Abstract
Stymied by a fractured politics and beset by sharpening economic and social inequalities, twenty-first-century American citizens and scholars look back to the Great Society during this cycle of its fiftieth anniversaries to consider when and how public efforts to broaden social justice can be effective, and why and how they fail. 1 Simultaneously, heightened public focus on the evils of our “carceral state” spurs scholarship seeking the origins of our present criminal justice system in postwar policy. 2
A new group of works draws these two strands together, opening a fresh phase of Great Society historiography. The odor of fable has long hung about histories of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, told as a struggle between the forces of light—battling to expand citizenship and burnish the public sphere—and the forces of darkness—reaction, bureaucratic flabbiness, racism, and fear itself—that sapped the effort. By retrieving Johnson’s significant undertakings in law and order for historical scrutiny, the new scholarship usefully deepens this two-dimensional and static picture. It reasserts the weight and significance of a set of competing values with which Great Society policy struggled. The decade’s wave of poisonous urban violence threatened the civic order, social cohesion, and the “consensus” in American values on which Johnson’s domestic initiatives relied. While battling to expand the body politic, policymakers had also to hold it together; Johnson’s law-and-order policy was an at-times desperate attempt to accomplish this. Great Society momentum ebbed as the challenges of delivering law and justice, order and equity overwhelmed policymakers.
One strand of this new scholarship focuses on the implications of American race relations for criminal justice administration. 3 Civil rights attorney Michele Alexander’s The New Jim Crow opened a broad public conversation on the burdens and cruelties unleashed on marginalized communities by the drug enforcement policies of the Ronald Reagan administration. 4 Political scientist Naomi Murakawa argued that the policy errors Alexander identified have roots going back to the Truman era. 5 Most strikingly, Murakawa asserted that the national law-and-order regime, far from being the creation of a political right convinced that the problems of the unruly, mongrel city could be solved, or at least contained, through systems of draconian punishment, was in fact the offspring of liberalism’s own hopeful postwar social welfare state.
It seems a shocking outcome. How was it that the great liberal lions had come to sire anticrime programs whose impacts in inner cities were so corrosive of the very social goals—diversity, equal opportunity, enhanced urban quality of life—they proudly touted? The result is—yet another—indictment of the midcentury liberal project, the implication that the liberal state, all the Great Society happy talk notwithstanding, has been an enemy of the people all along.
A different strand of this scholarship, rather than exploring the oppressive impact of law-and-order policy on the disprivileged, attempts to identify factors that shaped its origins and development. Much of this work emphasizes that the policy in its present form is a product of system-wide changes in federal governance, as much or more than of a desire to control the dangerous classes. This is fertile ground, and yields nuanced, powerful interpretations. Legal scholar Jonathan Simon has argued that present criminal justice policies are but one manifestation of a larger transformation, a shift toward Governing through Crime. As confidence in federal welfare programs weakened, public order and security were left as the last areas of consensus on the legitimacy of federal government engagement. 6 The crime victim became the “representative citizen,” and government was recast as guarantor-of-safety. Political scientist Lisa L. Miller shows that the federalization of crime policy—an area once the purview of state and local governments—drowned out the demands, and insights, of exactly those communities most burdened by crime. 7 These communities do press for energetic anticrime efforts, but they view those efforts as part of a broader program that includes social investment as well as law enforcement. The nuances of this policy approach are filtered out of a criminal justice system dominated by federal decision makers. Legal scholar William Stuntz details the impacts of this loss of local perspective in the area of criminal procedure. 8 Jury discretion has been replaced by plea-bargaining (which now accounts for 95 percent of case dispositions) and judges’ discretion by sentencing guidelines, stripping the system of the ability to tailor penal responses to local conditions, a facility crucial to justice.
The city is central to this new scholarship, as it was to the Johnson program. Neither before nor since Lyndon Johnson has a president focused so much policy energy on improving urban quality of life. In his May 1964 University of Michigan commencement address introducing the Great Society, Johnson named the city as its first pillar. Different from today’s view of the city as enterprise, Johnson’s urban policymakers understood the city as civic endeavor, and believed its open and orderly operation to be essential to the successful workings of American democracy. The administration’s city orientation intensified as the “urban crisis” rose to a boil in the second half of the decade; the Great Society’s dispositive battles were played out on city streets. Much of the Johnson presidency can be explained as an effort to find a workable system of American urban governance.
Randall B. Woods offers a largely conventional survey of the Johnson domestic program, enlivened by several unique contributions. Woods recognizes the Johnson initiatives as a recalibration of relations within the federal system and between American government and citizens. He integrates the War on Crime into the Johnson story, locating the evolution of the Great Society program in the dynamic play between the push to expand the benefits of and participation in American citizenship, and the felt need to protect civic order and defend the American center.
Woods recognizes the Johnson program as a campaign to remake the process of governing, that “one of the overriding goals of the Great Society was to achieve a basic redistribution of power in America” (p. 283). Johnson was an architect; his medium was government. Creative Federalism, Johnson’s vision for a renovation of federal system relations, contemplated “a massive expansion of the federal power, unprecedented encroachment on the private sphere, and extensive interference with state and local government” (p. 391). The Johnson program also aimed to remake the relationship between state and citizen: at bottom, “[w]hat the Great Society was about was expanding the definition of citizenship and extending full citizenship to as many individuals as possible” (p. 397).
Woods tells the story of Great Society defeats in a new way. Vietnam played a role. Woods emphasizes that the war did not only erode the president’s moral authority; it also ate away at the “liberal internationalist” (p. 399) notions concerning American identity and role in the world which were an integral part of the Great Society’s animating spirit. Johnson’s domestic and foreign ambitions for the nation emerged out of a unified, liberal vision of American responsibilities; defeats on one front sapped efforts on the other.
More directly responsible for Great Society shortfalls was Johnson policymakers’ inability to respond effectively to the debilitating controversies associated with “the northern, urban phase of the Second Reconstruction” (p. 396) which unfolded as the black freedom movement progressed beyond battling de jure segregation to the “larger struggle to eliminate discrimination in the workplace, to open housing markets, to provide quality education, to promote the economic development of impoverished communities” (pp. 396-97). The battle for urban reconstruction created mounting turmoil. Johnson responded to urban disorder, and eventually to urban rioting, by asserting the need to address poverty and inequality—the “root causes” that underlay the unrest. In Woods’s view, Johnson lost control of the law-and-order issue in the brutal violence of the August 1965 Watts riot. Before Watts, law and order was a weapon wielded by liberals against southern Jim Crow officialdom’s savaging of civil rights activists. As urban violence escalated in the north, conservatives made the issue their own.
Woods, thus, gives the War on Crime a central place in the War on Poverty’s demise, showing that the Great Society’s welfare initiatives collapsed in important part because the administration was unable to maintain order while expanding liberty. “Urban rioting and the white backlash that ensued created an opening for conservatives to equate civil disobedience with arson and looting” and declare the War on Poverty “responsible for urban unrest in that it encouraged a sense of entitlement and undermined individual responsibility” (p. 401). Opponents concluded “that the Great Society, in general, and the War on Poverty, in particular, were not antidotes to urban unrest, but the abettors of it” (p. 193). The result was a crusade among conservative legislators for law and order. The ensuing “War on Crime,” thus, “was in no small part a war on the Great Society” (p. 401).
Michael Flamm argues that the July 1964 riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant made law and order a key to the 1964 presidential race, vaulted the issue onto the national policy stage, crystalized a consensus among congressmen across the political spectrum on support for local law enforcement, and heralded the entry of the federal government as a major actor in the field of criminal justice policy.
New York City’s 1964 riots were sparked by the July 16 killing of an African American teenager by a New York Police Department lieutenant. A Harlem protest demonstration called two days later erupted into rioting, which continued sporadically through July 20. Just as those disturbances subsided, violence flared in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, continuing through the evening of July 23, when it sputtered out under a heavy rain. Street violence broke out in Rochester on July 24, in Jersey City August 3, in Paterson and Elizabeth, New Jersey on August 12, and in Philadelphia on August 28.
The disturbances ensured that law and order would be a prime issue in the presidential election campaign just then getting underway. On July 16, the very day of the police shooting, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater warned in his convention acceptance speech against “the growing menace” of “bullies and marauders” (p. 25) in American streets. As the Kansas City Star editorialized a few days later, “The rioters of Harlem who attacked police and looted stores wrote a postscript to Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech beyond the fondest dreams of those who oppose civil rights” (p. 148).
In “law-and-order,” Goldwater had found a chink in Lyndon Johnson’s otherwise impenetrable electoral armor. Polling showed that the president enjoyed a significant advantage with voters in almost every area, that “only law-and-order posed a serious danger to Johnson’s hopes for a landslide victory” (p. 231). As one administration official opined, it was “clear that civil disorder will be the central domestic issue of the election . . . Every Negro riot represents tens of thousands of Goldwater votes” (p. 236). Harris opinion polls showed public concern on public safety issues rising steadily throughout the autumn. “[T]he unrest in Harlem” was “front-page news across the nation and around the world” (p. 127).
Crime’s migration to the national arena had policy consequences. Local lawmakers might labor to craft practical policies with complex local conditions in view. But once law and order became part of the grammar of national politics, pressure was on national officials to rack up points in the ongoing polemic about where the blame for crime lay, and the proper role of government in confronting it. What had been a matter for competent local public safety administration became an element of partisan and ideological battle on the national stage.
Attempting to seize the issue from the Republicans, Johnson argued that quelling disorder required addressing inequality, promoting “the War on Poverty as a solution to the problem of ‘crime in the streets.’” In the accelerating urban violence of the following years, this liberal commitment to addressing “root causes” faced off against “[t]he conservative recipe for law-and-order . . . more police, harsher sentences, and larger prisons” (p. 188). As Flamm recounts, in this heated policy environment a “rare consensus” emerged around increased support for local law enforcement efforts. Both liberals and conservatives backed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 (LEAA), providing federal funding for local policing, although they did so for different reasons. Liberals “believed that professionalization would promote racial fairness and enhance police legitimacy in minority neighborhoods” (p. 265), while conservatives believed it “would strengthen riot control and discredit false charges of police brutality” (p. 266).
The Johnson era law-and-order enactments rewrote relationships among federal and local governments. As Flamm reports, the War on Crime “substantially widened the door to federal intervention in local policing” (p. 4). The LEAA “represented a significant moment in the gradual intervention of the national government in police practices and criminal justice at the local level” (p. 261). In fact, this federal system restructuring may have been the Johnson initiative’s most consequential result. The Safe Streets Act, which followed in 1968 is, in Flamm’s estimation, less significant as a substantive program for crime reduction—it “represented little more than symbolic attempts at crime control,” than as a federal system restructuring. “What mattered . . . was that Congress had opened the flood-gates to federal aid with block grants to state agencies” (p. 285).
Risa Goluboff’s exploration of the mid-twentieth-century collapse of U.S. vagrancy law spotlights American policymakers’ struggles to find a workable balance between the liberties of individual citizens and the claims of communities to public safety and order. In this as in other areas of criminal law, the American midcentury method of approaching that balance entailed relocating authority for policy decisions and discretion in implementing them from local to federal decision makers.
U.S. vagrancy laws long served as the Swiss army knife of urban order maintenance, criminalizing the presence of troublesome outsiders in city spaces. The typical ordinance read like the casting call for an Elizabethan street scene, banning “rogues and vagabonds, or dissolute persons who go about begging . . . common drunkards . . . common railers and brawlers, persons wandering or strolling around . . . habitual loafers, disorderly persons” (p. 1). And indeed, the laws traced a history originating in Elizabethan laws of settlement aimed at keeping a proto-industrial workforce in order, coercing labor from the idle, and disciplining drifters. Vagrancy laws provided police a portmanteau authority—the discretion to manage, and, if need be, to arrest, “persons out of place” in either the physical or social sense. They became a handy tool in the effort to maintain civic order in the obstreperous midcentury city.
As a legal scholar, Goluboff’s particular interest here is in the way law changes over time. In this regard, American vagrancy law presents a remarkable case study, a four-hundred-year-old legal regime that crumbled into extinction in the brief period between the end of World War II and the close of the sixties. Vagrancy law was teed up for dispositive judicial action by a combination of the clamor of social activists; tactical overreach by police forces tasked with maintaining order in turbulent times; and evolving social science perspectives on the problems of poverty, addiction, and difference. An army of pro bono attorneys played a crucial role. Although there was no coordinated attack on vagrancy laws like that mounted against de jure segregation, the antivagrancy cause gained momentum as advocates battling on behalf of political, cultural, or sexual nonconformists borrowed arguments from one another, often incorporating strategies first developed in defense of civil rights demonstrators.
The civic order that vagrancy laws protected proved in the postwar years to be too strictly conformist to pass constitutional muster. The laws’ very capaciousness opened them to challenge for vagueness, and many of them created “status” violations, criminalizing the mere fact of being a drunk, or poor, or idle, or suspicious. In addition, given that their very purpose was to enable police discretion, they were vulnerable to abuse in their application: biased enforcement against racial minorities, women—or men wearing dresses, veterans protesting war, hippies who did not bathe. Increasingly under attack from the late 1940s, vagrancy laws’ demise was made official by the Supreme Court in Papachristou v. Jacksonville (1972), a decision that confirmed new approaches pioneered by state and lower federal courts.
The tension between individual right and civic well-being was most sharply presented in cases involving criminal suspects. Police claimed that vagrancy arrests in these instances allowed law enforcement to investigate possible criminal activity or prevent crimes that were about to occur. Papachristou’s ban on vagrancy enforcement made no exception for crime prevention, but by the time of that decision, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Terry v. Ohio (1968) had validated stop-and-frisk as an alternative law enforcement tactic. This resolution had advantages for criminal suspects: although stop-and-frisk, like vagrancy law, was vulnerable to biased implementation, it did not involve an arrest, or generate an arrest record.
In the case of vagrancy laws, as in the case of the urban street violence of the 1960s, what had been a problem for local administration became the subject of national concern, and national law making. Federal rulings constitutionalized police administration of urban public spaces, relocating the authority to make choices on appropriateness of police tactics away from local police departments and the officer on the beat to the federal bench. These constitutional law decisions for a time opened up urban public space to all comers (although subsequent work suggests these gains were ephemeral). 9 But the Supreme Court’s carve-out of police tactics for special treatment reflects a characteristic American insistence that demands for liberty be weighed against the value of order when it comes to interpreting constitutional limitations on state power.
Barry Latzer, City University of New York (CUNY) emeritus professor of criminal justice, aims to explain trends in American crime rates during the twentieth century. This is a vexed question, one that has flummoxed researchers, theorists, and ideologues. Latzer, however, offers an answer: culture—specifically, the cultures of those racial and ethnic groups that are consistently over-represented in crime statistics. 10
Rise and Fall makes a useful presentation of the outlines of American crime rates from 1900, relying on homicide rates as a proxy for crime generally. The line charting the number of murders per hundred thousand in population over the twentieth century does indeed oscillate in curious ways. The table Latzer provides shows two extended intervals of high murder rates (above eight murders per hundred thousand annually), roughly from 1910 to 1935 and from 1970 to 1995, and two “crime troughs” (six per hundred thousand or fewer) from 1940 to 1965 and after 2000.
Latzer’s argument that culture is the key to criminality is predicated on his conclusion that “explanations founded simply on economic adversity, though favored by many criminologists (and liberals, generally), don’t align with the historical record” (pp. 164-65). The national murder rate does not track national economic conditions: it may be high in periods of relative prosperity, for example, the 1920s, or low during periods of economic stress, for example, the late 1930s. Even more telling, for Latzer, is the fact that the poverty of a particular ethnic community does not predict the level of its criminality. Members of some groups facing marked economic challenges and social discrimination—Latzer cites “impoverished Jewish, Polish, and German immigrants” (p. 266) of an earlier generation—rarely engage in criminal behavior.
What, then, are the sources of American crime? “[L]ong-term analysis reveals that the propensity for violence of various subcultures, whether they be ethnic, racial, religious, or regional, seems to generate high violent crime rates over fairly long time periods” (p. xi). In explaining these uniquely troublesome behaviors, reasons Latzer, “[o]nly ‘values’ or some other mental construct seem credible” (p. 166): for example, the “distinctive norms” of particular groups “that support and encourage violence” (p. 169). Subgroup culture must be the key to predicting criminality.
That the argument offends the sensibility of many is not good reason to reject it. Its incoherence, however, is. What elements of “culture” produce criminal behavior, and how? Are all members of the problem group infected? In what sense can a criminogenic factor be said to be sourced in a particular subculture—transmitted, if not genetically, then genealogically among its members? How do we know whether we are dealing with problems in African American or Hispanic or southern “culture”—or in American “culture” as a whole? Because Latzer nowhere defines “culture,” his claim that it plays a central role in criminality cannot be assessed systematically.
What is most telling, however, is that this “cultures of violence” thesis fails to account for the features of American criminality Latzer seeks to explain. If the sources of criminality rest in subgroup cultures, should we not expect middle-class members of those subgroups to be represented in crime statistics at the same rates as low-income members? If problem cultures are to blame, why don’t national crime rates more closely track patterns of migration of the problem groups? Why, if the most important factors in criminality are long-lasting cultural traits, is there any variability in crime rates at all?
And why even go there: “cultural” arguments are unnecessary to explain American crime patterns. As Latzer acknowledges, demography provides a generally satisfying explanation. Drop a large number of young, male, Americans into a densely populated metro; surround them with affluence; deny them opportunity—and crimes rates will climb. See, for example, the impact of the baby boom in elevating crime in the years after 1965.
Can anything be salvaged from Latzer’s offering? Elaborating an argument that American crime is sourced in the problematic folkways of particular cultures feels like an effort to localize the blame for social disorder and violence. Americans do not get off the hook that easy. Nevertheless, Latzer’s stark presentation of crime data, and in particular of the dizzying spike in crime during the 1960s and 1970s and the troublingly high rates of murder among African Americans relative to the rest of society, demand attention. The fear of crime, and fear of black crime in particular, that characterized the Great Society years was rooted in urban Americans’ quotidian experience, and generated voter demands for action to which policymakers were required to respond.
Elizabeth Hinton discounts 1960s crime data and the threat to civil society they reflected. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime builds on the wave of recent law-and-order scholarship (the meticulous notes to the opening chapters alone are a robust introduction to the field) to sharpen the indictment against midcentury liberal policymaking. Hinton joins Murakawa in rejecting the liberal/conservative binary, finding our present-day law-and-order regime rooted squarely in the postwar liberal program. Both scholars assert that liberal policymakers’ error was in conceiving of racism and criminal violence as aberrational, the result of individual psychological flaws, rather than as built into the very structures of power. For Murakawa, the bad policy that resulted grew out of the fact that liberal legislators who adopted this analysis limited themselves to procedural reforms, confident that fair enforcement of the laws would be enough to right the system. Hinton instead reintroduces policymakers’ invidious intent into the picture, asserting that the source of bad policy was “officials’ own racism” (p. 48), their “[l]ong-held notions about black Americans and criminality” (p. 73).
Hinton asserts that Johnson abandoned the War on Poverty effort and turned its administrative apparatus over for use in the War on Crime that he announced in 1965 and launched in full force with 1968’s Safe Streets Act. She argues that the Johnson-era policy approach was determined by legislators’ misappraisal of and, ultimately, disdain for, impoverished inner-city communities of color. “[P]olicymakers interpreted black urban poverty as pathological—as the product of individual and cultural ‘deficiencies’” (p. 3). Due to their “shared set of assumptions about race and . . . unwillingness to disrupt . . . racial hierarchies,” these policymakers “did not believe that African Americans were capable of governing themselves” (p. 337) and, therefore, “privileged punitive responses to urban problems” (p. 17) choosing to fund policing efforts to keep these communities merely in order, rather than investing in the public services and capital improvements that would have allowed them to become orderly.
The argument from intent is weak. For one, it does not account for the environment in which these laws were made. The seriousness of the 1960s crime problem does not register. By the middle of the decade, federal data were showing a sharp and accelerating rise in violent crime; in Washington, D.C., newspapers were full of articles expressing community anxiety on the subject. Hinton finds crime data unreliable. But while the numbers should, indeed, be evaluated critically, they cannot be dismissed. 11 Americans were aware of a marked increase in urban violence, were fearful of it, and pressured policymakers for action. Law-and-order legislation was less a scheme for managing troublesome communities than one promulgated in hopes of returning order to the city as a whole.
Hinton’s telling also miscasts the Johnson team’s intentions. Johnson remained actively committed to the War on Poverty and Great Society efforts through the end of his term, as is reflected in his determined push for program funding in each of his budgets. Johnson domestic policy appointees were likewise stalwart. To assert that the War on Poverty was “merged” (p. 61) with the War on Crime is to ignore the ferocity with which Washington administrators defend agency program objectives and turf.
In addition, the interpretation overlooks the role Congress played in crafting law-and-order policy. The Safe Streets Act, for example, was anything but “the capstone of Johnson’s Great Society” (p. 2). By the time the measure reached House and Senate floors, it was not any longer even Johnson’s bill, having been thoroughly rewritten in congressional committee. Johnson signed the bill under threat that vetoing it would produce an even more draconian substitute.
At the root of these misinterpretations of executive and congressional law-and-order efforts is Hinton’s failure to recognize that more than one set of legitimate interests was involved in forging this legislation. The 1968 act was not a perversion of War on Poverty programming; it was the victorious emergence of a distinct voice. The Great Society was not abandoned. It suffered defeats because it met with arguments on behalf of a different set of values that proved more powerful. Johnson liberals did not give up on the idea of a Great Society city in which all voices were heard, but the promise of a safe and orderly city proved more compelling to most Americans.
A key driver of the development of law-and-order policy in the Johnson years and beyond, largely overlooked here, was the great momentum behind the growth of the administrative state. The Johnson team did indeed seek coordinated, comprehensive delivery of federal programs across the range of its initiatives, but, contrary to Hinton’s position, coordination did not mean submersion of discrete program missions. The administrative phenomenon that Hinton documents is not the collapse of Great Society goals into “a national punitive intervention” (p. 103) aimed at vulnerable neighborhoods but, rather, the extension of the administrative networks of Johnsonian Creative Federalism. In fact, much of the Great Society’s impact was a function less of particular program goals championed by policymakers than of such Johnson-era sea changes in the forms of federal system governance.
The new scholarship represented in these works points policymakers and historians toward a reevaluation of the Great Society. It underscores the severity of the 1960s surge in crime and the intensity of public anxiety over the disorder, which, in its various forms, racked society. It recasts our Great Society story, moving it beyond a tale whose unitary trajectory traces the rise and inevitable fall of liberal aspirations for more expansive citizenship and justice. In taking the threat of crime and disorder seriously, these new interpretations enable a criticism that captures the dynamic struggles of 1960s governance—including not only the era’s aspirations but also, ineluctably paired with them, the anxiety to maintain society’s coherence, to ensure that the center would, somehow, hold.
These recalibrations point to the importance of seeking out the drivers of law-and-order policy development in the evolving postwar structures of American governance itself. “A focus on a narrow slice of history . . . for example racial tensions during the 1960s” undermines the inquiry, overstating “the salience of existing political conflicts to the crime agenda . . . while understating the gradual development of crime as a national policy issue over the nation’s history.” 12
As a matter of policy development, law-and-order ills created by changes in the structure of government may best be addressed by reforms to that structure. If it is true that “[w]hen and where criminal justice was an exercise in local self-government, the system worked reasonably well,” 13 this argues for returning discretion in meting out criminal justice to the city level, to “local lawmakers, who must juggle the twin demands for greater public safety and improved neighborhood conditions and opportunities in a concrete way.” 14 As Hinton proposes, “Instead of being criminalized, low-income citizens must be empowered to change their own circumstances and must be fully integrated in public institutions at all levels. Crime control is a local matter” (p. 339).
Policymakers can also move away from reliance on Bill of Rights proceduralism, the effect of which has been “to redirect judicial inquiry from justice of outcome toward propriety of procedure.” 15 This “perilous if well-intentioned pursuit of administrative perfection” has yielded “a normatively untethered liberal law-and-order regime.” 16 American criminal justice might be better served by a jurisprudence based in the constitutional requirement of equal protection, “using that body of law to advance some coherent vision of fair and equal criminal justice,” 17 and pushing criminal justice “debates to their normative core,” to the questions of “what warrants punishment, in what form, and why?” 18
This scholarship expands the Great Society conversation for historians by suggesting the potential of inquiry that starts from the assumption of the seriousness of the threat of urban violence and disorder to society, and assumes also the good faith of the political actors who struggled to address it. It is a perspective that will permit evaluation of Great Society policymakers’ failure in its full complexity and may also, ultimately, enable nuanced recognition of their success.