When Joe Biden, in his farewell address, said “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” he repeated perhaps the most common warning in American history. From the Jacksonians’ “money power,” to William Jennings Bryan’s “plutocracy,” to the 20th-century progressives’ “malefactors of great wealth,” each generation of Americans has shouted, with fresh horror, at the nefarious machinations of the wealthy.

The nature of their outcry, too, has remained almost the same. Americans feared that concentrated wealth would destroy the democracy that underpinned their own aspirations. Wealth, in America, should be available to all, and an oligarchy threatens an ossification of the economic structure. That impinges on the fundamental social contract of the country, and thus must be fought. Biden’s oligarchy here is a complaint of political capture, and his “fair shot” is another restatement of the radical equality of opportunity the country was founded on.

250 years on from America’s independence, these ideals are so omnipresent they’ve drifted into cliche, and restating them reads as parody. For some portion of my readers, that paragraph probably surfaced objections, like Steinbeck’s famous statement that a working class of “temporarily embarrassed capitalists” was an elite-propagated delusion serving only to undermine any socialist movement, or the long legacy of slavery that impugns any idealistic framing of America.

This modern cynicism, however, prevents us from appreciating how radical this proposition once was. Government of, by, and for the people is not the historical norm. A nation that is founded to guarantee the people’s right to equal treatment and social mobility is a historical miracle. Most people throughout history—including the modern day—live in societies with formalized hierarchies that circumscribe their ambitions. Most people are lowly and accept their lowliness.

An oligarchy means “rule of the few,” a generic-enough term that describes most societies throughout history. Biden reached for it because it’s self-evident to Americans why that is inherently unjust. He deliberately left aside the more common version of “rule of the few”: an aristocracy, or “the rule of the best.” An oligarchy is a state of being, while an aristocracy implies that the slanted distribution of power is somehow desirable or merited.

No one in America believes this today. We honor those that make their own wealth, but we know the very fact of their social ascendance means they’re made from the same clay that we are. We certainly do not offer them deference: who, today, for one example, would doff their cap as Elon Musk’s motorcade passes by, as 18th-century commoners frequently did? And conversely, we scorn inheritance of all sorts and use the levers of government to eliminate as many of the advantages of inherited wealth as we can. American heirs hide their familial status, while self-made people flaunt their humble backgrounds: a contradiction natural to us but unprecedented in most of history.

The true legacy of the American Revolution is this revolution of dignity. This overturning stripped the country of its humility, creating a society where no one “knows their place”: where anyone, anywhere, could be anything. And so, while free America became (and remains) a place of vast economic inequality, it is also one of remarkable psychological equality. Wealth is the universal aspiration and social mobility is the national mythos. Earning wealth is within anyone’s reach, and possessing it is merely a statement of circumstance. Thus, it offers little social distinction.

In a society where distinctions are so shallow, an aristocracy is impossible. There are only capitalists of varying success. Power and social rank usually do not follow automatically from wealth, but when they are perceived to, the great American fear of “oligarchy” leaps once again from the throat.

And yet, we are so far removed from that premodern civilization that our current societal organization seems obvious, perhaps even banal. We will never appreciate how radical the American Revolution truly was until we understand the aristocracy that preceded it.

The Old World

“My parents never expected any titles, honors, or great things for themselves or their children. They wished [only]…that we might earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, as they did.” So wrote Devereux Jarratt, an 18th century Anglican pastor, and so quotes Gordon Wood in the first chapter of The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood describes a premodern world of contracted dreams, inhabited by people born to a calling and a place that they largely adhered to. Social mobility was a suspicion, not an aspiration. Ordinary lives orbited a small set of relations to which one owed deference or received fealty.

In this society, to labor was to share in God’s punishment. As Jarratt described, the laboring classes inherited the shame of Adam, cast out as he was of bountiful Eden to earn sustenance by “the sweat of his brow.” All those who worked were party to this shame.

It follows that the core societal division was between those who labored and those who did not. In the traditional frame, the common people labored, while the gentry, those freed of this burden, inhabited a separate mode of existence. And to the gentry, those laboring masses were considered little better than beasts. No less than a young George Washington called the ordinary farmers ridging his estate “the grazing multitude.” John Adams called the lower classes of Boston the “common herd of mankind.”

Malthusian dynamics consigned the vast majority of laborers to poverty. But poverty was not merely the expected outcome: it was one the gentry considered optimal. Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, echoed common sentiment when he wrote that “it was poverty that will produce industry and frugality.” The upper classes fretted about commoners becoming wealthier and sending their sons to college, as that would “turn them into consumers and not providers of food,” and sumptuary laws were instituted to control their spending. Labor was thus fundamental to this society but it did not imbue any moral worth. It was assumed to be grueling, mundane, and unrewarding, and something one would only do if they were forced. From this lens, the vaunted Puritan ethic of industriousness and toil was just another cudgel to justify to laborers their own enforced misery. Those predestined to heaven would labor for God without complaint.

The non-laboring gentry—that upper crust that was the closest thing that colonial America had to an aristocracy—made up about 4-5% of the population. By British standards, it was an impoverished upper class. Outside of the largest planters in the South, most gentry struggled to afford their pretensions. And its poverty was matched by its relative equality: it had no ranks, and was composed only of “gentlemen” with no title but “sir” and “Mr.”

The gentry’s central distinguishing characteristic was leisure. Where everyone else produced, they only consumed. Where everyone else worked, they were idle. A gentleman ideally earned from land rents alone, a “pure” form of income that did not influence his disposition. That this income was “unearned,” that he faced no exertion for its maintenance, nor even in its acquisition (as most gentry were inheritors) was a mark of virtue. It’s difficult from our modern vantage point, where hard work and discipline are viewed as the core of moral goodness, to understand the disdain that this generation had for labor. All those who worked viewed it as their shame and sought to shed their burden at their first opportunity. Even Benjamin Franklin, who was a well-known and wealthy polymath by his 30s, refused to refer to himself as “sir” until he retired from business at 42.

Instead of labor, gentlemen adopted ornamental pursuits to emphasize their own distinctiveness. Gentlemen were educated in Greek and Latin and they took great pride in it, peppering their speech and writing with verse. Gentlemen wore silk stockings and breeches and powdered wigs and learned to fence and played the fiddle. Young gentlemen honed these ornamental skills as a mark of their status, in lieu of the “occupation” most commoners inherited.

For at his core, a gentleman was always defined by who he was, not what he did. He may be engaged in commercial interests (in the garb of social good, of course), but he wasn’t a businessman. He may perform science experiments or write poetry or serve in his local council, but he was not a scientist or poet or politician. And above all else in this social construction, a gentleman possessed a reputation: his “good name” that preceded him, and one that he sought to maintain by following various codes of honor. Military success, for example, endowed a man’s reputation, while engaging in trade denigrated him. A gentleman reduced to labor gave himself to servility.

Gentlemen thus dominated the three scholarly professions: lawyers, doctors, and pastors. These were not the totalizing “occupations” of the commoners, but learned positions that elevated a gentleman’s standing. Expertise and training did matter, but they were secondary to reputation. A lawyer with a good reputation bolstered a plaintiff’s standing in court, while one with a bad reputation—or worse, a commoner without a reputation—would be demerited by the judge. The same went for doctors. Medicine was then still a semi-mystical phenomenon of miasma and humors, and a doctor’s role was one of trusted bedside companion and representative as much as it was of healer. One must be trustworthy to embody this role—and who could be trusted but a gentleman?

This fundamental inequality was reinforced by colonial America’s economic structure. In America, almost everyone was a dependent of someone else. In this overwhelmingly rural society, with weak transport and communication links, there was little concept of a market. Instead, all commercial relationships were personal. Farmers seeking credit had to appeal to the local notables, who offered it based on their own assessment of the character of the prospective debtor. Artisans could sell their molded furniture or tailored silk or leather shoes only to the few gentlemen in their town. Shopkeepers kept ledgers that listed people by first name and catalogued their purchases and arrears. In these communities, which had scant hard currency, the ability to consume was a mark of distinction. Those who produced offered deference to those who could consume, because that consumption could always be withdrawn.

These personal relationships formed a network of patronage that underpinned colonial society. The wealthy offered credit and consumption to the common people; the commoners in turn offered gratitude and deference. Wood describes a public entreaty from a farmer in 1770 who urges the young not to harbor animus against the wealthy for “all the little injuries they may do.” Who else, he says, would buy our watermelons, for which “they pay us some thousand pounds a year” and are “no kind of use as food?” This concept of consumption as an indulgence that the rich offered the poor, which entirely devalues the labor and craft in production, is alien to our own thinking today, but was central to colonial society.

Government, despite its universalist pretensions, was enmeshed in this social hierarchy. Governmental offices were an extension of the person and officials were expected to use their private influence and wealth to achieve public ends. Social distinction was a prerequisite for both civilian and military leadership, as one could not ensure obedience from those being led without accepted societal standing. “Merit” as a legitimizing force remained very far from the colonial consciousness. This paradigm was most evident in judges. A town’s judge was always the local notable, and his judgments were accepted only because of the personal prestige he possessed. His societal rank facilitated and reinforced his public service, and served as yet another distinction that separated him from the commons. This was the intention of retaining gentry in government; as the jurist William Blackstone said, “It is impossible that government can be maintained without a due subordination of rank; that the people may know and distinguish such as are set over them, in order to yield them their due respect and obedience.”

As Wood describes, this patronage-based society coalesced at a national level into a broad-based paternalist cosmology. The King was the father to his children, each of whom depended on his benevolence. Below the King were innumerable lines of patronage and deference that bound everyone together. Each person was cognizant of those above him, to whom he owed deference, and those below him, from whom he accepted obeisance and offered favor. All people were organized vertically, forever dependent on another: tenant to landlord, artisan to patron, wife to husband, gentleman to king. But where the gentry’s dependence was mere rhetoric, the common person’s dependence was visceral, felt in a thousand different ways on every day of their lives.

This paternalism supported stark societal divisions. There were commoners that labor, gentry that benefited from their labor, and the society’s entire cultural framework was oriented around accentuating the distinctions between them. Gentry were educated where the commoners were vulgar. The gentry were honorable and trustworthy, while the commoners cheated and insulted without thought. The gentry ministered to souls and bodies while the commoners were fit only for the menial and base.

What’s most incomprehensible to us in the modern (Western) world is that the commoners themselves internalized their consigned role. Jarratt described how commoners were apt to be filled with “consternation and awe” when confronted with “beings of a higher order.” They often stood red-faced and fumbling when speaking to a gentleman. Most of the lowest commoners adopted a “down look” and learned well to “fawn and cringe” before a “sir” or “Mr.”

They felt no shame in this. Theirs was a corporate society of obligations and dependencies, running down the great chain of being from the king to the gentry to the lowly commoners, and each individual rung was anointed in its own fashion. To be a laborer was to be unworthy to rule, but not unworthy of respect. As Wood states, the common folk willingly bowed and doffed their caps to gentlemen because they knew their place was elsewhere, and they accepted it. Very seldom did they express a desire to change places with their supposed betters. They understood they were not equals, that their society had no equals, and they aspired to little beyond their own small lives.

In this, they mirrored the consciousness of common people throughout history. Most people in most places “knew their place” and limited their aspirations. Most people accepted they had “betters,” and doffed their caps or bowed their heads or kowtowed or touched their feet. Most people accepted hierarchy as a price of civilization, and understood the fundamental inequality that implied. That this perspective is alien to us—indeed, that it was alien to even the first generation of independent Americans—is an indicator of the immense overthrow of humility that took place after 1776.

Liberty and Equality

Wood thus locates colonial America not as the burgeoning commercial republic it would become, but as just another hierarchical society in a world that offered no alternative. In doing this, he contradicts even the colonists themselves, who claimed for themselves all the “liberty of Englishmen” with more blinkered enthusiasm than the English themselves.

But the English didn’t have liberty—they had liberties. Through years of parliamentary action and common law litigation, various groups, institutions and corporate bodies in England accumulated customary privileges. This could be particular governance rights granted to the local council of the City of London, or specific taxation exemptions for freeholders in a specific borough of Stoke. A person was thus granted liberties by virtue of their membership in these corporate bodies, and was free in that royal authority, restrained by parliament, could not abrogate their privileges. Englishmen lived under a government they consented to, under laws they could theoretically contest, and thus they were free.

These liberties served to reinforce societal hierarchy. Liberties granted to the nobility placed them above commoners, and inherited privileges compounded this across generations. Group and corporate privileges meant there was never equality before the law: each man demanded his own adjudication according to his own status. This is the legacy of the Magna Carta, and is most exemplified in the English Bill of Rights, which, unlike its American counterpart, asserts few individual rights: it is focused on asserting parliament’s prerogatives against the king.

This was the liberty Patrick Henry demanded, on pain of death, in the Virginia Convention in 1775. He echoed many American elites who assumed the Crown’s accidental policy of salutary neglect was an implicitly granted privilege to self-government, and he sought its restoration. In this, he echoed most of the gentleman revolutionaries. “Taxation without representation,” after all, was a fundamental protest against the deprivation of a liberty, not a proclamation for general liberty.

And yet, a year later, Thomas Jefferson claimed for Americans a far more expansive concept of liberty, founded not in customary, inherited rights, but natural rights endowed by God. It was one predicated on equality, as the famous opening line goes—“all men are created equal”—and thus, a radical sentiment opposing social order. In a society so riven by rituals of obeisance and superiority, where interlocking layers of dependence were the natural condition of most, to decree a simple equality is a radical proposition.

But this expanded definition, the one we now accept as writ, certainly wasn’t the intention. As Wood detailed, the Founding Fathers rhetorically broadened English liberty, but never imagined it as a universalist principle. Equality was still intended only for the “better sort,” but now, that upper crust was not a hereditary aristocracy but the “natural aristocracy”: people of merit, who ruled by virtue of their education, their prestige, and their independence. The more honest version of Jefferson’s famous line is the version he helped the Marquis de Lafayette write in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, where to the familiar preamble of “All men are born free and equal in rights,” he added “social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” For him, a free country was not an equal country. Free America would be ruled by a republican elite of merit, remade each generation by new men of proven worth.

Jefferson’s view of property is central to his societal ideal. For him, land was the only substantive property, and it was useful primarily to enable leisure. Jefferson aimed to democratize the vaunted aristocratic ideal of independence. Indeed, his original 1776 draft of the Declaration stated “all men are created equal and independent,” and this independence was derived from widespread land ownership. America’s vast Western frontier would let all men provide for themselves, forever severing the colonial bonds of patronage and eradicating the common people’s internalized deference. Rousseau’s observation that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” was to beget a utopian society where that freedom is the universal condition.

Yet Jefferson’s republican utopianism presumed an impossible reality. Each of his idealized yeoman farmers—who already existed, in droves, throughout an overwhelmingly rural country—required labor to run the farm and a buyer to sell their crops to. In colonial society, for most, the labor was their burden, and their buyer was the local gentry, who consumed as a societal duty. But now, as those old relations withered, the farmer found others willing to buy from him. He replaced dependence on one man with an emerging independence derived from many potential buyers: from the market.

Most people similarly took democracy as an invitation to pursue their own commercial interests. Colonial America was already a nation of shopkeepers, traders, artisans, small manufacturers, and cash-crop farmers; now, those common people pursued commerce unabashedly for their own ends. For them, property wasn’t an instrumental object towards “independence,” but a tool, and it was in constant flux. It could be expended to acquire goods, mortgaged to finance business expansion, or sold to materialize returns.

Property was, in short, a product of and valued by a new, omnipresent institution that came to dominate America: the marketplace. Entrepreneurs in the early republic invested in a series of transportation improvements, starting first with turnpikes, then canals, and then steamboats for riverine transport. They also formed new banks, which began issuing paper currency and offering credit. These together undermined the traditional patronage-based relations of credit and consumption. Artisans often now manufactured more standardized products for a market of buyers. Traders imported goods from a variety of producers and resold them, and their credit ledgers were replaced with tradable paper money and bank credit. Farmhands and apprentices now freely roamed, contracting for wages alone and weighing employers against each other. “The workman is generally dependent on the master, but not on any particular master,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. “The manufacturer asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages.”

Consumption was no longer a munificence a buyer extended to the producer: the producer sold to many willing buyers and offered no special consideration to any individual. And as credit became impersonal, creditors lost their right to obeisance. Financiers, producers, and consumers were all just semi-equal facets of the production cycle, holding leverage determined by their prominence in the market.

In this emerging capitalist society, property was inextricably tied to labor. Commercial enterprise required constant labor in a way that the proprietary wealth of the past did not, while the endless churn of the market imperiled even the largest fortunes. Wealth now had to be renewed, actively, by each generation, and the American gentry, always relatively poor, were now driven to the marketplace they tried so desperately to avoid. As Tocqueville wrote, in the United States “where fortunes are scanty and insecure, everybody works.”

And so, if land was subject to the vagaries of the market, then what independence could it grant? A landed estate was, after all, just a dividend-paying asset with potential for appreciation, and the years after independence were marked by speculative land bubbles that undermined any belief in the privileged independence real estate bought. This reality very quickly percolated to even landowners themselves. James Robertson, a Virginia slaveholder, argued in 1806 that “Man is man, and it is not within the power of a freehold to change his character.” A New York politician agreed: “Independence consists more in the structure of the mind and in the qualities of the heart.” And these “qualities of the heart” were present in all men, even “the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike.” For in this new America, all were equal. This was not the limited equality of the Founding Fathers, who believed that all men were born alike but differentiated themselves in life, but that all men, everywhere, carried the same moral worth, granted as a natural endowment to all those that labor under the sun. In this, America secularized the Christian belief that all souls were equal before God.

Despite the broadness of this idealism, the Revolution itself remained by and for white men. All of its ideological and economic victories accrued only to white men. It was they who were born equal, they who were endowed with fundamental liberties, and they who now took their new freedoms into the marketplace. Women made no tangible gains from the Revolution: they remained legally children, devoid of individual rights and unworthy of much moral consideration. And slavery, which was legal in every colony in 1776, was protected by the Constitution. Its size and footprint vastly expanded in free, capitalist America.

But while the revolution preserved both of these subjugations, the new ethos of equality highlighted them as anomalies. In colonial society, where almost everyone was a dependent, and all were subject to various depredations, women and slaves were merely the lowest ranks in a long chain of bondage. Their conditions weren’t individually notable because most in this society were unworthy of dignity. And neither had the ideological vocabulary to insist on their own, particular injustices.

In the new climate of equality, however, conditions of unfreedom did become notable. The Founding Fathers, many of whom were large-scale slaveholders and almost all of whom had used slave labor at some point, had to make uneasy excuses about their ownership for their entire lives. Some made promises of eventual freedom, while others created new, 19th-century justifications for subjugations in a society of equality.

Race and gender thus became the outlines of a new hierarchy of ascriptive characteristics. As universal dependence and subjugation gave way to white male equality, a new caste system arose to justify the continued subjugation of black people and women. For slavery, this was the “slavery as a positive good” theory, which posited that slavery uplifted the black race. For women, it centered around general female inferiority. And for both, this hierarchy remained anomalous to the broader American vision of equality.

The movements attacking these hierarchies used Jefferson’s own language to advocate for their freedom. Frederick Douglass, in his famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” demanded the very rights of life and liberty, accorded to him by the Declaration of Independence, for him and his fellow enslaved. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, which declared “that all men and women are created equal.” The abolitionist movement and the long struggle thereafter for women’s equality sprang from that incomplete equality decreed in 1776. The establishment of an ideal, inadequate as it was in implementation, created a society where its abrogation became indefensible.

The Unintentional Revolution

This equality, limited as it was, still reverberated across American society. Its very first casualty was titles. All white men in the new republic were known as citizens without any unique distinctions for the gentry. “Mr,” once a title reserved for gentleman, came into general use among all adult white males, while the titles “Esq[uire]” and “His Honor” were stripped from city council members. The “sir” that Benjamin Franklin once refused for himself became a universal term of address. Now, all were “Mr,” all were “sir.” Only officers of the courts retained their titles, and even then, these became formalities attached to the position, not the men themselves.

Education was also rendered suspect. Where common folk once stood in nodded befuddlement when a gentleman quoted Latin or Greek, they now looked at him with disdain. So too were the traditional ornamental skills of the gentry, which were viewed as the vestigial arts of an older, monarchical class. New value was to be found in the practical skills, in the making of furniture and the repair of carriages, in the weaving of clothing and the manufacturing of guns: the base physical arts that underpinned the new nation. America was now a place where everyone worked and everyone was trying to “get ahead.” It had no room for aristocratic contrivances.

But what truly cemented this overthrow of humility was the transmutation of aristocratic leisure into shame. Labor was now the true source of property, and from it, wealth. Industry and inventiveness were widely praised, while idleness was maligned as indolence. Inventors and entrepreneurs gained local celebrity, and it was the aspiration of every common person to become a millionaire, while leisure was a badge of dishonor. A young John D. Rockefeller, then an obscure bookkeeper in Cleveland, represented many when he said his two great ambitions were “to make $100,000 and live to 100 years.” “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” cautioned pastors in small rural churches all across America, and this time, they did not mean only for the commoners.

The traditional gentry professions—the lawyers, doctors, and pastors—now staked out their own claims to labor. As Edward Everett wrote, “Take the case of an eminent lawyer…he passes his days in office, giving advice to clients, arguing business in court.” He had no more leisure than a mechanic. So too it was with doctors, who ministered to patients, assembled remedies, and traveled across towns when called. And as the gentry lost their singular claim to moral worth, their “professions” themselves turned to mere occupations. Lawyers built their reputations on their previous performance and attestations from former clients, and they advertised their services directly. Clients chose them for their perceived skill, not their names. Reputation grew from what one did, not who one was. Lawyers and doctors acquired credentials to certify themselves, and these credentials granted them the title that was once a birthright. It was this system that allowed a self-taught Abraham Lincoln to become one of the best known lawyers in Illinois.

When John Adams, in 1790, observing the new republic of striving gentlemen, asked, with some incredulity, “who will work?” his question was pregnant with possibility. In his traditional frame, he still imagined an upper class of high-minded leisure to direct the affairs of the country. But America, just a decade later, offered a very different answer: everyone works. All were equal before God and men, and all would eat their bread by the sweat of their own brow. The only remaining social gradation that survived this scrutiny was the now revered product of labor: wealth.

The true paragon of early 19th-century America was the self-made man. A man was praised for being “the architect of his own fortune,” who “made it” without family influence or patronage. The greatest honor came from those who started from humble origins and rose to society’s pinnacle. And these new men, unlike most of history’s social climbers, celebrated their humble origins, often embellishing their childhood poverty to emphasize the degree of their success. In this, America was unique. Social mobility in traditional societies was scorned, and those who achieved it took pains to distance themselves from their origins. No less than Cicero, the great Roman orator, spent his life defending himself from aristocratic attacks on his “new man” status—and he was merely from less distinguished gentry. That in America, the new men flaunted their parvenu status with pride speaks to the nation’s fundamental belief in equality.

Wealth became society’s great leveler. In this land of boundless optimism, wealth was open to every man willing to labor for it. Hard work and its resultant prosperity became the new substrate of societal honor. Even failure in commercial enterprise was lauded, as it showed ambition, resilience, and a capability to work for one’s benefit. The only true dishonor was sloth, which showed weakness in character and soul. Even at this early hour, Americans embodied the striving ethos of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena”: a nation of men that dared great deeds.

But while prosperity brought widespread approbation, it did not confer social superiority. Wealth was, after all, a mere state of being, achievable by anyone with enough pluck and circumstance. Indeed, most of the honor in wealth came from its acquisition; merely possessing it meant little. This feeling stirred even before the Revolution: in 1760, the Charleston mechanics union wrote an open letter against a local gentleman, saying “All he ever did was inherit a fortune.” Can he really “claim any merit from possessing an estate not obtained by his own industry?” That contempt for inheritance, and prerogatives that drew on inheritance, became an essential part of the American consciousness, and as each new generation of entrepreneurs gave way to a legacy of heirs, their names fell from national repute. The Astor family, originally America’s first story of self-made brilliance, became a laughingstock of feuding inheritors. The Vanderbilts followed them, followed then by the Rockefellers and now, most recently, the Waltons. This was aided by the endless churn of American capitalism, which continually produced new fortunes and destroyed existing ones.

Post-revolution America was, economically, a far more unequal society than its predecessor, but had a much stronger sense of psychological equality than any nation before it—or indeed, after it. As we’ve seen, those with wealth continually disclaimed any distinction, emphasizing instead their own humble background and lifestyle. Rockefeller made a virtue out of his disdain for luxury, and even in the modern day, Warren Buffett is known for his middle-class upbringing and his average home in Omaha. And because wealth was the sole determinant of societal honor, if wealth seemed attainable, so too was everything else. Hard work and the grace of God were all that separated the rich and the many. And if all could be wealthy, why would one have animus against the rich? Where our colonial watermelon farmer once admonished the young to offer forbearance to the wealthy as they sustained their lifestyle, his revolutionary counterpart would tell those young men to learn from the wealthy so they could gain riches for themselves.

This transformation is exemplified in the reinterpretation of Benjamin Franklin. In life, Franklin was one of the most ideologically genteel of the Founding Fathers. His social rise was driven largely by patronage, starting with his friend Hugh Meredith’s father, who financed his first printing press in 1728. Franklin grew into a successful printer, but then retired at 42 into a life of leisure, where he accomplished much of the science and writing that gave him his fame. But just twenty five years after his death, Parson Weems, a popular biographer, retold his story for a new anti-aristocratic age. Here, Franklin’s success came not from patronage, but from “rising early and working hard each day.” Weems’s Franklin learned to survive on bread and water so no man could tempt him with money to betray his principles. He didn’t finance his first press from patronage, but through work alone, sleeping at midnight and rising at dawn to meet the demands of his one-man shop. Once, he saw a mislaid type just before bed and stayed up all night to fix it. The Franklin that Weems created was a paragon of frugality and hard work and an avowed enemy of recreation and leisure: the ideal of the democratic man, and one that bore little relation to the flesh-and-bone Franklin.

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Disillusionment

In all, early America was a product of the unbridled pursuit of happiness. The great economic mobilization of the Revolutionary War had settled into a mass peacetime commercial expansion. Everything was of business, everyone was caught up in the burgeoning marketplace. Labor was virtue, leisure was relegated to vice, and the accumulation of wealth was society’s new determinant of honor. This unleashing empowered, above all, what Americans called “the middling sort”: those small proprietors who, freed of patronage and obligation, now gave themselves entirely to their pecuniary interests.

Much of the history of America thereafter is the story of those “middling” classes. They supplied each subsequent generation of lawyers, doctors, and pastors. Their businesses drove one of the largest urbanization processes in history, and the capitalism they forced onto America is what made it the world’s great economic engine for two hundred years. We are the direct inheritors of these people, and the world they sought to build is the one we live in.

It may be surprising, then, that by 1800, almost all of the Founding Fathers were openly disdainful of what their revolution had wrought. They had never sought a capitalist revolution. Their economic leanings were largely mercantilist, and most of their political principles remained hierarchical. They intended to elevate a deserving meritocracy—themselves—and rule from a place of enlightened virtue. For this, they drew from Locke and Rousseau and Montesquieu, looking backwards to find the future. Instead, they found themselves fading from a country passing them by.

Because, along with the grand economic expansion we described, which undermined much of the Founders’ republican idealism, the revolution elevated the new “middling sorts” to government. And as their vision of property and labor destroyed genteel independence, their influence in government would be fatal to every conception of enlightened rule.

Local and state legislatures expanded in size and in suffrage during and after the war. In these new councils, elections became competitive affairs, decided not on one’s character but the policies they supported. Elected representatives were then beholden to the constituencies that elevated them. These new politicians turned legislatures into places of horse-trading and pork-barreling. Every new bill was interpreted through each politician’s own interests, and passed only after endless compromises made it acceptable to a sufficiently large bloc of representatives. This naturally lent itself to the formation of political parties, which enabled continuous adhesion between pre-negotiated interest groups across elections.

To us, governance assuming this form seems an obvious outcome—even a virtuous one. We’ve internalized the idea that a just government can only arise from universal representation of all interests, and that liberty is naturally preserved through negotiation and compromise. But to the Founding Fathers, steeped in ideas of “disinterested” virtue, this interplay of interests was not the substance of liberty but the downfall of republicanism. Alexander Hamilton, who led the emerging Federalist faction, was the most opposed to this universal democracy. Unlike his recent portrayal by Ron Chernow (and in song by Lin-Manuel Miranda), Hamilton was a reluctant capitalist and an avowed aristocrat—not a democratizing modernizer. He believed in a strong central government that could issue debt and tax commerce, and he wanted that government led by a strong executive.

Chastened by early democracy, at the Constitutional Convention Hamilton proposed a President and Senate with life terms. His opponents likened these to the King and the House of Lords, and he did not robustly disagree. James Madison reported later he had said “that the British Govt. was the best in the world”: an incendiary statement for an audience of delegates who had been fighting that British government just four years before.

Jeffersonians, however, were no less skeptical of commercial interests and the universal democracy arising from them. Jefferson himself, as we’ve discussed, believed the market was inherently corrosive to personal independence: his vision was a decentralized republic of proprietary wealth. Madison, in Federalist No. 10, conceded that interests were “sown in the nature of man,” and as long as people have liberty, they will form factions. His great fear was a majority faction set on some “improper or wicked project,” and his solution was a representative democracy, where the “better sort” filtered the views of the people and thus restrained majoritarian tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson’s folly was that he never understood the average person. He offered them freedom, but then expected they’d follow his own prescribed path. His rhetoric described democracy, but he never seriously considered that the leaders a democratic America would elect would be quite different from his own expectations. His faith remained blind and naive, deaf to objections from even his closest friend, James Madison. Perhaps this blindness is why his eventual disillusionment was so bitter, so personally affronted. “All, all dead,” he wrote in 1825, “and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not.” Hamilton, his great political enemy, who never had faith in the people, who aimed to free the republic from their vices, wrote his own lament some 23 years earlier: “this American world was not made for me.”

In this, Hamilton was right. America was not made for him, nor Jefferson, nor any of the Founding Fathers, who sought to build an ideal, enlightened state. It was made for the ordinary people who won their freedom by blood and sweat, and who then hoisted a government that aided them in pursuing their own ends. Their America stripped the gentry bare. Shorn of their distinctions, their supposed virtues, their vaunted reputations, their exclusive professions, they were left only as capitalists, indistinguishable from the great sea beside them. Their undoing forged a new equality in America, where, as distinctions of birth, refinement, leisure, and property all fell away, wealth became the only honor remaining. Social mobility simply required accumulating wealth, and all markers of rank were effectively for sale.

The new “aristocracy” forged from this unending churn turned over every generation. The only real distinction they had was wealth. But wealth makes no claims on the interior, nor exalts the intangibles of breeding and character. It does not impose a shared code of honor, nor grant a reputation, nor establish one’s unique personal dignity. And above all, it has no permanence. It can be built in months and lost in seconds. Within a single generation, it can be divided into irrelevance. It describes little but one’s immediate circumstances.

An aristocracy founded on mere wealth is a feeble creature indeed.

The recurring American fear of oligarchs, which Biden invoked again last year, is a mark of the revolution’s final triumph over aristocracy. That revolution birthed a society so imbued with the fundamental equality of all people that it doesn’t even have the vocabulary to imagine one where social rank is preordained. Over the following decades, the cultural memory of aristocracy was erased entirely from the American consciousness to the point that the word itself has lost meaning. This absence has left us unable to understand colonial-era commoners like Devereux Jarratt’s parents, who believed so strongly in society’s imposed hierarchy that they accepted their consigned lowliness as a fact beyond protest.

The story of the US Navy (USN) since the end of the Cold War is one of managed decline. The previous generation of procurement, largely completed in the 1980s, produced the world’s most powerful fleet, designed for peer competition on a global scale. But the decades thereafter saw that competitor’s utter collapse, ushering in an age of unparalleled American ascendancy. In the generation that followed, small-scale counterinsurgency warfare was the modal conflict, and in that, the US Navy found itself both over-provisioned and unchallenged. Its $2 billion Arleigh Burke destroyers, firing $2 million interceptors through their arrays of vertical-launch system (VLS) cells, were reduced to swatting $20,000 Houthi attack drones out of the sky, while its supercarriers, built to break the Soviet navy, now chased pirates along the Horn of Africa.

No one in the 1980s expected the USSR’s imminent collapse. The military planners of that decade, just like those from the decades preceding, considered themselves the latest inheritors of America’s generational struggle. They expected to pass that same burden to their successors.

This perspective was epitomized by secretary of the Navy John Lehman. As the Navy’s political head for the entire Reagan administration, he saw Brezhnev’s (and later, Gorbachev’s) USSR not as Carter’s fading superpower, but as the existential threat to American hegemony it once was. He considered direct NATO-Warsaw Pact war an actual possibility and saw the Navy as core to that conflict.

His strategy for that war was one of encirclement. The USN would use carrier strike groups to push into the Norwegian Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Western Pacific to attack the Soviet fleet in its home waters. Swarms of attack submarines would threaten the USSR’s nuclear submarine “bastions” in the Barents Sea (by Murmansk) and the Sea of Okhotsk (near Kamchatka), forcing the Soviet navy to remain at port. His plan aimed to defang the 3-million strong Red Army, stationed along the Iron Curtain, by preventing them from marching into Western Europe.

Achieving this plan required a 600-ship fleet, he claimed, and that became the Navy’s public target. Lehman called for serial production of known classes, faster development of new classes, and commissioned a set of new ship designs for the future. He aimed for 15 Nimitz-class carriers (with their accompanying strike groups) for power projection, 100 Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarines for undersea dominance, and 238 total surface combatants—cruisers, destroyers, and frigates—for general-purpose usage. To this end, the Navy made bulk-buys of the Nimitz class carriers, doubled output of the Los Angeles class submarines, and expanded the procurement targets for the in-development Ticonderoga cruisers and Arleigh Burke destroyers. He also revived the WW2-era Iowa battleships and refitted them with Tomahawks for modern usage. Under his leadership, the Navy also commissioned the successor to the Los Angeles class, the Seawolf attack submarines. These were the most expensive submarines ever constructed, designed exclusively for hunter-killer missions on other submarines. They would be the tip of the spear in the proposed invasion of the USSR.

By 1987, the Navy reached its historical peak of 594 ships. That year, during the Iran-Iraq War, the US launched Operation Earnest Will to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The USN peeled off 30 ships—primarily Perry-class frigates—from its fleet to escort a ship a day through the strait, and it maintained this for months without compromising its duties anywhere else. This allowed Kuwait to continue exporting oil through the explosive conflict that surrounded it.

Reagan left office in 1989, and George H.W. Bush oversaw America’s annus mirabilis of 1991—the most pivotal year in modern history. That January, Bush ordered Operation Desert Storm, where the US Navy, Air Force, and Army stopped the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait with only 113 enemy-caused deaths. And in December, the USSR collapsed. The Iron Curtain had already fallen two years before, but the final end of the communist menace presaged a full decade of Russian geopolitical irrelevance.

America stood triumphant astride the world like a new Colossus of Rhodes.

The decades thereafter were marked by contracting military ambition. The Seawolf class was cut from 29 submarines to just 12, and then canceled after just 3. It was replaced by the Virginia class, which was much cheaper but lacked the Seawolf’s attack capabilities. The Perry-class frigates were retired in 2015, the Ticonderoga-class cruisers were aggressively decommissioned from 2004 onwards, and neither were replaced. The Arleigh Burke class, originally destined for the same fate, was belatedly kept alive when the Navy realized that without it, it wouldn’t have any surface combatants left.

Nowadays, the USN only operates 295 ships—about half of its 1987 peak. Almost all of these are old designs, produced in that final Cold War burst in the 1980s. These are all approaching their stated service life, and as they’re retired, the fleet will only contract further. By 2027, this will fall to 283 ships, before rising slightly to 294 ships in 2030.

But as the Navy committed itself to self-imposed decline, China came into its own as a new competitor, reopening the possibility of peer conflict. In one sense, this was predictable. Even in 1991, China showed early signs of the industrial power it would become, and by the 2000s, its rise was eminently obvious. And even if China had liberalized, as the delusional optimism of the Clinton and Bush presidencies so-confidently claimed, the US would still have had to reorient itself towards a new battle for global supremacy1.

China’s Navy, the People’s Liberation Army Navy2 (PLAN) hit an inflection point in the 2010s. The Chinese commercial shipbuilding sector displaced Korea’s as the world’s largest, and these new shipyards enabled a massive expansion of the Chinese Navy itself. By 2019, the PLAN was the world’s largest navy, and the gap has only grown since. Today it fields 370 ships, a total projected to rise to 425 by 2030.

To be clear, this does not imply the PLAN has exceeded the USN’s combat capacity. The USN has 11 carriers to China’s 3, 75 destroyers to China’s 50, and 71 nuclear submarines to China’s 32. The modal Chinese ship is a 1500 ton Corvette, designed for coastal patrols along its borders. Its capstone blue water (i.e ships for oceanic use, instead of littoral or riverine usage) ships are far less numerous. The USN’s navy, on the other hand, is almost entirely blue water oriented. Its modal ship is the 9000 ton Burke-class destroyer, it has double the total tonnage of the PLAN, and more than double the total number of VLS cells.

Rather, this shows that the USN’s delusion of eternal preeminence was just that—a delusion. It now faces aggressive competition, arguably much more formidable than the USSR ever was, and will need to redesign itself once again for peer conflict. This particular measure is an indicator of the derivative. China has shown it has massive volume-construction capability and it is rapidly building capabilities to match the USN’s top-end vessels.

For example, of the PLAN’s 32 nuclear submarines, almost half of them have come online in the last five years alone. China currently can produce 3 guided-missile nuclear submarines per year—2.25 times American capacity, with further expansion ongoing. Similarly, the PLAN has built 45 latest-generation destroyers over the past decade, with another 14 under construction. These are rumored to have a dual-band radar that the USN’s Zumwalt program was intended to integrate, and their upgraded VLS cells can launch hypersonic anti-ship missiles.

Meanwhile, the US struggles at every level of ship construction. New ships die in procurement, as an atrophied naval design arm is unable to produce practical designs. Existing designs can’t be produced at scale. Even for well-known ship designs with many existing examples, the Navy struggles to increase production. The Virginia class of submarines, a mature design that launched in 2003, has been flatlining at an average of 1.33 produced per year. The Navy projects this increasing to 2 per-year—in 2032. The Arleigh Burke destroyer, conceived in the 80’s, was produced at about 5 ships a year from 1989 to 2005. Nowadays, that number is down to 2—half of its peak, in a forty year-old design. Compare this to the 14 surface combatants the PLAN is concurrently building.

If this trend continues, China will both have the USN’s high-tech capabilities and be far more able to replace its losses. The USN, on the other hand, depends on an aging fleet, and as its ships are retired, their replacements aren’t forthcoming. Its technological edge will shrink just as its physical capacity degrades to nought.

Nor is a technological edge sufficient for the effective operation of a blue-water navy. Right now, Iran is launching missiles and drones at commercial ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, scaring off commercial traffic. The USN doesn’t have enough escort ships to prevent this. At most, it has 75 Arleigh Burke destroyers, 9 guided missile warships, and 3 littoral combat ships, and almost every single one of these ships is already in use elsewhere. So far, the USN has moved 2 destroyers to the Persian Gulf, and over the last 3 months, has used them to escort exactly 2 cargo ships through the Strait. Where in Earnest Will, the US maintained Kuwaiti exports by force of arms, today Kuwait’s oil exports have fallen almost to nothing and the USN doesn’t have the capacity to intervene.

Consider other operations. Hypotheticals about war over Taiwan focus on carriers and amphibious assault, but neglect a far more basic capability: sealift. Any such war would require supplying an island hundreds of miles from any US military base for months, while it faces a probable naval blockade, arrays of anti-ship missiles, and attacks from shore-based launchers on the Chinese mainland. This would require a fleet of cargo ships, a huge escort operation, and a constant rotation of ships in and out of dockyards for repair and upkeep.

The USN of today doesn’t have the materiel, the personnel, or the facilities to bear this specific burden. The Ready Reserve Force (RRF), a fleet of 51 ships providing surge cargo capacity during naval engagements, is a hospice fleet, with an average ship-age of 45 and dozens of those ships more than 50 years old. In the last empirical readiness test in 2019, only 40% were capable of being put to sea without major repairs. The biggest gap is in fuel tankers. The USN has between 21 to 25 tankers in inventory, while projections say that any war in the Pacific would require at least 69. And because the US is almost devoid of commercial shipbuilding capacity, this expansion has to be acquired from foreign partners. This fuel bottleneck could leave the America’s largest advantage, its air force, grounded, unable to sortie from its supercarriers.

And finally, even if the RRF was fully operational with the correct complement of ships, it’s not clear the US has the manpower to staff it. The death of the merchant marine means there isn’t a base of mariners to hire into service in wartime, and hiring foreign crews is fraught with difficulty.

The USN is even losing the capability to maintain its current fleet. After a round of closures in the 1990s, the US has only four shipyards left that can maintain its nuclear carriers and submarines. The dry-docks and production facilities in these are, on average, 76 years old, and without major upgrades, they will not be able to support over a third of planned carrier and submarine maintenance periods by 2040. Attack submarines, in total, incurred 10,363 days of idle time between 2008 and 2018. Ships of all sorts have waited 33,700 more days than projected for maintenance. Together, this is as if 9 warships and 3 submarines were removed from the fleet entirely over that period.

Repairing and upgrading shipyards faces the same disease that building ships does. Updating the Portsmouth dry dock ballooned from $528 million to $2.2 billion between 2019 and 2021, while Pearl Harbor’s estimate exploded from $6.1 billion to $16 billion. This lack of capacity meant that in 2020, when the $750 million Bonhomme Richard was damaged in an accidental fire, the cost of repair was quoted at $3.2 billion: higher than the ship’s initial purchase price. The USN was forced to scrap it. In 2024, out of desperation, the USN began contracting naval maintenance for non-combat ships to Korea. Hanwha, HD Hyundai, and HJ Heavy Industries have overhauled eight USN ships in two years—several times faster than any American shipyard could manage.

Atrophied Foundations

But the USN is not a spent force. Despite headwinds, it has retained the technological frontier in naval technology and it continues to push that frontier forward. American marine nuclear reactors remain a step above their Chinese counterparts, with proven reliability, safety, and operational experience—which are really the crux of nuclear propulsion. America also retains a considerable edge in carriers. The USS Gerald R. Ford is a nuclear-powered capital ship that can sustain months-long deployments—it just completed one that lasted 326 days—and carries an air force larger than most nations’; meanwhile, China’s latest Fujian class is conventionally powered and considerably smaller.

Chinese submarines also have notably worse acoustic quieting. Essentially “underwater stealth,” this is a branch of engineering focused on reducing the vibrations produced by an operating submarine to prevent its detection by SONAR. It requires full harmony between the hull, the engine, the propulsion mechanism, and the surfaces, to minimize sound output, and the small margins mean simulation is not sufficient. Strong acoustic quieting takes years of experimentation to perfect, and China’s latest submarines remain a generation behind their American counterparts. This concern for survivability still constrains Chinese submarines on patrols outside the South China Sea.

If these seem like mere “details,” consider that a carrier that requires refueling is not one that can spend three months in the Persian Gulf as the headquarters of the largest power projection operation in history. A submarine that’s visible to enemies is just a slow, clumsy ship that can’t carry many missiles. China can build the legible technological targets, but the most specialized outputs, built on accumulated institutional memory, remain out of reach. China could not, today, execute the current Iran War. And if the roles were reversed, and China was the one tasked with a military takeover of an island 2000 miles from its shores, its “timelines” would be stretched by another two decades.

But that’s not the world we live in. Instead, the USN is tasked with defending that island, and the fleet it has is not sufficient. It was largely designed and constructed more than two decades ago for a previous generation of leaders’ conception of the war of the future. Their predictions were seemingly correct—the USN has performed exceptionally well in recent conflicts, and the PLAN’s goal is roughly to mimic the current disposition and armaments of the US Navy. The fleet they’re building now is a mirror of the one the USN already has.

What isn’t clear is how the USN will rebuild today for the war of our future.

The Navy certainly understands the problem—they’ve been trying to reinvent themselves since the 2000s. The fabled “pivot to Asia” was announced by the first Obama administration, when Leon Panetta, the secretary of Defense, planned to anchor 60% of the US Navy in ports in the Pacific. He explicitly revived John Foster Dulles’ concept of encirclement along the First Island Chain (i.e. from Kamchatka to the Malay peninsula). And many of the Navy’s recent ship designs were pioneered in that era to fill crucial roles in a Pacific war.

Yet this change in rhetoric has not led to actual change. Despite two decades of posturing, the pivot to Asia has not happened. America’s naval facilities across the first island chain are woefully insufficient for a war over Taiwan. Those new warship classes, announced from 2001 onwards, do not exist in any meaningful form.

And at the same time, as we discussed above, the Navy has steadily lost the capacity to perform the basic tasks necessary of a blue-water force. It struggles to build existing ship designs. It cannot cost-effectively repair, refurbish, or upgrade its ships. It can’t even maintain readiness of its essential reserve fleet, which itself was designed specifically for the war that now looks imminent.

Indeed, after three decades of cost-cutting, the Navy has forgotten how to effectively expend resources to expand national power. Large-scale procurement, once America’s great strength, has now become a morass. The Navy’s in-house ship design arm has atrophied, leading to unrealistic, outsourced designs that aim to accomplish too much. Contractors are incentivized to build before designs have been completed because they’re aiming to lock-in an appropriation and thus new revenue and they aren’t graded by the functionality of the final product. Years of consolidation and decline in the industry have also left the Navy with few choices for vendors and little opportunity for competitive bidding. The very scarcity of the Navy’s procurements has become an obstacle. Each ship is now designed to handle all possible functions because new design opportunities are so infrequent.

Failures in procurement compound with America’s overall declining industrial base, which makes it slow and costly even to produce existing ships. Ships require large and specialized facilities for construction. They need legions of skilled tradespeople to weld steel, fabricate hulls, fit pipes, install complex electrical wiring, and forge a multitude of custom components. Integrating radar, combat systems, and VLS cells into different hulls is complex work that is done custom for each ship, and has to be reimplemented for each new component upgrade. Marine nuclear reactors have a massive quality assurance and safety certification regime before they can be installed on ships and submarines. There are only four companies in the US, which operate seven different shipyards, that the Navy can rely on to construct new ships. For submarines and carriers, this number is down to two yards, which work together to build one ship at a time. And for conventional surface combatants, the average time to produce an Arleigh Burke destroyer, which trended downwards for a decade, is now longer than at its commissioning in 1991.

This decline is accelerated because American shipbuilding is a monopsony. The Navy is the only buyer of any scale, apart from small-scale operators of Jones-act compliant ships. This meant that Navy funding cuts and accompanying demand decrease destroyed the entire industry. It also means that even with Navy demand, shipyards never make the capital investment to increase production rates because Navy demand is low-volume (relative to commercial orders) and entirely bespoke. This means even the things that can be standardized via bulk assembly, like hull fabrication or casting, are still done by hand. And shipbuilding is also an oligopoly: just as shipbuilders can only sell to the Navy, the Navy has very few options on who it can buy from. The dearth of competition allows builders to bank Navy revenue as profit instead of reinvesting it into improvements.

For comparison, China built its world-leading commercial shipbuilding industry before its naval expansion. The PLAN’s success in volume construction comes directly from that commercial success: PLAN destroyers and carriers are built literally next to commercial tankers, and the workforce and techniques carry through to both. Chinese shipyards invest in automation to optimize commercial ship production, and then apply as much standardization as possible to naval orders so they can reuse their equipment and process. This means PLAN vessels are designed from inception for volume. And while naval construction is distinct from commercial construction, the biggest constraints in the American industry are workforce continuity and industrial base expansion, and both of those have significant overlap with the commercial industry. The vast majority of work on non-nuclear warships is the large-scale welding, wiring, and electronic installation present on commercial cargo ships, and so, nurturing the cargo industry buttresses the Navy’s own capabilities. Thus, any plan (pun-intended) to expand the US Navy’s production must also include rebuilding America’s commercial shipbuilding industry.

The New Generation

History officially ended for the US Navy in 1994, when John Dalton, secretary of the Navy, published “ Forward…From the Sea”, his redesigned mission for the Navy in a world without equals. He proposed a naval force where oceanic control is assumed and blue water operations subside to shore-based power projection. The US Navy no longer combated other navies because there were none left that merited the effort; rather, the Navy was just another tool for enforcing American will against the small actors that dared defy it.

After Russia, America’s next naval missions were ending genocide in Bosnia, guarding civilians in the Somali Civil War, redirecting fleeing refugees from Cuba, and undoing the latest Haitian military coup. In each, the oceanic Navy was over-provisioned for its task. A slew of retirements followed. The Perry-class frigates were all decommissioned in 2015. The Ticonderoga-class cruisers are following the same arc thereafter. And whatever was left of the Cold War leadership sank to grief.

By 2002, the Navy realized it was now under-provisioned for these missions. Its frigates were slated for retirement and both its minesweepers and its patrol boats were aging classes and needed renewal. This meant there wasn’t a ship designed for core near-shore functions: clearing mines, destroying smaller submarines, and fighting off smaller boats, the tasks that encapsulated most of the Navy’s new missions. Instead of replacing each of these functions separately, however, the Navy planned a single ship that could use replaceable modules to accomplish all of these tasks. This was the Littoral Combat Ship. It was intended to be a cheap (by naval standards), expendable hull, with a small crew, so it could be distributed across all of the various littoral areas the US patrols.

But the program ran into issues from the very outset. The Navy couldn’t choose between two designs, so it commissioned both: doubling training costs, spare parts requirements, and assembly lines for the entire program. Then, the scope expanded, as the LCS absorbed requirements from the retiring Perry-class frigates. This meant that the fast, lightly-armed coastal ship now also had to be a heavily armored surface combatant with VLS capability. Consequently, the LCS adopted exotic hull shapes and major increases in displacement so it could hold the massive engines it needed to be both fast and armored. Suddenly, the “cheap” hull already rose to a $600 million unit cost. Then, the expanded hull couldn’t be manned by the original crew size of 40, so that had to increase to 70, almost doubling workforce requirements.

And then, every aspect of the modules—remember, the core of the entire ship—failed to match expectations. The surface warfare module’s centerpiece was the non-line of sight missile launcher, but that was canceled halfway through development, leaving it only partially effective. The Mine Countermeasures went through three iterations, expanding into a much more expensive system of underwater drones, helicopter-carried monitoring systems, and a set of autonomous boats carrying SONAR. And the submarine warfare module never came into being at all, because despite hundreds of millions spent on fitting a custom variable-depth SONAR array to the ship, it became obvious that a fast ship that burns a lot of fuel is ill-suited for loitering in one place for a long time to scan for underwater threats.

The capstone of this dismal story came in 2014, when the module mechanism itself was written off. Originally, modules were intended to take “a few days” to fit on any decently equipped pier. Instead, on both LCS variants, it took over six weeks at a shipyard to swap between modules, which eliminated their primary utility. Eventually, the Navy just welded the modules permanently to each hull.

This experimentation took, in total, twenty years, and the failure was amplified because the ships started construction before any of the actual complexities in the module design or the crew requirements were ironed out. The first hull finished in 2008, but was unable to accomplish any of its stated tasks. Then, the Navy iterated on two versions of each module on each ship variant for 10 years until finally, in 2016, the module concept was abandoned, the anti-submarine and anti-surface boat concepts were dropped, and the LCS was relegated to a $3 billion minesweeper. During delivery, one LCS type had a transmission defect and had to be towed to finish its maiden voyage, while the other type faced galvanic corrosion, leading to its early retirement.

The core issue here was scope-creep. A specific ship for a specific function was expanded to cover several contradictory use-cases. Design then lacked the rigor required for a project of that complexity, and construction was started before the design was ready. The ship that was produced then was unable to handle any of its stated tasks, while the general design immaturity showed itself in the ships’ inability to even successfully propel itself.

The Constellation-class frigates were conceived from the impending wreckage of the LCS. It was envisioned explicitly as a low-risk corrective. The Navy was going to use a known ship design, for a specific, well-scoped task, make it compatible with American technology, and build it en masse. The need was clear: the Perry-class frigates were gone, leaving the US without any ships between the broken LCS and the expensive Burke destroyers. The USN eventually chose Fincantieri Marinette’s FREMM design, a frigate already in service in the French and Italian navies.

But the Navy then could not follow through on its minimal modification promise. US shock and hardening standards were higher than European norms, leading to a heavier hull. The Navy demanded common propulsion between the Constellation and existing Burke destroyers. The Aegis Combat system, with SPY-6 radar and Mk41 VLS, was larger and heavier than European equivalents with more cooling requirements.

Together, this ended most commonality with the original design. The hull was lengthened by 24 feet, widened by 10, and had a 10% increase in tonnage. This threatened the speed requirement, which then led to further design changes. The Navy finally settled on a ship that had on 15% commonality with the original FREMM: down from 85% in the original plan. In 2024, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) wrote that the “unstable design had stalled construction, and the functional design was less complete in 2024 than at construction start.” Constant requirement changes invalidated existing work, causing the project to lose progress.

And yet, despite the woefully incomplete design, the Navy started construction. This started in 2022, when the design was thought to be 80% complete. In reality, it was far lower, as a new set of requirements were added that invalidated existing completed work. And as requirements changed, the yard built out of sequence, assuming designs for components that often ended up wrong and required redoing. Workforce instability then started to seep in. Workers hired for fixed terms left, leaving work undone, and the yard couldn’t hire replacements. Costs steadily rose while little actual progress was made.

By 2025, the economics had now entirely inverted. The Constellation was projected to cost as much as 80% of an Arleigh Burke destroyer, while being a far less capable ship. The entire point of a frigate is to be a low-cost alternative to do the jobs you wouldn’t risk a destroyer for, and so, at the current cost, the frigate was pointless. The entire class was cancelled and the Navy procured additional Burke’s instead. The first two ships under construction were allowed to complete, but only because the Navy wanted to keep the Wisconsin shipyard building them open for future procurement. The Navy is now trying again by pivoting to an even less ambitious design, based on the US Coast Guard’s Legend-class patrol boats, and is contracting the work to Hanwha.

The Constellation program failed for the same reason the LCS did: scope-creep. The GAO has made a number of observations on why this happens. New ships have too many stakeholders, all of whom are empowered to inject requirements at any stage of construction. These requirements then lead to an entirely bespoke design. This is in contrast to the commercial market’s approach of having a clear idea for a ship, drawn from real experiences, and accepting only the requirements that match that initial thrust. The Navy also has the curse of unlimited resources and no deadlines, which allows it to expand projects indefinitely without having a cost ceiling or a target date constraining it. Combine this with the organizational incentive for every officer, who wants to take credit for the improvements they can claim once their requirement is incorporated but has little stake in the timely delivery of the project, and the pathology causing design instability is clear.

And then, in both the Constellation and LCS programs, builders started construction work well before the design reached maturity. This is termed “concurrency” in a lot of the literature, and it’s a consistent theme in all recent Navy procurement. On Constellation, concurrency compounded design instability, as each design change also required major physical reworking. You can imagine how this also creates a sunk-cost fallacy for the builder and the Navy, both of whom will resist major design changes introduced after construction is initiated to preserve the progress made so far.

The GAO has been complaining about concurrency for two decades now, but it still persists because several perverse, interlocking, organizational incentives that resist reform.

To understand this, consider how a commercial ship is commissioned. In a commercial transaction, the buyer and builder work together to design the ship. The buyer supplies use cases, which the builder turns into concrete ship requirements. These are negotiated back-and-forth, where the builder uses their in-house technical expertise to push back against technically infeasible options, while the buyer uses their own experience to reject inflated price estimates or timelines. Once this negotiation is settled, the buyer signs a fixed-price contract, where they pay a predecided price to deliver the ship at a specific time, with allowances for various delays. Then the ship goes through detailed design, where the builder usually modifies a well-known design to match any unique requirements. The builder is incentivized to be thorough here because they are responsible for all costs and delays.

This process forces the builder to shoulder all costs that arise during production, which incentivizes them to price accurately, provide realistic time estimates, and push against impossible requirements. It works because commercial ships only have small variations between buyers, allowing shipyards to reuse existing designs to make costs and timelines more predictable.

The Navy procurement process is entirely different. Every Navy acquisition is a completely unique hull with distinct requirements around speed, propulsion type, fuel efficiency, and most recently, stealth. It also has to incorporate a plethora of combat systems into the final construction, each of which has unique packaging and cooling requirements. This means Navy shipbuilders have very few options to improve output predictability, which makes fixed-price contracts unviable. Instead, the Navy uses cost-plus contracts where the builder provides a best-effort estimate of cost and time and the Navy bears responsibility for any overruns.

But the way the Navy implements this creates the opposite incentive. Now, shipbuilders are incentivized to start building as soon as possible because they only receive revenue once steel is cut and they don’t bear the burden of cost overruns or delayed delivery. The Navy also encourages starting early because construction is often the only way to prevent stakeholders from introducing new requirements to a project. And finally, starting a project significantly increases the costs of its cancellation. This means stakeholders facing pushback may start construction early to ensure it has to go forward. Politicians representing the district the shipyard is located in also want to start construction as soon as possible as it lets them tout the new jobs created to their constituents.

Together, these two interlocking problems mean the Navy has not executed on any of its recent procurement projects. An excess of stakeholders without any overseeing authority means requirements keep changing and the design is never settled. Concurrency turns design churn into cost overruns, and creates sunk-cost fallacies that hamper intelligent investigation. These issues are then compounded by the Navy’s lack of robust in-house design expertise. This means the Navy cannot determine what requirements are feasible, what the additional cost is, or whether the current design is mature enough for construction. They can’t question optimistic builder estimates and can’t freeze requirements or defend a requirements baseline. The Navy’s organizational incentives always induce design instability and concurrency, and the dearth of in-house expertise means there’s nothing pushing against them.

As the GAO states, the solution required is nothing short of generational. The Navy is wedded to a sequential developmental model, where requirement gathering, then design, then construction, and finally, delivery, complete in a continuous waterfall. Every modern organization has abandoned this methodology, because in sufficiently complex projects, initial assumptions will be incorrect and adjustments will need to be made. A material choice during design could prove unviable during construction, requiring a design change. A specific technological choice may not work under the ship’s expected conditions, requiring cascading updates. The linear model struggles to handle these scenarios, leading to the failures we see above.

Instead, the Navy needs to adopt an iterative, “agile,” development process. Engineers should use design-implement-test loops to validate the hardest questions before full construction. Designs should explicitly call out unknowns and highlight potential “unknown unknowns,” so these can be planned for, and engineers should derisk by minimizing “one-way doors”: decisions that cannot be undone without triggering rippling changes across the project. Functional design needs to be sufficiently ready before construction starts, but the construction process should lead to iteration on the design. iteration should be expected, and good initial planning should ensure that construction can progress while the design evolves.

The GAO has proposed each of these changes across 50 or so reports since 2009, with 90 accompanying recommendations. The Navy has implemented just 30 of them, and from my qualitative examination, it chose the least impactful ones to implement. Meanwhile, the McClung-class landing ships, the Navy’s latest procurement project, is following the same trajectory of the Constellation and the LCS. Perhaps that speaks to, in government, how vast a gulf lies between knowing and doing.3

The Industrial Base

Procuring a new ship is one thing; ramping production of an existing design is another. Procurement is a problem of abundance; reforming it is a matter of changing the process by which an abundant resource—money—is expended. But expanding production requires investing that abundant resource to increase the supply of scarce resources: shipbuilding facilities and shipbuilding workers.

In America, however, the decades since 1991 have seen those facilities steadily contract or close. Nowadays, there are only two yards that can build nuclear submarines in the US: General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut and Huntington-Ingalls at Newport News. These yards each produce separate parts of the submarine, so overall construction remains serial. Similarly, nuclear carriers can only be built at Newport News, one a time (though the Navy is working towards bulk buys). The story is similar for conventional ships. Burke class destroyers, the only surface combatant the Navy can actively produce, can be built only at two yards: Bath Iron Works in Maine and an Ingalls yard in Mississippi. Each can produce one destroyer at a time, and build times have slipped to almost 4 years per destroyer.

Altogether, this means American naval ship production has slipped to 1.8 per year—compared to China’s ~6.

And as these facilities contract, so does the naval workforce. Lower demand from the Navy caused mass shipyard downsizing. Those tradespeople moved into different lines of work, while the pipeline for future skilled labor fell off sharply. In 1991, the US had 218,000 shipyard workers; in 2023, that number was down to 145,000—a 33% decrease. These workers have an average age of 55, and their retirement coincides with a historically small incoming pipeline. And among those newer workers, low pay and seniority-based work allocation leads to attrition rates of 20%, often reaching over 30% in the most critical trades. Overall, the Navy projects a 250,000 worker deficit over the next 30 years.

Replenishing this workforce is a decades-long endeavor. Training a nuclear-certified welder can take 3 years, and it can take years of experience beyond that to make them fully qualified to build submarines. Apparently, General Dynamics is seeding its recruitment pipeline with fifth graders to build a workforce 15 years down the line.

At the very least, wages need to rise significantly. Judging from the scale of the shortage and how difficult it is to work at a shipyard, shipbuilding jobs should pay top-of-market in that area; instead, the average job pays just $62,400, which is above median, but lower than comparable employers, and considerably lower than what a skilled tradesperson could make elsewhere. Last year, Navy Secretary Phelan complained that unskilled jobs at Amazon warehouses and Buc-ee’s establishments near shipyards outcompete the Navy for its skilled workforce. Nowadays, ICE recruitment, with its $50,000 sign-up bonuses, will bleed the Navy even more, as will the massive skilled trades demand created by datacenter construction.

What the Navy needs is investment continuity. It wants shipyards to build a pipeline of workers and to invest in improvements that last beyond any given contract. This permanent capacity then enables more efficient delivery into the future. The Navy has one main lever to encourage shipyards to make these investments: providing stable demand. Its traditional approach is publishing annual shipbuilding plans to provide a steady demand signal to shipyards. The idea is, if a shipyard knows it will be contracted to produce some number of ships over the next five to ten years, it can expand its workforce and invest in improvements based on that expected revenue.

However, the Navy is unable to adhere to its own plans. The graph above shows the highest and the lowest procurement numbers the Navy has published for a given year. On average, the spread is about 8 ships, and from a sampling of these reports, I found that the Navy follows the worst version of this pattern: it publishes higher numbers earlier but revises them down as the year gets closer. Cutting procurements undermines any confidence shipbuilders have in Navy commitments. What happens if you invested in production to build 12 ships, but suddenly your contract is cut to 6?

The Navy has thus expanded the set of investment incentives it offers. It disburses a larger portion of the contract value at signing to provide early revenue for investments. It will accelerate depreciation schedules of delivered ships, so the yard can recover more of its investment earlier through tax deductions. New contracts also often include explicit provisions that increase the total fee but tie a portion of that fee to investments. The goal is to both create additional incentives to invest and provide additional funding at signing to enable that investment.

And yet, despite these programs disbursing hundreds of millions in additional funding to shipyards since their inception in the early 2000s, the Navy hasn’t seen a measurable decline in backlogs or an improvement in production times. The GAO has written extensively on how the Navy doesn’t even have the infrastructure to track a return-on-investment metric. Compare this to China or South Korea, who paired shipbuilding investments with robust performance metrics and executed clawbacks against underperforming firms. The Navy also has reported that firms, despite investment incentives, often prefer having a backlog of orders to ensure a steady flow of work. This is yet another impact of the Navy’s inability to signal consistent demand.

Part of the issue is that the Navy doesn’t have a coherent investment strategy. Nuclear submarines, for example—like jet engines—depend on an ecosystem of 5,000 different suppliers for increasingly specialized components. To use a programming analogy, this network resembles a directed-acyclic-graph: every supplier subcontracts components downstream, and suppliers often provide different components to companies closer to the end-product. The shipyard is only the place of final assembly, and while direct shipyard improvements are useful, they are only one bottleneck. The Navy gives the example of a single company that provides explosive welding capability for all submarine construction, and touts its “success” in securing a 30-year contract with this company to ensure it doesn’t fold.

The Navy needs to audit the entire supply graph, find other high-leverage points, and invest in them directly to expand production. Its 2025 roundup identified castings, heavy machining, and mission systems work as the core gaps—it should seed new companies to provide redundancy in these areas. At the very least, it should produce cost-estimates for expanding the industrial base so they can be included in the annual National Defense Authorization legislation, which is something it has heretofore been unable to do.

And yet, even if all of these efforts are implemented, they’re unlikely to cause a major revival of the industrial base. As we’ve discussed, American shipbuilding is both a monopsony and an oligopoly: the Navy is the only major buyer, but there are very few builders it can buy from. This gives the Navy two competing tensions: it wants to increase competition, which drives efficiencies in its contractors, while trying to preserve its existing contractors. Put differently, it’s aiming to break the oligopoly by introducing competition but also trying to expand each individual company in that oligopoly at the same time, and it’s doing this while being the only source of demand. These two contradictory ends cannot both be met.

What seems to be happening right now is that shipbuilders, recognizing the market isn’t competitive, do not feel compelled to invest. They bank the Navy’s early contract disbursements as revenue and make the minimum investment required to service that contract, and they maintain a backlog of orders as an assurance of continued business. Forcing them to make the long-term capital investments the Navy needs requires both a competitive market that imposes cost pressures, and counter-cyclical demand that isn’t subject to political vagaries. Neither of these are possible in a government monopsony, even when that government is the richest buyer in the entire world. The only other buyers available, however, are commercial buyers—but they all decamped from the US after 1981.

The Commercial Collapse

To call the American commercial shipbuilding industry “in decline” is to engage in understatement so severe you’ve obscured meaning. American commercial shipbuilding is not in decline, it is a cancer patient on the precipice of death, and with each passing day, the sickness worsens.

The numbers speak for themselves. American shipyards produced 5 large oceangoing commercial vessels last year; China produced over 1700. American market share in total commercial shipping has fallen to 0.1%. That remaining market share exists only because of the Jones Act, which mandates that traffic between American ports must be carried on American ships. China has 232 times the ship construction capacity of America. A single Chinese shipyard has more construction capacity than the entire American industry. Last year, a single Chinese company, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, built more commercial tonnage than the United States has since the end of World War 2.

Low capacity leads to higher costs across the board. American freight ships are, on average, 5 times more expensive than their Korean or Chinese counterparts. It also raises production times for each individual ship: American shipyards take roughly twice as long as foreign competitors to produce an equivalent ship.

The remaining American fleet, largely produced before the 1980s, is in steady recession. Out of the 2,926 US-flagged oceangoing vessels in 1960, there are only 188 left. More than 99% of American international seaborne trade now travels on foreign ships. For example, despite being the world’s largest liquid natural gas exporter, there is exactly one US-flagged LNG tanker—and it was built in France.

In traditional economics, commercial shipbuilding leaving America is just Ricardian comparative advantage playing out in the modern era. Shipbuilding is very labor-intensive and America is a high-wage country. HD Hyundai, for example, employs 40,000 skilled laborers at its Ulsan shipyard, and their wages make up 40% of the cost of each ship. Meanwhile, as we’ve discussed, even Navy shipyards in the US can’t pay enough to retain their workforce, and this is for a price-inelastic government buyer; the commercial market is far less forgiving.

These shipyards export to a very competitive market. Shipping margins are low, which makes shipbuilding margins even lower. To succeed in this market, shipbuilders are vertically-integrated, have government backing, and consolidate aggressively. The engineering for cargo ships is largely commoditized: each company competes on cost and size. The larger the ship, the more revenue it can generate and the less maintenance-per-unit it requires, so shipbuilders try to go as large as possible. The primary moat is scale. Building more ships allows more amortization, driving down costs and thus enabling gains in market share.

Putting this together, commercial shipbuilding is almost exactly the industry you’d expect to leave modern America. The US has a huge shortage of skilled labor, many regulations preventing the sort of continuous rebuilding modern shipyards need, and a population that can take easier jobs for better pay. The market itself is low-margin and cyclical. Shipbuilders are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, stuck in the corporate equivalent of the Malthusian trap. For example, Hanwha Ocean (formerly DSME) is the fifth largest shipbuilder in the world by revenue, and yet, the Korean Development Bank still had to pour ~$7B into it from 2008 to 2020 to stave off bankruptcy.

For all of these reasons, the US has not had a world-leading commercial shipbuilding industry since the 1840s. Instead, since the Civil War, American shipbuilding has followed geopolitical cycles, growing during conflict and withering during peace. Major government subsidies during WW1 built up a considerable American merchant marine. These fell into disuse during the Great Depression, but as WW2 approached, the US launched another industrial policy push to rebuild commercial shipping. This backed the lend-lease program and then the massive sealift needed to ship American materiel to Normandy and the Pacific. After the war, however, subsidies were phased out and the industry fell back into cyclical decline. American shipbuilders instead moved their businesses to a rapidly westernizing Japan, which grew to become the world’s largest shipbuilder.

The exception to this pattern came in 1970, when, with the Merchant Marine Act, the US launched its biggest peacetime shipbuilding program. This had early success, and in 1973, the US was briefly the world’s second largest shipbuilder (after Japan). But the oil crisis created a tanker glut which drove prices down and killed demand. American shipyards began to close even with subsidies. Reagan drove in the final few nails in 1981 when he repealed the Construction Differential Subsidy (CDS), where the government paid shipyards 50% of the difference between domestic and foreign construction costs.

There’s some irony here that the President who enabled the final burst of American naval shipbuilding also laid the groundwork for its subsequent death.

The collapse thereafter was immediate. In 1981, American shipbuilders had 69 orders for large oceangoing vessels; by 1988 this had plummeted to 0. No new oceangoing commercial vessels were ordered after 1984 for the rest of the decade. Shipyards transitioned to the new, heightened Navy demand, but once that waned in the 90s, they never recovered. What remains is a monopsony. The US Navy (USN) now makes up 95% of the revenue for American shipbuilders. Not a single American ship has been produced for export in three decades.

We’ve already discussed the impact of this. The Navy’s sealift capacity is fatally degraded, but the National Defense Sealift Fund’s regulations (U.S.C. § 2218) state that it cannot source more than 10 of its ships from foreign producers. American shipyards lack the capacity to handle Navy procurement, while the industrial base that enables them is in a state of frozen decay. The Coast Guard, after a decade of failed icebreaker procurement, is now buying icebreakers from Finland. The Navy now even struggles to repair its own ships, and has started contracting that to Korean companies.

Historically, this state of naval incapacity isn’t unique for America. As a continental nation protected by two oceanic borders, a navy has been an elective power-projection tool, not an existential force (like it was for Britain). Thus, the Navy has also mirrored the cycles of the commercial industry. Until WW2, it decayed during peacetime and made up for it with surge production in times of strife.

But unlike those past eras, the United States of 2026 is no longer an industrial nation.4 When, for example, FDR inaugurated his shipbuilding surge in 1941, he was redirecting the largest industrial economy in the history of the world to ship production. In his time, the US was the world’s largest steel producer, had reusable production lines that could be quickly reoriented towards military production, and had a huge surplus of industrial labor that could be quickly redirected. Today, that same push would stutter for lack of inputs. Meanwhile, the engineering requirements to produce modern ships have steadily increased. Every ship, including cargo ships, has gotten larger, more complex, and more specialized than it ever was. Just as repurposed car manufacturing lines can’t build planes anymore, today’s stagnant shipyards can’t scale to mass production without years of effort.

What’s Being Done

The Trump administration has actually launched several overlapping efforts to revive American shipbuilding. On April 9th, 2025, President Trump signed the “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” executive order, which established the Maritime Action Plan (MAP). This outlined a broad set of objectives and policy recommendations across four areas: supply-side shipbuilding reforms, workforce expansion, strengthening the industrial base, and, most interestingly, a set of policies to create and fund demand for domestically constructed ships.

There are four facets to this. The first is the Maritime Security Trust Fund (MSTF), a government funding pool, derived from fees on foreign-built vessels transiting American ports, that is earmarked for other demand-side programs. This funds Maritime Prosperity Zones, which are akin to China’s Special Economic Zones but focused on shipbuilding capacity. It modernizes federal financing tools to allow more loan disbursal to shipyards. And finally, it institutes cargo preference for American ships—in effect, strengthening the Jones Act for government cargo.

The SHIPS for America Act is an in-progress legislation that implements the demand-and-funding architecture outlined above. The administration plans to submit this to the House after its FY2027 budget request passes, so it’s hard to say how much of these changes will actually come into effect.

The final layer is the “Make American Shipbuilding Great Again” agreement between the US and Korea. Here, Korean shipbuilders pledge to invest $150 billion over the next 10 years to build and modernize shipyards in America. The flagship project is Hanwha Philly, a $5 billion plan to add two docks and three quays to an existing shipyard to raise capacity from 1 ship a year to about 20. This is anchored by orders for 2 LNG tankers and 10 medium-size tankers. The first delivery is predicted to come in 2029. This is the first pillar in a larger plan of offering foreign shipbuilders contracts for ships built in their own yards, with a commitment to subsequent investment in American domestic production. The Coast Guard’s purchase of Finnish icebreakers will follow this pattern as well.

In general, these measures make sense. America’s strength is its massive market, while its weakness is its decaying industrial base. Policies that leverage that latent demand to expand the industrial base are fruitful ways to expand national power. The risk is, as always, continued government support. The 1970 Merchant Marine Act led to major short-term growth, but this was undone by the Reagan administration. This latest push doesn’t even have a legislative arm yet. Thus far, it’s being orchestrated solely through executive orders and trade deals. All of these are ephemeral mechanisms that can be undone by a future democratic administration—or even just Trump himself next year5. [footnote: Stephen miller certainly tried - Korean ICE sweep].

But if the SHIPS for America Act does pass, however, then there will be a dedicated funding stream for shipbuilding revival. This is crucial. The Navy has failed for decades to induce private investment because it is incapable of providing credible demand signals. A mere executive order would be even less credible to shipbuilders, who have to plan in decades. But a law creating a dedicated funding stream makes the signal far more credible, which makes the entire agenda far more resilient.

The MASGA component in particular is a unique victory for both the US and Korea. The US gains process knowledge to operate a large-scale shipyard—something no American company has done in the modern age. Hanwha is also planning to rotate American workers to Korea for training, which will seed a new skilled workforce in the US. For Korea, Hanwha’s commercial yard is a stepping stone to contracting directly with the Navy to design and build warships. It’s a huge new revenue stream for them, and allows Korea to bring lessons from American defense technology back to Korea’s own burgeoning defense industry.

I think, if this program is sustained for the next two decades, it will be a major triumph for the United States, and perhaps one of the Trump administration’s few positive legacies.

However, there are clear limitations. This does nothing to solve the problems in Navy design and procurement—those are entirely distinct. It also doesn’t improve production rates for nuclear carriers and submarines, the long-tail engineering-constrained Navy outputs, which require a much finer grained industrial base expansion. The MSTF also does not include any provisions for clawbacks for underperforming firms, which risks the fund becoming yet another toothless subsidy to the oligopoly. And finally, the Korea-rotation plan creates a “bridge” workforce for immediate needs, but doesn’t do much to actually expand the workforce within America. Most likely, Hanwha will bring in Korean workers to address the immediate shortage, like TSMC using Taiwanese workers on its Arizona plants.

Nevertheless, these steps are significant. With this, America will produce its first globally competitive, domestically manufactured, oil tankers since the 1970s. They will create the largest commercial shipyard in the US, aiming to produce 20 hulls a year in a country that produced fewer than 10 oceangoing vessels in 2025. Together, these two milestones will seed the beginnings of a new export industry in America.

For The Future

Trump’s attempted reforms are a decade late, and they do not address the Navy’s two core issues: procurement woes and the industrial base. The administration is touting American-made LNG tankers, but these are not an end goal—only an instrumental one. The commercial industry, after all, is valuable only to buttress naval construction, but whether that comes to be remains in question.

The reforms we need are far wider. The Navy’s procurement is fatally flawed and has resulted in two generations of failed acquisitions that have left the fleet unprepared for tomorrow’s war. The industrial base has contracted, cratering naval construction capacity. And just as these factors reach their nadir, China’s peer threat has fully matured. It now threatens every foundation of American power.

This future was chosen by that post-1991 generation. Their so-called “peace dividend” produced our current military incapacity, and their lingering influence maintained our inertia. They were convinced that further military expansion in a unipolar world was vanity; now, only their own vanity is clear. China “rose” two decades ago but the US is only now adjusting to this reality.

Yet decline was a deliberate decision, and it is one that can be undone. The US has retained many advantages from which it can rebuild its naval power. This reversal, however, will require in abundance the one resource that America has a scarcity of: sustained political will.

Appendix: The Jones Act

You cannot write an article about American shipbuilding without mentioning the Jones Act. It is perhaps the biggest bugbear of today’s technocratic edifice, uniting the entire center-left and center-right in opposition. The CSIS, The Heritage Foundation, Cato, The Mercatus Center, and the Brookings Institution all support its repeal. It may seem like an oversight, then, that it’s only been on the periphery of this essay.

The Jones Act, officially known as The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, regulates a number of different aspects of domestic seaborne freight. Its most important provision states that all cargo traveling between US ports must travel on ships that are built in America, owned by companies that are 75% American-held, fly the US flag (i.e. be registered in the US), and the majority of the crew must be US citizens or permanent residents.

It’s obviously true that the Jones Act is bad policy. It is protectionism without industrial policy taken to its logical extreme. Over the 106 years since its creation, it has led to inefficiency in American shipyards, higher shipping costs for American companies, and higher costs for American consumers. It has created a parallel industry of expensive Jones-Act eligible cargo ships. These make a parody of made-in-America requirements, importing some 70% of their components from abroad with only hull fabrication and final assembly occurring in inefficient American shipyards. The Jones Act also interferes with critical government functions. Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, but supply ships already in the area couldn’t be unloaded for days because they were foreign-made. The same happened with Katrina in 2005. Nowadays, it’s common practice for presidents to issue Jones Act waivers during any national emergency. Most recently, President Trump did this to ease supply disruptions after launching the 2026 Iran War.

And yet, I haven’t focused on it because for ship construction, especially Navy warship construction, it is legitimately not relevant. The Navy struggles because of America’s decaying shipbuilding industrial base, a decades-long decline in shipyard investment, and a generational workforce shortage, along with its own internal procurement struggles—not protectionism. Commercial shipbuilding follows the same pathologies. Indeed, that a domestic commercial shipbuilding industry exists at all is due to the Jones Act; without it, American shipping companies would just be consumers of Hanwha or Hyundai or CSSC like everyone else.

In my recent article contrasting Chinese dynamism with American sloth, I described how the Chinese state-capitalist system has an unusual tolerance for social disruption, which, when paired with prescient leadership, enables massive societal uplift. Many of the comments, however, extrapolated this observation about state capacity into prophecies of inevitable American decline that I did not intend to imply. Perhaps the slight polemical detour gave some of the audience license to veer towards doomerism.

So let’s be clear: this is an incorrect assumption. A united Western alliance possesses many structural advantages the Chinese state will struggle to replicate. Instead, I think China-hysteria is largely just a belated overcorrection. After two decades disparaging the idea that any other power could pose a challenge to Western hegemony, we’re now astounded by the very existence of competition.

But this overreaction blinds us to nuance. China is not a national wunderkind: it is a technologically-advanced state that has an extraordinary capability to marshal national resources. Most of its successes involve utilizing this advantage to scale a mature technology, become its dominant provider, and use the synergies that affords to expand horizontally and vertically. This strategy finds success in some industries but meets with failure in others.

The pattern of where it fails is informative.

One illustrative example of failure is in jet engines. China has tried and failed for some fifty years to produce military and commercial jet engines at parity with the West. Why did it fail? Because, as I explore below, jet engines are almost uniquely designed to expose the weaknesses in the Chinese system. They’re a low-margin market focused on long-term reliability where manufacturing quality and consistency are paramount. Iteration speed is very slow and there’s a pervasive, internationally enforced, regulatory barrier for every finished product. These together neutralize the usual Chinese advantages in skilled labor, capital, and speed-to-scale. They also prevent traditional domestic protectionism from adding much value.

Analyzing the Chinese failure to produce viable jet engines gives us important lessons about the nature of the West’s remaining comparative advantage.

Turbine Blades As A Microcosm

A high-pressure turbine blade in a modern jet engine is expected to sit in gas hotter than lava, rotating faster than the maximum redline of a Formula One engine, while sustaining a consistent centrifugal load heavier than a Ford Focus. And it’s expected to do this without stretching, melting, or cracking for 30,000 hours—about 4 years—of continuous flying time. A failure in these blades would be catastrophic, resulting in the destruction of the engine, likely followed by the plane itself.

Achieving these requirements has made it one of the most complex manufacturing outputs in the world. The initial challenge comes from fabricating the material.

Frank Whittle’s first jet engines used Nimonic-75: a nickel-chromium-titanium alloy that crept (i.e. elongated under stress) over 700C, with a service lifespan of only for tens of hours. The breakthrough came in the late 1940s, when a British metallurgist realized that adding more titanium and some aluminum produced dramatic strengthening. This yielded Nimonic-80A, which is the base of every subsequent superalloy. Each subsequent generation then added new elements to the mix to solve the previous generation’s failure modes. Second-generation alloys added rhenium for creep resistance, a metal so rare its annual world production is fifty tons. Third-generation alloys doubled the rhenium content, which improved temperature capability but created brittleness under load, so the most recent iteration adds ruthenium, an ever rarer metal only produced as part of South African platinum mining.

The other major challenge is casting. Molten metals do not cool uniformly. Instead, different parts of the metal solidify at the same time, and these simultaneous solidification processes form multiple crystals in the final solid. These crystals meet at grain boundaries. Historically, the most common failure mode for a turbine blade is a fissure along these grains. To mitigate this, the modern turbine blade is cast using the single-crystal method. Developed in the 1980s, this method maintains a uniform temperature gradient along the molten metal’s surface to pull solidification in one direction, and combines that with a grain selector, a helical “pigtail” shape in the caster that compresses the solidifying metal to ensure that only a single nucleation process succeeds. This creates a final metal that has no grains at all.

The biggest complication here is yield. During the single-crystal casting process, dozens of variables need to be maintained within very small tolerances. Any disturbances during the process, any imperfections in the base material, any trace dissolved gases during nucleation, and you have micro-grains that cause the blade to fail certification. Established manufacturers still only reach 50-70% yield; a new entrant would be in the low tens for years.

Consequently, there are only seven companies in the world that can build turbine blades at scale. First are the three main engine manufacturers: General Electric, with casting facilities in Quebec and South Carolina, Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut, and Rolls Royce in Bristol, UK. The other four are specialty manufacturers: Howmet Aerospace in Michigan, PCC Airfoils in Ohio, Consolidated Precision Products in California, and Doncasters, a British company with plants in the UK, Germany, and Alabama.

Each of these companies relies on a deep network of suppliers. The alloys are produced by four companies across the US, who source the elements from around the world. Ceramics are sourced from two companies: CoorsTek in Colorado or Morgan Materials in the UK. Injection dies come from Japan, Germany, or Switzerland. The Bridgman furnaces to cast the blade are built by four companies: ALD in Germany, Consarc in New Jersey, Retech in California, and ECM in France. Coating is sourced from companies in the US, Switzerland and Germany. And finally, inspection and certification equipment is a broad category coming from a swath of companies in Japan, the US, Germany, and the UK.

All in all, a single turbine blade contains products from some 100 different companies, spread across 25 different US states and 15 different countries.

And turbine blades, as complex as they are, form just one component of a jet engine. A complete engine has over 40,000 parts, each of which operates under similarly extreme conditions that stretch the boundaries of conventional fabrication, and consequently, has its own exotic material composition and manufacturing process, optimized through decades of continuous engineering effort. This creates a final product that is dependent on a massive horizontal network of suppliers, with production centered in the US, the UK, France, and Germany and raw minerals sourced worldwide. In the modern day, the largest engine manufacturers are Rolls-Royce, General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, and Safran, who, through various joint ventures, produce the vast majority of the most advanced commercial and military jet engines in the world. This is a longstanding equilibrium. For the past half-century, these four companies have powered most aircraft produced in the world. The major notable exception is the Soviet Union/Russia’s domestic industry, which has consistently remained a decade behind the West.

But there is another—far smaller—player in the industry: China. Since 1986, when Deng Xiaoping established a strategic imperative for indigenous jet engine production, China has invested hundreds of billions in creating their own, parallel industry. This mirrors a massive outgrowth in Chinese investment in all sectors, in service of China’s nebulous goal of “strategic autonomy”—better known in the west as autarky. And in most industries, China has had unadulterated success. China’s vast pools of high-skilled labor and near limitless state-provided capital have allowed it to take over each technological frontier, squeezing out incumbent players. Notable examples here are electric cars, renewable energy, electronic components, and mature-node semiconductors. This pattern of Chinese industrial dominance has become so consistent that the West almost deems it prophecy.

It may be surprising, then, that in jet engines, China remains at least a full decade behind the West. Even after forty years of state-directed investment, China’s flagship commercial jet, the C919, is still powered by the LEAP-1C, made by CFM, a GE-Safran joint venture. China’s prospective competitor, the CJ-1000A, has faced numerous delays, and is now not slated to enter production until at least 2030. Meanwhile, China’s first fifth-generation fighter, the Chengdu J-20B, relied on a thirty-year old Russian AL-31 for a full decade until its domestic WS-15 program, which was started in the 1990s, was deemed ready for production. Even then, it’s projected to be far behind the Pratt & Whitney F135, the F-35’s engine, in durability, reliability, and efficiency. Its other fighter uses an outdated, 20-year-old Chinese engine. Indeed, China, which has otherwise mastered the catch-up growth formula, and has built a massive bank of manufacturing talent and capital, has not managed to produce any asymmetric speedup in jet engine manufacturing. The frontier remains clearly western.

Why? Because China’s most visible successes—the ones we cite most often when we ruminate on the “death of Western dynamism”—have broadly similar market structures. Jet engines are notably distinct.

China has excelled in industries with legible technological targets, well-known manufacturing processes, and fast iteration cycles. Their strategy has been to choose technologies with mature fundamentals but underserved demand, and then deploy capital to scale up production very quickly. These industries have fast iteration cycles, allowing Chinese companies to rapidly improve their designs, while their scale allows them to undercut Western manufacturers on price and quantity. The Chinese state helps this along by protecting nascent industries from foreign competition, giving them a domestic market to expand in before moving into exports.

Together, these factors allow Chinese firms to define a new, much lower floor in the market which they can own entirely. This allows them to accumulate knowledge and optimize their manufacturing process, eventually enabling them to move upmarket into higher-margin segments where they compete directly with Western incumbents.

The jet engine is the antithesis of each of those properties. Reliability targets are not like battery range or solar panel yield. They depend on alignment between every component in an engine, making them hard to directly optimize for. Iteration speed is very slow because reliability is very difficult to know a priori: it requires extensive testing and real-world monitoring. And jet engines do not have any lower-tier market with underserved demand: there’s a small set of customers with very strict requirements and a mature set of incumbents to supply them.

China’s jet engine program is stuttering because it’s applying a scale-focused method to an industry where the moat is accumulated knowledge.

Where China Succeeds

The most illustrative example of Chinese catch-up growth is its domination of electric vehicle production. China started building EV capacity in 2009, when Tesla was still a limited-capacity luxury brand and Western manufacturers were focused on building hybrid cars to preserve the value of their internal-combustion engine investments. Chinese manufacturers thus entered a wide-open market without any real incumbents. They were starting fresh—they didn’t need to retool their workforce or rebuild their factories. Electric vehicles are also considerably easier to manufacture than gas cars. Instead of 2,000 part internal-combustion engines built on decades of mechanical engineering expertise, with transmissions, fuel injection, and emissions controls, electric cars are driven by a single commoditized component: the brushless motor. The Chinese state helped them along by creating domestic demand, where Chinese citizens were given expansive subsidies to buy EVs, while quotas were set for the number of imported gas cars that could be registered any given year.

Additionally, there was existing synergy China could exploit. Chinese EV success was predicated on earlier successes in battery manufacturing. BYD actually was founded in 1995 as a battery manufacturer, as part of a state-directed initiative that saw batteries as a core strategic component. The pattern here is similar: China deployed almost $100 billion in the industry to subsidize scale-up, and used import controls to artificially create early demand. Chinese companies initially focused on lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry rather than the previously dominant nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) for two reasons: LFP was largely untouched by Western companies, and Chinese companies controlled most of the supply chain for LFP batteries. This allowed them to expand rapidly on the lower-end of the market. Korean and Japanese companies had a long history in NMC for customer electronics. Success in LFP gave China advantages in scale and manufacturing process knowledge, that allowed them to expand into that contested NMC market and in general, higher-end EVs.

This state-directed industrial policy created China’s version of the Korean chaebol or Japanese zaibatsu: a vertically integrated corporation that dominates entire segments of the economy. BYD, now the world’s largest EV producer, started in batteries as discussed above, and now also makes its own semiconductors, its own motors, its own software, and its own charging infrastructure. Huawei, which started in telecom infrastructure, now designs its own CPUs and GPUs, manufactures a wide range of consumer electronics, and even has its own AI foundation models. Nowadays, it also sells high-end electric cars. Verticalization, in both cases, gives companies pricing power over the entire supply chain, and—equally important in industrial policy—gives the state a small set of target companies to optimize.

But jet engines are a technological challenge that China’s state-capitalist model is uniquely unsuited for. Jet engines necessarily have slow iteration speeds. Their technical challenges are centered around optimizing long-run reliability, preventing catastrophic failure, and minimizing maintenance. Understanding these properties really only happens through an extensive testing regime and then, real-world deployment—together, that takes years. Additionally, as we’ve described, every component of a jet engine has undergone over half-a-century of continuous development, sprouting a network of firms each focused on one specific manufacturing process. Decades of built-up process knowledge have allowed them to build the intuition to optimize their yield and innovate on their formulae. In a world where simulation is still primitive, where physical data is used to refine the simulation rather than vice-versa, this procedural intuition is critical.

Together, this means that jet engine manufacturing has a much lower threshold for capital saturation. Capital can build out massive facilities and hire skilled operational engineers, but it cannot replicate process knowledge or specialization. This, in turn, defeats the traditional strategies China usually applies for manufacturing catch-up. Demand subsidization and import substitution doesn’t work when your domestic industry is two decades behind and cannot produce asymmetric growth.

And unlike many other areas, reverse engineering doesn’t add much value, because the real moat is in manufacturing yield, not one-off success. China has spent decades attempting this exact approach. In 1975, well before Deng’s modern launch of Chinese jet program, the Chinese government bought the rights to produce Rolls-Royce Spey MK.202, a state-of-the-art turbofan engine. They expected to have production up within a decade, but the WS9, China’s first successful turbofan, didn’t start large-scale production until 2013—almost forty years later. The core problem is that building a fully indigenous jet engine production line requires replicating the West’s entire vertical network of suppliers, from component manufacturers to tooling producers. China still depends on the West—mostly, Germany—for much of its heavy industrial tooling, and engines are no different.

Reexamining our turbine blade example, the core intellectual property is not the base material formula, nor the science of single-crystal manufacturing. These are well-understood. Instead, the IP is in the trace elements used in the blade to mitigate particular failure modes that are visible only under long-term sustained load, the process knowledge that tells the casters what parameter to change when yield is unexpectedly low, and the institutional memory that allows for faster iteration on each of the above. When it takes months to determine whether a single change has produced a positive impact, directional intuition is critical to faster development, and that lives entirely as tacit knowledge amongst generations of aerospace, materials, and mechanical engineers.

The Margin Squeeze

Another important factor is that the market for commercial jet engines is notably different from that of other Chinese successes. Unlike EVs, electronics, and batteries, jet engines do not have a low-margin market that China can use as its initial target. They are a highly specialized technology with only two real buyers: commercial aircraft producers and military-industrial complexes. We will discuss the military next, but commercial aircraft suppliers are part of the airline supply chain, which is one of the lowest margin sectors in the world.

The average airline is extremely capital intensive, as it needs to acquire a full fleet of aircraft, hangers, and maintenance facilities. They also have very large operational expenses, as they employ a massive workforce of pilots, crewmembers, and mechanics, and pay for ongoing maintenance on every component in aircraft. And, the industry is incredibly competitive. Most major routes have multiple airlines attempting to undercut each other, and they can’t differentiate on much beyond price. And, despite all of these issues, new airlines are constantly entering the industry, creating competition and driving down prices.

All told, this produces an industry with an average profit margin of 3.9%—one of the lowest in the world.

Airlines are thus extremely price elastic, a proclivity that percolates down through their entire supply chain. Consequently, engine manufacturers usually sell each engine at-cost and make most of their profit on maintenance, servicing, and part replacement. Each new engine generation involves hundreds of millions in capital expenditure for incremental gains in fuel efficiency and reliability. Usually, Boeing or Airbus, the world’s only scaled-up commercial aircraft manufacturers, partner directly with an engine company to produce a new engine optimized specifically for their latest plane design, so they can harmonize the entire architecture to achieve an overall fuel efficiency or reliability target.

On top of this, the certification regime for jet engines is one of the most complex regulatory processes in any industry. America’s FAA and Europe’s EASA together define a rigorous certification process that has been adopted by most of the world. Both certifications are the price of admission to global commercial aviation. For one example, consider the GE9X engine. It alone had 5,000 hours of testing across several test engines, with 8,000 test cycles simulating takeoff, landing, and cruise operations. It faced a litany of specific tests that simulated altitude, weather, ice, wind, bird ingestion, stalls, dust ingestion, and reliability. And this was for a derivative engine—a from-scratch engine would require considerably more. These tests are all essential for safety, but they squeeze the margins of the industry even more.

This together paints a picture of an industry that combines extreme cost sensitivity with an extensive regulatory burden. These are nearly impossible conditions for new entrants to succeed in. Is it any surprise, then, that China’s CJ-1000A has faced interminable delays? The program was started in 2009 and initially projected to reach production by 2015. Instead, prototypes only launched in 2017, in-flight testing (as a redundant engine on a four-engine freighter) began in 2023, and domestic certification isn’t projected until at least 2027. 2030 is the earliest it will be attached to the C919, China’s domestic airliner, which currently relies on CFM’s LEAP-1C. FAA or EASA certification is not on the horizon at all, meaning the engine is likely to remain a domestic backstop for the foreseeable future.

The Captive Consumer

China has had more success in military engines, which makes sense: the military doesn’t have the same requirements around efficiency or reliability where the thorniest engineering problems lie. China has two fifth-generation fighters, the Chengdu J-20B and the Shenyang J-35A, intended to be analogues of the US F-22 and F-35 respectively, and each is intended to be fitted with a domestic powerplant: the WS-15 for the J-20B, and WS-19 for the J-35A.

Both of these engine programs have ballooned in time-of-delivery and in cost. The J-20B entered service in 2017 with a Russian AL-31, transitioning first to an outdated Chinese engine before the WS-15 entered production in 2023. China claims it has roughly comparable performance with the F119 (which powers the F-22): 18.4 tons of thrust to the F119’s 15.9 tons, using single-crystal turbine blades and strong afterburning performance. It’s unknown whether it has comparable supercruise performance (sustained supersonic speed without afterburning): China claims it can cruise at Mach 1.3, slower than the F-22’s Mach 1.8, but this has not been demonstrated. The WS-19, on the other hand, is still five years off of production, leaving the J-35 using a 20 year-old WS-21.

Chinese military statements do need to be caveated. The F-35’s many operational issues are public because of a Western engineering culture that prioritizes shared learning. China has no equivalent. It has nothing like our annual Pentagon reports. F-35 crashes make worldwide news, but Chinese military aviation accidents are not reported. Maintenance issues remain classified. Given how little public operational data exists on the WS-15, it’s quite hard to believe that its performance matches its optimistic claims.

But even if we take Chinese claims at face value, China remains some two decades behind the West. The F119 started production in 2001, and the first F-22 was delivered in 2005. It’s now a mature engine with 21 years of service history and proven reliability. The F-35’s engine, the Pratt & Whitney F135, started production in 2009. America is now developing its sixth-generation fighter aircraft, and has two engine prototypes designed around adaptive cycling, where the turbofan ratio changes for efficiency in both high-thrust usage and long-range cruise. This is slated for 2028. China, on the other hand, hasn’t started development yet on its equivalent, and with its WS-19 issues, probably will not until the mid-2030s.

Why Would Anyone Build An Engine?

Putting all of this together, we see an industry with massive technical complexity, extremely thin margins, and very high regulatory requirements. It has huge barriers to entry, both in terms of capital but also the amount of learning and time it takes to reach viability. Any new entrant faces decades of investment with negative cashflow before any return is possible. This type of industry is almost tailor-made for long-standing oligopolies, who made their investments incrementally, one innovation at a time, with positive cash-flow at every stage.

Why would anyone else ever enter this industry?

For military usage, at least, the logic is sound. Yes, China’s air force is a captive market likely paying higher unit costs for weaker performance, but this is a necessary condition. No country that has ambitions to become a global power can depend on someone else for the propulsion of its fighter jets, the most important tool in the modern military. Before the WS-15, China relied on Russian AL-31’s, and Russia actually tried to stop selling them the engine because they feared China developing its own program. India’s “indigenous” fighter jet program faces this deficiency. They cannot make an engine, despite decades of trying, so they will rely on a GE engine with the subservience to American foreign policy that implies. Similarly, Turkey’s KAAN fifth-gen fighter will launch with the F-16’s engine. They’ve had their own turbofan in development since 2010, but this likely won’t bear fruit until at least the mid-2030s.

But for commercial engines, the strategic case is hazier and the economic case is terminal.

Strategy and Spillover

China’s main stated reason for building a commercial jet engine is quite simple: airlines are a strategic industry, and China wants all strategic industries to be indigenized. China constantly cites an episode in 2025, where export controls haphazardly applied by the Trump administration blocked the export of GE LEAP engines for the C919 for two months—and it is clear why this would induce fear in the CCP. But the actual strategic returns on indigenization break down once you consider the details.

First, the C919, China’s only domestic airliner, depends almost entirely on Western components. Its avionics, flight control systems, auxiliary power systems, weather systems, navigation systems, and a multitude of other components are all Western-produced, and all are about as hard to replicate as a jet engine is. Fully indigenizing the C919 is a multi-decade endeavor.

Second, the CJ-1000A is only one engine, tuned for one aircraft. The C919 aims to be comparable to the Airbus A320neo or the Boeing 737-MAX, but with a shorter range. It will handle a limited set of flights, mostly within China or to neighboring countries. It won’t, for example, replace the widebodies used for trans-Pacific travel. Building those requires another massive multi-decade project, with a new supply line, new capacity, and new engineering constraints. Engines are not all variations on the same.

And third, in doing this, China signs itself up to a constant zero-sum race to improve its engines to match the Western frontier. Any lag and it will lose its foreign buyers and condemn its domestic airliners to irrelevance. The western manufacturers, to mitigate this, constantly reorganize themselves into various joint ventures (CFM, Engine Alliance, IAE, etc) to share knowledge and costs. China would have to manage this alone.

Another explicitly stated reason is spillover. Jet engines require technologies that are used across a variety of other industries. For example, single-crystal engine turbine blades are also useful for power-generation turbines. Yet, the problem here is that jet engines are not an “easier” industry that allows you to generate cashflow and test your production: they are the hardest entry point possible. If you wanted to build power turbines, or maritime turbines, for example, then wouldn’t you just spin up a project specifically for that instead?

Civil-Military Fusion

The other reason is civil-military fusion: that military jet engines are a necessity, and commercial engines share enough of the underlying infrastructure and engineering that the marginal cost of the civilian program is far lower. And in one sense, this is true. The WS programs both have significant crossover with the CJ-1000A program. They both require single-crystal turbine blade casting, and the casting facilities can be shared between them. The same applies for powder-metallurgy turbine disks, for superalloy supply chains, along with shared manufacturing equipment, testing infrastructure, and engineering talent. Given this, once you’re committed to building a military engine, the obvious follow-up is to reuse that infrastructure for commercial jets.

This is, after all, the same logic that seeded both the Western and the Russian commercial jet engine programs in the 1950s. However, in the modern day, commercial jet engines have many additional requirements that complicate the proposition—requirements the Western or Russian programs didn’t have to deal with. The modern commercial engine is optimized for efficiency and reliability to a massive degree, well surpassing military requirements. Civilian aircraft also face an intensive certification process, another separate engineering effort. And finally, as we will see next, the payoff for commercial engines is quite weak, as they face a contested international market with very low margins.

Economics

The only dimension left is the economic case, which is, by the basic arithmetic, deficient. China has spent between 49 and 72 billion on commercial jet engine development over the past 30 years, and a substantial fraction of that was on the CJ-1000A commercial engine program. The engine, if it ever reaches its own lofty goals, will replace the LEAP-1C on the C919. China wants to produce about 100 C919 aircraft per year, so this is about 200 engines. At 15 million per engine, that’s $3 billion per year in engine costs. Against that, you have that capital investment, the (higher than the LEAP) unit costs of the CJ-1000A, the continual R&D expenses to stay on the technological frontier, and the operational expense of maintaining and expanding the production line. These ongoing costs alone will exceed the LEAP’s purchase price. And the commercial market here is limited. Because FAA and EASA certification is not on the horizon, China is limited to domestic sales, which isn’t enough for the program to provide a financial return.

Altogether, this is why most others have not bothered entering the market. Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy—all wealthy countries with large manufacturing sectors—have decided it’s better to buy engines and focus elsewhere. The USSR, now Russia, entered in the 1950s, when the technology was still new and the Western advantage was much smaller, and they still, over their entire history, did not produce a civil or military engine that had parity with West. Their commercial airliners were almost entirely limited to domestic use, and every country that could buy Western hardware chose it instead. China is a much stronger technological power than the USSR ever was, but it’s entering this market at a much more difficult time, and in doing so, it risks the same folly as the Russians.

Opportunity Cost

China obviously knows all of this, but it still stubbornly persists, because its goal is autarky and indigenizing jet engine manufacturing is a core ideological pillar. The CCP sees interdependence as a strategic vulnerability—a position that has hardened in recent years after Western technology denial has escalated. Under this framing, even the attempt to build the CJ-1000A is a triumph. The CJ-1000A program is not an expensive, contingent R&D project in a low-margin industry, but a symbol of national sovereignty that gleams even brighter because of its unattainability.

This matters because at this moment, China has the highest opportunity cost it will ever have. Right now, it has a massive, high-skilled workforce and dominance in a number of critical industries. The modernization that Deng Xiaoping launched, and that each subsequent premier faithfully nurtured, has now fully blossomed into massive domestic industrial capability. Xi Jinping now individually commands more state capacity than any historical leader before him. The confluence of this power structure with China’s awesome technological capabilities mean that right now, he could achieve almost any strategic imperative he chooses.

But this apogee is a mere temporary summit. China faces many headwinds going forward. Its demographics are dire, with a population set to age and shrink over each upcoming decade. Its Western rivals are currently flailing, but their decline is neither assured nor expected—and despite its rhetoric, China knows this. And even now, China’s many advantages and achievements still only grant it regional preeminence, not global hegemony.

China needs to use this moment to expand its highest-leverage bets. This is what they’re doing in AI, which matches the rough criteria for Chinese success. In AI, western competitors are chasing peak performance at the top of the market, leaving underserved demand that China can swallow. AI only has a decade of tacit knowledge accrual, and software has the fastest iteration cycle of any major engineering project. China’s models are about a year behind, but they’re open-source, cheap to run, and easy to finetune, which opens a huge market of companies that don’t need the cutting-edge.

Semiconductors are another success. China already produces the majority of mature-node conductors, which are sufficient for most of its electronics and much of its defense usage. It now is forced to embark on building EUV lithography, which is the exact long iteration cycle, deep tacit knowledge catch-up pattern that has doomed China’s jet engine program, but at least this is a high-leverage bet worthy of the effort.

Commercial jet engines, on the other hand, do not match this criteria. The several-hundred billion dollar outlay (at minimum) that China is embarking on could be spent better in the industries where it has more synergy, more comparative advantage, and a higher expected value. That China continues to push forward is a limitation of a system that hyper-focuses on legible targets and deliberately ignores market feedback.

The West, in a counterfactual world, would never embark on this program at this time because it relies on private capital, and private capital demands returns.

Instead, that private capital is making asymmetric bets that try to leapfrog the state-of-art and, by doing so, undermine incumbent advantage. Boom Supersonic and Hermeus have raised billions to build supersonic commercial jets that the airline oligopoly will not fund. Anduril and Shield AI are producing autonomous fighter jets that usual Boeing-Lockheed-Northrop defense cartel will not build. These bets are a direct product of the West’s decentralized capital infrastructure that doesn’t need politically legible goals or consensus: it can make contrarian bets with high-failure probabilities if the potential return is high enough. The future will be determined by the long-run innovation capability of each approach. Will China’s focus on scaling well-known technologies accrete into an unsurpassable capacity advantage? Or will Western focus on asymmetric technology create more new industries than China can catch up to?

This February, as San Francisco’s rainy season waned to a dour cloudiness, I found myself at a Winter Olympics-themed party. Eileen Gu was everywhere. Her face adorned the living room wall, her reruns blasted on the TV, and her name was the answer for two different trivia questions, including “Who is the most decorated American skier?”

That answer is, obviously, incorrect. Gu is the most decorated freestyle skier, but Mikaela Shiffrin, an alpine skier, wins in the overall count.

Also, Eileen Gu isn’t an American skier.

You could be forgiven for forgetting. Gu was, after all, born and raised in San Francisco. Her mother is a Stanford-educated venture capitalist; her father is a Harvard graduate. Gu grew up in Sea Cliff, one of San Francisco’s most-exclusive neighborhoods, where sprawling pueblo-style mansions overlook the Pacific ocean.

She started skiing at 3, joined Northstar’s ski team at 8, won her first championship at 9, and started international competition in 2018. In 2019, as China unveiled the first facilities for the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics, she made the announcement: Eileen Gu, the American-born American skier, would be representing China in its home games.

Like everything else under the CCP, this was not a spontaneous upsurge of patriotism. The Chinese government launched a program in 2015 to recruit diaspora athletes to boost its showing at the Olympics. Gu wasn’t even the first choice. They approached Alysa Liu first, but her father, a student who fled from tanks at Tiananmen square, refused without consideration.

The details of the deal Gu’s mother hashed out aren’t public, but quite a few things are clear. The government promised massive state media promotion during the Beijing winter games, a network of endorsements with Chinese brands, and fast-tracked her citizenship. They also allowed her to retain her American passport despite China’s official ban on dual citizenship.1

In 2022, she was listed as the second highest-earning female athlete in the world.

This all was quite reasonable to most people at the Winter Olympics party. When Gu’s backstory was mentioned, someone quipped, to a gale of laughter, “She did the most American thing ever—she sold out.”

I laughed too. It was a good line. But I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards. What struck me first was the composition of that room. The party was full of software engineers, data scientists, and researchers, from Berkeley or Stanford or UIUC or MIT. Everyone was intelligent, upwardly-mobile, and recently removed from an international vacation.

This was, in short, the vaunted “coastal elite.” They were the products of our most prestigious institutions, who now dominated our most powerful and vibrant companies. Some were immigrant children, others were many-generation Americans, but they all shared a similar appetite for achievement, status, and wealth.

This is the group that benefits most from modern America. They are the party helped by international outsourcing, elite credentialism, and professional stratification. And yet, inexplicably, they seemed to have little but contempt for the very country that produced them.

Indeed, for them, Gu’s example was rational, even admirable. She’d accumulated capital in America, and then, when a new opportunity presented itself, she deployed that capital for an improved returns. That those returns now required allying herself with the geopolitical enemy of the country of her birth was a logistical detail, not a moral consideration. Indeed, many of them looked at her in envy, imagining themselves doing the same.

Following that frame, Eileen Gu is a visible hallmark of a new conception of American identity. Here, America is a land of rootless opportunity, where one immigrates to extract and accumulate, not to inhabit or even respect. Citizenship is not a mark of allegiance, but rather, a market position, and patriotism is gauche, or worse: morally suspect. One isn’t an American, one is in America, and when China takes the lead in tech, or when Trump does something too fascist, or when the Bay Area becomes too dirty, one will just decamp elsewhere.

None of this sounds particularly subversive. If you’re an educated professional in a liberal city, what I described is the most visible form of national identity you see. And given how ensconced we are in this postmodern cynicism, it’s easy to forget how strange it is.

Imagine, instead, that it’s 1972. An American athlete couldn’t even think about representing the USSR in the Olympics: it would be tantamount to defection. Or more directly, imagine Eileen Gu’s direct inversion, a Chinese athlete wanting to represent the United States. The Chinese government would prevent it, and that athlete would face real repercussions. At the very least, they would never be allowed entrance to China again.

Instead, in modern America, we not only allow such a transparent betrayal, but we celebrate it. Eileen Gu skies for China but her victories are celebrated on American news channels. Even as she deflected comments on Peng Shuai in a press conference or downplayed the Uyghur concentration camps in Time magazine, she continued to exercise the privileges of American citizenship (unless, of course, she diligently applied for a Schengen visa on each of her many trips to Europe). And out of all of the deserving Chinese-Americans in the country, she was chosen as Grand Marshal of SF’s Lunar New Year Parade this year.

What we’re seeing here is the forging of a new social class, the professional-managerial class—American capitalism’s latest invention and world export. It’s a class reared in postmodern detachment, for whom America is not a country to support but an economic zone designed to provide maximum value. For them, citizenship is just one in a list of privileges they’re accumulating, and America is just one option out of 195. Eileen Gu is the latest emblem of that class. Her mother fled China when Maoism didn’t discriminate towards the wealthy; now that China is more amenable, her daughter is open to going back.

This isn’t a matter of taste of envy, nor of mere *ressentiment* against someone else’s success. It’s about the concept of nationhood itself. America is, in a specific and unusual sense, a nation forged from belief, and because of that, it’s uniquely fragile. Lincoln articulated it most clearly at Gettysburg: America is a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Indeed, we are a creedal people, united by our belief in core axioms about what makes a just, strong, and virtuous society. Our country is undergirded by an almost delusional faith in the government of, by and for, the people. It’s defined by an undying, unending optimism that America is an exceptional place with its own destiny, and the things we do here will save the entire world. As John Gast—an immigrant himself!—depicted, Columbia marches across the Earth, shining American light upon the benighted.

This carried us through the darkest of moments: secession, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and then the Soviet menace. It sustained through our deepest contradictions: slavery, Japanese internment and Jim Crow. But now, as we enter a second Cold War, our belief is fracturing. Our foundational myths have been deconstructed and problematized. Our works, both within and abroad, are criticized the most at home, by our own people. And now, even the immigrants who built their fortunes within our country are rejecting any claim we have to exceptionalism. How can that nation long endure? What happens when a credal people surrender their own creed?

A creed is far more than mere belief. Belief alone could never forge a nation. A creed is an identity. It is when intellectual faith in ideology sublimates into a perspective, deeply held, that colors every human judgement.

C.S Lewis spoke of this in The Abolition of Man, his famous lament on the British youth of his day. It was written in 1943, four years into the greatest existential struggle for Britain’s future. The Blitz was over, Stalingrad, with its awful human cost, had just been retaken, and while victory now seemed likely, its final achievement still remained a dream of the misty future. Around him, British intellectual life was awash with discussion on the civilization they would build in the war’s bloody wake.

Into this milieu, Lewis saw new British textbooks that aimed to bring the first embers of moral relativism to the British classroom, and imagined the future it would wrought on his beloved society. He imagined a generation of students, reared with sentiments like “when you call a waterfall “sublime,” you are not describing the waterfall but reporting your own feelings,” and considered what they thought of war. If you teach that moral claims are just expressions of feeling, how would they oppose the Nazi’s, whose own ideology depended entirely on that premise? And how would they justify the next war against evil?

And so, Lewis wrote a dissertation defending moral absolutism. There was a single model of virtue, he said, reaching as far back as Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, that all men ought to exhibit. There is a good, there is a bad, and the space between these poles contains the infinitude of all human behavior.

What’s more, Lewis stated that it wasn’t enough to know such a truth. One must have feeling. It must leap from the chest, Lewis’ abstracted home of emotion, and it must be instinctive. And those feelings, which he calls “just sentiments,” are core to virtue. You need just sentiments to do just things—mere intellectual knowledge will not suffice. He captured that vividly in his closing paragraph:

“And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

This diagnosis is almost embarrassingly applicable to modern America. Our credentialed elite, the fruit of our generational labor, has been reared in a framework where principled detachment is the core virtue. Is it a surprise, then, that our nation’s creed withers?

In his polemic, Lewis also builds on the western concept of citizenship. To be a citizen is to be a full member of a polity. You’re entitled to its protection, to its adjudication of justice, to have a say in its governance, and in return, you’re expected to serve it during its time of need. This dual concept of citizenship, where privileges are granted in return for duties, was originally a Roman innovation. It was the original model for an open society, where new men that were willing to accept the obligations of citizenship could also benefit from its privileges.

Those obligations were severe. Every male of military age was subject to conscription, and as the Republic was at war almost every year from 509 BCE to 27 BCE, they definitely would serve. Citizens paid additional taxes on land and on inheritance. Citizens had to present for censuses for tax reassessment and serve on juries when summoned. But in return, the privileges it granted were immense. One could vote for their leaders, one could stand for office, one could appeal judgements by Roman magistrates, one was exempt from cruel or unusual punishment and one had legal standing in court to sue for their rights. It was, in short, the granting of full personhood by the state.

Citizenship, thus, in the Roman ideal, was a binding commitment by the state to citizens and by citizens to the state. The state foreswore its right to arbitrary violence, while citizens vowed to serve the aims of the state. It was a definitional social contract governing the relations between the Senate and the people, and it bound the many facets of society together. And, it demanded responsibility from its citizens, who were granted the sacred right to choose their leaders.

The American system was directly inspired by Rome. The Founders read their Polybius and Cicero; the Federalist papers are thick with Roman precedent. The vision of citizenship they conceptualized was meant to be expansive, it was meant to be credal, and it demanded a public that took their obligations seriously. George Washington articulated this cleanly in his farewell address:

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

Republican government requires virtue from its constituents because it makes them a partner in rule. The citizen that doesn’t engage seriously with their duty is undermining the very foundation of the republic.

The Roman example is also instructive in showing how that social contract can collapse. Rome transitioned to an Empire after Augustus, and under an autocratic system, both privileges and obligations began to decay. Voting became an empty ritual that eventually stopped altogether. The military became a professional service and conscription steadily waned. Those broad privileges and obligations that defined a Roman steadily lost their primacy, and citizenship transitioned into a political categorization rather than a civic bond. In 212 CE, Caracalla formalized the transition by granting every non-slave in the Empire’s boundaries citizenship—so that everyone was subject to all the taxes.

As the Empire came under pressure from the 3rd century onwards, it was forced to rely on its civic bonds—and found them lacking. In Cannae, in 216 BCE, when 70,000 Romans died in a single day, the state rejected all peace overtures and raised a new army within a month. But when a much smaller army collapsed at Adrianople in 378 CE, the frontiers caved and the emperor had to hire mercenaries to stave off disaster. This pattern repeated with each successive Germanic tribe that pushed inwards. Britain severed itself, the Goths took Spain, and the Vandals conquered North Africa. Each tribe found the structures designed to resist them had grown hollow. The vaunted legions were too few, the civilians fled in advance, and the massive city walls were unmanned. In the end, the Roman state collapsed because no one left cared about it enduring.

America is now undergoing its own collapse in civic faith. Once, we had legions of people actively volunteering their lives to resist the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Russians; now, only 41% of Americans are willing to fight for their country. 19% of Americans under 40 say a direct attack on American territory is not a reason to go to war. And only 43% of Americans support defending Taiwan from an invasion.

More broadly, in 2025, only 41% of Americans said they were “extremely proud” to be American, an all time low. This is especially true for Democrats, the primary home of the professional-managerial class—only 36% of them expressed pride in being American. This understates the issue, because it doesn’t account for generational gaps. Out of Gen Z, only 25% express any pride at being American.

What we have left is a venal nation, consumed by doubt, that’s unwilling to even acknowledge its value or necessity. Our citizenship has been reduced to mere immigration status; our allegiances have been so corroded by cosmopolitan pretension that we shrink from civilizational pride or defense. Yeats wrote our diagnosis a century ago: “The best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passion and intensity.”

This is how Rome fell. As citizenship declined from a binding commitment that bundled privileges and duties into a bureaucratic category without distinction, the civic bonds grew hollow. The social contract—the Senatus Populusque Romanus—became a formality. The state was a provider of services; the people, it’s captive consumers. And when, under external pressure, the state buckled, there was no one willing to keep it alive.

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To me, this crisis is incomprehensible. I could never imagine myself as anything but an American.

I am the son of immigrants. My parents left India almost forty years ago for opportunity in a new land. They were raised in relative poverty in a society riven by hereditary privilege and omnipresent hierarchy. To them, America, with its Tocquevillian egalitarianism and its focus on basic equality before the law, was a world anew, and they took to it readily. They didn’t stop being Indian, but they accepted this country as home just as it accepted them as citizens. I always considered being American the greatest privilege they could have granted me. My parents could have done anything, they could have gone anywhere, but they came here, and I thank God for it.

I didn’t need school to instill our country’s greatness to me—it was self-evident. We had the audacity to rebel against the world’s greatest power, and did it for the dignity of the common man. We made the radical choice to build a society around the sanctity of the individual. We fought to preserve that society against those who aimed to pervert it to support human bondage. We looked abroad, saving Europe and Asia from totalitarian inhumanity, and then, we rebuilt them in our image. We engaged in a civilizational struggle to defend the western way of life against global communism—and won. Every American born today is an inheritor of this tradition.

This is, of course, aspirational. One can assemble their own catechism listing the multitudes of ways that we have fallen short of our ideals, and any honest American should. But, I posit that the aspiration is the goal. Belief that the arc of America bends towards justice is the fundamental faith that makes our varying multitudes into one people.

To see instead that the paragon of the new generation, the professional class, is so mired in cynicism that they cannot lift a flag on Independence Day, is shameful. It is a disgrace to our country, it’s a disgrace to the sacrifices my parents made to raise me here. I think about Theodore Roosevelt, speaking about citizenship in a republic in 1910:

Beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.

A nation thus corroded cannot endure.

Listen to any educated European complain about America and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: we don’t need what you have. We don’t need your economic growth—it just produces inequality. We don’t need your technology sector—it just creates oligarchs. We don’t need immigration or the frantic churn of American capitalism. And why would we ever need a military?

But Europe exists beneath the American umbrella. It relies on NATO to bind America to European security. It absorbs the pharmaceutical innovation that America’s for-profit system produces, then uses price controls to keep its own citizens insulated from the cost. It relies on the US Navy to patrol shipping lanes so it can import cheap manufactures from China. It depends on Big Tech for its basic digital infrastructure, then fines it to preserve European moral purity.

Indeed, Europe acknowledges that America is necessary. It sees it as a place to outsource the grubby work of capitalism, and it wants to capture the benefits of that growth without bearing any of its costs.

The irony is that over last five decades, America has done the same with China.

In the 1980s, as the American century waxed to apogee, China reemerged as a world power. Deng Xiaoping, after taking power in 1978, rolled back each successive facet of Maoism until he built a capitalist state under the nominal auspices of communism. He dismantled collective farming, built special economic zones to attract foreign investment, allowed private businesses to form, and encouraged joint ventures with foreign firms. China became the world’s biggest export-led growth story, using its resources of cheap labor to win low-end manufacturing on price, and then, it steadily moved up the value chain.

That growth was predicated on American disinterest. When China began its massive urbanization project, reshaping its cities from low-rise regional centers into massive megalopolises, America instituted ever more stringent zoning laws, freezing its own cities in amber. As China broke ground on new factories, new mines, and new foundries, America created a new regime of environmental review, blocking the expansion of any new industrial enterprise. And as Chinese factories flooded the world with cheap goods, America opened the door even wider by letting it into the WTO in 2001.

The result? Chinese growth led to American deindustrialization. American capital flowed into China. Factories in Cincinnati and Detroit were replaced by contracts with Foxconn. Some 2.4 million jobs were shipped overseas, leaving the industrial heartland devastated. American cars became a domestic cottage-industry. American steel turned into nostalgic symbolism. And American defense manufacturing withered to such a degree that today, the “arsenal of democracy” produces some 90 Tomahawk missiles in a year. For context, we just used 850 in Iran.

We accepted this with little more than a shrug. We don’t need manufacturing, we said. Instead, we abandoned our industrial base and moved into services. Chinese innovations lowered our input prices, while American service firms settled for the final “value-add” layer to pocket the highest margins. Finance and technology became the market’s darlings, and in the absence of any industrial policy, the US degraded into a nation of mere consumers. Ford’s “Built in America” gave way to Apple’s “Designed in California.”

Nowadays, America is steadily transitioning to the very same risk-averse museum it constantly accuses Western Europe of being. Every facet of the future we hope to build depends on Chinese industry. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, and most electronic components, are primarily made in China. Most of the world’s robots and drones are built in China. Most rare-earth minerals are mined in China.

Yet, beyond empty rhetoric, we’re doing almost nothing to contest their dominance. Instead, we spend our time gloating about all the things China has that we don’t need. We talk about their sweatshops, their 996 work culture, their “overcrowded” cities, the brutal gaokao and their impersonal education system, and we congratulate ourselves on our victory over such suffering. We talk about how much easier life is in America, and how we would never tolerate such an overbearing government or a polluted environment or such overcrowded cities.

Actions and Reactions

As a westerner in the twenty-first century, it seems fairly obvious that industrialization was a triumph. That first application of coal to superheat water cascaded into our unadulterated victory over the Malthusian past.

This brings up an obvious rejoinder: just do it again. Build. It’s what the moment requires.

But the magnitude of industrialization’s triumph ignores the costs imposed on those that went through it. If we actually analyze the toll the industrial revolution extracted from its subject populations, you’ll see why any functioning democracy would prevent it, each time.

Consider America’s experience with industrialization. Its demographic impact alone was profound. Between 1870 and 1920, America’s urban population increased sevenfold. From 1870 to 1900, Chicago grew from ~300k people to over 1 million. New York grew from 1 million people to 3.4 million. Immigrants arrived in unprecedented numbers. 25 million landed between 1870 and 1920, into a country that started with just 38.6 million people. By 1890, some 60% of the urban population were foreign-born. And there was the Great Migration. Between 1870 and 1970, some six million black Americans fled the post-Reconstruction South and settled in northern cities. For the first time, the North had a significant black population.

By 1900, New York’s Lower East Side became the densest urban conurbation in the world. Immigrants crowded into tenements, living twelve to a room, while gangs ran gambling and prostitution rings just below. Water sources were polluted with human waste and cholera ran rampant. Some five-hundred thousand horses in the city produced 1000 tons of manure a day. Inequality increased each year, while median wages stagnated for decades. By several measures, the average height of American men fell below their 1870 equivalents until the 1940s.

The impact was especially disastrous for the middle-class artisans. They went from respectable independent proprietors operating from their own workshops to interchangeable laborers in hellish factories. Their children, once destined to apprenticeships and respectability of their own, were now consigned to hard labor in the same factories.

In the American West, the patchwork of homesteaders were outcompeted by consolidated agribusiness, leaving the farmers themselves as disinherited urban dwellers. First railroads, then the interstate system, cut through the country, creating new towns but destroying others. Thousands of new bridges, new highways, new buildings were constructed, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their land with minimal recompense.

By 1970, America had spent a century in near-constant social reinvention. Immigration transformed the country’s demographics, while industrialization upended its social structure.

Now, consider that China underwent that very transition over just forty years, with an order of magnitude more people. Between 1978 and 1999, 174 million Chinese migrated into cities, rising steadily to 900 million by 2020—the largest and fastest urbanization in history. This transformed the urban landscape. Shanghai went from a decaying post-colonial port to one of the world’s great financial centers in fifteen years. Shenzhen grew from a fishing village of 30,000 to a metropolis of 17 million.

Urbanization was matched with an explosion of infrastructure development. China had no high speed rail in 2007; by 2024, it had 45000 km—more than the rest of the world combined. It built 175,000 kilometers of highway in twenty years. Between 2011 and 2013, it poured more concrete than the US did in its entire history.

Like everywhere else, this massive social upheaval had a long ledger of human costs. The hukou system—a system of local registration—excluded most rural workers, creating a permanent underclass that doesn’t have access to urban schools and hospitals. The migration also left some 60 million children abandoned by parents to grow up in dying villages.

Infrastructure development required massive displacement. For the Three Gorges Dam, 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1650 villages, amounting to 1.35 million people, were forcibly relocated. Most of them are now mired in poverty. High speed rail development has had that same impact, over and over again, across the country, as has the network of interstates. On average, China displaced about 800,000 people each year between 1949 and 1989 for infrastructure development, leading to tens of millions of total displacements across some 86,000 different projects.

Chinese workers, as well, face profound misery. Foxconn installed suicide nets in 2010 after 14 workers leapt from dormitory buildings in a single year. Internal migrant workers, without permits, build much of the infrastructure in China, and only 22% have health insurance, pensions, or injury compensation. Even most of China’s relatively-privileged white-collar workforce labors under “996” conditions—9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week.

In retrospect, these costs are elided because we are the beneficiaries of the imposed change. But imagine yourself perched on the edge of each transformation—you would be far less amenable. If you were a British artisan in 1812, you’d be a Luddite. If you were an Ohio farmer in 1898, you would resist your crucifixion on a cross of Gold. And would you be wrong? The Luddites are now an object of ridicule, but really, they’re just a class of artisans resisting their own imminent immiseration. That we now reap great benefits from cheap textiles is of little succor to them, or their children, or their children’s children, all of whom likely faced nasty, brutish, and short lives under the new industrial regime.

From a Rawlsian perspective then, industrialization should have never proceeded. That it did is a product of the distribution of power in each of these countries. America, despite its universal white manhood suffrage, was always deferential to the interests of capital. Before 1913, the Senate was an appointed body, and even after, a lack of labor regulations and the judicial upholding of strong property rights made government unresponsive to labor. Southerners also agreed to support industrial interests in exchange for the maintenance of racial apartheid. And China under Deng had one of the most centralized governments in history. It was the very same government that, in the midst of a massive famine, forced its starving population to kill sparrows en masse, and would go on to massacre pro-democracy protestors at Tiananmen in 1989. There was little chance of any popular resistance to industrialization.

Eventually, America did become a genuinely democratic country, and that gave popular sentiment real teeth. This peaked in the 70s, when cascading government action empowered a new set of interests aligned against capital. The National Environment Protection Act (NEPA), occupational safety regulations (OSHA), and the expansion of standing doctrine for environment litigation, created many new methods for organized groups to oppose change. And because capital was the primary transformative force in industrialization, each policy that went against it arrested its ability to impose change.

Mass democratic participation thus became the avenue to arrest dynamism. Those set to lose from socially disruptive growth now had the power to prevent it. And thus, even as technology progressed, actual societal change slowed. A new crop of conservationists, anti-gentrification activists, and small-c conservatives, used the new public mood to gum up the gears of the state-capitalist machine.

And so, as Robert Moses fell in New York, America’s appetite for social reinvention fell with him. America’s next fifty years saw the same pace of technological change, but not nearly the same degree of sociopolitical change.

Two Abreast on Ogygia

Robert Gordon, in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, described this best with a simple thought experiment. Imagine taking an American from 1870 and transporting them to 1970: the world they’d enter was utterly unrecognizable. Their house would have indoor toilets, plumbing, and running water, unheard of in the 1870s. They wouldn’t need candles or kerosene lamps, as 95% of American homes had electricity. They could turn on the radio for instant news and entertainment. If they needed food, they could use their automobile and drive along a paved road to a supermarket. They wouldn’t need to create fruit preserves or salt their meat—they could just put their purchases into a refrigerator. If they faced any number of sicknesses, they could drive to their local doctor and get antibiotics.

1870 to 1970 is one (very long) life. From birth to death, that one lifetime experienced the overturning of the Earth. Now, take that American from 1970 to 2026—clearly, much less has changed. The gas-powered automobiles they grew up in are still the ones they use now. There aren’t any new intercity train lines. Planes take the same amount of time. Refrigerators do the same thing basically the same way. Medicine is on average the same, better for rare diseases, and the biggest issues of cancer and heart disease are still unsolved. If you live in New York, the subway looks the same. If you’re in San Francisco, most of the houses are exactly the same.

The biggest changes are in the Internet, computers, and mobile phones. These are certainly transformative, but don’t have nearly the same broad-based impact as something like the car did. Gordon stated that most of our recent inventions have been optimizations: marginal improvements that don’t create new degrees of freedom for the human experience. They proliferated because they slot neatly into our existing systems without inducing socioeconomic tumult.

This is not because we’ve stopped innovating. The scope of technological change since 1970 has been vast. Instead, we’re unable to deploy that technology at scale because our political system has massive status quo bias. The groups disenfranchised by technology can now successfully stop its adoption, and more than that, can claim virtuous grounds in doing so. So our cars remain manual, our trains remain slow, our bridges keep collapsing, and I spent four years of my adult life paying $2500 a month to live in a 110 year old building and shower in an 80 year old tub.

If you want to see the urban landscape that modern technology can enable, go to Shenzhen, where autonomous drones deliver you lunch and a fleet of autonomous buses run citywide. Or, go to Chongqing, which has levels like Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and they thread monorails through residential buildings. In Xiong’an, pipes, cables, and freight all run autonomously in underground tunnels monitored by thousands of sensors, while in Shanghai, a maglev ferries you from the airport at 200 mph, and an entirely autonomous dockyard handles more freight in a day than Long Beach does in a week.

In America’s reaction to AI—our most revolutionary innovation since the internet—you see the basis of our stagnation. There’s barely excitement about the new possibilities it creates. Instead, politicians are already searching for new methods to arrest its progress. Artists are trying to level copyright claims, writers are trying to preemptively ban it from bookstores, lawyers are pushing legislation to prevent it from generating contracts. Teachers are fighting its use in classrooms. Every facet of American society is organizing to preserve its own particular rent.

Because today’s America doesn’t have a pro-growth constituency. Every issue is blocked by some parochial interest guarding its own rent. Housing abundance is imperiled by both progressive anti-displacement politics and suburban homeowner conservatism. Energy expansion is hampered by the left’s insistence on onerous environmental review processes and MAGA’s antipathy towards solar and wind. On re-industrialization, both left and right populists see this as a jobs program for their own identitarian goals. Each also opposes the degree of automation and foreign skilled labor this would require. Meanwhile, standard left-liberals object on various conservation, aesthetic, and environmental grounds. The left supports immigration on compassionate grounds but not strategic ones, while the right considers skilled immigration a threat to white male jobs and all immigration a “poisoning of the blood.”

It doesn’t take much extrapolation to chart our future from here. In a responsive democracy, parochial interests become impossible to dislodge. The cost of overturning them is concentrated on a single group, but the benefits are diffuse across the population: that makes it impossible to build a strong opposing coalition. Governments become beholden to those interests and lose the ability to actually serve the population. Voters notice the dysfunction but cannot diagnose it correctly, leading to epiphany politics and zero-sum populism.

And the nation experiences a decline entirely of its own choosing.

Perhaps, once America joins Europe in Ogygia—both former hegemons consigned to merely watch the coming of a new world on foreign shores—it can contest a claim to its a new, more befitting title: the regulatory superpower.

Once again, San Francisco’s main public transit systems—the Municipal Railway (MUNI) and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)—are broke. MUNI’s annual budget is ~$1.49 billion, but it has a $307 million deficit going into 2027 (slated to expand to $434 million within five years). BART’s annual budget is ~$2.3 billion, and it faces a $376 million shortfall, which is also posed to expand in 2028.

Once again, San Francisco voters are asked to intervene, with two upcoming measures: an additional property tax on all real estate in the city, and a supplemental 1% sales tax on all transactions in the city. If both taxes pass, the median household in San Francisco will see their tax bill increase by $450.

And if either tax fails, both BART and MUNI will make absolutely massive service cuts. For MUNI, the long-tail of lesser-used bus lines will be eliminated. All “rapid” bus lines will be canceled. Frequencies will be cut by 50% across the board. The underground section of the MUNI will stop running after 9PM. For BART, there will be 70% frequency cuts across all lines. All trains will stop running after 9PM—including the airport lines. Fifteen stations will close. And parking fees will (at least) increase by 50%.

This is the apocalypse scenario for public transit. Service cuts will destroy ridership, which will have a major impact on revenue. That will also lead to lower state subsidization, which will worsen service, which will itself reduce ridership. This locks the system into a negative feedback cycle which will compound into a generational disaster for transit in San Francisco.

If these taxes fail, the system will not recover for a decade.

Given the scale of our impending disaster, there’s a seemingly obvious answer to the tax question: vote for them. The most technologically important city in the world, where ambitious acolytes labor to conjure a digital God, should have trains that run after 9PM.

This is the angle advocates have taken. The system is broke, transit is important. “A fully functioning Muni is essential for that bustling economy,” they say. And they’re emphasizing the doom. “BART is not too big to fail.” They mention the second-order effects too. SF’s mild post-pandemic recovery will be extinguished and the city will return to its 2020-era gloom. House values in outlying suburbs will crater. Job creation will decline and labor shortages will multiply.

I don’t disagree with any of these impacts. Assuming these agencies aren’t inflating the impact, and the crisis does seem dire enough that they aren’t, the advocates are right. Vote yes, because while taxes suck, the downside of a broken transit system is unbounded.

But there is a certain moral exhaustion this rhetoric brings. Living in SF, it seems like every public service is perpetually on the brink of crisis—always one additional tax from utter bankruptcy—and there’s always some reason to pay more. The appeals for money, each time, always read like moral exhortations tinged with noblesse oblige, where you should pay because you can pay, and you shouldn’t question much more than that. Efficiency, effective usage, cost controls: these barely even enter the discussion.

To me, this begs the obvious question: is our transit actually underfunded? Or does it just spend its money poorly?

The DOGE Angle

The most common explanation I hear about BART and MUNI’s eternal decrepitude are its wasteful labor costs. In an odd similarity, we hear this about colleges, about public schools, about healthcare, and now, about transit, and you hear it ever more often now because of DOGE. Elon claimed to uncover trillions in waste in government; even now, nearly a year after his departure, he spent thirty minutes on the Dwarkesh podcast railing against long-dead social security recipients dutifully collecting their fraudulent billions.

At the federal level, his claims have dubious veracity. But MUNI and BART do have considerable spending on labor. Perhaps there’s something different here.

In MUNI’s operating budget in FY2025, about $919.1M—nearly two-thirds—goes to labor. Another $271.4M share goes to “professional services,” which includes spending on consultants, software systems, legal services, and IT support. The final ~10% goes to materials and debt service. For BART, the breakdown is similar. Out of a $1.2B operating budget, $763.3M—about two-thirds—goes to labor, $243.4M is for non-labor expenses (including parts, maintenance, and the “professional-services” category above), and another $145M goes to debt service [7].

That does seem like suspiciously high labor spending.

What does labor refer to here? SFMTA, in a section designed to respond almost exactly to this line of questioning, states that “80% of labor costs go to operators or direct support, and 97% of employees are non-management.” In aggregate, there are 6,292 budgeted FTE, with 5,169 in transit. Out of those 2,670 are transit operators (bus drivers and train operators), 1,003 in vehicle maintenance, 676 in line management, 445 in infrastructure maintenance, 348 in cleanliness and security, and 27 in safety compliance. Out of remaining ~1000, 601 are in revenue generation, a broad category including parking citation officers, fare inspectors, meter operations, and parking facility staff, 350 are in admin, 142 are in street management and safety (crossing guards, signal technicians, etc) and 35 are in various minor transit initiatives.

BART shows a similar background. They have 3,760 FTEs. Out of these, ~1000 are train operators, station agents, and other train-related employees, 763 in train and track maintenance, and the remaining in safety and compliance. Another 409 are BART police, hired to enforce order. The remainder are administration staff: HR, finance, IT, land-use and planning, infrastructure development, communications, and our favorite bugbears: civil rights and DEI.

From these breakdowns, I don’t see many obvious cuts. MUNI’s administration seems fairly small, and while BART’s is considerably larger, the service itself covers much more ground. There is probably bloat, but not enough to actually dent the budget. Yes, the DEI section is indeed quite useless, but cutting it saves almost nothing.

Why do we need so many transit employees? The short answer is that running trains is a labor-intensive business with minimal automation, which is worsened by strict union requirements.

For the long answer, let’s start with BART. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) allows for 12 hour shifts per operator, with 11 hours of mandated rest. Part-time operators are capped at 25 hours a week and 15% of the workforce. BART itself says it only runs 62 trains simultaneously at peak hours. If you consider each running train a “slot,” then to cover that slot, you need at least two operators a day. You actually need more, because not every operator does a 12 hour shift each working day, and if they work more than 40 hours a week they get overtime. You also cannot keep operators “around” for longer than 12 hours: that is, even if peak hour is passed and the train count reduced, you can’t make an operator “off-the-clock” and reactivate them during the next peak segment—you’re billed for the continuous segment and you need new operators after that 12 hrs. Putting that all together, you need at least 4-5 operators per slot, without accounting for vacations, weekends, sick days, trainings, and “wow I really need to pee right now so let’s swap” emergencies.

Sure, the union requirements are quite rigorous. The biggest issues are the restrictions against hiring part-time employees and banning split-shifts, but even those would probably help more in service flexibility rather than enabling widespread cuts. And there’s also the rest of the staff. There are people to coordinate the network, handling track changes or service disruptions, people to maintain not just the trains (which require constant maintenance) but the actual tracks and the electrical delivery and the transponders, people to clean each train, people at the stations to handle tourists who never learned how to read, and so on. This adds up to a lot of manpower. According to my crude estimate, every train “slot” has something like 5 secondary support staff required.

For Muni, the same logic applies with a larger denominator. I will spare you the exhaustive detail and say only that their union contracts are very similar: 12 hours maximum without rest, 12 hour split-shift maximums, and 40 hours a week before overtime. The difference is the MUNI needs even more operators, because instead of 62 simultaneous trains, you have, at peak, 364 buses, 158 trolleys, 109 light-rail vehicles, 14 streetcars, and 26 cable cars (data from 2024). This isn’t one-to-one, as 2-3 light-rail vehicles are connected into a single train with a single operator, so let’s make a low-end estimate of three vehicles per train and say 36 trains. Buses, light-rail, and street-car take one operator each, cable-cars take two. This means we have ~570 simultaneous slots, for which MUNI has 2670 operators. Similar ratio as BART.

Who Needs The Operator?

Okay, you then ask—or at least I do—can’t we automate this? Driverless trains are a solved problem: I went to Vancouver two years ago and they worked great. And the answer is yes we can, yes the unions are opposed, and—it might make a difference, but not enough, and not soon enough.

First, BART trains are already largely autonomous. The train starts, stops, and changes tracks on its own, without operator intervention, since at least 2024. This is actually pretty easy, because trains don’t need to steer, don’t have to interact with other traffic, and have predictable acceleration and deceleration patterns. Really, it’s closer to an auto-throttle than any form of road autonomy.

There are many things this auto-throttle can’t handle, however. The biggest issues are track obstacles and platform safety. Vancouver’s SkyTrain has LIDAR and infrared lasers installed throughout the system to detect track hazards. BART doesn’t have this, and it would take considerable expense to install. The other dimension is, the platform after the train has stopped is the most dangerous part of transit. What if a pedestrian falls onto the track? What if their jacket gets caught in the door as they step out? The way fully autonomous systems handle this is with platform screen doors (PSD) and sensors. This is hard for BART for a few reasons. First, this requires trains to stop on the same spot each time, which BART can’t do, as it hasn’t fully modernized its train-tracking system yet. BART’s CBTC modernization is still ongoing, and slated for 2030. Second, PSD is very expensive, in part due to BART-specific engineering constraints, and in part because capital projects in American transit are extremely expensive for various reasons that we will cover another day. And last, BART already has issues with vandalism and antisocial behavior. What happens when someone smashes the glass on an automated door and bricks the entire station until it can be repaired?

Okay, but let’s assume all of these problems have already been solved and we can fire every operator right now. BART doesn’t publish the number of operators it has, but to make a large overestimate, we can add up the rail department sizes (which include many non-operators), giving us 385 employees. From what I see, the highest reported salary for a train operator in 2024 was 209,000, with more datapoints in the 100k to 150k range. If we assume 150k for each, which is high, then cutting all of them saves us $58 million. A lot, but not nearly enough.

None of this is to say that autonomous trains are undesirable and shouldn’t be done. If all of these modernization efforts are seen through, we’ll have a system with higher peak capacity, higher frequencies, and the marginal cost of expansion will decrease considerably. It would be a huge win. But is not anything close to a short-term salve.

For MUNI, full autonomy is a much harder problem. Where BART is a grade-separated railroad for its entire length, MUNI Metro trains spend much of their time above-ground, sharing normal roads with cars and pedestrians. This makes the base autonomy problem much harder than that of a train. Obviously, the same goes for buses, which, apart from a few special cases (Geary, Van Ness, Mission), run in standard lanes with normal street traffic.

For MUNI Metro, there are definitely opportunities for increased autonomy. The underground segment of the metro is the easiest target. Like BART, the modern trains have an auto-throttle mechanism to make normal operation autonomous. Further autonomy there has the same issues: platform doors, which are also expensive, and an in-progress train control upgrade to allow for higher capacity and more precise stops—the current one still uses floppy-disks. Still, we can imagine a future where only one line runs in the tunnel, fully autonomously, and passengers just walk upstairs to transfer to above-ground lines. This would enable some labor savings.

Unlike BART, it’s quite hard to determine how many operators we could shed here, as you still need them above-ground. Why? Because above-ground, the tech needed is essentially that of a self-driving car. But, you say, we have already self-driving cars on the streets of San Francisco. Why can’t we just license their technology?

And we can. This probably is the future. Over the next two decades, fleet modernization will introduce self-driving buses and trains to the system and they will improve service significantly. But there are a multitude of issues that need to be resolved first. The environment of a self-driving car is quite different than what a San Francisco bus or aboveground train runs in. A bus or train stops constantly, at specific spots, where they facilitate mass onboarding and offboarding. Every stop has the traditional hazards we discussed for trains, like obstacles, people stuck in the doors, along with new issues, like wheelchairs, the “kneeling” system of the bus, and obstructions at the transit stop. SF’s dysfunctional social environment also comes into this. MUNI operators help prevent aggressive people from boarding, and stop antisocial behavior on the bus itself (like drug use). And there’s also the sheer cost of it all. We need a new generation of vehicles with a network of sensors and software. These will take years to commission, approve, and acquire.

The Scrooge McDuck Story

Okay, if we can’t just fire all of the employees, can we pay them less? BART and MUNI are rife with overpaid public employees suckling on the taxpayer’s teat. There’s a janitor making $270k a year (while napping in a closet), a BART escalator mechanic making $210k, and train operators making 285k. And even worse, BART and MUNI are hiring. Between 2019 and 2024, BART’s headcount went from 3,985 to 4,292, while MUNIs went from 5,981 to 6,798. Despite their growing deficits, BART and MUNI grew, adding new useless overpaid positions to their bloated parasitical administrations. We can obviously just cut salaries across the board and find massive savings.

Except we can’t, at all. The examples above have bad optics but are not typical. The average transit operator makes less than 150k, and “System Service Workers,” which is the BART title for janitor, average ~80k, with the highest salary reported at $176,221. The janitor making 270k apparently worked 361 days a year, taking every available shift, including weekends and holidays. At his highest stretch, he worked 17 hours a day for 18 straight days.

And while the average pay may seem high for a sanitation employee, consider the job more broadly. BART stations are filthy and constantly reek of piss and shit. Who cleans that? BART reopened its bathrooms recently, adding a janky self-washing mechanism that probably doesn’t work. Who do you think is the backstop there? This man worked almost every day of the year and he still ended up making less than the do-nothings that build JIRA. It seems fairly reasonable to me.

Every “egregious” example of a highly paid transit employee involves massive overtime shifts. Why do these overtime shifts exist? Because the agency is understaffed for the amount of work it has to do, and in almost every case, it is cheaper to have an employee do overtime than to hire another employee to split the work. There have been issues around overtime spend tracking, but this is more about bureaucratic attribution rather than widespread fraud, and really just underlines the core point.

On average, transit employees make considerably less than those headline figures. As we’ve already discussed, the average train operator makes ~120k. The average janitor makes ~85k. The higher average wages are for tradespeople, but often, these people are taking a pay-cut relative to their market rate. HVAC, electricians, escalator techs, elevator techs, and the like are all in short supply in the Bay Area. They’d make more in private business, but they work at BART/MUNI for pensions and benefits.

Capital Expenditures

In the last few sections, we’ve discussed the operational budget for BART and MUNI and found that while there certainly are economies to be had, they aren’t sufficient to cover the deficit. The real efficiency gains on offer actually require more short-term investment to drive greater efficiencies over the next few decades.

But operational budgets are only half(ish) of the story. BART has a $1.2B operational budget, but a $1.1B capital budget. MUNI has $1.45B operational budget, and a $423M capital budget. If there is a budgetary crisis, can’t each system use the capital budget for operational expenses, instead of damaging service cuts?

Like everything in this essay, the answer is maybe, with deep caveats. To start, MUNI actually was doing this already during the early stages of the pandemic. Even before the pandemic, it was already facing an operational deficit. They had a flexible pot of money from the city’s general fund that they repurposed from maintenance and vehicle replacements to use for operational costs. By 2022, this ran out, and the city was planning to cut the meter modernization program for the budget, but an injection of federal money via the CARES Act (signed by Donald Trump, ironically), backfilled the capital budget and saved the project.

In 2022, the bipartisan infrastructure bill created Section 5307 funds, which disbursed funds to local transit systems. These were targeted for capital expenses, but the law allowed for preventative maintenance and paratransit, which fall under MUNI’s operational budget. Thus, these were another backstop.

BART, on the other hand, didn’t have a similar mechanic. Before the pandemic, it was a sustainable system running under-budget, and actually shifted operational expenses to capital expenditure. This was useful to capture federal programs that matched local spending, allowing much larger capital projects than would be otherwise possible. The system underwent considerable expansion over the past decade, adding several new stations between Fremont and San Jose, and replacing the last generation of train cars with modern ones. It was never able to use capital expenditure for operational expenses.

Now, both systems have run dry on flexible capital funds. The remainder of the capital budget comes from bond measures, voted on by the public, which are approved for only a specific purpose. A large part of BART’s budget comes from Measure RR, a $3.5B bond measure approved by the public in 2016 to fund critical track and tunnel upgrades and capacity improvements. MUNI’s budget comes from various bond measures since 2016 with the same restrictions. Ironically, successful bond measures that increase the capital budget actually increase the operational deficit, as debt service has to be an operational expense.

To preempt the next question—no, we should not use bond measures for operational expenses. This is a basic good-governance measure and the intuition for it is clear. Passing new taxes or raising fares is difficult because it makes costs visible to voters. Bonds, on the other hand, are indirect taxes that are easy to obscure from voters. If politicians can just issue new debt each year, there’s never an incentive to economize or build reliable funding mechanisms. It will lead to increasingly large debts, spiraling debt service, and eventually, system collapse. This is the same mechanism as countries (that aren’t the US) issuing long-term debt for short-term expenses: it will always lead to a credit-crunch.

What Caused the Crisis?

So far, we’ve proven that MUNI and BART aren’t outrageously wasteful, haven’t massively overhired, aren’t massively overpaying janitors, and don’t have a hidden pot of money to solve their operational deficit. But we haven’t discussed why the deficit exists in the first place.

The first dimension here is revenue collapse. For BART, the explanation is simple—and especially tragic. Before the pandemic, BART was the second most revenue-efficient transit system in the country (after its Bay Area counterpart, Caltrain). In 2019, BART fares and parking generated $520M, which is about 66% of its operating budget for that year. The rest was covered by sales taxes and property taxes across the five bay area counties. In 2021, with lockdowns and work-from-home, fare and parking revenue fell to $69M, a 650% decrease. No organization can survive that degree of revenue collapse. BART, as as system, is centered around commuters heading to downtown SF from the peninsula and from the east bay. After the pandemic, the Bay never returned entirely to an in-person economy, and so, BART revenues have never fully recovered. In 2025, they were only up to $259.1M in fares and parking revenue—less than half of where they started.

This may sound dramatic, but think about the numbers. Very few office-workers are doing full 5-day RTO. If they’re doing 4-day RTO, then that’s a 20% decline in revenue already. Most people I know are somewhere between 2 and 3, varying based on the week, and they often have other dimensions of flexibility. For example, maybe now they commute to a local office rather than the HQ in the city, or they come in later after traffic subsides and then can drive for the convenience. These are all widely accepted work patterns now, but before the pandemic, each of these was a BART commute.

MUNI has a much more mixed story. It had a growing operational deficit well before the pandemic started. It has never covered much of its operations through fares—in 2023, the farebox recovery ratio (the ratio of fares to operational expenses) was just 8.6%, and even pre-pandemic it peaked at 24.5%. It’s revenue comes from citywide parking fees, various state-level programs for transit funding, large disbursements from the SF General Fund, and, since 2022, federal relief (that we discussed earlier). The latter is running out, leading to this deficit.

But this isn’t the entire issue. These deficits are in part due to an exogenous shock that fractured their funding models and left them in the lurch. This, however, neglects various structural issues that already left both systems especially vulnerable to ridership declines.

First, MUNI has had an increasing deficit for over a decade, well before the pandemic. The major cause here is the decline in parking revenue, which has been falling each year since 2015. This is due to rideshare companies. Rideshare reduces the number of transit trips, which hurts revenue directly, and it reduces driving, which hurts parking fees. Parking is designed as a revenue hedge against ridership, as it raises transit revenue even when transit can’t service a particular trip, and the decline of this counter-cyclical funding mechanism hurt the system’s viability.

MUNI’s other main vulnerability comes from its dependency on unstructured transfers from San Francisco’s tax base. This isn’t a priori unusual—Toronto’s metro system uses the same mechanism. But SF’s budget is unique in that despite its very large headline number, the actual money that the local government can freely allocate each year is relatively low.

In 2026, San Francisco’s total budget was ~$15.95 billion. Of this, some ~9B is pre-allocated. About ~$2.1B went to the SF Public Utilities Commission, $1.8B went to the airport, $1.4B went to MUNI (not true in 2027!), and $156M went to the Port of SF. Another ~$500M went to overall debt service. The remaining $7B is part of the general fund, but about $2.7B of that is already mandated from various historical ballot propositions and laws.

Remove certain classes of revenue, and that leaves $4.6B, which is what the city calls Aggregate Discretionary Revenue (ADR). Out of this, the city funds the police ($1.9B), the hospitals ($2B), general city administration ($150M), and then, the long-tail of everything else a city has to do: public defenders, prosecutors, the DA, the fire department, elections, and so on. This is rarely sufficient: the city already makes cuts somewhere every single year.

And so, when MUNI’s federal funding expired, despite the city’s on-paper abundance, almost every dollar was already spoken for. MUNI’s dedicated revenue streams had been weakening, its outside funding injections were drying up, and the city it’s servicing doesn’t have any money to spare.

BART’s vulnerabilities are almost the opposite of MUNIs. Where MUNI never relied significantly on fares, BART’s solvency hinges on fares. It only runs four lines that are optimized for commute patterns, and it optimizes its frequency around the usual 9 to 5 workday. And so, when COVID destroyed old ridership patterns, BART was left vastly over-provisioned for its initial use-case, but unable to cut costs without cratering its remaining ridership. BART would say its current predicament is a punishment for its success as an efficient commuter rail; I would say instead that the lack of revenue diversification was a known vulnerability that was never addressed because politicians didn’t think it was worth the effort.

But even if BART and MUNI had better funding structures, they’d still face the same incredibly high (and growing) labor costs. The root cause, as far I can deduce, is that transit is an inherently labor-intensive service, and the costs of labor in the Bay Area are very high. There are two main reason for this: housing prices and cost disease.

First, for most people, housing is their largest expense and the core determinant of their cost of living. This means that high housing costs raise the floor for the acceptable wage in any given area, which also drives up the cost of every labor-intensive service present there. This is one of the core tenets of the housing theory of everything, and it means for MUNI (and BART), to retain its employees, has to pay at least enough to match perpetually rising rents in San Francisco. How bad is it? Consider this: in SF, a family of four can earn up to $155,850 and still qualify for affordable housing.

And this leads to the next problem. It’s not enough for MUNI to have salaries that just match the cost of living, because government agencies have to compete with the private sector to hire. This requires roughly matching their salaries. But what’s the private sector in the Bay Area? For white-collar professions, it’s technology, AI, biotech, finance, and law—high-paying professions that have seen massive growth over the past decade. For blue-collar professions, the Bay Area has some of the highest rates for skilled labor in the country. Additionally, private sector salaries (especially in the white-collar professions) rise because increasing productivity gives companies more money to spend. Transit hasn’t experienced any of the same productivity increases, but it still has to offer competitive salaries. That leads to continually increasing labor budgets to even retain their workforce.

Both of these problems arise from the incredible economic success of the Bay Area, and together, they’re a recipe for perpetually rising operational expenses. To mitigate them, we have to both cut housing costs, which is perhaps the biggest problem in American politics, or increase transit productivity, which requires the long-term automation investments we discussed earlier. Neither solution is feasible in 2026.

Finally, given this is San Francisco, we have to touch on fare evasion. It is a problem, it is widespread, it’s an easy target for public opprobrium—and it barely matters for the top-line operational budget. Really, fare evasion is more about safety and quality of life, not revenue. It’s strongly related to general antisocial behavior on transit, which discourages usage and creates stigma.

In that sense, we actually understate the problem by reducing it to budgetary terms. To this point, BART recently spent $90 million on new fare-gates to reduce evasion, and it has actually reported a major decline in problematic behavior on trains since the new gates were installed. Why? The people that are unwilling to spend < $5 for a train ride have a lot of overlap with the people blasting music, urinating, or harassing women on the train, and so, reducing one greatly reduces the other. The solution for MUNI is quite a bit harder (how do you install gates on buses?), but it any effective solution will likely have the same benefits.

But Isn’t This Also True In <city_name>?

The pandemic wasn’t, of course, localized to San Francisco. Every single city in the world grappled with lockdowns, the sudden absence of foot traffic in downtowns, and the radical alteration of commute patterns. Every public transit system had tumbleweeds rolling through their empty trains in April 2020.

Indeed, BART and MUNI certainly aren’t unique for their incomplete recovery. The New York subway had 1.195 billion rides in 2024, which is a 30% decline from 2019. The Los Angeles Metro was at 83% of pre-pandemic ridership by early 2025. Outside of the US, the Toronto metro recovered roughly to NYC subway levels, with ~75% of normal ridership in 2024, and Vancouver is at about 84% of 2019 traffic. In Europe, Paris is at ~90% of pre-pandemic ridership. London is the only large western city I’ve seen that has made a near-full recovery, with 93% of pre-pandemic ridership and 98% of pre-pandemic total mileage.

Yet, we don’t hear about budgetary collapse in New York, Paris, LA, Toronto, or really, any other major city. Why? There are two main reasons.

The first is funding mechanisms. As we discussed above, BART is uniquely dependent on fares for revenue, while MUNI has been relying on an unstable combination of fares, parking revenue, and municipal largesse. This left both of them massively exposed to a ridership decline. Now, consider New York: only 39% of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) revenue comes from fares, while 55% comes from state and local taxes and 13% comes from tolls. This is much more resilient revenue base. Ridership declines did not lead to tax declines, because COVID did not actually cause an economic downturn. And while toll revenues fell during COVID, they didn’t fall nearly as much, and they rebounded faster than transit usage. The recent congestion tax for Manhattan drivers gives the MTA another counter-cyclical source of funding.

You see the same pattern in Paris. Only 34% of the Île-de-France Mobilités (IDFM)’s revenue comes from fares, while 51% comes from an employer-paid payroll tax and 13% comes from general subsidies. The payroll tax is another counter-cyclical force here, because even as ridership fell, employment didn’t, and so the system’s major funding source remained stable.

And second, it’s about the commute vs. non-commute split. The largest systems we discussed above had widespread usage for both commute and non-commute trips. And the recovery pattern for each type of ride is clear: commute-heavy weekday travel had the worst recovery, but non-commute and weekend travel recovered much better, in some cases surpassing its pre-pandemic numbers. This is clearest in New York. In 2024, weekend subway usage was at 80% of pre-pandemic usage, while weekday was at 68%. The Long Island Rail Raid (LIRR), one of the MTA’s commuter lines, has on and off-peak fares, and so can break down commute vs. non-commute rides more precisely. It stated that while commute ridership fell, non-commute ridership was actually up 16.7% over pre-pandemic numbers.

London and Toronto show the same patterns, though their data is less precise. Transport For London (TfL) showed that while ridership was at 93% of 2019 levels, commute-time ridership was down 16%—which is partially offset by growing non-commute ridership. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) showed that “commuters”—people using the system four weekdays each week—were at 50% of March 2020 level, but less-frequent users were at 109%, an actual increase. They also show weekend ridership is up to 91%, a significant recovery.

Out of all of these systems, BART is unusually commute dependent. Pre-pandemic, commutes made up 70% of its usage. In 2024, that number fell to 59%. This change happened due to the precipitous fall in the commute segment, and it suggests that the BART network is more useful for commutes, but less so for recreational or discretionary usage.

MUNI is different. It’s a city-focused transit system, with broad coverage and reasonable density throughout its length. The underground metro section is a single trunk line down the city’s core artery, ferrying people to and from downtown, while the aboveground metro and buses are non-radial connectors throughout the city. In 2024, the underground metro was at 59% of 2019 usage, while the aboveground metro and the bus system was at 81%. Most of the latter category was in buses. This means the most cost-effective part of the system faces declining usage, while the labor-intensive coverage-focused sector, designed to be the loss-leader, is gaining ridership. No functioning business can sustain this type of split, and MUNI, unlike a private operator, can’t cut lower-margin routes to sustain its core service. It’s the status quo or broad-based service loss.

What Can We Do?

None of this is an exoneration of BART or MUNI. The systems are not run by a business standard of efficiency. Any private equity firm would find many areas to improve. The problem is, government services do not have the same degrees of freedom as a private business, and in this constrained environment, the available cost-savings are not sufficient to stave off the deficit’s gaping maw.

The main area where we can find many tractable efficiency improvements are transit capital expenditure. San Francisco, in the last decade, has embarked on two of the most expensive transit expansions in the world: the central subway and the Caltrain downtown extension. These are both very short lines in urban areas, and the costs are absurdly high. For example, the Caltrain expansion is a 2.4 mile extension of the Caltrain into downtown SF, and it is slated to cost 7.6 billion dollars—about as much as the 200 mile “Shandong Section” of the Weifang–Suqian High-Speed Railway in China. That railway broke ground in 2024 and is slated to complete in 2028; the Caltrain extension, which is two orders of magnitude smaller, is not expected to complete until 2035.

This is abysmal performance by every possible metric, but it is a form of decrepitude distinct from what we’re discussing now, and deserves its own investigation.

Instead, given our current state, the only two options we have are to increase demand and create new sources of revenue.

To find new revenue, BART and MUNI have to deploy their capital budgets to create a new type of demand. For MUNI, I imagine this is more bus-rapid transit lanes on major arteries, increasing stop spacing on popular routes, and using their new tracking system to prevent busses from bunching up. This will increase frequencies and coverage, helping make the system a more viable substitute to Uber, Lyft, and recently, Waymo, on spoke-to-spoke trips.

For BART, the answer is less clear. One idea is creating new sub-lines focusing on specific parts of the system. You can imagine a line focused on ferrying people up to the city on weekends, and running late so it’s an Uber substitute at night. Once the San Jose Diridon expansion is complete, you can do the same for the East Bay to San Jose circuit. It probably also means shutting down the low-traffic outlying stations to concentrate service in a lower-revenue environment. Maybe also, BART can invest in shuttles from suburban stations to suburban office parks, which makes it more viable for that genre of trip.

And while sales taxes are an initial attempt at stable government funding, they aren’t sufficient. The current math shows the system will face another deficit in three years as the latest state subsidies expire. I think what the MTA has built in New York, with many different counter-cyclical revenue sources, is an ideal to strive for here. One medium-term fix here is a congestion tax. Rideshare has replaced driving as the primary non-transit mode of travel, and so, a congestion tax should replace parking as a counter-cyclical revenue hedge for MUNI. This also prices in the externality of traffic in SF’s downtown core, which will increase transit usage.

More broadly, the Bay Area needs to institute major reforms of the revenue structure of BART and MUNI. In the short-term, yes—we have to vote for the tax. There is no immediate alternative that saves us from a generational transit disaster. In the medium-term, BART and MUNI need more counter-cyclical sources of revenue. Fare dependence and unstructured transfers made both systems uniquely vulnerable to ridership downturns; more structured funding mechanisms that we’ve mentioned above would alleviate this issue. And in the longer-term, BART and MUNI need to concentrate capital expenditure on automation, so it can break its cycle of perpetually rising costs.

Appendix

A: What About Caltrain?

You may have noticed the conspicuous absence of Caltrain from this article. This isn’t an attempt as obfuscation as much as one of fait accompli: Caltrain already passed its own sales tax back in 2020. Measure RR (confusingly, different from the BART “Measure RR” mentioned earlier) was a 0.125% sales tax in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, that established a dedicated revenue stream for Caltrain. This tax accounts for 60% of Caltrain’s revenue.

Before the pandemic, Caltrain was even more fare-dependent than BART, and it faced an even steeper ridership collapse. The suburban employers it served were the first to announce long-term work-from-home, and its lower density surrounds made driving a more substitutable mode for riders. The low-density also meant its proportion of non-commute usage was extremely low, to the point that pre-electrification in 2024, it only ran one train per hour on weekends.

But Measure RR was its stopgap non-fare funding source, and it was passed before the full crisis hit. That measure averted the scale of disaster that now threatens BART and MUNI.

B: The (East) Asian Question

East Asian transit systems, like Tokyo and Hong Kong, which are brought up as frequent comparisons to their inferior North American brethren, operate on an entirely different model. Tokyo, and especially Hong Kong, have transit companies as full landowners of their stations. These companies can build housing on their own land, manufacturing their own demand, and creating a constant growth flywheel: transit expansion creates housing, encouraging density, leading to job growth in the city, leading to further demand and more transit. This requires weak zoning laws, by-right permitting, and low construction costs, none of which exist in America. Elon Musk is going to launch data centers into space because permitting solar farms in the Mojave is an intractable delay; I doubt building by-right transit-oriented apartments in city centers will somehow be an easier permitting problem to solve.

This is an article I wrote some time ago that I’m updating and republishing here.

The Andean foothills of southeastern Chile contain some of the last patches of untouched wilderness in the world. At the base of the Andes mountain range, the foothills overflow with verdant greenery, with small pedestrian roads sneaking their way through the foliage. Trickling mountain streams, fed by melting snow high in the Andes, turn into coursing rivers in the foothills, racing through thickets of trees, while vineyards and haciendas, cut into the rolling countryside like steps in an immense staircase, flourish in the fertile soil.

Boris Weisfeiler was a mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University. Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Weisfeiler was a gifted mathematician, and showed his potential from a young age. He received his Ph.D. from the prestigious Steklov Institute in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1970, and progressed rapidly in his career. In 1973, however, he was unfairly blocked from a promotion, allegedly due to unofficial antisemitism in Soviet academia. Seeing that there wasn't a future for himself where he was, he defected to the USA. Weisfeiler arrived in America in 1975, and in 1976, he joined Penn State as a professor. In 1981, he was naturalized as a US Citizen.

In December of 1984, Boris Weisfeiler had decided to take a solo backpacking trip through southeastern Chile. Even after a lifetime in Russia, Weisfeiler dreaded the long northeastern winters, and sought respite in more temperate climes during Penn State's winter break. He was an experienced trekker, having previously taken solo trips in Peru, Alaska, China, and Siberia, and so wasn't fazed by the remoteness of his chosen destination or the rugged terrain of his proposed route.

Weisfeiler boarded a flight from Penn State to Pittsburgh on December 24th, 1984. From Pittsburgh, he flew to JFK Airport in New York, and from there, to Santiago, where he landed at 10 PM. From Santiago, Weisfeiler took a bus south to the town of San Fabian, in the Nuble region of Chile, where he began his trek to the Andes. From here, the exact details of Weisfeiler's route are hazy, as he was traversing sparsely inhabited forest, eating from his own stores and sleeping wherever he could find cover, with occasional stays in the villages he passed through.

We do know, however, that on January 3rd, Weisfeiler had crossed the Nuble River, about 200 miles south of Santiago. He had dinner with two shepherds from the area, and spent the night sheltering in their tent, before leaving early the next morning. Weisfeiler continued travelling east, and reportedly saw one of the shepherds from the night before, a man named Luis Lopez Benavides. The two did not speak, but authorities would later find that this was the last confirmed sighting of Boris Weisfeiler.

Eight days then passed without incident. Weisfeiler was supposed to return to San Fabian on January 12th, and contact his sister Olga, before heading north to Santiago. He never did. He had a return flight to New York booked for January 13th, but the plane would depart without him. On January 14th, when Olga realized her brother hadn't returned, she immediately reported him to local police, who advised her that Weisfeiler had likely chosen to extend his stay in Chile. Uneasily, Olga waited for word from her brother. But on January 19th, at the start of the new semester, Boris still hadn't returned, and Olga and Penn State University jointly notified the US State Department about Weisfeiler's disappearance.

In Chile, the investigation had already begun. On January 14th, Chilean police had found Weisfeiler's backpack, which contained his US driver's license and credit card. Notably, his passport, return plane ticket, and money, were missing. This finding was only reported to the US Embassy on January 22nd, after the State Department approached the Chilean government about Weisfeiler's unexplained disappearance.

Then, the U.S Consular officer traveled from Santiago to the location the backpack was found. On arrival, he was presented with a body of a man, similar in height and build to Weisfeiler, who was supposedly found drowned in the nearby river, with police claiming it was indeed Weisfeiler. The officer objected, saying the face did not resemble Weisfeiler's, gesturing at a photograph he carried. Right then, a local man walked in and identified the body as that of his brother, Leopoldo Ponce Alarcon. When the consular officer examined the body after the man's departure, he noticed that the skin on the tips of the fingers had been peeled away, leaving no fingerprints for an identification.

Even after this incident, however, the Chilean police persisted with their original conclusion. On March 6th, 1985, the police declared Weisfeiler dead, marking the cause as accidental drowning in the Nuble river. The State Department never publicly questioned this conclusion, but privately, a number of questions were raised. Firstly, if Weisfeiler had drowned, what happened to the body? The Nuble river was narrow, and had a weak current, so it seemed unlikely it would have carried the body of Weisfeiler for any length. The recovered body of the drowned peasant the week before was further evidence of this. And second, at the spot Weisfeiler is said to have drowned, the Nuble river is barely four feet deep. Weisfeiler was an accomplished trekker, in good physical shape, and had crossed deeper rivers on the same trip: how would he have drowned in water he could have stood in?

The Chilean government has never publicly answered these questions. Indeed, after 1985, Chile hasn't made any public statements on Boris Weisfeiler's disappearance at all. And so, when this dubious pronouncement was made, the case went completely radio-silent. For sixteen years, it looked as if Boris Weisfeiler's death would remain yet another baffling mystery.

But in 1998, Augusto Pinochet, after years of political maneuvering, was finally indicted in England for human rights violations. In response, then-US President Clinton declassified a number of US diplomatic cables and reports from Pinochet-era Chile, which revealed a decade-long underground investigation by the State Department to uncover the truth about the missing American.

Some of the most salient information released was the intelligence the United States had on the Colonia Dignidad, a notorious religious-cult-turned-prison-camp, founded by Nazi defectors in postwar Chile, and used by the Pinochet regime for the torture and execution of political dissidents. The Colonia committed its crimes against humanity with the complicity of Chilean authorities, operating akin to a state-within-a-state, and it continued to exist through the late-1990s. The US had always believed the Colonia was related in Weisfeiler's disappearance, as it was at its height in the 1980s during some of the most active political repression in Pinochet's reign. Colonia involvement would also explain the conflicting Chilean responses to the disappearance, along with the general lack of transparency from Chilean authorities. When I read them, however, the documents revealed a much more obvious connection between the Colonia Dignidad and the disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler:

The Colonia Dignidad was located only twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, from the spot Boris Weisfeiler was last seen alive.

The real story of the disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, then, begins with one Paul Schaefer, a committed Nazi and convicted pedophile, who, in the 1950s, built and led a small commune in West Germany. Schaefer was influenced by the teachings of American revivalist preacher William Branham (who would later also influence Jim Jones), and he quickly acquired great power over his followers, who were indoctrinated into a repressive cult of personality and forced into indentured servitude.

The public front for Schaefer's commune was as a community orphanage for war widows and their children, an endeavour supported by his followers' labor. Schaefer's was known for his charisma, which, as one follower said, "radiated from him like beams of light," and his exhortations for moral and spiritual upliftment, along with generous financial support for new arrivals, proved convincing. The commune grew rapidly, and soon had almost 300 members, working and living in a building outside Troisdorf.

Things soured quickly, however. In 1960, two widows at the orphanage accused Schaefer of molesting their children. These accusations were deemed credible, and German police issued warrants for Schaefer's arrest, leading him to flee the country alone. In the Middle East, he met with a Chilean ambassador, who encouraged him to bring his commune to Chile.

In 1961, Schaefer arrived in Santiago. Later that year, using funds raised from his most devoted followers in Germany, Schaefer purchased a 4,400 acre ranch near Parral, in the Andean foothills, about 200 miles southeast of Santiago. The first ten German emigrès arrived shortly afterwards, and together, began building on the ranch. In 1963, once building had progressed, another two-hundred-thirty members, the bulk of his original congregation, joined the commune. The commune was proclaimed by Schaefer as a center for moral revival, and was officially named the Colonia Dignidad. Residents proudly referred to themselves as Colonos, followers of Schaefer, and members of a commune attempting to restore the dignity of man.

But the reality of the Colonia diverged sharply from this romantic fiction. Schaefer's purported utopia was an authoritarian dystopia, where Colonos were subject to numerous insidious methods of social control, with brutal corporal punishment applied for any violations or perceived violations of the code. Schaefer banned private conversations of all sorts. A system of "confession" was instituted, where members were compelled, daily, to confess their wrongdoings and report the sins of others. Men and women were kept entirely separate, with celibacy enforced on all adults. Children were raised communally, separately from their parents, and under the direct eye of Schaefer. Schaefer was alleged to have kept his own harem of young boys, who he groomed and abused for years.

Besides his bastardized version of Christianity, Schaefer's other exhortation was anti-Communism. His flock was largely composed of German war veterans and war widows, carrying vivid memories of the devastating march of the Red Army across the German east. Communism, to them, was the everlasting scourge, and after years of propaganda, this latent fear had become omnipresent paranoia. Schaefer used this to his own advantage, justifying his totalitarianism with McCarthy-esque screeds on the danger of the "other side."

Schaefer and his captive followers felt vindicated in their belief in 1970, when the socialist Salvador Allende was elected to presidency. The Colonia took Allende's victory as an existential threat, using their connections in Chilean conservative circles to import automatic weapons and military-grade equipment. A militia was formed, patrolling the borders of the Colonia, which was now marked by an eight-foot barbed wire fence, interspersed with guard towers and observation posts. When few "enemies" surfaced, the Colonia turned their search for traitors inwards, developing new methods of torture to punish wayward members.

In 1973, the political situation radically changed. After years of political acrimony, a right-wing military junta seized the government, vaulting General Augusto Pinochet into power as the de facto dictator of Chile. Salvador Allende was found dead with a self-inflicted bullet wound in his skull, and Chile went from a Soviet-aligned socialist state to one with deeply anti-communist leadership. Pinochet began his regime with a mass purge of political enemies and dissidents, with almost forty-five thousand people detained at makeshift detention centers. During this purge, he discovered the Colonia Dignidad, and saw in it a potential use.

Pinochet and Schaefer were always predisposed to be allies. Schaefer was virulently anti-communist, with overt Nazi sympathies. Chile and Germany had a long history of military collaboration, dating back to the late-1800s, and Pinochet, who made his name climbing the military cursus honorum, was steeped in an admiration of German military valor, and admitted multiple times to an "enchantment" with Erwin Rommel. And so, when Pinochet heard of Schaefer and the Colonia, he probably saw a opportunity ripe for mutual gain.

A direct meeting between Schaefer and Pinochet has never been confirmed, but it's almost definite that one occurred. Because, by 1974, when Pinochet formally assembled his regime's secret police, it began redirecting many of its most sensitive political prisoners to the Colonia for torture, interrogation, and eventually, execution. The role of the Colonia in political repression only grew throughout the Pinochet regime, and it persisted after Pinochet's fall, with defectors from the Colonia reporting mass executions in its vicinity as late as 1997.

In 1984, then, when Boris Weisfeiler entered Chile, he was entering an authoritarian dictatorship with a history of political repression and extrajudicial detention. As a defector from the USSR, a nation with a very similar track record, he likely understood the dangers he faced, but he reasonably expected that as an apolitical traveller residing in an allied nation, taking a solo backpacking trip through a relatively prosperous country, he'd remain free of trouble. But, through no fault of his own, his route took him perilously close to Chile's most notorious prison camp, and that seems to have sealed his fate. For a man who fled his homeland searching for personal liberation, this was a particularly cruel outcome.

The last person to see Boris Weisfeiler alive, as mentioned above, was Luis Lopez Benavides, a farmer in the Nuble river region with whom Weisfeiler had stayed with the night before. According to documents released at that time, this was Lopez's last involvement with Weisfeiler, who was alleged to have drowned in the four-foot deep water of the Nuble shortly afterwards.

Released U.S diplomatic cables, however, tell a different story. Lopez, after passing Weisfeiler, did not carry on with his day; instead, he filed a report with the nearby Chilean army garrison, claiming that a "foreign extremist" was in the area. It's unclear why Lopez had made the report, but there are a number of potential reasons why Boris would be particularly suspicious to the Chilean military officers that accosted him, particularly in a time of renewed Cold War tensions:

1. Boris Weisfeiler carried an American passport, but his birthplace wa listed as Moscow. This was expected, given he was a Soviet defector, but to the army officials that captured him, it must have seemed quite suspect. Defection, after all, is historically the most common cover for many of the Soviet spies that embedded themselves in the West.

2. Weisfeiler's backpack was adorned with Cyrillic lettering, and he was supposedly wearing beige khakis, easily mistakable for military dress.

3. And of course, there's the unfortunate coincidence of Weisfeiler's route. As we know, Weisfeiler was only twenty-five miles from the Colonia at the time of his disappearance, and the fact that his former companion Lopez reported him seems to indicate that he was moving towards the Colonia.

This theory is supported by a declassified cable from 1987, which discusses the eyewitness account of a military informant known only as "Daniel." This "Daniel" claims to have been on the military patrol that captured Weisfeiler, and states that they "took off his shoes, tied him up and took him into Colonia Dignidad, where he was turned over to the chief of security for Colonia Dignidad." He goes on to say that Weisfeiler was interrogated and determined to be a "Jewish spy," and was "kept in animal-like conditions" for a further two and a half years before his eventual death.

While the informant's account of Weisfeiler's capture is corroborated, whether he was actually was kept alive that long is dubious. The U.S State Department received a different cable in 1987 from the US Embassy in Santiago, detailing a tape recorded by one Heinz Kuhn. Kuhn had defected from the Colonia Dignidad in 1968, but still lived in the area in 1985, aiming to help other defectors escape the Colonia. On Christmas Eve of 1984, Heinz Kuhn had received Hugo Baar into his home, a high-ranking member of the Colonia who had defected after tiring of Schaefer's abuse. Baar's defection had raised the hackles around the Colonia, and patrols that week were penetrating unusually deep into the Andean foothills searching for Baar. In early 1985, Kuhn was monitoring radio transmissions out of the Colonia, likely tracking progress of the search for Baar, when he overheard a conversation between Schaefer and two of his subordinates.

In it, Schaefer questions them about the recent "intruder" to the Colonia, with several oblique references to a "Jew." A man responded to this saying, "'Don't worry, the problem has been solved. He is already eating potatoes underground.'' This outcome is also supported by a separate informant to the CIA, who, in a declassified memo, claims that after Weisfeiler's interrogation at the Colonia, he was beaten to death and thrown in the river. This source also states that the first unit to be sent in the search for Weisfeiler was the CNI—Pinochet's secret police—who removed all evidence of Weisfeiler's murder from the area.

Both of these were deemed reliable sources, so it is most likely the Boris was killed shortly after his abduction. "Daniel's" evidence in about Weisfeiler is likely a case of mistaken identity, because, along with a probable explanation for Weisfeiler's death, the declassified documents have evidence of a large-scale coverup of the murder by Chilean authorities. This signals that they understood two things:

1. Weisfeiler was not a Russian spy but an American citizen, and his abduction was a mistake.

2. Weisfeiler had seen far too much to be let go.

Given both of those were true, it made little sense for Chilean authorities to leave Weisfeiler incarcerated for another two years. His immediate execution would have served their purposes of secrecy, while his immediate release could have potentially mitigated a major diplomatic incident. Leaving him alive would have left the operation in limbo, and increased the chances of an escape.

The cover-up began almost immediately after Weisfeiler's death, which most likely did occur near the Nuble river. As mentioned previously, an informant claimed that the very first unit to arrive at the scene of Weisfeiler's murder was the Chilean secret police, which thoroughly cleaned the area, eliminating as much as evidence of a wrongful death as possible.

Then, in November 1986, the U.S Embassy is informed that Luis Lopez Benavides, the witness that saw Weisfeiler last, and allegedly reported him to the Chilean military, was dead. He was found hanging on one of the cable posts of a bridge across the Nuble river, close to the spot that Weisfeiler is said to have been murdered. The embassy was told that this death occurred sometime in 1986, but Lopez's mother attested that it happened on May 5th, 1985. Officially his death was ruled a suicide; unofficially, it's at best a very unfortunate coincidence.

Olga Weisfeiler, from a visit to the area in 2002, reported that a separate witness to the crime "drowned in a lake" in 1985. This has never been corroborated by Embassy sources, but for reasons we'll see shortly, that doesn't necessarily mean it is incorrect.

Also in 1985, the Chilean Mathematical society, with funding from the Penn State mathematics department, hired a private investigator named Oscar Tapia to look into the case. Tapia, a former Chilean police officer, produced a report in May of 1985 reaffirming the official conclusion that Weisfeiler drowned in the Nuble. However, fifteen years later in September, 2000, a police raid at the Colonia, which was being dismantled and investigated, found thousands of files with intelligence on political and military figure. Among them, there was a file on Boris Weisfeiler, which contained a report, commissioned by the Chilean Mathematical Society, on the Weisfeiler case. This was likely the original Oscar Tapia report, and in it, he states that "one can deduce that Dr. Weisfeiler was the victim of an accident due to his ignorance of the conditions in the rivers Los Sauces and Ñuble."

Tapis explicitly mentions the Colonia, stating it can be discarded as the perpetrator because it was more than 60 miles from the spot of Weisfeiler's disappearance. This sounds like a transparent lie, however—even this quick Google Maps search shows that the walking distance between the two spots was less than 40 miles, and that's only the public entrance. It's not hard to believe that the Chilean army have more direct routes to and from their most sensitive prison camp. It's also been established that that the Colonia was sending patrols out farther than usual due to Hugo Baar's contemporaneous defection.

And while we have evidence of military and police patrols penetrating deep into the Andean foothills on January 5th, we only have one informant account of the actual capture of Weisfeiler. Why is this? Because, when the US Embassy journeyed to Parral to speak to other eyewitnesses and corroborate "Daniel's" account, they found that every police officer on the search was relieved from duty, the lead police officer was retired and inaccessible, and every army officer that had "assisted" was transferred away. None were interviewed until the early 2000s when the case was reopened.

Part of why the investigation on this case feels incomplete may be explained in this cable from the US State Department to the US Embassy in Chile. The memo, with a subject line of "Funding for the Weisfeiler case," is notable for its brevity: "At present time there are no funds available...for this project." The standard explanation for this is bureaucratic shuffling—the State department was undergoing a cost-cutting exercise at the time, after a realignment to the Middle East in preparation for Desert Storm. With a more conspiratorial eye, however, one can derive a different conclusion—1990 was also the year Pinochet was forced to step down as President. In either case, the abortive investigation would end here, as would any investigation at all in the case for a full decade.

After the US documents were released, the Chilean government reopened the Weisfeiler case, and worked to build a criminal case against Schafer, the Colonia, and the police and army officers complicit in the cover-up. This was lead by Juan Guzman Tapia, who had also lead the successful prosecution of Augusto Pinochet himself, and finally, after almost two decades, a proper investigation into Boris Weisfeiler's death commenced.

Little progress was made in the Weisfeiler investigation over the next decade, however. In 2002, the case was transferred from Guzman to Judge Alejandro Solis, who presided over it until 2005, when it was passed to Judge Jorge Zepeda. Olga Weisfeiler made numerous trips to Chile in this period, pressuring American and Chilean authorities for transparency and updates. Her work largely drove the media blitz of 2003, where Boris's case was published in many major American newspapers.

In the meantime, however, Paul Schaefer and his Colonia Dignidad were finally forced to confess their own sins. In the 90s, as Pinochet was forced out of the Presidency, the Colonia's governmental support began to wane. Its public subsidies were cut, new scrutiny was applied to its financial dealings, and its seeming police impunity began to waver. In 1995, Schaefer launched a subsidized boarding school for local children on Colonia grounds. This began as a success, helping rehabilitate the *Colonia'*s reputation, until one twelve year-old student managed to smuggle a note out to his mother. It said, "Take me out of here. He raped me."

His mother smuggled him away from the premises and took him to a doctor, who contacted the national police. This eventually led to the issuance of a warrant for Schaefer's arrest, and in 1996, the Chilean police launched their first raid on the property. Schaefer was not found on that raid, but he had not left the Colonia yet—he was believed to have been underground, mere feet from the searchers, in a bunker he'd built for this purpose. Schaefer remained hidden at the Colonia for an indeterminate period of time, while police conducted over thirty raids, until at some point in the late 90s, he fled for good. It would take until 2005 for his arrest, when he was found living in an exclusive gated community in Buenos Aires.

However, Schaefer's capture did not bring answers in Boris Weisfeiler's murder. Judge Solis, then presiding over the case, interviewed him in prison, but left empty-handed. Schaefer would die in a Chilean prison 2010, tight-lipped till the end. Meanwhile, the simultaneous investigation into the military and police progressed minimally, if at all. Finally, in 2012, Judge Zepeda authorized seven arrests, charging three police officers and four military members with kidnapping. There wasn't enough evidence to charge murder, but in a case that had been on standstill since 1985, this felt like a victory.

But it would be a false dawn. In 2016, Judge Zepeda would release the accused, stating the crime had passed its statute of limitations. In Chile, "crimes against humanity" do not have a statute of limitations, but kidnapping, the original charge, does. Judge Zepeda claimed there was not sufficient evidence to charge the conspirators with a coordinated attempt to deprive Weisfeiler of liberty, instead stating that the 1985 investigation was "genuinely professional," and the officers had "acted in good faith."

And yet, none of the testimony of the accused was made public, no results of the investigation were revealed, and most importantly, none of the key questions in the case were answered. It seems like the investigation that Judge Zepeda had led was just as "professional" as the original one. And, it seems like the true perpetrators of Boris Weisfeiler's death have escaped justice once again.

The Colonia, too, **did not end its existence after Paul Schaefer's capture. Instead, it transformed itself. The name was changed to the Villa Baviera, the grounds were opened to tourists, and descendants of the original Colonos, born from the few that were allowed to procreate, attend school and college in the area, or work at its new restaurant or music hall. Guides lead visitors through the Colonia's **historic Bavarian-style buildings, with guests enjoying regular live music and special celebrations during Oktoberfest, while police excavate mass graves nearby, digging and dating hundreds of decaying remains to determine the total death toll of the Pinochet regime.

And Olga Weisfeiler is still waiting. Waiting for truth, waiting for justice, waiting for two governments to recognize the lost humanity of her brother, waiting for answers to the questions that echo through the crevices of her mind. But tragically, like Vladmir and Estragon's, her Godot has not arrived, and closure—that effusive "why" that leaps from the larynx in times of pain—is yet denied. Boris Weisfeiler is dead, this we know. Any more remains in the aging memories of very few.

Sources

Primary Sources on the Case

A timeline of the case: link

Olga Weisfeiler's first person account of her investigation: link

http://boris.weisfeiler.com/memorandum2.html

Declassified Documents

I will not link each individual cable/memo I read, as they're not particularly meaningful without context. Instead, I'd encourage using the timeline above, along with links I included in the main article, to explore the declassified documents.

Secondary Sources on the Case

News articles at time of disappearance

U.S. Presses Case of Missing Professor

Early 2000s News Articles

Hints of Cruel Fate for American Lost in Chile

Tracing a Mystery of the Missing in Chile

Declassified Documents Point to Missing Man’s Violent Death

2010s News Articles

Woman pushes for news of brother’s fate in Chile

Judge in Chile orders arrests over missing US hiker

Chile Halts Inquiry on American Who Disappeared 31 Years Ago

Excavations at Chile torture site offer new hope for relatives of disappeared

A disappeared American

Other

Chile’s American Desaparecido

This book excerpt

Boris Weisfeiler Minisode: Abducted by Nazis in Chile?

Colonia Dignidad Sources

The Torture Colony

Insight: German sect victims seek escape from Chilean nightmare past

Paul Schäfer (Wikipedia)

Colonia Dignidad (Wikipedia) (Use this as an outline, as much of what I read on this page was contradicted by more reliable sources).

As the police canvassed another neighborhood, combing through alleys, taking witness statements, looking for bullet casings, Mayor Joseph Alioto contemplated the dour evening that laid ahead of him. After almost three months of silence, there were five murder attempts in the last two weeks, each with the same profile, the same eyewitness descriptions, and the same gun. Scores of new police officers had been hired and put on patrols, and yet the key suspects escaped again—likely on foot. With a sigh, Alioto stepped into the car that pulled up outside his home, and started mentally rehearsing his monologue for the upcoming press conference.

Alioto was a born-and-bred San Franciscan, old school to his core. He was born in 1916, a second generation immigrant coming from Sicilian stock that went west after Ellis Island. Alioto’s parents were quite wealthy, and his early life followed the standard arc of the Catholic upper-class of prewar San Francisco. He went to school at Sacred Heart, followed by college at St. Mary’s, before cutting his teeth as a lawyer in the Justice Department. In 1967, after the all-but-anointed mayoral nominee died unexpectedly, Alioto edged out a victory in a race with 18 candidates. He campaigned as a “return to normalcy candidate,” capitalizing on the collective disgust aroused by that year’s “Summer of Love” (and the winter of discontent that followed). In 1971, Alioto won reelection (over future Senator Dianne Feinstein) in another campaign dominated by traditionalist candidates.

Alioto wasn’t a machine politician, but he deeply resembled one. He drew his base largely from trade unions, whom he rewarded with political appointments and favors, like blocking non-labor building projects or hampering efforts to automate the port. He also had support from the teachers and civil service unions, which he affirmed every year by fighting the state’s mandate for mandatory busing. The final buttress in this tripod was nepotism, which he engaged in so unabashedly that it drove even his political opponents to question their convictions. In 1974, Alioto was working on courting the police union, SF’s other major power broker, whose support was essential to maintaining his image as a law-and-order reformer.

This was especially important because, in 1974, San Francisco was not a city of law-and-order. The streets were not safe, neither in daylight nor after dusk. The sidewalks were filthy. Homelessness was rife. In February, Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. And in the last three weeks, psychotic black cultists had attempted to murder five people, succeeding in killing two. Alioto’s position was thus politically fraught. He was a conservative, pro-police mayor presiding over the largest crime wave in the city’s history. His police force, whom he had just made the highest paid in the country, had no suspects and few prospects for surfacing any.

On April 17th, the day after Nelson Shields was murdered, Alioto and Donald Scott, SF’s police chief, announced Operation Zebra. From the next day onwards, the police would implement a massive stop-and-frisk policy in San Francisco. Any black man with any resemblance to two composite sketches, assembled from the various eyewitness descriptions, was liable to be stopped and searched. Police patrols would be once again be expanded, both in number and in the area they covered. Alioto had decided, in utter desperation, that this drastic, likely illegal program was his only option to catch the murderers—and save his political career.

Immediately, there was chaos. The two black detectives in homicide department walked out in fury. The ACLU and the NAACP both launched lawsuits, seeking an injunction. There were protests outside city hall, where activists attacked Alioto with picket signs before he could escape into a waiting car. The next day, neo-Nazis, accompanied by other white supremacist groups, staged a counterprotest, offering to escort the police officers making searches. Bobby Seale, the Black Panther leader, himself a black separatist intent on inciting racial violence, commented that police, who were also searching for Patty Hearst, would never arbitrarily stop white women on the street.

Over the first two days, police searched almost 200 black men. After multiple duplicate stops, they began issuing “Zebra cards:” documents with an individual’s name, address, and driver’s license number that indicated they had already been cleared. A black nurse, Monique Von Clutz, made a public speech that compared these to the black identification cards used in what she called "the racist Union of South Africa."

The white public was overwhelmingly in support of the stops. Their opinions were reflected in the Chronicle, which wrote that the action was a last resort, and that “the police deserve every citizen's cooperation,” for finding the killers is a benefit to everyone. In strict terms, that was correct. And yet, as each day passed, the search grew coarser, the stops became increasingly arbitrary, and frustration built. Police stopped doctors and lawyers, men obviously too old to be a suspect, or young children who were never under suspicion. Kemp Dawson, a fifty-nine year old, fair skinned, 5’9, 255-pound man, was walking near Booker T. Westbrook, a seventeen-year-old, six feet tall, 155-pound, black high school student. Both were stopped, and afterwards, each wondered how they could both fit the same set of eyewitness accounts. And even worse, police often used the stops as a chance to search for outstanding warrants. Many black men, innocent of murder, were hustled to jail after they were booked for overdue traffic tickets.

The latent racial divisions in San Francisco, exposed by the murders, now threatened to widen into fissures. On the fourth night, an elderly black man walking in the Fillmore was stopped by a plainclothes cop. In a panic, thinking he was being attacked, the man pulled out a pistol and started firing. Several other cops in the vicinity all began firing at the man, who collapsed. He later died. That same evening, just south of Market, a brawl broke out between a group of black men and a mixed group of police officers accosting them. Two black patrolmen were able to separate the groups, until a different set of white cops started attacking them with truncheons. The black patrolmen joined the stopped men to resist their colleagues, leading to police officers fighting each other on the streets.

Finally, on April 25th, a federal judge enforced an injunction against the operation, calling it “unlawful search and seizure,” which violated the fourth amendment. Barely a week after it began, Operation Zebra was terminated. It didn’t generate any new suspects, didn’t create any new leads, and didn’t surface any new evidence. Mayor Alioto’s gambit was a complete failure.

The day before Operation Zebra was announced, Gus Coreris, one of the two detectives leading the Zebra investigation, was at a loss. He’d talked to each of the survivors of the most recent attacks, and not a single one could offer a useful description of their assailant. 5’10. Black. Perhaps 25-30? Not sure about hairstyle. Brown eyes - maybe? As Coreris scrawled the disembodied snippets down, his face fell. Those characteristics matched almost half of the young black men in San Francisco.

But as he contemplated further, Coreris realized something else. At this point, he had taken so many witness statements, adjusted so many composite sketches, that he had developed his own images of the three killers in the black Cadillac. The driver, large, lumbering, imposing. The passenger, lanky, tall, forceful. And the man in the backseat, who was only witnessed at one scene, and was the only one who had ever struggled with his victim.

With no other leads, Coreris went to Hobart Nelson, SFPD’s sketch artist, and described his recollections with as much detail as he felt comfortable with. That composite sketch made its way to Donald Scott, who authorized it for use in the Operation Zebra sweeps, and then to the Bay Area presses, which plastered it on every front page. One of those newspapers circulated in Oakland, and one of the April 17th editions found its way to the dining table of Anthony Harris. When Harris looked at it, he felt his stomach drop in horror.

The image on the front page was him. The eyes, the bushy hair, the long nose—it was unmistakably him. Harris shuddered. He looked out his window and felt eyes crawling over him, then retreated in a gasp. They had him. The police knew what he looked like. He couldn’t go to the NOI, he couldn’t escape from Oakland, and now, he couldn’t even go outside. Harris buried his face into his pillow, shaking with fear, and agonized about what to do next.

Only one real option surfaced in his mind, but he rejected it. For now.

On April 24th, the day after Operation Zebra was officially ended, Gus Coreris and his partner, Jon Fotinos, glumly sat in the corner of Homicide, chain-smoking cigarettes and fruitlessly combing over old leads. Coreris and Fotinos had been working the case since the murder of Saleem Erakat and the first indication that the killings, seemingly random, may be part of some overarching pattern. Both were hardened detectives with over a decade of service at every level of policing, but now, after almost six months of hysteria, political pressure, sixteen hour days, an excess of caffeine and alcohol, and almost nothing to show for it, they were becoming despondent. So, when the phone rang on Fotinos’ desk, its shrill urgency piercing their midafternoon lethargy, neither man moved.

Instead, Jeff Brosch, a junior detective recruited onto the case, walked over from the next room and picked it up. The gruff voice on the other side said he had information relating to the case, and he wanted someone to meet him in Oakland. All of the detectives looked at each other in exasperation. The only constant of the Zebra case so far was the glut of tips. Tips arrived with such frequency that during the murderers’ hiatus, the four man investigation team was turned into a peripatetic court akin to that of monarchs of old, who traversed their realms, retinue in tow, to hear complaints and dispense justice. In this case, however, the monarchs only heard either obvious deceptions, the ramblings of the deluded, or transparent racism, and could offer their subjects little but their shared frustration. The two older detectives, expecting more of the same, were unwilling to rise from their languor, and tasked Brosch with crossing the bridge to take a statement.

Anthony Harris hung up the payphone and stood in the booth awhile, retracing with his eyes the number he’d typed on the keypad. Idly, he wondered if he’d just signed his own death warrant. A second later, he dismissed the thought—on his current path, his death was assured. His conversation with Larry Green a few days before made that clear. Green told him, in no uncertain terms, that the brothers weren’t searching for him yet, but they would. And when they found him, he ought to have a good explanation for his absence. Harris shook his head in dismay. Green was a friend—an old one, before the Nation of Islam and the Death Angels. If Green was threatening him, then there was no safe place left. Talking to the police was his only remaining alternative.

Jeff Brosch stepped out of his cruiser in a parking lot in west Oakland, close to the bridge. To his right, shipping containers, stacked ten-high, stretched almost to the horizon. Callused, rough men, hardened by years of labor, operated cranes that dangled the containers in the air before lowering them onto the dock. This must be a daily ritual, Brosch thought. He considered its religious regularity, the precision of its timing. The ships would always dock. The containers would always arrive, one after another, stacked ten-high, stretching to the horizon. How easy it would be for a man to be crushed beneath one, Brosch thought. How easily life could be extinguished. Brosch wondered how many died on those docks each year. He wondered how much each investigation went into their deaths, and whether every longshoreman was interrogated when it happened. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Brosch saw a black man walk towards him. He realized that the lot, deserted, obscured by trees, was an ideal ambush spot. His own flesh-and-bone fragility flashed before his eyes.

But Anthony Harris came alone and unarmed. He told Brosch he had information about the Zebra murders. Brosch, skeptical, asked what he had. “It was the Death Angels. They think all the whites are blue-eyed devils and they kill them. Men, women, children, everyone.” The mention of children piqued Brosch’s interest. “What children do you mean?” he asked. “The three kids they tried to grab the night they hacked the woman.”

Brosch froze. He knew exactly what Harris was referring to. Two hours before the Hagues were attacked, three eleven year olds had reported that two black men had grabbed them and attempted to drag them to a van. The children had managed to distract their assailants, giving them a second to run away. None of them could give a good description of the two black men, but they remembered the van: a Dodge, dark colored, with a logo emblazoned on the side. After the Hagues were attacked, the similarities in the suspects, the van, and the timing, made connecting the two crimes obvious. But, because the abduction was a failure and the victims were minors, the incident was never mentioned in the press. Brosch was almost certain there wasn’t a single article mentioning the abduction. He looked at Harris now with newfound confidence. This man knew something.

Brosch drove back to San Francisco with Harris, where he was placed in an interrogation room with Coreris and Fotinos. Harris was reticent at first, but as the two seasoned detectives pushed, he started speaking, gaining momentum as he went on. Harris started with the kids, the Hagues, the train tracks, how Quita Hague had been raped. He spoke on Saleem Erakat, whom he called a Mexican. Then the attacks on Paul Dancik and Marietta Giralamo and Illario Bertucci and the rest. The package he dumped in the ocean. The night of four murders. Over time, he started giving names too. J. C. X Simon was the leader of their group, personally responsible for organizing the stings. Manuel Moore, the moveable dope with a murderous edge. Jesse Lee Cooks, already imprisoned. And Larry Craig Green, Harris’ old friend, who had threatened his life just last week. Harris also named four other men—Thomas Manney, Dwight Stalling, Edgar Burton, and Clarence Jamerson—who worked at the Black Self-Help Moving Company. Thomas Manney allegedly owned the black Cadillac present at so many of the murder scenes.

The investigators did realize, however, that Harris’ story had a number of gaps. Despite providing eight names, Harris could only place Simon, Green, Cooks, and Moore at a crime scene. And, they noticed, Harris never mentioned his own role in any of the killings. Every statement was phrased with a “they” or a “them,” even as the descriptions he gave required a first-person view. Harris did, however, give a number of important details. He mentioned a .32 automatic that Simon owned. He described several instances of finding unexplained bloodstains in the moving van. He described the Death Angels’ meetings, in the loft or the Mosque. By the end, the Zebra team was convinced that Harris was a legitimate informant, and despite his stated desire to claim the thirty-thousand dollar reward, his confession seemed authentic.

Harris wanted personal immunity and feared for his wife and child. Both detectives immediately offered protection for his family, but immunity was contingent on his testimony in court. Perhaps three months ago they would have bargained further, pushing for a plea deal instead of outright immunity, but right now, with the entire city of the verge of fratricidal conflict, they only cared about ending the killings.

Harris, his wife Deborah, and his new child, were lodged in the Holiday Inn next to the Hall of Justice. The interrogations continued in the hotel room the next morning. As Harris spoke more, the overall narrative of the murders began to take shape. And as it did, Harris’ refusal to place himself at any crime scene became increasingly absurd. Coreris and Fotinos realized that his insistence would collapse under cross-examination, and began to officially organize immunity for Harris. Perhaps when he was assured of exoneration, he would share his own culpability.

Meanwhile, at the front desk, a well-dressed black man was talking to the desk clerk. “Do you have Anthony Harris registered?” he asked. They did. The man asked to speak to Harris, and was put through. “Can I come up?” he asked. “No,” Harris replied. “Why don’t you come down then?” Harris hung up, knots of fear pulsing through him. He immediately told Coreris, and both looked at Deborah. That morning, Deborah was feeling nervous, and insisted on speaking to her friend, Sister Sarah, the wife of a high-ranking NOI minister. Harris looked at her. “Did you mention where we were staying?”

“I might have.”

Coreris, Fotinos, and Harris looked at each other. All of them knew what the unknown man had come here to do. The two detectives left the room and took the elevator to the lobby, where Coreris saw the black stranger idling near the front desk. Coreris walked up to him and asked, “what are you doing?” “Waiting for some friends,” came the response. Coreris paused, and glanced at the glass hotel doors. Just then, a black Cadillac pulled up and five men stepped out. The two detectives looked at each other. “Get to parking,” Fotinos whispered, and then the two split up. Fotinos ran to the elevators and went up. Coreris sprinted out the front door just as the group of Muslims walked in and moved towards the stairs.

Coreris ran to his car, parked just behind the building, and sped towards the spiral parking structure next to the hotel. He accelerated up the structure, flashing past pillars and careening around tight corners. The Muslims ran to Harris room, only to find it unlocked and empty. They scanned the floor, then moved up to the next. Coreris kept charging up the ramp. The Muslims took the stairs to the next floor, and then the next. Each floor was silent, empty, quiet. Finally, they reached the roof and vaulted through a side door, only to hear tires screech and see a car disappear into the descending coils.

Harris and Deborah were moved to the Stewart hotel near Union Square. The Muslims, so close from their prize, started canvassing every hotel near downtown San Francisco. This time, the front door clerk was given strict instructions to deny the existence of any guest named Anthony Harris to anyone that asked.

Later that day, when Coreris returned to his desk, he listened a voicemail from a patrol officer asking to meet with him. Coreris called him back, and the officer arrived shortly after. The officer asked him if he was holding someone named Anthony Harris.

“Why?” Coreris replied.

“Where is he being held?” said the officer.

“Who is asking?” Coreris deflected.

“Some friends of mine.”

“Are they Muslims?”

Taken aback, the officer said, “as a matter of fact, yes, they are.”

Coreris told the officer he should stop his inquiries about Harris immediately, and that he would be reporting him to the chief. As the patrolman left, Harris gaped at the brazenness of the attempt. He wondered how far the tendrils of this organization really stretched.

The grass in the backyard of 271 Vernon Street hadn’t been cut for months. By spring, it sprouted thick and rough, like wild wheat in a paleolithic savannah, interspersed with dandelions that shed spores into the evening gusts. The rising spores drifted past evergreen trees, which, shaking in the wind, littered the upper layers of the grassland in pine needles. Ladybugs fluttered between the stalks, while earthworms wriggled through the packed dirt below, consuming the detritus hidden beneath the rowdy green carpet.

On April 17, 1974, this natural rhythm was disturbed by a black metal object that pierced through the canopy of pine needles and sank into the grass. At first, it lay almost uncovered, but as time passed, the bent stalks died and new ones sprouted over them, while the wind scattered a patchwork of fallen leaves above. Within days, its brief impression in the urban savannah had been all but obscured. About a week later, when a boy, searching for his baseball, leaped over the chain-link fence into the yard, he didn’t see any unexpected disturbances. He stepped carefully through the dense undergrowth until his foot hit something solid, and then bent over and fished in the grass. Finally, he pulled out what he had found. It wasn’t a ball at all. It was a gun.

Meanwhile, a black Cadillac methodically progressed through the Financial District and Union Square, stopping at every hotel it passed. Two well-dressed black men entered each lobby, telling the receptionist that they were looking for their cousin, another black man, about thirty years old, who was traveling with his wife and infant. Detective Fotinos surreptitiously stood vigil inside one of those hotels, scanning the street for the Cadillac, while Anthony Harris and his family stayed upstairs. Every time a car passed, Fotinos’ heart leapt and his hand reached for his sidearm.

Coreris was trying to arrange Harris’ formal confession. Time was of the essence, as Harris could only be hidden for so long. Eventually, the Cadillac would pull outside of their latest hotel. But Harris refused to give a statement unless he was given a guarantee of immunity. Coreris didn’t have the authority to offer immunity, nor did anyone in his management chain. He could only offer a verbal promise to request it after Harris testified. Harris threatened to retract his confession unless this condition was met. This was an idle threat, and all sides knew it. If Harris ever returned to the streets, he was a dead man. But Harris still refused to concede. This impasse persisted for hours until finally, Coreris resolved to contact the only man who did have the authority to offer prosecutorial immunity.

The patrol officers leaving 271 Vernon knew immediately that the gun they’d been given was related to the Zebra murders. The address was, after all, just a block from the most recent killing. They handed it to the Forensics lab, which compared it to the casings found near Nelson Shields’ body. It matched. That also meant it matched the bullets used in every attack since Tana Smith. But, in a major blow to the investigation, the lab reported that the gun didn’t have any useable fingerprints. The police would have to trace the gun to their suspects manually.

It took hours for Coreris to contact the Mayor. Coreris first tried to contact his office, only to learn the Mayor was in Los Angeles. Then, he tracked down a police officer attached to his staff. That officer, when he was finally reached, promised to locate the Mayor in LA. Finally, at midnight, Coreris received a call from the Mayor. Coreris explained the situation. Alioto permitted himself a long sigh, and then said “Bring the suspect to my office. I’ll be back at 3 AM.”

Efforts to trace the gun started immediately. The ATF, a federal agency, tracked the gun’s origin to a firearms importer in New York, which in turn had sold it to J. C Penney, which then moved it to a store in North Carolina. A discharged army colonel then bought it in 1968. The army colonel then moved to San Francisco, and when he left the city in 1973, he gave the gun to his roommate. Police had found their link to San Francisco. But after this, the trail was hard to follow. That roommate was named Brad Bishop, and he had gone off the grid recently. The army colonel didn’t know where he was, nor did he know anyone who could know where he was. After a few half-hearted efforts, the investigation was temporarily shelved.

At 3:30 AM, Joseph Alioto met with Anthony Harris, his wife Deborah, Harris’ two lawyers, and the two detectives, Coreris and Fotinos. Alioto warned then that even he didn’t have the de jure authority to grant immunity: he could only assure that the government, when making its case, would note the assistance Harris provided and ask the judge for immunity. Harris said he understood. After this latest pronouncement, the room fell silent, and Harris and Alioto looked at each other.

Finally, the tension released. Harris and Alioto shook hands, their interlocking palms forming a bridge over the chasm between them. Coreris and Fotinos released a sigh. All sides had accepted the terms. A tape recorder was started, its gentle whir blunting the silence, and Harris was read his Miranda rights. Three days after he turned himself in, Anthony Harris began his formal confession. Over the next few days, he retold his story, starting from his journey to the Death Angels, to the first murders, to his eventual flight and surrender. This time, Harris gave himself agency. He had helped abduct the Hagues. He had left the car and stood lookout during Saleem Erakat’s murder. And he had shot John Bambic and watched him die. Anthony Harris admitted that he was a murderer. The Zebra team stared in disgust at the man they were now committed to protect. Up until now, the urgency to end the killings had run roughshod over all qualms, but after everyone finally heard the unabridged story—the closest to truth they’d likely ever receive—the cost of this urgency was more apparent than ever.

Three days later, on May 1st, 1974, one hundred police officers assembled in the dark predawn. Anthony Harris’ confession was official and a judge had approved a warrant to arrest the seven men Harris named. The officers divided into assault squads, each assigned to a different location in the city. 844 Grove, where Larry Green and J. C. X. Simon lived. 339 Fillmore, where Manuel Moore lived. The Black Self-Help Moving Company building on Mission. The Nation of Islam Mosque No. 26 on Geary. In silence, officers dispersed to each location, setting perimeters, sealing nearby streets, loading weapons, planning approaches, mapping exits, and shrinking from the slowly encroaching yellow of the sunrise. At 4:52 AM, all radio communication was ended. An unnatural silence ensued, broken only by unintentional shuffling of boots on grass and whispers muffled by clasped hands.

All units moved in at 5 AM. Coreris and Fotinos rushed in with the 844 Grove team. An officer used a crowbar to quickly dislodge the lock before the door was kicked in. Police officers swarmed in, shotguns cocked and ready, clearing the apartment. In the bedroom, they found J. C. X. Simon, sitting up in his underwear, frozen in fear. This man, who believed himself the flag bearer of the Black revolution, who organized almost every Zebra sting, who personally murdered five people dispassionately in the service of his own aggrandizement, did not even question the arresting officers. Without any prompting, he put his hands behind his head and whimpered, “I give up! I give up! Don’t shoot.” Police cuffed him and dragged out of the apartment, while his wife cried softly just behind.

Larry Green didn’t resist either. When Coreris walked over from Simon’s apartment, he found Green handcuffed on the couch, loudly protesting his innocence, while his wife and young child looked on. Manuel Moore was also picked up in his apartment without incident, as were the other four men, who were taken from the moving company or the mosque. The police didn’t, however, find a single gun. Despite Harris’ descriptions of Mosque meetings full of armed men, none of the apartments, nor the moving company, nor the mosque, had any guns. This was a major problem for the investigation. Anthony Harris had named eight men, but could only place five at any crime scene: himself, Manuel Moore, J. C. Simon, Jesse Lee Cooks, and Larry Green. Police were hoping physical evidence uncovered during the arrests could link the four other names as well.

On May 4th, a judge order edited that Thomas Manney, Dwight Stalling, Edgar Burton, and Clarence Jamerson should be released, as there was insufficient evidence to implicate them in the murders. The police now only had one remaining avenue to pursue: the .32 caliber automatic found in the backyard on Vernon. If this gun couldn’t be linked to any of the suspects, then the only evidence they’d have at trial was the testimony of an accomplice and admitted murderer.

They started by revisiting Brad Bishop, the missing roommate who was reported to have owned the gun last. The police compiled a list of every person that had known him in San Francisco and interviewed them. Bishop’s mother said he had moved to Los Angeles to search for work. One other person, an acquaintance, said they’d heard he moved to Honolulu. Both threads were investigated simultaneously. In LA, Bishop’s car was found in a Santa Monica tow lot, where it had been taken after it was left abandoned. No one in the area could remember ever seeing him. In Honolulu, Bishop’s face was plastered on posters, while cops canvassed the city for information. Eventually someone recognized him and Bishop was arrested on gun charges. Bishop, under a threat to be charged for the murders himself, said that he’d sold the gun to a Samoan named Moo Moo Tooa.

Incredibly, through a stroke of sheer luck, police located Tooa in San Francisco after he walked into a pharmacy that one of the Zebra detectives was in. But Tooa, despite endless pressure, cajoling, and blackmail, would not say what he’d done with the gun. He continually insisted he threw the gun into the ocean six months before the murders started. Eventually, Tooa, exhausted from the pressure, left the city unannounced. Two weeks later, while efforts were still ongoing to locate him, he walked out of a movie theater, clutched his chest, and fell forward. Myocardial infarction, fatal, near instant death. The trail truly went dead.

The grand jury met on May 6th, 1974, a week after the arrests. The remaining four accused—Simon, Moore, Green, and Cooks—were formally indicated on May 16th. Bail was set at three hundred thousand dollars, which none of the accused could meet. All four of them plead not guilty, refusing any semblance of cooperation with the authorities, and their trial date was set on July 8th, 1974.

In June, the trial was delayed to September. In August, it was pushed to January. Scheduling conflicts with the defendants’ lawyers, who were paid for by the Nation of Islam, continually postponed the trial through all of 1974. Eventually, in November, a date was set for May 8, 1975—almost a year after the last associated murder.

As the months passed, the terror that gripped San Francisco faded. The attacks finally ended. Tentatively at first, Haight street regained some of its liveliness. North Beach filled on Friday evenings, as people returned to bars and restaurants and clubs. And as the urgency of fear dissipated into mere memory, the public began to critically reexamine at the investigation. Journalists parsed through the public casefile and grand jury testimony, and commented on the number of times the killers slipped through the police’s dragnet, or on the porosity of the many permanent roadblocks and perimeters, and especially, on the absolute ineffectiveness of Operation Zebra. The grand jury testimony mentioned that every single person named by Anthony Harris had been stopped at least once by the Zebra patrols. One of them even had a Zebra card in their possession when they were arrested. The core tenet undergirding the entire operation—that the police could identify the murderers if they were stopped—was a complete farce.

On March 3rd, 1975, Gus Coreris received a call. Arnold George Lucas, a small-time burglar and drug addict, was in prison when he requested an audience with Coreris. Lucas wanted a reduction on his sentence for burglary in exchange for information. “What information?” Coreris asked. Lucas dawdled. The two men negotiated, but Coreris said he needed to hear the information first. Finally, Lucas said that he used to sell guns periodically to Thomas Manney, one of the men recently released from the Zebra indictment. Coreris felt a jab of familiarity and gripped the edges of his chair, trying not to betray his excitement. There was no way, he thought. “Where did you get the guns from?” he asked. Lucas paused, apparently remembering. “I bought them off some guy. Large Samoan, named Moo Moo.”

Moo Moo Tua’s name had never been released to the public, Coreris realized. This had to be genuine. Just two months before the trial, which itself was delayed due to pure chance, the prosecution’s most important evidentiary link had arrived on a lark, from an unrelated prisoner, well after everyone had already given up hope.

Now that the gun’s link to the accused was established, the prosecution could use the gun to place at least one of Simon, Moore, Harris, or Green at the each crime scene. When combined with Harris’ testimony, this created a concrete narrative of the killings that the defense would be hard-pressed to refute. Their primary avenue would be challenging the character of Harris and the other witnesses, and thus disputing the story entirely.

The trial, finally starting on May 3rd, lasted for a full year, until May 9th, 1976. It was the longest criminal trial in the history of California. A hundred and eighty-one witnesses testified, including Richard Hague, the survivor of the first Zebra attack. Anthony Harris testified for twelve days, telling his entire story, including his role in the murder of John Bambic. Larry Green, Manuel Moore and J. C Simon testified as well, as did Arnold George Lucas on his role in buying and reselling the gun.

Finally, the jury, after listening to almost ten months of testimony, began its deliberations. In only eighteen hours, they emerged with an unanimous verdict. All four defendants were found guilty on all counts. The jury believed Anthony Harris. Larry Green, J. C. X Simon, Jesse Lee Cooks, and Manuel Moore were each sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Simon stared stolidly at the ground, perhaps contemplating the enormity of the change wrought on his life. Larry Green grinned idiotically and kept looking at his stone-faced wife and silent child standing behind him. Manuel Moore smiled at everyone who looked at him. Together, all three were marched out of the courtroom to the local jail, from where they would eventually be dispersed to various prisons in California to serve out the rest of their lives.

Manuel Moore distanced himself from the Muslims in prison. Supposedly, he used his time to learn to read. He died in San Quentin in 2015 of a heart attack. J. C. X. Simon, the strident Muslim with dreams of power, spent years angling for leadership in the NOI in prison, and as a result, spent much of his confinement in solitary. He died in 2017. Jesse Lee Cooks, who was shunned by the NOI after his guilty plea, quietly spent his years in San Quentin. He died of natural causes in 2021. Larry Craig Green, now 71 years old, is the last Zebra killer left alive. I wonder now, with the majority of his life spent in a metal cage, if he still reflects on the day of his sentencing and smiles. And more so, I wonder what became of his son, whom he left, barely a toddler, to a destitute mother.

The city of San Francisco has changed dramatically since 1974. Two technology booms have completely reshaped the city’s skyline, obscuring many of the art deco skyscrapers in the Financial District behind glittering glass towers about half a mile northeast. Lower Haight, Fillmore, Divisadero, and Hayes Valley, then working-class neighborhoods that the Zebra murderers stalked, are now some of the most expensive in the city. I moved to Hayes Valley a year ago, and as I wrote this article, I walked, many times, across every block and intersection that had been the scene of an attack. The public housing towers have since been demolished and rebuilt into pleasant blocks of pastel-colored townhomes. Imposing condo buildings overlook the region’s eastern edge, while the streets flower with cafes and Asian restaurants and taquerias. Joggers and bikers take the quiet roads west, enjoying the best sunlight in the city.

But the Victorians, I imagine, look just the same: wood-paneled with elaborate molded facades, standing as silent witnesses to generations of human history. The Fillmore district, then a graveyard of exhaust and decaying buildings, has been entirely resurfaced into a quaint neighborhood of bakeries, brunch spots, and new apartments. The Nation of Islam Mosque No. 26 on 1805 Geary Boulevard left the reupholstered neighborhood sometime in the 80s and moved to Fruitvale in Oakland. 1805 Geary has since been rebuilt into a concert venue named “The Fillmore Auditorium.” I saw Alvvays there last October.

But despite this veneer of finality, the story of the Zebra murders cannot yet be closed. With Anthony Harris’ confession, the police were able to attribute fifteen murders and twenty-three victims to Harris, Moore, Green, Cooks, and Simon. Harris’ narrative was supported by the .32 caliber pistol found in a backyard on Vernon street, which could be directly traced to the murderers and placed at each crime scene. But much of the rest of Harris’ narrative cannot be verified. What exactly were the Death Angels? Who was the tall, bearded man who instigated the effort and ran the meetings? How centralized were they? The entire description we have of the cult comes from Anthony Harris, as all of the accused in the case refused to answer any related questions. Harris stated that these meetings were attended by almost thirty men, but he only named eight people. If they were Death Angels too, then what murders did they commit?

And that last question opens a much larger investigation. The Zebra attacks were truly random. The locations were arbitrary. The M.O’s varied between attacks, even for those known to be committed by the same perpetrator. The only unifying characteristic in their victims was their skin color. Indeed, the murders in San Francisco were linked only because the killers only used two weapons and two different cars.

During this same period, there was a spike in random killings of white people across California. There was also an unusual increase in murders of white hitchhikers on California’s major highways. Richard Walley, an investigator in the California Department of Justice, tallied seventy-one murders that could potentially be related to the Death Angels and the Nation of Islam. Clark Howard, the author of one of this article’s major sources, has claimed 271 potential victims.

This idea, of course, accepts Anthony Harris’ description of the cult as a centralized organization with clear leadership. Earl Sanders, an SFPD homicide detective who worked on the Zebra task force, wrote in his book that the Death Angels were a fantasy conjured by Harris to absolve himself of guilt. In Sanders’ view, the “Death Angels” were just a loosely-organized group of radicalized NOI members. There was never an older man directing the murders, nor any elaborate requirements to become a death angel. In this formulation, we have to then question the entirety of Harris’ story. Were there semi-weekly meetings at all? Why was there a pause in the killings? And if Harris and the others were truly independent of the NOI, then why did the NOI try to murder Harris after he became an informant?

Unfortunately, now, half a century since the last murder, and with most of the perpetrators deceased, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have an answer to these questions. Just like Gus Coreris and Jon Fotinos, the rest of the Zebra task force, and the jury in 1975, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with the incomplete and self-serving recollections of Anthony Harris. I think it’s at least clear that Larry Green, Manuel Moore, J. C. Simon and Jesse Lee Cooks all deserve their sentences. Justice was eventually done, if only in part.

Justice doesn’t, of course, resurrect the murdered or heal the wounds gashing the living. The dead remain in their eternal repose, and as the years grow distant, the memory of them flickers and dims. Those who survived carry scars, psychological and physical, that forever remind of them of their trauma. And, common to all crime victims, they are cursed to be remembered first as victims and second as people. A Google search of any of their names is littered with old news articles, references to their attackers, and details on those fateful months in 1974. About their lives before their murders, about their lives after their attacks, there is almost nothing.

But when I was researching for this article, I found a Facebook page for Paul Dancik, the artist murdered in a phone booth in December of 1973. It’s run by his brother, who has, for decades, cataloged his artwork, sought information on his life in San Francisco, and connected with people who knew him. It’s a beautiful tribute to a man who would otherwise fade anonymously into history, and it will ensure that Paul’s memory, while flickering, will remain alight for a bit longer. For the many other victims, the task of stoking that dying flame passes to the rest of us.

Sources

This is a list of the main sources I used. There are many more historical newspaper articles I used only for small details or isolated quotes that I did not list here for the sake of brevity.

Books

• Zebra: The True Account of 179 Days of Terror in San Francisco

• The Season of the Witch

Major sources

• People vs. Cooks (the Zebra casefile)

• "The Zebra Murders: Race, Civil Liberties, and Radical Politics in San Francisco”

Main Historical News Articles

• https://www.newspapers.com/article/114542963/sf-police-stumbled-on-missed-zebra/

• https://www.newspapers.com/article/114575316/the-zebra-shootings-without-warning/

Miscellaneous

• https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Zebra-murders-meant-to-start-race-war-2469576.php

• https://sfist.com/2013/03/27/5_interesting_facts_about_the_zebra/

• https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/remembering-the-zebra-killings-40-years-later-racially-motivated/

• https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/28/last-two-living-zebra-killers-denied-parole-tied-to-massive-california-murder-spree-targeting-whites-at-random/

Death and life. Karma and rebirth. The drowned Lord Rama rising from the Ganges to take his place in heaven. Jesus emerging three days after his crucifixion to reassume his Godhead. On February 26th, 1964, Allah’s newest son, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was also resurrected. One day after his eighth-round technical knockout of Sonny Liston—which, then and now, is one of the largest upsets in sporting history—he entered the Lethe and emerged anew as Muhammad Ali. Standing with Elijah Muhammad himself, he tore the Shroud of Turin from his body and announced himself as an ordained member of the Nation of Islam.

In an instant, Ali became the most controversial man in America. Martin Luther King bemoaned the loss of another prominent black figure to a segregationist cult. Liberal whites physically recoiled from this uncouth, bestial African proclaiming his absolute rejection of their vision and their values. But it was these very characteristics that also made him a beacon for the many who tired of lobbies, protests and political pressure—who sought not equality within the system, but independence from it altogether. To them, Ali was their rage calcified and made flesh. His fury gave voice to a generation of unvoiced frustrations, and as he rose from the holy waters to shake hands with Elijah Muhammad, those voices cheered him.

Two years later, Ali refused to be drafted. In possibly his most famous proclamation, he said "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." And then, refocusing his objection, he followed with "No Viet Cong ever called me n****.” Furore erupted from all directions, flying with vehemence from politicians and public figures, dripping like summer sweat from furrowed brows hunched over morning newspapers. Most importantly for Ali, disapproval emanated from almost every one of the nation’s boxing cartels, which systematically retracted his license to participate in officially sanctioned fights. Ali once again was messiah and pariah.

One man in particular was deeply influenced by Ali. J. C. X. Simon, then still a faux family man in Houston, viewed Ali as an idol—one of the few black figures fighting the white establishment instead of appeasing it. For Simon, Ali’s martyrdom at the altar made him Black America’s foremost icon, and his eventual triumph over the government was resolute proof that Allah was God and God was black.

On January 28th, 1974, Simon, along with most of the other congregants of the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 26, queued outside of the Winterland auditorium. Muhammad Ali was scheduled to fight Joe Frazier that very evening. Joe Frazier was then boxing’s most-feared. A two-time heavyweight world champion, he had already beaten Ali three years prior. Simon was furious with Ali’s last defeat, which he viewed as a fix, and swore that Allah would intervene for Ali this time.

But as Simon shuffled into the auditorium, his mind drifted from the fight. Much more would have to be done. The words, told to him by the tall man with curling beard, reverberated through his psyche. Simon had always believed he was destined for more than the drudgery of his marginal existence. That belief drove him to the Nation of Islam, to San Francisco, to the Death Angels. That conviction drove him each night to prowl the streets without relent, to offer no quarter, to kill without compunction. Simon wanted to be a Death Angel. And more, Simon wanted to lead. The city they were seizing from the white man should be, in part, his own.

But now, despite his recent good works, he was told that he was not yet ready. That the white man still resisted, that the procession of the walking dead must be culled further. The Death Angels must expand. Leadership would come only when Allah’s vengeance was truly exacted, and he would be chosen only if he was the hand of that vengeance.

No, much more would have to be done, indeed.

The black Cadillac tore out of the parking lot in a screech of tire treads, bouncing tremulously over the steep driveway and onto Steiner. The three men inside sat in pensive exultation, their hearts pounding with the thrill of a victory. Ali had won and his triumph was absolute. Three years after his return from exile, Muhammad Ali once again held the Black Muslim banner aloft atop the highest peak—a sign of Allah’s continued favor, and the warmth with which He viewed their holy work.

But Anthony Harris, sitting once again in the backseat, almost instinctually leaning away from Moore and Simon ahead, wasn’t quite so convinced of Allah’s divine guidance. Indeed, listening to Moore’s bluster, Harris wondered if they’d been watching the same fight. Ali had won, yes, but the victory was hard-fought to the end. Frazier had pushed Ali in every round, winning four out of the twelve, and every round he lost, he lost closely. If Allah had intervened for Ali, then divine intervention was a slender reed—so slight that it seemed imperceptible. And then, a more insidious thought needled through Harris’ brain. Frazier and Ali were both black. Before Ali, Frazier was the torchbearer of Black pride. And though Ali called him a “white n*****,” Frazier was no grafted snake. He just wasn’t a Muslim.

And what was it to be a Muslim, anyways? Harris had joined the group after he left prison because he wanted direction. He had no family, no friends, no connections to fall back on, and he was afraid that if he returned to San Francisco without changing his situation, he would return to the same despondency that landed him in San Quentin the first time. And if there was one conviction Harris had, it was that he never wanted to return to prison.

For a time, it looked like it was working. In the months after prison, Anthony Harris had, for the first time in his life, a steady job which paid enough to let him rent a small apartment on Laguna St, a few people he considered unconditional friends whom he met at the Mosque every Sunday, and a girl who he didn’t have to pay: who was genuinely interested in him, who worried about him when he stayed out all night and made him dinner after long days at the moving company. His life started to feel routine, but good, and the thought of losing what he’d built and returning to the subsistence that had defined it before sent thick knots of regret bubbling across his chest.

As his thoughts veered dangerously towards heresy, Harris once again began to erect walls around his cerebrum, trying to redirect any impure notions before they burrowed too deeply into the grey matter. But this time, Harris couldn’t avoid the inescapable logic that followed. What was he doing with the Death Angels? The white devils he watched them kill had done nothing to him. He feared they’d return him to prison. He tired of Larry Green, whose fanatical religiosity made any real conversation impossible, and Manuel Moore, who blindly followed every arbitrary stricture he was told. And above all, he was terrified of J. C. X. Simon, who was without conscience or regulation, who killed with calculation, not passion, whose cloudy brown eyes concealed a gaping cavity where in others, the normal parts that form a human personality resided.

Harris didn’t say any of this. He couldn’t. But in that moment, Harris decided something had to change. He would have to leave the Muslims.

Simon, as he turned the Cadillac onto Divisadero, viewed Harris’ torpor with suspicion. This was a moment of celebration, where every true Black Muslim should cheer a great triumph over the grafted snakes, and Harris instead was brooding. His heart had always been weak, Simon thought. As they passed the cordoned-off doorway where Moore had shot Marietta Girolamo just a week before, Simon had a thought. Harris had to be tested. And once again, the words of the Apostle echoed through his mind. Much more would have to be done.

A few blocks on, Simon saw a lone white woman walking in the shade of a fluorescent streetlight, and stopped the car. Moore walked out and took the seat behind the steering wheel, while Simon slipped his gun from the glove compartment and into his jacket, and then strode towards the woman, shrinking from the light as he passed. Tana Smith was in a celebratory mood. Her plans that evening were to buy new fabric to start a new set of blouses and skirts, which would occupy the rest of her weekend. The new clothes were a new beginning for the thirty-two year old Smith, who had just gone through a difficult breakup and only just started to feel like she could breathe again. Simon raised the .32 behind her and shot her twice, extinguishing her hopes in a single flash of nitrate. He was serving a higher cause and she was a necessary casualty. Tana Smith died before she hit the ground.

Anthony Harris was horrified. He was only vaguely aware of the stop, and in the seconds that followed after he rose from his reverie, a life had been taken. As Moore and Simon exulted in the front seat, Harris felt sick. Ten minutes later, they stopped again. This time, Simon turned to Harris and said “It’s your turn, brother,” pointing to an old white man fishing in a garbage can. Simon pressed the gun into his hand and opened the door. Harris hesitated, seeking some possible way out, until Simon looked at him again. “Or is your heart too weak after all?”

Shaking with humiliation and fear, Harris walked out towards the man, who paid him no notice. The gun felt alien in his hand, and he raised it uncertainly. John Bambic looked at him, realized the reality of his situation, and then rushed at Harris, who fired. The old man was staggered, but kept running. Harris stood frozen in shock, and Bambic locked his hands around his throat and squeezed. Blood gushed from his abdomen, but his grip only tightened. John Bambic was 89 years old, and had lived his entire life in San Francisco. He was a child when America won the Spanish-American War, a teenager when the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. He fought at Belleau Wood in 1917, saw the rise of Hitler, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Normandy, the landing at Inchon, the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the Watergate scandal. His final struggle with Harris was history’s recalcitrance emerging, just for a second, to strike against biological destiny. Bambic’s eyes widened, while Harris, paralyzed in shock, tore at the fingers around his neck, until finally the grip loosened. Bambic fell backwards, his limp body splaying across the sidewalk, while Harris stumbled forward, hacking phlegm as he collapsed into the backseat.

The faces that turned towards him wore masks of pity and disgust. “Don’t get so close to him next time.” “Why didn’t you shoot back?” “You were nearly taken out by a fucking fossil.” Harris stared at his hands, still clean, and saw the crazed eyes of Bambic staring back at him. The Cadillac stopped moving again, and this time, Harris resisted the urge to dissociate. He watched as Moore slammed the car door, ran to a pensioner walking down Scott Street, and shot him twice in the back. Vincent Wollin fell face-first onto the concrete, never even having the chance to see his assailant. He would die two hours later.

Jane Holly didn’t pay much attention when a black man walked into the laundromat. Her mind followed her clothes, tumbling opalescently in the dryer, and then, as she read a Chronicle article about the slow American withdrawal from Vietnam, to her son, a newly-minted Marine who had left on deployment a few months ago. She noticed that the new arrival at the laundromat didn’t have any clothes, and wondered why he was here. Then she saw his hands weren’t empty—the right hand had a gun. She stood up and leapt back in horror, too late, as Manuel Moore fired twice, hitting her in the neck and chest. The forty-five year old mother tumbled backwards, while the other patrons looked on, frozen in shock.

Four murders in two hours. Each time, police were minutes from the scene, and arrived just after the murderers fled. Twice, the killers passed an undercover patrol while stalking their victim. Every murder had at least one direct eyewitness, and each reported the same description: a black 1968 Cadillac with fins, three occupants, driven by a heavyset black man. The descriptions of the murderers were familiar by now: the lumbering black man, a younger, muscular, black man, and now, for the first time, a taller black man who had struggled with Bambic. All were in their late-twenties or early-thirties. And all of them were still at large. Despite the web of surveillance, patrols, and undercover detectives surrounding the one-square mile hunting ground, the Zebra murderers had escaped once again.

And they weren’t done. That night, as the Cadillac drove south, Simon saw Roxanne McMillan walking alone on Madrid Street in the Excelsior district. In a second, he pulled over and shot her twice before continuing his drive home. Through sheer luck, Roxanne lived: the only survivor of the night of four murders.

In February, Anthony Harris made one of the foremost decisions of his life: he moved to Oakland. He didn’t tell anyone about his move, least of all Simon, Moore, Green, or anyone else he knew from the Black Self-Help Moving Company, and he didn’t present himself to the Nation of Islam Mosque in Oakland. He registered his move with his parole officer but no one else, ignoring the NOI prohibition on voluntary interactions with the police, and found a job at a fish market by the docks. Harris rose each morning to prostrate himself before the rising sun, and then worked eight long hours descaling, gutting, and filleting halibut, returning home late in the evening reeking of ocean and rotting offal to see his newborn son. It was a hard life—certainly harder than the one he left behind, with its constant labor, with its loneliness—but Harris relished it. He worked hard, he slept early, he spoke of marriage to his girlfriend and he enjoyed the early trappings of fatherhood. For the first time since he left prison a year ago, he felt free.

Meanwhile, the city Harris left behind, already in the midst of prolonged hysteria, now took on a sickly pallor. The rainclouds of January faded into temperate midwinter, and the sun reemerged to shine golden rays over the top of the newly-finished Transamerica Pyramid, but San Francisco remained a diseased patient.

The mania that followed the earlier murders had been replaced with a profound existential horror. The cup of endurance hath runneth over. Blacks were revolting against the entire white edifice. Blacks were killing whites, randomly, haphazardly, with guns and machetes, for the perceived crime of existing. Black men were agents of chaos, armed by a psychotic black nationalist cult, intent on the death of all deemed complicit in their oppression.

For city residents, it appeared that the very fabric of American life was fraying. Peaceful protest had given way to racialized murder. The police, who patrolled every block, every evening, were powerless to stop them. Every week, Mayor Alioto announced new strategies, new leads, new patrols, and yet, every week, there were no arrests, no news, no answers.

The Zebra murderers, as they were now commonly known, had accumulated eighteen victims in three months, and another murder spree seemed imminent. The police knew it. The residents knew it. The hollowed out crowds that gathered in the Condor Club or the Mahubay knew it. And in this environment of paranoia, every black became suspect and every white, professed liberals all, shirked from their idealism when they passed a black man on the street, or when a black man walked into the restaurant they were seated at, or when a black man entered their usual laundromat. San Francisco, the home of the counterculture, which deemed itself a city beyond racial classification, now regressed to avoidance and mutual suspicion.

And then, the much awaited, much dreaded, killing spree didn’t arrive. Week after week, the Zebra murderers remained silent. The police, patrolling every street in the city’s center, never saw the prowling black Cadillac. The few lone whites walking on Gough or Haight after dark held their breaths for their entire journey, but they made it safely. San Francisco, it seemed, had been granted a stay of execution. The detectives chasing the nebulous murderers subconsciously hoped they’d died, or decided their revenge had been exacted and quit, and the seismic shocks shaking their city to its core had finally steadied. But when that thought percolated to the rational parts of their brain, they rejected it. Serial murderers never stop. They have to be stopped.

The police, since January, had been surveilling the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 26 on Geary, cataloguing entrants, periodic visitors, members and meetings. They saw a troupe of thirty or so black men arrive, at irregular intervals but approximately weekly, to the warehouse. In early February, the officers inside the unmarked police car idling outside, unknowingly, witnessed a particularly important meeting.

It was a smaller gathering than usual—only confirmed killers were invited, minus Anthony Harris, whose whereabouts remained unknown. The ten or so men, gathered from chapters across the Bay Area, took seats around the round table, and waited for one man in particular to speak. He stood and paused, as one does before speaking words expected to arouse a reaction, before saying, “We need to cool it for a while.” He stayed standing, expecting an outcry. But there was none. Everyone seemed to agree. Emboldened, the man continued: The police are out in force in San Francisco, Marin, and Oakland. One of us has already been arrested. We need to lay low until things calm down.

Manuel Moore broke the resulting silence, remarking that he didn’t want to go to prison, which was received warmly. It seemed like everyone understood: the police were everywhere and no one wanted to be caught. The grafted snakes would have to be left to conspire without intervention—for now.

J. C. X Simon, sitting in disgusted silence, chose this moment to speak. “What about those of us who almost have our Death Angel wings?” The group fell silent for a second, but their response was consistent in sentiment: It’s too dangerous. You’d endanger all of us for your vanity. Simon, unsupported, seethed but said nothing, and the meeting adjourned.

To most of the congregants of the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 26, Larry Green was an enigma. As one of the leaders in the race for Death Angel status, he garnered respect and awe—even the Fruit of Islam members that occasionally stopped by the temple on business knew his name—but as a person, he remained aloof from the rest. No Muslim was allowed to drink, but Green also self-imposed a ban on smoking. Rape and theft were officially prohibited, but casually tolerated; Green was one of the few that strictly followed and enforced both provisions. He interpreted NOI theology through his own personal frame of austerity and self-denial, with flashes of true religiosity, akin to an ascetic whose holy work was the eradication of the unholy.

But beneath this outer crust, deeper motives, pulsing currents through the magma shifting the tectonics above, frothed and percolated. One fact is apparent: Larry Green was half-white, and notably lighter than his brothers at the NOI. He was constantly aware how much of a physical resemblance there was between him and many of the white devils they targeted. His personal austerity may have stemmed from a desire to make his killings immaculate: acts of ritual penance that could purify his own tainted blood. Another likely fact is that Larry Green was gay. In the Zebra case file, there are snippets of the story of Green’s first murder, before he joined the NOI, where he killed an older gay man after propositioning him for sex. The NOI officially banned homosexuality, and most of his brothers would have found it abhorrent. Perhaps his repressed sexuality drove him further into fanaticism, as his blind loyalty silenced the unsettling questions that otherwise plagued him.

On April 1st, 1974, Green sat on a car fender, watching the cadets from the Salvation Army school on Geary stream past. His eyes focused on two in particular—Thomas Rainwater and Linda Story—who were holding hands and lagging behind the rest. He’d been watching them for several days, and today, his mind once again returned to its familiar grooves. He examined their skin, white and unblemished, and cursed his parents for leaving him divided between worlds. He looked at their uniforms, creased, adorned with badges, and secretly envied their easy, unforced loyalty.

As the sun dipped lower in the sky, turning a definitive orange, Larry Green leapt off the car fender and walked towards the couple, his right hand resting on the .32 in his inner pocket. He caught up to Thomas and Linda, passed them, and then turned around, raising the gun. Both of them, after a second of petrified terror, turned and ran. Green fired two shots at Thomas, hitting him in the lower back, and then fired two more at Linda. Linda collapsed and started screaming. Thomas, however, kept staggering forward. He was too far now to shoot. Green prayed to Allah and watched, silently, until finally, at long last, Thomas Rainwater collapsed. He then heard footsteps nearing him and took off in the opposite direction. In his preoccupation he didn’t realize that Linda Story had crawled to the edge of sidewalk, out of his line of sight. She would live.

Green, justifying his violation of the enforced hiatus to his brothers, claimed that Allah had moved him, and thus his work was beyond censure. Green didn’t mention that he’d been watching the Salvation Army school for weeks, counting the cadets as they marched past in formation, nor that when he thought of Thomas Rainwater, his mind wandered towards doors he didn’t dare open. His impurity need not pollute the pristine.

Meanwhile, the others in the room, all followers of Allah, may have contemplated something different. If God, despite his unknown form and his unknowable motives, could have His will could be so easily reinterpreted to justify human desires, then were any man’s actions within reproach?

Days later, as the sun slowly faded and the early spring evening ripened, the loft room in the Black Self-Help Moving Company slowly filled with people. The air crackled with nervous excitement. Larry Green’s most recent sting, inspired as it was by Allah himself, had met with no official reprisal from NOI leadership, and the expectation that the hiatus would now officially end was high. Feet drummed and twitched, eyes anxiously flitted toward watches or at the diminutive timepiece on the room’s far side. Conversations turned to taunts and recriminations—like peacocks preening during mating season—and tempers flared. But all fell silent at the sound of a heavy car door closing, and then the unmistakeable thumps of a walking stick on wooden stairs.

But as the newly-arrived man started to speak, their alacrity quickly diminished, turning to confusion. Stop the destruction of the grafted snakes? Convert the Black youth? Murmurs began to spread. Then the man’s speech became prescriptive. The Death Angels work was finished. All members would now return to their usual duties, as proselytizers, priests, and good, working men in service of the Mosque. There wouldn’t be any more stings or murders. Allah willed it, he said.

As the words sunk in, the mood turned hostile.

J. C. X. Simon clenched his fists beneath his chair, his face contorted in rage. He looked around and saw the same anger etched in the expressions around him, but he was at a loss for what to say. And then an idea came to him.

Rising from his seat, Simon began to speak. “What if Allah moves a man to destroy the grafted snake?” He put a hand on Larry Green’s shoulder. “Like this brother here, just a few days ago.” The speaker paused, visibly uncomfortable. “Allah doesn’t come to a man often,” said the speaker. Simon persisted. “But he has come to me, and others. Would it be right to kill if he came once again?” The speaker now realized that he had no retreat. He had stated Allah as his justification, which now opened his direct command to the ministrations of the motivated intellect. With great reluctance, he said, “That would be acceptable. But you must be sure that it truly is Allah moving you, however, and not false pride or vanity.”

The tension released. Simon, tasting victory, acclaimed “I have no false pride. And I’m never mistaken in what Allah moves me to do.” He walked out of the room, flanked by Moore. The speaker tried to continue, but his imperative now landed like a damp squib. The meeting adjourned shortly after.

The next evening, on April 14th, Terry Ward left an impromptu Easter party at around 8:30 and walked towards a bus stop on Fillmore. He took the first northbound bus, expecting to transfer at Hayes St for the westbound journey. Sitting in the corner, the teenager closed his eyes for a few minutes, slipping into a pleasant languor from the engine’s gentle hum. At the same time, Ward Anderson anxiously waited for his stop to arrive. He was heading south from the Marina, expecting to transfer at Hayes to head east, and he really wanted a cigarette. Smoking, however, was banned on the bus. He hoped he’d have time for one when he waited for his transfer.

Manuel Moore idly wandered downhill on Steiner, his hand clasped on the gun in his inside pocket, and waited for Allah’s voice. Simon’s words the day before had inspired him, and he knew Allah sought the destruction of the white devils, whatever the false prophet had said. In the evening fog, illuminated warmly from the glow of a window just behind, he could make out a few people at the bus stop on the corner. He walked toward them. As he passed, a man waiting for a bus stopped him and asked for a light. Moore’s heart leaped. This must be the sign. Taking a breath, he turned towards the man and shot him in the abdomen, the bullet tearing through his ribs and liver. Ward Anderson fell backwards, his surprised expression drooping into an unconscious stupor. Moore turned and ran across the street to the parallel bus stop and without pausing, fired twice at Terry White, who’d barely registered the sudden blasts before he collapsed himself. Moore then sprinted away, turning onto Fillmore towards Grove. And, somehow, despite the nine patrol cars in the square mile around the Hayes and Fillmore intersection, Moore was almost entirely unsighted. Within 5 minutes, the entire area was sealed, as police officers rushed into nearby warehouses, yards, and stores in pursuit, but it was too late. Moore was gone.

Both Anderson and White were immediately rushed to a hospital and underwent emergency surgery. Lying in parallel beds in the critical care section, they stubbornly clung to life, and then, as the next day passed, began to stabilize. Within a few more days, both would wake up, clouded with painkillers and wincing from every movement, however unintentional, but alive—definitely alive. Moore, following their recovery from the evening news, shook with anger, which gradually transmuted to fear. Had he misinterpreted Allah’s will? The two devils had lived, surely through His intervention. What then of the man who tried to defy His divine plan?

J. C. X. Simon, whose religiosity was a thin facade for personal ambition, had no similar qualms about misinterpreting the multiplicity of God’s will. On April 16th, two days after Moore’s failed sting, Simon was walking south on Vernon in Ingleside when he saw Nelson Shields hunched over, reorganizing the trunk of a hatchback. He felt his gun in his pocket, along with the familiar rush of adrenaline that preceded a kill. Simon smiled; the day had been a good one. He’d defended Manuel Moore at the evening meeting for his failed attacks, and earned respect from his brothers. What better way to end the evening than by earning his Death Angel status, once and for all? Simon raised his gun, pointed at Shields, who was still reorganizing the trunk, and fired thrice. Shields collapsed backwards, blood pouring from his back and pooling around his body, and slowly died on the asphalt. Simon turned and ran in the direction whence he came.

As Simon sprinted north, he heard sirens directly approaching him. The police had been patrolling en masse around every known previous Zebra attack, and Shields had been shot just blocks away from his attempted murder of Roxanne McMillian. This time, a police cruiser was just two blocks away when a neighbor reported the gunshots. Simon turned towards a house, sprinted towards the backyard, and hopped the fence. Running across the next yard, he jumped the fence again, but as he reached the next fence, he paused. A man was standing in the next yard, blocking his escape route entirely. New sirens began to approach from the other direction. In a panic, Simon crouched, hopped to the opposite yard, and then took cover amidst some shrubs. He realized, right then, that he needed to get rid of the gun: it was the crucial piece of evidence that eliminated any potential deniability. Panting hard, he slunk towards the nearest fence, and with his back pressed against it, tossed the gun directly overhead. He took the rustle of disturbed leaves as an indication that his disposal succeeded, and then ran straight back onto the sidewalk down the only street that wasn’t already crawling with cops. Police established a perimeter 10 blocks long around the murder location, but they were, once again, minutes too late.

Concluded in Part 3.

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On August 20th, 1619, twenty Angolans, kidnapped by Portuguese slave raiders in the Kingdom of the Kongo, were unloaded in Jamestown, the capital of the newly chartered crown colony of Virginia. These weren’t the first enslaved Africans in the Americas—the first shipment of slaves arrived in St. Augustine, Florida, almost sixty years earlier. They also technically weren’t slaves—as the institution of chattel slavery hadn’t yet been invented in British America, they were classified as indentured servants. And they had arrived in Virginia by pure chance. Originally on a ship bound for Veracruz, a raid by British privateers diverted a portion of the enslaved to the nascent Jamestown settlement instead.

The true poignancy of this day, instead, is derived in retrospect. 1619 marked the beginning of two-hundred and forty-six years of black bondage in the United States of America. Over this time, almost four-hundred thousand Africans were kidnapped and forced to undergo a harrowing journey to the United States. They were stripped of their names and languages. Their studded bangles were replaced with manacles, their headdresses with slave collars. Their only remaining rituals were the branding ceremonies on arrival to their plantation. Angolan chiefs, Congolese shamans, Gambian merchants, all became African slaves, their individuality utterly subsumed by a society that flogged their bodies and tortured their souls. Their existence was a horror of toil, brutality and anonymity.

By 1964, there were twenty-two million African-Americans in the United States, each an inheritor of this legacy of dishonor. And despite the Civil war, despite the 13th Amendment, despite three-hundred and forty-five years of progress, America had not overcome its original sin. Blacks still spent their days in subjugation to white institutions. Blacks faced discrimination in employment. Their schools were underfunded, their neighborhoods isolated and underserved. Slavery was abolished, but black men still toiled on prison farms and in chain gangs, or as sharecroppers on the very estates that enslaved them. Equality before the law was writ as law, yet the omnipresence of lynchings and false convictions and police brutality showed the law itself to be writ in water.

But as Martin Luther King wrote, “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.” Subjugation always engenders resistance. And indeed, the story of American apartheid is incomplete without retelling the long and fitful history of African-American resistance. Starting from the Stono Rebellion in 1739, and proceeding through John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, slavery was vigorously and continuously resisted by the millions bound by its yoke. The Civil War, supposedly a moment of triumph, was immediately tarred by the failure of Reconstruction, carrying forth a tainted legacy of broken promises and reimposed oppression through new means. This perceived betrayal created new generations of recalcitrants unwilling to reconcile themselves to subjugation.

1.2 million African Americans fought for America in World War 2. They fought to make “the world safe for democracy,” but returned to a country that denied them a say in their own democracy. And as the country triumphantly slipped into the postwar exuberance of the 1950s, African-Americans, their eyes smarting from the sting of the renewed lash, turned their anger into a nationwide struggle. America, then emerging as a deeply ambivalent superpower riven with internal contradictions, shook under the strain.

The Civil Rights Movement, though in retrospect conceptualized as a single moral arc, was in reality a disparate movement of various threads emerging from the fraying American quilt, united only by a conviction that the “cup of endurance [had] run over,” and the “bleakness of corroding despair” must be replaced by true justice for all. The primary divide in movement hinged between integration and separatism: whether one believed that white America was redeemable and reconciliation—incorporating blacks into the American mythos—was possible, or that years of apartheid had poisoned American society root and branch, and the only reconciliation possible was revolution.

Malcolm X, the most vocal and eloquent proponent of black revolution, asked, in 1964: “How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours?” Speaking on the eve of the Civil Rights Act, the first triumph of the integrationists, he rejected the premise altogether. MLK spoke of a timetable for another man’s rights; Malcolm X posited the very existence of such a timetable was an abrogation of black humanity, and any society that accepted such a schedule was corrupted and irredeemable. The only rational course of action in such a society was secession.

The Nation Of Islam (NOI), the organization Malcolm X spent most of his life representing, sought to be the facilitator of that secession. Despite the name, it was barely Islamic—instead, Islam offered revolutionary garb to counter the Christian ethos of the integrationist wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Theologically, it munged together Garveyist separatism, which called for black economic self-sufficiency, with an undercurrent of black supremacist thought that aimed to forge a new nation for the Black race.

The NOI’s spiritual founder was Wallace Fard Muhammad, who, due to the paucity of evidence on his life and the political importance of his narrative to overall church history, is as close to a mythological figure as can emerge in 20th century America. His origins are unknown, as is his real name. Even his appearance is an ambiguity: only five photographs exist of Fard, one of which is the official NOI portrait and four of which are blurred mugshots. Whoever he truly was, Fard emerged from history’s void in 1930, preaching black nationalism with Islamic overtones in Detroit. His preaching targeted poor, black migrants from the South, promulgated by raucous sermons in the stacked tenements in the city’s west. By 1933, he was said to have accumulated twenty-five thousand converts in the city, but in 1934, before he could consolidate his nascent organization, he vanished without explanation. His disappearance was never solved.

His most important convert was Elijah Muhammad, an itinerant laborer who found Fard in 1931 and quickly became a devoted follower. Fard transferred leadership of the (not yet named) NOI to Elijah in 1933, shortly before his disappearance, and Elijah would lead the church until his death in 1975, presiding over its apogee in the 1960s along with some of its darkest moments. Under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership, the NOI became a national movement with mosques in every major city. It established recruiting pipelines in most black neighborhoods, college campuses, alcoholism and drug addiction support groups, and most especially, prisons. The incarcerated became a core demographic for the NOI, as disproportionately black prisons formed deep wellsprings of anger that was easily radicalized into fodder for the revolution.

By the 1970s, the NOI was the central organization leading the revolutionary wing of black activism. But as Muhammad, whose health was always frail, slipped into terminal decay, the formerly centralized NOI began to strain, and fringe groups began to sprout, operating semi-autonomously under the NOI banner.

In the late 1960s, one such group, from the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 26 in San Francisco, began to push a more irredentist view of NOI ideology. Blacks could not simply secede from white society, they said, because the machinations of the white man would always undermine them. Indeed, for them, the existence of the white man’s rule anywhere was an inherent threat to the black man everywhere. The only solution was to kill every “white devil,” and in doing so, retake the society they built with their blood and labor.

In 1971, Mosque No. 26 moved into a new building on 1805 Geary Boulevard, in the Fillmore district. This move was replete with symbolism: the Fillmore, formerly an African-American community once known as the “Harlem of the West” for its jazz legacy, was the most poignant victim of urban renewal in San Francisco. Much of the neighborhood was leveled to expand Geary, the main thoroughfare, and displaced residents fled southeast to the Bayview or west to Oakland. Amidst this graveyard of smog-belching cars and deteriorating commercial buildings, this extremist cult planned the requiem of white America. Drawing from NOI theology, they named themselves the “Death Angels:” the avenging soldiers of Allah.

In the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 26, on October 20th, 1973, about thirty men crowded into the upstairs loft. Folding plastic chairs, stacked horizontally, bent and creaked under their shifting loads, and the air, dank despite the chill of the autumn evening, was pregnant with anticipation. Standing before the assembled audience, a tall black man, dressed in a suit and shining black shoes, a greying, pointed beard curling from his chin, spoke with deathly pathos.

“For four hundred years, we, the true followers of Allah, have suffered at the hands of this grafted white devil who came from our very own diluted seed!” The room erupted in calls. “Evil!” “Hear!” The man continued. “And now that we know the enemy, what must we do about him? Simply read the laws of Muhammad. All Moslems will murder the white devil because he is a grafted snake.” The room again shouted affirmations. “Praise Brother Muhammad!” “Kill the white devils!” And then the calls coalesced into a low chant. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” The men pounded insistently with their feet, and in their steady psychedelic hum, each man felt an upwelling of sheer religious ecstasy. The speaker quietly left the room.

As the meeting broke, three men—Jesse Lee Cooks, Anthony Harris, and Larry Green—purposefully walked out of the building and towards an old Dodge van in the parking lot, emblazoned with the logo of the “Black Self-Help Moving Company.” They drove without direction, heading first down Mission street, then taking the freeway north to the Embarcadero. Finding the alight waterfront too conspicuous, they made a left on Chestnut and slowly prowled Telegraph Hill. And then they saw something.

Richard and Quita Hague had left their apartment that night for a languid after-dinner walk. They adored San Francisco’s cool October evenings, the stunning vistas they passed as they climbed its steep hills, the way Coit Tower looked enshrouded by fog and mist. They didn’t think anything of the white van they passed, and they didn’t notice when it pulled over and three black men stepped out, moonlight reflecting from the sheen of their unused .32 caliber pistols.

As they passed a street corner, someone grabbed Richard’s arm. “Hold on man, you’re coming with us,“ said the voice, as a gun leveled was leveled at him. His wife tried to run but Green, the youngest of the assailants, sprinted forward, grabbed her by the hair, and painfully threw her to the ground. Together, the Hagues were dragged into the back of the van, bound, bloodied, and face-down, and it immediately drove off.

“We’re not allowed to fuck her!” Green, the driver, yelled. He saw, in his mirror, one of his brothers fondling the white devil, and was appalled by the broach in protocol. “It should be a clean death.” But Green was ignored, and when he shouted again, the only response was a gruff “shut the fuck up.” Richard Hague laid unconscious beside her, bleeding profusely from his broken jaw.

Green turned on 23rd and Pennsylvania, drove south, and stopped beneath a freeway underpass. It was a desolate industrial neighborhood where freight tracks followed the spur of the Bayview into Hunter’s Point. He slammed open the back doors of the van, shoved Cooks away from Quita Hague, and dragged her by her hair to the train tracks, stopping only to grab a machete from van as he left. Quita screamed as he positioned her over the cold metal rail and swung the sword, gashing her throat and nearly decapitating her. She died instantly.

Cooks, enraged by his denied conquest, grabbed Richard and beat him with a lug wrench. He took the discarded machete and slashed at Richard’s unconscious face, and then tossed him roughly by the limp, unmoving body of his wife. “Let’s move,” Green shouted, and all three men rushed towards the moving van. Harris, as he passed Quita’s body, noticed a golden wedding band, and, lagging behind the others, slid it off of her finger. Theft, like rape, was banned by the Death Angels’ Commandments, but Harris was getting married the next week and he couldn’t afford a ring.

Against all likelihood, Richard Hague lived. Demented, covered in blood, and in crippling pain, this half-risen Lazarus emerged from his repose an hour later and staggered forward, collapsing again closer to a trafficked road, where he was seen by a passing car and reported to the police. Hague was taken to the hospital, and miraculously, he lived. Police followed the trail of his blood to the railroad tracks, where they found Quita Hague, lifeless and cold, her head dangling from her shoulders by a sinew. Police cars, news crews, and confused residents accumulated by the yellow crime scene demarcation, craning their necks to see the dead body.

Meanwhile, Jesse Lee Cooks fumed. He hadn’t been able to rape the white devil, and even worse, the man he’d attacked had lived. It took four male kills to become a true Death Angel—fewer if you got a woman, or better, a child—and he, who organized the entire sting, who was the most spirited Muslim of all, had credit for nothing. And a worse sin gnawed at his heart. After his failure, he had tried to redeem himself on a white girl, but after he raped her, he couldn’t bring himself to kill. He knew the four hundred years of slavery her kind had foisted on him, but as she lay there, prostrate, he couldn’t fire—he left her and walked away. His soul lacked conviction, he muttered, and as he read his victim’s account in the morning Chronicle, Cooks deeply regretted his weakness.

Frances Rose didn’t expect to die. Almost no one does, but on October 30th 1973, as the twenty-eight year old Rose parked by the University of California Extension on Laguna St, she could think of little beyond the class she was grievously late for. As she gathered her books, she saw a tall black man walking stridently towards her Mustang. Too late, she realized the passenger door was unlocked, and as the man confidently took the seat next to her, she froze, unsure. “Give me a ride,” he said. A command, not a question. Before she could respond, he raised a gun. Jesse Lee Cooks had decided that this time, he would not succumb to weakness. In broad daylight, on a crowded street, he fired four shots, hitting Rose in the face, neck, and chest. Rose slumped. Cooks, stained with blood, quickly put on a black sweatshirt and took off.

Cooks made a left onto Haight and walked, not slowly, not unduly fast, but purposefully, and, he hoped, inconspicuously. Police swarmed the streets, looking for a black man fleeing on foot. Cooks saw one police car pass, then two. He quickened his pace. As he reached Steiner, a Crown Victoria, sirens blazing, turned sharply in front of him. Two cops emerged and ordered him to stop. Cooks pretended not to hear. His right hand twitched towards his belt, where he kept his .32. The cops raised their guns and repeated their command. For a second, time itself froze, murder hanging in the air, until Cooks blinked and obeyed. He laid down, hands over his head, as the two cops cuffed him, disarmed him, and took him into custody.

Cooks’ arrest landed with a dull thud, for both the police and the Death Angels. It had been just ten days since the murder of Hagues, and the police were still treating the murders as separate incidents. Thus far, the only connection between the crimes was that in each case, the assailant was a black male—a similarity that applied to a depressingly large segment of the city’s homicides. And so, for the murder of Frances Rose, Jesse Lee Cooks was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. He never gave a motive for the crime, he never mentioned the rape of Linda Enger, and he never mentioned Richard or Quintana Hague.

As Cooks was marched to a familiar cell at San Quentin, the prison where he’d already spent almost a decade of his life, a black Cadillac stopped by a convenience store on the corner of Turk and Larkin. The three men sitting in the car peered through the open glass door at the Lebanese man standing at the counter. The driver, J. C. X Simon, a newly arrived Muslim from Houston, gripped the pistol nestled against his thigh, muttered Allahu Akbar, then opened the door and stepped out.

Unlike many of his brothers, J. C. X Simon did not come from a broken home. He was not raised in housing projects, he had never gone to prison, and he even had a bonafide college degree. His conversion, instead, was driven by ideology. Simon had spent most of his life in Texas, and like most African-Americans in the state, he found his opportunities steeply circumscribed by his race. Segregation and the daily humiliations it imposed burned Simon’s pride, while the menial labor he was relegated to, along with the meager wages it provided, kept his family on the edge of poverty.

In 1970, Simon found his way to a Nation of Islam meeting in Houston. The NOI members appealed to him: they were confident, well dressed, and motivated. Their black separatist ideology appealed to him far more than MLK’s civil disobedience ever had. These men preached that whites were an inferior race, that Blacks deserved to inherit the earth, and that direct action, not meek nonviolence, was the path toward Mecca. The NOI gave Simon’s frustration a deathly shape, and as his stature and devotion as a member grew, he strived to contribute ever more to a black future. So, when a tall, aging black man, dressed in a suit and polished shoes, arrived at a meeting and spoke about how San Francisco, a premier city of the white man, stolen from the brown Mexican, was buckling under the pressure of the weak-willed hippy movement and was ripe for the taking, Simon emptied his apartment, uprooted his family, and started the long drive to California.

The man that stepped out of the car with him, Manuel Moore, was of a different breed. Moore grew up in Los Angeles, as one of ten children, raised by an abusive father and an absent mother. In school, he never learned to read—instead, he was passed forward, year after year, until, at sixteen, he left school altogether. Moore then drifted between juvenile detention and homelessness, until finally, after a particularly violent armed robbery, the State of California put him in San Quentin. Like so many others, in prison, Moore fell in with the NOI. For Moore, though, his motivation was simpler than ideology. He was tired of fighting the white gangs, he wanted better food, and he wanted to belong to something—a feeling he’d been searching for his entire life. After prison, he followed his friend, Anthony Harris, to San Francisco, and met the Death Angels. Moore, unsophisticated and unopinionated, joined them almost by default. The white man had never personally wronged him, he thought, but he hadn’t done anything for him either.

The third man in the car was Anthony Harris. And Harris was intending to stay there, in the car, until Simon approached the backseat, leveled at the passive face looking out the window, and pointed. Harris, who was wary of the crowded intersection the store sat on, was about to refuse. But the look in Simon’s eyes—the dark brown irises clouded with cold, manic, bloodlust—gave him pause. He was afraid of Simon, and in this moment, that fear overcame his reluctance. Harris sighed and opened the door. The three men then sprinted forward, their guns glinting in the drops of sun reflecting from the wet sidewalk.

Simon strode to the counter. Moore browsed in the background, while Harris kept a watch outside. As-salaam-alaikum, he said. Walaikum as-salaam, the man replied. Peace be with you. Simon then raised the gun. “Come with me.” He dragged the man to the back of his store and pushed him to a chair, his arms fastened behind his back. The man pleaded as his assailant slowly walked behind him and raised his gun. With a single shot to the back of the head, the man recoiled lifelessly, blood spattering onto his clothes, his shoes and the floor. Saleem Erakat, the owner and sole proprietor of Erakat Grocery for almost twenty years, was dead.

Harris heard the shot and rushed inside. Moore followed him, his casual demeanor contrasting with Harris’ manic energy. The closet door slammed open, and both men saw Simon, his gun still reeking of sulfur, with Saleem Erakat slumped forward, blood matting his bushy beard, his limp body dangling from his bindings. All three were silent, until Moore, looking at Erakat, remarked: “You sure he’s white? We don’t get credit for no Mexicans.”

Saleem Erakat’s murder marked the first touchstone in the murder spree afflicting San Francisco. In the following two weeks, the black Cadillac, populated by three men, slowly prowling the Fillmore, Japantown, Lower Haight, and Upper Mission, became a fixture of San Francisco’s twilight hours. The car slowed as it approached lone white people, but usually then accelerated away once they merged with a group, or entered an apartment building, or passed a black man. Unseen hundreds saw it, most disregarding it with only a passing glance. But every so often, when conditions held, when the adrenaline of the occupants inside crescendoed, the car stopped, and a single man sprinted from passenger side, holding a pistol, and fired.

On December 11th, 1973, Paul Dancik, a twenty-nine year old artist, walked out of a housing project on Haight and Buchanan holding a scrap of paper and searched desperately for a payphone. A few minutes later, he found one—a decrepit booth, harshly lit by an overhanging streetlamp—and unrolled the scrap in his hand. As he dialed, Manuel Moore walked in behind him and forcibly hung up the phone. Dancik turned in surprise, only to hear the sound of a .32 caliber pistol launch two bullets into his forehead at point blank range. Moore strode away, his discarded cartridges winking in the moonlight.

Two days later, on the evening of December 13th, 1973, Arthur Agnos walked out of a meeting of the Potrero Hill health committee. A top legislative aide to assemblyman Leo McCarthy, Agnos was an energetic reformer working toward a run for supervisor himself. As he stopped by his car, J. C Simon emerged from the shadows and raised his gun, shooting Agnos twice in the back. The bullets punctured his lung, spleen, and kidney. Barely lucid, Agnos turned to face his attacker, who took off. Then, with help, Agnos staggered to a house nearby to call for an ambulance.

Agnos, though gravely wounded, would live, and go on to become the Mayor of San Francisco in 1988. Marietta Girolamo wasn’t quite as lucky. Just twenty minutes after Agnos was rushed to the hospital, Moore and Simon saw Girolamo walking casually down Divisadero, alone, peering into the shops and bars she passed. The street was well-lit and trafficked, but that particular block was empty of pedestrians. Moore stepped out and tried to inconspicuously stalk Girolamo, who continued to weave across the sidewalk. As Girolamo stepped into a doorway, intending to enter, Moore grabbed her roughly by the neck. She turned around, startled, and Moore fired two shots into her chest. Marietta died almost immediately, slumping forward into the door of a clothing store.

As Christmas approached, the Death Angels’ murderous rampage intensified. On December 20th, Illario Bertucci, an eighty-one year old man walking home from his factory job, was gunned down by Moore. That same night, Teresa DeMartini, a twenty year old walking home from a Christmas party, was shot three times in the stomach by Simon. DeMartini lived. Bertucci did not.

On December 22, in a triangular traffic island between Market and Van Ness, Larry Green was following Neal Moynihan. He traced him through the intersection, and, as they passed Stevenson, where the street lights faded and created a small spot of shadow, he raised a .32 and fired twice. Moynihan died immediately. Green took off, running west towards Gough. In the throes of his getaway, however, he saw another woman struggling uphill towards the bus stop just ahead. Green raised his gun, still warm, with a .32 caliber bullet already in the chamber, and fired again. Mildred Hosler collapsed. Police, racing from the Moynihan scene, arrived to Hosler’s body, just two blocks away, less than five minutes later, finding several witnesses but a missing suspect.

And then, there was the case of John Doe #169.

Late on Christmas Eve, 1973, Anthony Harris drove the Black Self-Help Moving Company van west from Fillmore, along Geary, until he reached Sutro Heights. As he drove, his mind reflected on the bizarre evening, where he’d arrived late to a Christmas party at the mosque, was greeted with derision and dismissiveness, and then pointed to a package to dispose of. The man making the request towered over Harris, emitting a sickening odor of iron and sweat. Harris couldn’t refuse. Terrified, he took the additional precaution of not asking what the package contained.

As he passed Land’s End, Harris stopped the van along the highway railing. He stepped out onto the empty road and watched mist emanate from the crashing waves on the shore, rising and fading in the all-encompassing black murk. He opened the back of the van, and with effort, dragged the inert package out of the trunk and onto the empty road. The silence was penetrating, broken only by the ocean and the sound of labored breathing, as Harris lifted the box over the railing and then, with a single push, launched it over. He didn’t watch it tumble along the cliff, nor see it splash into the roiling sea below.

The next morning, two women walking along the beach in Pacifica came upon a sodden cardboard box and tore it open. Inside, wrapped in plastic bruised from its long fall, they saw the bloody outlines of a human body. They called the police immediately, who unraveled the plastic tarp on a coroner’s bench, and then recoiled. The body found within was missing a head, hands, and feet. Its arms were bloody stumps, bound tightly to its sides by wire, while the legs were amputated through the tibia, then brought up to the torso and bound across the body. The decapitation was labored; the muscle fibers were frayed by repeated slashes from a blunted sword, and the skin below was littered with deep gashes.

The faceless, fingerless, toothless, and nameless victim evaded all identification attempts. There were no useful photographs that could be taken, no dental records that could be extracted, no fingerprints, no tattoos, no identifying birthmarks, no unique bruises. DNA forensics didn’t exist. No recent missing persons in San Francisco matched the description. To this day, John Doe #169 remains unidentified. And the state of his body, and the sheer barbarity it implied, raised the slowly brewing hysteria in San Francisco to cacophonous levels.

Since the arrest of Jesse Lee Cooks two months prior, the police had made considerable progress in the investigation. They identified a clear pattern in the murders. The victims were all light-skinned, and apart from Saleem Erakat, universally of Caucasian descent. The assailants were all reported to be young black men. Almost all of the murders took place within a two mile rectangle near the geographic center of San Francisco. Ballistics for every murder were the same—.32 caliber rounds, fired by automatics widely available in the underground markets. Police had even used impressions on the leftover bullet casings to prove that all of the murders were done with just two different guns.

The police also knew about the Nation of Islam Mosque on Geary. Many convicted criminals—Jesse Lee Cooks among them—stated they were members of the NOI and attended semi-regular meetings at the mosque. San Quentin Penitentiary had a near-permanent presence of NOI members, and they hosted weekly sermons exclusively for black prisoners. They also knew about its affiliates, the Black Self Help Moving Company on Market and the Shabazz Bakery across the street, which employed a disproportionate number of the black parolees that found their way to San Francisco.

And yet, despite this seeming directionality, the police still had no suspects, no motives, no persons of interest, and no damning evidence. The most they had to go on were maddeningly vague witness descriptions, which could match almost any of the thousands of young black men in the city. Over and over, the police commissioner and the Mayor were forced to give bleak press conferences, detailing the minimal progress they had made and their complete lack of suspects.

San Francisco itself entered a state of prolonged, deep-rooted anxiety. Sidewalks emptied by sunset. North Beach, the city’s busiest nightlife spot, was deserted on Friday and Saturday nights, week after week. Vacancies multiplied at the Westin, the St. Francis Drake, and the Hilton, as tourists fled to safer climes. The news was dominated by endless reruns of the killing. Herb Caen, a longtime columnist for the Chronicle, received a call from a man who threatened to murder double the number of blacks in retaliation.

As 1973 closed, San Francisco—and California as a whole—was reeling. The Zodiac murders still made front page news. There were reports of a spree of house burglaries in Visalia. The Symbionese Liberation Army had murdered a school superintendent in Oakland, and had started planning a fateful kidnapping. A new church, led by an enigma named Jim Jones, had grown to almost two thousand members. Their bizarre slogans littered utility poles across the city. Hysterical residents demanded more radical action to restore the safety and normalcy of their communities. The mayor, responding to these calls, established a new task force specifically for investigating the murder spree, led by two longtime homicide detectives, Gus Coreris and Jon Fotinos, along with a handpicked team to assist them. Everyone on the task force was cleared of existing responsibilities, assigned new offices, and given a new a frequency specifically for any incidents potentially related to this crime wave.

That frequency was coded as “Z” on every cruiser’s radio. In police slang, this frequency was referred to as “Zebra.” The press seized on the unintentional symbolism and gave the attacks their most enduring sobriquet: The Zebra murders.

Continued in part 2.