September Situation Report

Getting Started

With fall approaching and eight months’ experience with White House–directed capitalism under our belts, what can we say about the economic situation and prospects for continuing prosperity? Considered against the uproar generated by tariffs, the shutdown of major federal agencies, the disruption of farm operations by worker deportations, White House efforts to control Federal Reserve interest rate policies, the passage of a deficit-filled budget, and, believe it or not, even more, there can be no doubt about two things: First, large policy boulders continue to be dropped in the nation’s economic waters almost daily, and the resulting ripples and waves generate unexpected costs and opportunities. Second, White House actions concentrate power in the hands of the president instead of decentralizing decision-making across private citizens, corporations, and free markets. 

For example, along with imposing a 15 percent tariff on imports, the recent Japan trade agreement empowers the president to manage a $550 billion investment fund provided by Japan, thus enabling Trump to determine what, when, and where investments might be made. The European Union agreement, just completed on July 27, 2025, calls for $600 billion in Trump-managed investment. Empowered to pick winners and losers, the president is expected to take pay-to-play actions that will tend to cartelize US industries and substitute political approval for winning in the marketplace. When exercising the new trade deals, the trading partner countries will also concentrate power in the hands of their executive branch. In short, unguided free market activity, which can be mutually beneficial and more predictable than political behavior, will diminish.

Almost as if producing a reality TV show, President Trump basically organizes the script and is not reluctant to alter or even reverse a key position. Trump seems to determine what works on the basis of media and crowd reactions.[1] Shake, rattle, and roll and the headlines that follow seem to be the Trump administration’s definition of a good day. Of course, the associated effort to control the narrative can frustrate the president and generate high uncertainty for the rest of us. 

There’s plenty to consider as we review the current economic situation. Strongly affected by policy-generated wide swings in imports, the first estimate for second quarter real GDP growth came in at a healthy 3.0 percent. This estimate followed the first quarter’s shrinking, −0.5 percent growth, yielding a two-quarter growth of 1.3 percent. The Commerce Department report also indicates that the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index climbed at an annual rate of 2.9 percent compared to  3.1 percent in first quarter. And the latest Consumer Price Index numbers show inflation advancing at 2.7 percent. In a word, the Federal Reserve has reason to be concerned about tariff-induced inflation. And we the people have reason to worry about stagflation.

But buried among the signals are indicators that, while barely generating positive growth, our Great American Bread Machine may be ready to produce some prosperity.[2] There’s still a pulsebeat. No, things aren’t all roses, not by a long shot, but at least some cautious optimism is in order. As Rondald Reagan might have put it, “When I look at the situation, I can’t help but believe there is a pony in there somewhere.” (Again, I warn the readers. My mother loved me a lot when I was little. I tend to be optimistic.) 

Looking for a few words to describe the economic situation, I choose “hunkering down.” It seems economic decision makers—consumers, investors, and corporate leaders—are taking steps to weather these uncertain times while hoping that more normal times are in the offing. Even a hunkered-down economy can generate a bit of prosperity.

GDP and state economic indicators 

Let’s consider the outlook for real GDP growth over the next four quarters. In Table 1, I report estimates provided by the Philadelphia Fed’s panel, The Wall Street Journal, and Wells Fargo Economics. I note that there are no negative numbers. The slowing effects of tariffs are the kicker, and we are just now getting a final determination of what those border taxes will be for our major trading partners.

What about the states? Each month, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia produces a map showing individual state coincident economic indicators, which are based on employment and earnings data. By comparing two of these maps, one can quickly determine if things overall are getting better or worse and where geographic prosperity seems to be improving.

Figure 1 shows 50-state outline maps for June 2025 and March 2025. The June map reports seven negative-growth states: Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, and Oregon. Two states, Montana and Virginia, show zero growth. But one can also see a 9-state band of growing prosperity starting at the country’s midpoint and reaching west. By comparison, the March map shows seven zero- and negative-growth states, which is better than June, but fewer high-growth states and no compelling pattern behind them.

The report’s remaining sections

In the report’s next section, we take a closer look by way of soft and hard economic indicators and assess the extent to which there are reasons for optimism or pessimism. After that, we focus on two ongoing—or one might say, never-ending—problems involving the Fed’s interest rate policy and the nation’s desire to consume more than is produced each year. Fed independence and the tyranny of debt are the twin topics in that section.

In the report’s next-to-last section, we examine two elements of Trump’s policy-making process that may help us understand how the White House works. I offer two theories. The first suggests that for various reasons, such as the use of executive orders and desire to get things done independent of Congress, Trump tends to throw ideas out, observe reactions to them, and revise and reverse as necessary. This tendency leads to a surprising number of revisions and reversals. The second theory, which is related to the first, says that Trump insists on controlling the narrative and therefore media coverage of his actions. Simply put, he wants to control the elements that go into the story and the story as told later. 

Finally, in the last section, “Yandle’s Reading Table,” I offer a review of Ilyon Woo’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom.

Taking a Closer Look

Instead of operating with hearings or with congressionally designed industrial policy, the Trump version of state-directed capitalism works more like a reality TV show in which the president sets the theme for the moment, and his aides become the cast. The president’s desires generated by his media comments are treated as instructions to be followed or else. Each daily show is independent of previous shows, and the results form a combination of executive orders and voiced directives that, while inherently more temporary than legislated actions, give direction to major firms and economic sectors. 

Whether it be a new tariff policy for Japan, the United Kingdom, or the European Union; a specific tariff on aluminum and steel; instructions to retailers about avoiding tariff-induced price increases; or a desire for soft drinks sweetened with cane-produced sugar instead of corn syrup, Trump’s wishes turn into frequent policy changes that become reflected in soft indicators that may later be confirmed by hard economic data.

Soft indicators

What’s the current picture? First, consider the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Indicator and University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, two closely watched soft indicators. Both have multiple components, some of which focus on the present and others on the future, and both recently took positive turns that may be attributed to growing comfort with a more relaxed Trump tariff policy. 

The overall Consumer Confidence Indicator has moved in a positive direction since May, but with the employment component registering continuing weakness. Matching the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) weak employment numbers, consumer assessment of employment prospects is now the lowest since March 2021. The University of Michigan August index for Consumer Sentiment fell below July’s number, which had risen for five months. The accompanying report indicated that consumers were concerned about rising inflation and declining employment prospects. 

The National Federation of Independent Businesses produces a member-derived monthly optimism index that, in July, was positive for the third consecutive month. The index had languished in weak territory from January 2021 through October 2024. It seems the small business respondents are observing calming waters while expressing concern about filling their employment needs. Because of high and rising interest rates, we get a negative outlook from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, where any value less than 50 indicates pessimism. The index fell from 34 to 32 between May and June, the lowest reading since December 2022, rose to 33 in July, and then fell back to 32 in August.

Although a mixed bag headed south, the soft data generally seem to be describing a kind of hunkering down, yielding a period of low but more stable growth, which is what the earlier discussion of real GDP growth suggested.

Some hard data

It’s hard to fault anyone for well-informed pessimism. After all, there is background chatter about the possibility of recession. (Isn’t there always?) For six months, we’ve seen destabilizing tariffs, government layoffs, deported workers, and a loss of clean energy subsidies. Making employment matters worse are reports of robots replacing warehouse workers and AI threatening to displace massive numbers of white-collar workers.

Real possibilities for concern were reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the July employment report. It showed overall employment gains for July at just 73,000 and gave downward revisions for May and June employment of 258,000 workers that practically eliminated the gains previously reported for those two months. President Trump was so troubled by the disappearing employment count that, in an effort to control the narrative, he ordered the firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who headed the agency and was responsible for producing employment data. 

In his note ordering McEntarfer’s firing, Trump indicated that contrary to the BLS report and Fed inaction, the economy is “booming.” But instead of sending out accusations that BLS’s actions were designed to undermine his presidency, Trump might have taken the unusual data opportunity to call for government-wide efforts to modernize all data collecting and data analysis. It would be helpful if the BLS reported an initial estimate and then a final estimate. Doing so would reduce the critical impression attached to the numbers first reported. Note that most July new hires were in state and local governments and healthcare, undermining the idea of a private-sector boom.

Consider manufacturing employment, Trump’s most frequently highlighted sector and another mixed bag of news and data. Employment in that sector is now at a five-year low, and part of the weakness is attributed to tariffs, which are affecting the delivery of needed inputs. The president regularly reminds us that his tariff and tax and regulatory policies will bring a renewed Rust Belt and a new “Golden Age” built partly on manufacturing and a reshoring of factory jobs.

It’s not clear why manufacturing jobs are superior to jobs in the service sector. June average hourly wages in manufacturing stood at $35.19 while the wage rate in services was $36.13. Some argue that it’s more desirable to be the nation that invents new chips and designs AI applications (which are in the services category) than to be another of the world’s high-volume producers of chips and hardware.

Signs of new life?

It will take years, if ever, to know the cumulative result of Trump’s latest manufacturing push. For now, we know that a BLS metric called the 30-day manufacturing employment diffusion index—which summarizes how 72 individual manufacturing sectors are expanding, holding still, or contracting—suggests a slowing sector. A value larger than 50 means more sectors are growing than shrinking, and vice versa. It just fell to 43.8 in July after registering a losing 48.6 in June.

From January through June 1, manufacturing employment fell by 5,000 workers while services added 532,000 jobs, casting doubt on the notion that manufacturing is destined to be the high-employment sector.

Turning to manufacturing production, we see that the Federal Reserve’s most recent industrial production diffusion index—which gives a reading on manufacturing, mining, and public utilities for 296 distinct sectors across a six-month period—is at its highest value in a year.

In short, both soft and hard indicators suggest we have an economy that is hunkering down with improved prospects for future prosperity. That said, we still know that on a day-to-day basis the Trump administration will be dropping new boulders into the nation’s economic waters. Uncertainty is the only thing we can count on.

What About the Fed and Deficits?

Almost from the beginning of his administration, President Trump has been on the hunt to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell because of the Fed’s unwillingness to cut interest rates. Though Trump is the first recent president to openly call for a Fed chair to be fired, presidential battles (and alliances) with the Fed are nothing new.

Trump’s one-sided word battle with the nonresponding Fed took a decided U-turn following his April 2 trade war announcement, which generated a cataclysmic collapse of US financial markets that wiped out the year’s Fortune 500 gains. Chastened by the market reaction, Trump threatened to fire Powell if the chair did not take the lead in cutting rates to stimulate the tariff-frightened markets. But with Fed independence threatened, world financial markets reacted immediately. The dollar fell, interest rates rose, and commentators said that US Treasury issue was suspect. Some even posited that the era of American economic exceptionalism was over. 

Then, overnight, but all too briefly, it seems, Donald Trump switched from openly criticizing Chair Jerome Powell—whom he had called a “major loser”—to happily accepting Fed independence. On April 17, an angry Trump had said Powell’s “termination could not come soon enough.” But in a May 4 interview, when asked if he would terminate Powell, Trump responded, “No, no, no. That was a total—why would I do that? I get to replace the person in another short period of time.”

The early confrontations grew out of a desire for easy money to assist the arrival of the Trump-promised golden age. Then, as the tariff announcements shook world markets, a Fed softening was seen to pour oil on troubled waters. Now, it seems, Trump is looking for a way to reduce the enormous cost of funding a growing federal debt. With deficits and debt on his mind, Trump is once again calling for Powell to step down. But after referring to Powell as a “numbskull,” Trump said “he’s going to be out pretty soon anyway. In eight months, he'll be out.” Needless to say, US policy uncertainty indexes have had a skyrocketing holiday.

Past central bank struggles and the tyranny of debt

Struggles between presidents and central bankers seem to go with the White House territory. George H. W. Bush had serious differences with Fed Chair Allen Greenspan, who raised rates in the leadup to Bush’s unsuccessful reelection campaign. Bill Clinton had interest rate concerns in 1993. George W. Bush had a cooperative relationship with Chair Ben Bernanke in 2008 when Fed independence was forfeited in an effort to soften a recession that threated to become a financial panic. 

In contrast, Barack Obama stayed aloof from the Fed and was later criticized for doing so. Ronald Reagan stands out perhaps most of all for refusing to sit on a stove. When asked in 1982 whether Chair Paul Volcker should be replaced for insisting on keeping interest rates high, Reagan said, “I can’t respond to that because the Federal Reserve System is autonomous.”

Monetary history is filled with stories of the inability of nations and central banks to control the urge to print money or deliver low interest rates as a way to satisfy political demand for more government services and quick prosperity. We’ve learned again and again that there is simply no such thing as a free lunch. Unfortunately, it seems, each generation must relearn the lesson the hard way.

The Trump administration and Congress struggled mightily but unsuccessfully to pass a budget bill that could limit the flow of red ink.[3] At the same time, 42.5 million former students are now required to start paying off $1.78 trillion in government-funded student debt.

No doubt about it, the tyranny of debt is alive and well.

Try as they might, our political leaders were unable to avoid passing another deficit-laden budget bill. By Penn/Wharton estimates, the House bill considered generated $2.7 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a deficit for the final bill of $3.4 trillion across those years. Of course, there is more to consider.

Some argue that Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) spending reductions and tariff-generated revenues can make a big difference. Indeed, the CBO estimates that tariffs could generate as much as $2.5 trillion across the next 10 years, even though they are being implemented by executive order instead of through legislation and thus are subject to a sitting president’s whims. 

One thing is certain: It’s a whole lot easier to borrow money than to pay it off. And the payoff struggle constrains a person’s ability to pursue happiness long after the debt-enabled happy times have ended. The interest rate clock never stops ticking. Debt is a tyranny.

Just how bad is it? We the people must now struggle to pay off $45.46 trillion in federal debt, up from $19.98 trillion in 2016. The annual interest cost of the debt is the second largest item in the federal budget, after Social Security, and is running $841 billion thus far in fiscal 2025. Unless our government habit is controlled, interest on the debt will squeeze out the expansion of government services desired by the public. Of course, debt has allowed us to consume more than the nation produces, year-in and year-out, every year since 1985. Like a horse and carriage, we have a budget deficit and a trade deficit.

Debt tyranny

Much of today’s debt tyranny—for the nation and former students—arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic led the government to exercise the nation’s emergency powers. Federal spending rose 50 percent during the COVID years (2019–2021). Both the Trump and Biden administrations opened the money valves and spent trillions to fund stimulus and public health programs. According to a Tax Policy Center (TPC) analysis, the direct and indirect spending for COVID raised the deficit to 14.9 percent of GDP in 2020 and 12.4 percent in 2021, the largest shares since World War II.

While COVID spending ended with the pandemic’s passing, the cost of the COVID debt lived on. Assuming a federal interest rate of 3.1 percent that the Congressional Budget Office forecasts, the TPC analysis says that in 2033, “the interest payments on the $5.6 trillion in additional debt from the COVID-19 pandemic’s . . . policies amount to about $170 billion per year.”

To accommodate pandemic spending, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. As COVID progressed, rules for accessing food stamps and Medicaid were relaxed, and in March 2020, student debt payments were suspended. Indeed, the Biden administration tried desperately but unsuccessfully to cancel all student debt. Once the pandemic had passed, the stimulus and most emergency healthcare efforts ended. The nation’s budget managers tried to resume past habits of just passing out pork to their worthy constituencies, but the tail of past deficit spending came forward, bringing tyranny to old-fashioned pork barrel politics. Indeed, there was recently strong opposition to passing the Trump budget bill because of the effort to restore food stamp and Medicaid enrollment rules to the pre-COVID standard.

Past debt habits are constraining us. As things stand now, Morgan Stanley economists predict that student debt payments this year will rise by $1 billion to $3 billion a month and trim 2025 GDP growth by about 0.1 percentage point. Still, we the people have little choice but to tighten our belts and pay off the debt. After all, America’s bond ratings have been cut for the first time in history, imported goods are being restrained, and interest rates are rising.

It's time the tyranny of debt ended.

Push Start, and Look for Smoke: Is This a New Way to Govern?

The Trump White House has become known for sending up trial balloons for policy changes and looking to see if they fly or get shot down. Trump has certainly not been reluctant to reverse a policy position when strong and loud objections are heard from the parts of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) base that matter. Indeed, it seems to me that managing this way is the Trump way.

“If all else fails, push the start button, look for smoke, and repair what is burning.” During my 15 years working with industry, this was common advice when dealing with troublesome, complex electric controls that just would not respond to a more scientific analysis.[4] And it worked. Should we expect a president hellbent on changing the world order to apply the same approach? 

Flipping policy switches on and off might not sound scientific, but despite chaos and missteps, there’s at least something to be said for the idea.

Maybe it’s the rush to get things done. Or perhaps it’s the fact that Trump is relying on executive orders rather than on legislation with hearings to mandate much of what he envisions. In any case, the Trump administration is now famous for hitting a policy start button, seeing smoke, and then, when alarms go off, reversing position.

How else might we explain the large number of policy reversals that have occurred in the president’s first few months in office? Consider a handful of examples.

Just a week into his new term, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a freeze order on all federal loans and grants in an effort to make certain that all funded programs would abide by the new administration’s tamped-down Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion guidelines. But the outcry from state and local governments that rely on federal funding for day-to-day operations was so loud that OMB quickly reversed its order.

Then, in February, the Trump administration announced an end of free COVID testing, a mainstay program in fighting the pandemic. When the Department of Health and Human Services indicated that the agency would thus be destroying 160 million unused tests, political alarms went off and the policy was reversed. 

More famously, after growing impatient with the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee for not cutting interest rates, Trump decided to hit the start button and blow the committee out of the water. He called the Fed Chair Jerome Powell a “major loser” and indicated that Powell should be fired immediately. 

When world financial markets sensed that America’s central bank was about to be run by politics, interest rates rose, respect for the dollar fell, and smoke was everywhere. Trump backed away, softened the tone of his relationship with Fed Chair Powell, and moved on to tilt with other windmills.

Another tilting occurred when Trump took on China by imposing a 145 percent tariff on all its exports to the United States, the functional equivalent of an embargo. China responded by placing 125 percent tariffs on US exports and indicated a willingness to engage in a trade war or any war that became necessary. Markets shuddered. American retailers cried foul and indicated Santa Claus’s sled would be empty. Apple and other US smart phone producers offered up end-of-world industry forecasts. 

In short, the circuits turned red, and the smoke was dense. Trump dramatically altered his policy position. The trade war with China suddenly de-intensified, at least for the next 90 days.

In another case, Elon Musk’s DOGE activities brought their own host of circuit tests that generated smoke and reversals. There were sweeping actions taken to fire thousands of federal government workers only to cause a rush to rehire some of these employees when it was learned that they filled critical jobs involving nuclear weapons or controlling a raging bird flu epidemic.

Finally, after a severe running battle with Harvard University that brought an announced end of federal funding and a call for Harvard’s international student body to exit the university, go elsewhere, or return home, Trump eased up and gave Harvard some time to respond to his demands. This softening came after the “wires turned hot” from court intervention.

And then there are what turned out to be temporary reversals generated when policy actions caused too much pain to components of Trump’s MAGA supporters. A recent reversal on deportation actions taken against farm workers and employees in food processing plants and restaurants is an example. The June 13 White House message read “Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” Four days later, the reversal was reversed. But then, on June 20, Trump reversed the reversal, at least for farm workers. As Harry Truman famously advised, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Some look squarely at these policy reversals and see evidence that we have the equivalent of Keystone Cops running the federal government—officials who don’t seem to know what they are doing but do it anyway. Alternatively, and in at least some of these situations, we might consider the old “push the start button and look for smoke” explanation.

In a rush to bring dramatic change, the Trump administration seems to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” When things change, they change. Policy reversals are messy, but some might be a necessary part of Trump’s intended revolution.

Grumpy Trump and politically corrected happy talk

A key part of Trump’s White House–directed capitalism involves controlling the content of news that flows from the White House. For example, whether US B2 bombers “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability in their extraordinary June 21 raid, which is President Trump’s preferred wording, or just “severely damaged” the capability, as reported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), matters so much to Trump that he has threatened to sue CNN and The New York Times for reporting the CIA take on the matter.[5] Indeed, his widely recognized desire to shape the news and his aversion to criticism are generating a form of politically corrected happy talk perhaps not seen since Jimmy Carter’s time in office.

In 1978, Carter, worried about how to reverse America’s sagging economy, ordered all cabinet members to refrain from alarming the country by using the word “recession.” Carefully minding his boss’s instruction, economic adviser Fred Kahn was asked directly if America might be headed in that direction. Kahn famously responded, “We’re in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.” With US first-quarter GDP growth now revised downward to −0.50 percent and more than one respected forecast group looking at zero to 0.50 percent growth later this year, the Trump preference for happy talk suggests we may find ourselves slipping on a late 2025 banana.

Talk about politically corrected talk, in February this year, the White House banned an Associate Press (AP) reporter from White House press conferences and Air Force One over AP’s take on Trump’s arbitrary decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. To Trump’s chagrin, the AP did not change the geographic description in its influential style manual and was punished, at least until cries of First Amendment rights turned the tide.

Turning to tariffs and inflation, we find more corrected talk controversy. Trump recently chastised Walmart executives when they announced that tariffs on Chinese imports would force the retailer to raise its prices. Trump angrily called for the firm to “eat” the tariffs and reminded them in less-than-gentle terms that he would be watching. In another example, the toy maker Mattel indicated that it too would be raising prices because of tariffs. Outraged and using the Oval Office as a megaphone, Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on Mattel’s products, promising the firm “won’t sell one toy in the United States.” 

Since then, given the president’s tendency to publicly skewer US firms that refuse to follow his instructions, business leaders have been avoiding speaking about the price increases and other disruptions that Americans are quite obviously experiencing because of the tariffs. As Neil Saunders, director of GlobalData Retail, warned, “The White House has decided it should aim its tanks at companies that do speak out.”

So, when offering investor guidance, some retailers speak of “adjusting” prices, others address the elephant in the room “gently and sparingly,” and still others refer to their pricing policies with words like “surgical.”

Above all, linking price changes to tariffs is definitely a no-no. Denise Dahlhoff, director of marketing and communications research at the Conference Board, advises executives to use more neutral terms such as “sourcing cost” or “input cost” or “supply chain cost,” which “are not as incendiary as ‘tariff.’” 

Past Presidents’ happy talk

Trump and Carter are hardly the first pair of presidents to pour rhetorical oil on troubled waters, but the historical results, as with today, are mixed at best.

It was in Harry Truman’s time that the Korean War became known as a “police action.” Somehow the phrase softened the perceived scale of the situation and suggested the conflict would end quickly. But mid-century America knew a war when they saw it. Losing political patience, voters turned away from Truman’s party and chose Dwight Eisenhower to bring the action to an end.

In later wars, mostly undeclared, political speech began to deny the use of the word “retreat.” Instead, our leaders referred to “an orderly withdrawal of troops.” Somehow the phrase sounded less dramatic and more positive. Even though we pulled out in both cases, we did not hear much about retreats in Vietnam or Afghanistan. 

Perhaps the most audacious and enduring effort by a western leader to alter political speech came in 1604 when newly installed King James I of England ordered 47 of the nation’s leading biblical scholars to develop a new Bible translation. The resulting King James Authorized Version of the Bible is thought to be one of the most beautifully written volumes of the age. By the king’s order, it also removed references to kings as tyrants, which had existed in the earlier English Bible.

How we speak and write matters, especially when presidents, kings, or holders of lesser offices feel that their power is being threatened or their wisdom questioned. Inevitably, leaders will frame things as they see fit, and understandably, we the people may modify our own language in those cases when our livelihoods appear threatened.

Here in the land of the free and home of the brave, where freedom of speech was once celebrated even in the White House, perhaps only the bravest will have the gumption to call a spade a spade.

Yandle’s Reading Table

Ilyon Woo’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom is a truly outstanding read. A carefully researched and beautifully written nonfiction story, the book, at times, is a cliff hanger. Woo describes an amazingly successful 1848 effort by an unlettered enslaved married couple from Macon, Georgia, to escape slavery. Ultimately, the pair get to London and to freedom. In all of England, slavery had been outlawed along with slave trade. Only then, after having traveled from Macon to Savannah by train; then by ship from Savannah to Charleston; and then to Philadelphia, to Worcester, Massachusetts, and on to Canada, did Ellen and William Craft find freedom without fear of capture. To some extent their plight was like that of America’s undocumented immigrants. They were not citizens, they had no due process protection, and the authorities were after them. Making their situation far more complicated, they themselves were runaway property that had a high market value. 

Woo’s account of the carefully developed ruse used by Ellen and William to escape—Ellen would disguise herself as a White man and the owner of William, her slave—contains a number of elements critical to the Crafts’s successful escape. First, Ellen Craft was the daughter of one of her previous masters and an enslaved mother. She was light skinned, able to “pass” as White, a skilled seamstress, and, as a result, given special status in her owner’s household, which was within walking distance of downtown Macon. (The home, located at 830 Mulberry Street, still stands.) William, Ellen’s husband, in a marriage respected by their owners, was Black and a highly skilled furniture maker who had been rented out by his master for years. As a result of his work, William had considerable freedom of movement, though like all Black people, he had to carry a form letter on his person at all times granting him permission to be out and about. 

Through his work, William had developed conversation skills, even though he was unable to read. More important, he also had accumulated a small amount of savings that would be used to purchase suitable dress for their journey as well as to fund the couple’s travel expenses. While William had gained the trust and respect of his owner and furniture shop customers, Ellen had traveled with her owner’s family when they made a temporary move to Charleston, South Carolina. She had ridden trains and passenger ships with her owners, the Robert Collins family, and knew what to expect as a slave when crossing state lines and other boundaries. Part of those expectations involved a requirement that a slave owner be able to sign a form authorizing the slave’s presence. Like William and most enslaved people, Ellen had been denied the opportunity to learn to read and write. (I note that those who have traveled in foreign countries can understand what it is like to be unable to read signs and ask directions.) Denying slaves the ability to read and write was essential to maintaining slavery. Thus, Woo’s account describes the initial conditions that the couple had to satisfy as they undertook their slavery escape.

As the Crafts made their way from Macon and finally to London—in some cases, by the skin of their teeth—they gained an understanding of slave law, which had evolved over centuries in the United States, and the power of slave owners to recover runaways, even in states like Massachusetts, which no longer allowed slavery. They had to constantly be on guard, and that required having the assistance of dedicated abolitionists, like Worcester’s renowned philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway, who provided safekeeping and substance at critical times. Perhaps just as critical to their success were the couple’s unusual dramatic talents. The Crafts developed widely celebrated lectures and presentations, which drew large public audiences in major cities in the United States and elsewhere, even lecturing at London’s 1851 Great Exposition. Their fame rivaled that of Charles Dickens, who also attracted crowds at the event as he read from his highly successful novels. 

Woo’s outstanding book, once read, will be remembered. It is a heavy reminder that just a little more than 200 years ago, a nation whose people celebrated being “created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” was still struggling to find a path forward that would end slavery. Reading Mary and William Craft’s story causes one to pause and celebrate what it means to be free.

Notes