Cabin made the rounds through the enlightened souls who purchased the book by mail from bookstores in New York and Boston.

The Old Corner Bookstore ceased to exist when Ticknor died in 1864, and Fields sold the premises to another publisher. Today it is included on the Freedom Trail and the National Register of Historic Places. “It was once a literary jewel,” writes Friss, “a place where some of the greatest authors congregated, and a regular store . . . where books arrived, were put on the shelf, picked up, tasted, bought, read, and discussed. The Old Corner helped launch American literature and the American bookstore.” Sadly, on the historic site of Old Corner today sits a Chipotle, a reminder of the commercial priorities in American life.

A good bookstore can define a community. They are where ideas flourish and free speech thrives. The world is shaped by them. At successful independent bookstores, like Politics & Prose in Washington, Books & Books in Coral Gables, and The Strand in New York, speaking engagements by authors, book signings, group discussions, literary tours, and annual book fairs are part of the experience. Indeed, these events enrich the surrounding neighborhoods and allow the stores to become crucial community spaces, where people gather as much for social fellowship, and to converse and be educated, as to browse and buy books.

Owning and operating a bookstore is challenging. Bookstores are not the most commercially viable of enterprises. After all, a bookstore is one of the few places where patrons frequently linger for a long time without spending any money. They are low margin businesses that require large physical space, a combination that performs poorly in high-rent cities like New York, Washington, and San Francisco, even though enthusiastic readers disproportionately populate those cities.

Over the years, certain bookstores were less interested in making money than in pursuing a mission. Their purpose was to change the world. In 1967, Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York’s Greenwich Village was opened not to make a profit, but to function as a welcoming space and information center for the gay community. It soon became a political launching pad and hub for the gay rights movement. Drum & Spear, which opened in Harlem in 1968 as part of a wave of Black-owned bookstores, sought to promote books by Black authors, books about Black history, literature, and Black liberation, and books for Black children that would instill pride in their heritage and skin color. These were more than bookstores. They were intellectual centers of the gay rights and Black Power movements, safe places where the gay and Black communities, respectively, could think, talk, read, and thrive at a time when most bookstores catered to mostly straight white customers.

Oscar Wilde and Drum & Spear both accomplished their desired aims. And both became victims of their own success, as the books they sold eventually became available in the larger bookstores, or online, or in new and competing mission-driven stores. Neither store is open today but, in their heyday, they were spaces that inspired political change and influenced what people read. They impacted the lives of thousands of people and fomented positive changes in American society.

The Joy of Books, Hendersonville, NC

Even a modest used bookstore is a gem. My sister Linda recently gave me a gift certificate for The Joy of Books, a used bookstore in a narrow, confined space in Hendersonville, North Carolina, with a small but fine collection of books on history, literature, poetry, religion, and philosophy. On our last visit to Hendersonville, I picked out a two-volume biography of John Adams that Andrea wanted and had discovered on the library shelves of the bed and breakfast inn where we stayed, a book by historian Douglas Brinkley on America’s race to the moon in the 1960s (American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and America’s Race to the Moon), and Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe. But the most pleasurable part of the gift was in the experience of browsing, looking, handling, and sampling dozens of books before it was time to go.

From the nation’s founding and throughout American history, bookstores, small and large, successful and unsuccessful, have impacted American life. Bookstores are magical places full of discovery, where one can get lost in the pages and ignore the passage of time. They are community spaces, places where ideas are hatched, where democracy is born and nurtured, and where the world is changed and transformed for the better. As long as I am alive, I will love books and the gift of reading. And wherever I find myself, I will always search the streets for a good bookshop to browse, linger, and feel at home.

A Nation of Immigrants: Has America Lost Its Way?

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – Emma Lazarus

America is a nation of blended cultures, ethnicities, and religions – Black, brown, and white, Latino and Asian, African and Middle Eastern, European and South American, Jew, Christian, Muslim, and so much more. We are a country defined as much by our differences as our similarities. It is the beauty of this country and the source of our greatest tensions. But what makes us all Americans? 

Only those descended from Indigenous populations can claim direct links to this land of ours. For the rest of us, all our families at some point in time, even those who came over on The Mayflower, arrived in this country from somewhere else. What makes all of us American, the one thing that distinguishes us from everyone else, is our commitment to the U.S. Constitution and rule of law. The Constitution is the rulebook that guides and governs our daily life, and it is the document to which every person who becomes a U.S. citizen must swear an oath. And that—not values, morality, ethnicity, or personal history—is the only thing we all share, the one common denominator that makes us American.

Carlos Lozado of The Washington Post has explained that, to be an American, is a choice we must make every day:

We aren’t the land of opportunity or a nation of immigrants or equal before the law just because we say that’s what we are. Our leaders don’t respect our rights or derive their powers from our consent just because that’s how it is supposed to be. We become those things — we remain those things — only if we strive for them, without ceasing, and even then nothing is guaranteed. After all, the Declaration did not win independence; it only gave it a purpose.

It took a bloody and violent revolution and years of war and internal debate before the nation’s Founders agreed on the language in our Constitution and the rights enumerated in it. We rejected monarchy and created a governing system that consists of an elected Congress, an elected president, an appointed judicial system based on the rule of law, and a Bill of Rights limiting the power of government to restrict our speech, infringe on our religious freedoms, enter our homes without a judicial warrant, or deprive us of life, liberty, or property without due process. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “It is a republic, if you can keep it.”

Except for native Americans and African American families whose ancestors were brought here forcibly against their will, we are indeed a nation of immigrants, a land of destiny for millions of Americans who fled their homelands and landed on American shores in search of a better life. Although the darker forces of history, isolationism, and nativism have frequently thrown cold water on the idealized American myth that we are a land of refuge, since our founding and through the long arc of history we have in fact welcomed people from all over the world and provided them a chance to make it in America.

Americans have long prided themselves on the belief that we are a beacon of liberty, a light unto the nations, and that people from all over the world go to extreme lengths to arrive at our shores in search of freedom, liberty, and justice. At our best moments, we are a generous nation, a land of opportunity and new beginnings for anyone willing to work hard, play fair, and commit to the rule of law. It is, of course, essential that we protect our borders and enforce laws that regulate admission into the country. But for those seeking asylum from persecution in foreign lands, or those desiring to work in jobs most Americans refuse to do, the United States historically has offered an avenue to citizenship.

Sadly, as we celebrate the 249^th year since we declared independence from the British monarchy, the American ideal of a nation that symbolizes freedom from tyranny, and where the rule of law prevails, is proving to be more myth than reality. Under the Trump administration, we are no longer a welcoming nation. Immigrants and refugees are treated as less than human. Even the millions of immigrants who are here legally and are following all the rules, those who attend college or work and pay taxes and dream of one day becoming fully American, are at risk of being snatched on the street by masked ICE agents and put into a detention camp or whisked away on a plane to an unfamiliar foreign land. Although the administration claims that ICE is targeting only the worst-of-the-worst, the hardened criminals, this is a bald-faced lie, for the facts prove entirely to the contrary.

To placate the sadistic Stephen Miller, Trump’s man in charge of the mass deportation efforts, and to achieve his arbitrarily imposed quota of 3,000 detentions per day, ICE is now raiding construction sites, farms, and other workplaces that employ large numbers of immigrants, arresting and detaining the undocumented and fast-tracking deportation. These are people simply trying to live the American dream, who are working and providing for their families. They are not hardened criminals; most have no criminal record.

They are people like 19-year-old college student Arias Cristobal, whose family brought her here from Mexico without documentation when she was four years old. In May, Arias was mistakenly pulled over by a police officer in Dalton, Georgia, and arrested over her protestations. “I cannot go to jail,” she said, “I have my finals next week. My family depends on this.” Despite having committed no crime, not even a traffic violation, she spent exam week behind bars. Fortunately, a judge recently released Arias on bail and the officer who wrongfully arrested her has resigned from the police department. But the administration still intends to deport Arias and her father.

Arias Cristobal

They are people like the Tufts University PhD student from Turkey, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was physically grabbed by four masked ICE agents in plain clothes from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, while she was walking to meet friends for dinner. Ozturk, who was legally in the United States on a student visa, spent six weeks in a Louisiana detention center, housed in a mouse-infested cell with twenty-three other women. A federal judge ordered her released after determining that the government arrested her as retaliation for exercising her right to free speech – co-authoring a student editorial critical of the human toll of Israel’s war in Gaza. 

Rumeysa Ozturk, Tufts University PhD Student

They are people like 17-year-old Jose Adalberto Herrara, who was arrested on his way to work with his uncle when a Maine state trooper stopped the minivan they were in. Herrara had arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor at the age of twelve and, with the government’s assistance, eventually reunited with his family in Lewiston, Maine. He had no criminal record and currently sits alone in a New York detention facility, once again separated from his family.

Jose Adalberto Herrara

They are people like Andry Hernandez Romero, 32, a gay makeup artist who entered the United States last year in search of asylum after facing threats and harassment in his home country due to his sexual orientation. Romero has no criminal record and was one of 238 Venezuelan migrants sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), notorious for its cruel and inhumane treatment, where prisoners are beaten and physically and psychologically abused in violation of international human rights standards. Once there, the prisoners have almost no hope of ever being released. Like everyone sent to CECOT, the government provided Romero with no hearing, no due process, and no opportunity to establish that he is not the “terrorist” and “gang member” the administration claims (without evidence) that he is.

Andrey Hernandez Romero

And they are people like Jerce Reyes Barrios, a 36-year-old professional soccer player and coach from Venezuela. Berrios has no criminal record, and he followed the rules in seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border after fleeing from violence in his home country. The government has tried to claim that Barrios is a Tren de Aragua gang member based on his tattoos, which consist of a soccer ball topped with a crown to represent his favorite team, Spanish club Real Madrid. His other tattoos include the names of his daughters, Isabela and Carla Antonella, a map of Venezuela, a star, and a goalkeeper, his soccer position. Like Romero, ICE sent Berrios to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where he has almost no hope of ever getting out. The United States Government charged Berrios with no crime and provided him with no due process, and now he has no ability or means to reverse the injustice that occurred.

Jerce Reyes Barrios and daughter

These are only five examples of the human lives impacted by Trump’s mass deportation efforts. There are thousands more just like them, as the government continues to round up seemingly everyone but the murderers and rapists, terrorists and gang members, promised by Team Trump. The problem for Miller and company is that, as explained by Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer, “The U.S. population of undocumented immigrants doesn’t have huge numbers of hardened criminals – not surprising since study after study has shown migrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.” (See, e.g., American Immigration Council, “Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime”)

The recently passed Big Ugly Bill – the cruelest and most immoral legislatively enacted budget in American history – commits almost $170 billion to unprecedented levels of immigration enforcement and border-related operations. The administration intends to hire thousands of new ICE agents and more than double the number of ICE detention centers (which financially benefits the companies that contributed large money to Trump and his inauguration). Another $46 billion will be spent on a major expansion of Trump’s border wall that is specifically designed to keep out the brave, the poor, and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

And then there is “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new ICE detention center in the Everglades, which can only be described as an American concentration camp. With a projected capacity of 5,000 beds, the camp will forcibly detain immigrants in improvised tents and chain-link cages that will put them on display. The migrants will endure south Florida’s extreme heat, disease-infested mosquitoes, and harsh swamp conditions. Expedited “hearings” will be overseen by National Guard members playing the role of immigration judge. As described by Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (Little Brown and Company, 2017): “This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed.”

Shame on Trump. Shame on America. The Statue of Liberty is but a lonely and forgotten symbol of a once honorable past. One day I hope Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and the president will be held to account, although I have for the first time in my life begun to lose hope that accountability is even possible in America today. Is it apathy? Are people simply exhausted by the sheer magnitude of this administration’s disregard for the rule of law, the norms of civil society, any respect for truth and facts? Or has America simply turned inward and given up on morality and compassion?

All my life I have loved America and have been proud to be an American. But pride is quickly giving way to mortification, for what is happening in our country today is enough to make one ashamed of being American. What I am witnessing – what all of us are witnessing – is a nation that has lost its way.

For at least the past 25 years, Congress, due mostly to Republican opposition, has rejected all attempts at enacting comprehensive immigration reform that addresses border security while providing a pathway for citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Shamefully, early in 2024, Trump insisted that House Republicans reject a bipartisan solution passed by the Senate (and favored by conservatives) because he cynically wished to politically exploit anti-immigrant sentiment to help him win the election. And it worked.

“Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened American life,” wrote John F. Kennedy in his 1958 book entitled A Nation of Immigrants. Demonizing immigrants may be good politics, but it ignores America’s historic dependence on immigrants and devalues the very essence of what it is to be an American. Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts represent the worst elements of our character. “The American Dream may be slipping away,” according to Jon Meacham. “To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much.”

For the sake of America and the world, I hope that we will find a way to heal our divisions, respect the beauty of our rich cultural diversity, and demonstrate to the world that we are indeed a welcoming nation, and a kind one. I hope that one day soon we will regain confidence in our democratic heritage and the strength of our Constitution to allow us, in the words of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, to “believe in a government strong enough to use words like ‘love’ and ‘compassion’ and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.” Changing times have always demanded that we embrace new values and viewpoints. The health and very existence of our democracy and the country depend on it.