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October 3, 2005
October 2, 2005
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Today's Papers
Tourist Trap
By Jesse Stanchak
Posted Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005, at 2:36 AM PT
The Los Angeles Times leads (at least online) with the explosions in Bali, Indonesia, that killed at least 25 and wounded more than 100 others. The New York Times leads with a report on the growing number of prisoners serving life sentences. The Washington Post reports on hurricane refugees struggling to find shelter before the end of the Red Cross' housing program on Oct. 15.
Details on the Bali blasts are hazy at best. The papers all agree (the story is the off-lead for the WP and the NYT) there were three explosions at different tourist destinations, which killed a total of at least 25 people and injured at least 100 others, including two Americans. The NYT, however, notes that initially the reported number of attacks was higher and that a definite body count remains elusive. Everyone points out that the attacks fall almost exactly on the three-year anniversary of a similar attack that killed 202 people. The 2002 attack is credited in every article with weakening the country's vital tourism industry, and subsequently waking up the Indonesian government to the realities of terrorist activity in the island nation, a problem it had previously ignored. Indonesia has since drawn praise from the U.S. for its no-nonsense stand on terror. No official suspect has been named in the bombings, but every article indicates that the government is looking at Jemaah Islamiyah, the group responsible for the 2002 attack, several members of which are still at large.
The NYT finds that almost 10 percent of the America's inmates are serving life sentences, more than one-third of which are behind bars for crimes other than murder. Over the last 30 years, the number of life sentences has exploded, while commuted life sentences (once more common, now politically thorny at best) are almost nonexistent. The NYT's data is admittedly incomplete and the story's bias toward shorter sentencing is palpable. But even taken with a grain of salt, the numbers should make budget analysts and prisoner-rights advocates cringe. A "conservative estimate" puts a $3 billion-a-year price tag on housing inmates with life sentences. Meanwhile, the study finds that the recidivism rate for released lifers is about a third of the average, suggesting that keeping 70-year-olds behind bars may provide diminishing returns.
The WP points out that no one has yet figured out what to do with the 400,000 hurricane refugees whose housing assistance runs out in two weeks. The refugees are staying in hotel rooms paid for by the Red Cross through Oct. 15. Red tape has hampered FEMA efforts to house them in thousands of mobile homes, with some officials worrying that the resulting communities would too closely resemble depression-era "Hoovervile" shanty towns. Meanwhile, the NYT writes about the $100 million worth of ice FEMA purchased after Katrina, only to have much of it sit unused in storage units around the country.
The rebuilding of New Orleans could end up being even more difficult than anyone guessed. Not just because of the extent of the damage, or the amount of land that needs to be cleared away and redeveloped from scratch, but because fiercely divided local interests are engaged in a war of attrition over how best to proceed, according to the LAT. One would-be renovator refers to the process as "a game of three-dimension chess."
The WP fronts a profile on Ronnie Earle, the media-savvy (if somewhat eccentric) prosecutor who knocked Tom DeLay from his leadership perch last week with charges of funneling illegal campaign contributions. Earle comes across as a left-leaning reformer and something of a likable rogue. The WP reports that Earle once famously befriended a politician who had repeatedly threatened to kill him.
A tale of catastrophic grief compounded by bureaucracy graces the LAT front page. A month after Hurricane Katrina and its attendant flooding claimed the lives of hundreds, those bodies remain largely unidentified and unreturned to the bereaved, some of whom are still don't know if their loved ones are dead or not.
Under the fold, the NYT finds that the ongoing violence and instability in Iraq has been rough on the Iraqi middle class, too.
Inside, the WP reports that Connecticut began issuing licenses for same-sex unions on Saturday. The WP points out that decision was made with little controversy or fanfare, in stark contrast to the flap over similar moves in Vermont and Massachusetts.
The WP runs a piece inside on the bizarre history of the only widely available treatment for alcoholism in Russia, where alcohol poisoning deaths top 50,000 annually.
It always looked like a bull's-eye to me …
A WP editor takes an informal look at the words different cultures use for that funny little "@" symbol that became ubiquitous with the rise of e-mail. While the prevalence of English abroad makes referring to it as simply "at" more commonplace, many countries cling to cute, if occasionally idiosyncratic, euphemisms for that most curlicue of symbols. The OED admits that it has no official name in English, but dourly notes that calling it, "the at sign" is "good enough for most people."
Jesse Stanchak is an assistant documents editor at Congressional Quarterly.
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Today's Papers
All the Judy Details
By Telis Demos
Posted Saturday, Oct. 1, 2005, at 2:28 AM PT
Judith Miller's morning of testimony leads the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's top box. Lawyers say she testified, as expected, that Scooter Libby was her source on Joseph Wilson's connection to the CIA. The Washington Post fronts post-Katrina economic news: lower personal income and weakened consumer confidence. An efficient and well-coordinated response to forest fires may have prevented nearly 2000 homes from being destroyed, leads the Los Angeles Times.
Keep in mind that the papers don't know exactly what Miller told the grand jury, and Libby's lawyers don't know if her account of two conversations with Libby differs from his own. So the NYT looks at events leading up to Miller's testimony: a phone call with Libby saying it's OK to talk and a deal with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, notably that he would ask her about only Libby and that she would hand over portions of her notes. The NYT also talks to journos who worry that future prosecutors will be quicker to toss reporters in jail. The WP's Howard Kurtz says some NYT insiders wonder why Miller didn't just talk in the first place.
In the other papers' stories, a couple things should stand out. First, Libby probably isn't going to be nailed as the leak. According to the WP, sources say Miller's testimony was that Libby initially said the White House was looking into Wilson's connection to the CIA, then later that he'd learned Wilson's wife worked for the CIA—but that Libby didn't know her name or that she was a covert operative. It's unclear whether her testimony added anything to what Fitzgerald already knew. Second, Miller's lawyer Floyd Abrams explains to the LAT why she didn't testify when Libby's lawyer said it was OK more than a year ago. She wanted direct permission from Libby.
The WP's Page One economic outlook is convincingly bleak, but does it deserve the Katrina headline? Despite dropping income, Americans' spending increased, making it the third month in a row that personal savings were negative—the first time that's happened since such numbers were collected. But how's that need to spend linked to the storm? The Journal's analysis is clearer, linking Katrina to faster inflation and reporting that the high price of gas is slowing necessary spending in other areas.
The WP also fronts news that Katrina caused $1 billion in damages to three historically black colleges that lack the resources to rebound as quickly as the region's other schools. The three colleges are especially worried that other schools will try to recruit black faculty who have temporarily relocated. Inside, the WP details Mayor Ray Nagin's plans to get the city back on its feet but also talks to New Orleanians who don't plan to return. And the NYT finds cynical Louisianans who fear the state's history of corrupt politics will divert needed relief money.
Despite yesterday's pessimism about Iraq forces, the LAT finds U.S. generals who say American troops might be hurting more than helping, arguing that a draw-down should happen sooner rather than later. A heart-wrenching NYT front-pager follows a U.S. battalion assigned to collect wounded and dead comrades.
Off-lead in the NYT, the GAO says the Department of Education's sketchy efforts to get positive media coverage—like paying columnist Armstrong Williams and hiring a PR agency—were an illegal use of public money for partisan purposes. Is this connected to other Bush administration media shenanigans? A DOE-produced TV bit used the same "reporter," Karen Ryan, who appeared in spots praising the Medicare drug benefit. There's more bad news for Bush when complaints about an allegedly underqualified State Department appointee get Page One airing in the LAT.
Below the fold, the WP says Republicans abandoned an agreement with Democrats to stop paying a Clinton-era independent council to investigate illegal payments to a mistress by then-housing secretary Henry Cisneros—to which he plead guilty six years ago. Republicans think the investigation might be finding new dirt from the Clinton years.
Happy Daze. A sharp Journal analysis says Republicans are heading into defense and homeland security budget sessions with deficit reduction on the brain. But they can't really say no to the troops or the storm victims, and they don't have leader Tom DeLay right now. Can the majority party make it work? At least one House GOP insider isn't optimistic: "If we offset $20 billion, we'll go home happy."
Telis Demos is a reporter at Fortune.
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To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars
Elmira Star-Gazette
1969, AGE 15
Jackie Lee Thompson's mug shot after Charlotte Goodwin's killing.
2004, AGE 49
Mr. Thompson has spent 35 years in a Pennsylvania prison.
To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars
HARRISBURG, Pa. - In the winter woods near Gaines, Pa., on the day before New Year's Eve in 1969, four 15-year-olds were hunting rabbits when Charlotte Goodwin told Jackie Lee Thompson a lie. They had been having sex for about a month, and she said she was pregnant.
That angered Jackie, and he shot Charlotte three times and then drowned her in the icy waters of Pine Creek.
A few months later, Judge Charles G. Webb sentenced him to life in prison. But the judge told him:
"You will always have hope in a thing of this kind. We have found that, in the past, quite frequently, if you behave yourself, there is a good chance that you will learn a trade and you will be paroled after a few years."
Mr. Thompson did behave himself, learned quite a few trades in his 35 years in prison - he is an accomplished carpenter, bricklayer, electrician, plumber, welder and mechanic - and earned a high school diploma and an associate's degree in business.
So exemplary is his prison record that when Mr. Thompson, now 50, asked the state pardons board to release him, the victim's father begged for his release, and a retired prison official offered Mr. Thompson a place to stay and a job.
"We can forgive him," said Duane Goodwin, Charlotte's father. "Why can't you?"
The board turned Mr. Thompson down.
Tom Corbett, the state attorney general, cast the decisive vote.
"He shot her with a pump-action shotgun, three times," Mr. Corbett said. "This was a cold-blooded killing."
Just a few decades ago, a life sentence was often a misnomer, a way to suggest harsh punishment but deliver only 10 to 20 years.
But now, driven by tougher laws and political pressure on governors and parole boards, thousands of lifers are going into prisons each year, and in many states only a few are ever coming out, even in cases where judges and prosecutors did not intend to put them away forever.
Indeed, in just the last 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin.
A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of the nation's prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population. Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, including burglary and drug crimes.
Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words "without parole" appended to their sentences. In 1993, the Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole. Last year, the number rose to 28 percent.
The phenomenon is in some ways an artifact of the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment have promoted life sentences as an alternative to execution. And as the nation's enthusiasm for the death penalty wanes amid restrictive Supreme Court rulings and a spate of death row exonerations, more states are turning to life sentences.
Defendants facing a potential death sentence often plead to life; those who go to trial and are convicted are sentenced to life about half the time by juries that are sometimes swayed by the lingering possibility of innocence.
As a result the United States is now housing a large and permanent population of prisoners who will die of old age behind bars. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, for instance, more than 3,000 of the 5,100 prisoners are serving life without parole, and most of the rest are serving sentences so long that they cannot be completed in a typical lifetime.
About 150 inmates have died there in the last five years, and the prison recently opened a second cemetery, where simple white crosses are adorned with only the inmate's name and prisoner ID number.
A Growing Reliance on Life Terms
American enthusiasm for life sentences reflects an uneasy societal consensus. Such sentences are undeniably tough, pleasing politicians and prosecutors, but they also satisfy opponents of capital punishment.
"If you are punishing a heinous criminal who has committed a violent murder, it is appropriate to use severe sanctions," said Julian H. Wright Jr., a lawyer in North Carolina and the author of a study on life without parole. "It has the advantage of achieving a harsh penalty and keeping a violent offender off the streets. And you don't take a human life in the process. Indeed, if you mess up and do it wrong, you haven't taken someone's life."
But the prison wardens, criminologists and groups that study sentencing say the growing reliance on life terms also raises a host of questions.
Permanent incarceration may be the fitting punishment for murder. Few shed tears for Gary L. Ridgway, the Green River killer, who was sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms in Washington State, one for each of the women he admitted to killing.
But some critics of life sentences say they are overused, pointing to people like Jerald Sanders, who is serving a life sentence in Alabama. He was a small-time burglar and had never been convicted of a violent crime. Under the state's habitual offender law, he was sent away after stealing a $60 bicycle.
Fewer than two-thirds of the 70,000 people sentenced to life from 1988 to 2001 are in for murder, the Times analysis found. Other lifers - more than 25,000 of them - were convicted of crimes like rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, extortion, burglary and arson. People convicted of drug trafficking account for 16 percent of all lifers.
Life sentences certainly keep criminals off the streets. But, as decades pass and prisoners grow more mature and less violent, does the cost of keeping them locked up justify what may be a diminishing benefit in public safety? By a conservative estimate, it costs $3 billion a year to house America's lifers. And as prisoners age, their medical care can become very expensive.
At the same time, studies show, most prisoners become markedly less violent as they grow older.
"Committing crime, particularly violent crime, is an activity of the young," said Richard Kern, the director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission.
Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group that issued a report on life sentences last year, said that about a fifth of released lifers were arrested again, compared with two-thirds of all released prisoners.
"Many lifers," Mr. Mauer said, "are kept in prison long after they represent a public safety threat."
In much of the rest of the world, sentences of natural life are all but unknown.
"Western Europeans regard 10 or 12 years as an extremely long term, even for offenders sentenced in theory to life," said James Q. Whitman, a law professor at Yale and the author of "Harsh Justice," which compares criminal punishment in the United States and Europe.
Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota and an expert on comparative punishment, said life without parole was a legal impossibility in much of the world.
Mexico will not extradite defendants who face sentences of life without parole. And when Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, was pardoned in 2000, an Italian judge remarked, "No one stays 20 years in prison."
Some developing and Islamic nations mete out brutal sanctions, including corporal punishment and mutilation. But if the discussion is limited to very long prison sentences, Professor Tonry said, "we are vastly more punitive than anybody else."
The reasons for this gap are hard to pinpoint. Professor Whitman detects an American appetite for harsh retribution. Professor Tonry locates that appetite in a Calvinist tradition.
"It's the same reason we're not a socialist welfare state," he said. "You deserve what you get, both good and bad."
That sort of talk struck M. L. Ebert Jr., a former president of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association and the district attorney of Cumberland County, Pa., as a little fancy.
"Is it too much to ask that people don't kill people?" he said. "I can't tell you the devastation it causes families, who never forget. If you kill somebody, life means life without parole."
The Crime and the Victim
"My anger broke loose, and I shot her," Mr. Thompson said recently, recalling for the millionth time the day he killed Charlotte Goodwin. He was afraid, he said, that her pregnancy would get him kicked out of his foster home, his fourth in five years and the first one that he liked.
Mr. Thompson is a slight, almost elfin man, with receding, wispy, unkempt salt-and-pepper hair, a casual mustache, breath that smells of cigarettes and moody brown eyes in a heavily creased face.
He is serving his time at the Rockview Correctional Institution near Bellefonte, just up the road from Pennsylvania State University. It is a soaring and forbidding mass of granite, a piece of Gotham City plunked down in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania.
He used his friend Dennis Ellis's pump-action shotgun, Mr. Thompson said, and he shot Charlotte at close range three times. He tried to explain the repeated shots.
"You have to pump each time," he said. "It is true. Dennis and I, we always had a habit of going out in the woods with a gun and see how fast we could empty a gun. That's where the second and third shots come from."
Charlotte's wounds were not immediately fatal. The youths had the idea, Mr. Thompson said, of putting her in a nearby creek. But she bobbed to the surface. So the three teenagers slid her body under the ice that covered a part of the creek, drowning her.
"You should have seen how stupid we was," Mr. Thompson said. "I wish I could change that."
Mr. Thompson grew up as a slow and confused child, with a slight speech impediment. He had 13 brothers and sisters, "and that's not counting the half ones," he said.
"Three or four of them have died so far," he said. His mother died when he was 10, he added, "I'm told of cancer."
Mr. Thompson recalled his younger self.
"That 15-year-old kid was so scared. He was a special-ed kid. Special-ed kids get teased a lot. I was small. I kept running away. Here was a kid who was always scared to death, picked on, possibly beat up."
"Looking back," he said, "I wish someone would have grabbed hold of me and kicked my butt. I wasn't a bad kid."
He met Charlotte Goodwin at the foster home.
"I didn't get to know her that well," Mr. Thompson said. "At that age, boys are after one thing. A girl can talk all she wants and you ain't listening to her. You're thinking of only one thing."
Duane Goodwin, Charlotte's father, remembered a cheerful child.
"She was just happy-go-lucky," Mr. Goodwin said of her. "If there was any kind of music on, she'd move to it."
Jackie confessed to killing Charlotte, and Judge Webb sentenced him to life. At that time, 1970, in Pennsylvania, a life sentence usually meant fewer than 20 years.
Dorothy D. Quimby was the clerk of the Orphans Court of Tioga County at the time and she knew him as "a gentle, good boy who had suffered a lot of hurt."
"I also knew Judge Webb very well," she wrote to the pardons board, "and know that his intentions were not to have Jackie incarcerated for any great length of time."
A few months ago, Mr. Goodwin, 78, traveled 100 miles to speak up for his daughter's killer before the pardons board, which meets in an ornate courtroom of the State Supreme Court here, under a stained-glass cupola and a dozen frescoes attesting to the majesty of the law.
Mr. Goodwin, a retired glass factory worker with a gray goatee and a hearing aid, is a small man with erect posture, alert eyes and quick laugh, but he gets a little overwhelmed by public speaking. He spoke softly and haltingly.
"He was just a scared little kid," Mr. Goodwin said of Jackie. "If he ever gets out, he's got a good education, and I think he'll use it."
Kenneth Chubb, a retired facilities manager at the prison in Camp Hill, told the board that he had a proposal.
"My wife and I would both like to offer, if needed, a place for him to stay," Mr. Chubb said, his voice choking with emotion. "Plus, my son, who has a plumbing business, will offer him a job."
That drew a low whistle of surprise from a former prison official in the audience.
"For a corrections person to embrace an inmate is just incredible," the official, W. Scott Thornsley, said.
A few days before the hearing, Mr. Corbett, the state attorney general, met with Mr. Thompson.
"I walked out of the room thinking and feeling that he was going to say yes," Mr. Thompson later said. "He was not coldhearted. He wasn't drilling me. He gets to the point. He's a decent man."
But in the end, that visit, Mr. Goodwin's pleas and Mr. Chubb's offer were not enough to sway Mr. Corbett, the one dissenting vote on the five-member parole board.
"I am not prepared," Mr. Corbett said, "at this time to vote in the affirmative."
John F. Cowley, the district attorney in Tioga County, where the killing took place, agreed that Mr. Thompson should never be free.
"At the end of the day, in Pennsylvania life means life," Mr. Cowley said. "I come down on the side - not firmly - but I come down on the side that there should be no pardon. It's a tough case. The only reason is the age at the time of the crime. Everything else is way beyond ugly."
In lawsuits around the country, lifers are complaining that the rules were changed after sentencing. In some cases, they have the support of the judges who sentenced them.
A survey of 95 current and retired judges by the Michigan state bar released in 2002 found that, on average, the judges had expected prisoners sentenced to life with the possibility of parole to become eligible for parole in 12 years and to be released in 16 years. In July, a Michigan appeals court echoed that, saying that many lawyers there used to assume that a life sentence meant 12 to 20 years.
"This belief seems to have been somewhat supported by parole data," the court said in rejecting a claim from a prisoner who claimed that recent changes in the parole system had worked to his disadvantage. "For example, between 1941 and 1974, 416 parole-eligible lifers were paroled, averaging 12 per year."
In the last 24 years, by contrast, a New York Times analysis found that while the number of lifers shot up, the number of lifers who were paroled declined to about seven per year - even using the most liberal of definitions.
In 2002, for instance, a Michigan judge tried to reopen the case of John Alexander, whom he had sentenced to life with the possibility of parole for a seemingly unprovoked street shooting in 1981.
The judge, Michael F. Sapala, said he had not anticipated the extent to which the parole board "wouldn't simply change policies but, in fact, would ignore the law" in denying parole to Mr. Alexander. "If I wanted to make sure he stayed in prison for the rest of his life, I would have imposed" a sentence "like 80 to 150 years," the judge said.
An appeals court ruled that the judge no longer had jurisdiction over the case.
Executive Clemency Wanes
In Louisiana, which, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, has a large number of lifers, "it was common knowledge that life imprisonment generally means 10 years and 6 months" in the 1970's, the state's Supreme Court said in 1982.
Since 1979, all life sentences there have come without the possibility of parole, and the governor rarely intervenes.
"The use of executive clemency has withered, as it has all over the country, especially with lifers," said Burk Foster, a recently retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
The federal appeals court in California is considering whether the parole board there may deny parole to lifers based on the nature of the original crime, which, prisoners say, is a form of double jeopardy. The plaintiff in the case, Carl Merton Irons II, shot and stabbed a housemate, John Nicholson, in 1984 after hearing that Mr. Nicholson was stealing from their landlord. Mr. Irons was sentenced to 17 years to life for second-degree murder.
The parole board refused for a fifth time to release him in 2001, saying that the killing was "especially cruel and callous."
The prosecutor who sent Mr. Irons away spoke up for him at a hearing the next year, to no avail. "If life would have it that Carl Irons was my next-door neighbor or I heard he was going to move next door to me," the prosecutor, Stephen M. Wagstaffe said, "my view to you would be that I'm going to have a good neighbor."
Mr. Irons filed a lawsuit challenging the board's decision. A federal district judge agreed, ordering him paroled. The federal appeals court is expected to rule soon.
The state has 30,000 lifers, of whom 27,000 will eventually become eligible for parole. As a practical matter, parole for lifers is a two-step process: the parole board must recommend it, and the governor must approve it. Neither step is easy. In a 28-month period ending in 2001, according to the California Supreme Court, the board considered 4,800 cases and granted parole in 48. Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, reversed 47 of the decisions.
Governor Davis had run on a tough-on-crime platform. In five years as governor, he paroled five lifers, all murderers.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who succeeded Mr. Davis in late 2003, has been more receptive to parole. He has paroled 103 lifers, 89 of them murderers.
"Even though he is letting out more than Davis, it is still just a trickle," said Don Spector, executive director of the Prison Law Office, a legal group concerned with inmate rights and prison reform. "The victims' rights groups are used to seeing nothing, so to them, it seems like there's been a flood of releases."
Reginald McFadden is the reason lifers no longer get pardons in Pennsylvania.
Mr. McFadden had served 24 years of a life sentence for suffocating Sonia Rosenbaum, 60, during a burglary of her home when a divided Board of Pardons voted to release him in 1992. After Gov. Robert P. Casey signed the commutation papers two years later, Mr. McFadden moved to New York, where he promptly killed two people and kidnapped and raped a third. He is now serving another life sentence there.
Lt. Gov. Mark Singel had voted to release Mr. McFadden. When news of the New York murders broke, Mr. Singel was running for governor and was well ahead in the polls. The commutation became a campaign issue, and Mr. Singel was defeated by Tom Ridge, who did not commute a single lifer's sentence in his six years in office.
Ernest D. Preate Jr., the state attorney general at the time, was the sole dissenting vote in Mr. McFadden's case.
Then, it took only a majority vote of the board to recommend clemency. Mr. Preate worked to change that, and in 1997 Pennsylvania voters passed a constitutional amendment requiring a unanimous vote in cases involving the death penalty and life sentences. The amendment also changed the composition of the board, substituting, for instance, a crime victim for a lawyer.
Mr. Thornsley, a former corrections official who now teaches at Mansfield University, said the amendment made a sensible change. "It took a unanimous vote to convict somebody," he said. "It should take a unanimous vote to send a case to the governor. If you're going to have a sentence, it should be served out in its entirety."
The McFadden experience in Pennsylvania is a representative one, said Michael Heise, a law professor at Cornell.
"Around World War II, governors were giving away clemency like candy," Dr. Heise said. "Ever since Governor Dukakis and Willie Horton and President Clinton and Marc Rich, executive officers have been far, far more reticent to exercise their power. The politics are pretty clear: they don't want to get burned."
As recently as 30 years ago, pardons for lifers were common in Pennsylvania. In eight years in the 1970's, for instance, Gov. Milton Shapp granted clemency to 251 lifers. Since 1995, even as the number of lifers has more than doubled, three governors combined have commuted a single life sentence.
These days, Mr. Preate is on the other side of the issue, working to overturn the amendment that he himself set in motion. He said his change of heart came after he spent a year in prison on a mail fraud conviction in the mid-90's. Meeting older lifers convinced him that the current system could be unduly punitive, he said.
"That got me involved in the fight against the amendment I helped create and supported," he said.
Mr. Preate now supports legislation that would allow a parole board to consider the cases of lifers who have served 25 years and are at least 50. "I never foresaw the politicization of this process," he said, "and the fear that has crept into the process."
Mr. Thompson entered prison in an era when its goal was rehabilitation, even for people serving nominal life terms. These days, he works as a prison carpenter, earning 42 cents an hour building cabinets and fixing things up around the prison, which houses about 1,800 inmates, more than 180 of whom are lifers.
"It helps pay the cable and gets you a little bit of commissary," he said. "It might be strange to say, but coming to jail helped me. I got an education. Would I have got that out there? I probably would have quit like my brothers and most of my sisters. Would I have an associate's degree? Would I have job training?"
He has a cell to himself, with a television and a guitar. He plays "the old rock, the classics" and said he was partial to Bob Dylan. He has started playing sports.
"Softball season started up again and the young boys talked me in to playing again, and I'm pretty good," he said several months ago. He plays second base.
A lifer entering the system today would have few of Mr. Thompson's advantages. Programs have been cut back, and those that still exist are often reserved for prisoners serving short sentences.
Mr. Thompson sounded resigned when he talked about being turned down by the pardons board.
"A lot of guys in here really thought I was going to make it, staff and inmates, to give a little hope to the lifers," he said wearily. "I didn't cry this time. I committed a crime. Even though I think I've been punished enough, I'm to the point where I'm worried about my people, my supporters, because it really does take a toll on them."
October 1, 2005
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Character Observed
Character Observed
.....
It Takes a Village
The writer Isaac Bashevis Singer liked to call the elegant Italian Renaissance building on the West Side of Manhattan, where he lived for decades, a “shtetl.” His building, comprising 250 apartments and many shops and restaurants, was his village. He knew most of the famous journalists, actors, and opera stars who were his neighbors; he had his hair cut in the building’s barbershop, patronized its bank, and ate in its Chinese restaurant. He could fulfill all his other needs – save meeting with his publisher – without walking more than a few blocks.
While great cities and their outlying regions often look monolithic to outsiders, they are in fact nothing of the kind. Rather, they are nearly always conglomerations of villages, with allegiance owed to the village rather than the city. When asked where they are from, native Bostonians will often give the name of a community – Southie, for example – rather than Boston itself. Native Chicagoans routinely become even more specific, seldom mentioning their neighborhood, such as Beverly, but instead their parish, such as Christ the King.
Those who live in Brooklyn state their borough as their home, not New York itself, which they derisively call “the city,” the distant entity to which they were forcibly joined in 1898. Many Brooklynites do their shopping, entertaining, and socializing on their side of the East River, proudly refusing to leave their borough except to go to the airport.
Such aggressive parochialism is important – and productive for the local economy, which is kept strong and diverse by neighborhood dollars, even as watchfulness (what urban analyst Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”) keeps the neighborhood safe. Had policy makers understood this urban parochialism better, they surely would not have imposed on cities the costly and disastrous urban renewal and Model Cities programs that demolished whole neighborhoods until they were finally halted in the 1980s.
The seldom-studied phenomenon of neighborhood loyalty has helped bring American cities back from their catastrophic post–World War II state of deteriorating housing, failing schools, violent crime waves, and rising taxes. The cities that are thriving today – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston – have their neighborhood patriots to thank – those who stayed and fought while others fled, and who worked to attract new residents when things got better.
Harlem is a prime example. The neighborhood was in such bad financial shape in the 1970s that hundreds of buildings were simply abandoned by their owners. The city government ultimately took over more than 70 percent of Harlem real estate in tax foreclosure proceedings. Yet today Harlem is booming, attracting over one-third of all Manhattan residential construction. Part of Harlem’s success is due to the hard-core loyalists who relentlessly lobbied City Hall for more police, better sanitation, and more extensive fire coverage. Choreographer Mercedes Ellington (and granddaughter of the Duke) says that homeowners kept many blocks of Harlem pristine even as other blocks succumbed. “Edgecombe Avenue always stayed fine, even if you had to walk around crack dealers to get home. Hamilton Terrace remained the oasis it had always been. Those home owners weren’t going to leave, even if they had to rent out apartments quietly to make their mortgages. Now they form the core of the current Harlem renaissance.”
Together with the newer residents who moved into the neighborhood in the 1990s, they’ve joined school boards, community boards, and, according to one local real estate agent, “they know the captain of the precinct by name and they have his number on direct dial.” They’ve made Harlem the hottest neighborhood in New York. Beautifully restored brownstones now sell for $2 million – showing pretty conclusively that loyalty pays.
—Julia Vitullo-Martin
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Dog’s Best Friend
A dog might be man’s best friend, but that friendship often depends on man’s loyalty to his furry companion as much as the reverse. In Herbert Brokering’s recent book Dog Psalms: Prayers My Dogs Have Taught Me, one ode entitled “Trust” reads, “I am dog and I am loyal. I need your faith for my faith.”
People’s devotion to dogs has helped fuel everything from pet-centered estate planning to Take Your Dog to Work Day (recognized by roughly 10,000 companies last year, according to Pet Sitters International). “I say dogs are the new children in New York,” estate planner Frances Carlisle told a Dow Jones reporter earlier this year after giving a speech about animals and the law for the New York State Bar Association.
Perhaps nowhere is fidelity to Fido more on display than in Japan, where a legendary dog, Chuken Hachiko, or “loyal Hachiko,” captured the nation’s imagination in the years before World War II. Hachiko was a white-coated Akita who used to greet his master at the Shibuya train station just outside Tokyo when he returned from work each day. But in 1925, Hachiko’s owner had a heart attack and died at work. Hachiko continued his daily routine unaltered for the next nine years, waiting at the same spot outside the station every afternoon. Inevitably, he always returned alone to the home of his master’s relatives.
Helen Keller, herself an Akita owner, once called her dog an “angel in fur” and apparently that’s how Japan felt about Hachiko, for the nation turned out to be loyal to him. Word spread of the dog’s faithful vigil, and while he kept it up passersby fed him. After his lifeless body was found one afternoon waiting for his master’s train, his obituary was run in the newspaper, his body stuffed and placed on display, and a statue of him planted in his spot, keeping the vigil. During World War II the statue was melted down for the war effort. But in 1947, the public, still loyal to Hachiko’s memory, erected a new bronze statue of him alongside the tracks. It remains there today as a monument to a dog’s loyalty to a man and a nation’s loyalty to a dog.
—Paulette Chu
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Europeans Unite!
What becomes of national loyalty if a nation is subsumed under a larger entity, like, say, the European Union? The recent debate over the European Constitution has brought this question into focus.
While there are many economic and legal arguments against the creation of a European “superstate,” advocates of this project often demonize their opponents as chauvinists. In the Czech Republic, for example, the Europhile politician Jiri Pehe explains that opposing the EU project is a symptom of “political immaturity” and xenophobia. “The Czechs suffer from political puberty,” Pehe told the Prague Post, “that is the result of the strict, Stalinist type of communism this country had from the 1970s.” Pehe simply ignores the possibility that a certain kind of political growth might have occurred in the Czech soul after the ordeals of 1919, 1945, 1968 and 1989, and 1994 – ordeals of extrication from the rule of Austrians, Germans, Russians, and Slovaks, respectively. Meanwhile, in Britain, opponents of European integration, worried about the fate of their common-law rights, and about the right to determine their own foreign and economic policies, are referred to snidely as “Little Englanders.”
Yet it is possible that the denigration of national loyalty springs not from contempt, but from envy. The supporters of European unification need to create a feeling of European patriotism to offset the national patriotism that they believe is the primary obstacle to their project. As Chris Patten, the former EU Commissioner on External Relations recently lamented, “A healthy European democracy will develop only when people begin to feel an emotional attachment to their European identity.” How this feeling of loyalty will come about remains ambiguous. Suggestions range from the silly – a European national soccer team – to the sophisticated. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas suggests that European loyalty must be forged not from ethnic descent, “a shared tradition and a common language,” but “rather from the praxis of citizens who actively exercise their civil rights.” He proposes a “constitutional patriotism” that would take the place of national loyalty. But the 488 articles of the proposed European constitution, recently rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands, do not seem to have inspired this sort of attachment.
Habermas and Patten assume that national loyalties must be dissolved in a superior, less selfish European loyalty. That the European Union project seems to demand this kind of choice among loyalties may one day be regarded as a symptom of an essential weakness in the “European idea,” rather than a strength. After all, human beings are made in such a way that they can feel multiple loyalties, attachments and bonds. Why should loyalty not be as Shelley described love, differing “from gold and clay, that to divide is not to take away”?
—Sam Schulman
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Loyal Dissent
Approach Ground Zero from the north and look closely at the windows high above the site of what used to be the World Trade Center and you will see a sign that reads: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Adopted as a slogan of sorts by opponents of the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, and the larger war on terrorism, this quotation is routinely attributed, probably incorrectly, to Thomas Jefferson.
There are a number of reasons why the antiwar crowd would like to adopt Jefferson as their intellectual ancestor. His line about the tree of liberty needing to be “refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” is appropriately inflammatory for the politically angry. He was also an isolationist president, unwilling to go to war with England over American sailors being pressed into service in His Majesty’s navy. And then there is this quotation, which would seem to put him in line with those who protest the war today: “If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”
It isn’t as concise as the sign on the window (and therefore not as convenient for the placard-wielding class), but a more accurate dictum on loyalty to country comes to us from Edward R. Murrow: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said. “When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower offered both brevity and clarity on the issue when he said, “May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” But in explaining that it is not the act of dissent that makes one a loyal patriot, but rather the principle for the sake of which one dissents, Mark Twain said it best: “Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”
—Brendan Miniter
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Scout’s Honor
On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.
—Scout Oath
When I was a young Boy Scout at summer camp, my troop gathered at twilight each day to lower the colors for the night. On the first day, I saw this as just another activity of camp life. By midweek, I began to notice that my stomach was growling for dinner while everyone else was watching silently, and the gnats also seemed to grow especially aggressive whenever I had to salute or stand at attention. By the end of the week, I was sweating throughout the ceremony, and could not see any value in the exercise at all.
Two years later, I returned to camp as a patrol leader, having passed the requirements for demonstrating proper flag care and protocol. I was still hungry, the bugs still bit, and the sweat still beaded, but I no longer seemed to mind. This small activity began to make sense in the context of the larger scouting experience. These seemingly minor rituals, endured by everyone in my troop, began to form the basis for our loyalty to each other.
The natural boyish inclination to competitiveness – whether in building fires, climbing mountains, or saluting the flag – inspires the scout to make his home unit succeed. And life-long friendships are a common result of this intense experience. But loyalty to other people is not sufficient. The points of the Scout Oath emphasize the scout’s duty to God and Country. Friendship is only the means and the happy by-product of this duty. ?
—David Friel
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Groupies
Describing why he produced the ABC miniseries The Beach Boys: An American Family, loyal fan John Stamos explained, “For me their music bypasses your brain and goes straight to your heart.” Whether we are moved by Mozart or Madonna – by high culture or low – music’s power is visceral, creating extremely loyal listeners. Just think about the phrase “music fan.” The word music comes from the Greek, meaning “presided over by the muses.” And fan, of course, is short for fanatic.
It seems a tad fanatical for aging baby boomers to camp out all night to get Rolling Stones tickets. But it may be perfectly reasonable when compared with some of their fellow former-hippies who followed the Grateful Dead around this country for months or years at a time. Even the more settled expressions of music loyalty can seem a little outrageous. What but the muse of sound can explain Jane and Irwin Jacobs’s record-breaking 120 million-dollar gift to the San Diego Symphony?
Perhaps no musician has capitalized on his fans’ loyalty better than Bono. He has used his popularity as the lead singer of the band U2 to become a spokesman for alleviating world poverty and fighting AIDS in Africa. Many of Bono’s fans have followed him past music and into politics. Now that’s loyalty for you.
—Ann Henderson Hart
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Gang Loyalty
I didn’t come face to face with many gang members during my childhood in suburban Levittown, New York. But there was one – Nicky Cruz. Once the ruthless leader of the violent MauMau gang in New York City, Cruz experienced a dramatic religious conversion in the late 60s and became a household name in evangelical families across America. Cruz’s story was so captivating that it was turned into a movie, The Cross and the Switchblade, starring Pat Boone as David Wilkerson, the young preacher who stood up to Cruz, and later converted him.
But what propelled Nicky Cruz into gang life? The sociological and economic conditions that drew Cruz toward loyal gang membership are the same ones that encourage gang membership today. Whether you’re scanning academic monographs or journalists’ interviews, two ingredients are common to almost any gang member’s story: a dysfunctional family and a belief that the future holds limited possibilities.
Cruz’ mother, a witchcraft practitioner, dubbed him “Son of Satan.” He recalled having seen his parents perform a ritual sacrifice of a goat and then drink its blood. Young Nicky explained that he longed for a family that could eclipse his birth family. And he found it in the MauMaus.
They offered him a kind of protection as well. As Cruz recently told a reporter: “New York City was a jungle .... In the jungle you behave like an animal. An animal has to kill other animals for survival because that’s the name of the game.”
In the last forty years, the gang problem in America has only gotten worse. Violent gangs are active in 94 percent of medium and large American cities today, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Crips, an African-American street gang that originated in Los Angeles in the 60s, requires its initiates either to commit armed robbery, beat up another initiate, or perform a drive-by shooting before they are allowed to join. The process, referred to as “courting,” is designed to bolster courage and build loyalty.
Crips further show commitment to their “family” by wearing a blue rag. They refer to one another as “Cuzz,” and even their dialect – using the letter “C” to replace the letter “B” in conversation – is meant to set them apart. The Crips mark their turf with graffiti, often spraying the letters “BK” for blood killers.
And while many gangs like the MauMaus and the Crips attract young men, the number of “gangsta girls” is on the rise, according to a Boston Phoenix article. Billy Stewart, a juvenile probation officer in the Dorchester District Courthouse, told the reporter, “Economic background is not the only common denominator .... Like the guys, girls join for a sense of family they don’t have in their real lives.”
Might a gangsta rapper shed any light on the loyalty of gangs? I select judiciously from Fat Joe’s lyrics on his album called “Loyalty”:
“Now I’m in too deep
Only sixteen already hold a name on the street…
I’m a gangsta by destiny, OG’s selected me
I earned my spot, my whole team elected me
Gangsta, gangsta
I wanna be a gangsta
My daddy was a gangsta …”
—Ann Henderson Hart
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Frequent Buyers
Widespread lamentation about the decline of loyalty has caused one area of modern life in which loyalty is flourishing to be overlooked – business. Devoting resources to retaining existing customers – rather than trying to gain new ones – has become a widely acceptable practice.
The trend may have started with the introduction of frequent flyer programs in the 1980s, but much of the credit for “loyalty marketing” principles goes to one man, Fred Reichheld, a partner in the Boston consulting firm Bain & Company. In a series of articles appearing in the Harvard Business Review beginning in 1989, Reichheld laid out the mathematical and commonsense underpinnings of the loyalty movement. He taught businesses to look at the lifetime value and profitability of a retained customer, rather than just each unit of sale. He demonstrated that relatively small improvements in customer retention produced huge swings in cash generation.
Indeed, Reichheld claims that “carefully selecting customers, employees, and investors, and then working hard to retain them” should be understood as one of the “fundamental laws governing business systems.” The key to understanding this law is to see loyalty as a virtue that works, incidentally, as a business device. As he writes in the first of his books, The Loyalty Effect, “Loyalty-based management is a Sunday school teacher’s dream come true – an ethical approach to business that pays so well that it puts unscrupulous approaches to shame.” Reichheld’s laws have enabled companies such as Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Intuit, eBay, the Vanguard Group, Dell Computer, SAS Institute, and Chick-Fil-A to prosper while many of their competitors have failed.
Reichheld acknowledges that the roots of his interest in loyalty come from his own temperament. “Intuitively I believed that loyalty was at the core of good business practices,” he says. “Doing business by golden-rule principles seemed right.” Indeed, building relationships – not only with customers, but with employees and investors – on golden-rule principles has made business, as opposed to government or nonprofits, the most dynamic force in the modern world. Business done right embodies the highest ethical rules, far more than extraneous practices designed to demonstrate “social responsibility.” Building a business that sustains relationships brings about a moral transformation as well for the people involved. As Reichheld puts it, “mutual benefit and mutual accountability can be made flesh in a business institution.”
—Sam Schulman
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Major Dilemma
Despite the remarkable attention given to Major League Baseball’s steroids scandal and the damaging doubts about whether the sport’s modern record-holders should have asterisks placed by their accomplishments, loyal fans are flocking to ballparks in record numbers. The national pastime is thriving, and it’s even returned to the nation’s capital.
The start of every season, however, raises a dilemma for this transplanted New Yorker. My first sports memories are of the 1969 “Miracle Mets,” so my emotional connection to New York’s “other” team is strong. I can remember coming home from school and rushing to turn on the television to follow the Series against the mighty Orioles. (That was back in the days when baseball executives thought it worthwhile to televise the sport’s premiere event before most children on the East Coast went to bed.) The Mets have provided their fans with a few mountaintop experiences (just a number – 1969 or 1986 – or a name – Tom Seaver, Bill Buckner – is enough to bring a smile to a fellow Mets fan), a few near misses (1973, the Subway Series), and a lot of misery in between (Vince Coleman, Mo Vaughn, Who’s on third?).
I own a faded Mets hat, but my local paper, television, and radio station cover the Philadelphia Phillies, who now sport a new stadium, a high payroll, and some completely disappointing players. After eight years in the City of Brotherly Love, and with a household of boys who know no other city, I should be a Phillies fan. But I haven’t quite abandoned my first love. And yet, I must admit to a roving eye, not for the unappealing Phils but for Washington’s newest aspiring power broker, the Nationals. They are a scrappy bunch who have survived and even thrived through two years of baseball’s equivalent of purgatory. Coached by a living baseball legend, the fiery Frank Robinson, the Nats are starting to pull me in.
But if home is where the heart is – and if the Phillies inspire no affection or passion in me – what is a baseball fan to do? Love for the game is a good thing, but no one is a fan of Major League Baseball without rooting for a team. (Who wears a hat with just the MLB logo?) Loyalty, at least in baseball, is local. Which is why I’ve found my new favorite team close to home: my ten-year-old son’s Lower Merion Little League Stingers. (Full disclosure: I am the head coach.) The Stingers are scrappy and spirited, play without pay, and often miss the cutoff man. They still think a ball at eye level is a hittable pitch, want to steal third base with two outs in the inning, and rejoice in every success, great and small. So, while my Major League loyalty is divided, there’s no doubt which team is first in my heart, at least for this season: Go Stingers!
—Kimon Sargeant -
The Ties That Do Not Bind: The Decline of Marriage and Loyalty
There is no way that I subscribe to everything the writer puts forth in this piece. There are some rather carefully chosen statistics which immediately induce a healthy sense of scepticism. Meanwhile, it is not the facts that I might dispute but rather the underlying reasons for the large numbers of people who do not view marriage with the same gravitas that was once part and parcel of civilization as we know it. Things were not all peachy keen and cool in those two parent Leave it To Beaver households either. There is rampant dysfunction across the board in modern society irregardless of neat statistics that make causation much too simply derived.
The Ties That Do Not Bind: The Decline of Marriage and Loyalty
Man is a social animal – utterly dependent on forming and maintaining relationships with other people. A person who has always been truly alone is one who will be emotionally dead. Of all of the relationships into which people enter, the family is the most important. We are raised by parents, confronted with siblings, and introduced to peers through our familial roots. Indeed, human character arises out of the very commitments people make to others in their family or outside of it. Marriage, of course, is the supreme form of that commitment. When we make marriage less important, character suffers. In addition to the fact that married people are happier, wealthier, and sexually more satisfied than are unmarried persons or those cohabiting, it turns out that married people and their children are less likely to commit crimes.
The problem our society, and indeed any society, faces today is to reconcile character and freedom. The Western world is the proud beneficiary of the Enlightenment, that cultural and intellectual movement that espoused freedom, endorsed scientific inquiry, and facilitated trade. But for a good life, mere freedom is not sufficient. It must work with and support commitment, for out of commitment arises the human character that will guide the footsteps of people navigating the tantalizing opportunities that freedom offers. Freedom and character are not incompatible, but keeping them in balance is a profound challenge for any culture.
One aspect of character that appears connected with marriage – and is even included in the marriage vows of many religious traditions – is loyalty. But what sort of loyalty is meant here? The word comes from the French loyauté, which in turn derives from the Latin legalis. In feudal times, it meant fidelity to one’s oath to a master. The nineteenth-century American philosopher Josiah Royce said that loyalty was the supreme moral good, but surely that cannot be right. As critics have pointed out, a Nazi is not regarded as a moral person because he is loyal to Nazism. Even being loyal to the state in which one lives can be destructive if the state is headed by an evil ruler or is constitutionally illegitimate.
Let me distinguish, therefore, between two meanings of the term. Loyalty can mean doing one’s duty (obeying the law, honoring promises, paying taxes, serving faithfully in the military) or it can mean a commitment to valued friends and family. In this second sense almost everyone is loyal to someone because they partake of the necessary sociability of mankind. No one can exist without being sociable to some degree; a human who lives life without any contact with other people will not be able to speak or perhaps even to think in some meaningful way. In this essay I use “loyalty” to mean the natural sociability of people. A loyal person is someone who is attached to other people for the long term based on a deep sense of what is due to them. It is hard to imagine a person who utterly lacks any sense of loyalty; that trait, after all, is the basis for friendship and the duties that friendship and moral obligations imply. Even people without married parents, or possibly without knowing any parent at all, will invest somebody – a friend, a teammate, a gang member – with loyalty.
One can imagine a person who is part of society but, because he or she trusts no one in that society, lives a life of anxiety and calculation. And we can find people who appear to enjoy the company of others but who nevertheless lack any sense of obligation to them. We call them sociopaths because they will cheerfully cheat or attack others without compunction.
The fundamental social institution that encourages loyalty is the family. An infant is raised by one or two parents and acquires an attachment, usually a strong one, to these people. If raised with brothers and sisters, a child will become attached to them. These siblings are ordinarily loyal to one another even when they are not fond of one another or live in widely separated locations. A family also instills some concern about the future, teaching people that they must pay taxes, service mortgages, and arrange for the education of their children in ways that suggest a commitment to manage whatever events may bring.
The evidence of the centrality of the family is all about us. We care more about our children than about the children of others; we run greater risks to save a threatened child or parent than we do to help someone else’s child or parent; when we go home we expect to be taken in; when football players appear between plays on television, they routinely say, “Hi Mom.”
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Some countries, and some people in almost every country, recognize the benefits of social commitments but seek to obtain them from nonfamily sources. In Sweden, public officials have made it clear that the laws of that country should give no advantage to marriage over unmarried cohabitation. In France, a law is now in force that allows any couple to appear before a court clerk where they sign a paper that recognizes their union, one that can be ended at will with no divorce proceeding. Here in America, Emory Law School professor Martha Fineman has urged that “marriage should be abolished as a legal category” and replaced by an arrangement in which “society” will pay for children to be raised by “caretakers.” Her views were matched by a conservative federal judge, Richard Posner, who, after arguing that conventional marriages “foster puritanical attitudes,” went on to propose the Swedish system in which marriage offers so few advantages over cohabitation that the latter is preferable to the former.
To see what is wrong with the view that commitment based on cohabitation is preferable to commitment based on marriage, one need only apply the implications of cohabitation to business partnerships. Suppose two people wish to sell bread. They can have an oral agreement to do that, or they can enter into an enforceable contract. If they rely on an oral agreement, then whenever one gets bored, greedy, or distrustful, he or she can walk away from the partnership with whatever that person can carry. But if they insist on a written and enforceable contract, ending the partnership will require the agreement of the other person and the sanction of the law. As a result of the power of contracts, most businesses use them.
So also with living together. Men and women who cohabit have only a weak incentive to pool their resources and to put up with the inevitable emotional bumps that come from sharing an apartment and a bed. In this country each member of a cohabiting couple tends to keep a separate bank account. This means that they keep personal wealth apart from shared wealth. When the two members of a cohabiting couple have unequal incomes, they are likely to split apart, whereas when two members of a married family have unequal incomes they are likely to stay together. In a marriage, we merge not only our feelings but our wealth. We know that we not only share our love, we share our dependency. Cohabitation merely means living together; marriage means making an investment in one another.
Why does marriage beget loyalty when cohabitation does not? The difference is that marriage follows a public, legally recognized ceremony in which each person swears before friends and witnesses to love, honor, and cherish the other until death parts them. Cohabitation merely means shacking up. Of course, many marriages end in an easily arranged divorce, but even in this new era of no-fault divorces, they still must be done before a magistrate and be accompanied by a careful allocation of property and children.
Perhaps because of the acknowledged impermanence of their condition, cohabiting couples, compared to married ones, are more vulnerable to depression, have lower levels of happiness, experience more cases of physical abuse, are more likely to be murdered, are more likely to be sexually unfaithful, and more likely to be poor. Children living with cohabiting parents are, compared to those living with married ones, much more likely to witness their parents’ relationships end, to have emotional and behavioral problems, to experience educational problems, and to be poor.
Some of the disadvantages of cohabitation result from the fact that in this country men and women who live together without being married are likely to be poor and erratic even before they formed their relationship. So the effects that are ascribed to cohabitation may result in part from prior disadvantages. In this country 60 percent of high school dropouts have cohabited compared to 37 percent of college graduates. In other countries, especially in Scandinavia, cohabitation is common among affluent people who have, in growing numbers, rejected conventional marriage. Because of these differences, the children of unwed American mothers are much poorer than those of unwed mothers in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. There is no easy way to sort out the different effects of cohabitation itself from the traits of those who choose to cohabit. It is possible that even if people who now cohabit were to marry, their lives, and those of their children, would be as bad as they are when they simply live together.
The defects of cohabitation and the benefits of marriage are lost on many young Americans. Six out of ten high school seniors think it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married because by cohabiting they will find out whether they really get along. In 1985 about half of all Americans said that there is no reason why single women shouldn’t have children. But in the same poll, people were asked whether it was acceptable for their daughter to have a child outside of wedlock. Only one out of eight respondents agreed. Apparently half of us think it is all right for other people’s daughters to have illegitimate children but hardly any of us want it for our daughters. As sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead put it, cohabitation is not to marriage what spring training is to baseball.
This tension between our libertarian views about other people and our conventional views about ourselves has made it hard for this country to think seriously about marriage. Almost everybody believes that marriage is a good idea, but over one-fourth of all children (and over half of black ones) are now being raised in single-parent families. There is one large exception to this confusion in the public’s mind: Among Americans who attend church weekly, only one-fourth said that it is morally acceptable to have a child out of wedlock, whereas among people who seldom or never attend church nearly three-fourths held that view. Religious communities are unabashed about wanting to breed the kind of cohesion and loyalty that results from a strong family unit.
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The problem of single-parent families is, of course, much worse than that of cohabiting ones. This fact is by now so well-known that most sociologists believe it. Though single-parent families are poorer than two-parent ones, the best research shows that, even after controlling for income, growing up in a single-parent (typically, female-headed) family makes matters worse for a child, and that this is true in every ethnic group. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur have done the most careful research on this matter and have concluded that poverty by itself accounts for about half of the problems of children in single-parent families, with the absence of the father explaining the rest. These problems are not trivial. After holding income constant, boys in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail and girls in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in married families to have an out-of-wedlock birth.
What all of this means for the rest of society is evident on the evening news programs. Boys without married fathers populate our street gangs, and these gangs are responsible for an inordinately high level of violence. We rely on the police to control gangs, but the important, and often absent, control is that exercised by fathers. A boy growing up without a father has no personal conception of what it means to acquire skills, find a job, support a family, and be loyal to one’s wife and children. Research on the link between unemployment rates and crime has shown that the connection is very weak. The connection between crime and father absence is much higher. Boys in single-parent families are also more likely to be idle rather than in school or unemployed and to drop out of high school. These differences are as great for white families as for black and Hispanic ones and as large for advantaged children as for disadvantaged ones.
In Europe as well as in America the proportion of children who live with a single, usually female parent has risen dramatically. In 1960 less than one out of every ten of the families in Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, or the United Kingdom was headed by a single parent, and many of these were families where the father had died. By 1988 that percentage had roughly doubled.
There are several explanations for these changes. One is that women have entered the workforce and become economically more independent than they once were so that more of them can survive (and in a few cases do rather well) with a child and without a husband. These are the Murphy Brown mothers, but they are relatively rare. Only about 4 percent of white unmarried mothers are college graduates; the rest have, at best, finished high school. A second is that when women outnumber men, as they do here and in some other countries, they face tougher statistical odds against getting married. A third reason for single-parent families is that, at least in this country, welfare payments have enabled poor women to choose children and government checks over children and a husband. Indeed, evidence now suggests that the availability of welfare payments is associated with out-of-wedlock births.
The fourth reason, in my view the most important one, is that cohabiting without being married and having a child out of wedlock have lost their stigma. We have a lot of single-parent families because the shame once attached to having a child out of wedlock has largely disappeared. In my book, The Marriage Problem, I devote many pages to explaining why this stigma has vanished. A full account requires one to understand how the way we conceive of our relationships to one another has changed in Western society.
At one time, a couple living together without being married was regarded as shameful. This stigma was reinforced by labeling any child emerging from this improper union as a bastard. The word “bastardy” referred to children born to unmarried parents. It did not refer to children conceived by their parents before marriage but born after they were married. Pregnant brides were common in England from its earliest history on; they produced about one-third of all births. They were not viewed as a social problem. But children born to unmarried parents faced very high costs. Such children could not inherit property, and so if they were abandoned by either parent they had no one to whom they could turn. To survive at all they usually had to be taken in by a kindly aunt or adult friend.
Scholars have studied bastardy in England using data that goes back to the sixteenth century. Until roughly the beginning of the eighteenth century, the illegitimacy ratio (that is, the proportion of all births that were out of wedlock) was 4 percent or less. In the nineteenth century it crept up to around 5 percent. By the 1970s it was well over 8 percent. Today it is nearly 30 percent. That increase came about because the state abandoned the penalties it once enforced on bastards, developed programs to take care of single-parent families, and had its policies shaped by new sentiments about marriage.
In this country those sentiments are easily captured by comparing opinions of the United States Supreme Court. In the late nineteenth century it spoke of marriage as a “sacred obligation” and a “holy estate” that was the source of civilization itself. By 1972 it had abandoned any such reference and said instead that marriage is “an association of two individuals, each with a separate emotional and intellectual makeup.” Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a sacred obligation, and now it is a private contract.
Friedrich Nietzsche would not have been surprised. He predicted that the family would be “ground into a random collection of individuals” bound together by the “common pursuit of selfish ends,” in other words, family loyalty would slowly disappear. John Stuart Mill would have been pleased by these developments; he had long argued that marriage should be a private, bargained-for arrangement.
For many women the change has been a disaster. They may prefer cohabitation and shun marriage as a trivial inconvenience, but then they discover that cohabitation will not last and their children will be disadvantaged. They may marry, but they will quickly discover that husbands often want new trophy wives and, in order to get them, will find it easy to end marriages. And when the marriage ends, the women will discover that, though the courts try to be fair, they will often be left with too little money with which to support themselves and their children.
Today the war between Western freedom and the radicalized critique of that freedom we find among many Muslims is a war about how well we manage the challenge between freedom and character. Our freedom has made the West wealthy; the lack of freedom in most Muslim nations has left that part of the world poor. Radical Muslims rejoin that Western freedom was purchased at too high a price because European and North American nations are awash in a sea of crime, drug abuse, pornography, illegitimate children, wanton women, and licentious television programs. Only by living in close devotion to the teachings of Allah as revealed in the Qu’ran do these critics think that a culture can be holy.
.....
There are some small signs that American culture is regaining a grip on itself in this regard. The crime rate has dropped dramatically for reasons that have nothing to do with economic success. The sharp increase in the percentage of children living with single parents that began around 1960 has leveled off and was about the same in 2003 as it had been in 1990. The rate at which children are born to teenage mothers has declined since 1991, the year at which it hit its peak. In 2000, teenage pregnancy rates for girls ages fifteen to nineteen were about one-fourth lower than they had been in 1991. Some of this reduction may well result from increased use of contraceptive devices rather than from sexual abstinence. In 2002, the use of condoms had increased by over one-third since 1988.
Though there has been a decline in teenage birthrates and an increase in the use of contraceptives, the leveling off in the proportion of children living in single-parent families is at best a modest gain. It may be the result of either a revived culture or the exhaustion of further victims. The cultural explanation would be this: women are more willing to avoid becoming unwed mothers. The exhaustion argument is this: perhaps there are no more people at risk, and so the rates of children living in single-parent homes have reached a natural apogee. We cannot choose between these two explanations with any precision, but there are some signs that a cultural change has occurred.
Bill Cosby made headlines when in June 2004 he called on parents to take charge of their children and for black men to stop beating their women. A survey done in 2001 jointly by CBS News and Black Entertainment Television found 92 percent of black respondents agreeing that absent fathers are a major problem. Many rap and hip-hop musicians, to a degree not appreciated by most of us, sing lyrics that call attention to fatherless families and child abandonment, albeit in words that offend practically everyone. It must be one of the supreme ironies of the modern age that the most vulgar, foul-mouthed musicians sing words that call attention to our gravest social problem. It surely is paradoxical that the worst features of our commitment to freedom endorse an appeal to the greatest threats to our character.
At this point in an essay, one expects to find set forth the correct solution to our problem. That will not happen here. There is no magic bullet that can revive marriage and enhance its character-forming properties. Even our boldest measures have so far had little visible impact. Welfare reform reduced the proportion of women on welfare and increased the fraction who are working, but it has done next to nothing about increasing the likelihood that welfare recipients marry before having more children.
It is easy to see why. If you run a welfare agency, you can urge your frontline employees to be tough about women seeking welfare payments. If you do that, your success is immediately evident, you save the state money, and you act in accordance with public opinion that has always regarded the old welfare system as a disaster. But now imagine that you want to tell these employees to increase marriage rates. Your effect will not be measurable or even visible for many years, you will not save the state any money, and you will not have public opinion strongly behind you.
In fact, there is a tendency in American politics to shy away from any discussion of these matters because they lack the obvious pain of an airplane crash or the dramatic appeal of an isolated case. Since the Supreme Court struck down laws against homosexual conduct many people have been preoccupied with either encouraging or resisting homosexual marriage. Whatever your views about homosexual marriage, were it adopted nationally it would affect only about 2 or 3 percent of the population. Cohabitation, divorce, and single-parent families are problems that affect roughly half of the population. Still, we find it more interesting to discuss homosexual marriage than to discuss marriage itself.
But talking about marriage is essential to the future of our society. Marriage shapes our commitments and builds our character. No one is quite certain what will restore marriage to its once privileged position, but many private groups and some state governments are trying to find out. Our task ought to be to encourage and to evaluate these efforts.
If we are successful in revitalizing marriage, we shall have dramatically improved loyalty and the benefits that flow from this commitment. Marriage, it is true, is a lasting restriction on human freedom; indeed, some young people resist marriage because by accepting it they lose some of their freedom. But every human freedom has its limits: we cannot falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater nor knowingly print libelous stories about another person. In every aspect of our lives we accept limits to freedom, but in the case of the limits set by marriage we gain a great deal in return: longer, healthier lives; better sex; and decent children. Loyalty to spouse and children and relatives enhances our capacity to enjoy the freedom we have.
.....
James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He is the author or co-author of fourteen books, the most recent of which are The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, Moral Judgment, and The Moral Sense. Many of his writings on morality and human character have been collected in On Character: Essays by James Q. Wilson.
September 30, 2005
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No Sunni Delight
By Eric Umansky
Posted Monday, Aug. 22, 2005, at 12:41 AM PT
The Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal's newsbox, and New York Times all lead with last-minute constitutional haggling in Baghdad, where the NYT announces that negotiators "moved to the brink of agreement." The LAT agrees but along with the Journal emphasizes that Sunnis are hopping mad after having been "cut off" from the negotiations. The Washington Post leads with the widening rift among Democrats about Iraq. In case you haven't heard yet: Many grass-roots activists want the U.S. out, while many A-list Democrats, including potential presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, want the U.S. to stick it out. Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, also a likely contender, broke with the party last week and said there should be a firm deadline. Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel also seemed to come close to calling for a withdrawal timeline. USA Today leads with Northwest, the U.S.'s fourth-largest airline, getting its planes in the air despite a strike by mechanics. Yes, "replacement mechanics" are on the job. As a front-page NYT piece explains, Northwest has been preparing for this eventuality for at least a year. And if no major problems occur, it could set a precedent for the industry and would mean nothing good for unions.
There's still a split about how the Iraqi Constitution should incorporate Islam, with some Shiite politicians pushing for clerics to get four of nine seats on the Supreme Court. And then there's the tension with Sunnis: The NYT says the draft constitution has been "written almost entirely by Shiite and Kurdish leaders," with Sunnis having been "largely excluded from the deliberations." Yesterday's Times said the apparent "American-Iraqi strategy" was to present a deal to Sunnis as a "take-it-or-leave-it proposition."
Sunnis, who called for another delay, are primarily opposed to Shiite and Kurdish pushes for autonomy. If autonomy happens, then there's a good chance oil revenue will stay in the oil-field-rich north and south while the oil-poor but Sunni-dominated center will be SOL. If those concerns are tossed aside, warned one Sunni politician, "We will start a revolution."
But as the Post notices inside, interestingly, a coalition of Iraqi insurgent groups put out a statement calling on supporters to register to vote and reject the draft constitution at the ballot box. (If the Iraqi legislature approves the draft, there will be referendum in October.) "Because voting is a jihad of word, and doesn't differ from the jihad by sword, there is no objection to participating in the referendum to show the world your numbers and strength and to defeat federalism," said the insurgents' statement. They also promised not to attack U.S. forces on the day of the referendum, so as "to protect people who go to vote."
One GI was killed yesterday in Iraq, near Tikrit.
Four more American soldiers were killed by a bomb in Afghanistan. Two embassy employees were also lightly wounded when a bomb hit their armored SUV near Kabul. A pro-government cleric was also assassinated. The Post describes a "wave of near-daily attacks" in the last week. As the NYT headlines, this has been the deadliest year so far for GIs in Afghanistan; at least 65 have been killed, 13 in August alone. With the elections next month, everybody expects attacks to increase.
An unnamed Afghan security official told the NYT that al-Qaida men have come back from Iraq and taught local fighters an unspecified "new tactic they learned in Iraq." The Post says the bomb that killed the GIs destroyed an armored Humvee, which was "tossed into the air." Have insurgents in Afghanistan used such big bombs before?
Yesterday's Post interviewed a Pakistani jihadist who was recently caught in Afghanistan. He talked about training at a base in Pakistan. "We've given the Pakistanis all the information we have," said an Afghan intel official. "We're waiting for Pakistan to show the willingness to fight." The LAT had a report last month on the apparent plethora of such bases.
The Post fronts Harvard scientists announcing that they've used regular old skin cells to create embryonic stem cells. The research is still in the embry ... early stages. But obviously it offers the (vague, distant) possibility of an end run around the whole embryonic stem-cell debate.
Everybody mentions that just one small settlement is left to be cleared in the Gaza Strip. The strategically located but tiny Netzarim was repeatedly attacked by Palestinians over the years. According to the WP, Prime Minister Sharon once equated its importance with that Tel Aviv. Still, residents are expected to go quietly. Then soldiers will move on the four slated-to-be-cleared settlements in the West Bank, two of which are now filled with outside protesters. "We expect some harsh resistance there," said an army official. "We know that some of them are armed."
Eric Umansky (www.ericumansky.com) writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
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Eccentric on 'S.N.L.' Is 'Jus' Keeeeding!'
Dana Edelson/NBC
Eccentric on 'S.N.L.' Is 'Jus' Keeeeding!'
Fred Armisen's office at "Saturday Night Live" is deceptively small, barely big enough to fit a desk, a couch and an iPod. Yet the glorified closet on the 17th floor of the NBC headquarters at Rockefeller Plaza can simultaneously house a wisecracking Latin American bandleader, an enigmatic rock 'n' roll guitarist, a gay movie monster, a stand-up comic who is both deaf and racist, and several dozen more oddities and eccentrics.
These offbeat, seemingly incompatible personalities - and many, many others - are all contained within the slender frame of Mr. Armisen himself. "They're in here somewhere," said the comedian, 38, pointing to a spot on his head just above his black Buddy Holly spectacles. "So is my need for lots of attention."
As he begins his fourth year on "S.N.L." (which returns for its 31st season tomorrow at 11:30 p.m.), Mr. Armisen has certainly been receiving his share of it, having used his time on the sketch comedy show to originate numerous memorable bits and characters, from the drummer Fericito, a master of percussion and corny punch lines, to an impression of the rock musician Prince so dead-on it could make doves cry.
"Fred's the most like Peter Sellers of anyone I've known, except he's a nice guy," said Bob Odenkirk, a co-star and co-creator of the cult HBO series "Mr. Show With Bob and David." "There's a sweetness to him, and you like his characters for it."
But there is a deceptive side to Mr. Armisen as well. Beyond his gentle demeanor, the soft-spoken boyishness in his voice, and his tendency to sit with his knees pointed inward and his hands folded in his lap, he might just be a rock star, too.
"When I was growing up, records meant everything to me," said Mr. Armisen, who was born in Manhattan and spent part of his childhood in Rio de Janeiro before his family settled in Valley Stream, N.Y. Raised on new-wave and punk-rock groups like Blondie, Devo and the Clash, he started playing drums at 10 and soon began forming garage bands of his own. "When you live on Long Island," he explained, "your instrument is all you have."
After dropping out of the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, Mr. Armisen spent the better part of the 1990's as the drummer for Trenchmouth, a Chicago rock quartet whose sound he describes as "a cacophony of noise - heavy and fast and jagged." Though Trenchmouth may not have set the record charts aflame, it did attract the curiosity of clubgoers, who noticed Mr. Armisen's unusual style of playing his drums while standing up.
"He didn't want to be the typical drummer," said Damon Locks, the former lead singer of Trenchmouth, who now performs with the funk group the Eternals. "He didn't want the drums to be a background element, and he didn't want to be a background element."
To his bandmates, Mr. Armisen was more like the class clown who invented funny voices and politically incorrect personas to entertain them on long van rides. But he lost that performance opportunity when Trenchmouth broke up in 1996, and while he continued to work as a fill-in drummer for other rock acts and the Chicago company of Blue Man Group, Mr. Armisen became increasingly disillusioned with the music industry and his career within it.
At the South By Southwest music conference in Austin in 1998, his frustration reached its boiling point. Annoyed by the many wonkish symposiums there that promised the secrets to breaking into the music business, Mr. Armisen enlisted a friend to videotape him as he crashed these panel discussions and harassed attendees in a variety of comic guises. In one indelible scene, he asked the record executive Gary Gersh and the music critic David Fricke if they would kiss each other; in another, he thoroughly perplexed the musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie, of Siouxsie and the Banshees, by wearing fake buckteeth and a preposterous pompadour, pointing a microphone at them and asking them no questions at all.
Almost immediately, the videotape, entitled "Fred Armisen's Guide to Music and SXSW," became a frequently bootlegged and highly sought-after collector's item, not only by jaded rock fans who secretly resent successful bands, but by the bands themselves. "It's genius on a lot of levels," said Jeff Tweedy, the guitarist and lead singer of Wilco. "It's poking fun at a lot of people who don't get teased a whole lot. The indie rock community and all the people outside of the mainstream think of themselves as the good guys, but they're just as easily lampooned as anybody else."
Mr. Armisen is almost apologetic when he talks about the project now. "I didn't want to be mean to anybody," he says. "The whole point was awkward silences - that weird feeling of, is this real?"
But to this day, some of Mr. Armisen's most ardent fans are still surprised by the tape's guerilla-style ambushes. "It's like watching a modern-day Andy Kaufman," said Henry Owings, the editor of Chunklet, a Georgia-based publication that covers alternative culture. "Both of them come from that vampire school of thought. It's cold-blooded."
Nevertheless, the film offered Mr. Armisen an entry into show business that his music could not, first at HBO, where he produced and starred in a series of comedy shorts for the HBO Zone channel, and then on the stage of the Los Angeles club Largo, where he continued to develop material and hone his comedic skills. Then in the summer of 2002, he was invited to New York to audition for "Saturday Night Live" and hired as a featured performer.
Not surprisingly, many of Mr. Armisen's most vividly realized characters on "S.N.L." (where he was made a full cast member at the start of the 2004 season) are manifestations of his passion for music. Fericito, the gold-toothed timbales player who caps his jokes with a slow burn or the catchphrase "I'm jus' keeeeding!" is his homage to the late mambo king Tito Puente, who had a similarly forthright stage presence. Mr. Armisen said: "It was like, here comes a joke. Here's the joke. I just told a joke!"
And in his more direct tributes, Mr. Armisen has learned to let go of the disgruntled feelings that yielded his "Guide to Music" video. "There's nothing mocking or critical about the way Fred does Prince," said Lorne Michaels, the "S.N.L." creator and executive producer. "You can tell that he paid attention in that kind of detail to Prince because he admired him that much. He comes from the place of a fan."
Apparently, Prince - or someone who knows how to write like him - agrees: when a scheduling conflict prevented the musician from appearing on "S.N.L." last year, Mr. Armisen (who is a member of Prince's official fan organization, the New Power Generation Music Club) received a mysterious e-mail message soon after. "It's 2 bad that Prince was not able 2 per4m on the show this season," the note read in part. "Something interesting could have happened 4 sure."
Like many an "S.N.L." star before him, Mr. Armisen has started taking his first tentative steps into film, with bit parts in the recent comedies "EuroTrip," "Anchorman" and "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo"; he'll next be seen in this spring's "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny," playing - what else? - a security guard at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And his industry colleagues expect that even more substantial movie roles await him: "Everybody's cheering about Steve Carell and 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin,' and saying, 'He's more of an actor that I thought he was,' " Mr. Odenkirk said. "Well, I think Fred is even more of an actor than that."
While Mr. Armisen said he was grateful that "S.N.L." had opened so many doors for him, he seemed most excited by the increased opportunities that it had provided him to perform as an opening act for his favorite rock bands (like Sleater-Kinney and Les Savy Fav), direct music videos for rock bands (as he did this summer for the Portland, Ore., duo Helio Sequence), and basically just hang out with rock bands. "When I see pictures of Peter Sellers with the Beatles, or the Monty Python guys with Keith Moon, I liked how that worked out," Mr. Armisen said. "I know I'm going to be happy way later in the future, knowing that's the way I conducted myself."
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History in the Backyard
Linda Spillers for the New York Times
September 30, 2005
History in the Backyard
As told to AMY GUNDERSON
WHO Dr. Irvin Hess, 67, a retired surgeon, shown with his wife, Nancy, 47, a retired medical office manager
WHAT 4-bedroom house
WHERE Port Republic, Va.
I was raised in Pennsylvania, so I'd been to Gettysburg on Boy Scout trips, but back then I wasn't a student of the Civil War. It turns out that ancestors of mine had property at the Cross Keys battlefield. Cross Keys and the battle at Port Republic marked the end of Stonewall Jackson's 1862 Shenandoah Campaign. In that battle, the Eighth New York Infantry Regiment was ambushed.
My house, the Widow Pence Farm, was built before 1840, and some of the action of the battle took place around it. I knew that it was going to be sold at auction; while in surgery, I heard two anesthesiologists talking about buying it and dividing it up. I ended up buying it with the Civil War Preservation Trust. We split the price. The trust holds a conservation easement, so while I own the land and have all the rights of private home ownership, I can't develop the property.
My wife and I have restored the house back to a late-1800's farmhouse with log beams exposed inside. We also built a replica of the original post-and-beam barn. The house is used to entertain friends but also by people working to record this part of history.
The farm is close to our primary residence, so I'm there every day, taking care of the lawn and the garden. It has 51 acres of rolling land. It produces a hay crop, and we have cattle. I have a modern home in town, but I like that I can go several miles away and be a farm boy. As told to Amy Gunderson
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Fighting the Battle of the Bungalow
Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times
LIKE TOPSY A new house towers over its neighbors in Ocean City, N.J.
September 30, 2005
Fighting the Battle of the Bungalow
By JULIA LAWLOR
SOON after Brian and Barbara Illencik bought their ranch house in the seaside resort of Ocean City, N.J., in the mid-1990's, they started a nightly ritual: "We used to sit on the back porch and wait for the moon to go across the horizon," Mr. Illencik recalled. But five years ago, their moonlit reverie came to an abrupt end.
Just across from their backyard, a modest house was razed and a boxy three-story duplex arose in its place, blocking their view of the sky. "Now we sit on the porch at night and wait for the guy in the upstairs duplex to turn on the bathroom light," Mr. Illencik said.
The Illenciks and their neighbors in Ocean City Homes, a suburban-style development of modest houses a short walk from the ocean, were taken by surprise when, in 2000, their long-settled neighborhood began to morph into teardown territory. Upset about the demolition of small houses to make way for tall, bulky duplexes, they organized and picketed construction sites, then herded into City Council meetings to urge restrictions on the size and height of buildings in their part of town. Eventually, new zoning rules restricted allowable height and size of houses, but not before several other duplexes had been built. "It was a rude awakening," Mr. Illencik said. "Nobody ever thought to check the zoning rules to see if we were safe."
Today, with the real estate boom turning coastal resorts from New Jersey to California into construction zones, a backlash is gaining strength. Longtime residents who don't want change are fighting back, and a particular focus of their wrath is the teardown. Homeowners fear oversize mansions squeezed onto tiny lots, blocked views, clogged streets and a loss of affordability for the middle class. In some places citizens rally to try to save grand Victorian houses; in many, they defend aging bungalows.
On the other side of the battle are developers who want to get the most for their square footage, public officials interested in new tax revenue and newcomers in search of their own piece of the beach. "When you pay $1 million for a property," said John Loeper, chairman of the Ocean City Historic Preservation Commission, "it's hard to look at a 60-year-old building with inferior wiring and windows, no insulation, bad framing, and say, 'Let's save it.' "
Some owners who bring in the backhoes are even old neighbors themselves, replacing outdated houses.
Anti-teardown forces often learn about demolition plans before the wrecking crew arrives. They picket, circulate petitions and hire lawyers.
"We're hearing about teardowns from more and more communities," said Adrian Scott Fine, director of the northeast field office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "Once it starts happening, it's really hard to slow down. Some local governments view it as progress; it's an increase in the tax base. But it's changing the character of the community." In some places, he said, "the starter house no longer exists."
So many people have asked for advice on fighting teardowns that Mr. Fine has written a guide to methods that have sometimes stopped them, like demolition moratoriums and historic districting.
On the rapidly changing 127-mile Jersey Shore, the pace of teardowns has accelerated in the last two to three years, said Ron Emrich, executive director of Preservation New Jersey, a nonprofit group in Trenton. "There is not a Jersey Shore community that isn't having a problem," he said.
In Beach Haven, the teardown of a large Victorian house to make way for duplexes prompted outraged citizens to form their town's first historic preservation advisory commission last year; it can delay a teardown within the borough's historic district for six months while a buyer is sought to restore the property.
Eighty-five miles to the south in Cape May Point, a committee hired a planning consultant last year to help it form a historic preservation commission. Joe Jordan, the chairman, said quaint cottages from the early 1900's were being smashed to make way for big new houses. Residents of West Cape May are trying to form a similar commission, spurred by the demolition last May of the Moffitt House, built in the 1700's.
The Illenciks' town, Ocean City, is a seven-mile-long barrier island with a middle-class tradition and a population of 15,000 year-round and about 115,000 in summer. Some of its tightly packed bungalows, capes and old rooming houses are in disrepair, but many more are simply outdated. For at least the last seven years, according to data collected by the state Department of Community Affairs, Ocean City has given more permits for housing demolitions than any other Jersey Shore town; in 1998, 2001 and 2003, it had more housing demolitions than Newark, the state's largest city. Between 300 and 400 Ocean City buildings have been demolished each year since 1998.
Many old houses were replaced by duplexes built as tall and as wide as the rules would allow - for example, a 1,950-square-foot duplex on a lot just 30 by 65 feet, said Jody Alessandrine, a City Council member.
"We're getting $800,000 to $1 million of new revenue each year through taxing these new properties," Mr. Alessandrine said. But he said he feared that Ocean City was losing its sense of community. "It's becoming more of a place to diversify your portfolio than to live," he said.
HOMEOWNERS are fighting back neighborhood by neighborhood. Residents of the Gardens, an area of sweeping lawns and fairly large homes, pushed for regulations - enacted last February - that outlawed roof decks and reduced the size of new buildings in their area. But they were too late to block construction of more than a dozen houses that don't meet the new standards.
The 16-34 Community Association is fighting for similar controls in the area from 16th Street to 34th Street, which Kim Baker, a 16-34 homeowner and a retired historian and writer, said would become "the duplex farm of tomorrow" if nothing were done.
Mr. Loeper, whose commission regulates 250 properties in Ocean City's historic district, sees development pressures as inevitable and opponents as lacking an understanding of history. "They can whine about development all they want, but this has been going on since the island was founded in 1880," he said. "Ocean City has always been developed and redeveloped."
For people who want to move into the new and larger houses, the antidevelopment forces can seem oppressive. Todd Lukens, a medical device salesman from Glenside, Pa., agrees with much of what the Ocean City activists are saying, but as the owner of a tiny 1920's bungalow on St. James Place with no parking, an ancient kitchen and a tiny bathroom for his family of five, he finds himself at odds with neighbors who have pushed through new zoning laws. He would like to tear down the bungalow, which he bought five years ago, and build a three-story house with four bedrooms, three baths and a garage, but height restrictions prevent it. "I think the antidevelopment groups have gone too far," Mr. Lukens said. "It feels un-American. For the most part, I think the new homes look lovely."
Sometimes the forces of preservation score a spectacular success. The battle to save Ocean House, a rambling wooden seaside resort built in 1869 in the affluent Watch Hill section of Westerly, R.I., began when the community learned in March that an out-of-town developer intended to tear it down to build five houses to sell for $7 million to $10 million each. The feverish campaign of petitioning and publicity that soon followed had two goals: saving the building and preserving public access to the hotel's prime beachfront. After several standing-room-only town meetings, another buyer was found and promised, after finding the building too ramshackle to restore, to rebuild it from the ground up. Buoyed by their success, the activists have turned their attention to saving buildings along Watch Hill's main commercial street.
But often local homeowners find themselves in long, frustrating battles. In Rehoboth Beach, Del., a community association has been disconcerted to find its opponents turning the tactics of citizen activism to their own advantage.
Rehoboth Beach was a Methodist camp in the 1880's and grew to a town of cedar-shingle houses and simple Cape Cods on 50-by-100-foot lots. Its small houses are now worth $1 million or more, and "they are being torn down one after the other," said Tim Spies, who is on the board of the Rehoboth Beach Homeowners Association.
"The typical developer mentality is 'any old house is nothing but trouble,' " Mr. Spies said. "You can get a permit and knock it down the same day. No architectural review committee. It's like the wild, wild West."
After attempts to stop the teardowns failed, this year the association decided to push for a small change - a 500-square-foot reduction on the maximum size of a new house on a typical 50-by-100-foot lot (to 3,000 square feet from 3,500). The measure narrowly passed at a rancorous town hall meeting in May.
Immediately, a group of local real estate agencies responded with their own grass-roots guerilla tactics: they hired a lawyer and, arguing that the new rule reduced the value of residents' land, gathered signatures on petitions to force a vote on overturning it.
But when the referendum was held earlier this month, it was the preservationists who had cause to celebrate: homeowners voted by a solid margin not to overturn the new rule. The real estate lobby, for the moment at least, has given up the fight.
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