Party of 1

A good case could be made that labor issues are the crucial, but nonetheless hidden and almost unmentionable, issues in contemporary American politics. For a look at the condition of the working man and woman in early 21st-century America, few sources could be better than Prof. Joseph B. Atkins of the Department of Journalism at the University of Mississippi.  An experienced journalist as well as an academic, Dr. Atkins has specialized in labor issues, about which he comments regularly on his Labor South blog. For insight into his perspective, here is a brief snippet from the opening pages of his 2008 book, Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press (University Press of Mississippi).

“The seed of this book was planted long ago in a textile plant in Sanford, North Carolina, where my father, brother, and uncle worked. Located in a nineteenth-century former iron works foundry, the plant produced textile machinery. I worked there nearly every summer in high school and college, rotating from first to second and sometimes the graveyard shift.

“Everybody worked hard. I remember the plant as a dark, hot, and noisy place where the air was thick with the smell of grease and metal.Huge factory fans kept the summer heat at bay. People talk loud if they wanted to be heard, but mostly they worked….

Joe Atkins

“Certainly no union existed to represent them. To my knowledge, none existed in my town….

“I held many other blue-collar jobs before the belated launch of my journalism career in my late twenties, but I never forgot the men at that plant….

“This book is about such people, the working people of the South, the struggles they faced whenever they tried to organize into unions, and the way the press treated them when they did….

“…  To accomplish the task of this book, I traveled across the South several times, from the Carolinas to Louisiana, as well as beyond the South to places like Chicago, New York, and St. Louis, interviewing along the way workers, journalists, labor organizers, activists, immigrants, business people, and scholars. I read every book on labor and the South I could get my hands on. I put to the task decades of work as a journalist and a teacher and, not to be forgotten, the education I received operating a drill press during those hot summers in Sanford, North Carolina.”

I spoke to Joe Atkins in late January, by telephone from Oxford, Mississippi.

DC:    Looking at your book, you’ve presented it as a kind of history of the relationship between the southern media/southern papers and labor issues, but really you’ve given us a pretty thorough history of labor relations in the past century, in the South and in the whole country as well. It’s just an awfully sad story — and I don’t know what the prospects for it are. The prospects don’t look especially good. Everything seems to be running in the opposite direction from the way I might surmise you would like to see it going. Would that be a fair statement?

JA:    Well, it does seem to be that way, and the author of the foreword to the book, Stanley Aronowitz, a well-known sociologist and author who writes a lot about labor, called it a heartbreaking story because it does seem to be, as you said, a sad story in many ways. Yet it’s also a heroic story, I think, of the people in the South, textile workers and others who tried to stand up for workers’ rights and were often quite brutally repressed. And as far as what the future might hold, it does seem that things are moving even further away from the aspirations they and others might have had. But you know, you go back to the 1920s and you really take a broad view historically, and you look at the 1920s, that was a period of time in which labor unions in this country were at the very bottom and they had experienced an earlier time, mineworkers and others, of growing strength, the Knights of labor and other groups, but then with World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent red scare in this country, unions were often really suppressed and wiped out of existence and reached a real low point. And then the economy went bad as well in the late 1920s and you had a new political leadership in the 1930s that was quite pro-labor, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, the best pro-labor president we’ve ever had in this country, I guess, and then you see in the very next decade, labor rise to its greatest strength. The United Auto Workers and other unions like that really emerge as very strong players on the scene. So labor unions have been down on their knees before and it doesn’t mean that they can’t rise back up. As far as the South goes, I that, you know, you’ve got a growing industrial base in the South with automobiles, the auto industry and so forth, and a lot of workers out there — there’s potential, but there’s major obstacles still in the way.

DC:    One problem is that economic development around the world is so uneven, and this is something that started in the past generation or so as things have become more globalized. China is sort of hanging over everybody’s heads. We hear we’re eventually going to see automobiles from China in our own showrooms. NAFTA was supposed to help Mexico alleviate our illegal immigration problem but much of that work went to China. But China and India and much of that part of the world are beginning to develop, so if development becomes less uneven, maybe things will improve in the very long term, maybe in a century or two or more, I don’t know. One thing I noticed, you mentioned, the longshoremen, the dockworkers are some of the more internationalized unions, and some people say with the globalized world, it’s going to take cooperation within labor across international boundaries, but of course with so many countries, you’ve essentially got company-dominated or state-dominated unions, I’m sure unions in China don’t amount to any more than that.

JA:    That’s absolutely true. And the labor leaders have always recognized — or at least said they recognized — that you’ve got to have international solidarity working with unions in other countries, but never more so than now, when we have a global economy, major corporations that stretch around the world and they no longer have the national allegiances that they once had. And they can just move a plant anywhere, shut down a plant here and move it somewhere else. So you’re absolutely right, I think. Labor leaders, the movement itself has to think on a global scale and work in this kind of context. That chapter you made reference to, the Charleston dockworkers, that’s a classic example of how that can work successfully. Those dockworkers protested a Danish shipping company that was going to all of a sudden break past labor agreements and stop using union workers Aligning with the protesting longshoremen in Charleston were longshoremen in Spain and elsewhere in Europe and it really put pressure on that company and that company finally relented and the Charleston workers won. They won that protest and so it shows you how it can work. I will tell you there are unions out there that are really working harder on this international loyalty. The United Auto Workers, for example, they’ve been meeting with labor organizations in Germany and elsewhere because this phenomenon of “Detroit South,” where Mercedes Benz and other companies are coming to the Unites States, to the southern United States, to open plants to avoid unions, they’re working with those guys. And also the United Electrical Workers, an old union that goes back to the ‘30s, has been really aggressive. The UE is working really aggressively with Mexican labor organizations, and trying to do this on a more international scale.

DC:    You mentioned there’s a tendency for the press in these communities to cheerlead for these people when they come in, Daimler in Vance, Alabama, Nissan in Canton, Mississippi. But this kind of employment — textiles at one point, but then textiles went overseas, the automobile manufacturers are coming in — but, looking back over the years at the rise of the so-called Sun Belt, arguably the whole region hasn’t benefitted from it very much. Poor rural areas and small towns are still poor, but we continue to try to pursue this low-wage, right-to-work strategy.

JA:    You know, the strategies, by and large, haven’t changed since Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, in the years after the Civil War, talked about a “new South.” “Come to the South, invest in the South. We’ve got docile, cheap labor down here, willing to work for nothing, and political leadership that’ll do anything to get you down here.” We’re still doing that and yes, the South is jobs-hungry, just as would be any poor region of the world, and often desperately so. We need to respect our fellow workers more and to insist that these companies be good community citizens and not just come in because it’s the cheapest route for them. We lured the textile industry down here from New England at the turn of the last century and now they’ve packed their bags and moved, first to Mexico and then to China. And now, increasingly, we’re getting the auto makers here. Will the auto makers someday pack up and leave too? It’s a little bit different story there because these plants, if you look at a textile mill and then you look at a big auto plant, like in Canton, Mississippi, that’s just gigantic — that’s not to say it can’t shut down, but there is a huge investment there. And, they are closer to the markets where they want to sell autos. It’s harder to pick up and move but it doesn’t mean that they can’t do it. I think it’s a little more difficult than it would be for a cotton mill or a textile plant.

DC:    The Obama administration got elected with a Democratic Congress with support from organized labor, as they traditionally have had, and one piece of legislation that labor is very eager about is the Employee Free Choice Act or so-called “card check.” I wonder what you hear about the prospects — if health-care reform fails, I suppose the prospects for card check are not much better. What are you hearing?

JA:    Well, I’ve actually written a fair amount about this in columns and articles and so forth, although this issue really came up after my book came out. This was first announced with great fanfare within the labor community — “this is the thing that can turn our prospects around” — and Obama strongly endorsed it, said he was for it, and there was a lot of expectation he was going to bring it or have it brought up his first year in office, and then we got so sidetracked on this whole health care reform that is has not been brought up and it looks like if it’s going to be, it’ll be this coming year. I’ll tell you, if he thought he had a fight on his hands with health care, he’s going to have a huge fight on his hands with this one. And because it’s going to be absolutely solid opposition from anyone with an “R” after his name, I’ll tell you that. The Chambers of Commerce are going to fight this tooth and nail and the Obama folks know this. Their labor supporters are watching to see how this is all going to play out but it is going to be a huge battle. I have friends at high levels in the labor community who are skeptical about whether this is really the magic pill that’s going to change everything. But it certainly would make organizing easier and avoid the months-long process that now exists in which it can really get bitter and really divisive. Of course, opponents say it takes away the secret ballot — it’s always an option. Workers can still use a secret ballot if they want to but this card check legislation would give them the same option that companies actually have, and it could just make the process a lot easier and less fraught with all kinds of nasty campaigning.

DC:    Card check refers to exactly how the organizing of an election that’s required by the Wagner Act under certain circumstances would be carried out….

JA:    Exactly. The Employee Free Choice Act means that employees in a company could have a choice of whether they have a traditional election or whether they can just have what’s known as a card check, they could simply sign a card saying whether they would support joining a particular union or not. And so then they don’t have to have the lengthy process of an election. Actually, employers already have that option. Employers can go either way if they want to and some employers actually have opted for a card check election, for example, in casinos in  both Las Vegas and in Mississippi. And all this legislation would do would extend that option to employees.

DC:    I suppose the idea is to just afford a little bit of protection against hardball tactics.

JA:    You know, what goes on right now is essentially because of certain provisions that were included in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Companies opposed to a union coming in to their factories can have a closed audience with their workers — which is what happened when the UAW tried to organize Nissan in Tennessee — in which the CEO requires workers to come to this meeting and then he can just say, “You join this union, it’s not going to be in your best interest or in this company’s interest,” and essentially it’s a very threatening atmosphere. And there’s all kinds of accusations back and forth, what we’ve seen in traditional union campaigns and it’s really a bitter process. It divides friends, it can divide families, and so that may be what’s necessary but ultimately, that may be what some workers choose as well as companies. But this other process, you know, at least offers another option.

DC:    It just seems like the playing field has been awfully stacked against labor. At some point, you always hear, it really goes back to 1981 and Reagan’s action against the air traffic controllers. And ever since then, it’s been almost nothing in the private sector, a little better in the public sector.

JA:     Some would say it was almost an Armageddon for the labor movement because it sent a clear signal across the country that here we have a president who, although he was a former labor union leader himself at the Screen Actors Guild, he was not siding with, not sympathetic to the unions at all and he destroyed a major union, PATCO, the air traffic controllers, and it sort of set the tone for the next 30 years. And we’ve had, as far as labor issues go, conservative presidents ever since then, and that includes Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is called a Liberal practically every day on Fox News and what have you, but as far as labor issues goes and the labor movement, working people and everything, he was no raging liberal at all. He brought us NAFTA and all the promises that came with it — the jobs and so forth, and NAFTA has not been a good thing for American working people.

DC:    We hear about a lot of issues. Recently, it’s been health care, regulation of the banks, financial downturn, financial crisis, terrorism. But the thing about it is, this is an extremely central issue, the way the political parties defined themselves in the 20th century: business versus labor. But it’s become obscured, labor has. . .

JA:    It has.

DC:    Labor has been so beaten down and you say with the press, it’s gone from outright hostility to indifference.

JA:    Exactly. That’s a good question and that was a central theme in my book, is that it’s the media’s role or the press’s role, and of course we have, by and large, a corporate-owned media — they’re going through all kinds of trouble now, and our media landscape is changing dramatically as we speak, but the corporate-owned press has never been particularly sympathetic to labor issues. It doesn’t mesh very well with the corporate sort of view of the world. There have not been that many studies on the press and labor. And when I say the press, I’m really isolating within the larger media world, journalists practicing journalism, whether it’s broadcast or print or online or what have you, as opposed to a broader media world that can include everything from movies to whatever, and so that’s what I mean when I say press. It could be broadcast or online. But in the studies that have been done, including mine, of the press and labor, you see this so much –a corporate worldview that’s pushed, it’s subtle and understated in a way but yet it’s pervasive. And I’ll give you an example. If there’s a major strike going on in a particular city and workers have decided they’re going on strike, that’s what we’re going to do because of our protest against this employer — how is that news going to be presented on the evening news and the next morning’s newspaper? Well, I guarantee you, it’s going to be — how did this disrupt commuters, how did it disrupt consumers getting their products, what is going to be the discomfort to the public at large in this strike? Now that is a factor in this story, but what about why are these workers doing this? You know, a strike is an act of last resort. Nobody wants to go on strike. It costs the unions money. It costs the company money. It’s a desperate act and no one wants to do it — the number of strikes has gone down pretty significantly in the past several decades. But when these workers do this, why do they do it and what are the issues, gets totally fogged over because of consumer concern and that is a purely corporate worldview that we’re getting in our supposedly objective press. And that’s why working-class issues are obscured today and gets sort of sidetracked as we talk about all these issues.

DC:    You’ve almost got to go to the alternative press to get coverage of it, it seems.

JA:    Absolutely. That’s where you’re going to be informed. You do that, I do that, but a lot of people don’t, you know. A lot of people are still on the mainstream media to get their news and so this is the missing story. And I have to say that there’s another theme, an underlying theme in the book, was that this has been what’s going in the South but now it’s become kind of a model for the nation as well.

DC:    Somebody wrote a book called The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America [John Egerton, 1974, in fact -- D. C.]. And you mentioned southern labor conditions are pressuring the whole country.

JA:    Exactly. You know, if you go back to the early 20th century — and I discuss a number of journals at that time, you had some pro-labor journalists, there were always a few out there, but there was also an intense hostility toward labor and you had editors and columnists and so forth that just bitterly opposed to what was then a fairly strong labor movement, comparatively strong. Bitterness and anger and rancor — “Well, if we just don’t tell the story, maybe they’ll go away,” and now kind of a conspiracy of silence that’s replaced that.

DC:    Speaking of the consumer, one thing you’ve discussed lately on your blog — farmworkers going up against a Lakeland, Florida-based supermarket chain, Publix, over working conditions — tomatoes especially seemed to be a flashpoint. Everybody’s got to shop. Most everybody goes to the supermarket, everybody wants to pinch pennies, but it’s almost a matter of slave-labor conditions for some of these people, and we’re getting into immigrant labor when we talk about farmworkers, of course. [Discussed at Joe Atkins' Labor South blog here. Link to farmworkers' advocacy group Coalition of Immokalee Workers here.]

JA:    Sometimes we’re just not aware of the conditions that exist that went into producing the products that we have in our houses or on our tables. And you know, as a community of fellow human beings, we should be aware there was undue suffering that went into this product and into the fact that I was able to buy it at this very cheap price. But when this was brought to the public’s attention about in the 1990s about sweatshop conditions had produced Nike shoes or some of these other very popular products, the public got engaged with that and it forced these companies to address that issue and to change some of their practices. And maybe that’s what’s going to ultimately be needed in some of these other situations like you referred to with the people picking fruit or what have you, a largely immigrant workforce, and what really bad conditions they have to endure to provide us our food products.

DC:    You’ve reported matters like this through your career — it just seems to me, you get into a situation like this and you push very far, before long, you get beneath the polite veneer of the political system. Would I be wrong to think that pretty quickly you can get into a situation where maybe you become afraid that people are going to mess with you? You must have experienced that here or there.

JA:    Oh, yes. I have. And I get all kinds of all letters — angry letters, because I write a regular column for newspapers here in Mississippi and it often gets picked up by other papers. And I try to publish a fair amount as well as teach here at the university and so I get a lot of angry responses as well as a lot of supportive responses, too. But, you know, I was interviewed on a public radio station, well, not a public radio station but on a sort of a conservative radio station here just a year or so ago….

DC:    Hmmm.

JA:    In which here in Mississippi which, you know, the host called me a communist, and all other kinds of things, you know. And you know, I said, well, you need to ask my priest about that. But anyway. . .

DC:    The host called you a communist?

JA:    Yeah.

DC:    Did you know what you were getting into?

JA:    Well, the first time, no. He interviewed me twice and just sort of came on me like gangbusters and I was really kind of overwhelmed the first time. I was ready for him the next time and I tried to even up the count a little bit. Some years back, when I was up for tenure here at this university, there was word that there was an effort in the state legislature to get me fired. One influential person over decisions about tenure for faculty members in this state, I have to say to the credit of the university, stood by me and didn’t react but yeah, there’s always potential for political repercussions.

DC:    It was the sort of radio station that carries a lot of conservative talk radio, I guess.

JA:    Right.

DC:    Angry rhetoric, but nothing to the point of out and out physical threat, I hope.

JA:    I don’t recall anything like that. A lot of, “you need to be fired, you need to be this, you need to be that. . . .” Nobody, at least it . . . .

DC:    It gets heated pretty quick in this area, doesn’t it?

JA:    It can. You know, I quote, right at the beginning of the book, some old labor veterans, labor organizers who worked here in Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South during the civil rights era and later, and being shot at, being threatened — you know, I’ve got a friend who lives right in this area, in Oxford, Mississippi, who was a labor organizer in the ‘70s — literally, night riders went after him, firing left and right like something out of the Wild West — and so, there’s a long history of that kind of thing, for sure. So, no, I haven’t had anybody shoot at me. [chuckle]

DC:    Well, I’m glad. Public opinion surveys show the public holds unions in low regard because of the public schools and the automobile industry. In the latter case, they think, I suppose, that the UAW pushed too far, priced themselves out of the marketplace and brought some of their problems on themselves. Fair critique or not, and what should the response be?

JA:    Well, I think unions aren’t above criticism. The UAW is really in a kind of an amazing study in the whole labor history of this country. When they came into being in the mid-‘30s, employing tactics like sit-ins that the civil rights movement would later adopt, people like Walter Reuther were real heroes. They were really out there fighting for all working people, not just their own. And I think that legacy and spirit still lives on in the UAW. There are some really good people there, and other unions as well. There are a lot of critics, people who are sympathetic to working people and to the labor movement but they feel that it has gotten too parochial and too interested in their own memberships without a broader sense of “we’ve got to be out there to help all working people, and not just our own members.” And so a lot of people who were not members of unions felt left out, and they tend to look at them as “the other,” particularly in the South — when the UAW came down and tried to organize Nissan, it was — “Well, you guys are from Detroit. You’re not one of us.” And that was a factor in the failure of that effort. And so reformers within the movement, and I’m friends and close with a number of them, and in many ways I include myself among them, feel that the labor movement has to recapture that sense of being a social group like the civil rights movement was. We’re out there to help all working people — yes, we want to help our own people, but it’s got to be a broad-based movement and then people are going to be more sympathetic and some of these surveys you make reference to are, they’re going to be some different results on that, I think. But I will say the labor movement lost a sense of that mission — for a number of reasons. And that includes the strong anti-communist feelings of the post-World War II Era, the McCarthy era, that targeted unions, when Republicans took over Congress in 1947 and passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which was the polar opposite of the pro-union Wagner Act — the Taft-Hartley Act was anti-union, and set up these right-to-work laws and so forth. Unions, in trying to adapt to that new climate, purged themselves of a lot of the people within their ranks who most strongly felt that sense of social mission and social justice. And they became more insular as a result and lost this sense of the social movement and those were factors, too, in changing unions today and why unions need to recapture some of the old spirit.

DC:    I understand there’s been some internal debate. Does it come down to organizing particular workplaces, I guess, versus broader political activity, making it a social movement? I understand there’s been something of a split a couple of years ago, the AFL-CIO on one side and the Teamsters and the service employees on the other. What was going on there, exactly?

JA:    We got that split there, between the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win folks who broke free the AFL-CIO. And now there’s some discussion about possibly coming back together again, at least in part. Maybe it was different when John Sweeney came in in, I think, 1995, and took over the AFL-CIO. There was a feeling that a new day has finally arrived. We have a new vigorous leadership that’s going to recapture some of the old spirit that I’ve just discussed. And 10 years later or more, there’s, it feels like Sweeney and his team didn’t quite live up to that promise and maybe that’s not their fault, but the promises, the division was not quite realized and unions are still suffering. And so there’s a lot of theories and ideas out there and some say, well, we need to do more grass-roots organizing. We need to do more broad-based movement-type things and so forth. And there’s probably some of all of that, there’s still a criticism among a lot of labor activists, that the movement itself, labor unions, the AFL-CIO, big labor unions, the SEIU, are too top-down. They’re not listening to the voices of the people on the ground enough. And so there needs to be some reorganizing there, perhaps. Some opening up of a more democratic process within the labor movement so they can hear some of the different ideas out there and be more, do a better job in responding to some of the challenges they’re facing.

DC:    One thing we see is that movement is doing better in the public than the private sector. But the public-sector unions are not really the traditional labor movement. I don’t know how much difference it makes. Of course, the service employees, if that’s the way the economy is going, I mean, it’s not surprising — the people who are doing, really doing some of the more menial labor these days, and that’s very often black and brown rather than white people in the service employees union.

JA:    You’re absolutely right. You know, one thing is our changing workforce — as people say, we don’t make things much anymore. And those who are making things in America are working for a Japanese or a German company. I think we’re in the direst economic straits now than we’ve been in since the Great Depression, and political leadership hopefully recognizes that and if we’re going to be great again, we’re going to have to be making things once again, too. And so maybe it’s going to take the people at large, beyond labor, to demand that our political and economic leadership do more to really to help create these kind of jobs that a lot of people need, that we all need.

DC:    While we’re on this employment issue — among employers, some have a worse reputation than others, of course. Wal-Mart has come under some very, very severe criticism. Others have a better reputation. In retailing, Costco has a much better reputation and some people would rather give their consumer dollars to Costco than Wal-Mart — they treat their employees better, and I suppose that’s also true of an outfit like Apple. Maybe in automobile manufacturing, Toyota has a little different aura about it than some of the others. Ultimately, doesn’t it come down to — they are all under bottom-line pressure, ultimately there is a rap sheet against all of them. For some it may be a longer rap sheet, for others shorter. I wonder what your judgment is on that. Wal-Mart especially — the effect that corporation has had has been well documented.

JA:    Wal-Mart is — of course, it’s a southern company, Arkansas-based. It’s vehemently, virulently, I would say, anti-union and we see what happens in the absence of a union among Wal-Mart workers, when it was announced just days ago, I guess, that it was firing 11,000 workers. And also. . .

DC:    And outsourcing their in-store product sampling for Sam’s Club. They’re going to give all that to a third party. [Discussed at Joe Atkins' blog here; wire-service story here.]

JA:    Right. Exactly. It’s saying, “happy new year” to all of those workers. And then according to reports that I’ve read that they’re refusing to pay severance pay to those workers unless they signed a waiver not to sue Wal-Mart for . . .

DC:    Shopper Events is the outfit they’re putting in the stores….

JA:    Exactly. And so, so you’ve got companies like that, yes. And you know, there’s always going to be some tension because labor and management have different points of view about things. We’re in a country that’s a very capitalistic country in which the standard operating procedure is, “I’m the one who gives the orders here.” But you can have other companies that are more enlightened, that realize, that a workforce that’s being treated well is going to be a better workforce, more productive. You mentioned Costco — Freightliner [now a Daimler subsidiary -- D. C.] has a pretty good relationship with the UAW, and Kroger and some other companies tend to have more labor peace than others.

DC:    It looks like a fairly desperate situation for labor at the moment. What do you think is the outlook, then — in the short term, intermediate term, long term?

JA:    Well, short term, you know, difficult uphill fights and a still sort of a kind of an entering a new era in which we have a desperate need for ideas and to put those ideas together and into place. I tend to be the last optimist in the room. And you know why? Because I just believe in the human condition, particularly when I look at my own region, the South — I can’t believe that all the sacrifices and work of generations of people who went totally against all odds and tried to stand up for their fellow human being, that that’s just going to go to the wayside and be forgotten. The ashes of history. And a lot of people out there working, right now, you know there are a lot of people across this region who are making coalitions and alliances — not just the South, of course I focus on the South, but really across the country. I know here in the South, you have civil rights groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference working with immigrant groups and so forth. And they’re at the ground level, grass roots. We’re not hearing a whole lot about them now, but they’re out there. And I’ve got a feeling that their voices are going to be increasingly heard and we’re going to see some changes — the labor movement’s been down before and it was not out and it’s not out now. So that’s my last voice of optimism for all these sort of pessimistic, depressing sort of factors that are out there.

DC:    Well, Professor Joe Atkins, thanks so much for talking to us.

Frank Schaeffer is a film director, screenwriter, and author of, among other works, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) (Da Capo Press, 2009) and Crazy for God: How I Grew up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back (Da Capo Press, 2007). He became a leading figure in conservative Christianity, along with his father,  the theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer, with whom he produced books and multimedia presentations such as How Should We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Frank Schaeffer came to regret his association with right-of-center politics, and he concluded that his father had been co-opted. Although his politics have changed, Frank Schaeffer remains very much within the orbit of Christianity. His life story, the shifts in his understanding of Christianity and of politics, and his reaction to contemporary Christianity and to atheism make for fascinating and thought-provoking reading.

I reached Frank Schaeffer by telephone earlier this month at his home in Massachusetts.

DC:    In the first section of your book, you take on the New Atheists, although you take on atheists and also believers of a certain sort in this work. Plainly, the New Atheists were provoked by both the Religious Right and Islamic fundamentalism but, especially in the case of somebody like Richard Dawkins, he turned it into a caricature and created a fundamentalism of his own — I suppose is the way you would put it….

Frank Schaeffer

FS:    Yes, you’re perfectly right. The New Atheists are a reaction to 8 years of George Bush, two wars, a very aggressive Christian fundamentalism in America, a kind of an anticultural knee-jerk bias against education, media, and so forth. But, on the other hand, atheism is not new, and my critique of atheism in Patience with God is not based on an argument with atheism itself. I have my own views; I happen to believe in God, but that’s not my problem. My problem with these people is very specific to those that I talk about — people like Bill Maher, with his movie Religulous, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. And then, in the same book, I actually have a whole chapter on some of the atheist views that I like, that I’m not arguing with, and so it isn’t just a generalization about atheism. And then of course, as you mentioned, there’s also a critique of fundamentalist religions. So I guess my point is really more about the tone of the argument and less about the actual philosophy. And what I’m trying to do here is change the conversation, because obviously, long term, we’re not always going to be at war with the Taliban, we’re not always going to be butting heads with Islam. This is a moment of history, but in the longer reach of time, people still need to be able to look at spirituality with open eyes, take what they can from it for their own comfort without everything always being cast in this kind of political back and forth between right and left, atheism and belief, and so forth. And so I’m just looking at what I hope is a bigger picture.

DC:    You mention that everyone needs to assume a position of humility. Within theology, you refer to apophatic theology — I believe is the term…. [Definition of apophatic theology: "Of or relating to the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not" -- D.C.]

FS:    Yes, that’s right. Apophatic theology actually is very ancient. I know most people think sometimes that, you know, fundamentalism must have been there from the beginning, but really, if you look at certain threads within the Christian tradition and other religious traditions as well, you have a theology of unknowing, where you’re saying essentially, look, what we can’t say about God is what we’ve got to concentrate on because obviously there is a God. This is not something that can be summed up by human beings, by creatures. And so I think a return to that kind of open viewpoint, which is far less based on theology and doctrine and much more on kind of a mysterious experience of spirituality and the divine in our own lives is where I feel most comfortable. It also offers, I think, an alternative to this kind of black and white, you’re an atheist or you’re a Christian, you’re for or against, 100% belief-based kind of doctrinal church systems of religion. I just don’t think that’s where all religion has always been and what I do is, in the latter part of the book, I trace a little bit of that history back to an earlier way of looking at things.

DC:    Sure.

FS:    A much more open-ended and I think much more humble way of approaching things.

DC:    Sure. Well, look, none of these people are cut from exactly the same cloth. I believe you mentioned Daniel Dennett is someone you’re probably more sympathetic to than some of these other people and Sam Harris is cut from a little different cloth. And there’s Christopher Hitchens who’s sort of an archetype of a sort of hard-living, hard-driving, hard-drinking provocateur in journalism.

FS:    Yes, and Hitchens really is the bad guy here. He’s also a very kind of hard right, jingoistic, pro-war, let’s smash these Islamic countries while we have the chance kind of guy who actually changed his point of view from being a left-wing anti-imperialist to join George Bush’s crusade against Iraq and spent a lot of time writing about that war. So he really doesn’t fit the typical atheist-liberal-left mold. In fact, he’s basically become an outcast in places like The Nation magazine and Alternet and these other more left-wing places because of the fact of his support for George Bush and his war. You know, my beef with him is that he’s taken seriously by people who think that he’s actually presented a good argument for atheism whereas, really, all he’s done is produce a very detailed rap sheet of everything bad religion has ever done. And of course, what I say in the book is that religion does have a terrible rap sheet but then so does atheism. You know, I mean, when you look at the Gulag, and the Soviet Union and China and Pol Pot and Mao Zedong and the eugenics experiments of the ’20s and ’30s. you know these were nothing done in the name of Christ or any religion.

DC:    Sure.

FS:    These were being done in the name of reason, science, atheistic philosophy, and I don’t blame atheism for that any more than you can blame Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism or Judaism for things done because of religion in the sense that the real problem, I think, that I talk about in the book, is human nature itself and the way we’ve devolved to the kind of creatures we are and the fact that we’re an eyeblink from our ancestral evolutionary homes. We really haven’t learned very much. We’re pretty crude creatures. Obviously, we’re going to look at any excuse to justify what we do, be that atheistic science or religion. That’s the problem. The problem is who we human beings are, not the flag we happen to be flying over when we bash somebody in the head.

DC:    Well in any of those episodes, it’s hard to point to any single cause….

FS:    Correct….

DC:   … that would lead to death or persecution of thousands and thousands or even millions of people. Look, you appeared in September, before the election, on the Rachel Maddow program on MSNBC and that was an appearance that got a little bit of attention, in the blogosphere at least.

FS:    Right.

DC:    And in that appearance, you emphasized the development of an evangelical subculture which something you yourself eventually got fed up with and had to move away from. You mentioned in that appearance that you thought eventually we were going to have to move past these people. They were left behind. They had left themselves behind, shall we say.

FS:    Yes, what I was saying there was — Rachel asked me, you know, what to do, how to approach these folks, how you could change the hard evangelical right’s mind about not just politics but how they see the world, how they see other people that aren’t like them, whether that’s gay people or progressive people, or people getting PhDs at secular universities that they fear are from the left, and so forth. And I said, “Well, you know, when you really get to the outer reaches of the lunatic fringe, you can’t change minds. You just have to move past them.” Because these folks are bent on waiting for some kind of an apocalyptic end to history. They think that war in the Middle East is good. It’s a harbinger for Jesus’s return. They think that the right to bear arms is some sort of metaphysical mandate. They look at the U.S. and they root for a country where torture is legal in some cases, with our prisoners of war, and then on the other hand, they’re rooting against health care reform, and doing all this in the name of Christianity and conservative politics which, by the way, traditional conservatives like William F. Buckley would never have recognized as his own, and on the other hand, historic Christians would look at folks who espouse legal torture but not health care reform so that families can have decent health care, as basically crazy. And so I was just telling Rachel Maddow that it wasn’t a question of convincing these folks any more than you can convince the village idiot to not be a village idiot. There’s a certain line that gets crossed that’s beyond reason and this line has been crossed and you see it very clearly when you realize that these same folks are running around with signs calling Obama Hitler or the Antichrist or selling mugs and T-shirts and bumper stickers quoting a psalm saying “pray for the president” — and when you read the psalm they’re quoting, it’s actually praying for the death of the president [Psalm 109:8 -- "Let his days be few; and let another take his office" -- D. C.], making his wife a widow. You know, when you add this stuff up, this isn’t a question of coming up with a reasoned argument. You’re way past reasoned.

DC:    Well, I guess the question then becomes — how big is this lunatic fringe?

FS:    Huge! I mean, how big is the Fox News audience? Why is Sarah Palin’s book a #1 New York Times bestseller? Who has bought the 16 novels of the Left Behind series and sold 10 million copies, tens of millions of copies of these books, becoming one of the mainstays of the publishing industry? So, sure — this fringe element is not about to take over the country. The sky is not falling. Three hundred million Americans are not these people, but when you’re on a subway car and you’ve got one drunk up front, you know, carrying on in a disorderly way, molesting people, he can make it pretty miserable for everybody else on the ride, and so that’s what this group is. It’s not huge, it’s in the millions, not the tens of millions, but you know, these are the folks that overlap with the Fox News audience. They overlap with the Rush Limbaugh audience. It’s not all the same people. They have a secularized doom-saying version in the teabagger movement that’s often libertarians and secular people, but driven by that same apocalyptic the-end-is-coming fantasy — in their case, the federal government is so terrible that it’s gonna destroy America and on and on and on. But there’s no reasoning with folks that aren’t looking at facts the same way you are. It used to be, with more traditional conservatives, you could argue about how to interpret facts, but you kind of agreed that the Earth was round, that the federal government had a place in our lives, that we needed to pay taxes, that it would be good if people could have health care, and it was just a question of how do we get there. But when you get to this group of people, the how is not the question. The very basic facts are in dispute. Why do you need any government at all? Why should we pay taxes? Why not just bomb the hell out of all our enemies? And so forth and so on. So you’re really in a very different universe and then you add in the Christian angle of this apocalyptic scenario of the end times and the return of Christ and now you’re not even in different politics, you’re on a different planet. And there’s very little way to discuss with them. It would take an entire revolution of the mind and the spirit of these folks to even begin to consider alternative positions because you’re dealing with a religious faith here. You’re not dealing with a reason-based set of propositions.

DC:    Well, the question I have then is, from the point of view of progressives, the problem is, is it not, that we’re talking about a fair number of low- to moderate-income people here, is the problem that I see. So I wonder — we can drive down the highway — you’re in Massachusetts I understand, I don’t know how right it is in your part of the country, but that’s more of a red state than a blue state to my mind [prior to January 19, at least! - LOL - D. C.], but they’re everywhere. We can pass by, as we drive down the highway, an abandoned Wal-Mart or strip shopping center and very often we see churches have moved into these spaces and very often they are independent and so-called nonsectarian evangelicals. I’m just wondering, there’s gotta be a continuum with any group of people. In your estimation, where it’s a huge subculture, people who watch Fox News, people who….

FS:    Right, right. And they overlap, these subcultures. I’m not saying it’s the same folks, but it’s the same vibe. And there is a big overlap. So a lot of these Pentacostal people waiting for Jesus to come back are people who are also very far right-wing in their views on everything. And they’re the same people who distrust American foreign policy. They don’t believe in peace talks in Israel. They think Obama’s the Antichrist or a Communist or wasn’t born in America. They don’t believe in health care reform. They think we ought to be paying low to no taxes. You know, there’s a big overlap here. And so Rush Limbaugh’s not an Evangelical and he’s not a fundamentalist Christian, but a lot of his listeners are and they love his conservative politics. Conversely, you know, there’s a lot of Fundamentalist Christians that don’t have as political a view of the world as he does but you know, they still have that sense of being totally alienated. They’ve got this kind of weird victimization where they treat themselves as a beleaguered minority, which is ironic, given that they kept George Bush in power for eight years. And that’s a problem.

DC:    Sure, sure. Well, the question arises, I suppose, from the point of view of progressives, is there any point, then, to attempts at persuasion? I’ve run into people who say, well they’re so far gone, anything you try to do will amount to pandering. You’ll just be pandering to them.

FS:    Well, if it comes to just right-wing politics, sure, because you may have all kinds of folks who are going to be convinced by facts. But when it comes to people who, as a matter of religious belief, actually think we’re on a kind of final countdown within their lifetimes to Armageddon and the return of Christ, politics need not apply. I mean, there’s no political argument that’s gonna get them to change that view. They’ve gone somewhere else, and to the extent that they look at a guy like Obama as the Antichrist, for instance, there’s no discussing with that point of view. There’s no halfway place to meet that. It’s not like you say, well, instead of calling him the Antichrist, why don’t you just call him extremely evil. I mean, there’s no way to argue with this when you get out into the religious ozone layer here, and that’s what we’re talking about. In my book, Patience with God, I have a whole chapter on this apocalyptic scenario and another one on just trying to explain what’s happened with this kind of personality and culture and religion that you have in these big megachurches. It ties up into a group of people that are impossible to reach. They’re following pastors in their megachurches. They’re like John Hagee in Houston, he’s one of these apocalyptic Christian Zionists — you’re not gonna talk his followers out of this. Now, if they have a total loss of faith and become utterly disillusioned, and there’s a lot of people who have, by the way, who write me e-mails and say, “Well 20 years ago, I was where you were 20 or 30 years ago,” but I got disillusioned and left. But the idea that I would have left if you had just made a good political argument to me is nonsense because that wouldn’t have reached me at that point. I had to become totally disillusioned, get out, rethink everything. Then I was ready to reconsider the facts. And until that happened, you never would have been able to change my mind on anything.

DC:    Abortion, of course, has played a huge role here. I noticed in your memoir, you mentioned it was really the catalyst for the contemporary Religious Right. And actually, the first time I ever came across your dad, it was to do with the book and a multimedia presentation, How Should We Then Live? which you were in on, I believe.

FS:    Yes, and in my memoir, Crazy for God, I give a very detailed description. The subtitle says it all: How I Grew up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back. Well, the growing up in the Religious Right was something I not only did but I was part of. And the abortion issue was a big part of that. My dad and I were the first Protestant Evangelical people, more or less, to talk about this. When we got into it in the early 70s, it was essentially considered a Roman Catholic issue. My dad and I were going around talking to people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and others who at that point were very leery and hesitant to get into what they regarded as a Catholic issue. And it was dad and me who talked them into taking a stand on this. And unwittingly, therefore, became, in dad’s case, a father of the Religious Right. Because of course the early antiabortion pro-life movement morphed into the Religious Right. It became the power base of the Republican party. It became the same group of people who have been gay-bashing and added other things into their agenda, such as anti-immigrant policy and so forth. And it all became a much bigger thing. But when we were in it, it all centered around the issue of abortion. And in that sense, Roe v. Wade is really responsible for the culture wars we’ve had ever since.

DC:    Your attitudes go all the way back to your experiences as a young kid in the retreat in Switzerland and the kind of people that you met there.

FS:    Correct.

DC:    And also your own experience. You had some difficulties with polio as a young man and I suppose you still suffer from the after-effects.

FS:    Yes — as an adult, I’m fine. I have an atrophied left lower leg. Big deal. It’s not that much. But as a kid, I did, and also, you know, I got my wife pregnant when we were unmarried. She was 17 and 18, and so we were typical teens in the milieu of the 60s and, you know, the Christian community we were in, the L’Abri fellowship that I talk about in my memoir, Crazy for God, in a lot of detail, was very welcoming to us, very helpful, very kind, very compassionate, and that gave me a personal stake in having this little child of mine who was born to me when I was a teenager, in a kind of pro-life view of things — look, life should be received with open arms. And I haven’t changed that view. What I have changed is the idea that you can use the law to outlaw something, which people are going to be doing anyway, and it’s much better to do what Barack Obama is doing, and that is trying to have a social safety net in place that provides, for instance, universal medical coverage for women and their babies, whether they can pay or not. And which relieves a lot of folks from the economic hardship which leads people to make these very tough decisions sometimes. So I just don’t think it’s a matter of reversing Roe v. Wade. I think it’s a matter of giving people compassionate options and that’s why I support Barack Obama’s position in that he’s both pro-choice but, at the same time, trying to actually help people come up with a better solution than an abortion.

DC:    Well, the only thing is, looking at your memoir, it would still be your view, would it or would it not, that in your heart of hearts, you would still like to see more restrictions than someone like Obama would.

FS:    I think so, but it’s a difference of opinion with someone that also, from my point of view, also says, look, I think in the best of all worlds, we’d be more like France, for instance, which restricts abortion after the 12th week pretty severely. There has to be a real medical reason and it has to be discussed by a committee of physicians and the whole system is geared to either early abortions or none. That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions and I just think Roe v. Wade, as a matter of both tactics and morality went too far, but that’s a difference of opinion with people. It’s not me saying, “Let’s overthrow the U.S. government,” as my dad said in his book, A Christian Manifesto, “because abortion’s going to lead to a holocaust just like Nazi Germany and our leaders are completely morally bankrupt.” In other words, you can have differences of opinion on how abortion should be legalized and what age and all the rest of it without resulting in the kind of bomb-throwing we were doing in our pro-life stance that eventually spins out of control into places where you have abortion providers actually being gunned down as we still see quite recently.So, absolutely — my point of view would be more conservative than Barack Obama’s but, on the other hand, my point of view would also say that when you get to the idiocy of the other side, where you’ve got, for instance, George Bush trying to rescind condom distribution in Africa, leading to a greater incidence of AIDS because he’s had his arm twisted by the pro-life wing of the abstinence-only community, you can see that, you know, if you go the other way to the extreme, you come up with an even worse situation.

DC:    I wonder what the future holds for the issue. I mean, the Supreme Court’s intervention into it sort of rendered it a political impasse and of course the Supreme Court decision is very difficult to overturn. You run into people who say, “Well,  just forget about it, it’ll never be reversed.” But it keeps rearing its head, as it has in the health care debate with Representative Stupak’s amendment, hasn’t it?

FS:    Yeah. I don’t think Roe v. Wade itself is going to be reversed, but I do see a trend and that is that the polls that I’ve read show that, surprisingly, the support for abortion is stronger in people of the age group that came from that Roe era and the culture war, and actually young people in general have a less favorable view of legal abortion than their elders do across the board. Not particularly in the evangelical community, but just generally in the population, which goes to show a healthy mentality — that abortion is very serious and it shouldn’t be decided on the basis of religious propaganda or feminist propaganda. It’s not a matter of a winner-take-all and drum-beating. It’s a difficult thing. It reflects one of those basic human moral dilemmas that we all face just because of the way we’re biologically made, divided into male and female and reproductive systems and all the rest of it, which are pretty serious things. And so I do think there’s gonna continue to be discussion. I don’t think the issue can be ducked. And I think the recent Stupak amendment and the health care debate just go to show, this is with us for the long term. And so the folks, say from the Planned Parenthood side, are dreaming if they think that this issue is going away because Roe v. Wade changed everything. It did, but it was an opening round of a long, long debate that could go on, for all we know, for a hundred years. And I think science, in the end, is also going to intervene. We already see that as the age of viability rolls back and back and back. And it isn’t just in the States. You see this in Europe. In Europe, it’s certainly very secularized. There’s a definite feeling that abortion is not the first choice in terms of a solution to unwanted pregnancy. Either pregnancy should be prevented through contraceptive distribution and good sex education on one hand and/or social programs provided for women to have children more easily in terms of financial support. And/or, you know, a moral question raised which just makes people look at this in a wider context, in a more holistic way, and less as just an individual crisis of that moment. All of this stuff is going to stay on the plate, so whether Roe is reversed or not, whatever one’s position is, realistically, you have to say, hey, this is not going away.

DC:    You often hear casual, offhand, off-the-cuff statements made in conversation or in the press to the effect that the matter is really all settled in Europe. But you don’t think that’s completely the case…

FS:    No, not at all. It isn’t at all. There continues to be a movement in Europe and not just in Roman Catholic countries, but for instance in Britain. There’s a very definite sense in Britain, very similar to our own country, that their laws have gone too far and there’s been a whole series of attempts in the House of Lords and also in the House of Commons in Parliament to roll back, not the legalization of abortion, but roll back the age limits, and that pressure’s going to continue. And it will here, too. So this isn’t going away and it’s certainly not settled in Europe. One reason it’s a little more settled in Scandinavia, for instance, and in France is because the social programs are such that there are less abortions and more alternatives to abortion than we offer here.

DC:    One thing I learned when looking at Crazy for God — I had never really heard of Mary Pride, and the role she played as sort of guru of the Christian homeschooling movement. I wondered if I could talk to you for a moment about what’s going on with homeschooling and homeschoolers. You mentioned, I looked at one of your pieces from The Huffington Post about a faith-healing issue and an issue of those where an individual, a couple effectively let a child die who could very easily have been treated and they tried to treat her through prayer. Do you see a parallel situation arising with some homeschoolers? People tell me about people who don’t want to let their children read anything but the Bible. You mention in some cases…

FS:    Definitely. I mean, look, there’s all kinds of homeschoolers. One can’t generalize, but let’s just look at a few. There are secular academics who are homeschooling their kids because they want to give them a better education than they can get at the local public school. There are very moderate, well-spoken, educated, qualified, good, religious parents who are educating their kids for the same reason. They’re taking them to soccer and letting them mix with people and doing all sorts of good things. But there is also a very big fringe element that goes back to people like Mary Pride, who developed their own textbooks and even worse, back to people like R. J. Rushdoony, the Christian Reconstruction movement that actually wants to return America to an Old Testament-based theocracy including the stoning to death of gays, believe it or not, and actually has literature to that effect. They’ve also churned out homeschooling curricula and there the intent is not a good education. The intent is to separate yourself from the world so completely that you can brainwash your children without the danger of anybody ever enticing them to ask any questions that would lead them away from your point of view. Take away their choices and that group, I think, crosses a line into what I think really has to be termed child abuse because you are in a group of people, and I’m not talking necessarily of physical child abuse — although if you follow [Dr. James] Dobson’s teachings, you’re going to be beating your children, as he outlines in his books — but that aside, I think that it is abusive to take your kid and remove all their chances of education or serious secondary education or even university by virtue of the fact that you so isolate them and you give them such a weird and truncated view of the world that they can’t function. And there are literally millions of American children who are being raised in homes that are so far out of the mainstream that I think it just, to me, borders on the criminal that our justice system doesn’t take a real look at this. And occasionally you see when a child dies, and there are a lot of these cases, by the way, where a kid is not given medical treatment because parents believe only in faith healing that somebody’s prosecuted but there are many hundreds more that you never hear of and where there is no prosecution. And of course, for every one of those extreme cases, just think of the tens of thousands of cases there are when kids are just denied medical help and that hurts them in some way or they suffer more and then the millions of cases where kids are denied the ability to read literature or see great art or go to a play or watch a movie because their parents have decided that they don’t agree and so their kids cannot really participate in the full life of what it means to be a human being at this point in history with what’s available to us. And so where’s that line? I don’t know, but I know that there’s a group of people who definitely cross it and I had a lot to do with them in the ’70s and ’80s. We were, somewhat, heroes to them because our material was also advocating a withdrawal from the culture and so forth. And so I get letters from people, for instance, who watched the film series How Should We Then Live? that my dad made about art and culture, and they’re actually very thankful because they’re saying, “That’s the only thing my parents ever let me study about art and culture because your dad said it.” So at least they got to see some art. “We weren’t allowed to do anything else.” And so, you know, I find that just shocking.

DC:    There are homeschoolers, I’m sure, who’ve been inspired by people like John Holt, author of Deschooling Society, [actually written by Ivan Illich.  John Holt was the author of a number of works, including Teach Your Own -- D. C.] but it looks like the predominant expression of homeschooling in America is motivated by religious considerations to one extent or another. I wonder what your judgment is. I mean, we hear about homeschoolers being admitted to Harvard or winning the national spelling or geography bee or something like that…

FS:    Sure. You can bet they’re not coming from home some log cabin homestead in some backwoods area where the parents have gone off to wait for the return of Jesus or learn Bible verses and don’t their kids play with anybody. Actually, I have a good example of that in my own family. I’ve got a cousin who has 12 children, believe it or not, and he’s an impoverished minister, but he’s also a professor of history and teaches at a fine university and his kids are not whackjobs, they’re all wonderful, well educated, all got full scholarships to top schools, I think 8 of the 12 went to Ivy League institutions, including 3 to Harvard, and they’ve done superbly. Well, their parents were religious but they weren’t doing homeschooling to keep them out of doing anything later in life. For instance, in fact, most of their kids have wound up not following their parents’ religion.

DC:    Maybe the most famous homeschooled individual in America right now, who’s gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of years, would be University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, whose parents were missionaries. But if you’re a missionary, you can’t really cut yourself off and isolate yourself. You’ve got to at least be reaching out to other people…

FS:    Right.

DC:    And learning about the world.

FS:    Yeah, and as I say, some of those folks might be evangelicals, some might be Catholics or atheists or who knows what. But the group that I talk about are these people from this Christian Reconstruction group, for whom America’s a city set on a hill and we’re a city set on the hill within the hill and we’ve got to withdraw from it and be a light unto the nation by being different than everybody. And so the unfair thing is that parents have had options and they’ve made these choices to convert to some born-again faith or whatever but they’ve raised their kid in it without an option. And of course, you know, your kid doesn’t wind up where you wound up because you had a chance to look at something different and made your choices and now they’re starting there. So where do they go from there?

DC:    Through the years, you’ve met a lot of these people, like Robertson, Falwell, Dobson, a number of others, and Billy Graham even…. And on the whole, looking back at it, you really don’t think much of  them.

FS:    No, I don’t. And I must say, you mention someone like Billy Graham, who’s a very good and decent guy….  But you just see where this goes, because you’ve got his son Franklin here, who recently lent Sarah Palin the company plane from his ministry, flies her in to have dinner with his dad who’s now semi-senile, gets him to sign a support letter for Sarah Palin. Billy never would have done that. He always eschewed politics after he had a bad experience endorsing Richard Nixon. He never did it again. And now you’ve got his son, Franklin, who clearly is trying to cut himself out as a right-wing leader here in American politics, sort of in the model of Dobson, and on and on it goes. So even when you have somebody good in terms of personal integrity, sooner or later the thing gets derailed. And it becomes another one of these personality cults in bed with the political powers that be. And that becomes the agenda. And it always seems to go that way. Even in the Graham family.

DC:    That was a pretty grotesque story about the burial arrangements for Rev. Graham’s wife.

FS:    It’s insane, and I know Ruth, who was buried there, Ruth gets six people signing off on an affidavit saying she wants to be buried in the little cemetery next to their home in Montreat, and her son goes against her wishes and talks Billy into doing what he wants and she’s buried in a mausoleum inside sort of a Billy Graham tribute park. And, you know, it wasn’t her wishes. She put it in writing. And so, you know, there you are. That is the problem with big-time American religion. It’s all about the mailing list and the bottom line.

DC:    So she’s still interred at the theme park place….

FS:    Oh, she’ll be there forever. And they have Billy’s tomb all ready, next to her.

DC:    With someone like Rick Warren, in your view, as I understand it, the problem is that his church is all about him.

FS:    Well, I use Rick Warren as an example in Patience with God not as Rick Warren but as a kind of a stand-in for everybody. Rick Warren has this 55,000-member church. And I asked the question in my book, “Look, if he died tomorrow or was kicked out of the church or he left, do you think the church would maintain its size?” And no one would think it would because the fact of the matter is they’re there for Rick Warren. And these megachurches and these ministries are all built around an individual. And so, you know, my point there is just to say the evangelical culture in America is really a series of personality cults where you follow this person or that person. It’s not really about the church or even what the church is teaching. It’s this guy. This is your guy. You love his teaching, you feel so comfortable there and so forth, and if he moves on, you leave or quit. And so Rick Warren is just a good example of what it means to have personality cult-driven religion and he served that purpose in my book. I wasn’t saying he doesn’t have integrity personally, I don’t know him personally. But it is to say that he is a wonderful example of what it means to have a religion that is a series of personality cults, just judging by his followers.

DC:    Look, you’ve got a sort of complicated relationship with your dad, who’s been gone about 25 years now, I understand. What happened was, he got caught up in a conflict between modernist and fundamentalist views in seminaries in the United States going back to the early 20th century.

FS:    I detail that in my memoir, Crazy for God, where I talk about the fact that, ironically, he broke free of all that in his 60s in the community of L’Abri, he was talking about art and culture and opening the door to all sorts of people across the board: gay people, unmarried women with babies, and all the rest of it. And then all of a sudden, in the last 6 or 7 years of his life, partly because of me, he got very much dragged back into it because, after he became well known as a pro-life leader, it was assumed by people like the Southern Baptist Convention that he would be on their side on all these other social-related issues and also the issue of the inerrancy of scripture. And all of a sudden, he became their kind of heavy gun. “Okay, well, we’ll bring Francis Schaeffer to the meeting and he’ll tell us why we’ve gotta stick by this.” And so at the end of his life, he was dragged right back into the same sort of battles that he had left when he came to Europe, very deliberately to get away from them, which was the internecine strife between the so-called liberals in the mainstream and the fundamentalists in the 1920s that he saw happening in Princeton University, for instance. Not that he was there but he knew people like Gresham Machen who were.

DC:    He wanted it to be known that a conservative Christian could be a cultured individual. And he emphasized that with you, in your upbringing, although his upbringing of you was kind of complicated, given everything else he was involved with.

FS:    Right. And dad stuck by that. I mean, all the way to the end. He never completely went off to the Religious Right. In fact, his heart wasn’t in it. I have an example that I don’t have in my book that I might have included. But anyway, it’s instructive in that toward the end of his life, in the last couple of years of his life, there was a very anti-gay activist from Florida who was also an orange juice spokesman.

DC:    Anita Bryant.

FS:    Anita Bryant, who came by our house where dad was living, in Rochester, Minnesota, undergoing treatment there. And she talked to him about trying to get him involved with her anti-gay crusade to make it illegal for a gay person to even be a teacher, even if they’d done nothing, just the fact that they were gay. Dad looked at her like she was crazy. He said, “I’m having nothing to do with this. Why would you think I’d want to do this?” And she had made this assumption, just because he was “correct” on the issue of abortion, from her point of view, that he would be sort of toe-the-line on the whole thing. And so, you know, even at his most far Right, dad never went there, in terms of where these guys all signed on. And so it’s kind of tragic to me that he gets labeled with this “father of the Religious Right” tag and I’m hoping my memoir, Crazy for God, and also my book on spirituality, Patience with God, really in a way helps repair his reputation, in the sense that my relationship with him was complicated, but he was a complicated person. He wasn’t a sort of one-dimensional right-winger. By any means.

DC:    The circumstances of his death, though, seemed to be a little unfortunate. There was this bizarre service in a high school gym but at least you got to speak at the gravesite, I see, from your memoir. [Dr. Schaeffer was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota at the time of his death. Public interest was strong enough that a memorial service had to be held at a local venue -- D. C.]

FS:    Yeah, that’s right. But the service at the gym was, again, just like I used an example of Rick Warren becoming a personality cult. In my memoir, I tell that story for a number of reasons. It’s in my memoir. It’s interesting. I’m a writer. I want my reader to follow along and so I tell you interesting stories. But the deeper reason is that, again, it just goes from my point of view to show that when you cut religion off from any kind of historic base and any kind of system in which people are answerable to someone, where it’s just totally freeform, you wind up with these weird things. Like here you’ve got this religious leader being eulogized in a high school gymnasium because there’s no other meeting hall in town big enough to accommodate everybody.  You know, it’s irreligious. It actually looks much more like some Wikkan festival than a religious  service that would be recognized by the Church fathers, for instance. So it’s just a very strange thing. It goes to show, again, that it was all about personality and followers and far less about religion, really.

DC:    Mr. Schaeffer, thank you so much.

Tom Sharpe, a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican, had a lunch date on a September afternoon last year in the city’s Cerrillos Road shopping district. After lunch, it occurred to him to make a quick phone call to Beth Rickey, who was staying at the inexpensive Silver Saddle motel. Earlier in the day, a knock at the motel room door had brought no answer. Friends in the area had purchased the room for Rickey, who had been suffering from ill health.

In fact, Rickey had fallen upon hard times. She had won renown nearly two decades earlier in Louisiana, where she had played a decisive role in preventing former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke from being elected governor. Rickey, active in Republican circles, did not want Duke in her party. He had been presenting himself as a conventional conservative politician, but she had successfully exposed him as still being up to his old racist and anti-Semitic tricks.

Beth Rickey (1989 photo)

Rickey had been living in Santa Fe off and on for a number of years. Friends and acquaintances in the area were attempting to raise money to situate her in a nursing home or assisted-living arrangement. Sharpe was working on a feature about Rickey for his paper, and he wanted to speak to her in person, having interviewed her informally by telephone a few days earlier.

When Sharpe rang Rickey’s cell phone, a stranger answered. It was Mary Olivea, a local craftswoman, speaking not from the motel but from her Santa Fe bungalow. Olivea, along with her husband Charles, a high-school teacher, had at one point put Rickey up in their home for a number of weeks. Soon after Rickey’s arrival in Santa Fe, she and Olivea had become fast friends.

Olivea had bad news to report. Beth Rickey had been found dead in her motel room.

* * *

Born into an affluent family in Lafayette, in the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country, Rickey quickly worked her way up in Republican circles. With an intellectual as well as a political bent, she took graduate courses at both the University of New Orleans and Tulane, and worked briefly as a college instructor at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Meanwhile, David Duke was attempting to establish himself as a statewide and national political figure.

Duke’s political career would see him run opportunistically for offices ranging from the state legislature to President of the United States, as a Democrat, a Republican, and a third-party candidate. In 1988 he made little impact as a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, finally garnering the nomination of the far-right Populist Party, in which capacity he garnered a few thousand votes nationwide. He caught Beth Rickey’s attention when he ran successfully for the state legislature as a Republican in 1989 from a suburban New Orleans district. Duke then jolted the state and national political establishments when he appeared to have a chance to win high elective office, first as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1990 against J. Bennett Johnston, garnering 43% of the vote against the incumbent. Then, in 1991, he qualified for a runoff primary for governor against the former incumbent, Edwin Edwards. With Edwards tainted by accusations of corruption, it appeared that Duke might have a serious chance to win, and the race attracted national media attention. Ultimately, Duke fell short of 40% of the vote in the runoff against Edwards, who was aided by the appearance of bumper stickers bearing the slogan “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important.” In these statewide races, Duke went down to defeat due to the overwhelming opposition of African-Americans; exit polls showed that he won a majority of the white vote both times.

By 1989, Rickey had won a seat on the Republican State Central Committee. She opposed Duke and worked in the campaign of John Treen, brother of former governor Dave Treen, who ended up having to fight the former Klansman in a runoff primary for a seat in the state House of Representatives. Duke ultimately captured the seat by a margin of a little more than 200 votes out of about 17,000 cast. The campaign was marked by mysterious last-minute rumors insinuating that John Treen was a child molester. Duke purchased 30 minutes of time on local television, two nights before the election, for an appearance in which he charged that Treen had an arrest record. The following year, upon encountering Duke at a state GOP conference, Treen would call him “a lying, character-assassinating son-of-a-bitch” to his face.

Rickey’s scrutiny of Duke intensified after the 1989 campaign. Her approach was to befriend and engage him while disguising her true intentions. In the spring of 1990 she traveled to Chicago, where Duke was appearing at a Populist Party convention, surreptitiously tape-recording his remarks. Subsequently, she visited Duke at his legislative office in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, where she discovered that he was running a hate-literature bookstore out of the office. Apparently, Duke was making money from the operation and did not want to give it up, even while he was attempting to paint himself as a conventional Reaganite.

Duke appeared to enjoy Rickey’s attentions. Those who have scrutinized him the most closely report that he fancies himself an intellectual. On top of that, he betrays a hubristic streak and an exaggerated sense of his persuasive powers. Apparently, he believes that there lurks an “inner white supremacist” in all white people, which can be brought out by a sufficient amount of argument and persuasion. He engaged in lengthy telephone calls to Rickey, which she tape-recorded. They would also meet for lunch. Duke apparently likes Chinese food; one newspaper account mentions the Ming Palace restaurant in Metairie as a favorite meeting place. Rickey told the producers of a 1992 PBS Frontline documentary on Duke: “I kept getting this sense that this is unreal…. He has no clue what he’s showing me is horrible. He’s sitting there saying: ‘Well, could you pass the noodles. Look! You see, Auschwitz was merely a rubber manufacturing plant,’ you know, that they didn’t exterminate anybody.”

David Duke on the gubernatorial campaign trail, 1991

Rickey attempted to bring the evidence she had gathered to the attention of local media, but, by and large, newspapers and television did not want to touch the story. Especially after Duke was elected to the state legislature, media in the area took a “let sleeping dogs lie” approach, fearing that Duke would feed upon overwrought condemnations. He had displayed a knack for turning hostile interviews to his advantage. Things began to change when it appeared that Duke might have a serious chance of being elected U. S. Senator or state governor. Rickey eventually joined with a group of local clergyman, activists and academics to form the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, in order to take the campaign against Duke to a new level. The group put together enough money to engage in advertising of its own, and eventually the mass media picked up on its activities. Investigative reporter and novelist Jason Berry reported that, by the time of the 1991 gubernatorial runoff primary, Edwards was benefiting from media reports about Duke, “a schemer whose record of Nazi apologetics was now being unearthed in huge scoops each day on the news.” (Duke continued to run for office periodically after 1991. Eventually he landed in Europe. He was expelled from the Czech Republic in 2009 on grounds of involvement in unlawful extremist activities. He now resides in Salzburg, Austria, and denies harboring any further political ambitions.)

Sadly, Beth Rickey was unable to establish much of a place for herself in the years from 1991 until her demise. Eventually, her health deteriorated. Interviews with friends, relatives and associates tell an unhappy but compelling story, although more comprehensive biographical research would be needed to fill in every detail. At a glance, the story almost writes itself, or so it would seem — a courageous woman sacrifices herself to take on a demagogue, and the experience damages her constitution so badly that it eventually takes her life. And, indeed, a case could be made for such a thing — but it must be stipulated that the evidence is somewhat mixed. Arguably, a succession of episodes contributed to her decline. Some of her friends and relatives claim that she was most seriously damaged by events that took place a considerable time after 1991.

Beth Rickey was indeed in a stressful situation from 1989 to 1991 — and psychological stress can have a deleterious effect on physical health. She herself thought she had been damaged by the episode. Shortly before her death, she told Sharpe that “that took a lot out of me, people calling me and threatening me…. I had been through a lot with the Duke situation, and I wanted to move away and try to get my head cleared up. I moved here [to Santa Fe] to kind of get away from the insanity that I had been through, and I had some health problems as a result.” Her political work required extensive travel between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, while at the same time she was before the public as a college instructor in Hammond. She became a lightning rod for attacks once she acquired a public reputation as an opponent of Duke, apparently provoking some white Louisianians into regarding her as a “race traitor”; the situation on the campus in Hammond, as well as at LSU in Baton Rouge, which she had to visit frequently, was especially difficult. Traveling by automobile, she would at times find herself “tailed” by strangers who eventually would try to run her off the road. In an article written for an academic anthology about Duke, she discussed her September 1989 attempt to have the Republican State Central Committee censure him. “I received a phone call that said if I get up in front of the committee tomorrow and move to censure Duke, the caller will put a bullet in my head.”

Did the experience affect her politics? The evidence is mixed, although it is clear she was a lifelong Republican; as a young woman, she was a dogged admirer of Goldwater and Reagan. It nevertheless was upsetting to her that so many of her co-partisans were drawn to Duke, whose views she found so repulsive. Lance Hill is a Tulane historian who now directs the university’s Southern Institute for Education and Research, an outgrowth of the efforts of the Coalition Against Racism, where he and his colleague Lawrence Powell met Rickey. Hill believes that Rickey became disillusioned and came to question her core beliefs as a result of the encounter with Duke. She would report that when she confronted GOP officials with evidence of Duke’s extremism, they retorted: “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Apparently, some of the Republicans believed that Duke could bring in voters, but ultimately could be controlled. Rickey came to be vilified and lost almost all her friends, except for some liberal Democrats and a few Republican “holdouts.”

Quin Hillyer, a native New Orleanean and friend of Rickey who now works as an editorial writer for the Washington Times, believes that his friend experienced no more than a brief flirtation with being a left-of-center Democrat. Hillyer reports that, in telephone conversations with Rickey near the end of her life, she would for instance complain about George W. Bush — but the complaints would come from the right of center, i.e., that Bush had tarnished the Republican reputation for fiscal responsibility. Bethany Bultman, who now directs the nonprofit New Orleans Musicians Clinic, knew Rickey socially. She recalls her friend as having been a centrist who held Bush in low regard and might well have voted for Barack Obama, but remained a Republican nevertheless. Mary and Charles Olivea, for their part, found themselves one of the few Republican couples in the liberal outpost of Santa Fe, and they found Rickey to be a rare political kindred spirit. A fair surmise, then, might be that as a result of her experiences she became less ideological over the course of her life, but nevertheless remained a conservative Republican to the end.

In any case, the encounter with David Duke would serve as the turning point of Beth Rickey’s life. “She did not have a strong constitution,” emphasizes Hill, who believes strongly that Rickey was damaged by the Duke episode. He recalls that at one point during the gubernatorial campaign she underwent something of a “blackout,” and in the aftermath lost all memory of one 24-hour period. Bultman agrees that she had been deeply harmed by the political process, and recalls that the threats on her life affected Beth mentally. Other friends and relatives, however, insist that her decline was accelerated by events that did not occur until a number of years after 1991. For instance, Quin Hillyer insists that “I don’t know of any ill health other than a little nervousness” before 1996. He believes that Rickey’s decline dates back to a political campaign in which she was involved that year.

She had been working in the campaign of David Thibodaux, one of the early Louisiana Republican politicians, who sought a congressional seat from a sprawling district including the cities of Lafayette and Lake Charles. Thibodaux, a colorful figure, was a Lafayette school board member and professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (subsequently renamed the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), where Beth had completed undergraduate and graduate degrees. He was the author of two books attacking “political correctness.” Under the “jungle primary” system in effect for congressional races in Louisiana at the time, Thibodaux faced several opponents, Democrats as well as Republicans, in the first round of voting.

David Thibodaux

Rickey had arranged to take a week off in the middle of the campaign for a church mission trip to Mexico. She fell ill upon her return with what would become a chronic condition that she attributed to an infection she must have picked up while visiting the Latin American country. The problem was that candidate Thibodaux became incapacitated at about the same time, due to a vehicle accident. (He would lose his life in a motorcycle accident in 2007.) Thibodaux spent the time between the accident and the primary convalescing, believing that he had a spot in the runoff primary sewn up. Rickey, who by now was suffering flulike symptoms, had to stand in for the candidate at scheduled personal appearances, fundraisers, and candidate forums.

Rickey’s difficulties were compounded when a lengthy recount became necessary to determine the qualifiers for the runoff primary. Democrat Chris John, who eventually would win the seat, was the clear first-place finisher. On election night, it was reported that Thibodaux had finished second by a margin of about 200 votes over third-place finisher Hunter Lundy, a Democrat from Lake Charles. A week later, a recount found Lundy ahead of Thibodaux by twelve votes. Controversy swirled for a few weeks, but Thibodaux eventually abandoned his challenge, with GOP resources being absorbed by a similar controversy over a U.S. Senate race that eventually saw Democrat Mary Landrieu elected to the upper chamber.

In the meantime, Rickey, still battling illness herself, had to represent the incapacitated Thibodaux as ballot boxes were opened at far-flung courthouses across the district. Hillyer recalls that at one point police pulled her over for erratic driving, finding her feverish and sweating profusely. Rickey explained the situation, which had been reported prominently in local media. The officers ended up giving her an escort to a rural courthouse.

After the 1996 campaign, Rickey’s personal situation deteriorated steadily. She wanted to live the life of a committed political activist and intellectual, but found it difficult to find a niche that would permit this. Although Rickey was wealthy, her friend Bultman mentions that “Beth had no concept of money” — and this would become more and more of an issue as the years passed. She was generous to a fault, and perhaps she came across as an easy mark to those who might take advantage of her. Her declining health made it more and more difficult for her to find and hold a job.

A cousin, Pat Rickey Tuecke, who now works as a consultant in Reno, Nevada, agrees with Hillyer in that she does not recall any deterioration in Beth’s health in the aftermath of the confrontation with David Duke. She believes that a major episode in Beth’s downturn was the death of her mother in Lafayette, around the year 2000. Beth lived in her mother’s house for a few months afterward, but eventually it had to be sold, and the resolution of the estate proved traumatic for her. She ended up splitting the proceeds of the house sale with her brother Rob, who now resides in the UK, and she also had income from some rental property, but she continued to have difficulty finding work. She landed at one point in Houma in the far south of Louisiana, where she worked briefly for a land-management company. A visit a to a cousin in Santa Fe became the first of several sojourns to the New Mexico capital, and for a time she did find work there. The climate in the Southwest seemed to agree with Beth, although she continued to have health problems. The area is home to a number of practitioners of alternative medicine, some of whom she consulted.

Hurricane Katrina proved to be another traumatic episode for Beth. By now she had returned to Lafayette from Santa Fe, and she was upset by the devastation suffered by the people of the area where she had spent most of her life. The sports arena at the University of Louisiana was turned into an emergency shelter, and Beth worked there as a volunteer. She also took a displaced family into her tiny apartment.

Beth Rickey spent the last few years of her life as something of a vagabond, living for weeks or months at a time in Santa Fe and various locations in Louisiana. At one point a relative arranged for her to enter a nursing home, but as a relatively young woman who relished her independence, Beth resisted this. Charles and Mary Olivea estimate that some thirty-odd individuals or families may have taken her in for a few weeks at a time during these years.

Beth’s last regular job arose from a political controversy in Louisiana in 2007, permitting her to to return to her home state for a time and draw upon some of the experiences and skills developed earlier in her life. She was hired by the central Louisiana town of Jena, which had become embroiled in what came to be known as the “Jena Six” controversy, arising from the prosecution of six black teenagers for the beating of a white classmate at the town’s high school. The town suffered a black eye from the ensuing media tempest, and Beth was given a contract to handle its public relations. Nevertheless, this did not amount to a permanent or full-time position for her. The controversy died down after a few months, and the contract was only a short-term one.

Bultman mentions that Beth did consult a psychiatrist at one point. According to Tuecke, she had been treated by a number of physicians in Lafayette whom she had come to trust. Nevertheless, she was unwilling to consult physicians on more than a sporadic basis, and it is unclear whether there ever was a definitive evaluation or diagnosis of her condition. Press reports at the time of her death mention Crohn’s disease, high blood pressure, and an immune disorder. Bronchial pneumonia was listed as the cause of death. An amateur medical diagnosis probably should not be offered, but her contemporaries describe symptoms evocative of any number of stress-related maladies, ranging from fibromyalgia to chronic fatigue syndrome. Beth was hospitalized periodically for weeks at a time, but eventually she would rally and check herself out. Bultman believes that she rather enjoyed being hospitalized, since at least in this setting people had to answer to her needs.

Home of Santa Fe high-school teacher Charles Olivea and craftswoman Mary Olivea, friends of Beth Rickey who at one point turned their living room over to her

Her behavior during these years revealed Beth Rickey to be a flawed heroine. She had been raised in a wealthy household that had employed servants. In her later years, those who took her in found that, at the very least, she was not much help with cooking and cleaning. Her hosts came to feel that she was taking advantage of them, and Beth wore out her welcome quickly. Beth displayed something of a Jekyll-and-Hyde pattern during these years. As ever, she could a times be an engaging conversationalist and the life of the party. When her symptoms became aggravated, however, she would issue commands along the lines of “I feel sick, you must do this for me.” Part of the problem was her medication schedule, or lack of same. Relocating as often as she did, she came to carry her possessions in a large mesh bag, in which she kept any number of prescription bottles. The drugs helped control her symptoms, but she did not take them on a regular dosing schedule, instead downing various medications when her symptoms flared up. Mary Olivea recalls that Beth became livid when she was offered a multi-compartmental pill organizer.

A sad but compelling portrait emerges of a talented and committed individual who nevertheless could not find an appropriate niche for herself. She talked at one point of entering a convent. Brought up as a Presbyterian, she converted to Roman Catholicism after having attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic high school located near Lafayette, although some of her contemporaries report that she was far from a regular churchgoer. Tragically, at the end of her life, friends from around the country were raising money to work out a stable living arrangement for her, and a philanthropist had come forward who was willing to foot much of the bill. The news that she had been found dead in a Santa Fe motel room leaves the impression that she had become destitute. In fact, although she had indeed gone through much of her money, she never lacked for health insurance coverage. The difficulty was that she was militant about maintaining her independence, and this made it difficult for her friends to help her. Furthermore, her life circumstances had not allowed her to develop certain coping skills, and some poor decisions exacerbated her difficulties. At the time of her death, there was money sitting in an account established for the sake of transitioning her into an assisted-living arrangement.

One detail of Beth Rickey’s life should not be neglected: Her uncle was Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive who integrated major league baseball with the signing of Jackie Robinson. This was a fact about herself that Beth was at the ready to bring up; along with her confrontation with David Duke, this made up her self-definition, determining in large part the way people reacted to her. She appears to had been brought up with a sense of noblesse oblige; she was to be the kind of person who would “step up” in a circumstance such as the David Duke situation.. A fair surmise might be that her conservatism was not exactly the same as that of many of her co-partisans.

Silver Saddle Motel in Santa Fe, where Beth Rickey was found dead in September 2009

Beth Rickey, then, was a flawed heroine, but a heroine nonetheless. History will note that she had a hand in saving Louisiana from what would have been the debacle of a David Duke governorship, which might well have turned the Pelican State into a national and international pariah, with untold consequences for outside investment and economic development. Whatever conclusions one wishes to draw about the role of the David Duke episode in her eventual decline, it is clear that she was the sort of individual who put herself in the firing line on more than one occasion. The thought occurs that it is regrettable that she did not get to live out a normal lifespan. On the other hand, if sense can be made of the notion that she was fated to confront David Duke, and if indeed this contributed to her demise, given the weakness of her physical constitution, then perhaps it can be said that her life inevitably was cut short by the task she was put on earth to carry out.

Perhaps the last word can be given to Tulane professor Lawrence Powell, Beth Rickey’s colleague in the Coalition Against Racism. When contacted by the Washington Post on the occasion of Rickey’s death, he told the paper: “She was what down here we call a stand-up dame.”

Protest sign on ranchland adjacent to Colorado Highway 109 between La Junta and Kim

The town of Kim, Colorado — population 65, as of the 2000 census — sits in the middle of the short-grass prairie of southeast Colorado. There is at least a hint of winter in the air on a hazy, drizzly, overcast mid-October day, with temperatures hovering just above freezing. “You just never can tell, Colorado weather,” says Kim resident Lon Robertson. “It’ll be 60° one day, 20° the next.”

Robertson makes his living by ranching — his property lies about 15 miles west of town — and also by operating Kim’s most prominent business, the Kim Outpost, a general store that might remind tenderfoots of the shops patronized by their grandparents. The cash register sits on a counter just in front of a small but serviceable short-order kitchen. Just down the counter lie stacks of literature and petitions, rendering the Kim Outpost something of a beehive of political activity — if a town this size can be said to harbor such a thing. The material pertains to a matter that may strike the uninitiated as obscure — the Piñon Canyon expansion controversy. Robertson’s store serves as a sort of informal headquarters for the Piñon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition.

Lon Robertson's store, the Kim Outpost

Along with other ranchers in the area, Robertson fears that his ranchland may be seized by the U.S. Army via eminent domain. “Having fought this, and understanding how [the Army is] approaching it, I think we’re all at risk,” Robertson says of his fellow ranchers. “We can see the maneuver site from our house.”

The controversy involves the possible expansion of the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, which occupies about a quarter-million acres, just outside of Kim and less than an hour’s drive southeast of Pueblo. Northwest of the maneuver site, across Interstate 25, lies the Army’s Fort Carson complex, which extends to the outskirts of Colorado Springs. The maneuver site was established in the 1980s, in an initiative that has been described as the largest use of eminent domain in American history. According to the Army’s opponents, promises were made at the time that the site would not be expanded, and that maneuvers would not involve live fire. These and other promises eventually were broken — contributing to an atmosphere of profound mistrust between the military and area ranchers.

Bumper sticker on back of Lon Robertson's pickup, of a type seen frequently in southeast Colorado

This antagonism was heightened in 2004, when a map purporting to show the Army’s future expansion plans was leaked and circulated in the area. The document suggested that the Army had designs upon a huge corner of southeast Colorado bounded roughly by Interstate 25 and U. S. Highways 50 and 350, east of the town of Trinidad, just north of the New Mexico line, and south of Lamar, just to the west of the boundary with Kansas. This area encompasses nearly 7 million acres. In response to public opposition, Army representatives announced that the size of the proposed expansion would be scaled back — first to 400,000 acres, and then, in 2008, to no more than 100,000 acres. The concessions did little to mollify area residents or win the trust of the ranchers. Visitors to the area will note public expressions of opposition in the form of bumper stickers, placards in storefronts, and “Not 4 Sale” signs on prominent display wherever highways run through ranchland. Organized opposition takes the form of the Opposition Coalition and a newer, smaller group loosely associated with it, known as Not 1 More Acre.

The matter has become something of an issue in Colorado politics at the state level. By and large, it pits the city of Colorado Springs against rural and small-town Colorado, including but not limited to the state’s southeast corner. Opinion on the issue is divided along party lines up to a point, with Republicans inclined to support the military while Democrats side with ranchers and environmentalists. Republicans, however, are somewhat internally divided over the question, with libertarians and property-rights activists taking the side of the ranchers.

The city of Colorado Springs is the major base of support for expansion of the maneuver site. The city is a military town, home to Fort Carson, two Air Force bases, NORAD headquarters, and the United States Air Force Academy. Several defense contractors with operations in the city would stand to benefit from expansion of the maneuver site. Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn represents Colorado’s fifth congressional district, which consists in the main of metropolitan Colorado Springs. “Our strong military presence has served as an invaluable asset to our troops with training, readiness, and preparation to fight the Global War on Terrorism. In addition, it has benefited our local economy. Currently, the expansion of the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site is a delicate issue, but it is vital to better training for our soldiers as they train to fight the battles of the 21st Century,” a statement on Lamborn’s website reads.

Window placard, Mid-Town Motel, La Junta, CO

The state’s Democratic delegation in Congress, including both senators and five representatives, has sided with the ranchers. The southeast corner of the state, the area caught up in the expansion controversy, is divided between the fourth congressional district, represented by Betsy Markey, and the third district, served by John Salazar. Salazar in particular has been outspoken in support of the ranchers. “I cannot support taking land from my constituents, many of whom have been working the same land for generations,” he told the weekly Colorado Statesman.

The state is gearing up for a November 2010 gubernatorial election, with party primaries scheduled for August. Incumbent Democratic governor Bill Ritter will be seeking reelection, while, for the moment, his strongest Republican challenger appears to be former congressman Scott McInnis. With support from Colorado Springs looming as vital for success in the GOP primary, McInnis has staked out a position in support of the maneuver site expansion. McInnis’s main primary opponent had been state senator Josh Penry of Grand Junction, who has opposed the expansion, but Penry withdrew from the race as this report was being prepared. Media reports indicate that firebrand former congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo may jump into the race. During his congressional career, Tancredo sided with the ranchers and opposed the expansion.

Legislative initiatives pertaining to the expansion have been floated in both Denver and Washington. In June, Ritter signed into law House Bill 1317, which prohibits the State Land Board from selling or leasing state land adjacent to the maneuver site to the Army. McInnis and Lamborn  opposed the bill, which had the support of Penry and of most Democrats. “I am extremely disappointed in Governor Ritter’s decision to sign HB 1317,” Lamborn declared in a statement posted to his official website. “It’s very troubling that the Governor would agree to a discriminatory policy that lets land board property be used for any purpose except for the soldiers defending our freedom.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, Salazar has succeeded in attaching a year-to-year budget moratorium on any expenditures for expansion of the maneuver site since the 2008 fiscal year. An effort to enact a permanent ban was defeated in the House Armed Services Committee in June. In this case, Lamborn prevailed over Salazar and his ally on the committee, Sylvester Reyes of Texas, with the Colorado Springs Republican persuading several Democrats to oppose the permanent prohibition. “I knew the issue a lot better and I had principles on my side,” Lamborn told the Denver Post.

Landscape as seen from Colorado Highway 109 between Kim and La Junta, of a sort the U. S. Army appears to feel is typical of Iraq or Afghanistan

In September, the Not 1 More Acre group secured a ruling from U. S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch declaring the Army’s 2007 environmental study of the proposed expansion to be inadequate. Matsch found the study vague, having failed to acknowledge environmental damage from previous training maneuvers. (As this report was being prepared, the Army announced that it would appeal the ruling.) As the lawsuit proceeded, the ranchers obtained a copy of a plan to annex the maneuver site to Fort Carson — which might have allowed the Army to bypass the spending moratorium. The Army denied having approved the plan.

Both environmentalists and historic preservationists are concerned about the implications of expansion of the site, which ultimately could include portions of the historic Santa Fe Trail. Congressman Lamborn has stated: “At the current maneuver site, cultural artifacts have been carefully studied, protected and preserved. The Army expend substantial resources to protect rock art, Native American artifacts and fossils. Additionally, it fences off areas to prevent training in culturally and biologically sensitive areas.” Nevertheless, Harry Myers, who acts as manager of the Santa Fe Trail Association from his home in the New Mexico capital, is concerned that the Army may not have lived up to previous commitments in this respect. Citing reports from area residents, he claims: “From what we’ve heard … about areas that the Army has taken over [already] … it sounds like they’re not taking care of the cultural resources like they should be. If portions of the trail come under the Army’s ownership, we’d be concerned…. There’s not a whole lot of trust there, as to what the Army is doing with the cultural resources that it has now.”

Larry Daves, an attorney with Colorado Legal Services in the town of La Junta, just northeast of the maneuver site, emphasizes the environmental sensitivity of the area. Especially in the light of recent drought conditions, there is little if any grass to protect the soil from being destroyed by heavy equipment. “The ranchers out here are so aware of the sensitivity of the land that they don’t even go on the land with any sort of vehicle — they use horses,” he points out. “This land is not going to be well used by the military. In fact, it will be destroyed, and our whole history and culture will be destroyed.” Daves agrees with Myers about the historic-preservation concerns. “There are still places in this part of the state where you can see the wagon trails from 150 years ago.”

Entrance to the maneuver site from U. S. Highway 350 between Kim and Trinidad

These concerns are shared not only by white-collar, college-educated activists, but the residents of southeast Colorado as a whole — especially the ranchers. One reason that public sympathy in the area lies with the ranchers is an awareness that many if not most of those in danger of losing their property have had the ranchland in their families for four, five, or even six generations. “I’m a fourth-generation person here are living on this same place — there’s a lot of fifth- and sixth-generation people. It’s not like we’re here, and then we found a better deal and we move on. We’re here for the long haul, and money doesn’t — the amount of money they would offer me for my place, it doesn’t matter. It’s not for sale,” says Mac Louden of Branson, Colorado, just north of the New Mexico line, a board member of the Not 1 More Acre organization.

“I have stated publicly that if my ranch needed to be used, to save the United States — they wouldn’t have to buy it, I’d give it to them. But you’ve got to convince me that that’s the case,” says Louden, voicing a sentiment expressed frequently throughout the region. Ranchers and area residents cite the tens of millions of acres owned by the military and the federal government as a whole in the western United States in questioning why this particular region, which they assert is vital to beef production and “food security” for the nation as a whole, must be appropriated at this time. Furthermore, the notion that the terrain of the region resembles that of Iraq or Afghanistan is met with considerable skepticism. “I went back and read the literature — back in the ’80s, what they said was that this area — they wanted that area because it resembles Germany, where there is most likely to be a land war,” says Daves with a chuckle. Jim Montoya, a county commissioner and sixth-generation resident of Trinidad, adjacent to the maneuver site, claims that at least some of the terrain on the original site proved to be too wet for tank-warfare training. “When the first expansion took place, a portion of it … they had to give back some of the land, it was just too wet — it wasn’t even useful for what they were doing.”

Lamborn has stated that he seeks a “win-win” solution to the site expansion controversy. In the wake of a Wall Street Journal article on the matter, Lamborn issued a statement that was published in the paper’s letters section in July. The letter cites a statement by Assistant Secretary of the Army Keith Eastin: “The Army will only deal with willing sellers.” The congressman concluded: “If the Army only wants to deal with willing sellers, why should the governor or anyone else step in to hinder the expansion?”

A semi-trailer is converted into a protest billboard alongside U. S. Highway 385 at Campo in far southeast Colorado, just north of the Oklahoma Panhandle

The problem is that, according to ranchers and other residents of southeast Colorado, a “willing seller” is a creature that has rarely if ever been sighted. The WSJ article mentioned that “willing sellers are in short supply,” but Lamborn stated flatly that “there are definitely some out there, and they should have the right to sell their land to whomever they want.” He is contradicted by Daves: “We don’t think there are any willing sellers…. We’ve had meeting after meeting, dozens and dozens of meetings here over the last few years — I have never seen a willing seller.” Newspaper reports have mentioned an absentee landlord from Denver with a large holding in the area who may be willing to sell, but, according to Daves, “Anytime he’s publicly asked about it, [he] says he’s not interested in selling, because he doesn’t want to make the adjacent landowners mad…. As far as we know, we haven’t publicly seen anybody who is a willing seller.”

Area ranchers speak of diminished property values, disrupted lives and an inability to plan for the future, with uncertainty about the site expansion hanging over the area. “A lot of those ranchers are fearful that if they put in new fences, new water systems, or build a new barn — it’s all in vain. The Army [doesn't] give you any extra for all your improvements…. Just the fear of this expansion has put a hold on a lot of economic [activity] … through ranchers not purchasing infrastructure for their ranches and farms anymore,” says Montoya. He speaks of the owner of a small propane business in Kim who attempted to sell his operation, only to have the deal fall through when the prospective buyer heard of the maneuver-site controversy.

Daves says that the Army is “continuing to unnerve everybody down here…. The military has just gone too far. It wants too much. It’s really more of an issue of a huge federal government not being sensitive about what their policies are…. I think they insulted these folks, too. You read the original proposal that the Army sent to the Department of Defense to justify it — they said, ‘Here’s why we think this thing’ll pass here — these people are extremely patriotic, there’s a very small number of these folks down here that are affected by this thing, they have gone through a prolonged drought which has devalued their property, and as a result of that we think there won’t be organized opposition’ — they just were dead wrong.”

Reverse side of the Campo semi-trailer protest billboard

For the moment, no one can say when or whether the Army will move forward with any expansion plans it may be harboring. For his part, third-district congressman Salazar appears confident that he has staved off any further expropriation for the time being, although he was unable to secure a permanent funding ban. A spokesman for Salazar told the Denver Post in June that “we have concluded that Piñon Canyon is off the table for the foreseeable future” — with “foreseeable future” interpreted to mean the next 5 to 10 years. (The spokesman offered the caveat that “he might change his mind if the Army renewed its push.”) In La Junta, attorney Daves appears to share the optimism of Salazar’s office, at least up to a point. In the wake of the state legislature’s passage of HB 1317, Daves insists that “we think we’ve created a constitutional impediment to them moving forward [through] eminent domain proceedings, or with any voluntary purchases of property, unless they get the state legislature to agree….. I don’t think there’s a federal judge in the country that’s going to allow them … they have to follow the [environmental impact] process, they’re going to have to follow the U.S. Constitution, when it comes to either buying or taking the land. There’s not a federal judge around here that’s going to let them annex what they can’t purchase.”

On the other hand, in some quarters there is wariness, and a suspicion that the Army, in the face of resistance in the form of the state legislature’s actions and the formation of organized opposition groups, may make its move before opposition stiffens further. In Trinidad, Montoya estimates that “the Army is probably going to make an attempt — I would think it probably won’t happen until the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 — as far as trying to really push this forward.” Louden expresses confidence that the expansion has been stymied for the time being, but he worries at the same time that area ranchers could at any moment become the victims of backroom dealing in Congress. “On the whim of some appropriation in somebody’s district, all of this could change. I hate to be that cynical, but what happens a lot of times in Congress is — ‘Hey, I’ve got something you want, but you’ve got to give me something I want, so let’s go ahead and sacrifice the people of southeastern Colorado, because this would be good for my district [somewhere].”

From a wider perspective, one could speculate that the ranchers of southeast Colorado may end up paying a price for the far-flung, worldwide operations of the United States military, especially its interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the absence of conscription and other measures that would put the entire population of the country on a more serious war footing, it is arguable that the high costs of these interventions have been paid by a small number of people. It may be something of a caricature to represent the all-volunteer forces as being made up entirely of poor people, but traditionally military service has been used by the disadvantaged as a lever of economic opportunity — which would be characterized in some quarters as “economic conscription.” An outright return to a military draft might be opposed by “the brass” as carrying with it the chance of provoking political opposition. In the meantime, numerous reports have indicated that interventions in the Middle East have pushed American forces to the point of exhaustion, with personnel serving repeated tours of duty on the basis of “stop-loss orders” — the so-called “backdoor draft.” And while battlefield medicine has improved, along with improved logistics that allow the injured to be airlifted quickly to military hospitals in Europe, this means that some who might have been killed during the Vietnam War now survive despite horrific injuries. Are the ranchers of southeast Colorado in something of the same boat?

Small-town and rural America usually is not thought of as a hotbed of antiwar sentiment, and, indeed, opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a leap that the people of southeast Colorado by and large have not made. Many ranchers are veterans themselves, or count their parents or grandparents as veterans. “There are a number of kids from this area that have gone into military service and are still there. We have several young people from this area that have gone to Iraq and served two or three [tours]. So, they’re playing a part, even though they know this Piñon Canyon thing is out there,” says Robertson. Rhetoric can become heated in the midst of political controversy, and there have been instances in which politicians who support the expansion have questioned the loyalty of opponents. With few if any exceptions, however, the people of the Piñon Canyon region, even those most vehemently opposed to the maneuver-site expansion, are quick to express their support for the troops.

American agricultural production, after all, is highly energy-intensive, and the agricultural sector of southeast Colorado depends on being able to put fuel in the tanks of its vehicles at least as much as in any other corner of the country. Not every American military intervention may amount to a “war for oil,” but the country’s military establishment exists, in part at least, to help maintain the flow of resources, including fossil fuels, so that the world economy is not disrupted. Other things equal, it might be desirable for America to back away from its global military presence, but this does not appear to be in the offing for the short to intermediate term, given the power vacuum that it might create.

In any case, venality need not be assumed on the part of either party to the Piñon Canyon dispute. The ranchers wish to continue to work the land that in so many cases has been in their families for generations, but at the same time Colorado Springs desires further economic development. To decision-makers in Washington, either in Congress or at the Pentagon, Colorado consists largely of metropolitan Denver, with even municipalities the size of Colorado Springs taking a back seat; southeast Colorado will be nearly invisible to them, an impression which is confirmed by automobile travel through the thinly populated area. A matter such as this rarely makes it all the way to the Oval Office, and it may fairly be doubted whether either George W. Bush or Barack Obama has ever heard of Piñon Canyon.

The thought might occur that with the advent of the Obama administration, determined as it is to show a less bellicose face to the rest of the world (at least rhetorically), there might be less urgency on the part of the military to take such steps as the seizure of property in the Piñon Canyon area. At the same time, the administration is unlikely to withdraw precipitously from Afghanistan. As with so many other matters in a complex society, the fate of some individuals lies in the hands of faraway decision-makers who may have little awareness of their predicament.

In the meantime, the ranchers of southeast Colorado can only wait pensively….

After several weeks of blog posts and press reviews, I’m pleased to present what I hope will be the first of many interviews and features on the site.

The April 4, 2007 incident in which “shock-jock” Don Imus described members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos” quickly spiraled into a surreal episode in the history of American race relations, at once sad and amusing. Michael Awkward, Gayl A. Jones Collegiate Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture  at the University of Michigan, is a thinker of progressive inclinations who at the same time seeks to avoid excesses of so-called “correctness.” He is the author of Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), a work in which he attempts to place the episode in the broadest possible context and give all the participants their due, for better or worse.

I spoke to Prof. Awkward by telephone in late October, from his home in Ann Arbor.

DC: You were a regular listener and/or viewer of the Imus program going back to the year 2000 or so?

MA: Yeah, that’s right.

Michael Awkward

DC: You mention that you sympathized with Imus, because in your academic work you deal with feminist issues and you would meet with feminists at conferences and in your work — who took the attitude that  “a good man was hard to find” and they weren’t quite sure you were it?

MA: I’m not sure to what extent that has to do with me sympathizing with Imus. I think as much as anything else, I was trying to speak about a moment in my life when I had developed more of an antiauthoritarian attitude than I had had previously, in terms of the work that I was doing and I think that I was a little frustrated with certain things that were going on professionally and personally and in other areas and it was useful and interesting and maybe even refreshing to some degree or another, to encounter at that moment somebody with the predilictions toward those kind of impulses that Imus himself had, so I think that there was a kind of sympathy on my part with regard to my own thinking about things and his.

DC:    Sure. In the sense of not making concessions too quickly to so-called correctness.

MA:    Well, I just, I think I had always tried to some degree to figure out what worked and what didn’t work, what seemed to be a function of people’s limited ideas about things and what seemed to actually be true and I did it in my work with regard to my engagement with feminism, which I fully embrace and accept, but there were also moments and times when I realized that I was being asked to capitulate to certain kinds of attitudes that I didn’t really necessarily fully feel, so I think that there was a kind of element, always, in me that wanted to push the ideology that I was concerned with a little bit further and I was just interested in the ways that Imus, pushed all sorts of boundaries.

DC:    Going back to the  April 4, 2007, incident . . . . It didn’t look as though you ever had any contact with Imus or McGuirk or McCord or any of his employers, MSNBC or WABC, did you?

MA:    Not at all. Maybe for 3 or 4 years or so, I contributed to his charities. . . . More recently, I became an Imus Insider [Actually, "Inside Imus" -- paid subscription to broadcast archive, podcasts, email -- DC] because between the time the show went off of the air and the time that my book came out, I hadn’t really paid a whole lot of attention, except in the newspaper articles, to what was going on, –  it just wasn’t easily available, but now I’m an Imus Insider, so I get to check on his Web site and listen to segments of the program or all of it, if I really want to. . . . But no, I haven’t really talked to any of those people.

DC:    It looked as though you had done some research or were able to dig some information up about what goes on at the program behind the scenes. Can you speak about that, about what you were able to find out?

MA:    Maybe I’m not particularly understanding your question, but just in terms of what I’ve read and what they allow us to know in terms of the minimal interviews that they did, of course, when the incident happened and the show had been taken off the air, Bernard McGuirk started appearing on television as himself in ways that he hadn’t before and so . . . .

DC:    Yeah, I remember one or two appearances on Hannity and Colmes in particular . . . .

MA:    . . . . So I have a sense of what goes on in the show, but largely it comes from what Imus himself talks about or what they talk about on the air. And I’ve read some books and read some interviews and some articles about it, but that’s basically what I know.

DC:    There may be some things viewers and listeners, including yours truly, may have been naive about. For one thing, I notice you describe the incident in question, the exchange between Imus and McGuirk, as a skit . . . .  I can recall seeing a Congresswoman on one of the cable TV networks, a week or two after the incident, mentioning that she thought the remark was premeditated or at least prerehearsed, but  — would the prerehearsal, as far as you know, have consisted of anything more than maybe a brief conversation the night before or that morning before the thing aired?

MA:    The only thing that I could imagine that would have happened is that there was some — and this is just pure speculation on my part — but some discussion on Imus’s part about what he had watched the night before. It does seem as though there was some agreement on their part that they were going to comment on that bit, that segment of the news or of the sports, but whether or not it went any further than that, I’m not really sure. A lot of times it just seems as though what they are doing is sort of freeform responding to what the other says. Whether or not that happened in this case, I don’t really know, I’m just speculating, but it appeared to be the case. And the other thing that was just absolutely clear to me is that, um, when I was looking at and listening to the skit again, there was this sense that somebody had decided that they were going to bring up the Spike Lee film, that they were going to bring up other issues that were then addressed there, but that Imus himself wasn’t aware enough or informed enough about what was going on to be able to actually play his part. [Imus responded to producer Bernard McGuirk's use of the terms "Jigaboos" and "Wannabes" to refer to the Rutgers and Tennessee players respectively. Co-host Charles McCord attributed this vocabulary to Lee's Do the Right Thing -- whereas in fact it was School Daze that portrayed a battle between young women who conformed broadly to these stereotypes. -- DC] They had to keep feeding him lines.

DC:    You mentioned he wasn’t really well-prepared for what they were going to do . . . .

MA:    From what I could tell, the nature of his responses and affect, it seemed as though they were trying to remind him of things that they might have mentioned to him before the show, but he just didn’t know — he was pretending in all sorts of ways, a kind of knowledge and hipness with regard to urban culture, film culture, and a lot of other things that he never really manifested at least as far as I can tell, with regard to Black culture.

DC:    Well, I have heard his audience skews toward older white males, so he may be hipper than his audience but maybe not hip enough for what he was trying to do on the day, I guess.

MA:    What I’ve seen subsequently is that the demographic they’re trying to reach and probably were trying to reach by responding to the skit in the ways that they were, was the sort of 25- to 49 demographic but  . . . .

DC:    A younger audience.

MA:    Yeah, but I suspect that — he talks about this a lot and right before the show started airing on [Fox Business Network], he gave a couple of interviews and he talked about the fact that what they were hoping to do was to increase their audience — but he knew that mainly the audience was readers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and I don’t suspect that that audience consists very much of people under the age of 30, so. . .

DC:    Were you tuned in when the incident happened that morning?

MA:    No. No, I wasn’t. I read about it in the newspaper.

DC:    Actually, I think I was, but I wasn’t paying attention fully. . . .  One thing that you mentioned that I wasn’t really hip to and many other viewers and listeners may have not been — was that when they did the skit, they altered the tone of their voices so that, in effect, they were doing the skit in blackface. They were trying to mimic young, urban, African American males.

MA:    As I tried to talk about in the book, Bernie McGuirk, the producer, does that all the time. He does it less, I suspect, these days than he used to, but he used to come on the air in character, not necessarily in blackface obviously, but mimicking the voices of certain kinds of, certain famous blacks who . . . .

DC:    [New Orleans Mayor] Ray Nagin, for quite a while . . . .

MA:    Yeah, Ray Nagin, Maya Angelou, and a couple of other people, and he does it a lot and Imus does it a little bit but mainly in terms of that, “Yo, baby,” — those sorts of formulations. And so it seemed to me that that was the best way to think about they were trying to do, not that they were speaking for themselves but they were trying to approximate what they that thought young Blacks would think about looking at the women who were on the Rutgers women’s basketball team as they were running up and down the court. But it’s just not clear to me that it would be possible to imagine that Imus really cared that much about the appearance of those women. I don’t think that he was thinking about them much at all. I think that they were trying to figure out some way to make the story interesting to their viewers and they did it in the way that they often do things, by offering, just obviously, to some degree or another, sexist remarks, but remarks that responded to specifically what they saw as the appearance of the women that they saw who were running up and down the court, so . . . .

DC:    Well, what happened was that, obviously, he thought he could say this and not be misunderstood but he was wrong. In this case, it went a little bit over the line.

MA:    Well, I think that part of what happened was — it’s interesting, in large part because of the book but, and in part because I’m sort of very vaguely fascinated with regard to Imus, I’ve continued to read things about him and it’s, it’s interesting that, that part of what he’s tried to do recently is to move away from a kind of defense of his statement that he started to make in the beginning of the controversy. He was trying to insist that people needed to understand him and his show in context and he said that, at the very least, they needed to understand that what the show does, which was to, as he keeps saying, and he’s started to say even more recently, to revel in other people’s misfortunes. And what I think he’s started to do is to, what he tried to do immediately, was to say, if you understand who I am and who this show is, what this show is about, you’ll understand that there was no malice intended. You’ll understand that this is just our attempt at humor that went awry. More recently, though, he’s been saying that that’s not the case. He’s been saying that he said something that he shouldn’t have said, he said something that was over the line and that he  insulting people who weren’t in the position to defend themselves and people who weren’t big enough in the culture to have justified his comments in the ways that he made them. And so there’s a kind of 180 that he’s been taking with regard to what he said. I think he made a promise to the girls on the Rutgers basketball team, the young women on the team, that he was never going to say anything that, that made them think that they shouldn’t have accepted his apology and I think he’s trying to stick to that, even to the extent that he’s sort of reversed himself on whether or not it was acceptable or understandable that he had said what he said.

DC:    Do you reckon bringing Tony Powell and Karith Foster onto the program, and guests like Deborah Dickerson, is that panning out the way it ought to, do you think? Have you followed it closely?

MA:    I know that Karith Foster is no longer on the show for whatever reason — I haven’t tried to figure out precisely why, I never actually saw her on the show. Tony Powell is on the show and he seems to have fit in with what I think of as the sort of “old boys network” that he and McGuirk and Charles McCord and Rob Bartlett have — there’s just this sort of way in which he seemed to be more comfortable with regard to what’s going on there, I suspect, than Foster was, but clearly there’s been a turn toward talking more seriously about racial issues. He had Dick Gregory on the program, Carl Jeffers seems to be frequently on, and of course Deborah Dickerson, who seems to have been on there every 2 or 3 months or so, so there’s at least a willingness on his part to engage certain kinds of issues, but there remains the desire or the need to keep the show at least in part what it was. I was watching part of it today and Tony Powell was making light of the problem that became somewhat newsworthy, that a former colleague of Imus’s on MSNBC — I think it was Contessa Brewer — mistook Jesse Jackson for Al Sharpton and she called him Reverend Al Sharpton and so they made light of that and they had Tony Powell imitating Jesse Jackson and making fun of her and making fun of the issues and making fun of Jackson and Al Sharpton at the same time and so there’s still this desire to keep that element of the show but also, at least in terms of his interviews with people, which tend to be, like all of his other interviews, both serious and played for fun in a kind of way. So it’s become a part of the issue of race and race relations, especially as it relates to the President and people’s responses to him, seems to have become a regular part of the inquiry that’s going on in that show.

DC:    When the incident happened, having watched the show, having followed it for as long as you have, about every weekday morning, I had hoped at the time that a way could be found to save the show — it turned out that he had to go away for a few months, whereas, for a week or two, I had my fingers crossed that something could be done to save it. It became apparent, eventually, that he did have to go away for a while. I noticed there was this sense of, you could almost call it fury, especially among college-educated African American professionals, they took this incident to mean — “Whatever we do, we’re still going to be treated like menials.” And you have mentioned, I think –  you don’t know whether that was really appropriate. At the same time, it’s as though African Americans are trauma survivors and they have an almost instinctive reaction when something like this happens.

MA:    One of the things that Imus himself said in discussions on his show right before it got taken off of the air was that he had talked to . . .  the pastor who had been connected, to some degree or another, with the women on the Rutgers basketball team, who was also a mover, a shaker, in northern New Jersey, and this pastor told him that blacks often, if not always, and again, this is not a direct quote, had the sort of suspicion about the level of racism that white people feel and that when we are always expecting whites to say something or do something to demonstrate that they have this innate racism that they cannot shake and that they spend a lot of time hiding. And when incidents like this happen, these incidents confirm these beliefs that blacks have. So that was at least in part what Imus learned or was told in response to this and I do suspect, in a lot of ways, that this is the case — that there is a kind of fear and suspicion, maybe not so much person to person, but person to institution, to large groups of whites, where there is this sort of fear that the racism that used to be expressed in a kind of institutional and overt way is still there and is still lurking in the hearts of whites but that whites are hiding it. So part of what I was trying to do, to some degree, is to figure out why this incident mattered so much to so many people. Why so many blacks thought this was, given all the problems that are going on in the nation and going on in black communities, going on in inner cities, why this incident seemed to matter so much to them, and the best that I could come up with in terms of an explanation, the best way that I thought that I could understand it had to do with the fact that at the very least we live in a nation where there’s never been a kind of formal acknowledgement, formal apology, formal recognition of the fact that slavery happened, that what followed slavery was 100 more years of terrible oppression and terrible mistreatment of black people. And so a part of what I was trying to figure out is that how, in the context of those historical facts, do black people then enter into the nation in the ways that other minority groups are able to do, the ways that other immigrants are able to do, and feel safe and protected in the place that claims that it’s the sort of model of democracy for the world. And so I think that, at the very least in terms of my argument, part of what I see happening in the Imus incident and in a number of other incidents, is that they become a kind of way for people to recognize and to comment upon and to reflect upon the nature of their marginalization within the country that is historical and that they see these moments as kind of confirmation of the fact that things haven’t changed significantly or haven’t changed enough and that people still don’t recognize the problems that blacks face. Whether or not it was, I mean it seemed to me that it was an overreaction. It seemed to me that it was uninformed or misinformed and it seemed to me that people did not think very much about the context but that they wanted a victory. They wanted a demonstration that somebody who could be said to have said something that was racist and sexist could be brought low as a consequence of the response of decent people to it and it seemed to me that that’s what was happening as much as anything else. It didn’t seem to me that the hurt that people claimed to be feeling as a consequence of that — at least as far as I understood in the conversations I had with people — it didn’t seem that the hurt that was that much connected with what they believed that Imus was saying or doing, but it was connected more to the sort of sense of national and racial hurt that they were feeling.

DC:    You have written, if I may paraphrase you, there’s an agenda between white and black Americans. There are some matters hanging out there that are still unresolved between black and white Americans, but what happens is that we seize upon incidents such as this one with Imus and that’s not quite an appropriate way to resolve it.

MA:    I think it does nothing to solve the problem. I think what it does is to pretend as though, what whites are able to do in this instance, is to say, “Look, one of the people in our midst is a bad guy. We should get rid of him.” The people in Newsweek, the people who used to appear on his shows, said, “We were always ambivalent about appearing on his show but we did it because it was good for us in a kind of way,” and so they were able to locate in him all of the bad things that they think that blacks and other people think about people like Imus. He’s a racist, he’s not, he’s into this sort of progressive consciousness that we manifest and demonstrate all the time, so he needs to be exorcised in a kind of way and that blacks are able to confirm in their responses to Imus the notions that they think whites or at least many whites have, and so, by identifying Imus as The Bad Guy, what both progressive whites and blacks were able to do is to say, “We’ve seen the problem, we’ve cut it out of our midst, and we will now, as a consequence, move on” –whereas the sort of underlying problems, the underlying pressures and tensions and the difficulties having to do with the history of race in America don’t really, as a consequence of that kind of effort, get addressed at all.

DC:    Of course, the Imus incident wasn’t really the only such incident. Right now, the biggest issue seems to have to do with whether Rush Limbaugh ought to have been able to buy ownership of the NFL St. Louis Rams. I don’t think that’s quite at the level of the Imus incident.

MA:    No, it’s because he’s such a lightning-rod figure. For a little while, I watched — I don’t know how long it was, Rush Limbaugh had a show that was on CBS in Philadelphia. It started at 6 o’clock in the morning and I watched it a bit and I read about him but I’ve never actually listened to him so I don’t quite honestly know a whole lot about him except what other people have to say about him, but I know that in all sort of ways, he’s a kind of lightning rod, that he says all kinds of things that people . . . that a number of people who are on the left believe are racist in their constructions and in their intent — the most I know quite honestly, besides these little sound bites and his jokingly, I think, talking about Obama as the dancing Negro [Actually, "Barack the magic Negro" -- DC] during the campaign and his discussion of Donovan McNab during his ill-fated and fortunately short-lived time on ESPN’s [NFL] pregame show — I know about those incidents, but I don’t suspect that the question of whether or not Rush Limbaugh should own or partially own an NFL team really concerns much of anybody at all except Rush Limbaugh and the people who support him, and clearly, there are millions and millions of people who do. But I guess there’s a question for somebody who’s so directly involved in and seen as a leader of a political party, should that sort of person be a part of a sports organization that’s trying to serve everybody. I, to be quite honest with you, I’ve never thought about it much before this. I mean, I do know that the person who wound up being the [43rd] president, used to be the owner of the Texas Rangers and that was never an issue or a problem for him, so . . .  I don’t know, I’m utterly agnostic about the question of whether or not Rush Limbaugh ought to have been an owner or a partial owner of an NFL team but it certainly is the case that there are — it became a controversy and I know on WABC’s Web site there is this . . . [link] where you can read Rush Limbaugh’s response to the efforts on the part of people to keep him out of the NFL. [The link appears to have been removed from the WABC website, but readers may click here to read Limbaugh's Wall Street Journal op-ed on the matter. -- DC]

DC:  You discuss the matter of reparations, but you are not quite as enthusiastic about reparations as other people you’ve met. Could you speak to that?

MA:    When the movement actually started depends on when you want to date it. There’s right after slavery — and there have been little moments where it’s become vaguely popular within black communities. It became really popular in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, where the idea was to try to pay or at least compensate blacks in the United States for the forced servitude of their ancestors. It is an idea that, again, a lot of people have thought about that seems, on some level to a whole lot of people, logical, but it just never seems to me, in its execution, to be possible. And also, we’re in a country where I know that it’s never going to happen. I’m just too much of a pragmatist to believe that we ought to be putting a whole lot of energy into efforts that are bound to fail. And since I’m so cynical about it or so pragmatic about it, I don’t really take the movement quite as seriously as other people who are smart and whom I respect. But it does seem to me that, at the very least, one of the things that the nation could do and should have done years and years ago, is to take it upon themselves to do what we do in these situations all the time. When people are mistreated, and the nation is at fault to some degree, somebody with some power offers an apology. It happened with the Japanese who were interned during World War II. It happens all the time and in all sorts of ways, but there seems to be no political will on the part of lawmakers to do so, although I did learn that some time in 2008, people in the House of Representatives at least sponsored a bill whose purpose was to apologize for slavery, but that bill had no traction and, as far as I could tell, was not publicized at all and it might as well have been that it didn’t happen. [For what it may be worth, apology resolutions were approved by the U. S. House in 2008, and by the Senate in 2009. The Senate resolution stipulated that it could not be invoked in support of claims for restitution. -- DC] Obama was seen like, a very very serious candidate for the President, so that seemed to be infinitely more important than any sort of backward-looking effort to say that the United States’ participation in chattel slavery was terrible and horrible and something that we needed to apologize energetically for. So what you saw happening at that point was what I think America is always involved in, is that on the one hand there is this desire to recognize and to see the significance and importance of history, that is to think about our national history and to think about our founding documents and other sorts of things, and on the other hand to think about the present and the future, and I think that that we make justice toward the past but we’re really not that concerned about the past except as it serves us and I think that what people became infinitely more involved in, and understandably perhaps, was Obama’s candidacy and then presidency, to which they could then attach all the issues having to do with race and the nature of black-white relations in the United States and so I think that that’s what happened then.

DC:    Any such apology could provoke a backlash.  There has even been a backlash against the apology for the Japanese internment [click here -- DC]. There has been something of a backlash against some statements made by President Obama for overseas consumption that have been taken in this country as overly apologetic. You mention the possibility of a national slavery museum of some kind. What are the prospects for such a thing?

MA:    I know there are a lot, a lot of cities and states have small local museums, sometimes much smaller than museums but call them museums, part of whose purpose is to recognize slavery and to give people some capacity to interact with the documents and other kinds of relics of that period, but — and I’ve said this before — what seems to me to be the case that what the nation wants to do is to recognize not our participation in bad things but our victories. That we will memorialize wars, we will give monuments, construct monuments to all sorts of things, but the idea of us, of the nation sanctioning the notion of a museum whose purpose is to say, “We were wrong, look what we did, look how horribly we failed to do what the nation claimed to be about, and that is that to recognize the humanity of everybody and to try to make it possible for everybody to succeed in the nation,” the idea of us doing so seems to me to be — however good it might seem to be, it would go against everything that I understand the intensity to be in terms of thinking about these issues. So we are much more likely to and have already sanctioned a museum that deals with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, which then demonstrates not so much the negative racial atmosphere that caused it but the fact that that led to the necessity of a Martin Luther King acting in the ways that he did or the civil rights movement. What we are able to think about is the victory, that King gives us the victory over the bad forces within the society and we are able to sanction that and to feel good to some degree or another about the changes that happened rather than sort of reveling in and thinking really seriously about what could have caused us to participate in that sort of activity in the first place, so I don’t see a museum like this ever being possible even under a Black president, maybe especially under a Black president because of the fact that the nation doesn’t want to think about how we failed.

DC:    I understand there have been Civil Rights museums built. There’s one in Montgomery . . . . There’s one in either Atlanta or Memphis, I think . . . . [There is a National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, built around the former Lorraine Motel -- site of the assassination of Martin Luther King.  There is a Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.  An International Civil Rights Center and Museum is under construction in Greensboro, located in the former Woolworth's store that was the target of the 1960 "Greensboro sit-ins." Richmond is home to the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial.  The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was designed by artist and architect Maya Lin, creator of Washington's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Not to be neglected is the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta and the adjacent headquarters of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. -- DC]

MA:    Yeah, I just think symbolically, that the difference between a sort of local museum dedicated to those issues and a museum that’s on the Mall in Washington, which then says the nation finds it central, in the nation’s sense, I think that’s a big difference.

DC:    Professor Awkward, to wrap up — the whole incident back in April ’07 was sad and amusing at the same time, or so it seemed to me. Surreal, almost. Imus scheduled this meeting with the basketball team, the Governor of New Jersey has an automobile accident and is almost killed on the way to mediating the meeting, and the thought occurred to me, if Hollywood wrote the script that way, nobody would believe it. Which brings me to the question, do you think there will ever be a movie made about the incident?

MA:    (Laughter) I don’t think so. I don’t think there will ever be a movie made about the incident while Imus is alive.

DC:    See what you think of this. This is who I’m going to cast in Nappy Headed Hos — the Movie: We want Dwight Yoakum as Imus. He’s a singer but he’s had a few film credits including Sling Blade. We want Billy Bob Thornton as Bernard McGuirk.

MA:    Okay. . .

DC:    We want Forrest Whittaker as Al Sharpton and we want Oprah Winfrey as Coach Vivian Stringer.

MA:    (laughter)

DC:    We want Julia Roberts as Deirdre Imus [Sorry, Deirdre -- Julia Roberts is bigger box office --DC], but we want Deirdre making a cameo as someone other than herself.

MA:    (more laughter)

DC:    Deirdre crashes into the radio station as an impostor claiming to be Deirdre Imus. So that’s who we’re going to cast. How does that grab you?

MA:    Okay, do you have somebody in mind for Corzine? Because you do have that dramatic accident that you would have to film . . . .

DC:    I uh, no, I don’t have anybody in mind for Corzine, actually. But. . .

MA:    And there would be some news footage . . . .

DC:    But if you would find somebody to raise the money, as long as I can get a cut for my casting suggestions . . . .

MA:    Well, Corzine might be out of a job soon, so maybe he’ll. . .

DC:    Maybe he can play himself. . . .

MA:    [Laughter]

DC:    Well, Professor Awkward, thank you so much for speaking to us.