Revisionist History - General Chapman’s Last Stand

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

Good fences make good neighbors. Or maybe not. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that sends the frozen groundswell under it. Robert Frost, one of the greatest American poets, reading Mending Wall. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill, and on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall

between us. They walk together down the border of their properties, between his apple orchard and his neighbor's pine trees. Every spring they have to mend the wall, hauling stones to fill the gaps. The narrator asks his neighbor, do they really need a wall to keep pine and apple trees apart?

He only says good fences make good neighbors. Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder if I could put a notion in his head. Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall, I'd asked to know what I was walling in or walling out and to whom I was like to give offense. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,

my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about the most famous line from Mendingwall. Good fences make good neighbors. Written in 1914, D.C., 8th and I Streets near Capitol Hill. From May until the end of August, every Friday night, the public is invited for evening parade. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the oldest post of the Corps, Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C., celebrating over 60 years of performing evening parades. It starts at 845, precisely, on the immaculate lawn in front of the Commandant's House.

The ritual of honoring the flag, the famous famous silent drill the drum and bugle Corps Marines in the traditional white with dark blue tunics one hour and 15 minutes of precision marching Evening Parade was the creation of General Leonard Fielding Chapman, Jr., when he assumed the command of the Marine Barracks in 1957. Chapman believed Marine parades had become anglicized. Too many theatrical flourishes, trick drills, frivolities like the Queen Anne salute, the small hats the British favor, the heavy double-soled shoes with cleats.

My policy was that we will be regulation, Chapman once said. We will be U.S. Marine Corps regulation. We will do everything in accordance with the Marine Corps regulations and we'll do it perfectly. I've met a handful of senior military leaders in my life. They're not like CEOs who represent an infinite range of variation on the general theme of tall white guy. Generals are the product of one of the world's largest and most rigorous meritocracies. To get to the top, they've had to be more disciplined than the disciplined people,

and then, at the next level up, smarter than the smart people, then, at the level after that, more charismatic than the charismatic people, and on and on, all the way up to five stars. Generals are the winners of a single elimination tournament that goes on for 30 years. Chapman was appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1967, served with distinction for four years during one of the most difficult periods in Marine Corps history. He was a Southerner who loved Lincoln, a voracious reader, an intellectual, the man who did as much as anyone to bring the Civil Rights Revolution to the Marine Corps.

Chapman was once interviewed by a Marine Corps historian, and by the end of the recording, which runs for hours, you want to follow him into battle. Toward the end of the war, when we were pulling out of Vietnam, I came to the decision that we were going to clean house, shape up or ship out. Chapman shrank the Marines from 300,000 to 200,000 men, let go every Marine that he felt did not measure up, made sure everyone who remained knew what the score was. And I'd make my speech about tightening up the Marine Corps and going back to our standards,

and I got applauded every time. And it was in such sharp contrast to what was happening in the other services. See, the other services loosened their standards. You know, long hair, beer in the barracks. Navy especially. Navy especially, yeah. We went exactly opposite directions. The Navy loosened their standards, so did the Army. Tell me, what did he look like? Well, he was very handsome. He was, you know, the pictures of him when he was young, and a pretty incredibly, you know, dashing sort of man. This is the general's granddaughter, Danielle Chapman. And he was still very handsome when he was in his 60s and 70s. And tall, you know, he still had that military posture to him, also just an incredible stamina. And he actually was very proud of that, too, on the golf course, that until he was in his 80s, you know, he walked and carried his clubs, and he would really rib his buddies about

that, and he would say, you know, they would ride in the cart and he would say, oh, they're over there riding in the cheeseburger wagon, you know, but he was, he was, he was walking and carrying his clubs the whole way. General Chapman retired from the Marine Corps in 1971. But he didn't take a lucrative job in the defense industry, like so many ex-military brass do. Instead, he goes to his boss, the Secretary of Defense, and asks for help in finding another job in government. He gets his wish. In 1973, he's named commissioner of what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency responsible for securing the borders of the United States. Now, why does he do that?

Being head of the Marine Corps is a job of enormous prestige. The INS in 1973 was a backwater. Why would someone take such a big step down? It's not obvious until you think about what Chapman has just been through. Vietnam. He ran the Marine Corps during the worst years of the war. And what was Vietnam? A war about a border.

The country was split in two, with a communist government in the north and a pro-western government in the south. And the north kept sending insurgents across the border to make trouble in the South. That's why the U.S. went to Vietnam, to secure the border. The Marines were in the thick of it. They were way up in the farthest corner of South Vietnam, right on the border with the North. At one point, the Secretary of Defense wanted a wall built along the border to stop the North Vietnamese from trickling in. It was the job of the Marine Corps to build it, and they couldn't do it. They couldn't secure the border. Nothing worked.

Chapman saw the failure firsthand. The trouble with Vietnam for the Marine Corps was that the Army was in charge of the whole thing. Chapman's son Walton joined the Marines and served in Vietnam. And the Marines that were there, my dad had no tactical control. In other words, he couldn't tell the 26 Marines to leave Khe Sanh and go somewhere else.

General Chapman would make the long journey to Vietnam many times, but all he could offer was moral support. There's a moment in his oral history when Chapman describes the orders that came down from the Pentagon when the U.S. military shipped out of Vietnam. Each branch of the military was supposed to pack up and send home anything worth more than $50. Chapman said no.

The Marines would bring home everything worth $5 or more. Furthermore, I issued an order that we leave our spaces in Vietnam ready for inspection. Everything cleaned up, all the trash buried, all the temporary buildings knocked down and disposed of. And we did that too. We left every one of our areas in impeccable condition, ready for inspection. That's what the Marine Corps was reduced to in Vietnam, being the best at tidying up behind them. How could someone like Chapman be satisfied with that? If he couldn't defend the borders of South Vietnam,

then maybe running the INS would be his second chance. He would have liked nothing better than to be able to say, yes, the border is secure, Mr. Secretary of the Interior. The border is now secure. In the 1970s, a young sociologist named Douglas Massey became interested in the subject of Mexican migration. It was then, as now, a matter of political significance. But Massey was struck by how little was actually known about the problem. Nobody really understood exactly where migrants were coming from or exactly where they were going, or, for that matter, what they were doing once they got to the U.S.

and what happened to the families they left behind. Sociologists are the great note-takers of the social sciences. They're used to projects that stretch out for years, that even consume entire careers. So Massey decided to be a good sociologist and study migration properly. He found a partner, a Mexican anthropologist named Jorge Durand, and the two of them began systematically interviewing families

of migrants around Mexico. We pick communities. We pick four to six communities every year. We do a complete household roster and collect basic socio-demographic information on everybody in the household, plus detailed information on everybody's first and last trip to the United States and the total number of trips they've taken. The survey is called the Mexican Migration Project. After 30 years, it's massive. Millions of life years of information, case histories, extraordinary detail.

It's the gold standard. This has got to be one of the world's biggest migration databases. It's certainly the biggest and most reliable on Mexico-U.S. migration. When the government wants to know what goes on, they don't go to the border patrol because their data are lousy. They come to the Mexican Migration Project. In all of your work with this project, was there anything you ran across that really surprised you? I guess what surprised me in the late 70s when I first saw this was just how routine it had become and how institutionalized the circulation was

and how it was woven into the fabric of Mexican life at the time. How institutionalized the circulation was. The principal finding of the Mexican migration project is that Mexican migration to the United States has a distinctive pattern. It's overwhelmingly circular. Now what does circular mean exactly? It means they work seasonally in the United States and return home on an annual basis to be with their families. So these workers, are they leaving their families back in Mexico? Yes. Yeah. It's overwhelmingly male, young, young males.

And the typical pattern is you go for several times to earn some money to help you back home. What made the back-and-forth circulation possible was the fact that for most of the 20th century, the border between Mexico and the United States was porous, more of a line on a map than an actual border. The Border Patrol was a tiny force in those years. There were no walls, no surveillance drones. If you got stopped, you got turned around and sent back home, then you tried again. Our family is mainly a family that was born and raised in the border area. Carlos Marentes, a labor organizer and former migrant worker,

talking about his childhood in the 1960s growing up in Juarez, Mexico. He and his friends used to swim across the Rio Grande, carrying watermelons that they would sell on the American side, like the river was a pond in their backyard. We did not have a sense that we were living in two different countries. To us, being children means that, you know, that we were living in a big city with two neighborhoods, one south of the river, one north of the river. What Morentes is saying, in economic terms, is that the cost of crossing was effectively

zero. It was free. And what happens when something is free? You use as much of it as you can. Usually they leave in February, March, as the seasons start picking up, and then return in December for the holidays, and there's a big fiesta in migrant-sending towns. Massey's saying that Mexico was where family and roots were.

It was cheap and close. America was where money could be made, easily and quickly. This is not the way, say, Jewish immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century. They didn't go back to Eastern Europe every summer. Nor did the Italians who came over in the same period. Entire villages moved en masse from southern Italy to the United States, permanently. The price of returning where they came from was not zero. Their homeland was not welcoming, and even if it were, the cost of crossing the ocean was so high that it could not be done routinely.

But Mexican migration was different. Carlos Marentes remembers his grandfather telling him that he wanted to return to Mexico, to Zacatecas. So the attraction to go back to Mexico will be to go back to your real homeland, to the rural communities that you left behind, with families, with your history, with everything, all your identity. This is not the story the United States tells itself. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty does not read,

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free for six months until you make enough money to go home again. When we think of immigration, we think of the Jewish and the Italian model, permanence. Second thing, circular immigration is very hard to measure. Border controls are designed to count the number of people coming in, not the number of people leaving, because we assume the number coming in is what matters, which it is in most cases, but not in the number of people leaving. Because we assume the number coming in is what matters, which it is in most cases, but not in the case of Mexico. Because if a huge group of people eventually go back home again, the only number that matters is net migration. Those who come in

minus those who go home. And thirdly, most importantly, circular migration is the result of a zero-cost border crossing. It is what happens when you can swim across the Rio Grande or walk from Juarez in Mexico to El Paso in Texas. So what happens to circular migration when the cost of migrating is no longer zero? One of the things that General Leonard Chapman heard when he took over the INS was that his predecessor had never left Washington, D.C. For someone coming from the Marine Corps, that was unthinkable. Leaders review their troops. So Chapman set out to visit every INS field office,

close to 400 of them, all over the world, some with no more than two or three people. And it took me three years to do it, but I did. I got to every single one of them, at least once. So I spent a tremendous amount of time traveling, talking to my troops, for whom I built up a very high regard. Chapman modernized the agency.

When it came to information management, he thought the INS was 30 years behind the Marine Corps. Chapman set up a public affairs office, the first in the agency's history. He became a familiar face on Capitol Hill. And the more he learned, the more alarmed he became. There was, as he put it, a general laxity in the enforcement of immigration laws. For goodness sake, kids were swimming across the Rio Grande, selling their watermelons and then going back home again. People were treating the border like it was just a line on a map. I mean, it's easy to envisage 25 million, 50 million, 75 million, 100 million illegal areas.

Why not? There's no machinery to stop them. In 1973, when Chapman took over the INS, the cost of crossing the Mexican border was effectively zero. By the time he left in 1977, it was not. And so it begins. In 1986 comes the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which militarizes the border. Then Operation Blockade, which stiffens up the border crossing in El Paso. Operation Gatekeeper, which stiffens up the border crossing in San Diego. The budget of the Border Patrol between the mid-1980s and 2010 increases tenfold. And then today, where the Attorney General of the United States, sometimes sounds like

Commandant Jefferson Sessions. I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry on our southwest border. If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It's that simple. The cost of crossing the border has been escalating for a generation. And it began with Leonard Chapman. We ran a Gallup poll right after I first got there that showed that only something like 15% of the American people had ever heard of the problem. When I left, three years later, we had another Gallup poll, and over 85% had heard of it. In his years in office, Chapman made 250 speeches across the United States.

This is at the same time that he's personally visiting every INS field office and overseeing the complete overhaul of the agency and making his argument over and again on Capitol Hill and giving hundreds of press interviews. The United States went from an INS headed by someone who never left his desk to an agency headed by someone who couldn't stay at his desk. He was relentless. Waking America up. For telling America about a problem they didn't know they had. Americans didn't think they had an illegal immigration problem. Leonard Chapman convinced them that they did. When I was 14, growing up in Canada, I went to a week-long track and field training camp

at the International Peace Garden. It's a park straddling the border between North Dakota and the Canadian province of Manitoba. I'd go for long runs each morning with two friends. One day, we noticed a diner on the American side, so we hopped the fence and got a burger. I say fence because the border in that stretch of prairie was just a fence, the type that someone in the suburbs might have around their backyard.

On our way back to Canada, we were spotted by a Border Patrol officer. He arrested us, put us in the back of his car, and took us to the nearest INS office. We had to put our names in a book underneath a big photo of President Jimmy Carter. I decided to be clever and wrote my name as William F. Buckley. Then we got dropped off back at the border fence with a stern lecture. When I got home and told my parents, they found the whole thing hilarious. But as you can imagine, it left an impression.

That burger at the diner was my first visit to the United States, and I ended up in the back of a patrol car. I first read Robert Frost's Mending Wall not long afterwards in school. The poem is a back and forth between a man and his neighbor over the value of their fence. One side says, good fences make good neighbors.

The other side, the narrator, says, maybe not. It all depends on who the fence is keeping in or out. Right from my first read, I sided with the narrator, because all I could think of was the fence I'd just jumped between Manitoba and North Dakota. We were 14-year-olds, and the fact that there wasn't much of a fence between the countries at that point meant that we could do normal 14-year-old things, like get a burger.

Would a better fence there have made us better neighbors? Or would we have just gone hungry? Frost's neighbor thinks good fences solve problems, and the funny thing about that poem is how many people agree with him. But do good fences make good neighbors, or do they just disrupt normal patterns of behavior? So what happened when the Mexican border became a good fence? Well, the historical Mexican migration pattern was that young men came to America, worked, went home, came back, went home again. That's what Douglas Massey documented in the Mexican Migration Project. Our data from the Mexican Migration Project indicate that between 1965 and 1985, 85% of all undocumented entries

were offset by departures, so the net inflow was small. Between 1965 and 1985, lots and lots of Mexican migrants came to the United States without legal status, but almost all of them eventually went home. But then the border patrol was expanded. The crossing opportunities through El Paso and San Diego were shut down, and migrants had to adapt. They shifted from the fortified crossings in El Paso and San Diego to the most brutal parts of southern Arizona. Now you're out in the middle of high desert, open desert. It's bitterly cold at night, boiling hot during the day.

There's no water, and death's mount. And when you're out in the middle of nowhere, it's more costly to stage a crossing. The financial incentive to come to the United States remains. But returning home is now suddenly so risky that you don't do it every six months, or every Christmas, or maybe even ever. You stay.

And as the male workers stay longer and longer, family reunification occurs. They send for their wives and younger children, and those younger children are today's dreamers. In 1980, what was the likelihood of a Mexican migrant returning home after his first trip to the United States? According to the Mexican Migration Project's data, it was about 50%. By 2010, it's zero. We built a wall to keep Mexican migrants out. In fact, the wall has kept them in. People who would otherwise have gone home stayed so long they put down roots. In March of 2016, Douglas Massey, along with Jorge Durand and Karen Prenn,

published a brilliant paper in the American Journal of Sociology, Why Border Enforcement Backfired, in which they ask a hypothetical question. What would have happened if the United States had done nothing over the past 30 years? Frozen the budget and staff of the Border Patrol at 1986 levels. Allowed for some circular migration. The researchers estimate the undocumented Mexican population of the US would be about a third lower.

A third lower than it is now. This is according to the people who know more than anyone else about Mexican migration, who have access to one of the biggest immigration databases in the world. And what is their conclusion? That the attempt to solve the problem of illegal Mexican migrants is what has caused the problem of illegal Mexican migrants. You can just hear the frustration in Douglas Massey's voice. For me, I've been watching this train wreck in real time

for the past two decades, really. And I kept trying to tell people that, you know, when it comes to border enforcement, less is more. And if you militarize the border, you're going to produce a larger undocumented population. I said this before the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration. And what happens after Massey testifies?

The same thing happens every time. Nothing. And then the ranking minority member, who's Representative King from Texas, gets up and basically says, take your lion data and go home because we know what the truth is. We're being invaded and we've got to stop this. Massey says we need to do the exact opposite of what we're doing now. When we raise the cost of crossing the border, that shut down circulation.

If you want to restore circulation, then you should make the border, that shut down circulation. If you want to restore circulation, then you should make the border easier to cross. Reduce the size of the border patrol. Don't increase it. Make it easier for migrants to get legal status, not harder. If you wanted to lower the number of Mexicans living in the United States, give them green cards, and a lot of them would go home.

The US is not that nice a place for people, for Mexicans living in the United States, give them green cards, and a lot of them would go home. The U.S. is not that nice a place for people, for Mexicans these days. But they have families here. They've got U.S.-born kids. And if they know they can come back, they'll go home. If we had kept things the way they were in the early 1970s, the same badly run Border Patrol, the same badly run border patrol, the same ineffectual leadership, the same indifferent public,

we wouldn't be tearing our hair out over immigration. If there was ever a place for bad government, it was on the southern U.S. border. But what did we get? We got the one guy who couldn't do bad government, the man haunted by his country's failure to build a wall in Vietnam. I think you came out with a comment about the all Marines are green type of thing. There's a fascinating moment in General Chapman's oral history.

His interviewer asks about racial troubles that rocked the Marine Corps in the late 60s. The civil rights movement was at its apex. There was a near-race riot at Camp Lejeune, fistfights among soldiers in Vietnam. Black Marines wanted to be treated with the same consideration as white Marines. Chapman's response may be his most memorable pronouncement. All Marines are green, not black, not white. The color of the uniform is what matters. Backed up by a directive on racial discrimination sent to every officer under his command. He even made a Solomonic ruling on the prohibition against black soldiers wearing their hair in an afro. Hair, he said, was hair. The concern of the Marine Corps was not with its form, only with its length. What it said was that within those limits, a Marine can style his hair any way he wants

to. That's what it said. So that if a black Marine wanted to have an afro that was no more than three inches long and was neat and trim around itself, fine. Why not? Yeah. And the evening parade? To participate in the evening parade at 8th and I,

you used to have to be a perfect specimen of military manhood. More than six feet tall, no glasses, and white. Chapman says, why can't you be a perfect specimen of military manhood and black? He desegregated evening parade. That got him hauled before a congressional committee full of angry Southerners. Chapman describes the experience with typical understatement as a, quote, interesting few hours, but I'm a deep Southerner myself, and so I was able to battle them with good effect, unquote. I'm curious, if he were here today, what would he make of the way we talk about

immigration, the way that debate has changed? I'm not sure if he were here today, what would he make of the way we talk about immigration, the way that debate has changed? I'm not sure what he would say. This is Chapman's granddaughter, Danielle, again. He really disliked complaining. And, you know, he would always say, if anybody was, well, OK, what are you going to do about it? You know, he was incredibly pragmatic. So I think that he would probably view a lot of the current conversation as just a bunch of noise without a solution. So what was his solution then? General Chapman did what came naturally. He enforced the law. He drew the line. He made a complicated issue clear. He didn't like the idea of, you know, mass illegal immigration. But at the same time, his views had none of the tone that the immigration debate has now.

He just didn't think of it like that or attach the kind of emotions that you hear people attaching to it in the current debate. General Chapman traveled to every corner of the United States and stood up in that deliberate Ramrod Strait Marine Corps way and told the American people plainly and clearly what needed to be done. Can I fault him? I can't. I wish there were more people like Leonard Chapman, especially these days. It's just that in some cases, complicated things are best left unclear. And we're better off letting whatever it is that doesn't love a wall run its course. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down. I could say elves to him, but it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather he said it for himself. I see him there bringing

a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand like an old stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, not of woods only in the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying. And he likes having thought of it so well he says again, good fences make good neighbors. Thank you. engineer, fact-checking by Beth Johnson, original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez for capturing the sounds of the evening parade. And for the audio of Robert Frost, thanks to the National Council of Teachers of English. And thanks, as always, to Andy Bowers and Commandant Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.