talkin' 'bout Our Generation
IN HIS 2003 STATE of the Union address, President George W. Bush focused on the case that he was building for invading Iraq, and the enormous stakes of that gamble and its potential for disaster were clear even then. But in that same speech, Bush made a less attention-getting pitch for a much different foreign adventure, one that would turn out to be as noble as Iraq was shameful. He announced the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and his determination to devote $15 billion over the next five years to fighting the disease in the African and Caribbean nations that were hardest hit by it.
I remember being stunned and moved. I wasn’t alone. “I damn near drove off the road,” said Sandra Thurman, who had been the director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy in the Clinton administration. Ms. Thurman was talking to Benjamin Ryan of NBC News, explaining that she had been in her car when she heard Bush’s proposal. “It took my breath away and made me cry tears of joy and gratitude.”
That’s because AIDS funding had never been an easy sell. The disease was associated with the kinds of people — gay or Black or destitute or drug-addicted — who are so often neglected or reviled. And here was a Republican president calling for lavish spending on AIDS in poor countries where America wasn’t looking for military support or other reciprocal favors.
There are cynical explanations. National security officials feared that the grimly rising toll of AIDS-related deaths in those places could destabilize them in a way that threatened America. Religious conservatives who were an integral part of Bush’s base had warmed to the idea of Christian charity on this scale. And Bush was flexing a big-heartedness and big-mindedness that were helpful in peddling the Iraq war.
Similarly, the implementation of PEPFAR was imperfect, in part because those conservatives insisted on elements, such as abstinence education, that were driven more by ideology than by practicality.
But those very compromises are an integral part of American democracy. They did nothing to take away from the fact that Bush’s $15 billion ask was much, much larger than his advisers initially recommended or thought possible; that PEPFAR won bipartisan support in Congress; that it was signed into law just five months after Bush’s speech; that it has endured for 23 years (though it’s currently diminished and endangered); and that it has directed more than $100 billion toward H.I.V./AIDS relief, sharply reducing rates of infection and death. By the most widely accepted estimate, more than 25 million lives have been saved.
That’s not facile symbolism or political gamesmanship. That’s mercy. That’s generosity. In his 2003 remarks, Bush cited the increased effectiveness and decreased cost of drugs for the treatment and prevention of AIDS to proclaim: “Seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many.” That he and members of Congress seized the moment speaks to the conviction within many Americans — too often obscured but never extinguished — that a country’s greatness is measured by the good that it’s willing to do.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION announced its celebration of America’s semiquincentennial with a tweet.
“TONIGHT,” an official White House X account declared last New Year’s Eve, “The Illumination of America on the Washington Monument kicks off the celebration of America’s 250th birthday year 🇺🇸.”
For the next week, visitors to the monument would see a “projection-mapping spectacle” that aimed, said the spectacle’s organizers, to narrate the “Nation’s discovery, expansion, independence, and vision for the future.” The displays showed images of settlers, soldiers, cowboys and astronauts — archetypal figures drawn from our national mythology.
As deployed by this White House, each archetype emphasizes masculine conquest, national expansion and manifest destiny — it is freedom as the power to dominate others. But there are other freedoms in the American experience, and as we reflect on the 250th anniversary of the nation — as we think through the United States’ ideals and identity — we might look to an archetype that stands for something different. A figure in American history that was of great significance to our national story but one that never quite found a place in our popular culture.
That figure is the fugitive slave.
For as long as there had been slavery in British North America — and later, the United States — there had been runaways: fugitives from bondage who escaped to whatever sanctuary was available. As the cotton economy grew at a rapid clip through the 1820s and into the 1830s, so, too, did the slave economy. And as the number of enslaved people rose throughout the Southern states, so, too, did the number of runaways.
The 1840s and 1850s saw a steady exodus of Black Americans from “Upper South” states such as Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland to free soil north of the Mason-Dixon line. Many thousands of people made the attempt, overcoming harsh terrain, vicious slave catchers and, with the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the full weight of the federal government, which required states to return runaways under threat of harsh penalty.
In their determination to free themselves, in their heightened awareness of the fundamental importance of autonomy, agency and individuality, and in their determination to realize, for themselves and others, a broad and egalitarian freedom, fugitive slaves embodied some of this nation’s highest values. They stood as living examples of the best that Americans could be. They also stood, and lived, as a profound challenge to what the nation actually was.
In stealing themselves from bondage, fugitives also brought fire, fury and critical knowledge to the antislavery cause. It is no coincidence that many of the most important abolitionists of the 1830s, ’40s and ’50s were former slaves, including Isaac Williams, Harriet Jacobs and, of course, Frederick Douglass.
That the roster of former fugitives includes some of the most quintessentially American men and women ever to grace this country’s history is indicative of why the fugitive slave ought to share the stage as an archetypal American figure.
We are living in a moment when our actions as a nation are far afield of what we claim to value. It is the best time, then, to reflect on a group of Americans who heightened that contradiction with their very selves.
MUCH OF WHAT I LEARNED about American history, culture and politics, I learned in the Great Hall at Cooper Union — not when I was an undergraduate at the school but a couple of years later, after I had dropped out and joined ACT UP.
At that time, the organization held general meetings there on Monday nights. Hundreds of people came to present reports on the latest medical research and ideas for future direct actions, to debate, to vote, occasionally to yell at one another, and always to flirt.
ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was formed in 1987, fueled by the rage and grief of people affected by the AIDS epidemic. Most of the early patients were gay men and intravenous drug users — people whom President Ronald Reagan’s administration and much of American society at the time appeared to consider disposable. Even doctors and nurses often treated people with AIDS with disgust, disdain and fear.
Many of the people in the core group of ACT UP founders were white, well-educated, professional gay men. They had discovered that their status, money and health insurance couldn’t keep them from dying of this mysterious new syndrome, and from being treated horribly as they died. Like many Americans before them, these gay men, when confronted with injustice, wanted to protest. But what informed the work of ACT UP was an extraordinary panoply of people of all ages, genders and backgrounds — a uniquely American panoply.
In the 2021 book “Let the Record Show,” Sarah Schulman traces many of the influences that made ACT UP what it was. The group’s approach to direct action was partly informed by the civil rights movement. The trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience, which preceded every major ACT UP event, took lessons from the women’s peace movement. The Feminist Women’s Health Movement gave ACT UP its approach to patient advocacy. Latin American immigrants, who had experience in antifascist movements in Chile and Argentina and student protests in Mexico, brought resolve and inexhaustible energy, and the Russian dissident movement lent ACT UP the term “samizdat,” which is what we called the assorted Xeroxed materials laid out on the tables outside Great Hall every Monday night.
ACT UP operated as a radical democracy: Anyone could conceive and organize an action, which — inspired by a mix of anger and creativity — included protests that shut down the Food and Drug Administration and New York’s City Hall, a mass “die-in” at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the draping of an enormous condom over the home of Senator Jesse Helms in suburban Virginia. The larger group provided funding and bodies. There was no time to waste. Some ACT UP members had months or even days left to live.
ACT UP was a phenomenally successful movement. It, along with the subsequent groups it spawned, sped up the development of effective H.I.V. treatments, but it did so much more than that: It influenced the ways scientists approach medical research; it changed the F.D.A.’s drug approval process; it affected the relationships between patients and health care providers, turning patients into partners in their own care long before the advent of WebMD and the internet in general. It helped shift media coverage and societal attitudes toward gay people and AIDS, but also toward illness and disability more broadly. And, like the protest movements that helped shape it, ACT UP helps shape the protest movements of today. Veterans of the organization have been training new activists all over the country.
It also helped shape me. For a young and fairly new immigrant, ACT UP was an education in the very American belief in agency and justice and the very American practice of protest. It taught me to read American history, among other things, as one of protest movements and hope — the stubborn insistence that this country deliver on its promise to all of its citizens. And it continues to help me understand this country. The Trump administration is rolling back the achievements of the civil rights movement, attacking immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q. people, delegitimizing protest and painting direct action as terrorism, dismantling the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and medical research, as well as shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provided H.I.V. care in many foreign countries. I am not surprised at this choice of targets, even as I am shocked by the betrayal of the country’s promise. And I place my hope in protest.
THE HEALTH OF AMERICAN CHILDRENhas been declining for decades. We are losing more babies and children to gun violence and car accidents than we did 20 years ago; children in the United States are far more likely to die than children in our peer nations. From 2007 to 2023, rates of 15 chronic health problems, from obesity to seizure disorders, increased significantly. Our current leaders seem hellbent on dismantling any institution that safeguards public health, when what we need is a robust mission focused on the well-being of our country’s children.
Thankfully, we have a glowing historical example to emulate in the Children’s Bureau, a federal organization dedicated to the welfare of children that was spun up at the turn of the 20th century. The Progressive reformers Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley came up with the germ of the idea — an organization that would research and help improve the health and virtue of children — in 1903 and brought it to President Theodore Roosevelt. Congress eventually passed a law creating the Children’s Bureau in 1912. The statute granted the bureau 15 employees and an operating budget of $25,640 per year.
Julia Lathrop was appointed as chief, making her the first woman to lead a federal bureau. With a small budget and a scrappy staff, Lathrop realized that the bureau would be the most effective if it put most of its energy behind just a few issues, and it began studying infant mortality and the health of pregnant women. “Until the bureau was established, no one knew accurately how many babies were born in the course of a year, how many died, or why or how they died,” The Social Service Review declared in 1932.
We’re taught to think of our government as sluggish and bureaucracy as useless, but Lathrop’s Children’s Bureau was nimble and effective. The field studies on infant mortality that she led inspired legislation that funded state programs for mothers and babies. States used that money to create public health clinics, educate midwives and pay nurses to visit new and expecting moms, all of which resulted in an estimated 9 percent to 21 percent decrease in infant mortality. The bureau published plain-spoken guides to prenatal care, that dispelled common misconceptions about pregnancy and gave women up-to-date medical advice, and it helped to institute birth registration laws.
Lathrop was a powerful coalition builder, and the bureau’s success drew so much support that by 1915, her staff had quintupled in size and appropriations for the Children’s Bureau had increased more than sixfold. Ultimately, it was folded into bigger agencies, and it now sits under the Administration for Children and Families.
The work the Children’s Bureau did at the beginning wasn’t flashy. It was data collection, statistical analysis, childbirth education and listening to mothers. This is boring, wonky government stuff at its finest: statistics and pamphlets used to change the world and save lives.
I despair thinking about how much actionable information we have lost and will never get back because of the sizable budget cuts to children’s health and education research. But the fact that Lathrop and her colleagues could move quickly to study and protect the most vulnerable is inspiring, and we should recover their spirit. If we could improve the scientific foundation of children’s health before there was even a telephone in the Oval Office, we can do it now, with so many better tools at our disposal.
One is a spot beside a glacier-fed creek high on the slopes of the vast Mount Hood Wilderness in Oregon, in an area called Paradise Park. Another is in a flower-filled meadow in Goat Rocks Wilderness in Washington State, with mountain goats frolicking above.
My retreats aren’t mansions or even homes, except in the most temporary sense. They are overnight camp spots on our glorious public lands. I lay out my ground sheet and sleeping pad, unfurl my sleeping bag and, when darkness comes, drowsily watch for shooting stars above. (I don’t believe in tents.) Nobody can pull rank on me, except a bear.
Elon Musk and Bezos cannot buy these spots because some of our visionary ancestors battled successfully to preserve this legacy for future generations. For us.
About 40 percent of the United States is publicly owned, and that fraction is much larger in Western states. The stars in the firmament may be Yosemite and Yellowstone, but there are countless others. My favorite beach spot in the United States is a little place you’ve never heard of called Strawberry Hill. It’s a magical wayside hidden below the highway on the Oregon coast. But it abounds with harbor seals basking on the rocks, stray agates sparkling in the sand, and tide pools with starfish and sea anemones.
America’s wild places seem among our last bastions of democracy and inclusion. Any given meeting place from a bar to a public square tends to be tinted red or blue, catering to this group or that. Yet the wilderness is just plain green, a meeting spot for people of all backgrounds and political views, from deer hunters to biologists, bass fishermen to poets. Wild spaces used to be disproportionately male, but now, partly because of the influence of the book and movie “Wild,” women fill the trails.
Speaking of which, my daughter and I backpacked the entire Pacific Crest Trail, 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada, and we found it a rare safe place from the kind of judgments we make about one another every day. On a trail there is no hierarchy or aristocracy, for we all stink and are filthy. So we mix and empathize — Trumpers and never-Trumpers, young and old, rich and poor, bonding over blisters.
America’s bounty of wilderness is mostly the result of shrewd policy decisions that preserved these lands for all of us to cherish today. Otherwise, they could have gone the way of other elements of our heritage, such as buffalo and passenger pigeons.
Lord Bryce, a British ambassador to Washington, is said to have observed something to the effect that public lands are “the best idea America ever had.” What was important, though, was not the hatching of the idea but its execution.
We enjoy this inheritance only because some great Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries fought for it. The heroes were those like Gifford Pinchot, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt who became the first head of the U.S. Forest Service. In less than eight years, Pinchot and Roosevelt set aside roughly 230 million acres as national forests and other public preserves — an area bigger than the three West Coast states put together. Congress tried to stop them in 1907 from setting aside more national forests, so they swung into action and preserved 16 million acres in a single week. President Trump has whittled away at this and tried to sell off some of our natural inheritance, but the overall edifice of public lands seems reasonably secure.
America’s best idea survives. Because of Pinchot and Roosevelt and others like them, I’m reasonably confident that in another 250 years, wilderness will still awe my descendants. I imagine my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren camping on the side of Mount Hood much as I do, drinking from the same creek and dazzled by the same lupine flowers, all while thanking our forebears for their vision and determination that makes this possible.
This notion of America as a refuge for the oppressed has waxed and waned over our country’s history, and has obviously never been absolute. (Washington’s concern for the “persecuted part of mankind” coexisted, somehow, with his ownership of slaves.) But it still represents what is best about the United States. The idea expressed in Washington’s letter has, to varying degrees, been woven through America’s culture since its inception. As much as some of the white nationalists in the Republican Party would like to deny it, the United States is, as John F. Kennedy put it, a nation of immigrants, and has often been better than any other country in the world at integrating newcomers and benefiting from their energy and talents.
In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville attributed America’s democratic character to its immigrant makeup. “It may be said that on leaving the mother country that emigrants had, in general, no notion of superiority one over another,” he wrote. “The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.” More than a half-century later, Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” echoing the aspiration expressed in Washington’s letter, was affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming the refugees and fortune seekers landing on America’s shores: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
There has, of course, always been a nativist counter-tradition to this spirit of openness, one with its own long history. Ten years after Washington’s letter to Van der Kemp, John Adams signed the Alien Enemies Act, which gave the president power to detain and deport noncitizens, and which remains in effect today. It’s easy to tick through moments when America was seized by xenophobic hostility, from the anti-Catholic Know Nothings in the mid-19th century to Donald Trump today. But Trump’s pinched and cruel conception of America shouldn’t blot out the more generous and cosmopolitan ideas that have long been foundational to this nation.
By the time I was being taught American history in school, Lazarus’s words had become part of America’s civic religion, the catechism of what at the time seemed like a consensus faith. Republicans and Democrats alike were proud that anyone could become an American, and that almost the whole of humanity was represented in our country. “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world,” said Ronald Reagan. “And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.”
Today this vision is under siege by a president who dehumanizes immigrants in fascist terms and is building a nationwide network of squalid internment camps. But it’s not dead. In 2025, New York City elected the latest in a succession of immigrant mayors. “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built for immigrants, powered by immigrants. And as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” Zohran Mamdani said in his victory speech. It’s the American way.