History

In 1994, TIME picked 50 people to keep an eye on

Exactly 20 years ago, the the Dec. 5, 1994, issue of TIME made a gamble, predicting the 50 people who were the most promising leaders for the future.

The magazine’s editors selected “50 for the Future”: 50 people under the age of 40, from the worlds of politics, science, activism, business, media and the arts, who seemed poised to take charge of America’s next steps. They had, David Van Biema wrote, “the requisite ambition, vision and community spirit to help guide us in the new millennium.” We decided to see just how well that group has turned out. Whatever happened to that Bill Gates guy, anyway?

Tundi Agardy, then 37 and a marine biologist

The World Wildlife Fund scientist made it to the original list for the way she used her hard-science chops to advocate for conservation. During the past two decades, she has continued that work, founding the marine conservation organization Sound Seas; leading the Marine Ecosystem Services Program at Forest Trends, a nonprofit that uses business ideas to protect the environment; and participating in the United Nations-led Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Helen Alvaré, then 34 and an antiabortion leader

The self-described “pro-life feminist” lawyer was the U.S. spokesperson on the subject of abortion, on behalf of Catholic bishops. She left her job with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2000, after which she began teaching at the George Mason University School of Law. She has received several awards for her service to the Church, and continues to consult for the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

Marc Andreessen, then 23 and co-creator of Mosaic

Andreessen’s Mosaic browser and the company he founded, Netscape, landed him on the cover of TIME in February 1996. In recent years Andreessenn, 43, has become one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists through his firm Andreessen Horowitz with payoffs from Twitter, Facebook and Skype. He is now one of the tech industry’s most visible leaders. He is on Twitter at @pmarca.

Evan Bayh, then 38 and Governor of Indiana

After two terms as Governor of Indiana, Bayh, 58, served in the Senate for twelve years until 2011. The Democratic lawmaker flirted with running for president in 2007, but ultimately endorsed then-Senator Hillary Clinton. He is now a partner at DC lobbying firm McGuireWoods.

Dr. Regina Benjamin, then 38 and a rural health-care provider

With an M.D. and an MBA, Benjamin took advantage of a federal program to fund her practice in coastal Alabama. After continuing to work in healthcare in the region during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, she was named Surgeon General of the United States by President Barack Obama in 2009. She resigned in 2013 and was appointed to an endowed chair in public health sciences at Xavier University.

Henry Bonilla, then 40 and a Texas Congressman

The Texan was a frequent surrogate for President George W. Bush, but redistricting made his seat more favorable for Democrats, and he lost re-election in 2006 after serving seven terms in the House. He is now a partner at the Washington government relations firm The Normandy Group.

John Bryant, then 28 and founder of Operation HOPE Inc.

Bryant continues to serve as the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Operation HOPE Inc. In 2008 he was appointed by President George W. Bush to be vice-chair of the President’s Council on Financial Literacy. President Barack Obama appointed him Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Underserved and Community Empowerment for the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability, where he focused on forming local financial literacy councils in cities across the country.

William Burns, then 38 and a foreign-service officer

After 33 years at the State Department, Burns retired in November 2014 as Deputy Secretary of State, the department’s number two, under Secretary of State John Kerry. One of the most decorated diplomats of his time, Burns continues to play a role in the P5+1 Iran nuclear negotiations. In February of 2015 he will become the next president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Stephen Carter, then 40 and a law professor at Yale University

The William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Carter is a renowned fiction and nonfiction author of titles like The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. He has taught and written extensively about the law and ethics of war and is also a columnist for Bloomberg View.

Sean Carroll, then 33 and a molecular biologist and inventor

A co-founder of Ophidian Pharmaceuticals, Carroll (not to be confused with the CalTech theoretical physicist of the same name) also used his non-commercial side to study butterfly wings in order to investigate the relationship between genes and evolution. In addition to contributing to the Science section of the New York Times, Carroll has written several books about evolution for popular audiences. One of them was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for non-fiction. His latest, Brave Genius, was released last year.

Christopher Chyba, then 35 and a planetary scientist

His research on comets and asteroids concluded that Earth was unlikely to be majorly damaged by a collision with one, and he worked with the White House to make sure that planetary damage wouldn’t come from unsecured nukes either. He received a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant in 2001, and is now director of the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

James Dimon, then 38 and president of Travelers Group

Back in 1994, about a decade after founding the New York Academy of Finance — a program that prepped underprivileged kids for Wall Street jobs — he was considered one of the stock world’s top 10 figures. Now, as CEO of JPMorgan Chase, “Jamie” Dimon has since become even more recognizable in the Wall Street world. Though the bank has not had a completely smooth run in recent years — the “London Whale” mess cost it billions — he is credited with helping JPMorgan Chase get through the financial crisis with minimal damage. He has been a frequent honoree on TIME’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and currently ranks at #18 on the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world.

Chaka Fattah, then 38 and a Pennsylvania Congressman-elect

About to enter his 11th term representing parts of Philadelphia in the House of Representatives, Fattah is the ranking member of the House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies and the Vice Chair on the House Gun and Violence Task Force.

Bill Gates, then 39 and co-founder of Microsoft Corp.

Gates was already America’s richest man in 1994 (TIME estimated his net worth at $9.35 billion) — but Forbes now estimates his net worth at a whopping $82.1 billion. And while Microsoft continues to chug along, he now dedicates much of his energy to the major philanthropic organization that is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he and his wife launched in 2000.

Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., then 38 and an advocate for the homeless

Not content to provide healthcare for the homeless by visiting them on the streets and in public parks, Greer had founded four free clinics to make sure they got the best care possible. Since 1994, he has continued to provide healthcare for underserved populations in Florida and teach at the Florida International University School of Medicine. His autobiography, Waking Up in America, was released in 1999, and in 2009 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

John Kaliski, then 38 and an urban architect

Kaliski used a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to research L.A.’s urban sprawl, to help avoid mistakes as the cities of the future were built. In 2000, he founded the architecture firm that carries his name, and he is a co-author of the book Everyday Urbanism. He continues to design award-winning projects throughout California.

John F. Kennedy Jr., then 34 and a health-care entrepreneur

In 1995, JFK, Jr. founded the short-lived political/fashion magazine George. He died in 1999 after losing control of his Piper Saratoga airplane in a crash that also killed his wife and sister-in-law.

Randall Kennedy, then 40 and a Harvard law professor

A nationally recognized expert on race issues, Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he continues to write about race, discrimination, and the law.

Alan Khazei, then 33 and co-director of City Year

By co-founding the “public-service entrepreneurship” that had, by 1994, helped hundreds of people find yearlong jobs, Khazei recruited corporations to help pick up the tab. City Year also inspired President Clinton to start AmeriCorps. Since then, Khazei also founded Be the Change, a nonprofit of which he’s now CEO, which promotes service among an even wider swath of the population. His runs for Senate in Massachusetts, however, have proved unsuccessful.

Ronald A. Klain, then 33 and chief of staff to Janet Reno

Klain was chief of staff to two vice presidents, Al Gore and Joe Biden. His role in the 2000 Florida recount was immortalized by Kevin Spacey in the HBO movie Recount. He is now serving as the White House’s Ebola Response Coordinator and is rumored to be next in line to be President Barack Obama’s chief of staff or senior advisor.

Wendy Kopp, then 27, Founder of Teach for America

In 1994, Teach for America was active in 17 districts and received a few thousand applications for 500 positions. Kopp’s organization has since become one the biggest movers in the education. In the 2013-14 school year, according to TFA’s numbers, 750,000 students nationwide were taught by 11,000 TFA teachers. The organization has also expanded to include Teach for All, a global education network, and Kopp has written two books.

Samuel LaBudde, then 38 and a biologist

A video LaBudde shot while undercover on a Panamanian tuna boat helped make dolphin-safe tuna a national issue. He has continued to work for environmental causes in the years since.

Winona LaDuke, then 35 and a Native American rights activist

A two-time vice presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket, LaDuke is the executive director of environmental non-profits the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Honor the Earth. She has worked extensively to raise the political awareness and clout of Native American tribes.

Maya Lin, then 35, a sculptor and architect

In the last two decades, Lin’s art and architecture projects have continued to make news. About five years ago, Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., announced that a new project called What Is Missing? would be her “last memorial”: the project memorializes environmental loss with a web site, art installations and a foundation. She will be working on it, she has said, for the rest of her life.

Roderick von Lipsey, then 35 and a Major in the U.S. Marine Corps

After 20 years as a Marine Corps Aviator, during which he served as director of the National Security Council and as a senior aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, von Lipsey is now a Managing Director at UBS Financial Services, Inc. in Washington in the firm’s private wealth practice.

Jonathan Lunine, then 35 and a planetary astronomer

Then head of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Committee, he was studying whether it would one day be possible to send a manned mission to Mars. (By 2030, maybe, he guessed.) He has continued to advise NASA — he worked on the 2011 Juno mission to Saturn — and he teaches at Cornell. (Manned missions to Mars remain an idea of the future — but Lunine may yet be proved right.)

Frank Luntz, then 32 and a Republican pollster and analyst

The GOP messaging guru who popularized terms like the “death tax” and “global warming” and the man behind Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America has worked extensively in American and international politics on behalf of conservative candidates. In 2010 he branded the Affordable Care Act a “government takeover” of healthcare, a talking-point used extensively by Republicans as they retook the House of Representatives. He is also a prominent commentator on Fox News.

Wynton Marsalis, then 33 and a Jazz musician

Not content to be a virtuoso trumpeter, Marsalis was also an ambassador of jazz, dedicating his time to visiting schools and introducing the music to a new generation. Since 1994, he has received the National Medal of the Arts and a Pulitzer Prize, and has been appointed a U.N. Messenger of Peace. Jazz at Lincoln Center, the program he helped found, is now one of New York City’s leading jazz venues, and Marsalis remains one of the genre’s most famous players.

Fred McClure, then 40 and a corporate consultant

Now the Chief Executive Officer of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation, McClure was an aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Then-Governor George W. Bush appointed him to the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University. He was previously a managing partner of the international law firm, SNR Denton.

Cynthia McKinney, then 39 and a Congresswoman from Georgia

McKinney served six terms in the House of Representatives, become a vocal critic of the Bush administration and the Iraq War. She gained notoriety for accusing the Bush administration of having advance warning of the 9/11 attacks and allowing them to take place, and has since become a vocal critic of American interventions overseas. She was twice defeated by Democratic primary challengers before abandoning the party. She was the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2008.

Wayne Meisel, then 35 and founder of COOL

After leaving the foundation he helped found, Meisel, who is a Presbyterian minister, served as Director of Faith and Service at the Cousins Foundation in Atlanta. Earlier this year, he became the founding director of a new center at the McCormick Theological Seminary, focusing on the intersection of religion and public service.

Nancy-Ann Min, then 37 and a White House budget official

Nancy-Ann Min DeParle served as President Barack Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy from January 2011 to January 2013 after a stint as director of the White House Office of Health Reform. She coordinated the administration’s efforts to pass and implement the landmark Affordable Care Act in 2010. She is currently a Partner & Co-Founder at Consonance Capital Partners, a healthcare-focused private equity firm.

Albert Mohler, 35, and president of the Southern Baptist Seminary

Only about two years after becoming president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he returned the school to older traditions, by forcing out the school’s first female theological professor—and he promised to spread his values throughout the Baptist community. He remains president of the Seminary to this day.

Susan Molinari, then 36 and a Congresswoman from New York

After three terms in the House, Molinari quit Congress to take a job at CBS News. She later became a Washington lobbyist and now runs Google’s Washington, D.C. office, where she is Vice President of Public Policy and Government Relations.

Charles Munn, then 39 and a conservationist-zoologist

Munn turned a love of birds into a career in conserving their tropical habits, particularly by encouraging ecotourism and promoting land-management by tribal communities from the areas in question. One of his more recent ecotourism ventures was a jaguar-focused photo-safari center in Brazil.

Jim Nussle, then 34 and a Congressman from Iowa

Now the president of the Credit Union National Association, Nussle served in the House from 1991-2007, where he was chairman of the House budget Committee. In 2007, President George W. Bush selected him to run the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Ralph Reed, then 33 and Executive director of the Christian Coalition

The conservative political activist became one of the leading evangelical powerbrokers in Republican politics, despite a brief fall from grace in the late 1990s and ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Reed now runs the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit organization whose conferences are regularly attended by Republican presidential hopefuls.

Condoleezza Rice, then 40 and Provost of Stanford University

During the 2000 Bush campaign, Rice took a leave of absence from Stanford to serve as the then-Texas governor’s top foreign policy advisor. When he won the White House, she was selected as his first National Security Advisor, a position she held until 2005 when she was nominated to be the first black woman to serve as Secretary of State. After Bush left office, Rice returned to Stanford, where she is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. One of the first two women invited to join the Augusta National Golf Club, she also serves as a member of the College Football Playoff Selection Committee and is frequently mentioned as a possible successor as commissioner of the National Football League.

John Rogers, then 36 and a mutual-fund manager

Notable for his relatively frugal lifestyle, the stock savant was the first African American president of the Chicago Park District and helped put dozens of inner-city students through school. He remains Chairman and CEO of Ariel Investments, the company he founded, while serving as the chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans, which councils the President on how to work toward future economic stability by educating young people about how money works.

Jeffrey Sachs, then 40 and an economist

The director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Sachs has put his economics background to use as an advisor on developing countries across the globe. The author of books like The End of Poverty, Sachs is one of the leading thinkers on sustainable economic development and has twice been named to the TIME 100.

Bret Schundler, then 35 and Mayor of Jersey City

As the Republican lawmaker of a Democratic city, Schundler drew acclaim as a reformer until he left office in 2001. He twice unsuccessfully ran for governor of New Jersey and briefly served as Commissioner of Education under New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in 2010.

Tavis Smiley, then 30 and a radio talk-show host

These days, Smiley does television too: his eponymous PBS talk show is in its tenth year. He’s written more than a dozen books and, in 1999, started a foundation focused on mentorship and leadership.

Lawrence Summers, then 40 and Treasury Under Secretary

The outspoken economist quickly rose to be President Bill Clinton’s final Treasury Secretary, where he led efforts to deregulate the financial sector. After leaving office, he became the 27th President of Harvard University, where he had a tumultuous tenure. After President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he selected Summers to be Director of the National Economic Council, a post from which he helped lead the administration’s response to the global financial crisis. He left the White House in 2010.

Terri Swearingen, then 37 and an environmental activist

Concerned with a hazardous-waste processing incinerator too near her local elementary school, she devoted herself to the environment, went on a hunger strike and ended up influencing national environmental policy. In 1997, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. She has stayed out of the news in recent years.

Urvashi Vaid, then 36 and a gay-rights advocate

She was the first woman of color to head up the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Her first book came out in 1996; she has written or edited two more since. In 2012, she helped launch the first lesbian political action committee, and since 2011 she has been the director of a Columbia University project that examines the role of tradition in the success or failure of gender justice advocacy.

Fidel Vargas, then 26 and Mayor of Baldwin Park, California

After a successful career in private equity, Vargas is now the President and CEO of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for Latino students to succeed in college.

Kevin Vigilante, then 40 and Founder of Community Outreach Clinic

After a failed run for Congress, Vigilante returned to treating female HIV patients in Rhode Island. He now works at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he consults with government clients about public health topics.

Rebecca Walker, then 25 and co-founder of Third Wave

The Third Wave Foundation continues to be dedicated to encouraging female leaders of the future, registering female voters and making feminism work for women of color. In the last two decades, Walker has also written or edited more than a half-dozen books. She teaches memoir writing, and in 2009, she co-founded Write to Wellbeing, a business that helps writers improve their lives.

Oprah Winfrey, then 40 and a talk-show host

Her talk-show business was making her more than $50 million a year, and her openness about her own past had helped get the National Child Protection Act through Congress. Twenty years later, her earnings, her power and her media empire are even bigger. She remains, in short, Oprah.

Naomi Wolf, then 32 and a feminist author

The author of The Beauty Myth was credited with bringing feminism “back to life” when she accused the cosmetics industry of hobbling advancement for women. Wolf — who has also worked as a political consultant and in the nonprofit space — continues to inspire conversation with her writing, as with her 2013 book Vagina: A New Biography.

Read the full 1994 list of 50 future leaders here, in the TIME Vault: A New Generation of Leaders

What changed from page to screen in the new Reese Witherspoon film

The new Reese Witherspoon movie Wild faced a major challenge as it headed to the big screen. In the popular memoir of the same name, author Cheryl Strayed hikes the Pacific Crest Trail in hopes of finding ways to cope her mother’s death, her experimentation with heroin and her divorce. The then-26-year-old Strayed spends most of the book traversing the trail alone and, though flashback scenes and pit stops on her journey provide some material for action and drama, the book mainly consists of Strayed’s own thoughts—material that’s hard to translate into a screenplay.

Still, the film closely parallels the book, mirroring Strayed’s bleak back story and her uplifting journey. Here’s what was truth, as described by the memoir, and what was changed for the movie.

Warning: spoilers follow for Wild, both the book and the movie.

Cheryl’s last phone call before starting her hike was to her ex-husband, Paul

Ruling: Fiction

In the film, Cheryl calls her newly ex-husband Paul before she sets off on her journey, probably so that audience members will become familiar with Paul (who appears in many flashbacks throughout the movie) early on. In reality, Cheryl resisted the urge to call her ex the night before she began her hike. Cheryl fell into using heroin for a time between her mother’s death and her hike four years later. Paul disapproved from the habit and helped Cheryl quit, but she used again shortly before the hike. She feared that if she called Paul he would somehow divine that she had done drugs just days before.

Cheryl’s only family was her mother and brother

Ruling: Fiction

The movie cuts out a few important people in Cheryl’s real life. In the film, Cheryl has only one sibling, her younger brother Leif. In reality, Cheryl also had an older sister, Karen. The movie also removes their mother’s second husband, Eddie. Eddie is a father figure to Cheryl and her siblings when they are young. (Their biological father was abusive and Cheryl loses touch with him after her mother files for divorce.) Cheryl and Eddie grew particularly close during her mother’s sickness, but after she passed, Eddie remarried and grew distant.

Cheryl and Paul got matching tattoos when they divorced

Ruling: Fact

To honor their connection to each other, the two got tattoos of horses on their arms. Their divorce (as reflected in the film) is largely amicable. Cheryl blames marrying too young and her own infidelity for their failed marriage.

Cheryl threw her boot off a cliff

Ruling: Fact

Cheryl’s boots did plague her throughout her hike, taking six of her toenails because they were too small. In the film, Cheryl finds out that REI will ship her new boots for free at one of her first stops on the trail. In reality, she heard about the satisfaction guaranteed policy much later when the damage was already done to her feet.

One of her boots did tumble down a cliff, allowing her to chuck the other one after it, screaming profanities as she did. She walked in taped-together sandals to her next rest stop, where her boots were to be delivered. However, her problems did not end there: The boots were not shipped as quickly as she expected, and she was forced to hike on sandals to yet another stop before finally getting her new shoes.

She was interviewed for the Hobo Times

Ruling: Fact

A reporter really did stop Cheryl and talk to her for a piece in the Hobo Times. (Though the book never mentions whether the story was actually published and picked up by Harper’s, as the journalist suggested it would be.) The interview forces Cheryl to question whether she is, technically speaking, homeless, since she is traveling alone and doesn’t have a house to call her own. The hobo care-package she receives is also real and did indeed include a beer.

Cheryl got pregnant while experimenting with heroin

Ruling: Mostly Fact

Another character cut out from the movie is Joe, Cheryl’s boyfriend who gets her hooked on heroin. Cheryl begins experimenting with the drug while she and Paul are separated but not yet divorced. As shown in the movie, Paul does drive across the country to find Cheryl when a mutual friend tells him that his wife has been using drugs. Cheryl consents to leave with him only after she is threatened by a man with a knife.

In the movie, Cheryl says she does not know who got her pregnant. In the book, it was certainly Joe. After getting an abortion and setting out on her hike, Cheryl receives several letters from Joe on the trail promising to get better and expressing a desire to be her boyfriend. Cheryl does not find out whether Joe actually goes to rehab.

MORE: Reese Witherspoon Isn’t Nice or Wholesome in Wild, and That’s What Makes It Great

She walked out of her therapy sessions

Ruling: Fiction

Much of Cheryl’s internal monologue during her therapy sessions is made into dialogue with her therapist in the movie. In fact, Cheryl saw a therapist consistently, not just for one session.

Cheryl missed her mother’s death while finding her brother

Ruling: Fact

In real life, Leif disappeared while his mother was in the hospital. Cheryl spent the night before her mother died trying to track him down. When she finally found him and the two visited the hospital the next morning, their mother had already been dead for an hour. A nurse, thinking they had already been informed, approached them and told them they put ice on their mother’s eyes so she could donate her corneas.

Cheryl and Leif shot their mother’s horse

Ruling: Fact

One of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the book is when Cheryl and Leif are forced to put down their mother’s sick horse. The horse grew weak after Eddie neglected it following the death of Cheryl’s mother. Cheryl asks Eddie to mercy-kill the horse, but he doesn’t. Cheryl then says Leif must shoot the animal. The horse does not die from the first shot, but to Cheryl’s dismay must be shot multiple times and dies slowly. In the book, Cheryl often dreams of her mother begging to Cheryl kill her and of her mother’s horse offering a bouquet of flowers to Cheryl, forgiving her for shooting him.

"Republicans and Democrats inhabit different factual universes"

In 2004, an unnamed senior White House staffer, widely thought to be political adviser Karl Rove, gave a famous interview to Ron Suskind, “The aide,” Suskind wrote, “said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’”

But, the anonymous man told Suskind, that wasn’t the way the world worked. “We’re an empire now,” he’s quoted as saying, “and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

The staffer may not have known it, but he was identifying one feature of the kind of crisis era into which the United States had just entered. Great political crises like those of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression and the Second World War, and the one that began in 2001 and continues today are also struggles over the meaning of words—words like democracy and dictatorship, freedom, free enterprise and socialism, and so on. They also become struggles over the most basic facts. Writing during the great worldwide crisis of the Second World War, George Orwell identified a number of competing world views whose adherents could not accept various obviously true statements about the world around them. Within ten years more—that is, by the mid-1950s—that was no longer the case. Victory in war and postwar economic growth had created a new consensus in the western world.

But today, divisions over reality are as deep as they have been for a very long time, and Republicans and Democrats inhabit different factual universes. One obvious area of disagreement is climate change. While President Obama seeks agreements with foreign nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Republicans almost unanimously reject the consensus of scientific opinion and argue that those emissions have not been proven to heat up the planet. Another very important area of disagreement concerns fiscal and economic policy — and this week it became clear that some Republicans are struggling to make their version of economic reality prevail in Washington, too.

The New York Times reported on a campaign by prominent Republican conservatives and some Tea Party Congressmen to replace the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas W. Elmendorf, with someone who would calculate the effects of tax cuts in a different way. Led by the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and the Heritage Foundation, these Republicans specifically want a new director who would use what they call “dynamic scoring” to predict the impact of tax cuts. “Dynamic scoring” is based upon the theory of supply-side economics. That theory, first popularized under Ronald Reagan, held that tax cuts, particularly on the highest income brackets, would unleash extraordinary economic growth, and therefore bring in more, rather than less, revenue within a few years. Dynamic scoring is a theoretically more sophisticated application of this idea. Rather than simply deduct the projected cost of tax cuts from federal revenues to estimate their future impact, dynamic scoring actually predicts how much new tax cuts will increase GDP by unleashing economic growth, and how much they will tax revenues and mitigate the effect of the cuts upon the deficit. Since the new Republican majorities in Congress are determined to cut taxes yet again while claiming to move closer to a balanced budget, this is an idea they need to validate in order to justify their plans.

The history of dynamic scoring is closely tied to the history of Republican economic policy since Ronald Reagan. When Reagan took office in 1981, the federal deficit was $79 billion. His Administration immediately adopted policies based on supply-side economics. It didn’t work. When he left office eight years later after several rounds of tax cuts on the higher brackets, the annual deficit was $152 billion, down from a peak of $221 billion in 1986. Despite George H. W. Bush’s tax increases, which split the Republican Party, a severe recession had raised the deficit back up to $255 billion when he left office in 1993.

Bill Clinton began his Administration with an income tax increase on nearly all Americans. It helped cost the Democrats the House of Representatives in 1994. It was at that point that Newt Gingrich, then the new Speaker of the House, and his fellow Republicans began to advocate dynamic scoring as a means of calculating the impact of further tax cuts. Once again, they claimed they could accurately estimate the beneficial impact of leaving more money in the hands of the wealthy and ease fear of deficits. But Clinton refused to go along, and eventually, the Clinton Administration ran a budget surplus in fiscal 2000.

George W. Bush inherited a deficit of only $32 billion in 2001, and came into office determined to cut taxes again. By 2003, the Bush Administration was basing calls for a second round of cuts on dynamic scoring estimates that once again claimed that the cuts would generate increased revenue. The cuts passed, but their impact, combined with the Iraq war and the Great Recession, was to balloon the deficit up to $641 billion in fiscal 2008. Together, President Obama and the Republican Congress have now reduced the deficit to $483 billion in the fiscal year that was just completed. This pattern actually dates from the 1950s. Beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, every Republican President has substantially increased the federal deficit, while every Democratic President except Jimmy Carter has reduced it during his term of office.

Few theories of public policy have been tested so repeatedly and failed tests so spectacularly, as the idea that tax cuts in the high brackets will ultimately increase revenue and lower deficits. But led by Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican majority, by pushing for personnel changes that will lead the non-partisan Congressional budget office to adopt dynamic scoring, is eager to try it again. It is hard for me to believe that any Republican activists seriously believe that a new round of top-bracket and corporate tax cuts will increase revenues. Their real agenda, I suspect, is the one that Grover Norquist—a prime mover in the campaign to replace Elmendorf—has repeatedly spoken of: to force further reductions in government spending by reducing government revenues still further. Meanwhile, wealthy Republican donors will get even wealthier, and, presumably, even more generous in their contributions. Once again the Republicans are trying to create their own reality: a world in which making the rich richer will bring down deficits, while only a few poor benighted members of the “reality-based community” take the trouble to notice that this is not so.

David Kaiser, a historian, has taught at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Williams College, and the Naval War College. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War. He lives in Watertown, Mass.

"Racism can work through laws, even seemingly good laws"

Ever since the grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, protests across the country have rallied around Garner’s final words, repeated multiple times as he was choked and restrained: “I can’t breathe.”

But we should also pay attention to Garner’s first words in the video that recorded his death: “Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it.” Those words point us to the past—not only to Garner’s past encounters with the police, but also to the nation’s long history of using the law to “mess with” black citizens.

That history includes the years following the American Civil War. After their defeat, citizens of the former Confederacy could no longer buy or sell black people. Still, in 1865 and 1866, Southern state legislatures quickly passed a series of “Black Codes” that hampered attempts by newly freed people to escape the control of former masters.

These postwar Black Codes redefined customary local privileges, such as hunting wild hogs, as major crimes. Local white police forces enforced criminal laws selectively, using ostensibly color-blind laws to harass and incarcerate the newly freed. Of the nearly three hundred formerly enslaved people sent to the state penitentiary in Texas between 1865 and February 1867, the vast majority were charged with theft, including George Tucker, accused of stealing twenty cents in Montgomery County. Despite his protests of innocence, Tucker was sentenced to two years in prison, as was Tom Gravys of Harris County, accused of stealing half a plug of tobacco.

Even tax codes became weapons in white Southerners’ efforts to control black citizens. Black Southerners briefly thwarted those efforts between 1867 and 1876, when Congressional Reconstruction enabled formerly enslaved people and their allies to seize control of Southern legislatures. Republican governments, elected by black voters, overturned Black Codes and strengthened public services like education. To pay for increased public spending, Republican lawmakers overhauled the antebellum Southern tax system, too, shifting the burden of financing the state to its wealthiest instead of its poorest citizens.

Yet in the mid-1870s, so-called “Redeemer” Democrats, who campaigned on white supremacist platforms, began to wrest control of Southern legislatures away from Republicans, placing the power of the law back in the hands of reactionary whites. Redeemers quickly reinstituted Black Codes, using them not only to imprison but to disenfranchise black voters. According to a 2009 article by historian Pippa Holloway, between 1874 and 1882 every southern state but one passed constitutional amendments that disenfranchised petty thieves and turned misdemeanor crimes like stealing chickens into felony offenses.

Those Democrats also made taxes more regressive, hoping to force fine-harried workers to accept any wages white employers were willing to offer. By increasing licensing fees and excise taxes that targeted black citizens, they shifted tax burdens away from white landowners and rolled back public spending on things that mattered most to the people they disenfranchised. The result, as historian Eric Foner once wrote, was that poor black laborers “bore the heaviest burden of taxation and received the fewest public services.”

For students of this history, it is difficult not to hear echoes of such stories today. Two black men lie dead after encounters with the police that reportedly began because of alleged offenses like petty theft and sales of loose cigarettes designed to evade a regressive tax. Police had already arrested Eric Garner dozens of times on a string of misdemeanor charges, all of which he planned to contest in court.

Meanwhile, last year in Ferguson, Mo., the population of the city was lower than the number of warrants, many of them for offenses like minor traffic infractions or forgetting to sign up for garbage collection. And nationally, data indicates that black citizens are more likely than whites to be arrested, patrolled, stopped, and killed by police officers, even as crime rates have declined.

Such examples of overpolicing black citizens may well appear to future historians much like the application of the Black Codes look to historians of Reconstruction today, as clear examples of one group of Americans using power to hold another group down. To prove them wrong, we the living will have to confront our own history, stretching back to the Civil War and beyond, more honestly than most of us have done in the past.

Indeed, our collective lack of historical perspective shows even when Americans from different sides of the political spectrum agree that Garner’s homicide was unjust. Earlier this week, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky blamed high cigarette taxes for Garner’s death. While Paul has commented before on the role of racism in our criminal justice system, his and others’ focus on “big government” betrays a reluctance to grapple with our history. We cannot fix our problems without acknowledging how long “broken windows” policing has targeted black communities, or how often public spending has been vital to protecting their rights as citizens.

On the other hand, without endorsing Paul’s specific analysis or policy proposals, we should also be reluctant to declare, as some did on social media, that “it is harder to get farther from the point than arguing the cause of Eric Garner’s death was cigarette taxes.” History warns against assuming that any part of our society is necessarily far from the reach of racism. Our history reminds us that racism can work through laws, even seemingly good laws, just as it can through lynch mobs. Black citizens have been held down with physical force, but also with fines, fees and felony sentences that took away the political power to change those very things.

In view of that past, there is little, if anything, about our country and our legal system that we should not be subjecting to a critical eye today. None of our institutions stand outside of our history, not our grand juries, not our police and not even our excise tax laws. And every chapter of that history contains evidence of black Americans being harassed by both legal and extralegal means.

The nation has found countless ways to “mess with” black lives for generations, and our past ways are not dead. They are not even past. That is why Eric Garner started by saying “I’m tired,” and why so many other Americans are now shouting “I can’t breathe.”

W. Caleb McDaniel is assistant professor of history at Rice University and the author of The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform, which won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Dec. 5, 1933: Prohibition comes to an end in the United States

The 18th Amendment, which prohibited the production, distribution and sale of alcohol, easily ranks as the least popular amendment in U.S. history — and the only constitutional amendment ever to be repealed.

When the 21st Amendment was ratified on this day, Dec. 5, in 1933, it ended Prohibition 13 years, 10 months, and 19 days after it began. The time had not passed quickly, according to journalist H.L. Mencken, who noted, “It seems almost a geologic epoch while it was going on, and the human suffering that it entailed must have been a fair match for that of the Black Death or the Thirty Years War.”

The national experiment was a resounding failure, even according to some of its early supporters. Lifelong teetotaler John D. Rockefeller, Jr, had recanted his support the year before Prohibition’s repeal, in a letter published in the New York Times. He wrote:

When the Eighteenth Amendment was passed I earnestly hoped… that it would be generally supported by public opinion and thus the day be hastened when the value to society of men with minds and bodies free from the undermining effects of alcohol would be generally realized. That this has not been the result, but rather that drinking generally has increased; that the speakeasy has replaced the saloon, not only unit for unit, but probably two-fold if not three-fold; that a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale… I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe.

While a Dallas newspaper editorial warned that Rockefeller’s change of heart “may in later years cause him deep regret,” William Randolph Hearst countered that Rockefeller’s opinion would help “bring the nation to calm conviction on the ineffectiveness of prohibition as a temperance measure.”

Early temperance advocates had warned that drunks were in danger — because of their high blood-alcohol levels — of spontaneous combustion (a claim that has since been proven impossible), but instead Prohibition sparked its own public health crisis. Drinking tainted bootleg liquor caused blindness, paralysis, and an estimated national average of 1,000 deaths a year.

Economically, the measure also failed to generate increased sales of clothing and household goods, which supporters claimed would skyrocket once breadwinners stopped throwing away their income in saloons. Sales of soda and juice were similarly expected to rise, along with entertainment industry revenue, as people sought ways to amuse themselves while sober. But those hopes were never realized; instead, the ban on alcohol cost the federal government $11 billion in lost tax revenue, according to Ken Burns’ documentary Prohibition.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was among those relieved to witness the end of the era. “What America needs now is a drink,” he’s reported to have said.

Read a 1930 report on the 10th anniversary of Prohibition, here in the TIME Vault: Prohibition: Birthday

Photos: Prohibition and the Speakeasies of New York in 1933

The South African leader died on Dec. 5, 2013

It was one year ago, on Dec. 5, 2013, that Nelson Mandela died at age 95. To mark the passing of a man who U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called “a giant for justice and a down-to-earth human inspiration,” TIME put out a special issue, with remembrances from luminaries like Bono and Morgan Freeman, as well as a look back by the magazine’s former managing editor, Rick Stengel, who had worked closely with Mandela.

Stengel recalled visiting Mandela’s ancestral village with him, and finding that the South African leader seemed uninterested in talking about death:

Mandela might have been a more sentimental man if so much had not been taken away from him. His freedom. His ability to choose the path of his life. His eldest son. Two great-grandchildren. Nothing in his life was permanent except the oppression he and his people were under. And everything he might have had he sacrificed to achieve the freedom of his people. But all the crude jailers, tiny cells and bumptious white apartheid leaders could not take away his pride, his dignity and his sense of justice. Even when he had to strip and be hosed down when he first entered Robben Island, he stood straight and did not complain.

Read the full issue, here in the TIME archives: Nelson Mandela, 1918–2013

The boy who won't grow up has rarely been played by a real boy

It’s pretty much the single most important plot point in Peter Pan: the main character will, in the words of one of the signature songs from the musical based on his story, “stay a boy forever.”

Except that he hasn’t. When Allison Williams—the actress best known, appropriately, for her role on Girls—takes to the skies Thursday night for the live televised version of the play, she’ll be joining a long line of grown women who have played the ever-youthful boy.

In fact, it’s been an even century since Nina Boucicault played the starring role in the original 1904 London production, which came to New York the following year with Maude Adams in the lead. As Slate has reported, there were several reasons to cast women in the role, from the logistics of dealing with child-labor laws to the thought that an adult man wouldn’t seem boyish enough and a real boy wouldn’t be capable. Furthermore, casting an adult as Peter meant the child actors around her could be relatively older too. And the actresses cast as Peter were fully on board with the decision: TIME reported in 1950 that, in her day, Adams would leave the theater in costume, so as not to let young fans know she was a grown-up and a woman.

Other grown women followed her in the stage role, like Marilyn Miller, Eva Le Gallienne and Jean Arthur.

When the musical version of the play arrived in 1954, the tradition—complete with music suited for a female singer—continued. Mary Martin quickly came to be a favorite, and is still associated with the role to this day. “She looks as boyish as can be expected of any grownup of the opposite sex,” TIME noted a review of the Broadway production.

There has, however, been a truly noteworthy deviation from the norm: Disney’s 1953 animated version, not constrained by the demands of live human actors, was able to do what no play could. In that movie Peter is voiced by child actor Bobby Driscoll.

The path that Reese Witherspoon walks in her latest film took 60 years to become a reality

Wild, a film based on Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir, in theaters Dec. 5, tells the tale of a woman wandering over more than 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. And that means one of star Reese Witherspoon’s most important co-stars is the trail itself.

Today there are more than 1,000 official national trails that sprawl across America like a nervous system. But in the beginning there were just two: the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail. The latter, spanning about 2,650 miles of America’s West Coast, from Mexico to Canada, was the dream of a fellow named Clinton Clarke. In 1932, the avid hiker formally proposed a border-to-border trail connecting the peaks of the Pacific Coast, to preserve and protect America’s “absolute wilderness” before it was overrun by “motor cars” and industry.

“In few regions of the world—certainly nowhere else in the United States,” he later wrote in 1945, “are found such a varied and priceless collection of the sculptured masterpieces of Nature as adorn, strung like pearls, the mountain ranges of Washington, Oregon and California.” The Pacific Crest Trail, he said, “is the cord that binds this necklace.”

Clarke’s hero, and cause, was the explorer who would pitch his or her tent in the mountains night after night, desperate to hear the snowfall and see nothing brighter than the stars, seeking a “simpler and more natural life.” He believed that the “PCT” wasn’t just some track of dirt, but a means of forging “sturdy bodies,” “sound minds,” “permanent endurance,” “moral stamina” and “patriotic citizenship.” (As if it needed to be mentioned, Clarke was a dedicated Boy Scout.)

Clarke wasn’t the only person to dream of such a trail, but he was the most organized. To further the cause, he put together a whole federation of hiking clubs and youth groups dedicated to the project, known the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference. For years, he oversaw the massive task of scouting and constructing a route through the wilderness, connecting existing trails by building new ones, all while avoiding as much settled area as possible. Clarke served as the president of the conference for 25 years, which included big-name members like the Sierra Club, YMCA and photographer Ansel Adams. For this, he earned his place in history as the “father” of the trail.

The Pacific Crest Trail officially became the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in 1968, 11 years after Clarke died at the age of 84. The popularity of hiking had been growing and, as of 1963, America had a President and First Lady who were very interested in preserving the outdoors: Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. Johnson proposed the study of a national system of trails, which would give the federal government a way to establish and oversee footpaths that weren’t on federal land. The volunteers who oversaw the Appalachian Trail were anxious for that kind of mandate, worried that handshake agreements allowing hikers to pass through private lands might otherwise dry up.

People like the Department of the Interior’s Daniel M. Ogden, who recounts the political battle for establishing a national system of trails in a 40th anniversary newsletter, pushed Congress to pass a bill based on the study Johnson requested. And Oct. 2, 1968, Johnson signed a “conservation grand slam” of four environmental measures: the National Trails System Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Redwood National Park Act, and the North Cascades National Park Act. The only two national scenic trails at the time, which require an act of Congress to be designated, were the Appalachian and the Pacific Crest.

By 1972, a council created by the government had come up with a final route for the trail that Clarke had imagined 40 years earlier. After years of construction and negotiation with private property owners, the trail was completed in 1993 with a “golden spike” ceremony reminiscent of the transcontinental railroad. That was also the year that the non-profit Pacific Crest Trail Association forged a partnership with the federal government to oversee and keep up the trail.

Many people have since completed the whole-hog, end-to-end trek. Others, like Cheryl Strayed, have settled for three-month, 1,100-mile adventures. So long as the hikers come out a little different on the other side, they should all be satisfying Clarke’s wish for what the trail would be. “It is simply a ‘track worn through the wilderness,'” he wrote in 1945, “for hardy adventurers who can enjoy the experience and benefits of a friendly struggle with Mother Nature.”