Recasting the Cast Iron Man: John C Calhoun

[Music] so without any further ado Bob elder it is great to be here today talking to y'all I am very grateful for the invitation from John John where you are John I just I'm ashamed to say the first time that I've met John was today but I've very much enjoyed talking with him and hearing about what y'all are doing here at the pachyderm club it's I think the last time I was in the the Petroleum Club was for a wedding more than ten years ago so it's great to be back here as well I should say from the outset that everything that I'm gonna say today about Cal poon is part of an ongoing book project which I hope eventually will sell more books than my first book dead my editor tells me that this book will be out sometime at the end of 2019 which I told him that will happen if he'll come and teach my classes at Valparaiso for me so I'm working on it but this is still kind of material from the second research project so I'm gonna be talking about Calhoun Jhansi Calhoun and I'm gonna do several things here first of all I'm going to talk about how Calhoun has been popping back up in the news and in our kind of national consciousness in the last five years in very interesting ways sometimes confusing ways unexpected ways then I'll talk a little bit about Calhoun's biography just the kind of bare facts of his life and a also a kind of very spare intellectual biography what are the most important ideas that he's known for and then I'll talk a little bit about how historians have approached Calhoun interpreted Calhoun in passed and how that is changing right now and I hope that my book is going to be part of that shift and I'll try to I'll try to end in plenty of time to take questions here so the most immediate point that Calhoun began popping up recently if you are in the back you may not be able to see this as a monument to Calhoun in Charleston South Carolina in Marion Square right in the middle of Charleston and if you were looking from the top of this monument this is a picture from 1907 you would be able to see Emanuel AME Church the church that in June of 2015 Dylan roof entered and shot nine people during a Bible study at that church Emanuel AME Church ironically enough is on Calhoun Street in Charleston and it amid all the other reactions that the that that shooting provoked one was a direct reaction within a couple days to this Monument so a couple days after the shootings in Charleston someone vandalized this Monument and at the base of the monument to Calhoun which is this giant pillar the original inscription reads truth justice and the Constitution and someone added truth justice and the Constitution and slavery below that and then below Calhoun's name in red they wrote racist and what so what they're doing is connecting what happened at mother Emanuel to the legacy of Calhoun and pretty soon this was just one incident pretty soon all over the nation people began debating Calhoun's legacy the the one of the more prominent places that this debate started was at Yale University which has since 1933 has had a residential college named for Calhoun who went to Yale in the early 19th century and in 1933 they named a residential college after him so this is one of the places at Yale where students live and eat and a debate erupted which it has periodically over the past 20 years about whether or not to rename this College and at first the president of Yale Peter salivate resisted the urges to rename Calvin College he said his argument was essentially we're better off not trying to erase parts of history that make us uncomfortable but rather using them to kind of talk about and provoke discussions about that history and so let's leave Calhoun College there the Yale spend the entire academic year of 2015 through 2016 engaging the entire student body in conversations about Calhoun College the entire freshman class had to go through essentially a Calhoun crash course taught by history professors because Peter Saliva's position was before we make a decision about this we have to know a little bit about this person and then eventually solve a and the board at Yale decided not to rename the college but to name a special commission on renaming that would preside over any of these sorts of situations in the future and the criteria that they came up with was that in considering whether or not to rename a building they would consider what they called the primary legacy of a figure and they decided the next year that Calhoun's primary legacy had been his defense of slavery which we'll talk about and on those grounds they finally renamed Calvin College in September of this of 2017 to Grace Hopper College I don't know what they're gonna do with images like this which are literal a part of the facade the stone of the building but but they did rename the college so he was he was kind of in the news for that maybe most interestingly and this is a wichita connection is last june a book by a duke historian named nancy McLain came out and McLane's book is called democracy in Chains the deep history of the radical right stealth plan for America I should say that this book is a very it's very sensationalistic it's very controversial it and the basic argument of democracy in Chains is that Charles Koch figured that we many of us in this room know who that is the basic argument of the book is that Charles Koch over the course of the last two to three decades has employed the ideas of a somewhat a famous but to most people obscure economists names James Buchanan who championed something called public choice theory in the mid 20th century and public choice theory if I had to condense it Russell would be much better at condensing this than I would but public choice theory was basically the idea that because government legislation is coercive to pass it you need as unanimous a consent as possible so that there's broad consensus about the legitimacy of this and that if you're going to force people to do things there need to be options there need to be choices so one of the grandchildren of public choice theory could be seen as things like charter schools today things like that MacLaine's argument is that Koch founded and funded Institute's all over the United States including at places like George Mason University in order to support these ideas get them into the public sphere and in her argument subvert democracy and the book has been at just a foot I mean nobody has nobodies agreed on it I think it's been a very controversial book but where did in in Maclean's telling where did James Buchanan this mid 20th century economist get his ideas about subverting democracy and in her view subverting majoritarian rule well he got them from John C Calhoun so her entire first chapter is on Calhoun and his ideas which we'll talk about you'll see maybe the the connections and and her argument is that James Buchanan and other figures picked up Calvin's ideas turned them into kind of economic theories and that those have now been popularized and that these are now the basis of what she calls the radical right in the United States okay so Calhoun is and and there's this is just the tip of the iceberg I could go on and on there's a Lake Calhoun outside of Minneapolis Minnesota that is there's an ongoing argument about whether or not to rename that there are I have a Google Alert set I'm probably the only person in the United States with a Google News Alert set for John C Calhoun and I get multiple alerts every day because there are conversations going on all over the United States about the legacy of Calhoun and whether or not to rename things over him I bet other than Andrew Jackson thanks probably to Donald Trump's comparison to Andrew Jackson Calhoun is probably the the nineteenth-century politician who has been mentioned the most in the last year or two so these are all things that are kind of why he's back in the news I guess so I'll give a brief overview of Calhoun's biography his life and a couple of the most important ideas before we go to kind of how historians have interpreted him you may or may not be able to see this very well but this is probably the best-known image of Calhoun taken in 1849 just a two months before he died he was sick with tuberculosis he didn't look like this most of his life but I think this image has kind of shaped our perception of Calvin Calvin was born in 1782 I always find it significant that he was born in the period when the United States is governed under the Articles of Confederation so he is born before the Constitution before the debate over the Constitution before it's ratified and among a very small subset of American politicians in Calhoun's generation I think Calhoun had the idea of the Constitution as something that could still be tinkered with that needed to be perfected still something that I don't think we a lot of people have today and I think that that has to do with when he was born the fact that he saw this process working out Calvin's family were scots-irish they immigrated to the United States in 1933 from Ulster in Ireland they were Presbyterians probably involved in the linen trade in Ireland and when times got bad they emigrated to Pennsylvania and kept following free land down the eastern seaboard until they finally got to South Carolina in the 1750s his father Patrick was really famous for his day politician in South Carolina one of the wealthiest landowners in the Upstate of South Carolina and part of the debates went during the constitutional era Patrick was involved in the debates over whether or not to ratify the US Constitution after the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and Patrick was a vocal opponent of South Carolina ratifying the US Constitution on the grounds that he said in John Calhoun's memory he said you don't give that sort of power to an entity as far away as this new federal government it's too much power to give to an entity that far away Calhoun was wealthy I mentioned that not as wealthy though as a lot of the South Carolina's Lowcountry planters that you might think of when we think of kind of the antebellum south and and our images of that the up country of South Carolina was a very hard scrabble small D Democratic kind of place and this was kind of where Calhoun grew up somebody realized that Calhoun had extraordinary intellectual abilities early in his life and his brothers after the death of his father agreed to send him to Yale he'd had a kind of rudimentary classical education at a school run by a Presbyterian minister in the back country of South Carolina he graduated from Yale in 1804 went back to South Carolina and immediately started a kind of meteoric rise in prominence he's first elected to the US House of Representatives during the War of 1812 he becomes known as one of the Warhawks who is in favor of pushes going to war with Britain in the war of 1812 he is the Secretary of War from 1816 to 1824 he's probably one of the ironies of Calhoun's career is he's probably one of the primary figures responsible for the United States having something of a modern military when the Civil War comes around which is then used against the south but Calhoun probably lays the groundwork for a kind of scientific approach to the military during his tenure there he's then vice president under two very different presidents John Quincy Adams first and then Andrew Jackson and I think it's a sign of Calhoun's kind of stature and national standing that that that he is vice-president under both of those figures although he and will come back to this he doesn't get along with Jackson very well I think it's an understatement to say that supposedly when Andrew Jackson died some of his last words were I should have hung John C Calvin and it actually sounds like something Jackson would say so I I don't doubt that story when Calhoun resigns from being vice president during the nullification crisis of 1832 to 1833 which we'll talk a little bit about South Carolina immediately elects him senator and he serves in the US Senate until his death in 1850 with the brief interlude as Secretary of State during John Tyler's administration so in the 1840s and Cal who dies in in 1850 in March of 1850 right at the kind of in the critical period when the Union is starting to unravel and he's been alternately blamed for the Civil War and for and and other people who believe that if he had lived he might have been able to prevent the Civil War but historians don't usually deal in hypotheticals like that so Calvin is mainly known for - if I had to pick two central ideas or contributions that Calhoun is known for one of them would be I know you can't read this I'm gonna read it one of them would be the crucial role that he plays in the Senate during the 1830s in committing the south to what was a a new position about slavery in the 1830s and this is famously summed up in Calhoun speech on the floor of the US Senate in 1837 when he declares slavery upon not only a necessary evil but a positive good in a democratic society so the context of this is that there had been increasing numbers of abolitionist petitions to Congress in the Senate in the 1830s and Calhoun's position was that the Congress shouldn't even accept these petitions they should be immediately tabled not discussed this was too dangerous of a proposition and the historical position of many southerners had been something like Thomas Jefferson's position on slavery which was yes slavery is not a good thing it's an evil but it's one that we can't easily do without without doing damage both to our own economy and to the well-being of the enslaved themselves so it's a it's a conundrum Jefferson famously said you know we have the tiger by the tail and we can neither let him go nor hang on with with any safety and Calhoun becomes dissatisfied with this position he doesn't think it's strong enough and so in this famous speech in 1837 he says I'm just gonna read parts of it here he says but I take higher ground I hold that in the present state of civilization were two races of different origin and distinguished by color and other physical differences as well as intellectual are brought together the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two is instead of an evil a good a positive good I hold them that they're never yet there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not in point of fact live on the labor of the other broad in general as is this assertion it is fully borne out by history this is not the proper occasion but if it were it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labor it was produced and so large a share given to the non producing classes the devices are almost innumerable from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivance 'as of the modern I might well challenge a comparison between them and the more direct simple and patriarchal mode by which the labor of the African race is among us commanded by the European and he goes on to make comparisons between industrial laboring classes and the slaves of the south making the point that slaves have it better than than the industrial laboring classes of England and the North then at the end he says but I will not dwell on this aspect of the question I turned to the political and here I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the south against which these blind fanatics are waging war forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions it is useless to disguise the fact there is always and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization a conflict between labour and capital the condition of society in the south exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict and which extend this explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding States has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the north now there's several really important things going on in this some historians have pointed to the fact that in this speech Calhoun is using categories that Karl Marx will use ten years later in the communist Manifesto he's talking about the conflict between labor and capital he's even and this is why marxist historians are frequently fascinated by calhoun he is even seems to acknowledge this point that Marx and and others would be arguing in the 19th century which is that the non producing classes right the the bourgeois in Marxist terms essentially apropriate the labor of the of the producing classes Kalam seems to say yeah of course that happens it's always happened and we just disguise it now so why disguise it is Calhoun's radical really incredibly radical argument why disguise it let's just acknowledge it and acknowledge that actually slavery is a better way of of managing the relationship between labor and capital because it unites the interests of labour and capital together in the person of the planter and we don't have this conflict that that in the 1830s Calhoun and others were seeing in the industrial capital capitalistic economies of the north or England so he's essentially just saying you know this is a better way to manage this relationship and obviously it's it's a based on this root assumption of race but he's also saying near the end right that this is a better way to build a Democratic Society he's saying Calhoun is often accused of being anti-democratic this was one of Nancy Maclean's central arguments and I don't think that's true at all I think Calhoun was intensely Democratic but he had his own somewhat illiberal vision of democracy he believed passionately in white democracy and he thought that white democracy in the United States depended on slavery the idea these ideas were so radical that when Calhoun made this speech in the Senate some of his southern colleagues left to their feet to say hey we don't actually agree with this this is going too far for us right we still hold to the old necessary evil argument but it's also undoubtedly true that by the 1850s Calhoun's argument was the majority common argument that most white Southerners believed in and so in in some ways by committing white Southerners to this a vision of slavery is a positive good you could lay some of the blame for the civil war on Calhoun because once white Southerners are committed to that vision there's not much room for negotiation with something like abolition there's no room for gradual emancipation which was the path that Great Britain took if you're committed to a vision of slavery is a positive good you're not going to be willing to negotiate it at all the other the other and and just as important this is why I somewhat disagree with Yale and their idea that Calvin's primary legacy is his defense of slavery I think it may be one of his primary legacies that there can be more than one the other one is Calhoun's ideas about the relationship between States and the and the federal government which get embodied in his arguments about nullification and then at the end of his career the idea of the concurrent majority so in the Nullification Crisis which happens in 1832 this is the the break between Andrew Jackson and Calhoun Calhoun was Jackson's vice president most southerners thought that Andrew Jackson was a kind of Pro states rights president and in 1828 Congress passes a new tariff right a new import tax and the idea behind the terror of 1828 was to encourage northern manufacturing so they taxed the sorts of manufactured goods that you could get from England but that we're also being produced in northern factories things like cotton textiles you know shoes wool other manufactured goods the tariff quickly became known as the tariff of abominations by southerners and their position was that constitutionally any form of Taxation has to apply equally to all different parts of the country that's there's a clause in the Constitution right which says any form of taxation levied by Congress has - it has to be equal across in its effects and the argument of many southerners like calhoun is that the effects of the 1828 tariff were not equal and they were not being used simply for revenue which they believed was a constitutional use of tariffs instead they were being used to prop up certain industries to kind of pick winners and losers if you want to use our kind of current terminology and Calhoun's answer to this came in the form of this doctrine of nullification which he elaborates first in an 1828 document called the south carolina exposition and protest and then in 1831 in in something called the fort hill address and the basic idea of nullification which many of us have heard of and are probably familiar with right is the idea that a state can interpose itself between its citizens and the federal government in the case of an unconstitutional law and to get this idea Calhoun harped back to two documents from 1798 the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions which had been written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the midst of a conflict with the John Adams administration the Adams administer had passed the Alien and Sedition Acts which was suppressed free speech and Jefferson and Madison had responded with the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions saying that a state could on the in their view a state could interpose itself Jefferson actually in the Kentucky resolution used the word nullification but the Kentucky legislature took it out they thought that was a little too radical but Calhoun harks back to those documents and brings them into the current context and and argues that states can interpose themselves between their people and the federal government and this would trigger in Calhoun's thinking a constitutional I mean it would be a crisis but a constitutional convention in which each state would decide whether or not the states protest was legitimate or not so in essence it would trigger a whole new round of what happened in 1787 through 1789 and you would decide based on how many states were in favor or against whether this was constitutional then you would go on down the road so in the Fort Hill address in 1831 he says the great and leading principle is that the general governor government emanated from the people of the several states forming distinct political communities and acting in their separate and sovereign capacity and not from all the people forming one aggregate political community that the Constitution of the United States is in fact a compact a word that was really important to Calhoun to which each state is a party in the character already to describe and that the several states or parties have a right to judge of its infractions and in case of a deliberate palpable and dangerous exercise of power not delegated they have the right in the last resort to use the language of the Virginia resolutions to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil and for maintaining within their respective limits the authorities rights and liberties appertaining to them and he says you can call this whatever you want state right veto nullification any other name but he says this is a fundamental principle of our Constitution now calhoun believed some people thought this was a crazy idea john quincy adams called called nullification the most pernicious political doctrine ever introduced in his lifetime now the Adams were prone to overstating things like this but but he did honestly believe this was a dangerous political doctrine Calhoun thought that nullification was essential to maintaining the Union that this was the only way that states would be able to be confident enough to stay in the Union because Calhoun also believed that in the end states have a right to secede and so only a mechanism like nullification would allow this to somehow be worked out Calhoun develops this idea over the rest of his life and it's probably best expressed in his disquisition on government which is published after his death in 1850 and in disposition on government this becomes the idea of the concurrent majority and basically the idea that calhoun expresses in the disquisition on government is that it's a mistake to think about any form of government especially democracies as operating on the principle of numerical majorities he says there's two kinds of majorities there's a numerical majority and what he calls a concurrent majority and he says if you operate your democracy on the paper basis of a numerical majority well you're gonna get tyranny somebody's gonna get squashed the minority in his view slaveholders in his own era the minority is going to get the short end of the stick eventually if you if you operate on the principle of numerical majority so instead of that calhoun says we need to think of society as separated out into interests there are different groups that constitute different interests in a society and each of those interests Calhoun says should have a veto power ultimate veto over any form of legislation that's on the table and in Calhoun's view this would assure that nobody even proposes any legislation that's not in the common interest because they know that whoever's interest it is not in will veto it so he views this as kind of purifying the political system not making people coalesce into huge political parties that try to beat each other up in order to get numerical majorities and then pass their legislation over the objections of the other party other people pointed out that this might be a recipe for total government paralysis Calhoun gave lots of examples like he said jury trials juries operate this way interestingly he used the example of the part of Polish Parliament which not many people probably knew him anything anything about in 1850 and he said look at how the Five Civilized tribes the Iroquois nations decide things they have to be perfectly unanimous before they can go forward the concurrent majority has been debated ever since much more by political scientists I think than by historians but it's definitely one of Calhoun's most important contributions ok so Colleen dies in 1850 and over the next decade a lot of his ideas especially the idea of nullification and the idea that the states are a sovereign unit and the logical endpoint of that that is secession Calhoun himself is not a secessionist in the sense that he he doesn't advocates but his ideas are weaponized in the 1850s by other southerners who are and and it is Calhoun's ideas I think that are partly responsible for secession in the Civil War my favorite story about this is this is a an image of Calvin's grave in Charleston and in 1865 the poet Walt Whitman was sitting in a hospital in Washington DC and he her overheard two Union soldiers talking and one Union soldier said to the other I've been in Charleston I just came from Charleston and I saw Calhoun's monument by which he meant this tomb not the monument that we started with and the other soldier said no you haven't seen Calhoun's monument I've seen Calhoun's Monument Calhoun's monument is the entire South ravaged and destroyed a whole generation of young men dead on the field and the very people that he didn't think deserved freedom freed that's Calhoun's monument and i think in some ways this has been a one of the verdicts of a lot of historians on Calhoun so I'll just give two quick examples and just talk about how historians see him how that's changing and and then I'm done so in 1947 Richard Hofstadter wrote a really a wonderful essay on Calhoun but took a pretty negative view of him I think Hofstadter whose essay is called the marks of the master class said Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy a particular in an age of nationalism a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country quite understandably he developed a certain perversity of mine or this one's much more recent the last biography of Calvin in 1993 the historian Irvin Bartlett said the dominant tendencies of the Western world moved toward human liberty equality and nationality and Calhoun frozen in time in tiny South Carolina seemed to defy them all my own favorite negative assessment of Calhoun is from the historian David Potter who once said that Calhoun was the most majestic champion of error since Milton's Satan which is a I mean if you know Milton that's like that's sort of a compliment but I mean Satan is a very interesting figure and Milton but not really but not a not a positive assessment now I don't think historians are not in general moving towards a kind of defense or a positive assessment of Calhoun I think but what is undeniable I think right now is how important calhoun and his ideas still are so you may not be able to see these but these are examples of books that have come out just in the last I think the oldest one of these is probably three years old that are provoked I think a total reassessment of kind of Calhoun's importance and context and I'm just going to make two points about these the first one is that it used to be common a common interpretation to see calhoun as representing the entire south as a kind of backwards looking reactionary being drug into the modern era you know kicking and screaming force and this has to do with slavery of course which most people saw as a fundamentally pre-modern pre capitalistic form of labor and in the last couple years historians have been kind of overturning that interpretation and showing how slavery in the south is connected to the rise of global capitalism so some of these books describe how slaves and slavery and the expansion of slavery in the South is financed by banks in the north and in England and of course the cotton is being exported to the north and two cotton mills in Manchester England and cotton is the the fundamental it is the quintessential engine and material of the Industrial Revolution in England so and and they're showing how the practice of slavery in the south is itself run in many cases according to kind of capitalistic notions of efficiency and value and those sorts of things so what does this mean well instead of Calhoun looking like a kind of backwards looking defender of an outmoded regime of Labor kind of you know do it placing his hand and saying stop against the flow of history I think now calhoun looks much more like a someone who's facing domestic headwinds of abolitionism at home but if you look at at calhoun and the south from an international perspective he's mounting a defense of a vital hub of global capitalism that cotton manufacturers in places like England were terrified of losing and so it makes the the story much less much less simple and binary I think the old interpretation of the civil war was a modern capitalistic North it goes to war with a pre capitalist agrarian South and that I don't think we can really say that anymore so Calhoun looks very different in that regard the other one is so see it's skip to this one the other one is a reconsideration of secession now Calhoun's ideas do lend themselves to secession I said I think in an American context we usually think of secession rightly as a kind of self obviously wrong idea an idea that's been tried failed and should never be tried again right because of our own history right our own our own history of the Civil War we know that seven hundred and fifty thousand people died at least the last time this was tried right so unless you know I used to say maybe Texas will try it I think maybe if Donald Trump wins again maybe California will try it we'll see but in an international context this simply isn't true the civil war instead of being the end of secession in the modern world the civil war is really the beginning of secession in the modern world the Harvard historian and David Armitage calculated that since 1816 there have been roughly 500 wars in the world and of those a hundred and nine have been fought on the about the issue of secession so nearly hundred wars since or you know around the time of the Civil War have been fought by states trying to establish an independent identity and instead of seeing Calhoun as kind of the father of this kind of failed philosophy nullification and secession I think instead whatever you think of it for better or worse Calhoun instead now looks like maybe one of the first figures in modern history to think about the question of how how you can unmake a nation-state which is a new creation right the new the United States is one of the first modern nation-states and one of the fundamental questions about these is how do you unmake them can they be unmade and by what means could they be unmade if so and political philosophy scientists and philosophers now are engaged in this question which they now call political divorce and we're seeing this I use this one if you can't see this this is graffiti that says Catalonia is not Spain Catalonia has voted to secede from Spain twice in the last year and just this week they reelected the ousted regional president who had presided over the secession process and provoked now you know an ongoing constitutional crisis in Spain and we can just think of Scotland and brexit and all these other issues where this is not a dead issue in our society so like it or not I think we're stuck with John C Calhoun for the foreseeable future thank you very much I'll take questions [Applause] [Music] you mean the concurrent majority and constitution or the concurrent majority well that's this is a great question i calhoun thought that the principle of the concurrent majority was actually embedded in the constitution so he thought that he his interpretation of the Constitution is that it's mostly a negative document concerned with restraining power and in his view that's what the concurrent majority was that a that a minority interest should have veto power over the majority so so he just thought that the Constitution needed to be perfected in that regard so he didn't think it was wrong his view was that this concurrent majority principle was already there just needed to be strengthened if that makes sense one mechanism that he suggested in his own time was maybe there should be a northern and a southern president each with veto question/comment jump c compliment was first elected Congress needs to attempt was a nationalist and during the War of 1812 a strong opponent of what became the Hartford Convention effort that arguably said that was an effort to secede by the delinquent states at that time at that approach isn't it fair to say that Calvin's position regarding regardless of his odious support for slavery throughout his career on this issue on the nationalist issues he actually flip-flopped and and did 180 politically while he was serving in public office my quick comment also I'm the opportunity to meet at the I am but I would say that he had more of an intellectual impact on James Buchanan as well as the rest of the Nobel laureate of Chicago he was mentioning Friedman Ziegler for the coast there's others who will shape my mind as woman than the idiocy of yeah you're making a critique of MacLaine's book that I think a lot of historians and economists or have made I I can't speak to her other argument but it seems to me the link between Calhoun and Buchanan is very tenuous at best from what I can tell on your first so the accusation of the flip-flop which even in the 19th century right this was an explosive accusation yes it's true that Calhoun is much more nationalistic in the early phases of his career than he is later his explanation of that accepted or not is that these are two very different contexts that in the early part of this career they're facing the the country was facing a situation where they literally could have been blotted out of existence by Great Britain and that in that context he was a strong nationalist he supported a strong Navy he opposed the Hartford Convention the first where secession actually first surfaces in so and then later Calhoun's view is that by the end of his career he says the dangers now are different that we need a different our system can adapt to both but we need emphasis in different places of the system to protect states rights later in his career now Calhoun never would have acknowledged he he was not he never said he was wrong he would not never and most politicians won't but Calhoun seems constitutionally incapable of admitting that III do think there's more to the flip flop than calhoun himself said but it's also true I mean I think you also have to grant his argument that there are different contexts going on does that sort of help this is a biographer trying to be fair to the subject and also so I think the statue question is such an interesting one my first thing is I don't think there's a principle that fits every I think it would actually be a mistake to say there's one principle that should fit all all of this stuff right what I really liked about what Yael did at least at first was they said they resisted the impulse to just tear it down and rename it instantly right and I think that's the only part of the whole thing that I really don't like as a historian it gives me pause is is the episodes where governments have kind of just taken these statues down in the middle of the night I think there should be robust public conversations about these statues and what I like that Yael did was they said okay were initially right they said before you call for this to be renamed before it comes down you have to actually learn about this person so one of historian at Yale David blight gave a lecture where he went through all of Calhoun's accomplishments his long record of public service and said look we have to know all about this before we can even talk about whether or not to take this down I think in in and I think Gale is a good case because if it's a residential hall I would be really sorry if they took down the statue in Charleston the residential Hall I once had dinner in a house in South Carolina in Edgefield South Carolina in the dining room and there was a giant picture of Calhoun in the dining room right over the table and our hostess apologized for this she said this was here when we bought the house and and it's so important I just don't feel like I can take it down and I ate dinner with Calhoun basically that figure kind of looking down at me the whole time and it gave me a little bit of sympathy for the the students in in Calhoun College having to kind of eat under that presence all the time but I think the important thing is that Yale's process in the beginning was a kind of democratic process to involved education and debate about it but I think that I think it should be left up to local jurisdictions and I just wanted I believe in history not leave this part of God's plan so I wouldn't do that without slavery oh we have to kind of understand that you know [Music] Thank You Joseph yeah I think I think you know that's the argument right for keeping these statues and things up which as a historian is when I'm really sympathetic to which is these are if we take all these down then we're losing as a teacher what my reaction is we're losing these incredible opportunities for discussion right the fact that you can go to Charleston South Carolina and have Calhoun statue right there in the square and basically look across the street and see Emanuel AME Church and and understand the kind of drama of that juxtaposition would be it would be a real shame to lose that I think [Laughter] [Music] racism perhaps you've seen a bigger problem of economic exploitation and poverty ended in opposition to war and for that he was pretty much assassinated it is his progression Aires is his growth from racism is something broader than poverty to something causing both war significance if you would compare him well I mean Calvin there's there's a couple things I mean first of all Calhoun certainly develops as well maybe in the opposite direction not sure but I think I think one interesting thing is that Martin Luther King evolves in the sense that he comes to see that you can't deal in his view you can't deal with racism and race racial problems whatever those are he sees that those are intertwined with economics right and whatever your whatever your side that spectrum of politics you're on I think you can probably acknowledge that in different ways races intertwined with economics you know race and certain and class closely correlate in in this country and I think Calhoun is a thinker in the 19th century who already realized in almost in indirect in very different ways than King that those two things were intimately linked right his 1837 speech he's saying look if you're opposing slavery then let's talk about the larger system of which slavery is a part of right in in his view you're never gonna get rid of this system this inequality between classes is something that's always going to be there it's always been there we just have to figure out how to arrange it in the most beneficial way for both of them and in his view right that's slavery now where Calhoun did with that is well then why not enslave all the poor white people as well right and there are other thinkers in the south like George Fitzhugh who actually go that far and say hey actually this would be great for everybody [Applause]

Channel: Wichita Pachyderm Club

Views: 8,390

Rating: 4.5044246 out of 5

Keywords: John C. Calhoun, Bob Elder, Wichita, Kansas, Pachyderm Club, Slavery

Id: n295KwK8wLM

Length: 56min 22sec (3382 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018