Prolific investigative journalist, bestselling author and documentarian, Dr. Jack Cashill, has written a book that is essential reading for every American fed up with the endless smears against America’s history and America’s white population by the self-anointed “antiracist” mafia, including Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the rest of their ilk.
Really, all of America should read it, as it may open the eyes of many who have bought into the racialist myth of America’s founding and greatness peddled by those purveyors of hate.
Cashill’s newly-released memoir, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethic Flight from America’s Cities, is fascinating reading on several levels.
On a surface level, the book is a touching tale of growing up in a lower middle class, hard-working, Irish-American family in the 1950s and 60s in Newark, once one of America’s great cities. Cashill’s literary style combines humor, frankness, and clear, succinct sentences to make for a very readable, and relatable, important new work of nonfiction.
One almost feels a part of the author’s family, as he recounts coming of age on Myrtle Avenue in the small, but cherished home that his police officer father had struggled mightily to earn enough money to buy, having suffered the privations of the Great Depression and a rough childhood.
Moreover, Cashill’s half-century of writing in-depth, highly researched and riveting books concerning such topics as the crash of TWA 800 off of Long Island in 1996 and the crash of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s airplane also, interestingly, in 1996, makes the book interesting reading on a second level – in detailing the destruction of this former powerhouse of a city.
Cashill dove into newspaper archives, census data, other books related to Newark’s history, and memoirs by significant Newark natives who recounted their own experiences growing up there, as well as conducting countless interviews of others who came of age in Newark in the middle of the twentieth century.
The result is a compelling, deeply researched book about the history of Newark as it transitioned in a short span of a decade or two from a relatively wholesome, if hardscrabble, city of hardworking German, Irish and Italian immigrants into an economic and societal hellscape, thanks to corrupt politicians and misguided government policies.
It is at its third, highest level that the book really hits its mark, as Cashill uses Newark, which was Ground Zero for the race riots of the 1960s, as a case study in all that is wrong with the government-as-benefactor mentality embraced by Progressives old and new.
Cashill, who describes himself in the book as a formerly “aspiring Democrat,” before he was mugged by reality, was uniquely positioned to see this first-hand. He had once worked in the Democratic administration of Newark Mayor Ken Gibson as a Newark Housing Authority official in the early 1980s.
Gibson was the first black mayor of a major northeastern city, and sadly, would become as corrupt as many fellow Newark mayors, before and since. That experience was an eye-opening one for Cashill, in terms of both the political shakedowns he witnessed and the baleful reality of Newark’s public housing projects that he had to document as a Newark city official.
Cashill discusses at length what would become the heart of the destruction of black society, and by extension much of the rest of society, in Newark as well as many other American cities – the launch of Lyndon B. Johnson’s woefully misnamed “Great Society” programs in the mid-60s.
That destruction, as Cashill notes, was prophesied by a brilliant young sociologist and historian, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later to become a US Senator, in his seminal paper, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” which predicted that government handouts to black mothers would lead to the abandonment of those women by the fathers of their children.
That abandonment by their fathers in turn would leave a cruel void in the lives of young black boys, who had no one to provide them with a moral code, discipline and love that only a father can provide. The absence of those vital character-building assets, destructive to any child of any ethnic or racial composition, would lead to a loss of respect by these young men for other members of society, skyrocketing crime rates, and the destruction of the society around them, as Cashill saw up close and personal in Newark.
Woven throughout Untenable is Cashill’s wry sense of humor, which appears in all his books, even when discussing the most depressing of topics. It makes whatever research subject he’s addressing go down a bit easier for the reader.
Somehow, facing what many today would think of as insurmountable odds, Jack Cashill would rise from very humble beginnings to achieve great academic and professional success.
No doubt he would ascribe much of that success to a boyhood in Newark, New Jersey that no longer exists – one where folks could walk the streets safely at night, did not lock their doors, had neighbors all watching out for each other from their front stoops, and would quickly notify parents of any child going astray. They took pride in their homes, and hoped to own one, if they didn’t already. Parents didn’t hover over their children, but they had high expectations and set high standards of behavior.
Most importantly, the vast majority of households in Newark, as Cashill confirmed through his review of census data, were headed by two parents when he was a child. And it is Cashill’s parents that I expect were the principal source of his later success.
Cashill’s father, Bill, to whom the book is dedicated, figured powerfully in Cashill’s upbringing. Tragically, William Cashill would become a victim of the corrupt, intracity politics of Newark, which badly affected the Newark Police Department and Bill’s career, resulting in him taking his life when Jack was only 15.
Jack’s life, though, thanks to both his father and his no-nonsense Irish mother, had already been set on the right course. Even after having to move into the projects himself as a child, Cashill can write, “In reality, none of us was poor. We each had two parents in the home and a mother who put a meal on the table every night.”
We need more books like Untenable, documenting life in American cities before the death-grip of “progressive” politics destroyed them by replacing fathers with inept, uncaring and morally bankrupt government programs. Perhaps those like Kendi, DiAngelo and Coates could stop blaming “White Supremacy” for all of America’s ills for a moment, read Untenable, and consider other possibilities.
Americans of every stripe should be immensely proud of the society we have built, and Jack Cashill’s superb book tells us why, looking through the lens of Newark, New Jersey.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 35 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times and The Federalist. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)