A Review of The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent.

The Guarded Gate

Daniel Okrent is also the author of Last Call, the history and implementation of Prohibition. It was a surprisingly engrossing book, meticulous and completely relevant to the topic, so I was very happy to see that he had written a book on two topics which I'm even more interested in. What's even more interesting is his account of how those topics merged early in the 20th century in one of America's darker chapters.

In his work on Prohibition, Okrent delved into how temperance activists tapped latent racism to boost their case. In this book, he exhaustively (and exhaustingly) documents how the nation's seething nativism and paranoia over the changing population was a problem exaggerated to fit a new scientific solution: eugenics theory.

Eugenics may seem as arcane as bloodletting to the modern, but it was, like bloodletting, once the cutting edge of biological scientific theorizing. It's father was Sir Francis Galton, one of the many, many descendants of the legendarily brilliant and promiscuous Erasmus Darwin, and a cousin of Charles. Without implying causation and careful not to yoke the evolutionary theory directly to eugenics, the author continues. While he does not assign blame, Okrent does presume that the Darwinian Revolution removed the extant moral opposition of the scientific community to thinking of and consequently treating humans as merely an evolved hierarchy of animal life.

To say Galton was a prodigy is as much of an understatement as saying that his ancestor Erasmus was fond of the ladies.

He read at age 2, mastered Latin at age 4, quoted Sir Walter Scott often at age 5 and 6 years of age found him reading the Iliad with exceptional comprehension. He was the heir of substantial family fortunes, to which he had full access by the age of 22. But for apparently not one minute of his life, did he recline in the lap of luxury. His curiosity was ravenous and his method for satiating it was obsessive counting. He explained everything, or at least attempted to, with numbers.

He counted earthworms after rain, mosquito bites, formed equations for what percentage of an audience was attentive by noting and counting movements. No subject was too general or too specific. He even devoted 3 months to the exploration of what constitutes a proper cup of tea.

Galton's American protege, Charles Davenport, was another genius, as were many if not most prominent eugenicists, and many of them came from long established families of wealth and prominence, making their breathtakingly arrogant theories about the benefits of selective breeding perhaps a little more understandable, if not excusable. It never occurred to them to check their privilege.

Wikipedia's entry on eugenics states that in its early 20th century iteration, eugenics was promoted as a way to improve "groups of people" (and I would add society in general) while "new (current) eugenics" focuses on improving individuals, i.e. selecting and even altering embryos at the direction of the parents and is therefore not racist in any way.

It prompted some head scratching by yours truly on the difference between the individual and the collective. Can you separate the goal of improvement of individuals from the goal of improving groups and society? Apparently Davenport could not. It's true that his scientific curiosity was once more objective and, if we might use a characterization that Madison Grant might've, pure. He was, he professed, concerned with the improvement of individuals and did not apply scientific racism to his eugenics study. But as time passed and the passion to make the science a helpful societal tool blossomed, the "betterment of the human race" became paramount and Davenport's studies became a means to an end. His ideological purity was mongrelized and he became an unabashed proponent of "scientific racism."

Some proponents of eugenics theory were overtly racist and xenophobic, but not disproportionately considering the age.

One tireless advocate for immigration restriction AND eugenics was Henry Cabot Lodge, the patrician stalwart arch-conservative legislator from Massachusetts. By contrast, his cousin, Joe (never Joseph) Lee, who was a dedicated, behind-the-scenes proponent of eugenics and racial purity, was also a Boston school board member, philanthropist, father of the modern school playground and avid reader of Karl Marx. He was a textbook early 20th century progressive.

Racism was ubiquitous. It was not 4 decades earlier that slavery was still legal in the US, and even those abolitionists, (also progressives) of the North could not have helped an indulgent sense of having condescended to aid the poor Negro.

However, it is not completely clear who co-opted who, or whether there was any co-opting or exploitation of each other at all in the alliance of eugenicists and xenophobes. They appear to have been quite suited to one another and not at all uncomfortable with the relationship. It was probably either mutual exploitation or a hellacious harmonic convergence.

The list of American icons who at one time or another, or all of the time, in some cases, expressed stupefying racism, xenophobia and classism is sobering.

Beginning with Benjamin Franklin, through Ulysses S. Grant, to Booker T Washington, William Penn, the great suffragist Victoria Woodhall, John Scopes (of the Scopes Monkey Trial), Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Maxwell Perkins (the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway), H. Fairfield Osbourne (director of the American Museum of Natural History) and so many other notaries, the list of nativists does considerable damage to the idea that the US was ever in even approximate accord with the inscription on the Statue Of Liberty.

But the common cause of xenophobes and genetic planners is striking to me, considering the antipathy between what may be considered the modern incarnations of both anti-immigration sentiment and eugenics. Eugenics, right or wrong, is seen by many as the forerunner of elective abortion. And, in fact, it seems like a fair genealogical conclusion, since Margaret Sanger was a prominent eugenicist, an enthusiastic supporter of Davenport's endeavors and is most well known to us as the founder of Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider. But modern abortion opponents now are often the same people most likely to oppose immigration. (As they would have it, they are only concerned about illegal immigration, while remaining mostly non-committal on what legal minimums and maximums should be established.) Okrent is careful to note the objections of modern pro-choice advocates who say that if anything, the eugenicists of that era were more comparable to pro-life activists, since pro-lifers typically seek governmental prohibition of abortion or governmental control of "reproductive rights", similar to the forced sterilization policies championed by many eugenicists. But the disregard for human life is common ground that is not so readily ceded by many pro-choice advocates and immigration restriction advocates. There is a shared sense of entitlement. As in, "We are here, so we have a codified right to input into who else can be here." Or, if you like, "Possession (of life, here and now) is 9/10ths of the law."

A Review of Coyote America by Dan Flores

There's a song I like by Western artist Don Edwards.
It begins,

"Was a cowboy I knew in South Texas
His face was burnt deep by the sun
Part history, part sage, part Mexican
He was there when Pancho Villa was young
He'd tell you a tale of the old days
When the country was wild all around
Sit out under the stars of the milky way
Listen while the coyotes howled

Now the longhorns are gone
And the drovers are gone
The Comanches are gone
And the outlaw is gone
Geronimo's gone
And Sam Bass is gone
And the lion is gone
And the red wolf is gone

Then he cursed all the roads and the oilmen
And he cursed the automobile
Said 'This is no place for an hombre like I am
In this new world of asphalt and steel'
Then he looked off some place in the distance
At something only he could see
He said 'All that's left now of the old days
Are these damned old coyotes and me.' "

The old cowboy would be happy to know, I assume, that not only are the damned old coyotes still around, they are thriving.
Once only found in the Western United States, they are now howling in every state of the union.
And this in spite of, in fact Flores will argue BECAUSE of, almost two centuries of extermination attempts.
Beginning with Lewis and Clark's first encounter with this American icon which Clark dubbed the "prairie wolf", European settlers were first perplexed by the not-quite-wolf but not-quite-fox who seemed to be a little too comfortable around humans.
The perplexity soon enough turned to a loathing that rivals our commonly held hatred for cockroaches.
The coyote was outright declared a target for extinction by the federal government.
Bounties were set, traps were laid, strychnine factories were built. Later, aerial gunning and specifically designed poisons were put into use, dead animal carcasses spiked with trial-and-error vetted toxins.
Millions and millions of coyotes were killed.

And it was not simply a matter of utility.
Even though there were the inevitable predations that occur when domesticated animals come into direct contact with wild predators, animal scientists in the field even in the late 1800's were discovering by analyzing stomach contents and scat that contrary to conventional wisdom, sheep and cattle did not make up most or even a quarter of the coyote diet. And later, as livestock containment methods and the proliferation of national forests and parks as refuges for coyotes pacified stockmen somewhat, big game hunters, claiming that coyotes were diminishing the elk population and were an existential threat to mule deer were also proven wrong.
But the Great Coyote Wars continued, aided almost from the beginning by good war propaganda.
As settlement of the West continued, the coyote became a symbol of deprivation, cowardice and cunning. Mark Twain, in his charming polemics, gleefully helped a good portion of America unacquainted with the species to hate the coyote with his famous three-page rant in Roughing It. Horace Greeley described it as "a sneaking cowardly little wretch." Edwin Sabin in an Overland Monthly 1938 issue, described it as "contemptible and especially perverse" and "lacking higher morals." And exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing of coyotes, the Scientific American, in 1920, asserted that although coyotes were not worth the price of the ammunition to shoot them, it was still a patriotic guesture because, "The coyote was the original Bolshevik."

Even today, there are 500,000 coyotes killed in a year's time, almost one a minute.
And yet, or as Flores has it, as a result, coyotes now stretch from the southern border (and below) to the Yukon and from sea to shining sea. There is now a significant coyote presence in L.A., Chicago, and even Manhattan.
Coyotes excel under persecution.
They possess an autogenic trait that actually increases the size of their litters when they are under stress. Combine this amazing ability with their seemingly preternatural adaptability and a comfort level with humans that seems odd in a wild predator, and it becomes less incredible that patrons spilling out of a bar in Manhattan looked up to see a coyote on the roof, surveying the scene with casual boldness.

Flores does something else in the book that's a little startling. He insists that a given American's opinion of coyotes is often indicative of their opinions on......politics.
He uses the coyote as a locator of a person's position in the culture war.
And it's not a metaphor.
He claims that liberals tend to respect the coyote, while conservatives hate them. He says asking someone how they feel about coyotes is basically the same thing as asking them how they feel about John Wayne.
The conservative-liberal urban-rural divide is even reflected in how you pronounce the word.
Urban liberals tend to use coyot-ee, with the emphasis on the middle syllable.
Rural conservatives tend to use coyote, with the emphasis on the first syllable.
For what it's worth, I use the rural conservative pronunciation, partly because that's how we said it in Oklahoma (so that part checks out), but also partly because coyot-ee just sounds too cartoonish for obvious reasons.
I don't know if I believe that the coyote issue is as divisive or easily associated with a demographic as war or immigration, but I do recognize that there is some truth in what he is saying that I can corroborate myself. My opinion of predators is significantly different than those of most, or so it seems, of my conservative friends. They seem to view any wild predatory animal as a nuisance to be eradicated so that everything can be tamer. And safer.
At the risk of stretching the point along with Flores, and at the risk of giving anyone the opening to accuse me of reductionism, I have to admit I quickly compared the de facto conservative positions on immigration, drugs and civil liberties and nodded to myself.

Moving on, in the latter half of the 20th century, conservationists became alarmed at the rapid decline and imminent extinction of the red wolf in the southeast. The Fish and Wildlife Service believed that an ancient distinct species was on the verge of disappearing. Their solution was to gather the remaining survivors in the wild together with all the red wolves in captivity and breed a strong pure host of red wolves to re-release into the wild and hopefully recolonize their "native" habitat. But first they had to test each of the possible studs and brood canines for genetic purity. To their horror, they discovered that the majority of the "wolves" possessed coyote DNA. In fact, many were reddish full-blooded coyotes. In true bridge burning bureaucratic fashion, they destroyed every one of the impure animals, even the zoo animals, much to the dismay of the zoo officials.
But, as it turns out, the science that first declared the red wolf a distinct species was faulty. Most likely, the red wolves were actually a hybrid of coyote and wolf, much like the coywolves now populating many areas where wolf and coyote share hunting grounds. The fumbling incompetence of wildlife management experts in this instance is reminiscent of the heedless arrogance that in the previous century led the US government to support and subsidize the near extinction of the buffalo.

But maybe the coyote is too much like us for us to ever be completely rid of it.
Flores thinks so.
As a principal deity in the Native American Pantheon, Old Man Coyote seems quite similar to Zeus with a little bit of Loki thrown in.
He is not perpetually exemplary. He's one of those gods that we create in our own image. Which is to say he can be very good and also very bad. That split personality is what makes him like Zeus, along with his ability to appear human, whereas Zeus had the ability to appear animal.
Flores takes an imaginative, almost spiritual look at the coyote and concludes that he is us.
The indigenous peoples have many myths and legends with the coyote as a god, but a very human god. He is the wisest of all, but also often a fool. He is powerful, with sometimes paralyzing weaknesses. He is a trickster, but is constantly being tricked. He is not completely wild, and not completely tame. He'll do what it takes to survive, but often only just that and no more.
Less abstractly, Flores compares the evolution of man with the evolution of the coyote, and pronounces us clueless, if we think we can outmaneuver such a force.