Rick Perlstein | The Nation

Students at North Lawndale College Preparatory High School in Chicago walk through the school's hallways. The surrounding neighborhood has an unemployment rate almost triple the city average, and school officials estimate 5 percent to 8 percent of its 525 students are homeless at any one time during the school year. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)

Today was the first day of school in Chicago—and a profound setback for Chicago’s forces of decency. Fifty fewer schools will be in operation this term, with 2,113 fewer staffers, a colossal injustice I’ve written about here and here and here and here. The school closings are going forward because ten days ago Federal District Judge John Z. Lee denied the attempt to get a preliminary injunction to prevent it. A week before that ruling, I spoke with one of the lawyers who brought the suit, Thomas Geoghegan, for my monthly interview series at Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park—where I and my audience deepened our sense of just how mad and malign Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools agenda truly is.

You might know Geoghegan for his classic public-policy memoirs like Which Side Are You On? and his most recent, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life; or his quixotic run to win the congressional seat vacated when Rahm Emanuel became Barack Obama’s chief of staff, which The Nation endorsed. Our conversation at the Co-op—a public version of dialogues we’ve been having regularly over dinner and drinks for over a decade now—was, like so much of Tom’s discourse, heartbreaking and inspiring in equal measure.

We spoke on August 10, the day after Judge Lee declined to certify Geoghegan’s plaintiffs as a class, a harbinger of the preliminary-injunction denial to come—heartbreaking, because his arguments sounded damned well open-and-shut to my audience and me. The Americans with Disability Act specifies quite clearly that school systems, when moving disabled children, have to proactively provide opportunities for the kids and their parents to meet with “Individual Education Plan” teams to devise specific measures to ease the transition. The Chicago school board didn’t even try—it just called up befuddled parents to ask, as Geoghegan put it, “Anything you want?” And when these parents—overwhelmingly poor and harried, understandably inexpert in the intricacies of special-education best-practices—didn’t have anything specific to offer, the board considered its work done. One of Geoghegan’s expert witnesses, the woman in charge of special education of the Indianapolis school system, said the whole thing was pretty much totally nuts.

The suit also tried another angle. In 2003 Governor Rod Blagojavich (who actually did some good things) signed a state civil rights statute that allowed private plaintiffs to bring claims of disparate racial impact against entities like boards of education without having to prove discriminatory intent—a provision that used to be in federal law until the Supreme Court struck it down in the 1990s. Explained Geoghegan, 88 percent of the affected kids in the receiving schools are African-American, but African-American kids make up only 40.5 percent of students in the system. Pretty damned disparate.

Of course, the Chicago Public Schools had an explanation for that, of a sort: they argued that black kids were being helped by being moved. Actually, they made several arguments—changing them around each time the last was debunked. First it was that they needed to close schools to help with the system’s budget deficit, freeing up resources for instruction. But most of the money they claim to be saving (savings disputed in themselves) is being spent on moving kids, not instruction. And, Geoghegan points out, “After a year, that money goes into the general pot to aid kids in the system.” Look at the system’s plans, and it turns out “the board is going to use some of this money to build schools on the North Side”—the white North Side, in other words. It basically amounts to stealing from poor black kids to give to more affluent white ones.

The system’s second argument is that the schools that kids are being moved into are academically superior to the ones they’re leaving. Well, there is a word in legal jargon for what that claim represents in this case. That word is: bullshit. In their pleadings, Geoghegan’s team pointed out that only seven of the schools are arguably better academically than the ones kids are coming from; some are worse. In fact, the very act of moving kids under such circumstance basically cannot improve their educations. “What’s extraordinary about this is that the study of the Consortium of School Research at the University of Chicago stated that these school closings don’t do students any good but in the long term don’t do any harm,” Geoghegan told my bookstore audience. “The RAND study, which came out in 2012…says that they do do long-term harm, unless the children go to academically superior schools.”

You see the problem, even if a federal judge did not.

CPS’s third argument is yet more dubious. Between 2001 and 2012, leading up to this year’s closing, they closed some seventy-four schools. Back then, they said they were closing “failing schools.” But “now they’ve backed off from that notion of failing schools, which was always a little bit bogus to begin with because, Why are those failing more than any others? It was [empirically] indefensible.” (For instance, at one of the closed schools, Guggenheim, which I wrote about here, one-third of the students were homeless. Geoghegan relayed his suspicion to Chicago homelessness experts: maybe some kids counted as “homeless” were, say, doubling up at the home of an aunt. He heard back, “No! No! Those kids who are doubling up with the aunt aren’t counted as homeless. They’re, like, homeless homeless. Like, they don’t know where they’re going to be every night.” What does it mean to say a school serving a population like that, because of its poor test scores, is “failing”?)

So it was they settled upon the argument that the closing schools were “underutilized.”

Which argument one of Tom’s heroic plaintiffs, a woman named Sharise McDaniel, had already demolished on its face. McDaniel is the parent of a child at a school called George Manierre Elementary, which is by the former Carbini-Green housing projects. The advantages of Manierre for its black, impoverished population—it’s across the street from the Marshall Field Homes, where hundreds of the school’s kids live, making the commute rather safe indeed; also, the building is grand and gorgeous—and the disadvantages of moving them—the receiving school is a mile away, across a treacherous gang boundary—were brilliantly reported by the education reporter Linda Lutton for Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ. Manierre, however, with its gorgeous building, happens to be quite close to a bevy of luxurious condominiums where affluent white families live, and whose children go to overcrowded Lincoln Elementary.

McDaniel and her cadre of parents presented a solution at a community meeting. They learned that the supposedly strapped school board was paying hefty money to rent space for the Lincoln kids at DePaul University. The mothers proposed that, if Manierre was indeed underutilized, Lincoln kids could move into their second floor; Manierre kids could stay on the first floor, and—Geoghegan got a mixture of laughs and groans when he reported this one—“they would have separate entrances so they wouldn’t have to see each other!”

A win-win solution—if the point really was filling underutilized schools, and not, say, emptying out a desirable building of undesirable Chicagoans, the better for Rahm Emanuel to serve his affluent constituency.

So at the trial, Geoghegan asked the system’s number-two administrator, a mountebank named Tim Cawley, “‘Why not move the children from Lincoln Elementary into Manierre?’ I’m not going to quote his answer…but the effect of it was, ‘You don’t know how disruptive that is!’ ”

He earned a roar of laughter from our audience at that. Laughing to keep from crying.

The system denies that it’s placing such kids under physical risk. And yet it plans to spend $7 million a year on a “safe passage” system to protect them. Geoghegan now turns indignant: “The children are going under guard, though gang territory, another one or two or more miles to their new schools. For a worse education experience on all counts…there’s this trauma, not only of all this displacement, [but of] losing all your teachers because they’re all being laid off…. What’s the payoff for this? There is no payoff for it. And the board has no basis to believe these closings are doing any good for the children.”

And yet the judge ruled there was no proof kids “would suffer substantial harm as a result of the school closures.”

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So what’s the inspiring part? The solidarity. Noted Geoghegan in our Q&A, “It’s interesting how many middle class white parents have been radicalized by this. They didn’t start that way. But the more they deal with the board, the more they realize that, with the minority children on the South and West Sides, they’re fighting the same battle against a really dysfunctional bureaucracy which just does not work.”

Watch this space. I’ll be writing more about what happens next. It could get ugly—and interesting.

Rick Perlstein writes about the resurgent protest movement in Chicago that is fighting back against Rahm Emanuel’s austerity agenda.

US Postal Service Stamp, 1962. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a personal observation with a political thrust: if I were single, I don’t think I could handle dating a graduate student in the humanities or the social sciences. Or someone with a PhD but not a tenure-track job. Or perhaps even a junior professor working for tenure. When I close my eyes and think of friends who’re sweating their way up that greasy pole to find steady work as a professional scholar, the images I come up with are of people at wits’ end, often hardly capable of healthy relationships at all.

I think of one, a recently minted history doctorate, for whom a two-year postdoctoral fellowship fortuitously dropped from the sky—but whom before that happened I regularly had to almost literally talk down from the ledge, so frazzled was she by the thought of piecing together more years with a $15,000 income; or maybe (she didn’t have any teaching lined up for this fall when the postdoc came through) no income at all.

I think of another, a gifted and committed teacher, the single mother of a disabled son, whose employer, a downtown commuter college, began cutting her course load the more experienced she got—the better she got—because it was cheaper to hire teachers who were green. She referred to this as her “poverty summer,” and I think she was near to the ledge too.

There’s another guy, a romance languages doctorate from one of the world’s great research universities, also a gifted and committed teacher. He came from a working-class background—his dad drives a truck for Coca-Cola, and he himself has had jobs like warehouseman and forklift driver. Because of all that, he possessed a psychological profile that made thriving in academia difficult: namely, he is self-possessed, confident and utterly lacking in the other-directed brown-nose-itutde that is the mark of the modern professional managerial class. When he realized that most critical theory wasn’t to his taste, he avoided it—except when he had to parrot it back to his professors to pass his field exams. He also didn’t frantically seek lines on his curriculum vitae, grinding the same research into half a dozen all-but-identical conference papers. He didn’t suck up. Instead, all he did was write a brilliant dissertation with a timely and politically relevant theme, in elegant, readable prose. All the while he feasted upon books about every subject under the sun. An insatiable auto-didact, his love of knowledge burns more brightly than that of just about anyone I’ve ever met, and outshines every professor I know. A natural-born teacher, he simultaneously and joyfully practiced the arts of citizenship just about every day of the week in the form of long, passionate and generous e-mails to his working-class relatives, most of them Christian conservatives, teaching them about the sins of the national security state, the historical accomplishments of the welfare state, and so on and so forth. In a better world, academia would beat a path to this gentleman’s door. Instead, he knows tenured employment is almost unimaginable. So he’s applied to about a hundred jobs this summer, desperate to keep up with his mortgage—every kind of job, including one as an on-campus building manager. He finally ended up with a year-long contract at a private school teaching science to eighth graders. Though he has no particular interest in and no experience with science, he’s glad to be working at all.

I think about a junior professor I know, also at a great research university—I have to be careful here; academics are petty, and who knows what identifying detail might set off one of (his or her) colleagues on whom the rest of (her or his) professional life depends—who is up for tenure this year. When I listen to (him or her) talk about this, it sounds a little bit what it might be like to be a protagonist in a Kafka story. The decision sits in the hands of a small group of reviewers, judging via criteria that are ostensibly transparent but are for all practical purposes opaque. (He or she) works and plays beside (her or his) reviewers every day. Who knows what faculty meeting or dinner party faux pas might place one of them in a blackballing mood? Who knows whether that paper (he or she) wrote, passed around delightedly by graduate students because it takes on a trendy academic superstar, will catapult (his or her) esteem among (her or his) reviewers, or capsize it? Who knows—(she or he) certainly doesn’t—whether (he or she) suddenly, from one day to the next, will learn that (she or he) is suddenly guaranteed a lifetime sinecure within an upper-middle-class professional elite, deferred to for the rest of (his or her) life, or whether (he or she)…won’t?

It must not make for a very balanced inner life.

I could add a half-dozen similar stories; these, though, are the archetypes. I think of them, and I contrast them to the tenured professors I know. They live unimaginably charmed lives, in this season of our austerity.

I think of one academic couple I know, of whom I am very fond, and whose contributions to teaching and scholarship and left-wing activism are exemplary. I don’t begrudge them their gorgeous home with the expansive deck overlooking mountains and ocean; I don’t begrudge one of them for letting slip—we all have moments of hubris—that they make $400,000 between them. I don’t begrudge another such couple the fancy catered dinner parties they’re able to throw in their fancy home, because, hell, I was the guest of honor at one of those dinner parties. In fact, I’ve been the guest of honor, as a visiting independent scholar, at fancy dinners at all sorts of fancy universities, and am invariably fond of my hosts, for the most part decent, dedicated people: 1960s veterans, mainly, who’ve done their best to keep their values intact.

But here’s their problem—a tragic flaw. They’re hardly aware that they’re aristocrats, and that they oversee an army of intellectual serfs. Because no one saw this coming.

The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPS. Then state land-grant universities and urban city college systems (where, in the state of California and New York City, tuition was free) expanded opportunities for entry into the middle class to new ethnic groups, farm kids, strivers of every description. The GI Bill expanded those same opportunities yet further through the glorious infusion of federal cash, and the Cold War imperatives that midwifed the National Defense Education Act expanded the administrative capacity of university after university such that when the frolicksome baby boomers began flooded their gates there was plenty of room to accommodate them. The trajectory, in other words, once went in only one direction: expanded opportunity.

Qualitatively, too, the expansion of college education became a genuine ornament of mass democracy. It made America more decent, more lovely, more cultured, more critical, even—ask anyone who went to college in the 1960s or ’70s—more fun. It made America richer too, both spiritually and materially; though in an important sense the first condition fed the second, as the liberation of intellectual imaginations midwifed a thousand productive careers in every field, careers that were productive precisely because they were inspired by a “liberal arts” attitude, not merely pinched Babbit-like commercial aspirations. Some of these folks, gifted with a college education, chose a professional life that continued within those colleges. It was one of the ways a capitalist society healthily reproduced itself: by making life in our capitalist society more worth living, more savory, more decent (and again: more fun); and, too, by producing the professionals and managers it took to keep that society running.

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Now all we seem to care about is reproducing the managerial class.

It changed slowly at first, but then with headlong rapidity. Ronald Reagan was a leading indicator: he instituted tuition at the University of California system, famously asking why California taxpayers should be forced “to subsidize intellectual curiosity.” (But subsidizing intellectual curiosity was what made California one of the most prosperous economies in the world.) I hope to write more on these subjects in the coming months as school comes into session, as they occur to me: the “MOOCs”—massive online open courses, which may well render most professors redundant; the death of free college education at what few institutions, like Cooper Union, that until recently nobly upheld it; the actions of the board of the University of Virginia to thumb their nose at the school’s founder, a fellow named Jefferson, who wanted his school open for free to all young gentlemen of talent in the colony.

I want to write more about a contradiction: people still clamor for the chance to lead spiritually enriching lives as professional scholars, because it’s an opportunity they saw all around them in college, a model for an engaged and decent life—even as the possibilities for engaged and decent lives retreat more every semester.

I want to write, in other words, about the death of democratic higher education, and the re-enshrinement of an idea that only seems impossibly old-fashioned until you think about it for more than five minutes: the gentleman scholar. The person of means and leisure. Because, dammit, aren’t the only ones now who can afford to risk the miniscule chances of professional advancement in academia the people who already have enough to get by on their own?

It’s time for us to begin chewing on that: what we lose when democratic higher education dies. That is how a healthy capitalist society eats its seed corn.

Katrina vanden Heuvel on how debt is destroying higher education. 

Barry Goldwater. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Claire Conner was about 13 years old when her parents handed her a John Birch Society membership form and told her, “You are old enough to take part in saving the nation.” For Claire that meant getting her dollar-a-month dues automatically subtracted from her allowance—and doing a whole lot of cringing. Her father, who was the first Bircher in Chicago, and her mother, who was the second, had taken out lifetime memberships, which cost $2,000 ($12,000 in today’s money). For years they had been convinced that the John Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch, was one of America’s truest heroes—certainly after they received a numbered, mimeographed copy of a black-covered book called The Politician. I interviewed Claire, who is now a retired teacher and a most un-retiring liberal activist based near Orlando, Florida, about her memoir of growing up Birch, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right, at the Seminary Co-op bookstore in Hyde Park, where every month I host an author or activist for an interview in my “Rixonland” series. That particular sunny afternoon, she picked up a prop I had brought along for the occasion, and the audience’s attention was riveted:

“The Birchers call this the ‘Black Book. They call their bible the ‘Blue Book,’ because it has a blue cover…. This book”—she waved my copy of The Politician, a spiral-bound thing that I had ordered from John Birch Society headquarters in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1997—“is a tract written over a period of years showing Dwight Eisenhower as a dedicated Communist. Who reported, by the way, in Mr. Welch’s theory, to his brother Milton”—the president of Johns Hopkins University—“in the Communist Party. This book was given—secret copies, numbered copies—to certain individuals. Bill Buckley had one. Barry Goldwater had one. My father had one. My father got it in 1955, when I was 10, three years before the John Society ever existed…. You had to sign a pledge that you would never reveal the contents of this book. So, as the John Birch Society developed, there were rumors that developed that there was this”—she whispered—”secret book. ‘There’s a secret book! There’s a secret book! There’s a secret book! And it names real Communists in the government!’ And my father would say, all the time, at every meeting, when people said, ‘What about the secret book?’ that, ‘There is no secret book.’

“So I didn’t believe there was such a book.”

Her father and mother were fanatic adherents of Joseph McCarthy, who had been censured by the Senate the year before, and who died two years later. Basically, he drunk himself to death, but you couldn’t tell her mother that. “She said, ‘They killed him because he knew too much.’ And my father said, ‘It will take a lot more Joes to save this country.’ And as I say in the book, I didn’t realize that three years later my dad would be one of those Joes!”

By 1960, her dad, Jay Conner, was the leader of Chicago’s Birchers. That summer was a hot one, so the Society was holding its recruitment meetings in the nice, cool basement of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Glenview. (The pastor, she is sure, was a Bircher.)

“My dad was speaking to 200 people and giving his standard speech—about the United Nations and the conspiracy and so on—and during the question-and-answer period this woman [was] waving her hand, and my dad called on her, and she said, ‘What about this secret book?’

“So my father said, ‘There is no secret book. There is no such book. There will never be a book’—he went through this whole thing.”

The woman then reached into her satchel, pulled out the secret book, and partook to read from the section that said Dwight David Eisenhower was a secret Communist.

There happened to be in the audience a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, Jack Mabley, who wrote the first article that revealed to the non-wingnut majority the existence of this strange political sect who believed that the nation’s beloved Republican president was a Communist five days later, and wrote a second article a day after that focusing on the Birchers’ Chicago sachem, Claire Conner’s father.

It’s no small thing to see your own father exposed nationally not just as a lunatic but a liar. I wrote about much of this stuff, and what happened next, in my first book, Before the Storm: how the John Birch Society suddenly became a national sensation; how the Republican power structure and the “mainstream” conservative movement led by William F. Buckley and National Review purged Robert Welch from their ranks, careful, however not to alienate the massive Birch membership that formed its most determined activist cadre in elections; and how the “Birch issue” came to largely to define the civil war within the Republican Party over the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater—his famous convention-speech line “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” was, in context, largely a tacit defense of the Birchers’ patriotic bona fides. And I think I tell the story well. But it’s something else altogether to read it, as I put it in my blurb of Claire’s book, “from the inside out”—from the perspective of a family within which right-wing extremism served as an efficient machine for something just short of child abuse. Like I said in that blurb, I’ve been waiting for a book like this for a long time. I recommend it with the only reservation that it is too short.

Hear what happened when her mother returned from a rhapsodic tour of a literally fascistic nation. “The first night—now, I was 12 years old—we were sitting over dinner. And my mother said, ‘I want to tell you children a story about Spain.’ She lights her cigarette.” She told her children about the left-wing general who kidnapped the son of one of Franco’s generals and said that unless certain political prisoners were released he would kill the son. That boy, her mom was careful to explain, was exactly her age. “The general said to his son on the phone, ‘say your prayers like a good Spaniard.’ And he was shot.’ ” She writes in the book eloquently about her reaction: “Something happened to me after that night. I had frequent headaches and stomaches. A rash appeared on my neck, arms, and legs…. After Mother and Father were dead, I knew that one of the Commies would put a pistol to me head and pull the trigger.”

She told me, “When they walked down this path, I sort of walked with them. Because there was no other way to go”—that’s how families work. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. And then you work to unfuck yourself: “I’ve been trying to make some sort of peace with this for, oh, thirty-five years.” Of such stories great family memoirs are made. And this is a great family memoir.

But it also bears a political argument we need to absorb. Explained Conner in Chicago, “The John Birch Society built the most effective, best-funded right-wing populist organization in the United States of America. Now, not all my friends on the left want to hear this. It’s so easy to say, ‘These people were crackpots.” But Robert Welch “was a brilliant man. That doesn’t mean he was correct about anything. But he was a brilliant man. And he loved to sell.” And what comes through strikingly in the book is that, even as Welch and his organization were excoriated, the stories they told, frequently through carefully disguised front groups with pleasant-sounding names—say, the one from the 1960s about how sexual education was teaching children how to be sexually promiscuous; or the one in the early 1990s promoting the impeachment of Bill Clinton—were sold quite effectively to the broader political culture. They achieved things.

We really, really don’t want to believe this. Even Claire Conner did not want to believe this. She writes, remembering the Kennedy assassination, blamed in the wider political culture as a product of just the sort of extremism Birchers were promoting, “the whole right wing is kaput. My parents and the Birchers just became ancient history.” Less than eight months later, of course, Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential nominee. She writes of her conviction of how the miserable failures of the Bush years were “killing America’s appetite for right-wing Republicans.”

And yet now we have thirty states with Republican majorities, many of them veto-proof.

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And at that point, in Chicago, Claire Connner concluded in thunder. “These people are at the point of changing our government. If you want to see how, look at Texas, look at Florida. Look at Ohio. Look at Wisconsin, for God’s sake—my state. Look at Michigan, for heaven’s sake: they think they elected a moderate, but they elected a right-wing radical. That’s how this game is played. They’re changing the policy. And the whole thing is so deep that when they vote them out of office, number one, half of them won’t be able to vote. And number two, we will have years of problems to fix…. We were so happy that we won the popular vote, but they’re buying the place….they’ve virtually stopped the government for five years.”

Claire Conner knows of what she speaks. She was there at the inception—as a sad-eyed, vulnerable adolescent—then watched as the machine was put together: a machine whose deceptively smooth surface has always only barely hid the corrosive ugliness and cunning anti-democratic cleverness underneath, convincing too many liberals, too many times, that the ugliness could not but fade away in the fulness of time—convincing them wrong. Read her, and listen well: there is nothing new under the wingnut sun.

William Scranton (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The dinosaurs are nearly extinct. One of the last of the liberal Republican giants, William Warren Scranton of Pennsylvania, died this week at the age of 96. Let us not so much eulogize the man. Let us eulogize the species.

His aristocratic identity was announced by his name. William Warren Scranton: his ancestors founded the Pennsylvania town. William Warren Scranton: his mother was from the Warren family that sailed over on the Mayflower. From that Mayflower side, the liberal convictions came at the knee of his mother, who began picketing for women’s suffrage at the age of 16; she had her son gathering precinct returns by telephone at the age of 9, and the next year took him to the 1928 Republican convention. Why the Republican convention? Well, for one thing, the Democrats were the party of low-bred louts: people like Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi who would go on to write the segregationist masterpiece Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization. And the bosses who gathered the teeming urban immigrant masses into a block vote that tried to turn the Democratic Party “wet.” So there was snobbishness. But there were also liberal heroes in the Republican Party of the early twentieth century—people like Robert La Follette Sr., who, before he founded his own Progressive Party in 1924, invented the direct primary, installed the first workers’ compensation legislation and championed the vote for women. That was part of the Republican living tradition in which Bill Scranton was born and bred to.

Another liberal tributary came from his father’s side: the biblical notion that to those whom much is given, much is expected. Taking care of people: dismiss it as noblesse oblige if you want, but at least rich people back then felt the obligation. Done right, it very well can become the seedbed of progressive change. As I wrote in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,

“A Pennsylvania squire who said that the free market brought only blessings would be run out of town on a rail. Scranton, the city, had been the anthracite coal capital of the world before the market for the fuel collapsed in mid-century, the nation’s industrial center began sliding southwest, and radical new automation technology began sluicing off some 40,000 industrial jobs a month nationwide. In Pennsylvania, unemployment was 50 percent above the national average and fifty-six of fifty-seven counties were federally designed as depressed areas; in the same years that Phoenix grew from 50,000 residents to 500,000, Scranton shrunk. It was a quiet, underlying dread in the 1960s that these economic forces, as Rhode Island’s liberal Republican governor John Chafee”—dad of Lincoln, who of course ran screaming from a Republican Party that no longer had a place for the likes of him in it—“put it, would ‘dump the unskilled and semi-skilled worker into the human slag heap.’”

And back in the day, there were crazy kooky Republicans who actually believed enlightened, activist government could do something about it.

Bill’s dad started something called the “Scranton Plan,” combining private and public resources to spur industrial redevelopment, helping lure fifty industries and 20,000 jobs back to Lackawanaa County. Upon his father’s death in 1955, Bill Scranton took it over. He was 37, an accomplished lawyer with a promising career still ahead of him (his Yale Law fraternity pledge class, which included two future Supreme Court Justices, a future secretary of state and some dude named Jerry Ford, was nicknamed “Destiny’s Men”). He surely could have done something else—and lived anywhere but in a stagnating old coal town. But: obligation. “By the time he was plucked to become a State Department briefing office in 1959”—more obligation: there was a cold war on—“the chamber of commerce’s executive secretary described him as ‘the best-informed man in the United States on how to bring jobs back to depressed areas.’ ” I wrote of how he “burned with one of the core convictions of managerial liberalism: In a complex modern economy, only ‘labor market coordination’ by centralized government could save the free market from bringing about waste, inefficiency, and ruin as a side effect of prosperity.’ ” This notion that something other than the “free market” could help realize human flourishing—that human beings might be masters of their economic fates rather than playthings of it: Republicans used to believe that. Pretty crazy, huh?

(I reached the president of the Scranton Chamber of Commerce, Austin Burke, who had worked with Governor Scranton since 1972. He reflected, “The governor was recognized as a world-figure, but we knew him as a person who was totally dedicated to the well-being of his hometown. And I think that that the economic troubles of Scranton over the decades that the governor witnessed made him sensitive to the needs of the guy in the street, the people who needed some help from the government. And so it allowed Governor Scranton to be a Republican with a social conscience.”)

The next year the best-informed man in the United States on how to bring jobs back to depressed areas won Lackawanna County’s seat in the US House of Representatives, where he was only one of twenty-one Republicans to vote in 1961 to expand the size of the Rules Committee—a procedural attempt, akin to today’s fight over filibuster reform, to break a crucial bottleneck blocking bills on matters like civil rights and raising the minimum wage. He wrote a depressed-areas bill far to the left of a Kennedy administration he voted with over half of the time.

The next duty to call him was the Pennsylvania Statehouse. He took office the same week in 1963 when another new governor, George Wallace, pronounced, “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.” The New Republic called him “the first of the Kennedy Republicans.”

In Pennsylvania, the unemployment rate started falling by percentage points. And soon duty called again. The wingnuts were taking over the Republican Party. Barry Goldwater rose; Nelson Rockefeller fell. After Rockefeller was crushed in the June, 1964 California primary, the party’s liberal aristocrats prevailed upon Scranton to take up the moderate standard in the Republican Party’s civil war at the convention that went on to nominate Barry Goldwater, and cement the party’s rightward turn. I tell that story in far too much detail in Before the Storm, and won’t rehearse it here. Except to make a single point: about the liberal Republicans’s tragic flaw.

It was their arrogance, their sense of entitlement. Perhaps that story is best told in an image: Henry Cabot Lodge, one of those Republican aristocrats whose statement to the platform committee was to the left of Barack Obama, or maybe even Bernie Sanders—he called for a “Republican-sponsored Marshall Plan for our cities and schools”—sat in his hotel room, leafed through the roll of delegates and cried, “What in God’s name has happened to the Republican Party! I hardly know any of these people!”

Scranton, entering the presidential race in the middle of June, actually imagined that “these people” would come to their senses at the convention, do the responsible thing, switch their allegiance from Barry Goldwater to him and save the Republican Party from insanity—for that is how one of “destiny’s men” saw the world. It did not, of course, work that way.

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Following his resounding defeat, he pledged never to run for elected office again. Though when duty called, he still answered. As his New York Times obituary said, “Not yet 50, he became a youngish elder statesman. He served on government commissions, advised the White House on arms control and took on presidential missions—for Richard M. Nixon in the Middle East, for Gerald R. Ford at the United Nations, for Jimmy Carter on urban policy and intelligence oversight and for Ronald Reagan on Soviet-American relations.”

The most prominent of these was the commission charged with studying the May 1970 Kent State shootings, which Scranton chaired. Its report concluded, “Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified…. The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.” It recommended that the best way to prevent such violence in the future was “ending the Vietnam war, reforming the universities, and a continuing commitment to social justice.” Fifty-four Republican congressmen (and four Democrats) immediately responded: their spokesman called that “weak-kneed” and “wishy-washy.”

Rest in peace, William Warren Scranton. Rest in peace, Republican Party with a social conscience.

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