 Hello everybody. This is Jeff Sacks and welcome to Book Club with Jeff Sacks. I'm absolutely thrilled, Heather, to be in discussion with you today. We're in discussion with Professor Heather Cox Richardson, one of America's leading historians, one of America's favorite historians, very widely watched and read in her daily letters from an American. And also very, very widely read in her wonderful histories of the United States. And Heather, today we're going to be speaking about your fascinating and in many ways troubling the book. This one, how the South won the Civil War, because of course, we thought the North won the Civil War to end slavery and to create a society in line with the pledge of equality, but as you say in the subtitle of this book, this is a book about the continuing fight for the soul of America. So maybe we could start there, Heather. What is this fight for the soul of America? And you describe it as a fight that's been underway from the start of the American colonies up until today. We certainly do feel like we're in a fight. Could you help us to understand what that fight is about? Yes. Well, first of all, I want to say what a joy it is to be here and to point out that both you and I are in what we do in part because of the same man who both was your advisor and who was the man, although he was not in my field to encourage me to go to graduate school. So it feels lovely for the two of us to be here, someone in honor of Otto Eckstein, who is responsible, I think for both of us being here. So if I could just say for one moment about Otto Eckstein, a wonderful person and a great economist, and he was the instructor of introductory economics at Harvard College. And when I sat in his class the first day of freshman year, I said, wow, that's what I would like to do. And so you're exactly right that he got us to our conversation today. Well, well, and that was Eck 10, which I avoided like the plague. And I knew him only because he is the father of my college roommate and one of my and still one of my best friends. And so what isn't fun how people's responsibilities and the things they say to people when they're very young sometimes have very long repercussions. And although I didn't intend to set it up as a segue into American history, it works very nicely for a book like How the South Won the Civil War. Because what that book argues is that although the South lost on the battlefields, which it certainly did it won ideologically and it won ideologically over the concept that the north was trying to advance the idea is it was embodied in the declaration of independence that all men and eventually all people are created equal. And that concept certainly was the one that the Republicans in the north were trying to put into place. But what they didn't reckon with, although they tried they didn't realize what was going to come. They didn't reckon with the spread of American in the sense of people who came under the purview of the American government, American spread West immediately after the Civil War and in that post war West which has a very different history than the east does. The ideals of the Confederacy of a world based in racial and gendered hierarchies found a new extraordinarily fertile ground and entered not only into our political ideology and our economic ideology I actually would argue that it's our economic ideology that started the political ideology. They also entered into our popular culture. And with those symbols of a hierarchical society, presenting to Americans in the 19th century, and since the ideal American, we ended up with a world that looks now very much like the Confederates wanted to or as if it's on the road to what the Confederates wanted to achieve. And I'm telling you, when I wrote that book, I it truly never occurred to me that we would ever see the Confederate flag flying in the United States Capitol. And I'm telling you, in all that I have seen in my almost 60 years on the planet. That's the scene that almost broke me considering what I study. January 6 2021 insurrection. Did you think we would see an insurrection led by a defeated president to overturn a democratic vote. And did you believe that we would see it in 2021 in our lifetime. I expected insurrections I always expect insurrections but especially in this particular moment but what makes this moment unique in our history is that this is the first time that the calls are coming from inside the house. And I mean that with a small age house that is when the Confederacy decided it wanted to take its marbles and go home it did with the exception of the few Congress people who had to be expelled, who were, you know, wanted to align with the Confederacy. But aside from a very brief moment in 1879. It has never been the case that people who were in our government itself were trying to destroy it so that surprised me a lot. The fact that that was coming from from lawmakers themselves who still are sitting in Congress and this I think is the moment we're trying to negotiate now. What do you do when some of your key lawmakers don't believe in democracy. We're seeing that this came from the White House PowerPoints no less on how to manage a coup. Congressman actively involved and yet we seem almost defenseless right now do you feel that way. It's, it's startling to me how this occasion has passed. We'll get back to the old Civil War but we're talking about the new one right now. Are we able to confront this kind of challenge in our day. I believe yes, and I believe yes, in part because of our history. We are not helpless. One of the things that has happened in the years in America since World War two is this increasing concept of systems this idea that individuals can't make a difference that it doesn't matter what we do that things are going to be decided without us and the reality is something very different not only because of the sheer numbers on the side of the people of all parties who actually care about American democracy. But also because I believe because I study ideas and I believe that ideas are what change history. I believe that we as individuals and working together as as groups have the capacity to change the public conversation in such a way that we can reclaim democracy. I don't think it's all over and I don't think it's all going to be over until there's nobody else left to lift up their voices or nobody else who is able to to get access to the media to go ahead and spread ideas and it's not an accident that the right wing and I'm not talking about traditional republicanism any longer I'm talking about the right wing that has taken over the party and now our country. It's no accident that they have done everything they can to change the public conversation you know Alan Jones's media media empires known as info wars information wars and of course we have all the different media channels and we have the thoughts we have the attempt to take over social media that's no accident that they are trying to change the public conversation and Americans and people around the world who are concerned about American democracy can do their part to push back against that disinformation. It's no accident that authoritarian regimes shut down the journalists first I mean Belarus and certainly Putin in Russia shutting up Navalny there that as long as we still have our voices the game is not over. It's fascinating also how the new media play into this because we really have a harder time telling the difference of truth and falsehood when fake news really is so easy to concoct and the digital media to make it so hard or so hard to get the true signal through. I wonder if that's also part of the story from historians viewpoint each new medium, whether it was radio or television or now our social media give new opportunities for demagoguery and for creating a false narrative. Well of course the founders of this country were very concerned about demagogues and certainly new media has always enabled people to spread falsehoods but one of the things you just mentioned was radio and television and as of course you know that broadcast. Television and radio required the agreement to the fairness doctrine until 1987 and that meant that in order for you to get a license to broadcast you had to agree to try and keep your, your news factual and to go ahead and present both sides of a question and with the loss of the, the, the fairness doctrine in 1987 we got the rise of talk radio and interestingly enough one of the things that interests me about the rise of talk radio is that it was not initially political, it was an attempt to go ahead and try to make the the FM radio which was losing listeners to FM radio be profitable again so people like Rush Limbaugh did not begin talking about politics he began being a shock jock in other ways and discovered that at the time politics was the way to go and now a lot of people talk about the fairness doctrine but of course the people what we're talking about now our media channels that are not working off of broadcast licenses because they are cable news for example, or cable channels or people operating over the internet so one of the things that I think is really important and as you know every time we get new technologies they're misused it just it's a given anytime you get a new technology it's it's used by people who have bad intent or only trying to get more money or more power, and generally somebody finally steps in or the country finally steps in and but of course we're up against the first amendment that says the government can't curtail free speech. So, one of the ways in which people are talking about adjusting what you are referring to and that is for example the use of bots or trolls on social media, and especially on places like Facebook, the algorithms that privilege conservative information or I shouldn't use that word privilege right wing information so for example if you look at the at the list of the most shared stories on Facebook on any given day. For example on Gino who is a right wing commentator gets most of them and yet we know that those are not organic that those are those are part of a paid system. And one of the things that people are talking about when they talk about restoring a real political discourse is not to regulate the algorithms that is to make them insist on some sort of of level playing field and to to regulate the bots and the trolls and the money going into the system. And I actually think that has a huge amount of potential, especially as the government is now getting it through the bipartisan infrastructure bill getting involved in putting broadband around so much of the country and actually putting its money behind the systems that are carrying this disinformation. I suspect it's going to give them more power to regulate what is on that system without regulating the speech on it and I think that's got enormous potential I just wish they'd get to it. Your book is filled with fascinating stories about creating the narratives for instance the narratives of the individualist in the American West and I want to come to that. But a founding narrative of the United States is of course the the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. The book in essence one could say American society in its history is a battle over that description, because it was written by a slave owner. It was written at a time of mass slave ownership but was written in a settler colonial society that was extirpating the native Americans and would end up a genocidally removing native Americans as a historian and who has thought a lot about this. What did Jefferson think he was saying in those words. What do you what do you think he he thought he was saying and how, how could he do their beautiful words, but as a as a slave owner and a slave society. How do you get away with it exactly just as a, just as a starting question. I begin my understanding of the Declaration of Independence with the work of Edmund Morgan and a book called American slavery American freedom which he published I think in 1970. And using that as a starting point what Morgan argued was that, and he did it in a in a in a funny way in the book. If anybody's listening to this and think you got to run out and read this book, I actually I like the book in many ways for many things but it ain't an easy read in terms of the argument that I think it ultimately makes he makes it on a bit about in about the last quarter of the book, although the rest of it's interesting to he argued that the enslavement in America came to be the underpinning of the idea of freedom. Because what he argued was that the, the settlers around the in Virginia came to believe that all men were created equal as they said by and his concern was black Americans by reading out of that equation black Americans all together by saving them so that when he said all men are created equal and of course this is 1970 so he was literally looking only at men. The idea was that they read out of the body politic read out of anybody could have political identity, all of the black Americans, their black neighbors with whom they lived, and instead could say that all white men had the same interests and were equal because in fact under that in that situation they did. So what I did with how the South on the Civil War was to expand that with our more recent understandings not only of the role of women in American society but also of indigenous Americans and later on with them in the book and in in America with Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans and indigenous indigenous Americans in the West and the other people who are going to be coming in the 20th century in the West the Japanese for example and so on. And argued that that concept of all men are created equal if you expand that idea says that the white men who lived in the Virginia colonies were able to conceive of the idea that they were equal, not only in spite of the fact that they were surrounded by people they considered unequal, but because of it so that they were able to say that all men are created equal not only because they managed to read out of the equation black Americans, but also indigenous Americans who were also enslaved in colonial America, and women especially whom they didn't even consider I mean that was just by definition women were read out. And so from that concept, I went to what really fascinates me and that is a question that is raised by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book, true believers which everybody ought to go out and read I even think there's a copy PDF copy on the internet. And he is writing in the aftermath of World War two and he says you know, everybody and I'm paraphrasing by the way this is not at this is what I took from the book not what he actually said, but everybody is running around in the years immediately after World War two studying Mussolini and Hitler and and the other authoritarian leaders who rose in the middle of the 20th century and he says, I don't care. Like, why are we studying Hitler and Mussolini because every generation has Hitler's and Mussolini's. The question is, why do people follow them in certain times. And this to me was a light bulb going off because the question then is not to study the the authoritarian so much who really are part of a blueprint in many ways. The question is why a population would follow them. So what I came to think with this concept of all men being created equal literally meaning what is in a sense an interest group of white men who are controlling the economy and the politics of the early American history. The, I came to believe that this concept of all men being created equal. First of all, it depends on the idea of inequality. But second of all what it does is it the fact that it rests on inequality sends a dagger right to the heart of our democracy. Because it gives authoritarians or when I wrote the book oligarchs I think we have jumped into authoritarian territory authoritarianism territory in the last five years. It gives oligarchs a language to undercut democracy. So that any time it appears that women or people of color are going to approach equality with white men. There's a corollary to that idea that equality depends on inequality and that is that if you get rid of inequality. If people in charge lose their equality that is they're going to be denigrated if the other people move up that means somebody has to move down. And with that concept with that corollary. It gives free reign I think to some of the concepts that we offer and Hannah Arendt and George Orwell and the other and and Joseph Heller who were thinking about how ideas and language build political movements. It gives some free reign to some of their ideas and those ideas mean that an oligarch individuals are a person who is starting to get some money and starting to be powerful in a society in American society can look at for example the idea of indigenous Americans or women or black Americans or brown Americans getting some some freedom getting some equality and say I'm going to lose out here and can garner support from voters who would actually benefit from the kinds of reforms that brown people for example would like to have and that that budding oligarch can turn to those voters those white male voters and say hey wait a minute boy these people are going to take away your liberty. And in the process of the power that they begin to accumulate they are going to use the power of the government in such a way that it helps them the oligarchs and hurts the people who are on the make or who are falling in that society and that kicks in that concept that Hoffer worked with the idea that in order for an autocrat to rise or an oligarch to rise you need to destabilize the population either religiously or culturally or usually in America economically at first and then all of those things put together and then once you have destabilized them and they begin to get restive under the fact they are destabilized you say to them oh I can fix your problems the issue is those people over there and who those people are usually doesn't matter so much but in America it's been very easy to turn against the indigenous Americans in against enslaved Americans and by the 1970s at least against women who were asking for equality in American society and as they use that language that corollary to the idea that all men are created equal depends on everybody else being unequal as they continue to use that language they get more and more and more power so that that system I think it was in in one of your recent newsletters if I recall correctly you told a story that I did not realize at all about Trump actually cutting off aid for development projects in Central America in part to make things worse in part to generate the kind of unrest and refugee crisis and migrant crisis that he could use to stir up the his voter base is that right do I remember that correctly yeah yes but that's even more insidious than you just described it because it was not to read it that he was well you know what's interesting though and you do this as well what's interesting about what we do is that I think and I'll speak for myself here we're old enough that we know a lot and we can see more of the moving pieces than we could 30 years ago so what you're referring to is the fact that there is this terrible crisis of violence and of refugees and in the triangle countries in Central America and and it really began to hit in El Salvador and and it really hit it really hit during the Obama administration and the Obama administration tried to handle it there's I'm sorry let me that that crisis meant that there was a surge of migrants refugees not not economic migrants but but refugees from war essentially coming to the American border and Obama tried to handle this by actually sending money into that region and working to stabilize the governments and to stop the violence and to stop the drug trade and when Trump got into office now what's insidious about this is if you look at the rise of Victor Orban in in Hungary, he did he did this exact same thing and in fact this is a key, a key tactic of is to whip up fear of immigrants, and that fear of immigrants of course was so central to Donald Trump's rise that that's the first thing he says when he comes down that gold escalator to announce that he's running for office is to talk about Mexicans as criminals, and he's going to fold that into weirdly I mean it's one thing we haven't studied a lot of he folds that hatred of Mexicans into sort of terrorism in the Middle East and all kinds of other stuff as well so there's this, this sort of generic immigrant who's both on our borders and flying planes into Washington and it I was always busily trying to untangle which immigrant he was mad at which time and I think that wasn't the point. He was supposed to be immigrants, but, but what he did is he cut all the funding that was going to those triangle countries and of course it instantly made things terrible. And that created this enormous surge that he could then turn around and say look, we're being invaded. And this is one of the things that the Biden administration has tried to do is to restore investment into those countries and, and to this American involvement there and he's, this is one of the places that Vice President Kamala Harris has gone again and you know has gone to in person to talk to people and to say both of the immigrants don't come because they're still not able to come across the border because of the public health issues, the public health directive that has kept them out since the rise of the pandemic, but also to say we need to fix this at home people would rather stay at home they just don't want to stay at home if it means they're going to get killed. So that use of American money as a way or lack there of as a way to increase immigrants on the borders was really very deliberate and and very, you know, just really heartbreaking when you think about the fact these are actual human beings lies. Absolutely, people you completely as pawns. Let's go back to the antebellum pre civil war America in the South because you write about the two core hierarchies, the hierarchy of race and the hierarchy of class. And you've just also been explaining for those at the top of the economic heap. The question is how they convince the poor among them to support the oligarchs to stay in power. And in the South, the dynamic always was the slave owners, the poor whites, and the slaves. And if if I'm not wrong about this, the main argument of the slave owners is to the poor whites, you have to side with us otherwise look what would happen to you. You could be deluged by the rise of the people below you. So it's always a game of the people at the top, trying to pull in those who are suffering from an oligarchy economic system to somehow sustain that system. Well, let me nuance that just slightly because in addition to the the concept there of the black Americans and white Americans in the South, which is what what we've been studying for ever since the beginning right since the 1830s at least is the in the injection into that equation of indigenous Americans who are also in the American South in this period and still are, of course, and women, because what I'm arguing is that that that concept of equality, embraced by the Declaration of Independence is is not just about black and white, it's about who gets to sit on the top of a power structure and my concept of a power structure is not binary it is literally like a scale, which is, I spent a long time working on a theory that someday I'll put in writing but it's embodied in this book. The idea of of how one garners power as one is on that scale so we could we don't have time for but there's a complicated concept of how you go ahead and do that and this this of course is applicable across different ethnicities and races and genders. So, it I think is a more widely applicable theory but that being said, it's a real question. You know, how does a, why don't democracies stay democracies, why do people vote for their own destruction, and that's really the central question here. And my argument is that in America anyway, which is the only country I'm competent to talk about, they, they are convinced to do so because of that paradox buried in the Declaration of Independence that for a certain group to have equality, everybody else must be unequal. When unequal people begin to challenge that by demanding equality on their own, people of wealth and power and the media that is having control over the media are able to use that paradox to go ahead and convince people to vote against their own interests. And we see their own economic interest not necessarily their own their own ideological interests. We see the bizarre situation of course it would require a big digression and a lot of unpacking but the leading Democratic Senator opposed to the progressive economic policies proposed by the Biden White House is the senator senator mansion of the poorest state in the country, West Virginia, and he's leading the charge against the policies that would be so vitally helpful for his own state so that paradox of enticing people or manipulating the political system against the clear economic interest of the people involved is playing out again, right before our eyes. Very disturbing. Well, and remember, the people, people tend to blame mansion for that mansions of a very savvy politician. He recognizes what will play in his state and what will not currently. And again, if you talk to people as as polls have done over the child tax credit, that's enormously popular in West Virginia, and it's enormously popular over 80%, and yet, and people are are begging for it to continue and yet what he is up against is the one of the things he's got on the table right now that he would like to see cut from the new build back better bill that he is trying to cap at 1.75 trillion down from 2 trillion by the way which is what he said a few months ago and much lower than the Biden administration proposed at 3.5 trillion. And yet he is up against the, the national media, which is telling his voters that any kind of infrastructure bill like the build back better act is, in fact, socialism, which they are dead set against it's not socialism, of course, but that's what he's doing. And mansion, if you look at him remember that he is is a Democrat holding office in a state that is wildly dark red, and the fact that he is able to run to thread that needle suggests that he knows what his people want, even though he also is no fool and knows that things like the child tax credit would be very good for them. So let's come to the story of the West. Now, which we touched on the Civil War is over. The North has won contrary to your title, and yet somehow it doesn't quite work out as the northern victors suppose that it will so if you could tell us what happens in those years from 1865 onward with regard to what you introduce brilliantly and is not the way this story is usually told, the role of the westward expansion in the ongoing war in effect between the north and the south. And the west turning out to be a tipping point for what had been the southern oligarchic interest. It's an amazing, an amazing story. So if you could flesh that out for us. Isn't it an amazing story. If you think about it. If you think about reconstruction, as you know I say that word and I'm sure everybody's got an image in their head. Our most lasting image of reconstruction is not about black legislators or even about individuals in the American south that were you know working for wage labor or were became sharecroppers. It's not really about any particular labor organizer in the east. It's the American cowboy. The American cowboy operates from about 1866 to about 1886 there aren't that many of them and they don't last for very long but that image, which is dead center of reconstruction is the image that people remember about reconstruction so why I mean that's it's not I mean it's a major industry in a lot of ways but why does that become the symbol of America and that's such a cool story. That story comes from the fact that during the the American Civil War and it's immediate aftermath the United States Congress which is dominated by Republicans at the time remember the Republicans really right there are some southern Republicans but it is a northern based party and a northern and western based party actually in this period. And they organize between 1854 and 1856 and they almost immediately run a very strong candidate in 1856 and then in 1860 of course they run Abraham Lincoln who wins by a plurality of the vote about 42%. And that the Republican Party defense the concept of free labor the idea that everybody should be able to to enjoy the fruits of his own labor and by the end by 1863 and then by the end of the Civil War in 1865. What they do is they begin to use the federal government to make resources available to men on the make and to protect equality before the law and so in order to make resources available to people for example, they passed the homestead act in 1862 which gives people access to western lands which are indigenous lands by the way that's a different story but I'm going to take it away from the Native Americans but so be it it's the it's the westward expansion of the white population. And that's going to matter because at the very same time they're going ahead and and creating our system of federal colleges and going ahead and creating money our national money and our national banking system and putting down the United Pacific Railroad. They are at the same time doing something very different in the west but the Republicans go ahead and begin to try and give people access to resources and do a quality before the law and in that process that means that the federal government is going to protect black rights in the American south after 1865 generally through in a measure they put in place in 1865 which is which establishes the Bureau of refugees freedmen and abandoned lands. And what happens under that which is shortly going to become known as the Freedmen's Bureau although it also helps white Americans in the south by giving them rations and medical care and generally housing or some sort of ability to survive in what is this completely destroyed region of the country after the war. What that means is that in the American south where states are refusing to permit African Americans to testify in court or to sue white Americans. What that means is that after the war as black formerly enslaved people go to work for former employer former enslavers as employers in this case. They get cheated out of wages there are gangs on the roads that are raping women and killing men. They are being abused and they have nowhere to go except to the Freedmen's Bureau and the Freedmen's Bureau is housed within the the American military and the Congress put it there to emphasize that this was only part of the war effort. It was not going to become a full time part of the US government a welfare institution is part of the US government. And so what happens is that as freed people run to the the army and say hey wait a minute here we just work for a month and we didn't get paid. Or you know they just murdered my son the army steps in and decides at least in Texas which is where I'm a thorough study is from in favor of black Americans about 68% of the time. White southerners not all of them but former Confederates look at what is happening that is the federal government in the form of the army saying hey no you can't do that you actually have to pay the people who've been working in your fields. And they say see see this is what we were against it was never that we were trying to preserve enslavement that's not the word they use. It's that we were trying to make sure that a grasping federal government was not going to come interfere in our lives and the way we treated and I'm putting this in air quotes our people by. So the federal government goes ahead with the Freedman's Bureau and then by 1870 it but with the I'm sorry with the 14th amendment in 1868 it tries to protect the rights of freed people in the states with the the idea that you can't deprive a citizen of their rights without due process of law and that everybody in those states gets the equal protection of the laws and then when that doesn't happen in 1870 they not only pass and send the states for ratification which comes back in 1870. The 15th amendment to the Constitution which guarantees the vote for black men but also in 1870 we get the Congress establishing the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was designed to go into those southern states and say no you can't do this it was designed to put down the KKK and it did so really quite effectively until the late 19th century early 20th century. So with that idea of the government protecting black Americans by 1871 former Confederates in the south start to say hey you know it wasn't that we objected to people paying it to people to black Americans participating in our society on the grounds of their race we didn't mind that they were black. We minded that they were poor and uneducated and if they voted and had a say in society they would vote for a redistribution of wealth so what we're really against is not black people participating in American society which is ridiculous is exactly the same people who a year before were arguing on racial grounds by 1871 are saying that's well but not in 70, 1870 but yes five years before but in 1871 and I love this moment and you would love this moment and if I may say so I think Professor Eckstein would have loved this moment. In 1871 they begin to say no no no it wasn't about race it was about class we're against socialism because that's what black voting is it is socialism and of course this is forever before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution but Americans begin to equate the concept of 150 years actually this year that this argument has been made the Wall Street Journal makes it almost every day this is socialism if you help a poor person but you're saying go back 1871 and it was a cover also for racism what it does is it links race to class so this is one of the points that you know historians will argue to their blue in the face whether race is more important in America than class and I'm one of the people saying they're the same thing the way we talk about them. Both of them are hierarchy. So if I may jump forward for example to Lee Atwater. Before you do. I want to draw one point that I think is so important and your book really clarified and opened my eyes for that also which is that in the West. These hierarchical issues are the same but it's not about African Americans. It's about other minorities and I think it's so important to understand that because the Southern Confederates and the Southerners arguing exactly this point. Found an immediate resonance with the wealthy people in the West because race issues hierarchy of race was there as well but in a different form so if you could spell that out. It's absolutely crucial and fascinating. And always had been and just because I know you have a quite educated grip of people here. There this concept is is a slightly different one and it comes from ideas about emerging historical concept of concepts of the history of capitalism with which I have a number of problems those studies but the what what I argued was that the West has its own hierarchical society based on a much older history of both American history but the Mexican history and the Spanish history before it in which the economy was based on an extractive economy that looks very much like a Southern economy that needs high levels of capital high levels of capital and a lot of you know. A plan workers to work in those areas so I so I so I was thinking of them as tornadoes and with that concept that economic concept. Then with it you get the religious concepts and the social and the popular cultural concepts that spin around that, but you asked me about cowboys and and the to get back to that concept of the socialism in the East. At the very same time you get the rise of the cowboy in the West and cowboys historically about a third of the more men of color. We know as historians that the lives of cowboys near those of industrial workers in the East that is they had very low pay extraordinarily dangerous conditions. You know the reasons that cowboys sing are so that both to calm the cattle and so that other cowboys will know where the cowboys are so that if there's a stampede, they can try and turn the animals away from their colleagues because you would literally get flattened we have a memoir from a cowboy who talked about finding one of his friends who I'm not going to be incredibly graphic here but there he was stamp. There we go. He was stampeded to death that's right and. And so they live in these terrible conditions but former Confederates in the American South by 1867 at the latest but but as early as 66 begin to talk about the West is this new land. And it's a new land that is not corrupted in their minds by the what they call socialism or about to call socialism in the American East that is the federal government's not involved it's just these individual young men on their on horseback riding and taking control of this region that from the indigenous people the Mexican people the Chinese people. And of course again that historically this is entirely untrue the American government is more involved in the West than it is anywhere else and all those cowboys are selling their cattle to the American government for. To this day if you look at US government programs, large spending in the West which is supposedly the free market ideology of the Republican Party so it that remains true until today that the US government is deeply involved in investing in the infrastructure, building the dams the roads the power systems and all the rest under the name of individualism and free markets and attacking socialism all along the way, but socialism means helping for poor people. It doesn't mean all those other goodies that are coming to help the mind owners and the oligarchs. Well, and it's really very clear if you look at the voting patterns it's the plain states the cowboy states and the what used to be the deep south, not of course the far west, and the southwest is a little bit different as well. So there is this ideological continuation of the idea of hierarchy that that basically a few good white individualist men should be at the top of a society in which women function at least for the cowboys either as wives and mothers or as sex objects you know you get the concept of the women in the in the saloons or in the brothels in the American West and by the way, if you ever see old pictures, one of the ways you can tell if I mean aside from the frills that women would be wearing in those old pictures. If they are sex workers they will be wearing fishnet stockings that's that's a dead giveaway and often drinking alcohol. But whenever you see fishnet stockings in a picture at the turn of the last century, you know what you're looking at a girly at a girly photos what you're doing, which is today by today's standards is positively puritan but So that concept in the the American West is reinforced not only through the the concept of the cowboy, but also at the state level and I really have to give a big shout out here to Paulie Murray and to Peggy Pasco. Paulie Murray of course the very famous sociologist from the turn of the last century and Peggy Pasco who was a brilliant historian, they passed a number of years ago and and wrote a book that talked about that were at the time called miscegenation laws and she was mostly interested in marriage laws and how those laws enabled basically white men of property to go ahead and concentrate power. She was more interested in those laws in the state laws in the late 19th century, in how they established hierarchies of property and power, and of course, of social power through things like marriage but we actually have this wonderful database now where every state every state law, which is, they're just absolutely fascinating sometimes when I get, you know, bored with whatever I'm doing I sit there and I read the Arizona state laws because from 1864 because they're, they're just unbelievable and watch the system go in power. And those laws were discriminatory in the very period in the east when when the Congress is talking about equality and enforcing equality between white Americans and black American men. In the west, there are literally hierarchies of races and also of genders and that is all predicated not on the idea that the 14th amendment and the 15th amendment, especially the 14th amendment doesn't doesn't really apply to the west because western states rely on a series of laws from the early 1800s that say who can be naturalized, and those naturalization laws which were of course reflecting human enslavement in the east, say that you need to be free and white. By, by using that concept of the free white citizen, they managed to read out of equality, the brown people and the, the Asian people who are arriving in the American West, at the same time that during the war, the indigenous Americans would get redefined, not as people who should be included in the idea of all men being created equal but rather savages so we get this horrible cascade during the American Civil War of our first largest mass execution in American history in 1862 when the government executes 30 Lakotas in Minnesota. And then in 1864 we get the March, the long walk of the Navajo, which marches them across several hundred miles to what is essentially a concentration camp at Bosco Donda. And then, and then finally in 1864 we get the Sand Creek massacre, the Sand Creek massacre in which literally soldiers butcher the bodies and take physical trophies of the Cheyennes who may attack, who are a group of women and children and elderly who are camped under theoretically under the protection of the US Army. And so we get the, the, at the very same time that the Congress people in the Easter talking about equality, we get the reinforcement of racial and gendered hierarchies in the West that then continue after the Civil War. And I want us to jump in our remaining time to the 20th century until today, the South and the West, you show become again a dominant politics of hierarchy and I think you've made the case so clearly and persuasively that it's a hierarchy of class, it's a hierarchy of race, it's a hierarchy of gender. It is a hierarchical society and when, when it says all men are created equal you've helped us to understand that clause. Now, in the 1930s it seems, finally, to start to change. And then, again, with World War two and the aftermath. It seems that the basic idea that there should be more equality in the United States. It's kind of social democracy, not socialism, as say the Wall Street Journal would define it but help for people who are in need. The New Deal and its legacy seem to change and economic issues become more paramount at least for some period, then the old hierarchies comes the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, it seems to all be moving in that direction of a new liberty where that phrase of all men are created equal really is written in the large sense that we like to think of it. And then something stops in that move again so maybe in the last few minutes if you could bring us up to up to date that would be phenomenal because you bridge the whole period beautifully. There is a question. How does this concept that I just described as being resurrected in the American West come to dominate American history. Because what happens after the war of course is the areas in which I'm talk about which I'm talking in the American West are not states their territories that are brought into the country really quickly by the United States Congress during the Civil War. So what happens is that when the South goes solidly democratic by about 1880 it's pretty clear that's going to be the case. The Republican Party decides that it's got to pick up senators and electoral votes in the American West and they do so in 1889 to 1890 by adding two states to the US Congress or the US government that's the that the largest acquisition of states since the original 13 that begins to make this these hierarchical ideological arguments bleed back into the American government. And what the really interesting research part of that book was discovering that quite literally the American West and the American South begin to work together politically this is the first book I think that actually deals with the importance of political entity as well as an economic entity and that that beginning to work together really takes off in the the World War two years when it happens before that of course when it's actually the West that helps to stop anti lynching legislation in the early 20th century but with World War two when the country sort of tips and send so many people and so much money out to the American West. There are many reasons that that old hierarchical ideology in the West really imprints itself on the newcomers from the American South and the American Midwest into the American West and they become a very powerful voting block and that unity of the American South and the American West and their belief in that hierarchy and the idea that a very few people should control society is really highlighted when it's the delegation from South Carolina that puts Barry Goldwater over the top for his nomination for the Republican presidency. He is a senator from Arizona and he has nominated the final person who puts him over the top is a delegate from South Carolina. And that wedding of the sort of racist South to the hierarchical West becomes really visible with the Goldwater candidacy and 64 where he's shellacked across the country but he wins Arizona and five deep southern states. From that point on the Republican Party then begins to echo this language of socialism, communism, the fear that the idea that people of color that women will approach conditions of equality will create inequality for white men begins to enable oligarchs to go ahead and take control of the Republican Party and that I think that's the world in which we're still living. As you say, Heather at the end of the book, can a government based on the idea that human beings have the right to determine their own fate can such a government endure our country's peculiar history has kept the question open. And that's where we're going to have to leave it for our discussion right now. You have really brilliantly opened our eyes to this historical dynamic to this long dynamic of hierarchy versus equality in the United States and shown us the traditional dynamics over two centuries that have shaped the exact debates that we are in today. The book, how the South won the Civil War, absolutely mesmerizing fascinating reading. Heather, thank you so much for being with us. And let me thank everybody that is participating from around the world and also to let you know that our next book club will be on January 19 at 10am. Eastern Time 1500 hours UTC. We're going to be speaking with Casey Michael about the related topic is a new book is American kleptocracy. So it is about the continuation of the oligarchy. This book American kleptocracy is about money laundering about America becoming the center of the money laundering in the world because of the complete deliberate laxity of enforcement of responsible financial code so that wealthy people can hide their wealth. So that's a fascinating read and we'll see you on January 19 and until then, and to Heather and to everybody participating, let me wish you very happy holidays and a peaceful, happy and healthy 2022. Thank you so much for being with us today.