Sunday, November 15, 2020

 All the ways the pandemic could change cities forever

Abandoned office towers, empty subways, deserted cafés—post-pandemic, many cities will never be the same

By Brian Bethune November 13, 2020

During past epidemics, cities’ populations shrank due to death and the flight of those who could afford to leave. Will it be any different this time? (James MacDonald/Bloomberg/Getty Images)


During past epidemics, cities’ populations shrank due to death and the flight of those who could afford to leave. Will it be any different this time?

The ongoing urbanization of the human species, currently powered by a daily increase of 200,000 city dwellers, is inexorable, argues British historical writer Ben Wilson in his new book, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention. It’s been going on through good and bad—the latter very much including climate change and plagues—since the walls of Uruk began to rise in what is now the desert of southern Iraq about 6,500 years ago. “Humans flourish when they share knowledge, collaborate and compete face to face,” says Wilson in an interview. “As places become more densely populated, they become more productive. It’s just that cities are sometimes good places to live and other times terrible places.”

In short, the allure of cities, their crowd-generated excitement, innovation and opportunities, especially for the young—what urbanologist Richard Florida calls their “thick labour markets and thick mating markets”—is their nemesis as well. They have always been unparalleled disease sinks: in 19th-century industrial Manchester, 60 per cent of children died before their fifth birthday, Wilson writes, compared to 32 per cent in the English countryside. And that was merely regular metropolitan life, marked by the poor jammed together, living and working in unsanitary conditions, and the better-off departing for the season every summer. During epidemics, cities were depopulated by death and flight. Yet, time after time, the lure of the city pulled people back after the immediate danger passed.


READ: The doomed 30-year battle to stop a pandemic

Will it be different this time in the wake of COVID-19? Not in the developing world, argues Wilson, where the tide of new urbanites has not even begun to crest. (In Nigeria, Lagos—the 21st century’s quintessential megacity—has grown from fewer than 300,000 people in the 1950s to 21 million now, with 40 million expected by 2040.) But in North American cities, the internet offers a rough alternative to the economic (if not social) benefits of face-to-face interactions in a services-dominated economy. Combine that first in human history—the key city advantage is no longer absolutely dependent on city presence—with the way the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing reactions against the urban downside, and for many urbanologists, the supposedly inevitable return to the metropolis no longer seems so inevitable.

Even emergency-inspired measures can become permanent, notes Murtaza Haider, a professor and real-estate expert at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Ontario’s pandemic lockdown increased the percentage of provincial companies with half their employees working remotely from 11 to 34, and Haider does not expect anywhere near all of those workers to return to their downtown office towers. “Before the lockdowns, there was a lack of imagination and a distrust on the part of managers who really thought that unless workers were before their eyes they wouldn’t be productive. And now we know that’s not true.” What the post-pandemic urban landscape will look like is an urgent question for everyone from transit operators to real-estate investors to café operators. While experts are of different opinions on how, and to what extent, North America’s cities will bounce back, they all agree life in them will not be the same.

That much is in accord with historical experience. Florida, head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, has written extensively on how previous epidemics have changed cities in their very fabric. When 17th-century London rebuilt in the wake of both plague and fire, it was in brick as opposed to wood, and not simply because the firebrick was also “believed to be more impervious to disease-carrying vermin.” Sewers were constructed everywhere in the 19th century to combat cholera. Joel Kotkin, a professor in urban studies at Chapman University in California, points out in an interview that “people forget Manhattan had 2.4 million people in 1920, and 1.5 million in 1950 when New York was by far the dominant city in the world. When cities were afflicted with epidemics in the early 20th century, they responded with de-densification.” Florida adds a crucial coda to that observation: North America’s rapid, post-emish flu suburbanization in the 1920s certainly had a health impetus, but its (literal) driver was, then as now, a new technology—the car.


READ: Here’s how quickly cities across Canada are burning through cash

Automobiles, like public transit, are a major part of the uncertainty about the coming city, given the COVID-induced upheaval in moving people around metropolises. Haider asserts that some remote workers are even more productive at home than they were in office towers, because they have gained “the 90 minutes they had spent going to work and the 90 minutes coming back.” Suburbanites have always had issues, to put it mildly, with what Florida calls their “enormous, horrific commutes” to the city centre, and he expects “the legacy of remote work will be that a fifth to a third won’t go back to them.”

As for downtowners, Haider says, they will not re-embrace “the packed-like-sardines subway rides, or waiting for the next train, which at rush hour always comes just as filled as the one you let go by—I think those days are done.” They, too, will work from home or embrace the pedestrian walkways and bike paths that proliferated during the pandemic lockdowns as overall transit use plunged by up to 85 per cent in many cities. Or they will drive more. The drop in transit has not come entirely from people working remotely or biking to the workplace—streets once nearly deserted during the initial lockdowns are traffic-choked again in many metropolitan areas.

Transit issues were among the pre-pandemic fault lines in city life that have been exacerbated by COVID, “like the glaring inequality in income and health outcomes that we used to ignore but which we can’t not see any longer,” according to University of Toronto urban planning professor Matti Siemiatycki. Most North American cities, including Vancouver and Toronto, have radial transit systems designed to funnel people by exurban trains and subway cars into and out of the downtown core. “There’s such a mismatch between the transit systems we’ve built and people’s needs already,” says Siemiatycki. “Compare Toronto’s radial [subway] system to where so many of its lower-paid front-line type of jobs are.” Many of those are in parts of the city served only by crowded buses that have remained overloaded even after an airborne virus drove away anyone who could travel by other means.


In many cities, subways to suburbs sit empty while packed buses move lower-paid urban workers (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

Toronto is not alone in its current mismatch between transit demand and transit capacity, with crowded buses and empty subway cars. By October, in downtown Washington, “formerly a textbook case of a reborn city centre,” according to the Washington Post, 95 per cent of its 167,000 office workers had been missing for months and economic activity was down 87 per cent from 2019. On the Tuesday after Labour Day, about 1,000 people came through the McPherson Square Metro station, “compared with 15,000 on a weekday before the pandemic.” That’s a passenger level that won’t be seen again for years in any major city, if Haider’s prediction about the number of returning centre-city office workers is true.

Since the remote workers will not all return, North America is liable to see a “labour-market Armageddon—the loss of tens of millions of urban service jobs,” in the words of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. “Just consider downtown Toronto,” says Haider, one of the largest employment hubs in North America with over 450,000 jobs. They are not all FIRE [finance, insurance, real estate] office jobs. All around the office workers, to serve their needs, are the retail infrastructure, the hotels, the restaurants and cafés.” But while the FIRE workers have remained gainfully employed, “those waiting on them in the Starbucks” and other retail outlets “saw their business places shut down.”

Anything that affects food, and income generated from food, affects cities profoundly, argues historian Wilson. More than any other small business, food has been the means for the poor—newcomers and native-born alike, from students working in Montreal restaurants to Lagos’s roasted corn peddlers—to make their way in the city. And street food is fundamental to the economy of megacities in the Global South, particularly the off-the-books economy that keeps marginalized people alive. “Mexico City and Mumbai have close to 250,000 street vendors each, a high proportion of the working population,” says Wilson. That was life in the West, too, not that long ago—19th-century London had similar numbers of food carts, including 500 who sold nothing except pea soup and hot eels—and food industry employment is still vital to the modern urban economy. Canadian food service, projected last year to reach $100 billion in sales by 2021, now expects sales of less than $80 billion this year, with all the closures and job losses a 20 per cent decline brings. What will become of unemployed workers in a hard-hit industry is another open question.


READ: The tale of Toronto’s boardwalk foxes

There may be a glimpse of the downtown future already visible in the high-end Toronto retail district of Yorkville. Since September, coffee drinkers can buy a latte from the Dark Horse Robo-Barista café, the first fully automated specialty coffee kiosk in Canada. As Brad Ford, the general manager of the coffee program for RC Coffee, which supplied the technology, and Max Daviau, VP of retail for Dark Horse, explain in a joint interview, their pilot project was in the works long before the coronavirus put a premium on contactless purchases. “It’s just a continuation of some of the trends we see in fast-casual, quick-serve environments, part of society’s movement to convenience and technology—even in McDonald’s these days, people go in and order from the kiosk,” Daviau says. (Money plays a role, too, of course: start-up costs for the smallest viable downtown café are “north of $100,000,” says Ford, and more than triple that for “a serious larger space.”)

Regardless of its origins, though, the Robo-Barista couldn’t have timed its arrival better. Ford says landlords are contacting RC Coffee about immediate robo-stand-ins for cafés that are temporarily shuttered by the pandemic, and are also interested in possible permanent replacements for the coffee shops that don’t come back after COVID. There will be many of those: only a month into the pandemic, 10 per cent of Canada’s estimated 97,500 restaurants, bars and cafés had already announced their permanent closure.

Another indicator that North American cities are heading for a major reset is visible in real estate markets. Haider has been watching commercial subleases, and finds that even the biggest renters, who are caught in five- or 10-year leases, are now “trying to sublease 10 or 50 or 100,000 square feet because they have realized the workers are not coming back, at least for this year and the next year.” That’s a crisis that many experts also consider an opportunity for metropolises to do what they did a century ago when, as Florida says, “cities from Toronto to Detroit, and Pittsburgh and even New York City and London, transformed manufacturing and trade buildings into the kind of places where new activities crop up. We’re going to have to similarly adapt our cities to the decline of office work.”

Among those repurposed buildings, notes Siemiatycki, a British Columbia native, are the brick warehouses that were transformed into shops and living spaces in Vancouver’s Yaletown neighbourhood. Like Florida, Siemiatycki sees a chance amid the current urban upheaval to actually improve cities, by dealing with “the exposed tensions around affordability and racial inequalities.” Actually, more than a chance, says Florida, “it’s our obligation.” The pandemic “is hitting hardest at the least advantaged and racial minorities, and creates a context for policy-makers to at long last address these great divides in our societies.” To that end, Florida would prefer to see unused office space become not more condos—which is widely expected—but affordable housing, “We need policies to make this happen. I do not see it happening yet. I don’t see the thinking or the urgency.”

Experts all agree cities will get younger. The city will still offer the most opportunities for jobs and potential mates, according to Florida, and the departure of older, more virus-susceptible and more affluent people will open up affordable space for them, according to Chapman University’s Kotkin. “And then maybe the city won’t be so boring,” he laughs. With gentrification, “the chains moved in, too, and all the interesting eccentric parts of our cities were hit hard.” Siemiatycki points out that kind of urban life—the niche innovations cities are known for—has been finding its needed cheap space outside the central core, most notably in older suburban strip malls. “That’s where you find the new retail and the most authentic restaurants in Toronto.” Kotkin says the same about suburban Orange County in California. “Like an architect friend once told me, ‘The strip mall is the immigrant’s friend,’ and immigration drives innovation.”

The true pull of urban life, the art, culture and street festivals—what, in Siemiatycki’s words, “makes cities vital”—won’t be replaced by the internet, but will move to the inner suburbs. If, that is, the next generation of suburbs are designed for lower emissions, more home-based work and shorter commutes, says Kotkin, through “some substantial changes in their land use and zoning regulations.” This world of urbanized suburbs, featuring more spread-out populations and a resurgence (however temporary) of the car, seems inevitable to most urbanologists.

Not so fast, says Wilson. Metropolitan areas cannot cave to cars and let transit decline, precisely because too much de-densification is another doubled-edged urban blade. Just as density has always been the blessing and the curse of cities, sprawl is both a boon and a danger. Cities are the sharp point of the human spear in the battle to limit climate change disaster—stopping it being out of the question now—because they are literally on the front lines: two-thirds of metropolises larger than five million people lie in areas that are no more than 10 m above rising sea levels. Cities will have to continue their decades-long battle against cars, not just to cut their emissions, but to gain the space they occupy, says Wilson. He predicts they will “continue restricting and taxing [automobiles’] rights of access. In the U.S., there are plans to convert several enormous multi-lane freeways—the monsters that slashed through urban neighbourhoods in the 1960s, condemning them to terminal decline—into tree-lined boulevards with parks running down the middle.” And with fewer cars and more green spaces, metropolises will become denser and more sustainable.

The post-pandemic city, relatively more spread out, less affluent and younger in its demographics, and—ominously for many—probably subject to virus-tracking surveillance technology, will not be the same as the pre-pandemic city. If governments seize the chance for renewal offered by the coronavirus, the future will be brighter. If not, and if urban affordability follows its usual trend—cheaper rents accompanied by fewer jobs, increasing employment bringing rising living costs—it will be darker. But as Wilson’s riveting tour of cities ancient and contemporary shows, rapid evolution is their constant state. They will be, as always, places that will hold the good and the bad in tension, until disaster strikes again.

This article appears in print in the December 2020 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Farewell, metropolis.” 
LETTERS TO AMERICA

We must defund the police. It is the only option.

Sandy Hudson: 'Dear white people,' through your inaction, you show us your inherent belief system—a Black life lived with dignity is unreasonable, and a liberated Black life is impossible.



By Sandy Hudson  June 4, 2020

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in the U.S., Maclean’s asked Black Canadian writers to pen open letters to America addressing the recent upheaval and the task of confronting racism that—deny it as some Canadians might—persists in their own country.

Dear white people,

I have a singular focus in my appeal to you today, and I need you to hear me. Our lives depend on it. It’s time to defund the police.

I believe that we can do better than the slipshod “safety services” the police claim to provide for us. I know many of you are unfamiliar with the everyday activities of the police. They do not patrol your neighbourhoods under the guise of providing “safety.” They do not stop you on the street under the pretense of “protection.” They do not kill your people with a casual and consistent regularity that announces, Your life is worthless.


When they killed 26-year-old D’Andre Campbell in Brampton, Ont., this year, the police proved to us that they are ill-equipped to provide emergency mental health services. When in early 2018, bystander Bethany McBride recorded a Black boy being brutalized by fare inspectors in Toronto, police showed that they could not be trusted to help patrol our transit systems and campuses. In 2016, when an off-duty Toronto police officer and his brother beat Dafonte Miller so badly that they took his eye, police showed they cannot be held accountable for their actions. And when they refused to properly investigate the death of 26-year-old trans woman Sumaya Dalmar in 2015, the cops confirmed, yet again, that our deaths are not taken seriously.


A young woman takes a knee in front of police officers during a protest in San Jose, Calif., on May 29 (Dai Sugano/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News/Getty Images)

Perhaps to many of you, defunding the police sounds impossible. But Black people will continue to fight against accepted wisdom: we must defund the police; it is the only option. Through your inaction, you show us your inherent belief system—a Black life lived with dignity is unreasonable, and a liberated Black life is impossible.

White people, I need you to look beyond the limitations of your own making and understand that the possibility of my liberated existence requires more than a retweet, an opinion piece, and even more than attending a demonstration. That’s the easy way out.

How can we expect an institution that has failed all attempts at reform to suddenly refrain from targeting, maiming and killing Black people because of a new police chief, mayor or policy? I am asking you to refuse an approach to safety that is simply good enough for you, and absolutely unjust to me.

I need you to believe that, for Black people, this maddening cycle of trauma and despair is not inevitable. It only becomes so when we fail to evolve.

Sandy Hudson is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Toronto and a law student at UCLA.



Desmond Cole
A letter to the Canada-U.S. border
Things may be different on this side of the border, but not enough to save us
Andray Domise
Canada’s own legacy of racist oppression
‘To my brothers and sisters in America,’ you may be unaware that Canada aligned itself against your lives when it mattered

Esi Edugyan
‘The weight of change should not rest on the shoulders of Black people’
For true systemic shifts to occur, everyone has to feel the disgust and frustration
Lawrence Hill
Vote that Willy Lump Lump out of the White House
A trailblazing father’s everlasting guidance as anti-Black violence engulfs the U.S.—but runs rampant in Canada, too

Eternity Martis
‘Black women: It’s time society fights for our lives, too’
Black women, who experience ‘misogy­noir,’ a mix of misogyny and racism, are also aggressively punished by police


Rinaldo Walcott
Toward an abolitionist future
There has been something animated by the death of George Floyd that is deeply familiar and that calls out for something more

DISARM & DEFUND THE POLICE
The case for police reform in the style of 1820s London

The Bow Street Horse Patrol became part of Peel’s London Metropolitan police force in 1836 (Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

In 1780, more than 50,000 men decorated in cockades gathered in central London to protest what they imagined was one of the greatest threats to English liberty and way of life: a sect so regressive, warned the Whitehall Evening Post, that enabling its members would “encourage what by Toleration itself we mean to destroy, a spirit of persecution and bigotry of the most notorious kind.”

The threat: popery. And so these self-styled freedom fighters, opposed to lifting civil restrictions placed on Catholics, began with a peaceful march. But by 10 a.m. the mood had shifted; they attacked bishops and lords. Then they gathered near a Roman chapel and “began to break open the doors . . . pull down the rails, seats, pews, communion table & etc. And brought them into the street, laid them against the doors and set them on fire.”

So began the days-long frenzy that came to be known as the Gordon Riots, named after their chief instigator, Lord George Gordon. Eventually, order was restored using the only tool at the government’s disposal—the army. Several hundred were killed, and afterward, Londoners picked their way among the corpses, as they had done many times before and would do many times again.

The Gordon Riots were only the latest episode of sectarian violence in the 18th century, but they do highlight a pressing concern of the era: the police, insofar as they existed, were useless at preserving public order.


READ: We must defund the police. It is the only option.

At the time, “policing” was an amateur, patchwork affair organized by local parishes or private citizens. Justices of the peace, chosen from the landed gentry, oversaw parish constables. As population growth, wealth inequality, urbanization and the availability of cheap gin took their toll, crime against persons and property began to rise from a level we would already consider extraordinary today. Individual households outsourced their civic policing duties to local mercenaries and paupers who were notoriously corrupt, dim and brutal. London’s wealthy organized themselves into societies that paid dues to semi-professional detectives who could be called upon to fight. But one can imagine how well the poor fared in such a system. For those who could not afford private protection or high gates, London was a horror show of poverty and poor policy. There were idle soldiers returning from war, bad winters, poor harvests and corn laws that increased the price of bread. Think starvation, high rents and high unemployment.

The poorer classes resorted to crime to make up for the lack of political and financial stability, and according to some sources, up to 11.5 per cent of the London population was engaged in law-breaking to make ends meet. The bulk were women who resorted to prostitution.

In the absence of any credible civil authority, the elite at the time thought that the only response to the urban blight was an ever-harsher penal code. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, so many crimes were made punishable by death that the British criminal system came to be nicknamed the “Bloody Code.”

And so there were numerous riots, like the Gordon Riots, in which misery found its outlet in anti-Catholic bigotry. Absent due process and law and order, it’s the protection afforded by wealth and the impulse of the majority that prevail.


London carried on in this way through boom and bust, war and peace, prosperity and decline, for another two generations until Robert Peel was appointed home secretary in the 1820s. Under Peel, the Conservative government enacted widespread reforms of the criminal justice system before Peel took his turn on reforming the police.

He did what many reformers before him had tried and failed to do in establishing the London Metropolitan police force, which centralized and professionalized the mishmash of parish control that preceded it. It was not a popular move.

Although conservatives tired of watching their property destroyed in regular riots, they hated Peel for his sympathies to Catholics. Leftists and radicals feared that his police force would become a tool of oppression acting in favour of the propertied elite; and the general public hated the police on principle.

To address these interlocking skepticisms, Peel created a force that was then entirely novel. He hired men of upstanding character, who could not drink on duty, nor accept Christmas boxes or gifts of thanks.

The gendarmeries—militias tasked by monarchical states to manage local law enforcement in Europe—were anathema to British sentiment at this time, so Peel tried to distinguish his forces from the military. He dressed them in blue suits of a civilian cut and top hats. His police wore badges, but were unarmed. (This was a contrast to other organizations, like the Royal Irish Constabulary—a quasi-military organization administered by the British in the ever-rebellious Irish provinces. The RIC would eventually inspire the North West Mounted Police in Canada.)


RELATED: ‘The weight of change should not rest on the shoulders of Black people’

But the role of Peel’s police vision was preventative, not punitive. They were commanded to demonstrate devotion to the law, rather than to a political or sectarian faction. They were to show command of their tempers, and use the least possible force.

These proscriptions were canonized into what would be known as the Peelian principles, and they formed the framework for modern police forces.

It’s difficult for a modern person today, subject to countless videos of extraordinary abuse by police, to wrap our heads around this idea—but the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 created a liberal institution. The act conceded the fact that there is no individual liberty in a society that lacks the practical apparatus to impartially impose law and order.

The Peelian principles also stated that police are only compatible with a free society when they act with the consent and trust of the communities they serve. A reminder of this history might be of use to police forces that are now buying armoured vehicles and weapons from discarded military stockpiles. Modern forces increasingly look similar to the continental gendarmeries at odds with the Peelian model of policing.

This must change; but the answer to reform may lie in the past, in creating a police force closer to the spirit of the Metropolitan than the Royal Irish Constabulary.

Dismantling police forces takes us to an altogether different lesson: it would eliminate the possibility of an impartial, publicly funded law enforcement authority that can be called upon by rich and poor alike.

Like the liberal values that predated them, the Metropolitan police were a response to decades of civil unrest and sectarian violence. Much of the 17th century was a waking nightmare of massacres, revolutions and rebellions (parliamentarians vs. royalists, Protestants vs. Catholics), and a series of tyrannical kings, dictators and lord protectors. The reforms we wrested from that era—limits on state power, the primacy of individual rights, tolerance of religious beliefs—were wrought by self-inflicted harm. The civil liberties we casually denigrate—freedom of assembly, protest and speech—are necessary to the righteous dissent that channels anger away from violence and toward meaningful reform.

And, look: Protestants and Catholics who once burned each other alive have grown into indifferent, and even loving neighbours. Within the liberal framework, radical improvement is possible, though it may come slowly. Outside these hard-won institutions and values, what reason do we have to expect anything better than what came before?

This column appears in print in the November 2020 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “For want of a good cop.” 

What Prohibition teaches us about race relations in the U.S.

Prohibition propaganda leveraged anti-black racism, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment with stories and images that painted various “others” as debauched, immoral and a threat to wholesome white families wrapped in the American flag

This is a two-part series on the history of Prohibition, white terrorism and discriminatory policing in America, which revealed ingrained racism and tore America apart in the 1920s and ’30s. 

Parallel to the racial protests of today, the summer of 1932 saw more than 10,000 protestors marching in Washington, D.C., to oust Herbert Hoover, the wildly unpopular Republican president. 

The Great Depression was not entirely Hoover’s fault, but the hungry, unemployed and homeless felt the tariff-happy president who refused handouts wasn’t up to the task, and as a result, he was making problems worse. In response to his inaction, there were hunger marches all over the country that year. The United States was in its third year of depression, with record numbers of jobless and homeless citizens, and no federal aid in sight. The federal coffers were low, a problem that could have been addressed by repealing Prohibition, but Hoover wouldn’t even entertain the thought of making alcohol legal again. The most volatile and famous of these demonstrations was the “Bonus Army” marches, which saw veterans and their families make pilgrimages to the capital from all over the country demanding either a bonus or a job.

The bonus in question was a deferred payment the government had promised First World War vets, scheduled to be paid out in the 1940s. Given the depression, the vets wanted to be paid early, arguing that many would die of hunger long before their “tombstone bonus” could be cashed in. In mid-June, a Democrat-led Congress passed a bill for an early release of funds, but two days later, the Republican Senate killed it. 

MORE: Letters to America from Black Canadians

The Bonus Army had refused to leave D.C. until they were paid and kept up a vigil of “silent death marches.” Six weeks later, the Attorney General, William D. Mitchell, ordered to have them cleared out. Police shot and killed two activists. General George Patton had also ordered the cavalry charge to disperse the crowds with bayonets and tear gas. Then the authorities burned their camps. Washington looked like a war zone. People wondered if the republic—and democracy—would survive. 

Hunger marches weren’t unique to the United States. In December, 1932, for example, a group of farmers and labour activists journeyed to Edmonton’s provincial legislature to demand help. Some 10,000 assembled to witness or participate in the protest, only to be dispersed by a violent police riot ordered by Premier John Brownlee. That same year in England, a massive hunger march made its way to London to protest restrictions on government aid. Hunger marches persisted in Great Britain for years.  

In the United States, however, the marches started to subside in early 1933. Why? In part, because under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new Democratic president elected in November 1932, the protestors were finally offered jobs. Plus, Prohibition, which had made the sale and manufacture of alcohol illegal over a decade earlier, and had simultaneously given white supremacist groups and police an unofficial license to harass and incarcerate minorities, was going to be lifted as part of the comprehensive and ambitious “New Deal” the American people had voted for. 

MORE: Canada’s own legacy of racist oppression

We’re not being glib here and suggesting that all people needed was a glass of beer to solve America’s maze of problems. The end of Prohibition was significant, though, because it marked the end of the 13-year ban on alcohol, which was a divisive, discriminatory and insidious piece of legislation that was responsible for over 10,000 fatalities—many from poisoned alcohol.  Armchair historians characterize Prohibition as either fun times in flapper dresses or a story about religious reform and unintended consequences. It wasn’t fun for most people, however, and it wasn’t nearly as much about real religious values as it was about sanctioning white terrorism and establishing mass incarceration in the name of religion. In short, most everything people think they know about Prohibition is wrong. And that matters now, since a lot of problems we still have today are rooted in discriminatory practices from that era. Here, then, is the backstory to the ordeal that led up to the chaos and desperation of 1932. 

Much of this will be a surprise to those who believe Prohibition was brought about by some well-meaning Christian women. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a powerful grassroots organization from the late 19th century, put temperance on the map, but it was actually the efforts of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) that got the deal inked. This organization, under the leadership of Wayne Bidwell Wheeler, invented “pressure politics”—flooding the public discourse with incendiary propaganda and intimidating politicians to support its campaign to do away with the saloon. 

Much of the ASL’s propaganda leveraged anti-black racism, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment with stories and images that painted various “others” as debauched, immoral and a threat to wholesome white families wrapped in the flag. As renowned lawyer Clarence Darrow famously said in 1924: “I would not say every Anti-Saloon Leaguer is a Ku Kluxer, but every Ku Kluxer is an Anti-Saloon Leaguer.”

One pivotal moment that forged this powerful alliance between the KKK and the ASL was the Atlanta Race Riots of 1906, a three-day massacre that saw white mobs terrorize the city’s black residents. At least 25 black men and women were killed, but likely more. The riot was sparked by yellow journalism“, which is what they called deliberate and incendiary disinformation back in the day. In this case, two rival newspapers peddling fake news stories about four white women raped by black men. The papers had linked the alleged (and wholly unsubstantiated) rapes to some black-owned saloons on Decatur Street, which, after the news got out, were targeted by white mobs. 

The bars were an easy target, since Atlanta’s white residents were increasingly anxious about a rising black middle class that was gaining financial independence through entrepreneurship. Bars were a part of that. In addition, ideas about black men being unable to control themselves under the influence of alcohol had been peddled as part of the racist discourse.  

Prior to 1906, Prohibition didn’t have a lot of traction in the south, and not a single state had voted itself dry. Most support for Prohibition was found in predominantly rural areas of the Midwest and Northeast, where the ASL had successfully leveraged anti-immigrant feelings to convince people that saloons where southern and eastern Europeans gathered needed to be shuttered. 

The Atlanta massacre, where white mobs attacked African-Americans for two days in September in 1906, changed that. Even though it was white men who had perpetrated the violence, somehow the takeaway was that alcohol in black communities was the root of the problem. Five southern states went dry between 1907 and 1909—Oklahoma, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee. The laws gained support because they accomplished three things—shuttering some black-owned businesses, closing community gathering places and providing a pretext for harassing black men. These were Jim Crow laws. And they were important pieces of the puzzle in the lead-up to making the sale and manufacture of alcohol illegal nationwide by constitutional amendment, a law that came into effect in January 1920, just over 100 years ago.

How the Anti-Saloon League, responsible for Prohibition, shaped modern racist policing

Prohibition created the perfect storm for the mass incarceration of ethnic minorities, who’d been driven into the contraband trade through inequality of economic opportunity, then zealously policed for being involved

This is the second piece of a two-part series on the history of Prohibition, white terrorism and discriminatory policing in America, which revealed ingrained racism and tore America apart in the 1920s and ’30s

January 1920: The saloons were shuttered, liquor stores sold out and boarded up and just about everyone with enough space—and money—had hoarded a closet full of booze. 

You might think the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), which had worked for nearly three decades to make Prohibition a reality, would have celebrated with a soda fountain treat and called it a day. Game over, right? Nope, the ASL was just getting started. Its sights were set on making laws tougher, getting police to prioritize the enforce of those laws and, while they were at it, extending their anti-alcohol legislation into foreign territories—Mexico and Canada, in particular.  

Canada had been dry under the War Measures Act, which was suspended, funnily enough, in January 1920. As America went dry, Canadian provinces and territories, especially Quebec, British Columbia and Yukon, were heading wet, since they could go back to regulating their own alcohol laws without federal interference. The ASL tried to interfere wherever it could, starting in 1919, when it held a conference in Toronto to establish the World League Against Alcohol, a cross-border, wildly-ambitious, partnership designed to abolish alcohol from the planet earth. 

MORE: What Prohibition teaches us about race relations in the U.S.

At home in the United States, the ASL’s top priority was enforcement. Although we commonly hear that people drank more during Prohibition, that wasn’t quite true, especially at first when alcohol consumption fell by roughly two-thirds. As alcohol became contraband, prices went up. Many couldn’t afford it. 

Those that could, however, still drank. And many of the people who supplied that contraband alcohol were those who had trouble finding work that paid a living wage in the depression of 1920-1921. Unsurprisingly, in that xenophobic era when the motto was “America First,” a lot of the unemployed were ethnic or religious minorities. The way the law was structured, however, meant that only the bootleggers, speakeasy owners and rum-runners would be penalized—not their customers. Drinking alcohol was perfectly legal, but selling it wasn’t.   

That was the perfect storm for the mass incarceration of ethnic minorities, who’d been driven into the contraband trade through inequality of economic opportunity, then zealously policed for being involved. For a more in-depth understanding of how this played out, check out Lisa McGirr’s War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State and The Condemnation of Blackness: Race Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad. In it, McGirr argues that the 1920s shaped modern racist policing.  

MORE: Vote that Willy Lump Lump out of the White House

Take 1920s Manhattan as an illustration, which is often celebrated for its proud, young white scofflaws who bravely defied an immoral and antiquated law with rebellious wet-ness and patronized an estimated 10,000 speakeasies. Much of the actual trade, however, took place in Harlem or south of 14th Street, which were largely populated by Blacks and recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Those were the people taking the risks—and paying the price. 

Aside from uniformed police, the era also saw a rise in vigilantism. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), an organization aligned with the ASL, gained millions of members in the 1920s (it’s sometimes referred to as the organization’s “second wave”), many of whom took it upon themselves to enforce Prohibition laws, citing lax or corrupt authorities. 

“Enforcement,” however, looked a lot more like white mob violence than rule of law. Speakeasies were torched in Little Rock, Arkansas. People suspected of bootlegging or heavy drinking were tarred and feathered in Texas. In Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, gangs of “raiders,” deputized themselves and busted up speakeasies and still operations. Fiery crosses were burned on the lawns of suspected Jewish and Italian bootleggers and, to the KKK and ASL, pretty much all Italians and Jews were considered guilty of being in the trade.  

Canada had card-carrying KKK members, too. And Prohibition remained popular in many provinces for the same reasons it had traction in the United States. Namely, anti-immigrant sentiment, xenophobia and long-standing racist concerns over First Nations and alcohol. Despite this, in the mid-1920s, many Canadian provinces started to repeal prohibitions, largely for economic reasons—farmers wanting a bigger market for grain and governments needing tax revenue. 

Republican President Calvin Coolidge entertained no such thoughts. Confronted with violence and lawlessness, the party line was more law and order—both at the state and federal levels. Many states implemented “bone-dry” laws that outlawed medicinal alcohol and/or sacramental wine and commanded stiffer penalties. 

In 1927, the feds established a dedicated and independent Bureau of Prohibition and hired more agents. That was also roughly the same time the federal government implemented a poisoning program to add adulterants like shellac, nicotine, camphor, acetone and extra methanol to “industrial” alcohol so that bootleggers couldn’t buy it and turn it into something drinkable. Possibly as many as 10,000 died from this government initiative. 

Prohibition was a mess, and not even for the reasons you usually hear about, like mafia turf wars erupting on the city streets of Chicago and Detroit. The problems were deeper and more complex. They involved systemic inequality and increased rural poverty. The 1929 stock market crash and ensuing depression was the last straw. The initial downturn wasn’t necessarily his fault, but newly-elected Republican President Herbert Hoover made things worse with stiff tariffs, the deportation of Mexicans, a general resistance to intervene and a refusal to provide meaningful aid. One year after the financial crash, he lost Congress to the Democrats in the 1930 mid-term election. 

The economy was, perhaps, the biggest issue, but voters were also tired of chaos in the streets and heavy-handed fascistic responses from authorities. Prohibition was a part of this proto-fascism and inequality, but Hoover wouldn’t consider doing away with the law. To Republicans still aligned with the ASL, the problems with Prohibition could only be solved by more police, tougher laws, more arrests and longer prison terms. 

In response, women’s’ associations, labour groups, farmers’ collectives and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples) started protesting and/or organizing voters to head to the polls. Leading up to the 1932 election, the NAACP helped bring about the first phase of the National Negro Democratic Swing, persuading many to abandon the Republicans, despite the demographic’s long-standing allegiance to the party of Lincoln. 

This brings us right back to where we started this story in part one, namely, the Bonus Army marches of the summer of 1932, which saw starving U.S. army veterans and their families beaten back with violence instead of being met with reason or compassion. On top of the shattered economy, years of terror and discriminatory policing, the administration’s brutal response to the marchers was a factor in Hoover’s historic loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in November. The Democrats held onto Congress, won the Senate for the first time since 1916, carried 42 states and won the electoral college 472 to 59.  

FDR was flawed, as any modern historian will tell you. But the broad coalition that backed him helped bring about the New Deal, which built unprecedented social welfare, offered people jobs in massive public works projects and dismantled one of the most discriminatory laws to have ever been imposed in America. And it was driven by a desire to save the nation from chaos and creeping fascism backed by a powerful lobby group and its militias.  

The New Deal didn’t end mass incarceration, racist policing or the existence of the KKK in North America, obviously. But the KKK and ASL both lost members in droves and, as a result, they lost their power. That election proved to be a turning point that moved things in a better direction. 

This time around, there’s still room to hope that we’ll see an echo of 1932. And if it happens, hopefully America can make even more meaningful changes this time.   

Canada's Medicago's COVID-19 vaccine triggers immune response in early-stage trial



(Reuters) - Canadian drug developer Medicago said on Tuesday a combination of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine and GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine booster produced virus-neutralizing antibodies in all healthy volunteers in an early-stage study.


The company, which is backed by Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma and tobacco giant Philip Morris, said it planned to move into mid-to-late-stage trials with a lower dose version of its vaccine, along with the GSK adjuvant.

“What we’re most encouraged with is that we are able to go with the lowest dose for our phase 2/3 trials,” Medicago’s Chief Executive Officer Bruce Clark told Reuters.

Trials from rival coronavirus vaccine developers have generally shown that lower doses produce less side effects. Medicago did not disclose full safety data, but said side effects were mainly mild to moderate.

Further trials of the vaccine would not test Dynavax Technologies Corp’s adjuvant, based on full data from an interim analysis of the 180-volunteer trial that had been submitted to the medical website medRxiv.

Medicago is Canada’s most advanced domestic COVID-19 vaccine project, but lags larger, global rivals such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca Plc and Johnson & Johnson which have begun late-stage trials.

Initial data from Pfizer’s large-scale study on Monday showed the vaccine was more than 90% effective.

The global race for a vaccine has seen wealthier countries forge multibillion-dollar supply deals with large drugmakers such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

Medicago last month signed its first vaccine supply agreement - with Canada for up to 76 million doses - and Clark said the company was in talks with several other countries for potential deals.

“Even if you add the total number of doses that have been committed (by other companies), you are looking at a global population of seven billion and it will require different suppliers,” said Clark.


U.S. denounces terms for WHO-led inquiry into COVID origins



GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States, which has accused China of having hidden the extent of its coronavirus outbreak, called on Tuesday for a “transparent and inclusive” WHO-led international investigation into the origin of the pandemic, criticising its current terms.

The Trump administration has accused the World Health Organization of being “China-centric” and of being its puppet, which WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has denied.

Tedros revealed the team’s composition on Tuesday, telling the WHO annual ministerial meeting: “These are very respected individuals in their areas.”

Team members came from Russia, Australia, Sudan, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Vietnam, the United Kingdom and the United States, he said.

The virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, is believed to have emerged in the Chinese central city of Wuhan late last year, possibly from bats at a market with live animals.

Chinese scientists are carrying out research into its origins and how it jumped the species barrier. The WHO-led international team formed in September is to develop plans for longer-term studies building on China’s findings, according to its published terms of reference.

Garrett Grigsby, of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told the WHO’s assembly that member states had been informed of the investigation’s terms of reference only a few days ago.

The terms were “not negotiated in a transparent way with all WHO member states” and “the investigation itself appears to be inconsistent” with its mandate, he said, without elaborating.

“Understanding the origins of COVID-19 through a transparent and inclusive investigation is what must be done to meet the mandate,” Grigsby said.

Britain called for prioritising the probe, adding: “We expect the investigation and its outcomes to be grounded in robust science.”

Sun Yang, of China’s National Health Commission, did not mention the investigation in his speech on Tuesday, but said that China supports “WHO’s continued leadership role”.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn, speaking for the European Union on Monday, called for “full transparency and cooperation” during all phases of the investigation.

WHO’s top emergency expert Mike Ryan said on Oct. 30 that the WHO-led team and its Chinese counterparts had held a first virtual meeting regarding joint investigations and would deploy on the ground in time.

Trump announced a temporary halt to U.S. funding to the WHO in April, prompting condemnation from many world leaders. The United Nations said in July it had received formal notification of the U.S. decision to leave the body next July.


Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Catherine Evans and Nick Macfie


Saturday, November 14, 2020

 

AUSSIES GOT 'TUDE

Australian news reporter gets attacked by aggressive magpie before going live on-air

The black and white Australian magpies have been known to attack people who come close to their nesting grounds around the suburban areas

Channel Nine news reporter Brett McLeod was attacked by a magpie on Monday just as he was about to deliver his live bulletin. The Nine Network reporter was preparing to go on air outside Victoria's Parliament House when an aggressive magpie swooped at his face.

Despite the tussle with the much-despised Australian bird, McLeod quickly regained his composure and delivered his piece.

This is not the first time new reporters from the same channel have been attacked by a magpie. In 2018, reporter Mark Santomartino was attacked in Melbourne park and was left with blood dripping down his face. Another reporter, Josh Bristow, had to run away after a bird aimed at his ear.

The black and white Australian magpies have been known to attack people who come close to their nesting grounds around the suburban areas. Some even say they like to steal glittery treasures. However, they are not related and are different from magpies found in Europe.

This is what Australians call the "swooping season" which is usually around springtime when magpie fledglings hatch. Australians are given warnings every year as soon as magpie swooping season has arrived. They have a dedicated website that features tracking locations and incidents of swooping attacks.

To avoid such attacks, locals are urged to wear sunglasses when stepping out. People have learned to adapt to the swooping season by wearing protective headgear or having an umbrella at hand while hanging around parks and other open spaces to protect themselves from unprovoked attacks.

US elections: Thousands of Americans hold rally in support of Donald Trump in Washington

By evening, the march turned violent as skirmishes broke out between Trump supporters and counter-protesters critical of the administration.

Tens of thousands of supporters of United States President Donald Trump on Saturday marched through Washington DC, echoing his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud as he pushes ahead with a flurry of legal moves to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, Reuters reported.

A week after his Democratic rival clinched the election, Trump has refused to concede to Biden and his administration has rejected any appearance of assisting with the transfer of power. Instead, he continues to claim, without evidence, that there has been a multi-state conspiracy by Democrats to rig the vote tally. Although counting of votes in the United States is still underway, Biden holds a sizeable lead and there has been no indication of improperly counted votes so far that would shift the outcome.

Flag-carrying Trump supporters, however, were out in force on Saturday to complain of alleged electoral fraud.

“Stop the steal!” and “We are the champions!”, they shouted as they marched from Freedom Plaza near the White House to the US Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill. At one point, supporters swarmed Trump’s motorcade as he drove past on his way to his golf course.

The demonstrations were organised under different names, including Million MAGA March – using the acronym for Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan – as well as the March for Trump, and Stop the Steal DC, according to BBC.

Supporters of Trump march in Washington on Saturday. (Credit: Reuters)

Members of the far-right Proud Boys clad in black with some wearing helmets and ballistic vests, were among the marchers, while conspiracy theorist Alex Jones addressed the crowd.

The crowd sang the national anthem, sporadically erupting in cheers for the president. A large number of protesters had travelled across the country – from Los Angeles and Seattle – to show their support for Trump. One group, with the banner “Korean Americans Support 2020 President Trump”, told The Guardian they came in from South Korea for the election and had showed up to support Trump again on Saturday.

By evening, the protest turned violent as skirmishes broke out among Trump supporters and counter-protesters critical of the administration, including members of the loose movement known as antifa.

Near the Supreme Court, some counter-protesters carried black umbrellas and makeshift shields, while others formed a line of bicycles to prevent pro-Trump protesters from approaching their group. They called Trump supporters “Nazis”.

In one instance, several counter-protesters near Union Station attacked a Trump supporter, who fell to the ground and received medical care after suffering a cut to the head. The city’s police department had made 10 arrests by mid-afternoon, a Washington police spokesperson told Reuters, including four for firearms violations, two for assault and one for assaulting an officer.

Supporters of Donald Trump clash with counter-protesters in Washington on November 14. (Credit: Jim Urquhart/ Reuters)

Videos on social media showed fistfights breaking out, the police trying to keep the groups apart by forming barricades with their bikes, and protesters near Freedom Plaza, where people lit small fires.

 

Spurred on by false claims of fraud, Trump supporters rally in Washington




WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters marched through downtown Washington on Saturday, echoing his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and cheering as his motorcade drove past.

A week after Democrat Joe Biden clinched the election, Trump, a Republican, has refused to accept the outcome and has launched a flurry of dubious legal challenges to overturn the results. Election officials around the country have said they saw no evidence of serious irregularities.

Carrying flags and chanting “stop the steal,” the protesters walked from Freedom Plaza near the White House to the U.S. Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill as part of the “Million MAGA March,” referring to Trump’s campaign mantra of “Make American Great Again.”

Trump’s motorcade briefly drove through the crowds on the way to his golf course in Sterling, Virginia. Demonstrators cheered as the president, wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan, waved from inside the presidential limousine.

“They will not stand for a Rigged and Corrupt Election!” Trump wrote on Twitter, saying hundreds of thousands had taken to the streets. Police gave no official crowd size, but witnesses said it was far smaller than Trump’s estimate.

Donald Tarca Jr., who traveled to Washington from West Palm Beach, Florida, held a massive U.S. flag sporting a giant portrait of Trump.

“I think it was rigged on multiple fronts,” he said of the election. “Also, the media was so biased that they convinced millions of Americans to vote for Biden. They hate Trump.”

Scores of members of the far-right Proud Boys group, mostly clad in black with some wearing helmets and ballistic vests, were among the marchers. Some left-wing groups staged small counter-demonstrations, including members of the loose movement known as antifa.

Near the Supreme Court, some counter-protesters carried black umbrellas and makeshift shields, while others formed a line of bicycles to prevent pro-Trump protesters from approaching their group from the rear. They called Trump supporters “Nazis;” the protesters shouted back a profanity about antifa.

Reuters witnessed at least half a dozen scuffles and several tense standoffs, but the violence appeared isolated.

One person was stabbed and rushed to a trauma center, a spokeswoman for the city fire and emergency medical services department said. The Washington Post reported that the stabbing occurred amid a melee between Trump supporters, some carrying batons, and counter-protesters that broke out around 8 p.m.

The city’s police department had made 10 arrests by mid-afternoon, a spokeswoman told Reuters, including four for firearms violations, two for assault and one for assaulting an officer.