Let's write about George Washington the American farmer who rejected slavery but not during his lifetime

Echo book review published in the New York Review of Books.

Farmer George review by Daniel J. Kevles
Book by Bruce Ragsdale’s Washington at the Plow examines the connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.

https://www.amazon.com/Washington-Plow-Founding-Question-Slavery-ebook/dp/B097RYRBWM/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.703jj2-7iwoR9RxnUok0UQ.hxZcWa7HQywZiidRqNcwObdSWCfv5Zs_N2AGPYixBtk&dib_tag=se&keywords=Bruce+Ragsdale%E2%80%99s+Washington+at+the+Plow&qid=1771457537&sr=8-1

“First in war, first in peace,” one of George Washington’s Continental Army generals declaimed in Congress after his death, yet during his lifetime Washington wanted to be known as the new nation’s “first farmer.” Immediately upon the conclusion of the Revolutionary War with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, he resigned his command to resume his work at Mount Vernon, his family home on the western side of the Potomac River in Virginia. Contemporaries likened him to the legendary Roman leader Cincinnatus, who left his farm to repel an invasion, was quickly victorious, then relinquished power to return to the virtues of the plow. Washington gestured to Cincinnatus’s ideal of republican simplicity; according to a good friend, he found in farming “a personal gratification seen nowhere else in his life” other than in his domestic comforts. 

But Mount Vernon, which comprised extensive lands, scores of enslaved people under his control, and a mansion that he expanded to include a great room with Palladian-windowed views down to the Potomac, was far from simple. Neither, as Bruce Ragsdale reveals in the prodigiously researched Washington at the Plow, were his agricultural ambitions.

Those ambitions were striking—the management of his land and laborers to establish an agricultural model that was innovative and sustainable and that would inspire other farmers in building the new nation. Ragsdale, whose previous works include a study of economic development and slavery in Revolutionary Virginia, penetrates more deeply than other biographical accounts of Washington’s agricultural ideas and practices through close examination of the records of the Home House Farm—later called the Mansion House Farm—which surrounded the residence, and the four outlying farms, each a separately named plantation, into which Washington divided the Mount Vernon estate. He finds that the records expose “a curiosity of mind and boldness of imagination that few discerned in other dimensions of [Washington’s] life,” including in the military and presidential periods.

They also provide “the most detailed documentation of his engagement with slavery and his conflicted attitudes toward the institution.” Washington recognized that agricultural change at Mount Vernon depended on teaching his enslaved workers new skills or acquiring workers who already possessed them. The farm records report his encounters with the overseers and enslaved laborers who worked his lands, assessments of their attitudes, measures of their skills, descriptions of their tasks, and judgments of how well or poorly they carried them out. His goal of agricultural improvement drove the way he managed them while adding to the value of his investment in them. What is especially distinctive about Ragsdale’s book is its account of the strong, evolving link between Washington’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his beliefs and expectations concerning his enslaved laborers.

Washington, who had leased Mount Vernon from the estate of his late half-brother Lawrence beginning in 1754, inherited the property on the death of Lawrence’s widow in 1761. He had taken over its management in 1759, on his return from four years of duty as an officer in the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. He was newly married to Martha Custis, the widow of a wealthy planter, who brought a dowry of sizable personal property along with eighty-four enslaved men and women and six thousand acres of land, roughly tripling Washington’s total holdings. While some of the estate was used for raising corn, its major crop was tobacco, which Virginia planters had long grown and sold mostly to British merchants, shipping it down the Potomac to the Chesapeake Bay and across the Atlantic.

Washington had earlier worked as a surveyor in western Virginia, and his military service had brought him beyond the headwaters of the Potomac (which gather in what is now West Virginia) and across the Appalachian Mountains into what was then informally called the Ohio country. Although only twenty-seven when he began managing Mount Vernon, he possessed far more knowledge and experience of the colony’s western lands than most of his fellow planters, and Ragsdale writes that he “was eager to explore opportunities outside the traditional investments of the colonial Virginia gentry.” He soon envisioned the creation of an agricultural and commercial region that would reach from the transmontane west via the Potomac to the Chesapeake. Once Britain began imposing restrictive mercantilist controls on the colonies, he came to see Virginia and its neighboring colonies as constituting “a rising Empire,” energized by robust agriculture as well as manufacturing enterprises.

Washington assumed that his place in the future would depend on the development of a thriving agricultural enterprise of his own. To that end, he acquired from the Virginia Colony 33,000 acres of land in the Ohio country intending, in accord with Virginia law, to establish homesteads worked by tenants there. He also added substantially to his land holdings at Mount Vernon. In the years before the Revolution the estate came to comprise, including Martha’s lands, about 11,500 acres, some 3,260 of them arable.

Washington, who had picked up the rudiments of farming from Lawrence, involved himself in most of the estate’s operations and rode its expanse daily, a habit that he followed, when he was home, for most of his life. In regular touch with the soil, his managers, and a number of his enslaved workers, he recognized early on that the agricultural potential of his estate as well as of the rest of Virginia was threatened by soil exhaustion, a consequence of the long devotion to tobacco and corn. He sought to pursue a husbandry that would both restore the soil and yield products with markets beyond the mother country.

He turned for guidance to the “New Husbandry”—the methods and approach of the agricultural revolution that by the mid-eighteenth century was taking hold in Britain and spreading to France. Led by the owners of the great estates and their leaseholders, it was suffused with the tenets of the scientific revolution, casting aside ancient authority and practice in favor of empiricism and experimentation. Its advocates promoted new methods of sowing seeds, cultivating crops, and breeding animals, encouraged access to information through personal exchange and local societies, and published journals and treatises.

Washington initially learned of the New Husbandry from fellow gentry in Virginia and tobacco merchants in England, then after independence through correspondence with several of its British advocates. To his sensibility, they expressed an enlightened civic obligation that he considered worthy of emulation by his fellow American estate holders—“gentlemen who have leisure and abilities to devise and wherewithal to hazard something,” as he wrote to an enthusiast of the New Husbandry in Pennsylvania, men who would inspire the common farmer to take to the new agricultural methods. After the Revolution such men formed societies for agricultural improvement in a number of states, and several elected Washington to honorary membership. But while he endorsed their purpose, he refrained from publicly promoting the cause of innovation, preferring to encourage it via private influence and personal example.

Ragsdale writes that Washington acquired and studied a number of treatises on the New Husbandry, but he overlooks the fact that the treatises provided neither consistent nor straightforward instruction. Among those works, two in particular, influential on Washington and others, illustrate the point: Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s A Practical Treatise of Husbandry, new editions of which were published as Washington was taking over the management of Mount Vernon.

Tull, a mechanically resourceful estate owner in Berkshire, had invented a drill for sowing seed at uniform spacing and depth and a horse-drawn hoe for turning the soil while plants were growing. Duhamel, a polymath (knowledge about many fields) and member of the French Academy of Sciences, was distinguished in botany and agronomy. But while both extolled the New Husbandry in principle, they differed sharply on the best practices for pursuing it. Tull contended that finely turning the soil added significantly to its nutrient value and thus did away with the need for manuring and fallowing the land.

Duhamel, while admiring Tull’s sowing and hoeing, marshaled evidence from numerous experiments that without manuring and fallowing, cropland wore out.

In the face of such contradictions, Washington relied on his own resources and judgment. In the late 1760s, he replaced tobacco with wheat as his principal cash crop. 

Wheat would liberate Mount Vernon from dependence on the British market. It could be sold locally or for export as either grain or flour; in 1770 Washington built his own gristmill and soon, in response to Virginia’s requiring strict inspection of all flour for export, registered the brand “G. Washington,” marking it on all casks intended for foreign sale. By itself wheat, too, would deplete the soil; following Duhamel, Washington rotated the planting of it with successive seasons of corn, which he needed to feed his enslaved workers, and fallow. Apparently drawing on Tull, he cultivated wheat with a soil-turning plow but departed from him in applying a covering of manure.

On returning to Mount Vernon in 1783, after an absence of eight and a half years with the Continental Army, Washington resumed riding his farms and soon regretted that he had “continued so long in the ruinous mode of farming, which we are in.” 

Eager to change course, during the remainder of the decade he “put in place his most ambitious plan of farming,” Ragsdale writes.

He learned fresh strategies from recent British treatises—he solicited such works for the rest of his life—and from Arthur Young, Britain’s leading chronicler of the New Husbandry, who regularly sent him his Annals of Agriculture and advised him by correspondence on seeds, livestock, and farming tools. Washington assured him that the Annals would be his “guide.”

Young, doubtless with manure in mind, told him that in England farming succeeded in proportion to the attention given to cattle. Washington, like most American farmers, had been negligent with his livestock, and he resolved to improve them by establishing better meadows. He also constructed a large, functional barn, its design an eclectic joining of specifications from Young, among others, and his own judgment, that included stalls for dairy cows, pens for other livestock, and arrangements for the efficient distribution of feed and removal of dung.

Dung now ranked at the top of his agricultural armamentarium, figuring explicitly in what he wanted in a farm manager: a man deeply knowledgeable about advanced British husbandry who could “above all, Midas like…convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards Gold.” Washington built the first repository in the United States—a stercorary—for storing, mixing, and aging his animals’ droppings. Drawing on The Gentleman Farmer by the Scottish lord Henry Home, he devised his own expanded schedule of crop rotation, a seven-year cycle that started with corn and wheat, moved to revitalizing clover and grasses, and proceeded successively to turnips, barley, and pasture.

During his presidency Washington bought a license to install at Mount Vernon a remarkable milling machine that had been invented by the mechanical genius Oliver Evans, had been granted US Patent No. 3 in 1790, and processed grain from the first milling to flour packed in barrels. During his seven presidential years in Philadelphia—the country’s “thriving center of agricultural improvement and scientific inquiry,” Ragsdale reports—he paid close attention to “the practices that made Pennsylvania farming so productive and so distinct from the agriculture of Virginia.” After 1797, in his short postpresidential life, he remained a restless risk taker, devising a new plan for agriculture at Mount Vernon and investing in experimental enterprises and mechanical improvements. One such venture paid off handsomely: a distillery that “quickly became one of the largest producers of whiskey in the nation,” Ragsdale notes, and added substantially to the value of the estate’s grain production.

In the 1760s Washington had begun planting seeds in experimental beds that he eventually incorporated into a botanical garden, aiming “to try their Goodness” and measure the “several Virtues”—“powers,” in the botanical language of the day—of various compost mixtures. He grafted fruit trees onto rootstock and assessed varieties of English cherry, French pear, and walnut trees as well as grapes in the hope of creating a good Virginia wine. In the 1780s, in service of crop rotation and optimal preparation of the soil, he assessed different seeds and plants for how they flourished in various mixtures of soils and dungs, precisely recording experimental measurements as well as virtually every other detail of farming. Ragsdale notes that determining the ideal rate for sowing seeds per acre “became for Washington a quest comparable to his search for the proper sequence of crop rotations.”

Now famous on both sides of the Atlantic, Washington was a salient figure in an international network of agricultural exchange. 

Admirers at home and abroad, including the US ministers in Britain, sent him new plants and seeds as well as improved breeds of cattle and sheep, among them a calf produced by the first bull imported into the US from the herd of Robert Bakewell, the famed British pioneer of modern animal breeding. Particularly prominent in the network was the Marquis de Lafayette, a general of the wartime French forces and a lasting ally, comfortable in requesting Washington’s assistance to obtain seeds from Kentucky for King Louis XVI’s garden and generous in sending him a strong Maltese jackass for the production of mules, as well as two jennies (female asses) for multiplying the breed. Washington, no stranger to animal improvement, bred foxhounds in collaboration with his fellow huntsmen and earned steady stud fees for the services of his fine stallions, noting to his manager that he had “these kind of improvements very much at heart.”

The animal improvement closest to his ambitions, however, centered on mules, the offspring of jackasses and mares. 

Washington greatly valued large mules as draft animals, sterile though they are, ranking them superior to horses for their strength, longevity, and cheaper feeding costs. Powerful jackasses were uncommon in the United States, but he had learned about a Spanish breed during the war. Although Spain prohibited the export of its jackasses, in 1784 King Charles III, eager to curry favor with the new nation, authorized the export of two of them, one of which survived the Atlantic voyage and arrived at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in October 1785.

Newspapers covered its journey to Mount Vernon, one describing it as “the largest Jack Ass I ever saw.” Naming the animal “Royal Gift,” Washington put him to servicing mares, at first with little success, but by the next year, after using a jenny “as an excitement,” he could write, “Royal Gift never fails.” News of Royal Gift’s prowess spread, prompting Maryland planters to send mares and jennies to Mount Vernon for servicing. After Royal Gift’s death in 1796, Washington continued his mule production thanks in part to the Maltese jackass from Lafayette and his own enlarged stock of mares.

Having no counterpart in Britain’s New Husbandry, mule breeding constituted an independent initiative, Washington’s response to American agricultural needs. He explained to Young that he hoped “to secure a race of extraordinary goodness, which will stock the Country,” adding, “Their longevity & cheap keeping will be circumstances much in their favor.”

At the outset of his mule breeding, Washington told Lafayette another of his reasons for propagating the animals: they “are so much more valuable under the care which is usually bestowed on draught animals by our Negroes.” The pros and cons of relying on enslaved labor were never far from Washington’s thoughts on agricultural improvement. Ragsdale emphasizes that all the tasks of his new, innovative order—cultivation, experimentation, use of new tools—had to be “incorporated within a system of supervision and enforcement for which no British agricultural treatise would offer guidance.”

The more Washington expanded his efforts in the New Husbandry, the greater his reliance on enslaved workers, especially, as the enterprise grew more complicated, on those who were brought to Mount Vernon with essential skills or were taught them there. By 1774 Washington had acquired fifty-two additional enslaved hands—by purchase, natural increase, and transfer of some of Martha’s dower slaves—to work his enlarged estate and his western lands, bringing the total to 120 adults. Between 1786 and 1799 the number grew by at least another hundred, to a total of slightly more than three hundred able-bodied adults, children, and the elderly. They planted and cultivated the wheat and the multiple rotation crops with Tull-like mechanisms; worked at the gristmill and the distillery; managed the cattle and the sheep; gathered and applied the manure; and dug ditches and planted hedges to mark the estate’s boundaries. The carpenters among them coopered the barrels for the flour, helped build more housing for the burgeoning workforce, and joined with brickmakers to construct the elaborate barn, a project “of unprecedented scale and complexity,” Ragsdale notes.

At Mount Vernon, Washington likely brought to the management of the increasingly complicated New Husbandry the powerful shaping experience of his recent command of the Continental Army, an influence that Ragsdale neglects to consider. That job had included a broad range of interconnected responsibilities, including the acquisition of sufficient weapons, ammunition, and supplies; the training, feeding, discipline, and protection from disease of his ragtag troops; and the forging of them into a unified fighting force. At Mount Vernon, beginning in 1785, he reviewed weekly accounts that recorded the activities of his laborers, obtaining the data first himself and then from his overseers. A US senator later recalled that Washington’s overseers might “be styled generals,” adding:

The Friday of every week, is appointed for the overseers, or we will say brigadier generals, to make up their returns. Not a day’s work but is noted what, by whom, and where done; not a cow calves or ewe drops her lamb but is registered…. Thus the etiquette and arrangement of an army is preserved on his farm.

Washington was always concerned that Mount Vernon earn enough to cover the combined expenses of his self-styled gentleman’s life and farming operations. Ragsdale holds that the weekly reports reduced his enslaved laborers “to quantifiable units of production,” but he adds that Washington did not subject them to bookkeeping to determine profit and loss. Rather, the exercise aimed to assess the merits of managing the New Husbandry’s interwoven complexities with a reliance on enslaved labor.

Washington considered it a betrayal, perhaps something akin to desertion, when his enslaved workers ran away. He supported all efforts to recapture escapees from his own and others’ service. 

Like most slaveholders, he counted his enslaved laborers as strictly property suitable for sale or barter, or as currency for repayment of debts, valued according to their physical attributes, much as one might price a stallion or mare. On offering a consignment of salted fish and flour in Barbados, he declared that he would like payment “in Negroes”—two thirds young men and boys “not exceeding (at any rate) 20 yrs old,” the rest girls no older than sixteen, all “to be strait Limb’d, & in every respect strong & likely, with good Teeth & good Countenances—to be sufficiently provided with Cloaths.”

Before 1774 Washington had rarely acknowledged the cruel injustice of slavery and had taken its legitimacy for granted. But his attitudes began changing in response to the necessities of the Revolution and the forces it unleashed. To meet the need for able-bodied troops, several northern states allowed Blacks to join their militias. Washington resisted, but the initiative compelled him to participate in discussions of the “role of free Blacks and of slaves” in the war, Ragsdale writes. He reversed his stand, and ultimately some five thousand to eight thousand persons of African descent served in the Continental Army, making up as much as 3.5 percent of the total.

Amid spreading insistence that the principles of liberty applied to all human beings, Washington privately dismissed Quakers who encouraged enslaved people to seek their freedom, claiming that they “tampered” with men and women in bondage who were “happy & content to remain with their present masters.” 

However, he could not ignore Lafayette, a staunch enemy of slavery distressed by the idea that he might have enlisted his sword in defense of a country intent upon maintaining it. He urged Washington to endorse abolition and emancipate his slaves; several years later he tried unsuccessfully to enlist Washington’s support for an experiment in gradual emancipation. Washington assured his friend that he supported the scheme in principle, but he found reasons to stall.

Once back at Mount Vernon, Ragsdale says, Washington hoped to secure recognition on both sides of the Atlantic as an “enlightened and humane estate owner.” During the war he had ordered his manager to avoid the breakup of enslaved families and to refrain from selling any member without the enslaved person’s agreement. Now he told his overseers to continue providing his enslaved workers with adequate food and clothing, a draft of spirits during harvests, and medical care, emphasizing that they be treated “with humanity and tenderness when Sick.”

From the mid-1780s onward, troubled not least by the heated debates over slavery at the Constitutional Convention, Washington grew increasingly conflicted over his ownership of other human beings. Privately he confided that he considered it repugnant, in contradiction to the principles of the Revolution, and a form of property holding that undercut his enlightened identity. He found himself publicly attacked by antislavery advocates—for example, William Duane, an influential newspaper editor in Philadelphia, who lambasted “the great champion of American Freedom” for possessing “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY.” In much of the Anglo-American world that Washington cared about, “enlightenment” and “enslavement” were simply not in rapport.

Moreover, Ragsdale emphasizes, Washington increasingly realized that the system of enslaved labor, with its inflexibility and coerciveness, was antithetical to the trust and collaboration necessary to realize the New Husbandry agriculture on which he believed the commercial future of the United States in part depended. Many of the tracts on slavery in his library reinforced his experience that enslaved labor was an obstacle to agricultural improvement, and his inquiries into farming elsewhere revealed that its strength in Pennsylvania greatly benefited from its free-labor character. He held that in return for the sustenance he provided, his enslaved laborers had a “duty” to work steadily and reliably. He judged them “capable of much labor” but lacking incentive to do it; he counted them “ignorant,” untrustworthy, inept, and “more & more insolent & difficult to govern.” In the Continental Army he had rallied his troops by successfully coupling inspiration to authority; as the manager of an enslaved labor force he had no call to higher purpose that might transform duty into effort.

During his presidency Washington began contemplating the emancipation of his enslaved laborers, but since he continued to hope that they could be made to serve his plans for agricultural improvement, he took no action. 

To the contrary, while living in Philadelphia during his presidency, he worried that the several enslaved workers attending him might be infected by the ideas of freedom loose in the city and by the prospect of emancipation entailed in a Pennsylvania law that enabled them to become indentured servants for a limited term after six months’ residence. To protect his property, Washington prevented them from exercising their legal right to eventual freedom by sending them temporarily out of the state before the six months ended. To protect his reputation as well as his authority over his enslaved servants, he insisted to his manager that the move be accomplished in utmost secrecy “under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.” At Mount Vernon he allowed his overseers to mete out corporal punishment, which he had intended to end. His averred resistance to selling slaves evaporated, likely for economic reasons; by his death in mid-December 1799 more than 70 percent of his married enslaved persons lived apart from their spouses.

In the late 1790s, Washington drew up a plan for reorganizing operations at Mount Vernon, Ragsdale finds, to relieve the estate of much of its reliance on enslaved laborers and make it more closely resemble those of his model improving landowners in Great Britain. However, in 1799, unable to devise a strategy for his New Husbandry without enslaved laborers, he abandoned completely the aim of freeing any of them during his lifetime. His essential preferences by then, however, were revealed in the new will that he composed in July, five months before he died. It formally freed all the 124 slaves he owned upon his death but deferred their actual manumission until Martha’s death. He also stipulated that his heirs provide support for the elderly, infirm, and children among them, and he required that the young be taught to read and write. Martha, uneasy about keeping Washington’s freed but still-enslaved men and women in bondage, liberated them on January 1, 1801. By March, most, evidently not as happy and content as Washington had liked to believe, had gone elsewhere.

The emancipation came too late for establishing the model for economic growth that Washington had wanted to achieve at Mount Vernon. He had been farsighted in trying to promote agricultural innovation, but he had been shortsighted in sidestepping Lafayette’s plea that he strike a blow for emancipation, and he had doomed his own efforts in the New Husbandry by shackling them—and keeping them shackled—to an enslaved labor force.

Daniel J. Kevles is a Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and a visiting scholar at NYU School of Law. His books include The Physicists, In the Name of Eugenics, The Baltimore Case, and, most recently, Heirloom Fruits of America: Selections from the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. He is currently working on a history of innovation and intellectual property in living organisms. (February 2025)

Let;s write about literary refugees fleeing Nazi occupied Europe. A wonderful book review describes examples of courage

On May 21, 1940, the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger took a taxi from his home in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast, to Les Milles, an internment camp near Aix-en-Provence.

Review of Marseille 1940: The Flight of Litrature* by Uwe Wittstock, published in the New York Review of Books by Maurice Samuels.  

After the fall of France in World War II, many writers and artists fleeing the Nazis ended up in Marseille, desperately seeking a way out of occupied Europe.

From left, Max Ernst, Jacqueline Breton, André Masson, André Breton, and Varian Fry in Fry’s office, Marseille, 1941

It was a last extravagance to ward off reality, because Feuchtwanger knew what awaited him behind the gates. Eight months earlier, during the so-called Drôle de guerre (Phony War) that followed Hitler’s conquest of Poland, France had ordered all Germans and Austrians in the country, including those, like Feuchtwanger, who had fled fascism, to report to camps and detained them briefly. On May 14, four days after the Germans invaded France, an order went out for all “enemy aliens” between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five to turn themselves in once again. This time things were far worse. Even though Les Milles was not a labor or death camp, the conditions were squalid enough to make Feuchtwanger regret not having left for America while there was still time.

Fueled by a new methamphetamine called Pervitin, which it had developed to eliminate the need for sleep, the German army had broken through French defenses and was advancing at a pace that no one thought possible. Eight to ten million people fled in panic, jamming the roads. The situation was particularly dire for the German and Austrian refugees—many of them important writers and artists and many of them Jews—who had sought safety in France following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and found themselves once again at his mercy. The country they had escaped to suddenly became a country they needed to escape from. After the signing of the armistice on June 22, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern part of France, including Paris, as well as the Atlantic coast, while the south became a “free zone,” with its capital in the spa town of Vichy and a collaborationist government led by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. 

Many of the refugees converged on Marseille, France’s sole port not in Nazi hands, hoping to find a way out.

In Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature, the German literary critic Uwe Wittstock traces the anguished itineraries of more than a dozen refugee writers and artists and the efforts by a group of courageous Americans—along with many anonymous but no less courageous French people—to rescue them. Told in a series of short, suspenseful vignettes, it is a sequel to his book February 1933: The Winter of Literature, which followed a group of German intellectuals in the days after Hitler came to power.

Some of those whose hasty escape from Germany Wittstock narrated in the first book reappear in the second in even more dire straits. February 1933 struck a chord by charting the shift from denial to panic when Germans suddenly found themselves living in a fascist country, and Marseille 1940 makes another timely intervention: as governments once again shut borders and attempt to turn us against the foreigners in our midst, it helps us understand the plight of those fleeing dangerous or difficult circumstances as well as our responsibility to help them.

Central to the story is Varian Fry, a temperamental American journalist who had witnessed Nazi cruelty toward Jews and other dissidents firsthand while reporting from Berlin in the 1930s and who realized early on the peril that the refugees faced in occupied France. Fry’s story is known to English-speaking readers—less so in Germany—thanks to several historical studies and to Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio (2019), which was adapted into the TV miniseries Transatlantic (2023). With the help of associates, including his wife, Eileen, Fry formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which raised funds to send him to Marseille with a list of two hundred prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals to track down and save. His efforts to obtain American visas for them received an unexpected boost from Eleanor Roosevelt, who remembered meeting Feuchtwanger on a book-signing tour in the 1930s and who was moved when his American publisher sent her a snapshot of the writer in tattered clothing staring out from behind the barbed-wire fence of Les Milles.

During an election year, FDR feared opposition to such efforts from isolationists as well as from those, like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who claimed that the refugees would pose a threat to the United States. Applicants for entry were forced to prove that they had sufficient financial resources or a guarantor to support them so they would not become a public burden, to provide certification of their morality or good character (including an affirmation that they had never belonged to a Communist organization), and to submit a biographical sketch indicating the danger they faced at the hands of the Nazis. Despite enormous need, the State Department granted very few visas. However, the First Lady was able to apply pressure on her husband to speed the process for the famous names on the ERC’s list.

Even with American visas in hand, Fry had a difficult task. Locating the refugees on the list was the least of his problems: many sought him out after word spread of his presence in Marseille. 

But, getting them out of France was another matter. After the start of the war the only large transatlantic ocean liners departed from Lisbon, which meant that the refugees needed transit permits to cross Franco’s Spain and Portugal. Obtaining an exit visa from Vichy France was even more difficult, particularly for any refugee whose papers were not in order—as was the case for those who had refused to report to a French concentration camp or who had escaped from one. Fry eventually convinced an intrepid couple, the Hungarian-born Jewish antifascist resistance fighter Lisa Fittko and her husband, Hans, to smuggle frightened refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Drawing mainly on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Wittstock follows a wide cast of characters as they struggle to obtain visas and seek passage out of Marseille. Some of the stories end happily. Hannah Arendt, who later drew on her refugee experience to write her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), managed to escape from the French concentration camp of Gurs with forged papers and miraculously reunite with her husband before eventually obtaining an exit visa from France with the help of Fry and American Jewish groups. The writer Anna Seghers (born Annette Reiling), who could not get a US entry visa because of her Communist affiliations, finally secured one to Mexico and found passage, thanks to Fry, on a cargo ship along with the Surrealist impresario André Breton and the young ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. She channeled her experience into the novel Transit (1944).

Other refugees, such as Heinrich Mann, had a harder time. Once considered more successful than his brother and fellow novelist Thomas Mann, he began to lose his grip after fleeing Germany. Nervous and exhausted, he and his alcoholic wife made it to the US with the help of Fry, but he could not adjust to life outside Europe and never managed to regain his former stature. The philosopher Walter Benjamin did not make it out. In late September 1940, as his Spanish and Portuguese transit visas were about to expire and he was unable to obtain an exit visa from France, he presented himself at the doorstep of Fittko, an acquaintance from Paris, having heard that she was smuggling people across the Pyrenees. After being stopped by officials on the Spanish side of the border, Benjamin swallowed a lethal dose of morphine tablets rather than be turned over to the Gestapo. The next day the Spanish authorities, rattled by his death, let the rest of the party through.

Fry went to a great deal of trouble to help two antifascist Weimar politicians, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, both members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who had fled to France after opposing Hitler’s rise to power. Hilferding faced the added danger of being Jewish. They refused to be smuggled out of France with forged documents provided by Fry because they believed that such an escape was beneath their dignity as German politicians. Eventually the Vichy government granted them exit visas, and Fry helped arrange passage on one of the ships now traveling from Marseille to Martinique, but Breitscheid refused because the only available berth was in a dormitory below deck. It didn’t matter: in early 1941, shortly before the ship was to leave, they were both arrested by the Vichy police and handed to the Gestapo. Hilferding was tortured to death in custody, while Breitscheid perished at Buchenwald in 1944.

Although Wittstock makes readers feel the refugees’ overwhelming anxiety, he also relieves the tension with comedic moments. Feuchtwanger gets smuggled out of Saint Nicolas, another internment camp, by the American consul in Marseille, who gives him women’s clothes and tells him to pretend to be his mother-in-law when stopped by the French police. The novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel, travel through France with twelve suitcases, some of them containing the original scores of Alma’s ex-husband, the composer Gustav Mahler, which they hope to sell once they reach America to finance their lives in exile. When the precious suitcases go missing in the chaos of the exodus, Alma convinces a besotted hotel keeper to track them down for her. The couple eventually make it over the Pyrenees in the same group as the Manns, their luggage in tow.

Many of the writers and artists who cross Wittstock’s pages are familiar figures, but this glimpse into their flights reveals them in a new light. Marseille 1940 reads like a nonfiction version of Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite française, which follows a group of (non-Jewish French) characters as they flee Paris after the Nazi invasion.
Like Némirovsky, Wittstock explores how the extreme pressure of the historical moment functions as a kind of magnifying glass, revealing human characteristics that might never have emerged otherwise. Some of Wittstock’s subjects rise to the occasion. This is true particularly of the rescuers: Fry refused to buckle in the face of attempts by both Vichy officials and his colleagues back in New York to end his mission. The Fittkos risked their lives each time they ferried a group to safety. But it’s also true of many of the refugees, including Arendt and Seghers, who displayed a remarkable sangfroid and ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Some of them, however, descended into vindictiveness, pettiness, and worse. The catastrophe of France’s fall brought the deep-rooted rivalry between the Mann brothers to the surface and exacerbated tensions among the various Communist exiles. Mahler-Werfel, whose tortured romantic relationships with famous men—not just Mahler and Werfel but also the architect Walter Gropius—have earned her a dubious place in the pantheon of twentieth-century cultural icons, emerges in Wittstock’s account as a Hitler-loving harridan (bossy person) who regrets her marriage to the Jewish Werfel as soon as it puts her in danger. “Now I will have to wander to the ends of the earth with a people alien to me,” she confided to her journal, even as she and her husband engaged in an increasingly madcap folie à deux—lugging their twelve suitcases—through the south of France.

Historians may find fault with certain aspects of Marseille 1940. It lacks footnotes, making it impossible to tell which sources Wittstock used, and the bibliography is far from exhaustive. Some may bristle at the novelistic style. But Wittstock’s narrative method has advantages. By telling the stories of the refugees in the present tense, he forces us to see the world through their eyes. The book is filled with minute details that bring them to life—Feuchtwanger’s taxi to Les Milles, Mahler-Werfel’s suitcases—and allow us to experience the tragedy of France’s fall in a way that more conventional histories do not.

A more serious concern is the book’s focus on a relatively small number of renowned artists and writers. What about all the refugees who did not inspire the sympathy of the American First Lady and did not receive coveted American visas? Wittstock is not oblivious to this criticism. “Alongside every person mentioned in this book stood hundreds or thousands of others who had the same right to be memorialized,” he acknowledges in the epilogue. But the decision by the State Department to grant visas to only a select few is one of the great tragedies of the war, and Wittstock was not obliged to replicate it by keeping his focus so narrow. Aside from his descriptions of the throngs of people on the roads and the long lines at the American consulates, we get little sense of the plight of nonfamous refugees and no access to their inner lives.

Ultimately, though, I discerned a deeper purpose in his decision to focus on a narrow cast of celebrated characters. These are people we already know and care about. Some, like Arendt and Benjamin, are among the best-known intellectuals of our era. By depicting them as impoverished and desperate—denied, as Arendt put it, the “right to have rights”—Wittstock helps us conceive of a kind of suffering that all too often remains abstract when it affects unknown people in faraway lands.

Wittstock is preoccupied with the factors that enabled survival. To be sure, ingenuity and flexibility helped. Seghers turned to Mexico after the US closed its doors to her. Arendt saw an opening and slipped through when the time was right. They survived. Breitscheid and Hilferding refused to bend and did not. But as Wittstock makes clear, chance was a far more important factor. The decision to cross the Pyrenees at one place rather than another meant life or death. Whether refugees fleeing France happened to encounter a hostile border guard or one who was willing to let them through without the proper papers made all the difference: “In the end, whether one ends up with a supporter of Pétain or someone who sympathizes with the adversaries of the Nazis is a matter of luck.”

Even the luckiest refugees, however, would not have survived without a great deal of help from people who took enormous risks. By prolonging his stay in France to continue his work, Fry faced arrest and deportation, along with the dissolution of his marriage. The Fittkos faced certain death for their actions. The fact that Fry and his team—including two intrepid American women, the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who funded a large part of the operation, and Miriam Davenport, who administered it—were not heralded as heroes after the war is an injustice that has only recently begun to be rectified. Fry published his memoirs in 1945, but as Wittstock points out, “In the euphoria of victory, the American book market was not particularly interested in stories about past wartime suffering,” and many resented Fry’s allegations that the US State Department had made it difficult for Jewish refugees to enter America. He was not recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” until 1994.

And yet, though Fry’s contributions received belated recognition, the contributions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of French people to saving refugees have received no recognition at all. Over and over Wittstock describes small acts of generosity and quiet heroism by ordinary people who had no idea of the renown of those they were aiding. Vichy’s collaboration with Hitler casts a dark shadow over France in this period, but as Lisa Fittko put it in her memoir:


None of us could have survived without the help of French people in every corner of the country—French men and women whose humanity gave them the courage to take in, to hide, and to feed these displaced strangers.

When Fittko came out of the hospital drained and depleted, a kind butcher gave her an extra ration of meat even though she lacked the proper coupon. When she and her husband were stopped on the street by a French gendarme assigned to arrest foreigners, their landlady vouched that they were her neighbors. “It is astonishing how greatly influenced the populace is by the model set by personages like the prefect or the city’s bishop,” Wittstock writes of the residents of the town of Montauban, who allowed Arendt to live quietly among them. “Their commitment to refugees focuses public attention on how they can be helped, not on how they can be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.”

Wittstock does not explicitly make the connection to the dire circumstances facing refugees in Europe and the United States today, but he doesn’t need to. The parallels are all too apparent. When Fry received notice of his imminent arrest from the Marseille chief of police, he protested that his detention would be a violation of human rights. The Vichy functionary scoffed, “I am aware that they still believe in the antiquated notion of human rights in the United States.” But soon, he predicted, America would jettison such outdated ideas: “We’ve realized that society is more important than the individual. You will also come to understand that.” Now that our leaders are proving that policeman right, the stories of the refugees who flocked to Marseille in 1940 are more essential than ever.

*June 1940: France surrenders to Germany. The Gestapo is searching for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and many other writers and artists who had sought asylum in France since 1933. The young American journalist Varian Fry arrives in Marseille with the aim of rescuing as many as possible. This is the harrowing story of their flight from the Nazis under the most dangerous and threatening circumstances.

It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. In Nice, Heinrich Mann listens to the news on Radio London as air-raid sirens wail in the background. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is trapped in a French internment camp as the SS units close in. They all end up in Marseille, which they see as a last gateway to freedom. This is where Walter Benjamin writes his final essay to Hannah Arendt before setting off to escape across the Pyrenees. This is where the paths of countless German and Austrian writers, intellectuals and artists cross. And this too is where Varian Fry and his comrades risk life and limb to smuggle those in danger out of the country. This intensely compelling book lays bare the unthinkable courage and utter despair, as well as the hope and human companionship, which surged in the liminal space of Marseille during the darkest days of the twentieth century.

Let's Write about the lost civilization Easter Island archeology mystery

Easter Island and the Allure of “Lost Civilizations”- Book Review.
Why Western writers have shrouded the history of Rapa Nui in myth and mystery. By Margaret Talbot published in The New Yorker.

A moai on Rapa Nui, photographed by Katherine Routledge in 1913. The statues were carved by Polynesian settlers whose descendants were long treated as living among the ruins of a civilization they did not create. Photograph by Katherine Routledge / Royal Geographical Society / Getty

Finding out what actually happened in the deep past can be a slog (IOW, takes a long time), so when ancient history is packaged as mystery—spine-tingling but solvable—it’s hard to resist. 

Who doesn’t want to know how a lost civilization got lost, or where it might be hiding❓ The trouble is that what gets touted as a lost civilization often turns out to have been there all along. The people who can’t or won’t see the continuity in front of them have typically been European adventurers or armchair archeologists, busy spinning dismissive theories about the cultures of non-Europeans. The idea that the Pyramids of Egypt are so awesome they could only have been built by aliens is now a meme-able joke, fodder for Reddit debunkers and cheesy History Channel shows.

Still, the fancy persists, implanted like a microchip, ever since Erich von Däniken’s 1968, best-seller, “Chariots of the Gods,” begat the hugely popular 1973, television special “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.” Von Däniken argued that extraterrestrials must have visited Earth to lend a hand with various prehistoric undertakings—the Pyramids, the massive stone carvings of Easter Island, the Nazca Lines.  

A group of geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru.[2][3] They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed.[4] There are two major phases of the Nazca lines,

What may have begun as trippy speculation fed on a darker premise: that the present-day peoples of Africa, Polynesia, or Latin America were simply not impressive enough to have had ancestors capable of such feats. (Stonehenge was the rare European site to make an appearance among von Däniken’s confounding examples.)

The belief that Indigenous monuments must have been made by outsiders has, in more respectable guises, long shaped Western accounts of Indigenous cultural achievement. It continues to do so. The Pyramids of Egypt and the statues of Easter Island are extraordinary, and before modern archeological methods it was often hard to see how such works could have been produced without metal tools or machinery. That conundrum, however, slid easily into a failure of imagination and, specifically, an inability to credit the capacities of people who were not white. Nineteenth-century European explorers concluded that the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, now thought to have been built by the Shona between roughly 1100 and 1450 C.E., must be the work of Phoenicians or Babylonians or intrepid explorers from another far-flung place or, basically, anyone but the Africans who actually lived there. The pre-Columbian mound complexes scattered across North America met a similar fate. Their builders were variously imagined as giants, a vanquished white race of some kind, or members of the lost tribes of Israel—the last a notion promoted by Josiah Priest, a nineteenth-century pamphleteer with an animus against Native Americans, cited by Andrew Jackson to justify the Indian Removal Act, and taken up, in recent years, by Tucker Carlson.

In “Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island”* (Mariner), a crisp, confident, and convincing new account of the place and its chroniclers, the British archeologist Mike Pitts calls these theories of lost European civilizations and alien drop-ins “demonstrable claptrap.” Yet a much more reputable but equally insulting theory about Easter Island has remained influential, even dominant, Pitts argues. In this version of events, Easter Island is a cautionary tale about a population that destroyed itself, its island paradise, and whatever mysterious civilization had created its thousand or so stone monuments, or moai. (A Dutch captain who landed there on, yes, Easter gave it the name many Westerners still know it by. Rapa Nui is the Polynesian name for the island; Pitts follows the convention of using “Rapanui” for its Indigenous inhabitants.)

Europeans who arrived in the late nineteenth century on this speck of land in the vast eastern Pacific encountered a very small local population in whom they saw little of interest or value. By contrast, the statues—hewn from volcanic stone, with beetle brows, long ski-slope noses, down-turned mouths, and distant gazes, once upright and now toppled or partly buried—earned their respect. They were blocky, minimalist, stylized, enormous, and strikingly different from the representational statues of people and gods the Europeans knew from home.

In 1868, when the British naval frigate H.M.S. Topaze stopped at Easter Island to assess its usefulness to the Empire, the captain instructed his men to find a statue that they could bring home. With the assistance of islanders, they dug out an approximately eight-foot figure—one of the smaller, more portable moai, whose head had been spotted protruding from the ground—and hauled it back to the British Museum, where it stands to this day. The statue, known to the islanders as Hoa Hakananai’a, caused a sensation and, Pitts suggests, helped set off a new round of fervid conjecture about Rapa Nui. (Chile, Germany, and the United States soon dispatched ships to collect statues of their own.)

Martin Farquhar Tupper, a poet and an antiquarian favored by Queen Victoria, argued that Rapa Nui was the remnant of a lost continent whose people had perished. The spiritualist Madame Blavatsky saw the statues as evidence of a vanished race of giants who’d fled a mythical continent called Lemuria just before it sunk into the sea. Rapa Nui, Pitts writes, was subjected to “the full fantasy treatment,” based on a cluster of false premises: that the stone was too hard to carve with simple tools; that the island and its inhabitants were incapable of the civilization implied by the monuments; and that the real creators must have come from elsewhere—South America, Mexico, “Lemuria,” or beyond—and then disappeared. 

Running through it all was a strong note of judgment. The trees were gone because the islanders had cut them down to make war, and their world had been ruined, as Pitts writes, “because they had worshipped the wrong gods and reached above their station.”

It was common in these late-nineteenth-century accounts, Pitts writes, to describe Rapa Nui’s inhabitants as “born cannibals,” and to wonder who could have carved the stone figures. Perhaps a cataclysm—an earthquake, a volcanic eruption—had driven those people away. The dearth of trees on the island implied to some that the inhabitants had cut them down to make clubs and shields.

When a serious archeological expedition finally took place on Rapa Nui, in 1913-15, its leaders, the British husband-and-wife team Katherine and William Scoresby Routledge, concluded that the islanders they’d met were indeed the descendants of those who had carved the statues. Yet much of their work—Katherine’s in particular—was later lost or ignored. Pitts, who edited British Archaeology for many years and has written books on Stonehenge and the search for Richard III’s remains, first visited Rapa Nui three decades ago and has taken an interest in it ever since. He seems to see a kindred spirit in Katherine, whose legacy, he believes, might have reshaped the island’s existing narrative had it not been cut short in a notably harsh way.

In 1913, Katherine Routledge set out for Easter Island. She was from a wealthy Quaker family in the North of England, and formally trained in modern history. (She had studied at Oxford but received her degree from Trinity College Dublin, in 1895, because Oxford did not then grant diplomas to women.) By the time of the expedition, she was in her late forties and had already carried out archeological field work in East Africa with her husband, Scoresby Routledge, an anthropologist in the gentleman-explorer mold. The impetus for Rapa Nui came from Thomas Athol Joyce, an ethnographer at the British Museum who’d urged the Routledges to go while elderly islanders who remembered the old ways were still alive. Katherine read everything she could about the place, and the couple secured support from the Royal Geographical Society and commissioned a two-masted, ninety-one-foot wooden schooner for an archeological and ethnological survey designed to collect “scientific facts in relation” to the “inhabitants and their arts.”

In the course of sixteen months, from 1914, to 1915, the Routledges and their crew crisscrossed the island on horseback, worked closely with an influential islander named Tepano Ramo a Veriamo, and produced a pioneering survey of Rapa Nui’s topography and monuments. But, the oral histories Katherine conducted, interviewing elderly islanders, with Tepano translating, may have been more valuable still. Her informants told her, for example, about funeral practices—about how they wrapped bodies and carried them aloft to the base of coastal plinths. Pitts thinks that Katherine came to understand not only the island’s physical layout but its “psychogeography”: what certain places meant to the people who lived there.

She also formed a bond with a Rapanui prophetess named Angata, the leader of an uprising against the sheep-ranching operation then dominating the island, which took place during the Routledges’ stay. Scoresby dismissed Angata as a “mad woman” and her followers as “ruffians.” Katherine saw a “charming, frail old lady,” with expressive eyes, at the center of a movement that could not be reduced to livestock raiding. As the only woman on the expedition, and as someone who had long chafed at the limits imposed on her in Edwardian England, Katherine may have been predisposed to sympathy. When she thanked Angata for a gift of poultry and potatoes, Angata replied that no thanks were needed; the food, she said, came from God.

However impressive the Routledges’ research, it was no match for the seductive notion of a populace living among the ruins of a once mighty civilization whose origins were a puzzle and whose downfall was an object lesson. That idea was spooky and poignant and metaphorically potent. In particular, the Routledges’ research was no match for the narrative skills and indefatigable energy of the swashbuckling Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Heyerdahl became an international celebrity largely on the basis of his fascination with Easter Island and his eagerness to prove his theories about it, at great personal risk. Heyerdahl, whom Pitts describes as “a charismatic expedition leader, and a driven writer and self-publicist untroubled by historical nuance,” shared the common supposition that the moai could not have been made by ancestors of the present-day islanders. His particular spin was that the moai’s true creators were people who had travelled from the Americas. 

Pacific peoples weren’t known to be strong on massive visages and the like, popular opinion suggested at the time, whereas groups like the Inca, the Olmec, and the Toltec were. But Heyerdahl had further theories about where these ingenious Americans had come from originally. He took the “patronizing premise” that the Rapanui were not up to the task, Pitts writes, “and bolted on explicit racism.” And so Heyerdahl recast the island’s earliest settlers as members of a Caucasian race who had migrated from what is now Iraq or Turkey to the Americas and then across the Pacific, and who were tall, fair, blue-eyed, and bearded—not unlike Heyerdahl himself, as Pitts wryly observes.

In 1947, to demonstrate that a pre-Columbian voyage from South America to Polynesia was at least possible, Heyerdahl and a crew of five set off from Peru on a forty-square-foot balsa-wood raft he named the Kon-Tiki.

After a hundred and one days and some forty-three hundred miles drifting through shark-infested waters, they landed on a reef near Tahiti. The journey showed that such a crossing could be done—which did not, of course, mean that it had been. Still, it was a daring thing to have pulled off, and it yielded a best-selling book, an Oscar-winning 1950, documentary, and fuel for America’s postwar tiki-bar craze.

Heyerdahl’s ideas have been disputed by many scholars working on Rapa Nui, but they found a large and receptive audience, in part because they aligned with some of the conventional wisdom about Rapa Nui’s culture and its supposed violent rupture with its past. In 1994, the island received the Hollywood treatment in a film co-produced by Kevin Costner, not long after “Dances with Wolves.” In “Rapa-Nui,” bare chests, male and female, gleam in firelight, and internecine warfare—a love triangle gone apocalyptic—tears the island apart. Far more seriously, Easter Island became the exemplary case study in Jared Diamond’s 2005, book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.” Diamond called it “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources”—through deforestation, soil exhaustion, and overfishing—turning it into a worst-case metaphor for our collective future. The “ecocide” narrative, with Easter Island as its emblem, was eagerly taken up by politicians and podcasters, liberals and conservatives alike. New evidence from pollen analysis indicated that the island had once been home to tall palm trees, possibly even a primeval palm forest. In his writings and lectures, Diamond posed a chilling question: “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree”—like the Once-ler in “The Lorax”—“say while he was doing it?”

The story Pitts tells—drawing on new archeological findings, a fresh reading of eighteenth-century visitors’ accounts, and a reconsideration of Katherine Routledge’s neglected work—is quite different. It will no doubt be contested; Rapa Nui studies is a notably argumentative field, perhaps because so little can be definitively proved in the absence of early written records. All the same, Pitts’s account reflects a broader shift in the consensus, one that many readers will find persuasive, as this one did. He begins from a premise now widely shared: that Rapa Nui was settled in around 1200 by Polynesians who’d sailed in dugout canoes across uncharted reaches of the Pacific from another island. It was an extraordinary journey, but one that requires no transoceanic, or extraterrestrial, embellishment. The settlers spoke a Polynesian language, practiced Polynesian customs, and left descendants who continue to. Genetic studies of ancient and modern Rapanui confirm their Polynesian origins while also suggesting limited contact with South America, likely the result of later voyages rather than founding migration.

The island that the settlers discovered was probably less lush and hospitable than the one they had left. Much of it was open and grassy and studded with rocks, its soil fragile. It had coral reefs but not at sea level, rough surf, and no permanent freshwater streams. Still, the Rapanui made a go of it. Within a few generations, they began carving moai from volcanic stone and mounting them on plinths. Far from self-destructive, the Rapanui proved remarkably resilient.

When Europeans first arrived—a Dutch West India Company ship in 1722, a Spanish expedition from Peru in 1770, a British voyage under James Cook in 1774, and a French one in 1786—they encountered a population that appeared stable and well organized. Visitors noted agricultural practices that included crop rotation and other methods of soil renewal, carried out with what the French captain Jean-François de La Pérouse called “a great deal of intelligence.” The islanders kept chickens and grew taro, yams, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, and bananas.

They also described the statues as depicting distinguished ancestors, and interacted with them—lighting fires in front of them, dancing around them, or sitting before them with bowed heads. None of the eighteenth-century visitors “made a cultural distinction between living islanders and the statues,” Pitts writes. “They took it for granted that the statues were made by the people they met, and had meaning for them.” Population estimates varied, but Pitts places the likely number at around five thousand. (That’s high when compared with other scholars’ approximations, but several thousand seems like a safe assumption.)

These eighteenth-century European accounts have been underused, Pitts thinks, in part because they were hardly systematic or scientific, and also because some were thought to be lost in a shipwreck and others were scattered and difficult to consult. Today, there’s a range of archeological and genetic work that tends to support their basic observations while countering, or at least complicating, the familiar ecocide narrative. A 2024, genomic study tracking the island’s population over roughly four centuries found no sign of the sharp demographic collapse that is supposed to have occurred around 1600. Research by the American archeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt, among others, suggests that the islanders continued to prosper, and to build stone platforms for their statues, well beyond that date.

The evidence for environmental ruin, too, turns out to be less stark than advertised. The landscape of Rapa Nui probably never incorporated the sort of primeval forest of palm trees imagined in popular accounts, Pitts writes, but was more mixed, and scrubbier, with no one species of charismatic megaflora dominating. And, besides, it seems unfair to single out the Rapanui for cutting down their trees when, as Pitts notes, forest loss is a nearly ubiquitous consequence of human settlement. Medieval Europeans, to take one example, cleared enormous stretches of woodland—up to seventy per cent in parts of France and England by the fourteenth century—for farming, fuel, and timber. Later archeological research, including forensic examination of skeletal remains, has turned up no evidence for cannibalism or for a particularly bellicose society on Rapa Nui.

Something cataclysmic did happen to the Rapanui, but it was no great mystery, or shouldn’t be. In the eighteen-sixties, an Irish entrepreneur named Joseph Charles Byrne proposed a solution to a growing problem facing the Peruvian economy. Plantations producing sugar, the red dye cochineal, and cotton, along with guano operations on coastal islands, needed labor, and the tightening constraints on slavery were making it harder to secure.

Byrne suggested looking west, to Polynesia, where, he claimed, workers could be obtained cheaply. So began a round of slaving raids in Polynesia. Rapa Nui was especially attractive because of its relative proximity to South America. “Some 1,500 islanders were taken or killed,” Pitts writes, “as the rest of the community hid in coastal caves and cowered inland.” Byrne skirted formal bans on slavery by having captives sign work contracts—in Spanish, which they could not read—and selling the contracts rather than the people themselves. The slaving raids became a public-relations problem, anyway. They drew criticism in Chilean and Peruvian newspapers, and the French Ambassador in Lima made a fuss. The trade was halted, and ships carrying Polynesian laborers were ordered back.

By then, the damage was done. Some captives had come down with smallpox during an epidemic in Lima and carried it home, spreading it to others. After the crossings and the returns, according to Pitts, more than six thousand Polynesians died, with the Rapanui suffering the heaviest losses. By the late nineteenth century, Rapa Nui’s population had fallen to a hundred and ten people, only twenty-six of them women.

Even so, the island drew outsiders seeking to save souls or make their fortune. First came Catholic missionaries from Europe, who found willing converts among a population still reeling from catastrophe. Then came Chile, which had a navy and a long coastline and was looking for a toehold in the Pacific; in 1888, it annexed Rapa Nui. (The island remains a Chilean province. In the Chilean Presidential elections that brought a law-and-order conservative to power last month, it voted for a leftist woman.) Then came the Chilean branch of Williamson, Balfour, a global firm founded by two Scotsmen with interests in everything from flour mills to railroads and oil fields in Chile and Peru. It alighted on Rapa Nui as the site for a sheep-farming enterprise. From the late nineteenth century to the nineteen-fifties, the island functioned, in effect, as a company state where, as Pitts observes, the sheep got better treatment than the people, with the pastures as well watered as a golf course. The population slowly recovered, but most of the land was given over to grazing, and the remaining Rapanui were confined to a walled settlement. As a result, “generations of gardens, houses and monuments lay abandoned and inaccessible,” Pitts writes, and the practices that sustained historical memory were badly disrupted. Knowledge of the statues grew tenuous among survivors of the raids and their descendants.

After the Routledges returned to England, they gave lectures about and published their findings; Katherine wrote a well-received book about their expedition. She also retained reams of notes, interviews, transcripts, genealogies, and sketches, evidently intending to write up further studies.

By the late nineteen-twenties, however, her marriage was foundering, and her mental health was in decline. In 1927, the couple agreed to separate. Living in a grand house overlooking Hyde Park, Katherine packed up Scoresby’s belongings, sent them to a warehouse, changed the locks, and left for Syria and Palestine.

When she returned, she withdrew almost entirely, barricading herself in her seventeen-room house. In 1929, Scoresby’s and Katherine’s siblings had her committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she would remain until her death, seven years later. She was diagnosed with “mania,” believed by her doctors to be hereditary (one of her brothers had spent his life in an asylum after attacking his wife), aggravated, according to the diagnosis, by her “spiritualism.” Katherine appears to have suffered from paranoia and, at times, auditory hallucinations—though not, it seems, during her years in the Pacific. She needed help. Even so, the outcome was undeniably sad: a woman whose life had been defined by travel, research, and writing was cut off from all three. In a 2003 biography of Katherine, “Among Stone Giants,” the archeologist Jo Anne van Tilburg writes that “there is no evidence she ever saw Scoresby again.” For long stretches, she was denied access to books and bridled against the monotony and regulation of institutional life. When she was granted limited freedom to pursue her interests, such as walking in the garden, she exceeded the agreed-on terms and told her doctors she had done so “on principle.”

Even worse, perhaps, the wishes Katherine had set out in her will—that her notes, manuscripts, sketches, and photographs be edited, published, and deposited in a public archive, under the supervision of Thomas Athol Joyce, at the British Museum, or some suitable substitute—were never carried out, even though she had left the means to pay for this work. Scoresby, living in Cyprus and in poor health, showed little interest, and after his death, in 1939, no one else took responsibility. The fact that Katherine had been institutionalized may have tainted her scholarly reputation.

But she is not quite the neglected figure Pitts suggests—there is van Tilburg’s biography, for one thing, and she is regularly cited among a cohort of formidable women archeologists of the early twentieth century. If her papers had been collected and published, they might not have overturned entrenched ideas about Rapa Nui as forcefully as Pitts hopes. He’s surely exaggerating when he writes, “It seemed to me that had Katherine Routledge’s research become fully public,” those reigning narratives “would never have been born.” After all, his whole book makes a strong case for their tenacious utility. Still, it’s a shame that the papers were not available to the archeologists and anthropologists who came looking for them later. And it’s satisfying to see her taken so seriously, by a writer whose indignation on her behalf nearly matches his impatience with the persistent misreading of the island itself.

Rapa Nui continues to generate serious research questions. One that has long absorbed archeologists concerns the movement of the moai: how statues weighing several tons were transported from the quarry where they were carved to their platforms. Some scholars favor a method preserved in Rapanui oral tradition in which the figures were kept upright and made to “walk,” rocked forward with ropes. Heyerdahl demonstrated the technique’s feasibility in the nineteen-eighties, and more recently Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt have done the same, though others still argue for sledges or rollers. The island, in other words, still inspires genuine wonder, which is something quite different from the manufactured mystery of a lost civilization. The real question we should be asking now, as Pitts suggests, is how a people forced to cope with an inauspicious habitat, enslavement, and exploitation managed to survive at all. ♦

Published in the print edition of the February 2, 2026, issue, with the headline “Stone Face.”

*Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island book by Mike Pitts. Challenges the traditional narrative of Easter Island (Polynesian name- Rapa Nui) as a cautionary tale of self-destruction, arguing that the island's devastation was primarily caused by European contact, specifically the slave raids of the 1860s, rather than solely by internal ecological collapse. Pitts, a British archaeologist, uses new research to present a different story of a vibrant, resourceful Polynesian society that thrived for centuries before being decimated by disease and enslavement, refuting theories of alien intervention or a simple "ecocide".

Let's Write about Senator Bernie Sanders and the state of Vermont's synonymous relationship

This report is no "puff piece". It includes a good summary about the post World War II Vermont history.

When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills (of Vermont):

Early in his life, Sanders left the streets of Brooklyn for the woodlands of Vermont. What did the man bring to the state—and what did the  state bring to the man❓

Echo book review essay published in The New Yorker magazine, by Jill Lepore.  Senator Sanders arrived in Vermont before the New Leftists did in the sixties, and he stayed after they left. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and hippies but with the working poor.

Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “VERMONT,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians like chipmunks in a sap bucket. Inside, you could find out about snow conditions and fishing holes, inspect a woodstove, get advice about the best time to go leaf-peeping, pick up a train schedule, and buy a jug of maple syrup. A year after the center opened, Alfred Hitchcock went to Craftsbury, Vermont, to shoot “The Trouble with Harry.” People in that little town, population seven hundred and nine, brought the crew blueberry muffins and found a 1913 Buick for the production to use, on the condition that no one drive it more than forty miles an hour, which is about as fast as anyone could drive on those roads, anyway. The trouble with Harry is that he’s dead, flat on his back on a hill outside town, on a patch of grass carpeted with red-edged golden oak leaves, near a fallen log on a spot with a sweeping view of mountains blue and green and purple and glorious. In an interview with Vermont Life, Hitchcock said, “If one has to die, can you think of a more beautiful place to do so than in Vermont in autumn❓”🍂

It was in the autumn of the “Trouble with Harry” shoot that Bernie’s brother, Larry, nineteen, brought the thirteen-year-old future mayor of Burlington and two-time Presidential candidate on a subway ride from their three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment, at 1525 East Twenty-sixth Street, Brooklyn, where they took turns sleeping on a bed in the hallway (versus the couch), to Rockefeller Center. Wandering around, they stopped at Vermont, the bureau, and returned home with a brochure titled “Vermont Farms and Summer Homes for Sale.” Somehow, miraculously, Bernie Sanders would eventually own one such property, a stretch of woods in the tiny town of Middlesex, population seven hundred and seventy. “This brook is my brook❗” he said, and “This tree is my tree❗,” 🌳even if he didn’t altogether believe in private ownership. (“I am not a capitalist,” he once told the talk-show host Phil Donahue.)

Mr. Sanders, who i now eighty-four years old, was Vermont’s sole representative in the U.S. House from 1991 to 2007, and he has served in the Senate as an Independent from Vermont ever since. He has been a notoriously ineffective legislator, having introduced only three bills between 1991 and 2020 that became law, two of which concerned the names of post offices. Yet he has wielded nearly unrivalled influence over American politics of a quite particular and distinctively local character: in his career as the country’s leading progressive populist and the second most successful socialist ever to run for President—beaten only by Eugene Victor Debs, the railman of Terre Haute, Indiana—Sanders has brought to the political stage the view not from the streets of Brooklyn but from the mountains of Vermont, and especially from its biggest city, Burlington, which in 1981, when Sanders was elected mayor by a margin of ten votes, had a population, whopping for Vermont but by any other measure minuscule, of a little under thirty-eight thousand. (It’s barely bigger this winter, at forty-five thousand shivering souls.) 

This past summer (2025), Sanders more or less said that he has no plans to run for President again in 2028. (“Oh, God,” he told CNN. “Let’s not worry about that.”) He has, however, filed papers to run for reëlection to the Senate in 2030, when he’ll be eighty-nine, even though there doesn’t seem much chance he’ll really do that. In short, if it’s not quite time to assess the Vermonter’s legacy, it’s getting close.

Aside from Sanders and Calvin Coolidge—born in Plymouth Notch, in 1872—Vermont hasn’t left much of a stamp on American politics, at least nationally. Notionally, well, that’s another question. Vermont is for many Americans something of a mythical place, a land out of time, and there’s a reason for that: a storybook America, all red barns and covered bridges, black-and-white mottled cows grazing in rolling green pastures, and dried-apple-faced farmers leaning on pitchforks, is how the place sold itself, beginning not long before those two teen-agers from Brooklyn got off the train in midtown. Vermont Life, launched in 1946 to promote tourism in the heady days after the end of the war, when Americans had money in their wallets and gas in their tanks, regularly ran as a full-page ad a photograph of a sugarhouse, steam billowing from its cupola, above a few lines of text:  Something of the ruggedness of the granite and marble has entered into the veins of the people of Vermont. They do their own thinking; they make their own decisions; they stand by their own convictions with the unyielding tenacity of their eternal hills.
—Bruce Barton.

This endorsement appears to have been specifically aimed at New Yorkers, since Barton, a Republican, had represented Manhattan in the U.S. House. Barton helped invent Vermont, even though, as far as I can tell, he never lived there. He wasn’t only a politician; he was also, and mainly, an adman, the longtime president of B.B.D.O., the agency that served as a chief inspiration for “Mad Men.” His contributions to a Rockwellian vision of America included creating the fictional all-American home cook Betty Crocker. Was Vermont ever really Bruce Barton’s Vermont? Rugged and flinty and possessing an unyielding tenacity may be how a lot of Americans would like to see themselves, but in Vermont, a place Coolidge called a “brave little state,” what began as an adman’s pitch to tourists became something of an official state attitude that, among other things, transformed the landscape, or, rather, it committed the state to preserving the landscape for tourists. 

Inevitably, the people who paid the price for that preservation have been the poor and especially poor farmers. Today, you can board Amtrak’s Vermonter at Penn Station, heading north, and I promise you’ll know when you’ve crossed the border into that brave and beautiful and hard-luck little state.

Bernie Sanders crossed that border line just about as soon as he was able. His father, Eli, a Polish immigrant, was a travelling paint salesman; his mother, Dorothy Glassberg, born on the Lower East Side, suffered from congenital heart disease. She died in 1960, at the age of forty-seven. Young Bernard Sanders, who had been a high-school track star, watched her die in a charity hospital of a condition from which she might well have survived if the family had had more money. Two years later, Eli died of an apparent heart attack, having crashed his car outside a hospital emergency room to which he’d tried to drive himself. Sanders vowed to escape New York. He transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago, where he became a civil-rights activist and a devotee of the somewhat mystical and entirely sex-obsessed Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. After graduating, in 1964, mop-headed, bespectacled, and already famously slovenly, Sanders married, travelled in Europe and Israel, spent time on a kibbutz outside Haifa, and then went to Vermont with his wife. “We had never been to Vermont in our lives,” he later said. “We just drove up.” For twenty-five hundred dollars, they bought eighty-five mostly wooded acres, where they spent summers cooking on an improvised Sterno rig—old T-shirts stuck into coffee cans—that Sanders’s friends called Berno.

Vermont was at a turning point. In 1945, there had been twenty-six thousand family farms in the state. Twenty years later, when Sanders bought that patch of land, fewer than nine thousand farms were left, many families having lost theirs because the price of wool and milk was falling, or because the state had seized their land under eminent domain, to make way for the interstate highway, but also because, with all those skiers and second-home owners, including flatlanders like Sanders, property taxes had gone up, and farmers couldn’t afford to pay them. In other states, old farms became suburbs and strip malls, but not in Vermont, where most old farms reverted to forest. (Three-quarters of Vermont was farmland by the eighteen-fifties; three-quarters of the state is now forest.)

Mr. Sanders moved to Vermont, year-round and for good, in 1968, when droves of young people from all over the country headed for the hills. Much of the New Left, disillusioned with electoral politics after the fiasco of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, went back to the land. In Vermont, back-to-the-landers bought old hill farms for dirt cheap. By some estimates, a hundred thousand young people moved to Vermont between 1965, and 1975; by another, they set up more than a hundred communes. They kept the state rural, but they changed its politics. They started food co-ops and opened vegetarian restaurants and founded artists’ coöperatives and hooked up shortwave radios and published papers like the Vermont Freeman, a twenty-cent newspaper that was something of a radical, countercultural counterpart to Vermont Life, and whose editor distributed it out of the back of his VW. Year by year, under the influence of a movement sometimes known as Free Vermont, the stalwartly Republican state, which had voted for Richard Nixon by a wide margin in 1960, tilted further to the left.

Sanders doesn’t much like to talk about his early life, or, for that matter, his later life, and he declined to be interviewed by Dan Chiasson for the writer’s revelatory new book, “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place” (Knopf), but he left behind plenty of clues in Vermont. Between 1969 and 1974, Sanders contributed dozens of articles to the Vermont Freeman. In two pieces from 1969, for instance, he wrote about the wretchedness of city life (“the air is poisonous, the noise deafening, and the streets are dangerous to walk” ) and the hard lives of such “miserable people” as his father, taking the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan to do “moron work,” packed into subway cars with a faceless mob, then taking the train back at night to “family, dinner, arguments, TV and sleep”: “The years come and go, suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.” Like a miller whetting a stone, he readied his axe for grinding. A 1969 front-page teaser for one of Sanders’s articles in the Vermont Freeman works just as well for all of them: “Bernard Sanders views the ills of our troubled and dying society.” And that line could have served equally well as a slogan for his 2016, and 2020, Presidential campaigns.

Mr. Sanders, as Chiasson argues, considered himself a chronicler of Vermont’s transformation in the sixties, reporting that led him to a pained awareness of its economic costs. “I think Vermont has changed terrible since I was a kid,” a farmer told Sanders, in an interview published in the Vermont Freeman in 1970, a year when one in six Vermonters lived below the poverty line. (Currently, that number is one in ten.) “Vermont was beautiful, beautiful back in them days. And every farmer always paid his bills. He had the money to pay his bills. . . . And now, today, in the State of Vermont, the taxes is driving people right out of the homes that they own.”

Mr. Sanders boned up on socialism during his freshman year at Brooklyn College. But it was in the hills of Vermont that he witnessed the ravages of a particular kind of capitalism, saw families suffering in the hills the way his own parents had in the tenements. In 1971, he moved to Burlington and made his first run for the U.S. Senate, representing the Liberty Union, something of a counterculture political party. “I have only one donor, and he drove me here,” he said at a campaign stop, pointing to a friend. He won 2.2 per cent of the vote. That same year—blocks away from Sanders’s Burlington apartment, which wasn’t really an apartment, just a couple of rooms in what had once been a workers’ cottage, behind an abandoned glass factory—Dan Chiasson was born.

Chiasson, a poet, a longtime contributor to this magazine, and the chair of the English department at Wellesley, had a front-row seat to Sanders’s rise, and his “Bernie for Burlington” is nearly as much a memoir of its author as it is a biography of its subject and, not least, a history of the Green Mountain State. “It is no small irony that hill farms marketed to well-heeled city people piqued the interest of a thirteen-year-old Brooklyn Jew and future socialist who would arguably do more to impact Vermont’s traditional culture than anyone in the state’s history,” Chiasson writes, about the day Larry and Bernie stopped at that Vermont bureau and picked up that brochure. It is also no small irony that a boy who grew up in Sanders’s Burlington, only to leave it behind, would become its chronicler.

Chiasson’s roots in Vermont go back to his great-grandparents, Wilfred and Laura Delorme, French Canadians who met as teen-agers, in 1915, while working in a woollen mill in Winooski, across the river from Burlington. Burlington is so little, and Chiasson’s family history runs so deep, that his kin pop up all over the place. Wilfred fought in the First World War and then went back to the looms, but after the mills closed, in 1954, he began working for the state while also tending his farm in South Burlington. In the early sixties, one of Chiasson’s grandfathers worked on a crew that blasted a route through the Winooski River Valley to bring Interstate 89 up to Burlington.

That highway, along with Interstate 91, made it easier for the skiers and the second-home owners to get to Vermont from New York and Massachusetts, but highways also risked ruining what had become, after the decline of both manufacturing and farming, the chief source of Vermont’s wealth: its natural beauty. In 1968, the state legislature passed what became known as the Billboard Law, banning billboards so that the view from the highway would not be marred, and two years later it enacted Act 250, known as the Postcard Law, strictly regulating development to insure the preservation of the state’s Vermont Life landscape. In 1978, the legislature passed the Use Value Appraisal Act, which lowered property taxes for owners who agreed to maintain their property for agricultural purposes or forestland. (About a third of all land in the state is now enrolled in the program.) Freezing the landscape in time is what the people of Vermont, and not merely tourists, want, but it’s also left residents with a vexed regard for visitors. “Welcome to Vermont,” one bumper sticker reads. “Now Go Home.”

Vermont’s struggle to stay the same—Vermont Life-worthy—even as its population and its politics were undergoing a transformation as big as any state experienced in the twentieth century, shaped Sanders’s view of what politics can do and what it can’t, and what money can do and what it can’t, or ought not to. In the early seventies, when his relationship with the Vermont Freeman began to sour, he briefly published his own alternative newsletter, Movement. It didn’t last long—and published so irregularly that he told subscribers newsletters would appear “when you least expect it”—but it advanced the Liberty Union, which, in 1972, nominated Sanders as its candidate for governor and endorsed Benjamin Spock for President. (More Chiasson-family cameos: when Sanders took a visiting Dr. Spock out for steak, Chiasson’s great-uncle Esau was tending the bar.) By 1973, Sanders had settled into campaign rhetoric that would hold him in good stead to the present day. “While Vermonters are paying outrageous prices for gas and heating oil, the oil billionaires are getting even richer,” he wrote. More of Vermont’s rural poor sold their land. In 1975, when developers were buying up failing farms and building retail shops and restaurants to support ski areas, Chiasson’s great-grandfather Wilfred sold his small farm in South Burlington—“for pennies,” Chiasson writes.

Mr. Sanders, by now a perennial candidate, perfected his craggy, scolding, mitten-waving style. He’d arrived in Vermont before the 1968 New Leftists did, and he stayed after they’d gone. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and the hippies but with the working poor. In 1976, in a bid for the governorship during the U.S. Bicentennial, he complained about corporate ownership of the media: “We should not have a culture where the three major networks are controlled by the Chase Manhattan Bank.” (The premise that CBS, NBC, and ABC lacked journalistic integrity in the seventies is unsupportable, but the charge that corporate ownership corrupts the integrity of news organizations is borne out daily.) Tourism, Sanders argued, was having a “devastating impact” on the state’s economy. Men and women who’d lost their farms and their factory jobs were working as “chambermaids and burger flippers,” while out-of-state developers were getting rich and the skiers at Stowe were driving Porsches and BMWs. Sanders lost in 1976, but he had found his groove.

Mr. Sanders soon left the Liberty Union and started the American People’s Historical Society, a Howard Zinn-style educational outfit that made filmstrips and documentaries about everyone from Ethan Allen to Eugene V. Debs. The material was every bit as polemical and tendentious as Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and Sanders distributed it to Vermont public schools in his beat-up Volvo. He was also a bit strapped. In 1978, he was evicted. The next year, he made a documentary film, titled “Poverty in Vermont,” that featured penetrating and compassionate interviews with people who were displaced by Burlington’s ill-considered urban-renewal initiatives and living in a public-housing project called Franklin Square. By the fall of 1980, the Burlington Free Press was reporting that Sanders, “the historian and film maker,” was “testing whether he can build a coalition of poor people, blue collar workers and university students” in his race for mayor. It turned out he could. In 1981, he was elected mayor, if not quite the Zohran Mamdani of the Reagan revolution (Mamdani won by two hundred thousand votes, not ten), then at least a sty in the Gipper’s eye.

Born: 1971 (age 55 years), Burlington, Vermont

Dan Chiasson grew up as the son of a struggling single mother. He watched Sanders change Burlington, very much for the better, by supporting small businesses, redeveloping the deserted industrial waterfront into parkland and public space, balancing the budget, bringing minor-league baseball to the city, and expanding affordable housing through a municipal land trust. Sanders also established a new culture of citizen participation and engagement. He had a public-access TV show, “Bernie Speaks with the Community,” in which, mike in hand and dressed like a schlub, he interviewed Burlingtonians, especially kids and senior citizens and even the occasional cocker spaniel. It was a program with all the daffy affability of “This Is Spinal Tap.” Chiasson seems to know just about everyone in old clips from the show. He’s the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon of Burlington. When Michel Foucault came to give a lecture at the University of Vermont, where he was to be introduced by Sanders, the postmodern French philosopher sat on an orange sectional in a lounge where Chiasson’s mother had once recruited students to babysit her son. When Jesse Jackson appeared onstage at U.V.M. with Sanders during Jackson’s 1988 Presidential bid, Chiasson, a high schooler, tried, and failed, to get inside. The next year, Sanders’s last in the mayor’s office, Chiasson headed off to Amherst College. On Election Night in 1990, Chiasson climbed to an upper floor of the Amherst library to catch the radio signal from Brattleboro, where he was able to hear that, unbelievably, the socialist mayor from Burlington would become Vermont’s sole representative in Congress. He writes, with astonished and complicated pride, “My guy won.”

Looking back over Sanders’s career in Burlington from the middle of the sixties to the end of the eighties, Chiasson argues that “Bernie did, in important respects, change; and Vermont, in troubling ways, did not.” I’m not so sure I agree with what’s on either side of that semicolon. Sanders has sounded the same for more than half a century, while Vermont has, especially recently, changed a great deal.

 “The Trouble with Harry” movie's plot turns on the question of who killed the poor man, and, as nearly everyone in town tries to work that out, they bury him and dig him up and bury him and dig him up again and finally strip him naked and stow him in a bathtub. Key elements of the mystery include a dead rabbit, a live frog, a pair of loafers, a rifle, a milk bottle, and a millionaire who comes to town in a chauffeured limousine. You could very plausibly shoot a remake in Vermont today, and it would look just about the same. 

Still, it’s a different place, and more different every day. Given the housing shortage that’s afflicted the whole country, the state, in 2024, revised the Postcard Law to allow for more construction, at least in certain areas. Dairy farming has all but vanished, down from more than four thousand farms in 1969, to fewer than six hundred. Fentanyl has devastated Burlington, and much of the rest of Vermont, too, and the prevailing harm-reduction approach has largely, and often spectacularly, failed. The state, which has seen more deaths than births for years, faces a fast-unfolding demographic crisis. In the past few years, it’s suffered disastrous floods owing to climate change; Montpelier, the capital, has been flooded in two of the past three summers.

But Vermont has been buried before, and dug up again, and even brought back to life. Property taxes have risen by an average of forty per cent since 2020, when fugitives made their hopeful escapes from New York and New England, worsening the cycle of rising land values, rising taxes, and bigger bills for longtime locals. Despite the risk of flooding on lower ground, hilly, chilly Vermont is a destination for climate refugees. Other types of farming are replacing dairies. A lot of farmers are growing hops, hoping to make Vermont for beer what the Napa Valley is for wine. The state has about the best rural broadband program in the country, opening doors for small businesses and digital nomads alike. (Even my own scruffy little hill got hooked up last year.) Back-to-the-land movements seem to come in thirty-year cycles: the United States is due for one, and, who knows, maybe a hundred thousand Gen Z-ers, fleeing Brooklyn, will turn up in the next ten years, wearing canvas Carhartt pants and carrying iPads and knitting needles and glossy seed catalogues. More people, in short, are likely to move to Vermont. What they’ll bring, and what they’ll take, is harder to say.

After Bernie Sanders left Burlington for Washington, D.C., he mostly said the same things he’d been saying since the seventies, except louder. “Never before in American history have so few media conglomerates, all owned by the billionaire class, had so much influence over the public,” he declared in 2024. “Today, we have a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.” It can sound like cant, but it is, unfortunately, true in much of America, if, thank God, a bit less true in Vermont, brave little snowy muddy fierce little mountain state. ♦