Ramteen Arablui
Appearances
Throughline
The Kingdom Behind Glass
This was an era of massive industrial growth in Europe, especially in England. And so natural resources like rubber and palm oil were in high demand. And it turns out that many of those resources were in what's now southern Nigeria, the land the Oba ruled over. So throughout the 1800s, the British tried to insert themselves more and more into the rubber and palm oil trade.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The Oba continued to exert control, even though the British claimed he was violating their treaty. This would set the stage for a confrontation, one that would change the course of West African history. Coming up, an unannounced guest.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Cambridge is like the Harvard of England. Actually, it's much older. So I really should be saying that Harvard is like the Cambridge of the United States. It's this kind of old elite institution that for most of its history had a student body that came from England's upper classes, mostly male and mostly white. So when Ore arrived on campus, she felt out of place.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
This is from a letter James Phillips sent to the British Prime Minister in 1897, arguing that they should take action.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Basically, Phillips is like, look, if we want to efficiently extract resources like rubber and palm oil, things England needed to fuel its rapid industrial growth, we need to get the Benin kingdom's king, or Oba, out of the way.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Well, the British Prime Minister basically left Phillips on read for several weeks. Still, Phillips was an ambitious young man and he decided to send a letter to Benin's king requesting a meeting.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And he does this even though he'd already made it clear in his letter to the British Prime Minister that he wanted to depose Benin's king.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Phillips' party, in their confusion, thought they were being welcomed by soldiers from the Benin Kingdom. In fact, Phillips told his men not to get out their revolvers. This was a mistake because soon they were facing a hail of ammunition.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
A surviving British officer recounted a chaotic scene of gunfire and machetes.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The exact numbers of dead are still to this day unclear. But it's thought that most of the Europeans in Phillips' party were killed along with many of the African workers they'd hired. Word quickly got back to England. Newspapers there called it a massacre.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Just weeks after Phillips' party was ambushed in Benin, the British government prepared for a revenge attack. It would come to be called the Punitive Expedition. A very large force with hundreds of sailors and soldiers was amassed. A flotilla of ships was stocked with heavy weaponry.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
This is an account from a naval officer who took part in the punitive expedition.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
They set off in three columns, attacking villages along the way.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Over the course of nine days, the British violently ripped through the rainforest and zeroed in on Benin City.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Eventually, the British soldiers arrived in the heart of the kingdom.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The thing she's talking about is a statue. A statue of a rooster, also known as the Okoko. That's at least 125 years old. A few months into her first year, a friend of hers told her where to look for it.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
After the attack, the British forces did as they wished, including... The British built themselves a golf course, never mind other things.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
a nine-hole golf course. As for Oba Obamamwen, the king, he fled the city and hid out in the rainforest for six months.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
With the Oba out of the way, the British incorporated the Benin Kingdom's lands into its own holdings in West Africa.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And underneath it was a plaque with a message written in Latin.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Cambridge University's Jesus College would be the first institution to return a Benin bronze. Shortly after, other institutions and even museums started following suit. Countries like Germany pledged to return looted Benin artworks. And so did the Smithsonian Institution here in the United States, which had a total collection of 39 Benin bronzes.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
This is Deidre Farmer-Palman again, who's the executive director of the Restitution Study Group.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
D'Adria argues that the Benin bronzes should also belong to the descendants of the people the Benin Kingdom sold to European slave traders.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The Isan people were part of the kingdoms neighboring the Benin Kingdom. So when D'Adria found out about the Smithsonian's decision to return its collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria, she was shocked.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
But Deidre was like, well, the colonizers, the British, took these bronzes from the kingdom that enslaved my ancestors. So why should Nigeria have full control over them?
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
D'Adria and her organization filed a petition to stop the Smithsonian from returning the bronzes to Nigeria. The goal? To allow the descendants of people sold into slavery by the Benin Kingdom to have a say in their fate.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
In an email exchange at the time, the Smithsonian told D'Adria more research was needed to concretely link the objects in their collection to the slave trade.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Okay, so several months back, one of ThruLine's producers, Lawrence Wu, came to a pitch meeting with this wild story. It was one of those pitches that immediately made all of us sit up in our seats and listen.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
After they were denied, DeAdria and the restitution study group appealed to have their case brought up to the Supreme Court. The court would ultimately decline to hear D'Adria and her organization's petition against the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian had already begun transferring much of its collection to Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Thank you to Johannes Dergi, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lansi, Jay Venasco, Chloe Veltman, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The origin story of this rooster is a tale of a clash between two major powers, one from Europe and one from West Africa. It's a tale of imperialism, betrayal, and the making of the modern world. And it will remind you that behind every artifact is a universe, a story that will change how you think about your own history.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
It had layers that just kept getting deeper and deeper, and I don't want to ruin it for you, so obviously I will just say that it's about an object, a thing that just sat around on a shelf for decades, going pretty much unnoticed. But in 2015, that changed. And it changed because a first-year college student decided it needed to change.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Manila is derived from the Portuguese word for bracelet. They often came in the shape of a horseshoe of various sizes, usually made of brass, bronze or copper. And they were used as slave trade currency throughout West Africa by European traders.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
These manilas were used to fuel the kingdom's artistic traditions.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Sculptures like the rooster statue that Ore Ogumbi saw in the dining hall at Jesus College.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
What Deidre now refers to as... Blood metal. Blood metal, meaning that the price for these works of art were the lives of enslaved West Africans sent into the abyss of the Middle Passage. And the principal purpose of creating these bronzes was in service of Benin Kingdom's royal family.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The Benin Kingdom was ruled by a long line of Obas. They were like religious, political, and military leaders rolled into one. And for centuries, they enjoyed control over the trade routes in their kingdom. But all of this would begin to change when Europeans started making their way into the region's local economies and politics.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Once the Eighth Amendment was ratified in 1791, it didn't really come up again until the end of the 1800s when two death penalty cases reached the U.S. Supreme Court. There was the case in Utah where the court said the firing squad was constitutional and the second case where the court allowed the country's first execution by the electric chair. That execution did not go smoothly.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
But the status quo didn't change. The big turning point for the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause actually didn't have anything to do with the death penalty at all. It didn't even happen on U.S. soil.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The Philippines actually had its own Supreme Court, but the U.S. Supreme Court could overrule it.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The crime he was convicted of was falsifying records in an alleged attempt to redirect government funds to himself. He was tried according to Philippine law.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The court said the Philippine law had, quote, no fellow in American legislation.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And it went even further to begin to answer some of the big questions that the founders had when they wrote the Eighth Amendment.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The court was developing the line of reasoning it had started in the late 1800s, emphasizing that as society changes, norms will change too.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
In Weems, the court says explicitly, as the views of society change, the way we interpret the Eighth Amendment should change too.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
By the way, I'm going to use that term majestic generality in an argument. If anyone's accusing me of being vague, I'm going to be like, it's just my majestic generality. I love that term. Wow. How does Weems change the direction of the way we define this? And then how does that then kind of like interplay with the next big case?
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Wilkerson was sentenced to be executed by a firing squad, a sentence that was challenged all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had to decide whether a firing squad violated Wallace Wilkerson's Eighth Amendment rights.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
After the winds of the 1950s and 60s, lawyers with the NAACP turned their attention to the death penalty.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
There were historical reasons to launch this fight too. The Eighth Amendment banned cruel and unusual punishment. So some Southern states believe that meant a punishment had to be both to be unconstitutional, which means business as usual for white slave owners.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Now, almost 200 years later, civil rights activists were trying to make the case that the way the death penalty was applied was unusual. And they started gathering data.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that black men were overwhelmingly sentenced to death when compared to white men convicted of the same crimes.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Another one was that the death penalty could seem really arbitrary and it varied from state to state.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
It was quiet until the end of the Supreme Court's term in June.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
That meant all executions had to stop until states changed their laws.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And it's not that the punishment itself is intrinsically wrong. It's the way that that punishment is being applied, the lack of standardization for when it is applied that makes it something that's just untenable to still allow in the country.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
We still have the death penalty in America, though. What the hell happened?
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
If you could sum up some of the basic reasons for why states and also the federal government quickly pushed back against this, what were their justifications?
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
So 35 states and the federal government write new laws. Death rows around the country start to fill up again.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
In 1976, just four years later, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments for new death penalty laws from five states.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
But the Supreme Court strikes down the laws in North Carolina and Louisiana because those statutes, the court said, proposed mandatory death sentences for certain crimes.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
So the court ruled that in order to sentence people to death, juries had to hear, quote, mitigating evidence, evidence that might make them reconsider execution, like whether the convicted had a history of abuse, mental health issues, or even remorse. Without that step, the court said, the death penalty is unconstitutional.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
That is a beautiful phrase. The diverse frailties of humankind.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
But since 1958, the Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of who can be sentenced to death. So people with intellectual disabilities or who were juveniles at the time of the crime or people who have raped but not murdered, the Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot be executed.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Cesare Beccaria, the Italian philosopher who inspired much of the American founder's thinking around cruel and unusual punishment, himself quoted another famous philosopher, the French Montesquieu. He wrote that any punishment that goes beyond necessity is tyrannical.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Thank you to Johannes Derdy, Tony Cavett, Nadia Lansing, Keandre Starling, Jonette Oaks, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at ThruLine at NPR.org.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
So what is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And what do we know about how the people who wrote the Eighth Amendment imagined its meaning might change? I'm Ramteen Arablui.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Coming up, the Eighth Amendment and what cruel and unusual actually means.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Around the same time, a movement was brewing, one led by intellectuals around Europe who celebrated reason and knowledge and freedom and pushed the world toward more humanitarian ideals. It was the beginning of the Enlightenment, and one Italian philosopher would be especially influential to the American founders, Cesare Beccaria.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The Academy of Fists, which definitely sounds like the name of a pop punk band from the 90s, got its name because sometimes their intellectual debates would lead to fights. I know, ironic. But when they weren't fighting, they were thinking.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And in 1764, he wrote a book opposing torture and the death penalty.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The book also argues that any punishment should be proportional to the crime, which wasn't the case in much of Europe at that time. The English Bill of Rights didn't apply to the rest of Europe, where torture was common.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And then the book kind of blew up and he became known even in America.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
He's also authored a number of books about the death penalty, including one called The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
They would quote Beccaria as tensions between the colonies and Great Britain intensified in the late 1700s. And they were looking to enlighten thinkers like him as they imagined a new country free from the crown. His essay on crimes and punishments was so influential that John says it helped catalyze the American Revolution and what would become America's new criminal justice system.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Utah, 1877. A man named Wallace Wilkerson stops by a saloon. He starts by playing a game of cards with another man named William Baxter. An argument starts. Wilkerson takes out a gun, shoots Baxter in the head, killing him, and then he flees. Wilkerson is captured. A few months later, he's convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed the next month.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
So the other day I was reading this book about the first crusade. It's a moment in history that anyone who knows me knows I have long been obsessed with. And in one passage, there was a detailed description of what the city of Antioch was like then. There were details about the way the streets looked, the size of the citadel, how loud the central market was.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
Thank you to the American Academy of Achievement for their permission to use excerpts from their interview with Dr. Linda Buck. And special thanks to Hiro Matsunami, Dwayne Jethro, Melanie Bohi, Elise Perlstein, Connie Chang, Natalia Fiedelholz, and Yolanda Sanguini for sharing their time and expertise. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Audio was mixed by Maggie Luthar.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
Thanks to Johannes Dergi, Kiara West, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at doolineatnpr.org.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
But there was something noticeably missing. No description of what it smelled like. It was weird because I register a lot of thoughts and memories in my head through smells. I'm sure you do too. And I realized I almost never stopped to think about how or why I smell things. Like why does a rose smell like a rose?
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
Would the people in medieval Antioch have described the smell of a rose the same way I do? Well, Christina Kim, a reporter and producer on the ThruLine team, has been thinking about those kinds of questions a lot over the last few years. The other day, she even described smell as a superpower that allows us to time travel.
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History of the Self: Smell and Memory
Yeah, she went deep on some of the big questions about our sense of smell and ended up on this winding historical journey. And now you get to go on it too. Christina is going to take it from here.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated early 20th century novelist, wrote a sentence that has always stuck with me. The dream is the truth. These five words express a grand idea that our dreams can reveal truths to us that we cannot access when we're awake. It's a place where we're completely free from the confines of our self-awareness.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And when we try to make sense of our dreams, we can find meaning in our own thoughts and desires. According to Siddhartha Ribeiro, for thousands of years, we humans have made art, technology, and imagined new futures inspired by the dreams we experience almost every night.
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History of the Self: Dreams
In December 1994, three explorers were making their way through a big, complex set of caves in southern France. They walked through vast chambers, and as they got deeper into the caves, skulls and bones of bears littered the ground before them. Scratches surrounded them on the walls and the rocks. And then... Through the light of their flashlights, they saw something shocking.
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History of the Self: Dreams
All right, so let's address the obvious question. How does Siddhartha know all this? How can anyone know anything about the intentions of people 30,000 years ago? Well, the reality is no one knows for sure. These are theories based on his reading of evidence. He and other scholars are decoding messages from human beings that lived in a completely different world.
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History of the Self: Dreams
They're inferring intentions from outcomes. In this spirit, Siddhartha contends that because these cave paintings contain so many fantastical elements, particularly the melding of animal and human, the animation, etc., we can conclude on some level that prehistoric humans were engaging with their dreams, that they were taking them seriously.
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History of the Self: Dreams
This is from a dream tablet written over 3,000 years ago in Babylon.
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History of the Self: Dreams
This is some of the oldest evidence of dream interpretation ever recorded. And it shows us that in many parts of the world, for millennia, dreams played an important role in waking life.
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History of the Self: Dreams
From ancient times all the way up to the Middle Ages, dreams were often used to try to predict future events. Special people in society were assigned the role of interpreting dreams. You can see this in many texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Quran. People were very serious about it.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Even ancient rulers like Alexander the Great and Xerxes used dreams to predict victories in battle. And in many indigenous cultures around the world, dream interpretations were taken into consideration when making decisions, sometimes even for entire communities.
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History of the Self: Dreams
With the advent of science and reason, the need for mysticism and finding meaning through dreams became less relevant. During the Enlightenment in Europe, dream interpretation began to be seen as mere superstition. Philosophers like Rene Descartes trivialized dreams. This trend continued with the rise of modern science.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Because why would you need a dream to help you predict future events when you have a scientific method to test ideas and algorithms that can base predictions on data?
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History of the Self: Dreams
And by the 19th century, most scientists saw dreams as just something our bodies do while we sleep. Nothing more than the wiring hidden inside the walls of a house. As long as it functioned, that was all that mattered. But then, in the late 1800s, in Austria, a man came along who questioned that approach.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Sigmund Freud was one of the first scientists who thought deeply about dreams and attempted to better understand the science behind them and the emotions and behaviors they conjured.
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History of the Self: Dreams
At this time, scientists were trying to understand the connection between the brain and the mind, the body and consciousness. One of the most common diagnoses of the time was hysteria.
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History of the Self: Dreams
It was often a kind of catch-all diagnosis for people, especially women, who might have been suffering from symptoms like depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, insomnia, and even something called sexual forwardness. When Sigmund Freud was a medical student studying hysteria, he came to believe that it was a psychiatric disorder.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And after graduating, he opened his own private practice to treat patients and further study the condition.
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History of the Self: Dreams
After Freud's death in 1939, it still took some time for his work on dreams to be taken as serious science.
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History of the Self: Dreams
After Freud, there were others who continued to pursue the study of dreams and the unconscious mind. Specifically, another well-known psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. He believed that human beings are connected to each other and their ancestors through a shared set of experiences that are embedded in our DNA. An idea he called the collective unconscious.
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History of the Self: Dreams
As time went on, more and more studies on dreams and the unconscious continued to build on one another. And almost 125 years after Freud first published the interpretation of dreams, there's now research that supports the idea that dreams can have a significant impact on our waking life.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Thank you to Casey Herman for his voiceover work. This episode was mixed by Andy Huther.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Also, we want your voice on our show. Send us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 with your name, where you're from, and the line you're listening to ThruLine from NPR, and we'll get you on the show. That's 872-588-8805.
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History of the Self: Dreams
These questions are probably not that much different than the ones you're asking. Fears about the chaos of the world make it into our dreams. We mourn those we've lost. We escape the confines of our waking minds. We find joy in absurdity. We escape into ourselves in our dreams. And for thousands of years, dreams have helped humans find meaning.
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History of the Self: Dreams
They've inspired creativity, pushed people towards innovation, and even sparked conflict.
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History of the Self: Dreams
And we've been exploring the personal and how it's changed history. From the politics of smell to the history of love, one man's quest to end aging, and now the content of our dreams.
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History of the Self: Dreams
I'm Ramteen Arablui, and on this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're taking a journey through the history of dreams.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Phase one, the brain slows down, the body relaxes, muscles twitch.
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History of the Self: Dreams
Phase two, body temperature drops, bursts of brain activity happen in waves, your eyes stop moving, your muscles relax. Everything slows down. And then, about 90 minutes after you fall asleep, rapid eye movements start. You enter your first cycle of REM sleep.
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History of the Self: Dreams
The first one is short, but the cycles get longer and longer as you move in and out of deep sleep and dreaming sleep.
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History of the Self: Aging
Underneath that headline, it said things like l'élixir de l'éternelle jeunesse, the elixir of eternal youth, l'institut des miracles, the institute of miracles, la vieillesse vaincue, old age defeated.
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History of the Self: Aging
Eli Metchnikoff had captured the world's attention. For millennia, people had tried to evade death, seeking cures in things like mercury, gold, powders, liquids. But now they had a new tool. Science. And it was miraculous. There were new vaccines. X-rays had just been invented. You could now see what had once been invisible. And Metchnikov had helped to make that happen.
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History of the Self: Aging
Eli Metchnikoff was hardcore. The man drank cholera in the name of science. He injected himself with disease and he tested the body's power and its limits. Later in his career, his work on the immune system would win him a Nobel Prize. When the world was sick, Eli Metchnikoff tried to cure it. And he made sure people knew.
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History of the Self: Aging
No one had studied aging scientifically before. And here was this famous scientist saying he wanted to take it on. But Metchnikov didn't just want to study aging. He wanted to cure it.
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History of the Self: Aging
Around 200 BC, China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, feared death so badly that he sent an alchemist on voyages across the sea to search for a magic elixir that would give him immortality. After the alchemist disappeared at sea, the legend says the emperor took things into his own hands and died after drinking what he thought was a cure. Around 200 years later, another legend was born.
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History of the Self: Aging
I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
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History of the Self: Aging
Thanks to Leslie Kossoff, Susan Evans, Sam Evans, Carol Hacker, Stefan Hubinoff, and Anandita Balero. Also thanks to Sasha Solieva, Zakhar Kinserski, Artem Kuznetsov, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Anya Steinberg, Thomas Liu, and Laurent Lasablier for their voiceover work.
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History of the Self: Aging
Since the beginning of human civilization, people have been obsessed with staying young, even living forever. Today, that obsession is tied up with media, medicine, and money.
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History of the Self: Aging
But what if these are the wrong questions? Is aging something we even need to cure? And what does it mean if we can't? I'm Ramteen Arablui.
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History of the Self: Aging
On this episode of ThruLine, we're not going to answer the question of aging, but we are going to tell you the story of someone who tried.
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History of the Self: Aging
Coming up, our producer Devin Katayama tells the story of Eli Meshnikoff.
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History of the Self: Aging
A holy grail that was thought to hold life-restoring powers for anyone who drank from it. There was the Philosopher's Stone, the Fountain of Youth. And then, in late December of 1899, a scientist named Eli Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn that he had done it. He had found the secret to eternal life.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
Amanda Frost is a professor of immigration law and author of You Are Not American, Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
Julie Novkov is a political scientist and co-author of the book American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark, and the Battle for Citizenship.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
Carol Nakanoff co-authored the book American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
We're looking back at the story of Wong Kim Ark, a man whose legal battle shaped who gets to be an American citizen. In August of 1895, Wong Kim Ark was sitting on a steamship, detained and watched over by guards. He was there because, according to the government, he was not a U.S. citizen, even though he had documentation showing he was born in San Francisco.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
It must have been a lonely, bitter feeling to be just a few miles from his hometown, rejected by his own government. But he wasn't alone. Almost immediately, a group of people started working to get him out.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
This is Amanda Frost, professor of immigration law and author of You Are Not American, Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
The Chinese Six Companies, also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
They frequently hired lawyers, white lawyers, to help Chinese laborers who were subject to deportation under the law.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
So while Wong Kim Ark sat imprisoned on the steamship, his case headed to a California district court.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
the district court was faced with a monumental decision, one that hinged on a single sentence in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution after the Civil War to achieve, quote, equal protection of the laws. It was intended to make sure newly emancipated Black Americans had full, equal citizenship and rights. Some of the most impactful Supreme Court cases have hinged on this amendment. There's Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of segregation.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
Brown v. Board of Education, which reversed that. Even Roe vs. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion. Wong Kim Ark's case focused on a specific part of the 14th Amendment, the Citizenship Clause.
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
That phrase, jurisdiction thereof, it's key because the court had to decide what makes a person a U.S. citizen. Do all people born on U.S. soil fall under its jurisdiction, its laws? Or is jurisdiction about where your loyalties lie? Are Chinese people living in the United States really subject to U.S. laws? Or should they be considered subjects of the emperor of China?
Up First from NPR
Who gets to be an American?
And then, what does this legal argument mean for all immigrants across the country? Could this same logic be applied to birthright citizens from Europe?
Up First from NPR
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Wong Kim Ark was still stuck on a steamer off the coast while his case played out in court. It had been months, and he was right in the middle of a bigger battle between the U.S. government and Chinese Americans.
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Who gets to be an American?
Finally, in the fall of 1895, the court came to a decision. He wins. He wins.
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Who gets to be an American?
Wong Kim Ark was technically free, but his victory was short-lived.
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Who gets to be an American?
the government appealed the case up to the Supreme Court. They did this because they wanted to enforce and expand the Chinese Exclusion Act. Even the president at the time, Grover Cleveland, was in full support of excluding Chinese immigrants.
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Who gets to be an American?
So the government did it. It appealed the case all the way up to the US Supreme Court. And the Solicitor General, the lawyer who represents the government in front of the Supreme Court, was right out of central casting. A man named Holmes Conrad.
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Holmes Conrad came from a prominent slave-owning family. He had spent the Civil War as an officer, fighting for the Confederacy. And here's some nice irony for you. Because he fought for secession during the Civil War, Conrad actually had his citizenship revoked.
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Who gets to be an American?
Meanwhile, Wong Kim Ark, after being detained those horrible four months on ships, was back to his hardscrabble life in San Francisco. He was earning money and sending it to his wife and kids in China. And all the while, the government was trying to beat him in court, questioning his citizenship.
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Who gets to be an American?
Yet behind the scenes, he's got an all-star, high-powered legal team on his side, paid for by the Chinese six companies.
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This is political scientist Carol Nakanoff, who co-authored the book American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship.
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Who gets to be an American?
— For this case, they hired two accomplished white lawyers. One was Maxwell Evarts.
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Who gets to be an American?
Many big businesses had a keen interest in the Wang Kimark case. They needed labor, cheap labor, to expand and be profitable. So they jumped to support Wang Kimark's case.
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Evarts and Ashton had argued cases before the Supreme Court before, but... I would have to think that they were pessimistic at this point. The two of them were coming off a loss in a high-profile case involving a Chinese client. Going into this case, they had every reason to doubt the outcome, an outcome that would be potentially devastating for Wong Kim Ark and thousands like him.
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Who gets to be an American?
On the ThruLine podcast, the myth linking autism and vaccines was decades in the making and was a major moment for vaccine hesitancy in America, tapping into fears involving the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government.
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Who gets to be an American?
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