 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Linda Hirschman about her new book, The Color of Abolition, which examines the alliance among Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman in the fight to enslave her in the United States. In the authoring conversation is Margaret Sullivan, media columnist at the Washington Post. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up next month on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, April 5th, at 1 p.m., four days after the National Archives releases the 1950 census to the public, author James R. Gaines will be here to tell us about his new book, The 50s and Underground History. Gaines argues that they were not a decade of conformity by the time that sparked movements of change in gay rights, feminist rights, civil rights, and the environment. And on Tuesday, April 12th, at 1 p.m., Costa Kennedy brings us his unconventional biography of Jackie Robinson titled True, which focuses on four transformative years in Robinson's athletic and public life. The letter Robinson wrote after an incident on a bus while he was second lieutenant of Fort Hood, Texas, is on display in the east rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and online through April 20th. In the decades before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass emerged as the foremost orator and writer for the abolition movement. Abraham Lincoln said of Douglass that there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. And at Lincoln's second inauguration, Douglass sat near the president. How Douglass came to be on the side of the president is a story told in the color of abolition, our featured book for today's program. Linda Hirschman describes how the team of Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman successfully promoted the anti-slavery cause in the 1840s. By the early 1850s, however, Douglass joined with those who actively engaged in politics to achieve abolition and rejected the non-political means espoused by Garrison and Chapman. The New York Times reviewer William G. Thomas III calls the color of abolition a fresh provocative and engrossing account of the abolition movement. And in the Boston Globe, reviewer Lydia Mullen declares Hirschman's book is a wonderful cataloging of Americans, white and black, who devoted their lives to ending slavery. Then the Hirschman is the author of Reckoning, The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment, and of the New York Times best-selling sisters-in-law, Hal Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the Supreme Court and changed the world. Margaret Sullivan is the Washington Post media columnist and author of Ghosting the News, Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, and the forthcoming memoir Newsroom Confidential, Lessons and Worries from an Ink-Stained Life. Now let's hear from Linda Hirschman and Margaret Sullivan. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much for coming to this session. I'm very pleased to be here with Linda Hirschman who is a dear friend of mine and a brilliant author. Her book is wonderful and I'm looking forward to this conversation with her. So I'd like to start off with sort of a general question and one that perhaps is appropriate given that our audience and our sponsors here are the National Archives. Tell us, if you would, how you came to research this book and particularly how you came up with one of the aspects that has gotten so much attention, which is the role of the female protagonist, which really wasn't well known before, and how did organizations such as the archives and libraries, which are so precious, play into that discovery process? This is the first book that I have ever written which is said entirely in the past. So I didn't have any living people to interview, which is a big asset. Having living people is a big asset when you're writing a compelling story. So I knew it was going to be hard and I did what I think a lot of us do. I started with the secondary literature. So I read what other people have written about the period. And then when they said something that interested me, I followed their trail back into the archives. And I quickly learned that there was a staggering wealth of archival material about the abolitionist period. Let's say from 1830 to 1865, like consecutive inaugural. And it's located in a bunch of places, including here in the National Library of Congress. But one of the books I read was a little, a slim volume about the Western family of Boston, the Western family. And one of the Western sisters is Maria Weston Chapman after she married Chapman. And so I was alerted to Maria Weston Chapman's seemingly important role in the abolitionist movement. And yet there was nothing about her. So the author of that book alerted me to the fact that the Boston Public Library had a collection of the Western letters, a huge collection of the Western letters. These women did nothing but write letters to one another and the other people on the abolitionist movement. So I knew that if I could go to Boston and use their archival material, I could find out who Maria Weston Chapman was and try to figure out why she'd been neglected. But of course there was the pandemic. And luckily for me, the Boston Public Library had put all the letters online. So I had complete computer access to all of this rich correspondence among the many players in what turned out to be my story. And since the pandemic confined me to my home, I could spend all day every day looking at these illegible letters and trying to figure out what they were actually saying to one another. This book is a tribute to the power of archives. There is no chance I would have understood what was going on or how important she was without her. That's wonderful to hear. So tell me what your feeling was, what your emotion was when you realized that Maria Weston Chapman could be a major character in your book and that she really hadn't been written about before. I mean, was it a Eureka moment and did you see all of a sudden how this could play out and did it change your approach to the project? It was a Eureka process. I pitched the book as being about Garrison and Douglas, the interracial alliance. I'm very interested in how people overcome the things that divide them and act collectively. So originally, Maria Weston Chapman was not a very important character in the book at all. But as I slowly realized how important she had been and how underrepresented she was, she just grew out of my topsy. I mean, she was just, it just went up in an arc. And I have to give my editor at Houghton Ifland High Court now, wearing her books at HarperCollins, Deanne Irmey, a shout out. Because about halfway through the process, I docked back a version of the book from my editor. And she said, you know, I think you should feel free to make more of Maria. And of course, once unleashed, I had Maria, the woman who ran the bazaars, right? I'm the daughter of a rug merchant. So I love the idea of this high society woman running the bazaars. So I could really run with it. I don't know if someone who's a professional historian would have so quickly realized that she was underserved because this is not my specialty. My degree is in philosophy. And I'm interested in collective action. That's what brought me to this historical story. And so I'm not part of the club. So I was like, well, this is an important person. There's no books about her. Why would that be? Maybe because for generations, most historians were men, specifically white men, and they didn't notice her. And we're very glad that you did. I've always been fond of the subtitle of your book, which I'm going to recite for a moment, which is, How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation. So tell us why you use those three nouns. And particularly, I suppose, the Contessa, which is a wonderful word, and a kind of a real draw to how can you not want to know about that? Exactly. So my dad told Puppets, and I wanted to sell books. And Contessa was her nickname. I didn't make this up. She was nicknamed the Contessa because in that rather modest movement, she was wealthy, and she was beautiful, and she was gorgeous with dress. So it was kind of understandable that those sort of snobbish Bostonians wouldn't name her the Contessa. Her adversary is called her Lady of Bath, and that's also a noble title. And I wanted to tell the reader, even in a casual glance, that the role of printing and prophecy, which is mostly spoken words, and social power came together to make the abolitionist movement. So the subtitle conveys a lot of information, as well as being a little hook. Right. It is a hook, and it's a great one. So you do, as you have said, and as we can tell from your past work, which has to do with women coming onto the Supreme Court with gay rights, and with the Me Too movement, you write about social movements. What is it that ties these movements together? What are the necessary sort of, what is the necessary underpinning? And what are the, what's the foundation for social movements? How does it work? So I only write about America, which is a self-governing republic. To this moment, this is a self-governing republic that is a state of the Enlightenment West. So that's my specialty. And in those circumstances, there are conditions that give rise to movements for social change. And I specialize in movements that try to make the world better for people who are less powerful. I was a UN inside labor lawyer when I passed this law. I'm very interested in the distribution, the wider distribution of power and wealth and meaning and opportunity. So I only write about those. And what you look for is that there's a crack in the establishment. There's a change in the media technology. Goes all the way back to the invention of movable type in the Protestant Reformation. People have enough maneuvering room, enough security, material security and political security. They're not like threatened with the gulag, so that they can see the horizon. And usually there's a charismatic leader who understands that the oppression is not a law of nature, but is a decision, a political decision by other human beings. When those circumstances are present, then the soil is right for social change. And then I look at what works, right? So there's conditions for it, but it doesn't always take root. For example, Occupy Wall Street has been a very unsuccessful so far movement for social change. So I'm looking at what works. And I have, over the many years that I've looked at a lot of moments, I think developed some ground rules for what works. Do you want to hear the ground rules? I do. I think I'm fascinated by this. And as I'm listening to you, I'm putting this in the context of this moment in American history, which I think your book is so timely, though it is a historical book. It is so timely because of the civil rights reckoning that we have been through in the past a couple of years. Well, one thing I'm wondering, listening to you talk about this, is are you essentially optimistic about social change? And yes, I would like to. So maybe we can come back to that. But yes, what are the requirements? What are the underpinnings for a successful social movement? So I reverse engineered them, right, to get these rules. I didn't make this. I didn't come to it with this in mind. One is they have to take the moral high ground. Social movements that rely on relativism are rarely redistribute power. They might change the distribution among the powerful, but they rarely redistribute it to the less powerful. So if you go all the way back to Martin Luther or Karl Marx, there is a very potent moral argument in favor of the change. And the second thing I look for now is that they have revolution is a change in the media technology. And they exploit the change in the media technology going all the way back to the invention of mobile type. And they have regular meetings, right? The churches taught that. The potent power of regular meetings. And they get out and do retail politics. So there was no way that Occupy Wall Street was going to succeed without doing the hard work of retail politics. I call it walk and talk. In the abolitionist movement, the women and the men, but it was heavily run by Maria and her women troops, would knock on people's doors and get the signatures on petitions to abolish the slave trade in the national capital. And in that retail political movement, they would walk and walk the streets of all the cities of Massachusetts and knock on the doors of the houses during the day. It was the women who were at home. They couldn't even vote, but they would get their signatures on the petitions because you don't have to have the right to vote to petition the legislature. And then those women would be converted to abolition and then they convert their families. So my rules are take them all by ground, have regular meetings, walk and talk, do retail politics. That's fascinating. Is retail politics different now in the age of the internet? Does it actually not require shaking hands but sending things out on Twitter? I think that is not true. I think that the internet is the media technological change that is driving a lot of the current social movement. And I completely recognize and respect that. But I want to draw attention to the difference between 2018 when indivisible and a bunch of resistance movements to the Trump administration did retail politics in the living rooms of women all over this country. And 2020, when the Democrats took the White House, but they lost seats in the House of Representatives and they did not, in important ways, take the Senate. And then in 2020, of course, the pandemic precluded the kind of retail politics that I'm talking about. So I think you have to have both. The new media technology plays a huge role in terms of organizing and bringing people to street theater, which is another very important part of social change. Gathering people on the streets is very much tied to the new media technology. But you don't get them to come to the voting booth unless you knock on their doors. And the classic example of that is Stacey Abrams registering Black rural voters in Georgia and flipping Georgia. That is okay. I think it's both. Yep, it's got to be both. Well, that's a little bit refreshing in a way. I wouldn't like to think that social media could take over for face-to-face contact. And it's a very different kind of thing. I want to mention to our audience that I'm very happy to submit or to tell your questions to Linda. So feel free to submit them, I think, in the chat or in whatever way looks like the way to do questions here. And we'll integrate those into the conversation. I can talk with Linda endlessly, but I would love to ask her your questions as well. So please feel free to submit those. So if you would, talk a little bit about how the timeliness of this book now, can you put it in the context of the murder of George Floyd, the reckonings that we're seeing in, for example, newsrooms and other institutions? What's the relationship here? There clearly is one. So I will say this. I started out on this book years and years ago. And the question that I was interested in was can you have an interracial alliance? Right? I've always been interested in abolition. Abolition is the single most successful social movement in American history. So someone like me wouldn't actually want to say something about it. But there's been a tremendous amount of writing about it. So I thought what I could bring to the party is a current question, which is, how do you have an alliance across racial divide? A very, very important question. And I didn't think when I started out that it would be so relevant. I'm actually not all that glad that it's that relevant because you may recall of the period that I wrote about and this new book ended in a civil war. So the deep divide in American politics and the anger and hatred in American politics now was not something I would have wished for. I was hoping to tell a happy story of how black men and a white man worked together in abolish slavery. But here we are. And I would say that it is so relevant because after the, I would say, disappointing results of the 2020 election. I was disappointed with the results. And I was glad that the Democrats won the White House, but I was surprised actually and disappointed that they didn't do better in the state legislatures and so forth. So I want to say the most important message that I can convey to the public from what I've done is that this is a marathon and not a sprint. And the abolitionists were faced with adversarial conditions that are much worse than what we're looking at now. Four million people were caught in the terrible system of enslavement in the slave states. And the cotton was the single largest export that the American Republic had to send. And all of the financial institutions in New York and Boston were completely enmeshed in the financing of slavery and dependent on the cotton crops to make their fortunes. So it was, and the Constitution, a slave document, right? I mean, that's not an exaggeration. The Constitution was written to preserve the power of the empty rural slave states. So the situation for the 12 men in a basement of a black church in 1832 bounding the first anti-slavery society was profound and terrible. So I want to say to people now, it's not as bad as it was then. They thought they had a marathon and not a sprint. It was 33 years from the founding of the first anti-slavery society to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In social movement time, that's not a long time. So we need to take the lesson that you have to run a marathon and be committed, deeply committed. And in order to be deeply committed for a marathon, you have to have what the abolitionist movement had. And that is a clear understanding of the morality of your position. And in my opinion, progressive politics now stands for the survival of the oldest modern self-governing republic in the history of the human species. Could you have a higher moral purpose than that? And we have to remember that that's our purpose and not allow other kinds of side issues to get in the way. And we need to use the moral power. What could be more honorable than helping people to govern themselves and its endanger? And that's our moral lesson, just like the iniquity of enslavement and how it violated both the Christian religion and the Declaration of Independence was their moral high ground. And we have to use the new media technology in the abolitionist movement. It was the invention of the term table, movable press, and later the steam driven movable press. There were more than a dozen patents taken out for improvements in printing during the 10 years before the founding of the modern abolition movement and the following 10 years. So from 18, let's say 12 to 1842 say in those period, there were dozens of patents for improvements in printing. In our case, it's the internet, but it's also the public funding and the philanthropic funding of local newspapers. So I don't need to tell you this, but one of the really important things that happened in the abolitionist movement is that there were little abolitionist papers founded all over the North, especially after 1846 when the first telegraph line was laid from Washington to New York. So by the speed of the telegraph, news could go to the hinterlands and people found an abolitionist newspapers and like Indiana that had never been there because of the new media technology. It was usually important. We need to take advantage of the new media technology. We need to have regular meetings. I hope that the pandemic has retreated enough so that the institutions of progressive politics and saving the American Republic can once again start to have like Monday nights at the Gay and Lesbian Center in act up was absolutely critical. And the abolitionists learned that lesson from the Christian church. And we have to have people who are willing to knock on doors, to walk and talk and to keep going back. The abolitionists kept going back. They would sit, they had speakers call. They would spend, send a speaker to a town and he would stay, they learned this from the Revivalist religion. He would stay until the area was abolitionized and then he would leave. We need to have human beings talking to each other in person and at your door, just like the abolitionists do. Makes sense. Here's a question in the chat. You said that Maria Weston Chapman managed Frederick Douglass's speaking tour. How common was that role for a woman of that time period and how much money or how successful was she at it? Did she raise a lot of money for the movement? So she both managed it and she raised a lot of money but not from the speaking tours. So now I got to give William Lloyd Garrison a lot of credit. He understood that women were your best allies if you were going to make a political movement and he reached out to them. He heard that the Black women, of course, had preceded him by founding a Black female anti-slavery society and he immediately asked his female acquaintances, Lydia Maria Child was already in the movement, to found a female anti-slavery society and he stood by the women when the other branches of abolition didn't want to have women speakers and stuff. Garrison was a faithful ally to women so I give him a lot of credit and for that reason there were a fair number of women in the abolitionist movement. Abby Kelly was one of their most successful speakers and it was her presence on their delegation to the big meeting that broke up the anti-slavery movement because the New York branch didn't want to have women participating and managing it. So Maria was not the only one but she was the manager. She didn't like to speak in public. One of her public appearances had been mobbed and she found that very traumatizing even though she was incredibly brave but she was a fantastic manager and so as soon as she came into the anti-slavery meeting, her first meeting, she was so boardlessly dressed, they thought she was a spy. So she came in, she looked around, she saw they weren't running it very well and she was unbelievably competent, just took over and she started both running the tours. She often ran the liberator newspaper because William Lloyd Garrison was often having some hypochondriacal illness or vacation so a lot of what we attribute to Garrison is actually Western Jackman running the paper. She ran the speakers tours. These were like, it's the left. So these men of the left were a little, shall we say, disorganized and she came in and organized them and figured out who would go where and also she was this letter writer. So since there was no telephone or no email, all of the negotiations and stuff went through letters and so people quickly figured out as they wrote to Maria something would happen and they wouldn't get a letter back and they're all in the Boston Public Library archive. So she took over because she was so competent. She also took over the anti-slavery bazaars so that's where the money was. Okay, the money was in the bazaars and she raised so much money she paid the anti-slavery society's debts. She enabled the abolitionist movement in Boston to keep the lights on for years and she was so smart about it. I being a merchant's daughter, I loved this. She looked around and said, well, we'll make more money if we have richer customers. So she got all of her acquaintances in Europe and stuff. Remember, she was a very fancy lady to shop around for stuff for her to sell at the bazaars and that then attracted the rich women and men of Boston and they would come and spend large amounts of money and she would give it to William Lloyd Garrison to free the slaves. Pretty clever. Would you say that all three of the people you focus on were charismatic in their way or not really? I mean, certainly we know Frederick Douglass was. Oh, William Lloyd Garrison was also very charismatic. It's interesting. It sounds like you're saying that so was Maria Weston Chapman. She was tremendously charismatic but she did it sort of behind the scenes. She wasn't a speaker and we often assume that her writing was extremely charismatic like Garrison's. She was a very, very charismatic writer. And remember, print and letters really mattered then in a time when there wasn't no television and stuff. So even though she wasn't a charismatic speaker like Frederick Douglass was, she was charismatic in this print medium and she was also extremely funny. She pointed very, very funny limericks and stuff. But Douglass was the speaker and he's known for his charismatic speeches and there's nobody like him. There hasn't been anybody like him in the history of the American Republic. Full stock. He was the most important American in the 19th century. So, but people don't know that William Lloyd Garrison was also a very charismatic writer. Very charismatic writer. And he deployed the printing press to free the slaves. And he was also a pretty charismatic speaker and he gathered people ador him. He gathered people around him and they were faithful to him and the abolitionist movement could never have gotten started if they hadn't had such warm friendships with William Lloyd Garrison. They treated him like a father figure in the Boston movement. I love it. So here's a question in the chat. Since many abolitionists initially advocated universal suffrage, did the Maria Weston Chapman papers reveal any interest by her in the suffrage movement? No. She was not, although she was, a feminist. Okay. So here's a great feminist story about Maria. Two of the most effective speakers on the abolitionist speaking tour were Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who had been the daughters of sugar planners and enslavers in Charleston. The Grimke sisters left their slave family moved to Philadelphia, converted to Quakerism and became two of the most effective speakers on the circuit. And the man, the conservative men in the abolitionist movement did not want them to speak. They thought it was inappropriate for mixed audiences of men and women to listen to a woman's voice. Is this starting to sound familiar? And so when the Grimke sisters came to Boston, Maria Weston Chapman organized their speaking tour and all the Western sisters got together and guaranteed that they would have huge audiences in their speaking and men came because they wanted to hear these famous speakers and it broke up the moment. I mean, the conservative power of anti-slavery would not tolerate it. So Maria acted like a feminist. And she wrote a wonderful hilarious poem, if you want to read it, you can buy my book, about how a women speaking was such a scandal and she defied her own minister. So she acted like a feminist. She did not indicate interest in the suffrage movement by the Seneca Falls Convention. She had inherited her dead husband's fortune and moved her family to Paris. So she really was gone. And she does not have that crossover record that Lucy Stone and the others had over into a feminist of slavery, although she was a feminist. Do you, having written about these social movements, I started to ask you this before but I do want to come back to it. They have been, the ones you have written about have been vastly successful. They have really changed society. Does that make you an optimist? Can you be, you know, do you feel optimistic about where we are now, knowing what you know about these movements in the past? I think we're on the cusp in the midterm elections of 2022. And especially if the Supreme Court of the United States intervenes and makes it harder to vote or supports gerrymandered electoral districts. The Supreme Court of the United States can still play a role in the election this November. This midterm and then the presidential election 2024 represent a kind of inflection point in the survival of the progressive self-governing republic that I have always been writing about. But I will say there were inflection points in abolition, Margaret, which looked so bleak, the war that the United States have with the, that the United States annexed the slave state of Texas and then went to war with Mexico and acquired a great deal more potential slave land, let's say, in 1846, looked terrible. It looked like a terrible moment. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which initiated a reign of terror in all the black communities of the north. And so many black Americans, fugitive slaves or free blacks had to flee to Canada, just like the Russians are fleeing from Russia. Now Americans had to flee to Canada. So we have had inflection points in the past, which looked dire. And yet we taking America as a marathon and not a sprint, the forces of progressive politics were able to organize and to use those defeats in order to ultimately come to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. So I have, I'm holding my breath to see what happens in this election and the next election. But even if it is tantamount to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, I still will be hopeful because I saw in abolition a movement that surpassed many terrible setbacks by healing to the fundamentals of the American Republic, which is a kind of that every individual is entitled to dignity, whether from God, as Thomas Jefferson said, or from the manual kind. And also from the principles of the Declaration of Independence. All right. Well, I'll take that as a modified, I'll take that as a modified form of optimism. I'm searching for it. So I'm glad to hear that. You know, I'm very interested in the subject of heroic people in movements and in history and at this moment. And I wonder, and this is maybe a little unfair to spring this on you, but I know that your mind is very facile and you can jump into any question. Are there modern day versions or analogs of the three people that you write about or any of them? Are there are there people, whether in in the world or in the United States, who are charismatic figures who represent a moral stance and who can change the world? Like who are who are the versions today of these three people? Are there any? There sure, of course, there are. Of course, there are. I would go back to books to Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Sotomayor. I regard her as a charismatic and heroic figure. And she was, of course, right when she said that a wise Latina woman in the fullness of her experience might come to a different conclusion than a white man who had had a different experience of life. And when she got on the Supreme Court of the United States, even though, as with the current perspective, Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, she was not going to claim a majority, right, Sotomayor. But she has used the media and the possibility to be a charismatic leader of change in America. Her beautiful autobiography was an example of that. If you go and see her speak, she's a speaker that the abolitionists would have been proud to have in their speaking court. She's an incredibly charismatic speaker and she takes the microphone and she walks into the audience like Oprah Winfrey and you cannot get near her. It is an old-fashioned revival, meaning I have been watching her since I wrote about her and sisters-in-law and I would regard her as fitting the question that you asked. I am very interested in three up-and-coming political characters. I can't give a long description of each of them, but I like the combination of John Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock in Georgia. I think that both Georgia, I'm about to buy, there's a new book about Georgia flipping out that just came out. I'm about to buy it. I'm interested in Georgia and I think that the Warnock Ossoff interracial alliance, hello, and the way they managed to work together what made it greater than the summer experience. So I'm very interested in them and I'm very interested in AOC. I have thought that AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Portez, was a possible new Frederick Douglass since then. First commercial for her primary campaign for Congress in New York. I happened to cross her commercial on the internet and I was like, my antennae went up, you know, my Cassandra antennae went up and I was like, aha, that's someone to watch. And in the meanwhile, she's proved herself to be quite astute in the way she expresses herself, just similar to Douglass, the battles that she chooses, which is similar to Garrison and her ability to galvanize, hitherto disempower people, which is similar to Maria Weston Chapman. So she interests me greatly. And from the prophetic point, from the prophet, from my prophet, I would give you my friend, Ellen Listl, Justice Correspondent for the Nation, whose new book has also just come out. Allow me to retort. Allow me to retort. And I was blessed to meet Ellie in a social context years ago. And the first time I heard him speak, I was transformed. On the world stage right now, there's a great deal of attention to Vladimir Zelensky as a kind of, you know, some people have said that he has become a kind of moral leader for the world. How do you see him in, you know, I know your specialty and what you write about is America, but I'd love to hear you riff on him a little bit. Does he have some of these characteristics? Well, and does he use, I think he does use, the media revolution and technology in a very interesting way. So, you know, how does he fit in? Ukraine, in its modern incarnation, not when it was still under the thumb of the Russian-linked previous leader under Zelensky. And it's since the rebel, the rebel revolution, wherever they call it there, is more like a state of the Enlightenment West. And therefore it falls roughly into my wheelhouse. So if you would ask me about, you know, Japan or someplace that I know nothing about their culture, I would say I can't speak to it. But Ukraine resembles a, you know, a place where Napoleon got to with his troops. He did, but, you know, it's like that. So this is accessible to me. And I would say the violent thing. Volodymyr Zelensky has many of the characteristics that I would look for. Okay? He's educated. He is a lawyer. He's educated as a lawyer. So he understands the categories into which a lot of important Western social change fits. He is an actor. And in the attention economy, which really started with Ronald Reagan, he has an asset. I actually don't devalue it. I think it's an enormous value to have that kind of lesbian skill at the inner time of profound attention economy. And he's also a moralist. He's taking the moral high ground in a way that is almost intolerable to watch them suffer since he put such a moral frame around their struggle. So yes, I would say he fits into my categories. He also fits into my category in that at the end of the day, the abolitionist movement could not succeed without the Union Army. And so we'll tie that back to him. What are you saying about that? Because of the military aspect of this? Yeah, right. I mean, my work doesn't normally involve shooting wars. It involves usually verbal wars and battles at the polling booth. Blessedly, but in America, as it happens, my most recent book ends in Zoroa. And it was the Black soldiers that Abraham Lincoln needed because his incompetent generals could not beat the Southern Army. So he needed the Black soldiers, and that is why he passed the Emancipation Proclamation and why Dr. Frederick Douglass in the first place. So at the end of the day, it was about who had the... Someone said to me about my book, about the Civil War. Someone said to me about the Civil War when the farmers go to war with the engineers. Sooner or later, the engineers are going to win. And what Zelensky needs now is the product of the engineers more and more effective arms. Is there often a period of backsliding after a major social movement victory? Is that part of the sort of pattern? And do you see that in the different things that you've written about? It's almost inevitable. In the Gay Revolution, after the Hawaii Supreme Court found a right to marry in the Hawaii State Equal... Constitution Equal Rights Amendment. And that was, of course, broadcast all over the nation. The numbers of people supporting any kind of rights or equal status for gay and lesbian people went way down. There was an immediate backlash in response to the Hawaii Supreme Court opinion. And it took a long time for the gay movement to rebuild its support. So it's not at all uncommon. As soon as Wayne Lloyd Garrison started... Well, actually a little earlier, when Nat Turner had his rebellion in Virginia and then Garrison started the liberator at the same time, there was a backlash in Virginia, and they passed a hideous slave code, much worse than the hideous slave codes that had preceded it. And when there got to be a handful of abolitionists in Congress, John C. Calhoun started talking seriously about deceiving. So there is almost always a backlash. Yes, you know, backlash is a word we get from Susan Filoni, who wrote a famous book, Backlash, about the backlash to the feminist movement, which is the most potent and consistent of all the backlashes I have seen has been to the feminist movement. And my students used to ask me about this. They're like, why is this so hard, Professor Hirschman? And I said, you know, you can't move to the suburbs and get away from your why. So the feminist movement threatens male patriarchy everywhere. And so the resistance to it is potent. And did you see that as well with the Me Too movement? Yeah, so we see it now with the Me Too movement. It was almost immediate. This whole cancel culture thing is actually a response to the Me Too movement, right? Women were standing up and saying, I actually don't want you to put your hands on me. And the response to that was, are you trying to cancel me? So now the phrase theology, as it will do when the hands of the right, has been applied to every progressive social change, every request for progressive social change. People do not want to listen to the n-word in the workplace, newsflash. I'm guessing they always felt that way about it. But when they started saying they didn't like it, it generated in the people, in power, use the phrase cancel culture to resist it. But the origins of that are in a resistance to the Me Too movement, because you can't move to the suburbs and get away from your life. If you want to put your hands on women and they say they don't like it, you're going to resist it. I think it's useful. It's not a perfect analogy, but when I hear the words cancel culture, I like to just broaden the way I think about it is to just substitute the word accountability. And that puts a different spin on it that I think can be very useful. Have people lost their jobs? Have they lost some of their ability to do what they were doing before? Yes, they have. Is that being canceled in a negative way? Maybe it's accountability, which has a much more positive meaning. You know, all enlightenment societies have a concept of accountability, right? I mean, we have a criminal justice system. That's nothing of not accountability for the illegal things that you do. We have a civil justice system. People pay fine civil fines and civil penalties and damages for getting drunk and driving your car into Albert Schweitzer, right? I mean, we have always had accountability. And what's interesting is that each time a very deep old and fundamental concept like accountability is applied to people who have formally been immune from accountability for their acts, they find it horrifying and unfamiliar. So I think your phraseology is perfect because you're drawing on a fundamental concept in any civilized society, right? I'm glad you like it. I have one more question and it's a big one before we wrap things up. I hear a lot of people predicting that because we have such a polarized and hyperpartisan situation in the United States that we're on the brink of civil war. Given your study of this time period in the color of abolition, are we on the brink of a civil war in your opinion? If we are, it will be more like the Civil War in Lebanon than like the American Civil War because there is no easy Mason-Dixon line to divide the free soil of the North which raised an army, right? And mass manufactured guns and the enslavement soil of the South. We don't have that. So it will be scattered. It will be polling places around the country. It will be school boards around the country. So it will be, if it turns to violence, well, it's already turned to violence, right? We have to check on the nation's capital. It's really hard to be more of a civil war than that. So if we see repetitions of the violent attacks, they will be scattered. It will not be concentrated. And they will be somewhat less formal than the conscription of troops by the United States government, right? And the government of the United States of America. It's going to be informal. It's going to be scattered. It's going to be more like guerrilla warfare. I would not be surprised if there were violence, if that's really what you're asking, because guns are endemic and constant and widespread in American society. So everybody's armed. And that is always a dangerous spectrum. And both sides disagree down to bedrock, as they did in the period that I am writing about. So they disagree about where to get their information from. That's bedrock, right? You can have your own facts. That's the deepest divide you've been in. And they disagree about what it means to be fully human and honorific human. And they disagree about how to live together in political society. So those are the wide and deep divides. The nation is armed. It's scattered. And so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see violence. So we really do need some heroes, don't we? We need some heroes. We do. And we need people who are willing to guard the polling places the same way that the abortion clinics had coverage of guides to let the women who were seeking their needed help here get into the clinic. So that's the closest we've come to what I'm seeing now. And I'm Hop Scholar. I think we're going to need heroes. Linda Hirschman, thank you so much for this discussion. Linda is to my audience. Linda is brilliant. Her book is brilliant. And I recommend it highly. I also want to tell the audience that this discussion will be posted for all time on the National Archives YouTube channel. So you can find it there or send it around to your friends. And many thanks to the National Archives for hosting us here and to Linda for the great answers. Thank you very much. And thanks for those of you who came to watch and listen. Thank you, Margaret, for a wonderful conversation, as always.