May 18: The Mountain That Ate Itself, Plessy’s Lie, and the Rhode Island Heresy

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At 8:32 in the morning on May 18, 1980, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck beneath Mount St. Helens in Washington State, and the entire north face of the mountain — a volume of rock roughly equivalent to the volume of Lake Huron, 2.9 cubic kilometers of it — detached and slid. The landslide, the largest in recorded human history, depressurized the magma chamber beneath in approximately one second. What followed was not quite an explosion in the conventional sense: it was a lateral blast, a directed release of superheated steam and pulverized rock traveling at speeds between 300 and 480 miles per hour, that flattened 230 square miles of old-growth forest within three minutes and reached temperatures above 660 degrees Fahrenheit. The column of ash and gas that followed rose 80,000 feet into the atmosphere. Ash fell on eleven states. The eruption killed fifty-seven people. The mountain lost 1,314 feet of elevation. The crater it left behind is two miles wide.

The United States Geological Survey had been watching Mount St. Helens since March 1980, when it began showing signs of volcanic unrest: earthquakes, steam venting, the development of a visible bulge on the north face that was growing at roughly five feet per day. The USGS warned that an eruption was possible, even probable. The mountain had last erupted in 1857. The warning was sufficient for most people to evacuate the area; the fifty-seven dead were disproportionately people who had refused to leave or returned against advice, including Harry R. Truman, the eighty-three-year-old innkeeper of the Spirit Lake Lodge at the mountain’s base, who told reporters he had lived there for fifty-four years and had no intention of leaving, and did not.

What the Mountain Left Behind

The scientific yield from Mount St. Helens has been extraordinary. Because the eruption was closely watched, carefully measured, and extensively documented, and because the area was subsequently managed as a National Volcanic Monument rather than being immediately reforested, the mountain became the most studied example of volcanic ecology in the world. The landscape that emerged from the blast zone — gray ash, downed trees, a lake choked with debris — was assumed to be essentially lifeless for years. It wasn’t. Within months, gophers burrowing up through the ash were mixing organic material with the sterile surface. Prairie lupines colonized the nutrient-poor soil, fixing nitrogen. Insects arrived before any visible plant life. Elk returned and their grazing created patches of disturbance that plants colonized faster than the undisturbed areas. The recovery followed no predicted sequence. Life reassembled itself by routes that no ecologist had anticipated.

The Spirit Lake that Harry Truman refused to leave is still there, now choked with floating logs from the old-growth forest that was incinerated and blown into it in 1980. The logs have not sunk; decades of preservation in cold, slightly acidic water has kept them floating. Geologists study them as a possible analog for how petrified forests in the geological record were formed. Truman himself is under approximately one hundred feet of rock and debris; the site of the old Lodge is entombed in the lava dome. He got exactly what he asked for, which was not to be separated from the mountain. This is not usually how such negotiations with geology end.

The Law That Named a Fiction

On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Plessy v. Ferguson 7-1, upholding a Louisiana law that required separate railway carriages for white and Black passengers and establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine that would provide constitutional cover for American apartheid for the next fifty-eight years.

Homer Plessy was seven-eighths white by ancestry — he could and sometimes did pass as white — and had been recruited by a citizens’ committee in New Orleans specifically to test the Separate Car Act. In June 1892, he purchased a first-class ticket, sat in the whites-only car, identified himself as Black to the conductor, and was arrested. The citizens’ committee had even arranged for a private detective to perform the arrest, to ensure the test case was properly constructed. Plessy’s argument before the Court was that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause prohibited racial classifications in public accommodations. The Court, through Justice Henry Brown, held that racial separation was a matter of police power — that is, the state’s legitimate power to regulate social conditions — and that it did not imply inferiority unless Black people chose to interpret it that way. “If this be so,” Brown wrote, of the alleged badge of inferiority, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

The lone dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky who had evolved dramatically on questions of race. His dissent in Plessy is one of the great dissents in Supreme Court history: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” He predicted, with uncomfortable precision, that the majority’s reasoning would be used to enforce racial hierarchy throughout the country for the foreseeable future. He was correct. The decision was cited in cases upholding segregated schools, segregated hospitals, segregated prisons, segregated parks, segregated drinking fountains, and segregated blood banks — which is to say, blood was sorted by race, a practice that has no scientific basis and which the American Red Cross maintained until 1950. The “separate but equal” doctrine was used to justify conditions that were almost never equal in any material respect, because once you have established the legality of separation, the equal part is unenforceable. Plessy was effectively overturned by Brown v. Board on May 17, 1954 — fifty-eight years later, almost to the day.

Rhode Island’s Early Abolition and Its Long Contradiction

On May 18, 1652, the Colony of Rhode Island passed a law prohibiting slavery within its borders, the first such law in North American colonial history. The law was reasonably specific: it prohibited the enslavement of any Black or white person for a period longer than ten years. It was also, in practice, widely ignored. Rhode Island’s merchants, particularly those in Newport, became the most active slave traders in colonial North America within decades of the law’s passage, running the triangular trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and New England on a scale that made Newport one of the wealthiest cities in the colonies. By the mid-18th century, Rhode Island vessels were responsible for carrying approximately sixty percent of all enslaved Africans brought to the thirteen colonies.

The gap between Rhode Island’s 1652 law and Rhode Island’s actual practice is a compressed version of a much larger American story: the gap between stated principle and economic interest, between the rhetoric of liberty and the machinery of extraction. Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island in 1636 on principles of religious tolerance and separation of church and state, himself owned enslaved people by the 1650s. The colony that pioneered religious freedom and the first anti-slavery law in North America was simultaneously building the infrastructure of the Atlantic slave trade. Both things are true. The 1652 law is real. The slave trade is real. The history holds both without resolving the contradiction, because the contradiction was never resolved — it was simply repackaged, again and again, until very recently.

Two Births on the Same May Day

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born on May 18, 1872, in Trellech, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died in 1970 at ninety-seven, having written approximately seventy books, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, been imprisoned twice (once for anti-war activity in 1916, once for civil disobedience in 1961, at age eighty-nine), married four times, and changed his mind on several major philosophical positions, which he did not find embarrassing but regarded as evidence of intellectual honesty. His Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913, attempted to derive all of mathematics from purely logical axioms. It took the first volume roughly three hundred and sixty pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, demonstrated that the project could not ultimately succeed — that any sufficiently powerful formal system contains true statements that cannot be proved within the system. Russell accepted Godel’s proof. He continued writing anyway.

Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland, and was elected Pope John Paul II in October 1978, at fifty-eight, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first Polish pope ever. He survived an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981 — four bullets, a long surgery, months of recovery — and attributed his survival to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, whose feast day May 13 is. He visited his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, in prison in 1983. He was the most traveled pope in history and helped legitimize the Solidarity movement in Poland, which many historians credit as a significant factor in the eventual collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. He died in April 2005 and was canonized in 2014, one of the fastest canonizations in Church history, after Pope Francis waived the standard five-year waiting period.

Russell and Wojtyla agreed on almost nothing. Russell was an atheist who found most religious belief to be a form of fear dressed in the clothes of comfort. Wojtyla was a man whose faith had been tested by the Nazi occupation of Poland — he had hidden Jewish families, worked in a quarry to avoid deportation, lost his entire immediate family by age twenty-one — and who emerged from it with his Catholicism deepened rather than destroyed. They were born on the same day, fifty years apart, into the same century’s worst disasters, and drew opposite conclusions. The century contained both conclusions, and both men who held them.

Also on This Day

• 1642: Montreal is founded by French colonists as Ville-Marie, intended as a Catholic mission outpost. The founding ceremony takes place at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. The religious ambition of the founders — converting the indigenous population, establishing a Christian community in the New World — was largely unrealized; the settlement became primarily a fur trade center. Montreal grew into one of the largest French-speaking cities outside France, a fact that continues to complicate Canadian federal politics.
• 1944: The town of Cassino and the monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy are captured by Allied forces after one of the most brutal battles of the Italian campaign. The monastery, founded by Saint Benedict in the sixth century and one of the most sacred sites in Western Christianity, had been destroyed by Allied bombing in February 1944 on the mistaken belief that German forces were using it as an observation post. They were not, at the time of the bombing; they occupied the rubble afterward. The rebuilding of Monte Cassino began in 1948 and was completed in 1964, restored to its pre-war appearance with meticulous attention to the original plans.
• 2009: Sri Lanka’s civil war ends after twenty-six years when government forces defeat the Tamil Tigers and their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, is killed. The final stages of the war involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians into a shrinking “safe zone” that came under sustained military bombardment, killing an estimated 40,000 civilians according to UN estimates. The end of the war was celebrated by the Sri Lankan government as a military victory; international human rights organizations called for investigations into war crimes that have not, as of this writing, been conducted in any comprehensive form.

There is a pattern running through May 18: the gap between the category and the contents. Rhode Island’s anti-slavery law and its slave ships. “Separate but equal” and the enforced inequality underneath. The USGS’s accurate warning about the mountain and Harry Truman’s refusal to hear it. Russell’s attempt to derive all of mathematics from first principles, meeting the theorem that proved it couldn’t be done. The category fails to contain the thing. The category persists anyway, because the category is so much more manageable than the truth.

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