Jon Meacham Interview Part 2: From HBO’s “The Soul of America”

everybody ready i think history is a lot more effective if you argue by implication if you tell somebody they're just wrong they're probably not going to listen to your next sentence and so to me the goal is here are moments in history that have felt like the one we're in and here's how we got out of them and to me the american story is the story of more generously applying what jefferson meant when he wrote that all men are created equal we don't build monuments to people who limit that definition we don't commemorate holidays for people who decided to constrict access to the american mainstream we celebrate rightly people who broaden the definition who open doors who open their arms and that sounds partisan today which tells us more about ourselves than anybody else but it's not partisan it's simply i think a clinical reading of the very human mess of history the american story is full of violence and oppression but it's also full of peace and liberation all history comes out of conflict whether it's racial or class or economic or political tribal that's inevitable we live in a fallen world we don't live in a perfect world we don't live in a place where people come together and say how can we make things better because that's the right thing to do we live in a world where there are clashes of interests there are winners and they're losers and the moments that speak to us most are not the ones that feel olympian and distant but which feel messy complicated contingent close run we would think for instance that the civil war should have been the beginning of a great new era right we 750 000 americans die abolition has achieved the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments are passed this is the beginning of a new modern era but five minutes after appomattox five minutes after lee's surrender the reaction sets in and that's the story of the country is a couple of steps forward step or two back you just hope that by the time all the steps are counted we're a few more ahead than we are back we live in a world that is sinful and disappointing and a world in which tragedy is far more often the state of things than a kind of comic conclusion there's a reason shakespeare's tragedies are performed more often really than as comedies because i think they speak to us more we're all more familiar with heartbreak than we are with heart fulfillment and that's the nature of reality the constitution was written for moments like this it was written with an understanding that we are frail and fallen and given to appetite and ambition and that we have to as the federalist paper said have to have ambition to counteract ambition if we don't look the world in the eye if we don't take account of our own tendency to do the wrong thing then the thinking we do to try to set up our public affairs won't be particularly effective because people are going to do what they want to do the greatness of america in many ways lies in the fact that we've created a system where the founders assumed we would do the wrong thing most of the time we have not disappointed them winston churchill once said you can always count the americans to do the right thing once they've exhausted every other possibility and that's what we do and so i very much have a theological understanding of the nature of people and the nature of the country which is in fact the same a nation is only the fullest expression of the individual dispositions of heart and mind of all of us and if we can get to doing the right thing 51 of the time in a given day as people that's a hell of a good day i don't make it very much and the country's the same way because the country is the sum of its parts i can see why people would think that a message from a boringly heterosexual white southern man to relax it's all going to be fine would be annoying would be off-putting i've never been oppressed i am part of a gender in a class that has had things work out most of the time but if people like me don't speak up it seems to me that's unilaterally disarming in the in the struggle to me the message of hope is rooted in history it's not coming out of a vision some sort of ethereal vision of i would like the world to be this way it's based on how the world has been the experiment which was based on this understanding that people were going to get things wrong more often than they get them right has in fact been worth protecting and perpetuating and i think i'm right i really do because if you had grabbed an american in 1866 and said how are things going well if you were a formerly enslaved person in the american south things weren't going very well you had the ku klux klan on the march you had the south trying to resist the implications of the verdict of the civil war if you're an irish immigrant in new england and you were being told you didn't need to apply for a job because we don't hire irish catholics because we think roman catholicism is what people today would call sharia law if were an asian immigrant in california and you had a united states senator in washington say that we were worried that there was going to be a yellow asiatic empire from california to the rockies that's not a great moment nobody ever sat around at a moment in the past and said wow everything is perfect if only everything could stay exactly this way we're always questing we're always wanting more and sometimes you do that from a position of power sometimes you're from a position of powerlessness we all know what the american ideal is it's fair play it's liberty under law it's equal opportunity it's what lincoln called a fair chance for your industry intelligence and enterprise we can all agree on that if you wake people up in the middle of the night and say what's the ideal of america that's what they'll say we're equal we're home land of the free home of the brave but the question becomes how do you make the ideal real and that's why i talk about the soul of the country because in hebrew and in greek soul means breath or life the pagan world understood that there was an essence to who we were and my view is that the soul of the country you have your better angels on one side and you have your worst instincts on the other and every moment every era is shaped by the battle between those two forces in reconstruction all the forces that continue to shape us anxiety about race anxiety about class anxiety about power shaped and suffused to the era so you come out of 1865 we think that it's a new world we think that we've settled we've adjudicated the great question that had bedeviled the american founding which is the role of slavery and enslavement in american life and we find that actually there's still an enormous amount of racial animus that finds expression in law and in custom people were not in fact willing to apply the entire meaning of the declaration to everybody even though we just fought a war over that question whether it's the states rights or telling the government to stay out of your business or all those touch points that continue to shape our politics we're on vivid display from 1866 really through the 1920s you had a supreme court rule and plessy versus ferguson the separate but equal was a constitutional principle he had the ku klux klan writing and committing vigilante violence you had an american president andrew johnson who was unstable egotistical appealed to the worst dentist and not the best huh any of this sound familiar you know as mark twain is alleged to have said history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme all those forces are in play in america in the wake of the civil war the white resistance to the implications of the civil war that in fact the 13th 14th and 15th amendments were the law of the land we had decided that jefferson's assertion that all men were created equal applied in fact to all men regardless of color there was immediate pushback on that in 1865 a confederate journalist named edward alfred pollard wrote a book called the lost cause in which he defined the cause of white supremacy as the new abiding concern of the southern states so we've gone from slavery to supremacy it's a difference of degree but it's not a difference of kind it was palm sunday 1865 april 1865. general lee is surrendering the army of northern virginia to ulysses s grant they meet at wilmer mclean's house at appomattox courthouse a village in virginia and if history were a fairy tale this would be the moment at which we all lived happily ever after the army of rebellion this the secessionist movement that had cost so much blood so much toil so much treasure was ending peaceably lee goes and with dignity surrenders grant goes and with dignity and grace accepts the surrender and that should be if this were a movie the moment at which then flowers spring and the sun comes out and the music swells but it didn't it didn't white supremacy replaced slavery as the consuming concern of white southerners lee did not leave appomattox to return to a south that was willing to accept the implications of the defeat he returned to a south that wanted to keep fighting under a different flag although sometimes the same flag for a slightly different cause but the essence was the same the essence was no we don't think that all men are created equal we don't think that we say we do but in point of fact we're not going to act that way and we're going to set up laws we're going to set up governments in the southern states huge part of the country that is going to put segregation and racially based discrimination in law and custom we're not interested in a new birth of freedom as lincoln put it what we're interested in is preserving our way of life as best we can since we lost that's the southern view that view continues to shape the understandings of an enormous number of folks 150 years on the lost cause was an attempt by the white south to give some meaning to their defeat some explanation of their defeat and then to give the future a shape as well and so suddenly the south didn't lose because they were wrong the south in this view lost because they were outgunned and outmanned and uh the the pure brute strength of the north is what led to the southern defeat it wasn't a moral failing it was a material one and if it's not a moral failing then you have the excuse to continue to try to live under that system of law and custom the lost cause was the origin myth in many ways of the 20th century south and to some extent the 21st century south the people who in the 1960s were resisting the implications of the supreme court decision about school integration the people in the 1960s who are resisting the federal government's attempts to undo jim crow were all acting as if they were the last stand the last battalion in the civil war that in fact the civil war had not ended at appomattox the civil war was simply taking a different form and continuing to unfold the task that was before grant and before lincoln and then before andrew johnson is almost unimaginable in his complexity because as much as we want the north to be as robert warren said to be a virtuous region it was driven by racial questions as well it was driven by and shaped by a sense of racism if the cause was union then what grant was trying to do was create terms that would bring the union back together as quickly and seamlessly as possible where things got complicated real fast was the north was in many ways shaped by racism as was the south and they were attempting a social revolution on the back of a military victory which is very hard to do and what grant knew and what lincoln knew was that the union would have to endure and was to endure and if it were going to do that then we were neighbors again and so to be harsh toward the south to be punitive toward the south would create more chaos in peace time and a kind of quasi-military struggle that would continue after the full military struggle you know harry truman once said heroes always know when to die and abraham lincoln in a weird way knew when to die it's impossible to know whether he would have made a better success of reconstruction my own bet is that he would have because what you saw with lincoln was someone who was self-evidently changing and growing as president if you go back and read the first inaugural he says look to the southern states you have nothing to fear from me if you're a slave-holding state but he got to emancipation the last statements he made on reconstruction were more conciliatory but faced with a recalcitrant south would he have conducted a policy that was ultimately more effective would it have been a policy that protected the civil liberties that had been so hard fought in the war my own bet is yes but it's a mystery of history andrew johnson's conduct of reconstruction in many ways was the last southern battle of the civil war he was doing everything he could to reverse the verdict that had been reached on the battlefield he vetoed civil rights bills he opposed the 14th amendment which provided equal protection under law he did everything he could to return the country as much as he could to an antebellum way of being and he did so not least because he was a white southerner that was his constituency he was not a republican he'd been put on the ticket in 1864 to balance out a wartime election ticket imagine if you had a republican president who dies and then a democratic president comes in and in our own terms starts passing medicare for all and high tax rates after the republican who'd won the election had run on opposite platform that's kind of where we were see if any of this sounds familiar andrew johnson was an unconventional american president who had come to ultimate power by an unconventional route he did not have a natural political constituency in washington and he believed very much that he needed to govern for his narrow base of supporters and not for the country as a whole there's a long time debate about who really won the civil war it's a little facetious but the south got a really good deal out of the war perhaps the best way to put it is the north won the war but the south won the peace and it created a century or more of essentially an antebellum way of life in the south segregation replaced slavery separate but equal replaced human enslavement but that was the way the world was going to be for well over a hundred years it's a hundred years from appomattox to the voting rights act almost exactly uh the voting rights act was proposed and the great energy behind it came in march of 1965. appomattox was april 1865. yet an entire century where the southern vision of race relations was largely predominant over what you would have thought would have been the implications of the verdict of the war you look at charlottesville in 2017 neo-nazis klansmen marching around that is precisely at least in terms of the klansmen what the world looked like in 1866 67 you have people who are resisting the verdict resisting the tide of history in order to stand up for a racially defined divisive way of life and the fact that in the 21st century people calling themselves klansmen are in charlottesville virginia the home of robert e lee not far from appomattox basically fighting for an antebellum vision of the world is a remarkable thing but it's not all that remarkable if you know american history and if you know that five minutes after appomattox people were trying to figure out all right we lost the big one how can we win the smaller ones confederate journalist uh writer edward alford pollard writes this book called the lost cause he writes it in 1865. it's published in january of 1866 so not even a year after appomattox saying that we now have to embrace this new war for white supremacy he followed up with another book two years later he talked about a war of ideas he talked about the fact that we had to we meaning the white south had to resist the encroachments of a consolidated government which is what they would have called big government he totally framed this idea of an acceptable resistance to the full implications of what the civil war after emancipation and after gettysburg had been about lincoln said this is about a new birth of freedom this is about the enslaved people being forever free pollard and others say no we don't accept that what we're going to do is fight a rear guard action decade to decade to decade saying that our way of life a way of life based on skin color and exclusion is going to carry the day no matter what happened at antietam or gettysburg or appomattox the lost cause was very much about big government versus states rights it was very much about washington versus the rest of us it was very much about the feds are trying to tell us what to do that argument which has shaped us in every ensuing decade it has some origins way way back jefferson versus hamilton was to some extent about this in the early republic but for our purposes for the modern world the reaction after the civil war of the southern white southerners trying to say federal troops need to get out of here we don't want reconstruction forces we want to govern our own affairs all goes back to this idea that the war was lost but we could win the peace the lost cause as an idea in the book itself caught fire and endured because it spoke to this deep longing on the part of a defeated people to both find meaning in the defeat and a way forward but not a way forward in acquiescence to federal will but a way forward in resistance to that will there were many white southerners who tried to argue that they were fighting for states rights and not slavery it's not an argument that holds up by any means but the postbellum vision of a lost cause gave them a way forward a way to think of the struggle in not just in racial terms but as a whole political identity the lost cause sanctifies the southern vision of the world it becomes a cause that was not defeated morally but was defeated because they were outmanned they were outgunned but they let them say you know what we were right in its in our essence we were right and white supremacy is a principle worth defending i mean the lost cause gave a defeated people both an explanation for why they'd lost the industrial north and all its might had defeated us but we were right we were right and and they're hypocrites because they're racist too and it enabled a bunch of white southerners to justify their racism from decade to decade to decade confederate memorials come a bit later there was no money to build confederate monuments most of the monuments put up in the south in the wake of the war were union monuments because they had won and they had money the uh the end of the true end of reconstruction formally in the 1890s tended to lead to a burst in the in the monuments it's a fascinating story about how confederate memory was formed the war became more virginia-centric than tennessee or alabama or mississippi general lee became the saint uh there was an attempt to make lee the murder and lee was an appealing figure for that role general lee became the sainted martyr who if only he'd had the strength the guns the the men and material that granted had he would have carried the day and by being a martyr it suggested that lee was right but was unjustly defeated and that meant that white southerners who believed in the antebellum vision of racism of a race-based world were also right the political and cultural salience of the white supremacy argument was that anyone who was white rich or middling or poor could unite against the blacks and so as a political strategy it enabled people of means to enlist those who might have different economic interests than people with means against a common enemy the religious angle of the lost cause created an energy a uh a common vernacular in a fairly church-going region a key element of the christian story is that in defeat there is victory there is no crown without the cross there's no easter without good friday and so what pollard and others were doing was saying as a region we're a little bit like jesus we had to suffer but a day will come when the tomb will open and we will rise again the south will rise again is it intrinsically a religious cry because jesus rose again and anyone hearing that phrase in the american south either consciously or subconsciously would have associated their own fate with that of the god they purported to follow you have to use what you've got right and the only thing the white southerners had to build a resistance was sentimentality and religion and well three things white southerners had three things to make the lost cause work they had sentimentality they had religion and they had racism and it made a potent potent cocktail when you put the three together if you're going to fight the lost cause you have to fight on the field where they are and the idea that a christian society a society that purports to be christian would enslave others and discriminate against others in a systemic way has to be combated at least in part with the same language and the same arsenal with which the cause was was laid out and so lost cause folks want the south to have been jesus on good friday but easter is coming seems to me if you want to argue that the vision of gettysburg the new birth of freedom the vision of lincoln's second inaugural with malice toward none with charity for all you have to speak in biblical terms as well which is what lincoln did you have to speak in terms of do unto others you have to speak in terms of the key element of the faith that in many ways was perverted to try to secure and perpetuate a form of enslavement the language to fight that is the language of liberation well what is the duty of a christian the duty of a christian is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you it's in the words of the great commandment to love god totally and to love others as as they as you would want to be loved and so in any public policy question that's applicable health care taxation anything about the infrastructure of a democratic life can be about what would i how would i want to be treated and therefore i should treat others that way and that's in many ways even taking the religious element out of it is the fundamental covenant of a democratic republic lowercase d lowercase r if we don't have a sense of neighborliness if i don't at least somewhat care about what folks in california are doing or people in new york and i'm in tennessee why should i pay taxes for them to benefit and why should they pay taxes for me to benefit except that we're part of a covenant that runs on empathy runs on mutual concessions of opinion which is a phrase of jefferson's and really comes to be and endures because ultimately i care what happens to you in the hopes that you're gonna at some point when i'm in trouble care about what happens to me without that covenant free government falls apart if you know that this is not the first time we've dealt with these issues then you're able to revisit those moments and see how they got out of them so how did we get out of the long shadow of reconstruction we barely have and there are still look at charlottesville there are still moments where it's very much with us but we got out of it in a serious way in the middle of the 1960s because lyndon johnson speaking in the language of faith said that god should favor our undertaking that we should in fact extend our our arms we should not clench our fists we get out of these moments by more generously applying what jefferson meant when he wrote that all men were created equal and that can sound gooey and it can sound lefty i guess in this climate but it has the virtue of being true there's not a moment think about a moment you would want to go back to an american life and i promise you that that moment will be would be one in which reformers and others were trying desperately to widen the mainstream and not close it if you drive through washington walk through washington the monuments are to people who are about opening things not closing them monument to george washington monument to abraham lincoln monument to thomas jefferson monument to the second world war those folks washington jefferson lincoln were not perfect not arguing that no one is but if those flawed people could leave us something that was worth defending and something on which we could build if they could do it then don't we have an intellectual and moral obligation that sounds grand but an obligation to look and see how they did it so it's the winter of 1866-67 down in giles county tennessee in a law office near the courthouse and a group of old confederates get together and they decide to form what would be called the ku klux klan and the klan was going to be the knights of the invisible empire and the invisible empire was the ghosts the spirit of the confederacy that may have been defeated at appomattox but would rise again and would now fight and would punish people who were cooperating with reconstruction authority would terrorize african americans would really continue the battles of the civil war in an era when those battles are supposed to be over it's very hard to put ourselves back in a pre-civil rights mindset but to understand history we have to it was perfectly respectable for white southerners in the 1860s and 70s into the 1950s and 1960s to believe that white people were innately superior the confederacy had been founded on this idea the vice president of confederacy alexander stevens gave a speech saying that the cornerstone of the confederacy was the fact that blacks were inherently inferior and to these people the civil war had not changed that and they were going to carry on this battle by other means so the ku klux klan became a paramilitary force to continue to fight for the cause of white supremacy when we were supposed to have settled that and so when people say the civil war never really ended that's pretty much what they mean the clan was ferociously violent u.s grant when he becomes president does a pretty good job of shutting it down the justice department comes into being largely to fight the klan grant actually wrote out in his own hand the enforcement act he needed the powers he needed to break it but the fact that it had to be done suggests the strength the depth the durability of the underlying feelings of a confederacy that was defeated but was not going quietly into the night grant as president decided that he would in fact break the back of the klan that this was a an unacceptable paramilitary force in the country and in one of the few bright moments of reconstruction with a few bright moments in race relations from the war through the civil rights era he did what he could to use law enforcement use the military to shut down this marauding vigilante force grant goes to congress writes down on a piece of paper in his own hand the powers he needs to exert federal authority into the states in order to break the clan using his officials it was the first time we would see it again in the 1950s and 1960s where washington was deputizing officials to go and fight in the states that otherwise saw themselves as sovereign the lesson to learn is that the federal government when it puts its mind to something can create great change it creates great backlash as well but without without the federal government i'm not sure how my native region stumbles into modernity at all and we think of this as in sort of the civil rights era we think of it in terms of president kennedy and president johnson uh enforcing the court orders uh the supreme court orders in the middle of the 20th century but their precedent their their case study was the way grant reacted to the klan no southern state escaped this florida texas virginia there is no part of the old confederacy that escaped what i would call the shame of racially reactive post-bellum violence on the saturday after thanksgiving in 1915 on stone mountain georgia near atlanta the ku klux klan is refounded and it's refounded in reaction to a couple of things shifting economy from an agrarian to an industrial world 1920 would be the first time we would record that more urban folks were living in urban areas than in rural areas immigration was at an extraordinary high 1890s was the peak but people were coming in there was white anxiety about cultural identity about economic opportunity about a shifting culture radio becomes a big force in the early 1920s the second clan is really about how do we protect protect this american way of life 1917 is the bolshevik revolution you have world war one coming with incredible anxiety about socialists and anarchists and dissidents and the country felt as if it were spinning out of control and so the second clan which ultimately attracted we think between two and six million americans it took the 1924 democratic national convention to 103 ballots because there were 347 clan delegates at madison square garden who would not vote for al smith the governor of new york because al smith was an irish catholic the governors of texas georgia colorado indiana and oregon were all members of the clan hugo black future supreme court justice was a member of the clan harry truman almost joined but he had a lot of catholic friends and so that kept him from doing it it was a big broad-based reactionary movement about what that was seen as foreign and sinister influence in the united states and what they wanted to do was make america great again and what they wanted to do was try to create really a paramilitary army that was both literal and figurative to defend this idea of what was called 100 americanism americanism was a predominant phrase because there was a genuine anxiety that the bolsheviks were coming here so president wilson closes down 400 newspapers uh a mitchell palmer the attorney general under wilson launches a number of raids on suspected dissidents and anarchists tried to blow up the attorney general's house he lived across the street from fdr who was then the assistant secretary of the navy the roosevelts were finding body parts in their bushes it was an era where people people in power were cracking down on civil descent they were fighting immigration they were fighting the movement towards civil rights the naacp had been founded in 1909 coming out of what's called the niagara movement 1905 and so the country seemed to be changing immigrants people of color national culture different ways of making a living the familiar world of the farm where you controlled your whole life you decided where you went to church you decided what newspapers to subscribe to you decided what books to read you totally controlled your family until about 1920 21 22 and the clan stepped in exploited and exacerbated those tensions to the point where in 1925 and 26 50 000 klansmen marched down pennsylvania avenue in what was a remarkable but not stunning public display the clan of the 19 teens and 20s was focused on immigration disappearing jobs a changing culture and playing to a sentimental understanding of a country that had been lost but might be able to be recovered with the right set of political action the right journey backward it's incredibly resonant the story of the second clan i'd argue that actually that's probably that 10-year period 1915 to about 1925 is probably the most analogous period because you had a significant social movement focused on the other you you were feeling your world slipping away either you were had been on a farm you were moving to a city and suddenly the city you moved to for a job that job was being taken by an immigrant perhaps you reacted by either joining or supporting the work of an organization that was devoted to this mythic racially charged vision of a country that had been taken away but you had to try to take it back and that was really the work of the second clan membership in the klan was a group a family an organization a sense of purpose a vision a idea that you belonged and were fighting a noble cause and there are a few things more seductive to human nature than the sense that you are fighting a noble cause and if that noble cause happens to run parallel with your self-interest all the better so dw griffins makes the movie the big blockbuster of the era uh birth of a nation it presented this hopelessly antiquated uh white supremacist version of reconstruction it cast african-americans as evil and the other and gave this idea of knights of the invisible empire you could become a knight imagine this imagine this you're a white guy you have lived on a farm probably grew up on a farm you moved to a city the job's not working out the job might disappear because if somebody doesn't look like you maybe a roman catholic maybe southern european whatever it is and suddenly someone comes along and says we're going to make you a knight of the invisible empire and you are going to fight for your racial identity and fight for your job and we are going to take our country back from these interlopers it's an incredibly seductive and attractive vision for people who are discontented and seeking some means of control in a world that feels as though it slipped out of their hands most presidents after they leave office begin to look better woodrow wilson is that rare example of a president who looks worse the more time passes he resegregated the federal government he cracked down on civil descent and civil liberties during the war he screened birth of a nation at the white house the movie makers like all great movie makers used anything they could for promotion so they gave this the sense that he had endorsed it there's some debate about that but he did screen it you know wilson was very much a creature of his time uh he was a figure of the progressive era but it was a white supremacist progressive era and i don't think we do any justice to him to sugarcoat that one of the great things about america is that every action creates a reaction so in during world war one when wilson cracks down on civil liberties you get the aclu you get the american civil liberties union to fight for civil liberties after plessy versus ferguson in 1896 and with the rising number of lynchings around the south the continuance of the black codes of segregation you got w.e.b to voice and you got the naacp a group dedicated devoted to trying to make what had been the hope at the end of the civil war a reality du bois writes about fear quite brilliantly he talks about the the capacity of a mob by which he means a white mob to do things together that they would never do individually that there was a multiplier effect of fear and anxiety and hate and the back of the writhing mob there was this fear this anxiety that tomorrow was not going to be what it could be for you and it was not going to be what yesterday was and fear is such an important element of the american story and it's this perennial struggle between hope and fear edmund burke said there's nothing so unreasoning as fear you know if you're on the edge of a precipice you're not going to act rationally you're going to try to get back from it and so often people in american history have felt that they were on a precipice and so they lash out they flail you saw it with white southerners after reconstruction you saw it with the second clan and the immigration the shifting economy you saw in the 1930s um so in the 1950s and 1960s with white southerners worried about integration you see it now industrial economy is giving way to an information economy there are people who do not believe that tomorrow is going to be better than today and sure selling gonna be better than yesterday was at least in their minds and so you lash out you you struggle for something you you point and it's their fault it's those mexicans it's those chinese it's those italians it's those irish it's those blacks those women so jews it's incredibly powerful political emotion and the great political leaders are the ones who don't cater to it who tamp it down instead of flame it it's 1924 warren harding has died calvin coolidge has become president on the republican side the democrats meet at madison square garden to nominate someone to take on president coolidge there are about 347 clan delegates there it drives the convention to 103 ballots most ballots in history because the klan would not support al smith the governor of new york known as the happy warrior because al smith was an irish catholic and irish catholics were seen as this foreign force a sinister force roman catholicism was a particularly favorite target of the second clan out in oregon a clan-dominated legislature had passed a law saying that every school-aged child had to go to a public school in an attempt to shut down the parochial schools they were basically trying to get the put the nuns out of business so in 1924 in new york the convention went on and on and on eventually smith was defeated john w davis uh not a name that lives in the annals of history becomes the democratic nominee because of anti-catholic sentiment nativism like isolationism like racism is a perennial force it ebbs and it flows it was flowing in american life particularly after the 1890s or so you had a lot of immigration coming in it didn't really stop until the 1924 immigration legislation which put quotas on national uh immigration from different countries nativists are people who only trust those by definition who are born in a particular country and so american nativists in the first part of the 20th century believed that american-born americans were the only true americans and anyone who had immigrated here was somehow suspect the red scare in 1919 1920 was about fear of immigrants and fear basically because the bolshevik revolution which brought the communists to power and the disorienting impact of the first world war it led to another ism worth avoiding which is isolationism you had a prevalent fear that radical socialist communist bolsheviks were taking the country away that's the perennial theme here is that somehow or another some group has gotten over the city wall is in our midst and is trying to take everything away from us the first world war creates all kinds of isms that are worth avoiding there's nativism there's isolationism there was in the red scare a an anxiety that communists were coming to get us that russia had fallen to the bolsheviks the royal family was murdered this was a live fear in the country that a revolution that had started far away would come here and part of the appeal of the klan part of the appeal of a growing isolationist movement a growing nativist movement was if we were not a hundred percent americans if we were not a hundred percent of practicing 100 americanism then somehow or another we would lose what we cherished most and when the argument is you are going to lose what you love few more powerful political arguments than that people saying you're going to lose what you love and it's their fault and i'm pointing right at the people and those are the people we need to take on and whether they're catholics or jews or immigrants or whatever they are the force of the other of demonizing the other has been one of our most perennial and least attractive and least productive cultural forces in times of fear people turn on the press as well they don't want to read they don't want to hear they don't want to see disturbing messages and if they believe that the press is somehow exacerbating the threat to the country then they try to take out the messenger uh woodrow wilson enforced this edition act uh his postmaster general closed down 400 newspapers and magazines that were deemed radical or un-american usually that meant they were pacifists usually that meant they just disagreed with them and it takes a strong country a strong leader to understand that as jefferson said if the choice is between having a government with no newspapers or newspapers with no government i'll take newspapers with no government because without a free press without free expression without the ability to be wrong without the ability to listen to someone with whom you wildly disagree but always defend their right to say that which with which you disagree without that it's not a democracy it's an autocracy and if you want an autocracy you better be sure that your guy is the autocrat because today's autocrat is tomorrow's deposed autocrat and it's one of the reasons religious toleration is so important you know if you want if you want a state religion you better be sure that your state if you're in it you better be sure it holds power because tomorrow you may not be the one in my view there are about five elements that can help shape an era for good or for ill there's the presidency the congress the courts the press and the people themselves and my view is if two or three of those are rowing in the right direction we have a good chance in the rise of the second clan the presidency was not too bad uh cool harding and coolidge both spoke out against it if in guarded terms the courts were strong supreme court ruled against it in a couple of key cases the press did a good job joseph pulitzer's newspapers others did a lot of expose although that somehow that sometimes cuts the other way the klan leadership in the 20s thought that having congressional hearings against the klan had increased their numbers because they could say see they're they're see they know how powerful we are they're coming after us uh if we must be doing something right if the people in power are against us and that's one of the dangerous and and seductive to some extent dynamics of populism is if you hold to a conspiratorial worldview then you put yourself in a kind of tragic position that any counter-argument any argument that might challenge that conspiratorial worldview is seen not as a potentially prevailing argument but as confirmation that you were right in the first place see they're after us and that's a a loop a self-reinforcing loop that the our greatest moments have been marked by moments in which we have broken out of that there's nothing new under the sun and the scopes trial in dayton in 1925 was an early culture war what we would think of now you can imagine how cable news would cover this you know if if oj were a um science versus uh faith issue the the trial was an emblem of this anxiety about modernity you had people who didn't want to think they were descended from apes and believed that if the bible could simply be true then it would both invest them with a certain dignity and would put the people who seemed to be changing their world in their place and so it was a media circus uh broadcast on the radio it was the the wall-to-wall coverage of the era and in many ways i think it's an example of how people who feel a great deal of stress lash out and these were people who felt stress economically socially culturally and they wanted their bible to be the first and last word and they didn't want to hear about science they were they weren't interested in that because the one thing they had was genesis this is the way it was written this is the way it was and if you're going to come in with these newfangled theories and throw everything up in the air and i can't even count on my bible then what on earth can i count on the clan faded not least because enough people stood up and said we're not going to be superstitious we're not going to be as racially divided as the clan wants us to be and the fact of the matter is that we were created equal and that we should not be separating into these paramilitary armies doing battle against each other i think the fall of the clan in many ways is a victory of reason it is a victory of people listening to their better angels realizing that people who simply were from a different country are not innately inferior that's not a reasonable thing to think and it was really in many ways the triumph of the mind over the gut one of the great miracles of american history is that the klan dissipated before the crisis the 1930s came it came about because of internal clan dissensions we were very lucky because it was hard enough for franklin roosevelt to do what he did in the early 1930s one would have thought that given the cataclysm of the crash in 29 leading to the depression in 32 and 33 that the klan would have sputtered back to life but it didn't and we were incredibly lucky in that sense because it was hard enough for fdr to do what he had to do he had wall street bankers who were plotting against him trying to bribe the american legion to come and form a fascist army that would throw roosevelt out of office the line that got the biggest cheer on fdr's inauguration day was that we we are now at a point where we he may have to govern as if we had been invaded by a foreign foe and the crowd roared and mrs roosevelt wrote that it chilled her to the bone that the crowd seemed ready for a dictator the line we remember in sentiment is the only thing we have to fear is fear itself that day the more intriguing line the more resonant line was one about a strong man and so the the crisis of the 30s would have been immeasurably worse i think if the clan had endured at strength the clan fell because both harding and coolidge didn't give it oxygen there were internal dissensions the clan itself was corrupt and there were enough people who had joined this to be a knight of purity that they realized that if the organization itself was impure it was not worth their money and their time and i think the courts did a good job the courts ruled that you had to publish the names of the members so suddenly what seemed to be a great idea when you weren't in the paper it wasn't such a great idea when you were in the paper that's a pretty good test if you're not if you're not willing to stand up and be counted for what you're doing then more likely than not you shouldn't do it and i think that to some extent was part of the clan's fault harding and coolidge both decided that they would issue general but pointed statements about fraternal orders that seem to be conspiring against a great american center this is not to make anyone a hero out of this this was an era where political equality was still very much a um an ideal people thought about political equality but they weren't really thinking as much about social equality so even at the most progressive a lot of people within the mainstream we're about protecting civil rights but we're not about creating a pluralistic multi-ethnic integrated society as as we know one of the things to keep in mind is that that pluralistic multi-ethnic integrated society is a very recent idea and even a more recent reality coolidge in particular wrote a letter that was quite well known attacking someone who had attacked him for a rep an african-american being a republican nominee for congress and coolidge said this is democracy this is the way the system is supposed to work so without lionizing the past we i think do have to give due credit to those who in the context of their times took strides forward harding faced charges that he had descended from mixed race ancestry which was an attempt to smear him in the context of the time you know personal attacks racially explicit attacks are a perennial force in american politics it didn't just start with the 2016 election and we recur to it again and again not least because it tends to work and enough people hopefully on the margins but enough people react to them that it becomes politically salient for those who have that ammunition to use it and the only way to fight that is not to let it work the critique of my argument basically is here's a white southern man saying everything's going to be all right maybe in part because my life experience which suggested everything would be all right fair enough fine i don't think that's particularly helpful because if we don't look back we're not going to see what any of the analogies are what any of the precedents were but if we don't look but if when we look back we also have to give credit to a basic story of american progress it may be slower than a lot of us would like it may be more tragic it may be bloodier it may be incomplete it's all those things but it's the fact of the matter is that we have moved from a place where we would not want to be to a place that we prefer now is a place of preference a place of perfection absolutely not but why would you foreclose the possibility of looking back and drawing some inspiration for the journey that we have taken why would you let the perfect be the enemy of the good i don't i don't see the point of that one can argue that to some extent women's suffrage began with abigail adams who in march of 1776 wrote a letter to john adams who was down in philadelphia for the continental congress saying remember the ladies because you all are always so your sex is too tyrannical uh which we've also proven to be the case there was a ferocious fight through the 19th century seneca falls in 1848 was a moment where suffrage leaders may issue the statement that all men and women are created equal to some extent the battle for suffrage was sidetracked by the emphasis on african-american male suffrage there was always tension uh between there the movement for women's suffrage interestingly sort of slipped into the mists we know about the civil war we know about the fire hoses and jim crow we don't know much about the 19th amendment there were force feedings in prison there were hunger strikes there were women who courageously were arrested in acts of civil disobedience outside the white house there were women who dropped a banner during one of wilson's state of the union addresses saying what about the women mr wilson they were willing to risk everything they learned a lot of this from their comrades in england uh from that battle and there were there was violence at suffrage marches in washington uh people scorning men scorning this effort because guess what if you're the white man susceptible to the appeal of the clan in the second decade of the 20th century my god now the women want to vote immigrants are taking my job catholics are trying to change my culture and now women want to vote what's next you know that was the view it all sounds kind of crazy when you list it that way but part of history is putting yourself back in the shoes of those in real time and that's what a lot of those guys thought into the 20th century you had alice paul who launched a very direct campaign on focused on the white house trying to get woodrow wilson to endorse the suffrage movement alice paul was born in new jersey she went to england to learn suffrage methods try to figure out how women in england had won the right to vote came back and launched a very focused campaign on woodrow wilson himself took up residence on lafayette square right around from right across from the white house made a point of having people at every gate of the white house so that the president would have to see them when he came and he went she was determined to take the fight directly to him and ultimately won and she was a key factor in wilson ultimately endorsing the amendment which finally extended the suffrage as abigail adams would have wanted i think for those who think that the country can't change i sometimes submit that a hundred years ago more than half the population couldn't vote now again it took too long but things can get better and one of the key things about the country is that not that suddenly presidents like fortinbras appear and put everything in order change comes when the powerful listen to the powerless there's never been a significant leap forward in american life that has not come from the many and as opposed to the few abolition suffrage civil rights lyndon johnson woodrow wilson abraham lincoln were not singular actors who waved a historical magic wand and made things better because they wanted to they were able to marshal the energy of an enormous number of people innumerable people who sacrificed everything trying to get us to listen to those better angels change comes in this country when the powerful pay attention to the powerless and if you can tell the story to the powerful that we will remember them fondly they will go down in history as great people if they do that then that's one of the reasons to tell this story it's not to romanticize the past it's not to glorify a handful of white male leaders but as long as leaders are going to be in positions where they can affect serious change why not give credit to those who did that in the past if only to encourage those who have the option now of deciding whether to do it or not do you want to be fdr or do you want to be andrew johnson do you want to be lyndon johnson or do you want to be james buchanan most presidents i know would answer that they want to be fdr they want to be lyndon johnson they don't want to be johnson they don't want to be buchanan and if we don't tell that story in those terms then we lose that arrow in our quiver woodrow wilson should have seen this coming when he arrived in washington in 1913 for his inauguration there was a paucity of a receiving crowd and he actually asked where are all the people and all the people were at a suffrage march elsewhere in washington a key example of the people without power doing the work of citizenship while the powerful were lagging behind on the one hand 100 years after the 19th amendment totally understandable why people would say that change has come far too slowly but we are trying to do something here that nobody else has tried to do which is run a pluralistic multi-ethnic democratic republic over a vast expanse of territory and it seems to me that the change is going to get more rapid that is that once it starts it's going to be total and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see that one of the results of the shifting sense of identity and what i suspect will be a reaction to the more exclusionary culture of the post-2016 election would be if not the election of a female president certainly a very uh great openness to it it's also worth noting secretary clinton won the popular vote i would feel very differently about all of this if the incumbent president had won the popular vote he's president because of a quirk of an 18th century constitutional system more people wanted her to be in charge of their destinies than wanted him to be and that however unsatisfying is progress we never know when the movement gains momentum or not uh it took 100 years for jim crow to fall apart it took a long time for women's suffrage to pass without the steady acts of citizenship and protest with no particular expectation that there'll be a high return on your investment anytime soon the story of the country would be radically different and you know you wish there were a three-point plan you wish there were a powerpoint that you could say here's how to change the world but there's really not it's a long complicated story and often often it's hard to know exactly when or what will fully attract the attention and ultimately the power of those who hold office 1965 lyndon johnson is surprised by bloody sunday john lewis is nearly beaten to death hosea williams almost beaten to death on the streets of selma alabama the images from the march go frank reynolds is angering abc news he interrupts the broadcast premiere of judgment at nuremberg to show this scene of a posse of alabama officials attacking peaceful non-violent marchers eight days later johnson goes to congress and says at time there are times when history and fate intersect to shape a turning point and man's unending search for freedom so it was at lexington and conquered so it was at appomattox so it was last week in selma alabama why lexington conquered and not someplace else why appomattox and not someplace else why selma and not someplace else because in the mystery of history there is this moment where the endless ripples that gather strength far from the centers of power finally wash over those centers we certainly have agency in creating history we just don't know when or how we may know why that's good but think of this what if franklin roosevelt had been killed in december of 1932 in miami and assassin tried to kill him killed the mayor of chicago who's sitting next to him would the 1930s and the 1940s have turned out the way they did without franklin roosevelt i'm not sure they would have the story of reconstruction might be radically different if lincoln had not been killed what if lyndon johnson had decided to take a pass on voting rights in the spring of 1965. i know it might be frustrating but history is not science history history's the story of all of us and i think we all know when we're being honest with ourselves that we're incredibly complicated and there are moments when i very much want to do the right thing but for a number of reasons i won't do it and there's some moments i don't want to do the right thing at all and certainly don't do it the country's the same way there have been three great inflection points in terms of a broad identity politics in the american context abolition abolition emancipation suffrage and then the end of jim crow and a common lesson there is that the leadership classes lagged behind the activist classes the activists were right longer than the leadership was and what i would hope is that by telling that story we would prompt people to say what are the activists telling us that we're not either listening closely enough to or not reacting to because if the voices of abolition were right early and they were and the voices for suffrage were right early and they were and the voices against jim crow were right early and they were what are the voices now that are right and early and we're not paying attention to it it's christmas eve 1929 the stock market has crashed in october the prosperity of the 20s has popped basically and god doesn't give you many metaphors like this but herbert hoover is in the main part of the white house having dinner in black tie when the oval office goes up in flames the west wing is on fire uncontrollable elemental hoover can't fix it that's all you need to tell the story of the late 20s and early 30s the country is in the throes of what becomes a global depression we're paying the price for isolationism paying the price for closing ourselves off after 1924 in many ways by instituting immigration quotas by putting up high tariffs by basically retreating to a kind of fortress america we we'd gone over we'd fought the first world war we didn't feel it had done what we wanted to do we'd rejected the league of nations the idea that we would be engaged we had this vision that somehow another our oceans would protect us from history would protect us from the rest of the world and yet we were part of a global economy even then by the spring of 1933 one out of every four adult american men was out of work there were riots in the midwest there was a live question about whether democratic capitalism could survive the decade as churchill put it as only churchill could do there was america was trying to burn brightly against the baleful flames of soviet bolshevism and the lurid flames of nordic self-assertion from berlin churchill could say anything well read the phone book he'd be great there was this real question you know could self-government in a capitalistic society work a lot of people didn't think so and on to that stage comes franklin delano roosevelt who had been the one the brightest young politicians in the democratic party in 1920 run for vice president has the most famous political name in america goes to a boy scout camp on his way to campebello off the coast of maine wakes up a few mornings later and can't walk wills himself back into the arena fights infantile paralysis and becomes in a way the embodiment of the american notion that we can recover and he believed we could all walk again not least because he had taught himself to walk again and that sounds homiletic and it sounds sentimental perhaps but it's true he did fdr is alleged to have said that the two redeeming features of american life is that we have a sense of hope and a sense of humor and he played to both of those and argued fundamentally that our instinct for hope had to overcome our susceptibility to fear and that was his singular contribution in many ways we all know this the the only way to understand the market is to realize that it's not understandable it's not a comprehensible thing because it's all based on emotion and most of it and the banks were closing and basically what makes things run is faith faith that the dollar will be worth something faith that if you pay this bill it works out whatever it might be and he did everything he could in that bleak winter to 1933 to restore that faith douglas macarthur had attacked the bonus army world war one marchers who'd come to washington looking for their pension macarthur launched the army at him when fdr became president he sent mrs roosevelt out to see them and one of them remarked hoover sent macarthur and roosevelt sent his wife and that sort of told you the the distinction between the two oliver wendell holmes had said of fdr that he had a second-rate intellect but a first-class temperament and temperament meant a lot in democratic leadership there's something about the tone and the tenor of the person at the center of things roosevelt himself understood the office that way he wrote in a little piece that was published on september 11th 1932 in the new york times that the presidency is not an engineering or administrative office it is preeminently a place of moral leadership by which he meant temperamental leadership if he could be buoyant then we would be buoyant history tends to render a different judgment often than the present does and fdr was seen as i think as walter littman put it he's a very talented young man who simply seems to want to be president very much and was not seen as the savior of the republic trust me but there was something about i think his particular biographical experience that was essential in that moment and his willingness to as he put it practice a bold persistent spirit of experimentation bold persistent spirit of experimentation try a method and if it fails admit it frankly but above all try something and we went through almost three or four iterations of the new deal agencies would be created they'd fall apart they would you know it would just it would it went on and on but he spent that decade trying to save capitalism from the capitalists redefined the relationship of the individual in the state you can argue whether that was a good or a bad thing but the american way was in the dock on march 4th 1933 in a way it was not in the dock on april 12 1945 which is the day he died in warm springs and he's not alone in making that happen he gave voice to countless others people wanted that from him and in that mysterious connection between chieftain and follower you had the story of rescuing america from one abyss and then helping rescue the rest of the world from a different and even more deadly abyss you know my friend david mccullough likes to say no one walked around in the past and said my what an interesting world the past is it's all conditional it's all contingent would a different president have done what fdr did i it's unknowable unlikely there was a particular set of circumstances a particular set of skills he brought to that are we less resilient than americans were in 1933 maybe not less resilient we know each other less we're unified by less the cataclysm of the depression itself created bonds of shared experience that helped us when the crisis of the second world war came so that that's different but at every point when we've been challenged the the present generation has wondered whether they could rise to it whether it was the founding generation the war of 1812 the age of jackson the civil war world war one world war ii the depression the cold war the crises of the sixties and at every point we have in fact risen to that occasion and continued to create a more perfect union does that mean the story continues to unfold that way no doesn't necessarily mean that way there's no there's no happily ever after there's no once upon a time but there has been saint augustine you know that's an augustine threat saint augustine once defined a nation as a multitude of rational beings united by the common objects of their love multitude of rational beings united by the common objects of their love so one things we always have to ask is what do we love in common in the 1930s we loved the experiment enough the capitalistic democratic experiment enough that we were going to defend it the cold war we loved liberty enough that we were going to defend that so the question now is what do we love in common do we love these institutions enough do we love a constitution that makes rapid change for the good very difficult but it also makes rapid change for the ill very difficult do we have enough of that in common my own bet is yes but it's just that it's just a bet no one ever became president because of a vanishingly small ego uh that just doesn't happen [Music] people who put themselves in the way of high politics are people who believe that they have something to contribute that other people do not and that requires a pretty strong ego george w bush is very funny about this he says you know it takes a lot of ego to say hey what about me you know of 300 million people and he's right it does and so i think the remarkable thing about american presidents is they aren't crazier actually most of them are pretty well adjusted there are exceptions there are really at least two kinds of populism populism being the sense that the virtues of the many are being stymied or taken over by the interests of the few and so a populist leader is one who appeals to the masses saying this group or that individual they're trying to block you from your greatness or they're trying to take away what is rightfully yours so you are you are a populist if you appeal to the masses against elites of some kind or the other of some kind there's economic populism which is we want to make sure there's enough wealth for everybody and there's cultural populism which is a leader who says to the masses this small elite is not letting you be all you want to be or wants you to think like them they want to tell you what to think in the 1930s you had all kinds you had both gods you had huey long who was an economic populist who wanted he was sort of the bernie sanders elizabeth warren if you if they had a louisiana accent uh very much wanted to share the wealth wanted to create more of a wealth equality across the board father coughlin charles coughlin the radio priest and others were more about the jews the bankers they're trying to take away what's yours and what they have in common but what populists tend to have in common is that they want you to blame someone else and it's a politics that is less about positive motion forward and more about pointing fingers it's not it's not always true but that's largely true charismatic leadership is essential to populism because by its very nature populism is about inspiring an enormous number of people to rise up against a smaller number of people and so if you are charismatic if you which means touched by the gods if you are someone who can rile up a crowd you're more likely to be an effective populist the 1930s were a decade where people were anxious they were anxious for hungry for leaders who would give them a story to explain not only why they felt the way they felt but a way to get them out of it and the populism of the 30s was about wealth inequality identity groups the out-of-touch nature of alleged elites at a time of isolationism at a time when people didn't want to be engaged with the world because they thought somehow i know they'd gotten a raw deal under woodrow wilson during the first world war things hadn't they hadn't gotten what they were supposed to get for projecting that force and so in many ways the 30s were a backlash to the more global vision of wilson in 17 and 18. i don't think there's any doubt that the isolationist of our own time is a reaction to the forward-leaning nature of both the cold war leadership and george w bush's forward-leaning leadership after the attacks of september 11th when we think of fdr we think of the great line the only thing we have to fear is fear itself which is a marvelous sentiment the line that got the biggest cheer that day though was when she said that the current crisis is of such scope that he might require powers as if he had been invaded as if we had been invaded by a foreign foe and the crowd roared and it suggested to eleanor roosevelt who wrote that she was chilled by it that they were ready for a dictator that the world had become so seemingly complicated so seemingly out of control that this 18th century constitutional system of checks and balances was not commensurate with the challenges of global governance in a rapidly shrinking world sounds pretty familiar and her concern and the concern of a lot of folks because dictatorship was on the march look at germany look at italy look at the increasing totalitarianization of the soviet union the anxiety was that amid the crisis of the depression popular dictatorial leaders would present themselves as heroic figures who could restore prosperity restore national greatness and therefore the the pesky yet wonderfully essential elements of democracy would go by the wayside that was the fear like everything else totalitarianism dictatorships ebb and flow it's flowing right now you know in the 100 years ago or more we were moving from an agrarian to an industrial economy that had enormous challenges populations were becoming more diverse that created challenges of identity of national sense of oneself same thing's happening now as we move from an industrial economy to an information economy the rise of a mass media is usually a very very uh telling sign for dictatorship because dictators political leaders who master the means of communication of their era can move millions hitler understood the radio fdr understood the radio [Music] so people who understand how to reach followers where they live are to be reckoned with it was the 50th anniversary of the battle of gettysburg and wilson who'd been born in virginia who had southern sympathies and was a democrat and a huge part of the democratic base in that era was among white segregationist southerners he went and gave a an address that had very little to do with lincoln and a lot to do with the lost cause it was a recon what was thought of as reconciliation it was that this was a national struggle that there was equal valor and equal weight to the arguments on both sides which of course would have surprised those who had fought for the union it was really a kind of high-water mark of the revisionism about the civil war trying to make it less about race and more about valor and american identity as broadly put as possible and it would take another 50 60 years before really the popular imagination came to see the war as what it had been which was a struggle over slavery and power birth of a nation feels like a very primitive movie right it doesn't flow in the way we think of cinema but for its time it was quite advanced and it was a storytelling device of the modern world telling a story of the old world of a world that had faded it was very much about white supremacy the actors are in blackface there are scenes of anxiety because a white woman is about to be taken away by a person of color it's every possible stereotype you can imagine uh is played out in birth of a nation and it had an electrifying effect around the country it was a huge success financially commercially culturally because it affirmed this white view of the war and reconstruction not as the natural result of a struggle over slavery but of somehow a battle of northern aggression against southern valor and southern morays and it was curiously for 1915 curiously really belonged to 1845. it was a movie out of time yet all too tragically it did represent the prevailing racial views in a huge part of the country well stereotypes become stereotypes because there's some truth to them right it's like cliches or cliches because they work um sure there are regional distinctions regional characteristics that uh whether it's accents or customs or mores but to be prisoners of stereotypes either in reality or in rhetoric is particularly counterproductive because we all i think in our lives have to figure out a way to overcome what our intrinsic instincts are and our intrinsic instincts are pretty much selfish not all of them but a good good many and so the story of growing up the story of a human journey in many ways is learning how to reach out to be gracious when you're inclined to be selfish and that certainly plays out regionally my part of tennessee was not hugely shaped by the lost cause at least my universe wasn't i grew up on missionary ridge a battlefield in chattanooga it's where arthur macarthur douglas macarthur's father won his medal of honor when he was 17 years old i grew up about 7 800 yards from braxton bragg's headquarters the confederate commander but about three miles that way was chief john ross's house of the cherokee nation so you had this embodiment of the twin original sins of the american experience right there african-american slavery native american removal so i though i grew up in a place where the civil war was ambient we weren't really refighting it at least in my household in in the world i grew up in very aware of the significance of the battlefields around but by the 1970s and 80s at least in my part of the world blessedly we'd moved on when i was little you could still find monet balls uh civil war bullets on missionary ridge and around and so to me history was just right there it was something you went and tried to dig around for uh and i think that shaped how i think because it's at once remote and at hand which is true of the larger hist larger drama of history as well um you know faulkner said wonderfully in requiem for a nun that the past is never dead it isn't even past and it's one of those tropes i probably use it too much but it's true and there's something i don't know if it's comparatively of southerners or more susceptible to that i know plenty of new englanders who still think that the mayflower just pulled out [Music] but i do think because so much of the war unfolded so much of the civil war unfolded here you know if you're driving on here's a great scene think about this if you're driving on interstate 75 in the american south uh which i think is how a lot of folks get to disneyland uh or disney world whatever it is um if you're driving on an interstate in the american south you're driving on a road that was built by dwight eisenhower sponsored by al gore senior and prescott bush showing you some of the the intimacies of history and it's on a system that was built for cold war defense in case we had to have massive mobilization in the event of nuclear attack or invasion from the soviet union but you're driving past civil war sites where people with muskets and cannons and cavalry charges were fighting over the nature of identity and power you know 150 years ago and in those days less than a hundred years ago so the american story feels so vast i mean my god lexington conquered to hear the niagara movement to here it's just so it seems so extraordinary it's all the day before yesterday i mean we're 240 something years old you know that's that's a blink in the eye i found that one of the most exciting things to do intellectually and which is not a word i would have used when uh when this started is to look at something that's totally commonly accepted and ask why so here's a good example why is this the second decade of the 21st century what does that mean exactly why is it why is it 21 centuries how do we start to tell time well it goes back to the birth of jesus of nazareth that's how the west decided to structure its calendar so seems to me it's a fairly self-evident question to then ask how on earth did that happen how did a jewish peasant born at the corner of an empire become the central cultural figure for more than half the world and i can't tell you exactly when that started but those are the kinds of questions look at a monument there are always monuments you just drive by right uh i'm sure there are in your neighborhood there are in in my neighborhood and asking why they're there this will surprise you that i was a strange child i know it'll go become as a shock to you but i remember reading william manchester's biography of douglas macarthur called american caesar and it opens on missionary ridge not far i'm sure he was somewhere near where i grew up because manchester is a great biographer wanted to go to the beginnings of the myth and the myth of macarthur was how could i match my father who at the age of 17 won the medal of honor in the civil war and the description of the world i knew seeing it in a book in print i think triggered something which suggested that what was familiar to me could be worthy of commemoration and communication to others my grandfather was born in 1913 a classic southern lawyer was frustrated had wanted to go to the naval academy but his mother who i think was quite a battle ax thought that a landlocked boy didn't need to be going off to the oceans so he was a vanderbilt law school uh went back to chattanooga to practice and then the war came of course and he spent four years in the pacific as a gunnery officer and came back and lived kind of the classic eisenhower era uh ethos uh by the time i came along he'd gone on the bench and took me down to court i used to sit on the bench with him in the city court of chattanooga god knows what the defendants must have thought it must have been very frustrating but it was fascinating and he would take me he had coffee with his uh friends every weekday morning at an old hotel in chattanooga called the reed house and so the mayor would be there and the police commissioner and the old d.a who was about 112th and uh he was probably 70. you know that's how things but my sense was he was methuselah uh and so i heard all these stories i just heard uh both conversations about what was going on in the life of the country but also what was going on locally refracted through these uh you know straightforward uh courthouse types and one of the things that i'm convinced it did is a it made politics fascinating and it made it very human because these were guys going out to win votes and running campaigns and so i would see them there but then i'd see their name on a sign out in the you know the city and so i could connect those two things and the other thing that was fascinating was connecting the men i saw on the news or read about in the newspaper with the ones i actually had been around and heard and when you think about it that's a huge part of the biographical enterprise is either reconciling those two persona seeing that they're constant or pointing out that they're irreconcilable so that that's really what a biographer does and so i think i was i don't use the word faded but uh but i'm convinced that that was a huge part of why i got interested in what i do i went into journalism when i was 18. the chattanooga times which was adolfox's first newspaper uh ruth hamburg his granddaughter and paul neely the editor sweetly hired me i had no qualifications whatever but i wrote a couple of stories that first summer went back a couple more summers went back after i went to college uh for a year and a half or so loved it and it's a disappearing world that that size newsroom that was a 40 000 45 000 circulation paper but it was just uh you know it was straight out of a movie you know too much drinking and uh and a lot of uh chasing stories it probably didn't matter a huge amount to the course of civilization but we thought they did around 1991-92 i was covering local politics in north georgia which was right over the line from chattanooga and i remember going to rallies in that year pat buchanan was running in the primaries buchanan actually did well in that part of the state and i remember going and there were religious conservatives with signs very respectful uh people who had homemade poster board that had all these social indicators divorce rates uh crime rates all dated not from 1973 which is the row decision obviously but from 1962 which was the school prayer decision that declared sectarian compulsory school prayer in public schools unconstitutional and i'd never seen the drama of the conservative world pinpointed there i always thought 73 is the beginning of everything and all this is a reaction to abortion it wasn't that was an exacerbating factor for them obviously but it really began with the supreme court and the fact that an eisenhower court created in many ways by a republican had seemingly betrayed their values i don't think i was a very good newspaper reporter uh my editor paul neely used to say please don't put please don't quote edmond burke anymore when i was writing about north georgia politics at fair point um yes uh you know it was you know president bush was running for reelection uh the south was moving from having been solidly democratic though going republican in presidential elections to becoming deep deep what we would later call deep deep red so i was there right on the edge i remember covering the georgia legislature in the early 90s and there was one republican from north georgia in the georgia house of representatives now if you're a democrat you couldn't get arrested i mean it's just it's that that so i was right i was there right at that that pivot point it was interesting because president bush senior was very much part of the other the sane world my first conscious political memory was being allowed to stay up to watch richard nixon resign which would have been nine o'clock eastern time on august 8th 1974 thursday night and i remember and then a couple years later started when the watergate books started coming out i started reading about it because it was sort of fascinating it was like a real life narnia you know uh you know it had heroes and villains and bernstein in woodward's the final days remember very clearly reading that early on and the drama of politics the human part of it was totally fascinating what i made of all that was the politics was this crazy world where sometimes great things happened and sometimes terrible things happened i remember reading about you know martha mitchell making slightly drunken phone calls to reporters and pianos like you know that happened in my family right it just it just happens you know and i hadn't thought about it exactly this way until i was to write the second but i'm sure that there's some connection there um the big moment for me was in 1986 i read two books all the king's men by robert p warren and the wise men by walter isaacson and evan thomas and that was transformative as well because you have the great in many ways the great american novel in warren's hands it's about willie stark who's really like huey long but it's as ever it's mixed he's light and he's dark and he's trying and then walter and evan had written this marvelous book about april harriman and dean atchison the the foreign policy elite that had shaped the post-war world and i remember in both cases i finished the book and then started it again and years later when i was having a job interview for newsweek with evan i told him the story and i said i was a senior in high school and i i read your book and then i started again and he said god you must have been a loser which was a fair point i went from the chattanooga paper to charlie worked for charlie peters at the washington monthly charlie's a fabulous man uh he really kind of helped revolutionize journalism uh wanted to be one of the democratic party to be cultural culturally sensitive to uh what is seen as more conservative elements uh there was a famous washington monthly cover in the 70s saying criminals belong in jail which was kind of a radical thing to say in the mcgovern era and charlie charlie was vital uh taught me details mattered enormously you know never never think of something you need to do and think okay i'll do that later you know if you see it say it do it and it taught me also the publishing the journalism was really an all-in thing it was totally consuming uh there was no uh no doing it halfway and then i went to newsweek and uh in new york and i was there for 15 years i loved newsweek um i'd grown up with it and time and that was how the world came to you pre-internet the weekly news magazines were hugely important particularly to somebody growing up in tennessee the arguments made in the magazine were made with some brevity but one of the things you learn is that if you can't make an argument briefly you probably haven't got it uh you may not have an argument to make and so i um i never thought that somehow or another it was anti-intellectual or or surf or skimming the surface i'm convinced that because i loved books when i was a kid i was a terrible athlete so i had to you know that was kind of the choice uh though they're not mutually exclusive growing up where i grew up where history was ambient and not particularly divisive right i mean this was it wasn't a lost cause world it wasn't uh you know i'm not some survivalist escapee you know it's it's not that at all [Music] growing up where i grew up loving big narrative nonfiction and [Music] loving politics both for [Music] well the first the the the way into this was the human drama of it you know i wasn't sitting you know when i was growing up thinking if only we could do this with medicare part b we would be okay my interest was in the struggle and the personalities that did the struggling and so journalism was a natural place to land and it sure as hell beat law school i went to three schools in my life and they were all religiously affiliated more or less i went to an episcopal montessori a nominally presbyterian secondary school and an episcopal college and if you look at the anglican tradition it's all about scripture reason and tradition but reason and tradition are right in there and so i'm convinced that the teachers i had and the institutions i was part of certainly helped me think in the way i think insofar as i think if the 2016 election had gone the other way i wouldn't have written about the soul of america i'm not so arrogant or self-involved to think that i can say here are the four points that will lead us forward but what i can do is try to take advantage of the fact that i've spent most of my life thinking about the past and thinking about how the past became something either worth emulating or worth avoiding my hope with all of this with the arguments i make the case studies i try to bring forward is not that somehow or another it will instantly bring perfection to the world but it may give us a sense of proportion it may enable people when they're looking at a headline when they're looking at the chiron on cable when they're looking at their phone when they're just about to explode either side whatever's going on they might say you know what we got through fort sumter so maybe i can not have my head explode right this minute i've been incredibly lucky uh beautifully educated professionally fortunate uh some folks want to read or listen to what i have to say which is hugely flattering and an honor i have an obligation to repay their time and attention with something that is worthwhile and i think that if you make a historically based argument if you tell the story of someone within the biographical construction that it has its own rules of course but in the end you do want the reader the listener to find something illuminating for their own lives in their own time so that it's not my view is that is that history there's a purely clinical way of looking at it and that's and that's great for me it's it's it's more about let's tell this story and then let's talk about what we can learn from it i don't think of writing as lonely partly because i'm a biographer and so by definition i'm in conversation virtual conversation with both the subject and all the people who have done remarkable work about that subject through the years and so i don't uh i don't think of it as a as a lonely enterprise it's frustrating it's hard sometimes but i'm always whenever i'm feeling sorry for myself i'm reminded of an old hl minkin line that when writers feel sorry for themselves they could go out and work on an assembly line and they would be fine and that will send you back to your typewriter uh pretty quickly but i i think of this as being part of a conversation you know i've written about people who about whom much has been written uh andrew jackson thomas jefferson uh and i've written about people where it's kind of the beginning of the conversation george h.w bush but it is a conversation i don't think there's such a thing as a definitive biography because can is anyone life ever definitive um i think that this is a big disputations complex uh marketplace of ideas and that there's plenty of room for for all of us uh am i disappointed sometimes that how stuff is received sure i mean if if you're you know whenever you write something what you're really hoping is that people would just say not since isaiah has there been such a master of prose that happens very rarely but you know look it's um you can't be for the first amendment for yourself and then be against it for others that's the damnable thing about it so it's 1924 really the high water mark in many ways of the second ku klux klan there's a georgia politician named clifford walker who had run for governor and lost he then became more closely associated joined the clan and he won and he gave a speech out in kansas city at a klan meeting saying that he wanted to build a wall of steel as high as heaven to keep southern europeans out italians greeks build a wall of steel as high as heaven and again the rhetoric of isolationism of nativism of that's the other we need to get rid of the other so that we can be what we whoever we is was the prevailing sentiment of that time a politician's natural instinct is to govern for those who brought them to the dance they already support you they support you because you support causes they want we call it the base they're the folks that you take care of history tells us though that greatness in the sweep of time is often granted to those who don't simply govern for the base in the 1920s you had politicians who were governing for the klan uh there you have uh reconstruction politicians who were governing for the white supremacists but the one the presidents we tend to remember fondly are those who surprise us and who do something that the base either doesn't like or is forced to learn to like when fdr died in 1945 there were people who said i never met him but i feel as though i just lost my best friend there were people who put signs in the windows instead of death in the family in store windows there were gis of course who really had never known another president he'd been president since 1933 it had been 12 years so if you'd been seven or eight years old that was your president people didn't know who harry truman was he was a monumental figure in the life of the country not least because he was the first president to fully inhabit radio his voice was familiar to them his voice was as familiar to the country as subsequent president's visages would be so he was ubiquitous uh the speed is relative right and that sort of thing is relative and there were those who believed he was god and there was 40 of the country that couldn't say his name they called him that man so when we try to sentimentalize the past when we try to say oh this era is so much different if only we could be like the 1930s or 40s yeah you know 40 of the country never voted for franklin roosevelt you know at best we're a 60 40 country and most of the time it's 51.49 i just think that's important to remember to keep things in perspective franklin roosevelt is no paragon here he interred the japanese americans he resisted anti-lynching legislation but we have to judge people on the totality of their lives and the totality of what they accomplished within the context of their era and by that standard franklin roosevelt is one of the greatest executive leaders we ever had the thing about executive power is you're always against it until you have it and you're against it if someone you don't like is exercising it but then you're all for it if someone you like is the story of the american presidency has been a gradual and sometimes rapid accretion of power very unlikely that that gets rolled back in a significant way anytime soon it's why the presidency matters so much not simply for its cultural role but the person in that chair the person behind that desk does have a remarkable ability to set the tone tenor but also the actual policy of the country seems obvious to say that but a lot of people sometimes say well you're exaggerating the role of the presidency it's also about mayors it's also about absolutely true but if you have that kind of executive power article two power as is called under the constitution you want someone sane doing it i don't think that's a particularly radical proposition in the wake of pearl harbor there were anxieties particularly along the west coast that japanese americans might serve as agents of the japanese imperial government an enemy force the attorney general of california earl warren and others argued that there should be an internment program that as a national security measure people of foreign descent were dangerous were potentially enemies of the country and so fdr issued executive order 9066 in turning japanese americans it's one of our most shameful episodes in american history and a reminder that even in the midst of a global campaign to defend liberty and to fight tyranny someone as otherwise remarkable as franklin roosevelt was able to make a serious miscalculation and a decision that violated fundamental principles of both human and american rights for roosevelt this decision would have been about politics mostly the west coast was fearful and he wanted to make sure he did everything he could both to secure the country but also to reassure those who were anxious and so he made a wartime decision a hasty wartime decision in war civil liberties do not do well uh it happened in the first world war it happened in the second world war it happened the civil war abraham lincoln suspended habeas corpus so in times of war presidents more often than not curb civil liberties in the name of broader national security concerns what changed everything was pearl harbor and the fact that bombs had been dropped americans had died war had been brought to us by the japanese led to that remarkable reaction out of the first world war there was an enormous amount of anxiety that more global engagement would lead to entanglements uh debt uh the power of the few over the many and so america first which was founded at yale uh so not a midwestern thing very much in the heart of the the american elite the isolationist movement was centrally based on the idea that our oceans would protect us and that we could should not be drawn into foreign quarrels foreign entanglements because someone was always taking advantage of us there was a populist streak in the isolationist movement it was the same thing that people would argue in more domestic populist moments it was that someone is taking advantage of us and we need to be smart because they think they're smarter than us and in this case it was the old world we don't want to be outsmarted and lindbergh charles lindbergh ironically given that he had proven how small the world was because he had crossed the atlantic in an airplane becomes the central voice for this the voice for what he called and a phrase we might hear again the silent majority fdr dealt with isolationism incredibly carefully he believed as he once put it that you can never get too far ahead of your followers because you might look back and no one's there he knew that the country was uninterested in fighting another global war he knew that to be in place to make decisions that he thought he should make he had to maneuver incredibly carefully and in many ways be deceptive he once said i'm a juggler i never let my left hand know what my right hand is doing and that was that was certainly true late 1940 campaign he says your boys are not going to be sent to fight in any foreign wars and wendell wilkie the republican nominee said that son of a that's going to beat me and it did it's true that great presidents have known ultimately where they wanted to go and have managed to hold on to power long enough to get at least close lincoln was a skeptic on this he once said that i admit plainly that events have controlled me he was reacting to reality but even within that how you react within the constraints of a time you have a choice crises are about moments of decision where fate is decided the initial meaning of the word crisis goes back to health it's so it's whether you decide whether you're going to live or you're going to die and so in political life crises present certain choices lincoln made the choices he made fdr made the choices he made lyndon johnson made the choices he made each with a sense that they knew where they wanted to go and they might not get there with this decision or that decision or even another decision but that there was a place that they knew the hill they wanted to get to and i think that's what separates truly great leaders from people who are simply marking time in positions of authority in the second week of april 1945 fdr goes down to warm springs to his cottage in georgia and he's working on a jefferson birthday address jefferson's birthday is april 13th and some of the last sentences we know he wrote included the only limit to the realization of our hopes for tomorrow will be our doubts of today we must move forward with strong and active faith and they were in many ways his last words he was a politician and a person who always preferred thinking ahead and hoping as opposed to fearing sounds banal but if you've been struck down by polio and if you've managed to come back into the arena you know that that journey is possible you know that you can move from fear to hope and he fundamentally understood that the best american presidents the best american eras were ones where you talked about strong and active faith you talked about what he called in the same speech the science of human relationships you talked about as he put it in his final inaugural that the only way to have a friend is to be one in the new world all of those messages which can seem like we're talking about needlepoint pillows or coffee mugs or something or just being a homiletic it was true for him and the proof is in the fact that when he died that day the country dissolved in an emotional wave in many ways and that when we look back we see someone who confronted two of the greatest crises in american history and we came out stronger ultimately then we went in and believe me if it had gone another way we would hold him accountable so justice requires giving him credit eleanor roosevelt always reminded franklin roosevelt of why he was truly there she was a goad a conscience a a source of perennial reminders that our better angels had to continue to fight our worst instincts she had become his eyes and ears and legs long before she had found her own work uh in civil rights and progressive causes and women's causes everything you can think of one of the greatest women who ever lived one of the greatest people who ever lived eleanor roosevelt and when fdr was thinking that he would go a little slower on this or that she would be right there and it drove him crazy you know he would you know he'd be sitting there just trying to have a drink at the end of the day and she would come in with a basket of letters and things he should do and you know he was just oh god here we go again uh i've often thought of lionel trillings line literary critic he once said of fanny in mansfield park jane austen's novel then an evening with fannie would not be undertaken lightly an evening with mrs roosevelt would not be undertaken lightly she was a very serious person and yet the plight of a lot of folks is a lot better today because she was there's a school of thought that one of the reasons earl warren was as devoted as he was to the brown versus board decision in 1954 was that there was some guilt because of the japanese internment that's the subject of great great debate but warren is a great example chief justice warren of the nature the dual nature of reality he was wrong about internment and he was right about integration fdr was right about the war and wrong about internment you know it's just lincoln was right about emancipation but he was wrong about leaving slavery in place for the two years he did so if you want someone perfect you know write a novel after the war vinegar joe stillwell uh pacific commander comes to california and goes to award a citation to a regiment of japanese americans and there was a young hollywood actor who gave a talk at the same ceremony talking about how the we might come from different places but the blood we shed on the beaches in the cause of liberty was all the same color and that was a young man named ronald reagan who then as president 40 years later would apologize for the japanese internment i think the the ultimate apology for the internment the prevailing view that it was the wrong thing is a cautionary tale for us which is that when we have focused our fire literally and figuratively on particular groups we have almost always come to regret it in the fullness of time so african-americans women japanese americans during internment will that be true of immigrants today i would bet yes because of the historical pattern if you demonize if you select out people based on ethnicity or nationality whatever it is you're really not acting in the full spirit of the american revolution which is that we have to find a way to open that definition of what jefferson meant and i don't understand why history doesn't have more of an impact on these decisions in real time i do understand because it's emotional and it's fear-based and all that but part of my argument is whenever you want to say this group is bad this group must be discriminated against think back and find a case where we've decided that where the mainstream decided that and didn't come to regret it we always end up apologizing so why don't we not do what we have to why don't we not do the thing that we apologize for in the first place could we try that maybe once capitalism survived the 1930s for a whole host of reasons the industrial output of the second world war the new deal played its role prosperity that the prosperity that came after the war was really unparalleled in terms of its widespread impact the the creation of the post-war middle class is one of the great stories uh in history and i don't think it's a coincidence that it was a prosperous america that ultimately undid jim crow and ultimately passed the voting rights act because enough people who looked like me felt they were doing well enough that we could extend a hand people who are interested in social reform would do very well to be interested in broad-based prosperity too because the fear that keeps people from extending their hand is often based on an economic anxiety and if they're doing well if they're feeling secure in their own place in the world they are far more likely to widen the definition of the mainstream than they are if they're feeling economic pressure the american story is of private enterprise and the public sector working together and whether it's the transcontinental railroad or the creation of land-grant universities the internal improvements before that the interstate highways the gi bill public schools you know it's cold war spending uh there's no question that the public sector has fueled private prosperity and there's no question that private enterprise has created innumerable jobs and opportunity and i think trying to say all one is all good or one is all bad is a historical you know we people who are anti-government are usually doing so you know in a house lit by the tva after they've driven on an interstate built by dwight eisenhower shortly before they cash the social security check if you're looking for an emblem of the absolute ideological rigidity of the age there was a sign at an obamacare rally where someone held up a sign that said i want the government to keep their hands off my medicare and you don't really have to know anything else if i were trying to craft a big government-centric policy these days i don't think i would use the new deal i think i'd use the marshall plan the rebuilding of europe as the example the new deal conjures up this vast bureaucracy that you know as president reagan said the closest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program and so it's still in the in the brain stem of the american public the new deal can put people off nobody's against the marshall plan you know that was an act of generosity it rebuilt europe it created stability created security it helped us win the cold war and it's limited people think of the new deal as a perpetual thing which in many ways it has been the marshall plan is a focused attack on something the solution to a given problem we feared big government long before the civil war and that was jefferson versus hamilton uh the anxiety about the power of the state versus the power of the individual is as fundamental to the american dynamic as anything and it predates the civil war it posts the civil war it's a little it's intellectually dubious because we don't really define what we mean anymore by government versus private sector necessarily but but i think that there's no doubt that well this way there's something about the american spirit that bounces us from guard rail to guardrail right so now that we have this right wing populist who knows what happens next i mean you could end up on the far left again uh fairly quickly because we tend to go from extreme to extreme so joe mccarthy becomes a national force on lincoln's birthday in 1950 wheeling west virginia he gives a speech saying he has in his pocket the names of 253 i think 257 communists in the department of state never really found any there had been communists in the government but they had been driven out mostly by truman in a loyalty program that upset civil libertarians mccarthy his own lawyer roy cohn said was an opportunist he was he'd bought communism the way other people might buy a car it was a vehicle it means to an end he rose to power interestingly in a radio and newspaper world where his charges were sensational and immediately transmitted to the world it's very interesting that he fell in a tv world that people who watched what was unfolding decided that's not who we want to be or at least that's not who we want to be right now and my sense is that both edward r murrow's program which basically just showed mccarthy being mccarthy and then mccarthy's own performance during the army mccarthy hearings of being a bully made people think this isn't what we want to do now they thought that after four years of it you know these things take time that was four years watergate was 27 months you know it's it's it's not a it's not the work of a new cycle there was a huge amount of debate during the mccarthy era about whether a journalistic institution should simply report what was said broadcast what was said without assessing its validity without telling readers or viewers this is true or not true it sounds somewhat familiar and there was a lot of discussion a lot of argument about do you take mccarthy and treat him as a different kind of thing than simply the old news test of a united states senator says there's a communist loose in iowa therefore we must write that a united states senator said there's a communist loose in iowa just because someone in power says something does that make it news and if it does make it news does the journalistic organization have an obligation to assess the validity of what was said the 1950s really saw the birth or at least the growth of politics as entertainment it became a serialization it was serialized in the papers it was serialized on radio and ultimately on on television and richard hofstetter the great columbia historian said that it's now possible to keep the mass of men in a state of constant political ferment because you have characters you have drama you have shifting scenes it's really kind of like dare i say it a reality tv series mccarthyism fell not least because enough people said this is hysterical this is not in fact a proportionate response to what's unfolding and reason won out it's actually quite a reassuring story it took a long time lives were ruined took four years but ultimately mccarthy falls from power because enough people realized there was not a red under every bed as the phrase went and i think the mcfaul of mccarthy is an incredibly important case study in how reason can ultimately triumph over passion the anti-communism of the era was a passionate thing you felt the existential question and why wouldn't you nuclear weapons unfolding struggle uh people who would be inside the government trying to undo things totally makes sense it's it's an amazing drama but ultimately we decided you know what people who know a lot about this say it's not that big a deal in many ways the conservative movement that has a connection with conspiracy theories begins in the aftermath of the second world war there was anxiety about the way fdr handled yalta people thought that he had sold us out that quickly moved into a anti-communist conspiratorial world where eisenhower was seen as a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy george marshall the army chief of staff during world war ii was seen as a communist agent there was this ferment of completely wild and untrue views that the power structure was somehow working with the soviets against ordinary americans which plays in yet again to this recurring theme that there is some force foreigners powerful people rich people who are trying to undo the america that is most familiar and most beloved to those who are listening to the conspiracy theories conspiracy theories are perennial richard hofstetter called it the paranoid style in american politics they ebb and they flow there are completely respectable conservative voices in the post-war era william f buckley being chief among them but there are also for every buckley there's a john birch society uh in the 1950s you have a an incredibly fraught debate about the nature of freedom the nature of our defense against the soviets it's friday november 22 1963 it's a sunny day in dallas kennedy and johnson in texas trying to bring peace to the two wings of the democratic party in preparation for the 1964 election kennedy is shot to death in daily plasm johnson becomes president takes the oath of office on air force one they fly back to washington they don't know at that point to what extent this might be a widespread conspiracy that night johnson is lying in bed in his house in washington's house called the elms and he's listing all things he wants to do foreign leaders that need to be called funeral arrangements but in the midst of this he says he wants to pass the administration's civil rights bill without changing a comma the bill that had come into being after the standoff in the schoolhouse door with george wallace in alabama in june of that year and it was kind of a remarkable moment because johnson had a presidential race coming up the reason they'd been in texas is they were worried about the south no more political man ever drew breath than lyndon baines johnson everything about that moment would have led him politically to have made all kinds of promises all kinds of rhetorical nods to the civil rights legislation but not to pursue it there was something in johnson's soul that led him to believe that this was the moment to strike and as he later put it what the hell is the presidency for if not to do the big things that other men might not what the hell is the presidency for and he had a very clear vision that it was for doing big things that would loom large in the lives of people and ultimately in the life of history johnson had been a senator from texas a segregated state a lot of debate about to what extent he watered down civil rights legislation in the 50s but he did he was in no way a leading progressive he'd been put on the ticket in part because the new england liberals needed a southern conservative in the democratic party of that time and so you wouldn't have bet on that afternoon in dallas or on route back to andrews aboard air force one that lyndon johnson was going to try to finish the work of lincoln the story of civil rights in the post-war era in many ways begins with harry truman he integrates the military in 1948 that creates a huge backlash a lot of conservative democrats left the party over that in 1954 the brown decision ordered school integration in 1955 there's an enforcement decision that means we really mean it you got to do this but by 1964 there had been enough non-violent activism that the full planoplay of segregation was under attack kennedy after george wallace the governor of alabama steps in and says he's going to stop the integration of the university of alabama in tuscaloosa they propose a far-reaching civil rights act it was not going particularly well in congress which was dominated by white southern democrats until the assassination and what johnson then did from 63 to 64 is he created a remarkable coalition of republicans and democrats to pass a law that would finally undo what had been the react the racist reaction to the verdict of the civil war lyndon johnson was one of the great persuaders in american politics the johnson treatment it was called he would feel you um he wouldn't do very well now he would he was always grabbing folks and one of the ways he pushed the case for civil rights was he would tell the story about his housekeeper or his aides uh both male and female who were african-american who would have to stop on the way back from washington to texas to urinate on the side of the road because they couldn't use public facilities he he used the particular to illustrate the universal he also used the broad sweep of history he weaponized history in a very effective way he's sitting in the oval office with george wallace one day and wallace has been launching the counter-attack against the protesters on bloody sunday uh the selma to montgomery march and johnson puts him on a couch where he sinks down and wallace was a little guy anyway johnson was a big guy johnson's looming over him largely and he says george what do you want people to say you're on your tombstone do you want to say george wallace he hated or george wallace he built and it was clear that in johnson's mind you want you wanted said of you that you built and he really i think brilliantly appealed to a politician's vanity to do the right thing and that's a hell of a combination you can appeal to do the right thing or you can appeal to their vanity it's the truly great moments where you can do both johnson's historical stock is complicated obviously the deep unpopularity of the vietnam war which drove him from office in 1968 has driven him from i think the full light and appreciation of history that's changing somewhat as these things do but here's a man again whom you wouldn't have bet on like truman wouldn't have bet on truman being a transformative figure you might not have bet on lyndon johnson being a transformative figure who did remarkable things and was he perfect hell no god no but is the country better off because of what he did on certain issues yeah it is lyndon johnson is a vivid case of the best the presidency can be and sometimes the worst politicians can be he understood that being on a great stage required great action required a breadth of vision but he was a particularly uh sensitive politician strongly disliked slights i don't know anyone who likes being slighted so i should add that but he was always politically attuned to a remarkable degree and that created a kind of internal drama that i suspect was took a huge amount of wear and tear he never got over the fact that he thought the kennedys didn't give him enough credit uh he was always anxious and insecure about his social and educational credentials even why when he becomes the most one of the most powerful presidents in american history but none of this is to criticize them it's just to say that's what happens in this most human of businesses you know politics is not clinical it's not it is as human as it gets and johnson was as human as you got johnson believed in drawing on his life experiences when he argued for the voting rights act he talked about how he had taught poor mexican children and who had been so desperate made so desperate by poverty and that becoming president gave him an immense amount of power in order to help them as a texan as a southerner he had a certain credibility uh with the region that needed the most reform but they turned on him i mean it wasn't as though [Music] you know johnson going to civil rights was like nixon going to china uh goldwater the states barry goldwater carried in 1964 were the states that uh were in johnson's native region the key thing about him about johnson i think is that he saw the country whole and i don't mean to be sentimental about it but that that matters he saw that being president meant rising above sectional concerns rising above his constitution his old constituency i think that's one of the reasons he was able to make that leap from senator to vice president to president in terms of growing a widening breadth of vision is he understood that he was president of everybody and the great presidents have understood that politicians want to be reelected that's kind of the oxygen they breathe and sometimes they'll say it doesn't matter i will stand on principle and sometimes they mean it george h.w bush meant it on taxes in 1990. lyndon johnson said it a couple of times i don't think he particularly meant it uh ultimately he gave up the presidency one of the fascinating things about this whole world is you have these intensely ambitious driven people who are in a sphere of life where you're ultimately judged by how you transcend being ambitious and driven so it's an inherent tension you have to be tough and strong and egotistical to win great political power and then when you have great political power you're expected to rise above the kind of conflicts that you mastered and won to get there so actually we have a fairly high expectation we don't think about it much but a fairly high expectation of political leaders they frequently disappoint it's why we only talk about a handful in terms of you know we need to be more like x or y there aren't that many x or y's lyndon johnson risked just about everything for civil rights now he won an incredible victory that year he was lucky in his opponent barry goldwater was seen as too extreme johnson was playing for this conversation he was playing for and that sounds dismissive i don't mean that he was playing for the ages he wanted to be franklin roosevelt he wanted to be abraham lincoln he wanted people to put him in that paragraph in the paragraph of those who transcended the circumstances of their time and expanded liberty expanded what jefferson meant when he wrote that we're all created equal that's what lyndon johnson wanted he wanted something big and he got it and he fought for it and we have to give him credit for it it's really important when we talk about civil rights in in the 20th century to realize that we give truman credit for integrating the military we give eisenhower credit for responding to little rock we give johnson credit for finishing the work of lincoln and undoing jim crow but they were reacting to innumerable acts of courage from people whose names we know and don't know rosa parks martin luther king the people who marched and fought and died for this cause change in america comes when the powerful take notice of what the powerless have been saying and on civil rights and you see it in the relationship between kennedy and johnson and dr king the presidency was a lagging indicator not a leading indicator when when kennedy watched dr king give his speech to the march on washington and when he was over he said he's damn good he appreciated the performer in him understood what king was was doing the complicated calculus the trade-offs the deals cut to get to a legislative solution for the problems of injustice that were being pointed out in the great iconic moments is the work of politics and lyndon johnson in particular gets great credit because it would have been easy to have punted on this just said you know what i'm not going to deal with until after the election he dealt with it during the election he was willing to take the risk martin luther king understood america in fundamental ways at kennedy's funeral in washington walter font roy a associate of kings says to dr king civil rights will really pass now now we're going to get it and king looked at him and said we're a 10-day nation walter we basically have an attention span that lasts about 10 days now it's about 10 minutes or so but king understood that public attention and a public appetite for change came and went civil rights act was really about enforcing the 14th amendment the idea of equal access there was no special legislation though to try to enforce the 15th amendment the right giving african-american men the right to vote and so there was a voter registration march planned from selma alabama to montgomery alabama it was sunday march 7 1965. john lewis young man head of the student nonviolent coordinating committee he'd been born with a stutter he learned to speak by preaching to the chickens in his family's yard in troy alabama lewis and hosea williams are leading the march they go across the pettis bridge lewis had packed for jail he packed a toothbrush a book some fruit they come down the bridge the alabama troopers and posse men say there'll be no march today lewis says may we kneel and pray he kneels the possum and come after him and nearly beat him to death it had happened a thousand times or more in the american south but there was one thing different and that was a television camera and the footage of that attack was shown that night abc news broke in interrupting the broadcast premiere of judgment at nuremberg to show what what became known as bloody sunday and then a fascinating eight-day period unfolded because in the usual way the story is told you go from the scene on the bridge to lyndon johnson standing in the well of the house of representatives saying and we shall overcome but that was eight days and in those eight days lyndon johnson did something pretty remarkable he enforced he got wallace in line he also got king and the civil rights activists to acknowledge the authority of the courts so he got wallace to acknowledge the rule of law and he got the civil rights folks to acknowledge the rule of law he had everything in place and then he steps in and says that the time has come for voting rights to be secured in the united states and it's one of the great pieces of presidential literature written by dick goodwin uh who was a little hungover uh he was upset he had not been assigned the speech in the beginning and so he'd gone out and had a fairly liquid evening then came in the first draft was terrible they asked goodwin to do it and that speech which echoes even now is one of the great pieces of presidential rhetoric written totally on deadline in the eight days between bloody sunday and the speech to congress johnson made both george wallace and the civil rights activist submit to the authority of the courts that were supervising the march he made both acknowledge that there was a rule of law so he created a kind of balance equal poise and then he came in really on the side of the activists george corley wallace of alabama from barbara county used to chew on white owl cigars which is not a good kind of cigar he was a fairly progressive non-verdalently racist democrat until he lost a couple of elections and then became the segregationist we know him to have been he was a populist he understood the power of race among white voters that white voters who might be poor would vote with white voters who might be rich because they would have a common foe in the african-american world wallace said in his inauguration and montgomery that he would support segregation today segregation tomorrow segregation forever wallace became the perfect enemy for both president kennedy and president johnson he was the embodiment of this lost cause finding new energy in the cold war and ultimately the breaking of wallace was a huge breakthrough for the country wallace had been a fairly progressive democrat he lost an election he decided he wanted therefore to be victorious so he adopted segregation he became a much more virulent racist candidate out of convenience one of the important things to remember about george wallace is he did very well outside the south in 1968 1972 he was 1964. he was a candidate who took a regional message to a national audience and so if you're a northerner or midwesterner or a westerner and you want to look down on the south check and see how well george wallace did in your 1968 presidential race he won 13.5 percent of the popular vote kind of amazing five states they were all southern states but wisconsin indiana i mean this was this was someone who had a message that was all too tragically american and not exclusively southern in january 1963 george wallace stands in front of the alabama capitol in montgomery and says segregation today segregation tomorrow segregation forever and it was this creed decor from the heart of the old south in a new world in a world of the cold war of a world of shifting identity and it would not stand for long but it was a powerful cry at that point and captured the fears of millions of people i met wallace once i was about 1995 or 96. and of course he was in a wheelchair and trying foreign assassination attempt in 1972 and we met in montgomery a lot of history in montgomery alabama it's there's a place where jefferson davis took the oath of office as president of the confederacy it's the place where wallace stood and did his segregation today segregation tomorrow segregation forever speech and dexter avenue baptist church which of course is dr king's church is not far away we were down in that same sort of square and wallace at that point was quite old and you know frail in terms of the chair but he was sitting in front of this quite heroic portrait of himself and so you had this interesting conflict between the man as he was and the man as he wished to remember himself and in many ways that's true of the region he came to represent so clearly wallace had recanted a lot of his views you know some of it was convenient uh he wanted to continue to win elections and african-americans were now enfranchised and so um he's a great example of how do we deal with redemption in american life you know do you take him at his word or not you know everybody has to make a decision on that the last speech lyndon johnson ever gave was at his library in austin uh he come from his ranch in stonewall there'd been a snowstorm he was late it was a civil rights symposium and johnson knew it was the end was near uh he started smoking again he started drinking he was told by his doctors never smoke again or he won't make it and he didn't but the speech he gave was about the centrality of civil rights as the american promise and he said i feel embarrassed that i've done so little that i was not able to accomplish more which is a remarkably open and candid assessment of of what was otherwise what was in fact an incredible legacy why are we so divided now there are a couple of thoughts uh first of all the 1850s were pretty bad so you know let's not run too far ahead here i think that one of the issues is the parties have become purer that is the democratic party had a segregationist wing and a northern liberal wing the republicans had midwestern conservatives but new england progressives western conservatives the parties have become more their essence and so you don't have the parties don't play the filtering role they once did truman worried about this harry truman said that he worried about the moment when all the liberals would be in one party and all the conservatives in another because then you would have this stark choice and the other side wouldn't have any incentive to cooperate i think the death of incentive for compromise is is a key villain here voters don't reward those who vote according to what their minds tell them as opposed to what their party caucus tells them and i think some of this is on us lawmakers only hear by and large from the people who are upset if you're pleased that your senator your representative voted with the other side on something with which you agreed let them know now you're probably not going to know that because that presumes a pretty detailed grasp of what's going on which is unusual but this is not brain surgery politicians are reactive they are accountable they are interested in pleasing you to make sure they continue in office and if you want something different you have to speak up the work of the mid-1960s the passage of the 64 act the passage of the 65 act really finishes a century that began with the civil war of a huge part of the mainstream of the country not accepting a fundamental premise of equality after 1965 it became very difficult for that to be a mainstream position there are those who do but 1865 to 1965 is a long complicated story that ends well or well enough which is about all you can do in terms of history by securing open public accommodation by securing the right to vote we in many ways manage to come as close as we've been able to to leveling a playing field and there's an immense amount of work to be done and there's a lot that's happened since then of of immense importance unquestionably but by and large lincoln would have recognized what johnson would linden by and large abraham lincoln would have recognized what lyndon johnson did as finishing the work of the civil war and that's an extraordinary arc by march 1968 lyndon johnson was bereft by the war in vietnam 47 americans were dying a day in 1968 in vietnam the year had begun with tet the north vietnamese offensive johnson realized that there was very little he could do while running for president and trying to negotiate it into the war he would have loved to have remained as president he was certainly open to being drafted but eugene mccarthy a democrat from minnesota had come in challenged him in the new hampshire primary done very well bobby kennedy at that point had entered the race so he had these challenges from the left and saw the writing on the wall seems to me the key thing for this particular era is to understand that it is difficult but not unique the forces that are shaping the worst parts of us right now isolationism nativism racism extremism are forces that are part of the american character and that might be more depressing than you might want to think but i think there's something somewhat liberating about knowing that we have faced these forces in the past we have pushed them back we have made progress they're never permanently defeated there's no such thing as a permanent victory i've i think about the soul because i think that there are better angels here and our worst instincts here there's dr king here and there's the clan here and every day is shaped by the struggle between these two forces it's true of all of us and it's true of the country as well now we do better in america when we actually listen and try to use our brains as opposed to simply reacting with our guts so we need to find some way to restore the role of reason if i disagree with you 99 percent of the time and so when you get up and say something i think oh jesus here they go again if i don't listen then i'm not being true to the american revolution if you're a conservative you should love this point because this is the original intent the original intent of the country was that reason would take a stand with passion in the arena so if you get up you make your case and i think huh maybe they got a point i'd argue that a lot of the best part of america happens when you say huh maybe they have a point and we don't say huh maybe they have a point nearly enough right now so we need to use our brains we need to use reason and we absolutely have to fight tribalism we have to fight this instinct to pick one jersey or the other pick one team or the other and then the other team is just always wrong because i think we know in our own lives that's not true i mean maybe maybe people think they're right all the time i don't know anybody who does the country was built by people who were willing to learn from their mistakes who were willing to say huh i got that one wrong and if you can't do that then you foreclose the possibility of ever learning of ever moving ahead if we had not been able to admit that we made a mistake on segregation for instance or how about this if we had not been willing to admit that we had made a mistake in the 1930s and early 1940s by not actively opposing adolf hitler if we hadn't admitted that we wouldn't have won the second world war if we didn't admit that segregation was wrong we would not be a freer and just just more just and better country if we weren't willing to admit that slavery was wrong we would have been hopelessly knocked out of modernity what's the common denominator there the common denominator is we looked the facts in the face and we thought you know what what we thought was true and good yesterday is not true and good today and we used we used facts and we used reason that's not a partisan point it sounds partisan today which tells you something but it's not ronald reagan was right about the cold war franklin roosevelt was right about hitler in the end there's a republican there's a democrat you know it's it's not about that party label it's about the capacity to say i want to live in a country that looks and feels like this

Channel: Kunhardt Film Foundation

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Id: Xl9PQk1C9gQ

Length: 180min 41sec (10841 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021