David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog

by Malcolm Gladwell

  2 Kennedy goes on to argue that if you examine actual criminal motivations, what you discover is that the calculation of risk and benefits is a “radically subjective” process. Kennedy writes: “What matters in deterrence is what matters to offenders and potential offenders. It is benefits and costs as they understand them and define them.” As the criminologists Anthony Doob and Cheryl Marie Webster recently concluded in a massive analysis of every major punishment study: “A reasonable assessment of the research to date—with a particular focus on studies conducted in the past decade—is that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society.…No consistent body of literature has developed over the last twenty-five to thirty years indicating that harsh sanctions deter.” What they were saying is that most countries in the developed world are in the middle part of the curve. Locking up criminals past their criminal peak and threatening younger offenders with something that younger offenders simply don’t care about doesn’t buy you all that much.

  3 Clear first described his ideas some years ago in a research paper entitled “Backfire: When Incarceration Increases Crime.” It presented ten arguments for why putting a very large number of people behind bars might have the opposite of its intended effect. At first, Clear couldn’t get anyone to publish it. He tried the major academic journals in his field and failed at all of them. No one believed him, except the corrections community. Clear says, “One of the little-known facts of my world is that corrections professionals, for the most part, don’t think that what they are doing is going to make things better. They try to run humane prisons, do the best they can. But they watch what’s going on, and they’re right there. They know—they say things like ‘My guards are mistreating people’ or ‘They aren’t going to leave the prison feeling better’ or ‘We don’t give them anything they need.’ This is a real embitterment experience for them. So my paper was making the rounds, people were handing it to one another, and some guy at the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Research Consortium asked if he could publish it. I said sure. He published it. And for a long time, if you Googled me, that was the first thing that came up.”

  4 In its simplest formation, Clear’s thesis is as follows: “Cycling a large number of young men from a particular place through imprisonment, and then returning them to that place, is not healthy for the people who live in that place.”

  5 For example, under the law, prosecutors can choose whether to ask for Three Strikes penalties in sentencing criminals. Some cities, like San Francisco, use it sparely. In some counties in California’s Central Valley—near where Mike Reynolds was from—prosecutors have used it as many as twenty-five times more often. If Three Strikes really prevents crime, then there should be a connection between how often a county uses Three Strikes and how quickly its crime falls. There isn’t. If Three Strikes really acts as a deterrent, then crime rates should drop faster for those offenses that qualify for the law’s penalties than for those that don’t—right? So did they? They didn’t.

  6 In the 1980s, California spent 10 percent of its budget on higher education and 3 percent on prisons. After two decades of Three Strikes, the state was spending more than 10 percent of its budget on prisons—$50,000 a year for every man and woman behind bars—while education spending had fallen below 8 percent.

  7 In November 2012, 68.6 percent of Californian voters voted in favor of Proposition 36, which stated that in order to receive a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence, a repeat offender’s third felony must be of a “serious or violent” nature. Proposition 36 also allows offenders previously sentenced under Three Strikes and currently serving a life sentence to appeal for resentencing if the third conviction was not serious.

  8 In the book Amish Grace, there is a story of a young Amish mother whose five-year-old son was struck and critically injured by a speeding car. The Amish, like the Mennonites, are heirs to the tradition of Dirk Willems. They suffered alongside the Mennonites in the early years of their faith. In the Mennonite and Amish tradition, there are countless stories like this one:

  As the investigating officer placed the driver of the car in the police cruiser to take him for an alcohol test, the mother of the injured child approached the squad car to speak with the officer. With her young daughter tugging at her dress, the mother said, “Please take care of the boy.” Assuming she meant her critically ill son, the officer replied, “The ambulance people and doctor will do the best they can. The rest is up to God.” The mother pointed to the suspect in the back of the police car. “I mean the driver. We forgive him.”

  9 Williams was released a few years later after a judge reduced his sentence, and his case became the rallying cry for the anti–Three Strikes movement.

  10 By the mid-1990s, the IRA was organizing daily bus trips to the prison outside Belfast, as if it were an amusement park. “Almost everyone in the Catholic ghettos has a father, brother, uncle, or cousin who has been in prison,” the political scientist John Soule wrote at the height of the Troubles. “Young people in this atmosphere come to learn that prison is a badge of honor rather than a disgrace.”

  Chapter Nine

  André Trocmé

  “We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews.”

  1.

  When France fell in June of 1940, the German Army allowed the French to set up a government in the city of Vichy. It was headed by the French World War One hero Marshal Philippe Pétain, who was granted the full powers of a dictator. Pétain cooperated actively with the Germans. He stripped Jews of their rights. He pushed them out of professions. Revoking laws against anti-Semitism, he rounded up French Jews and put them into internment camps and took a dozen other authoritarian steps, large and small, including instituting the requirement that every morning French schoolchildren honor the French flag with a full fascist salute—right arm outstretched, palm down. On the scale of the adjustments necessary under German occupation, saluting the flag each morning was a small matter. Most people complied. But not those living in the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

  Le Chambon is one of a dozen villages on the Vivarais Plateau, a mountainous region not far from the Italian and Swiss borders in south-central France. The winters are snowy and harsh. The area is remote, and the closest large towns are well down the mountain, miles away. The region is heavily agricultural, with farms tucked away in and around piney woods. For several centuries, Le Chambon had been home to a variety of dissident Protestant sects, chief among them the Huguenots. The local Huguenot pastor was a man named André Trocmé. He was a pacifist. On the Sunday after France fell to the Germans, Trocmé preached a sermon at the Protestant temple of Le Chambon. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty,” he said. “Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”

  Giving the straight-armed fascist salute to the Vichy regime was, to Trocmé’s mind, a very good example of “obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel.” He and his co-pastor, Édouard Theis, had started a school in Le Chambon several years earlier called the Collège Cévenol. They decided that there would be no flagpole and no fascist salutes at Cévenol.

  Vichy’s next step was to require all French teachers to sign loyalty oaths to the state. Trocmé, Theis, and the entire staff of Cévenol refused. Pétain asked for a portrait of himself to be placed in every French school. Trocmé and Theis rolled their eyes. On the one-year anniversary of the Vichy regime, Pétain ordered towns across the country to ring their church bells at noon on August 1. Trocmé told the church custodian, a woman named Amélie, not to bother. Two summer residents of the town came and complained. “The bell does not belong to the marshal, but to God,” Amélie told them flatly. “It is rung for God—otherwise it is not rung.”

  Throughout the winter and spring of 1940, conditions for Jews across Europe grew
progressively worse. A woman appeared at the Trocmés’ door. She was terrified and trembling from the cold. She was Jewish, she said. Her life was in danger. She had heard Le Chambon was a welcoming place. “And I said, ‘Come in,’” André Trocmé’s wife, Magda, remembered years later. “And so it started.”

  Soon more and more Jewish refugees began showing up in Le Chambon. Trocmé took the train to Marseille to meet with a Quaker named Burns Chalmers. The Quakers provided humanitarian aid for the internment centers that had been set up in southern France. The camps were appalling places, overrun with rats, lice, and disease; at one camp alone, eleven hundred Jews died between 1940 and 1944. Many of those who survived were eventually shipped east and murdered in Nazi concentration camps. The Quakers could get people—especially children—out of the camps. But they had nowhere to send them. Trocmé volunteered Le Chambon. The trickle of Jews coming up the mountain suddenly became a flood.

  In the summer of 1942, Georges Lamirand, the Vichy minister in charge of youth affairs, paid a state visit to Le Chambon. Pétain wanted him to set up youth camps around France patterned after the Hitler Youth camps in Germany.

  Lamirand swept up the mountain with his entourage, resplendent in his marine-blue uniform. His agenda called for a banquet, then a march to the town’s stadium for a meeting with the local youth, then a formal reception. But the banquet did not go well. The food was barely adequate. Trocmé’s daughter “accidentally” spilled soup down the back of Lamirand’s uniform. During the parade, the streets were deserted. At the stadium, nothing was arranged: the children milled around, jostling and gawking. At the reception, a townsperson got up and read from the New Testament Book of Romans, chapter 13, verse 8: “Owe no one anything except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.”

  Then a group of students walked up to Lamirand, and in front of the entire town presented him with a letter. It had been drafted with Trocmé’s help. Earlier that summer, the Vichy police had rounded up twelve thousand Jews in Paris at the request of the Nazis. Those arrested were held in horrendous conditions at the Vélodrome d’Hiver south of Paris before being sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Le Chambon, the children made it clear, wanted no part in any of this. “Mr. Minister,” the letter began:

  We have learned of the frightening scenes which took place three weeks ago in Paris, where the French police, on orders of the occupying power, arrested in their homes all the Jewish families in Paris to hold them in the Vél d’Hiv. The fathers were torn from their families and sent to Germany. The children torn from their mothers, who underwent the same fate as their husbands.…We are afraid that the measures of deportation of the Jews will soon be applied in the southern zone.

  We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching.

  If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the order to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the order received, and we would try to hide them as best we could.

  We have Jews. You’re not getting them.

  2.

  Why didn’t the Nazis come to Le Chambon and make an example of the residents? The enrollment at the school started by Trocmé and Theis rose from 18 pupils on the eve of the war to 350 by 1944. It didn’t take any great powers of deduction to figure out who those extra 332 children were. Nor did the town make any great secret of what it was doing. We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. One aid worker described coming up on the train from Lyon several times a month with a dozen or so Jewish children in tow. She would leave them at the Hotel May by the train station and then walk around town until she found homes for them all. In France, under the laws of Vichy, transporting and hiding Jewish refugees was plainly illegal. At other points during the war, the Nazis had demonstrated that they were not inclined to be conciliatory on the question of Jews. At one point, the Vichy police came and set up shop in Le Chambon for three weeks, searching the town and the surrounding countryside for Jewish refugees. All they could come up with were two arrests—one of whom they later released. Why didn’t they just line up the whole town and ship them to Auschwitz?

  Philip Hallie, who wrote the definitive history of Le Chambon, argues that the town was protected at the end of the war by Major Julius Schmehling, a senior Gestapo official in the region. There were also many sympathetic people in the local Vichy police. Sometimes André Trocmé would get a call in the middle of the night, warning him that a raid was coming the next day. Other times a local police contingent would arrive, following up on a tip about hidden refugees, and treat themselves to a long cup of coffee at the local café first, to give everyone in town ample warning of their intentions. The Germans had enough on their plate, particularly by 1943, when the war on the Eastern Front began to go sour for them. They might not have wanted to pick a fight with a group of disputatious and disagreeable mountain folk.

  But the best answer is the one that David and Goliath has tried to make plain—that wiping out a town or a people or a movement is never as simple as it looks. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak. The Huguenots of Le Chambon were descendants of France’s original Protestant population, and the truth is that people had tried—and failed—to wipe them out before. The Huguenots broke away from the Catholic Church during the Reformation, which made them outlaws in the eyes of the French state. One king after another tried to make them reunite with the Catholic Church. The Huguenot movement was banned. There were public roundups and massacres. Thousands of Huguenot men were sent to the gallows. Women were imprisoned for life. Children were put in Catholic foster homes in order to rid them of their faith. The reign of terror lasted more than a century. In the late seventeenth century, two hundred thousand Huguenots fled France for other countries in Europe and North America. Those few who remained were forced underground. They worshiped in secrecy, in remote forests. They retreated to high mountain villages on the Vivarais Plateau. They formed a seminary in Switzerland and smuggled clergy across the border. They learned the arts of evasion and disguise. They stayed and learned—as the Londoners did during the Blitz—that they were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.1

  “The people in our village knew already what persecutions were,” Magda Trocmé said. “They talked often about their ancestors. Many years went by and they forgot, but when the Germans came, they remembered and were able to understand the persecution of the Jews better perhaps than people in other villages, for they had already had a kind of preparation.” When the first refugee appeared at her door, Magda Trocmé said it never occurred to her to say no. “I did not know that it would be dangerous. Nobody thought of that.” I did not know that it would be dangerous? Nobody thought of that? In the rest of France, all people thought about was how dangerous life was. But the people of Le Chambon were past that. When the first Jewish refugees arrived, the townsfolk drew up false papers for them—not a difficult thing to do if your community has spent a century hiding its true beliefs from the government. They hid the Jews in the places they had been hiding refugees for generations and smuggled them across the border to Switzerland along the same trails they had used for three hundred years. Magda Trocmé went on: “Sometimes people ask me, ‘How did you make a decision?’ There was no decision to make. The issue was, Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!”

  In attempting to wipe out the Huguenots, the French created instead a pocket in their own country that was all but impossible to wipe out.

  As André Trocmé once said, “How could the Nazis ever get to the end of the resources of such a people?”

  3.

  André Trocmé was born in 1901. He was tall and solidly built and had a long nose and sharp blue eyes. He worked tirelessly, lumbering from one end
of Le Chambon to the other. His daughter, Nelly, writes that “a sense of duty exuded from his pores.” He called himself a pacifist, but there was nothing pacifist about him. He and his wife, Magda, were famous for their shouting matches. He was often described as un violent vaincu par Dieu—a violent man conquered by God. “A curse on him who begins in gentleness,” he wrote in his journal. “He shall finish in insipidity and cowardice, and shall never set foot in the great liberating current of Christianity.”

  Six months after the visit from Minister Lamirand, Trocmé and Édouard Theis were arrested and imprisoned in an internment camp (where, according to Hallie, “personal possessions were taken from them, and noses were measured to ascertain whether or not they were Jewish”). After a month, the two were told they would be released—but only on the condition that they pledged to “obey without question orders given me by governmental authorities for the safety of France, and for the good of the National Revolution of Marshal Pétain.” Trocmé and Theis refused. The director of the camp came up to them in disbelief. Most of the people in the camp would end up dead in a gas chamber. In exchange for signing their names on a piece of paper, to a bit of patriotic boilerplate, the two men were getting a free ticket home.

  “What is this?” the camp director shouted at them. “This oath has nothing in it contrary to your conscience! The marshal wishes only the good of France!”

  “On at least one point we disagree with the marshal,” Trocmé replied. “He delivers the Jews to the Germans.…When we get home we shall certainly continue to be opposed, and we shall certainly continue to disobey orders from the government. How could we sign this now?”