Coconuts are everywhere. If you walk into a grocery store pretty much anywhere in the United States, you’ll find a cornucopia of coconut products: coconut water, coconut oil, coconut macaroons, and, of course, husked coconuts themselves.

Most consumers spend little time thinking about where the coconuts in this “coco craze” come from. But according to a Samoan proverb, “The coconut is sweet, but it was husked with the teeth.”

For the Samoan farmers and workers of the early coconut industry, these sweet treats were a site of struggle against colonial rule and exploitative plantations. By launching cooperatives, Samoans proved themselves savvy participants in the expanding global coconut trade while seeking economic self-determination. Recalling that fraught history is a reminder of the importance of worker power in contemporary global supply chains—where many of the same inequalities persist.

Americans got their first taste of coconuts just over a century ago. In the mid-19th century, the U.S. Navy began eyeing the South Pacific islands of Samoa as a coaling station. Around the same time, British and French missionaries along with German traders opened the first trading stations in Samoa. They moved methodically to monopolize the import and export of goods essential to the Samoan economy, and by the late 19th century, coconuts and copra—the dried meat of the coconut—had become Samoa’s main export to Europe and the United States. There, the copra was processed into a variety of products, including high-quality soap, margarine, and even dynamite.

From the start, Samoans resisted the Euro-American monopoly of the lucrative copra trade. They quickly realized they were being cheated by outlanders. After weighing out copra at trading stations, Euro-American traders routinely paid Samoan producers 30-50% less than they should have.

In response, Samoans took out large lines of credit and endlessly deferred their payments, knowing that the lack of effective legal enforcement of debt defaults protected them from punishment. They also resorted to manipulating the quantity and quality of the copra they delivered to traders by soaking the copra in water or mixing in greener nuts of poorer quality.

The U.S. Navy established formal colonial rule over eastern Samoa in 1900. The next year, hoping to raise revenues and increase copra production, the cash-strapped naval administration introduced a copra tax. In the eyes of U.S. officials, requiring taxes to be paid in copra protected the “child-like” Samoans from exploitation by unscrupulous traders.

Samoans were slow to pay this new tax. Many Euro-American traders even tried to keep the Samoans from cutting copra to pay taxes rather than sell it to them for export. By 1902, Samoans still sold copra below market price, keeping the prices artificially low as long as the naval government used the copra taxes to finance its operations. “In some villages,” Governor Uriel Sebree noted, “the natives have already resolved to sell wholesale rather than individually, and thus get a higher price.”

In 1903, the naval administration cut out the pesky traders and took over the sale of copra. From then on, Samoan producers brought their copra to government-run stations and received a standard price per pound somewhat lower than the projected annual bid. This margin allowed the government to pay expenses such as transportation and wages for the stations’ clerks. After the year’s copra output was awarded to the highest bidder—generally an American or Australian firm—any remaining surplus was returned to Samoan family chiefs. But instead of cash, they received copra receipts that could only be used to purchase goods in official stores.

By and large, Samoans did not object to the U.S. government’s takeover of the copra trade, because it increased their profit margins. Just the year before, Samoan copra producers had founded their own copra cooperative. In an effort to outcompete foreign traders, cooperative members from the main island of Tutuila and the smaller Manuʻa Islands 75 miles to the east pooled production and distribution of copra.

For a few years, the producer cooperative worked well. The company operated stores in several villages across the islands and owned three motorboats to ship copra to Pago Pago for export to San Francisco. Most importantly, the cooperative protected Samoan copra production by adding a crucial distribution mechanism. But because it allowed its Samoan members to buy goods on credit, company debt continued to rise.

By 1907, rumors of embezzled funds and skyrocketing debt led the U.S. naval government to become a trustee of the company. Then, on the brink of World War I, U.S. officials determined that the cooperative had failed economically and should be shut down as soon as remaining debts were collected. As Governor C.D. Stearns summed up with characteristic condescension, “The natives are absolutely incapable of managing their own affairs in financial matters and it is believed that permitting them to establish co-operative stores and co-operative schooners has been a mistake.”

Yet what looked like failure to paternalistic U.S. officials in Pago had provided Samoans in Manuʻa with a much-needed way to pool resources and mitigate risk. For the moment, they refused to let the cooperative venture sink.

As it turned out, the cooperative did not survive much longer. In January 1915, a tropical cyclone devastated Manuʻa. Half of the 1,500 inhabitants of the islands had to be relocated because most of the food crops had been destroyed, along with the majority of the cooperative’s copra stock. It took several years for agricultural production in Manuʻa to recover, but the copra cooperative never did. By 1919, the former store of the cooperative had become a naval dispensary and wireless radio office. The following year, the Manuʻa Cooperative Company officially folded.

While the cooperative movement eventually collapsed under political coercion, it helped form the nucleus of a more sustained challenge to colonial rule in the 1920s. To protest Navy mismanagement, American Samoans organized a copra boycott and practically shut down the naval government, which depended on the taxes drawn from the sale of copra.

Faced with Euro-American coconut colonialism, Samoans resisted by holding on to their community-based farming practices and succeeded in protecting long-standing ways of life. At the same time, they adapted selectively to the new colonial world by founding cooperatives whose worker mutualism aimed for greater economic self-determination.

Remembering the deep colonial roots of coconuts—and many other products—on American shelves helps put current frustrations, whether about stocking speed or quality, in perspective. With colonized workers serving American consumers, early 20th-century coconut production in Samoa carried the seeds of today’s global division of labor. Then as now, American consumers should push for worker control over the means of production and distribution of the tropical fruits they have come to love.

The post How Samoans Resisted Coconut Colonialism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During the first Republican presidential primary debate, on August 23, former Vice President Mike Pence spoke of founders of the nation conquering the American “wilderness.” It was one of many mentions of American history: Candidates also name-checked the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. Toward the end of the evening, Pence stressed the wilderness theme: “If we renew our faith in one another and renew our faith in Him, who has ever guided this nation since we arrived on these wilderness shores, I know the best days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”

Historical references are so ubiquitous in presidential debates and stump speeches that they can seem superficial. This year’s Republican candidates seem especially committed to the idea that the past matters, perhaps because of battles over history and ethnic studies curricula spreading in some states.  If, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis opined, “We cannot be graduating students that don’t have any foundation in what it means to be American,” then perhaps we also need to pay closer attention to what kind of American identity candidates are finding in history.

When Pence referenced conquering the wilderness, he used a keyword lifted from the Puritans. Those early American immigrants make cameos in plenty of political speeches, but often in ways that are misquoted or misunderstood, because their writings reflect a world of the 1600s, whose concerns are not identical to those of our time.

In England, the Puritans constituted a religious minority who opposed the state-sanctioned Church of England, which they believed had betrayed true faith. By leaving for North America, many believed they were testing whether their distinct vision of Protestant Christianity could survive in a new continent.

The concept of conquering a wilderness came into American vocabulary from these immigrants. Between 1630 and 1650, Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford penned a history of the Puritans’ settlement of Plymouth, known today as “Of Plymouth Plantation.” In the text, the governor offered a vivid depiction of how the Puritans who sailed to the coast in the autumn of 1620 met a land “with a weather-beaten face” and how “the whole country, full of woods and thickets,” had “a wild and savage hue.”

In reality, Bradford and those who sailed with him on the Mayflower did not encounter a wilderness as we typically use the word now. As even other Europeans like Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith acknowledged at the time, these English arrived in long-settled Wampanoag territory. Cornfields, not thick woods, surrounded Patuxet, the town the English renamed New Plymouth. Residents of the town had suffered through a devastating epidemic, possibly caused by rats that had stowed away on ships from Europe, that tore through coastal New England in the late 1610s.

Despite the loss of life, the Indigenous community survived. Yet because Christians did not inhabit these places, Bradford and the other Puritans saw them as part of the “wilderness” that needed to be conquered. Later in the same book, Bradford celebrates the destruction of a Pequot village, which left 400 to 700 dead in a single night. The Puritans rounded up survivors and sold them into slavery.

In his references to wilderness, Pence left unspoken the irony of representing a party bent on restricting access to newcomers while praising the idea that the nation emerged only because newcomers ran roughshod over those who already lived in North America.  In his version of early American history, Europeans were the only important actors, so his view of the nation’s history concentrates on them alone.

The second Republican debate will take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley today. Like Pence, Reagan invoked the Puritans to boast of American exceptionalism. In his farewell address to the nation on January 11, 1989, he cited a lay sermon delivered in 1629 by soon-to-be governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop, and referred to the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” Reagan famously interpreted Winthrop as stating that America was “a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.” He also called Winthrop “an early freedom man.”

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott repeated this invocation of Winthrop. He stated that he hoped to lead “a team anchored in conservatism that wants to make sure that America remains the city on the hill.”

But Winthrop wasn’t bragging about the colony being a yearned-for destination, like a freedom-minded Emerald City. He didn’t even use the word “shining” at all—that was Reagan’s addition. The original text was Matthew 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill, cannot be hid,” the verse reads in the 1599 Geneva Bible the Puritans favored. Winthrop understood what the apostle meant: Creating a biblically centered community was a challenge, and if the Puritans succeeded, they would be the envy of the world. But if they failed, everyone would see their shortcomings. They would make an embarrassment of the Protestant agenda to reform the world in the way they believed God intended.

Reagan took the line out of context. His proud, sunny version missed the Puritan theologians’ point, which was made at a time when religious wars were driving Catholics and Protestants against each other across much of Europe. For Winthrop and his contemporaries, the fate of the world was at stake. They knew that the English migrants could lose their battle. That possibility did not fit into Reagan’s belief in the inevitability of American greatness.  (For what it’s worth, when John F. Kennedy invoked Winthrop’s speech shortly before he became president in 1961, he understood that it referred to a challenge rather than an assertion of inevitability.)

But if Pence and Reagan twisted the meaning of the twinned ideas of conquering wilderness and building a city on a hill, they are right that these concepts are foundational to American history. The English migrants to New England believed that what happened to them had world-historic significance, but that success was not pre-ordained. Bradford and Winthrop each recognized that danger lurked. They believed that survival depended on adherence to their faith—and that even so, the risk of failure was high. Those views shaped early New England and, by extension, much of what became the nation’s culture in the years after the American Revolution.

A different kind of existential threat seems to animate at least some of the candidates for the Republican nomination. In some ways, it appears, these candidates feel the kinds of pressure that the Puritans faced four centuries ago. They too look to stake out a moral position, based on the notion that the future of our culture depends on who comes to occupy the Oval Office.

Though they are battling to govern in the future, the Republican candidates seem obsessed by how we understand the past. Those who cite the legacies of President Reagan and the conquest of wilderness want to emulate what they see as the heroic steps the Puritans took to establish a nation. Yet they seem blind to the complexity of the actual past, in which Europeans pursuing one vision of the future displaced and attacked Indigenous peoples who had their own plans for what was to come. If the Puritans are to serve as inspiration, it seems time to reckon with their actual ideas and actions.

The post What the GOP Gets Wrong About the Puritans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The pandemic has changed the way women dress; we’re purchasing fewer shoes, dress pants, and makeup, and trading underwire bras for loose bralettes or sport bras, or even choosing to forgo them completely. Yet, as businesses around the country get ready to call their workers back to the office, this life of loungewear might be coming to an end. And as women contemplate their return to formal wear, the return of the bra might be one of the most dreaded aspects of post-pandemic normalcy.

This struggle is not new. Women have long connected clothing with ideas of freedom, and there is a long and strong relation between women’s demand for sartorial comfort and feminist ideas. Indeed, for many women, both in the past and today, discarding bras is not just an act of personal choice but an act of feminist rebellion.

The association of bras, and similar undergarments like corsets, with discomfort, oppression, and distress, goes back to the 19th century. Then, members of the nascent feminist movement sought simultaneously to free themselves from oppressive legal and social systems—and from tight corsets and trailing skirts. “Something of the nature of the American costume … must take the place of our present style of dress, before the higher life—moral, intellectual, political, social or domestic—can ever begin for women,” feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps argued in 1873. Phelps called women to burn up their corsets, arguing that by freeing themselves from discomfort they could truly experience emancipation.

And in the second half of the 20th century, burning bras (or corsets)—whether as a real act or as a metaphor—would become one of the most popular images representing a new generation of feminists. Arguing that “the personal is political,” these feminists sought equality in all realms of life, from the home to the workplace, demanding control over their uteruses as well as their clothing choices. No bras were burned in the famous “No More Miss America Protest” of 1968—though some were thrown into a trash can along with lipstick and high heels. But the media was quick to associate bra burning with the radical feminists who protested oppressive beauty standards.

Yet before women’s fraught relationship with their undergarments became a symbol of radical feminists, women sought to liberate themselves through attire. There was, in fact, a similar push a century ago—in the shadow of another global pandemic and the realignment of world order after World War I. Emboldened by the right to vote and the social changes it brought, young women in the U.S. and elsewhere began to reevaluate their position in society as well as their appearance. Funny enough, in doing so they popularized the now-reviled bra.

Pre-World War I, in response to women’s growing involvement in sports and leisure, the fashion industry began marketing lighter, less restrictive corsets and more flexible girdles in an attempt to maintain their profits. Into this atmosphere, a relatively new undergarment emerged as a corset substitute: the brassiere. Although its origins are somewhat unknown, in the U.S., socialite Caresse Crosby patented her brassiere design in 1913.

A Maidenform bra advertisement. Courtesy of Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Women’s growing mobilization into the workforce and social reform during the 1910s only increased the demand for sartorial change. The U.S. entry to the war in 1917 and the influenza pandemic in 1918 also affected changes in fashion. By the 1920s, young women shortened their skirts and hair and discarded their corsets, often in favor of a bra, insisting on wearing comfortable clothing that suited their active lifestyles and to celebrate their sexuality without being reprimanded for it.

“’Let Go’ is the law of the new corset and the corsetless figure,” exclaimed Eleanor Chalmers, fashion editor of the women’s magazine Delineator, in 1922. These new fashions became identified with the image of the modern flapper. But they also became both a visual and symbolic statement of a new feminine presence in the public sphere. By forgoing their corsets, women were also forgoing the ideas that were attached to them: confinement, passivity, and oppression. The corsetless figure became the epitome of women’s social and political freedom and mobility, forging a new beauty ideal that was younger and slenderer.

Some of the first widely marketed bras of the 1920s had a flattening effect that fitted the straight, rectangular silhouette of the flapper ideal. But unlike boned corsets, these bras gave only minimal support, functioning more as an extra layer beneath clothes than a means to mold a woman’s torso.

Taken together, the new flapper dresses and the bras beneath them became a means for women to assert their power as consumers and their rights. “They demanded independence, and they got it … when they went shopping they asked for what they wanted, instead of what they saw,” explained fashion consultant Margery Wells in 1928 as she looked back at the shift in Women’s Wear Daily. Instead of being followers of fashion, women began to actively voice their preference.

The ideal silhouette evolved alongside undergarments—and social reform. Women’s Wear Daily.

By the end of the 1920s, with the coming of the Great Depression, the youthful, leisurely flapper ideal seemed out of touch. Instead, a more mature and curvier silhouette gained popularity. Bras became undergarments responsible for enhancing and uplifting the breasts and creating a more structured shape, similar to the function we chafe against today. Yet the emphasis on comfort, whether imagined or real, continued to be part of the selling message for women.

Over the next four decades, the bra progressed slowly from an item associated with women’s liberation and self-dependency to another confining and restrictive garment associated with women’s oppression. Indeed, it was the meanings that women gave their bras in the postwar, post-pandemic 1920s, more than the design itself, that offered women a sense of liberation. And it was the meanings, not the design, that feminists in the 1970s found so abhorrent.

In the 1920s, fashion was where women turned to convey their new reality. And today, amidst a pandemic, bras once again become a symbol of the limitations on women’s experience in the labor force. As women reevaluate their social position, the sound of rebellion is getting louder. Even if COVID will not bring a wave of bra abandonment, women today are already making fashion choices that will impact our future. And if history is a lesson, we are in for an interesting ride.

The post Bringing Down the Bra appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Esquivel opened our annual book and poetry prize program with a reading of her winning poem, “La Mujer,” which “transports across cultures and generations, and yet feels very specific and momentary. It’s profound and moving,” said Tim Disney, who sponsored both prizes this year. Disney congratulated Esquivel for winning the 10th annual Zócalo Poetry Prize, for the poem that best evokes a connection to place.

Disney then introduced Jia Lynn Yang, winner of the 11th annual Zócalo Book Prize, who is also national editor of the New York Times. Yang’s debut book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, is an “outstanding work in explicating the complicated and fraught history of immigration to this country,” said Disney. “This topic and her masterful treatment of it could not be more salient.” The prize honors the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion.

“My wildest dream of my book was that it would foster a sense of community,” said Yang, as she thanked Disney and Zócalo for the recognition before beginning her lecture. “Thank you for seeing that spirit in my work.”

Yang explained that from 2016 to 2020, she researched and wrote One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, which chronicles one of the most restrictive periods in America’s immigration history. During the Trump presidency, the book evolved into a story with strange and direct parallels to today. In libraries and archives, Yang found stories and arguments around immigration that “did not merely have echoes from the past but messages that seemed to have risen from the dead.” One example: In 1922—two years before Congress enacted strict ethnic- and race-based quotas designed to keep the country white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant—one of the authors of that bill, Pennsylvania Senator David A. Reed, said that he was worried that other nations wanted “to make us the trash basket of all creation by sending us the very worst they have.”

There was little resistance to this statement, and the legislation that followed, said Yang who juxtaposed that historical moment to the moral outrage that arose nearly 100 years later when President Trump enacted a Muslim travel ban a week into office. Protestors’ signs in the wake of that ban included a common refrain: “We are a nation of immigrants,” a statement that might seem obvious today, yet, said Yang, “this political idea is not only not that old; it’s quite radical.”

Yang traces it back to a 1951 book by historian Oscar Handlin—an activist and son of Jewish immigrants—called The Uprooted. Handlin was trying to create “a new, romantic idea of American nationalism that is rooted in immigrants,” said Yang—and at the same time, he was endeavoring to get the quota system abolished. He succeeded in those aims—Handlin’s book was credited for helping inspire President John F. Kennedy’s push to abolish the quotas, a mantle that was inherited by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who managed to find success after Kennedy’s assassination.

Yang’s book takes its title from the speech Johnson gave welcoming the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, in which he called the U.S. a country “built by a nation of strangers … joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.”

The law, which Johnson said would not be revolutionary, turned out to be exactly that. “This law ends up unleashing huge amounts of immigration from outside Europe,” said Yang. “It’s this group of people … who are now changing this country in enormous and lasting ways that we are only beginning to understand and to see.”

Yang added, “To say that the people who define this country are the same people who are not from it, that it is the outsiders who make it what it is—that is quite an idea.”

Stanford University sociologist Tomás Jiménez, author of The Other Side of Assimilation, then joined Yang for a question-and-answer session. He began by asking her to “tell us about the biographical roots of this project.”

Yang explained that the 1965 law allowed her parents and other family members to come to the U.S. from Taiwan and China in the 1960s and 1970s. She wanted to know why, and why so many of her friends—whose families are from the Middle East and Eastern Europe—came to America. “Why don’t I know why all these people are here?” she said. “How did this country get so multi-ethnic?”

Jiménez asked Yang if Johnson’s eventual success in ending the quotas—and the failures that preceded him—offer lessons for more recent failures to enact comprehensive immigration reform, including for the current administration.

“It’s so deeply morally complicated to figure this out,” said Yang. “It’s very hard to arrive at clear answers,” such as what a number cap on immigrants should be and how you arrive at that number.

Jiménez agreed. “People like me, who think there should be big immigration reform, have a hard time articulating concisely what those tradeoffs should be.” It’s easier, he added, to say what we don’t want immigration to be.

This challenge gets to the heart of the deep contradictions in Americans’ attitudes toward immigration. President Trump’s opponents saw his anti-immigration policies as ahistorical, but “we’ve turned the spigot on and off very hard over the years,” said Yang. At the same time, she added, we don’t treat undocumented immigrants well, and we are currently dealing with a wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans. “It feels like a very volatile mix to me. We are working out all these demographic, cultural, political changes,” she said. “I think the whole country is trying to process, who are we now?”

The people wrestling with that question include Yang’s generation, she said. “In a way, the romanticism of a nation of immigrants is so powerful that we can feel it’s not political,” she said. But in this moment, “you have to look beyond the category that you’re in.”

Minority groups’ histories are knitted together, she said. “I want to kind of propose that the history of Asian Americans is actually Jewish American history, Italian American history, Black American history.”

While new immigrants and their children sometimes feel as though they have no history in their new country, Yang hopes her book serves as a reminder to them that “you don’t have to start from scratch,” and illuminates their connections to “all these other Americans who came before” them. She concluded: “You and we are part of something much bigger.”

The post This Radical, Revolutionary Nation of Immigrants appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“We need to forget about this so we can heal,” said an elderly white woman, as she left my lecture on the history of enslaved cooks and their influence on American cuisine.  Something I said, or perhaps everything I said, upset her.

My presentation covered 300 years of American history that started with the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and which still echoes in our culture today, from the myth of the “happy servant” (think Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottle) to the broader marketing of black servitude (as in TV commercials for Caribbean resorts, targeted at white American travelers). I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I had not anticipated the woman’s displeasure, trying to forget is not an uncommon response to the unsettling tale of the complicated roots of our history, and particularly some of our beloved foods.

It is the story of people like Chef Hercules, our nation’s first White House chef; and Emmanuel Jones, who used his skills to transition out of enslavement into a successful career cooking in the food industry, evading the oppressive trappings of sharecropping. It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost. But from its most famous to its anonymous practitioners, the story of Southern cuisine is inseparable from the story of American racism. It’s double-edged—full of pain—but also of pride. Reckoning with it can be cumbersome, but it’s also necessary. The stories of enslaved cooks teach us that we can love our country and also be critical of it, and find some peace along the way.

It’s not easy uncovering the histories of enslaved cooks, who left few records of their own and whose stories often appear in the historical record as asides—incidental details sprinkled through the stories of the people who held them in bondage. In my recent study of enslaved cooks, I relied on archaeological evidence and material culture—the rooms where they once lived, the heavy cast iron pots they lugged around, the gardens they planted—and documents such as slaveholders’ letters, cookbooks, and plantation records to learn about their experiences. These remnants, scant though they are, make it clear that enslaved cooks were central players in the birth of our nation’s cultural heritage.

In the early 17th century, tobacco farming began to spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater region. Before long, plantations were founded by colonists, such as Shirley Plantation, constructed circa 1613; Berkeley Hundred, and Flowerdew Hundred, whose 1,000 acres extended along the James River. These large homes marked a moment of transition, when English cultural norms took hold on the Virginia landscape.

Traditions surrounding dining and maintaining a grand household were part of those norms, and the white gentry began seeking domestic help. At first, the cooks they hired on plantations were indentured servants, workers who toiled without pay for a contractually agreed-upon period of time before eventually earning their freedom. But by the late 17th century, plantation homes throughout Virginia had turned to enslaved laborers, captured from central and western Africa, to grow crops, build structures and generally remain at the beck and call of white families. Before long these enslaved cooks took the roles that had once been occupied by white indentured servants.

Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime. Up every day before dawn, they baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, and created divine feasts for the evenings. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, and crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food. For a guest, this must have been delightful: biscuits, ham, and some brandy, all made on site, ready to eat at 2:30 a.m. or whenever you pleased. For the cooks, it must have been a different kind of experience.

Enslaved cooks were always under the direct gaze of white Virginians. Private moments were rare, as was rest. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the “front stage” of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslavers—and of Virginia—on their shoulders. Guests wrote gushing missives about the meals in they ate while visiting these homes. While the missus may have helped design the menu, or provided some recipes, it was the enslaved cooks who created the meals that made Virginia, and eventually the South, known for its culinary fare and hospitable nature.

These cooks knew their craft. Hercules, who cooked for George Washington, and James Hemings, an enslaved cook at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, were both formally trained, albeit in different styles. Hercules was taught by the well-known New York tavern keeper and culinary giant Samuel Frances, who mentored him in Philadelphia; Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris, where he learned French-style cooking. Hercules and Hemings were the nation’s first celebrity chefs, famous for their talents and skills.

Folklore, archaeological evidence, and a rich oral tradition reveal that other cooks, their names now lost, also weaved their talents into the fabric of our culinary heritage, creating and normalizing the mixture of European, African, and Native American cuisines that became the staples of Southern food. Enslaved cooks brought this cuisine its unique flavors, adding ingredients such as hot peppers, peanuts, okra, and greens. They created favorites like gumbo, an adaptation of a traditional West African stew; and jambalaya, a cousin of Jolof rice, a spicy, heavily seasoned rice dish with vegetables and meat. These dishes traveled with captured West Africans on slave ships, and into the kitchens of Virginia’s elite.

You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called “receipt books,” handwritten cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries. These were compiled by slaveholding women, whose responsibilities sat firmly in the domestic sphere, and are now housed in historical societies throughout the country. Early receipt books are dominated by European dishes: puddings, pies, and roasted meats. But by the 1800s, African dishes began appearing in these books. Offerings such as pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya became staples on American dining tables. Southern food—enslaved cooks’ food—had been written into the American cultural profile.

For the women who wrote and preserved the receipt books, these recipes, the products of African foodways, were something worthy of remembering, re-creating, and establishing as Americana. So why can’t we, as Americans today, look at this history for what it was? Colonial and antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. During the 19th century, there were moments of widespread fear that these cooks would poison them, and we know from court records and other documents that on at least a few occasions enslaved cooks did slip poisons like hemlock into their masters’ food.

Depiction of Aunt Jemima, 1920, in the Saturday Evening Post. Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons.

But the country began recalibrating its memories of black cooking even before the Civil War, erasing the brutality and hardships of slavery from a story of Old Southern graciousness. The revisionism went full throttle during the era of Jim Crow, when new laws made segregation the norm. Post-emancipation America still relied heavily on the skills and labor of newly freed African Americans. In a highly racialized and segregated America, still grappling with its guilt over slavery, white people created a myth that these cooks were—and always had been—happy. Advertisers leaned on characters like Aunt Jemima and Rastus, stereotypical black domestics, drawn from minstrel song.

While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters and waiters—the only jobs they could get—Aunt Jemima and Rastus smiled while serving white folks, enhancing the myth that black cooks had always been cheerful and satisfied, during slavery and with their current situation. You can find their faces throughout early 20th-century black Americana, and they are still on the grocery shelves today, though modified to reflect a more dignified image. 

My angry audience member was likely raised on the old enslaved-cook narrative in which these images took root, where the cook was loyal, passive, and purportedly happy—a non-threatening being whose ultimate goal was to help a white woman fulfill her own domestic vision. But to be an American is to live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that bind a complicated heritage divided sharply by race. It is to ignore the story of Chef Hercules, or the real story of Aunt Jemima. By forgetting enslaved cooks’ pain to soothe our own, we erase the pride and the achievements of countless brilliant cooks who nourished a nation.

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The Dillingham Commission is today little known. But a century ago, it stood at the center of a transformation in immigration policy, exemplifying Americans’ simultaneous feelings of fascination and fear toward the millions of migrants who have made the United States their home.

In 1911, the Dillingham Commission produced perhaps the most extensive investigation of immigration in the history of the country, an exhaustive 41-volume study that demonstrated just how vital 19th-century and early-20th-century immigrants were to the U.S. economy. But the commission’s own recommendations, delivered in the context of a fierce backlash against migrants, set the foundation for the end of industrial-era immigration and a half-century of exclusionist policies.

Congress created the Commission in 1907 in an effort to find a compromise between proponents and opponents of immigration. During the previous several decades, pundits and lawmakers had debated the need to impose restrictions on immigration. Lawmakers enacted several polices intended to interdict those deemed to pose a specific danger, such as people afflicted with contagious diseases or involved in moral turpitude. One notable act excluded Chinese laborers, and another prohibited the entry of workers who had been hired overseas by U.S. companies.

But critics dismissed these provisions as insufficient, and instead sought laws to reduce the overall number of entrants and improve their quality, the latter of which meant attributes, like literacy, that were perceived to make it easier for newcomers to assimilate and contribute to the nation.

The literacy test, a requirement that most adult immigrants be able to read or write, became the preferred restriction. Supporters saw it as the best means of securing the “most desirable” migrants, while critics saw education as the product of opportunity, not character or potential. In 1907, when Congress could not agree on its propriety, it created the Dillingham Commission—named for its chairman, U.S. Sen. William P. Dillingham, a Vermont Republican.

Over the next three years, the nine-member commission—comprising three U.S. senators, three representatives, and three “experts” selected by President Theodore Roosevelt—fulfilled its charge by conducting a thorough and wide-ranging investigation of current and past immigration. Its multi-volume Reports is a treasure trove of information that remains profoundly useful to students of immigration today.

The Dillingham Commission, named for Sen. William Paul Dillingham, front row, middle. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Most of the work centered on “Immigrants in Industry,” but other topics of inquiry included “Immigrants in Cities,” “Children of Immigrants in Schools,” and a study of changes in immigrant physiology, the last conducted by anthropologist Franz Boas. He and his associates took head, or cranium, measurements of immigrant children in schools and concluded that the U.S. environment was engendering positive changes in “bodily form.” The children had features less like their European counterparts and more like “American types.” Commissioner Jeremiah Jenks also prepared a controversial Dictionary of Races, in which he sought definitively to identify and characterize the world’s races—or ethnic groups.

But it was not these reports that made the most impact. The commission also produced a compendium to summarize its findings and make policy recommendations. The latter would have profound effects.

The commissioners based their recommendations on the principle of admitting immigrants of such “quantity and quality as not to make too difficult the process of assimilation.” This, they acknowledged, constituted a departure from America’s traditional welcome of “the oppressed of other lands.” A corollary called for basing admission standards on “the prosperity and economic well-being of our people.” This raised the question of which polices would produce the desired effect. The recommended literacy test, argued racial theorist Madison Grant, would exclude low-quality individuals lacking in social, physical, and mental capabilities and who added nothing of value to America’s moral or intellectual character. Others saw it excluding too many of the hard-working manual laborers who had forged America’s steel and built its railroads.

After intense debate, the commission recommended passage of the literacy test, calling it “the single most feasible” method of exclusion. Restrictionists viewed this as an endorsement of their cause and used the recommendation to secure the test’s eventual passage by Congress in 1917.

The Reports also mentioned several other possible means of restriction that could warrant future consideration. These included the “limitation of the number of each race arriving each year to a certain percentage of that race arriving during a given period of years.” At the time, “race” was often equated to the modern meaning of ethnicity and sometimes drew its terminology from nationality, such as references to the “German race.” But, Jews were considered a distinctive race, subsumed within various nation-states.

William W. Husband, the Commission’s chief administrator, thereafter developed a quota scheme based on the 1910 census. Admission of immigrants belonging to a particular nationality would be limited to 5 percent of their total as reported in the census. Congress reduced that percentage to 3 in its temporary quota measure, passed in 1921. The permanent measure, passed in 1924, lowered it to 2 percent and used the 1890 census as the benchmark. The changes were deliberately designed to exclude more southern and eastern Europeans, so-called new immigrants deemed “undesirable” by many contemporary Americans. Asians, deemed wholly “undesirable,” did not receive any quotas. (Intriguingly, the Quota Acts exempted immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.) These provisions would define American immigration policy until passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.

The experience and impact of the Dillingham Commission offers lasting lessons to a country that still argues about immigration. The chief one is that fear tends to override facts about immigration policy, even when facts are in abundance.

Throughout its inquiry, the commission’s investigators sought to maintain objectivity; to collect the facts, let them speak for themselves, and make recommendations absent of bias. Throughout the Reports, the commission described immigrants positively, including the vilified “new” arrivals. Even the verbiage immediately preceding the recommendation of the literacy test spoke of them positively.

Yet, a social climate of fear and bigotry hijacked the investigation, and the commissioners themselves, ignoring facts in their own reports, endorsed restriction, largely to exclude the most recent types of immigrants. Critics, to no avail, would argue that socioeconomic conditions did not warrant more extensive exclusion, based on the commission’s own standards for such action. But the commission’s identification of the literacy test as the most “feasible method” trumped any such assertions.

So, too, when William Husband drafted his initial quota proposal, he based it on much more generous terms than did the congressmen who approved the final version. He also included quotas that would admit people from Asian countries—but the final versions in the quota laws had none, as bigoted extremism carried the day. The United States would enforce an Asian Exclusion Zone until the 1950s, and then establish only minuscule Asian quotas.

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Though the United States is a nation built by immigrants, nativism—the fear of immigrants and the desire to restrict their entry into the country or curtail their rights (or both)—has been a central strain in the national fabric from the beginning. Nativism waxes and wanes with the tides of American culture and politics, with some eras exhibiting more virulent anti-immigrant activism than others.

But few eras have exceeded the 1840s and 1850s, when a ferociously anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic secret society grew into a nativist political entity called the Know Nothing Party and briefly dominated the politics of a handful of states by stirring up violent outbursts before imploding over the slavery issue in 1855.

Though the United States always enjoyed robust immigration, it was not until the 1840s and 1850s that it became a divisive issue in politics. The highest level of immigration in U.S. history (as a proportion of overall population) occurred in 1854, in the wake of the massive influx of people from Ireland and the German states. The Irish were desperate to escape the infamous “potato famine,” which struck in 1845, and the Germans were motivated by overpopulation and unemployment in their homeland.

Coastal cities, in particular New York, were the primary entry points for European immigrants, with Irish and Germans establishing their own neighborhoods, maintaining their ethnic identities, and becoming the new industrial working class. Many current residents, fancying themselves “natives” (with no sense of irony concerning actual Native Americans), were none too pleased, unfairly condemning the newly-arrived Americans as job-stealers, drunks, criminals, and—perhaps worst of all, to their way of thinking—Roman Catholics.

Religion was at the core of the fight over immigration in the 19th century. Though not all the Germans and Irish who disembarked in the antebellum period were Catholics, the majority were. Their arrival reignited the war between Protestants and Catholics that had played out in Europe over centuries. American Protestants viewed Catholics as a genuine threat to the republic, believing that their loyalty was to the Pope in Rome rather than the U.S. government. This wave of Catholic immigrants, nativists asserted, was a papal invasion aimed at overthrowing democracy and establishing a monarchy, not unlike the Catholic crowns of France and Spain.

Motivated by anti-Catholicism and perverted patriotism, nativist organizations sprouted in New York City and spread to Philadelphia in the 1840s. With such names as “Native American Democratic Association” and “Organization of United Americans,” they were, at first, semi-secret fraternal organizations concerned more with local matters and cultural camaraderie than with national politics.

In 1851, however, the state of Maine banned liquor, which sparked a controversy. Nativists, seeing their Catholic neighbors as drunkards (Irish and their whiskey, Germans and their beer), emphatically embraced temperance as a way to punish immigrant communities, and mobilized to spread the “Maine Law” to other states. Liberals and newly arrived immigrants, on the other hand, rejected state-imposed morality and fought to kill temperance legislation.

The emerging battles over temperance and immigration at the local and state levels were symptomatic of larger national crises, as the nation experienced a disruptive “industrial revolution” and a growing division over the spread of slavery. The two-party system of Democrats and Whigs, forged in the 1830s over such issues as banking policy and nullification, could not contain the passions unleashed by abolitionism, the Maine Law, and immigrant rights. In short, the 1850s were not the 1830s, and white Americans came to care more about slavery and immigration than banking and tariffs. Thus, the Second Party System fractured. Whigs collapsed after their Southern wing united with Democrats to push through the notoriously pro-slavery “Compromise of 1850,” while many Northern Democrats, appalled by the pro-Southern content of the so-called compromise, bolted their party. Invigorated by the influx of Whig enslavers, Democrats won Congress and the White House in 1852 and launched a bold pro-slavery agenda.

Northern Whigs and Democrats, meanwhile, found themselves in partisan limbo. Looking to demonstrate their outrage at Democratic pro-slavery policies, they flocked to their local nativist organizations. Enjoying the sudden influx of members, nativist organizers began to forge a national movement. In 1853, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, New York City’s largest nativist organization, joined with the Order of United Americans, which had chapters along the East Coast, to form the “Know Nothings.”

Instead of being semi-secret and community-oriented, the Know Nothings were completely covert and dedicated to passing nativist legislation at the state and national levels. The origin of the appellation is unknown, but was probably concocted by the group itself as a reference to their mysterious nature. Know-Nothing “lodges” were established in almost every American city, with membership and meetings shrouded in secrecy. The plan was to infiltrate political parties, achieve elected office, and then push through temperance reforms and immigration restrictions.

Their plan was impressively underhanded and devious. Instead of running openly as “Know Nothings,” nativists campaigned for office as Democrats or Whigs, got on a regular party slate, and then, with the covert backing of their lodge, achieved election. Put another way, a town or city would not know they had elected Know Nothings until after the election had occurred. Needless to say, these tactics wreaked havoc among the parties, as Whigs and Democrats scrambled to find the hidden Know Nothings in their ranks. Adding to the confusion was the fact that the lodges operated almost independently of each other—there was no national leadership or coordination until 1855.

A series of unrelated events in the early 1850s served to boost nativist numbers. First, cities and towns experienced battles over the public funding of Catholic schools, enraging Protestants who hated to see their tax dollars help Catholic kids. Second, in 1853 Cardinal Gaetano Bedini, personal agent of the Pope, made a tour of the United States, raising suspicions of a papal plot. And third, Democratic President Franklin Pierce selected a Catholic to be postmaster general. The idea of Catholics controlling the mail made nativists apoplectic. Nativists took to the streets to vent their anger, attacking Catholic churches and Catholic-associated businesses in small towns like Chelsea, Massachusetts as well as major metropolitan areas including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Cincinnati.

Nativists easily preyed on popular passions and paranoia, and since they operated outside the normal partisan channels, they relied heavily on their populist appeal. Still, by May 1854, membership in the Know Nothings did not exceed 50,000—certainly not enough to shape national policy. With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that spring, previously free western territories were opened to the spread of slavery. With the Whig Party in the grave, more Northerners joined the Know Nothings to express their anger at the Democrats for passing the bill. By October 1854, membership had jumped to more than one million, and the Know Nothings seemed poised to replace the Whigs as the major opposition to the Democrats. Most Know Nothings embraced the anti-slavery movement for several reasons, including disgust with the Catholic Church’s long history with slavery, frustration with Democratic policies, and the belief that the Irish were pro-slavery. “The love of liberty in the Irish consists in the desire of freedom from oppression in their own persons, and the privilege of exercising tyranny over others,” wrote one resident of Maine to The Liberator. “I never saw one of the race since the anti-slavery movement commenced, who did not hate a negro.”

Local and congressional elections in the fall of 1854 were a mess, as voters had a confusing array of new and old parties to choose from and the Know Nothings enjoyed significant electoral gains, winning control of several states and sending a substantial number of men to Congress.

Despite their successes in 1854, however, the Know Nothings quickly fractured as slavery proved a more potent political issue than immigration. At their first national convention, held in June 1855 in Philadelphia, Know Nothings refashioned themselves as the American Party, but split between anti-slavery Northerners and pro-slavery Southerners. Throughout 1855 and 1856, “Americans,” as they called themselves, aligned with Republicans and Democrats in an attempt to keep immigration and nativism at the fore of national politics.

Illustration depicting a “Know-Nothing” demonstration in front of New York’s city hall (1855). Courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Ultimately, they were unsuccessful. In 1856, they even launched an abortive White House run. Former President Millard Fillmore, a lifelong racist and xenophobe, campaigned under the banner “Americans Must Rule America.” To an audience at Rome, New York, he warned: “You should be thankful that you live in this free and happy land. Guard well your institutions, and be ever watchful against any attempt to divide or destroy your country.” To an American Party chieftain, he was more blunt: “I have for a long time looked with dread and apprehension, at the corrupting influence which the contest for the foreign vote is exciting upon our election.” Sadly for him, he carried only one state.

After the embarrassing Fillmore flop, Know Nothings learned to acquiesce to their subordinate position in their new partisan homes. In the free states, they joined with Republicans to fight the spread of slavery, and in the slave states they agreed with Democrats that the protection and expansion of slavery was paramount. The final American Party convention was held in Louisville, Kentucky in June 1857, and few bothered to attend. Delegates agreed to abandon the national campaign and return to local reforms, such as state-mandated waiting periods for immigrants before allowing them to vote. In 1858, Republicans, now boosted by Know Nothing converts, won control of Congress, and, in 1860, the presidency.

Though the Republican Party did not adopt any of the Know Nothing nativism when they absorbed their members, Republicans certainly benefitted from their votes and support. Republican Abraham Lincoln is the perfect example: Though he was an outspoken critic of nativists, he won their votes. “I am not a Know Nothing,” he stated emphatically in 1855. “How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? . . . As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty.”

In the end, the Know Nothings were a partisan flash in the pan, but they made nativism a political strategy. Nativism flared again in the late 19th century as the nation experienced another spike in immigration, this time from China, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Today, the fight continues over people from Latin America and believers in Islam. The Know Nothings may be a fascinating phenomenon of the 1850s, but the way they used immigrants as political targets has persisted.

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In the last quarter of the 19th century, Mormons, under immense pressure from local and federal authorities, jettisoned their utopian separatism in favor of monogamy, market capitalism, public schools, national political parties, and military service. The question is, how can any human institution—much less a religion that historian Martin Marty has called the 19th century’s “most despised large group”—change so much so quickly?

The answer lies in understanding how Mormons determined that a pact with America was not a deal with the devil.

It also lies in American universities. In the same period that animosity between Mormons and non-Mormons reached fever pitch (the two decades between the death of Brigham Young in 1877 and Utah’s admission into the Union as the 45th state in 1896), a rising, influential generation of Mormons began attending the nation’s universities. On those campuses, Mormons enjoyed a rare, revivifying freedom from both outside aggression and ecclesiastical oversight. For them, the realm of American higher education was one of genuine dignity, hospitality, and meritocracy; it was a liminal, quasi-sacred space where they would undergo a radical transformation of consciousness and identity.

As a result, a generation of Mormon leaders developed an enduring devotion to non-Mormons’ institutions, deference to non-Mormons’ expertise, and respect for non-Mormons’ wisdom. These extra-ecclesial loyalties would dismantle the ideological framework of Mormon separatism and pave the way for Mormons’ voluntary re-immersion into the mainstream of American life.

It was Brigham Young himself who in the 1860s and ’70s authorized the first wave of Mormon academic migration to American institutions of higher education—like the University of Michigan, the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia, and West Point. His hope was that a few exemplary Latter-day Saints could secure professional training in law, medicine, and engineering that would help reinforce Mormon independence.

Students, however, began harboring their own diverse ambitions, and their experiences left them ambivalent at best about Mormon independence. As law students at the University of Michigan, for example, Mormons James Henry Moyle and Henry Rolapp wrote home about how they relished the opportunity to wrangle with non-Mormon classmates over Utah’s bid for statehood and the church’s legal status. They earned the clear, abiding respect of their peers not by proselytizing but by engaging them in rational discussion and debate about law and politics, leaving matters of faith off the table.

It was a rehearsal for, and a path to, American citizenship. In correspondence published in 1883 for Mormons in rural, southern Idaho, Rolapp wrote, “We have had quite [a] severe time in our class regarding our religion, but after we determinedly let them understand, that while we were not on a preaching mission, we were nevertheless proud of our religion, and could not be converted by ridicule—they let us alone.” Non-Mormons did more than leave them alone. They would support Moyle in his bid for the junior class presidency and elect Rolapp to the law department’s Supreme Court. For downcast Saints at home, Rolapp exulted, “we have held our own in spite of coming from Utah.”

Other Saints had similarly exhilarating academic experiences, which official church periodicals celebrated and disseminated for audiences delighted to know that the church’s best and brightest could succeed in the proving grounds of American academia. Each student’s dispatch introduced a distant, prestigious school—Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Michigan, the U.S. Naval Academy, even the art schools of Paris—to Mormon youth. The feature articles contained large photographs and ample descriptions of each school’s distinctive strengths, religious milieu, entrance requirements, daily routine, social life, and insider language like “quiz” and “flunk.” The students thus assumed authority as culturally bilingual diplomats who allowed the faithful at home to experience, vicariously, the thrill of being welcome in America.

Richard Lyman, writing from Ann Arbor, bore some of the most ebullient testimony. He described the University of Michigan’s campus and surrounding town as “a perfect little garden of Eden.” He had arrived with fear and trembling, because Mormons tended to “go out into the world feeling that in some degree, at least, we shall be curiosities to people.” Anxiety nearly overcame him when he introduced himself to the university’s president, James B. Angell. Carefully examining Lyman’s credentials, Angell assured him, “I am very glad to see you. We have had a great many students from your state, and among them we have found only good workers.” Lyman’s relief was inexpressible.

Also from Ann Arbor, the Mormon medical student Julia MacDonald Place wrote that the University of Michigan possessed a redemptive power that lifted her to heights of romantic eloquence. “Here is one place in the world,” she enthused in her correspondence to young Mormon women, “where money and position are of little avail, unless coupled with ability, and conscientious application to study … So may it ever be, thou queen of western universities. Be ever as now, the friend and helper of the poor and struggling student, who but for such aid must needs sink beneath his load of poverty, and the frowns of those more fortunate than himself.”

John A. Widtsoe, who graduated from Harvard in 1894, became of one the first Mormons to earn a PhD. Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

Likewise, the first generation of Mormon students at Harvard luxuriated in the company of the university’s renowned faculty and student body. Reflecting years later on his arrival in Cambridge in 1891, John A. Widtsoe—who became one of the first Mormons to earn a Ph.D., president of the University of Utah, and a high-ranking church authority—enthused, “History, tradition, science, books—the dream had come true! My prayers had been heard. Who cared for the past, in full view of a glorious future!”

Harvard’s famed president, Charles Eliot, had intentionally created this sort of environment for his students. He exalted their freedom by promoting unfettered inquiry, making chapel attendance voluntary, and implementing an elective system that allowed students tremendous power to determine their courses of study. Widtsoe and his Mormon companions revered him. Widtsoe recalled, “In my generation he was easily the foremost citizen of America. Such men as he have the power to shape the world, and always for good.”

Ordinary Americans had no idea that a small cadre of Mormons was enjoying such lavish hospitality at Harvard. They found out in 1892, when the personal connections that Mormons had established with Charles Eliot led him to visit Salt Lake City. Before a crowd of 7,000 Mormons and non-Mormons in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Eliot delivered a speech on one of his favorite topics, religious liberty. He expressed admiration for the Mormons, who, he said, resembled the early Puritans in their willingness to endure hardship and travel great distances in pursuit of a religious ideal.

But reports of the speech drew a backlash. Non-Mormons in Salt Lake City and throughout the nation found Eliot’s comparison intolerable, even traitorous. Eliot only added to the storm of controversy when he acknowledged that there was indeed a “colony” of Mormon students at Harvard.

The aftermath of Eliot’s speech illustrated how badly Mormons wanted to be seen as fully American, and how far most of the country still was from seeing them that way. Mormons rejoiced when President Eliot continued to defend them in the face of public criticism. “They live together,” Eliot conceded, “but they are not colonists in the sense of propagating Mormon doctrines or endeavoring to secure proselytes. They are good students, but do not differ greatly from other young men in their habits and customs.” Mormons savored the soul-stirring respect.

Other leading educators beat a path to Utah in the 1890s. The ambitious and idealistic head of the nascent Brigham Young Academy (later BYU), Benjamin Cluff, who had spent years at the University of Michigan, inaugurated a series of summer schools that brought the church, and Utah, into close communion with academic royalty. Guest lecturers included Col. Francis Parker of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago (1892), James Baldwin of the University of Texas (1893), and Burke Hinsdale of the University of Michigan (1894). Hundreds of Mormon and non-Mormon teachers attended the summer schools to hear lectures on the latest methods in education and psychology. John C. Swenson, a member of the Brigham Young Academy faculty who had never set foot outside Utah, recalled that the event fueled his desire to pursue university training in pedagogy and psychology at the glittering new Stanford University, starting in 1894.

As a result, by the dawn of Utah’s statehood, university-trained Mormon students possessed a new status and authority perhaps best exemplified in the career of Martha Hughes Cannon, MD. In 1896, Cannon became the first American woman to serve in a state senate—defeating her polygamist husband, Angus, in the election. She held three degrees from outside Utah, all earned in the early 1880s: a bachelor’s in medicine from Penn, a second bachelor’s from Philadelphia’s National School of Elocution and Oratory, and her MD from the University of Michigan. In the mid-1880s, during the federal raid on Utah polygamists, she had gone into exile in Europe, pregnant, to help Angus avoid arrest. There, she had visited training schools for nurses, and she had opened her own training school in Salt Lake City in 1889, before entering politics.

Such resilience and success made the 1890s heady times for the young scholars of the church. From Stanford, John C. Swenson wrote to Benjamin Cluff that with statehood secured, there was no telling “what we cannot do.”

Celebration of the students’ success would forestall a resurgent Mormon anti-intellectualism until the early 20th century, when conservative members of the church’s hierarchy, even some highly educated ones, began to fear that Mormon scholars’ respect for “the theories of men” had gone too far. They recast students’ enthusiasm as arrogance, their diplomacy as treason. As education turned into the main battleground in the 20th-century war to define Mormon identity, patriarchal scrutiny would often make Mormon scholars rebel or cower.

In the tumultuous late 19th century, however, Mormons needed their intellectuals—and American universities—to show them that becoming American would be neither humiliating nor irrational.

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Roosevelt did not extend that consideration to professional football players, whose sport did not register politically. As a result, the NFL nearly shut its doors during World War II. So many players were called to serve that several franchises had to merge. In fact, the league didn’t take off until it closely associated itself with national politics. For the last half-century, the intertwining of American football and politics has sustained both pastimes, and no one played both games more enthusiastically than Richard Nixon.

By the 1960s the United States was involved in a different war, and the politics of sport had changed, nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital. Washington was “a male town, and football is its game … the right metaphor for its politics,” journalist Hedrick Smith wrote. “Not to possess Redskins season tickets spells a fatal absence of status,” observed Mary McGrory, an astute observer of local mores. The Washington Post detailed David Broder, its prizewinning political columnist, to cover a preseason game. The Harris poll named football America’s most popular sport in 1965, the Gallup poll in 1972.

What had changed? The NFL, to grow its business, spent the post-war decades single-mindedly pursuing cultural currency. Under PR-conscious commissioner Pete Rozelle, who took the job in 1960, the effort resembled nothing so much as an advertising campaign: in Rozelle’s mind, “anything that caused people to connect with pro football” would do. Conveniently enough, that’s exactly where politics were heading. “We’re moving into a period where a man is going to be merchandised on television more and more,” a Nixon aide explained to a reporter in 1968.

The NFL published its own books, made its own movies, and eventually sponsored an essay contest officially certified as part of the 1976 bicentennial celebrations. NFL Creative Services’ books depicted professional football as the essential expression of a complex and multifarious America. NFL Films sold viewers a vision of the game as a spectacular, vivid, and heroic showcase for passionate excellence.

The NFL’s intention was to persuade audiences both popular and elite that the sport deserved support because it was quintessentially American, perfectly in tune with the contemporary world, and deserving of solicitude should it encounter any legal roadblocks.

But the NFL never stopped politicking. Its cultural productions went global, usefully extending American soft power while cementing the association between NFL and Americanism.

Politicians benefited as well. Just as the NFL grew more adept at selling itself, so too did political figures begin to cultivate an interest in sports figures. In 1960, the John F. Kennedy campaign “put celebrity-gathering into mass production,” as one veteran consultant put it. A Nixon campaign organizer noted that “round[ing] up practically every All-American here” had helped the Republicans carry California.

Soon every politician was seeking out jocks. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy’s recruiters noted that athletic endorsements paid big dividends because “you are dealing with people who usually get press on their own steam.” Hubert Humphrey directed his campaign toward sympathetic sportswriters, attempted to get an article published in Sports Illustrated on the virtues of competition, and even scooped up Kennedy’s “top recruits” two days after his assassination. “With luck, if Teddy doesn’t run,” they could be enticed to hit the campaign trail for Humphrey.

Politicians across the spectrum hobnobbed with players and coaches, endorsed the campaigns of former players, and exerted themselves to win new franchises for their states. By the mid-70s, the collective intertwining of what one reporter called the “sport of politics and the politics of sport” had become inextricable.

The coziness between football and power rendered lobbying almost unnecessary: Lawrence O’Brien, Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for congressional relations, recalled “inordinate efforts on behalf of the NFL in the Senate” by Senators in “constant quest…for a franchise location in their state.” No wonder that, when House Judiciary committee chair Emanuel Celler stalled a bill allowing the NFL to bypass the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and merge with the rival AFL in the fall of 1966, the House and Senate majority whips, Louisianans Hale Boggs and Russell Long, schemed to push it through the Ways and Means Committee. All it took was for the NFL to establish a team in New Orleans. “Pro football provides the circus for the hordes,” a disgusted Celler remarked.

In 1973, the House Interstate Commerce subcommittee “rammed through” without debate an NFL-backed measure preserving TV blackout rights for games that had not sold out 72 hours before their scheduled start. That blackout rule created incentives for fans and even cities to buy up unsold tickets. Without a sellout, TV stations would not show the home team’s games.

“It’s not true that Congress is divided, paralyzed, and unable to act with decision and leadership,” the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman acidly commented. “The pro football fans of America will be able to see their teams’ home games this year on television.”

Football on film sold America in ways that politicians liked. NFL Films perfected its craft with its magnum opus, They Call It Pro Football. Made in 1967, the 25-minute documentary neatly served the propagandistic, promotional, and political needs of both the league and the Defense Department. A number of reviews recognized the film’s social significance without fully grasping its extent, one extolling the “beauty and violence of the game—and its impact on the entire country.” At a briefing discussing how to sustain the morale of soldiers in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams told Defense Secretary Melvin Laird that the men wanted football games.

“These films are important to them,” Abrams said.

“We better call Rozelle up tonight,” replied Laird, who quickly pledged “a two-minute bureaucratic drill” to ensure that the Armed Forces Network provided servicemen with more televised football.

Their bosses enjoyed these movies just as much. Secretary of State William Rogers brought a supply of NFL films on tour to show to foreign diplomats in the Far East in 1969. Air Force One flew an NFL film to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in Texas, and Nixon later ordered a big-hits special for the White House. NFL Films’ productions were shown at the Continental Hotel in Paris, where homesick fans could savor the national pastime while munching hot dogs. They became a staple of life at military bases and on Navy submarines; and even in Saudi Arabia, where oil companies ordered copies of the films to console “American workers far from home.”

By the 1972 election, the merger between politics and football seemed almost complete. In April 1972, George McGovern announced an athletes’ committee heavy on football players. Its chair, Redskins guard Ray Schoenke, a history major and academic All-American at SMU, had walked into McGovern’s office the previous summer and volunteered his services. Schoenke made himself a one-man political operation. He handed out campaign literature at training camp, obtained rosters from the league office, and worked the phones every night.

But McGovern got crushed by Nixon in what a disappointed journalist panned as “one of the dullest political football games ever played before a nationwide TV audience.” No surprise. He was up against the country’s most football-friendly president.

Richard Nixon was a football fanatic who did the most to turn the game to political ends. Nixon’s connections to the sport ran deep. He frequently credited his coach at Whittier College, Chief Newman, with teaching him never to quit. He officially kicked off his first campaign for president on Whittier’s field before 20,000 roaring supporters and thanked Newman when accepting the Republican nomination in 1968. In his final memoir, In the Arena, Nixon recalled that “I learned more about life sitting on the bench with Chief Newman than I did by getting A’s in philosophy courses.”

He was not averse to putting those lessons to use. Nixon and his staff invoked football and attended games at strategic junctures throughout 1969 and 1970 with clear political intentions.

In November 1969, the administration countered nationwide anti-war marches with “National Unity Week,” featuring flag displays and what a White House memo called “a patriotic theme or event” at halftime of every televised college football game. Nixon told reporters that he was going to spend the Saturday afternoon of the march the right way: “It was a good day to watch a football game.”

The next fall, he kicked off his campaign for a Republican Congress before an enthusiastic crowd at Kansas State by contrasting the school’s football team (good) with youth protest (bad). He followed that up by sharing a podium with Ohio State coach Woody Hayes, celebrating the recently-deceased Vince Lombardi as “an apostle of teamwork,” and accompanying the Secretary of Defense and Wisconsin’s Republican candidates for Senator and Governor to Bart Starr Day, an event honoring the legendary Packer quarterback in Green Bay. A reporter traveling with the campaign found Nixon’s rah-rah approach utterly predictable: “It may be hard for some politicians to reduce a major political campaign to football terms, but not this one.”

In 1971, Newman’s successor at Whittier, George Allen, became coach of the Redskins. Nixon and Allen had supported each other’s endeavors since the 1950s, and the relationship deepened in Washington. Allen campaigned for Nixon and attended White House functions, and Nixon sent Allen a shoebox-full of notes, called him at home, and even attended practice at Allen’s invitation in 1971 to encourage his players.

The 1972 convention ratified what Nixon’s Republican detractors termed “game-plan politics.” “The President likes football analogies, and the relationships of field position and ball control were the essential elements of what the campaign organization tried to do,” the head of his advertising agency explained about the smoothly-run spectacle.

Bart Starr introduced convention chair Gerald Ford, and newly-elected New York Representative Jack Kemp, a former NFL quarterback and “No.1 [political] draft choice,” as a Sports Illustrated reporter following his campaign had described him, gave an “electrifying” speech seconding the nomination of Spiro Agnew. Numerous Republican power brokers nurtured Kemp’s political ambitions for a decade: Herb Klein, Nixon’s communications director, gave him a newspaper column, Reagan and the RNC hired him, and the White House publicly supported (and graced him with a congratulatory phone call after) his first run for Congress.

Despite Nixon’s electoral dominance, football’s triumph wasn’t partisan. No single participant succeeded in cementing a dominant political meaning for the nation’s most popular sport. Instead, football’s popularity provided a new language for politics and debate. Was one candidate trying a Hail Mary with a last-minute attack? Was another running out the clock with a lead? Had miscommunication in the Congressional huddle made a key bill fail? A political scientist complained in 1975 that “the discourse of politics” threatened to be “completely absorbed by the language of sports.”

The NFL, a profit-minded entity, both cultivated and profited from all this political attention. So when Richard Nixon told the crowd at Bart Starr Day that “the 1960s will be described as the decade when football became the No. 1 sport,” that sport’s number-one fan was merely adding a presidential signature to what a broad popular referendum had already decreed.

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By that measure, the United States has been in relative decline since at least the 1960s. Yes, the economic strength of America has grown, and continues to grow, in absolute terms. But its rivals and competitors—China, East Asia, Europe, Latin America—have grown at a stronger and more sustained rate.

This is the nature of relative decline: power in the world is a finite quantity (even if power is expanding), so the greater the power of others, the more the power of the United States decreases. Between 1940 and 2014, in terms of gross national product, the United States grew 12.5 times bigger. But the rest of the world has grown 26 times in gross product—more than double than that of the Americans.

Much of that gap in growth is from recent decades. In 1987, when Yale historian Paul Kennedy published his famous book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (which inaugurated the debate on American decline), the gap between U.S. and global growth was barely perceptible: Since 1940, U.S. GDP had grown six times in size, while the rest of the world’s GDP had grown seven and a half times. This slight difference did not prevent Kennedy from identifying the phenomenon with precision.

One can reasonably ask whether the growth differential of GDP can, by itself, give an account of the decline of a country, especially when it is only relative. Many other elements should be taken into account when comparing powers: variable economic factors, such as access to raw materials and their price; transport, research and development, productivity, finance, trade, investment; and then geography, military strength, demography, health conditions, education, the solidity of institutions, political stability. Finally, there are factors that are unmeasurable, but no less important: historical heritage, traditions, social psychology, ideologies, and religions.

Paul Kennedy wrote that, in examining the last five centuries of history, some “generally valid” conclusions can be drawn. The first is that there is a relationship between relative decline in economic power and shifts in the international political system.

The U.S. situation can be seen more clearly in this historical context. The country, said Kennedy, made “a vast array of strategic commitments” when the nation’s political, economic, and military capacity, as well as its ability to influence world affairs, was more assured than it was in 1987. The United States thus faced what Kennedy called “imperial overstretch,” with its obligations and interests adding up to more than its capacity. That’s a characteristic of relative decline.

Kennedy is sometimes dismissed because his predictions of American decline were based on the rise of Japan, and Japan’s rise was later impeded by its decades of stagnation. Still, this doesn’t undermine Kennedy’s historical analysis of decline. In more recent years, other voices have echoed him. In 2008, in its four-year report on international trends, the U.S. National Intelligence Council wrote that “owing to the relative decline of its economic, and to the lesser extent, the military power, the United States will no longer have the same flexibility in choosing as many policy options” as it once had.

In writing about relative decline, Kennedy took up again a concept formulated by political scientist Robert Gilpin: that over time, different levels of growth in power within a system eventually cause a fundamental redistribution of power within the system itself. State Department official Richard Haass later used that very same conclusion in order to argue that the United States needed to be ahead of the game so that any “new” balance of power in the world can be balanced from the United States’ perspective.

That argument has in turn been used to justify—and to explain—the theory of “preventive war,” applied later in Iraq. In one 2011 study, Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent argued that there are only two possibilities to deal with “a decline in relative power”: retrenchment or preventive war. The authors defined retrenchment as “redistributing away from peripheral commitments and towards core commitments” for the purpose of “economizing expenditures, reducing risks, and shifting burdens.”

But in the history of the United States, there is also a third possibility for responding to decline, embodied today by Donald Trump: isolationism.

Isolationism is not retrenchment, since retrenchment distinguishes between “peripheral commitments” and “core commitments.” Retrenchment is not therefore a matter of abandoning the commitments, but of making choices, however painful, on the basis of a well-defined political strategy. In Henry Kissinger’s words, “to find a sustainable ground between abdication and overextension.” The difference between retrenchment and isolationism is the difference between ordered retreat and a catastrophic rout.

Isolationism in the United States today is fueled by fear of worsening conditions. A fundamental misunderstanding of the world has led many people to believe that the United States is being plotted against externally and betrayed internally. But such fears and such misunderstandings are not the product of Donald Trump and his ideologues. Indeed, these fears, particularly around globalization, were cooked up in the intellectual laboratories of the far left in the late 1990s and brought to the public square by the Seattle protestors against free trade in 1999. A matrix of isolationism and petit-bourgeois anti-capitalism has always been found in Jeffersonian democracy, passing through Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century populist movement, and the Catholic critics of the far right and far left during the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Trump’s isolationism predates Trump. It’s a product of the end of the Cold War, when many Americans believed the time had come to finally “return to normalcy” and retreat to their island to enjoy the dividends of victory. In the 1990s, the United States refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, to participate in the treaty to ban anti-personnel mines and nuclear experiments, or to vote for the creation of the International Criminal Court. Before September 11, George W. Bush was openly isolationist and unilateralist, proclaiming his intention to withdraw the United States from some of the institutions it had created and which had guaranteed the continuity of its world order.

September 11 and its aftermath suspended this isolationist tendency only temporarily. The anxieties from the 2008 economic crisis, multiplied by the harmful effects of reckless interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, have restored it. During the presidency of Barack Obama, the United States adopted 317 protectionist measures on average each year—representing 20 percent of all trade restrictions adopted in the world, almost six times more than the second most protectionist country, India. And during the 2016 election campaign, both candidates called for the withdrawal of the United States from new strategic free trade treaties in the Pacific and the Atlantic.

The idea of “making America great again” is absurd. History does not walk backwards. When Americans talk of their greatness, they generally think of a bygone era in which their country dominated the economic, political, and military balances of the world, solitary and undisputed. It also was a time when unparalleled material superiority fueled their alleged moral superiority. Many of the most dramatic mistakes made by the United States during the Cold War derived from exactly this sense of moral superiority, and the corresponding conviction that Americans could shape reality without taking into account the annoying tangible and intangible constraints that exist in the real world. The absence of historical depth that characterizes the American ideology, combined with the rootlessness and the heterogeneity of the population, allows Americans to believe that the recipes that were successfully applied in the past—like deficit spending and protectionism—are reproducible under any circumstances.

Neo-Keynesians, for example, argue that they can overturn current trends by restoring the New Deal recipe of deficit spending, as though this were 1929. But public debt has changed with the times. Before the Great Depression began in 1929, the American public debt amounted to 16 percent of GDP. In 1941, it had reached 45 percent; in 2008, during the recession, the public debt was 68 percent of GDP; at the end of Barack Obama’s tenure, it was at 106.7 percent.

Today, the United States seeks to make itself great again on credit: In 2017, of the $20.245 billion of debt, almost one third ($6.349 billion) was in the hands of foreign governments—including Beijing ($1.189 billion) and Tokyo ($1.094 billion). In other words, in 2017 China and Japan funded more than 10 percent of U.S. public spending.

And yes, while the United States has been protectionist for most of its short history, and had great success under protectionism, that does not mean that today protectionism is a policy that could make the country great again. In a world of more shared power, where growth is based on the exchange of raw materials, financial products, ideas, and people, almost every type of production is linked by a thousand threads to the world market, and breaking one means breaking them all.

What gets left out of these protectionist discussions is that now, even the making of a hamburger—which involves cultivation, storage, transport, refining, production, packaging, and distribution—ties together 75 centers of activity from 15 different countries. According to a Boston Consulting Group report from 2017, an attack on NAFTA would be primarily an attack on the United States, given the country’s economic integration with its neighbors. Gordon Hanson of the University of California stated that if NAFTA had not existed, the entire American automotive industry would have already disappeared, swept away by competition from countries with lower wages, social protection, and public deficits.

In the future, Americans will no longer be able to afford to live as they have lived in the past. Such a reality has caused disquiet in all countries that once dominated world markets. But the anxiety has been much more intense in the United States, whose brief history has been marked by the promise, almost always maintained, of a constant improvement of the living conditions of most of its citizens.

Henry Kissinger wrote that the art of demagoguery consists of the “ability to distill emotion and frustration into a single moment.” But demagoguery cannot solve its problems; it only will aggravate them. In July 1971, when President Nixon took note that the United States was no longer in a position of complete pre-eminence, he was merely stating the obvious: that international relations are always multipolar. The question is the relative strength of the poles of power, and today, the relative strength of those poles is shifting at rapid pace. The distance between the United States and the rest of the world continues to shorten. According to the IMF World Economic Outlook of October 2017, the pace of growth of the so-called emerging countries (4.3 percent in 2016, 4.6 percent in 2017, and 4.9 percent in 2018) is more than double that of the United States (1.8, 2.1, and 2.3 percent). China’s growth is about three times higher (6.7, 6.8, and 6.5 percent).

There is no general law establishing how, when—and if—a country in relative decline enters a phase of absolute decline. And theoretically, at least, since decline is relative, it could reverse. Fareed Zakaria has argued that the world is becoming more “post-American” not because of the United States’ failures, but because of “the rise of everyone else.” If China or India or Germany were to enter a deep crisis, the United States could quickly be in a state of relative rise. But that presumes that the United States would not itself be infected by a deep crisis in the other powers. And such a prospect is very unlikely.

It is much more plausible that America will continue its relative decline, and will thus be obliged to surrender some of its global commitments and interests, creating imbalances in different places. Of course, things would be far worse if the United States were to withdraw from all commitments and interests in one fell swoop.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If America were to abandon the field, it would create a kind of black hole, into which all the world would be drawn. America’s insular illusions would soon be overwhelmed by the tsunami of disruption. Such an uproar would turn today’s relative decline into absolute decline; it would mean, in the words of Bismarck, a “suicide from fear of death.”

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