Slingshot

Freedom from Thinking

Near Uniontown, Pa. Ben Shahn/FSA, Oct. 1935.

Way back in the days of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, there was a 12-year-old boy who lived in rural Missouri. His name was JD, and his prize possession was a handmade slingshot. He carried it around in a small canvas bag with long handles that let him hang the bag from his shoulder. Nestled with the slingshot in the bag were a bunch of of small round stones and, usually, a ham sandwich.

Mostly JD shot his stones at squirrels. He'd killed one once, early on, and taken it home. His Pa had cleaned it and thrown the meat in the stew pot and told him to go kill more squirrels. But they'd gotten very cagey. It was almost as if they talked about JD. Whenever he stopped and started to take out his slingshot, the squirrels would go on alert, watch him for a second, and then disappear.

The squirrels were getting boring, and shooting trees wasn't very much fun, even though it was good practice. He'd gotten so he could hit the same mark on a tree three times in a row. 

JD was walking down a dirt road that led into town. He and his Pa lived in a shack on the other side of town. He was walking by a large, well-kept house that he had often passed before. He knew that an old widow lady lived there. He'd even seen her once or twice, sitting in a rocker on the porch.

JD looked at the porch. Back on the house's wall there were two large windows, each with twelve panes of glass. JD wondered if he could hit the bottom left pane on the left window. It would be a little tricky. He'd have to almost graze the top of the railing.

He took out his slingshot, loaded a stone, looked up, aimed carefully, and fired. There was a very satisfying crash of glass as the bottom left pane of the left window shattered, sprinkling shards of glass everywhere. 

JD admired his handiwork for a moment, and then something told him it would be a good idea to leave the area. He was walking away, stuffing his slingshot in the canvas bag, when he heard a voice.

"Young man, where do you think you are going?"

It was a lady's voice. He stopped and turned. It was the widow lady. She was standing on the porch.

"Why did you break my window?" It was a stern voice. He had heard that she had been a schoolteacher.

"I didn't mean to, ma'am. I didn't know it would break."

The widow lady had indeed been a school teacher.

"What did you think would happen?" she asked.

"I don't know, ma'am."

The old lady had been a schoolteacher for a long time . She'd seen a lot of twelve-year-old boys.

"So you weren't thinking about the consequences of your actions?"

The boy thought for a moment and then brightened visibly.

"Yes, ma'am. I wasn't thinking."

The lady thought of what she would teach this boy, given the chance. Some science. How cannons worked, slip in a little ballistics on the side. Maybe Euclid's Elements. If this, then that.

"Do you go to school, boy?"

"No, ma'am. My Pa says the great outdoors is my school." 

"Like Daniel Boone."

The boy looked at her blankly.

"What's your name?"

"JD, ma'am."

The lady thought that perhaps he went to Sunday school.

"Do you know the story of David and Goliath?"

He looked at her blankly. The lady sighed. She had no way into this boy's mind. Her husband had been a doctor. When they first arrived, he had tried to convince his patients not to dig their privy pit directly next to their well. After a few years he gave up, and just treated their symptoms as best he could.

"All right, JD." She walked to the edge of the porch and leaned her arm over the railing.

"Hand me the bag." 

JD complied. She dumped the contents onto a table. She put the ham sandwich back in the bag and handed the bag to JD.

"I'll be keeping your slingshot and your ammunition for a while." She couldn't resist trying to teach him something. Maybe he'd ask his father what "ammunition" meant. She continued.

"Tell your father if he comes today and fixes my window, I will give him the slingshot. You may go now."

Dejected, the boy hung his head and walked away.

Years later, one of her grandchildren visited her from the big city, and told her they were trying to figure out what to do with all the unruly children who kept skipping school. The schools could expel them for truancy, but that just made things worse - they would have every day to get into trouble on the streets. He said he didn't even know what to call them - street urchin seemed unkind, and didn't necessarily imply the petty criminality they were seeing.

They were sitting on her porch, she in her rocker, he in a wicker armchair, lemonade on the table.

The lady looked out, somewhere across the porch's railing. She thought of JD and smiled.

"Have you thought of calling them juvenile delinquents?" she asked.

See also The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office, Little Karl.

Disorder Breeds Bad Law

The Downside of Disruption

Cars broke the Fourth Amendment. That's the thesis of Sarah Seo's 2019 book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. (For a 2021 interview in The Trace, click here.) 

Back in the sunny days before World War I, chaos and mayhem came to America's streets in the form of the motor vehicle. I have known for some time what cars did to the fabric of our cities (See Cars and Bikes - the Back Story.) What I didn't know was that they also twisted our criminal justice system into a pretzel. 

Professor Seo traces this history from the introduction of the Model T Ford in 1908, noting that the first center line pavement marking - running down the middle of the road to separate traffic going in opposite directions - was painted in Wayne County, Michigan, in 1911. (Seo, p. 49.) 

It was part of a panoply of new devices - stop signs (1914), traffic lights (also 1914), and all kinds of painted lines on road surfaces - all brought forth by the need to control the movement of motor vehicles. (For the origins of the stop sign see James Longhurst, Bike Battles, 2015, p. 91. For an overview of early traffic management efforts, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011, chapter 2.) 

Motorists weren't terribly interested in obeying all the new signals on the street, or the many laws that legislatures were busily passing to try to bring some order out of chaos. 

Local governments created licensing requirements, established speed limits, mandated non-glare headlights and rearview mirrors. They established streets where motor vehicles were not allowed to go. They worked out rules for the right-of-way among motor vehicles, pedestrians, horses, and horse-drawn vehicles. A 1905 treatise even had a kind word for bicyclists: "Bicycles, tricycles and automobiles are ordinarily considered vehicles and entitled to the use of that part of the street or highway set aside for them." (Seo, p. 26.) 

All of this came as something of a shock to the citizenry, who were entirely unaccustomed to this level of regulation. As Seo explains, the roads had historically been governed by community standards and tort laws. This system did fall apart under the impact of motor vehicles, and so the gaze of your nosy neighbor, and the civil suit by an offended citizen, gave way to the gaze of the police and criminal prosecution of nonconforming behavior on the road. (Seo, pp. 24-27, 39, 60-61.) 

Why did the country's roads suddenly need all these rules? After all, the main selling point of cars was freedom - freedom of movement, to be sure, but so much else came along with that. By the 1920s there was clearly the element of romance. As with Emma Bovary's memorable carriage ride in Rouen, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it seems undeniable that the appeal of the motor car had an erotic dimension by the Jazz Age, if not before.

So it was perhaps a natural tendency for drivers to ignore rules that got in the way of their freedom.

The problem with this - and the reason for all the traffic control devices and laws - was that there was a downside to the automotive onslaught - two things in particular: endemic congestion and the vast number of crashes. Legislators, police, engineers, and concerned citizens were all trying desperately to deal with these issues. 

In general, the citizenry went with freedom over rules, and upstanding middle-class citizens discovered the joy of crime. Speeding? What's that? Stop sign? Hah! 

Of course, driving was not the only situation during the Roaring Twenties where middle-class people discovered the joy of crime. There was, for instance, something called Prohibition, which people liked about as much as they liked speed limits.  

Private Space, Public Space

It was at the nexus of booze and cars where the Fourth Amendment started to break down. Let's have a look at the text of the Fourth Amendment:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." 

Remember that word "unreasonable." It turns out to be the worm in the heart of the Fourth Amendment.

The framers of the Constitution would have viewed this language through the lens of the English common law, which drew a sharp distinction between the public space and the private space of life. The quintessential private space was the home, often romantically described as a castle, presumably equipped with a moat and a drawbridge and a portcullis.

As Professor Seo puts it, "This way of thinking ordered the world into two spheres, public and private. This division, in turn, determined the scope of legitimate state action vis-a-vis individual rights. Put together, government could regulate the public sphere, but free men (and they were men) enjoyed the right to be left alone and do as they pleased in the private sphere. Applied to the Fourth Amendment, officers could not probe the private sphere without a warrant specifying 'the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.' In contrast, no constitutional requirement hampered law enforcement efforts in the public sphere." (Seo, pp. 124-125.) 

This does not mean that the government could do whatever it wanted in the public sphere. The common law had rules for when police officers could arrest someone in the public sphere, without a warrant. There were different rules depending on the nature of the crime. "One such situation arose when an officer had reasonable grounds to believe that a person had committed a felony. For misdemeanors, the common law required more: the officer had to actually see the offense take place, and in some jurisdictions, the offense also had to amount to a breach of the peace." (Seo, p. 126.)

Note the words "reasonable grounds."

So is a car more like a home, or more like a person walking down the street?  

Carroll v. United States

At the end of 1921, government agents stopped a car on a road in Michigan. They were looking for booze, and they found it. The occupants of the car, George Carroll and John Kiro, were charged and convicted under the National Prohibition Act (also called the Volstead Act), which was the law implementing the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919, and the Volstead Act took effect in 1920. (For Carroll, see Seo, pp. 113ff.) 

Carroll and Kiro appealed, arguing that the search, which had been conducted without a warrant, was illegal. And so, in due course, Carroll v. United States became the Supreme Court's first car search case. 

The government initially viewed the case as enforcement of the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment. The defendants argued that the warrantless search violated the Fourth Amendment. 

As "the national debate over alcohol turned into a showdown between two constitutional provisions" (Seo, p. 120), a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The government switched its argument in the Carroll case from booze to cars.  

Solicitor General James Beck argued the case for the government. Here's Professor Seo on page 124: "With the possibility that Prohibition's unpopularity might jeopardize the convictions, he reframed Carroll as a case not about liquor but about how the automobile had completely transformed American society. In his brief to the Supreme Court, Beck asserted that the fact that 'this is a liquor case is accidental.' The import of the case reached 'far beyond the incidental problem of enforcing the liquor laws' to 'the invention, the rapid development, and the general use of automobiles as a means of transportation.' He described how cars had 'produced a more profound effect upon social conditions than any other invention of modern times.' Although this was a case about the illicit haul of alcohol, the next case could involve a murderer or robber fleeing in a getaway. The revolution in the commission and pursuit of crime, Beck argued, compelled the Court to reconsider 'the well-settled rules of the common law' regarding an officer's authority to search and to seize." 

Beck's arguments carried the day and, as collateral damage, ripped a gaping hole in the law of search and seizure. Chief Justice William Howard Taft (he had previously served as president of the United States) wrote the Court's opinion, which was handed down in 1925. (For the text of the opinion, and Justice McReynolds' dissent, click here.) 

Chief Justice Taft decided not to answer the question: Is a car more like a house or more like a person? Instead he created a new category, the "automobile exception."  Seo remarks, "Carroll v. United States held that a warrantless search and seizure was lawful if the 'officer shall have reasonable or probable cause for believing that the automobile which he stops and seizes has contraband liquor therein which is being illegally transported." (Seo, pp. 137-138.) 

As Seo notes, "allowing officers to seize a car and then search it with reasonable or probable cause for believing that the driver may be violating Prohibition laws, many of which were misdemeanor offenses, went way beyond what existing laws permitted. Under the common law for misdemeanors, warrantless arrests required actual knowledge through personal observation, not cause for believing." (Seo, p. 138.) 

"In short, the Carroll rule constitutionally legitimized police discretion." Chief Justice Taft gave powers to the police that had formerly been reserved for judges: "Carroll delegated the judicial inquiry of probable cause, at least in the first instance, to the police." (Seo, p. 139.)

Seo concludes, "Carroll marked a turning point in criminal procedure." (Seo, p. 141.) 

The Sixties

So how have things worked out? 

Let's skip over the next few decades of car stops (cue flashing lights), high-speed chases (sirens and squealing tires), and many, many crashes (screech, BOOM, tinkle of broken glass). Neither the car industry nor the government got very interested in building safe cars until the 1960s, when Ralph Nader forced them to. His book on the Corvair and related topics, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965), was a turning point. NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was founded in 1970. (For a good recent story on Nader and the sixties, click here.) 

And what about the law? Well, also in the 1960s, a Yale Law School professor found himself becoming troubled by the number of times the police were stopping him. He traveled a bit, and it happened in numerous states. When the professor, Charles Reich, asked why he was being stopped, the usual response was "Just checking." When one officer said he "had the right to stop anyone any place any time - and for no reason," Reich decided to write an article, which duly appeared in the Yale Law Journal in 1966, under the title "Police Questioning of Law Abiding Citizens." (Seo, p. 202. To see the article, click here.) 

I'd like to say that Reich's article had the same effect as Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed. But, instead of things getting better in the world of car stops and searches, they have actually gotten worse. Let's fast-forward again to the 1980s and a writer named Charles Remsberg, who looked at the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and effectively updated Chief Justice Taft for the modern era. 

The Rise of the Pretextual Stop

Remsberg did this by refining the arbitrary stop that police were already addicted to - "just checking," as they said to Professor Reich - and identifying legally acceptable ways to extend the stop into a criminal investigation that might lead to the discovery of illegal drugs. First, he recommended having an actual violation rather than the more amateurish "just checking." Actual violations are often readily at hand - failure to signal a lane change, for instance. The second step was to assess the situation for signs that could provide a reasonable cause for believing that the car contained contraband. Did the driver seem unduly skittish? Were his eyes glazed over? Strange odors? Furtive movements? And the carefully worked-out list of dos and don'ts goes on from there. (See Seo, pp. 254 ff.) 

And there is no question that this treatment has fallen disproportionately on people of color. A 1996 state case arising from traffic stops on the New Jersey Turnpike settled this issue definitively. In State v. Soto the New Jersey court, reports Seo on pages 264-265, "excluded evidence of drugs against seventeen black motorists based on the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The defense had compiled data showing disparities in traffic law enforcement 'so wide, so big' that the computer would not even 'spit out a number,' recalled the professor who had conducted the survey. Nearly every driver sped past legal limits, but blacks were stopped at a disproportionate rate - to be precise, between 16.35 and 22.1 standard deviations above the median, depending on the segment of the New Jersey Turnpike. The opinion helpfully explained that statisticians consider standard deviations over 2 to be statistically significant. To put this in layman's terms, it was 'highly unlikely [that] such statistics could have occurred randomly or by chance.' Even more damning, the defense's expert demonstrated that state troopers using radar stopped black drivers in proportion to their motoring population, while troopers not using radar arrested many more blacks. The witness commented, 'As they got more discretion, they stopped more blacks.'" 

It's worth noting that this case was about the Fourteenth Amendment, and not the Fourth Amendment. Perhaps this is a sign of how badly the Fourth Amendment had been broken, way back in the 1920s, basically by a bunch of overeager car salesmen who, careless of the consequences, launched an armada of cars on an unsuspecting country, causing grievous damage to our laws and to the fabric of our cities. 

What to Do?

As Professor Seo notes on page 266, "The problem with pretextual policing is not only that the police treat groups differently; it is, just as importantly, that they have that much discretionary power at all." 

So how do we limit the use of police discretion? There's an old religious maxim: "Avoid the proximate occasion of sin." I think we have a huge opportunity to radically reduce the amount of time that police spend policing motor vehicles. Red-light cameras and speed cameras change our thinking about how to administer the many, many rules of the road. Do we need a uniformed officer with a 9-mm pistol, a Taser, pepper spray, a wooden baton, or perhaps one of those fancy collapsible metal ones - oh, and a badge? Or do we need a civilian technician staring at a computer screen?  

Instead of selective enforcement, this administrative approach can provide 100 percent enforcement, which removes the game aspects of driving - the thrill of transgression, the need for wily stratagems to evade punishment. No more hide and seek, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Just know if you speed, you pay. 

How dull, you say. To which I say, speed kills. I know too much about what happens to a child's body when it's hit by a drag-racing car on Roosevelt Boulevard. 

People often say that the red-light cameras and the speed cameras are just a money grab, and have nothing to do with safety. Well, when speed cameras first went in on Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia, a gargantuan number of tickets were issued. Nine months later, the number of tickets issued had fallen by 93 percent, indicating that people were actually changing their behavior.

Crashes are also way down. There are still way too many crashes, but changes to the design of the road are in the works and should eventually help lower crashes even further.

We could also revisit some of our many, many traffic laws. If the laws are not changing behavior, does it make sense to have them? Take, for instance, the law requiring motorists to signal a lane change. Many people are highly compliant. I try to do it, but occasionally forget. And there are people who will never, ever signal a lane change. Does pulling people over and writing tickets actually change this behavior? 

I could go on about laws that don't do any good, and about how we can redesign our roads so they don't encourage dangerous behavior, but this is a story about the Fourth Amendment, so I think I will end with this thought.

We live in a modern state; it has many rules - perhaps too many. But we do need a lot of rules so that our very complex modern society can function. The idiocracy that seeks to govern us likes to bray about freedom without ever mentioning that we are all answerable for our actions. Freedom always came with responsibility. Those responsibilities are different now, but they do not prevent freedom; they seek to prevent reckless endangerment.

I would like to suggest that our choice is not between freedom and an oblivious bureaucracy. Our choice is between an administrative state and a police state. I'll take the nanny state.

Policing is not imposed from above; it is a service to the community, and the community can take the initiative in seeing that police service is what we want it to be. Legislatively or administratively, it is possible for a community to establish guidelines for police and citizens as well. - Charles Reich, 1966

See also Rugged Individualism, The Supreme Court and Parking, What the Greeks Knew.

A Few Deft Touches for Back Streets

And Suddenly People Want to Walk There

So what do you do with a blind brick wall? Paint a few doors and windows, or maybe just rectangles. And call it art. Because it is.

The scene above is on South Hicks Street, the location of my new favorite coffee shop, called Suprema (actually the entrance to Suprema is on Pine). Somewhere behind that wall are two small theaters, tucked into the old ballroom of the Drake apartment building, which fronts on Spruce and runs quite a distance down South Hicks. (I found this information online.)

So if you're thinking that the facade treatment above looks like a stage set, I'm thinking you wouldn't be wrong.

Not too hard to do, really. Once you have the idea. 

I've been writing about Philadelphia's alleys and small streets for a number of years, and I'm pleased to say that more and more people seem to be getting ideas. They don't have to be big ideas. Here's a provisional reworking of a small passageway on 16th Street, between Spruce and Locust, last summer.

The decor went away in the winter, but the passageway seems to be making a comeback now that the warm weather is here again.

And here's a temporary installation, also on 16th just north of Spruce. Call it eye candy, but it works. The alley is no longer invisible. It is a place.

I think one of our little streets with the greatest potential is Moravian, just north of Walnut. One of the reasons I like Moravian is that its current situation varies block by block, from depressing to catastrophic. Here's a shot at 17th Street.

This is a little unfair, because of the digging in the road, but I've taken too many pictures of long rows of greasy dumpsters, and I need something to motivate me to take a picture. So forgive me.

The upshot of upgrading is that you make the space more useful. Here's an alley behind the Atlantic building, in the 1400 block of Spruce. This space was a mess that you may not remember, because it was usually closed off with a sagging chain-link gate backed by some opaque plastic tarpaulins. 

Now, as you can see, it's open, it looks nice, and there are some parking spots and an entrance to the building that can be used by residents as well as staff.

Look at this side entrance to the Bellevue. Somebody decided to care. And it shows.

The easiest little streets to spruce up are the residential blocks. These streets provide access to the homes, but generally have very little through traffic. Other blocks are everybody's rear door. They're basically places to stow cars and stash trash, and they look it.

And many of them are a lot cleaner than they used to be. But still they tend to be colorless, and lacking in a sense of cohesion.

I wish someone would care a bit more about the 1400 block of Moravian. It's just west of Broad; on the north side lies the Union League, and on the south side are a number of very nice older buildings, including Drexel and Company on 15th and, in the mid-block, one of the former homes of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. (I've written about this block before; to see the story, click here.)

This block used to be a filthy mess. It's now much cleaner and neater than it used to be, but I think the people looking after things here should not rest on their laurels. Take this street to the next level. Put the dumpsters inside, and move the sheriff's-office parking to one of the many, many large garages in the area. A few of the facades on the south side of the street need some restoration. And then you can go for a pedestrian-priority street with outdoor dining.

Here's a taste of the payoff. This slice of the Union League is tucked away in the mid-block, waiting for its audience to show up and have a cappuccino.

See also Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, Streets Without Joy, City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street, What We Lost, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?

What Does a Clean Street Look Like?

And How About a Metric for Trash Collection?

Leaving a rally a few weeks after the Parkland massacre, Society Hill, 2018.

I've been doing some thinking about trash. It's actually a pretty boring subject. Almost as boring as parking, and the subject lacks a Donald Shoup, the man who revolutionized thinking about parking. Not that there haven't been important innovations in the past few decades - recycling, and designing products for their full life cycle come to mind. The concept of minimizing the amount of trash from inception through final disposal is very useful. There's even a mantra for these ideas - reduce, reuse, recycle.

In addition to the 3 Rs, deep thinkers have come up with the 7 Rs - Rethink, Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle, and Rot. This last being a nod to composting. The only problem with the 7 Rs, from my point of view, is that I am never able to remember them all. 

But I'm looking at a slightly different problem - how we collect and remove trash in a way that gives us clean streets. 

Normally, when I think of street trash, I see two things: First, household and commercial trash that is placed out for collection, a portion of which always seems to wind up on the street and not in the truck. Second is trash dropped by street users - dog walkers, cigarette smokers, people who are eating a candy bar, someone who has finished reading the newspaper, a motorist discarding a banana peel - who decide not to use a trash can.

I'd like to expand that definition of trash to a definition that includes fallen leaves and what I call road schmutz. So, street trash, leaves, and road schmutz.

Three Issues

Let's start with leaves. I clearly remember a brisk autumn day, decades ago, when my young daughter and I were returning home. As we turned the corner onto our block we saw, stretching into the distance, a series of large, neat piles of fallen leaves. They had undoubtedly been made by the street sweeper, a City of Philadelphia employee who appeared on the block from time to time, with a broom and a barrel on wheels, and swept the sidewalk. As we approached the first pile, Alicia couldn't resist, and she jumped into it feet first. Just then I saw the street sweeper, who had been standing back by a stoop. The look on his face turned from shock to benign amusement when he figured out that my daughter was too small to scatter the pile of leaves very much. 

Yes, the City used to sweep sidewalks, and even pick up leaves. One day I noticed that our guy hadn't been around for a while, and later on I figured out he wasn't coming back. I was helped along on this path by attending a meeting where Rina Cutler, who was in charge of streets and other things at the time, told us that the street sweepers had gone away and weren't coming back.

And so now it's up to us, the residents, to sweep the leaves each fall and bag them appropriately and set them out at the right time for collection.

Second, let's do road schmutz. This is the grimy particulate matter that quietly darkens your sidewalk. It also shows up on your window sills, and happily gathers in abundance in the gutter, nestling up to the curbstone. My understanding is that this material is mostly hydrocarbon particulates coming out of the tailpipes of passing motor vehicles. 

We all seem to be remarkably accepting of it, but it definitely alters the appearance of our streets, much as the smoke from a fireplace can alter the appearance of a Rembrandt painting that hangs above the mantle. Hues are darkened and subdued, and images lose their original clarity.

I haven't hosed down the sidewalk in front of our house for quite a while, but I know that if I did that, the sidewalk would be a much lighter, brighter color. 

Are the effects of grime a big deal? Well, people who restore old Frank Furness buildings seem to think so. Cleaning the facade of the Furness Library out at Penn revealed a building that is a startling, vivid shade of red. Who knew?

Finally, to the stuff we all think of as trash. I confess I live in a charmed world, just a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square. The local civic group, the Center City Residents' Association, partners with the Center City District, which primarily looks after the central business district, to have its street cleaners come along on trash day, after the City trash collection trucks have been through, and pick up the stuff that didn't quite make it into the truck. This makes a huge difference in the amount of trash hanging around on my block and many others. 

Other neighborhoods are not so fortunate. The City publishes a litter index, which color codes neighborhoods on a map, using red for very trashy, followed by the progressively less dire colors of orange, yellow, and green. Most of Center City is green, with a few areas of light yellow. Large parts of the city are red, particularly in the north, south, and west. The far northeast and northwest look very green. 

How Clean Is Clean? And, Do We Care?

Cleanliness is actually a controversial topic in Philadelphia. There are competing priorities. 

There is, for instance, strong resistance to bringing back alternate side of the street parking, which requires parked cars to clear one side of a street to allow for street sweeping to clear the gutter. Many people just hate this idea, and they have effectively blocked it for years. Before the pandemic hit, there were some actual signs of movement. We'll see what happens. (For a pre-pandemic story, click here.)

What lies under the parked cars. Wash West, 2021.

And then there's the Italian Market, where two recent efforts to organize a business improvement district have created almost a textbook case of misgovernment. Certain people don't want things to change, and they have the power to enforce their will. It's quite similar to what is going on in the U.S. Senate today. (I'm not going to get into the weeds here, but if you'd like to see some stories, click here and here and here and here and here.)

Finally I suppose there are some who may question whether a focus on cleaning streets is essentially a distraction from more important issues, like saving the planet. Well, I think substituting electric cars for cars that burn gasoline would be good for the planet; it would also reduce pediatric asthma; and it would result in visibly cleaner streets. So maybe spending time on clean streets adds a new battalion to the army fighting against global warming and poisonous air.

Two Strategies

It seems to me that the City is pursuing two basic strategies as it seeks to grapple with the issue of clean streets. The first strategy is to increase capital invested per worker; the second strategy is to push work onto the customer.

1. The idea that capital spending can increase worker productivity is an old one. After all, a carpenter can surely do more work with power tools than with hand tools. This isn't the only way to increase productivity, but it has been reliably effective.

2. An early example of pushing work onto the customer came when grocers decided they were tired of pulling cans of beans off the shelf, and told the customers to do the picking themselves. And of course self-service could be sold as empowering the consumer. I personally think this is a weak argument, but it has been remarkably effective over the years, allowing grocers to sell more beans with fewer workers.

At the Streets Department, both of these strategies appear to assume that the basic issue is a manpower shortage caused by budget constraints. As I started working on this story, I was inclined to agree with this analysis. After all, I've been watching the workers disappear for decades. And of course I read the newspaper stories about the City's budget difficulties.

Looking for a Metric

But can we prove that the problem is not enough workers? This thought led me down a rabbit hole. I had a look at the City's 2021 budget. (I looked at the 2019 actuals, to steer clear of the pandemic. When the 2022 budget came out, I checked, and the numbers are consistent, when you allow for the pandemic.) 

In the budget there's a metric for total tonnage hauled, but that number by itself doesn't tell you very much. You need to know how many workers are hauling those tons. I looked for the workers who actually throw the trash and drive the trucks and found some numbers. I think I got them all, but I'm not sure.

Then I went looking for another city to benchmark against. A lot of cities are very close-mouthed about how many people work in their sanitation departments. New York, of course, loves to talk about numbers, and so I used it as my test case. 

Just for fun I started by looking at workers per square mile; then I compared workers to the city's total population. And I looked at workers per street mile. 

-The number of square miles in New York City is only about twice the number in Philadelphia, so it's not surprising that, with its larger workforce, it has about five times as many sanitation workers per square mile.   

-When it comes to total population NYC has about twice as many sanitation workers per thousand residents as Philly does.

-On the other hand, NYC has about three times the number of miles of streets that Philly has, so it's not surprising that Philly has more than twice the sanitation workers per mile of street.

When I got to comparing tonnage hauled per worker, Philly actually did substantially better than NYC.

But I could hear some alarm bells ringing quietly in my ear. New York has more workers per square mile, and more workers per thousand residents, but Philly has more workers per mile of street. I think this means that Philly's collection network is much denser than New York's, which would help explain its better performance on tons of trash hauled. But I was very uncertain. This problem is more complicated than I had expected it to be.

So I sat and I thought.

Moravian Street, 2017.

A Few More Variables

While I was thinking I reached out to a convenience sample of well-informed New Yorkers and asked them how often their trash got picked up. 

My daughter lives in a small apartment building in Brooklyn. She has three trash pickups per week. Plus a separate pickup for recycling once a week. There used to be another pickup - for composting - but that went away during the pandemic.

My brother lives in a large apartment building in Manhattan, and he reports two trash pickups and one recycling pickup per week.

This brings up an interesting point. New York City collects trash from large apartment buildings. Philadelphia does not - it requires these buildings to hire private trash haulers. 

Commercial Buildings

Both cities require commercial buildings to hire private trash haulers, but New York is in the process of establishing Commercial Waste Zones to rationalize the current helter-skelter system of private collection. As the NYC Sanitation Department's website puts it, "more than 90 different private carters crisscross the city each night to service the city’s 100,000 commercial businesses, driving long, overlapping and unsafe routes.

"The CWZ program will divide the city into 20 zones, each served by up to three carters selected through a competitive process. Five citywide contracts will also be awarded for the collection of containerized waste and compactors. This approach will reduce truck traffic associated with commercial waste collection by 50 percent, eliminating millions of heavy-duty truck miles from NYC streets every year, while strengthening service standards and allowing for customer choice." (For more on NYC's Commercial Waste Zones, click here.)

Next to the Union League, 2017.

Tonnage per Truck

Back to the large residential buildings. The fact that NYC picks up - and Philadelphia doesn't - strikes me as a big deal. It means that these two cities are conducting very different operations. One might even say non-comparable, but I have further thoughts on that. 

One more complicating factor. My casual observation also suggests to me that the size of the crew serving a truck is variable, at least in Philadelphia. There may be good reasons for this -  some routes may work better with more people; others with less. The amount of trash put out may vary over the course of the year. And so on.

So, what metric might allow us to compare the efficiency of trash collection in Philadelphia with the performance of other cities? There are so many variables that need to be filtered out. After a while I came to tonnage per truck. 

And I looked for the number of trash trucks in Philadelphia's fleet, and I couldn't find it. 

A man's got to know his limitations. I gave some thought to filing a Right to Know request, but I frankly think assembling and analyzing all this information is a job that is beyond me. Remember, our most appropriate peer cities aren't necessarily more communicative about their trash operations than we are.

Tonnage per truck should allow us to filter out frequency of pickups, size of truck crew, and differences in the types of buildings where the public sanitation service picks up trash. Will it filter out variations in network density? I'm not sure. But I think that's a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole, and this story is already too long. 

If tonnage per truck does filter out all - or at least most of - the noise in the system, we should be able to use this metric to compare the efficiency of trash collection in Philadelphia with the performance of other cities. 

Perhaps this comparison would tell us that we simply need to hire more people. After all, when you compare Philly and NYC staffing by square mile or total population, you're tempted to say Philly is understaffed. 

But what if tons per truck doesn't tell us we're understaffed? Then perhaps we should look more closely at peer cities that perform well, and see if they're doing things that we might want to bring to Philly.

Of course, it's possible that Philly's Streets Department has a tonnage per truck metric, along with other internal metrics that might prove useful to outsiders trying to analyze the Sanitation Division's operations. But if such internal metrics are not there, somebody is going to have to roll up her sleeves and build them from the base data. Time for our city's controller, Rebecca Rhynhart, to do another one of her famous performance audits.

In Sum

Here we are at the end. So what I have I learned? 

I think we're stuck with the Streets Department's two main strategies - push work to the customer, and increase investment per worker. What this means is that richer neighborhoods are going to be a lot cleaner than poorer neighborhoods. I personally think that is a suboptimal outcome. And even the richer neighborhoods are going to be dirty. The rotting leaves in the gutter can be hard to get to (parked cars), and many homeowners are content to stop their cleaning at the curb. And the road schmutz will continue to make the fabric of our built environment darker and murkier than I would like.

I think progress is possible, but many powerful constituencies are defending their perceived interests in ways that will make progress difficult.

Years ago, a friend of mine had moved to a nice block in Fairmount that was extremely short of street trees. She decided to organize a petition requesting that trees be planted, and she started going door to door asking for signatures. She remembers one older lady answering her door and listening patiently to the spiel. Then the old lady said this: "You want trees? Trees are dirty. If you want trees, move to the country!"

Don't assume that other people see the world the way you do.

Personally, I prefer Gordon Cullen's approach. Years ago, he wrote this: "... today the tree is more usually accepted in its own right as a living organism which is pleased to dwell among us."

Is it too much to ask for both trees and clean streets?

Recycling bins, Prague, 2013. Sklo means glass in Czech.

See also Barnacles at the Curb, Scavengers and Scow Trimmers, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor, Measuring the Health of a Parking System.

The War Over MLK Drive

Where Have I Seen This Movie Before?

Near Manchester, Vermont, 1988.

My favorite range war drives the plot in the movie Shane, which came out in 1953 and is my personal pick for Best Western Ever. The structure of the movie is fairly simple. Basically the sodbusters are moving in - President Lincoln's Homestead Act, you know. They're bringing their families with them and - gasp! - plowing the land and planting crops. 

The cattlemen are aghast - particularly the ranch owner, who at one point gives a speech in defense of the open range, claiming that he has a superior right to the land because he had come to a place that was wilderness and made it fruitful. 

The sodbusters aren't terribly interested in conforming to the expectations of the cattlemen. They keep on plowing and - gasp! - even building fences to keep the cattle away from the crops. 

The rancher boss decides it's time for sterner measures, so he brings in a gunslinger played by Jack Palance, who delivers a performance that is a distillation of pure evil. I remember as a child practicing putting on gloves the way Jack Palance did.

Unfortunately for the cattlemen, Alan Ladd has been working as a hired hand for one of the sodbusters. He's also a gunslinger, but he's been trying to retire.

And things go on from there.

So what does all this have to do with MLK Drive? Simply that the struggle over MLK, which has been going on for decades now, is a range war. 

On one side we have the people who live in neighborhoods adjacent to Fairmount Park, where Martin Luther King Drive is located. On the other side we have people from all over the city - and the region - who come to walk, bike, run and otherwise make use of the space. 

There's a nice story in PlanPhilly entitled "Change is hard." A resident of Wynnefield told the reporter that traffic on Belmont and Parkside avenues is up as people try to avoid the Schuylkill Expressway. This person also mentioned that local residents like the convenience of using MLK Drive to get to Center City and added  that older neighbors, in particular, want to avoid the Schuylkill. I don't blame them. I hate the Schuylkill.

But underneath all this, I sense a deep feeling that was memorably formulated by my son when he was two years old: "I want it the way it was."

That's simply not going to happen. The world is changing. 

I have no desire to push octogenarians onto the Schuylkill Expressway. But there are better solutions than a knee-jerk reversion to the status quo ante. 

I understand that members of City Council, like all politicians, have a strong interest in reelection, which involves a strong focus on pleasing constituents.

However, in public life there used to be an interest in balancing politics with policy. Many current politicians seem to have moved away from that formula, to the detriment, I would say, of both our country and our city.

See also Is It a Park, or Is It a Traffic Sewer?

Flexible Vanderbilt

Open Streets Brooklyn-Style

Yes, that's a parked car. No need for Inspector Javert.

Call it Vanderbilt 2.0. On a chilly Saturday recently, I had a look at the Open Streets installation on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn's Prospect Heights neighborhood. It's been there for a while, but this was my first visit.

The thing that struck me right off the bat was the two-way bicycle lane on the east side of the street. This is a temporary lane. It's only there when Vanderbilt is Open - Friday, 5 to 10 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 10 pm. 

This section of Vanderbilt runs from Atlantic Avenue to Grand Army Plaza, which is the front door to Prospect Park. (As Philadelphia's traffic engineers redesign Eakins Oval in front of the Art Museum, they could look at Grand Army Plaza for things not to do.) 

Prospect Park is Brooklyn's version of Manhattan's Central Park. Both parks had the same designers - Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux - and some people think Brooklyn has the better park. I love both parks equally. 

Like Central Park, Prospect Park is a mecca for bicyclists. And many of the cyclists heading to Prospect Park from places like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill seem to favor getting there (and back) by way of Vanderbilt. However, I hasten to add that my impression of the bicyclists on Vanderbilt is that many of them are not out for a recreational spin, but rather using their bikes as utility vehicles to get from one place to another. I judge this largely by their dress and the bikes they're riding.

My sources tell me the two-way lane is a relatively recent innovation. When Vanderbilt first became an Open Street, I'm told, it simply maintained the two separate bike lanes next to the parking lanes on each side of the street. This apparently led to some conflicts between bicyclists and pedestrians and diners, which were resolved by creating the two-way bike lane on the east side of the street, leaving the rest of the area for pedestrians. Here's a view of the current setup on the west side of the street. 

Even booksellers love the outdoors.

Vanderbilt is a wide street, and at some point in the past a street designer had the lovely idea of including a median strip, something I'd like to see more of in Philadelphia. Little islands like this have their uses, and people seem to pick up on this flexibility pretty quickly.

Another use of the median is storage of the barriers when Open Streets is on hiatus.  I managed to get out on Sunday morning and got this shot. I also bought some fabulous pastries at a French patisserie named Mille Feuille, 622 Vanderbilt. My four-year-old grandson just loved the raspberry croissant.

And here's a shot of the one-way bike lane on the west side in operation. The expression on the face of the first bicyclist may have something to do with the hill that he's climbing. This area is called Prospect Heights for a reason.

Some people may question why Vanderbilt is only an Open Street on weekends. I instead am impressed by Vanderbilt's flexibility, which shows itself in several ways.

First, separating pedestrians and bicyclists palliates the conflicts between people on bikes and people on their feet that bicycle advocates often seem reluctant to talk about. Certainly the conflicts are less dangerous than those created by motor vehicles, but still they exist, and here Vanderbilt has taken steps to reduce conflict.

Second, motorists also have a right to the street, and in this neighborhood I think parking is probably a bigger issue than passage. There is remarkably little off-street parking in Prospect Heights, and there are a lot of cars. In this respect, the area is very different from Center City Philadelphia, where we are so overbuilt for off-street parking that many garages are being demolished and replaced by residential construction.

And I do like that there is tolerance for the occasional laggard car that's still at the curb when the Open Street opens. No need to tow. We can work around it.

Although I don't suppose I'd be opposed to a parking citation. 

See also Fitting the Solution to the Problem,  Don't Tell Me That Peace Has Broken Out!

The Roots of the Republic

Unearthing the Reality

Annin Flag Co., Verona, N.J. Marjory Collins/OWI, March 1943.

I recall two parts of American history that I didn't learn much about in school - the time before the Revolution, and the decades after the Civil War.

After I got out of school I made a few stabs at filling some of the gaps that any education contains - there is, after all, only so much time.

I did read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (my copy is from the sixteenth printing of Samuel Eliot Morison's 1952 edition, which I bought in Plymouth, Massachusetts). Bradford served quite a few years as governor of the Plymouth colony; when he wrote he had not only his personal experience but also access to documents. 

I was stunned by his description of the Pequot War, and particularly of the Mystic massacre in 1637, which involved the burning of a fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River in what is now the state of Connecticut. 

"It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire," writes Bradford, who adds, "and horrible was the stink and scent thereof" (Bradford, p. 296). 

What had the Pequot Indians done to deserve this wholesale slaughter? It's a complicated story, but basically the Pequots and the English were neighbors, and they kept stepping on one another's toes. This led to violence, and in time the English decided they had had enough. The ensuing war led to the virtual destruction of the Pequot tribe; those who were not killed were incorporated into other tribes or enslaved, with a number apparently being sent to Bermuda. 

All of this doesn't exactly square with my childhood images of the first Thanksgiving. Which is probably why it is one of the many lacunae in our school books. 

Another thing I recall from my childhood exposure to American history is the occasional abrupt transition. Where, for instance, did the doctrine of Manifest Destiny come from? As I recall, it was presented to me as a last-minute cobbling together of novel ideas coupled with some brilliant phrase making. But what if there was nothing last-minute about it? What if Manifest Destiny - the term was coined in 1845, just before the war with Mexico - has firm roots dating back to the beginning of the English colonies, shortly after 1600? 

Gaps and twists can be signs that facts are being adjusted to fit a theory. But my thinking about the flaws in our national narrative didn't go much beyond Hey, I think there's a problem here. And then my son gave me Aziz Rana's The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010). Rana thinks American society has two basic issues that are tying us in knots today, and they have their roots, in North American soil, in the early seventeenth century. 

Our two problems are tension between an ingroup and several outgroups, and an insatiable lust for land, which has, over time, manifested itself in various ways. They are related problems, and Rana, who is a professor at Cornell's law school, brings them together in the term settler empire. (Rana, pp. 3, 12-14, 109-111. I think this term is basically a koan. The more I think about it, the more I see in it.) 

Rana traces the development of these two ideas in American history from the seventeenth century up to today. 

I'd like to suggest these two cultural constructs are not unique to America, but in fact occur spontaneously in human society. One has to do with defining a group, and the other has to do with defining the space from which the group gets its food.

Ingroups, Outgroups

Sociologists have been studying ingroups and outgroups for decades. Perhaps the most famous early experiment is known as Robbers Cave, from 1954. And the most vivid description of the ingroup-outgroup dynamic that I know of is the 1954 Lord of the Flies, which William Golding apparently wrote independently of the research literature. (For my understanding of ingroups and outgroups I rely heavily on Lilliana Mason and her 2018 book Uncivil Agreement, which was another eye-opener for me. Here's a link to the story I wrote in 2018.) 

Ingroups and outgroups are a complicated subject. For an example from American history, let's look south for a minute, to Virginia, where the first English arrived in 1607. Like the Puritans up north they immediately encountered their first outgroup, the Indians. And then, in 1619, a new outgroup showed up, the Africans. 

And here is where it gets interesting. The outcome for the Africans - centuries of slavery and oppression - was not foreordained. The social situation in Virginia in its early days was actually rather fluid. Many of the whites in the colony were also in an unfree status as indentured servants. These whites had an advantage over the black slaves in that their servitude came to an end after a defined number of years. It became an accepted practice to do the same with the Africans, freeing a slave after a number of years of service. 

And the former slaves had rights. Notes Rana, "In Virginia, free blacks were able to acquire property, vote, hold minor office, take legal action against Anglo settlers, and even own their own white indentured servants." They could also own slaves, and sometimes did. 

And those free blacks could and did marry whites. However, the most famous case of interracial marriage in early Virginia was between an Indian, Pocahontas, and a white man, John Rolfe, in 1614. When it comes to early Virginia, that was the main thing that I learned in school. 

And then things changed. It appears that the people at the top found their situation a little bit wobbly, and they found it convenient, among other measures, to develop a program of racial discrimination. Rana observes, "Perhaps the very first such law was passed in 1670 and denied free blacks in Virginia the right to own white indentured servants." Virginia's ship of state had changed course, and the Africans were excluded from the ingroup. It didn't have to be that way. 

In the seventeenth century, decisions were made by a small group of white men in Virginia that have dramatically affected the course of American history to this day. (For the situation in early Virginia, see Rana, pp. 43-45, 47-48.) 

Expansion

When it comes to both outgroups and the impulse to push boundaries, the Puritans would have had a ready-made roadmap for their journey - the story of Moses and Joshua leading the chosen people to the promised land. (For more on this, see Abortion and the Bible.)

And all the English colonists had pretty much a free hand defining and pushing around outgroups and expanding their territory as they saw fit for about a century and a half. Then, in the 1760s, things began to change. 

What changed was not the colonists, but the central government in London, which was facing what is sometimes called a problem of success. During the worldwide struggle known as the Seven Years' War (1756-1763, known as the French and Indian War in North America), the English beat the tar out of the French. The war cost France Canada and effectively ended French power in India, where the English began the slow process of absorbing the entire subcontinent. 

Until the Seven Years' War, the British Empire had been largely focused on the North American colonies and a number of islands in the Caribbean that produced sugar cane and rum. All of a sudden London no longer had an empire composed of colonies run by people whose roots lay in England. Instead it had the immediate challenge of figuring out how to incorporate some truly exotic societies into its empire.  

In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War the two places of greatest concern were Bengal and Quebec. Quebec was populated almost entirely by French Catholics, who were unlikely to become Protestants and who would certainly resist switching out their laws for the English common law. (There were an estimated 75,000 French and 400 Anglo-Protestants.) In Bengal the situation was, of course, even more extreme. Turning Bengalis into Englishmen was recognized as a non-starter. As Professor Rana puts it, "sheer demographics required the English use of local authorities and practices." (See Rana, pp. 72-74.) 

In their planning, the British were informed by their experience in Ireland. The English (and their Norman rulers) first showed up in 1169. Talk about a slow-moving train wreck. Anyway, by the sixteenth century, English control had largely been limited to the Pale - Dublin and its immediate surroundings. In 1565 England started to move out from the Pale, attempting to reestablish control over the whole island. Once again, things didn't go very well, but the English did use the occasion to refine their approach to the problem. 

In particular they evolved techniques and rationales for the expropriation and removal of indigenous populations. This approach reached its apogee in Ulster, the northern part of the island, in 1609 - two years after the English arrived in Virginia. In that year King James I reserved 80 percent of Ulster's land for English and Scottish settlers, thereby setting a precedent as the colonial project moved to the New World. (For Ireland, see Rana, pp. 28-30.) 

Working with this background, London in 1763 set about reorganizing its imperial apparatus to handle "a massive and culturally diverse empire," as Professor Rana puts it on page 72.  This involved a balancing act, because some of these populations had conflicting interests. Whether it wanted them or not, London found itself with 100,000 American Indians who were living in the territory of the empire, and it had to find a way to keep the English settlers and the Indians from squabbling with one another. Removing the Indians would be difficult and expensive, and so, in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, London drew a line at the Appalachian Mountains, reserved the land west of the line to the Indians, and told the English settlers not even to think of moving across the line. (See Rana, pp. 65-69.) 

(There's an interesting parallel here with Teddy Roosevelt, who is sometimes called the conservation president. He established 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, and five national parks, along with a number of other things like game preserves and national monuments, protecting more than 230 million acres and creating a conflict with settlers like Cliven and Ammon Bundy that persists to this day.) 

The ban on western migration enraged the English colonists. The poor people wanted to move west so they could get land of their own. And the wealthy, including people like George Washington (p. 69), saw a great deal of money to be made by speculating in western land. On a deeper level, London's move ran against the two basic beliefs in the concept of settler empire. First, the settlers were no longer being viewed as an ingroup. Instead they were being treated as an outgroup, relatively equal to the Indians and the French Catholics in Quebec and even the people in Bengal. Second, since their founding, the colonies had taken continuous territorial expansion as an article of faith. Not only was it important economically. It was also a big part of their identity. (Remember Moses and Joshua in the Bible.) 

From here, the path to the American Revolution is familiar - estrangement, attempts at reconciliation, and finally a lengthy divorce proceeding from 1775 to 1783. 

Fast Forward

Now let's fast forward to today. ... Wow, that was a tumultuous trip, which Professor Rana describes in detail (this is a very rich book, brimming with remarkable insights).

On 6 January 2021 a lynch mob stormed the Capitol looking, among other things, to hang Vice President Mike Pence by the neck until he was dead. They even set up a gallows outside the Capitol. 

Why did this happen? The seeds of 6 January were planted before the Revolution.

The people who say that we are a white Christian country aren't entirely wrong. Our founders saw their country as one that was ruled by white Protestant English men. In time, because there was a shortage of English men - George Orwell worked as a police officer in Burma, for God's sake - we became a country where the ingroup was white Christian men. And since then other groups have achieved at least formal membership in the ingroup through such devices as legislation and Constitutional amendments. It's possible that some of these admissions have been provisional, or notional.

And it is certainly true that some people refuse to accept any revision of the original setup, except of course for the first revision - the one that expanded Protestant to Christian and English to white.

Here's the nub of the issue: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Is it possible that Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, was feeling his way to a future he did not see clearly? I think so. I'd say the same of Lincoln.

History is a dynamic process. That's why it's so important to have a north star to steer by. And good charts, so we know where the reefs and shoals are. Professor Rana has helped me greatly by providing a roadmap to America's colonial history. 

One footnote: Yes, the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is named after the Pequot tribe: "Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes." (Chapter 16.)

See also Rugged Individualism, Mr. Piketty's Book, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, On Demagogues.