Speaker 1: Pushkin. Something there is that dozen love a wall that
Speaker 1: sends the frozen ground swell under it. Robert Frost, one
Speaker 1: of the greatest American poets, reading Mending Wall, I let
Speaker 1: my neighbor know beyond the hill, and on a day
Speaker 1: we meet to walk the line and set the wall
Speaker 1: between us. They walked together down the border of their properties,
Speaker 1: between his apple orchard and his neighbor's pine trees. Every
Speaker 1: spring they have to mend the wall, hauling stones to
Speaker 1: fill the gaps. The narrator asks his neighbor, do they
Speaker 1: really need a wall to keep pine and apple trees apart?
Speaker 1: He only says, good fencies make good neighbors. Spring is
Speaker 1: the mischief in me, and I wonder if I could
Speaker 1: put a notion in his head. Why do they make
Speaker 1: good neighbors? Isn't it where there are cows? But here
Speaker 1: there are no cows. Before I built a wall, I'd
Speaker 1: asked to know what I was walling in or walling out,
Speaker 1: and to whom I was like to give a fence.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about the most famous line from Mending wall. Good fences
Speaker 1: make good neighbors, written in nineteen fourteen, as if it
Speaker 1: were yesterday. The historic home of the US Marine Corps
Speaker 1: is the Barracks in Washington, d C. Eighth the Nie
Speaker 1: Streets near Capitol Hill. From May until the end of August,
Speaker 1: every Friday night, the public is invited for evening parade.
Speaker 1: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the oldest
Speaker 1: post of the Corps, Marine Barracks, Washington, DC, celebrating over
Speaker 1: sixty years of performing evening parades. It starts at eight
Speaker 1: forty five, precisely on the immaculate lawn in front of
Speaker 1: the Commandant's house. The ritual of honoring the flag, the
Speaker 1: famous silent drill, the drum and bugle Corps marines in
Speaker 1: the traditional white with dark blue tunics. One hour and
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes of precision marching. Evening parade was the creation
Speaker 1: of General Leonard Fielding Chapman, Junior, when he assumed the
Speaker 1: command of the Marine Barracks in nineteen fifty seven. Chapman
Speaker 1: believed marine parades had become anglicized too many theatrical flourishes,
Speaker 1: trick drills, frivolities like the Queen Anne salute the small hats,
Speaker 1: the British favor the heavy double souled shoes with cleats.
Speaker 1: My policy was that we will be regulation. Chapman once said,
Speaker 1: we will be US Marine Corps regulation. We will do
Speaker 1: everything in accordance with the Marine Corps regulations and will
Speaker 1: do it perfectly. I've met a handful of senior military
Speaker 1: leaders in my life. They're not like CEOs, who represent
Speaker 1: an infinite range of variation on the general theme of
Speaker 1: tall white guye. Generals are the product of one of
Speaker 1: the world's largest and most rigorous meritocracies. To get to
Speaker 1: the top, they've had to be more disciplined than the
Speaker 1: disciplined people, and then at the next level up smarter
Speaker 1: than the smart people, then at the level after that,
Speaker 1: more charismatic than the charismatic people, and on and on
Speaker 1: all the way up to five stars. Generals are the
Speaker 1: winners of a single elimination tournament that goes on for
Speaker 1: thirty years. Chapman was appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty seven, serve with distinction for four years
Speaker 1: during one of the most difficult periods in Marine Corps history.
Speaker 1: He was a Southerner who loved Lincoln, a voracious reader,
Speaker 1: an intellectual, the man who did as much as anyone
Speaker 1: to bring the Civil Rights Revolution to the Marine Corps.
Speaker 1: Chapman was once interviewed by a Marine Corps historian, and
Speaker 1: by the end of the recording, which runs for hours,
Speaker 1: you want to follow him into battle. Toward the end
Speaker 1: of the war, when we were pulling out of Vietnam,
Speaker 1: I came to the decision that we were going to
Speaker 1: clean house, shape up, or ship out. Chapman shrank the
Speaker 1: Marines from three hundred thousand to two hundred thousand men,
Speaker 1: let go every marine that he felt did not measure up,
Speaker 1: made sure everyone who remained knew what the score was.
Speaker 1: And I'd make my speech about tightening up the rink
Speaker 1: Corps and going back to our standards. And I got
Speaker 1: applauded every time. And it was in such sharp contrast
Speaker 1: to what was happening in the other services. See the
Speaker 1: other services loosened their standards, you know, long hair beer
Speaker 1: in the barracks. Oh, Navy, especially Navy especially. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: went exactly obbosite directions. The Navy loosened their standards, so
Speaker 1: did the Army. To me, what what did he look like. Well,
Speaker 1: he was very handsome. He was, you know the pictures
Speaker 1: of him when he was young, and a pretty incredibly
Speaker 1: you know, dashing sort of man. This is the general's granddaughter,
Speaker 1: Danielle Chapman. And he was still very handsome when he
Speaker 1: was in his six season seventies and tall, you know,
Speaker 1: he still had that military posture to him also, just
Speaker 1: in an incredible stamina and he actually was very proud
Speaker 1: of that too. On the golf course that until he
Speaker 1: was in his eighties, you know, he walked and carried
Speaker 1: his clubs, and he would really rib his buddies about that,
Speaker 1: and he would say, you know, they would ride in
Speaker 1: the card and he would say, oh, they're over there
Speaker 1: riding in the cheeseburger wagon, you know. But he was.
Speaker 1: He was walking and carrying his clubs the whole way.
Speaker 1: General Chapman retired from the Marine Corps in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: but he didn't take a lucrative job in the defense
Speaker 1: industry like so many ex military brass do. Instead, he
Speaker 1: goes to his boss, the Secretary of Defense, and asks
Speaker 1: for help in finding another job in government. He gets
Speaker 1: his wish in nineteen seventy three, he's named commissioner of
Speaker 1: what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the
Speaker 1: agency responsible for securing the borders of the United States. Now,
Speaker 1: why does he do that? Being head of the Marine
Speaker 1: Corps is a job of enormous prestige. The Ions in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three was a backwater. Why would someone take
Speaker 1: such a big step down. It's not obvious until you
Speaker 1: think about what Chapman has just been through. Vietnam. He
Speaker 1: ran the Marine Corps during the worst years of the war.
Speaker 1: And what was Vietnam? A war about a border. The
Speaker 1: country was split in two, with a communist government in
Speaker 1: the north and a pro Western government in the south,
Speaker 1: and the North kept sending insurgeons across the border to
Speaker 1: make trouble in the South. That's why the US went
Speaker 1: to Vietnam to secure the border. The Marines were in
Speaker 1: the thick of it. They were way up in the
Speaker 1: farthest corner of South Vietnam, right on the border with
Speaker 1: the North. At one point, the Secretary of Defense wanted
Speaker 1: a wall built along the border to stop the North
Speaker 1: Vietnamese from trickling in. It was the job of the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps to build it and They couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: They couldn't secure the border. Nothing worked. Chapman saw the
Speaker 1: failure first hand. The trouble with Vietnam for the Marine
Speaker 1: Corps was that the army was in charge of the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Chapman's son, Walton, joined the Marines and served
Speaker 1: in Vietnam, and the Marines that were there, my dad
Speaker 1: had no tactical control. In other words, he couldn't tell
Speaker 1: the twenty six Marines to leave Caisson and go somewhere else.
Speaker 1: General Chapman would make the long journey to Vietnam many times,
Speaker 1: but all he could offer was moral support. There's a
Speaker 1: moment in his oral history when Chapman describes the orders
Speaker 1: that came down from the Pentagon when the US military
Speaker 1: shipped out of Vietnam. Each branch of the military was
Speaker 1: supposed to pack up and send home anything worth more
Speaker 1: than fifty dollars. Chapman said, no, the Marines would bring
Speaker 1: home everything worth five dollars or more. Furthermore, I issued
Speaker 1: an order that we'd leave our spaces in Vietnam ready
Speaker 1: for inspection. Everything cleaned up, all the trash buried, all
Speaker 1: the temporary buildings knocked down and disposed and We did
Speaker 1: that too. We lived and left every one of our
Speaker 1: areas in impeccable condition, ready for inspection. That's what the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps was reduced to in Vietnam, being the best
Speaker 1: at tiding up behind them. How could someone like Chapman
Speaker 1: be satisfied with that? If he couldn't defend the borders
Speaker 1: of South Vietnam, then maybe running the ions would be
Speaker 1: his second chance. He rules like nothing better than to
Speaker 1: be able to say, yes, the border is secure, mister
Speaker 1: Secretary the Interior, the border is now secure. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, a young sociologist named Douglas Massey became interested
Speaker 1: in the subject of Mexican migration. It was then as now,
Speaker 1: a matter of political significance, but Massey was struck by
Speaker 1: how little was actually known about the problem. Nobody really
Speaker 1: understood exactly where migrants were coming from, or exactly where
Speaker 1: they were going, or for that matter, what they were
Speaker 1: doing once they got to the US, and what happened
Speaker 1: to the families they left behind. Sociologists are the great
Speaker 1: note takers of the social sciences. They're used to projects
Speaker 1: that stretch out for years, that even consume entire careers.
Speaker 1: So Massey decided to be a good sociologist and study
Speaker 1: migration properly. He found a partner, a Mexican anthropologist named
Speaker 1: Jorre Durand, and the two of them began systematically interviewing
Speaker 1: families of migrants around Mexico. We pick communities to pick
Speaker 1: four to six communities every year, we do a complete
Speaker 1: household roster and collect basic socio demographic information on everybody
Speaker 1: in the household, plus detailed information on everybody's first and
Speaker 1: last trip to the United States and the total number
Speaker 1: of trips they've taken. The survey is called the Mexican
Speaker 1: Migration Project. After thirty years, it's massive, millions of life
Speaker 1: years of information, case histories, extraordinary detail. It's the gold standard.
Speaker 1: This has got to be one of the world's biggest
Speaker 1: migration databases. It's certainly the biggest and most reliable on
Speaker 1: Mexico US migration. When the government wants to know what
Speaker 1: goes on, they don't go to the Border Patrol because
Speaker 1: their data are allousy. They come to the Mexican Migration Project.
Speaker 1: In all of the you'll work with this project, was
Speaker 1: there anything you ran across that really surprised you? I
Speaker 1: guess what surprised me in the late seventiears when I
Speaker 1: first saw this was just how routine it had become,
Speaker 1: and how institutionalized the circulation was, and how it was
Speaker 1: woven into the fabric of Mexican life at the time.
Speaker 1: How institutionalized the circulation was. The principal finding of the
Speaker 1: Mexican Migration Project is that Mexican migration to the United
Speaker 1: States has a distinctive pattern. It's overwhelmingly circular. Now, what
Speaker 1: does circular mean? Exactly means they work seasonally in the
Speaker 1: United States and return home on an annual basis to
Speaker 1: be with their families. So these workers are they leaving
Speaker 1: their families back in Mexico. Yeah, it's overwhelmingly male, young,
Speaker 1: young males. And the typical pattern is you go for
Speaker 1: several times to earn some money to help you back home.
Speaker 1: What made the back and forth circulation possible the fact
Speaker 1: that for most of the twentieth century, the border between
Speaker 1: Mexico and the United States was porous, more of a
Speaker 1: line on a map than an actual border. The border
Speaker 1: patrol was a tiny force in those years. There were
Speaker 1: no walls, no surveillance drones. If you got stopped, you
Speaker 1: got turned around. And sent back home. Then you tried again.
Speaker 1: Our families mainly a family that was born and raised
Speaker 1: in the border area. Carlos Merentz, a labor organizer and
Speaker 1: former migrant worker, talking about his childhood in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Growing up in Warez, Mexico, He and his friends used
Speaker 1: to swim across the Rio Grand carrying watermelons that they
Speaker 1: would sell on the American side, like the river was
Speaker 1: a pond in their backyard within Ahima says that we
Speaker 1: were living in two different countries. To us, being children
Speaker 1: means that you know that we were living in a
Speaker 1: big with two neighborhoods, one south of the Reber, one
Speaker 1: north of the Reber. What Marentez is saying in economic
Speaker 1: terms is that the cost of crossing was effectively zero.
Speaker 1: It was free, and what happens when something is free,
Speaker 1: you use as much of it as you can. Usually
Speaker 1: they leave in February March as the seasons start picking up,
Speaker 1: and then return in December for the holidays and there's
Speaker 1: a big fiesta in migrant sending towns. Massey's saying that
Speaker 1: Mexico was where family and roots were, it was cheap
Speaker 1: and close. America was where money could be made easily
Speaker 1: and quickly. This is not the way, say, Jewish immigrants
Speaker 1: came to the United States in the nineteenth century. They
Speaker 1: didn't go back to Eastern Europe every summer, nor did
Speaker 1: the Italians who came over in the same period. Entire
Speaker 1: villages moved en massed from southern Italy to the United
Speaker 1: States permanently. The price of returning where they came from
Speaker 1: was not zero. Their homeland was not welcoming, and even
Speaker 1: if it were, the cost of crossing the ocean was
Speaker 1: so high that it could not be done routinely. But
Speaker 1: Mexican migration was different. Carlos Marnez remembers his grandfather telling
Speaker 1: him that he wanted to return to Mexico to Zacatecas.
Speaker 1: So the attraction to go back to Mexico will be
Speaker 1: to go back to your real homeland, to the rural
Speaker 1: community that you left behind, with families, with your history,
Speaker 1: with everything, the old urilentity. This is not the story
Speaker 1: the United States tells itself. The inscription on the Statue
Speaker 1: of Liberty does not read give me You're tired, your poor,
Speaker 1: your huddled masses yearning to breathe free for six months
Speaker 1: until you make enough money to go home again. When
Speaker 1: we think of immigration, we think of the Jewish and
Speaker 1: the Italian model permanence. Second thing, circular immigration is very
Speaker 1: hard to measure. Border controls are designed to count the
Speaker 1: number of people coming in, not the number of people leaving,
Speaker 1: because we assume the number coming in is what matters,
Speaker 1: which it is in most cases, but not in the
Speaker 1: case of Mexico, because if a huge group of people
Speaker 1: eventually go back home again, the only number that matters
Speaker 1: is net migration those who come in minus those who
Speaker 1: go home. And thirdly, most importantly, circular migration is the
Speaker 1: result of a zero cost border crossing. It is what
Speaker 1: happens when you can swim across the Rio grand or
Speaker 1: walk from Warez in Mexico to al Paso in Texas.
Speaker 1: So what happens to circular migration when the cost of
Speaker 1: migrating is no longer zero. One of the things that
Speaker 1: General Leonard Chapman heard when he took over the IONS
Speaker 1: was that his predecessor had never left Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: For someone coming from the Marine Corps, that was unthinkable.
Speaker 1: Leaders review their troops, So Chapman set out to visit
Speaker 1: every IONS field office. Close to four hundred of them
Speaker 1: all over the world, some with no more than two
Speaker 1: or three people, And it took me three years to
Speaker 1: do it. But I'm then I got to every single
Speaker 1: one millist one. So I spent a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: time traveling talking to my troops, for whom I thought
Speaker 1: of a very high regard. Chapman modernized the agency when
Speaker 1: it came to information management. He thought the IONS was
Speaker 1: thirty years behind the Marine Corps. Chapman set up a
Speaker 1: public affairs office, first in the agency's history. He became
Speaker 1: a familiar face on Capitol Hill, and the more he learned,
Speaker 1: the more alarmed he became. There was, as he put it,
Speaker 1: a general laxity in the enforcement of immigration laws. For
Speaker 1: goodness sake, kids were swimming across the Rio Grande, selling
Speaker 1: their watermelons and then going back home again. People were
Speaker 1: treating the border like it was just a line on
Speaker 1: a map. Is easy a villagers twenty five million, fifty million,
Speaker 1: seventy five millions, a hundred, Why not? There's no machinery
Speaker 1: to stop them. In nineteen seventy three, when Chapman took
Speaker 1: over the IONS, the cost of crossing the Mexican border
Speaker 1: was effectively zero. By the time he left in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, it was not, and so it begins. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six comes the Immigration Reform and Control Act,
Speaker 1: which militarizes the border. Then Operation Blockade, which stiffens up
Speaker 1: the border cross again El Paso, Operation Gatekeeper, which depends
Speaker 1: up the border crossing in San Diego. The budget of
Speaker 1: the border patrol between the mid nineteen eighties and twenty
Speaker 1: and ten increases tenfold. And then today with the Attorney
Speaker 1: General of the United States sometimes sounds like Commandant Jefferson Sessions,
Speaker 1: I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for
Speaker 1: illegal entry on our Southwest border. If you cross the
Speaker 1: border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It's that simple.
Speaker 1: The cost of crossing the border has been escalating for
Speaker 1: a generation, and it began with Leonard Chapman. We ran
Speaker 1: a gaut A whole right after our first got there
Speaker 1: that showed it over somewhere people had ever heard of them.
Speaker 1: When I left three years later, we had another gallon
Speaker 1: pole and over eighty five had heard of In his
Speaker 1: years in office, Chapman made two hundred and fifty speeches
Speaker 1: across the United States. This is at the same time
Speaker 1: that he's personally visiting every IONS field office and overseeing
Speaker 1: the complete overhaul of the agency and making his argument
Speaker 1: over and again on Capitol Hill and giving hundreds of
Speaker 1: press interviews. The United States went from an IONS headed
Speaker 1: by someone who never left his desk to an agency
Speaker 1: headed by someone who couldn't stay at his desk. He
Speaker 1: was relentless wake in America. Last we're telling America about
Speaker 1: a problem with The Americans didn't think they had an
Speaker 1: I legal immigration problem. Leonard Chapman convinced them that they did.
Speaker 1: When I was fourteen growing up in Canada, I went
Speaker 1: to a week long track and field training camp at
Speaker 1: the International Peace Garden. It's a park straddling the border
Speaker 1: between North Dakota and the Canadian province of Manitoba. I
Speaker 1: go for long runs each morning with two friends. One
Speaker 1: day we noticed a diner on the American side, so
Speaker 1: we hopped the fence and got a burger. I say
Speaker 1: fence because the border in net stretch of prairie was
Speaker 1: just a fence, the type that someone in the suburbs
Speaker 1: might have around their backyard. On our way back to Canada,
Speaker 1: we were spotted by a border patrol officer. He arrested us,
Speaker 1: put us in the back of his car, and took
Speaker 1: us to the nearest I and S office. We had
Speaker 1: to put our names in a book underneath the big
Speaker 1: photo of President Jimmy Carter. I decided to be clever
Speaker 1: and wrote my name as William F. Buckley. Then we
Speaker 1: got dropped back at the border fence with a stern lecture.
Speaker 1: When I got home and told my parents, they found
Speaker 1: the whole thing hilarious, but as you can imagine, it
Speaker 1: left an impression that Burgher at the Diner was my
Speaker 1: first visit to the United States, and I ended up
Speaker 1: in the back of a patrol car. I first read
Speaker 1: Robert Frost's Mending Wall not long afterwards in school. The
Speaker 1: poem is a back and forth between a man and
Speaker 1: his neighbor over the value of their fence. One side says,
Speaker 1: good fences make good neighbors. The other side, the narrator says,
Speaker 1: maybe not. It all depends on who the fence is
Speaker 1: keeping in or out. Right from my first read, I
Speaker 1: sided with the narrator because all I could think of
Speaker 1: was a fence. I'd just jumped between Manitoba and North Dakota.
Speaker 1: We were fourteen year olds, and the fact that there
Speaker 1: wasn't much of a fence between the countries at that
Speaker 1: point meant that we could do normal fourteen year old
Speaker 1: things like get a burger. Would a better fence there
Speaker 1: have made us better neighbors or would we have just
Speaker 1: gone hungry? Frost neighbor thinks good fences solve problems. And
Speaker 1: the funny thing about that poem is how many people
Speaker 1: agree with him. But do good fences make good neighbors
Speaker 1: or do they just disrupt normal patterns of behavior? So
Speaker 1: what happened when the Mexican border became a good fence? Well,
Speaker 1: the historical Mexican migration pattern was that young men came
Speaker 1: to America, worked, went home, came back, went home again.
Speaker 1: That's what Douglas Massey documented in the Mexican Migration Project.
Speaker 1: Our data from the Mexican Migration Project indicate that between
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five and nineteen eighty five, eighty five percent
Speaker 1: of all undocumented entries were offset by departures, so the
Speaker 1: net influenced small. Between nineteen sixty five and nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: lots and lots of Mexican migrants came to the United
Speaker 1: States without legal status, but almost all of them eventually
Speaker 1: went home. But then the border patrol was expanded, the
Speaker 1: crossing opportunities through El Paso and San Diego were shut down,
Speaker 1: and migrants had to adapt. They shifted from the fortified
Speaker 1: crossings in El Paso and San Diego to the most
Speaker 1: brutal parts of southern Arizona. Now you're out in the middle,
Speaker 1: high desert, open desert. It's bitterly cold at night, boiling
Speaker 1: hot during the day. There's no water, and death's mount
Speaker 1: And when you're out in the middle of nowhere, it's
Speaker 1: more costly to stage crossing. The financial incentive to come
Speaker 1: to the United States remains, but returning home is now
Speaker 1: suddenly so risky that you don't do it every six
Speaker 1: months or every Christmas, or maybe even ever. You stay,
Speaker 1: and as the mail workers stay longer and longer, family
Speaker 1: munification occurs. They sent for their wives and younger children,
Speaker 1: and those younger children are today's dreamers. In nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: what was the likelihood of a Mexican migrant returning home
Speaker 1: after his first strip to the United States. According to
Speaker 1: the Mexican Migration Project's data, it was about fifty percent.
Speaker 1: By twenty ten, it's zero. We built a wall to
Speaker 1: keep Mexican migrants out. In fact, the wall has kept
Speaker 1: them in. People who would otherwise have gone home stayed
Speaker 1: so long they put down roots. In March of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: Douglas Massey, along with Jorge Durand and Karen Prenn, published
Speaker 1: a brilliant paper in the American Journal of Sociology, Why
Speaker 1: Border Enforcement Backfired, in which they ask a hypothetical question,
Speaker 1: what would have happened if the United States had done
Speaker 1: nothing over the past thirty years, frozen the budget and
Speaker 1: staff of the border patrol at nineteen eighty six levels,
Speaker 1: allowed for some circular migration. The researchers estimate the undocumented
Speaker 1: Mexican population of the US would be about a third
Speaker 1: lower a third lower than it is now. This is
Speaker 1: according to the people who know more than anyone else
Speaker 1: about Mexican migration, who have access to one of the
Speaker 1: biggest immigration databases in the world. And what is their
Speaker 1: conclusion that the attempt to solve the problem of illegal
Speaker 1: Mexican migrants is what has caused the problem of illegal
Speaker 1: Mexican migrants. You can just hear the frustration in Douglas
Speaker 1: Massey's voice for me. I've been watching this train wreck
Speaker 1: in real time for the past two decades, really, and
Speaker 1: I kept trying to tell people that when it comes
Speaker 1: to border enforcement, less is more, and if you militarize
Speaker 1: the border, you're going to produce a larger undocumented population.
Speaker 1: I said this before the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate
Speaker 1: Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration, and what happens after Massey
Speaker 1: testifies the same thing happens every time. Nothing And then
Speaker 1: the rank minority member, who's Representative Kane from Texas, gets
Speaker 1: up and basically says, take your lying data and go home,
Speaker 1: because we know what the truth is. We're being invaded
Speaker 1: and we've got to stop this. Massey says, we need
Speaker 1: to do the exact opposite of what we're doing now.
Speaker 1: When we raise the cost of crossing the border, that
Speaker 1: shut down circulation. If you want to restore circulation, then
Speaker 1: you should make the border easier to cross. Reduce the
Speaker 1: size of the border patrol, don't increase it. Make it
Speaker 1: easier for migrants to get legal status, not harder. If
Speaker 1: you wanted to lower the number of Mexicans living in
Speaker 1: the United States, give them green cards and a lot
Speaker 1: of them will go home. The US is not that
Speaker 1: nice a place for people, for Mexican sea stays. But
Speaker 1: they have families here, They got us born kids, they
Speaker 1: and if they know they can come back, they'll go home.
Speaker 1: If we had kept things the way they were in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen seventies, the same badly run border patrol,
Speaker 1: the same ineffectual leadership, the same indifferent public, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: be tearing our hair out over immigration. If there was
Speaker 1: ever a place for bad government, he was on the
Speaker 1: southern US border. But what do we get. We got
Speaker 1: the one guy who couldn't do bad government, the man
Speaker 1: haunted by his country's failure to build a wall in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: I think your team out will comment about the all
Speaker 1: Marines are green. There's a fascinating moment in general Chapman's
Speaker 1: oral history. His interviewer asks about racial troubles that rocked
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps in the late sixties. The civil rights
Speaker 1: movement was at its apex. There was a near race
Speaker 1: riot at Camp Lea June, fist fights among soldiers in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Black Marines wanted to be treated with the same consideration
Speaker 1: as white Marines. Chapman's response maybe his most memorable announcement
Speaker 1: all Marines are green, not black, not white. The color
Speaker 1: of the uniform is what matters, backed up by a
Speaker 1: directive un racial discrimination sent to every officer under his command.
Speaker 1: He even made a solemonic ruling on the prohibition against
Speaker 1: black soldiers wearing their hair in an afro. Hair he
Speaker 1: said was hair. The concern of the Marine Corps was
Speaker 1: not with its form, only with its length. What savage
Speaker 1: that within those limbus a marine and style his hair
Speaker 1: anyway he wants to, Yeah, that's what it said. So
Speaker 1: that if a black marine wanted to have an afro
Speaker 1: that was no more than three inches long and was
Speaker 1: neat and trail around the five, why not? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: the evening parade To participate in the evening parade at
Speaker 1: eighth and you used to have to be a perfect
Speaker 1: specimen of military manhood, more than six feet tall, no glasses,
Speaker 1: and white. Chapman says, why can't you be a perfect
Speaker 1: specimen of military manhood and black? He desegregated evening parade
Speaker 1: that got him hauled before a congressional committee full of
Speaker 1: angry Southerners. Chapman describes the experience with typical understatement as
Speaker 1: a quote interesting few hours. But I'm a deep Southerner myself,
Speaker 1: and so I was able to battle them with good effect.
Speaker 1: Un I'm curious if he were here today, what would
Speaker 1: he make of the way we talk about immigration away
Speaker 1: that debate has changed. I'm not sure what he would say.
Speaker 1: This is Chapman's granddaughter, Danielle. Again. He really disliked complaining,
Speaker 1: and you know, he would always say if anybody was, well, okay,
Speaker 1: what are you going to do about it? You know,
Speaker 1: he was incredibly pragmatic, so I think that he would
Speaker 1: probably view a lot of the current conversation as just
Speaker 1: a bunch of noise without a solution. So what was
Speaker 1: his solution? Then? General Chapman did what came naturally. He
Speaker 1: enforced the law, he drew the line. He made a
Speaker 1: complicated issue. Clear he didn't like the idea of, you know,
Speaker 1: mass illegal immigration. But at the same time, his views
Speaker 1: had none of the tone that the immigration debate has now.
Speaker 1: He just didn't think of it in racial or ethnic terms.
Speaker 1: I never heard him talk about it like that or
Speaker 1: attach the kind of emotions that you hear people attaching
Speaker 1: to it in the current debate. General Chapman traveled to
Speaker 1: every corner of the United States and stood up in
Speaker 1: that deliberate Ramrod straight Marine corpsway and told the American
Speaker 1: people plainly and clearly what needed to be done. Can
Speaker 1: I fault him? I can't. I wish there were more
Speaker 1: people like Leonard Chapman, especially these days. It's just that
Speaker 1: in some cases, complicated things are best left unclear, and
Speaker 1: we're better off letting whatever it is that doesn't love
Speaker 1: a wall, for in it's course, something there is that
Speaker 1: doesn't love a wall that wants it down. I could
Speaker 1: say elves him, but it's not Elves exactly, and I'd
Speaker 1: rather he said it for himself. I see him there,
Speaker 1: bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand,
Speaker 1: like an old stone, savage armed. He moves in darkness,
Speaker 1: as it seems to me, not of woods, only in
Speaker 1: the shade of trees. He will not go behind his
Speaker 1: father's saying, and he likes having thought of it so well.
Speaker 1: He says, agan good fancies make good neighbors. Revisionist History
Speaker 1: is a Panoply production. Senior producer is Melavelle, with Jacob
Speaker 1: Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton, Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams is our Engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson, original
Speaker 1: music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to ac Valdez for
Speaker 1: capturing the sounds of the evening parade and for the
Speaker 1: audio of Robert Frost. Thanks to the National Council of
Speaker 1: Teachers of English, and thanks as always to Andy Bowers
Speaker 1: and Commandant Jacob Weisper. I'm Malcolm Glad. I think the
Speaker 1: only time I can remember him really getting angry with
Speaker 1: me was when I kind of blasphemed the Constitution, and
Speaker 1: I don't know why I would do that except I
Speaker 1: was a teenager.