Which brings us to the story of a photograph.

On January 22 in Minneapolis, federal agents arrested Nikema Levy Armstrong, a local African-American civil rights leader. She was arrested for her role earlier that day in a protest against the presence and conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officers in her city.

That same day, the White House posted and circulated a digitally manipulated photograph of her, done in order to make her look weak, fearful, and uncomposed. (The actual, unfalsified photo conveys the opposite qualities in her appearance.) Later, White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr defended the use of the doctored photo and promised more to come, calling the falsified Armstrong photo a “meme” and stating plainly: “The memes will continue.”

A crucial line just got crossed.

First, this occurrence appears (no pun intended) to be the first time in our nation’s history that a president or a president’s administration has deliberately altered photographic evidence to demean an American citizen for political purposes.

The Administration’s defenders can reply that altering photographs is nothing new, and they are right. Today millions of us use Photoshop to make our pictures more appealing, and each time we do, we alter an original photograph. Many people today also create so-called memes in which photos are altered in order to appear funny or communicate sarcasm.

But the falsification of Nikema Levy Armstrong’s facial image on the day she was arrested was not done by ordinary citizens to make her look more attractive or tell a funny joke. It was done by the highest officials in the land to deceive the public about a possible crime and inflict intentional harm on an American citizen. This has not happened before, and we can thank Heaven for it.

We also learn from this episode that arguably the worst form of public lying is corrupting our visual understanding -- our capacity as citizens to make intelligent use of our own eyes.

Why? Because much scientific evidence suggests that, for humans, seeing is prior to interpretation. Our initial access to the world comes primarily through our eyes. That’s why we say that “seeing is believing” and why saying “I saw it with my own eyes” is more convincing than, for example, “I heard it with my own ears.” Among humans, vision dominates cognition. First and mainly we see it, then we try to make sense of it.

Authoritarian political leaders have long understood and acted on this fact. In the former Soviet Union, Communist rulers regularly doctored official photographs, including the removal of people’s images entirely, because they knew erasing adversaries visually is longer-lasting and runs deeper than simply disparaging them with words. Today, the similarly authoritarian Russian government regularly deploys manipulated photos and videos as part of information warfare campaigns in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Hannah Arendt, the great student of totalitarianism, tells us that the ultimate aim of the totalitarian system is not to convince you that its lies are true, or even to force you to treat them as true when you know that they are not. The ultimate goal is to disorient you so thoroughly that you no longer feel able rationally to distinguish fact from fiction.

What’s the best strategy for achieving this state of affairs? It’s to disable me visually -- to put me in a world where I can no longer trust my own eyes. Am I looking at the face of Nekima Levy Armstrong? Maybe, maybe not. I have no way of knowing. I can no longer see my way.

In any society, this form of assault is terrible. In a republic, it’s potentially lethal. Public truth-telling, a necessity for self-governing people, effectively loses its meaning when citizens can no longer reliably judge what is true and what is false.

This is how free societies become unfree.

That’s why, even in today’s noise and haste, when news flies by so quickly that we feel unable to give anything the attention it deserves, all of us ought to take a moment, for the sake of our republic, to look carefully at the actual face of Nekima Levy Armstrong.

What else? The Administration should reconsider its stated intention to continue the practice of manipulating photos for political purposes, and instead conduct a review of this episode, with the goal of new, publicly stated pro-truth guidelines to highlight the ethical and civic issues involved and improve practices in this area across society. The vast majority of Americans would support and admire this form of public leadership.

More broadly, we can learn from the pioneering work now taking place in Estonia and Ukraine. This work includes a comprehensive approach to teaching school children how images can be falsified, television programs devoted to exposing examples of manipulated images and videos, and mobilizing journalists and others in civil society to adopt and improve effective strategies for visual verification.

Relatedly, we can support the work of organizations such as the News Literacy Project, which works in the United States, and WITNESS, which works globally.

We have leaders who know what to do. The next and most important step is for America as whole to decide that this issue is vital to our civic life.

A version of this essay was published in the Deseret News on February 22, 2026.

For an actual, undoctored recent photo of Ms. Armstrong, as well as the falsified photo, see “White House Posts Photo Altered to Show Arrested Minnesota Protester Crying,” New York Times, January 22, 2026.

Once again, many people seem already to have taken sides. Administration officials have made it clear in dramatic language that they already know what happened and where guilt and innocence lie. They’ve also made it clear that they do not intend to cooperate with local officials, or with anyone, to conduct what might plausibly be called an independent investigation.

We may be crossing the Rubicon. It’s alien to our values and form of government for our leaders to refuse, in cases such as these, to conduct investigations guided by established rules in which all facts are considered prior to reaching conclusions. A country that no longer seeks to determine truth according to impartial procedures rather than politically desired outcomes is no longer a functioning republic, at least in the sense that the American founders intended.

More broadly, it appears likely that things in Minneapolis will get worse before they get better. Much of Minneapolis civil society is determined to oppose and publicly protest the federal government’s actions, and the federal government seems equally determined to stay the course and even double down.

I remember as a child in Mississippi witnessing the “Mississippi Summer”of 1964, in which my state became, for much of the nation, a symbol of everything that was going wrong regarding civil rights for African-Americans. Many people from across the country went to Mississippi that summer to assist the civil rights movement, and two of them were murdered (a third victim was from Mississippi).

It may be that Minneapolis is becoming, again for much of the nation, just such a symbol. We may be approaching a time of reckoning.

The Arctic has long been flattened by two dominant habits of seeing. It appears either as spectacle - an endless white sublime emptied of social life - or as warning sign, reduced to a moral tableau of planetary crisis. In both frames, geography as lived reality disappears. Settlement, interiors, work, infrastructure, and routine are pushed aside in favor of symbolism. What is gained is moral urgency; what is lost is understanding and with it, the ability to judge places as they actually are.

The photography of Inuuteq Storch quietly but decisively resists that tradeoff. His work does not scold or sermonize. It does not demand outrage or awe. Instead, it attends - carefully, concretely, and without ideological theatrics. Across landscapes, interiors, and scenes of labor, Storch insists that Greenland is not an abstraction but a civic and domestic world, shaped by policy decisions, inherited practices, environmental limits, and daily competence.

That sensibility is on full display in Soon Will Summer Be Over, Storch’s first U.S. solo exhibition, now on view at MoMA PS1. The exhibition traces roughly a decade of work across Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but it returns again and again to Storch’s hometown of Sisimiut, a community of about 5,500 people just north of the Arctic Circle. That scale matters. This is not the Arctic as frontier or metaphor, but as town: a place with routines, constraints, institutions, and memory.

Seen together, the photographs in the exhibition clarify what this kind of attention accomplishes and why it carries larger civic and cultural implications.

Settlement Without Spectacle

One wide photograph looks down on a Greenlandic settlement stretched laterally across the frame, positioned between exposed brown tundra and a frozen bay. Low clouds compress the horizon, flattening any sense of grandeur. At first glance, the image resembles the Arctic panoramas museums often favor. But the center of gravity is elsewhere. The eye is drawn not to ice or sky, but to the band of houses; modest, evenly spaced, oriented toward use rather than display.

Nothing here is heroic or fragile. The town is not dwarfed by nature, nor does it dominate it. Instead, the photograph records accommodation: how people place themselves where permanence is provisional and seasons impose real limits. Roads curve with the terrain; spacing reflects judgment rather than ambition. This is geography as settlement - ordinary, durable, and lived - rather than landscape as myth.

Across the exhibition, images like this recur, quietly insisting that Greenland is not empty land awaiting meaning from outside forces. It is already organized through human decision-making, sustained through routine, and governed - sometimes well, sometimes imperfectly - through institutions that leave visible marks on the land. In a cultural moment inclined toward abstraction, Storch keeps returning us to placement, proportion, and use.

Interior Life as Cultural Ground

One of the most consequential images in Soon Will Summer Be Over is an interior. A large cut of fish occupies the foreground, heavy and unmistakably material. Behind it sit two elderly women, composed and unperformative. They do not smile. They do not pose. They do not explain themselves.

The room carries the deeper story. Religious imagery hangs on the wall. Utilitarian shelving holds everyday objects. A Greenlandic flag rests in the corner without ceremony. Light fixtures hang plainly, slightly off-kilter. Nothing here is decorative. Everything is functional, inherited, or habitual.

The photograph collapses familiar binaries - traditional and modern, sacred and secular, domestic and political - and replaces them with continuity under constraint. Culture appears not as performance or heritage display, but as practice, carried forward inside modest modern space. The setting is contemporary housing; the activity is ancestral. They coexist without friction and without commentary.

This emphasis on interiors runs throughout the exhibition. Kitchens, hallways, and shared spaces become sites where Inuit tradition, Danish colonial legacies, and global modernity are not debated but lived. Storch documents these spaces without nostalgia and without accusation. What emerges is a truth rarely acknowledged in contemporary cultural discourse: communities endure not through visibility or symbolic recognition, but through repetition; skills practiced, food prepared, rooms used as intended.

Work, Animals, and Proper Scale

Another photograph places people and dogs together at the edge of broken ice. The dogs are not romantic symbols; they are working animals - alert, restless, integral. Humans move among them without ceremony. No one poses. The ice is fractured and transitional, signaling not timeless winter but seasonal uncertainty.

What stands out is scale. Human figures are neither heroic nor diminished. They are proportioned correctly; to dogs, to tools, to ice floes, to shoreline. The image records competence rather than endurance mythology. It refuses nostalgia and refuses crisis. Work continues because it must, and because people know how to do it.

Across the exhibition, scenes like this recur. They show labor not as spectacle or suffering, but as practiced judgment. Limits are real - environmental, seasonal, economic - but they do not erase agency. In a cultural climate that increasingly frames people primarily as victims of systems, Storch’s photographs insist on something sturdier: the dignity of competence, responsibility assumed rather than performed.

Weather as Friction

In a snowstorm photograph, flakes fill the frame, breaking the image into a field of light and shadow that nearly dissolves depth. The effect approaches abstraction. And yet, at the center stands infrastructure: a steel structure, a utility bin, snow piled thickly against both.

There is no metaphor here. Snow is not purity or erasure; it is interference, delay, accumulation. It presses on systems designed to endure it and shapes how space is navigated and time is experienced. Rather than dramatizing isolation or climate anxiety, the photograph records what weather actually does: it interrupts.

This attention to infrastructure - housing blocks, walkways, utilities, industrial remnants - runs throughout Soon Will Summer Be Over. Buildings appear not as backdrops, but as records of governance and policy. Weather does not symbolize crisis; it tests systems. Climate is encountered not as abstraction, but as maintenance deferred, repairs required, movement slowed.

The civic implication is clear. Environmental limits enter human life not as slogans or spectacles, but as friction with the built world. Storch photographs that friction without editorializing it.

What the Camera Refuses

What distinguishes Storch’s work is not simply what it shows, but what it refuses. Much contemporary photography is asked to do moral work on behalf of institutions - to dramatize crisis, simplify causality, and convert places into arguments. In that visual economy, accuracy is often treated as neutrality, and restraint as evasion. Storch rejects that logic. His photographs insist that seeing clearly is not a moral failure. It is the condition for moral seriousness.

This discipline of seeing is increasingly rare and its absence has consequences. When places are reduced to symbols, judgment collapses. When people are framed primarily as embodiments of crisis, competence disappears from view. Storch’s work quietly but firmly pushes back against that cultural drift.

Where This Work Belongs in Photography

Seen clearly, Soon Will Summer Be Over is not best understood as Arctic photography, Indigenous photography, or climate photography; at least not in the reductive sense those categories often imply. Storch’s work belongs to a longer and increasingly endangered photographic tradition that treats ordinary life as morally sufficient: worthy of sustained attention without conversion into spectacle, indictment, or allegory.

The most instructive historical comparison is Walker Evans. Evans’s photographs of Depression-era America - storefronts, tenant interiors, vernacular architecture - were defined by discipline. He rejected sentimentality and reformist melodrama. His documentary style insisted that description, when precise, carries its own moral authority.

A closer contemporary parallel is Robert Adams, particularly his New Topographics work. Adams relocated moral meaning from wilderness to the built environment, photographing roads, housing tracts, and infrastructure under pressure. Storch shares this attention, but without Adams’s elegiac tone. Where Adams often documented decline, Storch documents continuity under strain.

Among living photographers, Storch’s restraint aligns with Rineke Dijkstra and Alec Soth; artists defined by patience and refusal. Dijkstra’s beach portraits hold adolescent subjects in flat, even light, withholding narrative context until awkwardness becomes dignity. Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi lingers on interiors and faces without explaining what they mean. Like them, Storch withholds emotional instruction and narrative closure. The camera waits. Meaning is allowed to emerge.

This lineage has always been vulnerable. Today it is increasingly crowded out by forms of photography that substitute affect for accuracy and declaration for description. Storch’s work stands as a corrective.

This placement clarifies not only what Storch does, but what he rejects: activist documentary that turns images into arguments; conceptual photography that abstracts place into theory; identity-forward portraiture that converts people into symbols. His photographs ask not what a place represents, but how it functions.

That is a conservative posture in the deepest sense; not ideological, but civic.

The Larger Cultural Argument

Taken together, the photographs in Soon Will Summer Be Over articulate a worldview that runs against several dominant currents in contemporary culture.

Storch replaces the Arctic sublime with proportion and placement. He replaces cultural display with routine and use. He replaces environmental allegory with work, infrastructure, and judgment. He replaces narratives of fragility with competence and continuity.

What emerges is an Arctic that is neither pristine nor collapsing, neither mythic nor moralized. It is a place where people live: deliberately, knowledgeably, and within limits that are real but not theatrical. Inuit traditions, Danish colonial influences, climate volatility, and globalization are all present in the work, but none are allowed to dominate the story. They are absorbed into daily life rather than elevated into ideology.

That is why this exhibition matters beyond Greenland or the art world. In a society increasingly governed by abstraction, where places become causes and people become symbol, Storch’s photographs defend a more demanding civic posture: the discipline of seeing ordinary life clearly. Attention, here, is not indifference. It is respect.

Soon Will Summer Be Over does not ask viewers to feel awe or alarm. It asks them to practice judgment and see towns, rooms, work, and weather without converting them into symbols. In a culture increasingly governed by performance and abstraction, that discipline is not aesthetic refinement. It is civic competence.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute. He writes frequently about civic aesthetics.

Few things are more important than how a society decides what is true. In the United States, we depend on specific ways of determining what is true and, in cases such as what happened in Minneapolis, who is innocent and who is guilty. Those time-tested ways are rooted in humility, trust, discipline, and most of all, restraint.

Let’s review. When a life is lost, government officials and civic leaders are first expected to express personal regret and sorrow for the loss. Next, they are expected to assure us, and then make sure, that the government will follow the proper procedures for a non-partisan investigation. Finally, they are expected to accept the results of those procedures, even if they don’t like them.

This way of proceeding is based on core democratic principles. The first principle is civility. The second is a process governed by rules, not people. The third is transparency. The fourth is a commitment to the careful examination of all the evidence. The fifth is the involvement of people with credentialed juridical expertise. And the final and most important is a commitment to fair-mindedness and the sincere search for the truth, regardless of political consequences.

This traditional method does not guarantee a fair outcome in every case, but it’s far more likely to do so than the new method we are currently adopting. This method is based on coercion and on who holds political power. It is rooted in arrogance, hatred of political adversaries, tolerance of procedural sloppiness, and most of all, aggression.

If you want to know how it works in practice, just look around.

Are you a government official who just heard about the shooting in Minneapolis? Announce immediately that you know what happened, say that you are fighting evil, and call a press conference for the next morning in order to speak with righteous outrage.

Are you a citizen who just heard about the controversy? Trust your political instincts and pick a side — now. Hear a politician or journalist you like tell you what to believe? Believe it. Hear someone you don’t like to tell you what to believe? Don’t believe it.

Are you a powerful political leader who wants to ignore and disparage old-fashioned, rule-based investigations? Say that such investigations are rigged and that the people who run them are corrupt.

What’s at stake is one of the foundations of our democratic way of life. Societies wishing to remain free cannot determine what is true on the basis of which leaders are currently in power, who can shout the loudest, or who can use the most extreme or threatening language.

Do we need someone to blame for this dangerous predicament? Please, let’s not blame Trump, or Biden, or the man behind the tree. Let’s blame ourselves. We are not all equally complicit, but we are all complicit. And if we are losing the civic virtues on which our form of government depends, only “We, the People” can reclaim and renew them.

It’s not too late. Our civic decline is not inevitable. What happens in the future is in our hands.

Do we need an idea? Regarding the Minneapolis shooting, it would be unwise for the FBI to conduct the investigation, as is currently being proposed by the Administration. In fact, it would be harmful for any federal agency to conduct it. President Trump, Vice-President Vance, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Todd Lyons, and many other high-ranking Administration officials have all stated in the strongest possible terms that they already know what happened and where guilt and innocence lie. This is tantamount to announcing the outcome of the investigation prior to the investigation.

A better idea would be an independent commission consisting of members mutually agreed on and appointed by President Trump, the nation’s ranking Republican official, and New York Senator Chuck Schumer, our ranking Democratic official. The commission’s mandate would be to carry out a full, fair, and impartial investigation.

The commission’s findings would likely not carry the force of law, but both the commission’s existence and method could remind us of what it looks and feels like to behave as if a nonpartisan process guided by fair rules and serious deliberation is more important to us than any particular result.

This essay was published in the Deseret News on January 17, 2026.

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Note: This is the third of three essays by Samuel J. Abrams focusing the lives of important contributors to American civic aesthetics -- creators who have shown us how the arts and the built environment can enrich the formation and practice of civic life. (Here is the first essay and here is the second.) This is an important topic, and one to which we’ll return.

The news of Martin Parr’s passing feels like a quiet rupture in the cultural record. Parr was not simply a photographer. He was a documentarian of civic life in its most unguarded, democratic, and unselfconscious forms. His lens captured modernity not through abstractions or theories, but through the granular details of how people move through everyday spaces; details most of us overlook, though they reveal who we are more honestly than any political slogan or census table.

Parr’s world was not the realm of monumental architecture or carefully manicured urbanism. His was the realm of beaches, food courts, supermarkets, small high streets, half-faded seaside towns, and the awkward social choreography of leisure. These places – often dismissed as banal or vulgar by cultural elites – were, for Parr, civic landscapes. They were the stages on which people negotiated class, aspiration, identity, and belonging. And he treated them with a seriousness that contemporary social analysis often reserves only for institutions. That alone made his work radical.

His breakthrough series, The Last Resort (1983–85), remains one of the clearest articulations of his worldview. Shot in New Brighton, it documented working-class families vacationing in a declining seaside town during an era of economic upheaval. What gives the series its power is not its critique but its honesty. The trash-strewn beaches, sunburned children clutching melting ice creams, and parents asleep in plastic chairs are not staged, not idealized, and not mocked. They are simply visible – as they were, as they lived, as they coped. In an era obsessed with “representation,” Parr represented ordinary people by refusing to turn them into symbols. He allowed them to occupy the center of the frame.

His camera understood, long before social media made it inescapable, that consumer life is a language. His 1990s project Signs of the Times, which explored domestic décor trends and the earnest, sometimes touching, sometimes absurd ways people construct self-identity inside their homes, reads today like an early ethnography of aspirational culture. The floral sofas, plastic-laminated dining tables, and proudly displayed tchotchkes signal the same anxieties and yearnings that now play out algorithmically on Instagram and Pinterest. Parr understood that taste is never neutral; it is a form of self-expression shaped by class, exposure, and the emotional economies of late capitalism.

Even before that, his early black-and-white documentary work from the 1970s – nonconformist chapel communities, declining rural villages, small-town rituals – captured a Britain on the cusp of social transformation. The scenes feel intimate and already fading: congregations thinning, traditions eroding, a sense of place stretching thinner each year. That early attentiveness to social texture deepened into the saturated flash aesthetic that made Parr famous. But the core remained: a desire to record how people inhabit spaces, how spaces shape them in return, and how modernity rearranges both.

What distinguishes Parr’s work, especially to anyone who studies civic life, is that it refuses both nostalgia and contempt. Many cultural observers treat consumer spaces and mass leisure with either hand-wringing or disdain. Parr took a different path. He documented these spaces with anthropological fidelity, without sentimentality, without moralizing, and without surrendering to cynicism. His images of crowded beaches with their sprawling towels, patterned swimsuits, folding chairs, squinting faces do not mock their subjects. They reveal public life in one of its few remaining egalitarian environments. A beach is one of the last places where class, age, and background spill into each other, however imperfectly. Parr noticed these collisions and treated them as central rather than marginal to modern civic experience.

Color was essential to his argument. At a time when “serious” photography still clung to black-and-white aesthetics, Parr insisted that modern life was too bright, too saturated, too garish to be rendered in monochrome. His palette captured not just the surface of consumer culture but its psychological atmosphere. The neon signs, fluorescent supermarket aisles, cheap souvenirs, vivid plastic toys; these were the textures of everyday aspiration. He did not hide or soften them. He made viewers confront the world as it actually was, not as they preferred it to be.

This is why Parr’s work matters so deeply now. The world he photographed is evaporating. High streets struggle, independent shops shutter, seaside towns are hollowed out, and informal public life is increasingly displaced by screens. The rituals he captured – families picnicking on unfashionable promenades, couples wandering through shabby arcades, children making their own unstructured fun – are giving way to curated leisure, algorithmically filtered entertainment, and a civic sphere where spontaneity feels like a relic.

Parr’s photographs are not simply nostalgic artifacts; they are records of a social ecosystem that once sustained a sense of common life. In his images, you see the friction and humor of people encountering difference casually, without mediation. You see informal norms negotiated without institutional intervention. You see the everyday indignities and everyday pleasures that formed the connective tissue of community life – messy, fragmented, ordinary, but shared.

Critically, Parr’s photography also documents the geography of inequality without preaching. In The Last Resort, the decaying seaside amusements reflect economic strain without turning the families enjoying them into props. In Signs of the Times, interior décor reveals aspiration and insecurity without indicting the people who embraced it. Across his global projects – from tourism culture in Europe and Asia to food rituals in the United States – he mapped how consumer culture shapes social expectations while leaving room for agency, humor, and tenderness.

For those of us who write about civic culture, community, and the changing built environment, Parr’s archive is invaluable. It is visual sociology of the highest order; not for its technical mastery but for its insight into how people live. His images show that civic life does not reside solely in institutions or grand projects. It resides in the mundane negotiations of public space, in the quiet dramas of leisure, in the informal social codes that govern queues, beaches, parks, and discount stores. These are the places where people encounter one another as citizens, not abstractions.

Parr’s death comes at a moment when the very idea of unmediated public togetherness feels fragile. His work reminds us of what we risk losing: uncurated spaces, unselfconscious rituals, the kind of public intimacy that emerges when we are not performing for a digital audience. He captured the ordinary before it became endangered.

In the end, Martin Parr’s legacy is not only artistic. It is civic. He showed us that everyday life – messy, colorful, contradictory – is worth understanding. He restored visibility to people often ignored in cultural narratives. He taught us that the vernacular spaces of modern life are not trivial but foundational. And he insisted that to see society clearly, we must look directly at how ordinary people actually live, not how we imagine they do. That clarity is a gift, and we are fortunate he left so much of it behind.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics and social science at Sarah Lawrence College and a member of the Civic Life advisory council.

This essay was originally published in newgeography on December 9, 2025.

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Note: This is the second of three essays by Samuel Abrams focusing the lives of important contributors to American civic aesthetics -- creators who have shown us how the arts and the built environment can enrich the formation and practice of civic life. (Here is his first essay.) This is an important topic, and one to which we’ll return.

Two titans of American architecture — Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern — have passed within days of each other. Gehry died at 96 in Santa Monica, Stern at 86 in Manhattan. Their departures close a defining chapter in American design, but they also open an opportunity to reconsider what we expect from our cities, our institutions, and the built environments that shape civic life.

Their careers unfolded in completely different registers. Gehry was the disrupter: the Toronto-born, Los Angeles-forged rebel who discovered emotional electricity in chain-link fences, corrugated metal, sun-bleached stucco, and the digital tools that eventually allowed him to twist steel into improbable billows. Stern was the historian and builder of context: a Brooklyn kid who fell in love with New York’s limestone behemoths and marble-clad entryways, and who spent half a century arguing that tradition could be renewed rather than discarded. Yet despite their differences of temperament and technique, they shared an unusual seriousness about architecture’s civic purpose. Both believed that buildings could elevate ordinary life, strengthen our sense of belonging, and make cities more humane.

I remember seeing Gehry’s earliest plans for the Guggenheim Bilbao when I was a teenager in New York. I didn’t yet know the theoretical vocabulary — I wasn’t thinking about deconstructivism or parametric curves — but the image stopped me. The museum’s titanium looked like it was alive. It didn’t sit on the riverbank; it unfurled onto it. The forms seemed to be moving even as the building stood still. Until then, buildings had been objects. Bilbao was an event. It showed me for the first time that architecture could make you feel something unexpected and, frankly, joyful — and that public space could carry that emotional charge.

For Bilbao, Gehry took a dying industrial waterfront — a landscape of rust, soot, and shuttered factories — and turned it into the global shorthand for urban renaissance. The so-called “Bilbao effect” was often mocked by critics as a faddish, simplistic formula, but the underlying lesson was more profound: cities can be revived not only through infrastructure and zoning, but through beauty, risk, and ambition. Whether one loves or hates Gehry’s sculptural exuberance, he proved that a single building, properly conceived, can shift a city’s trajectory. In the decades since, many cities have learned the wrong lessons, erecting loud buildings that imitate the surface spectacle without the deeper logic. Still, Gehry’s achievement remains singular. His work insisted that cities owe citizens not merely functionality but delight — an underrated civic virtue.

Stern worked from the opposite direction. He believed deeply in continuity, in the idea that cities accrue character over time and that good architecture participates in that long story rather than bulldozing it. Long before he became famous for 15 Central Park West, he spent decades designing unflashy but dignified dormitories, libraries, museums, and civic buildings that understood their settings. He believed that architects had a duty to engage context, not ignore it.

Stern’s 15 Central Park West — two limestone towers, one modestly scaled on the park and the other taller and set back, joined by a copper-domed rotunda and a civilized motor court — was a rebuke to the anonymous glass towers that had overtaken Manhattan. Critics noted that the building seemed to belong to an older era of New York civic confidence. Buyers flocked because it felt familiar yet new, rooted yet polished. It was Stern’s breakthrough, but its real significance was that it restored respect for the prewar vocabulary that had made New York legible in the first place. Where Gehry reimagined the future of form, Stern reasserted the value of memory.

Stern’s civic projects — the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge — all followed the same quiet principle: people deserve buildings that treat them as participants in a story. His work argued that tradition is not nostalgia but a democratic inheritance. For Stern, the past was not an anchor holding the city back; it was a set of tools for creating places people would actually love.

It is tempting to reduce Stern and Gehry to opposing poles in a culture war: classicism versus deconstruction, hand drawing versus computer modeling, limestone versus titanium. But that framing floats above the more meaningful truth. Both were reacting against the same problem: the thinness of modernism when abstract ideology overrides human need. Stern criticized the modernist tendency to produce “self-important objects” with no relationship to their surroundings. Gehry recoiled from the antiseptic perfection of high modernism — the polished pavilions that he felt were “effete” and incompatible with the messy vitality of real life. Both men, in their own ways, rejected purity. Both cared about people first.

Their shared conviction — that architecture is a civic art, not an academic exercise — matters now more than ever. We are living through a period of deep institutional fragility. Students arrive on campuses anxious and lonely. Cities, especially legacy metros, are grappling with empty office towers, transit strains, unaffordable housing, and weakened civic confidence. Too many new buildings are interchangeable glass commodities, equally at home in Seoul, Austin, or Midtown Manhattan. Too many public spaces look like corporate lobbies: frictionless, placeless, and forgettable.

Gehry and Stern provide a counterpoint. They remind us that buildings teach. A well-designed campus signals order, purpose, and seriousness. A museum that welcomes people with beauty rather than intimidation suggests that civic life is meant to be shared, not siloed. A neighborhood that respects its past invites trust and affection. A city that takes risks on public art, unusual forms, and emotional resonance gives residents reasons to care.

Both architects also demonstrated that taste is not trivial. When a city builds well, it dignifies the people who live in it. When it builds poorly, it signals indifference — or worse, contempt. This is especially evident in the fabric of American suburbs and small cities, where too many civic buildings are designed like budget hotels and too many commercial centers are anonymous boxes surrounded by parking lagoons. Gehry and Stern would have disagreed about the right materials or forms for these places, but they would have agreed that the task is honorable, that residents deserve something better than the purely expedient.

Their deaths also invite a reflection on the American habit of oscillating between opposites: between nostalgia and novelty, between aesthetic puritanism and architectural spectacle. Stern and Gehry suggest a more mature direction. Continuity and reinvention need not be enemies. A city can honor its historical grain while still experimenting with new shapes, materials, and technologies. A community can build traditional civic buildings without sliding into pastiche, and can build expressive modern structures without turning them into billboards for developers. The question is not old versus new, but whether the result strengthens the civic realm.

When I think back to seeing the Bilbao plans as a teenager, what struck me wasn’t the novelty but the possibility. When I think now of Stern’s work — the way 15 Central Park West fits Manhattan’s skyline without disappearing into it — I think about the power of restraint. Cities need both impulses. They need imagination and memory, ambition and modesty, the courage to shock and the wisdom to calm.

That balance is painfully rare in contemporary planning debates. Our arguments about zoning, density, and housing often reduce buildings to units, envelopes, and FAR calculations. These are essential elements of policy, but they are not the whole story. A city that builds only for efficiency will eventually erode its own identity. A city that builds only for spectacle will eventually exhaust itself. Gehry and Stern, each through decades of work, showed that civic architecture is most powerful when it is clear about its purpose: to make the shared world feel worth belonging to.

Their deaths are reminders, not just losses. They urge us to demand more of our public spaces, our institutions, and our cities. They ask us to look up — literally — and to let architecture rekindle our sense of possibility. America has no shortage of challenges, but we have also inherited a remarkable toolkit: the imagination of Gehry, the discipline of Stern, and a tradition of building that once took citizenship seriously.

The question now is whether we still have the will to use it.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics and social science at Sarah Lawrence College and a member of the Civic Life advisory council.

This essay was originally published in newgeography on December 8, 2025.

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, jointly organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gathers more than 300 works spanning five decades of artistic production. The exhibition is far more than a historical survey; it is a civic revelation. In a moment when contemporary art often trades in irony, provocation, or despair, Asawa’s work stands as a counter-tradition of constructive joy. Her art is not rebellion but repair. It embodies the conviction that beauty, education, and community are inseparable threads in the democratic fabric.

Formation and Discipline

Asawa’s life story is as American as it is extraordinary. Born in 1926 to Japanese-American farmers in Norwalk, California, she was sixteen when her family was forced into internment camps during World War II. Her father was arrested by the FBI in February 1942; the rest of the family was first held at Santa Anita racetrack, then sent to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. The experience could have produced bitterness. Instead, she found order and solace in pattern and repetition. In the camp she began to draw; after the war she enrolled at the legendary Black Mountain College, where she studied under Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Albers taught design as moral formation. “Art is revelation instead of information,” he believed – a philosophy that to see clearly was to live rightly, that perception itself was a civic virtue. Asawa absorbed that ethic completely. She would later write, “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” That conviction shaped her life and teaching. For Asawa, art was education, and education was the moral architecture of democracy.

The lessons of Black Mountain followed her west. What she learned in Albers’s classroom – discipline, patience, respect for material – she transformed into an art that united craft and contemplation. Her San Francisco home doubled as studio and classroom; children threaded wire beside her while neighborhood students dropped in to learn. The line between life and art, between family and form, simply dissolved.

The Geometry of Community

Her signature looped-wire sculptures – those floating volumes of air and light – grew from a basket-weaving technique she learned in Mexico in 1947, during a summer trip while studying at Black Mountain College. Using ordinary materials – galvanized steel, brass, copper – she built intricate lattices that feel at once mathematical and maternal. Each loop encloses and releases space, creating inside and outside simultaneously. “I’m not so interested in the expression of something,” she once said. “I’m more interested in what the material can do.”

Standing beneath these forms at MoMA, one senses a rare harmony between intellect and humility. They are rigorous yet tender, abstract yet profoundly human. Their calm precision offers an antidote to the noise of the age. Where much contemporary art insists on confrontation or spectacle, Asawa’s insists on coherence. She understood that art’s highest purpose is not to shock but to order, not to dazzle but to dignify.

Some critics mistake Asawa’s serenity for retreat, her discipline for decorum. Yet in her patience there is protest: a quiet refusal of cynicism, haste, and the hollow virtue of outrage. Each loop of wire is an act of faith that connection still matters, that emptiness can hold form.

From Studio to City

That ethic carried beyond the studio. After settling in San Francisco, Asawa turned her attention outward – to fountains, plazas, and public schools. Her Andrea Fountain (1968) at Ghirardelli Square, with its entwined mermaids and sea forms, invites children to play and touch. Her San Francisco Fountain (1973) near Union Square, covered in hundreds of cast-bronze reliefs depicting the city’s neighborhoods and workers, transforms the everyday into civic monument.

In contrast to the forbidding monumentalism of mid-century public art, Asawa’s civic works are intimate and participatory. They do not impose; they invite. Where Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc divided Manhattan, Asawa’s fountains bind communities together. Her art exemplifies what might be called a civic modernism of belonging; an art that joins beauty to stewardship.

MoMA’s retrospective restores this dimension. Models, sketches, and archival photographs of her public commissions line the galleries, revealing an artist who saw no hierarchy between fine art and civic architecture. For Asawa, the city itself was a canvas of relation and, powerfully, a place where form could teach virtue.

Education as Civic Renewal

Of all her legacies, education may be the most enduring and this was featured potently in the retrospective. During the 1970s and ’80s, as arts programs were disappearing from public schools, Asawa became a tireless advocate for creative education as civic necessity. She organized community workshops, wrote curricula, and lobbied the San Francisco Board of Education to establish a public arts high school. Her decade-long effort culminated in the founding of the San Francisco School of the Arts in 1982 – now renamed the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.

She believed that learning to see was the beginning of learning to care. In an era when politics increasingly substitutes for pedagogy, her conviction that creativity undergirds citizenship feels newly urgent. A society that neglects the arts, she understood, erodes the habits of attention and patience that self-government requires.

At a time when art and music programs are again the first casualties of budget cuts, Asawa’s legacy reminds policymakers that aesthetic formation is civic formation – that to teach beauty is to teach democracy.

Against Spectacle

The exhibition also offers a quiet rebuke to the art world’s current obsessions. Where so much contemporary work aims for shock, Asawa sought equilibrium. Her practice rejects the assumption that seriousness demands despair. She built beauty, not irony.

Her fountains were not luxury goods for collectors but instruments of civic play. Her wire forms were not slogans or identity statements but expressions of shared discipline. The retrospective’s curators, Cara Manes and Janet Bishop, wisely resist framing her as a rediscovered “outsider.” Instead, they present her as a peer of Albers, Calder, and Eva Hesse – an artist who expanded modernism’s vocabulary by rooting abstraction in the everyday.

Her legacy forces a question: what if public institutions embraced her ethos? What if beauty and stewardship, not branding and outrage, guided our cultural life? That MoMA, the most visible museum of modern art, now devotes its sixth floor to her work is itself an act of civic correction; a recognition that rigor and gentleness are not opposites but allies.

Transcendence in the Everyday

The quieter rooms of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective reveal the artist at rest. Watercolors of wilted poppies, contour drawings of her children, geometric studies in ink – all bear the same meditative rhythm as her wire sculptures. There is something almost liturgical in their repetition, as if each line were a small prayer for coherence.

The show’s through-line is unity: between sculpture and sketch, between home and public space, between the hand that loops wire and the city that receives its pattern. “Art is doing. Art deals directly with life,” she said. Those words capture the civic heart of her vision—an understanding that attention itself is a form of creation.

A Civic Vision for Our Time

Asawa’s worldview was never narrowly aesthetic. It was civic, even constitutional. She believed that the virtues of making – patience, discipline, care – are the same virtues that sustain a democracy. Her life offers a model of citizenship rooted in creation rather than consumption.

That insight speaks directly to the crises of our own moment. Polarization has replaced participation; distraction has replaced devotion. Yet Asawa’s example reminds us that civic trust is built the same way a sculpture is: one loop at a time, each joined to the next. When students learn to draw, weave, or fold, they are also learning how to see one another

The Republic of Beauty

In the film that concludes the exhibition, Asawa leads a classroom of children in a paper-folding exercise. Their faces brighten as flat sheets rise into complex geometries. “You can make something beautiful out of almost anything,” she tells them in the film. It could be her epitaph or a creed for public life.

For Asawa, beauty was not ornament but ethic: the visible sign of care, the trace of faith that the world can still hold form. Her retrospective is more than an art event. It is a moral reminder that beauty is a public duty.

Standing in MoMA’s final gallery, as the wire forms shimmer and sway, one senses not nostalgia but instruction. The work teaches us how to look, how to care, how to build. It suggests that beauty, like democracy, is not a finished product but a practice – looped, patient, participatory, and unbroken.

In the fragile republic of art and citizenship alike, Ruth Asawa remains our most luminous teacher – showing that to make something beautiful is to believe, however quietly, that the world can still be made whole.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a member of the Civic Life advisory council.

This essay was originally published in newgeography on December 1, 2025.

Lincoln’s contemporary and frequent critic, the African American leader Frederick Douglass, addressing a “Burns Supper” in New York in 1849, told his audience that “I am not a Scotchman, and have a colored skin.” But if anyone in the audience might think him out of place on this occasion [and here Douglass points to a picture of Burns on the wall], “I beg that the blame may be laid at the door of him who taught me that ‘a man’s a man for a’ that.’”

The poet Walt Whitman, arguably the 19^th century’s most important articulator of the American character and purpose, wrote that “Without the race of which he [Burns] is a distinct specimen, (and perhaps his poems) America and her powerful Democracy could not exist to-day—could not project with unparallel’d historic sway into the future.” He says that “one best part of Burns is the unquestionable proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetical elements of their blood.”

Burns wrote the song “A Man’s a Man for a’ that” in 1795.

Is there, for honest poverty,
That hangs his head, an’ a’ that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Our toils obscure, and a’ that;
The rank is but the guinea’s [gold coin’s] stamp;
The Man’s the gowd [gold] for a’ that!

What tho’ on hamely [homely] fare we dine,
Wear hodden [rough] grey, an’ a’ that?
Gie [Give] fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man’s a Man for a’ that!
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, and a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae [ever so] poor,
Is King o’ men for a’ that.

Ye see yon birkie [fellow], ca’d [called] a lord,
Wha [What] struts, and stares, an’ a’ that?
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof [dolt] for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that,
The man of independent mind,
He looks and laughs at a’ that!

A prince can mak [make] a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;
But an honest man’s aboon [above] his might,
Guid [Good] faith, he mauna fa’ [mustn’t fault] that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities, and a’ that,
The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that!

Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that;
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,

May bear the gree [take the prize], an’ a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet, for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the warld [world] o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that!

For a Contrasting View

Read the poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The Law of the Junge.” Both Burns and Kipling wrote poems and ballads. Both wrote in dialect. Both were enormously popular with the common people and less so with the critics. But they differed sharply in their outlook.

The Essentials

Civic Life aims to build a library of readings and other materials focusing on the meaning of citizenship for free and freedom-seeking people. “The Essentials” are those selections from contrasting perspectives deemed to be most indispensable to read, see, or hear on the topic.

He viewed honesty as a primary democratic virtue. Throughout his life, he distrusted political passion and was deeply committed to the use of reason. Arguably his highest political commitment was to the rule of law, which more than any other factor explains his fierce determination to preserve the Union.

Although not a conventionally religious man, he spoke of transcendence more intensely and more beautifully than any other American president, in part because he had experienced great personal suffering, and in part because he believed (with Shakespeare’s Hamlet) that “a divinity shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”

What of Lincoln’s habits of mind and intellectual temperament?

In a speech in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1848 he said:

The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.

Most of Lincoln’s political contemporaries, especially in the 1850s, believed the opposite. They argued that, in fact, most things are either wholly good or wholly evil, and that politics consists of either / or choices between right and wrong, virtue and sin.

In arguing differently, Lincoln reveals a way of civic thinking that he never abandoned, even in dark moments. The idea is that I can find something of value even in views I oppose, just as my opponents, at least on their better days, can find something of value in mine. Lincoln believed that our shared history as Americans – what he called the “mystic chords of memory” – did not necessarily foster this form of civic friendship, but did make it possible.

A related way of thinking which Lincoln also exemplified is the idea that many conflicts are less about good versus bad than good versus good. Saving the Union is good. Freeing the slaves is good. As the nation lurched toward civil war, these two good conflicted with one another. Lincoln’s highest commitment was to the former, but he ultimately struggled for the latter as well, and in the end sacrificed his life for both. He was self-consciously struggling, painfully and imperfectly, with what liberal philosophers a century later would call “goods in conflict.”

Preserving the rule of law is good. Winning the war is good. In 1861, the two conflicted. Lincoln arguably weakened the rule of law that year when he unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus on grounds of military necessity. But he never viewed the choice in binary terms of good versus bad.

Most importantly, Lincoln never saw himself as good and his opponents as bad. Even in war, the harshest of human social struggles, he did not demonize, indulge in abusive stereotypes, falsely exaggerate disagreements, or treat his opponents as less than human or too depraved even to try to understand.

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, was Lincoln’s opposite in many ways, including temperament. In 1861 he said: “Our people now look with contemptuous astonishment on those with whom they had been so recently associated.” Lincoln did not think or talk that way. Nor did he respond in kind to personal attacks, even as they rained down on him without cessation. Remarkably, when Lincoln in his Second Inaugural said “malice toward none,” he meant it.

The ideologues around him never really trusted him. Many viewed him as a weakling. Lincoln’s feelings toward them are revealing. He tells his secretary that these radical men are “utterly lawless” and “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with,” but “after all their faces are set Zionwards.” They’re doctrinal and reckless, Lincoln seems to be saying, but they’re walking toward the promised land of freedom for all. Here we get perhaps our deepest look into Lincoln’s approach to people and conception of politics.

He was fundamentally averse to ideology. This quality in him was seldom praised. He was often noncommittal, seeming to want things both ways. He would bewilder colleagues by telling them, “My policy is to have no policy.” He would change his mind, equivocate, and propose half-measures which tended to displease everyone.

These qualities can seem less than heroic, and they help to explain why many of Lincoln’s contemporaries viewed him as dithering and indecisive. Faced with constant conflict, he was always seeking to soften the edges, reassure and often placate opponents, carve out more room to maneuver, and look for ways to keep the conversation going, no matter how badly it was going.

He had a remarkable ability to work with, and ultimately win the loyalty of, leaders of nearly diametrically opposed views. All his life Lincoln told people that Henry Clay of Kentucky, who was often called “The Great Compromiser,” was his “beau ideal of a statesman.”

As styles of communication, he consistently chose humor over vitriol, understanding over judgement, telling stories over delivering lectures, and making suggestions over giving orders. A strong and confident man, but one who also experienced dark depression, he was mild-mannered. His capacity for empathy was striking to the people around him.

Coda: First Inaugural Address

Nearly the entire First Inaugural was an appeal for the restoration of trust. He speaks directly to southerners, seeking to reassure them that the government will not threaten their peace, property, or personal security. He insists that as president he cannot legally interfere with slavery in the southern states and has no desire to do so even if he could. He reiterates his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. He does refuse, as did most Republicans, to accept the Supreme Court’s pro-slavery Dred Scott decision as final, but even here Lincoln equivocates and avoids strong language. The tone throughout, according to the respected Lincoln scholars J. G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, “struck the note of gentle firmness and breathed the spirit of conciliation and of friendliness to the South.”

Citing law and history, Lincoln argues that the Union is perpetual, cannot consent to its own destruction, and therefore cannot be legally undone on the “mere motion” of one or a group of states. He says that, as a president sworn to uphold the law, he has no legal authority under the Constitution to “fix terms for the separation of the States.” He says that he trusts that this fact “will not be regarded as a menace” and that in carrying out his “simple duty” to defend and maintain the Union “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be done unless it is forced upon the national authority.”

Like a lawyer speaking to a jury, he suggests that separation would make the nation’s current problems worse, not better. He appeals to reason: “Physically speaking, we cannot separate.” He proposes that in a democracy the ultimate wisdom of the people can be trusted to prevail and he reminds those who would oppose his Administration that even bad governments have limited powers and limited terms of office. He says that both north and south “profess to be content with the Union, if all constitutional rights can be maintained,” and pledges again that these rights will be maintained. He pleads for calmness. He argues against a rush to action: “Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.” He closes by appealing to “our bonds of affection” rooted in “the mystic chords of memory.” And finally, he promises that we will be “again touched” by “the better angels of our nature.”

In practical terms, the speech was a failure in nearly every respect. Hardly a southerner attended the inauguration ceremonies. Many southern newspapers, especially in the Deep South, simply ignored Lincoln’s address, and those which did not frequently mangled and misrepresented the text. Southern commentators commonly portrayed Lincoln as an untrustworthy hypocrite, claiming in the speech that he did not want civil war while promising in the same speech to do what would cause one. An editorial in the Midgeville, Georgia, Southern Federal Union said: “Mr. Lincoln talks with a forked tongue.” On Inauguration Day the Richmond Examiner called Lincoln “a beastly figure” whom “no one can hear with patience or look on without disgust.” The next day the Richmond Enquirer said that Lincoln’s address consisted of “the deliberate language of the fanatic.”

Lincoln took office as a beleaguered president, widely disliked and mistrusted in the country. Many in his own party viewed him as a crude, unreliable man. Many in the South viewed him as a would-be despot, while many others in all parts of the country viewed him as a weakling who could be controlled by others. The immediate result of his election was further to divide an already divided nation. His Inaugural Address did little to change any of these realities. Five weeks after the speech, Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and the war came.

In 1909 he was ordained as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, but ten years later, radicalized by his opposition to the Great War and by his involvement with striking textile workers that year in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Muste left the church and abandoned Christianity. Through the mid-1930s, he was active in labor organizing and in radical politics. In 1936, he re-embraced his Christian faith. Over time Muste’s journey led him to the Society of Friends (the Quakers) and to ministerial posts in Congregational and Presbyterian churches. But Muste’s truest Christian witness, both within the church and in the larger society, expressed itself in struggles for social justice, nonviolence, and peace.

Tall, lean, and frugal, Muste had simple tastes, avoided bank accounts, and admitted to “a strong aversion to money-making.” In Peace Agitator, Nat Hentoff’s biography, Hentoff reports that Muste “gives the impression of owning only one suite.”

Many people who knew him describe him as serene and, astonishingly for a political radical, almost never given to zealotry or self-congratulations. Quiet and soft-spoken, he avoided the limelight and usually did more listening than talking, even when he was in charge. He laughed often, including at himself. He was a Christian mystic who was fiercely intellectual and read constantly.

Partly owing to his study of Mohandas Gandhi, Muste in his work as a peace activist became America’s foremost early 20^th century exemplar of the philosophy and tactics of nonviolent resistance. In 1949, a young student at Crozier Theological Seminary, Martin Luther King, Jr., was first exposed to these ideas when he heard Muste give a lecture on the topic. The two men became collaborators. Years later, at the height of the sit-ins and other nonviolent protests of the U.S. civil rights movement, Dr. King said: “I would say unequivocally that the current emphasis on nonviolent direct action in the race relations field is due more to A.J. than to anyone else in the country.”

For most of five decades he was a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nondenominational pacifist organization committed to nonviolence and international understanding. In this work, Muste had great empathy and listened to everyone. He did not end relationships.

Starting in about 1955, Muste, a strong anti-communist, initiated a series of private conversations with American communists who were considering leaving the party. One of those who met with Muste during this period later said:

We had been trained to believe that there couldn’t be anything decent or honest in ‘liberals’ who weren’t in the party, but it was revealing to recognize the thread of principle that ran through everything a man such as Muste did and said. Most of the other non-Communists were thoroughly suspicious of those of us who were having doubts … I say this as an atheist, but if I were to be asked if I’ve ever known a saint, I’d have to say Muste comes close.

As a result of these and similar efforts, Muste was publicly accused of disloyalty by the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1957 reported to a U.S. Senate investigating committee that Muste “has long fronted for Communists.” Muste wrote a long letter of reply to Hoover, detailing his long-standing opposition to communism as well as his on-going conversations with party members. He closed by saying that, while “conscientiously opposed to responding to summons to appear before any government official or agency engaged in investigating the political or religious opinions of myself or others,” he [Muste] would “appreciate it” if Mr. Hoover “should have time to discuss these matters with me on a personal basis.” Director Hoover did not respond.

Asked about his approach, Muste said:

One has to be both a resister and a reconciler … You have to be sure that when you’re reconciling, you’re also resisting any tendency to gloss things over; and when you’re primarily resisting you have to be careful not to hate, not to win victories over human beings. You want to change people, but you don’t want to defeat them.

Part of Muste’s genius in bringing people together is that he never succumbed to the belief that he spoke truth and that his opponents spoke error. He said:

You always assume there is some element of truth in the position of the other person, and you respect your opponent for hanging on to an idea as long as he believes it to be true. On the other hand, you must try very hard to see what truth actually does exist in his idea, and seize on it to make him realize what you consider to be a larger truth.

This was Muste’s civic way.

Wilbur’s parents, Charles and Manie Chapman, were Christian missionaries. Both had attended the University of Kansas and together had found their life’s calling as part of a YMCA-inspired youth religious revival which had swept across Kansas in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Inspired by faith, the couple dedicated their lives to an organization called the World’s Gospel Union, later the Gospel Missionary Union, devoted to global Christian evangelization.

In April of 1913, Wilbur’s father, Charles, was home on leave, having spent more than a decade abroad selling bibles and preaching the gospel in Ecuador and Columbia. His mother Manie, whose health had become too poor to remain overseas, was supporting the Union’s work from their home in White Cloud.

Responding to the biblical injunction to “cleanse the leper,” Mrs. Chapman started prayer groups in the area to seek God’s help in caring for the world’s lepers. When she thought the time was right, she wrote to the head the American Mission to Lepers, a man from Boston named William Danner. Come visit us in White Cloud, Mrs. Chapman wrote. We’re praying for the lepers. If you’ll visit our churches, she said, I believe you can raise $250, enough to care for ten lepers for a year.

A good and dedicated man – like Wilbur’s parents, he had come out of the western YMCA movement and as part of that work in 1903 had started a YMCA “health farm” near Denver, Colorado, for boys suffering from tuberculosis – Mr. Danner went to White Cloud. He stayed in the Chapman home. He befriended young Wilbur, who soon enough was calling him “Uncle Will.” He visited and spoke in four local churches – in a town of about 750 people – and raised a total of $225 for the American Mission to Lepers. Mrs. Chapman apologized to him for not meeting their goal of $250.

At the train station before dawn, waiting to head back East, Danner recalls that he took three silver dollars out of his pocket and “slipped them into Wilbur’s hands as I said good-bye, asking him not to show these to anyone till morning.”

Several weeks later Danner got a letter from Wilbur. In the fall, Wilbur wrote, I’ll use the three dollars to “buy a pig, and feed him, and see if he will not grow big so I can sell him for enough to support a leper for a year … Mother’s tenth leper! Do you see?”

Danner saw. In November he got a second letter. Wilbur had bought the pig. Moreover, the pig was becoming a local celebrity. Neighbors had learned about Wilbur’s idea, and children in town were eager to help feed “the leper pig.” The pig was growing rapidly. Wilbur had named him Pete.

In the spring of 1914, Wilbur sold the pig and sent $25 to Mr. Danner, finally raising the town’s contribution to $250 and thus completing the pledge for “Mother’s tenth leper.”

That’s how the story begins. Moved by what Wilbur had done, Danner shared the story with friends at a prayer meeting. One of those friends worked at the Sunday School Times, a national publication for Sunday School teachers. He asked Danner to write a story for the Times about Wilbur and the pig. Danner agreed.

The story caught on. Sunday School teachers across the country began collection drives in which children would contribute coins to “feed Pete” to help the lepers. Soon the American Mission to Lepers was distributing thousands of metal (later, plastic) “Pete the Pig” banks for children to fill with coins. By 1919, 11,000 “Pete the Pig” banks had been distributed to U.S. Sunday Schools. By 1938, the number had reached 100,000, and contributions to the American Mission to Lepers from Sunday School children had exceeded $1 million.

When you were a child, perhaps you had a “piggy bank.” Do you wonder who conceived this idea and what made these little banks so popular? There’s no single answer. Linking the concept of pigs with the need to save money has been around for centuries. For example, earthenware money-boxes called “penny pigs” or “pinner pigs” were popular among British children in the 19^th century. But one apparently important influence on the evolution and popularity of the “piggy bank” in the U.S. was the success of the “Pete Pig” campaign, which grew out of Wilbur’s civic idea.

We’re a new nonprofit civil society organization.

Our goal is to help launch a citizenship movement. Our strategies are mobilizing civil society organizations, grassroots seminars, a subscriber-based media network, a public Call to Citizenship, and an annual Convention. Our vision is an America in which large and growing majorities of citizens are equipped with the character, competence, and desire to sustain the American experiment in ordered liberty.

Why are we doing this? Why now?

Because America’s most important public office is in disrepair.

In most times and places, the most important public office is that of the ruler. In a monarchy, for example, the king rules and subjects obey.

But in a republic, a remarkable thing occurs. The king is broken into many pieces, with each citizen getting a piece to carry inside themselves. This change revolutionizes civic life. Subjects need only do what they’re told. But self-governing citizens, each in some measure a king, are required to possess virtue.

Which is why, here in America, the most important public office is that of the citizen.

The American founders, breaking away from a monarchy to establish a republic, stressed this point repeatedly. Called by many the father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison in The Federalist asks whether Americans in the future will act with “sufficient virtue,” since “Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

At the close of our Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, someone asked Benjamin Franklin whether the new nation would be a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”

In these troubled times, Civic Life seeks to form citizens with “sufficient virtue" so that "you can keep it."

Keeping it is no longer something we can count on. Our civic life is failing in fundamental ways. We’re steadily degrading our most important public office.

The loss of our civic bearings didn’t just happen. It’s closely connected – partly as a result and partly as a contributing cause – to three interconnected social trends. The first is the steady weakening of key institutions in our civil society. The second is the rise of toxic political polarization, such that we not only disagree with our political adversaries, but also mistrust them and even hold them in contempt. And the third is the rise of illiberal values and conduct on both the left and right of the political spectrum – an illiberalism that is inimical to the principles the founders bequeathed and on which the success of our republican form of government decisively depend.

We’re in a perilous moment. Our fundamental civic logic is in jeopardy. A generations-long era of persuasion in our politics is waning, and one of coercion is succeeding, and a democratic way of life whose core promise is the supremacy of persuasion over coercion now faces its time of testing.

What is to be done? At the core of our new enterprise is the conviction that today’s civic crisis does not come from Trump, or Biden, or the man behind the tree. It comes from “We, the People.” It may sound difficult, and it is, but the surest and likely only way out of the mess we’re in is the remaking of our most important public office.

That’s what we’ll seek to do. We’re just getting started, and we need you. Please subscribe.