The Atlantic 2016-03

ERIN PPAhoTtoRgIrCapEhsOb’yBRIEN THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 51

On a sultry evening last July, a they were 10 years ago—tackling more-complex material than tall, soft-spoken 17-year- many people in the advanced-math community had thought old named David Stoner possible. “The bench of American teens who can do world-class and nearly 600 other math math,” says Po-Shen Loh, the head coach of the U.S. team, “is whizzes from all over the signiicantly wider and stronger than it used to be.” world sat huddled in small The change is palpable at the most competitive colleges. At groups around wicker bis- a time when calls for a kind of academic disarmament have be- tro tables, talking in low voices and obsessively refreshing the gun echoing through aluent communities around the nation, browsers on their laptops. The air in the cavernous lobby of a faction of students are moving in exactly the opposite direc- the Lotus Hotel Pang Suan Kaew in Chiang Mai, Thailand, tion. “More freshmen arrive at elite colleges with exposure to was humid, recalls Stoner, whose light South Carolina accent math topics well outside of what has traditionally been taught warms his carefully chosen words. The tension in the room in American high schools,” says Loh. “For American students made it seem especially heavy, like the atmosphere at a high- who have an appetite to learn math at a high level,” says Paul stakes poker tournament. Zeitz, a mathematics professor at the University of San Fran- Stoner and ive teammates were representing the United cisco, “something very big is happening. It’s very dramatic and States in the 56th International Mathematical Olympiad. They it’s happening very fast.” igured they’d done pretty well over the two days of competi- In the past, a small number of high-school students might tion. God knows, they’d trained hard. Stoner, like his team- have attended rigorous and highly selective national sum- mates, had endured a grueling regime for more than a year— mer math camps like Hampshire College’s Summer Studies practicing tricky problems over breakfast before school and in Mathematics, in Massachusetts, or the Ross Mathematics taking on more problems late into the evening after he com- Program at Ohio State, both of which have been around for pleted the homework for his college-level math classes. Some- decades. But lately, dozens of new math-enrichment camps times, he sketched out proofs on the large dry-erase board his with names like MathPath, AwesomeMath, MathILy, Idea dad had installed in his bedroom. Most nights, he put himself Math, SPARC, Math Zoom, and Epsilon Camp have popped to sleep reading books like New Problems in Euclidean Geometry up, opening the gates more widely to kids who have aptitude and An Introduction to Diophantine Equations. and enthusiasm for math, but aren’t necessarily prodigies. In Still, it was hard to know how his team had stacked up Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, math circles—some run by against those from the perennial powers China, Russia, and tiny nonproit organizations or a single professor, and ofering South Korea. “I mean, the gold? Did we do well enough to get small groups of middle- and high-school math bufs a chance the gold?” he said. “At that moment, it was hard to say.” Sud- to tackle problems under the guidance of graduate students, denly, there was a shout from a team across the lobby, then a teachers, professors, engineers, and software designers—now collective intake of breath as the Olym- have long wait lists. In New York City pians surged closer to their laptops. As last fall, it was easier to get a ticket to Stoner tried to absorb what he saw on “For American the hit musical Hamilton than to enroll his own computer screen, the noise your child in certain math circles. Some level in the lobby grew from a buzz to students who circles in the 350-student program run a cheer. Then one of his team members have an appetite out of New York University illed up in gave a whoop that ended in the chant to learn math about ive hours. “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” and the smattering at a high level, of applause from the other Olympians something Math competitions are growing grew more robust, and inally thunder- in number and popularity too. The number of U.S. participants in Math ous. Beaming, one of Stoner’s team- very big Kangaroo, an international contest for mates pulled a small American lag out is happening.” irst- through 12th-graders that came of his backpack and began waving it. to American shores in 1998, grew from Stoner was grinning. For the irst time 2,576 in 2009 to 21,059 in 2015. More in 21 years, the United States team had than 10,000 middle- and high-school won irst place. Speaking last fall from his dorm at Harvard, students haunt chat rooms, buy textbooks, and take classes where he is now a freshman, Stoner recalled his team’s triumph on the advanced-math learners’ Web site the Art of Prob- with quiet satisfaction. “It was a really great moment. Really lem Solving. This fall, the Art of Problem Solving’s founder, great. Especially if you love math.” Richard Rusczyk, a former Math Olympian who left his job It also wasn’t an aberration. You wouldn’t see it in most class- in inance 18 years ago, will open two brick-and-mortar cen- rooms, you wouldn’t know it by looking at slumping national ters in the Raleigh, North Carolina, and Rockville, Maryland, test-score averages, but a cadre of American teenagers are areas, with a focus on advanced math. An online program for reaching world-class heights in math—more of them, more reg- elementary-school students will follow. Last fall, Zeitz—along ularly, than ever before. The phenomenon extends well beyond with another math professor, a teacher, and a private-equity the handful of hopefuls for the Math Olympiad. The students manager—opened the Proof School, a small independent sec- are being produced by a new pedagogical ecosystem—almost ondary school in San Francisco similarly centered on amped- entirely extracurricular—that has developed online and in the up math. Before the inaugural school year even began, school country’s rich coastal cities and tech meccas. In these places, officials were fielding inquiries from parents wondering accelerated students are learning more and learning faster than when a Proof School would be opening on the East Coast and 52 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

Break time at a Sunday class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, held by the Russian School of Mathematics, which enrolls some 17,500 students nationwide. One of the school’s co-founders, a former mechanical engineer in the Soviet Union, believes math education in the U.S. begins to go wrong as early as second or third grade. whether they could get their child on a waiting list. “The appe- Massachusetts, were being taught to solve problems by mem- tite among families for this kind of math instruction,” Rusczyk orizing rules and then following them like steps in a recipe, says, “seems boundless.” without understanding the bigger picture. “I’d look over their homework, and what I was seeing, it didn’t look like they were Parents of students in the accelerated-math community, being taught math,” recalls Rikin, who speaks emphatically, many of whom make their living in STEM ields, have enrolled with a heavy Russian accent. “I’d say to my children, ‘Forget their children in one or more of these programs to supplement the rules! Just think!’ And they’d say, ‘That’s not how they or replace what they see as the shallow and often confused teach it here. That’s not what the teacher wants us to do.’ ” That math instruction ofered by public schools, especially during year, she and Irina Khavinson, a gifted math teacher she knew, the late-elementary and middle-school years. They have rea- founded the Russian School around her dining-room table. son to do so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, much of the growth in our domestic economy will come from STEM- Teachers at the Russian School help students achieve lu- related jobs, some of which are extremely well paid. College ency in arithmetic, the fundamentals of algebra and geometry, freshmen have heard that message; the number who say they and later, higher-order math. At every level, and with increas- want to major in a STEM ield is up. But attrition rates are very ing intensity as they get older, students are required to think high: Between 2003 and 2009, 48 percent of students pursuing their way through logic problems that can be resolved only a bachelor’s degree in a STEM ield switched to another major with creative use of the math they’ve learned. or dropped out—many found they simply didn’t have the quan- titative background they needed to succeed. One chilly December Sunday at a school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, seven second-graders filed past a glossy poster The roots of this failure can usually be traced back to sec- showing Russian School students who had recently medaled ond or third grade, says Inessa Rikin, a co-founder of the Rus- in math competitions. They settled into their seats as their sian School of Mathematics, which this year enrolled 17,500 teacher, Irine Rober, showed them conceptual examples of students in after-school and weekend math academies in 31 addition and subtraction by ripping paper in half and by add- locations around the United States. In those grades, many edu- ing weights to each side of a scale to balance it. Simple stuf. cation experts lament, instruction—even at the best schools— Then the students took turns coming to the blackboard to is provided by poorly trained teachers who are themselves explain how they’d used addition and subtraction to solve an uncomfortable with math. In 1997, Rikin, who once worked as equation for x, which required a bit more thinking. After a brief a mechanical engineer in the Soviet Union, saw this irsthand. break, Rober asked each child to come up with a narrative that Her children, who attended public school in aluent Newton, explained what the expression 49+(18–3) means. The children THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 53

BEAM participants are selected for their strong reasoning, stamina, and communication skills—and also for the pleasure they take in solving complicated problems. Clockwise from bottom left: New York City eighth-, ninth-, and 10th-graders Zyan Espinal, Jontae Martin, Jezebel Gomez, Nazmul Hoq, Aicha Keita, and William Laurence. Bottom center: staf member Oksana James. invented stories involving fruit, the shedding and growing of their minds see math diferently,” she told me. “It is common teeth, and, to the amusement of all, toilet monsters. that they can ask simple questions and then, in the next min- ute, a very complicated one. But if the teacher doesn’t know Although the students were laughing, there was nothing enough mathematics, she will answer the simple question and supericial or perfunctory about their explanations. Rober and shut down the other, more diicult one. We want children to her class listened carefully to the logic embedded in each of ask diicult questions, to engage so it is not boring, to be able the stories. When one young boy, Shawn, got tangled up in his to do algebra at an early age, sure, but also to see it for what it reasoning, Rober was quick to point to the exact spot where his is: a tool for critical thinking. If their teachers can’t help them thinking went awry (in the enthusiastic telling of a tale about do this, well—” Rikin searched for the word that expressed her farmers, bountiful harvests, and apple-eating varmints, Shawn level of dismay. “It is a betrayal.” began by talking about what happened to the 49 apples, when the order of operations demanded that he irst describe a re- For a subject that has been around almost as long as civi- duction in the 18 apples). Rober gently set him straight. Later, lization itself, there remains a surprising degree of the children told stories about 49–(18+3) and 49–(18-3) too. contention among experts about how best to teach math. Fiery battles have been waged for decades over what gets taught, Rikin trains her teachers to expect challenging questions in what order, why, and how. Broadly speaking, there have from students at every level, even from pupils as young as 5, been two opposing camps. On one side are those who favor so lessons toggle back and forth between the obvious and the mind-bendingly abstract. “The youngest ones, very naturally, 54 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

conceptual knowledge—understanding how math relates to a 5-story building. Now imagine that the rope is lifted at all the world—over rote memorization and what they call “drill points simultaneously, so that it loats above the Earth at the and kill.” (Some well-respected math-instruction gurus say same height all along its length. What is the largest thing that that memorizing anything in math is counterproductive and could it underneath the rope? stiles the love of learning.) On the other side are those who say memorization of multiplication tables and the like is necessary The options given are bacteria, a ladybug, a dog, Einstein, a for eicient computation. They say teaching students the rules giraffe, or a space shuttle. The instructor then coaches all and procedures that govern math forms the bedrock of good in- the students as they reason their way through. Unlike most struction and sophisticated mathematical thinking. They bristle math classes, where teachers struggle to impart knowledge to at the phrase drill and kill and prefer to call it simply “practice.” students—who must passively absorb it and then regurgitate The Common Core State Standards Initiative walks a nar- it on a test—problem-solving classes demand that the pupils row path through that mineield, calling for teachers to place execute the cognitive bench press: investigating, conjecturing, equal importance on “mathematical understanding” and predicting, analyzing, and inally verifying their own math- “procedural skills.” It’s too early to know what efect the initia- ematical strategy. The point is not to accurately execute algo- tive will have. To be sure, though, most students today aren’t rithms, although there is, of course, a right answer (Einstein, learning much math: Only 40 percent of fourth-graders and in the problem above). Truly thinking the problem through— 33 percent of eighth-graders are considered at least “proicient.” creatively applying what you know about math and puzzling On an internationally administered test in 2012, just 9 percent out possible solutions—is more important. Sitting in a regular of 15-year-olds in the United States were rated “high scorers” ninth-grade algebra class versus observing a middle-school in math, compared with 16 percent in problem-solving class is like watching Canada, 17 percent in Germany, 21 per- kids get lectured on the basics of musi- cent in Switzerland, 31 percent in South Children should cal notation versus hearing them sing an Korea, and 40 percent in Singapore. aria from Tosca. The new outside-of-school math see math “for In my experience, a common emo- programs like the Russian School vary what it is: a tool tion in the NYU math circles, at the in their curricula and teaching methods, for critical Russian School, in the chat rooms of but they have key elements in com- the Art of Problem Solving and similar mon. Perhaps the most salient is the thinking. If their Web sites, is authentic excitement— emphasis on teaching students to think teachers can’t among the students, but also among about math conceptually and then use help them do the teachers—about the subject itself. that conceptual knowledge as a tool to this, well—it is Even in the very early grades, instruc- predict, explore, and explain the world a betrayal.” tors tend to be deeply knowledgeable around them. There is a dearth of rote and passionately engaged. “Many of learning and not much time spent them are working in the ields that use applying a list of memorized formulas. math—chemistry, meteorology, and Computational speed is not a virtue. (“Cram schools,” featur- engineering—and teach part-time,” Rikin says. They are peo- ing a mechanistic, test-prep approach to learning math, have ple who themselves ind the subject approachable and deeply become common in some immigrant communities, and plenty interesting, and they are encouraged to convey that. of tutors of aluent children use this approach as well, but it is But excitement aside, the pedagogy is very deliberate. At the opposite of what’s taught in this new type of accelerated- the Russian School, lessons are carefully structured and each learning program.) To keep pace with their classmates, stu- teacher’s lesson plan is reviewed and revised by a mentor. dents quickly learn their math facts and formulas, but that is Instructors watch videos of master teachers deftly helping to more a by-product than the point. clear up students’ misunderstandings of particular concepts. The pedagogical strategy at the heart of the classes is Teachers gather by videoconference to critique one another’s loosely referred to as “problem solving,” a pedestrian term instructional technique. that undersells just how diferent this approach to math can be. Many of these programs—especially the camps, competi- The problem-solving approach has long been a staple of math tions, and math circles—create a unique culture and a strong education in the countries of the former Soviet Union and sense of belonging for students who have a zest for the subject at elite colleges such as MIT and Cal Tech. It works like this: but all the awkwardness and uneven development of the typi- Instructors present small clusters of students, usually grouped cal adolescent. “When I attended my irst math competition,” by ability, with a small number of open-ended, multifaceted at age 11, “I understood for the irst time that my tribe was out situations that can be solved by using diferent approaches. there,” said David Stoner, who joined a math circle a year later, Here’s an example from the nascent math-and-science site and soon thereafter became a habitué of the Art of Problem Expii.com: Solving. Freewheeling collaboration across age, gender, and Imagine a rope that runs completely around the Earth’s geography is a baseline value. Although the accelerated-math equator, lat against the ground (assume the Earth is a per- community has historically been largely male, girls are getting fect sphere, without any mountains or valleys). You cut the involved in increasing numbers, and making their presence rope and tie in another piece of rope that is 710 inches long, felt. Kids blow of steam by playing strategy board games like or just under 60 feet. That increases the total length of the Dominion and Settlers of Catan, or “bug house” chess, a high- rope by a bit more than the length of a bus, or the height of speed, multiboard variation of the old standby. Insider humor THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 55

abounds. A typical T-shirt slogan: 3-1 23- › … AND IT WAS DELI- gains are almost entirely limited to the children of the highly CIOUS! (Translation: “I ate some pie …”) At the Math Olympiad educated, and largely exclude the children of the poor. By the Summer Program, a training ground for future Olympians, one end of high school, the percentage of low-income advanced- of the acts in the talent show last June involved a group of young- math learners rounds to zero. sters developing computer code while holding a plank pose. To Daniel Zaharopol, the founder and executive director of The students speak about career ambitions with a rare Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM), a nonproit degree of assurance. Problem-solving for fun, they know, leads organization based in New York City, the short-term solution to problem-solving for proit. The link can be very direct: Some is logical. “We know that math ability is universal and interest of the most recognizable companies in the tech industry regu- in math is spread pretty much equally through the population,” larly prospect, for instance, on Brilliant.org, an advanced- he says, “and we see there are almost no low-income, high- math-community Web site launched in San Francisco in 2012. performing math students. So we know that there are many, “Money follows math” is a common refrain. many students who have the potential for high achievement in math but who have not had opportunity to develop their math Although efforts are under way on many minds, simply because they were born to the wrong parents or fronts to improve math education in the wrong zip code. We want to ind them.” in public schools using some of the techniques found in these In an experiment that is being closely watched by educators enriched classes, measurable gains in learning have proved and members of the advanced-math community, Zaharopol, elusive. who majored in math at MIT before getting a master’s in math Nearly everyone in the accelerated-math community says and teaching math, spends each spring visiting middle schools that the push to cultivate sophisticated math minds needs to in New York City that serve low-income kids. He is prospecting start early and encompass plenty of thoughtful, conceptual for students who, with the right instruction and some support, learning experiences in elementary and middle school. The can take their place, if not at the International Math Olympiad, proportion of American students who can do math at a very high level could be much larger than it is today. “Will they all learn it at the same rate? No, they will not,” says Loh, the U.S. math team’s head coach. “But I assure you that with the right instruction and steady efort, many, many more American students could get there.” Students who show an inclination toward math need additional math opportunities—and a chance to be around other math enthusiasts—in the same way that a kid adept with a soccer ball might eventually need to join a traveling team. And earlier is better than later: The subject is re- lentlessly sequential and hierarchical. “If you wait until high school to attempt to produce acceler- ated math learners,” Loh told me, “the latecomers will ind themselves missing too much founda- tional thinking and will struggle, with only four short years before college, to catch up.” These days, it is a rare student who can move from being Daniel Zaharopol (right), the founder and executive director of BEAM, believes that far too “good at math” in a regular public high school to many low- and middle-income kids are being left out of the advanced-learning revolution. inding a place in the advanced-math community. All of which creates a formidable barrier. Most middle-class parents might research sports programs and sum- then at a less selective competition, and in a math circle, and mer camps for their 8- and 9-year-old children, but would rarely eventually at a STEM program at a competitive college. think of supplemental math unless their kid is struggling. “You Zaharopol doesn’t look for the best all-around students to have to know about these programs, live in a neighborhood admit to his program, which provides the kind of comprehen- that has these resources, or at least know where to look,” says sive support that wealthy math nerds get: a three-week resi- Sue Khim, a co-founder of Brilliant.org. And since many of the dential math camp the summer before eighth grade, enhanced programs are private, they are well out of reach for the poor. (A instruction after school, help with applying to math circles, semester in a math circle can cost about $300, a year at a Rus- and coaching for math competitions, as well as basic advice sian School up to $3,000, and four weeks in a residential math on high-school selection and college applications. Those who program perhaps twice that.) National achievement data relect get perfect grades in math are interesting to him, but only to a this access gap in math instruction all too clearly. The ratio of point. “They don’t have to like school or even like math class,” rich math whizzes to poor ones is 3 to 1 in South Korea and 3.7 he says. Instead, he is looking for kids with a conluence of spe- to 1 in Canada, to take two representative developed countries. ciic abilities: strong reasoning, lucid communication, stamina. In the U.S., it is 8 to 1. And while the proportion of American A fourth, more inefable quality is crucial: “I look for kids who students scoring at advanced levels in math is rising, those take pleasure in resolving complicated problems,” Zaharopol 56 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

says. “Actually doing math should bring them joy.” reasoning. In some places, parents pay for their children to Five years ago, when Zaharopol entered M.S. 343, a boxy- be tutored for the admission exam, or even privately tested to get in. looking building in a rough section of the South Bronx, and sat down with a seventh-grader, Zavier Jenkins, who had a big As a result, while many such programs still exist, they’ve smile and a Mohawk, nothing about the setup was auspicious. been increasingly spurned by equity-minded school admin- With just 13 percent of kids performing at grade level in English istrators and policy makers who see them as a means by which and 57 percent in math, M.S. 343 seemed an unlikely incubator predominately aluent white and Asian parents have funneled for tomorrow’s tech mogul or medical engineer. scarce public dollars toward additional enrichment for their already enriched children. (The vaguely obnoxious label But in a quiet conversation, Zaharopol learned that Jenkins itself—“gifted and talented”—hasn’t helped matters.) had what his siblings and peers considered a quirky ainity for patterns and an inclination toward numbers. Lately, Jen- The No Child Left Behind Act, which shaped education for kins conided to Zaharopol, a certain frustration had set in. He nearly 15 years, further contributed to the neglect of these pro- could complete his math assignments accurately, but he was grams. Ignoring kids who may have had aptitude or interest in growing bored. accelerated learning, it demanded that states turn their atten- tion to getting struggling learners to perform adequately—a Zaharopol asked Jenkins to do some simple computations, noble goal. But as a result, for years many educators in schools which he handled with ease. Then Zaharopol threw a puzzle at in poor neighborhoods, laser-focused on the low-achieving Jenkins and waited to see what would happen: kids, dismissed suggestions that the minds of their brightest kids were lying fallow. Some denied that their schools had any You have a drawer full of socks, each one of which is red, gifted children at all. white, or blue. You start taking socks out without looking at them. How many socks do you need to take out of the drawer The cumulative efect of these actions, perversely, has been to be sure you have taken out at least two socks that are the to push accelerated learning outside public schools—to priva- same color? tize it, focusing it even more tightly on children whose parents have the money and wherewithal to take advantage. In no sub- “For the irst time, I was presented with a math problem that ject is that clearer today than in math. didn’t have an easy answer,” Jenkins recalls. At irst, he simply multiplied two by three to get six socks. Dissatisied, he began The good news is that education policy may be begin- sifting through other strategies. ning to swing back. Federal and state legislators increasingly seem to agree that all teenagers could beneit from the kind “I was very encouraged by that,” Zaharopol told me. “Many of accelerated-learning opportunities once reserved for high- kids just assume they have the right answer.” After a few min- aptitude kids in aluent neighborhoods, and many public high utes, he ofered to show Jenkins one way to reason through the schools have been pushed to ofer more Advanced Placement problem. The energy in the room changed. “Not only did Zavier classes and to expand enrollment in online college courses. But come up with the right answer”—four—“but he really under- for many middle- and low-income students who might have stood it very thoroughly,” Zaharopol said. “And he seemed learned to love math, those opportunities come too late. to take delight in the experience.” Four months later, Jenkins was living with 16 other rising eighth-graders in a dorm at the Perhaps it is a hopeful sign, then, that the newly autho- BEAM summer program on Bard College’s campus in upstate rized Every Student Succeeds Act, which recently replaced New York, being coached on number theory, recursion, and No Child Left Behind, asks states to recognize that such stu- graph theory by math majors, math teachers, and math profes- dents can exist in every precinct, and to track their progress. sors from top universities around the country. With some coun- For the irst time in the nation’s history, the law also explicitly seling from BEAM, he entered a coding program, which led to allows schools to use federal dollars to experiment with ways an internship at Microsoft. Now a high-school senior, he has of screening for low-income, high-ability students in the early applied to some of the top engineering schools in the country. years and to train teachers to serve them. Universal screening in elementary school might be a good start. From 2005 to 2007, BEAM, which is ive years old, has already quadrupled in school oicials in Broward County, Florida, concerned that size—it hosted 80 middle-school students at its summer pro- poor kids and English-language learners were being under- gram last year and has about 250 low-income, high-performing referred to gifted programs, gave all second-graders, rich and students in its network. But its funding remains limited. “We poor, a nonverbal reasoning test, and the high scorers an IQ know there are many, many more low-income kids who we test. The criteria for “gifted” status weren’t weakened, but the don’t reach and who simply don’t have access to these pro- number of disadvantaged children identiied as having the grams,” Zaharopol said. capacity for accelerated learning rose 180 percent. There is already a name for the kind of initiative Whether individual states take up this challenge, and do so that might, in part, bring the beneits of efectively, is their decision, but advocates say they are mount- BEAM, math circles, the Russian School, or the Art of Problem ing a campaign to get started. Perhaps the moment is right for Solving to a broader array of students, including middle- and members of the advanced-math community, who have been low-income ones: gifted-and-talented programs, which are so successful in developing young math minds, to step in and publicly funded and can start in elementary school. But the show more educators how it could be done. history of these programs is fraught. Admission criteria vary, but they have tended to favor aluent children. Teachers can Peg Tyre is the director of strategy at the Edwin Gould be lobbied for a recommendation; some standardized entry Foundation and the author of The Good School: How Smart tests measure vocabulary and general knowledge, not creative Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve. THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 57

HowAmerica Is Putting Most Americans believe the country is going to hell. They’re wrong. What a three-year journey by single-engine plane reveals about reinvention and renewal—and about how the Second Gilded Age might end. W HEN NEWS BROKE late last year of a mass every destructive economic, political, and social trend of the shooting in San Bernardino, California, most country as a whole. San Bernardino went into bankruptcy people in the rest of the country, and even the in 2012 and was only beginning to emerge at the time of the state, probably had to search a map to igure shootings. Crime is high, household income is low, the down- out where the city was. I knew exactly, having grown up in town is nearly abandoned in the daytime and dangerous at the next-door town of Redlands (where the two killers lived) night, and unemployment and welfare rates are persistently and having, by chance, spent a long period earlier in the year the worst in the state. meeting and interviewing people in the unglamorous “Inland Empire” of Southern California as part of an ongoing project So if you wanted a symbol of what conservative politicians of reporting across America. like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz mean when they talk about American decay, what liberal writers like George Packer or Some of what my wife, Deb, and I heard in San Bernardino Robert Putnam mean when describing America’s unraveling, before the shootings closely matched the picture that the non- San Bernardino would serve—and it did, in most of the reports stop news coverage presented afterward: San Bernardino as after the shooting. a poor, troubled town that sadly managed to combine nearly But that was not the only thing, or even the most interesting 58 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

By JAMES FALLOWS thing, that we saw during our time there. If “news” is what as artists or accountants or in part-time jobs. But all were you didn’t know before you went to look, the news of San Ber- involved in what you could call a raveling-up of the town’s tat- nardino, from our perspective, was not the unraveling but the tered social fabric. reverse. The familiar background was the long decline. The surprise was how wide a range of people, of diferent genera- “I was just pissed of,” an artist in his 20s named Michael tions and races and political outlooks, believed that the city Segura told us. “By the time I was old enough to vote, everything was on the upswing, and that their own efforts could help was in such terrible shape in San Bernardino. We just heard all speed that trend. the time that it’s a city of losers. We’d had enough.” In early 2013, just after the city declared bankruptcy and appeared to For instance: Last spring we met a group of San Bernardin- be at the depth of its hopelessness, he and a handful of friends ians in their 20s and early 30s who called themselves Gen- began eforts to engage the city’s generally disafected resi- eration Now—San Bernardino. They were white, black, and dents in improving their collective future. Latino. (The city is about 60 percent Latino, 20 percent white, the rest black or Asian.) Some had inished college, some were Voter-turnout rates were among the lowest in the state, still studying, some had not gone to college. They worked especially in poor and heavily Latino precincts; Generation Now members encouraged their neighbors to show up for Photograph by ADAM VOORHES THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 59

civic sessions and register to vote. The numerous foreclosed Clarke in particular, they share the current GOP pessimism homes and shuttered storefronts gave great stretches of San about trends for the country as a whole. But they both feel Bernardino a war-zone look; artists in the group covered some encouraged about the collaborative efforts on education of the buildings with murals. Other members organized park- reform under way right now in their own town. What is true for cleanup days, removing needles and trash, and replanting this very hard-luck city prevails more generally: Many people bushes and grass. Soon, neighborhood kids were following are discouraged by what they hear and read about America, them around, cleaning up alongside them. but the closer they are to the action at home, the better they From a distance, the San Bernardino story is of wall-to-wall like what they see. failure. From the inside, the story includes rapidly progressing What Americans have heard and read about the country civic and individual reinvention. One illustration is a prosperous since Deb and I started our travels is the familiar chronicle of Air Force veteran turned aerospace engineer named Mike Gallo. stagnation and strain. The kinds of things we have seen make Five years ago, he decided to run for the board in charge of the us believe that the real news includes a process of revival and city’s chronically troubled, low-scoring schools. Why? “These reinvention that has largely if understandably been overlooked kids deserve a better chance, and we can help them get it,” he in the political and media concentration on the strains of this told me. It sounds formulaic, but teachers, students, and poli- Second Gilded Age. ticians said that Gallo’s hard-charging, Teddy Roosevelt–style “In scores of ways, Americans are iguring out how to take energy and efort had helped the schools begin a turnaround. advantage of the opportunities of this era, often through He is now the board’s president. bypassing or ignoring the dismal national conversation,” Phil- Another illustration is his colleague Bill Clarke, who worked lip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia and a as a trainer and manager for General Dynamics and then had director of a recent Markle Foundation initiative called “Re- a career teaching manufacturing skills in local public schools. work America,” told me. “There are a lot of more positive Five years ago, when he retired, he and Gallo set up a nonproit narratives out there—but they’re lonely, and disconnected. technical school for unskilled locals, and It would make a diference to join them intensiied training programs in the pub- together, as a chorus that has a melody.” lic schools, whose students are mainly MANY PEOPLE ARE This is the alternative melody we from poor households. In these programs, DISCOURAGED would like to introduce. the students learn to use and repair the machinery that defines the advanced- ABOUT AMERICA. I N EARLY 2013, I placedashortitem manufacturing age: 3-D printers, robots, BUT THE CLOSER on The Atlantic’s Web site asking for and enormous CNC (computer numeri- THEY ARE TO THE advice from readers about cities of cally controlled) machine-tool systems. ACTION AT HOME, a certain type. We wanted to hear “We’re training them on real machines, about cities whose recent dramas might with real national-level certiication, for THE BETTER reveal something about the economic and good real-world jobs that really exist,” THEY LIKE WHAT cultural resilience of the United States. I Clarke told me in the machine shop at his THEY SEE. asked about cities that had sufered some nonprofit school, beneath a banner say- kind of economic, political, environmen- ing WE ARE MAKING AMERICA GREAT IN tal, or other hardship during the inancial MANUFACTURING AGAIN. Since 2010, he crash or earlier, and whose response was said, more than 400 students had passed through the school instructive in either good or bad ways. I said we were looking for “right into the high-tech manufacturing world.” This was going “smaller” cities, by which I really meant anything less famous on in the same city that was blanketed by reporters from around than the big stylish centers of the East and West Coasts. I also the world for several weeks. They did a thorough job on one said that we deinitely were not looking for the merely “quaint,” particular story in San Bernardino, but more was happening. the kitschy touches of Americana such as the little town show- As a whole, the country may seem to be going to hell. That casing the world’s largest ball of twine. Nor were we looking jeremiad view is a great constant through American history. for “undiscovered gems” or entries on a list of ideal low-budget The sentiment is predictably and particularly strong in a retirement sites. Rather we hoped to treat seriously parts of ly- presidential-election year like this one, when the “out” party over territory that usually made the news only after a natural always has a reason to argue that things are bad and getting or man-made disaster, or as primary-campaign or swing-state worse. And plenty of objective indicators of trouble, from stag- locations during presidential-election years. nant median wages to drug epidemics in rural America to gun In the end we got more than 1,000 responses—nearly 700 deaths inlicted by law-enforcement oicers and civilians, sup- within a few days!—including several hundred making an ex- port the dystopian case. tended case for the signiicance of what had happened in the But here is what I now know about America that I didn’t writer’s town. Suggestions have kept coming in. The knowledge know when we started these travels, and that I think almost that I cannot possibly ever see most of the places I’ve now read no one would infer from the normal diet of news coverage about makes me surprisingly sad. But we’ve been steadily visit- and political discourse. The discouraging parts of the San ing as many as we can. So far we have had extended, repeat-visit Bernardino story are exceptional—only five other U.S. cit- exposure (usually totaling 10 days to two weeks) to two dozen ies are oicially bankrupt—but the encouraging parts have cities and towns all around the country, and shorter sessions in resonance almost anywhere else you look. Mike Gallo and two dozen more. Bill Clarke are politically conservative and, as I heard from There is a high-toned tradition of road trips as a means 60 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC Photographs by MARK PETERMAN

SAN BERNARDINO REINVENTION Clockwise, from top left: Tay DuBois (with his daughter), an artist who has worked with Genera- tion Now, a group of young activists who have created murals and are cleaning and replanting parks; Gloria Macías Har- rison at the Garcia Center for the Arts, on whose board she serves; Mike Gallo, who as school-board president is helping change the city’s low-scoring schools; Elizabeth Flores, of Generation Now, on one of the group’s murals; Bill Clarke, who runs a nonprofit school teaching ad- vanced manufactur- ing skills; a gallery at the arts center. THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 61

of “discovering” America, from Lewis and Clark and Tocqueville through John Dos Passos, John Stein- beck, and William Least Heat Moon (whose Blue Highways made its debut in these pages). Apart from other obvious points of contrast, our proj- ect was diferent in that rather than going by car (or wagon, or pirogue), we’ve gone from city to city in our family’s small single-engine propel- ler airplane, a Cirrus SR22. This was a decision made for convenience, for beauty, and for ediication. The convenience comes from the simple fact that almost any settlement in America is within close range of a place where a small airplane can land. Some 5,000 public airports, many of Starting with a flight to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2013, through a trip to Mississippi last them built for military purposes dur- fall, James and Deborah Fallows made extended visits to two dozen cities, and shorter stops in ing and after World War II, are scat- another two dozen, covering a total of 54,000 miles in their single-engine propeller airplane. The tered about the U.S., making many longest swing was from November 2014, when they left Washington for the West Coast—with stops remote hamlets more easily reachable in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Arizona—until the following July, when they by air than by other means. returned via Montana, Colorado, Nebraska, and Ohio. The beauty comes from the privi- lege and unending fascination of watching the American land- in the middle, then mountain and desert in the west, before the scape unfurl below as you travel at low altitude. At the dawn strip of intense development along the California coast. It’s also of powered light, a century ago, it was assumed that writers full of features obvious from the sky that are much harder to and painters would want to become aviators, and vice versa— notice from the ground (and diicult to pick out from six miles Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Ernest K. Gann were up in an airliner): quarries at the edge of most towns, to provide liers who wrote; Beryl Markham, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, gravel for roads and construction sites; prisons, instantly identi- and Anne Morrow Lindbergh were writers who lew—because iable by their fencing (though some mega high schools can look of the unique perspective on civilization and nature ofered similar), usually miles from the nearest town or tucked in loca- by the aerial view. The late novelist James Salter, who was a tions where normal traic won’t pass by. I never tire of the view Korean War ighter pilot and retained his passion for light, was from this height, as diferent from the normal, grim airliner a mid-century example; William Langewiesche, a longtime perspective as scuba diving is from traveling on a container ship. Atlantic writer (and the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, whose The ediication comes from lessons in history, geography, Stick and Rudder is the lying world’s equivalent of The Elements urban planning, and environmental protection and despoliation of Style) is a current one. that are inescapably obvious from above. Why is St. Louis where A coast-to-coast drive across America has its tedious it is? Ah, of course! It’s where the Missouri and Mississippi Riv- stretches, and the teeming interstate corridors, from I-95 in the ers come together. Why were mill towns built along the fall line east to I-5 in the west, can lead to the despairing conclusion that of the Appalachians? Because of the long north-to-south series the country is made of gas stations, burger stands, and big-box of waterfalls. As you cross South Dakota from east to west, from malls. From only 2,500 feet higher up, the interstates look like the big city of Sioux Falls at the Iowa and Minnesota borders ribbons that trace narrow paths across landscape that is mostly toward Rapid City and the Black Hills and beyond, you can far beyond the reach of any road. From ground level, America see the terrain change sharply. In the East River portion of the is mainly road—after all, that’s where cars can take you. From state, between Sioux Falls and the Missouri, you see lat, well- the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland watered farmlands and small farming towns. Then past Pierre ELEVEN SIGNS had developed an informal a lot of other things about it. In midterm elections of 2014, then A CITY checklist of the traits that our experiences, these things while the Supreme Court was WILL distinguished a place where were true of the cities, large or ruling on same-sex marriage SUCCEED things seemed to work. These small, that were working best: and Obamacare, and then as items are obviously diferent BY THE TIME we had been in nature, most of them are 1 Divisive national the 2016 presiden- to half a dozen cities, we subjective, and some of them politics seem a tial campaign was overlap. But if you tell us how gathering steam. a town measures up based on distant concern. We Given the places these standards, we can guess we were visiting, I first traveled during imagine that many the run-up to the bitter 62 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC Illustrations by CHELSEA BECK

you reach West River, with rough, dry badlands, some grazing spend their working lives amid the same Upper Midwest land- cattle, and very few structures. Everyone who has looked at a scape and outdoors opportunities with which they had grown map “knows” about the efect of topography and rainfall, but it up. And now another generation of entrepreneurs is choosing means something diferent as it unfolds below you, like a real- Duluth. The Benson brothers, Dave and Greg, grew up in Min- world Google Earth. neapolis and went to college in the early 1990s at the University You can also see the history of transportation in the way of Minnesota at Duluth. If you saw them in Southern Califor- towns are settled. Even in South Dakota’s fertile East River, you nia, you might think they were surfers—shaggy-haired, rangy, can easily trace from low altitude what the railroads ushered weathered. Their sports were instead the northern-plains vari- in 150 years ago, and how their impact has ebbed. As we lew ants: skiing, ice-skating, and skateboarding. along one of the east-west lines that brought settlers into these Soon after college, in 1997, they founded (with a friend, territories and carried crops out to markets, we would see little Tony Ciardelli) a company called TrueRide, which became a settlements every few minutes. In the 1800s they were set up successful manufacturer of ramps, half-pipes, and other ingre- at roughly 10-mile intervals, an eicient distance when farmers dients of outdoor skateboard parks. They started the company were delivering their harvests by wagon. Now it seems that four in Minneapolis but moved to Duluth because it was so much out of ive of those towns are withering, as farms are run with more afordable. They also liked Duluth’s livable scale, and giant combines and crops are hauled by truck. what locals consider its year-round recreational opportuni- I would love for more people to know how this country looks ties. (Year-round if you enjoy the cold: When we visited the from above. I would love for America’s sense of itself to include Bensons’ manufacturing plant, a week after Memorial Day in more of what we’ve seen on the ground. 2014, the last ice loe on Lake Superior had just melted. But, proving the locals’ loyalty, that same week residents were out- DESPITE THE “BIG SORT,” TALENT voting people from the likes of Asheville, North Carolina, and DISPERSAL IS UNDER WAY Provo, Utah, to win Outside magazine’s online poll to choose America is egalitarian, and snobbish. The city looks down on America’s “Best Town.”) the countryside, the north on the south, the coastal meccas on The skateboard parks that TrueRide sold were made of the lyover interior—and of course each object of disdain looks expensive plastic and composites. The Bensons didn’t like how back with its own reverse snobbery. A version of today’s hier- much scrap was left over after they cut out the big sections for archical awareness is the concept of the “big sort.” This is the their skating ramps. They formed irst a kitchenware company idea that if you have irst-rate abilities and more than middling called Epicurean, then a furniture works called Loll, to make ambitions, you’ll need to end up in one of a handful of talent chairs, tables, cutting boards, and other products from the destinations. New York for inance; the San Francisco Bay Area material they had been discarding. or Seattle for tech; Washington, D.C., for politics and foreign On a wooded hillside outside Duluth, some of the compa- policy. If you can make it there … ny’s design and manufacturing oices are housed in a building This sorting is real. Through my working life, as a California that had once been a factory producing cement burial vaults patriot I have waited for the time when the news-media base and then was closed as a hazardous brownield site. The city would shift to the West Coast. I am waiting still. But nearly and state governments agreed to help clean up the site if the everywhere we went we were surprised by evi- Bensons based their businesses there. As you dence of a diferent low: of people with irst-rate approach from the back, you think, “This is what talents and ambitions who decided that some- a Depression-era burial-vault factory would look place other than the biggest cities ofered the best You can find like.” Once you step inside the door, you’re in an overall opportunities. We saw and documented hundreds of environment that the hippest firm in San Fran- examples in South Carolina, and South Dakota, additional cisco or Brooklyn would envy: recycled timber, dispatches from and Vermont, and the central valley of California, the Fallowses’ taken from the frigid depths of Lake Superior, for and central Oregon. I’ll talk now about northern ongoing the walls, staircases, and beams; other structures Minnesota and inland Southern California. reporting trip, as made of the companies’ own sleek plastic; one well as videos, Duluth, Minnesota, has become one of the interactive maps, whole wall of glass, looking out on the woods. country’s aerospace centers largely because the and more, at From this building, Loll and Epicurean ship their two brothers who founded Cirrus Design, Alan theatlantic.com/ products to customers in 61 countries. As Dave americanfutures. and Dale Klapmeier, decided that they wanted to Benson showed us around, employees went of to of the people we interviewed the focus in successful towns question we’d ask soon activist, an artist, a saloon- were Donald Trump supporters. was not on national divisions after arrival was “Who keeper, a historian, or a but on practical problems that makes this town go?” The radio personality. In one city But the presidential race just a community could address. answers varied widely. in West Virginia, we asked a didn’t come up. Cable TV was The more often national politics Sometimes it was a mayor newspaper editor this ques- often playing in the background, came into local discussions, the or a city-council member. tion, and the answer turned most frequently Fox News; if worse shape the town was in. Sometimes it was a local out to be a folk musician people had stopped to talk business titan or real-estate de- who was also a civic organizer. about what was on, they might 2 You can pick out the veloper. Sometimes a university What mattered was that the have disagreed with one another local patriots. A standard president or professor, a civic question had an answer. And the and with us. But overwhelmingly THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 63

jog on lunch breaks; in the winter they ski or skate. Racks just REDLANDS inside the front door hold their sporting equipment. RENEWAL The Duluth area has new irms in aerospace, medical equip- ment, environmental tech, and other ields. “Ten years ago Above: Robb there weren’t many start-ups,” Dave Benson told us. “Now it’s Pearson, the general buzzing.” If you saw this operation in San Francisco or Seattle, manager of Augie’s you would think: Of course! Where else could you combine the Co ee Roasters, product-design talent that can appeal to a worldwide market, part of a downtown the emphasis on sustainability that has made the irm a leader revival. Right: An in recycling techniques, and the production skills necessary orange grove at to create a rapidly changing line of items? But you ind it in the University of Duluth—“because we just like the quality of life here,” Dave Redlands, a legacy Benson said. And you find it in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; of the city’s original Greenville, South Carolina; Burlington, Vermont; Louisville, industry. Left: The Kentucky; Bend, Oregon; and Davis, California. And in larger headquarters of the but noncoastal cities like Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio. mapping company Esri, whose owners And in Redlands, neighbor of now-notorious San Ber- wanted to live and nardino. When I was growing up there, in the Baby Boom era, its work in the city economy rested on the orange-growing business, the neighbor- where they grew up. ing Norton Air Force Base, and a medical community serving the nearby desert area. Now the orange groves are nearly gone, (Jack Dangermond’s parents, Dutch immigrants, ran a nursery the Air Force base is closed, and the desert communities have in town, and his original training was in landscape architec- their own doctors—but the city has been transformed by the ture.) The Esri campus in Redlands, like Loll and Epicurean’s in presence of a tech irm that by all rights should be in some big- Duluth, is just what you’d expect to ind in a famous tech center, ger, fancier place. This company, Esri, is a world leader in geo- exactly where you wouldn’t expect to ind it. graphic information systems, or GIS. These are essentially the industrial-strength counterparts to Google Earth, which gov- Where you wouldn’t expect, that is, except we have seen so ernments and companies around the world use for everything much of this nearly every place we’ve gone. America thinks of from tracking pothole repairs to monitoring climate change. itself as having a few distinct islands of tech creativity; I now see it as an archipelago of start-ups and reinventions. Esri, which now has more than 10,000 employees world- wide and 2,500 in Redlands, “should have” been based some- John Dearie, a co-author (with Courtney Geduldig) of Where where near Harvard; that is where its founder, Jack Danger- the Jobs Are, argues that new-business formation is the single mond, did his original work in GIS in the late 1960s. But he most important guide to future employment trends. This is and his wife, Laura, had grown up in Redlands (where I knew because of the unlikely-sounding but true economic observa- them), and preferred it. “We fundamentally felt more comfort- tion that, over the decades, all the net new job growth within able starting out, living, working, and operating our business the U.S. economy has come from irms in their irst ive years of in a place that was sort of of the grid, where we could actu- existence (and mainly from fast-growing ones in their very irst ally get things done,” he wrote in an e-mail. Instead of going year). Big, established irms—Walmart, McDonald’s—employ to where the tech talent pool already was, they chose where a lot of people. But the increase in jobs, overall, statistically they wanted to be and recruited talent to join them there. Not comes from new irms, as they go from no employees to the every computer programmer wants to live in a less expensive, irst dozens or hundreds. The Kaufman Foundation annually family-friendly city rather than in the Bay Area, but enough do to make the company a success. The Dangermonds still own the company, which is valued in the billions, and have taken on a role as smaller-town counterparts to Warren Bufett: per- sonally unlashy, doing internationally successful work from an out-of-the-way location, and behind the scenes support- ing the town’s philanthropies, especially conservation eforts. more quickly it was provided, the But in successful towns, engineers to teach and super- a collaboration among the better shape the town was in. people can point to some- vise science fairs, at their own city, county, and state govern- thing specific and say, This is expense. In Holland, Michigan, ments; local universities; and 3 “Public-private partner- what a partnership means. In the family-owned Padnos several tech start-ups trains ships” are real. Through Greenville, South Carolina, the scrap-recycling company works high-school dropouts and other public-school system includes with a local ministry called unemployed people in computer the years I had assumed this an elementary school for 70x7 Life Recovery to hire ex- skills. The more specifically a engineering in a poor neighbor- prisoners who would otherwise community can explain what term was just another slogan, hood. The city runs the school; have trouble reentering the their public-private partnerships local companies like GE send in workforce. In Fresno, California, mean, the better of the city is. or a euphemism for sweetheart deals between Big Government and Big Business. 64 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

has an efect—on how much you have to work, on what you think you need, on the risks you can take. Every calculation— the cash low you must maintain, the life balance you can work toward—is diferent when a very nice family house costs a few hundred thousand dollars rather than a few million. ranks the “start-up density” of metro areas: the number of new “ H O P E LE SS ” P L AC E S AR E B U S I LY irms divided by population size. It covers larger metro areas than most we visited, but San Francisco is not even in the top REINVENTING THEMSELVES 10 of the 2015 ranking (it’s No. 12). Miami, New York City, and Orlando are the top three, followed by Austin, Denver, and Apart from San Bernardino, the hardest-pressed place we vis- Tampa. Columbus, Ohio, showed the greatest increase in ited was the area of northeastern Mississippi, close to the Ala- start-ups from the preceding year. In 2015 both New York State bama border, that has rebranded itself as the “Golden Triangle.” and Florida made the list of top 10 states in start-up density, at This is rolling, wooded country rather than the bottomland of Nos. 4 and 5, respectively. The rest were lyover states—North the delta, but it is nearly as poor. The cities that make up the Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, South Dakota, Colorado, triangle are Columbus, Starkville, and West Point. During the Vermont, and Nevada. North Dakota and Wyoming might be slaveholding era and afterward this was a cotton center; Colum- downplayed as energy-boom outliers, but the rest relected bus still has a rich endowment of antebellum homes. In mod- “normal” business growth. ern times the region has had an economic base consisting of the campus of Mississippi State University, in Starkville; an Air A great, underappreciated advantage of “every- Force pilot-training base outside Columbus; some catish farms; where else” in America: The real estate is cheap. In and low-wage, low-tech factories. Nonetheless, the long-term New York, in San Francisco, in half a dozen other trend was downward. A quarry and workshop in Columbus that cities, everything about life is slave to hyper- supplied marble headstones for the military and that thrived expensive real estate. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota; during the Vietnam War closed. The low-wage, low-tech facto- in Allentown, Pennsylvania; in inland California; ries that had come to the area after World War II—a toilet-seat across the south, costs are comparatively low. This plant, cut-and-sew garment workshops, a meatpacking plant owned by Sara Lee that once employed 1,000 people—closed one by one. A little more than half of the 120,000 or so residents of the Golden Triangle are white; most of the rest are black. The median household income last year was about $35,000, versus about $54,000 for the country as a whole. If you wanted a vista of American hopelessness, you might think to start in Mississippi. But here again we heard that though the country as a whole was in trouble, things at home were moving in the right direction. The main economic turnaround of the region is generally traced to an organization called Golden Triangle Development Link and its leaders, a white man from Arkansas named Joe Max Higgins and a black woman from Mississippi named Brenda Lathan. Over the past decade they have negotiated, cajoled, and otherwise persuaded a series of international manufactur- ing irms to build new factories in an industrial zone surrounding the new Golden Triangle airport, equi- distant from the three cities. What is remarkable is less the details of the negotiations than the sense and pace of progress, in yet another corner of America where you’d hardly expect it. When we first visited early last year, Joe Max Higgins took us to the most modern “mini-mill” 4 People know the civic stories too. For Sioux Falls, big enough to make anything that they are in the process of story. America has a South Dakota, that it’s just the possible; small enough to actu- turning around. As with guiding right size: big enough so that ally get things done. For Bend, national myths, the question is “story,” which everyone under- people who have come from the Oregon; or Duluth, Minnesota; or not whether these assessments smaller-town prairie can find Winters, California, that they are seem precisely accurate to stands even if only to say it’s a challenge, stimulation, opportu- in uniquely attractive locations. outsiders. Their value is in giving nity; small enough to be livable For Pittsburgh, that it has set an citizens a sense of how today’s myth or a lie. A few states have and comfortable. For Columbus, example of successful turn- eforts are connected to what Ohio, which is several times around. For Eastport, Maine, or happened yesterday and what their guiding stories—California larger than Sioux Falls, that it’s Allentown or Fresno or Detroit, they hope for tomorrow. as either the ever-promising or the sadly spoiled frontier, Ver- mont as its own separate Eden. Successful cities have their THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 65

for producing steel in North America, in the Golden Triangle the older, smaller Lowndes County airport in Columbus are industrial zone. This “mini” structure is what most lay ob- the all-but-abandoned toilet-seat works, the shut-down gar- servers would consider to be unimaginably vast. Ladles that ment factories, the headstone works, and other sad-looking appeared to be the size of 747s transported burbling loads of remnants of an old economy. Ten miles west, a few minutes’ molten metal. The cooling line for the endless stream of new light, is the large, modern runway of the Golden Triangle com- sheet metal stretched thousands of feet, under one roof. Moun- mercial airport, with the sprawling steelworks on one side, and tains of scrap metal, from recycling shops and auto junkyards, helicopter and truck-engine plants nearby. A few minutes to sat outside the mill, raw material for the new steel to be made the north, just past some catish farms and cattle-grazing land, inside. This was the closest I have come in the United States is a scene of industrial ruin: the derelict Sara Lee meatpacking to the experience of major factory life in China—and it was in plant in West Point, which was being picked apart by wreckers rural Mississippi, where a racially mixed workforce of almost on our irst visit early last year. When we lew over the same 700 earned a median wage of more than $80,000. A Russian- area again three months ago, a $300 million Yokohama Tires owned company invested more than $1.5 billion to build this factory had just opened, with the company’s most modern pro- plant starting in 2005. Steel Dynamics, based in Indiana, duction facilities in the world. bought it two years ago and is expanding production. Now it is only one of several major high-wage manufacturers in the area. THE ASSIMILATION ENGINE Several times over the past three years, Deb and I have MOVES EVER FORWARD lown, low, over the factories of the Golden Triangle. They look as if they were laid out in an instructive diorama. Near Almost every place we went, the changes in America’s ethnic makeup were obvious. Almost no place did this come up as 5 They have a downtown. War II. In the mall-and-freeway visited were pouring attention, 2,000 communities. Of the This seems obvious, but decades after the war, some of resources, and creativity into downtowns we saw, Greenville’s these buildings were razed and their downtown. The Main Street and Burlington’s were the most it is probably the quickest single many more were advanced, studied by planners abandoned or America project, around the world. But down- marker of the condition of a disfigured with from the National town ambitions of any sort are a cheap aluminum Trust for Historic positive sign, and second- and town. For a “young” country like fronts. Preservation, third-floor apartments and has coordinated condos over restaurants and the United States, surprisingly Most of downtown-revival stores with lights on at night the cities we projects in some many cities still have “good bones,” the classic Main Street– style structures built from the late 1800s through World 66 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

GEORGIA EDUCATION whiter, younger people darker. One version of what hap- I N N O VAT I O N pens next is familiar to anyone who’s ever read a newspaper. At Camden County High School, Richer, whiter people think that public schools, public places, in Kingsland, Georgia, students center cities are no longer for “people like us” and withdraw in one of five “career academies” themselves, their children, and their tax support to the sub- can take classes in electrical urbs or private schools. We did see cases of that. But we also work, pottery, carpentry, culinary saw the opposite. arts, and law enforcement. Rich Gamble (below), a former naval One example: The little town of Holland, Michigan, got criminal investigator, stages mock its name because so many Dutch people congregated there. crimes as part of the school’s law- A generation ago, its population was overwhelmingly white, enforcement program. mainly Dutch, and generally ailiated with sects of the con- servative Dutch Reformed Church. In high-school graduation an economic, cultural, or political emergency, or even as the photos from the 1970s, nearly all the faces are of blue-eyed most pressing local issue. Based on everything we could see, blondes. the problems of immigration that presidential candidates have seized on for political advantage were largely another “rest of Since then, Michigan’s surprisingly important agricultural America” problem. That is, people generally saw things as industry, including a large Heinz pickle factory right in down- manageable or improving locally, but believed they were fall- town Holland, has drawn a substantial Latin American popu- ing apart everyplace else. lation, and strong Holland-area manufacturing and design companies have drawn immigrants from around the world. In 2014, a nationwide Gallup poll found that immigration By 2005 the public-school population in this famously white had “modestly below-average importance to registered vot- town was mainly nonwhite. ers”; on a list of 15 challenges facing the nation, it came in at No. 9. In 2015, Gallup found that 65 percent of Americans In 2010 the superintendent of Holland’s public schools, thought levels of immigration should stay the same—or go up. Brian Davis, who grew up in a white farming family in Michi- In California, the state most dramatically afected by immi- gan, began a campaign to get major new bond funding for the gration, a 2015 poll reported that 59 percent of voters viewed schools. This was in the depth of the inancial collapse, in a immigration as a “positive force.” If you hadn’t heard the hard-hit state, in the same election cycle in which the Tea Party speeches and read the stories about an immigration-driven made its debut—and Davis was asking a mainly white elector- crisis in America, you might conclude city by city that the ate, most of whom did not have children in the public schools, American assimilation machine was still functioning. to reinance the schools. And they did. The new programs and facilities paid for by the bond, according to Davis, helped We saw this shift all around the country: older people reverse a decline in public conidence in the schools. “We have children who come from homes with $1 million–plus annual income, and ones who come from homes with incomes under $20,000,” Davis told me in 2013. “Just under 10 percent of them are considered homeless.” He reeled of some of the 20 native languages of his students. “Of course Spanish, but then Japanese, Russian, Tagalog, Korean. We’ve got more Garcias than Vans”—Van being the shorthand for standard Dutch names. “We’re what the future of public education looks like.” This is the reality as we heard it in many other cities. Another example: Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It would be easy to take this city as an example of the ways in which American ethnicity is not changing. Sioux Falls is nearly 90 percent white. But a very noticeable part of the Sioux Falls street scene are people who obviously did not come from Spearish, or Bis- marck, or the other farming towns of the Great Plains. Some are American Indians from Pine Ridge or other reservations; suggest that the downtown has economy by bringing in a stu- Central Valley, that person or UC Davis and associated crossed a decisive threshold and dent population. Over the longer probably works for a university. agro-tech ventures. Riverside will survive. term, they transform and San Bernardino were a town through the Research universities similar-size cities with similar 6 They are near a research researchers and profes- have become powerful economic prospects at the end university. Research sors they attract: When start-up incubators. For of World War II. Their paths have you find a Chinese or instance: Clemson and diverged, in part because in the universities have become the German physicist in the the array of automotive- 1950s Riverside was chosen as Dakotas, or a Yale litera- tech firms that have the site of a new University of modern counterparts to a natu- ture Ph.D. in California’s grown up around it California campus. in South Carolina, ral harbor or a river confluence. In the short term, they lift the THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 67

some are Latino or Asian migrants as in any other city; but a saving money to send their children to college. Deb met two substantial number are Somalis, Sudanese, or people from young sisters from Darfur, one of whom was in high school and Nepal or Burma or other sites of recent turmoil. The U.S. State had joined ROTC there. Her main regret was that she was not Department manages the resettlement of refugees across the allowed to wear her ROTC uniform to school on dress days, country, working mainly with religious groups. Sioux Falls, because ROTC rules forbade wearing the uniform with a head despite being relatively “nondiverse” and remote, is a city with scarf. (Yarmulkes were acceptable, since they it under the uni- one of the best records of absorbing refugees (Burlington, Ver- form cap.) mont, is another). We heard a few months later that the rule had been waived. The civic and business leaders of Sioux Falls we spoke with, The young woman wore her ROTC uniform, with her head most of them white, seemed proud rather than beleaguered scarf, to school. about their city’s new role as a melting pot. As always, there were problems and challenges. Refugees from Sudan and A N A R T S R E V O L U T I O N I S Somalia had to be instructed not to ofer bribes if stopped by T R A N S F O R M I N G S M A L L C I T I E S the police—and the police had to be told not to throw the book I am a philistine, who has not really cared about the state of at the refugees. A boy from Africa had never used an indoor the arts. Give me research centers and “makerspaces” with toilet and had to be shown how. Sioux Falls is reviving its down- 3-D printers, plus a factory or two, and I’ll tell you how I feel town district, but most of the area is laid out in typical freeway- about a town. Perhaps the topic on which I’ve most changed era American sprawl. Many refugees don’t have cars (or can’t my mind through our travels concerns the civic importance drive), and they can’t rely on the shaky public-bus system. So of local arts, and the energy being devoted to them across on hot days in the summer and very cold winter nights, you can the country. see groups of Somalis or Sudanese trudging along the road- Almost every place we visited offers an example: Bend, ways to and from their jobs at factories or shopping malls. Oregon, whose Art in Public Places project has installed large The most dramatic display of this era’s assimilation process sculptures at 20 traic roundabouts; Bethlehem, Pennsylva- is at a huge pig slaughterhouse, one of the dominant features nia, which has converted the ruins of a Bethlehem Steel plant of downtown Sioux Falls’ cityscape. The plant was set up in into a concert center and arts space; Riverside, California, the early 1900s by the John Morrell company; for many years with life-size sculptures of prominent leaders of all ethnici- it was the city’s largest employer, and it ties throughout its new downtown mall; still employs more than 3,000 people; Rapid City, South Dakota (the closest city eventually it was sold to Smithield and AMERICA THINKS to Mount Rushmore), with its life-size in 2013 to the Chinese firm Shuang- OF ITSELF AS sculptures of all the American presidents hui (which hoped that American-raised HAVING A FEW spaced throughout its downtown; Winters, and -processed meat would be popular California, with its springtime Plein Air among Chinese customers wary of tainted- ISLANDS OF TECH Festival, for which it invites artists to visit food scandals). Through the 20th century, C R E AT I V I T Y ; and portray the area in paintings, sculp- the Morrell plant was a site of represen- I NOW SEE IT AS ture, or photographs. Three examples of tative struggles in American society: the AN ARCHIPELAGO what is happening elsewhere are in the violent eforts to unionize the workforce largish city of Pittsburgh; the smallish city in the 1930s and the corporate eforts to OF START UPS. of Fresno, California; and the tiny town of de-unionize it in the 1980s, as wave after Ajo, Arizona. wave of newcomers arrived from overseas Pittsburgh’s late-20th-century trans- or farm towns to work “at Morrell’s” as their entrée to urban formation from dirty, dying steel center to chic tech hub is life. University professors, bankers, newspaper reporters, and probably the best-known American turnaround story. Parts of tech workers in Sioux Falls told me that their families had irst it are instructive for cities elsewhere, notably the emphasis on moved to the city to work at the plant. universities as centers of new-tech growth. Parts are unique. The workers at the slaughterhouse are now largely immi- “Pittsburgh feels as vibrant as it does—museums, opera, res- grants and refugees. The safety and work-rules instructions taurants, but not much traffic—because we’re living in an are posted in 30 languages. The workers on the line, cutting up infrastructure built for twice as many people as live here now,” pig carcasses, include Muslim women from Sudan or Somalia, Dutch MacDonald, the CEO of the design irm Maya, told me. 7 They have, and care more polarized existence: labor- people who might otherwise steel factory, versus a local about, a community replacing technology, global- be left with no job or one at median income of about ized trade, self-segregated minimum wage. East Mississippi $35,000). Fresno City College college. Not every city can have residential-housing patterns, Community College has taken works with local tech firms and the American practice of people who were jobless or on the city’s Cal State campus to a research university. Any ambi- unequal district-based funding welfare and prepared them for train the children of farm work- for public schools. Community work in nearby factories that ers (among others) for high- tious one can have a community colleges are the main exception, pay much more than the local tech agribusiness jobs. potentially ofering a connection median household income (for college. to high-wage technical jobs for instance, some $80,000 in the Obviously, this does not end inequality, and badly run Just about every world- historical trend is pushing the United States (and other countries) toward a less equal, 68 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

That is exactly the formula that led to enhanced the city’s international devastation in Detroit: lots of space reputation and, more important, and buildings, not enough people. In given it an expanded conception of Pittsburgh, by all accounts, the dif- itself. Plus, the Mexican War Streets ference is the extraordinary density district has become a tourist draw. of rich, locally rooted philanthropies In Fresno, Heather Parish, the set up by the titans of the robber- publicity director of a successful arts baron era and still committed to festival called the Rogue, said that the city’s development. The Mellon, cheap real estate would be the basis Heinz, Carnegie, Frick, and other for the city’s artistic future. “Fresno charities support Pittsburgh institu- is the bohemia of California,” she tions in a way any city would envy told us when we visited. “That’s but few can imitate. because you can afford to live here! The arts initiative that struck us And the pace of life is such that you in Pittsburgh was bottom-up and can have a full-time job if you need frugally operated, rather than a big to, but not be so stressed out or have foundation project. It is known as the 90-minute commutes of L.A. You the City of Asylum project, and its can aford the garage as your studio, goal is to revive a run-down area if you need it, which you can’t do in of Pittsburgh and make it a haven Doug Wagner, an architectural designer, at his San Jose anymore.” Of all the cities for persecuted writers from the rest studio in Bend, Oregon, one of many cities with an we visited, my mind changed most of the world. In the 1990s Henry ambitious public-arts program about Fresno—in part because I’d Reese, the founder of local tele- heard about it all my life as one of marketing and coupon-book firms, California’s least hip cities, and in and his wife, an artist named Diane Samuels, became inter- part because of the spark that the Rogue festival brought to ested in the cause of oppressed novelists, poets, and journalists. the businesses in the artsy Tower District. Last February, on By 2004, they had organized and opened the only indepen- the opening evening of the 2015 Rogue, the capacity crowd il- dently funded U.S. branch of the City of Asylum movement, ing into the restored Tower Theater passed belly dancers, men which was already strong in Europe. (There are two other on stilts, ire-breathers, mimes, and acrobats; inside they saw such cities in the United States, but they are run by universi- strictly timed two-minute performances by more than two ties; Pittsburgh’s is on its own.) They put up some of their own dozen dramatic, musical, and stand-up-comedy artists who money, and ran fund-raisers and recruited donors for more, so would be part of the festival. Nothing about it said small-town they could buy a series of rowhouses in the once-seedy Mexi- talent show. Instead it said, “There is more going on, in more can War Streets district of Pittsburgh (the streets are named for places, than you imagined.” battles and generals from that war) for their writers and artists The tiny-town example is Ajo, far south of Phoenix. Ajo’s to stay for periods of months or years. economic existence, like the Carnegie-era version of Pitts- One of the irst was a long-imprisoned dissident poet from burgh’s, once depended on heavy industry. In the early 1900s, China. He decided to turn his house into public art, covering it a mining company decided to exploit a major high-grade cop- with poems in large Chinese characters. A Burmese writer and per deposit in Ajo, where Spaniards, Mexicans, and American her family came, and painted the exterior of their house with Indians had dug small mines for many years. From the opening landscapes and “dreamscapes.” Strolling down the streets is of the company’s mine and an adjoining rail line just before like being in a graiti-covered part of town, but one where World War I until a bitter labor dispute in 1985 that led to the the style, palette, and theme vary building by building, and mine’s closure, everything about the town depended on the the decorations have been done carefully and proudly rather copper business. than on the fly. The program has steadily expanded, still The ugly remnants of those days are a vast crater, more than locally funded; in the past decade more than 250 poets, writers, 1,000 feet deep and a mile across, and a mountain of mine tail- musicians, and artists from around the world have put on pub- ings visible from 25 miles away. But the people running the mine lic performances in Pittsburgh. They have, through the arts, had cultural and artistic ambitions, and they left a beautiful community colleges can make often and more specifically we at the K–12 level. If four or five technical training, like Camden things worse by loading stu- heard people talk about their answers came quickly to mind, County High School, in Georgia. dents with debt without improv- community college, the better that was a good sign. Some were statewide public ing their circumstances. Nation- we ended up feeling about the boarding schools, like the South wide, only about 40 percent of direction of that town. The examples people those who start at a public com- suggested ranged Carolina Governor’s munity college finish within six 8 They have unusual widely. Some were School for the Arts years. But we saw a number of “normal” public and Humanities, and schools that were clearly forces schools. Early in our stay, schools. Some were the Mississippi School in the right direction. The more we would ask what was the charters. Some em- for Mathematics and most distinctive school to visit phasized career and Sciences. Some were THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 69

legacy as well. The manager, John Greenway, was a Yale gradu- THE ARTS REVOLUTION Above: Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum proj- CITY OF ASYLUM PITTSBURGH ate and a Rough Rider at San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. ect, which aims to transform a run-down area into a haven for perse- His wife, Isabella, was a lifelong friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. A cuted writers from around the world. Right: Nighttime in downtown century ago the Greenways laid out an elegant, expansive plaza Ajo, Arizona, a mining town reborn as an artists’ community. that would be admired in any Spanish town, and a comparably stately school. They lived in a white-stucco-walled, red-tile- saw artists revitalizing urban inner cities and wondered if we roofed house on the highest point in the town. From there you could make it happen intentionally in a small town,” Taft told us. can look, and I did, down on the lovely formal architecture of the The city’s vitality now comes from determined use of the arts. town center, with the white-stucco arcades, under red-tile roofs, of the plaza that the Greenways built. When I irst saw the plaza THE END OF THE SECOND GILDED AGE? last year and imagined the remoteness of Ajo when it was built, I thought of the grand opera house that rubber tycoons had built Everywhere we went, Deb and I saw the imprint of the great in the Brazilian jungle, in Manaus. national eforts of the past. An astonishing amount of the pub- lic architecture of 21st-century America was laid down in a few For years Ajo eked out an existence from what Gabrielle Depression-era years in the 1930s, by the millions of people David, the editor of Ajo Copper News, called “blue-collar retir- employed by the Works Progress Administration. The small ees,” who came in RVs or with tents to stretch pensions as far as airports we landed at were the result of mid-century defense- they could go. Ajo is the closest town to the spectacular Organ and-transportation building projects, as were the interstates Pipe Cactus National Monument, which we decided was given we lew above. The grid-pattern ields of the farmland Midwest that name only because another reserve was already called had been laid out by the rules of settlement from the earliest Saguaro National Park. The dominant plant in Organ Pipe days of the republic. The practices that made them the most is the towering, stately saguaro, with shorter, multibranch productive farmland in the world were crucially spurred by clumps of (aptly named) organ-pipe cacti in between. But most land-grant universities and agricultural-research schools. The of the park was closed after drug gangs murdered a park ranger wildlands and ecosystems that have escaped development did in 2002; it reopened, drawing visitors, only recently. so because of their protection as national parks or monuments. In 1992 a woman named Tracy Taft, who had once taught To seize the opportunities, and cope with the failures, of philosophy at Bryn Mawr College and had then been a com- this moment in American history, national eforts of the kind munity organizer in the Northeast, visited Ajo and was so that more recently underlay the creation of the Internet, the struck by the austere beauty of the Sonoran desert that she GPS network, and DNA decoding might again be best. But bought a house that same day. She moved there to live in 2000, and in a collaborative process that resembles what we for now, even if most parts of the complex American have seen elsewhere, she has raised money, enlisted allies, “system” work better than their counterparts in the rest become part of nationwide city-improvement networks, and of the world, our national politics works worse. Thus used her city’s potential as an arts center as the basis for its the United States has a harder time taking the steps economic revitalization. that would make adjusting to this era less painful and more productive. As the technological and economic Taft is now the executive director of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance. It has collected government and foundation grants and investments to turn the “good bones” of Ajo’s architecture into an arts community and destination resort. First it renovated the stately Curley School, converting it into afordable-rent apartments for painters, sculptors, pho- tographers, and others. Then the alliance remodeled the down- town plaza, which is a mixture of still-shuttered storefronts and occupied restaurants, shops, and public oices. Last year it opened the Sonoran Desert Conference Cen- ter in former schoolrooms redone in a hip style. This is designed to attract conference traic and host “tri- national” events involving the United States, Mexico, and the nearby native Tohono O’odham Nation. “We religious or private schools. The contrary. Politicians, educators, The mayor of Greenville, South same emphasis on inclusion common theme was intensity of businesspeople, students, and Carolina, asked us to listen for that makes a town attractive to experimentation. retirees frequently stressed the how many diferent languages talented outsiders increases its ways their communities were we heard spoken on the street draw to its own natives. trying to attract and include by business visitors. 9 They make themselves new people. Cities as diferent They have big plans. If I open. The anti-immigrant as Sioux Falls, Burlington, and Every small town in America see a national politician Fresno have gone to extraor- has thought about how to ofset 10 passion that has inflamed this dinary lengths to assimilate the natural brain drain that has refugees from recent wars. historically sent its brightest election cycle was not some- young people elsewhere. The with a blueprint for how things thing people expressed in most will be better 20 years from of the cities we visited. On the now, I think: “Good luck!” In fact, 70 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

dismay about corrupt and plutocratic politics, the shunting of populist concerns toward racist outbursts—all have their clear counterparts now. Sadly, history is not so mechanistic that we can say: Things turned out all right the last time around, so let’s wait for the reforms to happen again. But when we think about the shift from the original Gilded Age, in the late 19th century, to what came after, three elements can show us what to anticipate and what to seize on right now. The irst, unpredictable element is the national shock that galvanizes efort. For me the central document in American political psychology is William James’s 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” America is capable of almost anything when threatened militarily, James argued; think what it could do if it could muster the same determination without the threat. The sin of commission for the United States after its greatest recent shock, the 9/11 attacks, was the invasion of Iraq, with the consequences it will entail through the decades. The sin of omission may have been worse, to miss the opportunity for real national improvement. Consider how Dwight Eisenhower imperatives pushing toward a “gig economy” erode the pro- used the then-terrifying “Sputnik shock” of the late 1950s: tections of the corporate-employment model—more side mainly as a spur to technological and educational investment. income via Uber and Etsy, fewer guaranteed pensions or The second element is one that Paul Starr, of Princeton health beneits—national policy could respond, as it did more University, stresses in a 2015 American Prospect essay called than a century ago when the industrial age eroded the protec- “How Gilded Ages End.” Democracy, he argues, inally de- tions of the family-farming era. Then, the response took the pends on and is deined by the ability of political power to con- form of safety legislation, child-labor laws, union rights, and trol strictly economic forces. Otherwise you’re talking about the minimum wage. Now it could take the a nationwide corporation, not a country. form of extensions of health-care cover- American history of the era that began age and other safeguards harder to obtain SIOUX FALLS, with J. P. Morgan and ran through the without career-long jobs. Technology- DESPITE BEING New Deal was about political power re- friendly economists like Laura Tyson, of “NONDIVERSE,” asserting its preeminence. “Behind the UC Berkeley, and Lenny Mendonca, of myriad of specific reforms” that consti- McKinsey, have laid out just such pro- IS A CITY WITH tuted the early-20th-century Progressive grams. As automation and world trade ONE OF THE BEST movement, Starr writes, “was a common eliminate, or immiserate, some of today’s RECORDS OF recognition—a collective revulsion against jobs, schools can help prepare students for the privileges of great wealth allied with other kinds—as happened a century ago ABSORBING great power.” He argues that the coun- with the creation of high schools and then REFUGEES. try is due for such an adjustment again. again after World War II with the GI Bill. Through the past generation-plus, this But that won’t happen soon. Whichever struggle has been cast as a Republican- party wins the presidency, the other will hold enough of the versus-Democratic issue. From Nixon onward, the modern Congress to make comprehensive measures of any sort very GOP has channeled resentment about intellectual and cul- hard to push through. That is why local resilience and adaptabil- tural elites, and racial minorities, into support for the business ity of the kind we have witnessed deserve nationwide attention. elite. Thus white voters in West Virginia or Kansas support It’s now commonplace to observe that the United States is tax policies that disproportionately beneit inanciers in New living through a Second Gilded Age. The distortions of that York and San Francisco. Despite their obvious diferences, the irst age—the extremes of wealth and welfare, the sudden dis- discontents propelling Donald Trump’s campaign and that of locations due to technology and trade and ethnic change, the Bernie Sanders could signal a change. few national politicians even back.” Cities still make plans, would have been an unfair test has even more. A town that pretend to ofer a long-term because they can do things. for Mississippi, which efec- has craft breweries also has a vision anymore. When a mayor tively outlawed craft beers by certain kind of entrepreneur, 11 They have craft brew- setting maximum or city-council member eries. One final marker, alcohol levels at and a critical mass of shows me a map of how 5 percent. Now that mainly young (except new downtown resi- perhaps the most reliable: A law has changed, for me) customers. dences will look when and Mississippi has You may think I’m jok- completed, or where the city on the way back will have 10 craft breweries. ing, but just try to find new greenway will go, I Once-restrictive Utah an exception. think: “I’d like to come one or more craft brewer- — James Fallows ies, and probably some small distilleries too. Until 2012, that THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 71

THE LIBRARY meet my housing costs? Future of Libraries at the racial history of their state. CARD There are three areas American Library Association, In Redlands, California, the says makerspaces are part of program attracting the most By DEBORAH FALLOWS where libraries function as libraries’ expanded mission to volunteers is one-on-one vibrant centers of America’s be places where people can literacy tutorials for adults. A S WE TRAVELED around towns: technology, education, not only consume knowledge, And many adults use public the U.S. reporting on the and community. but create new knowledge. libraries as their access point to postsecondary online revival of towns and cities, we TECHNOLOGY E D U C AT I O N courses. Many people rely on librar- In my conversations with always made the local library ies for their computer and librarians around the country, COMMUNITY Internet use. According to a the most urgent topic was The library in West Hart- an early stop. We’d hit the 2015 Pew Research Center the education of America’s ford, Connecticut, ofers report, more than a quarter of youngest children. Patrick conversational-English newspaper ofices, the cham- Americans who had visited a Losinski, the CEO of the classes for immigrants. The public library in the past year Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan library in Seattle provides ber of commerce, city hall, and had used a computer, the library system, told me that citizenship classes. The Internet, or a WiFi connection when a 5-year-old walks into library in Duluth, Minnesota, Main Street for an introduc- there, with the usage num- kindergarten, takes a book, has a seed-lending program bers higher among minorities and holds it upside down, for local gardeners. The tion to the economics, politics, and low-income groups. “you know there is no reading library in Washington, D.C., readiness there.” I heard of ofers tango dancing on Sat- and stresses of a town. The More ambitiously, libraries many projects like Books urday afternoons. In libraries, have also begun ofering for Babies, which is run by I have practiced yoga and tai visit to the public library “makerspaces”—shared Friends of the Library in tiny chi, sipped lattes in cofee workspaces that provide Winters, California: Volunteers shops, and watched Millenni- revealed its heart and soul. technological tools and are scour birth announcements als with laptops arrange their designed to facilitate col- and go stroller-spotting, virtual start-up ofices at long The traditional impres- laborative work. I recently ofering each new baby a reading-room tables. Libraries toured the makerspace at box with a T-shirt, a cap, two serve as anchors in times of sion of libraries as places for Washington, D.C.’s flagship books, and an application to distress: The library in Fergu- Martin Luther King Jr. library. join the library. son, Missouri, kept its doors quiet reading, research, and An eclectic group of hobby- open even when schools were ists, entrepreneurs, and a In Charleston, West closed, and libraries in New borrowing books—and of mom with her homeschooled Virginia, despite recent fund- Jersey became places of ref- preteens were learning about ing losses that severely cut uge after Hurricane Sandy. librarians as schoolmarmish tools like 3-D printers, laser library staf, librarians still cutters, and wire benders. provide materials to teachers If these seem like devia- shush-ers—is outdated, as Ben Franklin, who conducted all across the 900-square- tions from libraries’ historical some of his experiments mile county. In Columbus, role as lenders of books, con- they have metamorphosed with electricity in the public Mississippi, the library gives sider that, around the start of spaces of the Library Com- high-school students access the 20th century, the earliest into bustling civic centers. For pany of Philadelphia, would to Civil War–era archives— Carnegie libraries included surely appreciate today’s slave sale records, court bowling alleys, music halls, instance, Deschutes Public public-library makerspaces. cases, and secrets of the billiard tables, swimming community—making real the pools, and gymnasiums. Library in Bend, Oregon, now Miguel Figueroa, who directs the Center for the cooperates with dozens of organizations, from AARP (which helps people with their taxes) to Goodwill (which teaches résumé writing). A social worker trains staf to guide conversations about one of the most frequent questions people trustingly bring into the library: Can you help me figure out how to And the third element that marked the end of the irst but actively experimental reformers in one state know about Gilded Age was fertile experimentation with new approaches parallel eforts elsewhere. and possibilities. Louis Brandeis’s famous claim that the American states, rather than the central government, were When the national mood after the irst Gilded Age favored the real “laboratories of democracy” came in a Supreme reform, possibilities that had been tested, reined, and made Court ruling in 1932. For several decades before that, states to work in various “laboratories of democracy” were at hand. and cities across the country had experimented with new After our current Gilded Age, the national mood will change school systems, new tax and spending schemes, new ways of again. When it does, a new set of ideas and plans will be at providing public services, new public-health programs, new hand. We’ve seen them being tested in places we never would regulatory approaches, all toward the goal of responding to have suspected, by people who would never join forces in the the crises of that age. “In Cleveland, Toledo, across the Mid- national capital. But their projects, the progress they have west and plains states, you saw these dedicated reformers,” made, and their goals are more congruent than even they Michael Kazin of Georgetown University, a historian of the would ever imagine. Until the country’s mood does change, Progressive era and a biographer of William Jennings Bryan, the people who have been reweaving the national fabric will told me. “Some were Socialists, some Democrats, some be more efective if they realize how many other people are Republicans—they were all trying something new.” One of working toward the same end. Bryan’s goals, Kazin said, was to let the politically disparate James Fallows is an Atlantic national correspondent. 72 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

ADVERTISEMENT TACKLING THE YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS BY FREEMAN HRABOWSKI AND JAMIE DIMON As President of one of America’s leading educational institutions and CEO of one of the world’s largest financial firms, we see the world through two very di erent lenses. But there is one challenge that we both see clearly: too many young people are not on a path to meaningful employment that will enable them to join the middle class. This challenge is exacerbated by the growing economic crisis of high inner-city unemployment, low high-school graduation rates and high college drop-out rates. The result is truly a national tragedy: over five million young people, including one in five African-Americans and Latinos, are neither working nor in school. To tackle youth unemployment and support the needs of today’s economy, students should be informed and educated about all their options, including college and career pathways that don’t include pursuing a four-year degree immediately. Students connected to high-quality education and training programs have a chance to find a way out of poverty and a real chance at economic opportunity. Educators need to better align what they teach with the skills employers desperately need. Likewise, business leaders need to support the education system as it strives to teach critical thinking and other workforce skills. To address the youth unemployment crisis, we are committed to increasing the number of young people who get on a pathway to economic success by being college and career-ready. First, we want to transform how states and cities design and develop career-focused education programs. JPMorgan Chase and its partners are launching a multi-million dollar competition for states to expand access to career-pathway programs that can lead to high-skill and high-wage jobs. Second, we need to make greater investments in career-focused education programs that are aligned with the needs of emerging industries. Programs focused on jobs like robotics, medical science and coding — the skills that employers desperately need. Now is the time for greater private and public focus on equipping young people at all income levels with the skills and experiences to be career-ready. Without this, economic opportunity and a shot at the middle class will continue to be out of reach for generations to come. Freeman Hrabowski is the President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Jamie Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. To learn more about New Skills for Youth please visit: jpmorganchase.com

What happened when 11 audacious exiles armed themselves for a violent night in the Gambia “LET’S GO TAKE BACK OUR By STUART A. REID Illustrations by MATTHEW WOODSON 74 M A R C H 2 0 1 6 THE ATLANTIC



IN They prayed, then formed a huddle. democracy—and Jawara was the THE DARK HOURS of the morning on December 30, 2014, eight men gathered Together, they whispered: “Let’s go last of its hopeful crop of 1950s in a graveyard a mile down the road from the oicial residence of Yahya Jammeh, take back our country.” and ’60s nationalist leaders still the president of the Gambia. The State House overlooks the Atlantic Ocean in oice. from the capital city of Banjul, on an island at the mouth of the Gambia “A BANANA SHOVED INTO Critics, however, saw Jawara River. It was built in the 1820s and the mouth of Senegal”—so as a distant elitist who spent too served as the governor’s mansion goes the polite version of a much time playing statesman through the end of British colonialism, in 1965. Trees and high walls separate local saying that describes abroad and not enough time the house from the road, obscuring any light inside. the Gambia’s appearance on a map. combatting poverty at home. The The men were dressed in boots and dark pants, and as two of them stood The country, home to fewer than 2 mil- objections seem to have reso- guard, the rest donned Kevlar helmets and leather gloves, strapped on body lion people, is a narrow strip of territory nated with Jammeh, who grew up armor and CamelBaks, and loaded their guns. Their plan was to storm the carved out of the banks of its namesake shuttling between relatives in the presidential compound, win over the military, and install their own civilian river. The Atlantic forms the western provinces after his mother left the leader. They hoped to gain control of the country by New Year’s Day. edge; Senegal surrounds the rest. family and his father died. When The head of the group was Lamin Sanneh, a bulky 35-year-old who had Weakbordersandweakgovernments the shabbily dressed boy earned commanded an elite military unit charged with protecting the president, still characterize much of West Africa, a spot at a prestigious high school until he had fallen out with Jammeh the year before and taken refuge in the and the coup d’état brewing in the grave- in Banjul, a childhood friend re- suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. To the men in the graveyard, Sanneh seemed yard would not be the Gambia’s first. called, he began carrying around perfectly suited to the mission. He had been trained at the best foreign military Sanneh was on summer break from mid- an opposition newspaper and academies and was familiar with the inner workings of Jammeh’s security dle school in 1994 when, one morning, a once got into a istight with the apparatus, from the armaments in the State House’s guard towers to the routes group of junior army oicers angry about son of the justice minister. taken by the presidential motorcade. “Gentlemen,” Sanneh called out, in their low salaries seized the national Jammeh joined the gendar- the manner of a general briefing his troops before battle. They would split radio station, the airport, and govern- merie after graduation, eventu- into two teams, he reminded them: Bravo would wait for Alpha’s irst gun- ment buildings in Banjul. The incum- ally rising to become an instructor. shot before mounting its attack. To the men’s frustration, they had misplaced bent president, Dawda Jawara, who According to Essa Bokarr Sey, who one of their two pairs of night-vision goggles. But there was no time to waste. had led the country since indepen- lived in the barracks with him for three dence, found safety on a docked U.S. years and went on to serve as his am- warship while his guards evacuated bassador to the United States, Jammeh the State House. When the disgruntled used to read Marx in his downtime, and officers arrived, Andrew Winter, then would lag down ministers’ cars as if to the U.S. ambassador to the Gambia, ask for a ride, only to berate them for told me, “I think much to their sur- being corrupt. “Na polotik nomo you prise, it was theirs.” At about 6 o’clock dey talk,” another instructor used to that evening, an announcement came tell Jammeh, pidgin English for “All you on the radio: A four- talk about is politics.” member group called AFTER WINNING A member of the Jola the Armed Forces Provi- A THIRD TERM, people—a small ethnic sional Ruling Council, or YAHYA JAMMEH group that was the last AFPRC, had taken over. LED HIS COUNTRY in the region to convert Its chair was Yahya Jam- WITH NEWFOUND to Islam—Jammeh stood meh, then a 29-year-old out on the base for his army lieutenant who was BRAVADO extreme superstition. Ac- little known outside the AND ERRATICISM. cording to Sey, Jammeh barracks. claimed that he could Under Jawara, the cure fellow soldiers’ Gambia had been a bright sprains just by touching spot in post-independence Africa. From them, and at night he would rub him- the start of decolonization, in the 1950s, self with leaves to ward of spirits. He until the end of his tenure, leaders in also had a reputation as a small-time continental West Africa were more bully. At the base’s gate, he once made likely to be ousted by members of the a pregnant visitor dance like a monkey military than to lose power in elections. until she fainted. After Jammeh locked During that period, the 14 other coun- Sey out of the dormitory one evening, tries in the region together experienced Sey wrote Jammeh a letter calling him 35 successful coups. But Jawara, over a dictator. “I am the irst person who his three decades in oice, fostered a used that word for him,” Sey told me. multiparty democracy, tolerated a free Jammeh was commissioned by press, and outlawed the death pen- the Gambian National Army in 1989, alty. Before the AFPRC takeover, the and soon began serving as a presiden- Gambia was Africa’s longest-surviving tial guard. In 1993, a year after being 76 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

promoted to lieutenant, he enrolled in Military governments do military unsuccessful coups in 1994, a four-month military-police course at things, and the Gambia’s once-open 1995, 2000, and 2006. After Fort McClellan, in Alabama, where he society began to contract. The police, the 2006 attempt—allegedly struck up a friendship with the base’s even when only on crowd-control duty led by the former chief of foreign-liaison officer, Major Fouad at a soccer stadium, were armed with the defense staf—Jammeh Aide. Aide liked to tell the story of how rifles and rocket-propelled grenade announced a crackdown. he learned that his mentee had seized launchers. So perhaps it was inevitable “I will set an example that control of a country: He answered his that when a group of students gathered will put a definitive end to phone one day and heard “Please hold in April 2000 to protest the alleged these ruthless, callous, and for the head of state.” He assumed the rape of a teenage girl by a security shameless acts of treachery call was a prank. Then Jammeh came oicer, the police opened ire. At least and sabotage,” he said. “I on the line, inviting him to the Gambia. 14 people were killed. have warned Gambians long enough.” Initially, Jammeh signaled that the Nonetheless, in 2001, Jammeh won new regime would not descend into a second term. He was popular for the In a classic 1999 article military dictatorship. Labeling the paved roads, hospitals, and schools his in the journal International AFPRC “soldiers with a difference,” government had built. Classrooms, for Security, the Rand Cor- he vowed to return to the barracks “as once, were furnished; no longer did stu- poration analyst James soon as we have set things right.” In dents have to lug their own desks and Quinlivan coined the term a gesture of frugality, he promised to chairs to school. But while international coup-proofing to describe auction off the Jawara government’s observers declared the election the measures a leader fear- Mercedes-Benzes, and showed up at “free and fair,” the political playing ield ing military overthrow rallies in a Mitsubishi SUV. was anything but level. Police raided might take to protect him- journalists’ homes and arrested activ- self. Among them is creat- Despite his rhetoric, Jammeh soon ists. Jammeh toured the country in a ing a system for enforcing began to follow the region’s standard motorcade bristling with rocket launch- loyalty. With enemies lurking every- post-coup playbook. In 1996, two years ers, reportedly distributing cash to the where, Jammeh established a National after the coup, in response to inter- crowds that greeted him. Intelligence Agency and a network of national pressure, he agreed to hold informants inside the bureaucracy. De- presidential elections and retired from J AMMEH FEARED THE bar- nunciations eventually became so com- the army, exchanging his red beret racks more than the ballot— mon that the government had to pass a and fatigues for a brimless cap and with good reason. The year law prohibiting false accusations. Intel- lowing gown. On election day, soldiers after he took power, he had ligence officers would take perceived at polling stations directed people how two members of his own party arrested enemies to an of-the-books detention to vote, while the leading opposition for plotting countercoups, and caused center at the agency’s headquarters, candidate hid in the Senegalese Em- a third to flee the country. Various which still bore a sign reading GAMBIA bassy, fearing assassination. Jammeh schemers within the military launched PRODUCE MARKETING BOARD. There, won handily. according to a report by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, they would be punched, burned, or elec- trocuted. One former detainee told me he had been whipped with a tractor belt. He showed me his bloodied shirt and photographs of his scarred back. A group of some 20 soldiers called the “Junglers,” which officially func- tioned as a border-patrol unit near Jam- meh’s hometown of Kanilai, carried out the regime’s dirty work. A defector from the group says the Junglers drove around in Jeeps and pickup trucks wearing black SWAT-team uniforms and wield- ing weapons from Iran. Most smoked marijuana and drank on the job. Around 2004, according to Human Rights Watch, the group’s commander alleg- edly started ordering the assassinations of regime opponents, working from a list of names provided by the president. Jammeh also cultivated a special mil- itary force, bound to him through ethnic THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 77

ties—another coup-proofing strategy. carefully when discussing the trade’s month, he was dismissed from the army. The unit, known as the State Guards, was charged with protecting the coun- links to Gambian officials, making He wrote to Meiser, requesting a letter try’s most strategically valuable points: the State House; the president’s villa in sure to cite pro-government news- of recommendation—“urgently”—for a Kanilai; and Denton Bridge, the sole roadway connecting the capital to the papers as sources and to omit all men- master’s program in Taiwan. Gambian mainland. Jammeh illed its ranks with Jolas, his ethnic brethren. tion of Jammeh. His adviser, Jeffrey Sanneh soon learned from neighbors Jammeh won yet another term in Meiser, recalled that among the bright that his house appeared to be under 2006, and started leading his country with newfound bravado—and errati- young oicers from around the world, surveillance, and not long after, he got cism. He upgraded his Mitsubishi to a black stretch Hummer and tossed bis- Sanneh had distinguished himself. At word that he should leave the Gambia cuits to crowds from its sunroof, send- ing children scrambling. (Some were hit his graduation ceremony, as he shook immediately. He led with his wife and by the motorcade and killed.) His title grew to “His Excellency Sheikh Profes- hands with General Martin Dempsey, children to Dakar, Senegal. Even there, sor Alhaji Doctor.” He unveiled his own herbal cure for HIV/AIDS, a green paste the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staf, he did not feel safe—an online radio sta- he rubbed on patients’ skin, and threat- ened to behead gay Gambians. In 2009, Sanneh stood out in his red full dress, a tion had announced that Jammeh’s men his security forces kidnapped hundreds of people accused of witchcraft and gold aiguillette dangling from his chest. were looking for him—so he applied for forced them to drink a hallucinogenic potion. That year, Jammeh survived an- Just after returning refugee status at the other coup attempt, and two years later, he won a fourth election. He told an to the Gambia, Sanneh THE OPERATION American Embassy, and interviewer afterward, “If I have to rule received his new assign- MAY HAVE HAD A in the summer of 2013 this country for 1 billion years, I will.” ment running the State WHIFF OF NAÏVETÉ, he resettled with his Guards. He had not BUT IT WAS family near Baltimore. J AMMEH WAS THUS putting been expecting the pro- CERTAINLY BETTER Lamin Sanneh in a position motion, he told Meiser ORGANIZED THAN He looked for a job, of considerable trust when he in an e-mail. “Very busy THE COUP THAT woke up early to catch made him commander of the and challenging, taking HAD BROUGHT Manchester United State Guards, in July 2012. Perhaps the care of the President’s THE PRESIDENT games, and tried to turn president saw himself in the young lieu- security,” he wrote, TO POWER. his master’s thesis into tenant colonel. Born in a rural village not adding that he thought an academic article—in far from Kanilai, Sanneh had joined the his revisions, he impli- military out of high school and worked as an instructor at the same barracks he would stay in the cated Jammeh in the Jammeh had. When the military opened a new training school in Kanilai, Sanneh position for the foresee- drug trafficking. Even- was picked as its chief instructor. able future. tually, he was hired as Like Jammeh, Sanneh went abroad for military training, irst to Sandhurst, Sanneh worked seven days a week an information-technology instructor in the United Kingdom, and then to the National Defense University, in Wash- at the State House, and often didn’t get at Baltimore City Community College, ington, D.C., as a counterterrorism fel- low. He lived with his wife, Hoja, and home until 1 a.m. Some nights, he slept making $28 an hour. But his mind was two of their children in a condominium in Arlington, Virginia, where their lives at the oice. But the job was prestigious, on the Gambia. One day, he placed a revolved around Sanneh’s academic work. On weekend mornings, after and gave him considerable face time phone call to a man he had met in the cooking breakfast for the family, San- neh would head to the condominium’s with Jammeh. As a former colleague Dakar airport on his way to the United business center to write. When he tired of typing, Hoja took dictation. told me, Sanneh would chat and joke States, a Gambian political activist In his master’s thesis, about drug with the president over cups of green named Banka Manneh who lived in traicking in West Africa, Sanneh trod tea. Sanneh knew, of course, that such Atlanta. The two complained about proximity could be dangerous: Mile 2, Jammeh’s regime for a while before a cramped, mosquito-illed prison near Sanneh made a proposal. “I think we Banjul, housed no shortage of erst- can solve this problem,” he said. while insiders. He protected himself A S AN EXILE and a promi- by taking detailed notes of his daily nent critic of Jammeh, activities, creating a time-stamped re- cord in the event that he was accused of Manneh was used to being anything insidious. approached by leaders of far- He was right to worry. His prob- fetched coup plots, and he always turned lems began when his boss, General them down. But Sanneh was insistent: Saul Badjie—Jammeh’s closest mili- Peaceful resistance would never do tary adviser—told him to fire subor- the trick. Jammeh must be overthrown. dinates without cause. When Sanneh When Manneh got a similar call from refused, Badjie started looking into his Njaga Jagne, a high-school acquaintance background, and found out he was a who had left the Gambia 20 years earlier, Mandinka—the most prevalent of the he decided to put the two men in touch. Gambia’s ethnic groups, and a regular The group of would-be revolutionar- target of Jammeh’s sniping—despite ies soon grew to include two more ex- hailing from a district with a high con- patriates, both of whom had served in centration of Jolas. In February 2013, the U.S. Army. They called themselves just seven months after he had started, the Gambia Freedom League. Sanneh was expelled from the State The men started holding hour-long Guards and demoted to major. The next conference calls every other Saturday 78 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

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evening. At first, these were relaxed citizens, we have decided to stake our But like the others, Faal had concluded affairs, filled with jokes about home- life and resources to answer the call.” that nonviolent methods of removing town rivalries. The members who had Jammeh had run their course. served in the military, and possessed By the late summer of 2014, the the sense of punctuality to match, play- Gambia Freedom League had added a Now, on the biweekly conference fully scolded Manneh for joining the recruit from Seattle and a U.S. Army vet- calls, Sanneh laid out a detailed blue- calls late. They eventually adopted code eran from Minneapolis named Papa Faal. print for capturing or killing Jammeh. names: “Fox,” “Dave,” “Bandit,” “X.” Dawda Jawara, the ousted president of “Chuck,” as the plan referred to him, the Gambia, was Faal’s great-uncle, and would be removed in one of four ways. Sanneh drafted a six-page docu- during a failed coup attempt in 1981— The first three involved roadside am- ment that he shared with the others which took place while Jawara was bushes at various points that Jammeh’s on Google Drive: “Military Strategy in London for the wedding of Prince motorcade was known to pass. The for Operation Gambian Freedom.” It Charles and Princess Diana—a 13-year- group assumed that the lead vehicle sketched out an operation designed to old Faal was held hostage at gunpoint would be disabled with a .50-caliber remove Jammeh and his inner circle. with his family. In a memoir published in sniper rifle. Then the convoy would The group would work with “local part- 2013, he had inveighed against the lead- halt and the ighters would persuade ners and agents” to acquire real-time ers of the plot, claiming that coups sow the presidential bodyguards to drop intelligence about Jammeh’s location. “the seeds of a future conlict or coup.” their weapons. Their preference would be to arrest him, but, the document stated, “in the event the capture fails for unforeseen reasons, he must be killed.” A flowchart that would not be out of place in a Pentagon PowerPoint presentation diagrammed the “ways,” “means,” and “ends” of the operation. Above it, eight assumptions were listed—among them, that there would be no leaks by the local partners, and no resistance from security forces. Tasked with fund-raising, Manneh approached Cherno Njie, a real-estate developer originally from the Gam- bia who lived in Austin, Texas. Njie had done well enough to send his son to private school in Austin and buy a million-dollar home in a gated com- munity. He had also funded some of Manneh’s activist efforts, paying for his travel to Brussels to lobby European Union oicials to levy sanctions against the Gambia, and bankrolling a radio station in Senegal that, until the signal was jammed, broadcast anti-Jammeh propaganda across the border. When Manneh called Njie asking whether he wanted to inance a more radical ven- ture, he says, he found Njie receptive. Manneh also busied himself with post-coup planning. He jotted down notes in his car during breaks from his job in construction, and typed away on his laptop at restaurants around Atlanta, eventually e-mailing the group a docu- ment titled “Transition Into the Third Republic.” It outlined a two-year interim period with Cherno Njie as president, after which elections would be held. “Another clarion call has been issued to all Gambian citizens and people of Gam- bian descent to rescue their country,” the document began. “As concerned 80 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

The fourth and most dangerous between two diferent gun dealers in that he would be taking the next semes- option was a direct assault on the State House. In that scenario, the group would Minneapolis. Jagne and Alagie Barrow, ter of, and set up his bills for automatic split into three teams, with Alpha going through the front gate and Bravo secur- one of the Army veterans, also bought payment. His wife happened to be plan- ing the rear one. Charlie would act as an auxiliary, swinging into place as needed. at least eight weapons each, including ning to take their infant daughter to the They hoped to negotiate with the guards, rather than ight them. But they would three Smith & Wesson riles that Bar- Gambia in December to see family; he shoot their way in if necessary. Sanneh labeled gates and guard towers on a row picked up from a gun store near his tried to change her mind but gave up Google Earth satellite image of the com- pound. Faal printed out the map and put house in Tennessee. when she grew suspicious. He delected it in a manila folder, which he marked TOP SECRET in black ink. Jagne and Barrow told Banka Man- questions about his own travel plans by Each scenario counted on 160 Gam- neh that their purchases had gotten saying he was going on a business trip. bian soldiers joining the mission. San- neh assured the group that, as a popular them lagged, presumably by the FBI, On December 3, Faal lew to Dakar former instructor under whom hun- dreds of soldiers had passed, he could which conducts background checks on alone, then took a taxi to the Gambia. deliver on this promise. In the event that the plot failed, the ighters would gun buyers. So Jagne asked Manneh Jagne soon followed. Along with Barrow, discard their weapons, strip off their armor to reveal civilian clothes, and to buy more weapons himself, direct- they rented SUVs and fenced-of safe blend into the streets. ing him over the phone as Manneh houses, each in a diferent Banjul sub- But if all went according to plan, Cherno Njie, waiting safely away from clicked through an online gun store that urb, and picked up the weapons from the action, would call up the commander of the Gambian military and persuade shipped to a pawnshop outside Atlanta. the port. The three started conducting him to join their cause. Then the military would secure the airport, power plants, Besides guns and ammunition, the reconnaissance of the ambush sites and ports, and border posts. Gamtel, the na- tional telecom company, would also be group obtained a platoon’s worth of casing the State House. Barrow shared taken over, and cellphone service would be shut down to disrupt communication equipment for the 20 or so expatriate some unsettling news: While he was within the regime. Once the state radio and television services were in friendly fighters whom Sanneh thought he in Dakar, the FBI had reached him by hands, the new government would be announced on the airwaves, with Man- could ultimately recruit to participate phone and asked him where he was. He neh serving as its international spokes- man. It would be a classic bloodless coup. in the operation. They collected eight said he had refused to answer. The operation may have had a whif walkie-talkies for communication Sanneh had a similar encounter. of naïveté, but it was certainly bet- ter organized than the coup that had during the raid, and the two pairs of In early December, after he bought a brought Jammeh to power, the planning of which, by some accounts, had begun night-vision goggles. Sanneh acquired ticket to Dakar, three FBI agents ar- only the night before. satellite phones so they could speak rived at his doorstep. He invited them T HE C OUP WOULD require considerable firepower— with the outside world after cell service into his living room, while his wife which the men could ac- quire legally in America. was shut down in the Gambia. A budget listened from the staircase. We know A spreadsheet they kept called for 28 rifles, eight pistols, four machine for the operation projected more than a lot of Gambians oppose Jammeh’s guns, and 15 sights. In a row listing two .50-caliber sniper riles was a note: $220,000 in expenses. rule, they said. Are you “NOT really necessary but could be very useful” (the group ended up splurging To get the equipment AFTER ONE going to the Gambia? on them). Faal bought eight M4 semi- to the Gambia, the men RECRUIT TOLD Sanneh assured them automatic riles, splitting the purchases would ship it in barrels HIS WIFE HE WAS that he was merely vis- under false names that GOING TO THE iting family in Senegal. sounded Jola, which they GAMBIA, SHE After the agents left, he believed would reduce TOLD HIS MOTHER, speculated to his wife the chances of inspec- that he had popped up tion. After one member AND HIS MOTHER on an FBI watch list of the group arranged a CONFISCATED because of his refugee successful test shipment HIS PASSPORT. status. He told her not of two weapons, Faal to worry. A few weeks broke down his eight ri- later, he boarded the les in his garage. He put plane as planned. the parts inside cardboard boxes, which The other members were less suc- he slid into plastic barrels and concealed cessful. According to Manneh, after with blankets, T-shirts, and shoes from the recruit from Seattle told his wife he Goodwill. He brought the barrels to a lo- was going to the Gambia, she told his cal shipping company and sent them of mother, and his mother confiscated to the port of Banjul. his passport and made him cancel his In late October, Alagie Barrow lew plane ticket. The remaining U.S. Army to Dakar, half a day’s drive from the veteran also bailed. Gambia’s northern border, to act as Manneh would not be joining the an advance man. The others tied up group in Africa either. He had discov- their lives in America. Njaga Jagne let ered that Njie had put together his his ex-wife know that he would be out own transition plan, in which Manneh of town for a few weeks and tried, un- would not serve as the group’s spokes- successfully, to rearrange their custody man. Manneh confided his concerns schedule to get extra days with their about the change to Sanneh, who would 9-year-old son. Papa Faal told the com- hear none of it. Soon, Manneh was ex- munity college where he was teaching cluded from the conference calls. THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 81

A SPRAWLING, cacophonous barrels entering his house, Barrow told civilian casualties among the crowds city with flights volley- his neighbors he was starting a business. that would inevitably line up to cheer ing in from Europe and As planned, the group collected intelli- on the presidential motorcade. Sanneh North America, Dakar is gence. The members who had served in called of the attack. a fitting place to muster an interna- the Gambian military plied their former tional crew to overthrow an African colleagues for updates about their bosses Sitting in leather chairs and on the government. In late December, at a and the whereabouts of their units. living-room carpet, the group weighed budget guesthouse on the outskirts its options. Some argued for lying low of the city, Sanneh assembled five Sanneh cultivated confederates until Jammeh returned from abroad, former soldiers who had also fallen out inside the regime. His biggest get was but Sanneh convinced the men that of favor with President Jammeh. After a presidential bodyguard who could now was the time to seize power. With trying in vain for a few days to expand provide him with Jammeh’s real-time Jammeh gone, the plan shifted to kid- the team—and joining up with Cherno location, down to the vehicle he would napping General Saul Badjie, Sanneh’s Njie—they headed for the Gambia, be riding in. Another insider told him former boss at the State House. where one more expatriate would meet that someone at the State House had re- them. They traveled light and crossed ceived a text from a Senegalese number On Saturday, December 27, three the border separately; those who risked advising that plotters were in the Gam- men were assigned to drive around being recognized avoided checkpoints. bia. The insider said the warning wasn’t looking for Badjie. They finally spot- being taken seriously. Still, the news ted him while parked outside a super- Bai Lowe, a former Jungler who had market, but one of the three was inside spilled secrets about the hit squad to the spooked Sanneh, and he wondered public, was the last to go. “The Gambia about a leak. buying something, and by the needs you,” Sanneh had told him a few time he returned to the car, weeks earlier, when he called to ex- Everyone expected Jammeh to Badjie had driven of. plain the mission. Soon a DHL package come out of his house on Christmas Eve containing a plane ticket had arrived at or Christmas Day, at which point they On Sunday, Sanneh told the Lowe’s home in Hannover, Germany. In could lay an ambush. But he never did, group that he had a new plan: Dakar, he entrusted his passport to a care- and the day after Christmas, a Friday, Another ally in the military, a taker at the guesthouse, instructing him Sanneh learned that Jammeh would captain, would meet with them to burn the document if he didn’t pick it be leaving the country early the next late that night outside Banjul up within two months. Then he walked morning. That night, the group gath- and join them in securing the across the border alone, in the dark. ered at one of the safe houses to pre- State House. Once again, the pare for an ambush near Denton Bridge. group gathered at a safe house There were 11 of them now in the As they geared up, however, Sanneh and waited. Once again, they Gambia, divided among the three was told by one of his sources that had to abort. The captain was safe houses. Guns and equipment Jammeh’s departure had been pushed not answering Sanneh’s phone filled their bedrooms. To explain the back to 10 a.m. The timing would rob calls. Morale was low, and some them of the cover of darkness, and risk privately doubted that Sanneh had the support he said he did. He told the men to go to bed. Most slept late on Monday. Some showered or sipped tea. At the dining-room table of the safe house where he was stay- ing, Sanneh met with some of the other members of the Gambia Freedom League to de- bate whether to attack the State House, where General Badjie stayed when Jam- meh was away. One of the men Sanneh had summoned to Dakar, a former army captain named Mustapha Faal (no relation to Papa Faal), thought it insane to try to take the State House with so few men. “I’m not here to com- mit suicide,” he said. Sanneh pushed back. Every extra day the men hid in the Gambia, the odds that they might be discovered grew. Calling off the mission would mean not only throwing away more than a year and a half of planning, but also failing those inside the regime whom Sanneh had persuaded to join 82 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

the riskiest venture of their lives. More Alpha and Bravo each got into a car tree. He sliced off his cargo pockets practically, Sanneh faced pressure from Cherno Njie, the would-be president, and drove toward the State House— with his knife to make his pants look who, as a businessman rather than a soldier, was uncomfortable living windows up, headlights off. When less like combat gear, and crouched be- among so many weapons and wanted to act quickly. Alpha reached the outer entrance, every- hind a concrete wall to wait for morning. Sanneh’s side prevailed, and Musta- one but Modou Njie got out of the car. Sarr jumped a fence and headed for pha Faal announced that he was leaving. “Don’t tell the boys,” Sanneh said. “If Lowe raised his gun at two scared sen- the beach. Pretending to be a guard look- you tell them, they’ll follow you.” tries at a guard post. “We’re not going ing for the intruders, he pointed his rile In the afternoon, Sanneh summoned everyone else to his place. After mid- to kill you,” he said. “Drop your guns.” left and right as he ran. He waded into night, he announced, they would attack the State House. Njie, Alagie Barrow, They complied. Sanneh radioed the the ocean to hide, later burying his weap- and Dawda Bojang, another of San- neh’s former associates who had moved news to Bravo. Then Njie rammed the ons in the sand and escaping Banjul. to Germany, would stay behind at one of the safe houses. The rest of the men car through a series of barriers, getting On the other side of the State House, loaded their weapons and gear into two cars and headed into the capital. deep inside the compound. with Sanneh dead, the T HEY MADE IT PAST the As Lowe and the rest IT SURE WOULD remnants of Alpha also Denton Bridge checkpoint of Alpha advanced on BE NICE TO decided to retreat. Mo- before 7 p.m., when the more foot toward one of the HAVE NIGHT- dou Njie had become scrutinous military would inner gates surrounding VISION GOGGLES, separated from the group. take over from the police. With hours Jammeh’s residence, they When Lowe reached him to kill, they drove aimlessly through the streets of Banjul, stopping for Coca- were spotted by a guard in FAAL THOUGHT by cellphone, he said he Cola, goat meat, and evening prayers. A New Year’s festival was taking place, a tower. The guard opened TO HIMSELF. had made it into the of- and they distracted themselves with the masked dancers and drummers. ire. Lowe knew him, and ice of the commander of Around 1 a.m., as the moon sank climbed up the tower to the State Guards. Every- below the horizon, the cars turned into the graveyard. Sanneh announced two negotiate. But before he one inside was confused. surprises. First, General Badjie was not at the State House, but more than 20 could persuade him to stand down, the Lowe told him to come back to the miles south, closer to the Senegalese border. Not to worry, he said. Soldiers guard ired his weapon again. Lowe re- outer gate. were standing by at the State House and near the airport, ready to help seize turned ire and retreated. When Modou Njie didn’t show power. Second, Sanneh introduced a last-minute recruit, who stepped out Within moments, Lowe heard an- up, Lowe called again, but someone of the woods: a young Gambian soldier who would go by the code name “Junior.” other shot—ired, he suspected, by the else answered. “Where are you guys?” By now, everyone realized that Musta- pha Faal had abandoned the group. same guard—and watched as Sanneh a man asked. Lowe recognized the Sanneh would head up team Alpha, crumpled to the ground. Lowe tried voice of the current commander of the attacking the front gate of the compound along with Junior, Lowe, Jagne, and a to drag his body to safety, but it was State Guards. Thinking quickly, Lowe young man named Modou Njie (no rela- tion to Cherno Njie), who had worked as too heavy. Nor could he get Sanneh’s answered that rebel reinforcements Sanneh’s aide at the State House. Papa Faal and two former Gambian soldiers, phone, which contained all his commu- had arrived and were waiting to slaugh- Alagie Nyass and Musa Sarr, would make up team Bravo, attacking from nications with the government insiders. ter anyone who left. The gambit bought the rear. With fewer men than expected, there would be no team Charlie. The bullets were still coming. him enough time to escape. He lost As some of the men later recounted, When the men in Bravo heard the track of the others. Junior, he would gunire, their car was pulling up next to later learn, also managed to get out the back gate of the State House, where safely. But Modou Njie was captured, the team was supposed to ensure that and at some point during the chaos, the soldiers leeing Alpha’s assault left Jagne was killed. unarmed. Before the car could stop, it Lowe hopped over the State House started taking shots from a guard tower. fence, stripped of his armor, and threw “Get out!” yelled Sarr. He and Faal ired down his gun. Troops were gathering at the tower—Faal with one of the on the nearby beach. He caught a taxi .50-caliber riles—but in the darkness, it and instructed the driver to head across was hard to know where to aim. It sure Denton Bridge. At the checkpoint, would be nice to have night-vision goggles, Lowe recognized some of the soldiers, Faal thought to himself. but they seemed not to notice him. A Nyass drove the car toward the gate, small bribe to expedite the process, and intending to burst through it; a blast of the car was through. gunfire from the tower stopped him. Lowe’s taxi made its way toward As he climbed out of the car, he was Senegal. At another checkpoint, the met with a hail of bullets. Sarr, whose police asked the driver to give a ride to a boot had been grazed and whose body soldier. For the 10 miles the soldier was armor had taken a direct shot, radioed in the car, Lowe pretended to sleep in Alpha to report that Nyass had been the backseat. When the driver dropped killed. He heard only static in response. Lowe of near the border, Lowe gave He and Faal decided it was time to lee. him 50 euros and told him not to tell Faal entered the courtyard of a hos- anyone what he’d seen. pital neighboring the State House, took Back at the safe house, Cherno of his vest, and laid his rile next to a Njie was waiting for news with Alagie THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 83

Barrow and Dawda Bojang. Their ra- Denton Bridge was shut down, as through more-official channels. In dio had not picked up any signal from the group. But then they got a call from was a ferry that provided the only May 2015, The Washington Post revealed Lowe, informing them that the opera- tion had been aborted. They tossed other way back to the mainland. Faal that the FBI had notified the State some weapons in their car and took a back road across the Senegalese border. wandered around the city, trying not Department of Sanneh’s suspicious As they escaped, Barrow called Banka Manneh in Atlanta. It was the irst Man- to make too much or too little eye travel plans, and the State Depart- neh had heard from him in some time. “This thing failed,” Barrow said. Sanneh contact with the soldiers he passed on ment had passed on the information and Jagne, he added, “couldn’t make it.” Manneh would later learn that Nyass the street. He wished he had the anti- to “authorities in a West African coun- had also been killed. anxiety pills he had been prescribed for try near Gambia”—read: Senegal. But The day after the attack, the names of the dead began to circulate on post-traumatic stress disorder after he two Senegalese foreign-policy oicials online radio stations and on Facebook. At home in Maryland, Sanneh’s widow, came back from Afghanistan. With the I spoke with latly rejected the idea that Hoja, refused to believe that her hus- band had taken part in the coup, never port still closed, he stayed the night at their government would tip of Jammeh. mind that he was dead. She tried calling and texting Sanneh, and even logged the house of a man he Relations with the Gam- in to his Verizon account to see his cellphone records. She turned to Man- befriended at a mosque. “HE HAD A bia are so hostile, one said, neh for help, knowing that he talked The next morning, BRIGHT FUTURE that Senegal would be frequently with her husband. When he HERE. HE HAD A happy to see him ousted. tried Sanneh’s number, someone who the ferry started running FAMILY HERE. HE “But of course we can’t ad- claimed to be a cousin answered, ask- again, and Faal took it mit that,” he added. ing Manneh to leave a message because to the north bank of the Sanneh was “quite busy right now.” The Gambia River before HAD EVERYTHING phone had been taken by the National Bai Lowe told me that Intelligence Agency. riding in shared taxis— HE NEEDED. everyone he encoun- at one point, like Lowe, WHY WOULD tered at the State House seated next to a Gambian HE EVEN GO?” seemed surprised. Had soldier—all the way back the regime known about to Dakar. When other pas- the attack in advance, sengers gossiped about a he argued, the group terrorist attack in Banjul, he kept quiet. would never have been able to make it It was nearly midnight on New Year’s through the checkpoints into Banjul, let Eve when Faal arrived, and the Ameri- alone disarm two sentries. Perhaps the can Embassy was closed. Frantic, he ultimate cause of the coup’s failure was waved down a guard. “I’m a U.S. citizen,” not what the Gambian military knew he said. “I need to talk to somebody about Sanneh, then, but what Sanneh inside.” He was led into the embassy thought he knew about the Gambian and introduced to a State Department military. “He believed all these army oicial and an FBI agent. They gave him boys were so tired of Jammeh that any H OUR S AF TER THE at- a slice of pizza and a bottle of water as day anything like this started, whether tempted coup, Banjul awoke he told them everything. “You know this they knew about it or not, they would to a military lockdown. The is a crime, right?” the agent asked. be happy to join the other side,” Banka streets crawled with soldiers Manneh said. “I think he had convinced moving from house to house in search “I T ONLY TAKES one con- himself of that.” spirator to betray a conspir- of hidden attackers. New checkpoints appeared. Businesses closed. A fire acy,” cautions How to Stage A FTER PAPA FAAL returned a Military Coup, a book that to the U.S., the FBI arrested truck was summoned to the State House to hose blood of the concrete. Alagie Barrow kept in his house. Had him, along with Cherno When Papa Faal, still hiding in the the Gambia Freedom League been Njie and Alagie Barrow courtyard, heard the call to prayer, he betrayed? (both of whom declined to be inter- approached a hospital visitor and per- Papa Faal thought so. The tower viewed for this article). The FBI also suaded him to swap clothes. He put on that ired at Bravo team, he said, was picked up Manneh. Each man faces up the man’s jeans, flip-flops, and dirty staffed with more guards than usual. to ive years in prison for conspiring to undershirt and slipped into the streets of Word of the attack could have been violate the Neutrality Act, a 1794 law Banjul. He was still unsure whether the leaked by one of Sanneh’s intended re- that bars U.S. citizens from taking up coup had succeeded or failed—maybe cruits, or by someone in the Gambian arms against any foreign country with Sanneh’s promised reinforcements had diaspora, where—despite the men’s which the United States is at peace, and shown up after all—until he walked back careful planning—rumors of an im- up to 20 years for buying weapons to to the State House and saw a white body pending coup had been circulating for do so. Faal, Barrow, and Manneh have bag being carried out and the vice presi- weeks. Two weeks before the attack, pleaded guilty and are awaiting sen- dent’s silver car arriving. The regime Pa Nderry M’Bai, a Gambian radio tencing. As of this writing, Cherno Njie was intact. State radio played traditional host based in North Carolina, posted has not entered a plea. music, and the government released a a picture of Jammeh for his thousands Bai Lowe and Dawda Bojang both statement: “Contrary to rumors being of Facebook followers with the caption returned home to Germany, where circulated, peace and calm continue to “Something big is brewing.” they are awaiting the results of their prevail in the Gambia.” A warning could also have come asylum applications. When I met Lowe 84 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

in Hannover, in May, he refused to eat THE WREN or drink in public, fearful that he might be poisoned; he had heard that one of First it lies to a side rail. Then a fern. Jammeh’s agents was in the country Then a fern, like a fountain, spilling out. looking for him. Can a curse be said to be song? Can it? Inside the Gambia, the crack- How can such a quick thing, tail tipped up, brown down was expansive. The govern- ment rounded up relatives of Gambia as a bun, on wings too busy to see, Freedom League members, including be so badly named? Troglodytidae. Sanneh’s elderly mother and Lowe’s 16-year-old son, and jailed them with- The term circles back to us—cave dweller, out charges. Lowe told me that Gambian brute recluse. Though a wren’s beak curves, like a police even showed up at his 7-year-old daughter’s school, in a border town scimitar, this one just wants its porch back. in Senegal. The headmistress scared Now it’s vanished down our hollow eave spout, them off by calling the gendarmerie. A Gambian court-martial convicted from whose depths returns— six soldiers for their roles in the coup says the book—a loud attempt—Modou Njie (who had been captured at the State House), four of the and often complex song. No, it is a curse. insiders Sanneh had been courting, and one soldier accused of displaying cow- — David Baker ardice before the enemy. Njie and two others were sentenced to death. As for David Baker’s most recent collection is Scavenger Loop (2015). the three men killed in the attack, the Gambian government never released now the leader of the People’s Progres- a “solidarity march” featuring some of their bodies, although pictures of their sive Party, in his living room. He knew the released prisoners, which began in bloodied corpses surfaced online. some of the plotters, and was baled by front of Arch 22, a dilapidated monu- their involvement. “I don’t know what ment in Banjul commemorating the In January, Banka Manneh drove convinced them that the military strat- coup that brought Jammeh to power. from Atlanta to a mosque in Maryland egy is more efective than the peaceful It was the rainy season, and support- to pay his respects to Sanneh’s family. democratic process,” he said. ers milled about with green umbrellas He recited the Koran and prayed with emblazoned with his party logo; the Sanneh’s friends and relatives. Hoja, Jallow had been arrested 20 times less fortunate stood in soaked T-shirts Sanneh’s widow, wore a traditional since Jammeh took power, and his left printed with his face. A marching band white mourning dress. eye was still injured from a beating played, arms swinging in unison. A he’d taken during one of those arrests. Toyota pickup truck mounted with a “People still ask me, ‘Why did he Even so, he believed that Jammeh was machine gun drove around in circles. go?,’ ” Hoja told me. “He had a bright fu- vulnerable. A drought, combined with ture here. He had a family here. He had the effects of the nearby Ebola epi- As the parade made its way down everything he needed. Why would he demic on tourism, had devastated the Independence Drive, I followed at a even go? I don’t have the answer to that.” Gambia’s already meager economy, distance. Behind me, I heard a thunder driving citizens to emigrate in record of footsteps and teenage shouts: the W HEN I VISITED the numbers. Given the widespread dis- youth wing of Jammeh’s party, rush- Gambia last summer, life content, he predicted, Jammeh could ing to join the rally. They had known seemed to have returned lose the next presidential election, no other president, and their devotion which is scheduled for December, and appeared unconditional. One girl’s to normal. But according be forced by the international com- shirt read WE WILL DO IT FOR JAMMEH munity to step down. AGAIN & AGAIN. to opposition leaders, the coup attempt One Western diplomat in Banjul A number of Gambian oicials ap- had done lasting damage. Ousainou scofed at that notion. More likely, in peared at the event, but noticeably his view, was that the president would absent was Jammeh himself. Since Darboe, the head of the United Demo- finally fall to a luckier band of revo- the coup attempt, he has curtailed lutionaries. “At some point,” he said, his public appearances and made no cratic Party, told me that Jammeh had “someone will get it right.” known foreign trips. He remains in the State House. used the attack to justify more repres- In July, President Jammeh, in what he advertised as a gesture of good- Stuart A. Reid is an editor at Foreign sion. “Any eforts to change the regime will, let more than 200 prisoners out Afairs. Reporting for this article was of Mile 2, including the family mem- funded by a travel grant from the by extralegal means take us three steps bers of the Gambia Freedom League. Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The next week, the government held backward,” he said. Darboe suspected that the National Intelligence Agency had put the opposition under increased surveillance. He’d noticed a suspicious phone-card vendor and other “strange faces” showing up near his house. I met O. J. Jallow, a former agricul- ture minister under Dawda Jawara and THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 85

A maverick investor is buying up water rights in the West. Could his plan solve the region’s water crisis? An irrigation ditch in Arizona’s Harquahala Valley, about an hour west of Phoenix

Liquid Assets By ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN/PROPUBLICA Photographs by B R Y A N S C H U T M A A T THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 87

On a brisk, cloudless day last January, Disque Deane Jr. stepped out of his SUV, kicked his cow- Reclamation Act, paving the way for the creation of the federal boy boots in the dirt, and looked around. He had driven bureau charged with reshaping the western landscape. two hours from Reno on one of the loneliest stretches of interstate in the United States to visit the Diamond S Within a year, four federal dams and a major river- Ranch, just outside the town of Winnemucca, Nevada. diversion project had been planned. In the ensuing decades, Before him, open ields stretched all the way to the Santa concrete barriers were erected across rivers from Montana Rosa mountains, 30 miles away. But the land was barren. to Mexico, magniicent canyons were looded, and tunnels The ields had been chewed down to the roots by cattle, and canals were built to reroute water under the Continental and the ranch’s equipment had been stripped for parts. A Divide and across the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts. By the steel trestle bridge lay pitched into the Humboldt River. 1980s, the Colorado River had been turned into one of the world’s largest plumbing systems—a web of infrastructure Surveying the dilapidated structures and the designed to distribute the region’s water as widely as possible gopher-riddled soil, Deane saw something few others and encourage settlers to move west and take advantage of it. might: potential. The ranch and an adjoining property, totaling about 11,400 acres—14 times the size of Cen- It worked. Since 1960, tens of millions of people have tral Park—were for sale for $10.5 million, and he was migrated toward the Paciic, settling in Las Vegas and Tempe thinking about buying them. and Boulder. Denver has tripled in size. Phoenix, having added some 3.6 million people, has more than quintupled. Deane is not a rancher or a farmer; he’s a hedge-fund Today, one in eight Americans depends on water from the manager who had lown in from New York City the pre- Colorado River system, and about 15 percent of the nation’s vious night. And as he appraised the property, he was crops are grown with it. less interested in its crop or cattle potential than in a diferent source of wealth: the water running through But the demands on the river were never sustainable. In its streams and coursing beneath its surface. This tract 1922, the seven states in the Colorado River watershed signed would come with the rights to large amounts of water a compact dividing its water. With little historical data, they from the region’s only major river, the Humboldt. Some calculated the river’s capacity after a decade of unusually of those rights were issued more than 150 years ago, wet conditions. In an average year, the river lows with less which means they outrank almost all others in the state. Even if water than the states and Mexico—which was later promised drought continues to force ranches and farms elsewhere in Ne- vada to cut back, the Diamond S will almost certainly get its ill. Portrait by CHAD BATKA Deane looks at the drought, the perennial mismanagement of water in the American West, and the region’s growing popu- lation, and believes a reckoning is coming. Rising demand and shrinking supply virtually guarantee that water’s value will increase. Anticipating that day, he’s racing to buy up as much of it as he can. T H AT T H E W E S T had a limited supply of water was understood from the start. In 1869, John Wesley Powell ran a pioneering expedition down the region’s largest river, the Colorado. He eventually reported back to Congress that the West was an inhospitable desert split by that great gushing river, which was so difficult to access—cut off by clifs and canyons and mountains—that its bounty was out of reach. Growing food in much of the West would be almost impossible. “Many droughts will occur,” he warned. “Many seasons in a long series will be fruitless.” But the allure of all that land was irresistible. “The western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation,” President Theo- dore Roosevelt declared in 1901. The next year, he signed the 88 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

Disque Deane Jr. its own share—count on taking out of it. have slowly worsened over the past two decades, politicians got into the water Since the current drought began, in 2000, have done little to avert the crisis. business in the that shortfall has averaged 25 percent. In- 1990s. He believed stead of adjusting their allotments, states Where government has failed, Deane believes capitalism water was an have drawn down the nation’s largest res- ofers an elegant solution. Allowing people to buy and sell ideal investment: a ervoirs, which are quickly draining. Even water rights is a more expedient way to redistribute the West’s resource everyone water, he argues. Waste would be discouraged, water would needed but almost shift to where it’s needed most, and farmers would be com- no one valued. pensated. He’s convinced that this is our best hope for ending the West’s water shortage—and that it could make him and his this winter’s El Niño weather pattern won’t investors very, very rich. bring enough rain to restore the region’s supply, and federal oicials are bracing for the possibility that Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the U.S., could reach a record low as early as next year, which would trigger emergency rationing. To determine who gets water and who doesn’t, states rely W H E N D I S U E D E A N E J R . first said he wanted to get into the water business, his father was skeptical. on a system that originated more than 150 years ago—when Disque Sr. was a legendary New York real-estate inves- tor who inanced Brooklyn’s Starrett City. He raised Disque Jr. water was plentiful and people were scarce. During the Gold with the boy’s mother—a fashion consultant and the second of his three wives—in an Upper East Side townhouse and sent Rush, prospectors staked claims along western streams, only him to the tony Trinity prep school and then to Duke Univer- sity. (He would later pledge $20 million to fund an institute at to ind themselves robbed of the water they needed in order Duke to study the future of the human race.) A famous hard- ass, he had no patience for stupidity or mistakes. to mine as competitors upriver laid new claims and diverted Disque Jr. saw himself working in foreign afairs. While still the stream’s low. The courts, hearing the miners’ grievances, at Duke, he applied on a whim to join the CIA but was roundly rejected. “The minute I walked into the interview room he settled on a system called “prior appropriation,” which prom- said, ‘You don’t have a chance,’ ” Deane told me. “ ‘We need people who blend into the wall. We don’t need people who ised rights to use a share of water based on who got there irst. stand out.’ ” Rather than become a spy, he got an internship analyzing arms control at a London-based think tank. About Prior appropriation became the foundation of western a year later, looking to make more money, he decided to go to business school. After graduating, he took a job as a trader at water law, and it established order in the West. Today, though, Lazard, the global investment bank where his father had been a senior partner. In 1991, he tried to start an online real-estate state water laws are largely to blame for the crippling short- company, an idea before its time. ages. Because water rights were divvied up at a time when few Two years later, Deane found what would become his life’s work when he read an article in Forbes about an inves- cities existed west of the Mississippi, some 80 percent of the tor who specialized in water. He ran models calculating the past performance of companies whose business was tied to region’s water goes to farmers, leaving insuicient supplies for water—pipe manufacturers, treatment facilities, utilities—and found that they beat regular Wall Street indices. He read every growing cities and industries. And farmers must put all their book he could get his hands on about hydrology and geogra- phy and western politics, and grew in his conviction that he’d water to “beneicial use” or risk losing their allotment—a rule tripped onto a prime investment strategy. “For me, this was perfect information,” he told me, “raw knowledge” no one that was originally intended to prevent hoarding but that today else seemed to have. can encourage waste. Many farmers have not adopted modern “There were very few people who thought I was rational,” Deane said. He had an enviable life in Greenwich, Connecti- technology that can cut water use by up to 50 percent, in part cut. When he packed up for Fort Collins, Colorado, to work with the water investor he’d read about in Forbes, a man named because they need to protect their water rights. Al Parker, his mother cried and his wife, an Argentinian he’d met in Spain, returned to South America, leaving Deane to ly Farmers might prefer to sell their extra water rather than down for visits. letting it soak into the ground, but there, too, the laws get in But Deane saw opportunity: a resource everyone needed but almost no one valued. His irst big investment, in 1995, was the way. Not only is it diicult to prove that water sales satisfy an old mining tunnel in central Colorado that came with the rights to a large volume of water. Deane and Parker named standards for beneicial use, but they are generally forbidden their new company Vidler Water, after the tunnel, and set out to sell water to Colorado’s eastern cities. across state lines. Where intrastate trades are allowed, they With the Vidler purchase, Deane and Parker had bought are conditioned on not causing harm to other rights holders in the rights to water that lowed down a creek from high in the mountains in Summit County, Colorado—water that residents the surrounding area. That’s a laudable intention, but it forces farmers who want to sell their water to spend thousands of dollars on engineers and lawyers. The West’s cities, meanwhile, are forecast to add at least another 10 million residents over the next three decades. Where the water to serve those people will come from is any- one’s guess. City and state leaders have seriously discussed building a pipeline from the Missouri River, seeding clouds with silver iodide to create rain, and towing icebergs from the Arctic. Their most pragmatic hopes lie in desalinating ocean water, an expensive and energy-intensive process. Something has got to give. In theory, states could step in and reallocate water accord- ing to modern economic priorities. After all, the West’s mil- lions of acres of farmland account for less than 2 percent of the region’s economic output, and moving just 10 percent of the water of farms would likely resolve current shortfalls. Few things are more controversial in the West, though, than even minor meddling with water laws. Canceling or redistributing rights that are more than a century old would be political sui- cide in a part of the country where personal property is sacro- sanct and farmers wield a lot of inluence. As water shortages THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 89

had been using for years to maintain their lawns and wash A MERICA CONSUMES more water their cars. One evening, Deane and Parker held a meeting and per capita than just about any explained that locals could continue to take their ill, for a fee. other country—more than three Deane says he thought he and Parker were ixing a problem by times as much as China, and 12 times as making water legally available to people who needed it. But much as Denmark. People in the driest the more Parker tried to explain, the angrier the crowd got. In states use the most: Residents of Arizona the back of the room, Deane opened a window, swung his legs each use 147 gallons a day (not counting over the sill, and dropped into the parking lot, where he pulled agricultural water or water used to gener- Parker’s Volkswagen Beetle around to scoop him up. ate power), compared with just 51 gallons Parker told me Deane is honest and highly intelligent, but in Wisconsin, largely by filling swim- also intense and opinionated—not always the easiest person to ming pools and watering lawns year- work with. Deane left Vidler in 1999 and struck out on his own. round in the desert. This extravagant use In 2005, he returned to New York and teamed up with an old continues despite scarcity because water friend he’d met when he was in college, Matt Diserio. A former is kept artiicially cheap. The water bills lacrosse player from Connecticut, Diserio, a self-described that Americans pay cover a mere sliver “information junkie,” had thought about becoming a journal- of the cost of the infrastructure that deli- ist but decided to work on Wall Street instead. They called vers water to them. Some city users pay their company Water Asset Management and brought on a $1 for 1,000 gallons. On farms, water is third partner to manage the operations, a former colleague of even cheaper. One thousand gallons of Diserio’s named Marc Robert. The three had skied together agricultural water in western states can long ago in Courchevel, France. cost as little as a few pennies. They pooled about $3 million of their own money and The West would have plenty of water launched a hedge fund devoted to buying and selling just if people used it more wisely: Most of about anything having to do with water. Diserio focused on the region’s supply goes to growing low- investing in stocks of companies that stood to profit as value, water-intensive crops such as hay water became increasingly scarce; Deane set out to get as and alfalfa—in many cases in the desert. close as possible to buying the water itself, scouring parts of “It seems crazy,” Douglas Kenney, the the country where water rights could be traded. They shared director of the Western Water Policy oice space in Midtown Manhattan with a group of lawyers Program at the University of Colorado who handled Hasidic divorces, and for two years none of Law School, told me. “But there is just them took a salary. no tradition of thinking about what is Today Water Asset Management runs funds worth more and is not an appropriate use of water than $500 million. It trades stocks of companies that manu- based on economic criteria.” facture pipes, pumps, and water meters. It bought and later Water markets promise to cor- sold a municipal water supplier, and has invested in treated rect this: When you allow water to be wastewater. Not all of the projects it has a stake in have suc- bought and sold more freely, its value ceeded: A controversial plan to develop a vast aquifer in the begins to match its importance, waste Mojave Desert and pipe the water to cities in Southern Califor- becomes expensive, and the West’s water problems begin to nia failed to get an important federal approval, and some share- solve themselves. holders have iled a lawsuit against the company behind the Water has been bought and sold in parts of the United plan. (The company, Cadiz, has contested the suit and moved States for decades. But arcane aspects of state laws have kept trading from becoming routine enough to make much diference in the overall supply. If Deane gets his way, barriers If Americans gave up meat one day a week, to trading will be removed and a mar- they would save an amount of water equivalent to ket will form that can shift water to meet the entire flow of the Colorado River each year. changing needs almost as quickly as the stock exchange moves shares. Australia has already instituted a water market similar to what Deane has in mind. By mid-2006, Southern for its dismissal.) But Deane and Diserio told me their two long- Australia’s Murray-Darling River Basin had seen a decade standing funds have shown annualized returns of 6.5 percent of drought. Then, unexpectedly, the flows of the Murray and 9.6 percent over the past decade, and California’s drought dropped farther, falling to 40 percent below the previous has brought new investors through their doors—including not record low. As in the U.S., water trading had for decades been just wealthy individuals with a tolerance for risk, but pension- limited and cumbersome. But as the drought worsened, the fund managers as well. To Deane, the growing interest is a sign government backed a cap-and-trade system. “We have a very that the rest of the world is inally coming to see what he did simple rule, which is that if somebody wants more water, you long ago. “Maybe,” Deane told me, “I have the ability to look have to igure out who gets less,” Mike Young, a professor of around corners a little bit.” water and environmental policy at the University of Adelaide 90 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

After most of the and an expert in water trading, told me. As The organization joined other groups in purchasing Colorado water rights in trading became more common, the market River water in 2014 for the sole purpose of letting it low. The began to arbitrate that decision. river reached Mexico’s Sea of Cortez for the irst time in 16 years. Crowley County were sold, the As a result, people have found ways to But one problem with developing a market for trading water is that many farmers—the people who control most of area’s economy the water—are against the idea. collapsed. reduce waste. Farmers in an irrigation dis- trict that had porous dirt ditches, for instance, began to line them with concrete, saving millions of dollars’ worth of water that would have otherwise seeped into the earth. The farmers T O UNDERSTAND FARMERS’ OPPOSITION, onehas only to look at the example of Crowley County, in south- started asking: “If we spend $3 million here and get water we eastern Colorado, once one of the nation’s most fertile agricultural areas. A cannery preserved tomatoes before ship- can sell for $5 million elsewhere, is that a good deal?,” Young ping them on the Missouri Paciic Railroad to markets across the country. Sugar City, a town of 1,500 people so manicured said. “And the answer is yes.” that everyone’s lawns had to be trimmed in the same direc- tion, was home to National Sugar, which employed hundreds In dry years, the price of water on Australia’s market rose, but of people. Ordway, the county seat, had two car dealerships, three grocery stores, a bustling JCPenney department store, so did the number of trades, showing that people used the mar- and a movie theater that played family ilms on Sunday nights. ket to move water to where it was needed—and valued—most. Crowley County relied on water diverted from a tributary of the Colorado River near Aspen, 200 miles away, in order Water-intensive crops such as cotton and rice were temporar- to supplement the Arkansas River. Farmers owned shares in ditch systems and reservoirs that distributed the water, and ily phased out as the water needed to grow them became more some 60,000 acres of farmland were cultivated with it. But in valuable than the crops themselves. In the western U.S., a consensus has begun to emerge that following Australia’s example is a good idea. In 2012, the West- ern Governors’ Association issued a report supporting states’ eforts to promote new ways of transferring water. Cities, too, are putting their weight behind trading. Even the nonproit Environmental Defense Fund cautiously supports the idea: THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 91

the 1960s, the growing cities of Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Aurora purchased a large portion of water rights from Crowley farmers, and all of that began to slowly slip away. When Foxley Cattle, which had enormous land holdings, made a deal to sell its water rights to Colorado Springs in 1976, the area’s decline went into high gear. The sale had two immediate efects: It dried up thousands of acres of pasture by permanently diverting a huge portion of the region’s water, and it opened farmers’ eyes to the incredible cash value of the water they had left. For a while, farmers pledged to keep their water in the county. But in the late 1980s, the city of Aurora made an irresistible ofer: It would pay about $1,000 for each share of a ditch system, and the water that came with it—quadruple the price of some of the earliest deals. Farmers in Crowley, like those in so many agricultural communities across rural America, had long been struggling against low crop prices, an exodus of youth, and an aging population. The money ofered an exit. “It was a way for them to get out, pay their debt of, and have a way to retire,” says Darla Wyeno, who runs the Crowley County Heritage Center out of a stately brick building that was once her schoolhouse. Her husband learned to drive the tractor on his family’s farm when he was 9 years old. “After we sold the water,” Wyeno says, “we played a lot of golf, did a lot of traveling.” The ofer was like a breach in a dam. Aurora also bought up almost all the water in another ditch system near the town of Rocky Ford, just across the county line. Pueblo West, 60 miles away, bought water to serve houses on just-constructed cul- de-sacs stretching all the way into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. As more houses were built, the value of the re- maining water in Crowley climbed even higher, reaching $10,000 a share. Orville Tomky, a 10th Mountain Division soldier who had farmed in the area since shortly after World War II, tried to resist as the pressure mounted. “My wife every night at sup- per would say, ‘When are we going to sell the rest of that Twin Lakes water so we can have a lot more money?’ ” he told me. One night he divided up the water rights, giving 20 shares to each of his four children, ive shares to each of his ive grand- children, and 30 shares to his wife. Selling the shares put some of the kids through graduate school, gave them down payments for their own Haboobs—huge black clouds of sand—blow in, homes, and paid for a family ski piling tumbleweeds against buildings and lodge in the mountains. making it difficult to see across the street. Eventually, though, Crowley County passed a point of no re- turn. With so much water gone, the empty irrigation ditches didn’t work; one lonely farmer at the end of the run would see all had lost. Though tens of millions of dollars in water rights his water soaked up by the soil long before it ever reached his were sold, few of the proceeds were reinvested in the com- farm. And with fewer and fewer farmers around to share the munity, he said. One by one, families moved away. The tomato expense of maintaining the ditch systems, the cost kept rising. and sugar factories shut down, and without goods to ship, the Farmers had little choice but to sell, and all but 11 in the county railroad stopped sending trains through town. Ordway’s car did. The place literally dried up. dealerships closed, and the tractor store went bankrupt. As Kneeling in his driveway changing a truck tire last summer, though someone had pulled a bottom block out from a Jenga Tomky’s son-in-law Matt Heimerich recalled what the town tower, Crowley County fell into an inexorable collapse. 92 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

Garrett Gibson “I couldn’t have eaten enough Prozac,” farmland. But if left unchecked, these deals could begin to (left) is one of Heimerich said. threaten the food supply. The United Nations’ Food and Agri- the few remain- culture Organization projects that food production globally will ing ranchers in One could view Crowley’s loss as an have to increase by 70 percent by 2050 to support an expanding Crowley County. inevitable part of the larger downturn in and increasingly aluent population, and it warns that urban Below: abandoned American farming—and a justifiable re- expansion into rural land is putting food production at risk. silos near the old allocation of resources. Crowley County was railroad tracks. And, of course, growing more food requires more water. In theory, Americans could simply eat less meat: A vast majority itself diverting water from the Colorado River system, after all, of the West’s water is used to produce feed for cattle, and data from Water Footprint Network, a Dutch NGO, show that if under a legal system that encouraged waste. But the people still Americans gave up meat one day a week, they would save an amount of water equivalent to the entire low of the Colorado living in Crowley point to the green ields in adjacent counties, River each year. But that cultural shift might prove even more diicult than reallocating water rights. and say the water sales killed their towns. Of the 60,000 acres Some opponents of water markets worry that when water once farmed there, about 4,000 produce crops today. Ord- is sold to the highest bidder, the poor could be priced out of an essential resource. “It’s a slippery slope,” says Mitch Jones, a way’s Main Street is a procession of boarded-up buildings. senior policy advocate at Food and Water Watch, which has studied the efects of water privatization and commercializa- The dead land has led to a sort of environmental catastro- tion. “You are setting up a system where ability to pay—wealth— is the determining factor in your ability to access water.” Jones phe. The wildlife is all but gone. Few birds chirp. With nothing points to places like Bolivia, where privatization has left some of the poorest people without access to water. to pollinate, bees have abandoned their colonies. Crowley was Disque Deane thinks such concerns are overblown. He once a paradise for hunters, Tobe Allumbaugh, a county com- supports the idea of setting aside what policy makers call “lifeline supplies” to guarantee households some minimal missioner, told me. Today “you could wear out a pickup truck amount of water. But he says if markets jack up prices on higher levels of consumption, that may not be a bad thing. and never see a pheasant.” Decades Anyone who wants to ill a swimming pool, water a golf course, or use billions of gallons of Colorado River water to grow of farming have left the soil brittle cotton in the Sonoran Desert, he says, should have to pay for that privilege. and sapped of its natural nutrients; L A S T W I N T E R I N W I N N E M U C C A , Deane parked now that it’s been abandoned, the outside a historic tavern called the Martin Hotel. He walked through its wood-paneled bar, beneath the land won’t simply heal and return attic speakeasy that kept the town lush through Prohibition, and into a private dining room in the back, where a local water to its natural prairie state. In every oicial from the state engineer’s oice was waiting. direction, empty ields and pastures Deane peppered the engineer with questions. Who are the big water users? Could the water from the Diamond S Ranch extend for miles. be used on the adjacent property he was also looking to buy? How about up the road on another farm he owns? “There is The wind in this part of Colo- some latitude there,” the engineer told him. rado can be merciless, and when Deane already knew the answers to many of these questions; his lawyers and staf had done their due diligence. He was more it rakes across unfarmed fields, interested in how his questions were addressed, in feeling out someone who had the authority to stand in the way of his plans. it scours loose soil and moves it. Water Asset Management’s strategy is to ind ways to use Another Crowley commissioner, its land to generate revenue—or at least cover costs—while maintaining its core investment in the water itself. At the Dia- Frank Grant, told me about the mond S, Deane talked about building a data center, because iber-optic cables run along the railway near the property, or haboobs, huge black clouds of sand, a small-scale power station that would take advantage of a natural-gas pipeline nearby. “If KB Home wanted to come in,” that blow in, piling tumbleweeds Deane told me, referring to one of the largest home builders in the U.S., “we’d talk about it.” against buildings and making it With the firm’s latest purchases, Deane is building out difficult to see across the street. a new fund, and his aim is to secure investors annualized returns of about 20 percent over 10 years. That leaves little The dirt piles up in drifts, blocking roads, illing gutters, and burying windshields. “We’ve essentially just turned into a desert,” Grant said. C ROWLEY COUNTY MAY be a worst-case scenario, but it is hardly unique. Even in neighboring counties, new water deals are being proposed all the time. To be sure, some of these sales have given farmers new income that helped keep them aloat—or allowed others who wanted to leave farming to cash out. But Crowley reveals a broader risk. Could water sales that today appear logical and eicient one day come to seem shortsighted? Western states have already retired hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland as cities have built on them or taken their water. Once water is moved of a farm, that land is unlikely to ever produce crops again. Water rights are diicult to buy back—Crowley’s farmers told me they can’t aford to do so— and in many places the land is developed, illed with houses and parking lots and strip malls. “We are actually dismantling our agriculture and the food infrastructure,” says Pat O’Toole, the president of the Family Farm Alliance, a grass-roots orga- nization that advocates for western agricultural interests. The United States can probably aford to lose some of its THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 93

time for government policies to change and water markets of individual farmers with the collective impact on the broader to mature. He’s looking for places where the laws already community? Was water the property of rights holders to sell in allow trading and other investors have yet to notice. The ideal the irst place—or were water rights simply a license to use a opportunity, Deane said, involves high-priority water rights resource that ultimately belongs to the public? on a run-down farm with major cities in every direction. The Deane emphasized the need for reform. The status quo has ranch near Winnemucca looked like a match, but Deane later failed, he told the audience. “What should we be doing to solve told me that he’d decided to pass because he had questions this problem? Because the alternative is unbearable, right?” about whether the groundwater might be contaminated. (The The discussion then turned to a potential compromise: Nevada Division of Environmental Protection has since con- Perhaps the risks could be mitigated, someone suggested, by irmed that pollutants were found at the site.) structuring temporary deals that allowed farmers to retain Ideal opportunities can be tough to ind. “Debt, death, and ultimate control of the water. divorce” has become a sort of motto, Deane said, because those Thirteen years ago, farmers in California’s Palo Verde circumstances drive people to sell. Not that he’s out to swindle Valley—one of the state’s oldest farming areas—entered anyone. “There are no stupid sellers,” he told me. “Rural com- into an agreement with the Metropolitan Water District, the munities are much smarter than most of the people that walk agency that serves Los Angeles, San Diego, and much of the into them. They know what they need and they know who rest of urban Southern California, to essentially lease a portion people are. It’s one of the reasons our card says ‘Water Asset Management,’ not ‘Sam’s Farm Co-Op,’ because you can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes.” “Debt, death, and divorce” has become a Deane told me he’d abandoned an efort sort of motto, Deane said, because those circumstances drive people to sell. to buy a distressed New Mexico property in 2014 after hearing about a local gas-station attendant who—opposed to the idea of inves- tors buying up water—refused to ill the cars of workers who were drilling wells on the prop- erty. He said he wants to work with communities, to facilitate of their water. The model seeks to protect farmers even from mutually beneicial solutions, as someone who has the net- their own inancial temptation. In addition to an up-front pay- work, capital, and know-how to make a deal. He pointed to ment of $3,160 an acre, the agency pays them $800 an acre for Water Asset Management’s investment in Prescott Valley, Ari- fallowing portions of their farms each year. It has also invested zona: The town wanted to upgrade its water-treatment plant $6 million in the community, to counter whatever economic and was looking for capital. Deane and his partners bought harm might come from the ields’ temporarily drying up. the rights to the cleaned-up water. The town got the money The arrangement is anything but a free market: To ensure it needed for the upgrade, and Water Asset Management got that most of the water stays in the valley, the agreement limits water it could sell to local developers for a proit. “We go where the amount of land any one farmer can fallow in a year to 35 per- we can be helpful,” he said. “That’s all I’ve said, since day one.” cent of his or her holdings. Still, farmers get added income with- Deane likes to see himself as a friend of farmers, someone out losing their rights to the water, and the Metropolitan Water who can get them the compensation they deserve for 100 years District says Los Angeles and its other cities get reliable access of homesteading. He said he shares their values. But when I to water, which helps them make it through drought years. described to him the water sales in Crowley County, he had Deane told me that if the political consensus leads to leas- trouble explaining exactly how some of his deals have difered— ing water, it’s a solution he can get behind. His hope, after all, except to say that the farmers he worked with went into those is that more-frequent trades, for lower transaction costs and transactions with their eyes wide open. Either way, there’s no smaller margins, will one day replace the blockbuster deals denying that farms—and by extension farmers—are the target his company relies on today. Leasing is a perfectly good way of his investments. Without them, water markets couldn’t exist. to achieve that aim. One evening at a cocktail reception in Las Vegas, Deane Farmers near Crowley County recently visited the Palo told a conservationist how to deal with farmers who might say Verde Valley and are setting up a pilot program to test out that no to fallowing their ields. How about for $100 an acre-foot?, model. “To me it was an answer to a prayer,” John Schweizer, he would press, referring to a common measurement of water. one of the leaders of the project, told me. He described it as “Maybe.” Two thousand dollars an acre-foot? “Sure.” “How do “the only thing I found where you can keep your water, keep you get a farmer’s attention?” he said. “Humbly, and with a your farming, and still get the cities their water if they need it.” thick wad of money.” But there was resignation in his enthusiasm, a tacit acknowledgment that much of what Deane and others have T HE IDEA OF letting money alone steer decisions about to say is correct: There is enough water in farming to move water use can make even the most open-minded public some of it without leaving the country to starve, and like it or oicials uneasy. At a drought forum held by the Western not, the transfer of agricultural water to cities is going to hap- Governors’ Association in late 2014, where Deane took part in pen. They can sell it, lease it—or have it taken from them. a panel discussion, oicials voiced a barrage of concerns: How would states maintain their authority over water if people sold Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior reporter with ProPublica, where it across state lines? How could markets balance the decisions he writes about energy, water, and climate change. 94 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

REFUSE TO ACCEPT MASS EXTINCTION. “ The world’s greatest naturalist” ( Jeffrey Sachs) has a plan to save Earth’s biosphere. “A brave expression of hope, a visionary blueprint for saving the planet.” —Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve “Wilson speaks with a humane eloquence which calls to us all.” —Oliver Sacks Resoundingly concludes the best-selling trilogy that began with The Social Conquest of Earth and National Book Award finalist The Meaning of Human Existence. LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING W. W Independent publishers since 1923

E S S AY Where Have You Gone, Annie Dillard? Why America’s latter-day Thoreau, who has been silent for nearly a decade, may have run out of words in her quest to renovate the soul By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ Illustration by Emmanuel Polanco T HE ABUN ANCE, a selection from the it also marks an absence: hers. Dillard’s irst book appeared COLAGENE.COM; BOB CHILD/AP work of one of the great, original voices in 1974. Over the following 25 years, she published 10 more in recent American letters, might just original volumes, including two that have achieved the sta- as easily be called The Absence. It speaks tus of modern classics, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a latter-day of absence—for nature’s profusion, in Walden, and The Writing Life, a “spiritual Strunk & White” (as Annie Dillard, is everywhere the sign- one reviewer put it), and two more that deserve to, Holy the age of the hidden god she seeks—and Firm, which might have been written in letters of lame, and 96 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC



Teaching a Stone to Talk, a jewel box of walnut I see from the bay window— narrative meditations. (Some might looked like a black-and-white frontis- add An American Childhood, her cel- piece seen through the sheet of white ebrated memoir.) In the 17 years since, tissue.” But she doesn’t need a simile she’s published one, and none since to send a sense aloft. Muskrats in their 2007. dens “strew the loor with plant husks The Abundance only serves to under- and seeds, rut in repeated bursts, and score the dearth. The subtitle, Narrative sleep humped and soaking, huddled in Essays Old and New, is false advertising; balls.” The language makes of brute fac- there are no new pieces here. The most tuality a verbal music. An egg case of a recent essay in the book, which is also praying mantis “has a dead straw, dead the only one not included in a previ- weed color, and a curious brittle texture, ous volume, is 11 years old. hard as varnish, but pitted There are many reasons a minutely, like frozen foam.” writer might slow down or There are lashes of humor even stop, most of them as well. Newts “are alto- mysterious to strangers. gether excellent creatures, But Dillard’s turn to silence, if somewhat moist, but no if that is what it is, could one pays the least attention in retrospect be seen as to them, except children.” having been inevitable all Children, of course, and her. along—given her choice of Yet for all Dillard’s bril- materials, her idiosyncratic THE ABUNDANCE: liance as a nature writer, sensibility, the very nature NARRATIVE ESSAYS nature isn’t inally her sub- of her project. ject. She situates herself OLD AND NEW on territory like Thoreau’s Dillard declared her ar- ANNIE DILLARD Ecco/HarperCollins rival, at the age of 28—brash but faces toward a very dif- and bold and talented beyond belief— ferent compass point. He also went to with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The nature, truth be told, with other things book was unabashed about its lineage. in mind. He looked at the pond, but he An ardent young American takes to the was thinking about Concord—how the ARCHITECTURE woods, anchoring herself beside a wa- people there lived, and how it might be OF THE OLD SOUTH ter. Sojourning for many a season, she possible to live another way. Walden’s 10 Book Series distills her experience down to a sym- irst, long chapter is titled “Economy,” View our collection of books on bolic single year. “I propose to keep complete with lists of expenditures for the history and culture of the American South on our website. Dillard scrutinizes things like nails and lard. We watch him build his famous little house, and plant The Beehive Foundation nature with monastic his beans, and chop his wood, which 1-800-896-9772 patience and a warms him twice. microscopic eye. beehivefoundation.org But in Pilgrim there is no economy and no society. We don’t know how Dillard lives, or how she makes a living, here,” she announces at the start of or much of anything about her circum- her account, “what Thoreau called ‘a stances. Notwithstanding the occa- meteorological journal of the mind.’ ” sional, distant presence of neighbors She scrutinizes nature with monastic in the book, it comes as a surprise to MODERN MEMOIRS, INC. patience and a microscopic eye. She ind her describing the creek’s vicinity, As-told-to memoirs & delivers doctrine with the certainty in a subsequent volume, as suburban— self-publishing services of revelation and the arrogance (and and a shock to learn, from biographi- since 1994 413-253-2353 agedness) of youth. She summons us to cal sources, that she was married the wake from dull routine. With lourishes whole time. In a curious way, she is of brass, she proclaims a new dawn. absent from her own book, at least The text itself is thickly planted with as more than an Emersonian eyeball /,7(5$5<$:$5'6 marvels to watch for, its vision fresh as (albeit one that’s cabled to a buzzing 6(1')25285)5((%52&+85( Adam’s on the irst day. A creek bank brain), and others are absent altogether. (DWRQ/LWHUDU\\$JHQF\\ is a “twiggy haze.” A gibbous moon is The cabin near Concord had plenty of 32%R[ “softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.” “It visitors—in fact, there’s a whole chap- 6DUDVRWD)/ snowed all yesterday and never emptied ter in Walden called “Visitors”—among ZZZHDWRQOLWHUDU\\FRP the sky,” Dillard tells us. “Any object at whom was Thoreau’s dear friend Ellery  a distance—like the dead, ivy-covered Channing. Dillard has a companion 98 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

named Ellery Channing too, but he’s a goldish. Thoreau, whose command- ment is “simplify,” wants to reconstruct society from the ground up. Dillard, whose law is “look,” only wants to reno- vate your soul. She looks at crayish, looks at copper- heads, looks at a little green frog, half out of the water, that as she watches “crumpled and began to sag … shrinking before my eyes like a delating football,” its innards liqueied and emptied by a giant biting bug. But looking at these marvels, she is always looking for God. She is not a naturalist, not an environ- mentalist; she’s a theologian—a pilgrim. Her field notes on the physical world are recorded as researches toward the fundamental metaphysical conundra: Why is there something rather than nothing, and what on Earth are we do- ing here? What, in other words—with crayfish and copperheads and giant biting bugs, with creeks and stars and human beings with their sense of beauty—does God have in mind? D ILLARD, NEEDLESS TO say, does not answer these questions. But the striking thing about her search for God is that she sometimes inds him. Pilgrim’s sec- ond chapter, after a kind of introduc- tion, is titled “Seeing.” (Both sections are included in The Abundance.) There are two kinds, she explains. The com- mon variety is active, where you strain, against the running babble of internal monologue, to pay attention to what’s actually in front of you. That’s the sort of seeing that produces perceptions, and phrases, like twiggy haze. But, she tells us, “there is another kind of see- ing that involves a letting go.” You do not seek, you wait. It isn’t prayer; it is grace. The visions come to you, and they come from out of the blue. The distinction is akin to Proust’s two forms of memory. His holy grail, you might recall, is the involuntary kind, the kind that bursts upon you unexpect- edly, as when the narrator’s entire child- hood unfurls from the madeleine. That is the epiphany; that is the miracle. So it is with Dillard. She tells us about a girl who was cured of congenital blindness and, being taken into a garden, saw, as she put it, “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for that tree, Dillard says, that she herself searched for years: THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 99

Then one day, walking along Tinker the clearer. That, I think, is why it has routes to God: the via positiva and the Creek, thinking of nothing at all, I to be a creek for Dillard, not a pond. via negativa. Philosophers on the via saw it—the tree with the lights in Walden, in its depth and stillness (the positiva assert that God … possesses it. It was the same backyard cedar attributes Thoreau insists upon most all positive attributes.” Those along where the mourning doves roost, keenly), symbolizes nature’s stability the other pathway “stressed God’s un- only charged and transigured, each and serenity. The world abides and knowability.” They “jettisoned every- cell buzzing with lame … It was less always will. But the creek, for Dillard, thing that was not God; they hoped like seeing than like being for the is energy, divine spirit, “the stream of that what was left would be only the irst time seen, knocked breathless light pouring down.” The world does divine dark.” Pilgrim, Dillard says, by a powerful glance … I had been not abide. Creation is continuous, and walks both routes in succession. The my whole life a bell, and never knew the heavens will be rolled up as a scroll. first half, culminating with the sum- it until at that moment I was lifted She watches the water, but waits for the mer solstice, is the plenitude; the and struck. lame. second the reduction. A final chap- ter recapitulates the movement. The encounter is erotic (“knocked The striking thing Its epigraph—employed again in breathless by a powerful glance”), like about Dillard’s search The Abundance—comes from the the ecstasies of Saint Teresa. God has for God is that she Koran. “They will question thee con- seen and seized her, claimed her. This, sometimes finds him. cerning what they should expend. Say: again, is something very diferent from ‘The Abundance.’ ” Accumulate, then Thoreau’s experience. To use a pair of Thoreau runs his narrative year spend. Accumulate to spend. Gather terms that Dillard introduces in a later from spring to spring—nature illing up, nature to get rid of it—but you can’t get book, she is not a pantheist (as he was) emptying, and starting to ill up again. rid of it until you’ve done the formic but a panentheist. God, panentheism Dillard runs her own from winter to labor that such gathering entails. says, is not coextensive with, identi- winter; the emphasis is on the empti- cal to, the physical world, the world of ness. In an afterword written for the G ET RID OF NATURE, to see nature. He is a being that transcends 25th-anniversary edition, she reveals the God who dwells in nature. it even as he dwells within it. Get rid a deeper, two-part structure. “Neo- It sounds paradoxical, and it of nature, for the pantheist, and you platonic Christianity described two is. (Dillard quotes Augustine in a later get rid of God. Get rid of nature, for book: “If you do understand, then the panentheist, and you see him all MARTIN RANDALL TRAVEL 5085 China’s silk road. ABTA No.Y6050 Now made smoother. EAST 2016 & 2017 Image: Shanghai, INDIA • CHINA • JAPAN watercolour by Mortimer Menpes, c. 1910. Visit martinrandall.com or contact us for details: 1-800-988-6168 • [email protected] 100 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC