Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 2, Episode 2: Heather Cox Richardson: How the South Won the Civil War

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Season 2, Episode 2: Heather Cox Richardson: How the South Won the Civil War · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, I will be speaking with Heather Cox Richardson, American historian and professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Richardson will be discussing her sixth and latest book, How the South Won the Civil War, Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a new birth of freedom, Richardson reveals how and why the old South not only survived, but thrived both in the South and the West.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, what is this fight for the soul of America?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: You describe it as a fight that's been underway from the start of the American colonies up until today.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: We certainly do feel like we're in a fight.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Could you help us to understand what that fight is about?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, first of all, I want to say what a joy it is to be here and to point out that both you and I are in what we do in part because of the same man who both was your advisor and who was the man, although he was not in my field, who encouraged me to go to graduate school.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: So it feels lovely for the two of us to be here.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, someone in honor of Otto Eckstein, who is responsible, I think, for both of us being here.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: If I could just say for one moment about Otto Eckstein, a wonderful person and a uh a great economist, and he was the instructor of introductory economics at Harvard College.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And when I sat in his class uh first day of freshman year, I said, wow, that's what I would like to do.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're exactly right that he got us to our conversation today.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, well, and that was EC 10, which I avoided like the plague, and um I knew him only because he is the father of my college roommate and still one of my best friends.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so, but isn't it fun how people's responsibilities and the things they say to people when they're very young sometimes have very long repercussions.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: And although I didn't intend to set it up as a segue into American history, it works very nicely for a book like How the South won the Civil War.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Because what that book argues is that although the South lost on the battlefields, which it certainly did, it won ideologically.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it won ideologically over the concept that the North was trying to advance, the idea, as it was embodied in the Declaration of Independence, that all men and eventually all people are created equal.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: That concept certainly was the one that the Republicans in the North were trying to put into place.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: But what they didn't reckon with, although they tried, they didn't realize what was going to come, they didn't reckon with the spread of American in the sense of people who came under the purview of the American government.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: Americans spread West immediately after the Civil War.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: And in that post-war West, which has a very different history than the East does, the ideals of the Confederacy of a world based in racial and gendered hierarchies found a new extraordinarily fertile ground and entered not only into our political ideology and our economic ideology.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: I actually would argue that it's our economic ideology that started the political ideology, they also entered into our popular culture.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: And with those symbols of a hierarchical society presenting to Americans in the 19th century and since the ideal American, we ended up with a world that looks now very much like the road to what the Confederates wanted to achieve.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm telling you, when I wrote that book, it truly never occurred to me that we would ever see the Confederate flag flying in the United States Capitol.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm telling you, in all that I have seen in my almost 60 years on the planet, that's the scene that almost broke me considering what I study.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not gonna be cheering so much more than some of them.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because you'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to be using and you have to be strong.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: The January 6th, 2021 insurrection.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Did you think we would see an insurrection led by a defeated president to overturn a Democratic vote?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And did you believe that we would see it in 2021 in our lifetime?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: I expected insurrections.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: I always expect insurrections, but especially in this particular moment.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: But what makes this moment unique in our history is that this is the first time that the calls are coming from inside the house.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean that with the small H house.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: That is, when the Confederacy decided it wanted to take its marbles and go home, it did, with the exception of the few Congress people who had to be expelled who wanted to align with the Confederacy.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: But aside from a very brief moment in 1879, it has never been the case that people who were in our government itself were trying to destroy it.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that surprised me a lot, the fact that that was coming from lawmakers themselves who still are sitting in Congress.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: And this, I think, is the moment we're trying to negotiate now.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: What do you do when some of your key lawmakers don't believe in democracy?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're seeing that this came from the White House, powerpoints, no less on how to manage a coup, congressmen actively involved, and yet we seem almost defenseless right now.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Do you feel that way?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's startling to me how this occasion has passed.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: We'll get back to uh the old civil war, but uh we're talking about the new one right now.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Are we able to confront this kind of challenge in our day?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: I believe yes.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I believe yes, in part because of our history.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: We are not helpless.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that has happened in the years in America since World War II is this increasing concept of systems, this idea that individuals can't make a difference, that it doesn't matter what we do, that things are going to be decided without us.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: And the reality is something very different, not only because of the sheer numbers on the side of the people, of all parties who actually care about American democracy, but also because I study ideas and I believe that ideas are what change history.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: I believe that we as individuals and working together as groups have the capacity to change the public conversation in such a way that we can reclaim democracy.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's all over.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think it's all going to be over until there's nobody else left to lift up their voices or nobody else who is able to get access to the media to go ahead and spread ideas.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not an accident that the right wing, and I'm not talking about traditional republicanism any longer, I'm talking about the right wing that has taken over the party and now our country.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's no accident that they have done everything they can to change the public conversation.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Alec Jones's media empire is known as info wars, information wars.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, we have all the different media channels, and we have the bots, we have the attempt to take over social media.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's no accident that they are trying to change the public conversation.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: And Americans and people around the world who are concerned about American democracy can do their part to push back against that disinformation.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Again, it's no accident that authoritarian regimes shut down the journalists first.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Belarus and certainly Putin and Russia shutting up Navalny.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: As long as we still have our voices, the game is not over.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating also how the new media play into this because we really have a harder time telling the difference of truth and falsehood when uh fake news really is so easy to concoct and uh the digital media make it so hard to get the true signal through.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: I I wonder if that's uh also part of the story from a historian's viewpoint.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Each new medium, whether it was uh radio or television or now our social media, give new opportunities for demagoguery and for creating a false narrative.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, the founders of this country were very concerned about demagogues.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: And certainly new media has always enabled people to spread falsehoods.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things you just mentioned was radio and television.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: And as of course you know that broadcast, television and radio required the agreement to the fairness doctrine until 1987, and that meant that in order for you to get a license to broadcast, you had to agree to try and keep your news factual and to go ahead and present both sides of a question.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: And with the loss of the fairness doctrine in 1987, we got the rise of talk radio.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: And interestingly enough, one of the things that interests me about the rise of talk radio is that it was not initially political.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: It was an attempt to go ahead and try to make the AM radio, which was losing listeners to FM radio, be profitable again.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: So people like Rush Limbaugh did not begin talking about politics.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: He began being a shock jock in other ways and discovered that at the time politics was the way to go.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: And now a lot of people talk about reviving the fairness doctrine, but of course, the pe what we're talking about now are media channels that are not working off of broadcast licenses because they are cable news, for example, or cable channels, or people operating over the internet.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things that I think is really interesting about this moment, and as you know, every time we get new technologies, they're misused.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: It just is a given.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Anytime you get a new technology, it's it's used by people who have bad intent or are only trying to get more money or more power.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: And generally somebody finally steps in, or the country finally steps in, and through our government regulates it in some way.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, we're up against the First Amendment that says the government can't curtail free speech.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the ways in which people are talking about adjusting what you you are referring to, and that is, for example, the use of bots or trolls on social media, and especially on places like Facebook, the algorithms that privilege right-wing information.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, if you look at the list of the most shared stories on Facebook on any given day, Dan Bongeno, who is a right-wing commentator, gets most of them, and yet we know that those are not organic, that those are part of a paid system.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that people are talking about when they talk about restoring a real political discourse is not to regulate the speech, but rather to regulate the algorithms that is to make them insist on some sort of level playing field and to regulate the bots and the trolls and the money going into the system.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually think that has a huge amount of potential, especially as the government is now getting it through the bipartisan infrastructure bill, getting involved in putting broadband around so much of the country and actually putting its money behind the systems that are carrying this disinformation.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: I suspect it's going to give them more power to regulate what is on that system without regulating the speech on it.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's got enormous potential.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: I just wish they'd get to it.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, your book is filled with fascinating stories about creating the narratives.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: For instance, the narratives of the individualists in the American West, and I want to come to that.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: But a founding narrative of the United States is, of course, the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created evil.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: The book, in essence, one could say American society in its history is a battle over that description because it was written by a slave owner.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was written at a time of massive slave ownership.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was written in a settler colonial society that was extirpating the Native Americans and would end up genocidally removing Native Americans.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: As a historian who has thought a lot about this, what did Jefferson think he was saying in those words?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think he he thought he was saying?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: They're beautiful words, but as a as a slave owner in a slave society, uh how do you get away with it exactly?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Just as a just as a starting question.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: I begin my understanding of the Declaration of Independence with the work of Edmund Morgan in a book called American Slavery, American Freedom, which he published, I think, in 1970.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: And using that as a starting point, what Morgan argued was, and he did it in a funny way in the book.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: If anybody's listening to this and thinking you gotta run out and read this book, I actually I like the book in many ways for many things, but it ain't an easy read in terms of the argument that I think it ultimately makes.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: He makes it on about the last quarter of the book, although the rest of it's interesting too.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: He argued that enslavement in America came to be the underpinning of the idea of freedom.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Because what he argued was that the settlers in Virginia came to believe that all men were created equal, as they said, by, and his concern was black Americans, by reading out of that equation black Americans altogether by enslaving them.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: So that when he said all men are created equal, and of course this is 1970, so he was literally looking only at men, the idea was that they read out of the body politic, read out of anybody could have political identity, all of the black Americans, their black neighbors with whom they lived, and instead could say that all white men had the same interests and were equal, because in fact, in that situation they did.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: So what I did with how the South won the Civil War was to expand that with our more recent understandings, not only of the role of women in American society, but also of Indigenous Americans and later on with Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans and Indigenous Americans in the West and the other people who are going to be coming in in the 20th century in the West, the Japanese, for example, and so on.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: And argued that that concept of all men are created equal.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: If you expand that idea, says that the white men who lived in the Virginia colonies were able to conceive of the idea that they were equal, not only in spite of the fact that they were surrounded by people they considered unequal, but because of it.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: So that they were able to say that all men are created equal, not only because they managed to read out of the equation black Americans, but also Indigenous Americans who were also enslaved in colonial America, and women especially, whom they didn't even consider.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that was just by definition women were read out.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so from that concept, I went to what really fascinates me, and that is a question that is raised by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book, True Believers, which everybody ought to go out and read.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: I even think there's a PDF copy on the internet.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: And he is writing in the aftermath of World War II, and he says, you know, everybody, and I'm paraphrasing by the way, but everybody is running around in the years immediately after World War II studying Mussolini and Hitler and the other authoritarian leaders who rose in the middle of the 20th century.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: And he says, I don't care.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like, why are we studying Hitler and Mussolini?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because every generation has Hitlers and Mussolinis.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: The question is, why do people follow them in certain times?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: And this to me was a light bulb going off because the question then is not to study the authoritarians so much, who really are part of a blueprint in many ways.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: The question is why a population would follow them.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So what I came to think with this concept of all men being created equal, literally meaning what is, in a sense, an interest group of white men who are controlling both the economy and the politics of the early American history, I came to believe that this concept of all men being created equal, first of all, depends on the idea of inequality.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: But second of all, what it does is the fact that it rests on inequality sends a dagger right to the heart of our democracy.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because it gives authoritarians, or when I wrote the book oligarchs, I think we have jumped into authoritarianism territory in the last five years, it gives oligarchs a language to undercut democracy.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that anytime it appears that women or people of color are going to approach equality with white men, there's a corollary to that idea that equality depends on inequality.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that is that if you get rid of inequality, the people in charge lose their equality.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: That is, they are going to be denigrated.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: If the other people move up, that means somebody has to move down.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: And with that concept, with that corollary, it gives free reign, I think, to some of the concepts that Hofer and Hannah Arendt and George Orwell and Joseph Heller, who were thinking about how ideas and language build political movements, it gives some free reign to some of their ideas.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: And those ideas mean that an oligarch who feels or a person who is starting to get some money and starting to be powerful in a society, in American society, can look at, for example, the idea of indigenous Americans or women or black Americans or brown Americans getting some freedom, getting some equality, and say, wait a minute, I'm going to lose out here, and can garner support from voters who would actually benefit from the kinds of reforms that brown people, for example, would like to have.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that budding oligarch can turn to those voters, those white male voters, and say, hey, wait a minute, boy, these people are going to take away your liberty.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: And in the process of the power that they begin to accumulate, they are going to use the power of the government in such a way that it helps them, the oligarchs, and hurts the people who are on the make or who are falling in that society.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that kicks in that concept that Hofer worked with, the idea that in order for an autocrat to rise or an oligarch to rise, you need to destabilize the population, either religiously or culturally, or usually in America economically at first, and then all of those things put together.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then once you have destabilized them and they begin to get restive under the fact they're destabilized, you say to them, Oh, I can fix your problems.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: The issue is those people over there.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: And who those people are usually doesn't matter so much.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: But in America, it's been very easy to turn against the indigenous Americans, against enslaved Americans, and by the 1970s at least, against women who were asking for equality in American society.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: And as they use that language, that corollary to the idea that all men are created equal depends on everybody else being unequal.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: As they continue to use that language, they get more and more and more power.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it was in one of your recent newsletters, if I recall correctly, you told a story that I did not realize at all about Trump actually cutting off aid for development projects in Central America in part to make things worse, in part to generate the kind of unrest and refugee crisis and migrant crisis that he could use to stir up his voter base.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: Do I remember that correctly?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, but that's even more insidious than you just described it, because it wasn't only a good idea.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, please tell us because I was shocked to read it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know what's interesting though?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: And you do this as well.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: What's interesting about what we do is that I think, and I'll speak for myself here, we're old enough that we know a lot, and we can see more of the moving pieces than we could 30 years ago.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: So what you're referring to is the fact that there is this terrible crisis of violence and of refugeeism in the triangle countries in Central America.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, yeah.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: It really hit during the Obama administration.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: And the Obama administration tried to handle it.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: That crisis meant that there was a surge of migrants, uh, refugees, not economic migrants, but refugees from war, essentially, coming to the American border.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: And Obama tried to handle this by actually sending money into that region and working to stabilize the governments and to stop the violence and to stop the drug trade.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: And when Trump got into office, now what's insidious about this is if you look at the rise of Viktor Orban in Hungary, he did this exact same thing.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, this is a key tactic of authoritarians is to whip up fear of immigrants.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that fear of immigrants, of course, was so central to Donald Trump's rise that that's the first thing he says when he comes down that gold escalator to announce that he's running for office, is to talk about Mexicans as criminals.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're not sending you.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're not sending you.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're sending people that have lots of problems.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they're bringing those problems with us.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it only makes common sense.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: It only makes common sense.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're sending us not the right people.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming from More than Mexico.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably, probably from the Middle East.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't know because we have no protection and we have no competence.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what's happening.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gotta stop.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gotta stop fast.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: And he's gonna fold that into weirdly, he folds that hatred of Mexicans into sort of terrorism in the Middle East and all kinds of other stuff as well.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: So there's this generic immigrant who's both on our borders and flying planes into Washington.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I was always busily trying to untangle which immigrant he was mad at at which time.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that wasn't the point.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was just supposed to be immigrants.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: But what he did is he cut all the funding that was going to those triangle countries.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, it instantly made things terrible.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that created this enormous surge that he could then turn around and say, look, we're being invaded.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: And this is one of the things that the Biden administration has tried to do is to restore investment into those countries and to increase American involvement there.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: And he's, this is one of the places that Vice President Kamala Harris has gone in person to talk to people and to say, both to the immigrants, don't come, because they're still not able to come across the border because of the public health directive that has kept them out since the rise of the pandemic.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: But also to say, we need to fix this at home.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: People would rather stay at home.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: They just don't want to stay at home if it means they're going to get killed.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: So that use of American money or lack thereof as a way to increase immigrants on the borders was really very deliberate and just really heartbreaking when you think about the fact these are actual human beings' lives involved.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: People use completely as pawns.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Let's uh go back to the antebellum pre-Civil War America in the South, because you write about the two core hierarchies, the hierarchy of race and the hierarchy of class.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh you've just also been explaining for those at the top of the economic heap, the question is how they convince the poor among them to support the oligarchs to stay in power.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And in the South, the dynamic always was the slave owners, the poor whites, and the slaves.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if if I'm not wrong about this, the main argument of uh the slave owners is to the poor whites, you have to side with us, otherwise, look what would happen to you.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: You could be deluged by the rise of the people below you.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it's always a game of the people at the top trying to pull in those who are suffering from an oligarchic economic system to somehow sustain that system.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let me nuance that just slightly, because in addition to the concept there of the black Americans and white Americans in the South, which is what what we've been studying for ever since the beginning, right?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Since the 1830s at least, is the injection into that equation of indigenous Americans who are also in the American South in this period, and still are, of course, and women.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because what I'm arguing is that that concept of equality embraced by the Declaration of Independence is not just about black and white.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's about who gets to sit on the top of a power structure.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: And my concept of a power structure is not binary, it is literally like a scale.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't democracies stay democracies?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: Why do people vote for their own destruction?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really the central question here.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: And my argument is that in America, anyway, which is the only country I'm competent to talk about, they are convinced to do so because of that paradox buried in the Declaration of Independence, that for a certain group to have equality, everybody else must be unequal.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: When unequal people begin to challenge that by demanding equality on their own, people of wealth and power and the media, that is, having control over the media, are able to use that paradox to go ahead and convince people to vote against their own interests, their own economic interests, not necessarily their own ideological interests.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: We see the bizarre situation of the leading Democratic senator opposed to the progressive economic policies proposed by the Biden White House is the senator, Senator Manchin of the poorest state in the country, West Virginia.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he's leading the charge against the policies that would be so vitally helpful for his own state.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that paradox of enticing people or manipulating the political system against the clear economic interests of the people involved is playing out again right before our eyes.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and remember very disturbing.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: People tend to blame Manchin for that.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Manchin's a very savvy politician.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: He recognizes what will play in his state and what will not currently.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: Now, again, if you talk to people as polls have done over the child tax credit, that's enormously popular in West Virginia.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_02: And it's enormously popular, over 80%.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: And people are begging for it to continue.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, this is one of the things he's got on the table right now that he would like to see cut from the new Build Back Better bill that he is trying to cap at$1.75 trillion, down from$2 trillion, by the way, which is what he said a few months ago, and much lower, of course, than the Biden administration proposed at$3.5 trillion.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: And yet he is up against the national media, which is telling his voters that uh any kind of uh infrastructure bill like the Build Back Better Act is in fact socialism, which they are dead set against.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's not socialism, of course, but that's what they're hearing.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: And Manchin, if you look at him, remember that he is a Democrat holding office in a state that is wildly dark red.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the fact that he is able to thread that needle suggests that he knows what his people want, even though he also is no fool and knows that things like the child tax credit would be very good for them.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's uh come to the uh story of the West now, which we touched on.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: The Civil War is over, the North has won, contrary to your title, yet uh somehow it doesn't quite work out as the Northern victors suppose that it will.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: So if you could tell us what happens in those years from 1865 onward, with regard to what you introduced brilliantly, and is not the way this story is usually told, the role of the westward expansion in the ongoing war, in effect, between the north and the south, and the west turning out to be a tipping point for what had been the southern oligarchic interests.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's an amazing, uh, an amazing story.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: So if you could flesh that out for us.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't it an amazing story?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you think about Reconstruction, you know, I say that word, and I'm sure everybody's got an image in their head.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: Our most lasting image of Reconstruction is not about black legislators or even about individuals in the American South that were, you know, working for wage labor or became sharecroppers.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's not really about any particular labor organizer in the East.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's the American cowboy.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: The American Cowboy operates from about 1866 to about 1886.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: There aren't that many of them and they don't last for very long.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: But that image, which is dead center of Reconstruction, is the image that people remember about Reconstruction.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: So why?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's a major industry in a lot of ways, but why does that become the symbol of America?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that's such a cool story.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: That story comes from the fact that during the American Civil War and its immediate aftermath, the United States Congress, which is dominated by Republicans at the time, remember that Republicans really form the Northern Republicans.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: There are some Southern Republicans, but it is a Northern-based party, and a Northern and Western-based party, actually, in this period.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: And they organize between 1854 and 1856, and they almost immediately run a very strong candidate in 1856.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then in 1860, of course, they run Abraham Lincoln, who wins by a plurality of the vote about 42%.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And the Republican Party defends the concept of free labor, the idea that everybody should be able to enjoy the fruits of his own labor.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: And by 1863, and then by the end of the Civil War in 1865, what they do is they begin to use the federal government to make resources available to men on the make and to protect equality before the law.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in order to make resources available to people, for example, they passed the Homestead Act in 1862, which gives people access to Western lands, which are indigenous lands, by the way.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's a different story.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right, they're taking it away from the Native Americans, but so be it.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's the westward expansion of the white population.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that's going to matter because at the very same time they're going ahead and creating our system of federal colleges and going ahead and creating money, our national money and our national banking system, and putting down the Union Pacific Railroad.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: They are at the same time doing something very different in the West.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: But the Republicans go ahead and begin to try and give people access to resources and to equality before the law.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: And in that process, that means that the federal government is going to protect black rights in the American South after 1865, generally through a measure they put in place in 1865, which establishes the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: And what happens under that, which is shortly going to become known as the Freedmen's Bureau, although it also helps white Americans in the South by giving them rations and medical care and generally housing or some sort of ability to survive in what is this completely destroyed region of the country after the war.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: What that means is that in the American South, where states are refusing to permit African Americans to testify in court or to sue white Americans, what that means is that after the war, as black, formerly enslaved people go to work for former enslavers as employers in this case, they get cheated out of wages.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: There are gangs on the roads that are raping women and killing men, they are being abused, and they have nowhere to go except to the Freedmen's Bureau.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the Freedmen's Bureau is housed within the American military.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the Congress put it there to emphasize that this was only part of the war effort.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: It was not going to become a full-time part of the U.S.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: government.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: A welfare institution is part of the U.S.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: government.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so what happens is that as freed people run to the Army and say, hey, wait a minute here, we just worked for a month and we didn't get paid, or, you know, they just murdered my son.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: The Army steps in and decides, at least in Texas, which is where our most thorough study is from, in favor of black Americans about 68% of the time.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: White Southerners, not all of them, but former Confederates, look at what is happening.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: That is the federal government in the form of the army saying, hey, no, you can't do that.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: You actually have to pay the people who've been working in your fields.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: And they say, see, see, this is what we were against.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was never that we were trying to preserve enslavement, that's not the word they use.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's that we were trying to make sure that a grasping federal government was not going to come interfere in our lives and the way we treated, and I'm putting this in air quotes, our people.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: So the federal government goes ahead with the Freedmen's Bureau, and then with the 14th Amendment in 1868, it tries to protect the rights of freed people in the states with the idea that you can't deprive a citizen of their rights without due process of law, and that everybody in those states gets the equal protection of the laws.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then when that doesn't happen, in 1870, they not only pass and send the states for ratification, which comes back in 1870, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the vote for black men, but also in 1870 we get the Congress establishing the Department of Justice.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: And the Department of Justice was designed to go into those southern states and say, no, you can't do this.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: It was designed to put down the KKK, and it did so really quite effectively until the late 19th century, early 20th century.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: So with that idea of the government protecting black Americans, by 1871, former Confederates in the South start to say, hey, you know, it wasn't that we objected to black Americans participating in our society on the grounds of their race.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't mind that they were black.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: We minded that they were poor and uneducated.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: And if they voted and had a say in society, they would vote for a redistribution of wealth.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: So what we're really against is not black people participating in American society, which is ridiculous, it was exactly the same people who a year before were arguing on racial grounds.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: By 1871, and I love this moment, and you would love this moment, and if I may say so, I think Professor Eckstein would have loved this moment.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: In 1871, they begin to say, no, no, no, no, it wasn't about race.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was about class.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: We're against socialism because that's what black voting is.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: It is socialism.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, this is forever before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_02: But Americans begin to equate the concept of the.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's uh 150 years, actually, this year, that this argument has been made.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: The Wall Street Journal makes it almost every day.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is socialism if you help a poor person.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: But you're saying go back to 1871, it is.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: What it does is it links race to class.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: So this is one of the points that historians will argue till they're blue in the face whether race is more important in America than class.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm one of the people saying they're the same thing.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them are hierarchy.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: I want to draw out one point that I think is so important, and your book really clarified and opened my eyes for that, also, which is that in the West, these hierarchical issues are the same, but it's not about African Americans.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's about other minorities.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's so important to understand that because the Southern Confederates and the Southerners arguing exactly this point found an immediate resonance with the wealthy people in the West because race issues, hierarchy of race was there as well, but in a different form.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if you could add out, it's absolutely crucial and fascinating.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: To get back to that concept of the socialism in the East, at the very same time you get the rise of the cowboy in the West.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: And cowboys historically, about a third of them were men of color.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: We know as historians that the lives of cowboys mirrored those of industrial workers in the East.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: That is, they had very low pay, extraordinarily dangerous conditions.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the reasons that cowboys sing are so that both to calm the cattle and so that other cowboys will know where the cowboys are, so that if there's a stampede, they can try and turn the animals away from their colleagues because you you would literally get flattened.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: We have a memoir from a cowboy who talked about finding one of his friends stamped to death.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: So they live in these terrible conditions.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: But former Confederates in the American South, by 1867, at the latest, but but as early as 66, begin to talk about the West as this new land.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a new land that is not corrupted in their minds by the what they call socialism, or about to call socialism in the American East.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: That is, the federal government's not involved.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's just these individual young men on horseback riding and taking control of this region from the indigenous people, the Mexican people, the Chinese people.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, again, historically, this is entirely untrue.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: The American government is more involved in the West than it is anywhere else.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: And all those cowboys are selling their cattle to the American government for a number of reasons.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: To this day, if you look at uh U.S.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: government programs, large spending in the West, which is supposedly the free market ideology of the Republican Party.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it that remains true till today that the U.S.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: government is deeply involved in investing in the infrastructure, building the dams, the roads, the power systems, and all the rest under the name of individualism and free markets and attacking socialism all along the way.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: But socialism means helping for poor people.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't mean all those other goodies that are coming to help the mine owners and the oligarchs.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's really very clear.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at the voting patterns, it's the plains states, the cowboy states, and what used to be the Deep South, not of course the Far West.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: And the Southwest is a little bit different as well.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: So there is this ideological continuation of the idea of hierarchy that basically a few good white individualist men should be at the top of a society in which women function, at least for the cowboys, either as wives and mothers or as sex objects.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: That concept in the American West is reinforced not only through the concept of the cowboy, but also at the state level.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I really have to give a big shout out here to Pauli Murray and to Peggy Pascoe.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_02: Pauli Murray, of course, the very famous sociologist from the turn of the last century, and Peggy Pascoe, who was a brilliant historian, who passed a number of years ago and wrote a book that talked about what were at the time called miscegenation laws.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: And she was mostly interested in marriage laws and how those laws enabled basically white men of property to go ahead and concentrate power.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: I was more interested in those laws, in the state laws in the late 19th century, in how they established hierarchies of property and power, and of course, of social power through things like marriage.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: But we actually have this wonderful database now where you can look at every state law, which is absolutely fascinating.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes when I get bored with whatever I'm doing, I sit there and I read the Arizona state laws from 1864 because they're just unbelievable.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: You can just sit and watch this system go in power.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: And those laws were discriminatory in the very period in the East when the Congress is talking about equality and enforcing equality between white Americans and black American men.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: In the West, there are literally hierarchies of races and also of genders.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that is all predicated not on the idea that the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, but especially the 14th Amendment, doesn't really apply to the West because Western states rely on a series of laws from the early 1800s that say who can be naturalized.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: And those naturalization laws, which were of course reflecting human enslavement in the East, say that you need to be free and white.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: By using that concept of the free white citizen, they manage to read out of equality the brown people and the Asian people who are arriving in the American West.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: At the same time that during the war, the indigenous Americans get redefined not as people who should be included in the idea of all men being created equal, but rather savages.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_02: So we get this horrible cascade during the American Civil War of our first largest mass execution in American history in 1862 when the government executes almost 30 Lakotas in Minnesota.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then in 1864, we get the Long Walk of the Navajo, which marches them across several hundred miles to what is essentially a concentration camp at Bosgradonau.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then finally in 1864, we get the Sand Creek Massacre, in which literally soldiers butcher the bodies and take physical trophies of the Cheyennes whom they attack, who are a group of women and children and the elderly who are camped under theoretically under the protection of the U.S.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: Army.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so at the very same time that the Congresspeople in the East are talking about equality, we get the reinforcement of racial and gendered hierarchies in the West that then continue after the Civil War.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I want us to jump in our remaining time to the 20th century and to today, the South and the West, you show, become again a dominant politics of hierarchy.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you've made the case so clearly and persuasively that it's a hierarchy of class, it's a hierarchy of race, it's a hierarchy of gender, it is a hierarchical society.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: And when it says all men are created equal, you've helped us to understand that clause.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the 1930s, it seems finally to start to change.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then again, with World War II and the aftermath, it seems that the basic idea that there should be more equality in the United States, a kind of social democracy, not socialism as uh say the Wall Street Journal would define it, but help for people who are in need.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: The New Deal and its legacy seem to change and economic issues become more paramount, at least for some period, than the old hierarchies.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: Comes the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to all be moving in that direction of a of a new liberty, where that phrase Of uh all men are created evil really is written in the large sense that we like to think of it.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then something stops in that move again.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe in the last few minutes, if you could bring us up to eight, that would be phenomenal because you bridge the whole period beautifully.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: There is a question.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: How does this concept that I just described as being resurrected in the American West come to dominate American history?
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: Because what happens after the war, of course, is the areas about which I'm talking in the American West are not states.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: They're territories that are brought into the country really quickly by the United States Congress during the Civil War.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: So what happens is that when the South goes solidly Democratic, by about 1880, it's pretty clear that's going to be the case.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: The Republican Party decides that it's got to pick up senators and electoral votes in the American West.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: And they do so in 1889 to 1890 by adding six new states to the U.S.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: government.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's the largest acquisition of states since the original 13.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: That begins to make these hierarchical, ideological arguments bleed back into the American government.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: The really interesting research part of that book was discovering that quite literally the American West and the American South begin to work together politically.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: This is the first book, I think, that actually deals with the American West as a political entity as well as an economic entity.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that beginning to work together really takes off in the World War II years, when it happens before that, of course, when it's actually the West that helps to stop anti-lynching legislation.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: We always blame the South, but it's actually Bora of Idaho, William Bora of Idaho, who stops anti-lynching legislation, a Republican in the early 20th century.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: But with World War II, when the country sort of tips and sends so many people and so much money out to the American West, there are many reasons that that old hierarchical ideology in the West really imprints itself on the newcomers from the American South and the American Midwest into the American West, and they become a very powerful voting bloc.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that unity of the American South and the American West and their belief in that hierarchy and the idea that a very few people should control society is really highlighted when it's the delegation from South Carolina that puts Barry Goldwater over the top for his nomination for the Republican presidency.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: He is a senator from Arizona, and he is nominated.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: The final person who puts him over the top is a delegate from South Carolina.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: And that wedding of the sort of racist South to the hierarchical West becomes really visible with the Goldwater candidacy in 64, where he's shellacked across the country, but he wins Arizona in five deep southern states.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_02: From that point on, the Republican Party then begins to echo this language of socialism, communism, the fear that people of color or that women will approach conditions of equality will create inequality for white men, begins to enable oligarchs to go ahead and take control of the Republican Party.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that, I think that's the world in which we're still living.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: As you say, Heather, at the end of the book, can a government based on the idea that human beings have the right to determine their own fate, can such a government endure?
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: Our country's peculiar history has kept the question open.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where we're going to have to leave it for our discussion right now.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: You have really brilliantly opened our eyes to this historical dynamic, to this long dynamic of hierarchy versus equality in the United States, and shown us the coalitional dynamics over two centuries that have shaped the exact debates that we are in today.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: The book, How the South Won the Civil War, absolutely mesmerizing, fascinating reading.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: Heather, thank you so much for being with us.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: Next time I'll be speaking with Casey Michelle to discuss his debut book, American Kleptocracy: How the United States created the world's greatest money laundering scheme in history.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: As investigative journalist, Michelle writes on illicit finance and kleptocracy for a range of media, including foreign policy, foreign affairs, the Atlantic, and the New Republic.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: Together, we'll discuss America's transformation into the world's largest offshore tax and secrecy haven and what that means for the rest of the world and for preserving open societies and the rule of law.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to hear your thoughts as we continue to develop the series.