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The Courts vs. Trump—Plus, "Gotham at War" | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner, later in the hour, 20 minutes without Trump.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a wonderful new history of New York City from the Depression through World War II out now.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's called Gotham at War, written by Mike Wallace, he won the Pulitzer Prize in History for the first volume in his Gotham series.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: To talk about Gotham at War, we'll turn to Brenda Wineapple.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: But first, the Supreme Court's new term began this week.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: David Cole will comment on the illegal things Trump is doing that the courts are considering and that the courts are not considering.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's coming up in a minute.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Supreme Court began its new term this week, and the Constitutional issues posed by Trump's orders and actions have never been greater.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: For comment we turned to David Cole, he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching at Georgetown Law School.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: He writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Review, and he's the nation's legal affairs correspondent.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: David, welcome back.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nice to be here.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: As the court met this week, Trump was sending 200 national guard troops from Texas to Chicago after a federal judge declined to block them.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: As we speak on Tuesday, we are told they have not yet deployed around the city.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Illinois Governor Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson are trying to block the deployment and their lawsuit will be heard
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: were told by the New York Times that as of Tuesday afternoon there was no visible military presence outside the federal courthouse in downtown Chicago and that it's just normal business there.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile in Oregon, a judge has ruled that Trump is temporarily blocked from deploying federalized troops from any state, including Texas to Portland, Trump had invoked the law that allows
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: He claimed Portland was quote, war ravaged by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: He said quote, professional agitators and crazy people were trying to quote, burn down federal buildings.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: The state of Oregon and the city of Portland sued and explained what's obvious to anyone who's there.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is no rebellion or threat to public safety in Portland.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Local law enforcement has been handling the sporadic vandalism there.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: The lawsuit argued that Trump violated the 10th amendment that gives states broad powers to handle their own affairs.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: The district court judge here, Karen Immergut, is a Trump appointee.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: She concluded her ruling that the president's quote, claim of emergency was simply untethered to the facts, close quote, wonder what your comment is on all this.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think that statement, which was accurate about Portland, could be applied to so much of what the Trump administration has done since taking office.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: He has invoked and exercised emergency authorities in the absence of any emergency.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The alien enemies act a killing of people allegedly smuggling drugs on the high seas, the tariffs.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: the targeting of the ICC.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: All of these are the exercise of quote-unquote emergency powers.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there is no emergency.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: The only emergency that we are experiencing is the one of Trump's own making.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's refreshing to see a court call him on that bogus assertion.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So as the Supreme Court starts its new term, some of our friends say,
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's hopeless, the Supreme Court will okay, everything he does.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, of course, they have ruled in his favor on some shocking cases, starting, of course, with immunity from criminal prosecution.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: But lower courts at this point, I looked up these numbers.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Lower courts at this point have blocked about 130 of Trump's actions with temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the Supreme Court is agreed to hear arguments that only a handful of them.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: As we speak on Tuesday, none of Trump's executive orders have been definitively ruled legal by the Supreme Court in a full signed opinion
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is according to the website Justice Security, which is following 432 cases challenging Trump.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this term the Supreme Court has agreed to hear only three of the 130 rulings against him.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The tariffs is efforts to take control of independent agencies and is attempt to fire a member of the federal reserve board.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's your assessment of all of this?
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think first, the lower federal courts are doing the job they're paid to do, which is to uphold the rule of law to stand for constitutional protections in the face of political actors who are running rough shot over those rights.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Second, the Supreme Court has ruled for the Trump administration on the emergency docket, a surprising number of times, but the Trump administration has been selective about what it has asked the Supreme Court to review, and so yeah, they've gone up about 20 sometimes.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: The court in most of those cases has ruled for the president, not in a number of significant ones, but in most of them.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if there's 130
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: injunctions down there blocking him, and he's only going up 20 times, that suggests that actually the courts are doing an important job, and he's not confident about prevailing in the Supreme Court on many of those cases.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's look at Trump's losses in federal courts just in the last week we've had, I think it's at least six.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me list them briefly and then ask you what you consider the most significant.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: A federal court appointed by Trump on Saturday Block Trump's deployment to the National Guard in Portland.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: when he tried to get around that by sending national guardsman from California the judge forbade the deployment of any federalized national guard from any state to Oregon for 14 days federal judge ruled on Tuesday that Trump violated the first amendment free speech rights of
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: International students and professors who had been arrested, detained, and deported, these are non-citizens, students, and faculty members who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activity.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: In this case, which was brought by the AAUP and its allies, there was a nine-day trial in July, then included the testimony of 15 witnesses.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Third example of federal appeals court in Boston ruled on Friday that the Trump administration can't withhold citizenship from children born to people in the country temporarily or illegally.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is yet another court that has rejected the president's order on abolishing birthright citizenship.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's now two appellate courts and a total of three district courts, which have declared that executive order on constitutional.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: A federal court in Tennessee ruled the Trump's many legal moves to incarcerate and deport Kilmar, a brago Garcia constituted vindictive prosecution.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Trump had sought to punish Kilmar for having filed a lawsuit successfully challenging his initial unlawful deportation to El Salvador.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: The New York Times called this ruling an astonishing rebuk of the Trump administration.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And on Friday, a federal court ruled that Trump's firing three members of the board overseeing Puerto Rico's finances was illegal and restored them to their jobs.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then two weeks ago, we should mention in Rhode Island, a federal court ruled it was unconstitutional and illegal for Trump to ban the use of federal funds to, in his words, promote gender ideology.
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was a case
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: concerning a policy Trump had ordered the national endowment of the arts in awarding grants.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think you argued that case.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course there's one more the Supreme Court itself.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's stand and appeal to court ruling the Trump can't fire federal reserve board member Lisa Cook at least not at this point in the litigation which of these many defeats Trump has suffered the last week or two.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you consider the most significant?
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think they're all actually incredibly important.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: The first amendment cases are especially important because Trump has targeted free speech, like really no president since the McCarthy era, and it is absolutely critical that courts stand up for free speech rights.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when the court in Boston held that non-citizens among us have the same first amendment rights as citizens, and you can't
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Deport them for engaging in speech that's protected for citizens.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was an absolutely critical decision The decision in the NEA case that I didn't argue.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm co-council with it But my co-council from the ACLU argued also very important basically says even when the government is just Distributing funds it can't seek to suppress viewpoints
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: that it finds politically incorrect, which is what they were doing in saying that no NEA grantee could promote gender ideology, which they interpret with the Trump administration turppets to include any recognition that trans people actually exist.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: The decision on Lisa Cook,
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: critically important because if the fed is going to function as a stabilizing force in our economy, it has to be insulated from everyday political pressures.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think everybody agrees about that with the exception of Donald Trump.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that the Supreme Court was not willing to allow him to remove Lisa Cook is a good sign that the court is going to protect at least the independence of the federal reserve.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think over again, the big picture here is courts are doing their job.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Courts are standing up to the present, calling out his claims when they are either lawless or unfounded.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: There will be many appeals to come, and at the end of the day, many of these cases will go to the Supreme Court, and we will have to judge the Supreme Court on how it does, we don't yet know, because it, as you said, it has only addressed emergency matters.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: and it is not addressed on the merits any of his actual orders.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: This term, I think it will probably decide birthright citizenship, but we'll decide the tariffs.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It might decide the alien enemies act.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: The use of the alien enemies act to try to deport Venezuelans.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And those are all major cases.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's one other major major case, which right now is not being litigated anywhere, the intentional murder of civilians on orders from Donald Trump who recently announced that the United States is in a, quote, armed conflict with drug cartels from Venezuela that are distributing narcotics.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: This announcement seeks to give legal cover for taking the lethal action against traffickers
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: multiple strikes against what the administration has claimed are Venezuelan boats which are in international waters.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: First of all, how many people did the United States kill in these attacks and the bigger question, what is the legality of Trump's orders?
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think the count is now 20 if the last boat had three people on it.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was 17 with the first three boats.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are people who, you know, we don't even know their names.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't know what was on the boats.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't know what they were actually engaged in.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because the United States just blew them out of the water, sunk all the evidence, never gave them a trial, never got a warrant to search the boat,
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even though Marco Rubio stated that they could have captured these people, the introduction of people suspected of drugs smuggling on the high seas is something the coast card does on a regular basis.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Marco Rubio said it would send a stronger message if we just kill them.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is, to me, the single most outrageous thing that the Trump administration has done.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, pardoning the January 6th, that's outrageous, prosecuting Jim Cummie for vindictively, that is completely outrageous, targeting universities for, because they don't agree with the political views of the president, that's outrageous, but murder is different.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what you have here is premeditated targeted killing of people who are civilians.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are not in an army, they have not attacked us.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is absolutely no justification under war powers to be targeting them and killing them.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, if they're smuggling drugs,
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: they can be tried, if you convict them, they can be detained, they can't be killed, even if they're tried and convicted.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no death penalty for drug smuggling, and yet you have the president and the military.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, carrying out death penalty after death penalty with no trial, no charge, no evidence and no war.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is completely outrageous.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Trump claims as his justification, his designation that the Venezuelan gang, trendy aradwa, is a foreign terrorist organization.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: What does that designation actually authorize?
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It authorizes only economic sanctions against that organization.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is, the government, when it designates a terrorist organization, it can then prohibit Americans from doing business with that entity, from providing any technical or monetary assistance to that entity.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does not authorize,
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Executions and that's what he is that's what he is doing here.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is you know the war on drugs is a metaphor But President Trump is not treating it as a metaphor.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is essentially saying no, it's a real war We should treat it as a real war and I get to kill whoever I want to kill in situations where of course I could capture them, but it sends a stronger message if I just kill them
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: it really is to me in a league of its own in terms of international crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: To me what's disturbing is it's gotten some concern but not a lot of concern.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have the president of the United States killing now about 20 people and very little concern expressed by the public.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Does anyone have standing to challenge Trump on this?
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I suppose the survivors of the people who were killed on the boats might be able to try to bring a challenge.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are lots of obstacles to suing the president in these kinds of circumstances, but I hope someone will, because it is absolutely lawless, and just because he has the power to kill, shouldn't mean that he can kill without any accountability.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's apparently notified Congress that he has declared this fictitious armed conflict with this group, Trendar Agua, that no one ever heard of until he decided he wanted to deport them and decided he wanted to claim that they were somehow attacking us militarily.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's notified Congress Congress under the war power's resolution could disapprove of his actions.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: by a joint resolution, but that joint resolution would have to be signed by the president or overridden with a veto.
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you'd not only have to have a majority in both houses, which are controlled by our publicans, but you'd have to have two thirds of the majority in both houses, because of course he would veto any such resolution.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Congress doesn't have much authority.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think they could
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: deny him any funds, you know, they could say you can not spend money killing people without, you know, justification outside of a of an actual war.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the politics of it are not good.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, he knows that he's put anybody who's defending these people on the side of defending drug smugglers and not many politicians want to be on the side of defending foreign drug smugglers.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's got good politics very bad law and essentially as I wrote in a piece of the New York Review of Books he's getting away with murder.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I understand from your piece in the New York review that there's a draft bill in Congress now that would expressly authorize Trump to execute narcoterrorists.
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, this is the brainchild of some Trumpite in the house who has come up with a brilliant idea of essentially giving the president a blank check to kill whoever he claims as a narcoterrorist.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've been down this road before.
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: The authorization to use military force after 9.11.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the time, seemed like an appropriate response to a armed attack that killed 3,000 civilians by an organization that had safe haven in Afghanistan.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it was then used
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: by a successive administrations to go after all sorts of people for targeted killings.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: But at least that was tied to an actual act of terrorism.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: This proposal is to say, give the president the authority to declare anyone he doesn't like, a narco terrorist, and then execute them.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: that is not something you do in a democracy.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope the proposal dies on the vine and that many Republicans would vote against giving the president that kind of power if it did come up for a vote.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not in favor of drug smuggling, you know, don't get me wrong, but I am definitely in favor of respecting the dignity of human life and not taking lives of civilians by calling them narco terrorists and shooting them out of the, you know, from this, from this guy's David Cole.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: is the most recent piece about Trump ordering the murder of Venezuela and civilians is titled Getting Away with Murder.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can read it in why books dot com.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: David, thanks for talking with us today.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for talking.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a wonderful new history of New York City from the Depression through World War II that's out now.
• 20:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's called Gotham at War, and written by Mike Wallace, who won the Pulitzer Prize in History for the first volume in his Gotham series.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: To talk about Gotham at War, we turned to Brenda Weinample.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's the author of many highly acclaimed books.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Most recently, her book about the Scopes Trial, which was 100 years ago this past summer, that book is called Keeping the Faith.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a bestseller named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, and it's out now in paperback.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We talked about it here with Adam Hochschild, Brenda Warnappell writes regularly for the New York Times book review and the New York Review, and she's currently a visiting professor of biography and memoir at the City University grad center.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Brenda Warnappell, welcome to the program.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pleasure to be here, thank you.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, where do you begin the story of New York City in World War II?
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mike Wallace starts his story.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The day Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: January 30th, 1933.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: What came next, of course, was just the beginning of the attacks on Jews in Germany.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But refugees started leaving.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And some Jews in New York thought they should
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: do something.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about that early boycott campaign.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The boycott was was not easily launched.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once it was launched, it was very successful.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, there were big department stores that were no longer importing German goods, but
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: it was a drop in the bucket.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I found fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time in this book and in this particular time there were sort of early to mid-30s is that there were huge numbers of people who knew what was going on in Germany, knew about the persecution
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: that was what the boycott really tried to do.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as I said, it was effective, but it was only so much that you could do because, and this is I think
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: while this is next point.
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are many industries that are when say collaborating as perhaps too strong as such a powerful word these days, but in cohoots to us that with German industrialists.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, let's say they were happy to do business with Hitler.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: There you go.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Happy to do business with it.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: G-E-E, you have general motors, it's chilling actually, because there was a kind of willful ignorant that allowed these corporations to ignore what more and more people knew was happening.
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And even though people followed the news from Germany, anti-war feeling remained very strong in the United States through the 30s and into the 1940 and 41, who was anti-war in New York City and why?
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: In New York, you have these lying isolationist groups.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the most famous one today is America first
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: radio priest so called father Kaufflan who was broadcasting from Detroit, not New York.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And at the same time Charles Lindberg, but at the same time, you had a group of pacifists and anti-war groups that are also against American intervention, and they're very moral and dedicated, I'm not saying that they're not.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: World War I still loomed large in their thinking.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was like yesterday, so those were the people of sort of moral rectitude who are very
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you have the Communist Party, too, which is arguing that they didn't want to get involved in a war of, I think, the phrase was, rival imperialisms.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there were Nazis in New York.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was the German American bomb.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: They brought thousands of people to Madison Square Garden in 1939, swastikas in American flags.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: They denounced Franklin D. Rosenfeld and his Jew deal.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was a real force in New York City.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, definitely.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a very large German and pro-German contingent
• 25:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Nazis don't change, but certainly some of the more pacifist meaning groups do change.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's one of the most important things here is what led them to change.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: September 1st, 1939 Hitler invades Poland.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's still a lot of anti-war sentiment that's probably a majority in New York and in the nation.
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: The turning point, Mike Wallace says, didn't come until September 1940 when they loothed off a began bombing London almost every night, and New Yorkers and Americans could listen to Edward R. Murrow on the radio, reporting directly from London and hear the bombs exploding in the background.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Finally, Wallace says, New York's fighting liberals mobilized to prepare for war against Hitler.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then of course you have Pearl Harbor.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the Mike Wallace book Gotham at War has a lot of great stories than about the war effort.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's just, I just want to mention a couple of these.
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I like the one about Rex Thout famous for writing the Neuro Wolf detective series.
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: He plays a small but interesting part in New York at War.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He certainly does.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, very popular.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: organizations, not fight for freedom, committee, and he was writing for basically his propaganda, but at point of view on the side of the angels, working toward galvanizing American, American support for the war effort and against, particularly against Nazis, Nazi persecution.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the same time he was saying, he had some pretty nasty things to say about women.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Women in the workforce in the 1940s, which is no small thing, because suddenly their women are drawn into the workforce because so many men have been drafted or have signed up to go overseas.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, we're very young women and one of the things that Wallace can do is cover the cultural
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: often teenagers in defiance of child labor laws, who are working, they have more discretionary income.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so when he talks about the superstar Frank Sinatra in New York in the 1940s, he's also saying that to a large extent it was women who made his popularity possible.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how about Franz Bois, the anthropologist at Columbia University, in 1936, Time Magazine put him on the cover for, quote, knocking the flimsy props from under Nazi ideas of race purity and race superiority?
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A wonderful and fascinating man, Trans Bois, who, you know, he influenced an enormous number of,
• 28:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: anthropologist out of Columbia University where he started, he himself was an immigrant too, it's a lot of book in this book about immigration, and he was a decidedly outspoken voice against any idea of white or racial superiority, and he was very influential with
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: with Benedict Margaret Mead, but also... Of course, one of the most difficult topics for anybody who's writing about New York City and World War II is what happened with the reports of mass killings of Jews in Eastern Europe, which started reaching New York City.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: in June, 1942, historians have been debating for decades that mix of, you know, willful ignorance, apathy, and the outrage around the relative lack of news coverage of what we now call the Holocaust.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the New York Times, of course, is a key element in this.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: What does Mike Wallace have to say about that?
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you have to say about that?
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of these, one of these episodes that is showing very difficult to read in the present because it's very hard to separate what we know from what you may or may not have known in New York Times family aunt Arthur Sultzberger is aware he's made aware of what's going
• 29:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as in the case of people who are against the boycott, many of them felt that to publicize what is going on will just increase anti-Semitism in this country, it seems a disingenuous to say the least point of view today.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that's admirable about the book is that the narrative itself is extremely fair-minded, but it never lacks a moral center, and so in just choosing what to write about and the information that was coming in through various groups, Polish-Bund Group, for example, when you find out that in, say, for example, the New York Times,
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: has the information, but it's not on the front page.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's on page 10 or 20, I don't remember, but you have to look for it.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: People who I hope read this book will find themselves in a kind of, as I did, a moral quandary, which doesn't mean that you lack judgment and outrage, but you try to understand where people were coming from at the particular time,
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: critical.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what else is in this book that we haven't talked about?
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, one of the things we haven't talked about and it's a very large part of this book is the way the arts are affected in New York and by New York during the war because you have a publishing industry that is very attuned to the fact that suddenly there are soldiers who have what will be paperbacks in their back backs so that they can be reading.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, you have an influx of immigrants and artists coming from Western Europe, primarily, not exclusively, and they land in New York, and suddenly,
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are, um, they are meeting one another, influencing one another, and out of some of their conversations in dialogue, you have a whole movement that's largely associated with New York, which is abstract expressionism.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, and, you know, so that you also have, we mentioned Harlem, but you have up in Harlem, you have a kind of
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: excitement of, I guess, the child of or different kind of music bebop.
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So all of those things seamlessly folded into this Gotham at war, which is not just at war tragically in terms of
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: what people are learning about the war and feeling helpless or angry about the war, but also because here they are forced into this place, New York, where people live side by side and actually there's a kind of exciting cross-fertilization out of which art pumps.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where do you end?
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: the story of New York City and World War II.
• 33:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think in popular culture, there's the iconic photo in Times Square on V.J.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Day, that they Japan surrendered, the photo of the sailor kissing the woman in the white dress in the middle of Times Square with people celebrating all around them.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: That picture is not in Mike Wallace's book, and that's, he does have a picture of Times Square on V.J.
• 33:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Day, but that's not where he ends the story.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: of New York City at World War II.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting, isn't it?
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's touching, actually, when you think of where we started, where the book started, and the book starts in 1933 with Hitler, you know, kind of consolidate, consolidating his power.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And where the book ends is in the creation of the United Nations.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I sort of have to chose when I say that because you can actually see that
• 33:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's sort of larger point of view.
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not optimistic exactly because Wallace is to smart, to savvy, and to moral, and to knowledgeable, and historian, it seems to me.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: to just say, oh good, you're not in nations, you know, here we have a new organization dedicated to fellowship among people, yeah, that's true, but he's also very, he's quick to point out that, and does a very good job of pointing out, that the United Nations was itself founded with a series of compromises and where the compromises was, that
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: is much as it was a kind of optimistic and progressive in the larger sense of the word organization.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had no enforcement capability and a lot of what was established was by catering to a group
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: or charter past, who were devoted segregationists and certainly didn't want an organization where they felt that their own racial politics would be called into question.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Part of the reason too that the book ends there is again, you see that we're always making compromised
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: coalitions or cooperation, that nothing is utopian, but it's also interesting too, given that, that where is the United Nations is located in New York.
• 35:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And again, it's a combination
• 35:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: big business.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's politics.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a sense of a better world.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's all of those kind of folded in to this building, literally, the building of the building.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Brenda Wine Apple, she wrote about Mike Wallace's book, Gotham at War for the New York Review.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Brenda, thanks for talking with us today.
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, John, my pleasure.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from the Nation Magazine.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer, Jack Merkinson is executive producer.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Pascal Sunkara is president of the Nation, Katrina Vanden Hovel is editor and publisher of the Nation.
• 36:52
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• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can find out more about StartMakingSense at thenation.com, and you can subscribe to StartMakingSense on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 37:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.