It was 1986, an intense point in Northern Ireland’s history. For almost 20 years, the wee nation of about 1.5 million people had been hobbled by what were euphemistically called “The Troubles” — ongoing sectarian violence between Catholic and Protestant paramilitary organizations that had caused more than 3500 deaths, tens of thousands of injuries, and untold trauma and suffering.

The Troubles put everyone and everything on edge. Uniformed British soldiers patrolled the streets, machine guns at the ready. Thick walls, often topped with barbed wire, separated Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Police gates ringed downtown Belfast, and all entering vehicles had to be inspected for bombs. We drove an armored car with windows two inches thick in case a terrorist targeted my dad.

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Two decades of bloodshed had scarred Northern Ireland’s people. My friends, their parents, and Belfast residents, both Protestant and Catholic, shared a sense of gloom that matched the sodden skies. Resigned to the ongoing violence, they had largely given up hope of ever finding peace.

Looking back now, 40 years later, that dismal world seems so distant. The Belfast that I knew as a teen has largely disappeared. The British soldiers are gone, the downtown gates have been dismantled, the political violence has ebbed. Belfast’s streets bustle with tourists — a 2024 National Geographic survey ranked the city the second coolest destination on the planet — and its people look forward to a brighter future. Peace, fragile though it may be, has reigned in Northern Ireland since the signing of the Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement) on April 10, 1998.

How did such a dramatic transformation happen in Northern Ireland? I won’t pretend to explain it all in this short essay, but I want to highlight the critical role of American diplomats, particularly a Mainer named George Mitchell. Tapped by President Bill Clinton in 1996 to serve as a special envoy to Northern Ireland, Mitchell spent two years coaxing the warring parties into negotiating through their differences. His work reminds us that making peace is rarely easy. It requires patience, political courage, and an almost superhuman willingness to believe that peace is possible, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And when it’s done right, diplomacy can change the future.

When I first moved to Belfast, I could not understand what the conflict was all about. Back home, religion didn’t matter much, and I couldn’t have told you which of my friends were Catholic or Protestant. But I quickly learned that in Northern Ireland one’s faith was the key line dividing “us” and “them.” In Belfast, people could sniff out religious difference based on your name, your accent, your school, your clothes, your taste in music, where you lived, . . . everything was coded either Catholic or Protestant.

The divisions stretched back centuries. Protestants in Northern Ireland still celebrate “Orangeman’s Day” on July 12 to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when the Protestant William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James II to reassert Protestant political supremacy in England and Ireland. A long struggle for Irish independence culminated with the founding of the Catholic-majority Irish Free State in 1922. But the six northernmost counties of Ireland were predominantly Protestant, and they stayed separate. These six counties became Northern Ireland and joined a United Kingdom with England, Scotland, and Wales.

For decades, Protestants in Northern Ireland dominated politics, society, and the economy. In the late 1960s, inspired in part by the American Civil Rights Movement, Catholics in Northern Ireland began pushing for civil equality and economic opportunity. As protests grew, the British parliament sent troops to restore order, escalating tensions and sparking violence, including a horrific 1972 massacre in which soldiers killed 14 unarmed protestors (the Irish rock band U2 immortalized the tragedy in its song, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”). Catholic paramilitaries formed the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) to attack British soldiers and Protestant civilians, while Protestant paramilitary groups coalesced as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) to fight the IRA. The Troubles had begun.

For the next three decades, Northern Ireland suffered bombings, murders, hunger strikes, kidnappings, and “knee-cappings” (shooting the knees of suspected collaborators). To get a sense of how deeply the Troubles permeated life in Northern Ireland, read Patrick Radden Keefe’s beautifully written Say Nothing.

By the 1990s, exhausted citizens had had enough, but the cycle of violence and retaliation seemed impossible to break. Political leaders in Northern Ireland had tried to engage in talks to end the conflict, but it became clear that they needed a trusted outsider to mediate the process. They turned to George Mitchell.

The son of Irish and Lebanese immigrants in Waterville, Maine, Mitchell had served two terms as a U.S. senator, including a stint as Majority Leader, before retiring in 1995. President Clinton convinced him not to “retire retire,” but instead to go to Northern Ireland to serve as a special advisor on economic initiatives. Mitchell began developing relationships with business and political leaders, and he quickly earned a reputation for being fair and impartial. He grew to love the land and its people, so he didn’t hesitate to say yes when Clinton asked him in 1996 to mediate the peace talks.1

Given how much distrust had built up over the years, Mitchell struggled to get the different parties to even sit in the same room together. Well-wishers appreciated his efforts, but they didn’t think he stood much of a chance. “You’re wasting your time,” people told him. “We’ve been killing each other for centuries and we’re doomed to go on killing each other forever.” Mitchell soldiered on anyway.2

Paramilitaries on both sides sought to undermine the process with targeted violence, but Mitchell was adamant about one thing: “You cannot let the men of violence control the agenda and control the future.” He laid out a series of principles in which all sides committed themselves to pursuing a nonviolent, political solution to the conflict. “It was a bit of a fudge and a bit ambiguous, and not everyone agreed with it, but it worked,” says historian Peter McLoughlin of Queen’s University Belfast.3

Mitchell did not impose any sort of American-approved peace plan. Instead, he just listened. For hours. Weeks. Months. Years.

It was a skill he had learned in the Senate. As Majority Leader, he remembered, “I had to listen to some long, rambling, often not-very-persuasive or coherent presentations” — and that is pretty much what he had to endure in Northern Ireland as well. But he knew that every side needed to be heard, that everyone had to be part of the process.4

Peace demanded real political courage. Not the blustery bravado perfected by high-profile men like fiery Protestant minister Ian Paisley (just writing the name, I can hear my father sigh and shake his head). Gravelly voiced and bombastic, Paisley whipped his supporters into a frenzy by telling them what they wanted to hear about their vile enemies. No, peace required real leaders, people willing to risk their careers by telling their own side what it didn’t want to hear. Fortunately for Mitchell, he found such courage in leaders such as John Hume of the Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party and David Trimble of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party.

In April 1998, after two years of seemingly endless negotiation, nearly all of Northern Ireland’s political parties, along with representatives of Ireland and Britain, agreed to the Belfast Agreement. The accord was built on the idea of consent — that no change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status within the United Kingdom could happen without the consent of a majority of people in both Northern Ireland and Ireland. It called for a gradual process of shifting power from London to Belfast, as well as sharing power among various parties within Northern Ireland. Paramilitary groups would lay down their weapons, the British troops would return to the mainland, and the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland would open up. “The Agreement provides for a new beginning — based on partnership and co-operation,” wrote Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. And it would not have happened, Ahern noted, without Mitchell’s “pivotal contribution.”5

Though hard-liners rejected the compromise, war-weary citizens embraced it. In two referenda held in May 1998 – the first island-wide vote in 80 years — the agreement won the support of 94% of voters in Ireland and 71% in Northern Ireland.6

Disgruntled men of violence tried one last desperate attempt to derail the peace process. In August, barely three months after the historic referenda, an IRA splinter group planted a car bomb in downtown Omagh, killing 29 people and injuring 200. It was “a truly senseless, brutal, barbaric act,” Mitchell recalled. But rather than undermine the peace process, the bombing invigorated it by reminding people what was at stake, what the country could devolve into if the agreement failed. Peace had to win.7

The Belfast Agreement was and is not perfect. The fragile coalition government institutions that the accords established have proven fallible, often struggling to find agreement or even to function at all. The Brexit vote in 2016 threw unexpected challenges into the political process. But the peace has held, and the country has been transformed. Life in Belfast today is unimaginably better than what it had been when I lived there 40 years ago.

All of this was possible because of the unglamorous, difficult, often tedious, yet sometimes courageous work of diplomacy. America does not need to bully and bluster to earn respect. Sometimes it leads best by listening.

• Ahern, Bertie. “The Good Friday Agreement: An Overview.” Fordham International Law Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1998): 1196-1199.

• Archick, Kristin. “Northern Ireland: The Peace Process, Ongoing Challenges, and U.S. Interests.” Congressional Research Service, March 5, 2024.

• ARK: Northern Ireland Elections. “The 1998 Referendums.”

• Enfield, Lizzie. “How Northern Ireland is Reclaiming Its Story.” BBC, September 14, 2024.

• Landow, Charles, and James McBride. “Moving Past the Troubles: The Future of Northern Ireland Peace.” Council on Foreign Relations, February 16, 2024.

• Mitchell, George J. Making Peace. Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

• Porter, Tom. “How George Mitchell ’54, H’83 Navigated the Delicate Road to Peace in Northern Ireland.” Bowdoin Magazine, April 3, 2025.

• Stanley Center for Peace and Security. “George Mitchell on Peace.” Common Ground, Program 9843, October 27, 1998.

At a time when young people are inundated with stories of conflict and tension, Terrell and Stein’s story reminds us of the power of collaboration and coordination. My students find their story remarkable and inspiring. I quite agree.

Tall and slim with fair skin, Mary Church Terrell embodied upper-class Black refinement in early 20^th century D.C. From her birth in Memphis in 1863 to her death in D.C. in 1954, Terrell’s life spanned the long arc between emancipation and the modern civil rights movement.

Terrell defied expectations of what it meant to be Black in America, then and now. She was the daughter of former slaves who became successful business owners and were among the wealthiest Black people in America. After excelling at Oberlin College, where she earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in classics, she spent more than two years in Europe studying foreign languages. She moved to Washington in 1890 to teach at M Street High School, where she met Robert H. Terrell, the Harvard-educated scion of an elite Black family from Virginia. They married in 1891 and became one of the city’s most well-respected Black couples.

Encouraged by Frederick Douglass to continue her career even after marriage – D.C. school regulations forbade married women from teaching – Terrell founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. She was appointed to the city’s Board of Education, the first Black woman in the nation to serve on a school board. She wrote frequently for popular publications across the country and became well known for her outspoken views on race relations, women’s suffrage, and education.

Terrell spent decades challenging D.C.’s segregated mores, and she recounts many of these battles in her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, which she wrote in 1940 at age 77. But she wasn’t done yet. Her autobiography came out too early to capture perhaps her greatest triumph: the integration of D.C.’s public businesses in the early 1950s.

For that battle, she teamed up with Annie Stein, the daughter of poor Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. A lithe 5 foot 7 inches with a thin face and prominent features, Stein had embraced radical politics as a student at Hunter College in the early 1930s. She moved to D.C. for a job in the Works Progress Administration and later worked as a labor organizer. By the late 1940s, she was as the primary caregiver for her two young children but remained politically engaged as the secretary of the local chapter of the Progressive Party.

Stein reached out to Terrell in 1949 after reading Segregation in Washington, an incendiary 91-page booklet that dramatized Washington’s segregated racial practices. Among the pamphlet’s many nuggets of valuable information was the revelation of what became known as the “lost laws.” While conducting background research, Howard Law School librarian A. Mercer Daniel discovered that an 1872 law banning racial discrimination in District businesses had never been repealed. The law required restaurants, barbershops, “ice cream saloons,” and other establishments to serve “any respectable, well-behaved person, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

It was like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only a century earlier. D.C. had been at the forefront of racial change during Reconstruction, and a biracial Board of Alderman had passed a series of anti-discrimination statutes. But by the late nineteenth century, the customs and laws of segregation had settled across Washington, and city officials no longer enforced the antidiscrimination statutes. When officials wrote D.C.’s legal code in 1901, they simply did not include such laws. A legal team headed by Joseph Forer, David Rein, and Charles Hamilton Houston determined that that the 1872 law, along with a similar one from 1873, were still valid. The attorneys called on city officials to enforce the antidiscrimination laws, but months passed with no action.

Stein wanted to light a fire under city officials. She convinced Terrell to join her in creating the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws. Despite its unwieldy name, the group proved quite nimble in battling recalcitrant businesses that segregated patrons, served Black customers at rear windows, or otherwise discriminated against Black people. For nearly four years, Stein and Terrell were the heart and soul of the movement to integrate the city’s businesses.

Terrell was now 86, the grand dame of Washington’s civil rights movement. She embraced her role as chair of the Coordinating Committee, willing to walk a picket line, testify before public officials, or pigeonhole a reporter to give a piece of her mind.

While Terrell was the elegant face of the campaign, Stein was the adrenaline. The indefatigable 36-year-old was a swirling force of nature. Her husky voice, salty language, and frenetic energy struck a sharp contrast to the stately, dignified Terrell. She melded an idealist’s commitment to racial justice with a commander’s mastery of strategy and logistics. Stein ran the committee’s operations out of her apartment. Committee members fondly recalled how she “usually had the handle of a mimeograph machine in her hands and stood in her bedroom cranking out leaflets or letters or press releases far, far into the night.”

“Segregation does not die gradually of itself,” Stein wrote in a December 1949 memo to committee members. It had to be destroyed though coordinated action. With dozens of local civic organizations offering support, the committee pursued several lines of attack:

- educate the public about the “lost laws” and the extent of discrimination in D.C.;

- negotiate with local businesses to encourage them to desegregate;

- plan and coordinate pickets and boycotts of uncooperative stores;

- lobby city commissioners, Congress, and the president for legislative action; and

- pursue litigation to win the judicial imprimatur for desegregation.

The committee’s opening salvo was to create a test case by directly challenging segregation at a local restaurant. It selected Thompson’s Cafeteria, which had been the target of a sit-in by Howard University students half a decade before. On January 27, 1950, Terrell led an interracial group of four “respectable, well-behaved” committee members to Thompson’s for a meal. The manager refused to serve them.

“I asked if Washington was in the United States and if the United States Constitution applied here,” Terrell recalled, to which the manager replied, “We don’t vote here.” (He was right — at that point, D.C. residents couldn’t vote for president, Congress, mayor, or anything else.) The group left without eating, but it had accomplished its larger goal: to create a documented case of discrimination that violated the Reconstruction-era laws.

The incident triggered a response from city officials. Within weeks, the city’s three commissioners agreed that the anti-discrimination laws indeed were still in effect, a remarkable turnaround for a body that had resisted racial equality since its inception. With the city itself now officially in support of the lost laws, Terrell led another interracial group back to Thompson’s. Once again, they were rebuffed. The city then sued.

As the litigation wound its way through the courts, Stein and Terrell sought to use the pressure of negative publicity to encourage businesses to voluntarily drop their segregation policies. They sent out interracial testing teams to determine which White-owned businesses would serve all customers – the U.S. State Department and foreign embassies were particularly interested to know where diplomats could expect service without discrimination.

As the list grew, Terrell and Stein used it as leverage in negotiations with reluctant managers. Quiet negotiations often were effective, but when management proved particularly stubborn, the committee pulled out the pickets. Its first target was Kresge’s 5 and 10 in the heart of the Seventh Street NW commercial district. In December 1950, Terrell, dressed in an ankle-length fur coat and stylish scarf, took her cane and braved a snowstorm to lead the first picket. After eight weeks in which 100 volunteers distributed more than 40,000 leaflets, Kresge’s changed its policy.

Once Kresge’s surrendered, other discount stores quickly followed suit. The committee hoped to repeat that pattern with department stores by targeting Hecht’s, a grand establishment on Seventh Street that got about 25 percent of its business from Black customers. Three months of negotiations failed, and in May 1951 the committee called for a boycott. Supporters sat in at the lunch counter, sent 8,000 postcards to management, and manned a well-dressed picket line for two hours daily throughout the summer and fall. Hecht’s finally began serving everyone in January 1952. Terrell led the first interracial luncheon.

Private negotiations, the potential for negative publicity, and the threat of boycotts succeeded in opening up individual stores, but the legal case for the enforcement of the “lost laws” followed a tortuous path. It took more than three years for the case to reach the Supreme Court. But along the way, the Coordinating Committee benefited from the guidance and support of the Department of Justice, under both Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

The Supreme Court decided the case quickly. On June 8, 1953, the Court ruled unanimously in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. that the anti-discrimination laws “survived . . .all subsequent changes in the government of the District of Columbia and remain today a part of the governing body of laws applicable to the District.” With stunning clarity, the Court swept away the remaining legal justifications for segregation in District businesses.

After more than six decades of struggling against the racial prejudice she saw around her, Mary Church Terrell had achieved her sweetest victory. Now 89, she met up with some friends from the committee, and the interracial bunch went for a celebratory luncheon at Thompson’s. The manager himself served them. “I will die happy to know that the children of my group will not grow up thinking they are inferior because they are deprived of rights which children of other racial groups enjoy,” Terrell exulted. She passed away just a year later.

Annie Stein mourned her dear friend from New York City, where she had moved just after the Thompson decision. She spent the next three decades fighting for integrated education. She died in 1981.

Mary Church Terrell and Annie Stein were part of a remarkably effective local civil rights movement in the nation’s capital in the decade after World War II. Before the nation had ever heard of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, years of concerted protest had toppled most of the major legal barriers to equal access in Washington. With support from key federal officials and the Supreme Court, Terrell, Stein, and other civil rights advocates successfully desegregated schools, restaurants, theaters, transportation, public housing, and recreation areas. Segregation in the city had not died gradually of itself — the inspiring collaboration between Terrell and Stein had helped to kill it.

Sources

All quotes and information are taken from:

Asch, Chris Myers and George Derek Musgrove. Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital. University of North Carolina Press, 2017. See especially pages 287-300.

Spring takes its time to get to Maine. My students returned from their Spring Break with tales of glorious D.C. cherry blossoms, balmy Florida baseball games, and sun-kissed South Carolina beaches. And what do we have? Leaden skies and sloppy mud, with spurts of irrational exuberance if the mercury nears 50.

But it’s still Spring, because this season is about more than just warmer temperatures and blooming flowers. It’s about promise and possibility, the sense that no matter how drab the landscape may look at the moment, it can (and will!) blaze with color again one day. After seemingly endless months of ice, snow, and bitter cold, the first green shoots of our day lilies and daffodils have begun poking their way into the light. I feel an almost giddy sense of awe every time I see them.

Imagining our barren yard ablaze in color makes me think of one of my family’s favorite places in Maine: the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Located on more than 300 woodsy acres along the Back River west of Boothbay, the Gardens (like Maine itself) are a bit remote and inaccessible. Yet they have grown into New England’s largest botanical garden, with stunning formal gardens, a hands-on Children’s Garden, miles of forested trails, a fairy village, waterfalls, vernal pools, and native plants aplenty. Beguiling, 30-foot-tall, wooden trolls built by famed Danish artist Thomas Dambo lurk in the woods, awaiting discovery by a wide-eyed child. It’s a magical place.

But this post is not an advertisement for the Gardens (though I think they are worth many visits). Instead, I want to tell the story of how the Gardens came to be because that story reveals a “Spring mindset,” a way to see promise and possibility where others might only see no hope at all. Regular readers of “What’s Gone Right” know that I love stories of builders, people who create things – institutions, works of art, ideas, movements – whose impact radiates far and wide. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens exist because passionate, patient, hopeful people built them. Our country is full of such people.

The Gardens have their roots, appropriately, in a garden conversation. It was the Spring of 1991, and Rollie Hale was planting Mr. Lincoln tea roses in the garden at his home in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. As Hale recalled, he and his friend, Chip Griffin, were talking about display gardens when Chip said off-handedly, “You ought to start a botanical garden.” Maine was one of three states without a botanical garden, so why not build one along Maine’s famously craggy coastline?

Hale was in no position to start a botanical garden from scratch. Botanical gardens are a monumental project, generally created and sustained by people or institutions with ample resources — wealthy philanthropists, universities, or big cities. Hale and his wife Cindy were small business owners in a town of 2,300. Their laundry business had burned down three years before, and they had turned Rollie’s love of gardening into a landscaping company. They were successful but not wealthy, certainly not like John D. Rockefeller, whose millions had helped fund the development of Maine’s top tourist attraction, Acadia National Park, decades earlier.1

But Hale saw promise and possibility in this “crazy idea.” If done right, a Maine botanical gardens could celebrate the state’s unique natural beauty, cultivate a love of nature in younger generations, and drive local economic growth. He assembled an eclectic bunch of “dreamers and doers,” as former Gardens Executive Director William Cullina called the original founders. They were everyday citizens who shared Hale’s love of Maine and gardens — retirees and educators and small business owners, men and women without fancy pedigrees or wealth. Over months of backyard discussions fueled by Hale’s homemade blueberry muffins, the group developed a vision for a made-in-Maine “people’s garden” with “ornamental and themed gardens, forested contours, natural ledges, woodlands, wetlands, and quintessential coastal landscapes.” Within a year, the group had formed an official nonprofit organization and began researching botanical gardens around the country.2

Patient and persevering, this merry little “band of Mainers” spent the next 15 years — 15 years! — conducting research, developing plans, raising money, and building the Gardens. This was a labor of love, a passion project that they wanted to get right. “It had to be world-class from the very beginning,” said nursery owner Bob Boyd.3

And they were willing to sacrifice for it. After a two-year search, they found a 128-acre parcel of land that suited their vision perfectly. It had been slated to be a housing development, but the plans had fallen through and it was now on the market — for $1.8 million (about $4 million today).

$1.8 million?!? The organization’s bank account had a grand total of $40,000.

They negotiated the price down to $500,000, still a Rockefeller-sized sum. Without time to mount a public fundraising campaign, Hale and nine other Gardens founders put their money where their dreams were, using their homes as collateral for a loan to make the down payment. As of December 1995, the land was theirs.4

Everything was starting to seem a bit more real. Still, “we had no money, no members, and no one knew anything about us,” recalled co-founder Claire Hunt. A retired elementary school principal and skilled public speaker, Hunt became the organization’s spokeswoman, making the case for the Gardens up and down the state. “I spoke in every church basement you could imagine,” she laughed.5

As they opened their project to the public, they encountered unexpected resistance. Local garden clubs didn’t want a massive new project in their territory, while state botanical societies didn’t trust the grassroots renegades from Boothbay. Other nonprofits, meanwhile, feared that the Gardens would gobble up the limited funding for charities in the area. But the outpouring of donations and volunteer support overwhelmed the skepticism and jealousy. Volunteers by the dozens came with “wheelbarrows, pickaxes, shovels — that was it,” said volunteer Larry Townley. “We had nothing, no motorized equipment. It was all done by hand.” They built miles of trails that visitors still walk today.6

In August 1998, the board organized a “charrette,” an intensive, time-limited collaborative planning process, to develop a master plan for the Gardens. (The term, which means “cart” in English, derives from a tradition in 19^th century French art schools. At the end of an assignment, students would frantically put the finishing touches on their projects before an instructor wheeled a cart around the room to collect them.) The board convened teams of experts, including landscape architects, civil engineers, horticulturalists, and environmental specialists, who spent three days hammering out the details a plan that guided the construction of the Gardens.7

It took another decade of planning, fundraising, and building, but the Gardens opened with much fanfare in June 2007. They attracted 37,000 visitors that first year; today, more than 300,000 people from all over the world visit annually. My family and I try to go a few times each year.

Spring rekindles our hope that things can and will get better. Having a “Spring mindset” means looking at the world the way Rollie Hale, Claire Hunt, and other founders of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens saw it: as a place of great promise and possibility. They took a “crazy idea” and turned it into one of the most spectacular places on Earth. Imagine what else we can build!

The Pendleton Civil Service Act may seem like the kind of law only a high school history teacher could love, one of those forgettable bills used in a “gotcha” question on an exam. But it was a transformative piece of legislation on par with the G.I. Bill, the Voting Rights Act, and other laws that have reshaped our country for the better. It launched a revolution in American governance and changed the relationship between the people and the public institutions that serve them. Though the bill was named for its congressional sponsor, Sen. George Pendleton of Ohio, its author and primary champion was not a politician at all. He was a cantankerous reformer named Dorman Eaton, “a public man in private station” (as his tombstone would assert) who left a lasting legacy of nonpartisanship that deserves our respect.

Dorman Eaton is not the kind of guy who gets much love from historians or the public these days. Born in Hardwick, Vermont, in 1823, he was part of what today we would call the privileged elite: scion of a well-established New England family, Harvard Law graduate, corporate New York lawyer. Acerbic, exacting, and blunt, he was not a man who most folks wanted to have a beer with. But Eaton’s almost maniacal focus on civil service reform helped to lay the groundwork for what would become our merit-based system of hiring for public jobs.1

Eaton embraced the cause in the 1860s while working as an attorney for the Erie Railroad. The railroad owners, including notorious financier Jay Gould, used their political connections to bribe judges and politicians and enrich themselves as they cannibalized the company. Eaton saw how this corruption infected public agencies and politicians throughout New York City, which at the time was largely controlled by “Boss” William Tweed and his political machine.2

Eaton understood that Boss Tweed’s power rested on “patronage” — the use of political positions to reward family, friends, and political supporters. Loyalty, not merit, drove the patronage system. Politicians doled out plum public positions, from local postmaster to agency clerk to federal judge, to their loyal supporters. In return, they not only expected beneficiaries to vote the right way, but they required public employees to assist on campaigns and donate to the party. These salary “kickbacks” kept political parties afloat and were the primary source of campaign funding in the 19^th century.

Patronage had a long pedigree in American politics. George Washington envisioned, perhaps naively, that the federal government would be staffed by virtuous men who demonstrated “real fitness of character.”3 But once political parties appeared in the 1790s, they turned to patronage as an effective if somewhat embarrassing way to build and sustain political support.

President Andrew Jackson embraced patronage not as a necessary evil but as a downright democratic good, the expression of the popular will. Jackson and his supporters believed that a president had both a right and a duty to staff federal agencies with supporters who would carry out his political agenda. “To the victor belong the spoils,” argued Democratic Sen. William Marcy of New York in 1832, and the use of patronage became known as the “spoils system.” By the mid-19^th century, politicians of all persuasions accepted patronage as the basic currency of government.

The Civil War spurred rethinking. The war dramatically increased the size and scope of the federal government, and jobs within federal agencies became increasingly technical and sophisticated. Postwar population increases, westward expansion, and industrialization drove more growth in the federal government. There had been roughly 20,000 federal employees in Jackson’s time; by the early 1880s there were more than 130,000. Well-publicized scandals involving political appointees rocked the Grant Administration and local political machines in the 1860s and 70s, and Congressional hearings revealed the extent of incompetence and corruption within the civil service.4

Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts proposed a civil service reform bill in 1864, the first of more than 64 such bills in the next two decades. All failed.5 Politicians of both parties proved reluctant to change a system that they had learned to manipulate to their benefit, even if many of them found it time-consuming and anxiety-producing.

Stymied at the federal level, Dorman Eaton and other reformers pushed for reform at in states and cities. Eaton’s work attracted fierce opposition, both politically and physically. While walking home one evening in February 1870, he was clubbed nearly to death – he remembered that the attack was coordinated but his assailants were never found.6

Forced into a lengthy convalescence, Eaton spent time in Europe, where he studied European approaches to government. Under the pen name “Non-Partisan,” he authored several works arguing for a merit-based system of public hiring. He argued that most municipal functions, including fire protection, public health, and police, were “managerial “or “scientific” and therefore should be conducted by skilled professionals, not partisan hacks. The result would be more effective and efficient public service, with little turnover from election to election.7

Eaton also used sharp language to frame civil service reform as a moral crusade. Machine politicians, he wrote, were “municipal pirates” who were “ignorant, mercenary, faithless, unjust, and incompetent.” They preyed on the “ignorant, bigoted rabble,” (particularly immigrants) to impose a “tyranny” of patronage and party politics.8

An act of political violence catalyzed the cause. On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau – universally remembered as a “disgruntled office seeker” – assassinated President James Garfield, in part because he feared that Garfield would end the patronage system. Guiteau received a death sentence rather than the job he expected.9 (A new Netflix series, “Death By Lightning” dramatizes the assassination.)

The killing galvanized public support for reform. Patronage had caused the murder of a president!

Energized, Eaton and other reformers with the new National Civil Service Reform League pushed Congress to pass reform legislation. Congressional Republicans balked, so Democrats, sensing opportunity, embraced reform as their own. It became the top issue in the 1882 congressional elections, as voters dumped anti-reform Republicans and handed Democrats control of the House. In January 1883, just a few weeks into the lame duck session of Congress, chastened Republicans joined Democrats in support of a bill that Eaton drafted. The Pendleton Civil Service Act passed by overwhelming margins.10

The bill replaced patronage with a merit-based system of competitive exams that would guide government hiring. It prohibited firing or demoting government employees for political reasons, and it banned the practice of requiring employees to give political contributions. A new Civil Service Commission was established to enforce the law.11

To honor the bill’s author, President Arthur tapped Eaton to become the first chairman of the Civil Service Commission. It would prove to be, as his biographer notes, “an uneasy anti-climax to his career.” After three years of modest success, Eaton retired and returned to New York City. He penned a treatise, The Government of Municipalities, shortly before his death in 1899.12

The Pendleton Act did not immediately transform the federal government. It initially covered only 10% of the federal workforce, but it empowered presidents to expand the scope of its provisions through executive order. Within fifteen years, about 40% of federal jobs were protected. Today, merit-based hiring covers nearly all the roughly 3 million federal employees.

Over time, the idea of nonpartisan expertise took hold, and Americans largely (though never fully) abandoned the idea that political loyalties should matter more than abilities, experience, or knowledge. As the federal government continued to expand in the 20^th century, it required top engineers, scientists, analysts, and other skilled professionals to staff public agencies in an increasingly complex world. It’s hard to imagine a loyalty-based civil service being able to administer Social Security, land a man on the moon, keep our air clean, or win the Cold War. State and local governments followed suit.

Dorman Eaton left a powerful legacy. The “partisan of non-partisanship” helped institutionalize the idea of professional, nonpartisan expertise, an idea foreign to his time, and seemingly forgotten in our own. He believed that the agencies and institutions of American government should serve all the people, regardless political affiliation, with the same high level of expertise and efficiency. Those ideals remain a lodestar for the millions of public employees who serve our country, our states, and our local communities. We neglect them at our peril.

Sources

• Calhoun, Charles W. “Late Nineteenth-Century Politics Revisited.” The History Teacher, Vol. 27, No. 3 (May, 1994): 325-337.

• “George Washington to William Washington, 27 September 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives.

• Maffucci, Jacqueline. “Celebrating 143 of the Merit-Based Civil Service: The Pendleton Act.” OurPublicService.org, January 16, 2026.

• McFarland, Gerald W. “Partisan of Nonpartisanship: Dorman B. Eaton and the Genteel Reform Tradition.” Journal of American History, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Mar., 1968): 806-822.

• National Archives. “Pendleton Act (1883).” Archives.gov.

• Theriault, Sean M. “Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and the Power of the People.” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Feb. 2003): 50-68.

The major league baseball season is officially underway. Finally! Winter is long and hard here in Maine, and Opening Day is a sign that the end is near, that we will indeed survive to see green again (even if we did get another six-inch helping of slushy white stuff the other day). Opening Day is Spring in action, a time of hope and renewal when even my beloved Washington Nationals, doormats for half a decade, still have a chance to win it all.

My kids love baseball. My son bakes an Opening Day cake each year, and my middle daughter knows more baseball history than most old-timers. We read baseball books aloud, play and watch games, even plan trips around visiting new ballparks. It’s something fun that we can share, a thread that connects us not only to each other but to eras past. Historians love baseball because baseball loves its history.

Baseball attracts its share of critics – the game is too slow, the season is too long, the rules are too complicated. In our fast-paced age, fans flock to football and basketball, and few can even recall baseball’s heyday as “America Pastime.” Critics have been predicting baseball’s demise for as long as I’ve been alive. There were chronic drug scandals in the 80s, crippling labor strikes in the 90s, and stat-juicing steroids at the turn of the century.

But baseball now is better than ever: the pitchers throw harder, the batters hit farther, the fielders are absurdly good. With the international integration of the game, the talent level is consistently higher, and the greatest player in the history of the sport (Shohei Ohtani) is at the top of his game. The rule changes that went into effect last year – adding a pitch clock, enlarging the bases, and restrictions on pitching changes – have returned the game to its faster-paced roots.

Today’s ballparks are beautiful, gloriously beautiful compared to the cookie-cutter AstroTurf monstrosities of my youth. Ballpark food may be more expensive (what isn’t?) but it offers more delicious variety than the rubbery dogs of ages past (though you can’t really improve upon old-fashioned fried dough). And thanks to Betty Carnes and the no-smoking movement, you can enjoy a game without inhaling the fumes of the chain-smoker an aisle upwind.

It’s not just the players or the ballpark experience that are better — the writers are as well. With its long season and relaxed pace, baseball lends itself to storytelling and reflection. No disrespect to Roger Angell, Peter Gammons, and other legendary baseball writers, but Joe Posnanski is the Shohei Ohtani of sports writing, the best now and perhaps the best who has ever written about the game. His Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball are my two all-time favorite baseball books, with troves of anecdotes and insights about the people and the moments that make the game great.

But there is one place where nostalgia still wins: the movies. Today’s baseball films just can’t hold up to “Major League,” “Sandlot,” “A League of Their Own,” and other great movies from a generation ago. In honor of Opening Day, my kids and I watched my favorite baseball movie, “Bull Durham,” the 80s classic about an aging minor league catcher who must mentor a flame-throwing phenom with “a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head.” It’s raw, it’s crude, and it’s ridiculously funny. And yes, candlesticks still make a great gift.

Baseball readers, what are some of your favorite books and movies about the game?

Jefferson also enslaved human beings — more than 600 in all during his lifetime. Slavery framed his entire life. Born into a slaveholding family, his earliest memory was of being handed up on a pillow to an enslaved nurse; his last words were spoken to the enslaved servants at his bedside. Everywhere he went, from New York to Paris to the White House, he brought slaves with him. At times he ordered whippings, even on children as young as 10, and he hired slave trackers to hunt down runaways. He purchased enslaved people and sold them, both for economic reasons and as punishment for resistance, and he gave them away as gifts. When he died, his slaves were sold to pay his debts. There was nothing “kind” about Master Jefferson.

Jefferson was far too smart and self-aware not to recognize the inherent contradiction of slavery in America. More than any other Founder, he wrestled with the contradiction and struggled to make sense of it. He knew slavery was morally wrong. As a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769, he proposed a modest bill to allow planters (rather than political leaders) to emancipate their slaves if they chose. The bill was crushed, but Jefferson remained convinced that slavery violated natural law. “Everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it as his own will,” Jefferson argued in 1770 in defense of Samuel Howell, an enslaved man of mixed heritage. “This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance.”1

This self-evident truth, that all people are born with personal liberty, found its full expression in the Declaration of Independence. In his first drafts of the Declaration, Jefferson tried to distance the American cause from slavery by blaming King George for it. “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” The clause could have turned the Declaration into an antislavery manifesto, but delegates from South Carolina and Georgia pushed to delete it, leaving behind only a vague reference criticizing the king for inciting “domestic insurrections.”

During the Revolution, still flush with the fervor of freedom, Jefferson denounced slavery in powerful, moral terms. Slavery, he argued in his 1785 treatise, Notes on the State of Virginia, not only stripped slaves of their natural rights, it also warped White people. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” White children are “nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny.” But he believed that the Revolution was eroding the foundation of slavery. “The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation.”2

Like other slave-owning founders, Jefferson hoped that slavery would wither over time and emancipation would come without government intervention. But it didn’t. In the early 19th century, slavery became more, not less, entrenched in the economic, political, and social life of Jefferson’s native South. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 fueled slavery’s explosive growth. The enslaved population grew from less than 700,000 in 1790 to more than 1.5 million in 1820 even as Northern states outlawed the institution.3

Jefferson grew increasingly reluctant to confront slavery, in part because he recognized that slavery was a powerful and profitable economic system that produced enormous rewards for his region and his plantation. A profligate spender, he depended upon enslaved labor to maintain his aristocratic lifestyle.

Jefferson also feared the political and social consequences of emancipation. White people and Black people simply could not live freely and peacefully within the same country, he believed. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained . . . will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.”4 While his idealism pushed him toward emancipation, his pragmatism led him to oppose it. “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” he wrote in 1820. “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”5

Jefferson’s economic dependence on slavery, his political pragmatism, and his instincts for “self-preservation” overwhelmed his philosophical and moral objections to slavery. For all his powerful denunciations of the institution, Jefferson chose not to emancipate any of his slaves — with one important exception. Jefferson only freed seven people, all of whom were all related to one woman: Sally Hemings.

Sally Hemings was the enslaved Black half-sister of Jefferson’s White wife, Martha. When Martha and Sally’s shared father died in 1774, Thomas and Martha Jefferson inherited one-year-old Sally. As a child, Sally served as a maid to the Jeffersons’ youngest daughter, Maria. In 1787 she accompanied Maria to Paris, where Jefferson served as a U.S. Minister. While in Paris, the light-skinned, straight-haired Sally learned French and studied needlework — and was forced into a sexual relationship with her master, 30 years her senior. Widowed and virile, Jefferson impregnated 16-year-old Sally in 1789, just as he was to return to America.

Sally, however, refused to join him. In France, she was legally free, and she had no intention of returning to a life of enslaved misery. But she also was a pregnant teenager in a foreign country with little means of support. So she negotiated with the future president, who wanted desperately for her to return to Virginia with him. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” their son Madison recalled. Sally agreed to the deal. She returned to Monticello and took up residence in the South Wing. Jefferson fathered her six children, four of whom survived to adulthood. And he kept his word. All four children were freed, as were three other Hemings family members.6

During his lifetime, the fact that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with an enslaved Sally Hemings was an open secret. Visitors to Monticello commented upon it, political enemies attacked him for it, and the physical appearance of his enslaved children fairly screamed it. “The story of black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts,” wrote one 1811 visitor to Monticello.7

Up until the turn of the 21^st century, however, few Americans knew or believed the story. Why not? Because for generations, academic historians, Jefferson’s White descendants, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (which runs Monticello) refused to believe it. Concerned primarily with preserving a mythic image of Jefferson, they preferred baseless speculation to historical fact. They ignored contemporary evidence, rejected oral history testimony, and even selectively edited plantation records to hide what they considered an embarrassing slander. Most deniers came around only after a DNA study published in the scientific journal Nature essentially confirmed what Black descendants had said for two centuries: Jefferson fathered Hemings’s children.

More than any other individual, historian Annette Gordon-Reed has worked to tell the full story of Sally Hemings and her family. In books (including her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello), podcasts, and speeches, Gordon-Reed has demolished the fiction surrounding Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson.

To its credit, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has completely reversed course. Beginning in the 1990s, the organization supported significant research into the enslaved people at Monticello. After the initial DNA study in 1998, it sponsored a deep investigation that put to rest the question of Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children. “The issue is a settled historical matter,” it now affirms. Its website (www.Monticello.org) offers a host of resources on Jefferson, Hemings, and slavery.

Monticello’s acknowledgement of the reality of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings shows a refreshing willingness to reject self-serving fiction and embrace uncomfortable truth. The history now offered at Monticello is more accurate, more nuanced, and, yes, more disturbing than the bland, comforting fare provided a generation ago. But I also find it more inspiring because it’s more real.

The full story of Jefferson and Hemings helps us see and understand our nation’s history in its full richness and complexity and humanity. Our history is messy because people are messy. We are a bundle of contradictions. Like our Founders, we often profess noble ideals yet fail to live up to them. Like Thomas Jefferson, we often don’t do what is right even when we know what we should do. Like Sally Hemings, we often feel forced to choose among a range of bad options. Jefferson, Hemings, and the founding generation were human, profoundly so. To do them justice, we must tell their full stories.

Sources

• Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello. W.W. Norton, 2009.

• Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia (1832, orig. 1785).

• “Extract from Thomas Jefferson’s Argument in the Case of Howell vs. Netherland, ca. 1770.” Monticello.org.

• U.S. Census Bureau, A Century of Population Growth in the United States: From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth: 1790-1900. Government Printing Office, 1909.

One special treat was an afternoon spent walking and eating our way through Little Havana, the heart of Miami’s Cuban-American community. Little Havana is an explosion of color and culture that radiates outward from Calle Ocho (8^th Street). Once a Jewish area, the neighborhood attracted Cuban exiles in the years after Fidel Castro took power in 1959, and it has become a hub of Cuban businesses, entertainment, and political activity. Today, more than 95% of its 50,000+ residents are Latino, the majority of whom are Cuban.1 The streets thrum with rumba and mambo as the intoxicating aroma of cigar-rolling shops mixes with the smell of ropa vieja (spicy shredded flank steak). It feels like Cuba.

I understand that our experience was, to some extent, curated and manufactured. Like many ethnic neighborhoods from San Francisco’s Chinatown to New York’s Little Italy, Little Havana markets itself well. Enterprising entrepreneurs know that culture sells, and they welcome tourists who want to experience “exotic” music, food, and traditions. With their sometimes cringey kitsch and boosterish commercialism, ethnic enclaves have attracted a range of critics across the political spectrum, from those who decry “cultural commodification” to others who fear that they foster unhealthy resistance to assimilation.

But I think ethnic neighborhoods are worth appreciating and celebrating as something that has “gone right” in America. In a country that has attracted immigrants from everywhere on the planet, these neighborhoods offer a safe place to land, a community of people who can help newcomers acclimate to their strange new world. They are both a buffer and a bridge, providing comfort and connections that help cushion a difficult transition and show new arrivals how to make it in America.

Ethnic neighborhoods long predate the United States, as colonists (free and enslaved) sought to recreate elements of their former homes in “New” England, “New” Amsterdam, “New” Spain, and elsewhere. Each community of immigrants brought different architecture styles, agricultural methods, religious practices, cuisine, and music, giving their new communities distinctive cultural flair that persisted across generations.

We can trace the impact of various events in American history by looking at the rise of ethnic neighborhoods. The Gold Rush brought a wave of Chinese immigrants to California in the 1850s, and they established what would become the nation’s largest Chinatown. The massive influx of European immigration in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries led to densely populated ethnic neighborhoods throughout urban America, from Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side in New York to Polish Downtown in Chicago. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the creation of the U.S. refugee resettlement program opened the door to significant numbers of Asian and African immigrants, who have built Korea Town in Los Angeles, Little Ethiopia in D.C., and Little Mogadishu in Minneapolis (and Lewiston, Maine!).

The presence and persistence of ethnic communities throughout American history show that when people immigrate to America, whether by choice or under duress, they rarely want to leave their culture and traditions behind. Instead, they seek to preserve, protect, and pass on cherished traditions while also adapting to life in their new country. In Maine, the French Canadians who sought economic opportunity in burgeoning mill towns a century ago described their strategy of adaptation as “la survivance.” Surviving in a new land meant not simply thriving economically but, as importantly, preserving their language (French) and their faith (Catholicism) to keep their souls.

As a historian, I am fascinated by the role that ethnic neighborhoods play in providing space for alternative histories, narratives that may not jibe with what the rest of America may learn in school. In Little Havana, my kids and I happened upon a museum, monument, and mini-park memorializing the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, when a group of 1400 Cuban exiles attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist regime. For most Americans, the Bay of Pigs is a historical aside, usually remembered (if at all) as a foreign policy disaster early in the Kennedy Administration.

But in Little Havana, the Bay of Pigs story commands attention, told as a noble, though tragic, attempt to liberate Cuba from tyranny. The fallen members of Brigade 2506 are remembered as heroic martyrs in the ongoing fight for Cuban freedom. Ten years after the invasion, Miami’s Cuban community erected a monument topped with an eternal flame to illuminate Calle Ocho; at the unveiling ceremony, the young daughter of a Brigade 2506 member lit the flame. A recent, $1.35 million renovation added a new memorial and enhanced the park around it.2 Little Havana is determined not to forget, even if the rest of America has.

The Cold War looks different when seen through the lens of Little Havana, just as the Vietnam War looks different in San Jose’s Little Saigon. Ethnic neighborhoods serve as repositories of alternate historical memory, where immigrants tell stories, honor heroes, and remember events that most Americans know nothing about. The stories told in Little Havana and Little Saigon and Little Mogadishu offer different perspectives on our past and remind us that the world is a beautiful and complicated place, that people are endlessly creative and diverse, that there are many different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the past.

Although the “melting pot” metaphor retains its powerful hold on the American imagination, ethnic neighborhoods help us see that we are more of a mosaic or a Caesar salad or, as Lin-Manuel Miranda puts it, a “great, unfinished symphony.” We don’t – we can’t – check our cultures at the door when we become American. We hold fast to old traditions even as we embrace new ones, preserving and adapting as we go, living ever with the tension between wanting to be fully American, yet also needing to be separate and distinct.

I hope you’re watching the World Series. My kids and I certainly are! As much as we detest both the Yankees and Dodgers – they are literally our least favorite teams in all of sports – it’s an incredible opportunity to watch the very best players in the world compete against each other. Starting with Shohei Ohtani, the greatest player in baseball history, the collection of talent at this year’s Series surpasses anything we’ve ever seen.

The Series also highlights something Americans take for granted: the international integration of major sports. Baseball may be America’s “national pastime,” but it’s a global game now. Unlike baseball leagues in other countries, MLB has no restrictions on the number of foreign-born players allowed on a roster. While it took far too long for baseball to shed its Whites-only past, in the last few decades the league and its fans have embraced top stars from around the world.

Shohei Ohtani is Japanese, one of 7 international players on the Dodgers (including another Japanese star, Yoshinobu Yamamoto). The Yankees have 9 international players, and many teams have even more – 16 of 26 players on the Astros roster this year were foreign-born. More than a quarter of all major leaguers are born outside the 50 United States, including some places you might not expect: Aruba, Brazil, Germany, Honduras, and South Africa.

But when it comes to producing major leaguers, there’s no place like the Dominican Republic, home of Yankees phenom Juan Soto and Dodgers playoff hero Teoscar Hernandez. The Caribbean nation of 11.4 million people is just 1/30 the size of the U.S. but nonetheless produces more than 10% of all major league ballplayers. Since 2000, the southern coastal city of San Pedro de Macoris, birthplace of Padres star Fernando Tatís Jr. (my son’s favorite player), has produced an astounding 14.38 major league players per 100,000 people, a rate five times higher than the most productive American metro area (San Diego). Baseball is “a national fever,” says former Angels infielder Winston Llenas. “In the Dominican Republic, it’s almost a way of life.”

Baseball first took root in the Dominican in the 1870s and 1880s, when Cuban refugees fleeing the Ten Years War brought the game with them. Though the Spanish had brought soccer to the island decades earlier, its popularity waned as Spanish influence diminished and the American presence on the island grew in the early decades of the 20^th century. “The Spanish never really had much love for this country. They came here, made their money, and abandoned us,” explained the late Professor Manuel Joaquin Baez Vargas. “Perhaps that is the reason that Dominicans did not take to their sports.” More and more young Dominicans studied in America and came home with baseball fever, and American soldiers and sailors played with local teams. In the 1930s, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo recruited an All-Star squad of Negro Leagues players, including future Hall of Famers Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell, to play for his Dragones de Trujillo club. Not surprisingly, Los Dragones won the league title.

Because Dominicans, like other Latinos, can be of any race, they did not (and still don’t) fit easily in the Black/White binary of 20^th century American culture. Light-skinned Latinos who could pass for White played in the big leagues for decades before Jackie Robinson famously shattered baseball’s color line in 1947. In a career that spanned from 1914 to 1935, light-skinned Cuban Adolfo Luque won nearly 200 games, mostly for the Reds. But Afro-Latinos were not allowed to play until 1949, when dark-skinned Cuban Minnie Miñoso signed with Cleveland. Cuba, with a longer history in the game and a more developed professional baseball league, was the primary source of Latino ballplayers until Fidel Castro took control of the country in 1959.

The first Dominican major leaguer, Osvaldo (Ozzie) Virgil Sr., joined the Giants in 1956. Virgil, who died as age 92 just this month, was an average ballplayer but excelled as a scout and a coach; his son, Ozzie Jr., became an All-Star catcher. Like many pioneering Latino ballplayers, Virgil struggled to find his place in American baseball. He faced racial discrimination from many White players and fans, yet his African American teammates were not always supportive either. “It was hard being ignored by both the white people and the African Americans, who didn’t always accept us Latinos as Black,” he remembered.

Though the walls of segregation had been breached, baseball was slow to fully embrace Latino ballplayers. The number of Latino ballplayers (both foreign-born and American) grew steadily but slowly, rising from 5% of major leaguers in 1956 to about 15% in 1990. They still faced stereotypes – many sportswriters and baseball insiders viewed Latinos as hot-headed, temperamental, and selfish, and they assumed that Spanish-speaking players did not have the smarts to play catcher. Latino hitters faced criticism for being free swingers who would chase pitches far out of the strike zone. (When asked why he swung at so many bad pitches, Dominican legend Julio Franco explained, “A walk don’t get you off the island.” Franco, by the way, had perhaps the wackiest stance in baseball history, with just two fingers of his bottom hand on the bat!)

Not until the 1990s did those stereotypes finally begin to erode as a wave of Latino stars crashed into the big leagues. The percentage of Latinos in MLB surged to nearly 25% by 2000 and has continued to climb, reaching roughly 30% today. The skill and variety of Latino ballplayers showed American managers, sportswriters, and fans that it is futile to try to pigeon-hole them. Personalities, sizes, positions, styles of play, politics. . .Latinos can be found across any spectrum, from pudgy Fernando Valenzuela to chiseled Jorge Soler, from slick-fielding shortstops like Andrés Giménez to powerful sluggers like Albert Pujols.

Some observers credit (or condemn) Latino players for bringing a more exuberant, joyous brand of baseball to American fields – it was Dominican Jose Bautista who launched the bat flip era with an epic toss during the 2015 playoffs. But for every flamboyant Manny Ramirez or Juan Marichal, there’s a stoic Roberto Clemente or a steely Mariano Rivera. And the idea that Latinos didn’t have the brains to catch? Downright laughable to anyone who has seen Ivan Rodriguez, Yadier Molina, or Freddy Fermín call a game.

Latinos and other foreign-born players face ongoing obstacles, particularly when it comes to language and cultural integration, but they are an integral part of baseball today. Led by Shohei Ohtani, six of the top ten best-selling MLB jerseys this year belong to foreign-born players. No MLB team that wants to be competitive and keep its fans happy can possibly ignore top talent from around the world. The international integration of our national pastime has made our game, and our country, immeasurably better.

Sources

· Mark Armour and Daniel R Levitt, “Baseball Demographics, 1947-2016,” Society for American Baseball Research.

· Richard Florida, “The World Series Isn’t Global, But Baseball Players Are,” Bloomberg, Oct. 22, 2019.

· Richard Goldstein, “Ozzie Virgil Sr., First Dominican-Born Major Leaguer, Dies at 92,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2024.

· Major League Baseball, “Opening Day Rosters Feature 264 Internationally-Born Players,” March 29, 2024.

· Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, “Ciudad Trujillo — The best baseball team you’ve never heard of,”MLB.com/blogs, Nov. 17, 2023.

· Rob Ruck, The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic (1999)

In my freshman writing course on the South this semester, my students are working on a “Character Sketch” assignment. As I tell them, people — characters — are the lifeblood of history. Southern history is full of fascinating characters, and my students’ job is to choose a figure from the turn-of-the-20^th-century South and make them come alive for readers.

I’m curious to see how they tackle this assignment. In the past, I have found that some of my students have struggled to portray Southerners, either White or Black, as full, complicated, messy human beings. Steeped in 21^st century politics and culture, they sometimes cannot see beyond the South’s racial mores. They fear that they may be misunderstood if they portray a racist White Southerner sympathetically, so they retreat to self-protective prose intended to distance themselves from the subject’s detestable racial views. Conversely, if the character is Black, students sometimes shy away from critical assessment, portraying the subject as flawlessly courageous and beyond reproach. In either case, the characters come across as flat — cardboard caricatures without the depth and complexity that make people real.

That’s a shame, not simply because it’s neither fair nor reasonable to demand that historical figures live up to our own impossible (and shifting) standards of moral or political behavior. It also saps history of its humanity. Characters become stock figures in a contemporary morality play rather than real people whose stories can inspire or shape us.

Take someone like Mary Breckinridge.

Mary Breckinridge was born into a storied Southern family. Her grandfather served as Vice President under President James Buchanan and ran against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential campaign. Her father, a Confederate veteran, became an Arkansas congressman and served as the U.S. Minister to Russia. Born in 1881, Mary had a cosmopolitan childhood. She traveled widely, witnessed the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, and attended an elite Swiss boarding school, where she spoke three languages and excelled academically. She loved the outdoors, learning to hunt and ride horses on her family’s extensive estates.

Breckinridge’s early life was both stunningly privileged and stultifyingly confined. All the moving and traveling left her feeling “unsettled,” Mary recalled, and she struggled with loneliness. While Breckinridge men went to college and assumed leadership roles, she was expected to get married, have children, and maintain the home. “I chafed at the complete lack of purpose,” she wrote. Inspired by the opportunities of the Progressive Era, she yearned to “do something useful” after graduating from high school, something that would add her name to the long line of Breckinridge leaders. But that’s not what a good Southern woman did.1

Her beloved elder cousin, Sophonisba “Nisba” Breckinridge, had somehow charted her own path. With her parents’ blessing, Nisba graduated from Wellesley College and embarked upon a pioneering career in law and academia, becoming the first woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School and helping launch the field of professional social work. Yet Mary’s parents saw “Nisba” as a bad example, a woman who “refused to go back home to live,” and they forbade Mary from attending college.2

Mary was torn between “the life I longed to live” and the “life allowed me.” She wanted marriage, a stable home, and a big family (with 8 kids!). But she also wanted adventure, a career, a purpose.3

Tradition initially triumphed. She married at age 23, but her husband died less than a year later. She then spent a summer at a girls’ school in North Carolina, where she watched a student die of typhoid. That experience drove her to pursue nursing. After graduating from nursing school, she returned home to Arkansas. She remarried in 1911 and gave birth to a son, Clifton Jr. (known as “Breckie”), whom she adored.

Tragedy soon derailed tradition. She gave birth to a second child, a daughter who lived only six hours, and soon thereafter adorable Breckie died of appendicitis at age four. Never happy in her marriage, a distraught Breckinridge filed for divorce in 1920 and re-assumed her maiden name, “which I did with a feeling not unlike that in which one puts on again an old pair of workday shoes,” she wrote.4

Widowed, grieving, and divorced, Breckinridge began her life anew. World War I had just ended, and she volunteered to help organize nurses for the American Committee for Devastated France. While overseas, she met British nurses who also served as midwives. Brilliant! We could use this in America, she thought, particularly in her native South where doctors were scarce and pregnant women relied on midwives who often lacked the latest medical knowledge.5

She returned home determined to establish a British-style nurse-midwife program in America. She went back to school to burnish her credentials, then traveled to the mountains of eastern Kentucky to survey midwives and mothers. Why Kentucky? She had family connections in the area — the Breckinridge name went a long way in the upper South — and she had the support of the state’s public health commissioner. She also knew that if her model worked in eastern Kentucky, it could work anywhere.6

By 1925, she was ready to launch her life’s work: the Frontier Nurse Service. From a central hospital based in Hyden, Kentucky (pop. 313), British nurse-midwives from FNS provided prenatal care, delivered babies, and taught families about hygiene and sanitation. “There was no motor road within sixty miles in any direction,” Breckinridge remembered, so the nurses made home visits on horseback, carrying saddlebags of medical supplies as they rode through the remote hollows of Appalachia. Their five-dollar fee was rarely paid in cash, but rather “in labor, in fodder for our horses, in pickled onions, quilted ‘knivers,’ skins of ‘varmits,’ and split-bottom chairs.”7

Neatly attired in gray-blue uniforms with riding breeches and boots, Breckinridge and her FNS nurse-midwives captured hearts nationwide. In the public mind, they were “angels on horseback,” an image that Breckinridge worked hard to cultivate and maintain.

Well-connected and media-savvy, the square-jawed, blue-eyed Breckinridge was a fundraising dervish, a riveting speaker with a commanding presence despite her small stature. Critics questioned her smoking, her cursing, her imperious decision-making, her haircut, and everything else that was “unladylike” about her, but she did not heed them. Even after a wicked 1931 fall from a horse broke her back, she strapped on a brace and continued to captive audiences with heartwarming tales of adventurous nurses, brave mothers, and grateful children. “She touched consciences and loosened purse strings wherever she went,” wrote the Louisville Courier.8

The FNS began with babies, but soon expanded to address patients’ broader medical and economic needs. A 1932 report from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company concluded that “If such service were available to the women of the country generally there would be a saving of 10,000 mothers’ lives a year in the United States.”9

In 1939, when World War II forced British nurse-midwives to return home, Breckinridge redoubled her efforts to train Americans in the field. She founded the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery, which lives on today as Frontier Nursing University.

Breckinridge spent nearly four three decades at the helm of FNS. During her tenure, FNS had a phenomenal success rate – more than 14,500 babies delivered with a mere 11 maternal deaths. Her work showed that nurse-midwives could play a valuable and cost-effective role in meeting the needs of rural patients.10

When she died in 1965, mourners hailed her as a hero. “While the deeds of her famous ancestors live on in musty history books,” wrote the Hazard Herald, a Kentucky newspaper, “her deeds live on in whole generations of living people.” She had lived up to her storied name.11

And yet . . . Mary Breckinridge was racist. She did not hire Black midwives in the FNS, and she held stereotypically patronizing views of the Black people in her own life.

Is that surprising? She grew up in the post-Reconstruction South, a racially segregated world marked by disenfranchisement and lynching. Very few White Southerners could escape the pull of White supremacy. Even her progressive cousin Nisba had to leave the South to pursue her egalitarian ideals.

That may feel frustrating and disappointing. We want her to transcend the limitations of her time. In many ways, she did — she upended notions of Southern womanhood and established herself as a visionary leader in public health. Yet we struggle to reconcile the inspiring “angel on horseback” with the reality of the human being who actually lived. Her racism may seem like a deal-breaker, and we may be tempted to dismiss her as just another privileged racist who doesn’t deserve our accolades or appreciation.

But I would encourage us to appreciate Mary Breckinridge in her full humanity. She was a flawed, complicated figure. So are we all. She couldn’t possible live up to the angelic image that she strived to convey to the world, just as none of us can live up to the idealized version of ourselves that we may strive to uphold. Nonetheless, she lived a remarkable life that changed our country for the better.

Sources

• Breckinridge, Mary. Wide Neighborhoods: The Story of the Frontier Nursing Service. University Press of Kentucky, 1981. (Original, 1952)

• Crowe-Carraco, Carol. “Mary Breckinridge and the Frontier Nursing Service.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 76, No. 3 (July 1978): 179-191.

• Dye, Nancy Schrom. “ Mary Breckenridge, the Frontier Nursing Service and the Introduction of Nurse-Midwifery in the United States.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vo. 57, No. 4 (Winter 1983): 485-507.

• Frontier Nursing University. “History of FNU.”

• Goan, Melanie Beals. “Establishing Their Place in the Dynasty: Sophonisba and Mary Breckinridge’s Paths to Public Service.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 101, No. ½ (Winter/Spring 2003): 45-73.

  • Mary Breckinridge: The Frontier Nursing Service & Rural Health in Appalachia. UNC Press, 2008.

• Pletsch, Pamela K. “Mary Breckinridge: A Pioneer Who Made Her Mark.” The American Journal of Nursing, Vol. 81, No. 12 (December 1981): 2188-2190.

(Interestingly, we spent much of the time talking not about the Delta but instead about hope, faith, and optimism in America. One of the students had found this Substack, and he wanted to know why and how I remain optimistic when our world seems so bleak. Some of the students struggled with the idea that we could or even should feel hopeful about anything these days, and they seemed genuinely surprised to hear someone talk about hope and possibility rather than about how awful everything is.)

The students will spend a week in Clarksdale, Mississippi, building a home with Habitat for Humanity, which is celebrating its 50^th anniversary in 2026. Habitat’s mission is simple but enduring: “Seeking to put God’s love into action, Habitat for Humanity brings people together to build homes, communities and hope.” Now an international institution with more than 1,500 affiliates across all 50 states and in 70 countries, Habitat traces its roots back to a farm in rural Georgia, where a rabble-rousing preacher embarked upon a controversial experiment in radical Christianity.

Clarence Jordan rubbed many people the wrong way. Born in Talbotton, Georgia, in 1912, Jordan was full of strongly held opinions about, well, pretty much everything — but especially about money. The son of a banker, Jordan rebelled against wealth and all its trappings. Rich people were “money addicts” who were “just like folks who have been hitting the bottle,” he said. “They have already had more than it takes to make them drunk, but they just can’t quit.” He could be abrasive and confrontational, with a touch of what one admirer conceded was “holier-than-thou moralism.” He also was a pacifist, a racial egalitarian, and a farmer with a Ph.D. in Greek New Testament . . . not your typical Southern Baptist preacher.1

Not content merely to preach the gospel, Jordan wanted to live it. In 1942, as the U.S. entered World War II, he and a friend bought 440 acres in Sumter County, Georgia, and established a farming community they called “Koinonia,” Greek for “fellowship” or “community.” Modeled on the early Christian community described in the Book of Acts, Koinonia rested on three principles: communal living, nonviolence, and equality. All possessions were held in common, and community members (called “partners”) worked, ate, and made decisions communally. It was, Jordan said, “our own little alternative to war”; his wife Florence called it “an adventure with the Lord.”2

Koinonia grew slowly. Located just off Highway 19, a route popular with tourists, its families subsisted by selling chickens and produce at a roadside farm stand and to locals in nearby Americus and Plains. By 1950, fourteen partner families, two of which were Black, lived on the farm.

The community’s interracial social mission attracted vitriol and violence, particularly after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Vigilantes torched the roadside market, shot into Koinonia homes, and attacked members when they went into town. They destroyed hundreds of the farm’s fruit trees, sabotaged farm equipment, and staged a boycott that devastated the farm’s revenue. The farm survived, barely, on donations from friends and a mail-order business selling pecans and fruitcakes nationwide. Its slogan read: “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia!”3

Over time, the challenges of communal living and the stress of fighting external threats undermined the community. By the mid-1960s, only the Jordans and one other family remained on the farm. Jordan declared the experiment over and devoted himself to writing what came to be known as the Cotton Patch Gospel, a reinterpretation of the New Testament in which Jesus lives in modern-day Georgia, gets lynched, and rises again to bring peace between Black and White Southerners.4

Just when Koinonia seemed to have run its course, Millard and Linda Fuller stopped by for a visit one afternoon in 1965.

The Fullers were a wealthy couple desperate to repair their marriage and find a sense of purpose in their lives. Millard was the son of an Alabama sharecropper who had made himself a millionaire by age 30. With a successful business, a plush 13-room home, and a lakeside cabin, he seemed to embody the American Dream. But his workaholic habits drove Linda to contemplate divorce. Isolated with two young children in a cavernous house, without a husband or community, she questioned the meaning of it all. What was the point of making so much money? Something had to change, she told her husband.5

Millard, whose own mother died when he was just 3 years old, despaired at the idea of losing Linda and the kids. During a tearful conversation on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, the couple decided to sell everything and, as Millard later recalled, “throw ourselves on God’s mercy to find out what He wants to do with our lives.”6

Reinvigorated, they cast about for inspiration. A friend suggested that they talk with Clarence Jordan at Koinonia. Their afternoon visit turned into a month-long stay that changed the trajectory of their lives.

Jordan had a powerful effect on the Fullers, particularly Millard. Unlike their friends and family, Jordan didn’t think they were crazy to rid themselves of their possessions. They were now free to serve God, he told them. “To me, he actually thought like Jesus!” Millard Fuller wrote in a memoir. “He was a practical man who loved God, his fellow man, and the land, which he considered a sacred gift from God.”7

The Fullers returned to Koinonia in 1968 to live full-time on the farm. They helped Jordan develop and nurture an idea for “partnership housing,” in which poor families worked alongside volunteers to build decent, affordable homes that they would live in and come to own by paying off no-interest loans. Their mortgage payments, coupled with donations and grants, would feed a revolving “Fund for Humanity” that could pay for future homes. This was the seed of what eventually became Habitat for Humanity.

“What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers, but coworkers,” Jordan wrote in the program’s first fundraising letter. “And what the rich need is a wise, honorable, and just way of divesting themselves of their overabundance.” That spirit of honoring human dignity – respecting the poor, not pitying them – infused the program from the beginning and remains a hallmark of Habitat.8

Jordan died before the first home had been completed, but the Fullers turned “partnership housing” into a lifelong mission. After five years at Koinonia, they took a missionary trip to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where they launched a partnership housing project. Despite facing overwhelming poverty, debilitating diseases, and bureaucratic corruption, they built 100 homes in three years.

The Fullers returned to Koinonia in 1976. With several friends, they officially founded Habitat for Humanity with an audacious goal: “to completely eliminate poverty housing and homelessness . . . by making shelter a matter of conscience.” Millard became president and Linda worked as his assistant, and the pair spent the next three decades evangelizing for Habitat. Business savvy and charismatic, they proved to be effective fundraisers and adaptable problem solvers. They cultivated prominent supporters, mostly notably their Sumter County neighbor, the peanut-farmer-turned-president, Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn.9

The Fullers had found their life’s purpose. Habitat was essentially a manifestation of their faith, Christianity in action. “True faith must be acted out,” Millard Fuller wrote in The Theology of the Hammer. “We must put faith and love into action to make them real, to make them come alive for people.”10

Since its founding 50 years ago, Habitat for Humanity has built hundreds of thousands of houses worldwide and helped to turn millions of low-income people into homeowners. It has attracted its share of critics who claim that it’s too religious, too cozy with developers, too focused on direct work rather than system advocacy. The organization has weathered many crises, including a challenge to the Fullers’ leadership that led to their ouster in 2005. And, as our current housing crisis shows, it certainly has not reached its goal of ending poverty housing and homelessness.

But what a difference it has made in the lives of millions of people! Not just the beneficiaries who get to live in a decent, affordable home, but the volunteers who work alongside them. Habitat has largely hewed to Clarence Jordan’s original vision of partnership housing that respects the poor and provides “a hand up, not a handout,” as the Habitat slogan goes. “Habitat volunteers aren’t at war, but they are fighting for a better America – by drawing sketches rather than swords, striking nails rather than people,” writes journalist (and longtime Habitat volunteer) Chris Goodrich. “And they’re finding, too, that they’re becoming better individuals themselves.” I hope those Bowdoin students discover that truth as well.11

Sources

• Abramson, Ben. “Habitat for Humanity: Lessons From the Front Lines of the Housing Crisis.” StrongTowns.org, May 16, 2024.

• Barnes, Shirley. “Building New Hope: Couple Find Each Other by Trading Their Millions for Hammer and Nails.” Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1995.

• Bossi, Joanna A., “Building Louder”: An Assessment of Habitat for Humanity, International’s Government Relations and Advocacy Efforts. Illinois State University, M.S. Thesis, 2015.

• Fuller, Millard. The Theology of the Hammer. Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 1994.

• Georgia Historical Society, “Koinonia Farm.” GeorgiaHistory.com.

• Goodrich, Chris. Faith is a Verb. Gimlet Eye Books, 2005.

• Habitat for Humanity. “Habitat’s History.” Habitat.org.

  • “Love Never Quits.” Habitat.org.

• Hollyday, Joyce. “The Dream that Has Endured: Clarence Jordan and Koinonia.” Sojourners, Vol. 8, No. 12 (December 1979).

• Owens, Steve. “The Charity Trap: How Good Intentions Preserve Bad Systems.” Medium.com, July 14, 2025.

• Queen, Edward. “Habitat for Humanity.” Encyclopedia of American Religious History. Infobase Learning, 2008: 453-454.

During his three decades as head of Stanford’s cardiothoracic department, Shumway performed or supervised an astonishing 800+ heart transplants and trained a generation of surgeons in his lifesaving techniques. His legacy has only grown in the decades since his death, as heart transplants have become standard medical practice. Each year, they save and extend the lives of more than 4,500 American adults and children.

Yet if you Google “heart transplant pioneer,” the name that pops to the top of the list is not Norman Shumway, but another man: Christiaan Barnard, the South African doctor who performed the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967. By being first, Barnard vaulted into global prominence and won the lavish attention of a celebrity-obsessed culture. But, as the story of heart transplants shows, being first and famous isn’t nearly as important as being persistent and right.

Shumway in some ways was a typical Midwesterner. Born in 1923 in Kalamazoo, Michigan (one of the all-time great place names), he was the son of a creamery owner. Laconic and shy, with a dry, mischievous wit to accompany a twinkling smile, he was, as his high school yearbook proclaimed, “a man of few words but great meaning.” He treated his staff and colleagues with kindness and care, and he preferred long hours in his lab to splashy events in the spotlight.1

The military made him a doctor. He had enrolled at the University of Michigan with dreams of becoming an attorney, but after Pearl Harbor he was drafted into the Army. Upon completing basic training, he aced a medical aptitude test. An officer asked if he would like to stay in the infantry or go to medical school. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he chose medicine.2

He studied at Baylor University, then Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, followed by a residency at the University of Minnesota. Minnesota sat on the cutting edge of heart science. As a resident, Shumway learned cardiac surgery and worked on children born with abnormal hearts. He also developed a method of cooling the heart so that surgeons had more time to operate on them.3

After residency, he moved west to Stanford, where he collaborated with a younger colleague, Richard Lower, on a series of federally funded experiments involving dogs. In 1959, the pair successfully performed a dog heart transplant. Though the pup lived only eight days with its new heart, the experiment was revolutionary — it proved that a heart could still work and blood could still flow after transplantation. As he patched up the little mutt, Shumway looked at Lower and said, “Christ, we can do anything.”4

For the next decade, Shumway and Lower refined their techniques and worked to address post-surgery complications, particularly when a dog’s immune system rejected the invading heart. Transplanting the heart itself was not all that difficult, Shumway explained, “but it’s what happens later with regard to the containment of rejection that makes the real difference.”5

The success Shumway and Lower achieved helped trigger an international race to perform the first human-to-human transplant, a riveting story told in Donald McRae’s book, Every Second Counts. McRae focuses on the four surgeons: Shumway and Lower, along with Adrian Kantrowitz at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center, and Christiaan Barnard, a brilliant but abrasive South African who had worked with both Shumway and Lower.

Barnard won the race on December 3, 1967. Taking advantage of South Africa’s lax medical laws regarding the use of donor organs, Barnard used the techniques he learned from Shumway and Lower to transplant a heart from a 25-year-old drunk driving victim into 53-year-old Louis Washkansky, who survived 18 days.

Barnard’s stunning achievement turned him into a star. Cultivating an aura of swashbuckling scientific cool, the media-savvy South African conducted countless interviews and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He became a jet-setting playboy, complete with attention-grabbing affairs with movie stars Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida.6

Shumway, understandably, was peeved. Part of it was personal – he had spent a decade methodically perfecting the transplant process, and he was annoyed that the glory-seeking Barnard had won the race using Shumway’s own expertise. Shumway’s anger was also principled – he worried that Barnard had rushed the process, dangerously putting ego above scientific discretion. He feared that a mindset that prioritized speed over science could lead to disastrous results.

At the same time, though, he was a bit relieved. Barnard had generated a “circus atmosphere with Marx Brothers overtones,” which Shumway hated. “We don’t need to worry about the press now,” he told a colleague. “We can proceed quietly and say nothing until we report our first 10 cases in the surgical journals.” Within weeks of Barnard’s surgery, Shumway himself conducted the first adult-to-adult heart transplant in the U.S. He placed a donor heart into the body of a 54-year-old steelworker named Mike Kasperak, who lived another 14 days.7

Despite Shumway’s efforts to keep it quiet, journalists (including a cub reporter out of L.A. named Tom Brokaw) found out and pushed him to hold a press conference after the first procedure. Characteristically, he downplayed expectations. There was still so much doctors didn’t know about transplants, he emphasized, and the profession needed to develop clear and careful guidelines about how to proceed. “We have reached first base perhaps, but the work is just beginning,” he cautioned.8

But the prospect of successful heart transplants proved too tantalizing, touching off a frenzy in both the media and the medical profession. Doctors around the world rushed to become transplant surgeons, often without taking the time to train properly in the procedure. More than a hundred transplants were performed in the next year.

The problem was that they didn’t work. Nearly all the patients died with a few hours or days due to their bodies rejecting the invading organ. By 1970, the situation got so dire that hospitals abandoned transplants altogether. Shumway himself faced a lawsuit from the coroner of Santa Clara County (where Stanford was located) for conducting transplants without first getting an autopsy. A 1971 Life magazine cover story condemned “the tragic record of heart transplants.”9

And that’s where the story could have ended.

But Norman Shumway wasn’t willing to abandon the mission. While Christiaan Barnard was off gallivanting with Hollywood starlets, Shumway went back to his lab. He practiced what he came to call “radical perseverance,” a dogged determination to keep working toward a distant goal that may or may not even be possible to reach. He simply didn’t give up.

The 1970s were not easy for Shumway and his team of Stanford researchers. Working with little fanfare, funding, or expectations, they made slow but steady progress in addressing the “fantastic galaxy of complications” that could follow a transplant. They developed an early detection system in which they used a bioptome — a scissor-like contraption attached to a miniature catheter — to perform a heart biopsy that could determine when a body was rejecting the new organ. They also proved the value of cyclosporine, an immunosuppressant drug that dramatically reduced the chance of post-operation infection. They carefully vetted potential donors and patients, and worked to expand the pool of potential donors to find appropriate matches.10

By the early 1980s, these advances had significantly increased transplant patients’ survival rates. In 1981, with Stanford colleague Bruce Reitz, he successfully performed the world’s first human heart-lung transplant, a far more complicated procedure. The medical establishment once again embraced transplants, and they are now widely used across the world.11

As he rejuvenated the field of heart transplants, Shumway poured himself into teaching and mentoring the next generation of cardiac surgeons. Unlike his contemporaries, he allowed his students to work directly on the operating table, intervening only when necessary. He peppered his pupils with pithy one-liners, including: “All you need to know to perform open heart surgery is that water runs downhill and seeks its own level” and “all bleeding stops sometime.” One of his own daughters, Sara, followed him into the field. Through teaching, he spread his expertise far beyond his Stanford lab.12

Norman Shumway may not have been the “first” to complete a human-to-human heart transplant, but he did something profoundly more important. Through careful research and “radical perseverance,” he made sure he got transplants right. He built the infrastructure — of evidence, of expertise, and of human capacity — to make transplants safe and effective. His legacy is visible in every “blue baby” who survives a heart defect thanks to a transplant, every patient who lives years and even decades after heart failure. How fitting it is that the latest major advance in heart medicine — the “heart-in-a-box” that allows doctors to transplant a beating heart — was developed recently by Dr. Joseph Woo, the Norman E. Shumway Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford. Many thousands more people will live thanks to his work.

Sources

• Altman, Lawrence K. “Norman E. Shumway, 83, Who Made the Heart Transplant a Standard Operation, Dies.” New York Times, Feb. 11, 2006.

• Andreopoulos, Spyros. “We Can Proceed Quietly.” Stanford Medicine News Center, Feb. 11, 2006.

• Baumgartner, William A., Bruce A. Reitz, Vincent L. Gott, and Sara J. Shumway. “Norman E. Shumway, MD, PhD: Visionary, innovator, humorist.” Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Vol. 137, No. 2 (February 2009): 269-277.

• Foster, Christine. “A Surgeon with Heart.” Stanford Magazine, May/June 2006.

• McRae, Donald. Every Second Counts: The Extraordinary Race to Transplant the First Human Heart. Simon & Schuster, 2013.

• “Norman Shumway, Heart Transplantation Pioneer, Dies at 83.” Stanford Medicine News Service, Feb. 11, 2006.

• Richmond, Caroline. “Norman Shumway.” BMJ, Mar. 4, 2006. 332(7540): 553.

• Schwartz, Harry. “Toward the Conquest of Heart Disease.” New York Times Magazine, March 27, 1983.

His decision prompted vitriolic criticism on campus and off, and in my earnest, 18-year-old way, I wanted to let him know that not everyone hated him. So, in an era before email and the Internet, I wrote him a short letter wishing him well and expressing how disappointed I was that I would not be able to take a class with him. I remember searching for his office mailbox on campus, slipping my letter into the slot, then hurrying out before anyone saw me. To my surprise, he wrote back to let me know how much the letter meant to him.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Skip” Gates is the kind of human who takes time to acknowledge everyone, no matter how busy he may be. He has what one writer called an “unquenchable cheeriness” that can disarm and charm (and at times infuriate) even his most bitter political or intellectual rivals.1

In the 35 years since that exchange, Gates has produced a prodigious and wide-ranging body of work, from academic tomes to historical documentaries to a wildly popular PBS Series on genealogy, “Finding Your Roots.” With his silver-headed cane and jaunty smile, the nattily dressed Gates has become a familiar figure on Harvard’s storied campus and on our television screens. But beneath his easy charm lies a steely determination to reshape how we Americans understand ourselves. Even as our culture and our politics conspire to tear us apart, Gates works to reveal our shared humanity, reframing the American story to help us celebrate and appreciate the full, complicated mélange of peoples that we are.

In his African American Studies courses, Gates pushes students to see that “there never has been one way to be Black.” His own life story proves his point. Gates’s roots lie deep in the mountains of West Virginia – not the first place we associate with Black America. Born in 1950, he grew up in Piedmont, a predominantly Irish-Italian paper mill town of 2,500 in the West Virginia panhandle along the Maryland border. His family was among the town’s 300 Black residents, and his kin had lived in the area for several generations.2

Often, biographic profiles of Gates portray a hardscrabble childhood: he grew up in a poor mill town, with a father largely absent due to his working two jobs and a mother who cleaned White people’s homes. But Gates himself frames his story quite differently. Piedmont at mid-century was not wealthy, but its people were fiercely proud of who they were and where they were from. Yes, his father worked two full-time jobs – at the paper mill during the day and as a janitor at night – but he did so because he wanted to earn enough so his wife could stay home with the kids. (The only time she cleaned others’ homes was as a kid to earn spending money.) The family lived in a beautiful house, and his mother showered Gates and his brother with love and attention. “It was like living in a love-cocoon,” he remembered. “She was a self-esteem factory.” His mother gave him his lifelong nickname, “Skip,” after a character in a children’s book.3

Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Piedmont schools integrated “without a peep,” Gates recalled, and he “never once experienced racial discrimination in the classroom.” As a kid, he embraced his inner nerd. “My friends wanted to be Hank Aaron or Willie Mays. I wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar.” In high school, he suffered a serious hip injury that left him with one leg two inches shorter than the other, giving him his signature gait.4

Coming of age during in the late 1960s, Gates imbibed the radicalism of his times. He read James Baldwin, organized a student walk-out after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and embraced the defiant assertiveness of the Black Power movement. “My grandfather was colored, my father was Negro, and I am Black,” he wrote on his application to Yale. “As always, whitey now sits in judgment, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision to either let me blow with the wind as a non-entity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself.”5

Prove himself he did. After graduating summa cum laude from Yale, he began a meteoric rise through academia — he earned a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University (the first African American to do so), won a MacArthur “genius” award at age 33, and taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke before joining Harvard’s faculty. At Harvard, he rejuvenated a moribund African American Studies program that had but one professor and barely 20 students; within a decade, there were 20 professors and hundreds of students enrolled.6

Gates sees his life’s work as helping to “redefine how the nation defines itself.” Our world is “profoundly fissured by nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender,” he wrote in 1992 (though he might as well have been describing America today). “And the only way to transcend those divisions — to forge, for once, a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities — is through education that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture.”7

As a scholar, he attacked the exclusivity of the Western canon, pushing to incorporate master works of African American literature – Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others – alongside Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and other classic writers. He has helped redefine excellence more broadly so that we can recognize it in people from a variety of backgrounds and literary styles.

Gates rejects the stifling racial essentialism that permeated his early days as a campus radical and our current time. In “Finding Our Roots,” he invites celebrities to explore their ancestry through DNA testing, often leading to surprising discoveries. He himself learned that his ancestry is half European, with significant genetic connections to Ireland. His point? “No matter how different we look on the surface — skin color, hair texture, shape of nose etc. — at the level of the genome we’re 99.99% the same.”8

Gates has shown tremendous intellectual courage, which, like political courage, requires challenging the ideas of your allies and friends, as well as your opponents. In the 1980s and 90s, some Black academics extended his critique to argue that the Western canon should be discarded altogether, replaced by a separatist, Afrocentric curriculum. Gates recoiled. “I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups,” he wrote in his 1991 memoir, Colored People. “Bach and James Brown. Sushi and fried catfish.” America and Americans can never be just one thing; we are necessarily hybrids.9

In the early 2000s, many intellectuals and political thinkers argued forcefully for Africans Americans to receive monetary reparations as compensation for centuries of slavery. Gates urged caution, calling on Americans to “end the slavery blame game.” Slavery was a brutal institution perpetuated not just by White Europeans and Americans, but also by Africans. “The culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers,” he wrote. “The sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time.”10

In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, when antisemitism exploded on campus among people with whom Gates generally might sympathize politically, what did he do? He looked to highlight the shared history of Jews and African Americans. His latest project, which premiered on PBS recently, is a four-part documentary series on Black-Jewish relations in America. (Why didn’t he finish it before I taught my “Jews and the Black Freedom Struggle” class last semester??) The series subtitle captures Gates’s approach: “An Interwoven History.”

When some commentators argue that White people “can’t” or “shouldn’t” teach Black History or serve as mentors to Black students (an idea directed at me in my career too many times to count), Gates pushes back. “It’s as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn’t appreciate Shakespeare because I’m not Anglo-Saxon,” he insists. “It can’t be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject.” Back in Piedmont, “my great inspirations were people who happened not to be black, that is, happened not to look like me but people with whom I shared a certain sensibility.”11

Gates is genuinely interested in people and their stories, in all their complexity, and he refuses to “cancel” people who differ with him. Knowing that “today’s politically correct position can soon become tomorrow’s discarded, ‘retrograde’ position,” he does not see fit to berate or scold or lecture people about what they should or shouldn’t say or believe. Instead, he conceives of himself as “a Talmudic scholar, someone whose job it is to preserve the tradition, to resurrect the texts and key events of the past and to explicate them.”12

Perhaps most importantly, Skip Gates is happily, fully, unquestionably himself. “Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am,” he said in 2003. “This is who I am, it’s who I was raised to be.”13

We need more scholars like him.

Sources

• Clarke, Breena and Susan Tifft. “A Race Man Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” Time, April 22, 1991.

• Cole, Bruce. “Henry Louis Gates Jr. Interview”. National Endowment for the Humanities, December 9, 2006.

• Gates, Henry Louis. Colored People: A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

  • “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” New York Times, April 22, 2010.

• Lifson, Amy. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” National Endowment for the Humanities, 1998.

• O’Hagan, Sean. “The Biggest Brother.” The Guardian, July 20, 2003.

• Remnick, David. “How Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Helped Remake the Literary Canon.” The New Yorker, Feb. 19, 2022.

• Swartz, Mark. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: A Child of Television Explores History – Personal, American and Global – to Illuminate Ancestry, Cultural Influences and Social Justice.” Early Learning Nation, Feb. 15, 2021.

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Hurricane Gloria was a dud. Billed as the “Storm of the Century,” it was forecast to ram the nation’s capital and the Eastern seaboard in September 1985. I was in junior high, and jittery D.C. public school officials closed the schools a day ahead out of an abundance of caution.

The storm never came. Instead, it veered eastward into the Atlantic, and my friends and I enjoyed a sunny September day of pick-up football. I remember laughing smugly about how bad the forecasters were.

Of course, I don’t remember thanking the forecasters for the other 99% of times when they were right. How many of us do? Instead, we get snarky when the forecast calls for a 20% chance of rain and we feel a sprinkle. But the truth is that weather forecasting is remarkably accurate, astonishingly so given how complex and dynamic weather is. And forecasting has gotten so much better in the past 75 years.1

Like many extraordinary inventions – the transistor, the polio vaccine, the bar code – our system of mathematical weather forecasting developed during the post-World War II era. It’s a story of individual brilliance and cooperative effort, of government investment and private perseverance, of faith and science. It’s also a story of how sometimes the story we want to tell differs from what actually happened.

For most of human history, weather prediction was the stuff of oracles and seers, not scientists. The invention of the barometer and the thermometer in the 17^th century made it possible to record and track current weather, but they were of little value for determining future weather. After the invention of the telegraph in the mid-19^th century, the Smithsonian Institution established weather observation stations across the country, and in 1870 the U.S. government created a weather monitoring agency. But as of the early 20^th century, weather forecasting was still just informed guesswork.2

In 1922, British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson laid out the theoretical possibility of mathematical forecasting. He spent six weeks calculating a six-hour forecast for one location – and it was woefully wrong. “Perhaps someday in the future, it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained,” he wrote. “But that is a dream.”3

A quarter century later, an American wunderkind named John von Neumann and a team of meteorologists and computer programmers turned the dream into reality.

Von Neumann’s brilliance beggars description. Born in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1903, von Neumann came to the U.S. in 1933 to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He became a citizen and worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. A polymath whose contributions span from mathematics to economics to AI, he is perhaps most famous for developing game theory, but his longest lasting legacy lay in computing. He wrote what his biographer calls the “most influential document in the history of computer,” laying out the basic structure of the digital computer. Largely forgotten today, this godfather of modern computing was considered “the most famous scientist in America after Einstein” when he died in 1956.4

After the war, Von Neumann returned to the Institute for Advanced Studies, where he immediately launched a Navy-funded meteorological Manhattan Project to investigate “the theory of dynamic meteorology in order to make it accessible to high speed, electronic, digital automatic computing.” Only one such computer existed at the time: ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which had been built at the University of Pennsylvania during the war and was housed at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Aberdeen, Maryland.5

For those of us accustomed to our lightweight laptops, the size of ENIAC was staggering: 42 panels, each measuring 10 feet high, 2 feet wide, and 3 feet deep, taking up three full walls of a room. It was operated by a crew of women who designed programs of plugged cables and flipped switches. By our standards, ENIAC seems clunky, slow, and prone to error, but von Neumann saw vast potential. ENIAC could do mathematical calculations up to 100,000 times faster than humans, making accurate weather forecasting achievable. “The possibilities that are opened up by these devices are so radically new and unexpected, that the theory is entirely unprepared for them,” he wrote.6

Brilliant as he was, von Neumann recognized that he could not undertake such a project on his own. In August 1946, he convened a “Conference on Meteorology,” a modest moniker for a confab that would lay the foundation for modern meteorology. At the conference, he recruited a team of top scientists who were committed to proving that it was possible to use math to make accurate weather predictions. They spent several years (years!) developing a 16-step process that would use ENIAC to conduct a series of calculations using weather data.

But the ENIAC was not quite ready for such a complex mission. It needed something we take for granted in computers today: memory. For that task, von Neumann turned to the best computer programmer he knew — his wife, Klara.

Klara Dan von Neumann was remarkable in her own right. Though she had received only a high school education back in Hungary, Klara had a knack for numbers and seized opportunities created by the war. While her husband was off working on the bomb, she crunched numbers for Princeton’s Office of Population Research. She became part of a community of female programmers who operated ENIAC, and she developed the first modern computer code. When John launched the meteorological project, Klara became his “experimental rabbit,” she recalled. “I learned how to translate algebraic equations into numerical forms, which in turn then have to be put into machine language in the order in which the machine has to calculate it.” The pair helped retool ENIAC into a stored-program computer with a memory system that could retain a series of instructions.7

By April 1950, the team was ready to test their equations.

The Army let them come to Aberdeen to use ENIAC for the calculations. Working round the clock, the meteorologists (John von Neumann, Jule Charney, Ragnar Fjørtoft, John Freeman, George Platzman, and Joseph Smagorinsky) collaborated with three ENIAC operators (Norma Gilbarg, Ellen-Kristine Eliassen, and Margaret Smagorinsky), who manually checked the systems and equations that were fed into ENIAC. It was tense and at times chaotic – at one point, an operator’s thumb got stuck in a punch card machine – but after 33 days they had produced something the world had never seen: two 12-hour and four 24-hour “forecasts” that used historical data to “predict” the weather for four days back in 1949. It was an extraordinary breakthrough.8

This tedious, time-consuming work proved that mathematical models could indeed predict the weather, and they laid the foundation for the instantaneous forecasts of today. Meteorologists are constantly adding data, tweaking models, and conducting tests in the real world, getting better each year. They are the oracles and seers of our time, though we barely appreciate how accurate they have become.9

Interestingly, some of the stories about the history of weather forecasting are far less accurate. As I was researching this topic, I found articles from Forbes, Smithsonian, The Guardian, and elsewhere crediting Klara von Neumann as “the computer scientist responsible for your weather app.” She had “helmed the team” at Aberdeen that made the breakthrough discoveries. Fascinating, I thought. Here was a powerful underdog story, a compelling example of a woman doing great work and not getting credit for it!

The producers at the “Lost Women in Science” podcast read those same articles and, like me, they were excited. They developed an entire season built around the story of how one unacknowledged woman created modern meteorology.

The problem, as the producers discovered, was that it wasn’t true. They pored through Klara von Neumann’s papers at the Library of Congress, but they couldn’t find anything about her role with the Aberdeen weather experiments aside from an acknowledgment in the post-experiment paper thanking her for “instruction in the technique of coding for the ENIAC and for checking the final code.” What were they to do?

To their credit, they acknowledged that they had been led astray. Rather than trying to cram a false narrative into their pre-existing framework, they changed course. They continued their research into Klara’s story and produced several episodes on her very real accomplishments. They also added a wonderful bonus episode where they explored the “The Weather Myth” and how easy it is for too-good-to-be-true stories to spread beyond what the evidence shows.

Like a kid desperately hoping for a snow day, historians can be tempted to misread the data or overlook contrary evidence so that we can tell the story we want to tell. But we have to be more like meteorologists – take in as much evidence from as many different sources as we can, and then let that evidence lead us where it may. Sometimes, that may mean a dull day with leaden skies and drizzle. Other times, it may yield a beautiful snow day that’s perfect for sledding.

As historian Jerrold Podair likes to say, “If you want it to be true, it probably isn’t” – great advice he attributes to a hard-bitten newspaper editor. We’re not perfect, and of course our backgrounds and experiences shape our perspectives. But historians have to do our best to get it right. Our misinterpretations may not have the same sort of immediate real-world consequences that a bad forecast might have, but we can still mislead our readers and students. As “Lost Women in Science” producer Katie Hafner notes, “One misremembered or misattributed event can spiral,” thereby distorting our understanding of the past. We don’t have to make things up to make them interesting!10

Sources

• Greenbaum, Dov, and Mark Gerstein, “The Lasting Legacy of John von Neumann.” Science, Vol., 375, No. 6584 (March 2022): 983.

• Hafner, Katie. “Lost Women of Science Podcast, Season 2, Episode 3: The Experimental Rabbit”. Scientific American, April 14, 2022.

  • “Lost Women of Science Podcast, Season 2, BONUS: The Weather Myth.” Scientific American, June 2, 2022.

• Platzman, George W. “The ENIAC Computations of 1950—Gateway to Numerical Weather Prediction.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 60, No. 4 (April 1979): 302-312.

• National Weather Service. “History of the National Weather Service.”

• Richardson, Lewis F. Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. University Press, 1922.

• Hannah Ritchie, “Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone.” Our World in Data, March 12, 2024

• Sheils, Barry. “How World War I Changed Weather Forecasting for Good.” Smithsonian, May 18, 2017.

• Witmer, Susan. “The Unheralded Contributions of Klara Dan von Neumann.” Smithsonian, June 16, 2017.

How old is too old to reinvent yourself?

I found myself asking this question as I learned about Rosalie Edge, the most important environmentalist you probably know nothing about. (Don’t feel bad — I didn’t know anything about her either until Andi informed me.) Edge was well-named. Prickly and pugnacious, she was a ferocious advocate for wildlife whose white gloves and ladylike image belied her willingness to scrap with anyone who crossed her. From the 1930s through the early 1960s, she challenged what she saw as the complacency of the conservation movement, pioneering a more confrontational approach to environmental advocacy that would blossom in the decades after her death.

With a steady stream of pamphlets and letters, Edge badgered legislators, government officials, and conservation leaders into taking more decisive action to protect the environment. She was the driving force behind the creation of the first wildlife refuge for birds of prey (Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania), as well as King’s Canyon and Olympic national parks out West. She was, in the words of biographer Dyana Furmansky, “the bridge stretching from the sainted John Muir’s quest for national parks to the highly esteemed Rachel Carson’s revelations about pesticides.”1 She left quite an impressive legacy.

But she didn’t start working on conservation issues until she was 52. My age!

Rosalie Edge is an inspiring story of what’s gone right in American history, not just because of her extraordinary environmental accomplishments but also because of what her life says about human potential. In her 50s, estranged from a philandering husband, raising two teenagers on her own, Edge reinvented herself, embarking upon a new adventure that would reshape the American environmental movement.

Rosalie Mabel Barrow was a child of New York City’s high society. Her father, a British immigrant related to Charles Dickens, ran a successful accounting firm and indulged his youngest daughter. On horseback, the pair often explored the city’s newly completed Central Park, with young Mabel (as she was called then) sporting her favorite, very fashionable silk hat ringed with stuffed ruby-throated hummingbirds.2

As a young woman, she seemed to live a charmed life. She met and married a tall English engineer named Charles Edge, and they spent several years traveling through Asia and Europe for Charles’s work. They returned to New York, had two children, and began a life together. With Charles often away for work, Rosalie focused on raising the children and developing the family’s country estate on Parsonage Point in Rye, where she fell in love with birding.

After her daughter Margaret was born in 1915, Rosalie grew increasingly involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Over her husband’s objections, she began donating money, writing pamphlets, and volunteering for the state Women’s Suffrage Party. Her time in the suffrage movement infused her with a sense of purpose and taught her the power of the pamphlet to raise awareness and mobilize supporters.

But things soon fell apart. Edge’s husband abandoned her for his secretary (how stereotypical!) and demanded a divorce. She refused to grant it, preferring to maintain the appearance of marriage for more than two decades after the couple separated in 1921.

The collapse of her marriage devastated Rosalie. Birding provided an escape. Watching birds “comes perhaps as a solace in sorrow and loneliness, or gives peace to some soul wracked with pain,” she later wrote. She joined the National Association of Audubon Societies (NAAS) and spent many afternoons tracking birds in Central Park, eventually logging more than 800 different species. She got to know the park’s birding community, which included the scientists at the nearby American Museum of Natural History.3

In the summer of 1929, while vacationing with her children in Paris, Edge received a 16-page pamphlet from one of her birding friends. “A Crisis in Conservation” revealed the extent to which hunters were killing bald eagles and other wild birds. A big part of the problem, the author argued, was the complicity of conservation organizations, particularly the NAAS, which had turned a blind eye to the slaughter.

The pamphlet catalyzed Edge, lighting a fire of indignation that would rage until her death three decades later. When she returned home, she met with one of the pamphlet’s authors, Willard Van Name, a zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Van Name told her that museum officials had prohibited him from writing any more such controversial pamphlets. But, he suggested, perhaps she could publish his research.

“How could I know that this simple suggestion was to change my whole life, to absorb my attention almost daily for the next thirty years, and more, to force me to study in fields that I had never distantly approached?” Edge mused years later. Her son Peter wrote, “my mother’s new career, her new life, and her new faith came suddenly, almost as it happened to Paul on the road to Damascus.”4

She had found her life’s work: to save birds and their habitat. Now she had to figure out how to accomplish it. In early 1930, she created the nonprofit Emergency Conservation Committee, which had a nominal Board of Directors but, as Peter Edge laughed, “The Committee was in fact the alter ego of my mother.” With its headquarters in the living room of the family’s brownstone on East 72^nd Street, the ECC churned out pamphlets, news releases, and letters by the hundreds. She enlisted her sister and her children in stuffing and stamping envelopes.5

With her steely blue eyes and slight stoop (from years of furiously typing letters, she explained), the nattily dressed Edge became a well-known, well-respected, and often-feared figure in conservation circles. “She is that peculiarly powerful being, an individual who has private means, who accepts no salary, no expenses, no gifts, and whose independent social position helps her to speak fearlessly and to act uncompromisingly,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. Her collaborate Willard Van Name called her an “indomitable hellcat.”6

Edge took particular aim at conservation organizations that she believed had become too complacent and comfortable, including the NAAS. When the group refused to share its membership list with Edge, she took it to court and won. An exasperated Audubon attorney complained that she was “a common scold,” which amused Edge. “Fancy how I trembled!” she wrote. Her persistent pressure broke the NAAS. Its president resigned, and it rechristened itself as the “National Audubon Society” with a new, more aggressive mission. Thanks to Edge’s goading, “the National Audubon Society recovered its virginity,” commented ECC board member Irving Brant.7

Edge also worked at the federal level, cultivating contacts within the Roosevelt Administration and in Congress. Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes recognized her value. When he needed to generate public support for the administration’s conservation efforts, Ickes would tell his staff, “Won’t you ask Mrs. Edge to put out something on this?”8

Edge loved lobbying and jousting with her opponents, but perhaps nothing gave her more joy than her work in establishing the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. “It is a beautiful spot, magnificently situated, commanding extended views of lovely country,” she wrote. It also was geographically unique, a magnet for birds of prey. “The prevailing winds create air currents ideally suited to the soaring of the thousands of raptors that migrate every fall on their route from Canada and New England to Georgia and tropical America,” explained Peter Edge.9

But an old road dating back to the colonial era made the area accessible to hunters, who saw the area as a shooting gallery for these birds of prey. In 1933, a young conservationist named Richard Pough assembled the carcasses of dozens of dead hawks, took photos, and sent them to the NAAS and other birding organizations, along with Edge and the ECC.

The NAAS promised to stop the slaughter, but did nothing. Edge decided to act on her own. In summer 1934, she figured out a way to lease the 1400-acre property and eventually bought it for $3,500 (about $200,000 today). Knowing that hunters would not take kindly to being barred from the area, she hired a warden to keep folks out. “It is a job that needs some courage,” she warned Maurice and Irma Broun, who became the sanctuary’s caretakers. She encouraged the Brouns to keep track of the raptors that flew by the North Lookout. Those counts continue to this day.10

As the world’s first sanctuary for birds of prey, Hawk Mountain became a pilgrimage site for budding environmentalists. In Fall 1945, Rachel Carson, then a relatively unknown nature writer, visited the sanctuary and marveled at how the birds “came by like brown leaves drifting on the wind.” Carson later used evidence from the site in her ground-breaking 1962 study, Silent Spring.11

Rosalie Edge remained active on the board of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary until she died at age 85, just a few months after Silent Spring came out. Her spirit lives on at Hawk Mountain, which has evolved into an extraordinary scientific research and education center, as well as a tourist magnet. It holds the world’s most comprehensive record of raptor migration, and it has inspired the creation of about 200 raptor count sites worldwide.12

“Edge’s career belies the common belief that a dead zone of environmental activity existed following the decline of Progressive conservation and prior to the resurgence of a postwar modern environmentalism,” writes historian Stephen Cutcliffe. She revitalized a moribund conservation movement and modeled a more aggressive and effective form of environmental advocacy for a new generation. Perhaps her greatest legacy is in the men and women whom she inspired, including Richard Pough, who took the photo of dead hawks that catalyzed Edge to buy Hawk Mountain. In 1951, Pough founded the Nature Conservancy, which has bought and preserved more than 125 million acres of land in the past 75 years.

Toward the end of her life, Edge composed a 230-page memoir, which she titled, Good Companions in Conservation: Annals of an Implacable Widow.13 Implacable, perhaps, but in a good way.

Sources

• Cutcliffe, Stephen H. “From Seed Men to Bird Women: Pennsylvanians and the Environment.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Autumn 2012): 495-506.

• Edge, Peter. “Rosalie Edge: A Most Determined Lady (1877-1962).” Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.

• Furmansky, Dyana Z. Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy : The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists. University of Georgia Press, 2009.

• Kneeshaw, Stephen. “Biography as Environmental ‘Herstory.’” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan., 2006): 20-24.

• Nijhuis, Michele. “How Mrs. Edge Saved the Birds.” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2021.

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When my kids or my students ask about how life today differs from when I was growing up in the 1980s, all sorts of things come to mind: technology (of course), parenting styles, movies, sports, violence (so much more when I was a kid!). In terms of social life, one issue stands out: gay rights.

When I was a teenager, homophobic language and behavior were a given, even in my very liberal hometown of Washington, D.C. In hallways and classrooms, on sports fields and in the streets, kids learned quickly that being gay was something embarrassing and shameful, something to be mocked and scorned. As I recall, there was just one openly gay student in my high school of 1,600, one remarkably brave girl who was willing to stand against the homophobic mainstream.

My kids live in a very different world. To them, being gay is no big deal. Gay rights are enshrined in the law, gay characters proliferate in literature and the media, and gay life is celebrated in pop culture. In my 2,500-person central Maine city, we enjoy a marvelous Pride festival each June and rainbow flags fly proudly on porches across town. The gay rights movement made so many gains so rapidly that we sometimes don’t appreciate just how far we’ve come.

Frank Kameny knew the distance that gay people had traveled. Largely unknown outside of gay circles, Kameny was the Moses of the gay rights movement. Before gay marriage, before “Will & Grace,” before Stonewall, there was Frank Kameny. A World War II veteran who lived to see the military lift its ban on gay soldiers, Kameny helped push our country beyond the “lavender scare” of the 1950s to the Pride parades of the 21^st century. Blunt and brash, with a wry, often edgy sense of humor and a booming voice that belied his small stature, Kameny fought for an expansive vision of American freedom that linked gay rights to the nation’s ideals of freedom and equality. His life is worth remembering.

As a child, Frank Kameny dreamed of a being an astronomer, not an activist. Born in 1925, Kameny was raised in Queens, New York, the son of middle-class immigrant Jewish parents. Precocious, shy, perhaps a bit nerdy, he breezed through high school, graduating at age 16. He enrolled in Queens College in Fall 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor.1

Kameny studied astronomy, but after World War II erupted his gaze drifted from the heavens to the hellish battlefields of Europe. He dropped out of school during his sophomore year to enlist in the U.S. Army, and he saw heavy combat in Holland and Germany. A fearless soldier, he earned a combat infantryman badge for having “dug my way across Europe slit trench by slit trench,” as he put it.2

By that time, he knew quite well that he was gay, but he didn’t act upon his desires. “While I was aware of my feelings, I bought into the prevailing philosophy, which was that it was a phase I was going through,” he later said.3

After the war, Kameny used the G.I. Bill to finish his schooling and eventually earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard. He moved to D.C. in 1956 to teach at Georgetown University, then landed a dream job with the Army Map Service developing maps used to guide missiles.4

The nation’s capital at mid-century was not a particularly welcoming place for a young gay man. As the Cold War intensified, panicked government officials scoured the federal bureaucracy not just for Communists but for “lavender lads” (gay employees) as well. Homosexuality was widely viewed as both a mental disorder and a national security threat. Closeted gay people, officials reasoned, were more vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet agents. The effort to purge gays from government accelerated after President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 Executive Order 10450, which cited “sexual perversion” (i.e., homosexuality) as a reason to rescind federal employment and security clearances.5

Kameny was “out” as a gay man, though not to his employers. “The term ‘coming out’ then meant coming to terms with yourself and becoming involved with the gay community wherever you were,” he explained. “Nobody ever came out publicly then unless they were backed into an awkward corner.”6

Kameny found himself boxed into just such a corner a few months after he started work at the Army Map Service. His superiors called him in for questioning about his sexual orientation. Kameny told them it was none of their business, and he was fired. He never worked in astronomy again.

Blacklisted by the government, he struggled to find employment, living on 20 cents a day and getting donations from the Salvation Army. But Kameny was a fighter. The combat veteran sued the government, arguing that discriminating against gay people was unconstitutional. The American Civil Liberties Union initially supported his lawsuit, but after he lost on appeal the organization backed away, believing his case was unwinnable.7

Kameny soldiered on, representing himself and writing his own legal brief that he submitted to the Supreme Court in 1961 in hopes of getting the Court to take the case. The 60-page brief is a bracing manifesto for gay rights. Channeling the Declaration of Independence, he framed his argument as a matter of basic American freedom and equality. “In World War II, petitioner did not hesitate to fight the Germans, with bullets, in order to help preserve his rights and freedoms and liberties, and those of others,” Kameny wrote. “In 1960, it is ironically necessary that he fight the Americans, with words, in order to preserve, against a tyrannical government, some of those same rights, freedoms and liberties, for himself and others.”8

There was nothing more American being free to love whomever you wanted to, he argued. The government’s anti-gay policies “are a stench in the nostrils of decent people, an offense against morality, an abandonment of reason, an affront to human dignity, an improper restraint upon proper freedom and liberty, a disgrace to any civilized society, and a violation of all that this nation stands for.”9

The Supreme Court denied certiorari and let the appeals court’s decision stand, effectively ending Kameny’s legal battle. He had lost his case (and his career), but he had found his calling. He spent the rest of his life as an activist for gay rights.

In 1961, he helped launch a D.C. branch of the Mattachine Society, which had been founded a decade earlier as the nation’s first “homophile” (gay rights) organization. Inspired by the success of the Civil Rights Movement, he embraced the tactics of nonviolent demonstration and encouraged gay people to become more active in defense of their own rights. He organized pickets at highly visible and symbolic venues, such as the White House and Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

For too long, gay people had been forced to hide their identities and feel ashamed of who they were. Kameny refused to play along. He wanted gay people to embrace and celebrate themselves, just as African Americans were doing. One night in 1968, he heard Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael talking about the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and he thought that gay people needed similarly pithy and memorable slogan. He came up with a line that became his lifelong mantra and encapsulated the essence of his message: “Gay is Good.”10

“Gay is Good” wasn’t just a heartwarming message to bolster gay people’s self-esteem. It also was a rallying cry in Kameny’s fight against the scientific “experts” who diagnosed homosexuality as pathological. The American Psychological Association officially listed homosexuality as a mental disorder, a designation Kameny believed was “not only destructive to the self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-image of the homosexual . . . but as perhaps the major supportive factor currently behind . . . the negative attitude of society at large.” He challenged what he called the “shoddy, slipshod, slovenly, sleazy pseudo-science” that underpinned the designation. It took many years, but in December 1973 the APA voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.11

For more than half a century, the charismatic Kameny fought to bring gay people into the mainstream of American life. He was extraordinarily effective. “Kameny had the confidence of an intellectual autocrat, the manner of a snapping turtle, a voice like a foghorn, and the habit of expressing himself in thunderous bursts of precise and formal language,” wrote journalists Adam Nagourney and Dudley Clendinen. “He talked in italics and exclamation points and he cultivated the self-righteous arrogance of a visionary who knew his cause was just when no one else did.” His fellow activists called him the “Moses” of the gay rights movement.12

As the gay rights movement blossomed in the early 21^st century, Kameny became a bit of a folk hero. In 2009, more than 50 years after he filed a suit against the government to protest his discriminatory firing, he was invited to the Office of Personal Management, the agency in charge of all federal government personnel. John Berry, an openly gay man serving as head of OPM, issued a formal apology on behalf of the federal government for its “shameful action” in supporting a policy “at odds with the bedrock principles underlying the merit-based civil service.”13

Kameny donated twelve of his original picket signs to the National Museum of American History. In the same exhibit featuring the desk where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and the inkwell Abraham Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, visitors could see Kameny’s hand-crafted signs: “First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals” and “Discrimination Against Homosexuals Is As Immoral As Discrimination Against Negroes and Jews.”14

Kameny “believed that the Declaration of Independence means exactly what it says,” wrote Jonathan Rauch. “He made its promise his purpose.” And he was proud of the progress gay people had made in America. “I never thought that it was possible that the movement would become as large as it is today,” he said in 2005. “Even as late as ten years ago, there were few of us who would have expected that we would be where we are now.” When he died in 2011, his dear friend and fellow activist Charles Francis said, “Frank was a revolutionary who lived to see the world change.” My kids and I, and all Americans, get to live in a much better world because of Frank Kameny.15

Sources

• Chibbaro, Lou Jr. “Longtime Gay Activist Frank Kameny Dies.” Washington Blade, Oct. 11, 2011.

• Dunlap, David W. “Franklin Kameny, Gay Rights Pioneer, Dies at 86.” New York Times, Oct. 12, 2011.

• Gambino, Megan. “Remembering Gay Rights Activist Frank Kameny (1925-2011).” Smithsonian Magazine, Oct. 14, 2011.

• Hinnershitz, Stephanie. “Frank Kameny: WWII Veteran, Patriot, and LGBTQ+ Activist.” National World War II Museum, June 26, 2024.

• Ivry, Benjamin. “Remembering Frank Kameny, the Moses of the LGBT Movement.” Forward, July 2, 2015.

• Kameny, Frank. “Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.” Kameny v. Bruckner, filed Jan. 27, 1961. The Early LGBT Movement in Washington DC.

• Kirchik, James. “Frank Kameny: The Accidental Activist.” James Kirchick, Oct. 4, 2010.

• Kisseloff, Jeff. Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, an Oral History. University of Kentucky Press, 2006.

• Minton, Henry L. Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

• Rauch, Jonathan. “A Pariah’s Triumph — and America’s.” National Journal, Dec. 7, 2006.

The condor also inspired one of my long-time readers, Erich Martel, to chime in. Mr. Martel (he will always be Mr. Martel to me) has been reading my work longer than just about anybody — for more than 35 years, since I was a high school junior in his AP U.S. History class. Among his many passions are postage stamps. Ever the teacher, Mr. Martel noted that the condor has been featured twice on U.S. postage stamps: once on its own, and once as a symbol of conservation. He pointed out that stamps often highlight what (and who) have gone right in America’s past.

He’s so right! Stamps are a tiny window into our culture’s evolving sense of itself. Issued by the U.S. Postal Service, stamps are official U.S. government products that have been approved and vetted through a formal process. They could be stodgy and bland, as austere as a federal building or as unchanging as George Washington on the dollar. But these mini works of art are more dynamic and variable than government-issued currency or official monuments, so they are more responsive to political and cultural changes. Since the first U.S. postage stamp appeared in 1847, stamps (and who or what they depict) have changed significantly, reflecting shifts in what we as a nation believe is worth celebrating and sharing about our culture.

Before the invention of postage stamps, mail had to be paid for upon receipt. When ship captains or carriage drivers arrived with bags of mail, they advertised in local newspapers for recipients to retrieve their letters or parcels and pay for the postage. Stamps revolutionized this cumbersome system, making it far cheaper and more efficient to meet the postal needs of a rapidly growing nation. Senders could simply affix a prepaid adhesive stamp to their envelope and sent it on its way. After Great Britain inaugurated the world’s first postage stamp in 1840 – the “penny black” featuring a crowned Queen Victoria – American leaders such as Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster pushed to bring the innovation to our side of the Atlantic.1

The U.S. Post Office Department, a Cabinet-level department led by the postmaster general, issued its first standardized postage stamps in 1847. The first stamps featured two legends from the founding generation: Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general, and George Washington, the first president. The standard 5-cent Franklin stamp sufficed for any piece of mail going fewer than 300 miles. For longer distances — anything from 300 to 3,000+ miles — senders needed a 10-cent Washington stamp.2

(I like to gripe along with other old guys about how expensive stamps are these days — 69 cents! $#@%$&! But to be fair, a 5-cent stamp in 1847 would equate to $2.05 today, according to Measuring Worth).

In choosing Franklin and Washington, rather than the postmaster general (Cave Johnson) or president (James K. Polk) at the time, postal officials followed a long-standing American tradition of not memorializing living people on official currency, monuments, or buildings. That tradition dated back to 1792, when Congress passed the Coinage Act. Having just fought a revolution against Britain’s King George III – whose face adorned British coins – congressional leaders rejected the idea of honoring living people, even someone as widely respected as George Washington, on new U.S. currency. It was simply too “monarchical.” Instead, the bill required that all coins have an “impression emblematic of liberty,” such as Lady Liberty or an eagle.3

So stamps were reserved for the dead. And in the decades after the first stamps appeared in 1847, the only dead people who passed muster were presidents and military men. That changed with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. To mark the celebration, the Post Office issued a set of 16 commemorative stamps honoring Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World. For the first time, a woman – Queen Isabella of Spain – graced a U.S. stamp.4

The 1893 commemorative series was wildly popular, and postal officials realized that stamps offered an opportunity (a very lucrative opportunity!) to depict a wide range of images, not simply the heads of former heads of state. The early decades of the 20^th century saw a slow but steady stream of stamps honoring historical events and people. The choices reflected what postal officials considered traditional and important, with a particular emphasis on the Revolutionary era and early European settlement of the continent — not just Pilgrims and Puritans, but also Norse and Huguenot settlers.5

President Franklin Roosevelt dramatically reshaped the stamp program. An avid stamp collector – he once said, “I owe my life to my hobbies—especially stamp collecting” – FDR saw stamps as a visual Fireside Chat, another way to reach everyday Americans with his optimistic message of hope and New Deal progress. He appointed his campaign manager, James Farley, to be postmaster general, and the pair experimented widely with stamp design and messaging. As historian Judson Mead writes, Roosevelt “made the Post Office do his bidding: he liked lots of stamps, attractive stamps, stamps of his own design.”6

Roosevelt used stamps to celebrate his political achievements, including a stamp honoring the National Recovery Act, a centerpiece of New Deal legislation that was passed in 1933. His choices reflected his broad political coalition, including women, workers, and African Americans. He helped design a 1936 stamp honoring Susan B. Anthony and women’s suffrage, which critics charged was a cheap political ploy during an election year. The first stamp featuring an African-American, Booker T. Washington, appeared in 1940.7

In 1957, the Post Office Department created a Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee to help determine who and what should be depicted on stamps. In subsequent decades, the range of depictions expanded tremendously as the social movements of the 1960s broadened our definition of whose stories matter in American history. Stamps featuring the leaders and achievements of the civil rights, labor, women’s rights, and environmental movements appeared alongside more traditional subjects such as the Bicentennial and Paul Revere.

By the late 20th century, stamps had moved far beyond Pilgrims and presidents. In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service (a government corporation that replaced the Post Office Department in 1971) released a massive 150-stamp “Celebrate the Century” series, with each decade of the 20^th century featured in a 15-stamp sheet. Its subjects included men and women of all races and backgrounds and hailed a century of technological innovation, racial integration, medical breakthroughs, pop culture phenomena, and political changes.

Visit the National Postal Museum’s online exhibit, and you’ll find a diverse, eclectic history revealed on American stamps in the past half century. The “Great Americans” series began in 1980 with Sequoyah, who developed the Cherokee Alphabet, and included radical suffragist Alice Paul and environmentalist Rachel Carson. The 2005 “To Form a More Perfect Union” series commemorated the Civil Rights Movement, while the ongoing Black Heritage series has featured nearly 50 famous and not-so-famous African Americans, from “What’s Gone Right” favorites like Langston Hughes and Ida B. Wells to lesser-known figures such as biologist Ernest Just and aviator Bessie Coleman. This was not the history depicted in your grandfather’s stamp collection.

Not surprisingly, the Postal Service’s efforts to depict American history through stamps have at times run into controversy. Critics questioned the 1995 Civil War commemorative set of 20 stamps that featured not just Union heroes such as President Lincoln, General Ulysses Grant, and Harriet Tubman, but also notable Confederates, including Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. Scholars have complained about what they consider a celebration of “settler colonialism” and the limited depictions of “labor struggle.” Any choices that a government agency makes about what to highlight in the past will (and should!) attract scrutiny.8

But when I look at the array of stamps the USPS has created in the past several decades, I am impressed by the breadth of subjects and the willingness to depict controversial subjects. Postal officials could have made very different choices, and I respect the effort they have made to honor and appreciate our nation’s extraordinary diversity.

Sources

• Goldblatt, Laura and Richard Handler. The American Stamp: Postal Iconography, Democratic Citizenship, and Consumerism in the United States. Columbia University Press, 2023.

  • “Why No Living People Appear on US Postage Stamps.” The Conversation, June 21, 2023.

• Mead, Judson. “A Postage Stamp History of the U.S. in the Twentieth Century.” American Heritage, Vol. 34, No. 1 (December 1982).

• National Postal Museum. “1847: America’s First Stamps.” Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

  • “Columbian Exposition Issues (1893).”

  • “1898-1925.”

  • “Susan B. Anthony Issue.”

• Reid, Donald M. “The Symbolism of Postage Stamps: A Source for the Historian.” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (April 1984): 223-249.

• Smithsonian Institution. “Delivering Hope: FDR & Stamps of the Great Depression.” Smithsonian.

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I can’t lie: the California condor is ugly. See for yourself:

Atlantic puffins, they are not. But when they take to the sky, they transform into majestic creatures. With a wingspan of more than 9 feet tip to tip, condors can soar up to 10,000 feet and fly 150 miles a day in search of food. At about 25 pounds, the adult condor is North America’s largest flying bird.

Like the adorable little puffin, the massive condor has made a remarkable comeback in the past half century. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the condors were a symbol of environmental destruction and decay. They were extinct in the wild, their population down to a mere 22 birds in captivity after being decimated by decades of lead poisoning.

But the California condor is back, with a population of nearly 400 wild birds today. Their successful reintroduction is a triumph of perseverance over pessimism, of careful conservation over wishful thinking, of scientific dedication over romantic resignation. It is one of many environmental success stories that we often overlook.

The condor looks like – and is – an ancient creature. Back in the Pleistocene Age, about 10,000 years ago, condors spread from California to Maine. By the time humans began settling the continent, its range had narrowed to the Pacific Coast, where they scavenged elk and deer and often dined on the carcasses of beached whales and sea lions. Their majestic presence captured the imaginations of Native tribes, including the Yurok of northern California and the Chumash of southern California, who incorporated them into their rituals and stories.

With the Gold Rush in the mid-19^th century, American settlers flocked to California in large numbers. They built cattle ranches and farms throughout the valleys and foothills where the condors roosted. Within a few decades, the condor population had plummeted, primarily due to poisoning as condors scavenged the lead-filled or strychnine-laced carcasses of wolves and bears that cattlemen had shot or poisoned. Museums also played a role, with museum staff from as far away as France and Germany capturing, killing, and stuffing condors for their budding natural history collections.1

By the late 19^th century, pessimistic observers began predicting the passing of what they called the California buzzard. It is “a doomed bird,” lamented ornithologist James Cooper in 1890. The New York Zoological Society listed it as “becoming extinct,” and naturalist H.H. Sheldon wrote that the bird “has outlived its time and is on the trail of the dodo.”2

But scientists and preservationists in the nascent conservation movement of the early 20^th century weren’t willing to let the condor simply fly off into the sunset. They gave the bird “an image makeover, transforming it from a lowly pest and opportunistic scavenger into venerated wildlife icon,” writes historian Peter Alagona. They began by giving it a new, alliterative name: California condor, rather than the dreary “buzzard” or “vulture.” They emphasized its prehistoric lineage, our “living link with the ice age,” in the words of National Audubon Society President John Baker. They personified the magnificent birds, emphasizing their lifelong monogamy, their cute inquisitiveness, and their extraordinary 60-year lifespans.3

And, most importantly, they began conducting research to figure out why the birds were dying and how they could be saved. Beginning in 1939, a dogged and determined University of California – Berkeley graduate student named Carl Koford conducted a series of long-term studies that raised awareness of the condor’s plight and laid the foundation for its return.4

In his landmark 1953 book, The California Condor, Koford counted just 60 condors in the wild, and he blamed (mistakenly, as it turned out) habitat destruction for its demise. The solution, therefore, was to preserve as much wilderness as possible to give the condors a chance to rebuild their populations. He became the primary proponent of what became known as the “hands off” approach to protecting the condor and other endangered species: cordon off as much land as possible and let nature take its course.

What he didn’t want was for condors to be captured by well-meaning but dangerous scientists. “The beauty of a California condor is in the magnificence of its soaring flight,” he wrote. “A condor in a cage is uninspiring, pitiful, and ugly to one that has seen them soaring over the mountains.” Shortly before his death in 1979, he implored, “Let us keep condors forever free.”5

Wilderness activists of the 1960s and 1970s shared Koford’s romantic vision of simply letting condors live. The problem was that they kept dying.

Biologist Sandy Wilbur watched the plummeting population with increasing alarm. As the head of condor research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1970s, Wilbur knew that lead poisoning from bullet fragments, not habitat destruction, was the primary cause of condor mortality. The condors needed more than just abundant land; they needed immediate intervention. He pushed for a “hands on” approach of scientific management: Capture the condors, initiate a captive breeding program, and then reintroduce them to the wild.

Many environmentalists, following Koford’s lead, vociferously objected. As Noel and Helen Snyder, a husband-and-wife team of condor biologists recalled, “the concept of captive breeding condors was apparently so repugnant and divergent from their image of the condor as the essence of wilderness, that they proclaimed their preference for ‘death with dignity’ for the species, should captive breeding be its only salvation.”6

For years, opponents successfully blocked plans to capture and breed condors, but scientific conservationists gradually gained support through the 1970s. In 1981, the California Fish & Game Commission established the first captive breeding program at the San Diego Safari Park. Within two years, the program had successfully hatched a chick captured in the wild.

A spate of condor deaths in the mid-1980s dropped the number of wild condors to a handful, with just one breeding pair (dubbed the Santa Barbara Pair). After the female of that pair died in 1986, the U.S. Department of Interior approved a plan to capture all the remaining wild condors in a last-ditch attempt to avoid extinction.

The task for finding the last condor fell to Jan Hamber, a Cornell-trained ornithologist who had spent years monitoring condors in the Santa Barbara area. In April 1987, Hamber spotted AC-9 (Adult Condor 9) about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles and called in a team to capture it with a cannon net. They filmed the capture:

With the species now officially extinct in the wild, the “hands off” and “hands on” advocates united behind a single goal: breed enough chicks to reintroduce the species back into nature. By 1988, the first egg to be conceived, laid, and hatched in captivity was born at the San Diego Safari Park. In the mid-1990s, zoo biologists began releasing condors back into the wild.

Problems abounded. Birds bred in captivity sometimes didn’t have the savvy to survive in the wild – they hit power lines and got electrocuted or they congregated near human structures and ate trash that ravaged their stomachs. So the biologists retooled their approach, training the birds to avoid power lines and buildings. Over time, their success rate improved.7

Because it takes so long for a single egg to mature, progress has been slow but unmistakable. The latest report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counts a population of 566, nearly 400 of whom live in the wild. Five breeding programs remain in operation, including one at Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City, Mexico.8

One male offspring, AC-4 (Adult Condor 4) from the Santa Barbara Pair had been captured in the 1980s and returned to the wild in 2015. A mature 35 years old, he immediately returned to his birthplace in the Santa Barbara Mountains. Within a couple years, he and his mate hatched a chick.

For Jan Hamber, who had spent so many years clambering the Santa Barbara canyons to track and protect the condors, it was a special moment. “There were a number of years where it seemed likely that we would lose the California condor,” she said. “AC-4’s return validates all the hard work we did. . . . After all the effort, seeing that bird flying free and nesting in the same canyon where he was born...it’s a beautiful circle.”9

The remarkable return of the California condor took many decades of scientific research, political support, and millions of dollars of public and private funding. Most of all, it took faith that human beings could indeed undo the damage that they had wrought.

Sources

• Alagona, Peter S. “Biography of a ‘Feathered Pig’: The California Condor Conservation Controversy.” Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 37 (2004): 557-583.

• Anderson, Jennifer. “California Condor Conservation.” Creature Conserve.

• Brower, Kenneth. “The Naked Vulture and the Thinking Ape.” The Atlantic, October 1983: 70-88.

• Farber, Paul. Review of California Condors in the Pacific Northwest, by Jesse D’Elia and Susan M. Haig, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 114, No. 4 (Winter 2013): 535-536.

• Haig, Susan. “Book Outlines History of California Condors in Pacific Northwest.” Oregon State University Newsroom, May 28, 2013.

• Moir, John. “This Bird Lives Because She Never Quit.” Audubon Magazine, Fall 2020.

• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 2024 California Condor Population Status Report. February 27, 2025.

• Walters, Jeffrey R. “Status of the California Condor (GymnoGyps Californianus) and Efforts to Achieve its Recovery.” The Auk, Vol. 127, No. 4 (2010): 969−1001.

As we head into 2026, I wanted to take a moment to say a heartfelt “Thank you!” to you, “What’s Gone Right” readers — about 1000 subscribers and nearly 3000 followers. I have LOVED hearing from you and talking about the posts I’ve written or about things that you think have gone right in our country.

I launched “What’s Gone Right” about a year and a half ago for both personal and reasons. Selfishly, I wanted to develop my writing skills, to hone my craft. And the best way to get better at writing is to write and write and write. Having an audience of interested readers motivates me to put fingers to keyboard!

I also hoped in some small way to shift how we think about our own country and its possibilities. I confess that I’ve been saddened to see so many Americans, particularly young people, feel dispirited and despairing about our country. I understand why. Our online culture can be so relentlessly negative and angry — even just a few minutes online makes my chest tighten and my fists clench as I read about the latest outrage. But that kind of anger and fixation on “what’s wrong” can warp our perspective, demoralize us, and undermine our willingness to engage with each other in the ongoing work to build a “more perfect Union.”

By writing about “what’s gone right” in our past, I hope to inspire readers to find ways to put their own ideals into action and make America a better place. As I wrote back in February (in my most popular post!): “American history can be troubling and difficult, but it also offers inspirational stories about builders and doers — people who saw where the country was broken, then did something to help fix it. Institution builders like Mary McLeod Bethune and Sylvanus Thayer, idealists like Sargent and Eunice Shriver, iconoclasts like “Crazy Daisy” Gordon Low and Abraham Jacobi, military heroes like James Stockdale and Joshua Chamberlain. These men and women were driven by a sense that they could help build a better America. And they did. Because of people like them, by most measures the America we inherit today is more equal, healthy, prosperous, and free than it was 50, 100, or 150 years ago.”

When you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the negativity, I encourage you to browse through the “What’s Gone Right” archives (more than 100 posts to date!) to learn about people who have faced challenges and worked to overcome them.

Thanks again for reading. I look forward to hearing from you in 2026!

“African American history is at the heart of the American story itself,” writes Christian Dwamenah Opoku, a freshman from Ghana. “The long struggle for citizenship, dignity, identity, and belonging shaped the entire country, and the struggle has not ended.”

Central to that long struggle is hope, the faith that tomorrow will somehow be better than today. “I believe the most powerful ‘right’ in African American history is the prevalence of hope,” argues freshman Curtis Zanni of Colorado. “African Americans never lost the hope of their rights, freedoms, autonomy, and advancement. Despite waves of challenges, hope prevailed. Rather than succumbing to slavery, harsh oppression, lynching, segregation, and violence, the notion that things can and will get better through action has led to African American success. Without hope, 300 some years after the beginnings of slavery it would not be possible to have Black Americans leading the nation (Barack Obama), dominating pop culture (hip-hop, rap), or working as professors, scientists, and community members who have advanced American culture.”

That sense of hope has nurtured a culture of resilience that inspires senior Peggy Jones of Ghana. “As a Black person, I find strength in knowing the battles our ancestors fought and the sacrifices they made. Their resilience reminds me that nothing is impossible, especially when I consider how far we have come and how much potential we still hold as a community and as a nation.”

For all its flaws, America does indeed have potential. “I was deeply ashamed of America and our history before entering this class,” writes freshman Anya Eder of New York City. “While some of these feelings remain, I am also much more positive about our history. I have come to realize our American capacity for growth. Change and the fight for equality for all is not linear; we cannot expect it to always be a straight line upward. Although we are currently in one of the ‘harder times,’ I feel a stronger sense of optimism that we will be able to move against the hate and the people creating it, and make our world better.”

We can indeed.

Today’s celebration: The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance — originally called the New Negro Renaissance — was an extraordinary flowering of Black art, music, and culture in the wake of World War I. As war veterans returned home and Southern migrants fled the rural South, Black communities blossomed in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, and across the urban North and West. These communities offered economic and political opportunity, as well as cultural freedom. Although associated primarily with Harlem, the renaissance was a national movement that featured creative Black artists, writers, and musicians such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Louis Armstrong.

“The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s was a period where blacks were able to truly find their pride and identity,” writes freshman Trevor Garrish of Maine. “Through jazz music, radio shows, and magazines, Blacks were able to show their true colors. . . The Harlem Renaissance was a time for a race that had dealt with so much turmoil and hate to finally express themselves with their unique and extensive culture.”

Learning about the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement “helped me see how creativity, art, and expression were survival tools, not just artistic movements,” argues Jalop Pewu, a West Philadelphian with Liberian roots. “Black beauty, Black writing, Black music, Black pride became a way to fight back against the country’s attempt to dehumanize them.”

Gabe Lopes, a freshman from Massachusetts, did a book review and presentation on When Harlem Was in Vogue, David Levering Lewis’s classic study of the era. “Something that stuck with me the most was a painting that depicted Black women drinking alcohol during Prohibition, dressed in fancy clothes, and enjoying life. The artist [Archibald Motley] was from Chicago — nowhere near Harlem — yet that is how he depicted it: as an amazing time to be Black.”

“Of course, Harlem had its problems, but it was such a time for joy,” Lopes writes. Black people had a safe space to express themselves and challenge White stereotypes. Although it was cut short by the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance was a time where you could be proud to be black and that to me is something worth celebrating.”

Sunday’s celebration: Hope & Resilience