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“That’s Not Who We Are.” Wrong. It Is Who We Are. So Let’s Deal With It.

A farm market in Somerset, KY., the largest city in one of the most conservative counties in the United States. All seems calm. County residents are engulfed by the various cultural messes that affect the rest of the country. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

SOMERSET, KY. — “That’s not who we are.” A number of Democratic presidential candidates have joined other national leaders in uttering these words. Presumably they’re meant as a rallying cry for the sane among us, served up to define principles of fairness and justice — the country’s core values.

Actually, it’s not who we are. What we are is the spasm of lies, violence, injustice, and hate that has characterized much of American history, a black blanket of cultural rage that has again settled on the country.

This is not a screed on the American president–though he encourages the mistrust and contempt destabilizing the country–or that Make America Great Again embodies too many of our worst national traits. And it’s not a lament that half the country approves what he’s up to and seems to enjoy the show.

Instead it’s an essay about us, written at a time of apparent full employment, when Krogers are arrayed in a bounty of food and goods, when Fords and Toyotas are flying off of dealer lots, and gasoline costs less in real dollars than it did in the 1970s. It’s prompted by a conversation I had earlier this month with a friend from Chicago, a Chinese immigrant, who told me he and his family have noticed a coarsening of attitudes, a hardened inflexible barrier in their interactions with Americans. Four years ago, when they arrived in America, they felt more welcome. People were friendlier, more accommodating.

My friend said he was nervous about an America he did not recognize. An interesting thought, considering he is an American archetype. My friend is a successful and brilliant engineer. He was born, educated, and employed overseas and chose to come with his family to America. He’s done well and lived well here. Same for his wife and children.

But he was worried because as a boy, he and his family lived through the same kind of coarsening in Chinese society, a cultural revolution a half century ago that was brutal and in some cases deadly to the most successful professional and educated people of that nation.

I told him he ought to be worried. I’m worried, too.

I also told him that with a few exceptions, our 243-year history has been stained by inequity and pain and evil intent aimed at every group that’s ever lived within our borders. America is great at fostering myth, I said. Few are as powerful and enduring as the myth of the benevolent America shining a beacon of hope and a lantern of opportunity on its immigrants, on its own people, and on the other nations of the world.

President Trump in Salt Lake City, December 2017. He removed 2 million acres from two national monuments in Utah, the first decision of its kind in American history. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

The reality is quite different. From the very beginning, we arrived on these shores and took everything we wanted from the Native Americans who lived here — land, women, wealth. And since that time, every immigrant that came to the United States has been the subject of torment and attack. Now many members of those same groups are the tormenters.

We’ve been an angry, selfish, perturbed country since the start. We enslaved Africans to build the agrarian economy of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. We terrorized their descendants with a state-sponsored system of apartheid and lynching for 100 more years. We wrongly convicted and mass-incarcerated thousands more black men and women.

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Bill Milliken Was A Great Leader And A Good Friend

Bill Milliken and yours truly at the annual Groundwork Center harvest dinner in 2014. (Photo/Gabrielle Gray)

William G. Milliken, the longest serving governor in Michigan’s storied history, died in October at the age of 97. One of the rare gifts of my life was knowing Bill and his wife Helen as friends and mentors. Both were terrifically helpful in getting our new northern Michigan land use policy group going in the 1990s. Helen was a board member. Bill was an active supporter. In 2000, when I stepped down as director of the group, the Michigan Land Use Institute, Bill wrote me a note of congratulation for a bringing important issues of growth, development, and environmental protection to public knowledge and action.

A gentleman and a statesman, Bill carried himself and produced for the public good in ways nearly completely lost in the United States. He saw the erosion in how we conducted our public affairs long before almost everybody else. And he worried about what it meant for the country’s ideals and values and ways of doing business. Every so often we would cross paths in Traverse City, where he was born, raised, and lived. Every time ours was a conversation of substance and a moment committed to memory.

I had the privilege of writing Bill’s obituary for the New York Times, one of the many assignments I’ve undertaken in a Times career that began in February 1982. Much of that article continues here:

In January 1969, days before he became governor — succeeding George Romney, who had joined President Richard M. Nixon’s cabinet — Mr. Millken delivered a speech to a joint legislative session that defined the personal values that would shape his long term in office. “It is my greatest hope that this administration will be known for its compassion, its idealism, its candor, and its toughness in the pursuit of public ends,” he said.

Mr. Milliken’s record of political achievements reflected that vision. It included investing in urban housing and education, defending auto industry jobs and profits in the wake of the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo, strengthening higher education, and installing innovative environmental protections.

Trim, athletic and soft-spoken, Mr. Milliken always looked years younger than his age. Much of what he achieved in public policy was made possible by what his allies and opponents agreed was his uncommon graciousness and decency. His ability to inspire people to trust him enabled Mr. Milliken to build remarkable political bridges. He succeeded in convincing cities and suburbs, labor and management, business executives and environmentalists, and Republicans and Democrats that their interests coincided.

This was no small feat considering that Mr. Milliken’s term spanned 14 years, from 1969 until 1983, the longest in state history, and coincided with the deepest economic crisis and highest unemployment in Michigan since the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, and the consequences of old factories and industrial practices on the economy and the state’s natural resources.

His administration was also distinguished by his concern about the condition of Michigan’s deteriorating cities, especially Detroit, and by the commitment he made to healing racial wounds. He took office less than two years after a race riot in Detroit that claimed more than 40 lives. Mr. Milliken campaigned for affirmative action, named young African-Americans as top aides — among them Roy Levy Williams, who went to become the chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. — and recruited black leaders and residents as allies.

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In Montgomery, Bryan Stevenson is Thurgood Marshall’s Heir Apparent For Supreme Court

Montgomery’s excellent jazz musicians highlight the city’s lively club scene. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

Montgomery, which has occupied one bank of the Alabama River since 1819, never deliberately set out to distinguish itself as the white hot furnace of American racial injustice, or the historic hearth of reconciliation. That’s what Alabama’s capital has become, though.

Yesterday the city of 200,000, where slaves were sold and where the Civil Rights movement was born, took another memorable step. It elected Steven Reed, Montgomery County’s first African American probate judge, as its first black mayor.

In the age of a maniac in the White House whose words enflame white supremacist hatred, Montgomery is a welcome lesson in cultural evolution. The city’s reckoning with its cruel past, and the opportunities afforded by its civil advance also has produced two more well-earned outcomes.

The first is the flourishing tourism trade centered on dramatic new expressions of racial injustice that are articulated in an emotionally gripping national monument to victims of lynching, and a sister museum of slavery and mass incarceration. Both opened in April 2018. The two attractions express a more urgent and contemporary narrative of bigotry that ties slavery, the Civil War, lynching, segregation, and civil rights to the current era of street shootings and mass incarcerations of African American men.

Dexter Avenue, which ends at the state Capitol, was the end point of the famous 1965 civil rights march from Selma. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

The second is the emergence of Bryan Stevenson as a national human rights hero. Stevenson is a decorated civil rights lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery to defend and liberate wrongfully convicted black death row inmates in Alabama. Stevenson was barely known in the city and state as recently as three years ago, even though he won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the ‘genius’ award) in 1995.

A lot changed since. Stevenson published a best-selling memoir about his work, “Just Mercy,” in 2014. The new museum and memorial, which he inspired and helped to design, are attracting throngs of visitors and encouraging a surge of downtown construction. The Equal Justice Initiative campaign to install historic markers at sites where lynching occurred gains momentum in counties across the country.

This year HBO broadcast a documentary on Stevenson, and Hollywood produced a major motion picture, “Just Mercy,” that stars Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as one of the book’s central characters.

As if the United States needs another reason to liberate the White House from its current occupant, here’s one more. Electing a Democrat as president would elevate Stevenson as a legitimate and logical nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and decorated civil rights lawyer. (Photo/Equal Justice Initiative)
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Alli Gerkman, Lawyer Who Worked To Reform Legal System, Buried In Michigan

Allí Gerkman’s energy and passion for reform was irrepressible. She had attitude and smarts — loved by her family and friends, admired by colleagues — that set her apart. (IAALS photo)

OLD MISSION PENINSULA, MI — On a sun-bright day, with a breeze that stirred leaves and a hawk that wheeled overhead, family and friends paid their respects and laid Alli Gerkman to rest yesterday. In a graceful ceremony of poetry, letters, love, and song, about 50 people gathered in a small cemetery here to honor a life cut short by cancer, but filled with Alli’s courage, and distinctive spirit, her humor and splendid judgment.

Alli’s mother, Betsy Alles, is a close friend who asked me to write Alli’s obituary days before the death of her daughter on August 31. It’s posted here in Alli’s honor.

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Alli Gerkman, the Michigan-born lawyer who settled in Colorado to make legal education more accessible to women and people of color, improve the skills of young lawyers, and restore honor and grace to a profession that is draining from both, won a prestigious honor in May from the Colorado Women’s Bar Association.

The Mary Lathrop Trailblazer Award memorializes an early 20th century probate lawyer much like Alli, a woman and a leader who surpassed conventional expectations to become an agent of change for a profession that needed to be stirred.

As a senior director of IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, Alli distinguished herself as one of the young lawyers to watch as she worked to modernize a system of education and practice that had become too cumbersome, too dispiriting, too expensive.

In accepting the award, Alli, a graduate of a mid-level law school, explained the ironic freedom that comes with being underestimated. “I was good enough,” she said. “But not good enough for the most coveted paths after law school. I can say with absolute honesty that I was never interested in a big firm job. But whether I was or wasn’t, wasn’t particularly relevant when you consider that no big law firm would ever have hired me. My failure to tap into the well-born caste of our profession meant that I couldn’t qualify for the standard path of my career.

“That turned out to be my superpower. If there is no predefined path and no outcome expected of you in your career, you can do anything that you decide that you want to do.”

What Alli did was exceptional. During eight years at IAALS she developed a national survey then, based on the results, launched a national movement that identified strength of character, integrity, and willingness to work hard as virtues in new lawyers that are every bit as important to hiring and practice as expert knowledge of the law. She directed a national program, Foundations for Practice, that worked with law schools and a select group of law firms to develop a curriculum for teaching students what she called the “character quotient.” The intent was to better prepare young lawyers for the contemporary challenges of starting their careers, and to open law firms to a wider range of new hires.

“Alli’s footprints leave imprints,” said Rebecca Kourlis, the former Colorado Supreme Court justice who founded and directs IAALS. “Her personality leaves impressions. Her work leads to impacts.”

Alli’s work was cut short, however, by a rare form of cancer. She died in Michigan on August 31, 2019. She was 41 years old. But in the four years of her illness, Alli challenged the tumor with the same grit, tenacity and grace that encompassed all of her life.

She was tested in completely new ways. The medical treatments were grueling. In the first 40 months, Alli wrote, she endured multiple surgeries, 27 days of chemotherapy, 51 days of radiation, and “countless days of emerging treatments, including molecular and immunotherapy.”

“I know that this cancer will change my life,” she wrote. “It is one of the first things I knew as soon as I learned more about the severity of my diagnosis. It is an unmovable truth. But I can embrace that without letting the cancer define me and wash away who I already am—and who I will be. As I said to my colleague who wanted to know if she could let one of our organizational partners know what I’m dealing with, ‘Of course—as long as you make it completely clear that I am still in the game.’”

An accomplished public speaker, she added this in a speech in 2018: “I think about my own death all the time. I know I will die, in a way I never knew it before. But the most important reason to think about your own death is that actually makes your life better.”

Alli had moxie and courage in all things, especially in living after her diagnosis in 2015.

She cultivated the furrows of her relationships with friends, her family, and her colleagues in and outside Colorado with more depth and urgency. She was determined to keep her characteristic optimism, her ready laugh and sense of fun that attracted a close group of friends and made her a delight to her family.

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AppHarvest’s Big Idea: Bringing Food Production Indoor At A Mammoth Kentucky Greenhouse

Jonathan Webb, the innovator and chief executive who is bringing food production indoors and wants to change the economy of eastern Kentucky. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

MOREHEAD, Ky. – Almost 70 percent of American consumers, including those who love fresh tomatoes, are a day’s drive from eastern Kentucky. That proximity to big markets is the primary reason AppHarvest is building the largest greenhouse in the United States in a big field in Rowan County just outside this university town.

Sometime next summer, when production commences, the $97 million, 60-acre building will begin shipping 45 million pounds of fresh produce annually, primarily tomatoes, to grocery stores from Atlanta to New York, and as far west as Chicago and St. Louis.

“I asked the engineers, ‘How big can we possibly be to operate efficiently and effectively,’” said Jonathan Webb, AppHarvest’s 34-year-old founder and chief executive. The 2.76-million square foot building, now being constructed on a 366-acre field close to Interstate 64, is big enough to lower costs on materials, production, and distribution. “It’s price per pound. We have to compete with produce coming from 2,000 miles away.”

I learned about Kentucky’s AppHarvest project last spring and visited with Jonathan Webb and his colleagues in late June for this story in the New York Times. If Webb succeeds he and his staff will do more than produce enough vegetables to help feed the East Coast. He’ll change the economic vector of a state that has a $5 billion farm sector, but has been associated historically to horses and tobacco, and for that matter to the failing coal sector. In food there is salvation.

The mammoth project, undertaken by the two-year-old Kentucky start-up, weds Dutch greenhouse technology to rising demand for American-grown tomatoes, an appetite that has climbed to 20-plus pounds per person, second only to potatoes. With its digital monitoring, sun and LED-lit environment, recycled rainwater, and non-chemical growing practices, the immense greenhouse also responds to a host of cultural concerns about food safety, freshness, environmental quality and energy consumption.

Other food growers have the same idea. AppHarvest, which will employ 285 people, is part of a wave of new greenhouse construction changing vegetable production in the eastern U.S.  

More Greenhouse Development

Kentucky Fresh Harvest is building a 30-acre, $13.5 million greenhouse to grow cherry tomatoes near Stanford, also in Kentucky, about 100 miles southeast of Morehead. Mucci Farms, a Canadian company, just opened the first of three large greenhouses for tomato production on a 75-acre farm in Huron, Ohio. Mastronardi Produce last year finjshed a 20-acre greenhouse for vegetables in Wapakoneta, Ohio. The Canadian company operates six others in Ohio, Michigan and New York.

AppHarvest is intent on meeting the rising demand for fresh tomatoes in a market increasingly supplied by imports from Mexico and Canada.

The two countries account for more than half of the $3 billion American fresh tomato market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says U.S. production, meanwhile, is declining.  Fresh tomato growing in Florida, a major producer, has fallen to around 30,000 acres, down from 39,400 acres at the start of the century, according to the U.S.D.A. Similar reductions have occurred in California, North Carolina, and other tomato suppliers.

Forehead State University built and operates a robotics research and development center close to where AppHarvest is buildings its greenhouse. Proximity to a state university is one reason Webb chose the site for his project. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

AppHarvest’s founder also is intent of leveraging his big greenhouse to promote two other transformative ideas. The first is to build huge AppHarvest greenhouses in other eastern Kentucky communities.  The second, he says, is to be so successful that other greenhouse growers settle in eastern Kentucky, enough to replace an economy devastated by the collapse of the coal industry with a “sustainable produce hub” that would turn Kentucky into “the agtech capitol” of America.

That goal is achievable. Greenhouses provide a controlled environment that allows vegetables to be grown year-round. The U.S.D.A., in a report published in March, said greenhouse tomatoes in 2017, the latest year for accurate figures, accounted for 32 percent of the domestic supply. The same year, according to the USDA, Kentucky farmers grew tomatoes in 1.1 million square feet of greenhouses on more than 300 farms.

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