General Chapman’s Last Stand

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: Something there is that doesn't love a wall that sends the frozen ground swell under it.

00:00:31
Speaker 1: Robert Frost, one of the greatest American poets, reading Mending Wall.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: I let my neighbor know beyond the hill, and on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us.

00:00:44
Speaker 1: They walk together down the border of their properties, between his apple orchard and his neighbor's pine trees. Every spring they have to mend the wall, hauling stones to fill the gaps. The narrator asks his neighbor, do they really need a wall to keep pine and apple trees apart?

00:01:02
Speaker 2: He only says, good fences, my good neighbors. Spring is the mischief in me, And I wonder if I could put a notion in his head. Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it weather cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.

00:01:27
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about the most famous line from mending wall, good fences, make good neighbors. Written in nineteen fourteen, as if it were yesterday. The historic home of the US Marine Corps is the Barracks in Washington, d C. Eighth the night Streets near Capitol Hill. From May until the end of August, every Friday night, the public is invited for evening parade.

00:02:17
Speaker 3: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the oldest post of the Corps, Marine Barracks, Washington, d C. Celebrating over sixty years of performing evening parades.

00:02:27
Speaker 1: It starts at eight forty five, precisely on the immaculate lawn in front of the Commandant's house. The ritual of honoring the flag, the famous silent drill, the drum and bugle Corps marines in the traditional white with dark blue tunics. One hour and fifteen minutes of precision marching. Evening Parade was the creation of General Leonard Fielding Chapman, Junior, when he assumed the command of the Marine Barracks in nineteen fifty seven. Chapman believed Marine parades had become anglicized too many theatrical flourishes, trick drills, frivolities like the Queen Anne's salute, the small hats. The British favor the heavy double soled shoes with cleats. My policy was that we will be regulation. Chapman once said, we will be U S Marine Corps regulation. We will do everything in accordance with the Marine Corps regulations and will do it perfectly. I've met a handful of senior military leaders in my life. They're not like CEOs, who represent an infinite range of variation on the general theme of tall white guy. Generals are the product of one of the world's largest and most rigorous meritocracies. To get to the top, they've had to be more disciplined than the disciplined people, and then at the next level up smarter than the smart people, then at the level after that, more charismatic than the charismatic people, and on and on all the way up to five stars. Generals are the winners of a single elimination tournament that goes on for thirty years. Chapman was appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps in nineteen sixty seven, served with distinction for four years during one of the most difficult periods in Marine Corps history. He was a Southerner, who loved Lincoln, A voracious reader, an intellectual, the man who did as much as anyone to bring the Civil rights Revolution to the Marine Corps. Chapman was once interviewed by a Marine Corps historian, and by the end of the recording, which runs for hours, you want to follow him into battle.

00:04:50
Speaker 4: Towards the end of the war, when we were pulling out of Vietnam, I came to the decision that we were going to clean house, shape up, or ship out.

00:05:03
Speaker 1: Chapman shrank the Marines from three hundred thousand to two hundred thousand men, let go every marine that he did not measure up, made sure everyone who remained knew what the score was.

00:05:14
Speaker 4: And I'd make my speech about tightening up the Ring Corps and going back to our standards. And I got applauded every time. And it was in such sharp contrast to what was happening in the other services. See, the other services loosened their standards, you know, long hair beer in the barracks, Navy, especially Navy especially. Yeah, we went exactly opposite directions. The Navy loosened their standards, so did the Army.

00:05:50
Speaker 1: To me, what what did he look like?

00:05:52
Speaker 5: Well, he was very handsome. He was, you know, the pictures of him when he was young and in a pretty incredibly you know, dashing sort of man.

00:06:03
Speaker 1: This is the general's granddaughter, Danielle Chapman.

00:06:06
Speaker 5: And he was still very handsome when he was in his sixties and seventies and tall, you know, he still had that military posture to him. Also, just an incredible stamina and he actually was very proud of that too. On the golf course that until he was in his eighties, you know, he walked and carried his clubs, and he would really rib his buddies about that, and he would say, you know, they would ride in the cart and he would say, oh, they're over there riding in the cheeseburger wagon, you know. But he was.

00:06:40
Speaker 6: He was.

00:06:42
Speaker 5: Walking and carrying his clubs the whole way.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: General Chapman retired from the Marine Corps in nineteen seventy one, but he didn't take a lucrative job in the defense industry like so many ex military brass do. Instead, he goes to his boss, the Secretary of Defense, and asks for help in finding another job in government. He gets his wish in nineteen seventy three. He's named commissioner of what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency responsible for securing the borders of the United States. Now, why does he do that? Being head of the Marine Corps is a job of enormous prestige. The ion s in nineteen seventy three was a backwater. Why would someone take such a big step down. It's not obvious until you think about what Chapman has just been through Vietnam. He ran the Marine Corps during the worst years of the war. And what was Vietnam? A war about a border. The country was split in two, with a communist government in the north and a pro Western government in the south, and the North kept sending insurgents across the border to make trouble in the South. That's why the US went to Vietnam to secure the border. The Marines were in the thick of it. They were way up in the farthest corner of South Vietnam, right on the border with the North. At one point, the Secretary of Defense wanted a wall built along the border to stop the North Vietnamese from trickling in. It was the job of the Marine Corps to build it, and they couldn't do it. They couldn't secure the border. Nothing worked. Chapman saw the failure first hand.

00:08:21
Speaker 7: The trouble with Vietnam for the Marine Corps was that the army was in charge of the whole thing.

00:08:31
Speaker 1: Chapman Son Walton joined the Marines and served in Vietnam.

00:08:35
Speaker 7: And the Marines that were there, my dad had no tactical control. In other words, he couldn't tell the twenty six Marines to leave Kisson and go somewhere else.

00:08:52
Speaker 1: General Chapman would make the long journey to Vietnam many times, but all he could offer was moral support. There's a moment in his Oral History when Chapman describes the orders that came down from the Pentagon when the US military shipped out of Vietnam. Each branch of the military was supposed to pack up and send home anything worth more than fifty dollars. Chapman said, no, the Marines would bring home everything worth five dollars or more.

00:09:18
Speaker 4: Furthermore, I issued an order that we'd leave our spaces in Vietnam ready for inspection, everything cleaned up, all the trash buried, all the temporary buildings knocked down and disposed of. And we did that too. We lived and left every one of our areas in impeccable condition, ready for inspection.

00:09:45
Speaker 1: That's what the Marine Corps was reduced to in Vietnam, being the best at tiding up behind them. How could someone like Chapman be satisfied with that? If he couldn't defend the borders of South Vietnam, then maybe running thes would be his second chance.

00:10:00
Speaker 7: He was like nothing better than to be able to say, yes, the border is secure, mister Secretary, was the interior the border is now secure.

00:10:19
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, a young sociologist named Douglas Massey became interested in the subject of Mexican migration. It was then as now a matter of political significance, but Massey was struck by how little was actually known about the problem. Nobody really understood exactly where migrants were coming from, or exactly where they were going, or for that matter, what they were doing once they got to the US, and what happened to the families they left behind. Sociologists are the great note takers of the social sciences. They're used to projects that stretch out for years, that even consume entire careers. So Massey decided to be a good sociologist and study migration properly. He found a partner, a mexicanthropologists named Jorge Durand, and the two of them began systematically interviewing families of migrants around Mexico.

00:11:17
Speaker 8: We pick communities. We pick four to six communities every year. We do a complete household roster and collect basic sociodemographic information on everybody in the household, plus detailed information on everybody's first and last trip to the United States and the total number of trips they've taken.

00:11:35
Speaker 1: The survey is called the Mexican Migration Project. After thirty years, it's massive, millions of life years of information, case histories, extraordinary detail. It's the gold standard. This has got to be one of the world's biggest migration databases.

00:11:54
Speaker 8: It's certainly the biggest and most reliable on Mexico US migration. When the government wants to know what goes on, they don't go to the border Patrol because their data are allowsy. They come to the Mexican Migration Project.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: In all of your work with this project, was there anything you ran across that really surprised you?

00:12:13
Speaker 8: I guess what surprised me. In the late seventies, when I first saw this was just how routine it had become, and how institutionalized the circulation was, and how it was woven into the fabric of Mexican life at the time.

00:12:27
Speaker 1: How institutionalized the circulation was. The principal finding of the Mexican Migration Project is that Mexican migration to the United States has a distinctive pattern.

00:12:38
Speaker 8: It's overwhelmingly circular.

00:12:41
Speaker 1: Now, what does circular mean?

00:12:43
Speaker 8: Exactly means they work seasonally in the United States and return home on an annual basis to be with their families.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: So these workers there are they leaving their families back in Mexico.

00:12:53
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it's overwhelmingly male, young, young males. And the typical pattern is you go for several times to earn some money to help you back home.

00:13:06
Speaker 1: What made the back and forth circulation possible was the fact that for most of the twentieth century, the border between Mexico and the United States was porous, more of a line on a map than an actual border. The border patrol was a tiny force in those years. There were no walls, no surveillance drones. If you got stopped, you got turned around and sent back home.

00:13:27
Speaker 6: Then you tried again, our family is mainly a family that was born and raised in the border area.

00:13:35
Speaker 1: Carlos Morentez, a labor organizer and former migrant worker, talking about his childhood in the nineteen sixties. Growing up in Warez, Mexico, He and his friends used to swim across the Rio Grande carrying watermelons that they would sell on the American side, like the river was a pond in their backyard.

00:13:56
Speaker 6: Within a Hella scenes that we were living in two different countries. To us being children means that you know that we were living in a big with two neighborhoods, one south of the river, one north of the river.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: What Marentees is saying in economic terms is that the cost of crossing was effectively zero. It was free, and what happens when something is free, you use as much of it as you can.

00:14:30
Speaker 8: Usually they leave in February March as the seasons start picking up, and then return in December for the holidays and there's a big fiesta in migrant sending towns.

00:14:45
Speaker 1: Massi is saying that Mexico was where family and roots were, it was cheap and close. America was where money could be made easily and quickly. This is not the way, say Jewish immigrants came to the United States in the nineteenth century. They didn't go back to Eastern Europe every summer, nor did the Italians who came over in the same period. Entire villages moved en mass from southern Italy the United States permanently. The price of returning where they came from was not zero. Their homeland was not welcoming, and even if it were, the cost of crossing the ocean was so high that it could not be done routinely. But Mexican migration was different. Carlos Morentez remembers his grandfather telling him that he wanted to return to Mexico to Zakitacus.

00:15:37
Speaker 6: So the attraction to go back to Mexico will be to go back to your real homeland, to the rural community that you left behind, with families, with your history, with everything the old your identity.

00:16:00
Speaker 1: This is not the story the United States tells itself. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty does not read give me you're tired, you're poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free for six months until you make enough money to go home again. When we think of immigration, we think of the Jewish and the Italian model permanence. Second thing, circular immigration is very hard to measure. Border controls are designed to count the number of people coming in, not the number of people leaving, because we assume the number coming in is what matters, which it is in most cases, but not in the case of Mexico, because if a huge group of people eventually go back home again, the only number that matters is net migration those who come in minus those who go home. And thirdly, most importantly, circular migration is the result of a zero cost border crossing. It is what happens when you can swim across the Rio Grande or walk from Warez in Mexico to al Paso in Texas. So what happens to circular migration when the cost of migrating is no longer zero. One of the things that General Leonard Chapman heard when he took over the IS was that his predecessor had never left Washington, DC. For someone coming from the Marine Corps, that was unthinkable. Leaders review their troops, so Chapman set out to visit everys Field office, close to four hundred of them all over the world, some with no more than two or three people, and it took me.

00:17:43
Speaker 9: Three years to do it, but I did. I got to every single one. I'm real least wont so. I spent a tremendous amount of time traveling talking to my troops, for whom.

00:17:55
Speaker 4: I built up a very high regard.

00:17:58
Speaker 1: Chapman modernized the agency. When it came to information management, he thought thes was thirty years behind the Marine Corps. Chapman set up a public affairs office, first in the agency's history. He became a familiar face on Capitol Hill, and the more he learned, the more alarmed he became. There was, as he put it, a general laxity in the enforcement of immigration laws. For goodness sake, kids were swimming across the Rio Grande, selling their watermelons and then going back home again. People were treating the border like it was just a line on a map.

00:18:34
Speaker 10: I mean, it's easy to inventage. Yes, twenty five million, fifty million, seventy five million. Why not, there's no machinery to stop them.

00:18:50
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy three, when Chapman took over the Ions, the cost of crossing the Mexican border was effectively zero. By the time he left in nineteen seventy seven, it was not, and so it begins. In nineteen eighty six comes the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which militarizes the border. Then Operation Blockade, which diffens up the border crossing in El Pasa, Operation Gatekeeper, which diffens up the border crossing in San Diego. The budget of the border patrol between the mid nineteen eighties and twenty ten increases tenfold. And then today with the Attorney General of the United States sometimes sounds like Commandant Jefferson Sessions.

00:19:40
Speaker 11: I have put in place a zero tolerance policy or illegal entry on our Southwest border. If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: Is that simple.

00:19:56
Speaker 1: The cost of crossing the border has been escalating for a generation, and it began with Leonard Chapman.

00:20:04
Speaker 4: We ran a gallup.

00:20:05
Speaker 9: Hole right after our first got there that showed that over something like fifteen percent of the.

00:20:10
Speaker 12: American people had ever heard of the problem. When I left three years later and we had another gallon role and that over eighty.

00:20:21
Speaker 10: Five had heard of him.

00:20:23
Speaker 1: In his years in office, Chapman made two hundred and fifty speeches across the United States. This is at the same time that he's personally visiting every IONS field office and overseeing the complete overhaul of the agency and making his argument over and again on Capitol Hill and giving hundreds of press interviews. The United States went from an IONS headed by someone who never left his desk to an agency headed by someone who couldn't stay at his desk. He was relentless wake in America.

00:20:56
Speaker 4: We're telling America about our problems. Then though they had.

00:21:01
Speaker 1: Americans didn't think they had an illegal immigration problem. Leonard Chapman convinced them that they did. When I was fourteen growing up in Canada, I went to a week long track and field training camp at the International Peace Garden. It's a park straddling the border between North Dakota and the Canadian province of Manitoba. I go for long runs each morning with two friends. One day we noticed a diner on the American side, so we hopped the fence and got a burger. I say fence because the border and nets Stretcher Prairie was just a fence, the type that someone in the suburbs might have around their backyard. On our way back to Canada, we were spotted by a border patrol officer. He arrested us, put us in the back of his car, and took us to the nearest as office. We had to put our names in a book underneath a big photo of President Jimmy Carter. I decided to be clever and wrote, my name is William F. Buckley. Then we got dropped off back at the border fence with a stern lecture. When I got home and told my parents, they found the whole thing hilarious, but as you can imagine, it left an impression. That Burger at the diner was my first visit to the United States and they ended up in the back of a patrol car. I first read Robert Frost's Mending Wall not long afterwards in school. The poem is a back and forth between a man and his neighbor over the value of their fence. One side says, good fences make good neighbors. The other side, the narrator says, maybe not. It all depends on who the fence is keeping in or out. Right from my first read, I sided with the narrator because all I could think of was the fence I'd just jumped between Manitoba and North Dakota. We were fourteen year olds, and the fact that there wasn't much of a fence between the countries at that point meant that we could do normal fourteen year old things like get a burger. Would a better fence there have made us better neighbors or would we have just gone hungry? Frost neighbor thinks good fences solve problems. And the funny thing about that poem is how many people agree with him. But do good fences make good neighbors or do they just disrupt normal patterns of behavior? So what happened when the Mexican border became a good fence? Well, the historical Mexican migration pattern was that young men came to America, worked, went home, came back, went home again. That's what Douglas Massey documented in the Mexican Migration Project.

00:23:48
Speaker 8: Our data from the Mexican Migration Project indicate that between nineteen sixty five and nineteen eighty five, eighty five percent of all undocumented entries were offset by departures, so the net influenced small.

00:24:00
Speaker 1: Between nineteen sixty five and nineteen eighty five, lots and lots of Mexican migrants came to the United States without legal status. Almost all of them eventually went home, but then the border patrol was expanded, the crossing opportunities through El Paso and San Diego were shut down, and migrants had to adapt. They shifted from the fortified crossings in El Paso and San Diego to the most brutal parts of southern Arizona.

00:24:27
Speaker 8: Now you're out in the middle of high desert, open desert. It's bitterly cold at night, boiling hot during the day. There's no water, and death'smount And when you're out in the middle of nowhere, it's more costly to stage crossing.

00:24:43
Speaker 1: The financial incentive to come to the United States remains, but returning home is now suddenly so risky that you don't do it every six months or every Christmas or maybe even ever. You stay, and.

00:24:56
Speaker 8: As the male workers stay longer and longer, family unification occurs. They send for their wives and younger children, and those younger children are today's dreamers.

00:25:07
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty, what was likelihood of a Mexican migrant returning home after his first trip to the United States. According to the Mexican Migration Project's data, it was about fifty percent. By twenty ten, it's zero. We built a wall to keep Mexican migrants out. In fact, the wall has kept them in. People who would otherwise have gone home stayed so long they put down roots. In March of twenty sixteen, Douglas Massey, along with Jorge Durand and Karen Prinn, published a brilliant paper in the American Journal of Sociology, Why Border Enforcement Backfired, in which they ask a hypothetical question, what would have happened if the United States had done nothing over the past thirty years, frozen the budget and staff of the border patrol at nineteen eighty six levels allowed for some circular migration. The researchers estimate the undocumented Mexican population of the US would be about a third lower a third lower than it is now. This is according to the people who know more than anyone else about Mexican migration, who have access to one of the biggest immigration databases in the world. And what is their conclusion that the attempt to solve the problem of illegal Mexican migrants is what has caused the problem of illegal Mexican migrants. You can just hear the frustration in Douglas Massey's voice.

00:26:42
Speaker 8: For me I've been watching this train wreck in real time for the past two decades, really, and I kept trying to tell people that, you know, when it comes to border enforcement, less is more, and if you militarize the border, you're going to produce a larger undocumented population. I said this before the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration.

00:27:02
Speaker 1: And what happens after Massi testifies the same thing happens every time.

00:27:07
Speaker 8: Nothing and then the rank King minority member who's representative for King from Texas gets up and basically says, take your lie in data and go home, because we know what the truth is. We're being invaded and we've got to stop this.

00:27:22
Speaker 1: Massey says, we need to do the exact opposite of what we're doing now. When we raise the cost of crossing the border, that shut down circulation. If you want to restore circulation, then you should make the border easier to cross. Reduce the size of the border patrol, don't increase it. Make it easier for migrants to get legal status, not harder.

00:27:45
Speaker 8: If you wanted to lower the number of Mexicans living in the United States, give them green cards, and a lot of them won't go home. The US is not that nice a place for people, for Mexicans these days, but they have families here, They got us born kids. They they and if they know they can come back, they'll go home.

00:28:08
Speaker 1: If we had kept things the way they were in the early nineteen seventies, the same badly run border patrol, the same ineffectual leadership, the same indifferent public, we wouldn't be tearing our hair out over immigration. If there was ever a place for bad government, it was on the southern US border. But what do we get. We got the one guy who couldn't do bad government, the man haunted by his country's failure to build a wall in Vietnam.

00:28:36
Speaker 10: I think who came out with comment about the all Marines are green.

00:28:42
Speaker 4: Fact the thing.

00:28:44
Speaker 1: There's a fascinating moment in General Chapman's oral history. His interviewer asks about racial troubles that rocked the Marine Corps in the late sixties, the civil rights movement was at its apex. There was a near race riodte at Camp La June, fistfights among soldiers in Vietnam. Black Marines wanted to be treated with the same consideration as white marines. Chapman's response may be his most memorable announcement. All Marines are green, not black, not white. The color of the uniform is what matters. Backed up by a directive unracial discrimination sent to every officer under his command. He even made a solemonic ruling on the prohibition against black soldiers wearing their hair in an afro. Hair he said was hair. The concern of the Marine Corps was not with its form, only with its length.

00:29:37
Speaker 4: What it said was that within those limits, a marine can style his hair anyway he wants to. Yeah, that's what it said. So that if a black marine wanted to have an afro that was no more than three inches long and was neat and trail around itself, fine, why not? Yeah?

00:30:03
Speaker 1: And the evening parade. To participate in the evening parade at eighth and nine, you used to have to be a perfect specimen of military manhood, more than six feet tall, no glasses, and white. Chapman says, why can't you be a perfect specimen of military manhood and black? He desegregated evening parade that got him hauled before a congressional committee full of angry Southerners. Chapman describes the experience with typical understatement as a quote interesting few hours, but I'm a deep Southerner myself, and so I was able to battle them with good effect. Unquote. I'm curious if he were here today, what would he make of the way we talk about immigration away that debate has changed.

00:30:55
Speaker 5: I'm not sure what he would say.

00:30:58
Speaker 1: This is Chapman's granddaughter, Danielle.

00:31:00
Speaker 5: Again, you really disliked complaining, and you know he would always say if anybody was, well, okay, what are you going to do it? You know, he was incredibly pragmatic, so I think that he would probably view a lot of the current conversation as just a bunch of noise without a solution.

00:31:21
Speaker 1: So what was his solution?

00:31:22
Speaker 12: Then?

00:31:23
Speaker 1: General Chapman did what came naturally. He enforced the law, he drew the line. He made a complicated issue.

00:31:31
Speaker 5: Clear, he didn't like the idea of, you know, mass illegal immigration. But at the same time, his views had none of the tone that the immigration debate has now. He just didn't think of it in racial or ethnic terms. I never heard him talk about it like that or or attach the kind of emotions that you hear people attaching to it in the current debate.

00:32:04
Speaker 1: General Chapman traveled to every corner of the United States and stood up in that deliberate ramrod straight Marine Corps way and told the American people plainly and clearly what needed to be done. Can I fault him? I can't. I wish there were more people like Letter Chapin, especially these days. It's just that in some cases, complicated things are best left unclear, and we're better off letting whatever it is that doesn't love.

00:32:33
Speaker 2: A wall, or in its course, something there is that doesn't love a wall that wants it down. I could say elves him, but it's not Elves exactly, and I'd rather he said it for himself. I see him there, bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand, like an old stone, savage armed. He moves in darkness, as it seems to me, not of woods, only in the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, and he likes having thought of it so well. He says again, good fences, my good neighbors.

00:33:18
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is a Panoply production. Senior producer is Miel LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson, original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to ac Valdez for capturing the sounds of the evening parade and for the audio of Robert Frost. Thanks to the National Council of Teachers of English, and thanks as always to Andy Bauers and Commandant Jacob Weisper. I'm Malcolm Glamin.

00:33:59
Speaker 5: I think the only time I can remember him really getting angry with me was when I kind of blasphemed the Constitution, and I don't know why I would do that except I was a teenager.