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June 27, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

01:05:06

Why The Constitution And Civil War Still Haunt Us To This Day

Our country's past still has profound influence on our society today, and co-host Nick Hauselman welcomes to the show historian Curtis Harris to discuss the many sequences of events that have led us to still be struggling with issues of race, as well as the need to tear down statues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hello to everyone out there.
	I'm Nick Hauselmann, your co-host of the Muckrake Podcast.
	I hope you're staying safe, wearing a mask if you have to go out, and maintaining proper social distancing.
	You might have noticed we didn't drop a pot yesterday, but have no fear.
	Jared and I will be back for our normal Tuesday show.
	But, this gave me a chance to sit down with a very smart historian and have an utterly fascinating discussion of how our society has been profoundly impacted by the founding of the country and its constitution to the Civil War and all the way through to the Civil Rights Movement.
	This is really an important topic that helps explain a lot of why we're wrestling with so many issues pertaining to race.
	So, here's the interview.
	Enjoy!
	Hi everybody.
	I'm really pleased to have a friend of mine, Curtis Harris, on the show to discuss Civil War and the Constitution and American history.
	And Curtis is a Ph.D.
	candidate in American history and, you know, fingers crossed you're going to get that Ph.D.
	sooner than later, Curtis.
	So thanks for coming on the show and joining us.
	Yeah, good to be with you, Coach Nick.
	And yeah, glad to talk about history and not just basketball history.
	For sure, for sure.
	Well, your Twitter feed does have a lot of interesting basketball history, but it also does get into some really great threads about the Civil War and Reconstruction.
	And I thought, let's start actually from the beginning with the Constitution, because I do feel like there's this notion of people out there, especially on the conservative side, who like to view the Constitution as a dead document and want to interpret it exactly as it was written.
	And so I thought we could kind of get your response to why that method is either good or bad or indifferent and what some of the fundamental issues could very well be with how they wrote the Constitution itself.
	Yeah.
	It's not just the Constitution, but just the whole idea and concept of the Founding Fathers, I think, is very flawed.
	So, like, if you, you know, hear on the news, you know, people often talk about, you know, this is not what James Madison envisioned or what Thomas Jefferson wanted.
	And you've got to realize that it wasn't just those two guys or just George Washington or Ben Franklin.
	Like, there were dozens of founding fathers.
	And these people disagree with each other.
	So this is the reason why they had, you know, months, you know, the whole summer in Philadelphia debating the Constitution.
	And remember, the Constitution replaces the Articles of Confederation, which had pretty much failed at that point.
	And then even when they finally go through all these compromises within the Constitution, you know, some of the more famous ones and, you know, racist ones, like the three-fifths compromise.
	Then even how Congress is set up, that's a compromise with the representatives in the Senate.
	Even when they got that together, a lot of the states refused to ratify it because they had no Bill of Rights.
	It said, here's the setup of the government, but it doesn't say about the rights of the people in that Constitution yet.
	So even the Bill of Rights, you know, the first 10 amendments, they are the first 10 amendments.
	Those are the first 10 changes to the Constitution.
	So right from the beginning, it's baked in there.
	People didn't fully agree on what the Constitution ought to be.
	It's a bunch of compromises.
	We have 10 amendments right from the get-go to the Constitution.
	So it's very dangerous to kind of view the Constitution as a dead document, that everybody agreed on it when it was created back in the late 1780s or early 1790s.
	Sure.
	So it's funny because we're dealing with that even now where, oh, 15 years ago, we were a lot different, and you can get away with saying stuff.
	But it felt like even 15 years ago, we knew not to say things that were so misogynistic or racist.
	And yet, that seems to be an interesting past.
	This does remind me, though, of the notion that we brought up in a podcast earlier about, like, the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I basically kind of caused World War II, and we kind of learned that.
	And to me, I almost feel like the same thing exists for the Constitution and the Civil War.
	And I'm wondering what your take on that is.
	Is there a direct line connection between how they ended up framing the Constitution and then how that directly leads to what we have in 1860?
	I wouldn't say there's a, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to say, like, the Constitution caused the Civil War.
	It might be better to think of the way the Constitution was written was insufficient to kind of stave off the Civil War.
	So, like, it didn't cause it, but it wasn't a good way to prevent the problems that came up throughout the 1800s.
	Because, you know, as we just talked about, the Constitution is written late 1780s, ratified by 1790.
	You have those first 10 amendments added on by 1791.
	So that's, you know, as good as it is or bad as it is, it was built with the United States in mind as it was in the 1790s.
	So over the ensuing decades, we have new problems, new issues arise, you know, new technology.
	So the problems are just different, and so that document that was created starts to kind of show its age, and it's insufficient to deal with these new problems, in addition to the fact that it didn't solve some of the problems at the time when it was made, most notably slavery.
	So I think it's safe to say that it held up well enough, but you can see some of the crumbling beginning, you know, with the Missouri Compromise in 1820.
	And then especially, I would say, after the Mexican War, which ended in 1848, that really the old Constitution, as I call it, is pretty much hobbling and is feeble, because consider the territorial extent of the U.S.
	in, say, 1790.
	It's the original 13 colonies, or states now, plus the territory up to the Mississippi River.
	After the Mexican War, you're talking about, you're adding on all that stuff in the Louisiana Purchase, plus the Northwest with Oregon and Washington State, or what becomes Washington State.
	And then, you know, now we've added Texas and California and New Mexico.
	That's a lot more land, that's a lot more people, that's just a lot more issues to get brought up, and it reignites the slavery debate, where it's like, okay, well maybe we could have, you know, northerners might have said, well, you know, we can We're not, you know, okay with slavery, but we can abide by it if it's relegated, you know, to the southern half of the U.S.
	as it was in, say, 1820.
	But by 1850, you're talking about slavery might go to New Mexico, California, Texas, Kansas.
	That's a completely different proposition to what had been before.
	So yeah, the old Constitution was just insufficient to deal with these new problems.
	So something had to change.
	And that's where, you know, Abe Lincoln, you know, just to cite the most famous American of that era, No, that's one of the reasons why he says House divided can't stand.
	And what brings him back into national politics was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which, you know, gave the opportunity for slavery to spread to all that Western territory.
	So that really just heightened up the temperature in the country.
	And as I said, something was going to have to change.
	Well, let me ask you this because, you know, it's so frustrating.
	Red states, blue states fly over a county, a country, all that kind of stuff.
	And you get so fed up sometimes you almost feel like Why do we have to have a United States?
	Maybe we didn't need to have all these colonies all together under the same umbrella.
	I'm kind of wondering, looking back on now, what was the pressure at this point?
	Because it obviously was a really big sticking point, I think.
	Unless you want to correct me and tell me the Northerners were indifferent enough to be like, whatever, we'll just let them have the slavery.
	What was that motivating factor that caused them to deal so Well, it was just, among white Americans, there really was this idea that the United States was a unique nation with the democratic institutions that we had at that point.
	And, you know, to a fair extent, they were right.
	Like, you know, very few other countries were experimenting with democracy in our way.
	As flawed as our democracy was, like it was just white men voting.
	At that time like no other country had his head as large Even as restricted as our electorate was it was still larger than pretty much any other country in the world at that point So there was a genuine pride from some people on that front So they don't want to see this idea fail in America because if it fails in America, it can't succeed anywhere else There's somebody hubris with him with the United States at that point and
	But also, I mean, there was a nationalism, like, you know, people, you know, still had a good attachment to their local state, but there was a nationalism, though, that was still around at that point.
	And also this view that, you know, the Constitution was kind of like a contract in some ways.
	It was like, you know, we've all agreed to this compact, to this contract, and it does benefit all of us.
	There are things we may not like about it, but it has benefited us.
	It's allowed America to go from those original 13 colonies now to spread all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
	So it was growing more powerful economically every decade.
	So there was a lot to say for the Constitution in some respects for a lot of Americans.
	So no one would want to get rid of it lightly.
	And there was a fear if we do break up, what's going to happen next?
	Just split in half, North and South.
	There is going to be a Northeast, a South, a Midwest, a Pacific portion now that's going to separate.
	And will those sections fight with each other after a while?
	Will we become just like Europe, where there's France and Germany and Italy and Austria and Russia and Britain all fighting each other?
	So there is a fear that that might happen in the U.S.
	So there's a lot of tension pulling the country apart, but there's also stuff trying to pull the country together as people were afraid of what might happen should we break apart.
	Well, you mentioned at some point, and I'm now forgetting what the agreement was, that opened up the potential for slavery across the West.
	And what year was that?
	What was the pact again?
	And tell me more about that.
	Yeah, so just to give like the brief kind of steps to it.
	So the Missouri Compromise, 1819-1820, that said that any territory at that point that was south of Missouri's southern border could have slavery.
	Anything north of, this is why it's so confusing, anything north of Missouri's southern border would be slave-free.
	So that was 1820.
	What happened in 1854 was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and that threw out the Missouri Compromise, and it said that settlers, white settlers, in those territories would now vote on whether or not there would be slavery in the territory.
	So Kansas, which is just west of Missouri, Was north of that line, and so they should have been a free territory, but with that act, people could now vote in Kansas territory to say, we want to be a slave state or a slave territory.
	And that's what you had, you know, the bleeding Kansas stuff in the 1850s, you know, with John Brown, everybody else out there resorting to violence to try to settle the issue.
	So, it really just created, I mean, that's what helps escalate into the Civil War.
	People realize that with a topic like slavery, it's really hard just to say, let's vote on it.
	Like, how can you have a, A vote on whether to enslave other people.
	So it got down to like, you know, what are the fundamental rights that everyone should have in the United States?
	And that is the big stepping stone, I think, toward the Civil War, the Bleeding Kansas episode.
	And it wasn't long.
	I mean, I'm sorry, what year was that?
	1854, the Act passed.
	And then by 1856, you have massacres, you know, pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces.
	You know, massacring each other in that state.
	Can I put you on the spot?
	Who was the president then?
	Yeah.
	Let's see.
	It is... So, it goes... Zachary Taylor, who died in, I think, 18... Yeah, he died in 1850.
	Zachary Taylor.
	Then, Mayward Fillmore takes over.
	So, under Fillmore, you get the Compromise of 1850, which also had the Fugitive Slave Act.
	So, that's another important milestone toward the Civil War.
	Because Northerners did not like that.
	So Northerners might have been able to stomach slavery in the South, but they didn't want to be slave catchers in the North to return, you know, fugitive slaves back to the South.
	So that was another big sticking point.
	But then after Fillmore came Franklin Pierce, and Pierce was a pro-slavery Northerner.
	And then came James Buchanan, who was another pro-slavery Northerner.
	So they were guys who were like, what's the big problem with slavery?
	Like, maybe we don't want slavery in Pennsylvania, but what's the problem with slavery in Virginia and Arkansas?
	That's none of our business.
	Let them have their slaves.
	Is it safe to say that, you know, absent social media and video and TV, I would imagine that without the images of what slavery looked like, I mean, I guess they had photography at some point.
	Yes.
	That's what I was going to bring up.
	Yeah.
	So tell me that, because I feel like that must be a thing that shapes hearts and minds of people in the North.
	Yeah, oh no.
	So that's why I mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation of the changing technology.
	Yeah.
	Photography and telegraph, telegraphy.
	Those are the two big tech changes in the 1840s that really skyrocket and help bring immediacy to the issue.
	So telegrams, you know, also makes news travel faster.
	So an event that happens in Kansas, Immediately gets transferred back to New York City or Washington DC, you know, and over a day instead of maybe taking a week or so to get back.
	And so same thing with social media nowadays, you know, something that might have taken, you know, maybe two days to become national news becomes national news, you know, within an hour if it happens now.
	So same kind of track just on a different scale back then.
	Then with photography, you know, that actually shows you photos, you know, actual images of slavery.
	Beforehand, slavery was abstract, you know, to Northerners.
	They're like, ah, you know, it's bad, but again, we don't see it with our own eyes.
	But with photography, that really allowed the abolitionists to really show, you know, this is what slavery is.
	Don't let these people try to fool you into thinking that it's some paternalistic, nice institution.
	You know, here's a slave who's had his back whipped.
	Or here's a photograph of someone, you know, in just terrible clothing and, you know, rags that's about to be sold off.
	You know, we got photos of these things now, so they can show it to Northerners.
	Bring more immediacy to the issue.
	Yeah, I think that that must have been, you know, and we've seen that throughout our history as, you know, the Vietnam War and different ideas of where we can, the immediacy of this shapes and changes the political will.
	Is there a way before we get into too deep of the Civil War, Can we maybe make some connections between these incidents and these moments in our history and what's happening today and why we're still affected by a lot of what happened back then in the face of people who want to argue that there is no racism anymore or systemic racism doesn't exist?
	Can we make some connections that way?
	There's so many, but I'll just focus on one because I think it's... I used to give tours at a museum here in Washington, D.C.
	about slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation.
	And so that's why I'm so versed in all this now.
	But when I would talk with visitors on those tours, and they would, you know, we would talk about, you know, just the effects slavery had on the country.
	And we think about, you know, just the wealth gap between black and white families.
	And you can, in my mind, the best example to use for that is, you know, say back in 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, if you live in Virginia, and you're a black person, Virginia had a decent-sized free black population.
	It wasn't the majority of the black people in Virginia, but there was a decent-sized free black population.
	But they would have relatives who would be enslaved.
	So, I mean, because, you know, if a woman is a slave and she has children, her children will be slaves.
	So that's the way it worked.
	So maybe the father was a free man, but he decided to try to marry an enslaved woman.
	But that means his kids will be enslaved.
	So that free black man, I know, the law's crazy.
	But this free black man... That was a law, what you're saying?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that was the law, going back to the colonial era.
	And that's why, unfortunately, that's why you had so many black women get raped back in slavery, is that, you know, if that black woman has children, those children are property of the master.
	So there's a financial incentive to sexually harass and rape these women, too.
	So that just gets the ugliest stuff, too.
	But a free black man, say like 1848, he's working, he saves up, you know, $100.
	Instead of using that $100 to improve his home, improve his business, buy more property, he has to use that $100 to purchase the freedom of his wife and his kids.
	So you're not using that wealth to improve yourself like a white person might.
	You're using that money to just free your family, which a white person would never have to think about.
	So I think that's really an example that black people don't think about, but I think it's a really great one to show you just how much effort and time and money black people have to expend just to be free, let alone having a home, a business, and all these other things that you can add on to life.
	And just going forward, these issues get compounded over time.
	So if you're $100 down the hole just trying to free your family, it's that much harder to own the business later on, that much harder to own a farm later on.
	Again, whereas white families, not only do they not have to worry about Freeing their own family they get government assistance in buying a home or buying a farm Later on you know that also reminds me in a in a lesser way of what happened with the housing crisis When all the predatory lenders were getting these people in the houses now of course we heard all about people who lost their houses
	But I do think that there's a big subset of people who just could barely hang on but are now forever, for the rest of their lives, stuck with a mortgage that they can barely pay and will never get out from under, right?
	And they have to sort of live with this, you know, and that's another version of like where they will never be able to get ahead because they got stuck in this predatory lending thing that happened, you know, in the mid-2000s.
	And so I just see, like, we keep seeing this over and over again, especially because I think that the disconnect can be, well, that happened so long ago, get over it, you know, or whatever they will say, like, right?
	You know, look, plenty of black people go to college now and they have jobs.
	You know, even with what Trump would say now about, you know, the unemployment rate before COVID, at least, of, you know, different people of color.
	But I don't know.
	It still rings hollow to me, even still.
	So I'm wondering if there's other examples of that kind of idea, where they would sort of make it look like there is progression there, and it really was just behind the scenes, these white guys were making it even harder.
	I mean, yeah.
	I mean, it is... The progression is... I would say that there was progression happening, but it was just going slower than it was for white people.
	So, let's see, I used the example of purchasing their own freedom.
	I mean, like, even in the northern states where there was no slavery by this point, largely, you know, black people were discriminated against.
	Like in Philadelphia and New York City, they were free, but they weren't allowed to live in certain parts of town or, you know, Own certain businesses, go to certain schools.
	A lot of historians have written about how the first Jim Crow laws weren't in the South, they were in the northern states, because they had the first large free black population.
	So they had to institute these laws to keep blacks and whites separate, or keep them in their right places, the correct places in society.
	So it's not even so much about black people aren't Having advances is about progressing economically, just that they're progressing at a slower rate than whites, which still ends up putting you back further along the track.
	So, yes, blacks, you know, today black people obviously have more college degrees than they ever have before, but it still lags behind whites in their college degrees.
	Or the cost of getting a college degree for a black person is higher than it is for a white person, because black students get higher student loan debt compared to white students who go to college.
	So even if y'all get the same degree, You have to put in a different economic path to get it.
	And then, of course, there's the hiring afterwards.
	So a black person with the same degree as a white person is still going to be less likely to get hired for a job they're both qualified for.
	So there's stuff like that's been happening, you know, forever in America.
	You know, I'm curious about when, if you're being a tour guide and showing people, you know, the history, were there any interesting, and I guess I put quotes around the word interesting, interactions with the people, the visitors who were coming and making their own observations that made you, you know, look at them in a little bit with a wide-eyed incredulity or something like that?
	Tons of them.
	I mean like, I would say like 90% of the people I talk with, to varying degrees, but 90% of them were good, you know, good people, were there to learn, soaked in information on whatever level they were at on slavery and the Civil War and all that.
	Another 8% were kind of just like, meh, going through the motions, neither here nor there.
	Then it's at that tiny little 2% that is just, god, they like get on your nerves so much.
	So like I was talking, I remember one tour I was talking about, um, well actually, um, so on the tour we would, again, it's about Abraham Lincoln.
	So a lot of it was focused upon him and his view of the civil war and emancipation.
	So his was not the only view, but his was the view we talked about on the tour primarily.
	And he came up with a fable, Lincoln did, came up with a fable describing how, um, you get a shepherd, a sheep and a wolf.
	And this person and these two animals are having these different ideas about freedom.
	So the wolf says he should have the freedom to eat whatever he wants.
	He wants to eat the sheep.
	The sheep says, I want the freedom to stay alive.
	Why should I be eaten by a wolf?
	And so the shepherd, he's like, well, I'm going to decide the sheep is correct.
	He should have his freedom to stay alive.
	And the wolf cursed the shepherd as a tyrant.
	The sheep praised him as a liberator.
	And as it happened in his speech, when Lincoln told this story, He said, oh yeah, by the way, the wolf is white, the sheep is black.
	So this was Lincoln saying, slavery, these slave owners are like these wolves trying to eat up these poor sheep.
	They make their living by basically devouring the liberty of other people.
	And I had a person, when I told that story on the tour, this one guy said, well, what if the sheep is lazy?
	And thankfully, I was about to say something, but his wife shot him a look like, I cannot believe you just said that.
	I mean, let alone thought it, but also just said it out loud.
	And I was like, okay, her look is good enough for now.
	I don't need to just lay into him about this.
	But for the rest of the tour, I decided to talk less about Lincoln because I was like, okay, this guy, Lincoln's not what he needs right now.
	I instead started focusing a whole lot more about what black people did during the Civil War.
	Like, to show that, you know, they weren't lazy.
	Like, I shouldn't have to tell somebody that black people aren't lazy, but since he said the black sheep, the black person in Lincoln's fable, what if they're lazy?
	So I was like, all right, here's all the non-lazy stuff, the active stuff black people did during the Civil War to help the Union win the war, but also to free themselves during the war.
	It wasn't just Lincoln that freed everybody and saved the Union.
	It took thousands, millions of people, black and white, to do it.
	So here's what the black people did to make this happen.
	So unfortunately there's other stories, but that's the one that sticks out to me first.
	Careless and sometimes just malicious statements people made on those tours.
	Yeah Well, let's get into the Civil War because it's gonna directly relate to what's happening now with the the desecration of statues And so I thought you know if you want to talk because I think the interesting thing here and it probably touches upon this this debate or Twitter history debate you want to call it with the Republican Party and
	Being the party that freed the slaves and and why that's why we should consider them that way now And I just you know if we can continue to make the connections between now, and then it'd be more I think interesting as well But so yeah, what are the you know as what are the sort of things that we wanted you would like to focus about on the Civil War that were like maybe things that people don't comprehend well enough So I would say the biggest
	Well, one of the biggest things with the Civil War that I think people get a misconception over, and sometimes it's nefarious misconception, like people are feigning ignorance over this issue, is, you know, how much of the war was about saving the Union and how much of the war was about getting rid of slavery.
	And I get back to the starting point of the war was about slavery.
	Didn't mean That the Northerners were going into war to try to free every person from slavery, but the war was about slavery.
	And people, understandably to a degree, don't quite understand that there is like a spectrum, a range of opinions about slavery.
	Of course, you had your abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, who said every person that's a slave ought to be free right now, immediately.
	That's one end of the spectrum.
	At the other end, you have your Alexander Stevens, your Jefferson Davis, who said black people ought to be enslaved forever.
	They should never be free, at least in the United States.
	If they are free, get them out of here.
	Wow.
	Even in the North?
	In between, yeah.
	So in between those two radical opinions, you have people that say, well, like I already mentioned earlier, some Northerners are like, well, you know, I don't like slavery, but as long as it's not near me, I don't have a problem with it.
	That's a Southern issue.
	But if it's going to the territories, I don't want it in the territories.
	Like I did, I get a stronger opinion about it.
	On the reverse side, you have some southerners that said, white southerners, who said, well, you know, I do like slavery, but I don't think we should break up the Union in order to have the most rigid, you know, firebrand form of slavery.
	Maybe we should make some compromises on the issue of slavery to preserve the Union.
	But what happens is that, you know, the country becomes more extreme, more gravitating toward the two ends of the spectrum as the 1850s go along, and especially after the war breaks out.
	Throughout the war, you see the people kind of gravitating toward the two different poles.
	Doesn't mean everybody got to either side of it, but you just kind of see the stretching out of the opinion.
	Now, what makes the Republican Party so interesting in all this is that they were an anti-slavery party, but they were not an abolitionist party.
	Distinct terms.
	Anti-slavery means that you do think slavery is morally bad, but it doesn't mean you want to free everybody from slavery immediately.
	Abolitionist was, we need to abolish slavery right now.
	That's Frederick Douglass.
	Abraham Lincoln was anti-slavery, where he said that slavery is wrong.
	Eventually, we ought to have it extinguished in the United States, but that's eventually.
	That might be 30, 40, 50, 100 years from now.
	Wow.
	And that's the majority opinion in the Republican Party.
	Then, of course, you have the Democratic Party, which had some anti-slavery people, but Democrats were more, eh, let the South have their slaves.
	As long as it stays in the South, who cares?
	And then, of course, you had Southern Democrats who were very much, you know, slavery's good, and then the radical ones who said that slavery actually should be everywhere in the United States.
	So that's why I say the Civil War is about slavery.
	How that's going to end is contingent on how the war plays out.
	And as we saw, the war plays out in a way where more and more people realize that this country can't survive with slavery in any form.
	We have to abolish it during this war.
	That's how I agree with it and a war to save the Union.
	So, you know, Jared had brought this up last week or a couple weeks ago on another pod where he framed it as the South were really fighting for the original constitution.
	So from their point of view, they were like, no, we want the United States the way it was founded, which was acknowledging slavery and saying it was legal and no problem, right?
	So, and it's a weird kind of notion.
	I don't know if a lot of, I grew up in the North.
	I don't know if Northerners wrap their head around that as much because we don't learn it that way.
	I would say both sides were correct.
	I don't like that phrase, you know, both sides.
	felt like they were probably the good guys.
	They were the rebels.
	They were in Star Wars.
	They were, you know what I mean?
	They felt like they were the ones who were trying to preserve what the country meant.
	I would say both sides were correct.
	I hate to, I don't like that phrase, you know, both sides, but the both sides, the union and the Confederacy, they had their valid points that they were fighting for, you know, the founding fathers vision, because as we mentioned from the top, you know, the founding fathers were split on what the vision of America ought to be.
	So it's not surprising that, you know, 70, 80 years later, you know, these next generations of Americans both think they're doing what the founders wanted.
	So, So, the Confederate vision, as laid out, you know, good God, I got books here on the shelf.
	I could open up and crack them and just read you quotes.
	Where these Confederates were like, you know, black people deserve to be slaves.
	This is a white man's republic.
	Nobody else ought to have rights in America.
	I mean, in a Dred Scott decision, Roger Taney, Chief Justice, said the black man has no rights.
	The white man is bound to respect.
	And Taney thought, that's what the founders envisioned.
	After all, they said black people are three-fifths of a person.
	So yes, I'm doing what the founders wanted.
	Whereas, you know, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the bigger union coalition, they said that You know, I was making allowances, not every, I mean, even Lincoln had some less than proper opinions about black people.
	He thought black people should be free.
	Wasn't quite sure black people were the social equals of whites.
	But Lincoln said that, you know, everyone's created equal.
	So that's the vision of the founders I want to take from the Declaration of Independence.
	And of course, Frederick Douglass took it further and said that, you know, it's not just us being free.
	We should be equal in every respect, civil, political, in the United States.
	So, I would say both sides of the war, or all sides of the war, could take a founding father or a piece of the founding and make a legitimate claim that they were upholding part of the vision that the founders had, because the founders had several visions competing with each other about what the United States ought to be.
	Well, with this ideology of the Southern states, how do we see that now?
	How has that been able to permeate the culture and see it pop up now?
	And maybe if you want to comment on how it's changed over the last, oh, you know, three and a half years or so.
	Oh, man.
	I would say the idea... Well, okay, so what the Confederates really latched on to was You know, the idea that black people should be enslaved, but deeper than that was that black people should be subordinate to white people.
	So that, whether enslaved or not, black people should be subordinate to whites.
	And so that's why, even though you get rid of slavery, you still had the Jim Crow laws that eventually come in and all this other stuff that we've been kind of touching on throughout the conversation.
	OK, so I would say in our contemporary world, this idea of black people being subordinate to whites It's throughout the country.
	It's not just relegated to the South.
	Again, like I mentioned historically, Northern states segregated black people from white people way back to the 1800s, so it's nothing new there either.
	But just this idea of when you respond or when you have the movement of Black Lives Matter, the response is, all lives matter.
	And that particular response was just to quiet black people, to be like, We don't need to focus on you, your problems.
	You're not important enough for us to really devote attention and resources to.
	And that plays back to the idea of black people being subordinate to whites.
	It's morphed the kind of specific response you give, because like, you know, in 1900, you wouldn't say all lives matter.
	You would just flat out say black lives do not matter.
	But in 2015 or 2018 or 2020, if you say all lives matter, You're trying to suppress black people's opinion that their lives matter, that there's still kind of the same outcome.
	Or saying blue lives matter, where you're saying that a particular job, the police force, is more important than a race of people.
	So like, it's the modern take on the old tropes of how black people just don't matter in the United States.
	I mean, obviously there's other examples, but that's what comes to my mind when you talk about that, the kind of parallels between the Confederacy and their ideology and the current expressions of that.
	Well, let me ask you this, because I feel like I've seen, and I'm not sure if it was in your feed, but the notion of the creation of a police from the very beginning seemed to have a notion or maybe more than a notion of keeping black people down.
	Do you have any, is that correct in saying that?
	I am less versed historically on actual police departments, but I will say generally that law enforcement, so let's take it broadly beyond police departments, this also includes sheriffs and stuff because You really don't have police forces until the mid-1800s, like kind of 1820-ish going forward, when you have really large urbanization in the United States.
	So you do have police forces that aren't explicitly out there to control black people, but they are out there to control the city and enforce social control, basically.
	So yeah, that will include racism.
	That's a form of social control.
	Along with classism and these other things.
	In the South, there's a different kind of law enforcement history where the main law enforcement apparatus was slave patrols.
	So in the South, there very much was a direct connection from the slave patrol into the post-Civil War developments of the police departments.
	It's like the slave patrol in the South could They had the power to make any white person join the slave patrol to help them search for any runaway slaves or to squash any potential slave insurrection or slave revolt.
	So that's very much a part of the Southern police history and a piece of, not completely, but a piece of the Northern police history as well, the enforcement of racism.
	And it does become explicit after the Civil War.
	The police being used to suppress black people when blacks begin to migrate in large numbers from the south into northern cities like Chicago and Detroit.
	So you're basically saying that the slave patrol before the Civil War, a lot of them just simply became cops.
	In essence, yeah.
	They were not called police departments necessarily, but the law enforcement in say Alabama or Georgia In the 1880s, after slavery, the people who worked in that department two decades earlier, they might have been slave catchers, or part of slave patrols.
	So they would use the same tactics.
	It was just like the slave patrol in a different form, where they would round up black people, black men who were accused of not having jobs, of being vagrants.
	And if you didn't have a job, that was a crime, you were a vagrant.
	And then you could be, or you were arrested, you were convicted of being a vagrant.
	And then any local white business had the, uh, they could come to the courthouse or the jail and say, uh, I'll pay the court fine of $25 for that black man who was a vagrant.
	And I get the services of that, that black vagrant until $25 is paid off.
	So you have the local law enforcement working, you know, basically hand in glove with local white businesses to arrest black men, get them convicted, and then hire them out as convict laborers in mines and farms, especially in Alabama, but also happened in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Louisiana, during the 1880s, 1890s, early 1900s.
	Alright, so can we then, you know, not to gloss over the Civil War because, I mean, people talk so much about that, but I do feel like, you know, with the statues and people trying to tear them all down now, I'm wondering if you have any insights into, like, how did our country become infested by so many, you know, Confederate statues and memorials, considering they lost?
	Oh man, that's...
	Civil War, as I said, was, you know, in my mind, how I conceived it from my readings and research, is a war about slavery that turns into the war to emancipation.
	They finally realized, like, that's the answer to the problem.
	It's just complete emancipation.
	We can't have any half steps.
	We've got to destroy slavery.
	So you get a 13th Amendment, outlaw slavery.
	Militarily, the Confederacy is defeated.
	But that doesn't mean the ideology of the Confederacy was defeated.
	So that's how you get the convict labor system that I was just talking about.
	It's just that same mentality that blacks are subservient, should be subdued and subordinated to whites in society.
	And so those laws during Reconstruction, the 13th Amendment that ended slavery, the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to everyone born in America, which is an important amendment, and also equal protection of the law, and the 15th Amendment, which said that You can't, this is important phrasing, you can't take away someone's right to vote because of their race.
	So it didn't say everybody has the right to vote, it just says you can't take away someone's right to vote because of their race.
	Okay.
	So you can find other reasons to do it, but it can't be because of their race.
	Right.
	Now, so those amendments, plus you had Civil Rights Acts, 1866 and 1875, you had Civil Rights Acts, That attempted to enforce these amendments that have been passed.
	Well, by 1900, unfortunately, white supremacy had won out.
	The Supreme Court had made decisions, most famous, the Plessy-Ferguson one that said, okay, everyone's equal, but you can still separate people.
	And we know how that really turns out in practice.
	You get inferior stuff, even though you're supposedly equal.
	The convict labor system that I talked about, and working in stride with that, is this ideological force Which was really, really pushed along by this group called the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the UDC, which they were probably the most powerful force in propagating the lost cause narrative that before the Civil War, black people were happy as slaves.
	During the Civil War, the Confederacy fought nobly, did not fight to keep slavery.
	They just fought to keep their honor and their heritage and their way of life.
	All these roundabouts were dancing around the word slavery.
	After the war, all this chaos during Reconstruction, there was a lot of riots and massacres, mostly of white people killing black people.
	But they said all this chaos, it was really because we allowed black people to have power.
	They aren't fit for it.
	Also, these Northerners, these carpetbaggers, they came down South and caused trouble.
	So now we've gotten rid of those carpetbaggers.
	Black people are back once again subordinate.
	Let's build these Confederate statues to help enforce and showcase our ideology and show that we were right.
	Our cause was correct.
	These men were brave.
	They did not fight for a dirty cause.
	It was a great cause.
	Yes, they lost the war, but we should remember them.
	And the best way to go forward and honor their legacy is to maintain the segregation system that we've built in the 1880s and the 1890s.
	And that's why you have these large constructions of these Confederate monuments He had some after the war in the 1870s, 1880s, but it was very small.
	But in the 1890s, throughout the 1920s, it is a huge surge of building of statues and monuments to the Confederacy.
	Was it clear to you that those monuments were not to sort of have a historical perspective on what happened, but to propagate what the real Southerners who were fighting, what they really stood for?
	Is that, you know what I mean?
	I feel like it's a subtle distinction, but it seems like it's what we're seeing now is there's a direct connection here.
	Well, see, the UDC and people like them who work with them, They were great propagandists.
	Terrible cause, but they were great at propagating it.
	So what the statues start there, with the statues and memorials, they would have speeches and dedications when they unveiled the monuments.
	And these speeches were often by Confederate veterans or the sons of the Confederate veterans.
	They would give these fiery speeches saying, like, you know, the South was great, the Confederacy was great, the white South—I should say the white South.
	We forget that almost two-fifths of the people in the South were black.
	So the white South was great.
	It was better before the war.
	The war was terrible.
	The war between the states that ruined the South, we were better off before the war.
	But let's honor these brave men that fought to keep the South as a great system.
	And now we have these dedications, these speeches, which are explicitly racist.
	Assault the rights of black people.
	They say that slavery was good.
	It kept the relations between the races in a great manner.
	That their words.
	But going in lockstep with all this was also the education systems in the South.
	Because the South did not have public school systems before the Civil War.
	Only the rich folks went to school.
	During Reconstruction, When black people got public offices, and some poor whites did as well, they voted in public school systems in all these southern states.
	So those public school systems survived the Reconstruction era.
	So then the Daughters of the Confederacy, they lobbied the state legislatures, which are now all white, because they expunged all the black members.
	These new school systems now began having this Confederate propaganda, where the school books said, yeah, black people are lazy, they're this, they're that.
	The Confederacy was a great cause.
	So, they didn't just build statues, they also wrote the textbooks that were adopted across the southern states.
	And that, as you can tell from people's educations even now, is taking well over a century to try to fight back against those ideas that got planted in the 1890s.
	Well, I was going to say, anybody who's outraged by that, it's happening now.
	We keep reading articles of the South, and to me, in my mind, it's more about evolution
	But, without question, when you have people who are, you know, in very small pockets, have that much power over the curriculum, and it so widely varies as well, from state to state and from region to region, that it's kind of frightening, and it's almost, it's, I don't, the word understandable is not the right word, but there's a certain logic to how we get to where we are, and why people want to defend You know, the Confederate flag, right?
	It kind of makes sense to me when you put it in that context.
	But yeah, no, I think understandable is the word.
	Yeah, obviously, it has a certain connotation, but it is the perfect word for this.
	Like, you got to look through it logically.
	And so when you see the train of events, yeah, you understand why things turned out the way they did.
	Because, like, no one ever learns or In high school, nobody ever reads in their American history class, you know, the cornerstone speech by Alexander Stevens, where he explicitly says, you know, racism is great.
	Black people are terrible.
	They ought to be slaves.
	No one reads any speeches from Jeff Davis.
	No one reads the secession documents from Mississippi and Texas where they say that we're all about slavery.
	My home state, Texas, their secession documents said that slavery should exist in all future time.
	Which, like, That doesn't sound like people that are thinking about getting rid of slavery.
	They said it should go on forever.
	So we don't read about that in high school.
	I didn't read about it in my Texas history classes when I was in high school.
	I didn't learn about it until, shoot, I was 23 years old, I think, was the first time I read that.
	And that's after I got my college degree, my bachelor's degree.
	So like, No, people don't learn about this unless you go above and beyond the call and have to find this on your own.
	In the North, for me, we learned about the Civil War in like fourth grade.
	And I can't understand why they would have not wasted it, but like, there's too much information, too much subtle nuance that we need to be a little bit older to be able to understand to do it in 4th grade.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	And I don't think I got much Civil War information or even, you know, maybe some constitutional stuff in like 6th grade.
	But then I can't even remember in high school really having an American history that wasn't like contemporary American history about the 50s and 60s.
	You know what I mean?
	So it's really startling to me and I can only imagine it's probably something similar where if you're in the South and you're, you know, you're going to learn about the Civil War, it'll be when you're young and don't have the capacity yet to really understand what they're teaching you.
	Well, it's a, there's different levels of capacity.
	So like you can, You can put across the same message, you just got to calibrate it to the audience you're talking to.
	Because like, again, like my tour guiding experience, like I gave lots of tours to elementary school students, even like kindergartners.
	So with kindergartners, like, I'm not going to talk to kindergartners about the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
	Like, that's honestly, that's going to be more at least high school, probably college level stuff.
	Well, with kindergartners, you can talk about how the Confederates thought that slavery was good.
	You can talk to them, like a five or six-year-old, and say, like, you know, I did this.
	I would ask them, what is slavery?
	And they would tell me what they thought slavery was.
	And most of them said, it's when you force somebody else to work or you own somebody else.
	They know what it is.
	You just got to tell them that these people in the Civil War thought that slavery was OK.
	Do you think slavery is OK?
	And most of them at five years old say, like, no, it's not OK.
	They think it's ridiculous.
	to judge somebody or to treat someone a certain way just because of their skin color.
	Now, what's curious is that they do start already at that age, they already start ingesting some of the racism around them in society.
	They're not necessarily acting on it expressly or explicitly, excuse me, but they are already starting to imbue it.
	But at that age, they still think that it's ridiculous to judge somebody or treat somebody just based on their skin color.
	So you can have those conversations with them.
	You just actually got to have the conversation.
	You can't sugarcoat it.
	So even in sixth grade, you can take it a little bit further and you can now talk about maybe a speech from Abe Lincoln and a speech from Frederick Douglass.
	You know, ask the sixth graders, all right, do you want to be a slave?
	Do you think this is correct?
	Do you think this is how society should operate?
	How should society behave itself?
	And so you have those kind of conversations instead of trying to beat in 1863 this happened, 1865 this happened.
	It's more about a thought process, less about the dates.
	Okay, well let me ask you this because I'm a little bit embarrassed.
	I went to the University of Wisconsin and in the news they tore down a statue of Hans Christian Haig who apparently was a guy who fought for the North and was an abolitionist and so it sounds like it's been misplaced but Today they announced that there's a group that wants to pull down the Emancipation Memorial, which I guess was the original Lincoln Memorial, where they have a statue of Lincoln standing over a slave who is still on bended knee.
	The optics are not great when you look at that statue.
	I've been to D.C.
	I didn't see that statue, but I'm kind of curious your take on what it means to tear these things down and whether you think they should tear down this Lincoln one.
	Well, first off, for folks listening or watching, there's a great book on all this.
	It's called Standing Soldiers Kneeling Slaves by Kirk Savage, and it talks about the Confederate statues, statues of slaves, and also the artwork of slaves during the 19th century.
	So that's a really great book, and it talks about the statue as well.
	This is where I first learned about the statue in depth.
	Based on that book that I read, also just my own thoughts and research, and I've seen that statue in person, it is not a good statue optically.
	We definitely would not create that statue in today's world.
	It was created in 1875-76, and my personal thoughts on it are that the statue shouldn't be the way it is without Actual context.
	That's a cop-out a lot of people give for any of these statues.
	Like, oh, we can't tear down the statue of Jeff Davis.
	Just put a plaque on it.
	That'll give proper context.
	Like, no, that's not going to cut it with Jeff Davis.
	But this particular statue, Lincoln's Emancipation, or the Lincoln statue, has a particularly just interesting story that I think needs to be told.
	So it's less about the statue itself.
	It's more about the story around the creation of the statue, where Black Americans, a lot of whom had just been emancipated over the preceding decade, raised money to the statue to honor Abraham Lincoln.
	Unfortunately, black people raised the money, but some white people took over the process of creating the statue.
	And so that's how you got that imagery of Lincoln standing over the slave.
	But the enslaved man is now free, and he's not bending down to Lincoln.
	He is rising up from slavery.
	So he's not nearly to Lincoln.
	He is rising up from the shackles of slavery.
	It still doesn't look good, but that's what the artist was trying to do, is show that this man is rising up from slavery.
	And Frederick Douglass, the day the statue was dedicated in 1876, gave a fantastic speech that really summed up, I think, in a great way, Abraham Lincoln.
	Remember Douglas said, at that speech, with Charles Sumner in attendance, with Ulysses Grant, who was president, he was in attendance, all these other dignitaries, and Douglas was the keynote speaker, and he said that, you know, Abe Lincoln was the white man's president.
	Douglas said, like, Lincoln was a white American, only white people voted for Lincoln, because that's how it was in 1860, like it couldn't be any other way.
	So he's like, Lincoln was the white man's president.
	There's no doubt about it.
	Black people's concerns, you know, might've been important to Lincoln, but they were secondary to white Americans.
	He's like, there's no bones about that.
	But he's like, but nevertheless, under Lincoln's administration, we had all these progressions toward freedom.
	We saw slavery end.
	We saw black people join the U.S.
	military.
	We saw, you know, Douglass didn't say this, but you know, the first black chaplain presided over the U.S.
	House of Representatives during that time.
	Before the Supreme Court or become an attorney like in the Supreme Court that happened during the Lincoln administration so Douglas like we had this great stuff happen under Lincoln Maybe he didn't design it that way, but it still happened under him And he didn't think that it could happen under any other president at that point Let me think about James Buchanan.
	That's sure as hell wouldn't happen with him Buchanan hated black people so Douglas I think really does a good job of kind of summarizing Lincoln, and I think to take that statue away from Would kind of take away that moment, I think, that really showed what America could have been and what it had gone through between 1860 and 1876, which is the Civil War Reconstruction era.
	So I'm not opposed to taking the statue down.
	I just don't want it torn down, you know, ripped to shreds.
	If they take it down, I want it placed in a museum with, you know, some exhibit or discussion about how it was created, the speech that Douglass gave, more info about Abraham Lincoln.
	But if people don't want it in the park anymore who live around there, it shouldn't be in the park.
	I think that about every statue in America.
	If people who live in that area don't like a certain statue, if they think it's offensive to them, why should you live around a statue that you don't like?
	I think that about everything.
	But with the guy with Wisconsin that you're talking about, I learned about him too when they tore down the statue.
	As with every movement, you're going to have some people that haven't quite thought through what they're doing.
	I think if people had realized the story of Hague, I don't think they would have tore down his statue.
	He was an abolitionist, not just anti-slavery, but an abolitionist.
	I think they would have left his statue up.
	There are excesses in every movement.
	That's going to be one of the excesses in this movement.
	But If a couple of statues get torn down that shouldn't be torn down in the process of getting rid of a hundred statues that ought to be torn down, then I'm okay.
	I'm not like okay with it, but I'm accepting of it.
	We can rebuild the statue to Hague if people want to do that.
	Sure.
	But any of the other ones, Jefferson Davis... Oh yeah, get rid of that.
	No.
	Just so we're clear, you tell us, you know, people might know the name, but tell us exactly what his significance is.
	Jefferson Davis.
	Jeff Davis, as you call him.
	Yeah.
	Too familiar from all the readings.
	Jefferson Davis.
	He's one of the most awful Americans.
	President of the Confederacy.
	I love how Abraham Lincoln, he always called it the so-called Confederacy.
	He never gave them official recognition.
	But yeah, Jeff Davis, stone-cold racist, should have been in prison for the rest of his life after the Civil War.
	Actually, he was just a terrible leader, too.
	That's something people forget, that during the Civil War, the white people in the Confederacy hated Jeff Davis because he was such a bad president.
	But after the war, after the war with the Lost Cause, they're like, okay, we can't say nothing bad about our Confederates.
	So they're like, oh, we love Jeff Davis now because, you know, if we badmouth him, that might impugn the whole cause.
	Like I said, terrible guy.
	I can read you one of these speeches he gave where he's like, black people are terrible.
	Abe Lincoln's a tyrant because he wants to free people from slavery.
	This is after Lincoln had the Emancipation Proclamation.
	So he has a statue in Richmond that ought to be taken down.
	Robert E. Lee, his giant statue in Richmond that ought to be torn down and ripped to shreds.
	Well, by the way, aren't there like, I'm sure there's bridges and there's highways.
	Yeah, rename all that.
	Yeah, rename that.
	And also just my general philosophy, I don't think it's a good idea to build statues to people because people are imperfect.
	Some people are just flat out terrible.
	Like again, like Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee.
	But even with Abraham Lincoln, you know, he has his imperfections.
	So I don't think we should be building statues to people.
	We ought to be building statues to moments and to ideas that kind of showcase the best of the United States.
	Like on the National Mall, we have a memorial to Abraham Lincoln, but we don't have any memorial to emancipation.
	I think we'd be much better off as a country if we didn't have that Lincoln Memorial and instead had a monument to the ending of slavery in this country.
	But streets, roads, bridges, schools, not a single one of those, military bases, none of those ought to be named for Confederates.
	They are the worst of the worst.
	of people in American history.
	Very few of them ever came out shining good.
	Literally, the only two Confederates I could think of that need something named after them is James Longstreet, because after the war, he repented and said it was a mistake.
	So it's like, okay, you get a Mia Copeland.
	He said it was a mistake, we shouldn't have done it, and he became a Republican and supported voting rights for black men after the war.
	So it's like, okay, you want to name something after James Longstreet, I'm not going to advocate for it, but I'm not going to push to get rid of it, because he kind of saw the light.
	And then there's also James Ackerman, or excuse me, not James, Amos Ackerman, who was also a low-level Confederate soldier.
	After the war, he became a lawyer and actually became Attorney General of the United States under Ulysses Grant.
	And he was headed the Justice Department, which was created during Reconstruction.
	There was no Justice Department before that.
	And the Justice Department's first job was to destroy the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK.
	So Amos Ackerman, former Confederate, headed to the Justice Department, personally went on raids in South Carolina and Georgia to help stamp out the KKK.
	So I'm like, OK, that's another Confederate who repented, helped destroy the KKK in the You want to name something after him?
	Good.
	But everybody else?
	No.
	Rename everything from those guys.
	Don't build another statue of these people.
	Tear them all down.
	Oh, well, I suppose it would be a whole other podcast to discover how the KKK was not destroyed after that, in that moment, because here they are, and they're still around.
	They were destroyed in the moment.
	They were reborn.
	Again, this gets to the The Lost Cause.
	So they were destroyed in the early 1870s, but you had other terrorist groups like the Red Shirts, all these other groups back then, too.
	But the KKK was reborn around 1915 with that movie The Birth of a Nation.
	Yeah.
	And so that re-sparked interest in the Klan.
	And they were re-sparked not just to hate black people, but also to hate Jews and Eastern Europeans and immigrants and Catholics.
	So it was a bigger and better Klan in the 19-teens.
	Yeah, they hated a lot more people than they did in the 1870s.
	Right.
	Well, OK, and then again, we now know how that directly relates to, you know, the president right now from the 20s.
	So, OK, well, listen, I think thank goodness that we have historians out there that can keep all this stuff, you know, keep track of all these things and help us understand it.
	Because I think that the overall thing I want to make clear is while we were discussing history here and deep history, it just seems it just reeks of what's going on now.
	And it feels like, it's just easier and easier when we understand what you just described throughout the last, you know, through then, why we're in where we are now, why we are having such a horrible debate and clash of ideology, you know, in 2020.
	Yeah.
	Well, if I could just kind of do a quick summation of what happens afterwards too, because like, the rebirth of the Klan, I think is a good, Good way to show that, like, this stuff, you might stamp it out, but it's like a hydra.
	Like, its head will grow back.
	So, the Klan was, again, kind of stamped out by 1930, mostly because of scandals.
	There was some criminal stuff they engaged in that kind of just destroyed the reputation amongst white people.
	But anyways, the Klan goes away by 1930.
	Still anti-racism and Jim Crow, obviously, so you get the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.
	But again, you get your backlash.
	That's when the Klan is reborn again, is in the 50s and 60s, in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement at that point.
	But you also got, you know, the White Citizens Councils and the private school academies that fought desegregation.
	So especially in Virginia, like that was the biggest state that did it.
	Other ones did it too.
	But what they did, instead of desegregating the public schools, they closed down the public schools and established private academies.
	But white families could use public money to pay for the student to go to a private academy, but black people couldn't.
	So that was their way to work around the desegregation order.
	So that was happening in the 60s and 70s, and even today, you look at private schools in the South, they're mostly Christian, primarily white, and the public schools in the South are majority black, even though blacks are not a majority of the population in the South.
	So you have that kind of discycling of, you know, we get this progress, but then you have the reaction to the progress.
	And the 1980s, of course, you know, we have the civil rights legislation, things are improving in one fashion, but then you have the war on drugs, which is instituted to help suppress black people and Latino people who get like, you know, the best example is the cocaine laws.
	Crack cocaine, many, many, many years in prison.
	Powder cocaine, which was associated with white people, Eh, slap on the wrist.
	But crack?
	Black people use that, so you get a harsh sentence to go to prison for that.
	Then, of course, recent years, you know, we get a black president, Barack Obama.
	What happens?
	You get the most incompetent, most overtly racist president we've had probably since, like, you know... Jackson?
	Andrew Johnson, probably.
	No, no, no, Woodrow Wilson.
	Forgot about Wilson.
	Woodrow Wilson.
	So, but yeah, like that's the reaction.
	It's like, okay, like some people just couldn't stand the idea of a black president.
	So they would elect this idiotic, like literally, like I cannot imagine anybody with Trump's credentials and intelligence and demeanor who could be president unless they were a white man.
	Like a black man who talked like Trump couldn't be president.
	A white woman that talked like Trump couldn't be president.
	Native American couldn't talk like Trump did to be president.
	It's only a white man that can pull that off.
	So I think that's the reaction to what the progress has been made.
	So this stuff goes in cycles.
	It'll keep on happening.
	But hopefully the progress that we make Well, now we can understand why, you know, 2020 is the most important election I think we've ever had in the history of our country, maybe up until 1860, only because, you know, in 1932, Germany, they probably didn't think that this would be their last free and fair election.
	And it was, right?
	It became the last one they ever had until, you know, after the war.
	And I kind of feel like if you were to give this administration one more, four more years, then whatever we're seeing, what we thought was free and fair and a republic will be destroyed.
	Yeah, no, I agree with that.
	He's, the man doesn't have, does not have a democratic bone in his body.
	Small D democratic.
	He does not believe in democracy.
	As flawed as the Constitution is, he's never read it, doesn't know anything about it.
	I begged journalists in 2016, I was like, I'm not like I was talking to a journalist, but I was like, you know, screaming out to the world who would ever listen, like, please, would someone just ask him, what's your favorite part of the Constitution?
	Have you read the Constitution?
	Just, do you know anything about how the government works?
	Right, well, it's like when they ask you what's your favorite part of the Bible.
	Yes, all of it.
	Yeah, all of it, right.
	The old school, the new one, you know, they're all great.
	It's a great one.
	It's all good, yeah.
	Yes.
	Meanwhile, he's got Mein Kampf on his bedside table as well.
	So, well, listen, Curtis, I can't thank you enough for breaking this stuff down for us and really giving us some context into where we are and where we're going, whether that's positive or negative.
	I guess we still have a few months to figure that out.
	But again, it's now more than ever, it's so important to properly understand what happened in history, especially when the curriculum is at the mercy, even when you're talking about private schools in the South.
	I can only imagine what their curriculum looks like even now versus what, you know, a more realistic version of it would be.
	Is that safe to say?
	Like, absolutely.
	I've never looked at it, but private school, the lesson plans, but yeah, I'm sure they don't teach it correctly, because I still, like, I'm working on my PhD right now, and so, like, I come in contact with, you know, with undergrads right now who have gone through various school systems, and they always talk about how, oh, we never learned about that in our school.
	These are students that went to public and private schools, and they come from across the United States to my university, so, yeah, we still don't do a good job teaching history.
	Not for lack of, I would say, the teachers' efforts, but it's just the setup of the institutions don't allow for teachers to actually spend a lot of time asking and putting across good stories and ways of thinking about American history.
	It's just like, can you pass a test?
	Remember this date.
	It's not critical thinking.
	It's just filling in the boxes on a piece of paper.
	So hopefully we get better at this as time goes on.
	I hope this moment has caused a lot of people to kind of search and reflect on What's happened in our past and how that's influencing and will dictate what happens in our future.
	Absolutely.
	Well, again, thank you so much for coming on.
	I really appreciate it.
	Yeah, no problem.

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