Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 357

Making Homeownership Less Exclusive

In the years since the recession, the dream of a steady paycheck and a home in a nice neighborhood have become more elusive for many working-class Americans. While some may say that the lack of homeownership reflects changing values, owning a home remains an important tool for wealth building for most families. Yet it is particularly unattainable for low-income and minority households. The homeownership rate for households that fall below median income was less than 50 percent in 2014, for those who made above the median it was nearly 80 percent. And the gap in homeownership between whites, and blacks and Hispanics is almost as large.

Now, a new program from Fannie Mae is trying to change that.

This week, the government-sponsored enterprise unveiled plans for a new loan product. HomeReady is specifically targeted toward low-income and minority households, and it allows prospective buyers to pay just a 3 percent down payment up front, provides a homeowner’s education course, and the biggest boon—the program will allow applicants to count income from those who won’t actually be borrowers, toward their gross income. That means in multi-generational households, the contributions of children or grandparents—and for younger borrowers, financial assistance from parents, or aunts and uncles—could be included. For current owners who rent a room or portion of their home for extra income, the money they receive from tenants would count as income if they decide to move.

These may seem like small perks, but the new program could be a big deal for households who rely on income that hasn’t been counted by banks or lenders in the past.

Homeownership by Race 2004-2014 Census

In the wake of the subprime debacle, banks tightened their lending practices. In the past few years, prospective home buyers had to put up larger down payments, and have higher credit scores than they did a decade ago. For lenders that wanted their loans to be guaranteed by Fannie Mae (which buys the loans, packages them, and promises to compensate lenders in the event of a default), borrowers also had to meet specific requirements that limited how much debt loan applicants could have relative to their income. Stagnant wages, expensive rent, and increasing debt loads made mortgage criteria hard to meet for many lower-income households.

The broader terms of this new program would make it easier for those households to meet these income requirements.

This generally might seem like good news, but the program already has critics. Edward Pinto, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Wall Street Journal: “I don’t think this is a step forward for borrowers. These other incomes that they’re adding are not of the same quality.” While the program will surely face additional opposition the fact remains that income is only one of several requirements used to assess a borrower’s loan-worthiness.

The case can be made that the current system of home loans leaves out many working-class Americans who could benefit from homeownership without risking another crisis. Low-income residents wanting to buy homes is not what caused the financial crisis: The boom and bust were the fault of predatory lending practices (that included fluctuating interest rates that could quickly change), causing mortgage payments to skyrocket along with the lack of due diligence by lenders—who were more concerned with making money than making quality loans. The lack of transparency about the risky financial products backed by these loans, which were repackaged and resold multiple times, caused a system-wide meltdown.  

This new program is also a recognition of the changing demographics of the country. According to the Urban Institute, 75 percent of new households will be headed by minorities during the next decade—88 percent during the decade after that. And a growing number of households include multiple generations living under one roof.

While some worry that HomeReady will allow poor families to buy homes they can’t afford, it’s a step in the right direction to help poor American families that already can’t afford the astronomical price of rent around the country—much less save up a down payment while paying those rents. A quarter of renters spend more than 50 percent of their salaries on housing, with minority and low-income households much more likely to face these severe rent burdens. Even for many families who have access to rent-controlled apartments, quickly gentrifying neighborhoods, and landlords looking to boost profits, threaten to push them out. All the while, monthly mortgages remain comparatively affordable in many places. But without access to credit, working-class families simply don’t have the choice to buy.

Fannie Mae’s new program will surely not be a panacea for inequity in the U.S. housing market. But the overarching goal, that of allowing all Americans to find housing that they can actually afford, is a worthy one. That’s because even after the crisis, homes still account for a large portion of the overall wealth of middle- and working-class families. And though many Americans are still understandably wary of the housing market and its risks, access to the economic benefits that growing wealth can provide, like collateral for loans, or equity lines, too often remain out of reach for poorer families.

How Trump Makes Jeb Bush Seem Like a Wimp

Donald Trump has gotten a boost in his efforts to maul Jeb Bush in recent days from an unexpected source: Jeb Bush himself.

Trump’s attack on Jeb isn’t mostly about issues. As with most things Trump, it’s mostly about persona. The Donald thinks Jeb is a dud. “He’s a man that doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing,” Trump said in June. “I call him the reluctant warrior, and warrior’s probably not a good word. I think Bush is an unhappy person. I don’t think he has any energy.”

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Over the last week, Jeb has proven Trump right. Trump, and his supporters, continue to demonize Mexican American illegal immigrants. On Tuesday, Trump threw the most popular Spanish-language broadcaster in America out of a press conference. That same day, Ann Coulter warmed up for Trump in Iowa by offering gruesome details of murders by Mexican “illegals,” and suggesting that once Trump builds his wall along America’s southern border, tourists can come watch the “live drone shows.”

This kind of thing likely enrages Jeb. He is, after all, married to a Mexican American immigrant. He speaks fluent Spanish. He calls his children Hispanic. He’s called himself Hispanic. He describes himself as “immersed in the immigrant experience.” When parents choose to enter the United States illegally because “their children didn’t have food on the table,” in their home country, Jeb said last year, “It’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family.”

Trump must expect Jeb to find his dehumanization of illegal immigrants repulsive. But like any good bully, he can smell fear. He knows that Jeb, like most of the other Republican presidential candidates, fears the animal spirits he has awoken inside the GOP base. And so he’s virtually dared Jeb to double down on what he really believes. Asked this week about Jeb’s trip to a town near the Mexican border, Trump quipped that “he’ll now find out that it is not an act of love … I think he’ll probably be able to figure that out, maybe.”

It was a test: not of Jeb’s views on immigration, but of his character. A test of whether, when challenged on a subject close to his heart, the former Florida governor can show “energy.” Whether he can show he really is a “warrior.”

Team Jeb’s logic was clear and safe: Don’t attack Trump from the left, and thus alienate conservatives. Attack Trump from the right and thus win them over.

Jeb failed, badly. On the surface, he answered Trump’s attack. But it wasn’t really him answering; it was his political consultants. The week before, Jeb’s campaign had launched a new strategy aimed at exposing Trump as a fake conservative. Reading from his new script, Jeb told a New Hampshire crowd that, “Mr. Trump doesn’t have a conservative record. He was a Democrat longer in the last decade than he was a Republican.”

Team Jeb’s logic was clear and safe: Don’t attack Trump from the left, and thus alienate conservatives. Attack Trump from the right and thus win them over. So in response to Trump’s immigration dare, Jeb called the real-estate mogul’s immigration proposals … too expensive. “Mr. Trump’s plans,” Jeb declared on his trip near the border, “are not grounded in conservative principles. His proposal is unrealistic. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It will violate people’s civil liberties. It will create friction with our third-largest trading partner that’s not necessary.”

It was the equivalent of the moment in 1988 when CNN anchor Bernard Shaw asked Michael Dukakis whether he’d support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered and Dukakis replied by citing statistics about the Massachusetts crime rate. Shaw wasn’t probing Dukakis’ views; he was probing his emotions. And Dukakis didn’t show any.

This week near the border, Bush did the same thing. The problem with Trump’s ideas about Mexican American illegal immigrants isn’t that they’re “unrealistic” or “expensive” or “not conservative,” whatever that means. It’s that they’re despicable. Trump, who lives to feed his ego, has realized that running for president can be the biggest ego-boost of all. He’s also realized that in today’s Republican Party, there are millions of downwardly mobile white Americans who are terrified about their economic prospects and alienated by America’s increasingly brown and black complexion. And he’s realized that by trashing the poorest of America’s poor, the exploited, undocumented immigrants who cross the border to do the brutal work upon which America’s economy relies, he can launch himself to the top of the presidential heap.

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Calling Trump a bigot misses the point. It implies that he has genuine convictions. He’s an opportunist using bigotry to feed his megalomania. And in the process, he’s breeding hatred toward people with brown skin and a Spanish accent, whether their papers are in order or not. Less than a week ago, two Boston men beat a homeless Mexican American man with a metal pipe, then urinated on him. When arrested, they told the police, “Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.” (Trump condemned the incident.)

Late last year, Jeb said a Republican presidential candidate should be willing to “lose the primary” in order to avoid “violating your principles.” Donald Trump is now testing that pledge. He’s assaulting the people Jeb loves to see if Jeb has the “energy” to fight for them, consequences be damned. And Jeb is replying by calling Trump’s demagoguery “unrealistic.”

We need “high energy leadership,” Jeb said yesterday in Florida, still trying to answer Trump. Unfortunately for him, energy, like courage, is not something you profess. It’s something you do.

The 2016 Candidates Who Are Making Headlines

The election season has begun, and with it come regular mentions of presidential candidates on the television networks.

In an effort to visualize the number of media mentions each candidate receives, we put together a daily dashboard that tracks national television coverage of the 2016 presidential election, updated each morning. Using data from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive and processed by the GDELT Project, the visualization ranks the major presidential candidates from both parties by the number of times each is mentioned over the course of the day.

All shows on Aljazeera America, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, FOX Business, FOX News, LinkTV, and MSNBC are monitored (with the sole exception of Comedy Central, which only includes data from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, and At Midnight With Chris Hardwick because of their focus on current events). Also note that the counts are based on the raw closed captioning of each broadcast, so they may contain a margin of error due to the imperfect nature of closed captioning.

We invite you to explore the graphic and view a running picture of how the candidates are faring on television during the election season, or drill into the numbers by network using the explorer dashboard. Sort by the number of days to see how the trend and mentions change, along with the ranking of each candidate.

Will the Chair of the Democratic Party Desert Obama on Iran?

With each passing day, the drama is seeping out of the looming vote in Congress on the Iran nuclear deal. Except for a few notable defections, Democrats are lining up behind President Obama, and the likelihood that opponents will be able to muster a veto-proof majority to block the accord is dwindling.

There remain, however, a handful of key lawmakers on the fence, and one of them happens to be the president’s handpicked chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz. More than any other leader in Congress, Wasserman Schultz has for the last four years been obligated, by dint of her position as the titular head of the party, to vote with the Obama administration on the House floor. Yet she has also represented a significant Jewish constituency in south Florida for more than a decade, and she’s come under the same intense pressure as other Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Wasserman Schultz has given virtually no indication of which way she’s leaning, but on Thursday she announced that she was bringing Vice President Joe Biden down to Florida to make the administration’s case for the deal to Jewish leaders in the region. “I think that she’s torn,” said Greg Rosenbaum, chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council, which has come out strongly in favor of the Iran accord.

While Republicans have opposed the agreement en masse, the at-times vitriolic debate has split Jewish Democrats apart in an unprecedented way.  “I’ve never seen an issue this divided within the Jewish community in the United States and between the United States and Israel,” Rosenbaum said. The opposition from Charles Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic leader-in-waiting, caused a rift with the White House, while Representative Jerrold Nadler, a veteran Democrat in the House, has been so vilified by more conservative Jews in New York for supporting the deal that both the NJDC and the Anti-Defamation League have written open letters in his defense.

“I’ve never seen an issue this divided within the Jewish community in the United States and between the United States and Israel.”

Rosenbaum told me he’s worried the bitter fight will cause “irreparable damage” in a Jewish community that has been caught between the equally aggressive pushes by the Obama administration for the deal and the Netanyahu government in Israel against it. “I look at it and say, the day after this deal goes into effect, I gotta figure out how I put humpty-dumpty together again,” he said. Obama has drawn criticism for linking GOP critics of the deal with Iranian hard-liners, but Rosenbaum said the more offensive comments have come from opponents who have drawn analogies to the Holocaust. “I’ve been told that they hope I’m the first person they come for,” Rosenbaum told me, citing emails he’s received. “And ‘Get in the boxcar’ and calling me a ‘capo’ and a Nazi sympathizer. Those are direct statements from people in the Jewish community.”

All of that provides the backdrop for the decision that Wasserman Schultz now faces. In truth, she is far more senior in title than she is in influence these days. A pair of damaging articles in the last two years reported that she had lost the confidence of the Obama White House, and she has long since been supplanted by other ambitious Democrats looking to rise up the ranks of the House leadership. In recent months, Wasserman Schultz has broken with the president for the first time on a significant policy issue by opposing his push to normalize relations with Cuba, another sensitive topic in south Florida.

Among undecided Jewish lawmakers, Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would be a bigger get for Obama on Iran. But Wasserman Schultz remains a prominent spokeswoman for the party, and Republicans would undoubtedly seize on her opposition as a political coup. It’s even been suggested that she would have to resign as DNC chief if she opposed the deal, although Rosenbaum told me he thought she would do so only if she planned to campaign aggressively against it. In a statement on Thursday, Wasserman Schultz said there were “a number of questions and concerns” she and her constituents had about the Iran deal and that Biden would be “an effective representative” to answer them—which might be another way of saying that he is much more popular than Obama among Jews at the moment.

Throughout my process of reviewing the agreement and speaking with nuclear experts, economists, and administration officials, my goal has been and remains seeking as much information as possible to make an informed decision on this issue of great national and international security. Ultimately, I will make this most consequential of decisions based on what I believe is the best way to prevent Iran from achieving their nuclear ambitions.

Rosenbaum said he didn’t hold it against Wasserman Schultz that she’s taking “all the time that is available to her” to decide, and it’s possibly by design that she’ll wait to announce her position until after the outcome is clear. On the verge of guaranteeing that Republicans won’t be able to override a presidential veto of a resolution rejecting the deal, supporters have turned their attention to winning over the 41 senators they’d need to filibuster an initial vote. Even AIPAC, the pro-Israel group lobbying against the deal, now says it expect only a “strong and growing majority of Congress” to oppose it—not to block it entirely.

The Obama administration is making a renewed push to win the support of Jewish voters, and by extension, their representatives. In addition to Biden’s appearance in Florida, Obama is speaking to Jews around the country in a webcast on Friday. According to J-Street, a liberal group supporting the agreement, 13 of the 28 Jewish members of Congress are supportive, seven are opposed, and eight have yet to announce their position. “You could describe it as a split, but it is a split that is heavily weighted toward support for the deal,” said Dylan Williams, J-Street’s chief lobbyist. “This deal is likely to end up with majority support among the Jewish members of Congress.”

Wasserman Schultz, then, is probably not going to make or break the Iran agreement on Capitol Hill. And she wouldn’t be the most powerful Democrat to oppose the deal—that title still belongs to Schumer. But loyalty to the Democratic president is virtually a requirement of her position, and the mere fact that Obama cannot yet count on support from the chief spokeswoman and fundraiser for his party shows just how tough a vote this will be.

It's No Longer Hip to Be Square—on Instagram, At Least

Nearly five years after it was first released, Instagram has achieved something special, something that has eluded Twitter and Facebook.

With its mix of friend photos, vacation postcards, and pseudo-ads, Instagram has stayed fun, really fun. Along with Pinterest, it’s the only major social network that people actually still like to use. And on Thursday, it announced perhaps the biggest change to its service since it debuted web profiles in 2012.

It will now let users think, as it were, outside the square: photos and videos can now be posted in widescreen and portrait formats.

Previously, Instagram had only let people post square photos. This gave images from the service a characteristic look: If you saw a photo on the news or online that seemed strangely cropped to a square, odds were it came from Instagram.

Users found ways to break out of this. Many people began to upload their photos to Instagram with white bars on the sides, essentially creating widescreen photos within a square frame, like so:

A photo posted by Teju Cole (@_tejucole) on Aug 15, 2015 at 12:44pm PDT

As more and more phone screens got taller than they were wide, more and more people did this.

“It turns out that nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format,” says Instagram. The company’s blog post laments that, in the square, “friends get cut out of group shots, the subject of your video feels cramped and you can’t capture the Golden Gate Bridge from end to end.”

A portrait photo in the app (Instagram)

In other words, the square frame could literally divide friendships.

To the change-averse, the company says not to worry, the square will always be loved. “The square format has been and always will be part of who we are,” says a company statement. But it’s hard not to see the widescreen and portrait formats overwhelming ol’ squarey pretty soon. Most smartphones take pictures in portrait and widescreen, as do almost all cameras. (Except, of course, the camera that Instagram partly apes in the first place: the Polaroid SX-70.) It’s hard to see most people cropping a photo for old times’s sake when they can just upload the whole thing.

As my colleague David Sims notes, Instagram also debuted six seconds of the new Star Wars movie on its service Thursday. That video has all the usual Instagram trappings, including the “like” and the “comment” buttons. But on my phone, in widescreen, it doesn’t quite feel like Instagram. It feels a little more mature.

Three years ago, the British singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding asked fans to send her Instagrams from their lives, which were then strung together to make a sepia-toned “lyric video.” That finished product works very hard to get over the square format, projecting the borders of the fan-grams to simulate widescreen. I’ve seen similar effects on cable news, where often the only bystander video to a news event will be in square form.

Types of media come to symbolize certain eras not only because of that type’s ubiquity but because, for a year or a decade, that type filters how we see the world. The epochal example here is the giant photo spreads of Life magazine in the 1960s, but what I remember are the many-newsticker’d cable channels of the early 2000s. For the first half of that decade, CNN and MSNBC would stick as many as three or four crawlers below a talking head. I can’t see video like that anymore without thinking of that era. I bet that, in half a decade, even if an app called “Instagram” is still around and popular, we won’t be able to see a certain kind of over-filtered photographic square without thinking of the early 2010s, either.

Greece’s Ex-Finance Minister Takes Questions From 9 Leading Academics

When Yanis Varoufakis was elected to parliament and then named as Greek finance minister in January, he embarked on an extraordinary seven months of negotiations with the country’s creditors and its European partners.

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On July 6, Greek voters backed his hardline stance in a referendum, with a resounding 62 percent voting No to the European Union’s ultimatum. On that night, he resigned, after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, fearful of an ugly exit from the euro zone, decided to go against the popular verdict. Since then, the governing party, Syriza, has splintered and a snap election has been called. Varoufakis remains a member of parliament and a prominent voice in Greek and European politics.

When asked about Tsipras’s decision to trigger a snap election, inviting the Greek public to issue their judgement on his time in office, Varoufakis said:

If only that were so! Voters are being asked to endorse Alexis Tsipras’s decision, on the night of their majestic referendum verdict, to overturn it; to turn their courageous No into a capitulation, on the grounds that honoring that verdict would trigger a Grexit. This is not the same as calling on the people to pass judgment on a record of steadfast opposition to a failed economic program doing untold damage to Greece’s social economy. It is rather a plea to voters to endorse him, and his choice to surrender, as a lesser evil.

Nine leading academics asked questions to a man who describes himself as an “accidental economist.” His answers reveal regrets about his own approach during a dramatic 2015, a withering assessment of France’s power in Europe, fears for the future of Syriza, a view that the party is now finished, and doubts over how effective the socialist politician Jeremy Corbyn could be if he wins leadership of Britain’s Labour party.

Anton Muscattelli, University of Glasgow: Why was Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras persuaded to accept the EU’s pre-conditions around the third bailout discussions despite a decisive referendum victory for the No campaign; and is this the end of the road for the anti-austerity wing of Syriza in Greece?

Yanis Varoufakis: Tsipras’s answer is that he was taken aback by official Europe’s determination to punish Greek voters by putting into action German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s plan to push Greece out of the euro zone, re-denominate Greek bank deposits in a currency that was not even ready, and even ban the use of euros in Greece. These threats, independently of whether they were credible or not, did untold damage to the European Union’s image as a community of nations and drove a wedge through the axiom of the euro zone’s indivisibility.

As you probably have heard, on the night of the referendum, I disagreed with Tsipras on his assessment of the credibility of these threats and resigned as finance minister. But even if I was wrong on the issue of the credibility of the troika’s threats, my great fear was, and remains, that our party, Syriza, would be torn apart by the decision to implement another self-defeating austerity program of the type that we were elected to challenge. It is now clear that my fears were justified.

If only some economics were to surface in our meetings with the troika, I would be happy! None did.

Roy Bailey, University of Essex: Was the surprise referendum of July 5 conceived as a threat point for the ongoing bargaining between Greece and its creditors, and has the last year caused you to adjust how you think about game theory?

Varoufakis: I shall have to disappoint you Roy [Editor’s note: Roy Bailey taught Varoufakis at Essex and advised on his PhD]. As I wrote in a New York Times op-ed, game theory was never relevant. It applies to interactions where motives are exogenous and the point is to work out the optimal bluffing strategies and credible threats, given available information. Our task was different: It was to persuade the “other” side to change their motivation vis-à-vis Greece.

I represented a small, suffering nation in its sixth straight year of deep recession. Bluffing with our people’s fate would be irresponsible. So I did not. Instead, we outlined that which we thought was a reasonable position, consistent with our creditors’ own interests. And then we stood our ground. When the troika pushed us into a corner, presenting me with an ultimatum on June 25 just before closing Greece’s banking system down, we looked at it carefully and concluded that we had neither a mandate to accept it (given that it was economically non-viable) nor to decline it (and clash with official Europe). Instead we decided to do something terribly radical: to put it to the Greek people to decide.

Lastly, on a theoretical point, the “threat point” in your question refers to John Nash’s bargaining solution, which is based on the axiom of non-conflict between the parties. Tragically, we did not have the luxury to make that assumption.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya, University of Aberdeen: The dealings between Greece and the EU seemed more like a contest between democracy and the banks than a negotiation between the EU and a member state. Given the outcome, are there any lessons that you would take from this for other European parties resisting the imperatives of austerity politics?

Varoufakis: Allow me to phrase this differently. It was a contest between the right of creditors to govern a debtor nation and the democratic right of the said nation’s citizens to be self-governed. You are quite right that there was never a negotiation between the EU and Greece as a member state of the EU. We were negotiating with the troika of lenders—the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, a wholly weakened European Commission—in the context of an informal grouping, the Eurogroup, lacking specific rules, without minutes of the proceedings, and completely under the thumb of one finance minister and the troika of lenders.

Moreover, the troika was terribly fragmented, with many contradictory agendas in play, the result being that the “terms of surrender” they imposed upon us were, to say the least, curious: a deal imposed by creditors determined to attach conditions which guarantee that we, the debtor, cannot repay them. So, the main lesson to be learned from the last few months is that European politics is not even about austerity. Or that, as Nicholas Kaldor wrote in The New Statesman in 1971, any attempt to construct a monetary union before a political union ends up with a terrible monetary system that makes political union much, much harder. Austerity and a hideous democratic deficit are mere symptoms.

I have regretted several interviews.

Panicos Demetriades, University of Leicester: Did you ever think that your message was being diluted or becoming noisy, or even incoherent, by giving so many interviews?

Varoufakis: Yes. I have regretted several interviews, especially when the journalists involved took liberties that I had not anticipated. But let me also add that the “noise” would have prevailed even if I granted far fewer interviews. Indeed the media game was fixed against our government, and me personally, in the most unexpected and repulsive way. Wholly moderate and technically sophisticated proposals were ignored while the media concentrated on trivia and distortions. Giving interviews where I would, to some extent, control the content was my only outlet. Faced with an intentionally “noisy” media agenda that bordered on character assassination, I erred on the side of over-exposure.

Simon Wren-Lewis, University of Oxford: Might it have been possible for a forceful France to have provided an effective counterweight to Germany in the Eurogroup, or did Germany always have a majority on its side?

Varoufakis: The French government feels that it has a weak hand. Its deficit is persistently within the territory of the so-called excessive deficit procedure of the European Commission, which puts Pierre Moscovici, the European commissioner for economic and financial affairs, and France’s previous finance minister, in the difficult position of having to act tough on Paris under the watchful eye of Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister.

It is also true, as you say, that the Eurogroup is completely “stitched up” by Schäuble. Nevertheless, France had an opportunity to use the Greek crisis in order to change the rules of a game that France will never win. The French government has, thus, missed a major opportunity to render itself sustainable within the single currency. The result, I fear, is that Paris will soon be facing a harsher regime, possibly a situation where the president of the Eurogroup is vested with draconian veto powers over the French government’s national budget. How long, once this happens, can the European Union survive the resurgence of nasty nationalism in places like France?

Kamal Munir, University of Cambridge: You often implied that what went on in your meetings with the troika was economics only on the surface. Deep down, it was a political game being played. Don’t you think we are doing a disservice to our students by teaching them a brand of economics that is so clearly detached from this reality?

Varoufakis: If only some economics were to surface in our meetings with the troika, I would be happy! None did.

Even when economic variables were discussed, there was never any economic analysis. The discussions were exhausted at the level of rules and agreed targets. I found myself talking at cross-purposes with my interlocutors. They would say things like: “The rules on the primary surplus specify that yours should be at least 3.5 percent of GDP in the medium term.” I would try to have an economic discussion suggesting that this rule ought to be amended because, for example, the 3.5 percent primary target for 2018 would depress growth today, boost the debt-to-GDP ratio immediately and make it impossible to achieve the said target by 2018.

Such basic economic arguments were treated like insults. Once I was accused of “lecturing” them on macroeconomics. On your pedagogical question: While it is true that we teach students a brand of economics that is designed to be blind to really-existing capitalism, the fact remains that no type of sophisticated economic thinking, not even neoclassical economics, can reach the parts of the Eurogroup which make momentous decisions behind closed doors.

Mariana Mazzucato, University of Sussex: How has the crisis in Greece (its cause and its effects) revealed failings of neoclassical economic theory at both the micro and the macro level?

Varoufakis: The uninitiated may be startled to hear that the macroeconomic models taught at the best universities feature no accumulated debt, no involuntary unemployment and, indeed, no money (with relative prices reflecting a form of barter). Save perhaps for a few random shocks that demand and supply are assumed to quickly iron out, the snazziest models taught to the brightest of students assume that savings automatically turn into productive investment, leaving no room for crises.

It makes it hard when these graduates come face-to-face with reality. They are at a loss, for example, when they see German savings that permanently outweigh German investment while Greek investment outweighs savings during the “good times” (before 2008) but collapses to zero during the crisis.

Moving to the micro level, the observation that, in the case of Greece, real wages fell by 40 percent but employment dropped precipitously, while exports remained flat, illustrates in Technicolor how useless a microeconomics approach bereft of macro foundations truly is.

Under the current design only a currency union east of the Rhine and north of the Alps is sustainable. In short, the euro zone was badly designed for everyone.

Tim Bale, Queen Mary University of London: Do you see any similarities between yourself and Jeremy Corbyn, who looks like he might win the Labour leadership, and do you think a left-wing populist party is capable of winning an election under a first-past-the-post system?

Varoufakis: The similarity that I feel at liberty to mention is that Corbyn and I, probably, coincided at many demonstrations against the Tory government while I lived in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, and share many views regarding the calamity that befell working Britons as power shifted from manufacturing to finance. However, all other comparisons must be kept in check.

Syriza was a radical party of the Left that scored a little more than 4 percent of the vote in 2009. Our incredible rise was due to the collapse of the political “center” caused by popular discontent at a Great Depression due to a single currency that was never designed to sustain a global crisis, and by the denial of the powers-that-be that this was so.

The much greater flexibility that the Bank of England afforded to Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s British governments prevented the type of socio-economic implosion that led Syriza to power and, in this sense, a similarly buoyant radical-left party is most unlikely in Britain. Indeed, the Labour Party’s own history, and internal dynamic, will, I am sure, constrain a victorious Jeremy Corbyn in a manner alien to Syriza.

Turning to the first-past-the-post system, had it applied here in Greece, it would have given our party a crushing majority in parliament. It is, therefore, untrue that Labour’s electoral failures are due to this system.

Lastly, allow me to urge caution with the word “populist.” Syriza did not put to Greek voters a populist agenda. “Populists” try to be all things to all people. Our promised benefits extended only to those earning less than £500 per month. If it wants to be popular, Labour cannot afford to be populist either.

Mark Taylor, University of Warwick: Would you agree that Greece does not fulfill the criteria for successful membership of a currency union with the rest of Europe? Wouldn’t it be better if they left now rather than simply papering over the cracks and waiting for another Greek economic crisis to occur in a few years’ time?

Varoufakis: The euro zone’s design was such that even France and Italy could not thrive within it. Under the current institutional design only a currency union east of the Rhine and north of the Alps would be sustainable. Alas, it would constitute a union useless to Germany, as it would fail to protect it from constant revaluation in response to its trade surpluses.

Now, if by “criteria” you meant the Maastricht limits, it is of course clear that Greece did not fulfill them. But then again nor did Italy or Belgium. Conversely, Spain and Ireland did meet the criteria and, indeed, by 2007 the Madrid and Dublin governments were registering deficit, debt, and inflation numbers that, according to the official criteria, were better than Germany’s. And yet when the crisis hit, Spain and Ireland sank into the mire. In short, the euro zone was badly designed for everyone. Not just for Greece.

So should we cut our losses and get out? To answer properly we need to grasp the difference between saying that Greece, and other countries, should not have entered the euro zone, and saying now that we should now exit. Put technically, we have a case of hysteresis: Once a nation has taken the path into the euro zone, that path disappeared after the euro’s creation and any attempt to reverse along that, now nonexistent, path could lead to a great fall off a tall cliff.

This post appears courtesy of The Conversation.

The Paradox of Baby Names

There is a company that promises to come up with a list of names for your new baby that are—as much as baby names can possibly be—unique. Erfolgswelle, based in Switzerland,

Social Security Administration

Let’s look at Emma. Emma

Lily Tomlin: Not Your Typical Grandma

Do a search for “Grandma” on Google Images, and you’ll be greeted with row after row of older women—almost all of them be-spectacled, almost all of them be-halo-ed in a puff of white hair, almost all of them smiling, beatifically and benignly. “Grandma” may be, technically, a relationship rather than a description, but we have, collectively, our assumptions about what the person who occupies that role is like: She is probably sweet. She is probably docile. She’d probably really love to bake you some cookies. She is “Grandma,” and that—not just according to Google, but according to movies and novels and comic strips and TV shows, across the culture, and with very little exception—is her most relevant feature.

Not so Grandma’s Elle Reid, who manages to be a grandmother and a complicated human—both, against all odds, at the same time. Elle (Lily Tomlin, in a performance that is, oddly and tellingly, a breakout) is loud and opinionated and stubborn and ornery and angry. (“Mom says that you’re philanthropic,” her granddaughter, Sage, tells her. She quickly corrects herself. “I mean, misanthropic.”) A poet who was renowned in the 1970s and who has ridden her success to a life of academia-adjacent bohemianism—Adrienne Rich seems to have been a rough model—Elle is also a resolute feminist who has a first edition of The Feminine Mystique that she actually reads. She is quick with casual insults (“your face looks like an armpit,” she informs a young man who has displeased her), and even quicker with deeper ones. (“You were a footnote,” she spits at her girlfriend, Olivia (Judy Greer), while breaking up with her in the first scenes of the film.) And that’s largely because, a year and a half after her partner of 38 years, Violet, died of an unnamed illness, Elle is also grieving and hurting and lost. The pain—the phantom limb of a lost love—permeates everything she does, whether the thing is breaking up with Olivia or coming to terms with long-held family secrets or helping her teenage granddaughter to get an abortion.

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Grandma—written and directed by Paul Weitz, whose resume includes such diverse pictures as About a Boy, In Good Company, Little Fockers, and American Pie—follows a single day in the life of Elle, her daughter, and her granddaughter. Things begin in the morning, when Elle is interrupted from the quietly misanthropic day she had planned for herself by Sage—who is 18 and pregnant and desperate to not be—knocking on her door. Her granddaughter (Julia Garner, imbuing her character with a subtle wisdom that fits the name) has made an appointment at a nearby abortion clinic. For 5:45 that evening. Her boyfriend has failed to get the money—$630—he had promised to scrounge up to cover the cost of the procedure. Being broke and also hoping to keep her situation a secret from her domineering mother, Sage turns to her decidedly non-grandmotherly grandmother for the money, and for more general support.

The only (well, the other) problem? Elle has recently paid off her debts, cutting up her credit cards in a symbolic attempt to simplify her life. So she, too, is broke. But she’s also determined to help Sage. And so the two set out on a road trip that’s a little bit Terms of Endearment and a little bit Thelma and Louise. They encounter, in their quest to gather the $630 before 5:45, a series of people who double as specters from Elle’s life—making the whole thing also just a teeny bit Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Which sounds pretty terrible, right, plot-wise? Cliched, cloying, smug, forced, generally bizarre? And it so easily could have been all of those things. The small miracle of Grandma, though, is that the film is, in the end, none of them. It’s a character study and morality play and bildungsroman, subtly executed and lovingly performed. The characters who could all veer into empty tropes (the aging lesbian! the cold, career-driven mother! the irresponsible #teen!) pulse, in the end, with quirky humanity. They’re given room, in the space of a single day, to live and breathe and grow. Judy Reid (Marcia Gay Harden), the daughter Elle raised with Violet, may be introduced to viewers as an over-caffeinated executive who works at a treadmill desk and goes through assistants as if they were toothbrushes, but she grows. Sage may pivot, convincingly, between adolescent meekness and adolescent arrogance; she, too, grows. Deciding not to become a mother, for her, itself confers a kind of maturity.

Elle is a resolute feminist who has a first edition of The Feminine Mystique that she actually reads.

But the character who grows the most in all this is the one who, per the traditional conventions of the pop-cultured Grandma, has no growing left to do. This is Elle’s story, her (literal) coming-of-age tale. Grandma, indeed, insistently disentangles “age” from “maturity,” and that distinction finds Elle, with seven decades of living under her belt, engaged in stereotypically young-person activities: getting a tattoo (from her friend Deathy, played by the wonderful Laverne Cox), beating up the kid who got her granddaughter pregnant, getting punched in the face by a 5-year-old outside of an abortion clinic. It finds her throwing tantrums and testing her limits and vacillating unpredictably between sweetness and self-absorption.

You get the sense that Violet wasn’t just Elle’s partner, but a parental influence—stabilizing, calming, enabling—and that, in her absence, Elle has reverted to a kind of late-life adolescence. Elle herself is only partially aware of this. “I like being old,” she muses. “Young people are stupid.”

Elle’s feminism, too, is young. Her icons are Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir—she pronounces their names with reverence and love and, in Beauvoir’s case, an exaggeratedly guttural “r”—and she seems baffled that their iconography could have dissipated in the years between her youth and her granddaughter’s. “You don't know The Feminine Mystique?” Elle asks Sage, mystified and horrified. Her granddaughter replies, “Mystique is a character in X-Men.”

I won’t spoil anything more, but it’s enough to say that the family road trip ends, in its way, happily. It ends, maybe more to the point, humanly. Grandma doesn’t offer an overt message about the hot-button politics inherent in its plot—about same-sex partnerships, about women’s reproductive rights, about feminism—so much as it offers a gentle appreciation for political ideas as infrastructures of people’s lives. It refuses to judge its characters, and it refuses to reduce them to caricature. Elle is a lesbian; that is not all she is. She is a poet; that is not all she is. She is a feminist; that is not all she is. She is a senior; that is not all she is.

And she is, yes, a grandmother. That, too, is not all.

The Red-Baiting of Lena Horne

She was a goddess with a honey-sweet voice. “I remember once seeing her on a train,” says the jazz scholar and author Stanley Crouch. “She had a luminous restrained presence that most superstars try to pretend they have. She really had it.”

Over the course of her long life, Lena Horne became a star of film, music, television, and stage, as well as a formidable force for civil rights. She won a Tony in 1981, and two years later, earned an NAACP medal that had previously been awarded to Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Rosa Parks. When she died in 2010 at age 92, President Barack Obama noted that she was the first black singer to tour with an all-white band and that she refused to perform for segregated audiences. “Michelle and I join all Americans in appreciating the joy she brought to our lives and the progress she forged for our country,” he said.

Yet there was a brief period in the early 1950s when Horne’s career seemed to be over. Her name had appeared in Red Channels, a report that listed more than 100 entertainers who appeared to have communist leanings. For more than three years after that, she struggled to get work. She continued to perform at nightclubs, but nobody in the TV or film industries would hire her.

She was at a low point in June 1953 when she performed at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The city was not the shining epicenter of entertainment that it is today. It was not even the Las Vegas of Frank Sinatra’s famed Rat Pack yet. There were only a handful of hotels and motels, and the infamous Strip was nonexistent. But Horne had few other options. She closed the show with “Stormy Weather,” her most famous song:

Life is bare
Gloom and misery everywhere
Stormy weather
Just can’t get my poor self together
I’m weary all the time

Then she walked off the stage and went back to her room. On Sands stationery stamped with the hotel motto “A Place in the Sun,” her story unfolded. “Dear Mr. Brewer,” her letter began.

For decades, Horne’s biographers have largely glossed over the question of how Horne found her way back into the entertainment business. Even Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, who wrote a 1986 book about the Horne family, didn’t get to see the letter until 2013. All that time, it was sitting in a bankers’ box, packed away in a children’s playhouse on a dusty ranch in the San Fernando Valley. But those 12 neatly written pages reveal how a beautiful young black woman became a pawn in the Cold War—and how she ultimately regained control of her career and her life.

From the beginning, Horne was troubled by her inability to fit in anywhere. She refused to play the maid and prostitute roles usually reserved for black actresses of her time, which narrowed her prospects in Hollywood. At the same time, many black artists accused her of using her lighter skin to “pass.” Horne herself was ambivalent about her looks. “I came from one of the First Families of Brooklyn,” she once said, “yet it was the rape of slave women by their masters which accounted for our white blood, which, in turn, made us Negro ‘society.’”

In 1941 when she was 23, Horne was hired to perform at a unique club in Greenwich Village called Cafe Society Downtown. It was a “people’s nightclub,” wrote Buckley, Horne’s daughter, in her 1986 book, The Hornes: An American Family, the only place in the city where the races mixed.

What few of the patrons knew was that the club was moving money for the Communist Party. They were distracted by the musicians and mesmerized by Horne’s beauty. She was learning to personify everything she sang, and to make eye contact with the audience, especially men. In November 1941, Harper’s Bazaar called her the queen of Cafe Society. She later said that most of what she knew about music she absorbed there.

Robeson had seen the world, including the Soviet Union where he was treated like royalty and squired around the country.

One night after Horne’s show, the 43-year-old black stage and film star Paul Robeson came to her dressing room to pay his respects. His six-foot-three stature matched his voice—a baritone so commanding that he was the main draw of one of the most successful musicals of all time, Show Boat, where he debuted his signature tune, “Ol’ Man River.”

Robeson had an affinity for Horne because her grandmother, a staunch character with a college education, had helped him get a scholarship to Rutgers. He’d gone on to Columbia Law School—an astonishing rise for a man whose father had been a runaway slave. As a performer, Robeson had seen the world, including the Soviet Union where he was treated like royalty and squired around the country. During the 1930s, he’d even enrolled his only child, 9-year-old Paul Jr., in an exclusive school in Moscow, where he’d studied with Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana.

On this particular night in 1941, Horne found herself seeking Robeson’s advice. As she later detailed in her letter at the Sands Hotel, she told him she was exhausted by the pressures of show business, the racism she faced from the white establishment, and the disdain she heard from black people who accused her of “trying to pass.” Robeson kept listening. Finally, he exhorted her to devote her life to making the country a better place, to eradicate her pain by helping people everywhere. He named specific groups such as the Council for African Affairs and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.

Horne later said she was unfamiliar with these organizations at the time, but she took Robeson’s advice and signed up. She knew the country was still in the Great Depression and the world seemed to be growing closer to war. And with the rise of Hitler in Europe, Robeson’s call to actively oppose fascism felt timely. But she didn’t know that Robeson was part of something much larger, that his dedication and passion came from a force he didn’t discuss in the open, even with a kindred spirit like Horne.

In 1943, as her career was beginning to take off, Lena Horne christened the Liberty ship SS George Washington Carver in Richmond, California. (New York Public Library / Wikimedia)

“We were usually secret, covert, manipulative—it was part of the air we breathed. We said, ‘We have causes and we want to work with other people to do this, and this, and this...’” George Moore trailed off as he spoke, recalling his time in the communist orbit. His father, Hollywood writer Sam Moore, had been a member of the Communist Party, and George had been active in the youth wing throughout high school and college. In interviews, Moore and a half-dozen other Hollywood ex-communists said that the approach Robeson used with Horne was familiar. Celebrities were advantageous to their cause because they could dress up something most Americans would reject if presented outright, the ex-communists said. The most votes the Communist Party had ever received in a presidential election, a little more than 100,000, had come in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression.

In the post-war era, the communists’ challenge was how to get people like Horne working for them. Party members were taught to identify the grievances of potential recruits and offer them a vision of a utopia where those problems didn’t exist. Subtlety was vital. And Marx, Lenin, or communism itself could never be mentioned. “Too risky,” says Moore. If the communists could capture Horne, her glamour would come with the bonus of an issue the Soviets also believed they could turn to their advantage: bigotry.

By the early 1940s, Walter White, the leader of the NAACP, was embarrassed that the two most successful blacks in film, Hattie McDaniel and Lincoln Perry, were reduced to playing maids and a character named Stepin Fetchit—“The Laziest Man in the World.” White believed Horne was going to transform the image of black America and prodded Hollywood executives to give her auditions.

She got parts after that, but none of them were leads. In one MGM musical after another, she showed up in small roles—musical interludes that had little to do with the main story. In some states, where theaters couldn’t show black performers, her scenes were edited out altogether. “No one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut,” she said in a 1957 interview. “I had no communication with anybody. I began to feel depressed about it, wasted emotionally.”

Yet the songs were modern, captivating, even racy. “You’ll never catch her whipping up spoon bread and spirituals in an Aunt Jemima rig—she’s nobody’s mammy,” wrote Liberty, a general-interest weekly magazine popular in the ’40s. During the war, she traveled with the USO to perform for the troops. When the military excluded black servicemen from one concert, Horne stayed longer and did a separate show just for them. In return, black soldiers wrote to MGM and thanked the studio for giving them their own pin-up girl. “A lot of places where they were, they couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in there, see, but they were safe with my picture,” Horne said years later. “They made my career.”

In 1944, Horne won the Motion Picture Unity Award for “outstanding colored actress of the year.” But no matter how much admiration Horne received, she still didn’t feel worthy, as she would later reflect. She was the perfect mark for Carlton Moss, a 34-year-old black screenwriter who was on the speakers’ platform at the awards gala and invited her to perform on his radio show, Jubilee.

In contrast to Robeson’s giant presence, Moss was unassuming, with an almost nerdy voice. But when Horne began to confide her insecurities, he responded the same way Robeson had: He suggested that she channel her frustrations and insecurities into activism. In particular, he urged her to join the Hollywood chapter of an organization called the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, which had been founded to advance President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s liberal agenda. She agreed.

If the communists could capture Horne, her glamour would come with the bonus of an issue the Soviets believed they could turn to their advantage: bigotry.

The group’s leaders elected Horne to the Citizens Committee’s executive board where she served with movie stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, and, for a short time, even Ronald Reagan. Her commitment grew and she was made one of the Citizens Committee’s vice-chairmen. As Time reported in a September 9, 1946, story about the Citizens Committee, “Lena Horne will sing at any rally.”

With celebrities like Horne on the stage, the organization drew as many as 20,000 supporters to its events. But what most of those people, including the notables at the top, didn’t know was that a core group of Communist Party members was taking control of the prominent Hollywood branch, what de Havilland described to me as a “nucleus.” Carlton Moss was one of them.

The New Leader, a now-defunct magazine founded by socialists, once estimated that a small cadre of Communist Party members controlled an estimated 70 national organizations and thousands of local groups in 1946 alone. In Hollywood, multiple sources confirm, there were only about 300 party members, but by using thousands of others who didn’t know the first thing about Karl Marx, that minority was able to dominate and control almost a dozen unions and guilds in the motion-picture industry, including screenwriters, story analysts, cartoonists, and painters.

After FDR’s death and the end of World War II, the Citizens’ Committee grew bolder, more critical of President Harry S. Truman’s Cold War policies. De Havilland, who served with Horne as a vice-chairman, once told me the total lack of criticism of the Soviet Union was a clue that the organization was under Communist Party control. As Horne became a regular onstage presence at the group’s events, including an affair opposing Secretary of State’s James Byrnes’s “Get Tough with Russia” program, Liberty called her the “feminine counterpart of Paul Robeson.”

Left: In her dressing room at Cafe Society Downtown in 1941 (AP); right: Sailing into Southampton, England, in 1964 (AP)

It’s impossible to know for sure whether Horne had any inkling that there was something unusual behind her new friends. If she did, it’s not hard to understand why she chose to look the other way. After all, their social circles had allure and advantages. Suddenly the once lonely pin-up girl was running with scientists, authors, and academics. Buckley, Horne’s daughter, claimed in her 1986 book on the family that her mother knew “perfectly well that communists were active in many of the causes she supported.” As Buckley put it, Horne “never felt she was aiding communism, she felt that communism was aiding her.”

Moss stayed close to Horne throughout it all. When segregationists in L.A. banded together and filed suit to evict Horne from her house in Nichols Canyon by using restrictive covenant laws, Moss and other secret party members mobilized a campaign to support her. The celebrities outmuscled the bigots: Horne remained in her house and her ties to Moss grew even stronger.

By the spring of 1946, Horne was accepting an award from the New Masses Dinner Committee and speaking at a meeting honoring the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, sponsored by the Hollywood Writers Mobilization. Interviews with and testimonies from scores of ex-communists confirm that this organization and this affair were carefully designed to draw people like Horne to the communist cause.

At the time, there was only a trickle of revelations about Soviet spies in the U.S. and the American public was still unaware of the depth of the violent atrocities Stalin was inflicting upon the Russian people. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s scurrilous anti-communist crusade had not yet begun. So as Horne continued to praise outspoken advocates and screenwriters, she almost certainly didn’t think about the consequences—even if she did suspect that all of them were working in the communist underground.

She was only 32, but Carlton Moss still advised her that he thought it was time for her to write an autobiography. He suggested himself as her ghostwriter, and she took him up on his offer.

Horne trusted Moss so completely that she allowed him to read a draft of her autobiography to several of her friends before she’d read it herself. The overall theme of the book was the bigotry she had suffered. But according to Buckley, Horne thought Moss’s account of her life was “phony” and grew irate as she listened.

Moss went back to Horne and begged her to let him try again, explaining that he’d poured so much energy into her book that it had cost him other employment. After he showed her rewrites of the initial chapters, she authorized him to keep going but instructed him not to publish anything until she’d approved the final draft.

Horne performed at a fundraiser for 10 screenwriters who’d refused to testify; they’d been fired from their studios and found guilty of contempt of Congress.

All this time, collective memories of the Soviet Union as a wartime ally were fading fast. Stalin had swallowed Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia; anti-communist fervor was starting to boil. The world looked a lot different than it had when Horne first responded to Robeson’s overtures. Newspapers teemed with headlines about communist spies stealing U.S. nuclear secrets, and by August 1949 the Soviets were testing their first atom bomb, named “Joe-1” in honor of Stalin.

De Havilland and Reagan began to suspect that the Citizens Committee to which they and Horne belonged was controlled by communists. De Havilland devised a plan to “smoke them out,” as she explained to me. She asked Reagan to write a resolution condemning both fascism and communism, which she then introduced at a meeting. The communists rejected it, and de Havilland and Reagan resigned from the organization. De Havilland then receded from the political fervor of the times, while Reagan was galvanized and joined forces with others in Hollywood to respond to the battle the Reds were waging in the entertainment unions.

But Horne stayed and was left standing with the communists.

In Washington, the House Committee on Un-American Activities launched investigations and high-profile hearings on communism in the motion-picture industry. Horne performed at a fundraiser for 10 screenwriters who’d refused to testify; they’d been fired from their studios and found guilty of contempt of Congress. After the Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal, all of them went to prison, serving sentences that ranged from six months to a year.

Meanwhile, Paul Robeson’s public stature began to crumble. Long regarded as a champion of African American causes, he was now just as effusive when it came to the Soviet Union. But he went too far for much of the public on April 20, 1949, when he appeared at the World Peace Conference in Paris, one of a series of prominent Soviet propaganda gatherings. Robeson declared that black Americans would refuse to fight for the U.S. if war broke out with the Soviet Union. “It is certainly unthinkable for myself and the Negro people to go to war in the interests of those who have oppressed us for generations,” he said in a speech. The next morning, the headline “Negros Won’t Fight Russia, Robeson Says” appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and the story was picked up in papers worldwide.

Horne and Paul Robeson look over plans for a June 1946 rally at Madison Square Garden, hosted by the Council on African Affairs. (AP)

For several years, racists had been claiming that blacks were welcoming toward communism and lazy during World War II (even though during the war, half a million blacks had served in Europe alone). Many African American leaders objected to Robeson’s statement because it played into both slurs. In his 1949 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Lester B. Granger, the executive director of the National Urban League, responded directly to Robeson’s statement:

Authentic Negro leadership in this country finds itself confronted by two enemies on opposite sides. One enemy is the communist who seeks to destroy the democratic ideal and practice which constitute the Negro’s sole hope of eventual victory in his fight for equal citizenship. The other enemy is that American racist who perverts and corrupts the democratic concept into a debased philosophy of life. In opposing one enemy, Negro leadership must be careful not to give aid and comfort to the other.

Jackie Robinson, Major League Baseball’s first black player, spoke for many blacks when he called Robeson’s statement “silly.” “I understand that there are some few Negroes who are members of the Communist Party,” he said, “and in the event of war with Russia they’d probably act just as any other communist would.”

Robeson didn’t seem prepared for the condemnation his Paris statement provoked from other blacks, but his outbursts continued. At Paul Jr.’s wedding to a white woman that June in New York, he exploded at reporters who were there to cover it. “This marriage would not have caused any excitement in the Soviet Union,” he said. “I have the greatest contempt for the democratic press, and there is something within me which keeps me from breaking your cameras over your heads.”

Things worsened for Robeson when Manning Johnson, a 10-year veteran of the Communist Party who was also black, identified Robeson as a long-time comrade. “There is not one iota of doubt about Robeson’s membership,” Johnson said. Johnson, who had rejected communism after serving as one of the party’s national leaders, testified to Congress on July 14, 1949, that Robeson’s assignment was recruitment. “They just wanted to use him, as a great artist, to impress other artists and intellectuals generally,” he said.

Johnson made a series of sensational claims. He said that Robeson had made it his goal to become “a black Stalin” for the Negro community. He also alleged that one of the party’s additional goals was to establish, as The New York Times reported, “a Negro communist republic, starting on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and reaching into the Deep South, which would declare its autonomy and put on a rebellion.” In 1955, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. disclosed that the Department of Justice was paying Johnson (and dozens of other ex-communists) to expose Party members. Brownell told reporters that the government paid Johnson $9,096 in 1954, or $80,000 in today’s money. But even though the testimony came from a paid informant sharing fanciful schemes, it did lasting damage to Robeson’s reputation.

Horne said nothing to distance herself from Robeson.

In the spring of 1950, Horne set sail for Paris for a European performance tour. Lennie Hayton, a musical director from MGM, accompanied her in a professional capacity. He was also her husband, but interracial marriage was still illegal in California and the couple had been keeping their relationship a secret. When members of the press had asked her about the relationship, she’d lied to them.

Horne and her husband, Lennie Hayton, en route to Europe in 1950 (AP)

While Horne was singing for European audiences, American network executives and advertising agents were reading about her in Red Channels, the Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television—a 213-page booklet published by the retired FBI agent Theodore C. Kirkpatrick. He’d collected and printed data from public records on more than 100 individuals in film and TV. Several pages were devoted to Horne.

A short time later, Moss—with the help of another writer named Helen Arstein—finished Horne’s autobiography. It was more than 500 pages long, and Horne later claimed that he sent the manuscript to the publisher without showing her a word of it. The final product—In Person: Lena Horne, As Told to Helen Arstein and Carlton Moss—was released before she returned to the U.S.

In Person didn’t explicitly make Horne sound like a communist. But it had her paying tribute to the now-radioactive Robeson. At times, she seemed to suggest that America’s racial issues were a failure of democracy itself. In one scene, she arrives at a train station in Washington, D.C., for a performance at Howard Theatre. Horne and the musicians try to catch a taxi but are rejected by the driver:

“I can’t take you,” he said. “You’ll have to go over there and get one of them colored cabs.” Without a word, we picked up our bags and trudged out of the station in the direction of his gesture. There the colored cabs were permitted to drop their passengers and pick up new ones. We kept out silence until a colored driver picked us up. Then one of the musicians said in an odd tone, “And they call this the seat of democracy.” Everybody laughed. Everybody, that is, except me.

The book delved into Horne’s secret marriage to Hayton, disclosing her personal feelings about the relationship. Almost as soon as Horne’s ship docked in New York, reporters began firing off questions. They wanted to know about her ties to Robeson, her marriage to a white man—everything.

“My mother was furious,” Buckley, Horne’s daughter, told me in an email. “She hated the book.”

Horne first confronted Moss over the phone, but their conversation made her even angrier. When Horne returned to Los Angeles and met Moss face-to-face, she explained all the reasons she was appalled. Moss told her there was nothing she could do about it.

By 1951, dozens of whistleblowers had come forward to testify at the McCarthy hearings. In April 1951, the literary agent Meta Reis Rosenberg told Congress why she’d chosen to leave the party after seven years of membership. She said, “the minute you disagree, they begin to call you names, and this is a form of intimidation, this is a form of fear.” As part of her decision to break ranks, she identified members of her cell. One of the names she offered was Carlton Moss.

Meanwhile, black journalists were connecting the dots of Horne’s involvement with the party—the speeches, dinners, rallies, and other affairs. Her inclusion in Red Channels “shocked millions of her admirers,” reported the Los Angeles Sentinel, a leading African-American newspaper. Editors there published a scathing editorial, “An Idol Has Fallen,” lambasting Horne as “deplorable.” They wrote that her actions “do little to promote the Negro cause.” Writers at the Afro-American speculated whether Horne would become a “parallel to Paul Robeson, now the forgotten man of Hollywood” and asked, “Will Lena be replaced by the younger, beautiful and talented Dorothy Dandridge? She could be the person to make Hollywood forget Lena Horne.”

“Lena was screwed,” says Moore. “Nobody could or would defend her.”

By now, the mere hint that a celebrity might be a communist was enough to end her career. Nationwide boycotts were being organized against films connected with communists, and in an effort to protect their investments, executives and producers refused to hire people with communist connections. In that kind of climate, how could Lena Horne survive?

Horne poses with the cast of the film Cabin in the Sky in 1943. (AP)

Horne tried seeking help from George Sokolsky, an influential New York Herald-Tribune columnist who had worked as a newspaper editor in Russia but now championed Joe McCarthy. Horne later said that Sokolsky expressed sympathy for her plight but didn’t offer to help her in any way.

Next, she sought the aid of Ed Sullivan. She’d appeared on his show in the fall of 1951, but the CBS switchboard had immediately started lighting up as viewers demanded, Get that communist off the air. Sullivan was the host who’d helped give Horne her initial wave of national TV exposure, and he also had a newspaper column in which he expressed anti-communist views. He listened to her plight and suggested she repudiate communism in a statement for Kirkpatrick, the Red Channels publisher.

Black journalists were connecting the dots of Horne’s involvement with the party—the speeches, dinners, rallies, and other affairs.

She did, and Sullivan published that statement in his column on October 26, 1951. “No minority group in the country within the past ten years has made the advances scored by the Negroes … and we would have made even greater advances if the communists didn’t deliberately try to confuse the issue and stir agitation,” he quoted Horne as saying. She distanced herself from Robeson: “He does not speak for the American Negro. Agitation, however, will always be with us.”

The statement didn’t help her. Horne’s words were viewed as a calculated attempt at saving what was left of her career, and she’d sidestepped the larger issue of how she’d ended up in that grim place. Even with the wide circulation of Sullivan’s column, networks and advertisers wanted nothing more to do with Horne.

She had one other option: appealing to Roy Brewer, the toughest anti-communist in Hollywood. When an entertainer had been named in Red Channels, his or her only hope of working again was often to write Brewer a letter—naming names and disavowing communist connections in emphatic terms. If he found it sincere, he would forward it on to the studios. “Most of these people were the victims of the communists; they are not communists,” he later told Daily Variety. “We had to find ways for the ones who were suckered into it to get out. That was my effort.”

Roy Brewer testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947. (AP)

As a liberal himself, an international representative of the stagehands’ union in the ’40s and ’50s, Brewer told me he was appalled by the way the communists were appealing to people’s frustrations, ambitions, and idealism. These people didn’t necessarily know the communists were using them, he said. But when their ties were exposed, the public immediately labeled them as sympathizers. Brewer understood how they were being exploited by the covert members of the Communist Party.

Ex-communist screenwriter Richard Collins said the party cast Brewer as a Red-baiter, and historians and commentators picked up on it. According to an early script, this is how Brewer will be portrayed in the upcoming film Trumbo, which focuses on the travails of the communist screenwriter whom Horne had once praised.

By the time I met Brewer in 2001, he was retired and eager to tell his side of the story. It helped that he’d kept just about every document that crossed his desk. These papers were scattered about in more than 60 file boxes packed away at his daughter’s nearby ranch house. Over the next few years, he began to make them available to me.

When Brewer received his first call from Lena Horne on November 8, 1952, it was four days after Adlai Stevenson lost the presidential election. Brewer had been alarmed to learn that Horne was scheduled to perform at a Los Angeles campaign rally. He’d urged the rally’s organizers to remove Horne from the program, but her performance had gone on as planned. Brewer told me he hated McCarthy for damaging legitimate leftist causes, purchasing TV and radio airtime to accuse Stevenson of sympathizing with the Reds. But he also knew that the public was increasingly seeing the Democrats as soft on communism. That was indeed one of the main takeaways after Stevenson’s defeat.

Brewer told me his initial conversation with Horne lasted about 45 minutes. She seemed exhausted, hurt, and angry, venting her sense of betrayal, and Brewer told her she wasn’t alone. He said he knew of many cases where the Communist Party had surrounded entertainers, leaving them trapped. He told her she would have to clear her own name but pledged to support her.

However, he ended up doing more than that. On November 13, 1952, Brewer wrote to CBS and NBC executives, sending them a copy of the Ed Sullivan column with Horne’s 1951 anti-communist statement. “I have investigated this situation and I am of the firm opinion that there should be no further question about her position in this matter,” he wrote. “I am sending you this letter because I understand there is a possibility of the question being raised.”

A few days later, a CBS vice president wrote back to Brewer. The letter would be helpful, he said, in “removing any cloud that may have restricted the use of Miss Horne’s services.” On December 2, 1952, Brewer replied, “I think it is our duty to assist persons who have been innocently involved and who want to find a proper way to make known their real feelings.” That same day, Brewer informed Horne’s agent of the CBS communication.

But despite Brewer’s private attempts to help restore confidence in Horne’s reputation, her involvement with Moss continued to dog her. Moss’s coauthor on the Horne autobiography, Helen Arstein, was now vocal in her support of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. As the Rosenbergs were awaiting execution for stealing nuclear secrets for the Soviets, Arstein rallied a group to protest at the Truman White House. Horne knew that with Arstein’s name also now prominently linked to hers, she had to act.

So in June 1953, at Brewer’s urging, Horne sat down in the Sands hotel and wrote the letter she hoped would finally clear her name. “Dear Mr. Brewer,” she began. “If at anytime I have said or done anything that might have been construed as being sympathetic toward communism, I hope the following will help to refute this misconception.”

Horne at the March on Washington in August 1963 (AP)

She went on to recount her betrayal by Moss: “I suddenly realized that I had been used by someone cold bloodedly, one who had no scruples about my bearing the responsibilities of his actions.” Horne stopped short of claiming that Moss had influenced her to sympathize with communism, but she wrote that a man he’d introduced her to had hinted it would be a good idea for her to join the party. She’d declined the invitation.

Horne also claimed that both Moss and Robeson had preyed upon her concern for “the Negro people” who didn’t have the same opportunities she did. Looking back on her friendship with Moss, she wrote, “I also realized that the many actions I had assumed under his influence were all a part of the same pattern. I am angry that I did not immediately see through this pattern. The shock and the anger awakened me to the need of being more discerning and to channel my energies in more appropriate directions.”

Horne continued, “I have always known that America offers the greatest chance to all people, to achieve human dignity—and since this terrible experience I am more determined than ever to do what I can to impress these principles on the thinking of all people I come in contact with.”

She signed the letter, “Most sincerely, Lena Horne.”

An excerpt from the final page of Horne’s letter to Brewer

Between the November 1952 phone conversation, Horne’s 12-page mea culpa, and Brewer’s own familiarity with the communist tactics Horne described, he was convinced of Horne’s sincerity. He rejected the charge that Horne was, as one associate of the publisher of Red Channels put it to Brewer in a letter, “above all a political person” who “let her hair down” when “there was no economic penalty for pro-communist activity.”

Brewer found the letter compelling enough that he sent it to at least nine of the top executives at studios and networks, places he thought would hire Horne if her communist ties weren’t an issue. He also mailed Horne’s letter to powerful political operatives, including Sokolsky, who had his secretary mail a copy to J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant on July 21, 1953. “I find it very interesting,” the assistant replied to Sokolsky a week later. (A copy of that reply is in the bureau’s file on Horne.)

This strategy proved far more effective than Sullivan’s more public help had. Brewer said he knew the public had grown cynical about attempts to clear celebrity’s names. “Their clearance is really a fix and nobody is buying it,” Red Channels’ Kirkpatrick had told Brewer in December 1952. For that reason, Brewer said, he kept his communications private, knowing that his messages would reverberate through Hollywood, New York, and McCarthyite circles.

Before long, Horne was back on CBS, appearing on hits such as Your Show of Shows and What’s My Line? At the Waldorf Astoria a couple years later, her concert was recorded by RCA and became one of the biggest-selling records in the label’s history. By the end of the decade, she was on Broadway starring in Jamaica, a musical produced just for her that became a smash hit. Her success carried on without interruption for the next 30 years.

Robeson suffered a different fate. He had become such a Soviet loyalist that in 1952, the USSR had awarded him the Stalin Peace Prize and the State Department had revoked his passport, stating that it wasn’t in the country’s best interests for him to travel overseas. He was able to get his passport restored in 1958 and visited Moscow in 1961. According to his biographer, Martin Duberman, he was confronted by Russians who pleaded with him to help their loved ones who’d been jailed and even murdered by the Soviet regime. During that trip, he attempted suicide by slicing his wrists; his son later told Duberman that his father was consumed by fears of the CIA.

Robeson later left for London, where he continued to be despondent. A friend and confidante told Duberman she found him in a fetal position one day and persuaded him to go to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. On the way there, they passed the Soviet Embassy and Robeson grew terrified that his friend was taking him there instead. “You don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing!” she remembered him shouting. She said that Robeson was behaving as though “great danger was at hand”; while they were in the car, he implored her to “get down!” He lived the rest of his life as a recluse and died at age 77 in 1976.

As for Moss, his career faded. He ended up making instructional films like Happy Teeth, Healthy Smile and spent his final years working out of an office next to a Russian-language newspaper on Fairfax. When he died in 1997 at the age of 88, his New York Times obituary called him a “hero” and attributed his downfall to Hollywood’s enduring racism, not Moss’s association with communism.

Horne recovered her career and reputation, and was eventually honored by the NAACP. She was widely known for her unwillingness to stay silent in the presence of bigotry. The Los Angeles Mirror News described a February 1960 incident at the Luau Restaurant in Beverly Hills. According to the report, Horne heard a white man talking about her and declaring that he didn’t like “niggers.” Horne responded, “I can hear you and I want you to stop making those insulting remarks. After all, this is America and you cannot insult people like that.”

On her 65th birthday in 1982, Horne performs “Stormy Weather,” the final number in her self-titled Broadway musical. (AP)

The man repeated the slur, this time louder. Horne got up and hurled a lamp, dishes, and an ashtray at him. The ashtray struck the man on his forehead and police were called in. “I lost control,” Horne told the paper. Other news outlets also covered the story: “Lena Horne Defends Race; Tosses Dishes at Man,” read the headline in the Las Vegas Sun. Later, as the civil-rights era was starting, Horne sided with Malcolm X over Martin Luther King, Jr.

She did, however, soften her stance toward Robeson later in life. In 1985, she accepted an award named in his honor from Actors Equity. By then, Robeson’s reputation had been largely rehabilitated: The Vietnam War had led to a widespread a critique of Cold War policy, and the media began looking more favorably on once-blacklisted Hollywood communists. At the awards ceremony, Horne declared that Robeson had helped her learn who she was.

That self-knowledge was never more evident than when she starred in her one-woman Broadway show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, in 1981. When she reached “Stormy Weather,” she introduced it with a prologue: “It’s taken me 40-some-odd years to grow comfortable with this song. My skin has grown around it. And no matter where it came from or how I got it, I’m allowed to sing it the way I feel.” And then she sang the words she’d performed more than 2,500 times in a career that spanned six decades:

All I do is pray the Lord above will
Let me walk in the sun once more.

California Voters Want Policing Reforms That Politicians Won't Deliver

On Wednesday, the ACLU of Southern California released the results of a statewide survey that it commissioned to gauge the attitudes of likely voters toward policing reforms.

The results were overwhelming:

84 percent favor requiring police officers to wear body cameras.

74 percent of survey respondents believe the public should have access to footage from those body cameras any time that a police officer stands accused of misconduct. A narrow majority believes that the public should have access to all footage.

As for investigations into misconduct by police officers, 79 percent believe the public should have access to the findings if there has been wrongdoing, and 64 percent believe the public should have that same access anytime a cop is even accused.

The whole Black Lives Matter policy agenda would likely poll well here.

It is a testament to the political clout of police unions in the Golden State that policies favored by large majorities of Republican, Democratic, and independent voters are not policy. In Los Angeles, body cameras will roll out in greater numbers this Wednesday, but the LAPD has no plans to allow the public to see the footage generated. Statewide, the results of investigations into police-officer misconduct are sealed from public view under some of the most restrictive laws in the country, often passed by Democratic-controlled legislatures and signed by Democratic governors. Jerry Brown, the current governor, signed one of the worst laws during his last go-round in Sacramento, during the late 1970s. The Democrats who control the state now have yet to reverse it, despite the fact that rank-and-file Democrats are the biggest supporters of transparency. That is an embarrassing failure, and many of their Republican rivals in Sacramento are no better or worse.

The disconnect between what politicians are doing on this issue and the policies that the state’s voters overwhelmingly favor creates an opportunity for policing-reform activists and ambitious politicians. And it suggests that a statewide ballot initiative that takes aim at law-enforcement secrecy could win over voters in 2016.  

But none of that should be necessary. The legislature has already seen bills that would leave police officers better trained, more subject to transparency, and more accountable. More bills can be introduced. All that’s needed are politicians with the fortitude to put the public’s interest ahead of the public-employee unions.

Alas, California is short on politicians like that.