 On Wednesday, five o'clock block, you know, I've been looking forward to this show for a long time. Yeah, good, Jay. Good to be here. Yeah, this is our show, John David Ann, about history lens and talking about transformations today. Right. And this is really important. This is really an important discussion. Right, right. So, yeah, so we're going to, so we're wrapping up our series on political transformations and we, you know, we talked about the first part of the founding of the country in the 1790s and then we talked about the 1850s and the transformations there, the founding of the Republican Party, right? And then we talked about the 1890s when the populist movement tried to, tried its hand at transformation, tried to actually take control of the federal government and ran William Jennings Bryan and then he lost badly and the populists, they didn't disappear, but they really declined after Bryan lost. And then, and now we're talking about the 1920s and the 1930s when, of course, with the economic crash, the Great Depression, then you have a new set of populists who say, hey, we're not doing enough, we should do this and we should do that. And so, I think- And the country was different in the sense that there were millions of immigrants who had come in. Yes. And 20 or 30 years before that. True. It had been repopulated. That's true, right, right. And most of those immigrants, they didn't have much of a political identity before the 1930s. In the 1930s, because of what happens, they gain a political identity and it's, you know, what you have in the 1930s is this devastating situation where, you know, you have 25 percent unemployment, 50 percent drop in industrial production of, you know, just the great dust bowl in the mid-western and the- Oh, he's in the Arches going to the West. That's right. That's right. People who are so poor who are going- Actually, my grandfather and his family, including my mom as a little child, went from South Dakota where they had a farm and they couldn't farm it during the dust bowl. They put their, you know, packed up their stuff and they drove to, I think it was Washington, Washington state, and they picked apples for two summers straight to make a living. All that to consider, the country was at great risk at that time. It was an incredible situation. It was a question of whether it would survive, whether the political system would survive. Exactly, exactly. Good. This is very important to understand about the 1930s and really, when we look at the present day transformations, I don't think we're there yet in terms of a question of whether or not the country can survive economically. And so, you know, in the 1930s, you have capitalism, which has essentially failed. I mean, all of these companies have failed. Henry Ford actually takes his production offline for, I think, from 1929 to 1932. He's not producing any automobiles. Nobody could afford them. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So, you have a situation, and all the major industries are suffering because no one can buy anything. No one has any money. You have, so, along with the 50% drop in industrial production, this is almost exactly the same percentage drop in income. You have a tremendous deflation in the economy. The economy deflates by about 50%, and that means people's incomes essentially deflate by 50%. Costs also deflate some, but if you're not employed, if you don't have a job, it doesn't really matter, right? I keep thinking, and music is playing in my head while you're saying this, and this is the music. Brother. The hills are alive. Not that song. Brother. Can you spare a dime? Right, exactly. In a funny way. I mean, it's really sad what happened. I mean, a lot of people died. No, it's true. Yeah. People died in the streets. No options. Died in the streets. In the winter of 1933, which was terribly cold, and people were being turned out of their rentals because they couldn't pay the rent. I want to offer you a point about the morality of the country in that period. Brother, can you spare a dime? It's so important, because what it tells you is that all of a sudden, people who didn't know each other, people from disparate locations, disparate backgrounds, cared. Right. They had no choice to care. No, that's true. That's true. And they did. They kind of came together on some moral level, and that fiber, those threads, is still with us, I hope, today. Okay. Well, yes, and I hope so too, because that's an important point, and that's a concern of mine as well, that we become so materialistic and focused on consumption that can we actually understand political change as something other than about the economy, but about protection of basic values, the soul of the country as Joe Biden. The glue that holds us together is about caring. Right, as Joe Biden says. So what happens in the early 1930s then, Roosevelt wins the election. He wins handily because Herbert Hoover was really not doing much of anything, and Roosevelt says we'll do everything to try to solve this situation. The problem for Roosevelt, after two years of doing everything, is the situation is still dire. By 1935, the agricultural economy has improved somewhat, but the industrial economy, not much at all. Unemployment is still above 20%. You still have distress, and also what you have, because of this, is you have the emergence of two characters, two political characters, who are, they become enemies of Roosevelt. They actually support him in the election of 1932, and then they become enemies of 1933 onward, and I'm talking about Father Coughlin and Huey Long, the kingfisher, that great politician, that great demagogue from Louisiana. So let's take Long, okay. Long is a very interesting character, and I think we've talked about him before, but one of the things that Long does is Long actually, as a young man, as a young adult, he identifies something which is so current it fits our situation today. Long in the 1920s sends an editorial, sends a letter actually to the New Orleans item, which is a newspaper. And in that editorial, he talks about how wealth inequality is so terrible, I think he says, something like 65 to 75% of all the wealth in the country is controlled by the top 1% in the country, and he was, that was a little bit of an exaggeration, but Huey Long cared very much about this issue of wealth inequality. Now Long was himself a lawyer. He came from some money, his father was a successful farmer, so it wasn't like he was from the lower classes, but he had a bad experience. He bought an oil well, and then it started pumping oil, and he couldn't sell the oil. Long became a failure. He couldn't sell it because Standard Oil refused to buy his oil, and he had no other way to bring the oil to a market, to refining and the rest of it. And so Long became resentful against these big corporations that ran Louisiana. It was personal. That's right. In some ways, like some of us feel today about big corporations that we think run our lives, we think about this in ways similar to Long. When you look at wealth inequality, 1929, about 23.5% of the wealth was controlled by the top 1%. So Long was wrong in his stats. Today, how much wealth does the top 1% control? About 22% of all the wealth in the country is controlled by the top 1%. So we're right there with the pre-New Deal income inequality and wealth inequality. So this is a really current issue. What Roosevelt does? Wait. Yes, go ahead. You'll be long. You'll be long. What is a demagogue? Okay. What do you have to do to qualify as a demagogue, and what got him assassinated? He must have done it. You want to qualify? No. Okay, so the definition of a demagogue is somebody who appeals to the basic kind of emotions and prejudices of voters. Instead of telling them the facts, maybe put in a few lies or at a minimum, attack the kind of people these voters hate in their guts, right, in their emotions. So that's what Long did, right? He attacked the wealthy. He attacked immigrants. Now, I can't find any evidence that Long was a racist, but he was definitely ethnocentric. He left that to Father Coughlin. And his, yeah, I mean, Long doesn't say it explicitly like Father Coughlin does, but he's anti-Semitic in his heart. And these, you know, these attacks on financiers and kind of the merchants of death referring to arms dealers, these are almost always references to Jewish population. How do you deal with the African-Americans? Yeah. I have no evidence that Long was actually a racist in that way, although he's from Louisiana, so one would assume in that time period that you're dealing in a climate of segregation in Louisiana, so I think he probably was a racist. So I remember this old slogan about him. You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time and he got assassinated for trying to do that. So Long, I mean, he fools a lot of people a lot of the time. He became, he was governor and then became elected senator. There's one point. So Long, Long was a man of the people, but he was not a man of the democratic process. Okay, so in that way, I suppose he's reminiscent some of Donald Trump, who is a guy who doesn't know much about the Constitution, would really like to make decisions by himself, doesn't really have much respect for the democratic process. So Long at one point orders out the National Guard to surround the Capitol when they're not doing the, the legislature's not doing his bidding. At another point, he goes to the, to the Louisiana Supreme Court and has the lieutenant governor removed. He accuses him of trying to do a coup d'etat. So politics in Louisiana, it's blood sport. You said that Long and Coglan went against Roosevelt. They turned on him. That's right. They did. Well, how did that happen and what was the result of it? Well, so Roosevelt, they felt like Roosevelt was too conservative in his proposals and his solutions in the first two years. So then they come to the national scene and Roosevelt and his advisors recognized it. They say, hey, these guys, Roosevelt at one point refers to, it's, it's not Father Coglan, but Huey Long and then General Douglas MacArthur is the two most dangerous men in America. This is Long before World War II. Yeah, but MacArthur's got this big head and everything. So, so Long and Coglan, they, they developed this national platform. At one point, Huey Long has 7.5 million people who belong to his, this national organization called the Share Our Wealth Plan. That's a lot of people. A lot of people. Yes, that's right. A whole population of the country was less than a hundred million. Yeah, it's a little over a hundred million at that point. So this is an enormous constituency and Roosevelt becomes frightened by this. He thinks, okay, it's very clear what, what, where this is going Long is going to run for the Democratic nomination in 1936 and he could beat Roosevelt. So what Roosevelt does is he begins to move leftward in his politics. And I think we talked about this last time. He creates the new deal with the Wagner Act, the, the, the WPA and the Social Security Act. Well, on one hand, you got to give them credit for moving, you know, changing the position. On the other hand, you got to, you have to give those guys credit for pushing them. Well, that's right. It might not have happened if they had not pushed him. You might not like Huey Long for his demagoguery or father Coglan for his anti-Semitism. On the other hand, they did push. In that way, their, kind of, their, their usefulness, their utility was in pushing Roosevelt into the new deal that, you know, has, has really blessed this nation today with all of its benefits. I mean, is it, is it true? I mean, just, it's a one little tiny question. You know, it was not all that successful through the thirties. It got really the new deal. Oh. It got really successful when we, you know, we got into war. So query whether, you know, I mean, the popular wisdom, the conventional wisdom is that Roosevelt saved us in that period. Yeah. Did he, did the new deal save us in that period? Yes. I think Roosevelt saved, let's say it like this, Roosevelt saved capitalism, okay, and prevented us from going down the route of fascism. Because if Huey Long had gotten elected, he might have been tempted by the, by seeing what had been developing in Europe by the development of fascism in Europe and, and tried to take more power than, you know, than the constitutional loud and, and becoming a dictator. So he, so yes, Roosevelt saved capitalism. If you like capitalism, Roosevelt saved capitalism in the 1930s. But he also created another country, a different country. Absolutely. He put things into the mix that really profoundly changed us. And I submit this, I see if you agree, that all of that, that period from the time he was first elected to the, to the war, was essentially, serendipitously preparing us for the war. We came together. No, I mean, no, I mean, so, so by 1937, 38, those components of the New Deal were in place. And actually they were quite successful. If we hadn't had a war, the works program, the WPA was putting lots of people back to put, what, 8 million people back to work. So, so no, the, the, the New Deal was successful on its own. Now the, the war, the war helped the economy recover completely. That's certainly true. And the war allowed the Roosevelt administration to put in place what we call a liberal regulatory state. Okay. So, so, Roosevelt, the Roosevelt administration then put regulations on capitalism. So what had happened in the 1920s with the stock market crash and with, you know, kind of out of, out of control capitalists wouldn't happen again. Okay. So that was a good thing. Now many of those regulations were done away with in the period between 1980 and 2000. And so we had a great recession happen because we allowed capitalism to get out of control again. I mean that my, you know, what I'm trying to get at here is that if you're going to have a capitalist system, you need to put brackets on it. Yeah. You need to put limits on it. Regulations. So if you treat this discussion and one of the things, and you need to redistribute every so often as capitalism gives capital to those who already have capital. Right. It perpetuates itself. That's right. That way it becomes quite dangerous on its own without some redistribution. As an historian who looks at transformations, certainly, you know, what you're talking about in the 30s is a major transformation. Oh, this is a big trend. It's a saving grace kind of transformation. That's right. So when did it end? Right. And what followed that transformation? Good question, Jay. You'd make a good historian. All transformations end, but some transformations don't end so well. Right. So what we call the New Deal Coalition comes together in the election of 1936. It consists of workers. It consists of urbanites. It consists of immigrants, African-Americans. These last two categories had mostly voted Republican before that, especially African-Americans. You know, the party of Lincoln, they had voted consistently on the Republican side until Roosevelt, who offered them the New Deal wasn't a great deal, but at least it was something. It helped raise African-American hopes and livelihoods as well as white folks. So we have this New Deal that comes together and this Coalition that comes together. And then in the 1960s, things start coming apart. Let me go back to something you talked about, two or three shows. The re-emergence of the Klan around the time of Woodrow Wilson and thereafter into the 1920s. And that's when Trump's father was arrested as a member of the Klan or participating in a Klan event. So it sounds to me like before Roosevelt, it was a re-emergence of this kind of white supremacy thing that came, you know, in the days of the Coppett beggars and re-emerged and it was on the Republican side of things and the African-American community was saying, wait a minute, this isn't really our cup of tea? No, not on the Republican side actually. So the Klan re-emerges in the Midwest, but it has its real strength in the South, which is solidly Democrat. It's not Republican. So they left the Democratic Party. So no, no, they stay in the Democratic Party until the 1960s when the civil rights movement becomes an issue for the Democratic Party. The Democrats decide, you know, we're going to support civil rights. And that's when Southerners who are frightened by civil rights and believe that their system, the system where everyone has their own place, right, blacks on the bottom and whites on the top, is the right system. The segregationist system is the right system. They don't want to give up any political power to African-Americans. What I hear you saying is that this transformation changed. It was a big switch in the 1960s. In the 1960s. It wasn't just the civil rights movement, but that was part of it. Emblematic, yeah. And then it was Brown versus Board of Education, which is now, I mean it's so interesting Brown versus Board of Education is like withered, like vestigial already, and there are attacks on, believe it or not, like Roe v. Ways, there are attacks on Brown versus Board of Education. Yeah, I mean, yes. 1954. Yes. 1954. Sorry. Brown versus Board of Education. But that was just the beginning of the civil rights movement. So in the 1960s, you have the New Deal Coalition fracturing. And this is always the issue with coalitions. We assume that a decent political coalition, if it's well done and there's good leadership and they've got good issues, it will last for a generation, 32 to 40 years. And that's about what the New Deal Coalition lasts. And it comes apart in part because the Democratic Party embraces the civil rights movement and the South and Southerners begin to leave the Democratic Party. It also comes with Ronald Reagan's attack on government. We want to get the government off our backs and New Deal Liberals are associated with government. They're also associated. There's Ronald Reagan right there. Yeah. Yeah. And so New Deal Liberals are also associated with what we call Eastern elites. And so this kind of elitism is attacked by both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. So we've got a picture of Nixon as well. Here's Richard Nixon. Okay. What a wonderful post that is. That's true. He's pure Nixon. Anyway, that's Richard Nixon. So both Nixon and Reagan attack the New Deal Coalition very effectively. Really especially Nixon with his idea of the silent majority. He's opposing this to Liberals and the student movement and the hippies in the Democratic Party. And he's very successful at this. And then Reagan comes in the early 19th. It was time. The country was moving conservative. It was time for that. It became more conservative in part because savvy politicians like Nixon and Reagan actually used these issues to bring people into the Republican Party. So yeah, it became more conservative that way. And then of course Ronald Reagan in 1980 wins election. And what he does is he takes lunch pail Democrats, working class Democrats and he moves them. He gets 54% of working class Democrats to vote for him unprecedented. And this means that the New Deal is going to fall apart because the base of the New Deal was with folks who had voted for Roosevelt because he had supported them. He had supported unions. He had supported putting them back to work. And so the New Deal comes apart at that point. And then you have the development of this new, the rise of conservatism and that really hits. And that's still today. Well, that's dominated the political system until today actually. So what you have is when you measure liberals and conservatives, the percentage of the population, liberal percentage of the population, conservative. At the height of conservatism in the 1990s and yeah, really 1990s when you have Bill Clinton who's a Democrat but moves to the right as a Democrat, right, embraces conservative issues because he knows he can't get reelected as a liberal Democrat. At that point you have about 40% of the country is conservative and about 20% of the country is liberal. Today, about 35% of the country is conservative and about 26% of the country is liberal. So we've seen a steady decline in the number of conservatives and a steady increase in the number of liberals. I think probably it's the Iraq war and then the great recession really pushes people to think that hey, the government has to do something about this. Maybe the government does have a role in solving these problems. And so today actually liberalism has actually seen this resurgence. It's not so bad to be called a liberal. Is Trump involved in that? I mean, it seems to me that Trump has done things that would make ordinary human being God-fearing people more liberal. Yes, certainly Trump has accelerated this trend towards Americans turning more towards liberalism rather than conservatives. So we're on transformations. We're on transformations and here we are and I submit to you that Trump is either reflective or creating a transformation as never before in this country except the Civil War, except the Civil War because what we have now is a transformation that actually regularly, daily attacks the Constitution willfully. I wouldn't say the transformation is such that we've never had before except the Civil War. This moment in the history of the country. But what we do have is we have a president who is a demagogue who has been willing to use the most unsavory issues in the most unsavory way to bring people yet their emotion at their gut level into into his ranks. OK, and and so and and Trump as he has no rules, which is interesting and could mean this could mean that Trump can form a new political coalition with his ideas, right? Isolationism, tariffs, rejection of globalization, what he calls America Firstism, right? There was an America First movement in the 1930s, which ultimately was unsuccessful, but it was there has Trump been able to put together a new coalition, which would allow that to happen. Anti-immigrant coalition, when you say a new coalition, you say essentially a new party, that doesn't mean it has a new label. No, no, it's actually still the Republican Party. It's just been gutted and replaced. That's right. And I think that's isn't that what's happening? No, so so the thing is in order to have a viable political coalition, you have to be successful and you have to gain a majority of, you know, the votes. So the problem that Trump has is he's a very unpleasant character. A lot of Americans are turned off by his immorality and other personal issues, right? And his terrible attacks. And so and and and there are more Americans now who don't think some of these these issues that he's brought in these very kind of right wing issues, not at the center of the electorate, but very right wing kind of a strident issues, you know, abortion and, you know, and keeping all, you know, refugees out of the country in any way possible. But isn't that really part of a demagogues approach? What you do is you divide people, you create hate, no, that's true. You create racism. That's true. And then that makes you more powerful. Yeah, but the problem is that Trump has not gotten to the point where he can accumulate enough of a coalition to actually win an election, another election. OK, he didn't have a majority. Yeah, well, he didn't have a majority of votes in 2016, right? He's going to have. I can't see a pathway to Trump winning the next election. OK, the problem is that the what he's put together is a coalition of the minority of the right wing minority. And what he's done is begin to exclude a number of moderate Republicans who have to decide, OK, and I stick with Trump. No, I'm going to have to find somewhere else to vote or I'm not going to vote. And so what what really is the opportunity in this political transformation is for a Democrat to step in a liberal to step in and say, hey, I've got issues you could get behind and we're going to we're going to stop Trump in his tracks. And, you know, the polling right now shows that if if the election was held today, Joe Biden would win the primary and he would win the election. Wow, I was saying something by 68 points over Trump. But you know, and this is a this is a page out of Churchill's book. So history, professor, studying American history, and I really love that. I think it's so important. So glad to know about these. Making me happy. Well, it's really important. How can you possibly understand the present in American history without knowing all the things you've been talking about over these last few months? So to take a page, a question out of Churchill's book, you know, in terms of transformations, you know, from a historical point of view, OK, are we in terms of transformations? Are we at the end of the beginning? Or are we at the beginning of the end of the transformation that you have identified? I think we're right in the middle of it. Good answer. I don't you know, I think Obama began this with his argument for change. And but he didn't know how to culminate it. Honestly, he made some mistakes. He could have actually been a transformative leader like Roosevelt. But he was too conventional in the way he thought about the electorate, I think. And so I think we're right in the middle of it and it's not decided yet. But honestly, I think the way the trends are going, it favors a more liberal approach than the previous transfer. So if you study history and especially American history right now, you know, it helps you appreciate the present. Right. But but as any historian will tell you, in order to understand the continuum, you must also study the present. We must all also study the present. So so I'm the type of historian who believes that we have to take history, the lessons of history into the present. OK, so there are many historians who say, no, you shouldn't be doing that. You know, you should just study the past for the past. But I'm not one of those. I believe that the past offers all kinds of lessons to us in the present. And so, you know, the one of a couple of lessons, OK, first lesson, hang in there, OK, because it's not over. Right. And there's a there's an electorate out there. We still have our democracy hang in there. OK. The other lesson is be persistent. Don't give up. There are going to be some tough times in the next few years. But be persistent, stick with your goals and and and go for those goals. Be well organized, be willing to take risks and be persistent. Sooner we can continue this conversation. John David and the better I'm going to feel because we can test on whether those lessons are OK, are valid or are being learned. Yeah, that's right. John David and history professor, H.E.H.P.U. Thank you so much. You're welcome, Jay. It's history lens. Yes, right. You could be here.