 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Heather Cox Richardson, author of How the South Among the Civil War. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can enjoy online. From Thursday, March 19th through Sunday, March 28th, you may view the greatest good in a virtual film screening presented in partnership with the United States Forest Service and the 2021 Environmental Film Festival in the nation's capital. The film explores the history of the U.S. Forest Service using rarely seen footage and photos and dozens of interviews to tell a complex and compelling story. And on March 30th at noon, author Dorothy Wickenden will discuss the agitators, which uses the intertwined lives of Harriet Tubman, Martha Wright and Francis Seward to tell the stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad and the early women's rights movement. You may find links to both events in our online catalog at archives.gov.slashcalendar. Randall J. Stevens in his Washington Post review of How the South Among the Civil War wrote that Heather Cox Richardson explains Goldwater's crusade and the trajectory of modern conservatism in her masterful book. A timely book it sheds light on what was perhaps the most important political coalition of the 20th century. The coalition was that of the deep south and the west based on a hierarchical view of government. Stevens further stated in his review, Richardson tells the engrossing and deeply relevant story of these connections and she ties that story to the most important political and social developments of American history. Moving from the founding of our nation through the Civil War and Western expansion through the modern era, Richardson points out the ebb and flow of tensions between expansion of rights and the restriction of government activism and its rejection. Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College and the author of six books about American politics. Two of her other books, West from Mathematics and To Make Men Free, A History of the Republican Party were both editor's choice selections in the New York Times book review. Richardson is the national commentator in American political history in the Republican Party. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune among other publications and she writes the popular newsletter, Letters from an American. Now let's hear from Heather Cox Richardson. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome everybody. And thank you for being here. I want to start by saying what an incredible pleasure it is to be with the National Archives and Records Administration. One of those organizations that I think sometimes flies under the radar screen unless you're somebody who uses libraries the way people like me do. Totally worth checking out both obviously the stuff they have in Washington DC, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There are record keepers for the nation really, but also the records that they have themselves are wonderful for teachers, for people who are doing their own research into their family members. And just to know if you have ideas or questions about silly things like, well not silly necessarily to me, things like our customs houses or any of the many places in America that have kept records through our history. That's where they are. And they also have branch offices around the country as well. So it's an enormous pleasure to be here. And actually I just just talked about the National Archives and Records Administration more than my book, but they've told me I'm here to talk about the book. So I'm going to go ahead and give you a quick rundown of what is in that book and why I decided to write it. And just so you know, I'm going to talk probably for 20 minutes or so, and then I'll take questions about the book or about other things if you're so interested. So just think about throwing questions into the chat. So the story behind how the South won the Civil War is designed to answer a question that is a fundamental problem I think in American democracy or maybe in any democracy. And that is how do democracies fail? How do democracies turn into oligarchies? Because the more I studied American history, the more it was very clear to me that there were times in America when it looked like we were getting painfully close to oligarchy. So how does that happen in a democracy? Why would people literally go ahead and vote to move against their own interests? And the answer to that took a number of years for me to work my way through and what the result conclusion is in how the South won the Civil War. And what I argued in this book was that there is at the heart of American history a profound contradiction. And that is that America is indeed based on really powerful principles. The idea of human self-determination, the idea that everybody should be equal before the law, and that everybody should have equal access to resources. And I could hear you thinking of the caveats to that now. But those highfalutin principles grew in large part because, not in spite of, but because of the fact that those principles excluded any but a small group of white men, essentially, and usually white property men. So the founders who came up with the idea that all men are created equal, for example, started from the premise, first of all, that no women were included in that, that women were not really able to be political actors. So they are already outside the boundaries of being created equal, quite literally by God in the way that they thought about things. They also included in that group of people who could not be included in the idea that all men were created equal were indigenous people, and certainly people from Africa or from the Caribbean, so black Americans. And as the years went by, they put into that category many brown people, black people and brown people, and certainly women. So the idea in America, in How the South Won the Civil War, is that the founding of America depends not only on these enlightenment ideals of human self-determination and equality before the law. But that idea is tied to what I call the American paradox to the idea that there are a majority of people in America who are not part of that equality. They can't be part of that equality. And my argument behind this is not original. It comes from a book that was published in 1970 by Edmund Morgan called American Slavery, American Freedom, in which he said that Americans could conceive of freedom because they enslaved other people. And all I did was I took that idea and I expanded it beyond the idea of black Americans to include women and brown Americans as well, because I think that's really quite accurate. I'm one of those historians who does focus on indigenous history and on the idea that, of course, the first thing out of the box when English settlers came to the United States was to enslave indigenous people as well. So what I was getting at here was not, was first of all an ideological contradiction. So I suggest that the country has begun in this paradox in the idea that freedom depends on unfreedom. And from that, I started to explore the way politics changes in America. And one of the things that we don't focus on, at least in any quantifiable way, is the effect of language on politics. Now we all know that words matter, and certainly since at least the time of Wayne of Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, but really taking off in the 1990s with Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. There was a real emphasis in the Republican Party on the use of language. So you may or may not remember that Newt Gingrich's PAC, Political Action Committee, actually went ahead and produced a number of words that new Republicans were supposed to use when they referred to Democrats. And they were words like socialist and weak and liberal and surrender, sort of negative attributes. And then there was a list of words they were supposed to use when they talked about Republicans, and those were words like champion and, and winning and prosperity. You know, all sorts of very strong positive language. So one of the things about my work in the past has been that I always said I studied the zeitgeist, why the country was a certain way, and how that translated into legislation. But I didn't have the link between how those two things happened. And one of the things that I was trying to do in How the South Won the Civil War was to go ahead and make that link quite explicitly. And what I am arguing in this book actually comes from literary theorists, not from historians primarily. People like Hayden White, people, if you care about this stuff, but people like the more of the most influential figures in this book for me was Eric Hoffer. And who was a longshoreman out of San Francisco in the 1950s who went ahead and thought about how we got the rise of people like Mussolini and Hitler. And of course after World War II that was like a cottage industry. How did we get Hitler? How did we get Mussolini? And he said, who cares? That's not the question. Every generation has would be Mussolini's and Hitler's. The question is how do you develop a population that is willing to follow a Hitler or Mussolini? And what he came up with was a multifaceted view of how politics changes and how language changes politics. And those ideas are played with of course by people like George Orwell and people like Joseph Heller and Catch-22. The idea of the meaning of language and how language can be used. So what I was arguing in how the South won the Civil War was that the way you get from a democracy to an oligarchy is generally about a four step process in America. And that is first of all when they're in the 1850s and then again after World War II a group of powerful people begins to take over the political system. And they are rooted in a certain kind of economy. It's usually an extractive economy which is heavily capitalized. You need a lot of rich people and a lot of poor workers. And what they do is they as they start to take power they begin to pass legislation that hurts a lot of people. Economically in America. The arguments that the people I just talked about apply to other countries. I was focusing only on America. It hurts a lot of people economically and they start to feel economically dispossessed. And increasingly the religion and the society and the novels and the newspapers begin to sort of spin as I used to think of it. Like a tornado almost around the idea that those wealthier people who are making the laws and who are determining how society should function are really the centerpiece of society. They're really the ones at the heart of society. They're the ones who are doing things right. And if you're not part of that group that you're on the outs. And as their situation is the situation of ordinary Americans begins to deteriorate because of that new legislation in for example the 1830s and the 1840s and the American South or after the 1980s in America. What happens is that the people in control begin to tell the ordinary voters who don't like what's going on that the they are in fact having problems but the problems are not the fault of the leaders. The problems are the fault of someone else. And that someone else is people who are trying to become part of the body politic who are asking for equal rights in American society. So in the 1840s or the 1850s that becomes black Americans in the American South or after World War II that becomes first brown Americans and black Americans and of course women. So they start to say yeah you got a problem but the problem is not us the problem is that. And increasingly as those groups of voters turn against those other people they and treat them worse and worse language begins to build that says those people deserve that. You know it's not that you're being bad by saying that the that the Chicanos after the 1960s for example shouldn't vote or that African Americans shouldn't vote after World War II. Or that certain women shouldn't vote feminizes they're called in the present shouldn't vote. The problem is them. They deserve to be treated that way. And once you have gotten to that point it becomes harder and harder for other voices to come into that closed circle. And in the 1850s and again after the 1990s in America those the people who were in charge deliberately silenced the people who were critiquing them. Quite literally in the 1950s in the American South by refusing to let abolitionist newspapers or after 1856 Republican literature or even southern literature that critique the slave system from being circulated in the the region. And of course after the 1990s and after 1987 in America we get the rise of talk radio and after the 1990s we get the Fox News channel. And after the rise of the Internet we get these chat rooms that are bifurcated according to bubble if you will. So you increasingly restrict the voices and then as increasing numbers of people get unhappy with the economic system or with being read out of the system that dominant system. The people in charge are the you know I'm calling them the elite enslavers in the American South in the 1850s. And these are people who are going to be owning more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings. And those would be less than one percent of the population. And in the 1990s and 2000s and 2000 aunts in in America it's going to be the extremely wealthy people running our economy. Increasingly when they get to that position and it's clear that they no longer command a majority of the American people of the voters. Even though they have been turning those turning their voters into very strong voters by telling them to hate those other people. What they do is they cut people out of the vote. They start to suppress the vote in the 1850s. It was literally by not letting people who disagreed with the Democrats in the South vote in the present. Of course we get there first of all by voting restrictions which the Republicans begin to put in place in right before the 2000 election in Florida. Florida is the first state in the country that enacts a voter ID law in immediately before the 2000 election. Obviously it works very well in Florida when more than 100,000 people presumed to be Democrats are kicked off the rolls. And then the 2000 election gives the victory to George W. Bush in Florida by fewer than 400 votes. And those numbers of course have been suspect since that happened because the vote was stopped in progress by of all people Roger Stone. So they begin first of all to cut down who gets to vote. And then after 2010 in the present we get Operation Red Map which went to which was an attempt to redistrict the states in such a way that Democrats simply couldn't win. And that's what happened in places like Wisconsin and Kansas and North Carolina for example. So they increasingly pick who they get to vote. And we're seeing an extreme of that right now in America of course with these laws in 43 states that presumed the proposed laws to go ahead and try and cut more and more people out of the vote. And so what you end up with is this idea from the beginning that everybody should have a say in American society that everybody is equal before the law. But oligarchs as I have called them and as they were called in the 1850s make an effort over time to turn their supporters against the idea of expanding or of hurting the power of the people in charge by going ahead and saying to their voters those people are trying to take something from you because the minute that they get a voice in the body politic soon as women can vote as soon as brown people can vote as soon as black people can vote they are going to vote to take things from you to to hamper your ability to accumulate property. So they are going to hamper your ability to to be free. They're going to hamper your liberty. So what the book tried to do first of all was to set up this paradox and second of all to make this political this linguistic argument about the way that politics works how the language drives American politics. And finally the other thing that it brings to the table in terms of the historical argument is that it treats the American West as a political entity as opposed to being an idea or a colonial entity or an economic entity or even a racial entity it treats it as a political entity to say hey let's take a look at the West and see how people out there were voting. And what I realized early on what is the driving arc of the book is that when the Civil War ends and it looks as if the oligarchs have been put down permanently in the American East that's the very moment when people move across the Pacific into the West in in dominant numbers. And a lot of them come from the South is a brand new book out by somebody else who talks about how they are literally from the South. I didn't talk about that at all. But but I argued that the ideas of the American South move to the West because both the South and the West are based on extractive economies. So you get this idea that a few rich guys should run everything and everybody else should be poor and work for the rich guys. And that's really the dominant mode in the American West. Although we have this image of the West of being the land of the cowboy and the land of the independent person and the land of the free. That's really just an image embodied by the American cowboy that in today that West has always since the Civil War been dominated by a few powerful individuals. It just always has. And that was the most fun of the book was looking at for example the family dynasties in places like Nevada or some of the the long term dynasties in other cities where you know once you stayed in power in those regions once you got into power in those regions it's hard to lose power because it's such a close circle in so many of the Western cities which are really the West people don't think about it this way but the West is our most urban area everything centers around those those poles in the West if you will of the urban areas. So what I found when I looked at the movement of the ideology of the American West the idea that a few people should rule oligarchy in a sense that really was mirrored in the American West because of its own history and that the West and the South actually voted together a lot beginning after 1889 when the Republican Party recognizes that it's got a big problem because the South has become a solidly Democratic part of the country. This is the solid South. It's going to be pretty solid with the exception of Tennessee in 1920 until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 1965 that once the South goes solidly Democratic. The Republicans admit 60 states to the Union between 1889 and 1890 and we get North Dakota and South Dakota and Idaho and Wyoming and Montana and Washington and those states because they are in the West actually have more in common with the South than they do with the East with the Northeast and so quickly the South and the American West especially the Republicans in the American West begin to work together on issues for example of water control because the South's always flooding and it doesn't like that and the West doesn't have enough water so they want to go ahead and pass major legislation to work on the water industry in the West. So we get for example the Newlands Act which Teddy Roosevelt said in the early 20th century was the most important thing he did and that came from the idea of the Westerners who wanted to control the water supply and we're working with the South to get that. But we also get a real pushback on the idea of human equality because in the West where they don't care a huge amount in the early 20th century about the rights of African Americans because without the Great Migration of World War I that hasn't happened yet. They care hugely about the rights of indigenous people and Asians Asian Americans who come to the West and so there the Western Republicans are quite happy to talk about the idea for example of getting rid of the 15th amendment and they literally say you know we're not going to come down on white southerners for suppressing African Americans because we don't want Asian Americans voting. So this is an area in which we can we actually have a lot in common and when we look for example at the failure of anti lynching legislation in the American Congress in the early 20th century we tend to blame the American Democrats in the American South for that but it was actually William Borough of Idaho who was in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee who killed that panel. So you can see that the idea that of an oligarchy of a place where people all don't enjoy the same rights in America comes from the West and comes from the South and takes root in the West after the American Civil War. So the book did those three things. It established this paradox, it established this idea of language driving politics and it looked at the West as a political entity that worked with the American South to spread the idea of oligarchy and then it took a look at how the weight of the country and the weight of American politics moved West after World War II and the ideas of the American West, those oligarchical ideas of the American West then took over the American nation altogether really beginning first of all with the rise of Barry Goldwater in the 1950s and the 1960s and then with the increasing emphasis on the American West because of the rise of the military industrial complex really out of that region. So from that we of course get this idea of the American West as a place of individualism is cowboy individualism but that individualism was actually rooted in that post war period when the cowboy represents an individual white man which is completely mythological and to succeed in the American West you actually needed kinship networks that were dominated by women but there's this image of the cowboy who is the equivalent if you will of the Yaleman farmer from before the Civil War who is out there in the West trying hard to make it on his own which again is a myth in fact the US government was instrumental in developing settling the US West more than it was in any other region and that cowboy is in represents not only the idea of making it on your own through hard work but also of course that young white man is dominant over indigenous people in the region and the other people the Mexican Americans and occasionally Asian Americans that is in the literature refer the people who are referred to as for example uncivilized or in other negative words. So the that idea of the cowboy comes out of this same argument comes out of reconstruction and becomes the symbol of the rise of the Republican Party today really dramatically of course with a very gold water in as I say the 50s and the 60s but if you think about American television in that time it was characterized by westerns they were there were more than a handful of westerns on TV in the 1950s and we associate that with a sort of American cowboy individualism in the Vietnam war but it was of course a reflection as well on the American polity in the 1950s after the Brown versus Board of Education decision 1954 in which many white southerners looked at that decision which was a unanimous decision by the on the part of the Supreme Court by the way led by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren who had been a Republican governor of California and what they said is no no no this is once again the Republican the federal government overreaching they are crushing white Americans with this decision they're not they don't see that as a way for black Americans to become equal. They see this as a way for the federal government to crush white Americans by using their tax dollars to give benefits to African Americans that white people did not have so the Brown versus Board of Education decision. They literally interpret as a way to crush white people through tax dollars and the year after Brown versus Board of Education we get William F. Buckley starting his national review. Which he said would tell as he said the violated business man's side of the story and that that idea that America really is about individualism and that individualism is restricted to white men with women in the roles that the cowboy image assigned them the roles of being a wife and mother or a sex object become really deeply ingrained in American politics and since the the rise of that kind of new conservatism it was actually called movement conservatism to distinguish it from actual conservatism. It has very different principles and then actual conservatism it was a movement that was designed to overturn the idea that the government had a role in leveling the playing field amongst all Americans. That movement conservatism gains power as I argued in how the South won the Civil War through this language of the idea that yes you're hurting but the hurting is because in this case of African Americans and that's going to expand actually Brown Americans first Mexican Americans then African Americans and then it's going to expand through the 1970s into the present. So I'm going to tell you one more thing about this book but I want to remind you that if you have questions either about the book or anything else about the history of American politics or where we are today go ahead and throw them in the chat if you have access to that and we'll see if we can pick them up. So the other thing that I tried to do in this book was a new experiment in writing and I think those of you who read me elsewhere probably recognize where the modern projects I'm doing come from. And that was that in our new internet heavy world. I think we read very differently than we used to. I know I do in any case. So a friend of mine recommended to me when I was struggling with writing this book I was writing it as a history book which as I write history I always overwrite it. So if I'm planning to produce a 35 page chapter I write 120 page chapter and then I cut. And what that gives you is a very dense kind of argument but it's a very absorbing kind of almost novelistic feel to it. And what my friend told me is he said don't do that. He said nowadays what you need to do when you write and he's a journalist by the way is to go ahead and write very short little pieces that people can read before bed. They should be and I'm really bad about the number of words in in a section but I think in how the south one the Civil War I think they're all about seven pages each which is about all I can manage in bed. So there it is designed if you look at it you will see it is designed to be independent essays so you could read just one of these sections and nothing else. But each independent essay they're for per chapter they all also do hang together and then each one of the chapters of course becomes its own essay and then finally the book itself is again a whole argument of itself. So it's a very different kind of book as I said to somebody I wanted to write it as if I had simply rolled out of bed and said oh here here's something cool. But in fact it was the hardest book I have ever tried to design and I was not at all clear that it would work. In fact I wrote to a friend three times when I turned it into my publisher and each time I said. But Michael is it really a book because it's not the way I never written a book before and he kept saying yes Heather it's a book and I think at this point we can probably all agree that it is actually a book but I had to be convinced of that. So I'm looking here and I am not seeing any questions from and oh here we go. So there is a question here that says so anyway please send me your questions at this point. So the question is the south and the west had large landowners but the north had industrialists who are trying to exploit their employee labor. Most of the immigrants so why didn't that affect the same results. Okay this is a fabulous question and I'm really glad to ask it because people have come into that they felt I underplayed the same sorts of hierarchical ideologies in the industrialists from the 1890s to the 1920s 30s at least in the American north. And I did downplay that only because I cut too much I think at the end of the day from this book I had a whole section on that and I cut it out. And I think the answer to that is that industrialists did pick up this language and you can see this really clearly in Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth for example where he quite literally says that the wealthy in America should be considered the stewards of the nation's wealth. They would use it for things like concert halls and universities and art collections whereas if you gave it to workers they would simply fritter it away on silly things like food and shelter. So they did pick it up but it did not become the dominant way of thinking in the northern there was always significant pushback from this ideology in the north. And I continue to believe that the reason for that is because at the end of the day the northeastern economy and the northern economy was not extractive. There are certainly extractive pieces of it. There were the large industries but it was still possible very possible in the north and in the northeast well into well actually into the present at least into the 1970s for people to go ahead and participate in the economy without working for a large industrialist which was not the case in the American south where you have the rise of the textile industry or in the American west where you have agribusiness, migrant labor. Not to say none of those things existed in the north or in the northeast but there was this not only economic base that was different but also a cultural base. So you could have these novels about farmers in Illinois or something and it would be real. You could actually maintain that those people were the centerpiece of society in a way that nobody had any illusions that there were actually farmers, small farmers in North Dakota for example. Those people faded very quickly with the rise of agribusiness because of the need for irrigation. So I'm thrilled you asked that because I do think there's an answer. Mind you, you could argue with that. What good has come out of these periods of time in our history when our democracy is teetered on the edge of democracy and the edge of oligarchy. So a lot of good about it. So a lot of good has come out. And one of my real complaints about this book is that and I think this is a legitimate complaint and other people do add one of my real complaints about this book is that it's very negative. And I wanted the book to be about the paradox to say, listen, there's some really bad stuff here like America has never been equal. It has never been free. That has always been weaponized. All that is true. But there's this extraordinary hope also in the idea of creating a multicultural democracy that lasts in this country. And there is extraordinary freedom in believing that you can do it on your own. And one of the things that jumps to mind here is when I was a kid, you know, I grew up in a fishing village. And when I was a kid, I was out by the island with a friend who was, they didn't have running water or anything. And he was a fisherman and he was probably not a trajectory that certainly would take him to college or anything. And he said, you know, we don't have a lot of money. But when things get really bad, I come out here and I look at what I do for a living. And I look at this view and I realize that because we don't have any food in the house, we're eating lobster tonight. And I think I'm the luckiest man on earth. And that really hit me because if you look at the statistics of what his life was like, it looks really not so great. He wouldn't have traded it for anything. And there's power in that, I believe. And I wanted that in this book and it isn't there. So, because I cut it, because again, I cut this book too much, I think. But what comes out of these moments when oligarchy starts to rise, not starts to rise, almost takes over, I think, is that we get a recognition of just how much our principles mean to us. That the idea of human self-determination matters. And the idea of equality before the law matters. And I don't mean that in a moral sense, although it certainly is moral to me. I mean it in a political sense with the idea that the minute that we admit the principle that not everybody is going to be treated by the law equally, as soon as we say that's okay, there goes the whole concept of equality before the law and there goes democracy. We're right back to oligarchy. So there's a moment there when we can choose, when we can say, no, we don't like the way things are going. We want to get back to the way things should be. And the moment that I always look to for this is the period immediately after World War II, which is a period of extraordinary questioning and tension and people trying to make America equal. And certainly a lot of people pushing back against that. But there is that recognition, you know, when Superman says to the high schoolers in that famous image, don't ever let anyone tell you that a religion or a race doesn't belong here. That's un-American. That's not who we are. There is that sense that we really could pull this off. And I'm very hopeful now. I'm also terrified now half the time, but half the time I'm really hopeful because right now, I mean, one of the things that's interesting about the end of How the South Won the Civil War is, I tried to end it with, well, you know, we're probably in pretty good shape. I mean, I couldn't tell when I finished this. We're probably in pretty good shape because now people of color and women actually are voting and can vote, and so we're going to keep democracy going. It's almost like I teed up this whole idea of the 43 different states that are trying to get women and African-Americans away from voting, brown people away from voting. That's one of the reasons I'm putting such an emphasis nowadays on HR1 and Senate 1 to protect voting rights. So this is a moment when people, I think, say, wait a minute, this isn't who we, maybe who we are, but it isn't who we want to be. And in the 1860s and in the 1930s, they took America back. So our track record is good. We'll see where we end up this time. How did I get involved in the history of politics? You know, politics is not really, to me, the study of what I do. I did not start in politics at all. My master's is in literature, by the way. I care about power and I care about representation of power. So in America, power is the place where the rubber meets the road is politics. So I actually never intended to study politics and I got involved in it because, as I wrote somewhere else a few nights ago, I was ready to drop out of college. I hated it. I liked learning, but not on their schedule. And I happened on to the story of a bunch of normal people in Maine who had just gone about their lives and somehow at the end of the day, they ended up becoming instrumental in the Civil War and changing the course of American history. And that fascinated me. I love those stories of sort of ordinary people who come out of nowhere, not because they're like, I'm going to be a mighty mouse and take things on right now, but because somehow the world puts them in a certain place at a certain time and they make the right decisions. So I ended up getting involved in politics only because it's also about power. And I think the study of power is endlessly fascinating, not least because I have never wanted any. So it's easy for me to be attached from that, but it's almost like watching a play. The failure, somebody has asked, can I talk about the success and failure of education, civics and history and media in exploring and solving these issues? That is of course a huge, huge, huge topic. And let me start by saying one of the things in both of these issues, both these time periods I'm talking about, one of the first things that happens is an attempt to stop education, to make sure people are not educated. Because the minute you teach people to think critically, the minute it's very, very hard to lie to them. And so the corollary to that is that, you know, if you think about it, and certainly Abraham Lincoln did, democracy is a problem. And I would say this to my students, not in so many words, but the idea is great. Now let's think about, do you really want everybody to vote? And students usually are like, yeah, sure. And I'm like, yeah, what about the fact that, you know, there's not the university I'm at now, but a different university. I'm like, two thirds of the people are supposed to be in this class don't show up. Do you want them to have them say on their final, on what the final is? And I'm like, hey, wait a minute. Yeah, maybe people need to participate. And once you start, you know, what about four year olds? Four year olds vote? You know, there are real questions about how democracy works. And so what's the answer to that? What do you do when you look at the fact voters often make incredibly dumb decisions? Well, you could do, if I think those decisions are dumb, I could go ahead and say, well, we're just trying to let those people vote because they're going to make dumb decisions. And that's where we are right now, by the way, with these voter suppression bills that are in these 43 different states. And that's certainly where we were in the 1890s, not only with regard to black voting, but also with regard to immigrant voting. And it's a very common theme. But once again, once you've done that, you just got rid of democracy. So how do you reconcile these two things? And what Abraham Lincoln and the people of his time talked about and what Republicans have talked about until the 1980s, and certainly Democrats have as well, less so until after the 1960s, but they've always been interested in education, is education. You know, we must put money toward education. And one of the things that happened in the 1960s and the 1970s and then fed into the 1980s, first of all, we get desegregation creating private academies, especially in the American South. And they are, they're private schools. They're not public schools. And that breaks down the idea of civic identity and of a body politic. But at the same time, something else crucial happened that we don't talk about nearly enough. And that's that when women started entering the workforce in large numbers out of necessity or out of desire. In the 1960s and the 1970s, they sucked out of the American economy and the American system a huge amount of incredibly qualified, incredibly smart, incredibly valuable volunteer labor. And when that happened, the pressure on the schools and on some other institutions as well got very, very high. But Americans never wanted to pay for what they had been getting for free. So we've got this real beginning in the 1970s and then into 1980s. We've got this real disjunction between how much money we are putting in the schools and how much we are asking them to do. And that's one of the things, and I'm obviously not talking about the political imperatives of changing what's happening in the schools because I think this particular format is better for large questions. But if I could raise a wave of magic wand, I would be pouring money into the public schools and urging people to go to them. I am a huge fan of our public institutions, especially our public schools, where teachers do just an amazing job. All right, so that's not a lot on that, but let's go ahead. And now there's a ton of questions, and we're almost out of time. How do I counter arguments that say the historical past is not relevant to today's politics? I don't bother. Anybody who says something like that, what's the point? So what historians do is that the past does not echo. The past does not repeat itself as a better way to put it at all because we're all individual snowflakes. But what does happen is that what historians do is we study how things change. That's our job description. We look at how societies change. And in order to see how societies change, we need to examine the facts on the ground, and we need to see how things change. And what we do is we make arguments about how things happen. And unless you understand those arguments, you look at change in America today or in a society today, and you have no context. You have no way of saying, oh yeah, things change because of the fact that we're not going to change. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. We're going to change the world. So we're saying, oh yeah, things change because of the rise of women working outside the home or because of social movements or because of a charismatic figure. You have to, it's like saying that you can't, you can't apply math to figure out how many bushels you've got out of these three barrels because math isn't in the present. I mean, that's what we do. And you know, you get all kinds of that crap doing what we do nowadays. I'm going to speak here for a second to the moderator. Doug, I assume you're going to tell me when you would like me to roll this up. I'm going to go backward now from here in case he does tell me I need to wrap up here. Does my book discuss the role of the lost cause mythology? Yes, in winning the narrative of the Civil War. And what it does is it takes a look at how the lost cause mythology actually builds off of the image of the American cowboy in the 1880s and the 1890s, which is when all those statues go off, of course, and how that feeds into the literature of the time as well. Because what those statues do, tend to do, is they tend to emphasize the idea that the American South, when it fought for the Confederate States of America, was not designing, was not trying to protect slavery, which is ridiculous. That's exactly what it was doing. Look at any of the declarations of causes which are, oh, I don't know, at the National Archives and in our records administration and in places like that. It looked at those, if you look at those, you can see it's all about slavery. But what happens is in the 1880s and the 1890s, the South rewrites what the war was about and starts to say that actually, and it actually begins its rewriting in 1865, and that's in the book too, but the statues and things and the lost cause go up in that 1880, 1890 era. Because what they're saying is that the Confederate soldiers, the lone Confederate soldier, was standing for an individual who was fighting against a large government that was going to take what was his, and here he was standing, making a final last stand, and he kept that vision alive for the Northerners who had this moment of craziness where they wanted to use the federal government to create equality. So I talk a lot about that and about the movies that rose at the same time as well, who are lionizing that right up through the 1930s, right up through 1939. So I've been told to take one more last question and a quickie. Yes, I did an audiobook version and it's good. I had a great producer do that book. So yes, there's an audiobook and let me see. It's something easy here. So a great one here. How do I feel reconstruction impacted the future of civil rights? Could it have been handled differently if it had not been abandoned? So this is the story closest to my heart, and I'm going to finish with this because I think that our history since the Civil War has never left reconstruction. I'm not going to argue about when reconstruction ended. You can come up with a lot of different end dates for it, but that the patterns that we laid down in reconstruction, we are still living with today, literally. And what I mean by that is in the book, but let me just lay it out here, is the idea that during the Civil War, there's a number of things that happened. But one of the things that happens is the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln goes ahead and creates a new expansive federal government that has never existed before, and it finances that in part through the creation of our first national taxes, including an income tax. At the same time, of course, it admits a new body of people into the body politic, and that's going to be African-American men. So coming out of the Civil War, especially out of the 15th Amendment in 1870, we get the linkage of the idea that African-American, that is previously unequal people, are going to have a vote. They're going to be able to say what the government does, gives them a direct influence on other people's money. And as early as 1871, the idea of black voting becomes associated in the American South with the idea, and I am not making this up, of socialism. Americans begin to start to talk about socialism in 1871. The Bolshevik Revolution, of course, is going to be 1917, but they are talking about socialism. And of course, it doesn't mean anything what it's going to mean after 1917, but we get the idea that having previously unequal voices of black people, brown people, women in the body politic will create socialism. That is, they will vote for programs that are going to cost tax dollars that are going to have to be paid for by white people with property. We get that idea in 1871. And one of the places, it's a great place to end because one of the places this book started was the fact that when you read some speeches from the 1850s by people like James Henry Hammond, for example, a senator from South Carolina, his program for America sounds almost exactly like that of Barry Goldwater's ghost written, it was written by Elbrent Vazel, whose brother-in-law to William F. Buckley Jr., Elbrent Vazel is the conscience of a conservative. It's the same language. And that idea that somehow we need to cut people out of the vote now because they're going to vote for socialism, that is absolutely out of reconstruction, absolutely out of reconstruction. What could have been done differently? We could have been more careful about our media, among other things, which is one of the things that drives Americans backing, northerners backing away from the idea of guaranteeing a level playing field. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and thank you for being here and to wrap it up and hope that this was interesting for you. And with luck, there'll be another different book to be talking about in a few years. Thanks for being here.