Freedom by Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger is an accomplished author who wrote several successful non-fiction books. His most popular was The Perfect Storm, which chronicled the loss of the Andrea Gail, a fishing trawler out of Gloucester, MA, which sank during a powerful storm in late October of 1991. In Freedom, he writes about his own journey, walking from Washington, DC, across Pennsylvania with three friends and a dog. They lived off the land, usually sleeping under the stars and cooking their food over a fire. They walked along railroad tracks which got them off the main roads and brought them in close contact with the more rural parts of the state. They had to dodge railway policemen and weird people and find shelter from bad weather. The point of the trek was to take a first-hand look at the people, places and things that undergird the United States. The goal of the long hike was to explore the two major bookends of the American experiment, freedom and community.
The book is divided into three sections: Run, Fight, and Think. Run leads off.
Run
Freedom opens with the group having left Harrisburg, PA, and entering into a very rural part of the state. Junger talks about the first people who settled the area with their covered wagons carrying everything they owned. The trail the trappers and farmers trod today is a state road with trailer parks, camp sites, and strip malls. As the group moved away from the city, they ran into meth addicts and survivalists who posted signs warning the federal government to leave them alone. The area was also home to bears which, like railroad cops, were to be avoided.
Most of the book isn't about the author’s trip which, as a long, unstructured walk over 400 miles, is an embodiment of freedom. He connects bigger ideas to whatever land he is crossing. He recounts the history of Native American tribes that fought each other for land and dominance, with the winners often enslaving the losers. That's his first take on freedom, how easy it is to lose it. Over a hundred years various tribes conquered other tribes. One day you're free; the next day you’re not. Early settlers were often wiped out by the Indians; later, the white man won, taking away the Native Americans' freedom and land.
For those early settlers the effort was worth it. “The risks were appalling and the hardships unspeakable, but no government official would ever again tell you what to do.” You were free if you managed to stay alive.
Back to the trek. The hikers walked along the maintenance roads that were next to the rail tracks. The group walked together, in cadence, at a fast pace, almost like a military march. They traveled a total of 400 miles, usually by themselves, in empty spaces. Junger sees this free movement as the ultimate freedom.
Being feared gives you freedom. The group came across a well-known Black motorcycle gang that was so tough that everyone stayed out of their way, another kind of freedom. The absence of threat is perhaps the most important determinant of freedom. In a weird way, being in a gang is a guarantee of freedom against being a victim of violence in the city. The gang protects you. Of course, you have to do what the gang wants you to do, which limits your freedom, but for many young gang members the trade-off is worth it.
Poorer neighborhoods were friendly to the hikers, offering water and food. People in more affluent areas, suspicious of the scraggly crew, were likely to call the cops.
For most of human history, walking was the major means of transportation. Daniel Boone walked all over the wilderness, including trekking from Tennessee to Florida with only a bedroll and a musket. In the 1800s, escaped slaves literally walked to freedom to New England or Canada. Pioneers walked across the Appalachians and the prairies to start new lives. In these cases, walking helped make them free.
But walking to a new place isn’t always a good thing. The US government force-marched Indian tribes hundreds of miles to reservations. Mortality rates of these “walks” reached 25%. In Florida, the Seminoles refused to play nice with Uncle Sam and headed off into the woods and Everglades to avoid capture. They were successful and were the only tribe not to sign a treaty with the federal government. Walking away gave them freedom, at least for a while.
Apaches were another tribe that resisted being subjugated. They were poor and really didn’t have a homeland, so they were always on the move. This gave them the skills to avoid confrontation and battles with the white man, fights that they would surely lose. They would swoop in and attack the cavalry. While the troops were pursuing a small band of Apache warriors, the rest of the tribe would be sneaking out to a new home. These Indians often did not have horses so they would walk and run for days if necessary. Walking made them free, at least until the late 1800s when the tribe was forced into signing a treaty and moving to a reservation.
Junger talks about how people have always walked away to avoid losing their freedom. Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes were nomads who had fled oppression on their way to conquering the world. Over time, nomads were willing to undertake a perilous journey rather than submit to someone else’s rule.
Humans are good at walking and running. In ultra-marathons of 50 and 100 miles, runners usually beat mounted participants. Horses are faster over the short term, but they need a lot more rest than humans do, which makes them ill-prepared to go the distance.
Near Newport, PA, someone fired shots at the group. They ducked and the shooting stopped. Junger’s three colleagues were Afghanistan vets who would react to gunfire.
When there was no side road, they did have to watch out for trains when there was no road and they had to walk on the rails. Passenger trains ran much faster than freight trains and seemed to suck the air away as they roared by. Freight train engineers (the driver) were friendly; they would wave to the crew and toot their horn. Not so much with passenger train crews. They weren’t friendly.
While most meals were prepared on the road over a fire, the walkers looked forward to the times that they would go into a town and sit down to a real meal. They enjoyed the conversation with the locals who usually got a kick out of what Sebastian and his friends were doing (“You’re walking 400 miles?”). They’d use the restroom to shave and clean up and then move on.
Junger is a master of language: “The fire embers still pulsed, and the night air was soft and benevolent, and it felt like summer waited for us a few days upriver. My dog lay on my ankles, and the three other men shifted in their sleep. There may be better things than that, but not many.”
Fight
This section of the book begins by talking about the early settlers in central Pennsylvania. They were Dutch, German and Scotch Irish and all were willing to fight if necessary. The Native Americans did not like the incursion of the white men so there was a lot of fighting. Neither side gave a quarter. The losers were usually killed. Any man who refused to fight was shunned by the community. While the settlers took pride in the freedom of the frontier, in order to prosper you needed to follow the rules of the community, a quasi-government. There was no judicial system. Disagreements among the settlers were usually resolved through fisticuffs.
Railways were built along rivers and roads that had once been Indian paths. In the early 1800’s, the federal government realized that the new nation needed a transportation system to move goods. The government seized thousands of square miles of private land. The nation's freedom to be all that it could be trumped the right of the landowner to the free use of his property.
Fighting effectively is a key to maintaining freedom. In the animal kingdom, the biggest, baddest dudes dominate and win any confrontations. That’s not true of humans. Junger describes historical situations where the outmanned side won. In 1604, the mighty Ottoman Empire, with 12,000 troops, invaded tiny Montenegro, with 900. The smaller army harassed the Ottomans all night and, in the morning, attacked and killed one-third of the invading force. The smaller force kept using guerilla tactics to neutralize the enemy. Eventually, a rough truce was established and the Montenegrins kept their autonomy. Some humans are more clever than other humans and can pull an upset. Smaller, smarter, more nimble forces can win. In boxing, smaller, quicker, sharper fighters can and do win.
American soldiers tend to carry heavy packs when they go into combat. Enemy insurgents don’t. Packs slow people down and wear them out. That may explain why our ventures into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan didn’t work out. American military strategists have compared the Taliban to the Apaches in that both insurgents developed effective tactics to frustrate their powerful opponent. The Taliban had no air power, no heavy artillery, and sometimes even lacked boots and rifles. They still won.
Similarly, air power is no substitute for an efficient, nimble ground game. In Vietnam, we dropped seven million tons of bombs compared to dropping two million tons in World War II. We lost. With humans, being the biggest isn’t a guarantee of success in a fight.
“However it is defined, freedom is due, in part, to the fact that powerful nations do not always win fights. In fact, as often as not, they lose.”
Think
This section opens as the gang enters Altoona, a fading small Pennsylvania city that has steadily lost population as manufacturing and transportation industries left. It is a low-income, high-poverty community. They can’t find an open diner for breakfast. While walking through downtown, they saw dozens of people lined up to get a hot meal. A man came up to them and asked if they knew how to hop a freight train. He had to get to Atlantic City, NJ, for a job. He had been in Altoona for a couple of days. He said that the city was so poor that “They ain’t even got homeless. That’s how bad this place is.” Poor people who depend on soup kitchens certainly do not have much freedom.
“The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Powers are so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom. Democracy - both in its modern form and in its original, indigenous form - is an attempt to balance the two.”
Powerful groups can be a problem. Junger points out that the Catholic Church historically was very organized and strong and very good at oppression. Church leaders were not subject to any checks or balances to control their behavior. Despite supposedly being based on spirituality and doing the right thing, “Far from acting as an impediment to abuse, the Church was often allied with aristocrats like Aguilera, participating in military campaigns during the Middle Ages and even torturing and killing perceived enemies.” (Bob’s note: Aguilera was a Spanish aristocrat who lined up his workers and randomly executed a bunch of them to discourage the rest from demanding better working conditions. That’s one way to increase productivity.)
On the other hand, the founders of the United States, who were the ultra-elite, held themselves to the same standards as regular citizens:
“The authors of the American Constitution were among the wealthiest and most powerful men of their society and yet, with a few narrow exceptions, they made themselves subject to the same laws and penalties that governed others. (Many also risked being hanged for treason if the British won the war.) It was one of the few times in recorded history that a society’s elite stripped themselves of special protections and offered to serve the populace, rather than demanding to be served by them.”
Junger makes a good case that as society evolves and gets more civilized, the likelihood of reduced freedom – more oppression – increases. When humans were hunter-gatherers and literally living off the land, there was no real gap between rich and poor. There were no surplus goods for sharp people to grab and increase their wealth compared to average people.
As society became more economically sophisticated, income inequality increased as the haves – better educated, born wealthy, more skilled - grabbed more of what was produced. The distribution of income in a society is called the ”Gini coefficient,” where 1.0 means that one person earns all of the money and everyone else earns nothing. In a situation where everyone earns the same amount, the Gini coefficient is 0. A high Gini coefficient usually means less freedom in society since fewer people have more money and the power resulting from that. Deeply corrupt countries like Haiti, Namibia, and Botswana have Gini coefficients of .6. No one would argue that average people have a lot of freedom in those countries. The United States has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the developed world – .42 – but the nation also has a constitution and a legacy of freedom for its people. The fact that the US has a robust economy and a huge military also helps ensure freedom. However, people at the lower end of the economic spectrum certainly have much less freedom than wealthier people.
The last part of the book uses the Easter Rising in 1916 in Dublin, Ireland, and the rise of the labor movement in the United States to illuminate more aspects of freedom.
The Easter Rising was triggered by a battle between British soldiers and a group of Irish rebels who had taken a park in Dublin. Often the skirmishes between the locals and the occupying forces resembled street theater with taunting but not much shooting. Many of the Irish did not have weapons and even the armed men often had makeshift equipment. This time, a rebel shot and killed an unarmed policeman in the head and the fight was on. The British soldiers were young and poorly trained but they had weapons. After six days, the rebels surrendered.
Thousands of Dubliners were detained and fourteen leaders were tried, with many convicted of treason and executed. The defendants had no legal counsel and the military courts trying them were ill-prepared to conduct legal proceedings. The captured rebels freedom was sharply constricted even before they were convicted.
British troops suffered very few casualties in the uprising while hundreds of rebels died. Three months after the Easter Rising, Britain suffered almost 60,000 men killed or wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Junger notes that the overwhelming majority of casualties were poor people who were forced to fight. Richer folk could find ways to avoid service, a freedom of sorts.
The Easter Rising led to decades of strife in Ireland. The Brits often over-reacted to provocation, which gradually built up public support for the rebels. Over time, the Irish separatists developed political power and won elections. Ireland was given some autonomy, with the Protestant North Ireland remaining with the mother country. Over many decades, Ireland became totally independent. Eventually, a small, agrarian army had defeated a global power and won freedom. The rebels believed that they were fulfilling a historic destiny while the British soldiers were just ordered to fight. Having strong beliefs evens the odds and can lead to freedom.
The textile mill strike Junger discusses the role that women play in defeating a dominant power. He takes us to Lawrence, MA, in 1912, during a textile mill strike for better working conditions. The business owners got 5,000 National Guard troops to confront the strikers who ignored and taunted them. The soldiers didn't know what to do. While they were willing to beat up male strikers, they were not going to touch women. As one frustrated city official said, “One policeman can handle ten men, while it takes 10 policemen to handle one woman.”
The women organized their neighborhoods to join them in protesting poor working conditions which eventually wore down the mill owners. In the end, the strikers won. Men were good at shooting and fighting. Women were good at organizing support which ended up being more important.
Other strikes around the country did not succeed. The workers could not win harsh confrontations with hired strike breakers who were brutal in beating back the strikers, who were men. In Lawrence, the women prevailed because they used their brains and skills to develop support networks that produced success and because a male chauvinism of sorts usually protected them from bodily harm.
The author sees the labor movement as increasing freedom in the United States. Winning a strike obviously provides more freedom through better working conditions. Due to pressure from even failed strikes, Congress would eventually pass pro-labor legislation which gave more freedom to more workers.
The end of the journey In Bolivar, PA, a bit east of Pittsburgh, a locomotive pulling only one fancy car roared by the group with the passengers staring at them. Soon a man in a jeep drove up and told the hikers that the train had the CEO of the railroad company and his family on board. He was not happy and had instructed the railway police to act. The crew hid in the trees but the cops never came.
In the next hardscrabble town in the middle of nowhere, people were friendly and offered to fill up canteens. The last stop on the trip was Connelsville, a tiny hamlet where in 1754, as a young officer, George Washington was dispatched by the British to monitor and capture a small fort. He did his job and defeated a small force of French soldiers. A few years later, Britain took control of the eastern continent by winning the French and Indian War. Twenty years later, Washington led his army to victory against England in our War for Independence, another word for freedom.
The four guys and the dog were exhausted after having walked 400 miles. It was now high summer and it was hot. The trip was over. They would each head home to whatever was next.
Bob's Take
This was a short book that wandered a bit. The author would jump from building a fire on his trip to ruminating about ancient cultures and freedom. I don’t think that he always succeeded in connecting various elements of his trip with the historical and cultural elements of freedom that he discussed, but that may not be possible. It was an intriguing but disjointed book.
One aspect of the book that was particularly interesting was his take on the role of Native Americans in shaping the evolving United States. Various tribes - especially Apaches and Seminoles - organized their lives around preserving freedom. The Native Americans also taught settlers how to master the land, which ironically led to the demise of the tribes.
Before reading the book, I thought that all railways were the same. Not so. The high-speed lines, the ones Amtrak uses, were in good shape and they were well patrolled to keep the riff-raff (like our hikers) away. The tracks for the slower freight trains were in rough shape but no one cared if four guys and a dog walked along them.
Invariably, the higher the income in a town, the less welcoming were the residents. In places that had seen far better days, the people reached out and offered help to the four guys and a dog who often looked unkempt, like they had been walking for days, which they had been. The rich folks had the creature comforts but no real sense of community. The poor people didn’t own much but they did possess a positive attitude towards strangers who popped into their lives out of nowhere. They lived the essence of community.
Many of us can understand the allure of the journey. The four men on the trip were early middle-age, a time for reflection about what you’ve accomplished and what you want to accomplish in the time you have left. Taking off for several months to walk 400 miles will certainly provide the opportunity for lots of reflection on what has been and what might be in your life.
During the trip, Sebastian Junger was 51 years old and in the middle of getting divorced, something he did not share. Another walker, an Army vet who had served in Afghanistan, was also getting divorced, which he did not share. The trip away from their normal world no doubt represented a freedom from the unpleasantness of leaving someone you had loved and perhaps still loved.
Finally, the book didn’t get great reviews. Some left-of-center publications criticized Junger for not using more contemporary social justice or current political situations to illuminate freedom. Another, more critical but also more thoughtful review, did acknowledge the degree of difficulty of Junger’s effort. If you ask 100 Americans how they define freedom, you'll get 100 different answers, probably with few similarities. Even in less polarized times, getting any type of consensus about defining freedom would be a challenge. In today’s hyper-partisan world, it is probably an impossible task.
I certainly learned a lot from the book, which is my definition of whether something is worth reading. Freedom certainly could have been better, but I tip my hat to Sebastian Junger for even trying to define it.
