Here’s a new rule of thumb for Californians: If Donald Trump and the Chinese government both want to boycott a Golden State place, you should get yourself there as fast as you can.

Which means that now is the time to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, which in April, became a target of autocrats from Mar-a-Lago to the Middle Kingdom.

President Trump recently suggested on his Truth Social account that he would boycott presidential debates at the Reagan Library, in part because the chair of the institution’s board is Washington Post publisher Frederick Ryan Jr., a former Reagan aide.

Meanwhile, China’s leaders announced sanctions against the library after it hosted a meeting between U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Bakersfield Republican, and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, whose government China refuses to recognize. The sanctions mean that China will not cooperate with or recognize the library in any way.

Such blasts at the library made headlines—but even if Trump, Xi Jinping, and their acolytes stay away, the library would suffer no damage. It already is the most popular of the presidential libraries overseen by the National Archives, and rightfully so.

If anything, the attacks expose an irony, and highlight a remarkable success. In an era when politics has come to define and consume almost everything, the Reagan Library has managed a nearly impossible trick: maintaining its devotion to a major conservative political figure while simultaneously developing a reputation as a highly accessible and attractive center that serves people of all kinds of politics.

My own affection for the place is an example of this success. I grew up in Southern California during the Reagan era despising most of his policies; I couldn’t imagine voting for him today. And I’d put an end to the American presidency, with all its quasi-dictatorial power, if I could.

But I can’t get enough of Reagan’s library, because it offers so much to California.

The place is irresistible, first and foremost, because of its beauty. It seems to glimmer on a mountaintop in Ventura County—the embodiment of Reagan’s metaphor of America as “the shining city on the hill.” The views alone are worth a visit to Simi Valley: a panorama of mountains to the east, the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles to the south, the Central Coast to the north, the ocean to the west. There may be no better place to watch a sunset.

Like other presidential libraries, this one has permanent exhibits, artifacts, and films from its favored president’s life, though the Reagan Library is distinguished for its Hollywood flair (which includes the airplane he used as Air Force One). And the library has made itself an essential stop for Republican politicians, whether they are engaging in presidential debates (the library has hosted four), or giving speeches or book talks.

In heavily Democratic California, the library is the rare place where everyday people can meet and ask questions of GOP politicians who shape our policy—Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin just spoke, and upcoming events feature Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, and West Virginia U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a crucial behind-the-scenes dealmaker on bipartisan Congressional legislation.

But the Reagan Library has also smartly made itself a gathering place for people who aren’t Republican, or don’t care about politics.

Some of its attractions are serious. The library hosts what has become the country’s leading gathering of people who think about national security, the Reagan National Defense Forum, with speakers from across the political spectrum and from all sorts of industries. (The sitting Secretary of Defense delivers the keynote every year, regardless of their political party.)

The Reagan Library also hosts major special exhibits each year that aren’t about American politics at all. The current exhibit is immensely powerful. “Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away” offers a visceral sense of what it was like to be in a concentration camp and has been drawing large crowds. The library has accompanied the exhibit with extensive and creative programming, often connecting Holocaust survivors with young adults and school children.

Previous, less heavy exhibits, always rich in artifacts, have focused on the histories of the FBI, Egypt’s lost cities, the Vatican, Titanic, Abraham Lincoln, Pompeii, and baseball.

The Reagan Library also rents out its spaces for meetings for nonprofits and corporations—from local chambers of commerce to Amgen—and I’ve attended large meetings with Ventura County figures there over the years. The library, with its spectacular setting, also has become a favorite local site for high school proms.

While ideologues urge boycotts, the Reagan Library has become the sort of place where you can take your kids and your mom, with little resistance. The annual Christmas tree exhibit is beautiful and festive. There have been sunset dances with Beatles and Fleetwood Mac tribute bands, Eagle Scout recognition dinners, Mother’s Day brunches, and tastings devoted to Central Coast wines.

I’ve visited 14 of the 15 presidential libraries, mostly in my travels as a political reporter and history researcher (perhaps I’ll get to Abilene, Kansas, to see the Eisenhower Library, someday). None of them offers as much as the Reagan Library.

When I visit, it’s often to do archival research (the staff moves quickly and the rooms are comfortable) or meet someone in Ventura County (everyone knows where it is). I like to walk the 300-acre grounds, and visit the memorial where Ronald and Nancy Reagan are buried. There, an inscription from President Reagan reads: “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.”

Of course, you and I are too cynical about this nasty world to believe all of that. But we can appreciate the sentiment, and the welcoming library that expresses it.

The post Why Everyone (Except Donald Trump and Xi Jinping) Loves the Reagan Library appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post have all analyzed Zelensky’s comedy and performance to find some connection to his inspiring leadership style. “Indeed, watching Zelensky now,” the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote, “one does not think, Oh, wow, he once was a comedian! One thinks, This is what a comedian looks like in power.”

However, as the war has progressed and its horrors have become more evident, I think Gopnik’s observation should be flipped: Our thinking “he once was a comedian!” is the key to Zelensky’s moral authority during this crisis. Zelensky’s ability to pivot from silliness to seriousness, convincingly and completely, amplifies the power and gravity of his actions.

When examining the intersection of comedy and politics, it’s important to state a distinction: Volodymyr Zelensky is a funny person who became a politician, not a politician who happens to be funny. And the bar for being a “funny” politician is low. Consider a 1964 quotation compilation titled The Humor of JFK: It’s a mercifully thin book. (One line does still hold up: Kennedy joked that his rich father ordered him not to “buy a single vote more than necessary” because “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”)

Ronald Reagan made plenty of genial quips; Donald Trump was a fountain of caustic put-downs, and both were in the entertainment industry before they were in politics. But neither ever had to be hilarious for a living, day in and day out. While we have a sense of Reagan, Trump, or JFK without their humor, we can’t separate Zelensky’s rise from his work in comedy.

Our closest American equivalent is Al Franken, who was famous on Saturday Night Live before he won a Senate seat in Minnesota. Like Franken’s comedy, Zelensky’s ranges from purely silly (simulating playing “Hava Nagila” on a piano with his genitals) to thoughtfully satirical, on his hit television series Servant of the People. On the show, which aired from 2015 to 2019, Zelensky played Vasily Petrovich Goloborodko, a frustrated history teacher who delivers an anti-government rant to his class. The lesson goes viral, and Goloborodko is elected president of Ukraine, where he experiences the corrupting temptations of power and privilege and the inept bumblings of bureaucrats. Zelensky’s performance connected so deeply with Ukrainians that it launched him into real-life politics.

If the typical politician gets too much credit for being funny, I think the opposite is true for the comic-turned-politician, who has to impress by demonstrating seriousness. In office, Al Franken was a sober and earnest presence. Knowing that he had played the absurd self-help guru Stuart Smalley didn’t undermine Franken’s sincerity—it underscored that he had matured into a new role. Franken’s once having been a comedian, and his unusual path to government, often made him seem more, not less, authentic.

After Zelensky’s 2019 election, it would have been easy for critics to write off his presidency as a joke. Zelensky didn’t let them. He managed to pass anti-corruption legislation, and taking an unusual stance for an Eastern European politician, staunchly defended LGBTQ rights when confronted by a heckler during a marathon press conference.  He has approached war, too, with unwavering seriousness: remaining in his country in the face of great danger, galvanizing the world in a United Nations speech detailing Russian atrocities.

Humor may help a leader get votes, but once elected, a savvy and responsible leader knows when to evolve and find the right tone. “No leader wants to be thought of as ‘insubstantial,’ much less a clown,” said Patric Verrone, a comedy writer who served as president of the Writers Guild of America during its 2007 strike, which put thousands of his colleagues’ careers on the line. “The danger is making sure that you don’t ‘yuk it up’ so much that people don’t take you seriously,” he told me.

Playing against type is more powerful that trying to live up to it. Imagine if Zelensky’s hit show on Ukrainian television had been not Servant of the People, but Fury Force 5 or something similarly over-the-top, and Zelensky’s career had been more Arnold Schwarzenegger than Al Franken. Would his reported comment, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” have had the same impact? I doubt it. A fake action hero maintaining his persona in the face of actual danger seems out of touch, not inspiring. When Schwarzenegger was governor of California, his attempts to tap his fictional persona often fell flat. He has said he regrets calling legislators “girly men,” a term which originated, coincidentally, on Saturday Night Live. In contrast, Schwarzenegger’s recent appeal to the people of Russia, in which he spoke candidly about his father’s membership in the Nazi party, drew a positive reaction for being emotional and somber.

David Goodman, another comedy-writer-turned-serious-WGA-president, thinks that many comics have instincts that drive them away from leadership roles. “Politicians hate being laughed at; comedians or comedy writers, on the other hand, are not only used to being laughed at, they actually seek it out,” he said. Which makes it doubly impressive, Goodman added, when someone like Zelensky deftly handles a situation of such magnitude.

When we see a former comedian face the likelihood of death and call the world to account, we see a human being rising to meet the moment. We see someone transformed. As Adam Gopnik points out, it’s a sharp contrast to Vladimir Putin’s imperial posturing. Putin is surely someone who hates being laughed at. But he is trapped in his persona, a one-dimensional figure who may earn obedience but can’t surprise us enough to earn respect.

Comedy depends on surprise—a punchline is an idea that we didn’t see coming. And in the midst of a brutal war, “Oh, wow, he was once a comedian” may be the most inspiring punchline of all.

The post Should All World Leaders Be Comedians First? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One afternoon in July 1985, President Ronald Reagan met with his domestic policy council in the White House cabinet room. The question: should he keep pushing legislation to offer amnesty to undocumented migrants?

Some Reagan aides wanted him to drop his support for amnesty, the term for granting legal status to people in the country illegally. Reagan’s pollsters had told him that the public opposed amnesty. And the president’s championing of amnesty had produced defeats. Reagan’s first bill to legalize immigrants failed in Congress in 1982. In 1984, Reagan had convinced the House and Senate to pass a bill, only to see the legislation fall apart in conference committee.

But amnesty had one stalwart supporter in the room: Reagan himself.

Recently, at Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, I read through the records on the legislation that became the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Today, IRCA doesn’t get much respect; it’s long been dismissed across the political spectrum as “the failed amnesty law.” Its central idea, of broad forgiveness and quick legal status for undocumented immigrants, is completely out of political fashion today.

But while studying the records, I was struck by the difference between the reality of the 1986 amnesty and its 2018 reputation. The 1986 law was carefully conceived, realistic, and humane—reflecting the practical wisdom of a California president.

The records show that Reagan, despite his reputation for avoiding details, was personally engaged on immigration. When aides talked about the supposed peril to public safety of immigrants, Reagan shifted the conversation to specific stories of undocumented immigrants in California who suffered because of their lesser legal status. “The president cited past cases of exploitation of illegal aliens,” according to the minutes of that 1985 meeting.

Reagan ended the meeting by saying he wanted to talk more with the legislation’s co-sponsor, a Republican U.S. senator from Wyoming named Alan K. Simpson. In those conversations, Reagan and Simpson determined to go forward with the legislation, for two big reasons.

First, they saw legalization as essential to protecting and integrating immigrants. “The work to be done is to avoid seeing this nation populated with a furtive illegal subclass of human beings who are afraid to go to the cops, afraid to go to a hospital…or afraid to go to their employer,” Simpson wrote Reagan in a private note that began, “Dear Ron.”

Second, and more important, both men were old enough to have seen immigrants used as scapegoats; they urgently wanted legislation to preempt divisive politics. “If we do not choose to have immigration reform in the near future, the alternative will not just be the status quo,” said Simpson while reintroducing the legislation in 1986. “No, the alternative instead will be an increased public intolerance—a failure of compassion, if you will—toward all forms of immigration and types of entrants—legal and illegal; refugees, permanent resident aliens, family members and all others within our borders.”

The bill did pass, and it forestalled Simpson’s nightmare—but only for a while.

Immigration restrictionists blame the 1986 law for today’s bitter conflicts over immigration. But they have it backward. Today’s immigration problems result not from amnesty but from our collective failure to understand what made the 1986 law successful.

IRCA actually had two big pieces. One—the successful piece—was amnesty, which was limited, fatefully, to immigrants who had been continuously in the U.S. since January 1, 1982. But the bill’s other big piece drew more attention and was more influential in turning immigration into an American quagmire: a new enforcement regime that prohibited hiring and employing the undocumented.

Familiar figures from today’s politics show up in the records in ways rich with irony. President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, Trump legal spokesman Rudolph Giuliani, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—all then in Reagan’s employ—worked on amnesty’s behalf. The politics around this new enforcement were scrambled and did not break down along party lines. Many Democrats opposed the bill, with some arguing that hiring restrictions would lead to discrimination against all Latinos. Labor unions worried that the bill would be too lenient on employers, particularly in agriculture, while some Republicans opposed it because it might be too tough on businesses.

Compromises pulled the bill to passage. To reassure those worried about employment discrimination, an amendment prohibited, for the very first time, employment discrimination on the basis of national origin. And, crucially, California’s own U.S. Senator Pete Wilson—who as governor in the 1990s would embrace anti-immigrant politics—helped lead negotiations that led to the creation of a special legalization category for agricultural workers.

IRCA should have been celebrated as a tremendous legislative victory. But the bill’s passage was overshadowed by news of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Reagan didn’t sign the bill until after the November 1986 election, in a small ceremony subdued by the fact that Republicans had lost control of the U.S. Senate. Reporters in attendance asked about the Iran-Contra scandal, not immigration.

But in his remarks that day, Reagan unabashedly emphasized the benefits of the bill for the undocumented. “The legalization provisions in this Act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society,” he said. “Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.”

Under the two-step amnesty process, more than 3 million people applied for temporary residency, which lasted 18 months, in the first phase. In the second phase, 2.7 million people received permanent residency as a result of the law. This was the largest legalization in the country’s history, but it should have been larger. An estimated 2 million people did not legalize their status.

Why not? The law was not generous enough. It excluded newer immigrants who had come between 1982 and the law’s 1987 implementation. Some undocumented immigrants feared making themselves known, while others didn’t know about the program, because publicity and outreach came late in the window for legalization. Some were discouraged by the federal government’s bureaucratic and time-consuming legalization process of security checks, document checks, and requirements for competency in English and American civics.

In retrospect, the process should have covered all undocumented immigrants and should have established a regular amnesty process every few years, since the demand for immigrant labor was certain to keep attracting people to the country. But in many ways, amnesty was a government success story—it gave millions of people the legal status they required to have a better life. It even turned a $100 million profit for the government through the $185 fees it charged applicants.

But amnesty’s successes didn’t stop immigration restrictionists from criticizing the law and scapegoating immigrants, especially after the economy went south in the early 1990s. The main attack on the law continues to this day: Amnesty encouraged more undocumented immigrants to come, critics say. In fact, the opposite is true. Studies show that amnesty produced a small decline in the number of illegal entries into the country.

Restrictionists also have persistently claimed that only tougher border security and immigration enforcement will reduce illegal immigration. The 1986 law’s hiring enforcement provisions, and the ensuing three decades of additional border security and tough-on-immigration laws have not worked to reduce illegal immigration. Instead, the endless deluge of new laws and restrictions have made it nearly impossible for undocumented persons to legalize their status or establish themselves in the country, thus adding to the numbers of people who stay in the shadows. Even migrants who arrive legally and apply for legal status can be effectively turned into lawbreakers by the immigration system. This is pure Kafka: In the name of stopping illegal immigration, we make all immigrants illegal.

President Trump represents not a new approach but rather a nasty extension of our longstanding obsession with criminalizing immigrants; his innovations are to reclassify refugees and children as immigrant terrorists, who need their own concentration camps. This is stupidity in service of stupidity, and hatred for hatred’s sake. Today’s immigration reformers aren’t much smarter. Their proposals combine more failed border security policies with legalization plans so full of bureaucratic obstacles and delays—some proposals require a 20-year wait to achieve legal status—that they are worthless.

Sadly, both advocates and opponents of immigration now follow the same failed script of increased spending on border security, increased illegalness, and offering a narrow path to legitimacy.

It’s time to flip that script. Make amnesty, not border security, the starting point on immigration. The stance should be: not one penny for enforcement or walls until we have amnesty for all our undocumented neighbors.

Amnesty is wise policy for reasons that go beyond immigration. The United States is not just anxious and polarized now: It’s downright unforgiving. In our public sphere, we never forgive a single sin of those who trespass against us.

The Bible says this is wrong: “Forgive as the Lord forgave you,” it advises. Our lack of forgiveness is also a sign of national decline. “The weak can’t forgive,” Gandhi said. “Only the strong can.”

Americans need amnesty not to forgive our immigrants. We need amnesty so that we might forgive ourselves.

The post Why Amnesty Remains America’s Best Immigration Policy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After dinner Spiller exuberantly showed off a sample of “cotton ball,” a weird, semi-translucent rock formation containing borax. Spiller suggested to his hosts that fortunes awaited those lucky enough to find a generous deposit of the stuff. He showed them how to test for the mineral’s presence with a combination of alcohol and sulfuric acid. After Spiller left the next day, Aaron told Rosie he had seen a material very similar to this out on the desiccated lakebed of Death Valley.

That morning the couple set off to collect samples of the opaque dirty white bulbous material that resembled a handful of dirty cotton balls spread across the desert floor. They made a camp and (so the story goes) “when the shadows had closed in around them, Winters put some of the salt into a saucer, poured the acid and alcohol on them, and with trembling hand struck a match.” Watching anxiously, Aaron exclaimed, “She burns green, Rosie! We’re rich, by God.”

Getting rich by finding gold, silver, or oil is a California tale as old as the Gold Rush and as new as the Beverly Hillbillies. But the story of 20 Mule Team Borax is also the story of one of America’s defining brands, a product that came to sit on a shelf in every household, offering an only-in-America promise that by using this particular washing powder, immigrants from around the world could share in the heritage of the Wild Wild West and join the upper middle class.

Winters staked his claim in the middle of Death Valley and quickly sold the land for $20,000 in 1883 to William Tell Coleman, a Kentucky native turned San Francisco borax magnate who built Coleman’s Harmony Borax Works on the property. Forty Chinese workers scraped the mineral from the harsh desert floor for $1.50 per day, except when summer temperatures reached above 120 degrees Fahrenheit—not to give the workers a break, but because the borax could not crystallize properly under such extreme conditions.

Coleman used mules to transport the borax 162 miles due west to a railroad shipping spur in Mojave, California. The teams that later became infamous as “20 Mule Teams” in fact consisted of 18 mules and two draft horses. The animals were hitched to two massive wooden wagons with 7-foot-high rear wheels, carrying over 10 tons of processed borax apiece. Two fully loaded wagons with a full 1,200-gallon steel water tank and additional supplies weighed in at 36.5 tons. Just two men operated the wagons—one driving and operating the brake of the lead wagon, the other minding the rear wagon’s brake. The trip took 10 grueling days across the hot desert and was both monotonous—moving in a straight line was not much of a challenge—and dangerous on cliffside curves where an entire wagon train could fall off, driver and all. Specialized sections of the mule team were trained to angle their bodies while stepping sideways so that the preceding animals could navigate curves.

20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips

 
Coleman got so much borax out of Death Valley that the market crashed. In 1890, he sold out for half a million dollars to Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. Coleman died broke three years later.

Encouraged by young employee named Stephen Tyng Mather, Smith capitalized on the “lore and mystique” of Death Valley by creating the 20 Mule Team brand in 1894. Never mind that by 1896 borate ore from the region was shipped entirely by rail; the company created personalities like feisty William “Borax Bill” Parkinson, who was hired and trained as a driver for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and other promotional tour events across the U.S. When Parkinson died suddenly another man became the new “Borax Bill.”

Borax Bill, said an early brochure, spoke to his balky mules in language “that would not sound well in polite society.” If it seems strange that housewives of the time embraced the idea that a man with a dirty mouth would help them get their clothes clean and white, it helps to remember what hard labor laundry was before the advent of washing machines and sophisticated detergents.

Smith’s goal was to “put a box of borax in every home” and he succeeded at doing exactly that. By the 1920s the brand was considered a legendary triumph of American advertising, lauded for creating such demand that prices fell for consumers.

The brand’s popularity coincided with a push toward cleanliness and germ eradication in both the U.S. and Europe. Besides being promoted as a laundry detergent, borax was touted as an essential part of personal health, hygiene, and cosmetics. A 1919 advertising pamphlet titled Borax: The Magic Crystal read, “Perfect health depends on perfect hygienic cleanliness; and perfect sanitary cleanliness is secured by the use of nature’s greatest cleanser and most harmless antiseptic—Borax.” The product materials spoke in a kind of code to hard-working women who wanted to better their lot. Borax pitched itself as “a very popular powder for whitening the faces of ladies who are too much tanned, or have faded in some way.” The pamphlet said the product could remove freckles, be used as a sunscreen—or a deodorant—and soften hands that had done too much manual labor. The message that being clean—and paler—was the ticket to the American Dream was almost explicit in advertising of the time, which was aimed at a big melting pot of recent immigrants. As ad executive Albert Lasker told his staff in the 1920s, “We are making a homogeneous people out of a nation of immigrants.”

In 1930, the company pulled off another trick of turning itself into not just a shared soap but a shared memory of bygone frontier days, producing a radio show called Death Valley Days. These Western morality tales ran weekly for 15 years on the radio and then another 18 years and 600 episodes on television, where it was one of the longest-running Western programs in broadcast history. Ronald Reagan hosted the program from 1964 to 1965, and actors including Angie Dickinson, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, and James Coburn did guest appearances early in their careers.

Death Valley Days was Reagan’s last TV show before he ran for governor of California. In his ads hawking Borax, he is simultaneously a character of the old West, a glamorous actor, and the father of Patty Reagan, who shows how domestic Borax can be. It’s a neat trick, and it foreshadows Reagan’s uncanny ability to evoke a mythic past with a vision of domestic tranquility for political purposes.

But underneath all of the ideals of the frontier, of blockbuster marketing, and of the melting pot, what’s probably given 20 Mule Team Borax its sticking power is that it speaks to the core American value of hard, dirty work—even if it only took 18 mules.

The post How Ronald Reagan Peddled Laundry Detergent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I remember that it was supposed to have been different. My generation of schoolkids was told that we didn’t need to bother learning the number of inches in a foot or the number of ounces in a pound, as a switch to the metric system was imminent. The popular narrative holds that this 1970s conversion movement failed, and that Americans have never gone metric because we are too obstinate or patriotic or just plain stupid to do so. This tale is wrong, or at least wrongheaded. It is also faulty in its basic assumption.

News flash: The United States is metric, or at least more metric than most of us realize. In many areas, the 1970s effort to fall in line with the rest of the world did succeed. American manufacturers began putting out all-metric cars, and the wine and spirits industry abandoned fifths for 750-milliliter bottles. The metric system is, quietly and behind the scenes, now the standard in most industries, with a few notable exceptions like construction. Its use in public life is also on the uptick, as anyone who has run a “5K” can tell you.

Our hybrid system of measurement can surely be confusing, so why is it that America hasn’t gone full-on metric? The simple answer is that the overwhelming majority of Americans have never wanted to. Ditching all of our old measures is an extreme act that would require forcing citizens to change their daily habits and culture. The gains have always seemed too little, and the goal too purist.

The measurement debate actually goes back to our nation’s very beginning. The original metric system was developed in France during its revolution, and was so radically decimal that it divided the day into 10 hours. As our first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson was charged with deciding which set of measures would be best for the country to use. He had been instrumental in creating the dollar—the first fully decimal measure any nation ever used—and was in favor of a universal system of decimal measurement. Jefferson rejected the metric system, however, because in origin he found it to be too French—which was saying something coming from the nation’s foremost Francophile. His beef was that the meter was conceived as a portion of a survey of France, which could only be measured in French territory. How universal in spirit was that?

Other Americans didn’t share Jefferson’s concerns. President George Washington repeatedly asked legislators to look at adopting the metric system, while John Quincy Adams considered it the greatest invention since the printing press. Adams couldn’t, however, recommend that the United States adopt a measurement system that nearly vanished after the demise of the French Empire, with which it had first spread.

The meter’s fortunes would soon rebound, however. A new wave of revolutions in the 1830s would see France and Belgium re-adopt the system, while the second half of the 19th century would see it become a truly international system. The reasons for its adoption were various. Italy and Germany were unified out of dozens of statelets, duchies, and principalities, and a neutral system of measurement helped soothe parochial jealousies. Decolonization in Eastern Europe and South America created new nations keen to adopt modernity and standards that would align them with Western Europe. In all these cases, however, conversion was dictated by democratically deficient governments bucking the will of the people. The 1880s imposition of the metric system in Brazil led to a full-scale uprising that lasted months.

The strongest push in the U.S. actually came at the start of the 20th century, Alexander Graham Bell, Lord Kelvin, and other notables testified at congressional hearings on metric conversion. The hearings were shepherded by Samuel W. Stratton, the head of the new Bureau of Standards, who put forth the metric system as a vital national interest. Thinking they were joining a winning cause, lawmakers jumped aboard the metric bandwagon. But they were in for a rude awakening. Charges of elitism and wasting money came their way from a public that increasingly believed the U.S. should be the leader in global affairs and not just another follower.

Lip service was always paid to idealism and science as the reason for change, but politics and economics were the real incentives to go metric. The world’s most anti-metric nation—Great Britain—grudgingly began to ditch its Imperial system in the 1970s because it was the only way to gain access to the markets of continental Europe. Most of the rest of the world adopted the measures in order not to fall behind in the global economy, and that anxiety also fueled our own push toward it.

Americans were perhaps never more anxious than in the 1970s, and the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 is partial proof of that. American society turned unusually introspective in those post-Watergate days, even leading us to elect Jimmy Carter, the president who told Americans about their shortcomings like no other.

Ronald Reagan’s election sprang from a more familiar American attitude—that our problems were caused not by questioning our core values, but by drifting away from them. And it was Reagan’s axing of the U.S. Metric Board during his 1982 budget cuts that was seen as the deathblow to American metrication.

The notion that Reagan killed the metric system makes for a satisfying narrative, but it is spurious. The effort had already encountered stiff public resistance under Carter. And, Reagan actually signed a bill that required the federal government to go metric, a conversion achieved under George H. W. Bush.

Love it or hate it, there is no question that a uniform global system of measurement helps cross-border trade and investment. For this reason, labor unions were among the strongest opponents of 1970s-era metrication, fearing that the switch would make it easier to ship jobs off-shore. (Which it did.) The meter has never been a clear left-right political issue in this country, one more reason it has never gained traction.

Is global uniformity a good thing? Not when it comes to cultural issues, and customary measures are certainly a part of our national culture. But our measures are more than that. The metric system reinforces the idea that the world is ordered by tens. Base-10 math, however, originated in an accident of the hands. Ten is a poor choice, particularly when it comes to dividing. Thirds, quarters, sixths, eighths, and twelfths are all important fractions that are handled better in inches and ounces than in centimeters and grams. To have brains trained in such fractions as well as the relentless decimals of the metric system can only be beneficial, in the same way that learning a second language is better than knowing only one.

That ours is a dual-measurement country is part of our great diversity. We are the only republic on earth that predates the metric system, and that’s a major reason why we never fully joined the party.

The post Why Won’t America Go Metric? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.