David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog

by Malcolm Gladwell

  Finally the prison officials gave up and sent them home.

  Later in the war, when the Gestapo stepped up their scrutiny of Le Chambon, Trocmé and Theis were forced to flee. Theis joined up with the underground and spent the remainder of the war ferrying Jews across the Alps to the safety of Switzerland. (“It was not reasonable,” he explained to Hallie of his decision. “But you know, I had to do it, anyway.”) Trocmé moved from town to town, carrying false papers. Despite his precautions, he was arrested in a police roundup at the Lyon railway station. He was thrown into turmoil—not just at the prospect of discovery but also and more crucially at the question of what to do about his false papers. Hallie writes:

  His identity card gave his name as Béguet, and they would ask him if this was indeed true. Then he would have to lie in order to hide his identity. But he was not able to lie; lying, especially to save his own skin, was “sliding toward those compromises that God had not called upon me to make,” he wrote in his autobiographical notes on this incident. Saving the lives of others—and even saving his own life—with false identity cards was one thing, but standing before another human being and speaking lies to him only for the sake of self-preservation was something different.

  Is there really a moral difference between giving yourself a false name on your identity card and stating that false name to a police officer? Perhaps not. Trocmé, at the time, was traveling with one of his young sons. He was still actively engaged in the business of hiding refugees. He had plenty of extenuating circumstances, in other words, to justify a white lie.

  But that is not the point. Trocmé was disagreeable in the same magnificent sense as Jay Freireich and Wyatt Walker and Fred Shuttlesworth. And the beauty of the disagreeable is that they do not make calculations like the rest of us. Walker and Shuttlesworth had nothing to lose. If your house has been bombed and the Klan has surrounded your car and pummeled you with their fists, how can things get any worse? Jay Freireich was told to stop what he was doing and warned that he was risking his career. He was heckled and abandoned by his peers. He held dying children in his arms and jabbed a thick needle into their shinbones. But he had been through worse. The Huguenots who put their own self-interest first had long ago converted to some other faith or given up or moved away. What was left was stubbornness and defiance.

  The arresting officer, it turned out, never asked for Trocmé’s papers. Trocmé talked the police into taking him back to the railway station, where he met up with his son and slipped out a side door. But had the police asked him if he was Béguet, he had already decided to tell the truth: “I am not Monsieur Béguet. I am Pastor André Trocmé.” He didn’t care. If you are Goliath, how on earth do you defeat someone who thinks like that? You could kill him, of course. But that is simply a variant of the same approach that backfired so spectacularly for the British in Northern Ireland and for the Three Strikes campaign in California. The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission. You could kill André Trocmé. But in all likelihood, all that would mean is that another André Trocmé would rise in his place.

  When Trocmé was ten years old, his family drove one day to their house in the country. He was in the backseat with his two brothers and a cousin. His parents were in the front. His father grew angry at a car driving too slowly in front of them and pulled out to pass. “Paul, Paul, not so fast. There’s going to be an accident!” his mother cried out. The car spun out of control. The young André pushed himself away from the wreckage. His father and brothers and cousin were fine. His mother was not. He saw her lying lifeless thirty feet away. Confronting a Nazi officer paled in comparison with seeing your mother’s body by the side of the road. As Trocmé wrote to his deceased mother, many years later:

  If I have sinned so much, if I have been, since then, so solitary, if my soul has taken such a swirling and solitary movement, if I have doubted everything, if I have been a fatalist, and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day, and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly, it is because you left me that June 24th upon that road.

  But if I have believed in eternal realities…if I have thrust myself toward them, it is also because I was alone, because you were no longer there to be my God, to fill my heart with your abundant and dominating life.

  It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.

  The eldest son of Magda and André Trocmé was Jean-Pierre. He was a sensitive and gifted adolescent. André Trocmé was devoted to him. One evening near the end of the war, the family went to see a recital of Villon’s poem “The Ballad of the Hanged Men.” The next night, they came home from dinner and found Jean-Pierre hanging from a noose in the bathroom. Trocmé stumbled into the woods, crying out, “Jean-Pierre! Jean-Pierre!” Later, he wrote:

  Even today I carry a death within myself, the death of my son, and I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.

  But surely he must have paused when he wrote those words, because everything that had happened in Le Chambon suggested that there was more to the story than that. Then he wrote:

  They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing.

  1 The historian Christine van der Zanden calls the area the Plateau of Hospitality. The region had a long history of taking in refugees. In 1790, the French Assembly declared that all Catholic clergy, under penalty of imprisonment, had to pledge an oath to the state, making the church subordinate to the government. Those who refused to sign the pledge fled for their lives. Where did many of them go? To the Vivarais Plateau, a community already well practiced in the arts of defiance. The number of dissenters grew. During the First World War, the people of the plateau took in refugees. During the Spanish Civil War, they took in people fleeing the fascist army of General Franco. They took in socialists and communists from Austria and Germany in the early days of the Nazi terror.

  Acknowledgments

  David and Goliath has benefited greatly from the wisdom and generosity of many others: my parents; my agent, Tina Bennett; my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder; Geoff Shandler and Pamela Marshall and the whole team at Little, Brown; Helen Conford at Penguin in England; and too many of my friends to count. Among them: Charles Randolph, Sarah Lyall, Jacob Weisberg, the Lyntons, Terry Martin, Tali Farhadian, Emily Hunt, and Robert McCrum. Special thanks to my fact checkers, Jane Kim and Carey Dunne, and my theological consultant, Jim Loepp Thiessen of the Gathering Church in Kitchener, Ontario. And Bill Phillips, as always. You are the maestro.

  Notes

  Introduction: Goliath

  The scholarly literature on the battle between David and Goliath is extensive. Here is one source: John A. Beck, “David and Goliath, a Story of Place: The Narrative-Geographical Shaping of 1 Samuel 17,” Westminster Theological Journal 68 (2006): 321–30.

  Claudius Quadrigarius’s account of single combat is from Ross Cowan, For the Glory of Rome (Greenhill Books, 2007), 140. No one in ancient times would have doubted David’s tactical advantage once it was known that he was an expert in slinging. Here is the Roman military historian Vegetius (Military Matters, Book I):

  Recruits are to be taught the art of throw
ing stones both with the hand and sling. The inhabitants of the Balearic Islands are said to have been the inventors of slings, and to have managed them with surprising dexterity, owing to the manner of bringing up their children. The children were not allowed to have their food by their mothers till they had first struck it with their sling. Soldiers, notwithstanding their defensive armor, are often more annoyed by the round stones from the sling than by all the arrows of the enemy. Stones kill without mangling the body, and the contusion is mortal without loss of blood. It is universally known the ancients employed slingers in all their engagements. There is the greater reason for instructing all troops, without exception, in this exercise, as the sling cannot be reckoned any encumbrance, and often is of the greatest service, especially when they are obliged to engage in stony places, to defend a mountain or an eminence, or to repulse an enemy at the attack of a castle or city.

  Moshe Garsiel’s chapter “The Valley of Elah Battle and the Duel of David with Goliath: Between History and Artistic Theological Historiography” appears in Homeland and Exile (Brill, 2009).

  Baruch Halpern’s discussion of the sling appears in David’s Secret Demons (Eerdmans Publishing, 2001), 11.

  For Eitan Hirsch’s calculations, see Eitan Hirsch, Jaime Cuadros, and Joseph Backofen, “David’s Choice: A Sling and Tactical Advantage,” International Symposium on Ballistics (Jerusalem, May 21–24, 1995). Hirsch’s paper is full of paragraphs like this:

  Experiments with cadavers and hybrid simulation models indicate that an impact energy of 72 joules is sufficient to perforate (but not exit) a cranium when it is impacted on the parietal portion of the skull with a 6.35 mm diameter steel projectile at 370 m/s. A projectile does not have to perforate the skull, but just crush a part of the frontal bone to produce a depressed skull fracture (at best), or a stunning blow to render a person unconscious. Such an impact produces strain in the blood vessels and brain tissues upon impact to the front of the skull…because the motion of the brain lags the motion of the skull. The impact energy required to achieve these two effects are much lower, on the order of 40 to 20 joules, respectively.

  Hirsch presented his analysis at a scientific meeting. In an e-mail to me, he added:

  A day after the lecture was given an attendee came to me telling me that in the creek on the site where the duel took place one could find stones of Barium Sulphate which had a mass density of 4.2 grams/cc (compared to about 2.4 in usually found stones). If David chose one of those to use against Goliath it gave him significant advantage in addition to the calculated numbers brought in the tables.

  Robert Dohrenwend’s article “The Sling: Forgotten Firepower of Antiquity” (Journal of Asian Martial Arts 11, no. 2 [2002]) is a very good introduction to the power of the sling.

  Moshe Dayan’s essay about David and Goliath, “Spirit of the Fighters,” appears in Courageous Actions—Twenty Years of Independence 11 (1968): 50–52.

  The idea that Goliath suffered from acromegaly appears to have first been suggested in C. E. Jackson, P. C. Talbert, and H. D. Caylor, “Hereditary Hyperparathyroidism,” Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association 53 (1960): 1313–16, and then by David Rabin and Pauline Rabin in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine on October 20, 1983. Subsequently a number of other medical experts reached the same conclusion. In a letter to the journal Radiology (July 1990), Stanley Sprecher writes:

  Undoubtedly Goliath’s great size was due to acromegaly secondary to a pituitary macroadenoma. This pituitary adenoma was apparently large enough to induce visual field deficits by its pressure on the optic chiasm, which made Goliath unable to follow the young David as he circled him. The stone entered Goliath’s cranial vault through a markedly thinned frontal bone, which resulted from enlargement of the frontal paranasal sinus, a frequent feature of acromegaly. The stone lodged in Goliath’s enlarged pituitary and caused a pituitary hemorrhage, resulting in transtentorial herniation and death.

  The most complete account of Goliath’s disability is by the Israeli neurologist Vladimir Berginer. It is Berginer who stresses the suspicious nature of Goliath’s shield bearer. See Vladimir Berginer and Chaim Cohen, “The Nature of Goliath’s Visual Disorder and the Actual Role of His Personal Bodyguard,” Ancient Near Eastern Studies 43 (2006): 27–44. Berginer and Cohen write: “We thus surmise that the phrase ‘shield bearer’ was originally used by the Philistines as an honorable euphemistic title for the individual who served as Goliath’s guide for the visually impaired so as not to denigrate the military reputation of the Philistine heroic warrior. They may well have even given him a shield to carry in order to camouflage his true function!”

  Chapter One: Vivek Ranadivé

  Ivan Arreguín-Toft’s book about underdog winners is How the Weak Win Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  “We could not lightly draw water after dark” is from T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Wordsworth Editions, 1999).

  William R. Polk’s history of unconventional warfare is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (Harper, 2008).

  Chapter Two: Teresa DeBrito

  Perhaps the best-known study of the effects of class reduction was the Project STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio) in Tennessee in the 1980s. STAR took six thousand children and randomly assigned them to either a small or a large class and then followed them throughout elementary school. The study showed that the children in the smaller classes outperformed those children in the larger classes by a small but meaningful degree. The countries and U.S. states that subsequently spent billions of dollars on class-size reduction did so, in large part, because of the results of STAR. But STAR was far from perfect. There is strong evidence, for example, of an unusual amount of movement between the large- and small-class arms of the study. It seems that a large number of highly motivated parents might have succeeded in getting their children transferred into the small classrooms—and underperforming children may have been dropped from the same classes. More problematic is that the study wasn’t blind. The teachers with the smaller classes knew that it was their classrooms that would be under scrutiny. Normally in science, the results of experiments that are “unblinded” are considered dubious. For a cogent critique of STAR, see Eric Hanushek, “Some Findings from an Independent Investigation of the Tennessee STAR Experiment and from Other Investigations of Class Size Effects,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 21, no. 2 (summer 1999): 143–63. A “natural experiment” of the sort that Hoxby did is much more valuable. For what Hoxby found, see Caroline Hoxby, “The Effects of Class Size on Student Achievement: New Evidence from Population Variation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1239–85. For more discussion of class size, see Eric Hanushek, The Evidence on Class Size (University of Rochester Press, 1998); Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009), 272; and Ludger Wössmann and Martin R. West, “Class-Size Effects in School Systems Around the World: Evidence from Between-Grade Variation in TIMSS,” European Economic Review (March 26, 2002).

  For studies of money and happiness, see Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 38 (August 2010): 107. Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant discuss happiness in terms of an inverted-U curve in “Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (January 2011): 61–76.

  In “Using Maimonides’ Rule to Estimate the Effect of Class Size on Scholastic Achievement” (Quarterly Journal of Economics [May 1999]), Joshua Angrist and Victor Lavy acknowledge the possibility that what they are seeing is a left-side phenomenon: “It is also worth considering whether results for Israel are likely to be relevant for the United States or other developed countries. In addit
ion to cultural and political differences, Israel has a lower standard of living and spends less on education per pupil than the United States and some OECD countries. And, as noted above, Israel also has larger class sizes than the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. So the results presented here may be showing evidence of a marginal return for reductions in class size over a range of sizes that are not characteristic of most American schools.”

  For a discussion of the relationship between drinking and health as an inverted-U curve, see Augusto Di Castelnuovo et al., “Alcohol Dosing and Total Mortality in Men and Women: An Updated Meta-analysis of 34 Prospective Studies,” Archives of Internal Medicine 166, no. 22 (2006): 2437–45.

  Jesse Levin’s research on class size and achievement is “For Whom the Reductions Count: A Quantile Regression Analysis of Class Size and Peer Effects on Scholastic Achievement,” Empirical Economics 26 (2001): 221. The obsession with small class sizes has real consequences. The one thing that all educational researchers agree about is that teacher quality matters far more than the size of the class. A great teacher can teach your child a year and a half’s material in one year. A below-average teacher might teach your child half a year’s material in one year. That’s a year’s difference in learning, in one year. That suggests that there is much more to be gained by focusing on the person at the front of the classroom than on the number of people sitting in the classroom. The problem is that great teachers are rare. There simply aren’t enough people with the specialized and complex set of skills necessary to inspire large groups of children year in, year out.