The Bible Told Them So

Any Good Books, July 2021

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy

J. Russell Hawkins (Oxford University Press, 2021)

       "I don't believe the Bible endorses it; I don't believe God approves it; if we're going to eat with them and go to school with them, the time is going to come...when some of you that sit in this audience today will have grandchildren with Negro blood." In 1954, Pastor W. M. Nevins could get up in front of the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and argue against integration as an article of faith. He was speaking in a debate over a report from the SBC's Christian Life Commission which recommended an attitude of brotherly love in the face of the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision. The report was accepted, but iall across the South, resistance like Nevins's would be fervent and long-lived.

      J. Russell Hawkins devoted more than a decade to the research he presents in this book. He confined himself to one state, South Carolina and just two Christian denominations: the Baptists and Methodists. Such a robust slice of white Christianity generated plenty of letters, sermons, editorials, and meeting minutes for his purposes. His primary point is that southern white Christians considered themselves to have the correct Bible-based position on the matter of segregation, because they had been hearing it preached and taught from childhood, generation after generation. "Central to the drama for racial justice that unfolded during America's civil rights years lay an indisputable religious conflict between black Christian activists and their white Christian antagonists, both of whom confidently, proudly, and often joyously claimed God's favor for their political stance."

      Not only that: both sides cited the very same verse, Acts 17:26. "As recounted in the book of Acts, during Paul's visit to Athens, the apostle gave an impromptu sermon before the philosophers of the city in which he declared that God 'hath made of one blood all the nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.'" I'd like to point out that the slave trade itself had played merry hell with the bounds of their habitation, so it may be that that had been against God's will. No matter, the latter half of the verse served its purpose.

      "Interestingly, integrationists often appealed to the first half of Acts 17:26–the idea that God had made all the peoples of the earth from one person–as evidence that all humanity shared a common ancestry before God and could therefore lay claim to the equality that Jim Crow denied." Each side, as you might expect, accused the other of 'proof-texting', hunting for words in a row that supported their view.

       The white Christians of South Carolina had rhetorical recourse to other verses, as well, having to do with the tower of Babel and Noah's Ark, as well as the observation from the natural world that birds of a feather flock together. I think it's significant that the Baptists in particular were fundamentalists as to the Bible, considering it the literal Word of God. This stance made it bitterly difficult to accept that the Bible might be wrong, or that God might change his mind because the Supreme Court made a ruling. They also considered that each Christian had a right and a duty to read scripture for himself. For the Baptists, denominational power originated in the pews, for good or ill–it's a highly democratic system, but it means that pastors must cater to the views of his flock. A town with a Confederate soldier guarding the town square would never keep a pastor who appeared to accept school integration. Methodist bishops, by contrast, had authority over the placement of pastors, but that would not save the job of a 'radical' pastor in a church where the members disagreed with him. After the Brown decision, it was more likely that the minister would be found giving the invocation at a meeting of the local Citizens' Council. These organizations, comprised of leading businessmen, used economic power to preserve their social power over their black neighbors.

      Wofford, the Methodist College in Spartanburg, and Furman, in the Baptist university Greenville, were among the leaders in integration, albeit ten years after Brown. As private institutions, they could have opted to remain havens of whiteness, and plenty of alumni wished they would. But by 1964, the trustees and faculty could respond to other incentives: the schools preferred to attract serious scholars, and accept federal funds. Hawkins shows that the language of white supremacy had disappeared from the public arguments, while it's still seen in private communications. In any case, it took decades for enough black students to enroll to make either institution other than a safe white space.

      The Methodists of South Carolina, as part of the national United Methodist Church, spent the latter part of the 1960s working to reconcile the white and black conferences of the church, which had been separated by a 1939 compromise. In South Carolina, the merger was originally proposed to guarantee racially diverse bodies in the administration of the church, with a system of quotas; by the time the merger was hammered out, the white Methodists magically decided that they didn't need quotas because, in effect, their hearts were too pure to see race. Many fewer black Methodists voted for that version of the merger, but that's what passed. A posture of colorblindness drew a veil over the history of unequal treatment, which consequently went unresolved.

      South Carolina dragged its feet on school integration for nearly a decade; when it began to happen in earnest, the segregationist Christians changed their tune but not their intent. Segregation academies frequently started up using the Sunday School space of local churches. By this time, in the early seventies, people were careful to avoid mentioning race as a reason for choosing such a school. In the case of a school named after Wade Hampton, Confederate general and governor of the State at the end of Reconstruction, there's no need to say more. 'Heritage' and 'family values'' now carry the meaning.

       I don't entirely recommend this book as a reading experience: it's too close to its academic roots to be enjoyable as narrative. Hawkins quotes segregationists' anxious letters to Strom Thurmond, but he misses the chance to point out that Thurmond himself had black grandchildren (by way of a daughter whom he supported but never acknowledged, and whose rights he spent a long Senate career trying to quash.) Also, to my surprise, the copy-editing and indexing don't live up to the standards of the Oxford University Press.

       Howbeit, I was compelled to read it because the title answers a question I've wondered about pretty much all my life: what were they thinking? Why was there any such thing as a Christian segregationist? Within their bubble, these people were acting in good faith. The edifice of belief was too massive to move, sustained as it was by some admixture of self-interest and willful blindness. Of course I think they had much the worst of the argument, and many of their children were alienated from church by the perceived hypocrisy. I also think it's important to notice how that bubble continues to function down to the present day. White supremacy still comes in all flavors, from the violent to the genteel, and the church continues to be stained by it.

Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

Alexander Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021)

     Alexander Wolff sharpened his journalistic skills at Sports Illustrated for the better part of four decades. In 2017, when SI melted down its writing staff for scrap, Wolff took the buyout and moved to Berlin with his family for a year. The book that resulted is the biography of his family, embedded in the history of a chaotic and dramatic time. He goes back into the 19th century to find his Jewish ancestors, some of whom were baptized under the pressures of the time, but most of the book concerns his grandfather, Kurt, and his father, Niko, whose fortunes diverged when Kurt left for America, fleeing the rising Nazi regime.

     Kurt was a publisher, a womanizer, and a partisan of high culture. His first publishing house, the Kurt Wolff Verlag, lasted from before the first world war until 1930. "The Nazis likely objected less to Kurt's mother's Jewish ancestry than to his authors, many of them Jewish, like Franz Kafka, or Expressionist, pacifist, or 'degenerate' besides." After he and his second wife got away to New York, in 1941, they founded Pantheon Books, another enterprise as poor in funds as it was rich in good taste. Fortunes would change when the house landed Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, followed by Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Both were somewhat less highbrow than Pantheon's usual fare, and vastly more profitable.

     Kurt's first wife, Elisabeth Merck Wolff Albrecht, remained in Germany, as did their two children, Maria and Niko. Niko was, as the state measured these things, half as Jewish as his father, so he was eligible to join the Hitler Youth during his boarding school days. In 1940, he was drafted, and became a driver and mechanic in the Wehrmacht, supporting a Luftwaffe unit. For the next six years, his letters to his mother depict his transformation from an earnest teenager to an exhausted and hungry soldier, the embodiment of war-weariness.

    Wolff makes a productive digression when he supplements his father's personal history with research by the historian Timothy Snyder. In Bloodlands, Snyder describes the scorched earth that both the Soviet Union and Germany made of Poland, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine between 1933 and 1945. Something like fourteen million people died of starvation and associated causes, as both Stalin and Hitler deemed them unworthy of the means of life. But from Ukraine, Niko is writing cheerfully to his mother about the bread, soup, cheese, and sausage he and his comrades enjoy. "In wondering 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' says Wolff, 'I hardly expected the answer to come back, 'I ate well.'"

    Much later, when the allies won the day, Niko would be subject to a certain amount of payback, once riding in a cattle car for three days. The Allies had trouble keeping up with, let alone feeding, five million prisoners of war, amid the rubble of Europe. By the time he got back to his mother's house in Munich, he weighed a skeletal 133 pounds.

    Niko's mother, Elisabeth was a daughter of the Merck family, which made a multi-generational fortune in opiates and other drugs, including one called Eukodol to which Adolf Hitler is plausibly rumored to have been addicted before U.S. planes bombed the factory in late 1944. She was stably housed enough to receive and preserve her son's letters partly because Dr. Albrecht, her second husband, was a 'supporting member' of the SS, who contributed money rather than actually joining up. It's complicated.

    All credit to Wolff for pursuing the family history, interviewing cousins and probing into archives. He writes with due humility; how can we really know what we would have done? He's not seeking to take on the guilt of the past; each generation deserves a morally clean slate at birth. But responsibility? Yes, to "confront and engage and respond." From Berlin, he can see that the United States has a lot of work to do on this front. Are we treating refugees and migrants as generously as New York treated Karl and Niko (though obviously not all of the Europeans who needed help)?

     Wolff's own mother came from a family that had kept people in bondage in Mississippi. Our work of remembrance and reconciliation with that history is woefully lagging; imagine if all of the antebellum mansions that dot the South were considered as so many Treblinkas, and "the Stars and Bars as a homegrown Swastika."

     Each child is born with a historical clean slate, too. Niko made a break with his past when he emigrated, and his son was raised as an American baby boom child. "Why did he never go into such things? He wanted to spare us, of course. But the question, tacked on to an ever-lengthening list, suggests an answer in the form of another question: How could he have spoken of them? Although that hardly keeps the back half of the refrain from coming round, the companion to He never told me: I never asked." 

 

Published by email, June 1, 2021

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

James Nestor (2021, Riverhead Books)

 

          In Breath, James Nestor has found the ultimate subject for immersive reporting. Every one of us breathes every day, yet most of us know almost nothing about it. Actually, we know less than some ancient civilizations did: "Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating back to around 400 BCE focused entirely on breathing, how it could kill us or heal us, depending on how we used it." Today our doctors have all kinds of equipment, of course, and could readily study our respiration rates and the composition of our blood gases, but they almost never do. What are they missing, and why does it matter?

        In the past two centuries, some people have rediscovered and tried to reintroduce what the Taoists (and the Hindus, and the Buddhists) knew. "Many early pioneers in this discipline weren't scientists. They were tinkerers, a kind of rogue group I call 'pulmonauts,' who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them." Their work has consequently had trouble getting a lasting foothold in the culture of medicine. The chance to hear about these odd ducks is a strength, and a delight, of this book.

        Carl Stough, for example, started his career as a choral conductor. He went on to teach opera singers, paraplegics, and people with emphysema better ways of breathing. Under his training, the 1968 U.S. men's track team had one of the great Olympic competitions in history, setting five world records in Mexico City. He broke new ground in every field he tried, but he didn't train anybody to carry on his work. "Stough broke all the rules; he expanded lungs and extended life spans. And yet, most people today have never heard of him."

        Anders Olsson is a Swedish man who has become obsessed with better ways of breathing. He joined Nestor in a mildly insane experiment: they had themselves studied at intervals while they underwent ten days of breathing only through their mouths. The experience of nasal obstruction was as gruesome as you'd imagine: "My snoring has increased 4,820 percent from ten days ago." Fortunately, switching to nasal breathing for the next ten days relieved their headaches, sleep apnea, and other ills relatively quickly.

        Olsson joined Nestor in this project because his own research suggests that overbreathing is a widespread problem, that we actually need more carbon dioxide in our blood to make the best use of the oxygen we take in. Breathing more slowly, and spending more time between inhalations, seems to improve the functions of the nervous system, the heart, and the lungs, and reduce overall stress on the body. Some psychologists are extending that insight into treatment for anxiety disorders as well, having patients inhale extra carbon dioxide to stave off panic attacks. Maybe that's why we can sometimes get a calming effect from a brisk walk.

          Nestor also found that our breathing is also compromised by the changes in facial structure that came along with processed food over the past three centuries. It's not just genetics, it's functional. Of course, he's dogged about the question. "There had to be procedures, manipulations, or exercises that could reverse the past few centuries of damage from soft and mushy industrialized food. There had to be something that could help me with my own obstructed airways, and the wheezing, respiratory problems, and congestion I'd often experienced."

           There is: more exercise for the jaw. He actually added bone mass to his lower face by biting on a retainer and chewing gum. "The chew-airway connection, like so much else breath-related, was old news. As I dug through a century of scientific papers on the subject over several months, I felt like I was trapped in a respiratory research spin cycle. Different scientists, different decades; the same conclusions, the same collective amnesia."

            Since we breathe all day, every day, this book will make you self-conscious. How fast am I breathing right now? Can I walk faster without panting? How can I keep my mouth closed at night, comfortably? (I'm trying out a sleep mask as a chin sling; it's pretty comfortable, and I'm sleeping better.) Because this book is selling so well, I have hopes that this knowledge will be taken up in formal medicine. It probably won't, though, because it comes from outside the walls, which kicks up medicine's own immune response. Nevertheless, better breathing might make us healthier. It's up to us to be curious, and willing to try simple things. 

 

 

Any Good Books, May 1, 2021 

published by email

 

Rock Breaks Scissors:

Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

William Poundstone (2014; Little, Brown and Company)

       We hear a lot these days about algorithms behind the scenes of our digital lives: the minute we shop or browse for news online, Big Data draws a bead on us. Research shows that it would take a great deal of effort not to be predictable in this way; in fact, we probably couldn't achieve it if we tried.  This is not just true of my taste in L.L. Bean sweaters - and what I might be willing to pay for them - but all the way down to the smallest atoms of choice, like a friendly game of Rock, Paper, Scissors over a bar tab. (Not always so friendly: did you know that there are international tournaments of RPS?)

 

      There's actually a game one step more primitive than that, in which two players make individual choices, such as heads or tails on a penny they hold, and award the win to either matching coins, for one player, or non-matching coins for the other. Any binary will do: odds and evens, or yeses and noes. When playing against a machine, the ideal would be to play a random sequence of guesses, and avoid falling into predictable patterns. 

 

      Practically nobody can do this; our vision of randomness turns out to be guessable by the most primitive machines. Back in the fifties, a couple of the masterminds at Bell Labs built such machines; Claude Shannon's had sixteen bits of memory, fewer than you have in your fingers and toes. "A stream of brilliant and egotistical scientists, engineers, and mathematicians passed through Bell Labs in the 1950's. Shannons' outguessing machine was the sword in the stone. Anyone with pretensions to being smart could hardly leave without matching his genius against it. Few could resist the challenge, and few left without sacrificing a bit of ego." Shannon himself, naturally, had the only consistent winning record. 

 

      Poundstone's book looks into research on the prediction problems we encounter in everyday life: multiple choice tests, March Madness brackets, or tennis serves; and some that are rare but consequential: picking unguessable passwords, or offering the right price on a house. His advice won't make you unbeatable, but these are cases where moving the odds a little bit is at least pleasing, and possibly profitable. 

 

      Some of the advice amounts to: be humble. You're human, so your intuition about what randomness looks like is probably terrible. Your intuitions about football betting, in a point-spread tournament, are probably so bad that you'd win just as often betting the opposite of your preferred card, because if your contrarian Evil Twin wins, there are probably no other bets like that to split the pot with. 

 

       The stock market is the classic case of needing to outwit other humans as ill-informed as you are. Poundstone's long term investment strategy, based on a ten-year trailing average of price-to-earnings ratios, is the polar opposite of day trading. It's austere in the extreme, but he's probably right. 

 

      Even if you have no skin in such games, Rock Breaks Scissors is an invigorating book. The writing is clean and clear, and Poundstone follows the questions he raises to a reasonable depth. And his goal is salutary: "To understand the misperception of randomness is to gain power, not over fate but over ourselves. Fortuna keeps spinning her wheel, and no one gets out of the game."

Any Good Books, April 1, 2021 by email.

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

James Alan McPherson (2000, Touchstone)

       The essays of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) that are collected here were written near the end of his distinguished career as a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher. They offer glimpses of his life as a student, a father, and an observer of American culture and history. His range is impressive, not to say intimidating: he's also capable of reckoning with what ancient Rome, Shakespeare, and modern Japan might have to say to us.

      The exile of the subtitle refers to the fact that, beginning in 1981, he made his home in Iowa City, where he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; that's a long way from his childhood: "I lived in a lower-class black community in Savannah, Georgia, attended segregated public schools, and knew no white people socially. I can't remember thinking of this last fact as a disadvantage, but I do know that early on I was being conditioned to believe that I was not supposed to know any white people on social terms." As fate would have it, he became a reader, and then a student at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. At Harvard Law School, he studied fiction writing on the side, and followed up with an MFA from the Iowa workshop, having already been published by the Atlantic Monthly.

      Iowa may be one of the whitest places there is; what McPherson liked about it was that it was self-consciously a place with customs and rituals, a sense of the Done Thing. He went so far as to pose as a sports fan, in concert with the prevailing ethos. "...I was sure to find all the butchers watching a game on television. They had already assumed that I was an athlete because all the black males they noticed were athletes. I did not disappoint them." But of course, there's much more going on with him than that. It's just that you can't get close enough to people to figure out their real stories without making some gesture of community.

       McPherson's own community included Ralph Ellison, whom he appreciates here both as a hero and as a friend, in an essay responding to the publication of Ellison's Juneteenth. Ellison, McPherson says, brought to the modernist project a blues sensibility, capable of mingling the inescapable strife of daily life with a streak of humor, and of personal style. After all, among the ancient Greeks, "life was tragic, full of agon. But to them it was also comic. And the two dramatic categories were linked."

       They're linked in Huckleberry Finn, certainly. In an essay occasioned by the restoration of some passages of the book that had been cut, McPherson observes that Mark Twain "was writing about the possibility of friendships across racial lines, at a time when such emotional connections were considered radical. He was writing about the struggles of the human heart confined to the structure of white supremacy...yet Twain, like Stephen Crane after him, still wrestled with the possibilities of heroic action within the confines of a corrupt uncaring culture."

       Such matters are in McPherson's purview as well, particularly when he reads Othello in the shadow of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, which were recent history at the time. The outlines of our life today were clear to him already: "Prosperity has been polarized, with great wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The institution of the nation-state is rapidly being replaced by global corporate ties under invisible managements. The middle class is frightened. The poor no longer exist as human beings. Europe is becoming one federated nation, while the demographics of the United States are changing relentlessly. Information is everywhere, but there is less and less of it with any substance."

      That's the world we still live in, and we can't say nobody saw it coming.

 

Emailed as  Any Good Books, March 1, 2021