David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Emil “Jay” Freireich lost his father in 1929, shortly after the stock market crash. Freireich believed the death was a suicide. His mother had to work 18-hour days to provide for her children. She hired an Irish maid who watched after the children for room and board. Freireich came to view that woman as his true mother. Several years later, he was spending his days on the street, stealing because his family could not afford milk. He was not close with his family and did not like the stepfather that his mother had married.

Gladwell describes the fall of 1940, when the Germans began an eight-month bombing campaign on London. While planning for the attacks, British officials had been convinced that people would panic and flee to the countryside. They were wrong: “People who needed to stay in the city by and large stayed” (129). Soon, officials were surprised to notice that Londoners were starting to treat the bombs with indifference, despite the devastation they were causing: “Civilians from other countries also turned out to be unexpectedly resilient in the face of bombing” (130). Gladwell asks how this was possible.

In a book called The Structure of Morale, J.T. MacCurdy divides the population of a place that is being bombed into three categories: “people killed,”“near misses,” and “remote misses.” Morale depends on how survivors react, so corpses are not the ones who create more panic, explaining the first category. Near misses are those who witness the effects of a bomb and are “impressed” (131), which can mean anything from a state of shock to a feeling of fear. Remote misses are those who are aware of bombing, but do not see or suffer its immediate consequences. When remote misses survive several nearby attacks, they can start to feel invincible, “a feeling of excitement with a flavor of invulnerability” (131). During the London bombings, despite the massive toll, there were more people who would be classified as remote misses than near misses or people killed.

Gladwell calls MacCurdy’s theory of morale a “second, broader perspective” (133) on the idea of desirable difficulties. MacCurdy concluded that trauma could actually leave some people better off as a result. Gladwell returns to Freireich’s childhood. He contracted grave tonsillitis at age 8 and a doctor visited him in the home. By age 10, Freireich had decided he wanted to be a doctor as well. At the University of Illinois he worked as a hematology researcher. After being drafted into the Army he served at the National Cancer Institute outside of Washington, D.C. He was a gifted physician but had a terrible temper and few social graces: “In Freireich’s formative years, every human connection ended in death and abandonment—and a childhood as bleak as that leaves only pain and anger in its wake” (138). Gladwell then asks if the reader believes it is possible that a childhood such as Freireich’s could result in a remote miss.

A 1960s project interviewing creative types found that “a surprising number had lost a parent in childhood” (140). The psychologist Marvin Eisenstadt took two sets of encyclopedias and made a list of every person whose lives and works had resulted in more than one encyclopedia column. He had 699 people and researched their lives—to the extent that information was available—for the next 10 years. Forty-five percent of them had lost a parent before the age of 20. A historian named Lucille Iremonger found that 67 percent of England’s prime ministers had lost a parent before age 16: “Twelve of the first forty-four U.S. presidents—beginning with George Washington and going all the way up to Barack Obama—lost their fathers while they were young” (141).

Eisenstadt stresses that parents are essential, but his research, and that of others, “suggests that there is also such a thing as a remote miss from the death of a parent” (142). In 1955, Freireich began working in the childhood leukemia ward at the National Cancer Institute. Childhood leukemia was lethal, terrifying, and poorly understood: “When they came to the hospital, ninety percent of the kids would be dead in six weeks” (145), according to Freireich. While it was too psychologically stressful for most physicians, Freireich was relatively unaffected. Eventually, he became convinced that the problem was a lack of platelets in the children’s blood. This meant that the children’s blood couldn’t clot. To prove his theory Freireich needed blood for transfusions, but this was against regulations.

He began recruiting donors on his own. He was threatened with administrative discipline and ignored every threat. Eventually, his research got the bleeding to stop. Gladwell tries to determine the origin of Freireich’s courage and returns to MacCurdy’s idea of remote misses: “The conquering of fear produces exhilaration” (148). Freireich’s courage meant that children could now survive long enough to be studied in terms of solving the harder problem of leukemia. At the time, the drugs that killed leukemia cells could only be given in small doses. The dangerous cells would return after a week. Freireich contemplated combining the medications, which would seem to be more aggressive, but each of the drugs attacked leukemia in a different way and their combined effects were unknown.

Freireich asked for approval to try four drugs together and was denied by the medical board. His boss eventually acquiesced and approved a trial called the VAMP regimen. As their patients in the trial died, Freireich concluded that the children had to be treated monthly for a year. Children in remission seemed healthy. Freireich’s treatment would require them to return to the hospital while seemingly healthy and receive drugs that would make them sick: “Today, the cure rate for this form of cancer is more than 90 percent” (160).

Gladwell does not believe that a childhood like Freireich’s is desirable, yet it can yield positive results: “The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some sort of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do” (161).

Gladwell discusses the most famous photo from the civil rights movement. Shot in Birmingham in 1963 by Bill Hudson, it shows a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog. The boy is calm even as the dog bites him, accepting what is happening. The photograph was published in all major newspapers and was a great embarrassment to President Kennedy.

When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Birmingham in 1963, it was “the most racially divided city in America” (167). Ku Klux Klansmen terrorized Blacks with the support of police protection. King was the underdog and did not expect all of the people who had come with him to survive the days ahead. But Gladwell believes that he had an advantage because King came from “a community that had always been an underdog” (169).

Gladwell discusses the “trickster hero” popular in folklore. The trickster conquers bigger foes through cunning and deception. In America, Brer Rabbit is a prime example of the trickster. After being trapped—stuck to a baby doll covered in tar—by Fox, Brer Rabbit tricked him into throwing him into a briar patch, where he used the briar thorns to cut the tar off of himself and escape: “Trickster tales were wish fulfillments in which slave dreamed of one day rising above their white masters” (171). Brer Rabbit’s success was contingent on how well he understood Fox. As another desirable difficulty, Gladwell describes “the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules” (172).

A man named Wyatt Walker was the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and one of King’s most valuable allies. Together, they tried to find unorthodox ways to fight the racism of Birmingham as well as Bull Connor, the city’s racist public safety commissioner. They were outmatched and needed to find a way to play the role of Brer Rabbit. King asked Walker to create a crisis they could use: “The crisis created by Walker was the photograph of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog” (173).

Walker was fond of playing tricks on Connor. He organized aimless, long protest marches that police could not interfere with as they wound through offices and lobbies. He called in fake tips to the police about Blacks gathering outside of town, then laughed when the police went to investigate. But he knew King would not approve of the mischief, so he did it secretly: “People called Martin Luther King ‘Mr. Leader.’ Walker was Brer Rabbit” (177).

Walker devised what he called Project C, “for confrontation” (177). Project C involved sit-ins at local businesses, boycotts of downtown businesses, and mass marches that would lead to so many arrests that the jails would be filled. After the jails were full, Connor could not arrest the protestors because he would have nowhere to put them. But unless Connor fought back, Project C could not work. King asked Walker to make sure that Connor would be forced to show his “ugly side” (178). The national media was watching and for the movement it was important that Project C be a public success on the news.

After several weeks, the campaign was losing momentum. King had difficulty getting people to march with them. Many were afraid that they would be fired by their white bosses if they participated. Walker found a way to use their small numbers to their advantage. If they waited to march until most people's’ work shifts had ended, and began their protests as soon as downtown filled with commuters going home after their job, it looked as if the streets were filled with protestors. The news reported that 1,100 people had marched one day when in fact it had been fewer than 30. For Connor, “[t]hose imaginary one thousand protestors were a provocation” (182).

After a month of Project C, Walker arranged for hundreds of high school students to be at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Over 600 children were arrested as they came out of the church and prayed. A week later, over 1500 schoolchildren skipped school and repeated the protest. Fire trucks were there so that protesters could be sprayed with powerful hoses if Connor decided to do so. There were also many police German Shepherds there, and Connor had wanted to use the dogs for a long time. Walker knew that if he could provoke Connor into a dog attack on children—and he did—it would be a great advantage.

Gladwell addresses the reader: “Does Wyatt Walker’s behavior make you uncomfortable?” (186). King and Walker were criticized in the aftermath for tricking the kids into a dangerous situation. Malcolm X said that “real men don’t put their children on the firing line” (187). Two days later, King preached a sermon to the parents of the kids who had been arrested. King tried to make the parents proud of the suffering their children were enduring, but it is unclear how many parents were convinced by his argument. Walker and King were duplicitous in their planning. They pretended to have more protestors than they did. They condemned Connor for unleashing the dogs while they were secretly overjoyed at provoking that level of police brutality. It was ethically complex, but according to Gladwell, “we shouldn’t be shocked by this” (188). They used the most effective means available to them, and they had to perform as tricksters, who act out of necessity.

Walter Gadsden was the boy in the photo. He was a spectator, not a marcher. Upon closer examination of the photo, it is clear that Gadsden was not passively letting the dog attack him. He is grabbing the police officer’s wrist to steady himself while he delivers a kick to the dog: “Hudson’s photograph is not at all what the world thought it was” (192). It was actually a masterpiece of trickery.

Part 1 can be read both as Gladwell’s reasoning for approaching problems in unexpected ways, and of viewing advantages as disadvantages (as well as knowing when the inverse is true). Part 2 begins to demonstrate the potential costs of not attacking problems, with particular emphasis on the story of Emil Freireich. Part 2 also introduces the ideas that, while difficulties can lead to growth, discoveries, and adaptations that might otherwise not appear, they may also be essential for breakthroughs. People without desirable difficulties may find themselves dependent on those who have overcome them, or may find themselves benefiting from the fact that some people have overcome trauma and adapted as a result.

The example of Boies’s dyslexia—and Gladwell’s question of whether a parent would ever wish dyslexia on their child—furthers the discussion of education and expands on it. It appears probable that Boies would not have gained his particular skillset had he not learned to compensate for the challenges caused by his learning disability. His grateful clients in the future would benefit from his expertise as a lawyer, but it is the story of Emil Freireich that best—if the reader accepts Gladwell’s premise of adversity and adaptation—shows the importance of desirable difficulties in the development of society.

Assume that Freireich’s bleak childhood was in fact responsible for his fearlessness as a physician and leukemia researcher. His tenacity and disagreeableness indisputably led to the savings of many thousands of lives. Had his childhood experiences conquered him, it is impossible to say how much longer modern medicine would have waited before someone discovered the VAMP protocol that he had notable success with. His story shows that someone who fights a giant such as childhood leukemia, even in the absence of administrative and professional support, can alter the entire course of medicine. Gladwell questions where the doctor could have done so without the trauma of his formative years.

Wyatt Walker’s work with the civil rights movement is a corollary of Freireich. Although slavery had ended approximately a century before Walker arrived in Birmingham, African-Americans were discriminated against, beaten, and even killed, regularly. Had Walker and Martin Luther King Jr. not taken their stand against Bull Connor and the racist bureaucracy of the South, it is impossible to estimate how many more lives would have been lost and damaged by those who felt they could perform their racism publicly and with impunity. Walker operated with a chip on his shoulder similar to that of Freireich—he knew adversity and he knew that, while others might give in to it, he could not afford to. Enslavement and childhood abandonment are certainly not desirable, but as difficulties that may have helped bring about the changes of the civil rights movement and the inroads of childhood leukemia treatment, they were.

Part 2 is a powerful argument that progress is hindered without people who have triumphed over adversity. Part 3 will expand these ideas onto a global scale.