E. B. White on Compassion and Globalism: A Response to the Border Patrol’s Operation Charlotte’s Web

On November 15, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security sent a swarm of U.S. Border Patrol agents into my home city of Charlotte, North Carolina. These masked agents targeted Charlotte’s Latino population, apprehending people in public spaces, such as supermarkets, busy streets, and even a church. The operation sparked a sense of fear that quickly spread throughout Charlotte’s Latino neighborhoods and caused many residents to stay home and keep their children out of school. The Border Patrol called their incursion “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” after E.B. White’s classic 1952 children’s book, Charlotte’s Web.

Upon learning about this development, Martha White (E.B. White’s granddaughter and literary executor) immediately issued a statement denouncing the Border Patrol’s operation and their misappropriation of the title of her grandfather’s classic novel. She wrote that her grandfather “didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons. He didn’t condone fearmongering.”  She went on to call this operation “antithetical” to the theme of compassion that runs through the book and to her grandfather’s core values.

As a professor of children’s literature at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and longtime admirer of E.B. White, I agree with Martha White’s statement. I recently taught Charlotte’s Web in my advanced seminar on American Children’s Literature. During our class discussions, I mentioned that Charlotte’s Web is a story about the power of compassion told in three acts. In the first act of compassion, eight-year-old Fern saves a runt pig from being killed by her father. She names the pig Wilbur and takes care of him until he is big enough to live on a farm. In the second act, the spider named Charlotte devises a clever plan to save Wilbur from being slaughtered and served as part of a Christmas dinner. The third and final act takes place at the end of the story when Wilbur takes care of Charlotte’s egg sac following Charlotte’s death and looks after Charlotte’s baby spiders after they hatch. 

In these acts of compassion, characters take responsibility for those who are vulnerable and need help. By helping others, these characters gain a sense of purpose and meaning. As Charlotte says to Wilbur after saving his life, “By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that” (164).

White made clear in Charlotte’s Web that he believed in the importance of individual acts of compassion, but he also saw value in taking a more global view of the forces that can work against compassion. In his 1946 essay collection titled The Wild Flag, he argued that cultivating an obsession with nationalism can result in international conflict and violence toward one another:

We take pains to educate our children at an early age in the rituals and mysteries of the nation, infusing national feeling into them in place of the universal feeling which is their birthright; but lately the most conspicuous activity of nations has been the blowing of each other up, and an observant child might reasonably ask whether he is pledging allegiance to a flag or a shroud. … We may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part. (ix-x)

For White, his belief in embracing a more global view of humanity did not mean that he saw no value in honoring American traditions and culture. In fact, he celebrated America’s history of welcoming immigrants. As he stated in The Wild Flag, “The United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature. Here dwell the world’s emigrants under one law, and that law is: Thou shalt not push thy neighbor around” (72).  

This basic “law” that White articulates is why, according to White, America “has turned out more good than bad, more right than wrong, more kind than cruel” (72). Unfortunately, the Border Patrol agents who came to Charlotte totally disregarded this law. For these agents, pushing people around was their modus operandi.

The Department of Homeland Security probably thought it was clever to name their incursion into Charlotte after White’s book because it has the word Charlotte in it. However, their Operation Charlotte runs completely contrary to the values that White expressed in Charlotte’s Web and The Wild Flag.

Works Cited

White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. Harper & Brothers, 1952

---. The Wild Flag.  Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mark I. West is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has taught courses on children's and young adult literature since 1984.  He has written or edited twenty-five books, including the forthcoming Once Upon a Toy:  Essays on the Interplay Between Stories and Playthings, which he co-edited with Kathy Merlock Jackson.