Ms. Henderson worked for Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh department store magnates, and later their son Edgar jr. (he preferred that jr. not be capitalized) for more than 15 years. Asked what contributed to her longevity, she said simply: “Good food.”

Ms. Henderson’s kitchen was a hub of activity at the unique Fallingwater house, hailed as the most significant private residential structure in the United States

Author Suzanne Martinson tells the story of Ms. Henderson and shares her recipes in The Fallingwater Cookbook: Elsie Henderson’s Recipes and Memories (with the late Jane Citron and chef Robert Sendall; University of Pittsburgh Press).

In addition to an exploration of dining and food, the lively book offers a slice of twentieth century social history through the experience of Ms. Henderson at Fallingwater including her observations of the eccentric Kaufmann family, her sense of historic events and race relations, and her meetings with Wright, Isaac Stern, and Senators Ted Kennedy and John Heinz among others. According to Ms. Martinson, the book began when Lynda Waggoner, director of Fallingwater, gave her Ms. Henderson’s little brown notebook of handwritten recipes.

Ms. Martinson is a former food editor and writer for the Pittsburgh Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is a two-time winner of both the James Beard and Bert Greene Awards for food journalism. She lives in Kelso, Washington, with her husband Bob.

Ms. Martinson talked by telephone from her home about Fallingwater and its famous cook and her own work as a writer a few weeks before Ms. Henderson’s centennial birthday celebration.

* * * * *

Robin Lindley: How did you come upon the story of Fallingwater cook Elsie Henderson?

Suzanne Martinson: I met Elsie Henderson in 1991 when I interviewed her for a Sunday magazine cover story of The Pittsburgh Press magazine. I was food editor of that paper and, after it closed, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

We became friends and, one day, Elsie said she'd like to write a cookbook but didn't know how to go about it. Not knowing how much work it would be, I said "I'll write it for you." It took me ten years. If I hadn't retired, it still wouldn't be done.

When you met Ms. Henderson, weren’t her days as a cook at Fallingwater long past?

Long past, but she has an excellent memory. She can bring up names and dates and seldom makes an error.

Your book details Elsie’s life and her account of the people who lived at Fallingwater.

That's what made it so special: her view from the kitchen. You don't really know people until you live with them. Certainly the employees who lived under the same roof with the Kaufmanns probably knew them best. The old Upstairs, Downstairs thing.

You wrote that Ms. Henderson was a product of the African American oral tradition and didn’t keep precise records of her recipes. Didn't her recipes date back to her mom and grandmother?

Her grandmother was part Native American. She lived in the South so Elsie did not have much contact. Her own mother passed on her love of cooking. Elsie once wanted to be a practical nurse. Her mother said, "You hate blood. Why would you want to be a nurse?" Elsie decided that being a cook would be a better fit.

And Elsie grew up in Pittsburgh?

Yes. She was the youngest of thirteen children. She had eleven brothers and a sister. Her dad died when she was about two years old. Her mother was an ambitious woman who could get things done -- the go-to woman of Mount Washington, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where Elsie grew up.

What was Pittsburgh like in terms of race relations?

There certainly was discrimination, but Elsie had a strong mother with a lot of spunk. One day her mother was going to buy Elsie a new dress at a department store. The saleswoman kept bringing out dresses, until her mother asked why she didn't show them [a particular] dress. The woman said, "I didn't think you could afford it." Elsie's mother got angry and said, "I can afford anything in this place. I've got eleven boys who all work. Bring out the dress."

One black person told me that African Americans weren’t allowed to try on shoes. They drew an outline of their feet on cardboard and they would be fitted from these templates. You know that you can't get shoes to fit that way.

Was Mount Washington integrated?

Yes. There were, for instance, quite a few Italians. One of the great loves of Elsie’s was an Italian. On our travels, Elsie and I have met people who knew of her family at that time. They lived on a hillside overlooking downtown. When she was a little girl, Elsie cleaned the bathroom floor of an older lady who, she said, was “crippled up.”

Elsie seldom describes a person's race. Sometimes she jokes about “being the only black face in the crowd,” but she doesn't distinguish people by race.

She's been around rich people all her life, and she said in a way the Kaufmanns were prejudiced. They preferred to have black people working for them because they thought they were more honest. I said, "Elsie, how dare you stereotype that way." She was then ninety-six and by her account “that's the new seventy,” so she can say whatever she wants.

I was impressed that she was a great reader as a child.

A tremendous reader. In fact the neighbor women worried about her. "That girl's always got a book in her hand. Doesn't she play with other kids?” Elsie said most of them didn't have a book in the house. She has always been self-educated. She took up studying French at the University of Pittsburgh when she was ninety-four.

Speaking of the French and cuisine, did she talk about Julia Child?

She never mentioned Julia Child, but on a recent trip to Fallingwater, at the observation deck, Elsie spoke French to a visitor who couldn't speak English. She continues to amaze me and inspire me.

And she quit high school to work?

She was in a hurry to earn some money. She knew Edgar Kaufmann Sr. by sight for a long time. At seventeen, she worked in “bad accounts” in the Kaufmann’s warehouse. In the olden days, when customers made their department store purchases, the store charged them and then delivered them to their house at no charge. Elsie watched the invoices come through and, if the people hadn't paid their bills, she wouldn't send out their things.

Did Ms. Henderson talk about life in Pittsburgh during the Depression and World War II?

She always had work because she was a talented cook. She thought the Kaufmanns were her dream come true because, though she just worked weekends, she got paid for the whole week. If she didn't see them during the winter when they were not at Fallingwater, mostly a summer retreat, she still got paid.

Times were hard for many. The Swift meat man said the Kaufmanns must eat a lot of premium meat, but everyone who worked there laughed. The meat was for Mrs. Kaufmann's six longhaired dachshunds. In fact, one of Liliane’s friends asked her how she could feed her dogs premium beef when everybody else was on rationing, and Mrs. Kaufmann said in her husky voice, "Well, I didn't start the war."

On weekends, Elsie would fry up a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs and Mrs. Kaufmann would watch her dogs eat their breakfast. The dogs had special custom-made mattresses for their kennels.

The house was finished in 1939?

Yes, at the height of the Depression. People around there were so grateful to get any kind of work. The house is in Fayette County, which is in the shadow of Pittsburgh, but very rural with self-sufficient people. One of Wright's axioms was that you should build with materials on site, so the locals hauled all the stone by horse to construct Fallingwater. The lumber also came from there. It was quite a feat.

So Edgar and Liliane, co-owners of Kaufmann’s Department Store (now Macy’s), had Fallingwater built as a vacation home?

It's about an hour from Pittsburgh. Shortly before he died, Mr. Kaufmann told Elsie he had ordered a helicopter so they could get there faster. Elsie asked, “Are you going to fire all the chauffeurs?" He said no, and she said she'd ride with them.

Edgar Sr. was a flamboyant person. He loved woman. He'd drag Elsie out of the kitchen and introduce her to all of Fallingwater’s guests. It seemed to Elsie that the guests looked at him “funny” and wondered, what kind of person was this who would introduce the hired help to the guests? He even danced with her around Fallingwater. He was a character and loved people, and that was why he was a great merchant.

Mrs. Kaufmann wasn't just a lady of leisure. She did the buying for the elegant Vendome shop on the top floor of Kaufmann's. She had quite the taste in art and furniture and clothes, and was a beautiful woman. A Picasso hangs over her bedside table.

And they used the house mostly on weekends?

On Thursday morning, Elsie would meet with their cook at their penthouse in Pittsburgh and ask what they ate during the week so she didn't duplicate it on the weekend. She kept meticulous records of all the guests, when they came, and what she fed them, so when they returned, they weren't fed the same recipe. Even if you fell in love with one of her dishes the first time around, you probably weren't going to see it again.

Did she save those records?

When she moved from her house, the people who helped her clean out the basement threw them away. She is still distraught. Even then, she had a sense of history and her part in it and the Kaufmann's part in it. For example, Elsie cooked for Isaac Stern and Frank Lloyd Wright.

What happened when she met Wright?

He was quite a ladies' man, too. He visited Fallingwater after a flood when Elsie was working for Edgar Kaufmann, jr., after his parents had died. Elsie met Wright at the airport, and “Junior” had six men waiting for Wright on the bridge to the house.

The architect didn't want to go on the freeway, but to be driven through Pittsburgh’s eastside where the universities are. When Wright saw the 41-story Cathedral of Learning classroom building at the University of Pittsburgh, he called it "the tallest 'Keep Off the Grass' sign I've ever seen." It wasn't modern architecture. Elsie told the architect they had to build up because there wasn't enough land. He didn't care. It was just an ugly building. People in Pittsburgh love the building.

There were many things Wright didn't approve of, including the chairs Mrs. Kaufmann chose for the dining room. She bought three-legged Italian chairs, and Wright wanted his barrel chairs in there. Edgar jr. thought his mother was right because the floor was uneven stone and these sat better. Wright wanted to control everything: the furniture, where statues ought to go,

Elsie cooked lunch for Wright. She remembered that he had crab salad, some corn sticks and sherbet. He sat alone at the dining room table.

Did Wright make a pass at Elsie?

When he first met her, he asked what she did for the Kaufmanns, and she said, “I plan and prepare their meals.” Said Wright: "If you cook as well you look, I going to have a good meal."

Didn’t Kaufmann Sr. have a reputation as a womanizer?

Elsie called him the "Greatest Womanizer in the Western World."

The Kaufmanns were first cousins, and had to leave the state to marry because first cousins aren't allowed to marry in Pennsylvania. First cousins marrying was common in Europe, and they solidified ownership of Kaufmann’s Department Store, and lived their life together, and they had affection for each other.

That's not to say Mr. Kaufmann didn't have his dalliances. One time Elsie went to Fallingwater with Mr. Kaufmanns when Mrs. Kaufmann arrived unexpectedly. Elsie served lunch, and then she went to her room in the adjoining guest/staff house. She found Mr. Kaufmann's girlfriend sitting on her bed.

It's interesting that Frank Lloyd Wright decided to build above a waterfall. I don’t think a land use agency would approve that today.

It's had some structural problems. It's flooded twice, once when Elsie was there with Junior, as she called him. The creek rose and water came rushing through the house up to the top of the chairs.

Edgar said, "Elsie, I've got the ham."

Elsie said, "At lunch, you said it was too salty."

"That was then, this is now," he said. They took the ham to the guesthouse and waited for the flood to recede. It took a long time to clean up. A horrible mess. The gardener's wife, Mrs. Green, lost her preserves, but they saved all the liquor in the basement.

Wasn't Fallingwater voted the “Building of the Century” by the Architectural Institute?

I think it was the “House of the Century.”

And wasn’t Wright older -- about sixty-eight -- when he designed Fallingwater?

The wonderful house rejuvenated his career. And Edgar jr. took it upon himself to be his promoter.

Do you get a sense of how the Kaufmanns treated their staff?

The Kaufmanns trusted their employees. They didn't even lock their liquor cabinet. Mr. Kaufmann said, "I hire talented people and then I let them do their job."

Nor did Mrs. Kaufmann interfere in the kitchen. Sometimes she'd request something and Elsie would make it. She was slender and looked like a fashion model. When there were no guests, she ate just a few julienned vegetables and little pieces of fruit.

Mr. Kaufmann, on the other hand, would snack on clove cake or slices of ham loaf. He couldn't sleep and he'd wander around at all hours of the night.

And you visited Fallingwater even before meeting Elsie in 1991?

It's a magical place: that water and the sheer beauty of it. And it's so isolated. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has done a wonderful job. It’s as though Elsie and the Kaufmanns just walked out the back door.

I was always interested in the kitchen. As a food editor, I saw many fancy kitchens, but this was a modest little kitchen but at the time it was the best you could have. There was an Aga range and all the latest equipment. I wondered who cooked there, what they ate, what they were like. There were, for instance, different sets of dishes for each meal.

Elsie really loved the Kaufmanns, who were generous people. She gave them a "12" on a one-to-ten scale.

Didn’t they use a coal stove when she started there?

Simon, the man who fed the dogs, would come in and feed the coal stove. Elsie couldn't do fine baking with that. She really liked her Mint Chocolate Angel Food Cake. Mr. Kaufmann bought her an electric range.

The Kaufmanns didn't eat prepared food. No commercial salad dressings. All the breads were homemade. Everything was from scratch. That’s trendy today.

You wrote that the recipes in your book fit with today's farm-to-table movement.

The Kaufmanns had a greenhouse with flowers and a vegetable garden. Mr. Kaufmann was a kind of gentleman farmer who hired people to do the heavy work.

At various times, they had beef cattle, a flock of lambs, and a herd of Jersey cattle. The Jersey cows had a tiled milking parlor. Even the cows lived right. At the end of the weekend, Mr. Kaufmann gave each of the people who worked for him a gallon of milk. He said he had to charge, so he charged just ten cents.

The Kaufmanns had all this fresh food available to them. If they hankered for lobster, they had it flown in. And the Kaufmanns were very athletic. They walked or swam off the calories. They hiked the woods. It's rugged there.

They were hardy people. Didn’t Elsie spot them swimming nude on her first day at work?

Her very first day on the job, she saw the boss, his wife and all their guests swimming “buck-naked.” Not many cookbook writers get to use those words.

Some of the recipes seem exotic. Are most of the ingredients readily available?

Definitely Elsie's recipes are very accessible because she worked there in the '50s and '60s.

Chef Bob Sendall, whose All in Good Taste Productions provided the food for President and Mrs. Obama at the G-20 conference, is a famous chef in Pittsburgh. Here's how small the cooking world is. Elsie cooked for H.J. “Jack” Heinz and his son, the future Senator Heinz when he was a little boy. Bob cooked for Sen. Heinz, and he has cooked for Teresa Heinz Kerry, who is married to Secretary of State John Kerry. The meals he creates are very farm to table. All locally raised fruits and vegetable. It's a wonderful way to eat. It's great to go to the farmers market and look the farmer in the eye and know she gathered those eggs or he plucked that basil you're buying.

You mentioned that Elsie's recipes are from the 1950s and 1960s. Do you see your book as a historic document?

They ate heavier at that time with more butter and sauces. It was nothing to throw in half a cup of butter, whereas now we might use two tablespoons. We still have great fruits and vegetables. We don't have to put cheese on everything to make it edible.

Some of us are eating more healthfully, but sadly I'm afraid it may be a middle-class trend. People without a lot of resources end up eating a lot of bad food. Good fresh food grown locally often costs more than processed food

Did you and Elsie cook together to reconstruct her recipes?

Elsie and I had a lot of meetings and lunches. She has also cooked me many great meals. She wrote down a list of ingredients, and we would go over the directions. There are certain standard ways you make things, like cakes and breads. Elsie considers herself a baker, although she makes casseroles and many other things.

At Fallingwater the butler cooked many of the meats on the grill. Elsie mostly made the side dishes, the breakfasts, the lunches.

For the book, Bob Sendall and Jane Citron contributed additional meat recipes and many other cutting-edge dishes. Fallingwater Cafe chef Mary Anne Moreau also provided some delicious recipes.

Many days I would be in the middle of testing something and I'd phone Elsie to ask questions such as "Do you think we really need two cups of flour?" And she'd say, “You might even need a little more.”

Generally, her recipes were right on. You could follow them and they turned out. I know they work because I've cooked them and eaten them. I guess that's how a lot of people acquire traditional ethnic recipes.

As a food editor, I was always trying to get ethnic recipes out of Pittsburgh cooks. It’s a very rich city ethnically and a lot don't have written recipes. They're in the cook’s head so you talk with them. I spent a day with one African American woman trying to get her recipe for sweet potato pie, and I never did get it in a recipe form. It was more of a dialog with her. "Yeah. I might use three sweet potatoes. If I had four, I'd use four. Or you could use six."

Elsie's recipe for sweet potato pie in the book is more specific. I myself am a recipe cook. The first time I make something, I follow the recipe exactly, then later I might add more or less of something.

One of my favorite stories about being a food editor is, the first day on the job, I walked in off the street and still had on my coat. The editor said a reader wanted to talk with me. She had a problem with a recipe. She was on the phone and said, "I want to make banana bread, but I don't have any bananas." I said, "Well, baking is chemistry, and bananas have a lot of liquid in them. If you leave those out, I don't think you would be very happy with this banana bread. And besides, about the only flavor banana bread has is banana." And she said, "Oh. OK. I'll jump on my bike and buy some bananas."

What would you like readers to take from your book?

I think it shows a family. The Kaufmanns were Jewish, but they always celebrated with their employees at Christmas. They said this is a time for family, and they'd have a party with the help at Fallingwater. Elsie thought the world of them, and they thought the world of her. And Edgar jr. tried to take care of her if she needed money. They were good people.

And for them to give their house to the people to enjoy was a wonderful thing to do. There were no strings attached. The Kaufmanns chose the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy because they thought the organization would do a good job preserving it.

In the beginning of showing the house [1963], Edgar Jr. had a strong hand in how it would be presented. He wanted people to see how they lived. He didn't want ropes or areas tied off. Turn a corner, and there's a Picasso. It's amazing, as though they just walked out the back door. And they really did just walk out the back door. Magical.

Robin Lindley (robinlindley@gmail.com) is a Seattle writer and attorney, and features editor for the History News Network. His interviews with scholars, writers and artists have appeared in HNN, Crosscut, Writer’s Chronicle, Real Change, The Inlander, Re-Markings, NW Lawyer, and other publications.

Historian Dr. Robert M. Neer on His Groundbreaking Book Napalm: An American Biography

by Robin Lindley

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order

and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.”

This business of burning human beings with napalm . . .

cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

            February 1942. Just two months after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, at a dark time of defeat and anxiety for America, a bright spot for the military: Harvard researchers led by revered chemist Louis Fieser developed an incendiary weapon that would burn longer than traditional weapons, stick to targets, and extinguish only with difficulty. It was cheaper and more stable than existing alternatives, could survive extremes of hot and cold in storage, and could be mixed by soldiers on the battlefield.      

            Christened napalm, the deadly new form of thickened hydrocarbons helped win victory for the Allies in World War II. Indeed, although it was used extensively in both Europe and the Pacific, napalm was particularly effective against Japan as it fueled flamethrowers used against imperial troops and was dropped in bombs that incinerated dozens of Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands more Japanese than the atomic bombs—at a fraction of the cost.

            A few years later, U.S. forces dropped more napalm on enemy cities during the Korean War than was used in the Second World War.  Napalm strikes followed in short order in Greece and numerous other countries from Kenya to Brazil. There was little outcry about the use of this horrific weapon as it won wars.

            But napalm lost much of its luster during the increasingly fraught American war in Vietnam. Gruesome photographs of napalm wounds borne by Vietnamese civilians, including small children and infants, stoked the antiwar movement in the United States, and sparked student demonstrations against manufacturer Dow Chemical. After the war, popular culture from books to poems to music and Hollywood movies made the incendiary a monster, and international lawyers codified norms that restricted its use against civilians.

            Since then, the use of napalm has been disfavored and restricted under law, although recent reports indicate that napalm-like weapons have killed civilians, including school children, in the Syrian conflict.

            For the first time, historian Robert M. Neer tells the complete story of napalm from its American birth and successful use in war to subsequent revulsion and legal restriction in his book Napalm: An American Biography (Belknap Press, Harvard).  In this wide ranging cultural and social history of napalm, Dr. Neer provides the historical context of napalm in the history of fire as a weapon of war; sets out technical details on chemical and engineering issues; traces the history of napalm from war “hero to pariah;” explores moral and legal implications of its use; and offers an unflinching account of the human cost of this powerful incendiary in war after war in the past 70 years.

            Critics have praised Dr. Neer’s groundbreaking book for its original research, vivid writing, and measured, balanced approach to the history. Historian John Fabian Witt, author of Lincoln’s Code, for example, wrote: “Napalm is a revelation. In a story that takes us from Harvard Stadium to Vietnam, Robert M. Neer retells the past 70 years of American history through a single extraordinary and terrible invention. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the American way of war and its humanitarian dilemmas.” And in Dissent, Thai Jones remarked: “Robert M. Neer's clear-eyed and harrowing new account surveys this infamous technology from both perspectives. This is history, in a literal sense, from above and below. Using napalm as a symbol for American global influence acutely demonstrates the political trajectory of a superpower, from impetuous upstart to tortured giant to--finally--chastened hegemon.”

            Dr. Neer is a Core Lecturer in the History Department at Columbia University specializing in the history of the United States in the context of 20th and 21st century globalization, with a special focus on U.S. military power. He received his Ph.D. in History in 2011, his M.Phil. in 2007, and a J.D. and M.A. in 1991, all from Columbia. His current book project is a global history of the U.S. military, based on a Columbia course he has taught titled “Empire of Liberty.”. In his 14-year hiatus from Columbia after earning his law degree, he worked in international business and politics in London, Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong and Boston. He also is the author of Barack Obama for Beginners, and his journalism has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals and websites.

            Dr. Neer recently talked by telephone from New York about his book and research on napalm.

            Robin Lindley: What prompted your interest in the history of napalm?

            Dr. Robert Neer: I lived overseas for a long time in Hong Kong, Singapore and London.  As a result of that, I developed a strong sense that the perception of America outside the United States was often quite different than it was inside the United States. In traveling around in many different countries, I was able to see firsthand the extent of the U.S. military presence overseas in many different contexts.

            I wanted in the broadest sense to tell a story about America in the world and how there might be one perception of the country outside and another inside. Specifically, people inside the country often think of America as extremely just, well meaning, perhaps at the worst misunderstood.  Outside, some people consider the United States to be quite brutal, ignorant and dangerous.  There are many falsehoods in both of those ideas, but I wanted to bridge that gap.

            And I wanted to focus on military developments and the position of the United States in a global context. 

            Then I enjoyed reading books like The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Social History of the Machine Gun, and books like Cod, Salt, and others that were biographies of things that talked about the power of technology and the environment to influence history.

            I suggested to my advisor that this might be the basis for a dissertation. He, a wonderful advisor, said,  “Great. You just need to choose a weapon and a period.” I thought about different weapons and napalm was the most dramatic weapon I could think of.  When I looked, I discovered there wasn’t any scholarly treatment of its history, or, really, any treatment of its history at all.  In fact, the best publically available source of information when I started the project was Wikipedia: there weren’t any scholarly articles in any journals at all.  So that was a good dissertation topic, and it developed into a book.

            Robin Lindley: In your book, you include a history of use of fire in warfare back to ancient times.  I recall the scene in the movie Spartacus where the slave forces were rolling burning logs over the ranks of Roman soldiers.

            Dr. Robert Neer:  You may also remember in the movie Gladiator that they used incendiary weapons in a battle between Romans and Germanic tribes: flaming arrows and catapulted fire pots.

            Fire is a very powerful weapon for a variety of reasons. First, it releases energy and can do more damage later than at the moment of impact. Explosives, by contrast, carry their energy with them and, although they can be very damaging, they’re limited in a sense that fire is not.  Also, in more intimate combat, it’s very effective because people have an instinctive fear of fire that’s very deep set.  That’s evident in conceptions like the fires of Hell or fire-breathing dragons, and many different manifestations of frightful things that are closely associated with fire.  So people have sought to take advantage of that from very early times.   There are many descriptions as early as the Bible and all the way through the Middle Ages.

            Tactically, however, a weapon is only as useful as the range with which you can use it.  Although fire early on, as with Greek fire famously used during the Byzantine Empire and in many other contexts, was useful, the development of cannons made many fire weapons obsolete.  Before the fire could be delivered to a target, the people could be killed by a projectile.  An illustration for the principle that I use is the scene in Indiana Jones when he is confronted by a fearsome swordsman and he pulls out his pistol and shoots him. That’s an example of range being an important consideration in combat.

            Closely associated with the history of napalm as a weapon is the development of the airplane because, when airplanes were invented and perfected in terms of reliability and quantity—which happened to a significant degree in World War II—fire came back into vogue because people could drop it on other people and stay out of range of bullets or artillery shells.  Although people have tried to use fire throughout the history of combat, around the 1400s it stopped being so effective until World War II. So there was a 500-year interregnum in the use of fire weapons that napalm spectacularly ended. 

            Robin Lindley: You mention the use of flamethrowers in combat in World War I. 

            Dr. Robert Neer:  People experimented and tried to use incendiary weapons straight through from the 1400s with all kinds of experiments using different delivery technologies.   During World War I, different incendiary bombs were tried.  The Germans dropped firebombs on London from zeppelins. Mixtures of rubber and gasoline were used in flamethrowers.  Because there weren’t very effective air delivery systems, and also because the mixtures they used weren’t as effective as later mixtures as napalm, those weapons were not very effective or significant.

            Robin Lindley: And you mention the use of incendiaries just before World War II, such as the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

            Dr. Robert Neer: At the same time as napalm was developed, other incendiary weapons were also developed that proved to be quite effective although not as effective or as used in as great quantities as napalm.  For example, the cities of Dresden and Hamburg were burned to the ground by the British using magnesium weapons. And the Germans at Guernica in the Basque region of Spain used thermite weapons to destroy that town.

            Robin Lindley: And, by 1942, the chemist and Harvard professor Louis Fieser had created napalm.  Why did the U.S. need napalm then?

            Dr. Robert Neer:  Just prior to the beginning of World War II, a group of leading research scientists, spearheaded by Vannevar Bush—a prominent American scientist and academic leader—organized a committee to develop technologically advanced weapons of war that they thought would be needed by the United States in what they expected would be a war that would involve this country.  With the support of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the government established the National Defense Research Committee [NDRC] to develop a new relationship between the government and universities for war research through a practice that is now common, but that was very innovative at that time.  The government provided money to universities to use their facilities and people to do research on military technologies.

            Through that program, the first research into incendiary weapons began at Harvard in the chemistry department led by Professor Fieser.  The goal was to respond to what was perceived as the probability that the United States would need incendiary weapons in the expected conflict.  Their initial research focused on mixtures of rubber and gasoline following the technologies that were used not very successfully in World War I.  But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America’s supplies of rubber were dramatically reduced, so the chemists switched their focus to experimenting with different chemical and petrochemical combinations to make thickened gel incendiary weapons.

            Robin Lindley: It seems that magnesium was an effective incendiary. How was napalm an advance as a weapon?

            Dr. Robert Neer: This research was perceived as a solution to a technical problem.  The reason the United States didn’t want to use magnesium is that it was afraid it wouldn’t be able to get enough magnesium.  They moved away from rubber because they couldn’t get enough rubber.  And they thought they might have other needs for magnesium besides use in weapons. 

            And then, through what you might call a fortuitous circumstance, the ultimate concoction that they devised, the method of thickening gasoline using other chemicals, produced a weapon that was far superior in its military characteristics. For example, flamethrowers that shoot napalm could shoot three times farther than the previous types.  Also, with the previous types, about 90 percent of the mixture they delivered would burn up before reaching the target. Napalm increased the delivery fraction by about ten times.  Instead of having most of the incendiary material vaporize before reaching the target, the napalm would shoot a much larger flaming rod onto whatever they aimed at.

            In addition, from the perspective of using napalm in bombs, it was extremely stable. It could be chilled to very cold temperatures as in a bomb bay or heated to a hot temperature as in a tropical storage facility. It could be stored for a very long time. It was relatively inexpensive and easy to make because it could be reduced to a powder that could be mixed in the field with gasoline to produce incendiary gel.

            Robin Lindley: Professor Fieser had a successful test of napalm at Harvard in 1942 and he later said he didn’t contemplate the use of napalm on humans.  

            Dr. Robert Neer: Fieser told the government about the improved formula that they had developed on Valentine’s Day, 1942.  The War Department then supplied the Harvard scientists with a lot of bombshells—the same bombshells the U.S. used for its poison gas arsenal because those types of bombs were made with a thin steel skin that would burst easily and scatter whatever was inside over a large area.  It’s striking because, after World War I, people were very worried that poison gas would be dropped on cities and create devastation.  In fact, that was done, but it was done with fire, and not with poison gas, and the tests were done with the same type of bombshells.

            They did the first test of napalm bombs on Independence Day, 1942.  To your point, Fieser, in his reminiscences of that time, wrote that they were focused on solving a technical problem and they always anticipated that the weapon would be used against things.  It’s at variance though from the tests the War Department conducted. 

            The Harvard scientists tested the bomb in a pool of water that had been dug into the Harvard College soccer field behind the Harvard Business School in Boston, across the river from Cambridge.  Then they participated in field trials because there were competing gel incendiary weapons produced by DuPont and other companies and the Army was doing comparative tests.  The first tests were in some villages in Indiana that the government condemned and moved everybody out so they could practice burning down the houses and the stores.

            Later on, because the British in particular thought those test weren’t rigorous enough, they built model Japanese and German villages at a new test facility that the government created in Utah and practiced burning them down in various ways.  Those were residential buildings complete down to the furniture and even the clothes in the closets to model the potential targets.

            It would seem that it wouldn’t take a tremendous leap of imagination to suppose that these munitions might affect people: they modeled bedrooms in particular.  Still, it’s possible to credit the idea that they would be burning down houses as opposed to actually dropping napalm directly on human beings. 

            Robin Lindley: The experiment using bats as kamikaze deliverers of napalm was fascinating.

            Dr. Robert Neer: Many things are interesting about that story. One of them is that the government at the time spent almost five times as much money on the bat testing program, Project X-Ray, as they did in actually developing napalm.  The napalm budget for research and development was about five million dollars in current dollars, and compare that with the $27 billion dollars that was spent on the Manhattan Project, even though napalm wound up incinerating many more Japanese cities than the atomic bombs did.

            Fieser collaborated with the bat program extensively after his work of actual development of napalm was complete. For the rest of the war, the Harvard scientists created a James-Bond type, special napalm weapons research laboratory and production center at Harvard where they designed and made all kinds of special weapons using napalm, from a napalm pill that could be popped into a gas tank where it would swell up and sabotage tanks, to a special glass incendiary grenade to throw on the battlefield, to a special device called “The Paul Revere,” which could be used to start fires on land or on water.  Another one called “The Harvard Candle” was a special fire-starting device that could be used to destroy buildings. 

            Among those projects was a plan to arm millions of kamikaze American bats; I call them “suicide bomber bats” in the book, with tiny napalm bombs using a chemical fuse that Harvard scientists built.  They’d be dropped out of airplanes in special bat bombs that would be kept at cool temperatures to keep the bats quiet until release, and then when they floated down, [the bombs] would open like accordions with a parachutes and the bats would gently fall down onto small platforms and revivify under the salubrious effect of warmer air as they descended and then flutter off into whatever building or house they were near.  About 20 minutes after being released from the bomb, these chemical fuses would burn down and trigger the napalm time bomb that would burn down the house or whatever they dropped their way into.

            In the end, the only buildings the bats actually incinerated was a brand-new Army airfield in Carlsbad, New Mexico, next to the famous caverns that had a large supply of bats. Fieser armed several chilled animals to show off the system to an Army film crew. In an instant, the heat revived them and they flew away. A desperate hunt followed, but right on schedule they detonated, and burned the entire facility to the ground, tower and all. The base commander raced up with fire trucks but had to watch, distraught, from behind a fence; researchers refused to let him approach the top secret technology testing area.

            In early 1944, after spending about $24 million in today’s dollars, Marine Corps officials canceled the program without explanation: a historical mystery that remains to be resolved.

            Robin Lindley: As you’ve alluded to, the cost of napalm was far less than the atomic bombs produced by the Manhattan project when considering the damage done by these weapons. Those statistics are stunning.

            Dr. Robert Neer: Yes.  Napalm was used as widely and as quickly as possible by the United States in World War II.  They sent it to Europe where it played a role in the Normandy landings and in the battle in the Ardennes and the battle of the Bulge and elsewhere.

            But it was mostly in the Pacific where it was deployed to the greatest extent. In the case of Japan, the United States eventually incinerated 66 of Japan’s largest cities, 64 of them with explosive weapons and napalm, and two of them with atomic weapons.  Considering that the atomic weapons cost about $27 billion in today’s currency just for their development and destroyed two cities, that would be about $13 billion per city incinerated, whereas napalm cost about five million dollars, and that weapon burned to the ground 64 cities, about $83 thousand dollars in development costs per city destroyed. 

            That’s an indication of the power of chemistry.  I wrote that “the bomb got the press, but napalm did the work.”  It also speaks to the difference between the physicists who were some of the most prominent scientists in the United States and in the world, and subsequently had reams of books written about them, compared to the chemists who arguably produced a more cost effective weapon, but weren’t particularly famous.  Fieser was a well-known chemist, but not famous on the level of Robert Oppenheimer or Albert Einstein, and yet produced a very effective weapon.

            Robin Lindley: And the comparative casualties in the bombing of Japan produced by napalm versus the atom bombs is stunning.

            Dr. Robert Neer: The greatest human-created cataclysm in the history of the world remains the United States attack on Tokyo on March 9, 1945, because over 87,000 people died on that night as a direct result of the bombardment, which is more than died in either of the explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.  Of course, many people died of follow-on effects. Radiation poisoning killed many people after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events, but that also happened in Tokyo because people who were burned out of their houses became sick or from smoke inhalation developed pneumonia and many illnesses and problems that were follow-on effects of the burnt down city around them.  That underlines the incredible destructive power of fire.

            Robin Lindley: It seems that even air force general Curtis LeMay was stunned by the aftermath of the Tokyo bombing.

            Dr. Robert Neer: He said we, “scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

            Robin Lindley: This is a morbid question, but can you explain what happens when a human being is struck by napalm?

            Dr. Robert Neer: It’s a very effective because it’s sticky and burns at a very high temperature. 

            Fire works by emitting radiation, and it emits radiation most strongly to whatever it is touching.  If you think of a burning match, the hottest part of the match is the stick of the match that directly touches the fire, and the next hottest parts are above, then to the sides, then below.  So, if you want to make an effective incendiary, the closer you get it to what you want to burn and the longer it can be kept there, the more radiation energy you’ll be able to transfer to whatever the target is, and therefore the more effective it will be at starting and maintaining a fire. 

            In the case of a human being, this means that if you get hit by napalm or get napalm on you, this sticky substance that burns at an extremely high temperature will stay there and continue burning all the way down to the bone, unless it is put out. 

            It is worth noting that napalm itself is not extremely flammable. You need a relatively high temperature to get it to burn, so the other great scientific achievement of the Harvard scientists was figuring out a way to ignite this sticky, tough gel that they invented.  Their solution was to use white phosphorus, a chemical that burns at a very high temperature when it comes into contact with air.  The system they developed was a thin column of high explosive, TNT, inside a thicker cylinder of white phosphorus, and those two cylinders were inserted into the middle of a napalm bomb.  When the bomb detonates, the high explosives blast the white phosphorus into the napalm and scatters it over a wide area, and that produces a fire cloud.

            For a person who is unfortunate enough to come into contact with this invention, not only can the napalm burn them, but little bits of white phosphorus that are mixed into it can also burn them.  If you put it out by putting mud over it or putting the [affected] part of the body under water, if there’s enough white phosphorus mixed in, when it comes back into contact with the air, it starts burning again. That’s an awful wound that can take a long time to treat and heal.  This has devastating effects for people.

            Robin Lindley How is the fire from this material extinguished when initially treating napalm wounds?

            Dr. Robert Neer: In the case of Kim Phuc, the little girl captured in the famous 1972 photo “The Terror of War,” the napalm that hit her eventually burned itself out after peeling off several layers of her skin.  When that picture was taken, her skin was still burning.  She wasn’t a human torch, but there was still combustion in the skin, and usually it will burn itself out or the person will die.

            Robin Lindley: You frame the book with the very moving story of Kim Phuc who was just nine in 1972 when she was injured by napalm—and, as she ran from the blast, became the subject of Nick Ut’s photo, one of the iconic photos of the twentieth century.

            Dr. Robert Neer: I was very moved by talking with her and, given her experiences and the power of what she had to say about them, it was very appropriate way to begin and end the book, especially since it’s a “An American Biography.” I see it as a story of the United States in the world, not just a story about napalm. 

            Also, I would say it’s a hopeful story or even uplifting because the larger subject of the book is why we don’t use napalm as much any more, and how it could be that burning a city in 1945 with napalm was considered a heroic act and celebrated by Americans, but subsequent uses of napalm, especially after Vietnam are condemned worldwide and faced with such disapproval that I would say that military powers are restrained from using it, even though it’s legal to use it under international law on the battlefield against combatants. 

            Robin Lindley: You also detail the uses of napalm between World War II and the war in Vietnam, particularly by the U.S. in Korea and by our allies, often against anti-colonial forces or other insurrections.

            Dr. Robert Neer: After the effectiveness of this inexpensive, very stable weapon was demonstrated by the United States in World War II, commanders all around the world wanted to use it for their own purposes.  It wasn’t a difficult chemical problem to solve once it had been demonstrated, and the United States didn’t bother to keep it secret.

            Indeed, at the same time that the Rosenbergs were being electrocuted for espionage relating to the atomic bomb, the United States published the chemical formulas for napalm in a patent for the whole world.  That probably didn’t make much difference because it was a weapon that was easily observed and it was adopted widely regardless of the patent, but it’s an interesting parallel. 

            Subsequent to World War II, napalm was used in most major conflicts around the world.  It was used by many U.S. allies and it was also used by other countries that were not so friendly to the U.S.   But a broader paradigm is that it was used in general by the rich and the powerful against the poor and the dispossessed. 

            As I mentioned, it’s a weapon that is most effectively delivered by airplanes, so people with airplanes used napalm against people without airplanes all around the world, from parts of disintegrating colonial empires like Vietnam and Kenya to civil war like in Nigeria and in Brazil to conflicts between parties of all different descriptions as in India and extensively in the Middle East.

            I think that speaks to the military effectiveness of this weapon and a lack of any real criticism of it.  It was just another way of waging war until Vietnam.

            In the Korean War, the United States adopted a similar military strategy to that which had been so effective in Japan, and used napalm to incinerate Pyongyang and many other cities to the point where Douglas MacArthur came back and told Congress that the level of destruction in Korea made him want to vomit.  More napalm was used in Korea that in World War II, and then again more napalm was used in Vietnam than in Korea.

            Robin Lindley: You write that napalm was a hero that came a pariah, and it seems the shift of opinion was the result of its use in Vietnam with images like those of Kim Phuc running from a napalm blast and others that came out of the war.

            Dr. Robert Neer: I don’t think it was the use in Vietnam that turned napalm into a pariah so much as the fact that the United States lost the war. 

            When napalm was winning in World War II and Korea, there was very little criticism of it at all.  It should be said that many images of napalm in Korea were censored, but there were descriptions of its use, and it was no secret by any means.  And, as I said, it was also used enthusiastically around the world by military commanders in a variety of other countries. 

            During the Vietnam War, for the first time, a nationwide protest movement developed that saw in napalm a symbol or metaphor for their complaint about U.S. involvement in the war over all.  The record, as I saw it, suggested that the starting point was criticism of the war, and the vehicle that the criticism was manifested through was napalm.  Of course, these are complex phenomena, and many people objected to use of the weapon itself.  They were empowered to do that by a far greater amount of coverage and description of the effect of the weapon than had ever before been seen.

            While it certainly wasn’t a secret that napalm was being used by Americans in the Second World War and the Korea War, it’s also true that it was much more widely covered during the Vietnam War than ever before.  For example, Ramparts magazine published the first photographs of children and other civilians affected by napalm.  And Ladies Home Journal and Redbook [ran] very vivid descriptions of the impact of this weapon on civilians.  That triggered a nationwide protest movement by the youth of America on college campuses across the country against Dow Chemical Corporation, which manufactured napalm, [and that] continues to scar Dow’s reputation to this day.

            In a fairly short period, but in tandem with the nationwide movement of protest against the Vietnam War, this highly focused objection to napalm became a national movement.

            Those protest movements occurred in the late 1960s.  The iconic photograph of Kim Phuc was in 1972, after it seems that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was clear to many people that were familiar with the story there. It was only after the war had been fought that napalm turned into the global pariah that it is today.  It’s depiction after the war in movies, books and poems and all kinds of different media took the message of those protestors and mobilized it, distributed it, and cemented it. I’d say that didn’t happen during the war itself, but only after the conclusion of the war was clear.

            Robin Lindley: After Vietnam, it would seem that the United States would be reluctant to again use napalm, but you describe subsequent military uses. 

            Dr. Robert Neer: The United States since Vietnam has been reluctant to use napalm, but the solution that the Defense Department adopted to that problem was to continue the use of incendiary weapons but just not call them napalm, which is evidence of the social opprobrium that napalm assumed following the Vietnam War. 

            During the first Gulf War, the United States used napalm to ignite oil in trenches that the Iraqis had built as a defensive mechanism.

            During the [1993] invasion of Iraq, the United States used napalm to capture various Iraqi positions that were resisting our troops.

            In response to media reports in 1993 on the use of napalm, the response was that the United States had destroyed its last stocks of napalm.  That response was based on the argument that the word “napalm” means the specific chemical formulation of weapon that was used from 1945 to 1975, and now our incendiary weapons are gelled weapons with a different chemical formulation and therefore they are no longer napalm.  The problem with that argument is that the term [napalm] itself has no chemical meaning.  It means only any gelled form of petroleum, and the current incendiary weapons that the U.S. has its in arsenal use gelled petroleum based weapons so they are napalm, just as the weapons that were dropped in 1945. 

            But taking the military spokespeople at their word, it’s entirely possible to understand how they would be unclear about that because there wasn’t any history to tell them how the word was created or developed.  That’s an example of what happens when a country loses its history and that’s a testimony to the work that historians do.

            Robin Lindley: You call napalm “a war criminal on probation.” What is the legal status of napalm?

            Dr. Robert Neer: International law had no real criticism of napalm when it was winning, during World War II, during the Korean War, and as other nations used it.

            The legal regulations of incendiary weapons under international law only came after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam became clear.  It was only in 1980 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted Protocol III of the wonderfully named Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.  This is a treaty that regulates a rogue’s gallery of horrible weapons that people have invented for war. Protocol III covers incendiary weapons and stipulates that these devices are under no circumstances  to be used against concentrations of civilians, even if military facilities are mixed in with those concentrations.  That’s a war crime under provision of international law. 

            A threshold point to observe is that napalm and other incendiary devices are completely legal to use on the battlefield against combatants.  For example, the use of napalm by the United States during the invasion of Iraq was perfectly legal under international law.

            The response of the United States to the international control regime was to reject it.  Ronald Reagan and the first president Bush both refused to submit that treaty to the Senate for ratification.  President Clinton decided to submit it but only with a caveat or “reservation” as it’s called, which said that the U.S. would recommend ratification of the treaty but only with the proviso that the United States would disregard the treaty if, in its sole judgment, using incendiary weapons against concentrations of civilians would save more civilian lives than not doing so.  To my ears, that sounds similar to General LeMay’s justification for incinerating the cities of Japan.  He said that people who objected to that kind of warfare reminded him of the foolish man who cut off the dog’s tail an inch at a time because he said it hurt less that way. 

            That was the position under President Clinton, but the Senate, for its part, was not interested in even discussing that treaty under President Clinton.  The second President Bush followed the policy of his predecessor and urged ratification on the same basis with the same proviso, but the Senate was unwilling to discuss the issue until the very end of his term, at which point, along with a rush of other treaty legislation, they ratified the treaty subject to the proviso that I described. And President Obama signed that treaty on his very first day in office.  That’s the current law that the United States follows, and also most of the world’s other countries, although not all.

            Robin Lindley: You have a fascinating background with a law degree and a variety of jobs before you earned your doctorate in history and now you’re teaching history at Columbia University.  How did you come to the profession of history?

            Dr. Robert Neer: I went to law school at Columbia, but missed the undergraduate experience from my college days as a history major.  After my second year of law school, I applied to a joint JD-PhD program at Columbia and was accepted.  In my third year of law school, I had the experience of getting my Masters degree in history at the same time I completed my JD requirements.

            After that, I had a lot of debt and I had been in school for a long time.  I took a leave of absence and wound up spending 14 years working in the media and entertainment and also in politics in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Los Angeles and Boston. 

            But I maintained my love for history throughout that time and, when I came to a stopping point in my business career, I went back and talked to my professors at Columbia and told them I’d like to come back and finish my doctorate.  They were encouraging and said, “Once admitted, always admitted. Come on back.”

            In 2005, I returned to the program.  I went through a year of required course work to get my mind back in the world of academia.  Then I took my general exams and then wrote my dissertation.  Along the way, I had experience teaching in the history department at Columbia and, when I graduated and there was a job opportunity that they offered me, I took it, and I’ve been very happy ever since.

            Robin Lindley: Do you have any final thoughts on what you hope people take from your book or on the continuing resonance of this story?

            Dr. Robert Neer: My main hope is that other people would be interested in writing other books or articles on different aspects of the story of napalm.  There are plenty of interesting ones.  I made a website, napalmbiography.com, where I’ve presented ideas for other studies about napalm.

            The remarkable thing to me about this story is what I would call “the silence.” This weapon that has affected millions of people around the world, and was invented in the United States, which has one of the largest professional groups of historians in the world, wasn’t written about at all by anybody for 71 years.  That’s my greatest ambition for this project.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle writer and attorney.  He is the features editor for the History News Network and his writing has appeared in HNN, Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Real Change, Re-Markings, NW Lawyer, and more. He is the former chair of the World Peace through Law section of the Washington State Bar Association. He has a special interest in human rights, health and the history of medicine. He can be reached at robinlindley@gmail.com.

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To fill in the historical record, acclaimed expert in Chinese American history Professor Gordon H. Chang explores this forgotten yet momentous story in his new book Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Professor Chang vividly illuminates the journey of Chinese workers from poverty and war in China to their work building the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) from the California coast to Utah under the most extreme physical conditions imaginable as they also faced discrimination and violence in the new land. They laid rail in burning deserts and spent brutal winters digging tunnels in the treacherous Sierra Nevada Mountains. They were segregated, mocked, beaten, robbed and even murdered. Yet their tireless labor provided a foundation for the nation’s enormous industrial growth in the late nineteenth century. 

As Professor Chang recounts, 20,000 Chinese railroad laborers made up 90 percent of the workforce on the western link of the transcontinental railroad, the largest workforce of any private enterprise in America to that time. More than one thousand died in the effort and many more suffered severe and often disabling injuries. Exact figures on these casualties will never be known because the railroad kept no records of these catastrophes.

Virtually no documents by the Chinese rail workers survive, so Professor Chang conducted innovative research drawing on family memories, government records, archaeological reports, and other materials to reconstruct their punishing work and their daily lives. He succeeds in bringing this forgotten history from the margins of public memory and honoring the workers who helped create modern America.

Gordon H. Chang is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University as well as codirector of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project and former director of the Center for East Asian Studies. He specializes in the history of America-China relations and Asian American history, and has written extensively on these topics. His other books include Among These are Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972; Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writing; Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects; Chinese American Voices From the Gold Rush to the Present; Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970; and Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China. Professor Chang is a fourth-generation Californian who now lives in Stanford, California.

Professor Chang generously responded by email to a series of questions on his new book.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations on your groundbreaking book on Chinese railroad workers of the nineteenth century, Ghosts of Gold Mountain. How did you come to study and write about this overlooked history?

Professor Gordon H. Chang: I am a fourth generation Californian and had heard about the Chinese railroad workers when I was growing up in the Oakland area.  Substantive information about them was absent from history books and I had long wanted to address this neglect.  I conducted research on them throughout my career but it wasn’t until this past decade that I was able to devote full attention to them and co-direct a project involving more than a hundred other scholars to recovering their history.

Robin Lindley: As you note in your book, there was virtually no documentary evidence from the workers themselves. What was your process in researching and writing about them?

Professor Gordon H. Chang: The absence of documentation from them because of the destruction of their archive formed a huge challenge.  Many were literate but we believe their archive was destroyed because of the violence they and their relatives suffered in China and America in the 19th and 20th century. 

We had to read evidence in new ways and to rely on other disciplines such as archaeology that are not dependent on textual evidence.  Our published work reflects this inter-disciplinary effort.

Robin Lindley: Why did the Central Pacific Railroad decide to hire workers from far off China when other people in the country could have assumed that role?

Professor Gordon H. Chang: The Central Pacific turned to hiring Chinese out of desperation.  When construction began in 1862, the company wanted only white workers, but far fewer than needed showed up to work.  By 1864, the company turned to hiring Chinese, many of whom were already in the state. 

Chinese began migrating to America in the 1850s.  They came to seek opportunities, some going to the gold country with many others turning to wage work in mines and infrastructure projects.  They were not destitute or indentured.  They came because of the stories they heard about gold in California and the employment opportunities that were available.  

They were part of a huge migration stream that went all around the world.  Almost all came from the Pearl River delta in the Canton (Guangzhou) area, which had been hard hit with ethnic and political violence. 

Robin Lindley: How many Chinese laborers were employed by the CPRR?

Professor Gordon H. Chang: We estimate that up to 20,000 Chinese workers labored on the CPRR line over five years.  At their high point, about 12,000 labored but, because of turn-over, many worked for short periods of time. 

Robin Lindley: What did you learn about the working conditions and effectiveness of these Chinese men?

Professor Gordon H. Chang: They completed the most difficult and arduous and dangerous work. Ninety percent of the construction work force was Chinese on the CPRR.  They made themselves indispensable to the company. Because of their industry and discipline, they gained the respect of the railroad barons and developed a national reputation for themselves.  After the completion of the railroad, they were hired all around the country to work on local and regional lines.

Robin Lindley: Despite their tireless work, the Chinese faced discrimination and violence.

Professor Gordon H. Chang: The good work of the Chinese turned out to be used against them, as they were seen as labor competitors.  A xenophobic movement rose to drive them out of the country through violence and politics.  By 1882, Congress passed the first of what is known as the Chinese Exclusion Acts.

Robin Lindley: What did you learn about the role of women in this history of Chinese workers?

Professor Gordon H. Chang: The railroad workers were all men, but they had contact with women in their lives: as mothers, sisters, wives all back in China, or with prostitutes brought as slave girls to the US.  Eventually, some started families in the US that became the foundation of today’s Chinese American community.

Robin Lindley: It seems that many of these workers returned to China after the railroad project was completed.

Professor Gordon H. Chang: After the construction effort many, perhaps a third, returned to China.  Many others stayed in the US to continue to work on railroads throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries or went on to work in other occupations.  It is likely that the spread of Chinese restaurants in America was a result of the many cooks who served the workers and went on to open restaurants wherever the railroad could take them.

Robin Lindley: What do you hope readers take from your book on these previously ignored workers?

Professor Gordon H. Chang: Their accomplishments and suffering (some 1200 may have perished in the construction effort), needs to be remembered and honored.  We’ve tried to do this in our work and urge your readers to learn about the hidden and untold story of their epic efforts one hundred and fifty years ago.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Chang for your thoughtful comments, and congratulations on your groundbreaking book, Ghosts of Gold Mountain.

Mount Vernon Historian Mary V. Thompson is the author of “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon (University of Virginia Press, 2019).

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, NW Lawyer, Real Change, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights and conflict. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Drawing on years of extensive research and a wide variety of sources from financial and property records to letters and diaries, Ms. Thompson recounts the back-breaking work and everyday activities of those held in bondage. Without sentimentality she describes oppressive working conditions; the confinement; the diet and food shortages; the illness; the drafty housing; the ragged clothes; the spasms of cruel punishment; the solace in religion and customs; and the episodic resistance. 

Ms. Thompson also illuminates the lives of George and Martha Washington through their relationships with black slaves. Washington was a strict disciplinarian with high expectations of himself and his slaves. As a young man, he callously bought and sold slaves like cattle. However, as Ms. Thompson explores, his attitudes toward slavery and race changed with the American Revolution when he saw black men fight valiantly beside white troops. Although not a vocal abolitionist, his postwar statements reveal that he found slavery hypocritical and incompatible with the ideals of democracy and freedom for which he had fought. He was the only Founding Father who freed his slaves in his will.

Ms. Thompson brings to life this complicated history of enslaved people and their legendary owner. Her careful explication of the many aspects of life at Mount Vernon offers a vivid microcosm for readers to better understand the institution of slavery and its human consequences during colonial period and early decades of the republic.

Since 1980, Mary V. Thompson has worked at George Washington's Mount Vernon in several capacities, and currently serves as Research Historian who supports programs in all departments at Mount Vernon, with a primary focus on everyday life on the estate, including domestic routines, foodways, religious practices, slavery, and the slave community. She has lectured on many subjects, ranging from family life and private enterprise among the slaves, to slave resistance, to religious practices and funerary customs in George Washington's family. Her other books include “In the Hands of a Good Providence:” Religion in the Life of George Washington, and A Short Biography of Martha Washington.Ms. Thompson also has written chapters for several books, entries in encyclopedias, and numerous articles. She earned an M.A. in History from the University of Virginia.

Ms. Thompson generously responded by email to a series of questions on her work and her new book on the slave community at Mount Vernon.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Ms. Thompson on your recent book on George Washington and enslavement at Mount Vernon. Before getting to your book, I wanted to ask about your background. How did you decide on a career as a historian?

Mary V. Thompson: My father was a major influence on that.  He served for 32 years as an Army Chaplain and, through quite a few moves, would drag us to nearby museums and historic sites and encourage us to read about the next place we were going and all the exciting things that happened there, so we were pretty psyched by the time we got there. He was also the first curator of the Army Chaplains Museum, when it was in Brooklyn, during the Bicentennial of the Revolutionary War.  As part of that job, he also edited a 5-volume history of the Chaplains Corps, while writing the first volume, which covered the American Revolution.  So, as I went through high school, I helped in the museum with some of the exhibits, helped with acquisitions, and with research. I loved all of it.

Robin Lindley: I understand that you’ve spent most of your professional career as a historian at Mount Vernon. How did you come to work at this historic plantation and what is your role?

Mary V. Thompson: This was definitely a result of serendipity---or providence, depending on your world view.  I was getting ready to finish a master’s degree at the University of Virginia, while working as a volunteer for the Army Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, and sending out what felt like bazillions of resumes for jobs all over the country.  I started out part-time [at Mount Vernon] as an historic interpreter (giving tours to about 8,000 visitors per day).  From there, I moved on to doing special projects for the Curator, then to assisting full-time in the Curatorial Department.  I moved up to being the Registrar in the Curatorial Department, which involved cataloguing new objects as they came into the collection, keeping track of where everything was, doing inventories, working with insurance companies, etc.  

To keep me from going nuts, they gave me one day per week to do research on a specific, agreed-upon topic, the first of which dealt with foodways.  After a few years, my boss asked me to switch to studying slavery and slave life at Mount Vernon.  In the late 1990s, as the 200thanniversary of George Washington’s death was rapidly approaching, I worked on three major projects: a travelling exhibition entitled, “Treasures from Mount Vernon:  George Washington Revealed,” which opened in late 1998 and travelled to five cities around the country; redoing the furnishings in the mansion, with special exhibitions to make the house look as though the Washingtons had just walked out of the room; and the recreation/reenactment of George Washington’s funeral, a three-hour event on C-Span.  

I was then moved to the Library, where I worked as the Research Specialist and then as Research Historian.  This involved dealing with questions from people all over the country, generally dealing with domestic life here at Mount Vernon; helping authors, illustrators, and publishers by vetting publications; helping pretty much every department on the estate with helpful quotes and deciding whether we had enough information on a particular subject to do a special exhibit or program built around it.  Best of all was the opportunity to give talks on and publish my own research.  

Robin Lindley: What sparked your recent book on enslavement at Mount Vernon? 

Mary V. Thompson: I actually started working on the topic in the late 1980s, because Mount Vernon really needed to be able to teach its staff and visitors about this issue, but it was probably about seven or eight years after that before it knew it wanted to be a book.  It was in the early 1960s that I first learned about slavery, as a result of the Civil War centennial, which was going on when I was an elementary school student, at the same time that the Civil Rights movement was playing out on the news every night during dinner.  Then in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the late 1970s, slavery was the subject of much of our reading and classroom discussions.

Robin Lindley: Your book has been praised for its impressive detail and extensive research. What was your research process?

Mary V. Thompson: Thankfully, I was able to start with some of the sources compiled by prior members of our Library staff.  One of the Librarians had put together a bound volume of statements by George Washington on the topic of slavery, which she’d typed up back in the 1940s.  I went through that, page by page, listing the topics covered on each and then photocopied the pages and put them into loose-leaf binders for each of those topics.

I also went through bound volumes of photostats of the Weekly Work Reports that Washington required from his overseers, as well as photostats of his financial records.  The Weekly Reports provided detailed information on the work being done on each of the five farms that made up the Mount Vernon estate, as well as information on the food being delivered to each, the weather on each day, food delivered to each farm, the number of people working on each farm, and explanations for why certain people were not working each week.  This last category was really interesting, because it provides information on illnesses, injuries, childbirth, and how long women were out of work because they were recovering from giving birth.

Another great source was correspondence by family members other than George Washington, as well as descriptions of Mount Vernon by visitors to the plantation, that often mention those enslaved there.  In order to understand where Mount Vernon fit in the overall picture of plantations in Virginia, it was also necessary to learn about life at Monticello, Montpelier, Sabine Hall, and elsewhere in the colony/state.   

Robin Lindley: You reconstruct and put a human face on the lives of slaves at Mount Vernon—despite the virtual lack of any contemporary documents by slaves from that period. How did you deal with that challenge?

Mary V. Thompson:  Getting at the enslaved community was one of my favorite parts of this project.  I started by taking the two fullest slave lists, from 1786 and 1799, and used them to try to reconstruct families. Thankfully, these two lists enumerated the people on each of the five farms and what their work was, with the 1786 list linking mothers and their children who were too young to work, and the ages of those children.  The 1799 list did the same, but also linked women and their husbands and told where those husbands lived (whether they were on the same farm with their wives and children, lived on another of Washington’s farms, or belonged to another owner altogether, or were free men).

 Comparing the two lists made it possible to start reconstructing extended, multigenerational families.  I put together a document for each of the farms, organized by family, and then, as people would be named in the work reports, the financial records, or correspondence, would put those references in the individual records, if I was as sure as I could be that I’d found the right person.  

For most of the people, I was keeping track of such things as information about what work they were doing; references to their health; children; ways they might have made extra money; rations of food and clothing; instances of resistance; etc.

Robin Lindley: I was impressed by your description of the massive size of Mount Vernon and the number of slaves who worked there. How would you briefly describe the Mount Vernon plantation in Washington’s era in terms of area, farming, crops, forests, and number of slaves? 

Mary V. Thompson:  Mount Vernon reached an ultimate size of 8,000 acres during Washington’s lifetime. While Washington, like many plantation owners prior to the American Revolution, started out as a tobacco grower, by the late 1760s, he was making the switch from tobacco to grain and from markets in Europe to American and West Indian markets.  Much of the land was still forested after switching in crops and markets. As I understand it, in order to keep fireplaces running on a daily basis for heating, cooking, and washing, it takes ten acres of forest to get enough trees and branches dying naturally to do those things, without the need to cut any more trees.  The largest number of enslaved people on the plantation was 317 in 1799, the last year of George Washington’s life. 

Robin Lindley: What are a few salient things you learned about Washington’s treatment of slaves? 

Mary V. Thompson: Washington was a stickler for detail and a strict disciplinarian.  He was also approachable when his enslaved workers had problems with their overseers, needed to borrow something, or someone was interested in moving from one plantation job to another that required more responsibility.  They even talked to him to clarify things, when he didn’t understand a particular problem.  

Robin Lindley: How did Washington’s military background affect his treatment of slaves and other workers?

Mary V. Thompson: Washington used the same methods to keep an eye on his army as he did on the plantation with his slaves.  He directed that both officers and overseers spend time with his soldiers and slaves, respectively; he expected regular reports from them so that he had a very good idea about how things were going and would also travel daily through his military camps and farms to catch problems before they became major issues.  He also insisted on proper medical care for both soldiers and slaves and was a strict disciplinarian in both situations.

Robin Lindley: How did Martha Washington see and treat slaves? It seems she was more dismissive and derogatory than her husband concerning black people.

Mary V. Thompson:  Like her husband, Martha Washington tended to doubt the trustworthiness of the enslaved people at Mount Vernon.  Upon learning of the death of an enslaved child with whom her niece was close, she wrote that the younger woman should “not find in him much loss,” because “the Blacks are so bad in th[e]ir nature that they have not the least grat[i]tude for the kindness that may be sh[o]wed them.”  

The Washingtons never seemed to realize that they only knew Africans and African-Americans as people who were enslaved, which meant that they were not interacting as equals and any ideas they may have had about innate qualities of this different culture were tainted by the institution of slavery.

Robin Lindley: I realize that direct evidence from slaves is limited, but what did you learn about how slaves viewed George Washington? 

Mary V. Thompson:  Because Washington was so admired by his contemporaries, many of whom came to Mount Vernon to see his home—and especially his tomb—those visitors often talked with the slaves and formerly enslaved people on the plantation in order to learn snippets about what the private George Washington was like. 

Extended members of the Washington family, former neighbors, official guests, and journalists, often wrote about their experiences at Mount Vernon and what they learned about Washington from those enslaved by him. Some people were still angry about how they were treated, while others were grateful for having been freed by him.

Robin Lindley: In his early years as a plantation owner, Washington—like most slave owners—saw his slaves as his property and he bought and sold slaves with seeming indifference to the cruelty and unfairness of this institution. He broke up slave marriages and families, and he considered black people indolent and intellectually inferior. However, as you detail, his views evolved. How do you see the arc of Washington’s life in terms of how he viewed his slaves and slavery?

Mary V. Thompson: That change primarily happened during the American Revolution.  Washington took command of the American Army in mid-1775.  Within three years, he was confiding to a cousin, who was managing Mount Vernon for him, that he no longer wanted to be a slave owner.  In those years, Washington was spending long periods of time in parts of the country where agriculture was successfully practiced without slave labor and he saw black soldiers fighting alongside white ones. He also could see the hypocrisy of fighting for liberty and freedom, while keeping others enslaved.  There were even younger officers on his staff who supported abolition.  

While he came to believe that slavery was something he wanted nothing more to do with, it was one thing to think that slavery was wrong, and something else again to figure out what to do to remedy the situation.  For example, it was not until 1782 that Virginia made it possible for individual slave owners to manumit their slaves without going through the state legislature.  After an 8-year absence from home, during which he took no salary, Washington also faced legal and financial issues that would also hamper his ability to free the Mount Vernon slaves.

Robin Lindley: Many readers are familiar with the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Did you find any evidence that George Washington had intimate relationships with any of his slaves or any free blacks?  

Mary V. Thompson:  Not really. As a young officer on the frontier during the French and Indian War, one of his brother officers wrote a letter, teasing him about his relationship with a woman described as “M’s Nel.”  The wording suggests several possibilities: she might have been a barmaid working for a tavern owner or pimp, whose first initial was M; another possibility is that she was the mistress of a brother officer; or perhaps that she was enslaved to another person.  With the minimal evidence that survives, there are many unanswered questions about this mystery woman.

The oral history of an enslaved family at Bushfield, the home of Washington’s younger brother, John Augustine Washington, alleges that George Washington was the father of a young male slave named West Ford, who was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, roughly 95 miles from Mount Vernon, about a year or two after the American Revolution.  Here, the surviving documentary evidence contradicts the oral history, indicating that Ford’s father was someone in the Bushfield branch of the family.

Robin Lindley: What struck you particularly about the working conditions for slaves at Mount Vernon and how did they compare to conditions at other plantations?

Mary V. Thompson:  As was true on other Virginia plantations in the eighteenth century, the enslaved labor force at Mount Vernon worked from dawn to dusk six days per week, with the exception of four days off for Christmas, two days each off for Easter and Pentecost, and every Sunday throughout the year,  Because Easter and Pentecost took place on Sunday, which was already a day off, the slaves were given an additional day off on the Monday following the religious holiday.  If they were required to work on a holiday, there is considerable evidence that they were paid for their time on those days.

Robin Lindley: What are a few things you’d like readers to know about the living conditions of slaves at Mount Vernon?

Mary V. Thompson:  Most of the enslaved residents at Mount Vernon lived in wooden cabins—the smaller ones served as homes for one family, while the larger “duplexes” housed two families, separated by a fireplace wall.  

The majority of Americans at this period, free and enslaved, lived in very small quarters.  In comparing the sizes of cabins used by enslaved overseers and their families at two of the farms at Mount Vernon with those of the overseer on a plantation in Richmond County, the two at Mount Vernon had a total living space of 640 square feet, while the other had 480 square feet.

The homes of 75% of middle-class white farmers in the southwestern part of Virginia in 1785 were wooden cabins ranging from 640 square feet to 394 square feet.  Our visitors tend to be very surprised to learn that the entire average Virginia home for middle class or poor families in the eighteenth century would fit easily into just “the New Room,” the first room they enter in the Mount Vernon mansion. In other words, pretty much everyone was on the poor end of the scale, unless they were like the Washingtons, the Custises, or the Carters.  

Robin Lindley: I was surprised that some of the Mount Vernon slaves were literate. I had thought that education of slaves was illegal then. 

Mary V. Thompson: There were no restrictions on teaching slaves to read in eighteenth century Virginia, and, in fact, it might have been a useful skill, especially for slaves working in more of a business capacity, than in agricultural labor.  It was not until after a slave revolt known as Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800), that the state passed a law forbidding enslaved people to gather together in order to learn to read.  At least one historian has suggested that between 15 and 20 percent of slaves could read in the 18thcentury.

Robin Lindley: You found evidence that many slaves were aware of African lore and practices—at times from stories passed down through generations and at times from black people more recently arrived from Africa. What are some things you learned about African influences?

Mary V. Thompson:  African influence can be seen in everything from naming practices within families, to family lore and folk tales told to children, the languages spoken in the quarters, religious beliefs and practices, and even some of the food and cooking traditions.

Robin Lindley: You note that slaves were punished physically at Mount Vernon and that even Washington at times applied the lash. What did you find about forms of punishment at the plantation?

Mary V. Thompson:  One of the changes on the plantation after the war, recorded by Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear, was that his employer was trying to put limits on the physical punishment doled out to the slaved.  According to Lear, Washington wrote that no one was to be punished unless there was an investigation into the case and “the defendant found guilty of some bad deed.”  After the war, Washington also tried to use more positive reinforcement, instead of punishment, in order to get the sort of behavior he wanted.  Those positive reinforcements included such things as the chance to get a better job, earning monetary rewards, or even better quality clothing.

Robin Lindley: What happened to slaves at Mount Vernon who escaped and were recaptured? 

Mary V. Thompson: It would depend on the circumstances and how difficult it was to get them back.  Some people might run away briefly because of a conflict with someone else in the quarters, or with an overseer and needed a breather to let the situation cool off.  Others might have left to visit relatives on another plantation.  If they were not gone long and came back on their own, there might be little punishment.  In other cases, if someone continually ran away or was involved in petty crimes, they might be punished physically or even sold away.  

We know of at least one slave, who was sold to another plantation in Virginia, after running away four times in five years; three times when George Washington sold a person to the West Indies, something many people today consider akin to a death sentence; and one case where a young man at Mount Vernon—and his parents—were told that he would be sold there, as well, if he didn’t start exhibiting better behavior.

Robin Lindley: Did you find examples of slave resistance?

Mary V. Thompson:  Yes, many. When people today think of resistance, most probably are thinking of things like running away, or physically fighting back with an overseer, stealing something to eat, or poisoning someone in the big house. Not everyone was brave enough or desperate enough to do something so easily detectable.  They might well have tried something less obvious, like slowing down the pace of work, procrastinating on finishing a particular job, or even pretending to be sick or pregnant.  

Robin Lindley: Oney Judge Staines was a Mount Vernon slave who escaped to New Hampshire a few years before Washington died. He was angry and vigorously sought her return, but was unsuccessful. Did you find new information on this fascinating case?

Mary V. Thompson:  It wasn’t exactly new information, but the fact that this young woman was one of the “dower slaves” from the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband, meant that Martha did not own her or any of the others, but only had the use of them (and any offspring they had) until her death.  George Washington would lose access to those slaves upon Martha’s death, when the dower slaves would be divided among the heirs of her first husband, who in this case were her four Custis grandchildren.

According to a Virginia law at the time, if any dower slave from that state was taken to another state, without the permission of the heirs—or presumably the guardian of those heirs if they were minors—then the heirs or the guardian acting on their behalf would be entitled to take the entire estate immediately, without having to wait for the death of either the husband or wife. Oney’s escape may well have threatened the entire Custis estate.

Robin Lindley: You note that Washington was the only slave-owning Founder who freed all of his slaves in his will. You also note that he seemed circumspect and perhaps ashamed about owning slaves later in his life. Did he ever speak out publicly for the abolition of slavery in his lifetime?

Mary V. Thompson:  It depends on what a person means by “publicly”.  Washington corresponded with quite a few abolitionists, both British and American, after the Revolution.  In response to those people who were pushing him to emancipate those he held in bondage, Washington typically responded that he thought the only legitimate way to do that was through a gradual process of manumission, much like the northern states were setting up.  He noted that he would always vote to forward such a plan, however, he never stood in front of a legislative body as a proponent of a plan like that.  

Robin Lindley: What do you hope readers take from your groundbreaking book? 

Mary V. Thompson:  I would like people to understand that slavery in eighteenth-century Virginia differed from the same institution in both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and that it was a complex institution.  For example, there were people at Mount Vernon who were free, hired, indentured, and enslaved.  They came from many countries and cultures on two continents, represented a variety of both European and African religious traditions, and began their relationships speaking many different languages.  

Robin Lindley: It’s a complicated story. Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments Ms. Thompson, and congratulations on your illuminating book on the Father of the Country and enslavement on his plantation. 

American presidents before Donald Trump had some record of public achievement in politics, government or the military before they were elected. Donald Trump lacked any of those credentials, but brought his astounding history of involvement in thousands of lawsuits to the nation’s highest office. This trove of cases from more than 45 years reflects Trump’s contempt for ethical standards and for the US Constitution and the rule of law, the foundation of American democracy.

As a perennial litigant, Trump weaponized the law to devastate perceived enemies, to consolidate power, to frustrate opposing parties, as former federal prosecutor and acclaimed author James D. Zirin illuminates in his compelling and disturbing history of Trump’s use and abuse of the law, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits (All Points Books).

Mr. Zirin is a distinguished veteran attorney who spent decades handling complex litigation. He is also a self-described “middle of the road Republican.” Plaintiff in Chief stands as his response to Trump’s disrespect for law and our legal system. He stresses that the book is a legal study, not a partisan takedown. 

In his book, Mr. Zirin scrupulously documents Trump’s life in courts of law. Based on more than three years of extensive research, the book examines illustrative cases and how they reflect on the character and moral perspective of the current president. The details are grounded in more than 3,500 lawsuits filed by Trump and against Trump. Litigation usually involves sworn affidavits attesting to accuracy and testimony given under oath if a trial occurs, so Mr. Zirin is able to reference page after page of irrefutable evidence of Trump's legal maneuvering, misstatements, hyperbole, and outright lies. 

As Mr. Zirin points out, Trump learned how to use the law from his mentor, the notoriously unprincipled lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn whose motto was “Fuck the law.” Trump took Cohn’s scorched earth strategy to heart and used the law to attack others, to never accept blame or responsibility, and to always claim victory no matter how badly he lost.

”Trump saw litigation as being only about winning,” Mr. Zirin writes. “He sued at the drop of a hat. He sued for sport; he sued to achieve control; and he sued to make a point. He sued as a means of destroying or silencing those who crossed him. He became a plaintiff in chief.”

And Trump also has been a defendant in hundreds of legal actions, as Mr. Zirin details. In 2016, there were 160 federal lawsuits pending in which he was a named defendant, as well as numerous other investigations and proceeding. Mr. Zirin observes that Trump “has been sued for race and sex discrimination, sexual harassment, fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, defamation, stiffing his creditors, defaulting on loans, and . . . he [has] been investigated for deep ties to the Mob, which he enjoyed over the years.” 

And Trump’s pattern of disrespect and contempt for the law persists. As Mr. Zirin writes, "All this aberrant behavior would be problematic in a businessman. . . But the implications of such conduct in a man who is the president of the United States are nothing less than terrifying."

Mr. Zirin is a leading litigator who has appeared in federal and state courts around the nation. He is a former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York under the legendary Robert M. Morgenthau. His other books include Supremely Partisan-How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court and The Mother Court, on great trials from the Southern District of New York in the mid-twentieth century. His articles have appeared in array of publications including Time, Forbes, Barron’s, The Los Angeles Times, The London Times, and others. 

Mr. Zirin also hosts the critically acclaimed television talk show Conversations with Jim Zirin Digital Age, which airs weekly throughout the New York metropolitan area. In August 2003, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed him to the New York City Commission to Combat Police Corruption. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A graduate of Princeton University with honors, he received his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School where he was an editor of the Michigan Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.

Mr. Zirin graciously responded to questions on his study of Donald Trump by telephone from his office in New York.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations on your new book Mr. Zirin, and on your distinguished legal career. In your book, you chronicle Donald Trump’s life as a ruthless litigator for almost a half century. How did you come to write Plaintiff in Chief on Trump’s life through more than 3,500 lawsuits? 

James D. Zirin: About three years ago, a friend suggested that I write a biography of Roy Cohn. I knew Roy Cohn. He was an unscrupulous lawyer. He was disbarred 1986, about three years before he died. And he was Trump's lawyer and confidant, and their relationship was very close, very intimate. He boasted to a journalist that he and Trump spoke about five or six times a day. This was before Trump had any notion of seeking political office. 

Cohn really taught Trump everything he knows about waging what I call asymmetrical warfare, weaponizing the law and using litigation as a means to attain the various objectives that he had. They met in a bar in 1973 just after Trump had been named as a defendant along with his father in a race discrimination in housing suit brought by the Justice Department. Trump had a number of lawyers and normally a suit like that ends quickly with a consent decree with the defendant agreeing that he or she won't discriminate anymore without accepting or admitting or denying the allegations in the complaint. 

Cohn had a different recipe for going forward. He liked to beat the system. He'd been indicted three times by the legendary prosecutor Robert M. Morgenthau, and he'd been acquitted three times. Cohn’s recipe was fight, and he taught Trump the tools he used. Number one is, if you're charged with anything, counterattack. Rule number two is, if you're charged with anything, try to undermine your adversary. Rule number three is work the press. Rule number four is lie. It doesn't matter how tall a tale it is, but repeat it again and again. Rule number five is settle the case, claim victory, and go home. And that's exactly what happened in the race discrimination case. 

So anyway, I created a book proposal, which I sent to my agent and my publisher, St. Martin's Press. In its wisdom, the Press said I should try to write a larger book about the influence of litigation on Donald Trump because that's the way he had conducted himself in the 40 years before he achieved office, and I should use Cohn perhaps as a springboard but the book should center on Trump and what experience he had had in litigation. So, I did that and that's how I came to create the book. 

Robin Lindley: It's a remarkable and chilling account of Trump's life through the prism of his legal affairs. You stress in the book that the two most powerful influences in his life were Roy Cohn and his father, Fred Trump. 

James D. Zirin: Yes. His father, of course, was a defendant as well in the race discrimination cases. His father was also a real estate operator and he came up against the government in the arena of FHA loans. He was accused of profiteering. He testified before a Senate committee and was interrogated by Senator Lehman. He made a lot of money by mortgaging out with FHA loans in ways that they were never intended. Then when he was asked about the profits, he said he had never withdrawn the money from the bank, so therefore there were no profits. That was ridiculous. But here is an example of saying something that's totally ridiculous for public consumption that somehow or other some people will believe. And that's the approach Trump has used professionally and that's the approach he continues to use in office. 

Robin Lindley: Were you ever involved in litigation with Donald Trump? 

James D. Zirin: No. I never was. I met him several times, and I met him with Roy Cohn several times. 

When I first met Cohn, I was an Assistant US Attorney and Cohn was being investigated by a federal grand jury. I worked for Robert M. Morgenthau then and that investigation resulted in indictments. Cohn was in the anteroom of the grand jury chamber and witnesses were waiting to testify and he raised his open hand in what might be interpreted as a high five. I naively thought it was a high five to encourage the witnesses since they were facing the daunting experience of testifying before a grand jury. And it wasn't the high five at all. He was telling them to take the Fifth. 

That’s how Cohn operated and that's the way Trump operates. It's saying something that's highly incriminating and doing something that's highly incriminating, but doing it in a way so that you have total deniability if anyone calls you out for it. 

Robin Lindley: What was your impression of Trump when you met him decades ago?

James D. Zirin: I really met him only to shake hands. I never met him to talk with him, but I knew of his reputation. I knew he didn't pay his bills. I knew he didn't pay his lawyers. I knew he'd been in bankruptcy five times, and I knew about his Atlantic City casinos. I knew he'd been sued a number of times. And I knew that he had been a plaintiff an extraordinary number of times. He sued journalists. He sued small business people for using the Trump name. He sued women who he was involved with. He sued his wives even after a divorce, both Ivana and Marla Maples. And I knew that a lot of settlements he entered during litigation were kept under seal in the files of the court so the public would never know the terms of the settlements. 

In one major litigation effort, you had the so-called Polish brigade case which involved the construction of Trump Tower that opened in 1983.Trump had undocumented Polish workers and he did not contribute to the union pension fund as he was required to do. There was litigation and it was eventually settled for 100 cents on the dollar after lengthy litigation including a trial in which the trial judge said Trump's testimony was completely lacking in credibility. But the case was settled. We never knew what the terms of settlement were except, about 20 years later, a judge unsealed the settlement papers and it turned out that Trump had settled for 100 cents on the dollar. 

Robin Lindley: Full disclosure: I'm a lifelong Democrat and I think most in my party would agree with your history and characterization of Trump.

James D. Zirin: I'm actually a lifelong Republican and I'm decidedly anti-Trump because I don't think he represents the values of the country or the Constitution of America. I think he's been a rogue president.  

Robin Lindley; I agree. A lot has happened since your book came out, with Trump’s reaction to the Mueller report, his impeachment, his weaponizing of the Department of Justice, and more suits against the media and others. And Trump continues to follow the Cohn rules. Trump famously said he needed a Roy Cohn. Does he have his Roy Cohn now in William Barr, the Attorney General? 

James D. Zirin: Many people have suggested that. I think Barr is more of an ideologue. He's not an unscrupulous lawyer as Roy Cohn was. 

Roy Cohn represented mobsters and he was a crook. He was eventually disbarred because he stole $100,000 from a client. He was disbarred because his yacht went up in flames and a crew member was killed. He collected the insurance. It was supposed to go to his creditors, but instead he pocketed the money. He was disbarred because he made a false and misleading statements on an application to become a member of the DC bar, and there was a disbarment hearing. Trump was one of a number of his character witnesses and he testified to Cohn’s good reputation for honesty, integrity, truth and veracity. And of course, Cohn’s reputation for honesty, integrity, truth and veracity was very bad.

And after Cohn was disbarred in 1986, Trump distanced and himself from Cohn, but that was not for long because Cohn died three weeks thereafter. There was a funeral and Trump stood in the back of the room and delivered no eulogy, and never said much more about him. 

What we do know about how close the relationship is that 30 years later, in 2016, when Trump was elected president, he turned to gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a friend of his, and he said, “Cindy, if Roy were here, he never would've believed it.” So we know that’s how close the relationship was. And, in the White House in 2017 when counsel Donald McGahn was dragging his feet about firing Sessions, Trump made the famous statement, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” 

Robin Lindley: It seems to many observers that William Barr is acting as the president's personal attorney and has an authoritarian attitude about the Constitution and the role of the president while scoffing at the separation of powers. 

James D. Zirin: That is easily said, but I don't think it's easily demonstrated because the Constitution does not say that the attorney general must be independent of the president. There is a tradition of independence in the justice department, particularly since Watergate where the Attorney General must serve the Constitution, and not the president, and if there's a conflict the Attorney General should do something to resolve that conflict. 

 I think Barr has been quite cavalier about observing that tradition. He doesn't believe in it. He is contrarian and a libertarian. He believes in the unitary executive so that Trump is free to do basically anything he wants to do because he's the President of the United States. Barr has not been a check on Trump's unbridled abuse of power, but it's not really for the attorney general to do that. It's for the Congress to do that through the impeachment power, so you can't say that Barr has failed to ride herd on the president because he would take the view that that's not his obligation.  

Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining that view of the Attorney General’s role. Since your book came out the impeachment occurred. Senator Susan Collins thought the president would be chastened by that process. Of course, that hasn’t happened. How do you see Trump’s response to the impeachment and the unanimous Republican Congressional support of him, with the exception of Mitt Romney? 

James D. Zirin:I think Trump believes he's above the law, and when I say the law, I mean the law including the Constitution. 

The Republicans in the Senate were willing to give him a pass for various reasons. I suppose they could rationalize it. They could say, number one, it was for the American people ultimately to decide on whether he should remain in office and we have an election coming up in a few months. And number two, what Trump did was bad perhaps, but it wasn't so bad as to amount to an impeachable offense. Impeachable offenses are what two thirds of the Senate say they are was going to be. 

I don't think anyone ever thought that two thirds of the United States Senate would vote to remove him from office. But the Constitution provides for a trial and it's supposed to be presided over by the Chief Justice. And this was not a trial. It was a travesty because who has ever had a trial where the prosecution can't call witnesses to present the evidence. And that's what Romney was extremely upset about. 

I think it was a Senator Lamar Alexander's who said we don't need witnesses because, if five people say you left the scene of the accident, why call a sixth? And so, it was pretty much uncontested what the facts were, and what is to be made of those facts is up to the United States Senate under our Constitution. It shows that the hoary document we call the Constitution of the United States, which we put on a pedestal and supposedly has iconic significance, is an 18th century document that in the real world is pretty inefficient in curbing the powers of a tyrannical president. And I think that history will record that. 

Robin Lindley: And Trump responded that the impeachment was “a hoax” and said his letter to Ukranian President Zelensky was “perfect.” He actually asked a foreign government to interfere in an American election. It seems a high crime and misdemeanor under the Constitution. Elections are sacrosanct in a democracy. 

James D. Zirin:Well, that's true. And a high crime and misdemeanor does not have to be a crime that's in the United States Code, although this amounted to an invitation for a bribe, but also amounted to extortion, both of which are in the United States Code. 

But at the time of the enactment of the Constitution, there was no United States Code. The Constitution mentions bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. It was quite clear from the Federalist papers and the ruminations of Hamilton and Madison and others that abusive presidential power was an impeachable offense. And here you certainly have an abuse where Trump was using the foreign policy of the United States and the leverage of withholding funds for military aid that were authorized by Congress in order to achieve a domestic political advantage and benefit himself. 

Robin Lindley: And Trump continues to bring lawsuits from the White House. In the last couple of weeks, he's sued the New York Times and CNN for defamation. Of course, he'll never appear to be deposed, so those lawsuits will probably go nowhere. He continues to use the law as a weapon. You chronicle that sort of abuse of the legal system for the last 45 years or so. 

James D. Zirin: That's right. He has sued a lot of writers. Before he took public office, he sued the journalist Tim O'Brien for daring to write that his net worth was overstated. They took his deposition, and he demonstrably lied at least 32 times under oath, and the case was eventually dismissed. The defense was able to show the truth that, in fact, he had overstated his net worth. That was one of Trump’s sore points and he sued whenever someone said he was worth less than he believed should be stated. But O'Brien won his case. 

And he brought other cases against journalists. He sued an architectural critic for the Chicago Tribune for suggesting that one of his buildings, which wasn't even up but was planned, would be an eyesore on the horizon. The judge threw the case out because of the rule of opinions. To succeed in a libel action, you have to show that a statement of fact which is defamatory and false was made of and concerning the plaintiff. The architect stated an opinion that the building would be an eyesore on the horizon, and that's not something that could ever be libelous. 

Robin Lindley: You use the term “truth decay” and Trump is probably responsible for either misstatements or outright lies on an average of at least 10 times a day. How does this pattern of lying fit into his attitude toward the law? 

 James D. Zirin: I think he enjoys lying. I think it's part of his DNA. I don't think he has any grasp of the facts at all, so he says whatever he thinks will help him and whatever comes into his head. 

It is expedient, I suppose, to lie in litigation if you crossed an intersection through a red light. You can lie and say it was a green light and that changes the legal outcome of your case. And that's the way Trump operates. But he would go beyond that because he would say the heck with you and the horse you rode in on as he did in the House impeachment inquiry. Then, he denounced Adam Schiff and denounced Jerry Nadler and denounced the witnesses. He tried to subvert the whole proceeding by denouncing the whistleblower and by showing that those people who lined up against him were of low character and were themselves liars.

All of this goes back to Joe McCarthy because this is the way McCarthy operated. Then adversaries accused McCarthy of engaging in a witch hunt and accused McCarthy of generating these hoaxes. And of course, Roy Cohn was McCarthy’s chief counsel. And so he learned how useful those charges can be and how devastating they can be in any kind of controversy. And he taught all of that to Trump and Trump uses that to his great advantage.

Robin Lindley: Yes. And Trump certainly follows the Roy Cohn rule about declaring victory no matter how badly you lose. 

James D. Zirin: Yes. Even that conversation with Zelensky he called “perfect,” and it was something other than perfect. I don't know whether he's going to say the Corona virus is a perfect hoax, but perfect is a word that recurs again and again in his lexicon. 

Robin Lindley: Pardon me for this psychological observation, but you write that power and dominance are even more important to Trump than money. That seems pathological. And he seems to take a sadistic joy in attacking and ruining anyone he perceives as a foe of some sort. 

James D. Zirin: Well, that's true. 

In one of the cases that I describe in the book, he got wind of the fact that a small business, a travel agency conducted by father and daughter in Baldwin, Long Island, was using the name Trump Travel. Not Donald Trump Travel, but Trump Travel. They used Trump Travel because they were selling a bridge tours for people who play bridge, and “trump” is a bridge term. Also, like “Ace Hardware,” they thought “Trump” keynoted excellence. This was a little storefront travel agency in a small Long Island community. Trump had never been in the travel business and he never had any business involvement in Long Island, but he sued them. And at the end of the day, they were allowed to continue to use the name Trump Travel, but it had to make the lettering a little smaller. And they'd exhausted their life savings in defending the case. So he was quite sadistic about the way he went about it. 

There was another similar case where an unrelated family named Trump from South Africa had a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical business and Trump sued them. He'd never been in the pharmaceutical business and had never been in business at that point anywhere outside the United States. But this family had the wherewithal to defend the case and eventually the case was thrown out completely.

 Robin Lindley: What are a few things you learned about Trump's ties to the Mob or organized crime? 

James D. Zirin: In the first place, his father had ties to the mob. His partner was a man named Willie Tomasello who was a made man and they were partners in various real estate ventures. 

Through Roy Cohn, Trump met leaders of the five families in New York, principally Fat Tony Salerno, Paul Castellano, and others who controlled the poured concrete business in New York. He also met John Cody who was a labor racketeer and president of the Teamsters.

 At that time, particularly because of the mob involvement, poured concrete was a much more expensive way of constructing a building than structural steel. The poured concrete business was dominated by Castellano who was murdered, and Salerno who was eventually sent to jail for a term of about 99 years. 

Trump retained these mafia companies to construct buildings out of poured concrete even though it was more expensive. We don't really know why he did that, but his mob ties ran quite deep. They existed in Atlantic City where he had a number of casinos, principally the Taj Mahal, which went bankrupt six months after its opening. At times, on a Tim Russert program and under oath, he denied that he had any contact with the mob, but he was warned by the FBI when he went into Atlantic City that he shouldn't deal with mobsters because it would ruin his reputation. 

But Trump continued to have contact with mobsters. On at least two occasions, which I relate in the book, he admitted that he had ties with the mob. In the construction of Trump Tower, the Teamsters called a citywide strike. Construction trucks and concrete trucks didn't have access to construction sites, but mysteriously at Trump Tower poured-concrete trucks passed the picket lines and continued their work. Cody, the president of the Teamsters got not one, not two, but several condominium units at Trump Tower for a female friend of his who had no visible means of support. 

Robin Lindley: Did you learn anything about Trump’s ties to the Russian mob and Russian oligarchs?

James D. Zirin: Yes. A lot of it is revealed in the book [by Craig Unger] House of Trump, House of Putin. But in 1986, a Russian oligarch walked into Trump Tower and he bought five condominium units with monies that had been wired from London and laundered from Russia. He was a member of the so-called Russian mafia. Eventually the Attorney General cracked down on it and made a finding that these apartments were purchased with laundered funds. So Trump’s ties to Russia go back at least that far, maybe further. And he has continued to deal with Russian oligarchs throughout his business career. 

Robin Lindley: Money laundering is complicated to me. Can you say more about Trump and laundered funds?  

James D. Zirin: Money laundering is where money comes from some illegal source and the money can't be reported, so the origin of the money must be concealed, and that's why it's called laundered money. A good way to conceal the source of money, particularly with money from Russia that is obtained by fraud or theft or in violation of Russian laws, is to buy a condominium unit in New York and the condominium unit is there and there's no tracing of the funds. The funds went to Trump and he deposited them in his bank accounts and he used it to pay his loans, and the origin and tracing of the funds just disappeared. 

Robin Lindley: And you indicate that Trump has repeatedly used laundered money to hide illegal funds.

James D. Zirin: The interesting thing with Trump and the Russians is that Deutsche Bank was his principal lender. No other bank would touch him. He now owes about $365 million to Deutsche bank. At one point in time, he was in default on a debt service payment to Deutsche Bank and they were about to sue him. Trump tried to stop them with the same technique, a suit against the bank: a counter attack, suing for fraud in lending. Somehow or other that got resolved, and the debt service obligation was extended and another department of Deutsche Bank continued to lend him large sums of money. Now that’s very suspicious because what bank lends money to a customer who's been in default, number one, and number two, what bank lends the money to a customer who has sued them and charged them with fraud?

Deutsche Bank pleaded guilty to money laundering for Russian interests and there were definite ties between Deutsche Bank and the Russians, which have never been fully explored. Russian money in effect may have been used to guarantee Trump’s indebtedness.  I think Trump's son Eric said on a number of occasions, and Donald Jr. said at a certain point in time that they couldn't get financing until they got it from Russia. 

Robin Lindley: Yes, I recall that comment. Trump also has been able to keep his tax returns secret. How do you see his refusal to reveal his returns and its significance?

James D. Zirin: Trump’s five predecessors in office all had no trouble releasing their tax returns. Both Republicans and Democrats seem to regard this release as a tradition although there is no legal obligation imposed on a president to release his or her tax returns. 

Trump's tax returns remain shrouded in mystery. Now, the District Attorney of New York County obtained a grand jury subpoena covering eight taxable years, and five of the eight were before Trump became president. He didn't subpoena Trump for them, but subpoenaed Trump's outside accountants and the Trump organization. Right up the line the courts sustained the subpoenas and said that the accountants had to comply, which they were willing to do except Trump had instructed them not to. That matter is now before the Supreme Court and will be argued in March. Presumably it'll be decided in June before this term of the Court ends. 

In addition, committees of the House of Representatives have subpoenaed some tax returns and that matter is also before the Supreme Court. 

Now, this is absolutely appalling. In the Second Circuit subpoena case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, Cy Vance, Judge Chin questioned the lawyer for Trump in the Second Circuit. “Now your client said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and no one would mind. None of his followers would mind and would still vote for him. I suppose if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue a district attorney would investigate the case. Couldn't the police investigate the case? Couldn't they seize the gun? Couldn't they talk to witnesses?” Trump’s lawyer answered “No, your honor. He’s protected by the fact that he's president.” And if anyone buys that one, I think the rule of law is seriously compromised. 

Robin Lindley: Yes. That goes back the wealth of evidence you present that Donald Trump has no regard for the rule of law or the Constitution. 

James D. Zirin: Yes, if it gets in his way. He said that impeachment was unconstitutional even though impeachment is provided for in the Constitution. So he doesn't know what he's talking about as a legal matter. 

There were also the instances of his undermining the judiciary, accusing judges who decide against him of being Obama judges or Mexican judges and taking them on individually as so-called judges. And he's undermined the judiciary in a way that's totally obnoxious to any lawyer who's dedicated to the rule of law.

Robin Lindley: He swore an oath to the Constitution as president and yet continues to attack the legal system and the rule of law. 

James D. Zirin: Justice John Marshall said we're a government of laws, not men. He would've said today men and women.  But Trump has attacked not only the legal system, but the judges who administer the legal system like Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg who he thinks should recuse themselves from all Trump-related cases. And again, he's gone after the individual judges. 

Robin Lindley: You also point out his abusive treatment of women and his payments of hush money to his paramours.

James D. Zirin: He did that before he took office and that's why Vance wants to see Trump’s tax returns, to see how these payments were treated on his tax returns and perhaps to find payments to other women. 

Robin Lindley: Since the book came out, have you received any backlash or criticism from Trump supporters or Republicans.

 James D. Zirin: No. I'm often asked if I expect Trump to sue me, and I say I wish he would because it would help the sales of the book. The book Fire and Fury would have sold about 5,000 copies, but then when Trump tried to enjoin it, it was like “Banned in Boston” and it became a runaway bestseller and sold three million books. 

I haven't received any backlash because the book is very well documented and everything in it is true, but the [Trump supporters’] response is basically, so what.  The stock market is up. We have less regulation. The government is less intrusive in our lives, except maybe when it comes to abortion. [To Trump supporters] this is all a good thing. And they spit up the names Pelosi and Biden and Bernie Sanders, and they ask would you rather have someone who's going to tax and spend like Bernie Sanders who promises a chicken in every pot? Or would you rather have a Donald Trump whose policies are a good though he's a little ridiculous. That’s the comment.

Robin Lindley: In the context of your study of Trump’s attitudes and perspective on the law, how do you see Trump’s response to the public health crisis now of coronavirus?

James D. Zirin: The coronavirus is quite likely to be the undoing of Donald Trump, when his mendacity, ignorance and shallowness came into full view, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a Euclidian equation.

I saw it all coming and I cried aloud in my book “Plaintiff in Chief. “

Here’s a partial list of Trump’s lies about the coronavirus: 

Robin Lindley: Do you have any words of wisdom now on the future of democracy and the rule of law? Trump has persisted in twisting the law to his interests or ignoring it in the lifelong pattern you portray vividly.

James D. Zirin: He has continued and I think he will continue. And I think the rule of law has been seriously undermined. 

Our democracy has been seriously compromised because the framers of the Constitution never thought the system would work this way. Republican senators deserve part of the blame because of their need to retain power or whatever, they did not respect the oath they took to be fair and impartial judges of the facts and the law, but instead voted along party lines to acquit him. 

Robin Lindley: Trump said sometime in the 90s, as you note in your book, that “I love to have enemies.” I think most of us wouldn't feel that way and it seems pathological to me. What did you think when you found that quote from him? 

James D. Zirin: Most politicians are controversial and have political enemies. I think Trump relishes that perhaps more than others and he loves to attack them personally. We know Biden is “Sleepy Joe” and Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas” and Bernie Sanders is “Crazy Bernie.” He has nicknames for everyone and he revels in trashing them rather than addressing the merits of anything they propose. 

Robin Lindley: The mentality of an eight-year-old bully, it seems. You write that Trump’s experience in lawsuits reflects “his inmost ulterior motivation.” This comes out in your responses, but could you sum up your sense of his character, motivation, and morality based on your extensive research?

James D. Zirin: His virulent combination of anti-science, anti-law, ignorance, irrational conspiracy theorizing, instability, narcissism and vindictiveness has led us to national catastrophe. If he is re-elected, I fear for the republic and the American people.

Robin Lindley: As you demonstrate, Trump is an anomaly in terms of the adversarial system. Do you have anything to add on his abuse of legal process? 

James D. Zirin: Look, the adversary system is the crown jewel of our legal system. We got it from the British. The idea is that you had lawyers on both sides who were partisan, who were like the Knights Templar who rode into battle on behalf of somebody or other in the Middle Ages. That has been the best way of getting at the truth. In contrast, in civil law countries like France or Germany, the judge conducts the inquiry. The judge might ask questions of the lawyers, but the lawyers don't develop the evidence on both sides. 

But adversary doesn't mean enemy. What Trump has demonstrated is that we have a great legal system and we all have the benefit of it. But there are also limitations for the law and those limitations can be exploited by someone determined to beat the system, and that's what Trump has done.

Robin Lindley. Thank you, Mr. Zirin and congratulations on your groundbreaking and compelling book on the life of Donald Trump through the perspective of his thousands of lawsuits. It's been an honor to talk with you. 

My home state, Washington, became ground zero for the coronavirus or COVID-19. On February 28, 2020, the mysterious disease took the first life in the US at a long-term care facility in Kirkland, a Seattle suburb. Within a few weeks, deaths of more than 30 other patients from this facility were linked to the virus. At this writing, Washington State has suffered more than 300 deaths from the COVID-19 and more seven thousand people have tested positive for the virus. And the toll mounts daily.

I live in Seattle, about five miles from the ill-fated suburban nursing home that became a sort of Petri dish for the new pandemic. As in most states now, all Washington citizens are now under orders from our governor, Jay Inslee, to “stay at home,” except for workers in essential businesses or to address medical and food needs. We’re fortunate in Washington State that Governor Inslee listened to public health experts and took immediate steps to “flatten the curve” and reduce virus deaths by ordering closure of nonessential businesses and encouraging simple health measures such as social distancing and hand washing. 

The pandemic has affected all of us in many different ways. I have a special interest in the history of medicine and I wanted to know more about past global pandemics and the story of this mysterious new virus, COVID-19. 

Luckily, I recently came across distinguished historian Professor Frank Snowden’s magisterial new history, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (Yale University Press). 

Professor Snowden’s sweeping chronicle of infectious disease epidemics over the past 700 years offers vivid descriptive accounts of diseases from bubonic plague, smallpox, and tuberculosis to malaria, polio, HIV/AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and more, and also details the transformation and evolution of societies ravaged by epidemics. 

His book is also a compassionate account that gives readers a sense of the human face of those who suffer and die from epidemic illnesses, as well as those who offer care for victims as they sacrifice their own health, and those who seek treatments and cures. And it’s a story of medical progress and setbacks as it offers a context for understanding the new coronavirus in this era of rapidly emerging diseases. And, the book is a testament to the importance of understanding history in preparing for epidemics and developing effective responses.

Frank M. Snowden is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor Emeritus of History and History of Medicine at Yale University. His other books include The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900–1962, and Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884–1911. The Conquest was awarded the Gustav Ranis Prize from the MacMillan Center at Yale in 2007 as “the best book on an international topic by a member of the Yale Faculty,” the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize by the American Historical Association as the best work on Italy in any period, and the 2008 Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. He received his doctorate from Oxford University.

Professor Snowden graciously talked with me by telephone from his home in Rome, Italy. We began by discussing the situation in Italy, which has been devastated by COVID-19. He also explained the coronavirus in detail and its historical context.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Snowden on your sweeping new book of medical history, Epidemics and Society. How are you doing in Rome? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: I can't really complain. I'm doing as well as can be expected, but the circumstances aren't good for anyone at this point. But given that, things aren't too bad. Talk about yourself. I know Seattle also is having a terrible time. 

Robin Lindley: My wife Betsy and I are doing fine here. We are under Governor Jay Inslee’s order to stay at home, so we're staying in. We can go out for neighborhood walks but parks and other public gathering places are closed. Schools and non-essential business are closed. We went to a couple of grocery shopping hours for seniors, which are always a happening. The clerks eventually told us that these are the busiest times of day. So we’re well and safe so far. We have a governor who listens to public health experts, fortunately. 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: Yes. Jay Inslee is a wonderful governor. I was sorry he dropped out of the presidential race.

Robin Lindley: He’s a devoted environmentalist with strong views on the climate crisis. And he’s been an acknowledged leader in addressing this pandemic as national leadership has faltered. Each state now operates as a separate fiefdom, each one bidding against others for critical medical equipment. Governor Inslee has urged citizens to observe public health admonitions to stay well and protect others.

Professor Frank M. Snowden: Are some people defying the orders?

Robin Lindley: Most people we see are compliant and trying to observe physical distancing and other protocols. I sense that defiance isn’t a big problem, at least around Seattle area. How are you were doing and what's happening in Italy right now? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: I’m doing well personally. Like everyone else in the country, I’m locked down at the moment and it sounds a bit more rigorous than in Seattle. No one is allowed outdoors unless you have what's regarded by the state as an essential job such as in healthcare. But for ordinary mortals, you are allowed outdoors only for the purpose of shopping for provisions or medications. In fact, it's hard to show up for anything else because almost everything else is closed. 

Therefore, while one can go out to shop for food, you must have an official document that you download that says your purpose for going outside and where you are planning to go to show if the police stop you. And if where you're actually found is different from where you said you would go, then you can be subject to a hefty fine. And the police are fairly frequently outside. You are not allowed to go for a walk or things like that. There's only the one purpose, and you're not allowed to meet anyone. You can't visit family members or even an elderly parent. All social gatherings are forbidden.

One learns a lot from observing. In fact, I've kept sort of a diary during these three weeks of a lockdown so far, partly on how it's affecting me as I think about it, but more importantly, what I observe as I walk around the neighborhood on my shopping outings, which is really all I can see. I have a very small view of the world because I can't leave this neighborhood, just like anyone else. But I do see changes in people's attitudes over time. 

I would say that nationally, this is from reading and not from any direct observation, it seems as though the rather stern lockdown has been mostly accepted by people for several reasons. One is that it is imposed by democratically-elected people who, citizens trust, will be held accountable. Furthermore, it’s temporary, and there's just one message. The state doesn't speak with multiple voices as seems to be happening with the United States government. In other words, in the Italian situation there isn't the chaos of a president, fifty governors, boards of education, and mayors all saying different things. There's just one policy and it's uniform over the entire country. 

And with that goes very careful messaging.  Everyone understands that the measures taken are essential, and that their purpose is to protect people. The message conveys the clear idea that a lockdown is only known way of dealing with the crisis. 

Another aspect of the government message is that you're not helpless. There are things that you can do -- by complying -- to protect yourself and everyone around you. And that’s a powerful message. We’ve learned that we're all in this together, and the government is saying that at every opportunity. And you can hear the result even in the lines waiting outside of shops, where people say things such as, “I wonder if this was what it was like in the world war?” People have made reference to the Blitz in London when everyone was in a very tightly regulated, confined situation, but there was a sense that everyone was in the same situation together. I found that quite moving. It’s important for leaders elsewhere to have the chance to observe that.

But people are quite worried and frightened.  That comes across as well. For example, in the building where I'm staying the super and I were chatting. I said, “Don't worry too much. One day, this too will be over.” He replied, “Let’s hope we’re still alive to see that day.” Clearly, he meant to be funny, with a sort of Australian gallows humor. But his comment also showed me the extent to which people really are frightened, and you can see that everywhere.

For example, when you go shopping and encounter someone in the street, even though you’re both wearing masks, are outdoors, and are widely separated, most of the time that person will actually go into the street and walk around the cars to avoid coming anywhere near you. That’s a clear sign. 

And I heard neighbors waiting in supermarket lines grumbling about other people in the supermarket who weren't wearing masks, even though they’re not at all easy to find these days. We are not short on toilet paper, but masks and gloves seem to be what Italians have stocked up on. Nevertheless, there are all people who are put out that others are being socially irresponsible. 

So that’s what I'm observing. But my sense that people are compliant was pointed out by the local newspaper Il Giornalein Rome, which had a comment that this is the first time in 3000 years of Roman history that the people of Rome have been obedient. That's a nice way of thinking about it.

Robin Lindley: I look forward to your diary Professor Snowden, if you publish that. Why do you think the COVID-19 positive cases and death toll are so high in Italy? There are more than 15,000 virus deaths in Italy now and more than 125,000 people there have tested positive for the virus.

Professor Frank M. Snowden: That's one of the puzzles of this epidemic here. There are some clues, but I can't answer your question fully. I can just make a couple of observations in passing. One is a paradox of Italian success, and that is to say its healthcare system has been very effective in prolonging life so that you can live several years more by being here than in the United States, for example. One of the consequences is that the most vulnerable cohort of people, the elderly people, actually live longer than almost anywhere in the world. So I think that's one factor. But that doesn’t explain the whole difference. 

  Some of the answer may have to deal with how statistics comparatively are collected during this epidemic. Comparative observations are often like comparing apples and pears because the data behind them are collected in such different ways. The number, the amount of testing, and its extent, also varies from country to country and from place to place in a country. But the calculation of the number of deaths is very reliable because the bodies of the dead are unmistakable. The denominator, however, is the number of cases and that is a moving target. For every country that figure is very, very unreliable. 

Therefore, the appearance of a high mortality in Italy is partly an artifact of how statistics are collected rather than of what's actually happening. But that’s a suspicion, and I can't actually prove it except to say that the numbers in every country, as everyone agrees, are very unreliable because not enough testing has been done almost anywhere except in a few places like South Korea and parts of Italy. The Italians have done a lot of tests, but it's actually hard to get a test, so I don't place a lot of faith in what the real denominator is here, or anywhere.

Robin Lindley: Have you had a test for COVID-19? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: No. You would have a hard time getting the test at the moment because they are reserving them for people who have the classic symptoms. To get a test in Rome at the moment, you need to have a temperature and some difficulty breathing and a cough. Otherwise, it would be difficult to just request one. If I have a cough, it might be related to hay fever or something, and they would say, well let's monitor and see how this develops. I myself had a very slight temperature at one point.  I've been in contact with a physician and the temperature doesn't seem to be going anywhere. He told me that the health system would not see that as a valid reason to have the test.

 Robin Lindley: That's the same situation here. And there aren't a lot of tests available. I appreciate your book Epidemics and Society. It's very helpful in providing context for what we’re now experiencing with COVID-19. What is this new coronavirus and how did it originate?

Professor Frank M. Snowden: The novel coronavirus is present in wild animals, particularly in bats that are a reservoir for it. There are hundreds of species of bats, and some of them harbor the virus, although their immune system is such that they are actually not affected by it. It doesn't cause a bat disease. 

Part of the story of our globalized world is that we have this huge population, nearly eight billion people, with a common world economy that's constantly expanding. With that expansion, we are relentlessly devastating animal habitat, and the consequence is more and more encounters between people and wild animals than ever before. Polar bears are now found in Alaskan towns, and wild boars have become common in the streets of Barcelona. One can go on and on.

With regard to bats, a number of scientists have done studies and found that people in central China--in Wuhan--had been eating bats even before this became a human disease on a large scale, and there were spillover infections. Scientists discovered also that people had been in caves and they discovered the artifacts in terms of beer cans and other objects found in the caves.  They were able to discover a number of viruses and to identify the ways in which they spilled over from the bat population to humans. For the most part these encounters went unnoticed because they didn’t produce clusters of infection although testing demonstrated that there were people who had antibodies to the coronaviruses the scientists discovered. 

It also happens that people invade the areas where the bats live for extended periods and bring them and other wild animals to bushmeat markets to be sold for religious and medicinal purposes. Traditional Chinese medicine, for example, holds that various parts of these animals are health-giving and can be used as remedies to various maladies or conditions that people have. So there is a market for these animals, and their meat, being expensive, is a status symbol. 

The animals are taken to the wet markets in cages and butchered at the time of purchase in very unhygienic conditions such that their blood runs over everything as does water sloshing from fish tanks and other contaminants. Imagine a great warren of closely adjoined stalls with no hygienic regulations narrow passages jam-packed full of people like a large Petri dish. In Wuhan, the virus contaminated the environment of such a market. The coronavirus was actually found in the market, which wasn’t even closed down. Shoppers were infected and they took it home with them and spread it to their neighbors and families. So this disease began silently and unnoticed, and then spread in clusters through a very congested city. 

We can say that this virus was transmitted to people because of the way in which the human relationship with the environment and the habitat of animals has been transformed by our constant demographic and economic growth, taking over more and more areas of the planet and destroying biodiversity. So that's how the disease got to humans. 

Robin Lindley: Does climate change also play a role in the spread of the virus? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: Yes, climate change also plays a role in this. One can see that particularly in vector-transmitted diseases because a world is being created that extends the area within which various insect vectors such as mosquitoes can thrive, and you have the spread of Zika, malaria, and dengue fever. Those are really important aspects of climate change. 

Climate change is definitely changing disease patterns and producing emerging diseases that human beings are vulnerable to. So that is a very important factor. With regard to coronavirus, it's not so clear that climate, as opposed to habitat, is the major issue. We don't know very much about this disease because it has been known to affect humans only since December. We’ll learn a lot more about it as we go forward.

Robin Lindley: How does coronavirus affect humans and eventually lead to their demise?

Professor Frank M. Snowden: There’s a lot of misinformation about coronavirus. It’s not transmitted in casual encounters. It’s not transmitted on an airplane by an infected person to people sitting several or more rows away. By comparison, smallpox and measles could be transmitted through the air in just that way.

At least one of the good things about coronavirus is that it transmits within a small radius of infectivity. And it tends to infect people not through transient contact, but through prolonged contact as would occur in a family group, a workplace, restaurant, bar, or school. I'm afraid we're going to see many more cases in prisons and other closed places. 

COVID-19 is spread through droplets when people cough, sneeze, or talk, sending sputum into the air. Then the virus borne by the droplets is then inhaled by people or it contaminates a surface that people later touch, contaminating the fingers that they then bring to their mouth, nose, and eyes.  In fact, as studies show that, in the course of an hour, a person normally touches his or her face many times, allowing the virus to find a portal into the body. That's a very common way in which this disease is transmitted. 

Once admitted to the body, the coronavirus doesn't cause an upper respiratory infection, but rather goes down very far down into the lungs.  In serious cases, it leads to pneumonia. Therefore, severe complications are oxygen hunger and breathing disorders that require ventilators and other respiratory support.  Patients who have those very severe symptoms suffer respiratory distress leading in turn to multiple organ failure. It's not at all -- as we've sometimes been told -- like the common cold or seasonal flu. COVID-19 is far more likely to lead to agonizing disease and death.

Robin Lindley: Isn't this coronavirus considered a form of SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome]? That seems the closest analogy from your book. I was struck by the parallels in terms of Chinese concealment and how the SARS virus traveled in 2003. 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: Yes, indeed. COVID-19 is the disease and the coronavirus responsible is so similar genetically that it is termed SARS-V-2. 

SARS also began through a spillover from the animal world to people. And it seems to have originated in the same wet markets as the coronavirus. In fact, immediately after the end of the SARS outbreak, the Chinese authorities closed down these so-called wet markets. But then there was enormous push-back, and even authoritarian regimes often respond to popular pressure. The regime therefore yielded to popular sentiment in this matter and reopened the markets.

We need to remember that wet markets serve traditional Chinese medicine and folk beliefs such as the idea that eating wild meat makes you more robust and resistant to disease. At the same time, it's good for people who don't have refrigeration. Furthermore, since bush meat is expensive it’s a status symbol.

So these markets sprang up again, although the regime knew that they were a danger to public health. Today, there’s a lot of speculation about whether they’ll ever be reopened. But unfortunately, they were re-opened after SARS.

Robin Lindley: I don’t remember great public concern about SARS. Are there similarities between the progression of SARS in 2003 and what's happening with COVID-19? How did the SARS epidemic end? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: As human beings, we dodged a bullet with SARS because SARS is not so very easily transmitted as COVID-19 is, and so it was possible to contain it. It reached a number of different countries, but then was then confined within hospital settings and didn't initiate community spread. SARS thus lasted just six months.

Both are pulmonary viral diseases, and SARS is more deadly. But it doesn't produce asymptomatic or presymptomatic carriers who shed virus in the way COVID-19 does, and it is therefore more readily detected.  The incubation period is also different, and SARS requires more prolonged contact. Although their genomes are close, they are quite distinct diseases and SARS is much less dangerous as a pandemic disease than COVID-19.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining that Professor Snowden. I didn't realize the great difference in terms of transmission of SARS and coronavirus. I also wanted to ask about swine flu, the H1N1 virus that hit the United States in 2009 and caused about 12,000 deaths and about 60 million cases. Trump has mentioned swine flu and claimed that President Obama failed to respond. This administration also seemed to view swine flu as analogous to a COVID-19. What have you learned about swine flu? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: I actually don't think that it was forthcoming of our president to say that Obama didn't respond and that this new virus is similar. They are two completely different diseases and they're transmitted in different ways. The way that they reach humans is very different. 

Although H1N1 affected a large number of people, it didn’t have anything like the impact COVID-19 is having and is likely to have because we're still at a fairly early stage in the spread and progression of the COVID-19. Unfortunately, it looks as though it's only beginning to ramp up in India, Africa, and Latin America. So I think we haven't at all seen the world spread of this and the total toll it’s going to take in human life and suffering. So the analogy with swine flu is a poor one.

The naming of that disease as the swine flu caused people in Egypt in particular to slaughter all their pigs, holding pigs responsible for the disease. That’s one of the reasons that WHO was very careful to appoint a commission of scientists to find a term for the virus that was scientifically solid and didn't point a finger at a particular group or ethnicity or geographical area or even animal groups such as pigs. The swine flu is an example of why they took so much care about that. 

Scientists are very upset with the decision of the present administration in the United States to insist now on names for coronavirus such as the Wuhan virus or the Chinese virus or the foreign virus. It strikes me that this is part of this administration’s refusal to take science seriously. Many leaders of today's Republican party don't accept the theory of evolution or climate science. All of that also goes together with a rejection of the term COVID-19. That has very serious implications in terms of the relationship of our world to science, to authority and to expertise. 

I worry that the science behind the term COVID-19 is not being accepted because the implications of not accepting it are first, the one that I mentioned regarding the rejection of science. But a further serious result is the rise of stigma against people of Asian origin all around the world. That's been one of the sad and often violent undertones of this outbreak. 

Pigs suffered under swine flu and people of Asian origin are suffering now by being stigmatized and discriminated against. There are attacks occurring as we speak in various parts of the world by people who are bigoted and don't even make distinctions between Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese or other Asian people. They lump them all together and discriminate against all people of Asian origin as if coronavirus were embedded in their DNA.

Robin Lindley: How does coronavirus compare to the influenza of the great pandemic from 1918 to 1919?          

Professor Frank M. Snowden: It was a pandemic of influenza that also affected the deep areas of the lungs. Most lethally, the immune system of the body of young adults generated a devastating autoimmune response. Unlike COVIOD, the 1918 influenza preferentially targeted people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. 

It seemed unnatural that the flu pandemic was not so severe the elderly or the very young. The elderly are partly immune-suppressed and children have immune systems that have not fully matured. The very robust immune responses of young adults instead produces what is called a cytokine storm that mobilizes blood and the white blood cells as an immediate defense against the virus that has invaded the lungs. Unfortunately, the impact of so robust an immune response is that the blood in the lungs actually causes the patient to drown  

That's part of the story. This Spanish influenza was more easily transmitted over distance, and it was also far more lethal than COVID-19. In some ways a first reaction is that we're fortunate that this isn't the Spanish influenza. On the other hand, we don’t know what the future will hold and whether COVID-19 will be contained or will instead ravage those countries of the developing world where you can't practice social distancing because of the density of housing, or hand washing because of the absence of supplies of safe water; where people's immune systems are already compromised by other morbidities, such diabetes, malaria or HIV/AIDS; and where resource-starved healthcare systems offer no protection.

South Africa has the largest number of people suffering from HIV/AIDS, an immune suppressive disease, so one can imagine that coronavirus could take a terrible toll in loss of life and suffering there, especially in the congested and impoverished townships. So the context matters a lot in determining how serious this pandemic is going to be.

Robin Lindley: You mentioned the fraught term “China virus” and the stigmatizing of Asian people. There have been some horrible incidents just in the last couple of days in the US with attacks on Asian-appearing families and even severe injuries to toddlers. From the history you share in your new book, it seems epidemics often lead to oppression and hate crimes. And you note that germ theory was a phenomenal scientific discovery, but it also led to stigmatizing of poor and dispossessed people. 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: Yes, indeed. Stigma is one of the red threads that run through the history of epidemic disease. 

 It would be inaccurate, however, to say all epidemic diseases have produced this sort of reaction in populations. We were just talking about the Spanish influenza that doesn't seem to have produced such reactions in a sustained or widespread manner.

We can't automatically assume that when there's a pandemic disease, there will be an outbreak of stigma to accompany it. But, beginning with bubonic plague [from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth], there have been such reactions. That was a time of great violence, stigma and witch-hunts for whoever might be deemed responsible for the disease.  There were waves of antisemitism. In Strasbourg, France, the two thousand Jews who lived there were rounded up and offered the choice between either converting to Christianity or being killed on the spot. Those who chose not to convert were burned alive in the Jewish cemetery. Similarly, as the Christian Flagellants whipped their way across Europe in their 40-day processions of repentance, they often projected their violence outward onto foreigners.

That's an important part of the history of bubonic plague. One can see it also in the work of Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni who wrote a wonderful novel that's in part a plague novel called The Betrothed set in the 17th century when Milan was at war with Spain. As it happened, some helpless Spaniards having nothing to do with the war or espionage happened to be in Milan, and they were rounded up by local citizens and denounced for spreading the disease by smearing poisonous ointment on the doors of the city. The local authorities tried them and, under torture, they confessed. They then broke them on the wheel and then burnt them at the stake. The authorities also raised a column there to warn that in perpetuity, anyone who committed the same crime would experience a similar fate.

Blaming people has happened again and again. It happened with cholera. It certainly happened as we know with HIV/AIDS with the stigmatizing of homosexuals. This violence is not something that's new and it has accompanied many epidemic outbreaks over the course of many centuries. 

It's a very unhappy part of our psyche that so many people are tempted to look for an easy, nonrational explanation--that is to find a scapegoat. It has led to witch-hunts across the centuries, and that's a very regrettable part of our history. It's one of the reasons I think it's so unfortunate to call this the “Chinese virus,” which somehow legitimizes the reaction that Chinese people are somehow to blame for this virus. 

Robin Lindley: Yes. Some people with Asian physical features have paid a horrific price in recent weeks. I’d like to go back to the preparedness of the United States for the coronavirus now. This administration often has adopted divisive, antiscience and xenophobic positions that don’t bode well for addressing a global pandemic. Trump is also notorious for blaming Obama for every failing of his policies. However, the Obama administration had policies and people in place for dealing with pandemics, and those people and policies were abandoned by the current administration. How do you see US preparedness for this new pandemic?

Professor Frank M. Snowden: To me, one of the most disturbing questions posed during this pandemic thus far was the one our president raised when he asked “Who could have thought?” The answer to that is that everyone should have anticipated a pandemic challenge because, since the avian flu of 1997. public health authorities and epidemiologists have been saying that a pandemic – probably of a pulmonary virus -- is an inevitability and that it's only a question of when.

In 2005, when [infectious disease doctor] Anthony Fauci testified before the US Senate, he made an analogy with meteorological science. Climate scientists can warn people who live in the Caribbean with a certainty that they will experience hurricanes in their future. It's not a matter of whether but of when, although it’s impossible to predict the date or the force of the storm. But it will definitely come. The same, Fauci said, is true of epidemic diseases. We’re ever more vulnerable to pulmonary viral epidemics because of climate change, human population growth, the destruction of biodiversity and animal habitat, and the growing frequency of viral spillovers from the animal world. 

All of that is part of the globalized society that we've created and therefore the vulnerability and risks that we're facing. The idea of preparedness was raised consistently and loudly from 1997 onward. 

Preparedness is not simply a partisan issue. The Republican administration under George W. Bush developed a national plan for endemic disease that was published in 2005, and revised by 2007. It was followed on the global level by international health regulations making emerging diseases notifiable while the World Health Organization drew up an international, emergency plan. Similarly, departments of health in all 50 states of the US had their preparatory plans. Various major corporations also had plans in the event of a new pandemic threat internationally and to the United States. 

Under Presidents Bush and Obama, the United States launched the President's Malaria Initiative, a massive campaign to combat malaria in Africa, and parallel efforts against tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Within the National Security Council, they also appointed a council to advise the government on how best to counter the threat of an epidemic challenge that was known to be coming. 

It was a tragic that Trump fired Admiral Ziemer, the head of the council, and dismantled the whole organization that he led. It's also poignant that in 2018, the World Health Organization appointed a distinguished commission of international scientists headed by the former prime minister of Norway, herself a major scientific figure. In 2019, in its report entitled “A World at Risk,” the commission warned of another pandemic. That was the most recent of warnings that had been sounded constantly for nearly a quarter of a century.

So, to have the president of the world's most powerful nation ask, “Who could have known?” is profoundly distressing because that's something that the whole world of science knew. That's also why I was so upset by the failure of the administration to use the term COVID-19. By insisting on “Chinese virus,” the president demonstrates a blatant contempt for science and its arguments. It's in that context that the administration slashed the budgets for public health and for scientific research; stood down the sentinels; and discarded the structures on which our security depends. But such an approach did not happen in the United States alone. Other countries have done just the same. In Italy, for example, the Five Star Movement has consistently denigrated science, while the Italian government has savagely cut the funding for its health care system and for research. The budgets for the World Health Organization were also slashed. 

The point is, we didn't need to be so unprepared for this event. It was predicted. The tragedy is that the world turned a deaf ear to the warnings of scientists. In this way a quarter of a century of advance notice was squandered. That’s a central part of why we are where we are today. 

Robin Lindley:  What are the responses to pandemics that you’d like to see the US and other nations employ? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: I’d mention two interesting little statements. One was from a doctor in Toronto on the front line against SARS in Toronto. When that pandemic was over, he was asked what needed to happen, so it would never recur. He replied, “We must be forever changed.” Similarly Bruce Aylward, the Canadian epidemiologist who led the WHO mission to China, was asked what is required for our preparedness. He said, “What is required is that we have to change our mindset.”  What he meant was we must change our hearts and minds.  

As Dr. Tetros, the Director General of the WHO said, one of the requirements of preparedness is that every human being on the planet needs to have the guarantee of access to health care. It’s not just a humanitarian issue, but also an issue of enlightened self-interest because we've now created a genuinely global world where a virus appearing in Jakarta in the morning will land in Mexico City and San Francisco by nightfall. And  having access to healthcare is actually what it means to post sentinels. If people don't have access to a doctor because there are none, or the cost is prohibitive, or they're afraid to see a doctor because of stigma, then diseases can spread without anybody’s knowing. That's one of the great lessons to be learned from COVID-19.

It’s also prudent economically and fiscally prudent to establish universal access because dealing on an emergency basis with recurring challenges is the most expensive possible way of protecting public health. During the Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, the cost of fighting Ebola on an emergency basis exceeded severalfold the cost of establishing sustainable health systems in the three countries of West Africa that were struggling with the disease. Once established, those systems would have helped to promote health in multiple additional ways.

So it’s economically prudent and I think we'll see that the final cost of the coronavirus will be enormous and that it will disrupt the economy for a long, long time. It seems clear that it would have been far more cost effective as well as more humane to have had health care for everyone on earth. That would be my first point. 

We also have to recognize that a major driver of this disease is poverty. Millions of people can't afford to see a doctor, to practice social distancing, or to wash their hands frequently.  One need only think of the chawls of Mumbai, the townships of South Africa, or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. There are many places so crowded that people live with nine or ten people to a small room with no water supply. If they are locked down, people face starvation. 

Thus, the relationship of the industrial world to the emerging world is a very dangerous one in terms of health. We see now the large-scale flight of the capital from the third world with a devaluing of currencies with the result that goods and services essential to life are prohibitively expensive. Already, in large parts of the world, mothers are watering down the milk for their children because costs have suddenly shot up. In addition, the disappearance of tourism and investment means that people throughout the third world will be deprived of the necessities of life and that the world will suffer a massive surge in unemployment will further drive the pandemic. 

The world needs to realize, as Bruce Aylward said and as Dr. Tetros has been saying daily during, we really are all in this together. This virus is a disease of globalization and we must realize that microbes don't recognize borders. They don't make a distinction between the wealthy parts of the world and the impoverished parts of the world. And you cannot create walls to hold them out. 

Taking this global perspective, carefully funding the World Health Organization is a major part of our preparedness. Indeed, that's part of how we need to be changed forever after this experience. Just as important as dealing with this pandemic is the question:  once it is successfully contained, what are we going to do? What are our priorities for the future? 

This isn't the last microbial challenge, but the point about these challenges is they don't have to devastate us. There are things we can do to protect ourselves. One of those I didn't mention is directing scientific research. It is possible to develop vaccine platforms that are multivalent. That could have been in place with seasonal influenza vaccine platforms that could quickly generate a vaccine against, coronaviruses as a class. But that hasn't been done. We weren't developing and investing in the tools that medical science could provide us if we funded it in sustainable ways. That also needs to be done. 

Robin Lindley: Thank you for sharing those ideas on preparedness, Professor Snowden. I’m interested in your background. You’re one of America’s foremost scholars on the history of medicine. How did you decide to specialize in the history of medicine? Did you have a medical background? 

Professor Frank M. Snowden: The history of medicine is something that I hadn't anticipated doing, and I've been doing it now for 40 years

I believe two things got me into it. I studied political philosophy for my undergraduate degree. Then, in my doctoral work, I transitioned to becoming a historian. I started with political and social history and then discovered the field of history of medicine as I did broader reading on disease and health. 

I found that pandemics are looking glasses that reflect us back to ourselves. Why? Because these pandemics touch every area of the human psyche. They deal with such fundamental issues -- philosophical, religious, and moral. They touch our deepest anxieties and pose the question of the sudden death of our families, our children, our communities, and ourselves. They raise the question of our relationship with our deepest beliefs. Do we believe in a divinity that is all powerful, omniscient, and knowing, and yet created a world where, as with the Black Death, children were killed en masse? So people wrestle with their religious beliefs in times of epidemics. 

And, as we're seeing with coronavirus, pandemics devastate the economy, generating all sorts of anxieties about employment, about hunger, about one’s savings, about one's capacity to care for loved ones. 

All of these questions are thrown up. And what about political authorities? Do we trust them? Are they protecting us? All of those kinds of questions are raised by epidemic diseases. I found them a tremendous way of understanding how societies are put together, what their ultimate values and their moral and political commitments are. 

And I believe that epidemics are major parts of the big picture of historical change. Let's not say that they should replace economics, nor should they replace other factors such as environmental ones and a host of others. I'm not saying that studying epidemics should replace them, but they need to be an essential part of the historian’s craft. 

I decided to study epidemics in a really big picture away, and I took on the fall of the Roman empire. The fifth century was a time when there was major climate change in the Mediterranean and it was also a seismic and volcanic period, and with that a surge in mosquito populations. You see in the Italian peninsula a major series of epidemics of the worst form of malaria, falciparum malaria, that has been demonstrated by the DNA analysis of teeth from fifth-century burial sites. Malaria epidemics were also demonstrated archeologically by the abandonment of towns and villas during this period as malaria extended its reach. That led to the dislocation of agriculture and the economy, to the crisis of the economy, and to the weakening of the Roman legions. So that was a major factor in the fifth century, and then in the sixth century there was the Justinian plague. 

I would argue that in the future it won't be possible to deal with the fall of the Roman empire without invoking the major impact of disease. There are many, many other examples, but I just thought that the fall of Rome would help make the point. 

Robin Lindley: You’ve studied some of the most horrendous catastrophes in human history. What gives you hope now as we face a mysterious new pandemic in a time of anxiety and uncertainty?

Professor Frank M. Snowden: If I thought that the history of infectious diseases was exclusively a study of disaster and despair, I would long ago have abandoned the subject as unbearably depressing. Fortunately, however, along with the dark sides of human nature, epidemics also demonstrate our brighter and more hopeful qualities. One can see that again and again in the heroism of physicians, nurses, and caregivers; in the dedication and ingenuity of medical scientists; and in the slow, but steady advance of the science of public health and hygiene. 

That history fills me with the hope that we will, in the end, survive COVID-19, and with that experience behind us, we will resolve to organize our society in such a way that we are not again scourged by a deadly pandemic.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Snowden for your thoughtful insights and timely discussion of the mysterious virus we now face. And congratulations on your sweeping new history, Epidemics and Society. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Stay safe and well in Rome.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, NW Lawyer, Real Change, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, and more. He has a special interest in the history of visual imagery, medicine, law, human rights and conflict. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Just after midnight on May 15, 1970, officers of the Jackson Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol attacked unarmed students at Jackson State College, a historically black college in Mississippi. The law enforcement officers unleashed a murderous fusillade of hundreds of gunshots into a group of African American students who were simply standing in front of a women’s dormitory. After just half a minute of intense gunfire, two young men were left dead and a dozen young men and women were wounded, including several women in the dorm.

This tragic moment of brutal racial violence was soon largely forgotten in history. And, in subsequent accounts, the incident seems eclipsed in memory by the massacre at Kent State University ten days earlier, on May 4, 1970, when National Guard troops confronted antiwar protesters and wildly fired live ammunition into the throng of students, killing four white students and wounding nine others.

In her groundbreaking new book Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College (Oxford), distinguished historian and Professor Nancy K. Bristow unravels this complex story of this tragic and overlooked racial incident at Jackson State. The book is based on her meticulous examination of the history of racism in Jackson, the role of the college in the community, the horrific shooting, and the subsequent investigations and unsuccessful attempts of surviving victims and relatives to find justice. She also considers the role of memory, deeply ingrained racism, and the cultural response, in understanding this act of state violence against African Americans.

Steeped in the Blood of Racism presents the results of Professor Bristow’s painstaking investigation of the bloody eruption of violence at Jackson State and its historical context.  In addition to wide-ranging archival research of official records, photographs, news reports, and other material, she interviewed dozens of witnesses and others. As with her previous work, her powerful and deeply humane book offers a moving and sensitive account of an episode of overlooked history with consequences that still resonate today.

Professor Bristow teaches American history with an emphasis on race and social change at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, and she is a founding member of the university’s African American Studies Program. She also serves on the Race and Pedagogy Institute’s leadership team. She is a past Washington State Professor of the Year. Her other books include the critically acclaimed American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War.

Professor Bristow graciously responded to a series of questions by email.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations on your groundbreaking and heartbreaking new book Professor Bristow. In Steeped in the Blood of Racism, you have done an extensive investigation into the police shootings of students 50 years ago at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Your new book seems a departure from your previous books: American Pandemic on the 1918 influenza epidemic in America, and Making Men Moral on social engineering during the First World War, although those books also explore issues of memory, race and class, among other matters. What inspired your meticulous exploration of the horrific events at Jackson State?

Professor Nancy K. Bristow: I have been teaching African American history for thirty years, and running throughout this history is a central theme of the brutality of white supremacy.

I learned about the Jackson State shootings through a student’s research paper, and recognized both its importance in illuminating the consequences of the “law and order” perspective championed by Richard Nixon and its resonances with the ongoing crisis of state-sanctioned violence against people of color today.

As I began researching what happened at Jackson State, I realized how effectively this one story illustrates so many of the themes that emerge in the history of state violence against African Americans—how easily law enforcement fires on African Americans, the racism that makes this action such a quick response, the reality that officers rarely face consequences for their actions, the ongoing trauma that results from this brutality, and the resistance of so many in the white community to seeing this violence for the ongoing crisis it represents.

The story of what happened at Jackson State in May 1970 is one that every American should know if they want to make sense of the world they live in today.

What happened at Jackson State College on May 15, 1970, when police unleashed a tremendous fusillade of gunshots on a group of African American students, fatally wounding two young men and injuring many other students?

The night of May 14-15, 1970 was the second night of conflict between students and law enforcement.  The night before, some young people—students or local youths—had thrown rocks at white motorists on Lynch Street.  This thoroughfare bisected the campus, and was a longstanding source of harassment for students.  White commuters often endangered them by racing through the campus, and were also known to abuse student with racial epithets and insults.  In 1964 a student was struck and hospitalized, and in the aftermath, and on many occasions in subsequent years, the young people protested the mistreatment and laid claim to the street. 

On the night of May 13, police were called to close the street to motorists. A few trash bins were set on fire, and there was even a hapless attempt to attack the ROTC building. But law enforcement did not enter the campus, and things soon quieted. 

The next night, though the president of the university, John A. Peoples, asked the city to close the street to forestall any additional problems, the city refused.  Late that evening, rock throwing resumed, and the street was again closed. A crowd gathered in front of a men’s dormitory, Stewart Hall, on the western edge of campus. Someone drove a dump truck up Lynch Street from a nearby construction site and it stalled in front of Stewart Hall, and someone ignited it.  A city fire truck, called to put out the blaze, brought with it both city policemen and the Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol (MHSP). Their mission was to protect the fire truck. But with the fire out, these forces did not retreat to the periphery of the campus as they were charged to do, but instead marched up Lynch Street through the center of campus.  They took with them the city’s armored tank, shotguns loaded with heavy buckshot, two submachine guns, and two rifles with armor-piercing bullets. 

The forces halted in front of the women’s dormitory, Alexander Hall, where young people were enjoying the warm Mississippi night, and turned to face them, weapons leveled. Women’s curfew was at 11:30, and a little after midnight plenty of men were still hanging out, talking with the women through the windows.  They were shocked by the arrival of the troops, because they knew they were on their own campus, and had done nothing wrong.  Even so, they retreated behind the chain link fence between the dorm and the street when an officer commanded them to. And then a bottle crashed on the pavement and law enforcement opened fire.  For 28 seconds.  They fired more than 150 rounds, leaving over 400 bullet and shot marks on the exterior of Alexander Hall.  Two young men—James Earl Green and Phillip Gibbs—were killed, and twelve other young people were injured in the barrage.

When the firing finally stopped, the officers turned to picking up their spent shells, leaving the students to tend to one another.  They offered no aid to the injured. The on-site commander of the MHSP, Lloyd Jones, bullied the students, ordering one to check on the bodies of Green and Gibbs, lacing his words with racial epithets.  One reporter noted a mood of “levity” among the officers. Finally, the National Guard, who was to have replaced the city police and MHSP on campus, arrived and began helping the students.

You detail the history of Jackson State—a historically black college—and its place in the Jackson community and the state of Mississippi, a notorious site of racial violence through history. The shootings occurred early in the days of desegregation and in the time of a growing Black Power movement, but wasn’t Jackson State a quiet, conservative school that was tightly controlled by a white board of directors?

Though some of this is true—certainly the repression faced by African Americans in Mississippi—the situation at the college was more complex than the traditional narrative has suggested. 

Yes, Jackson State College was controlled by an all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning in Mississippi, and the board attempted to keep a tight rein on students across the state. For the black colleges, this meant students faced particularly harsh repercussions if they engaged in activism of any sort, and especially civil rights actions.

Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the college’s president, Jacob Reddix, conceded to the board’s demands in hopes of building a school that could serve its students well. In 1957 Reddix withdrew the school’s basketball team from the NCAA playoffs to avoid facing a white team in the next round of the tournament.  In 1961, when students from Tougaloo College north of Jackson attempted to desegregate the city’s downtown library and were arrested, some 800 students at Jackson State rallied in support, and even attempted a march to downtown.  Law enforcement cracked down on the march, and the president expelled two students believed to be leaders in the actions.  He also suspended the student government. Students learned early the consequences of activism on the Jackson State campus.

But by 1970 Jackson State was a changing institution.  A new president, alumnus John A. Peoples, saw himself as part of “the new breed of college presidents,” people who were “proud to be black and who would speak up for the freedom of black people.” He wanted to create a “true university,” and this included expanding student rights and allowing greater opportunities for student expression and racial consciousness. The school newspaper increasingly carried stories about contemporary issues, from the war in Vietnam to issues of black identity. Students brought local activist and Fayetteville Mayor Charles Evers and Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael to campus. The institution opened its Institute for the Study of History, Life and Culture of Black People, with noted writer and faculty member Margaret Walker as its director.  And some students became advocates of Black Power. It was this changing campus that law enforcement assaulted in May 1970.

The horrific shootings at Jackson State happened just 10 days after National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio killed four white students and wounded others during a protest against the US invasion of Cambodia. What should readers know about the historical context of these two college campus shootings?

On April 30, President Richard Nixon informed the American public that US troops had invaded Cambodia.  People were shocked, and antiwar activists were outraged.  Nixon had run on the promise of ending the war, had recently announced troop withdrawals, and was now expanding the war. Protests erupted around the country.  On the fourth day of protests at Kent State University, National guardsmen opened fire on students there, killing four young people and injuring nine more.  In the aftermath, students at campuses nationwide organized memorial services and letter writing campaigns, vigils and mock funerals. The largest student strike in US history took hold.

Though there were no established antiwar groups on the Jackson State campus, activists there nevertheless mobilized to protest both the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State shootings. Some 200 to 300 students boycotted classes, and still more participated in a protest rally, and conversations about “KSU/Cambodia/Viet Nam/Draft/etc.” continued on the campus in the days to come. It was in the midst of this nationwide unrest that law enforcement opened fire on students at Jackson State.

The story of the Kent State killings has overshadowed the deadly Jackson State police assault since both incidents occurred. You stress that both incidents were conflated as two shootings of student protestors, but you found that the incidents were very different. What did you learn about how the shootings at Jackson State were seen and why they were so readily forgotten by most, and then virtually disappeared from history?

The important distinction between the two shootings is the white supremacy that caused the shootings at Jackson State and accounted for the amnesia that surrounds them. 

The students at Jackson State College were assaulted because they were black students attending an HBCU in one of the most viciously racist states in the country.  As the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest concluded, “racial antagonisms” were essential to understanding law enforcement’s behavior, as was their awareness that if they fired, they would face neither disciplinary action nor criminal charges.

Though many of the students at Kent State understood this distinction, the broader American public conflated the two events. TIME headlined its piece on the Jackson State shootings “Jackson: Kent State II.” This quick linkage unfortunately hid the essential role of racism in the events at Jackson State College. In the years to come, as anniversaries passed, the media increasingly ignored the Jackson State shootings, using the violence at Kent State to serve as the iconic example of all of the campus conflicts of the era.  If they were all the same, it seemed, one could stand for the whole.  The victims at Jackson State became, as the Chronicle of Higher Education listed them, simply “others who died.”       

What was the historical problem you began with for your book and how did your book evolve during the course of your research?

I initially imagined a book exploring the ways the law and order narrative was used to justify state violence in the latter part of the civil rights era.  I wanted to understand how, as the nation professed to be moving into a more just future in the wake of major civil rights legislation, new mechanisms were employed to continue to repress African Americans.  I planned to write a book looking at how white representatives of the state used violence to control various elements of the black community in the late 1960s and early 1970s—not only college students but also black power advocates, people engaging in civil disturbances, the incarcerated.

I began my research with the shootings at Jackson State College, and stumbled into the opportunity to write this more focused book for Oxford University Press. I jumped at the opportunity, because my initial trip to Jackson State convinced me how important it was that more people learned this story.

What was your research process? For me, the book reads in part like a gripping, scrupulously detailed account of a complex crime.

I began with the archival sources, I think because that felt easiest.  But once I was situated with the essentials of what took place, I realized the book would be hollow, would lack the humanity it demanded, if I did not talk directly with people who had been affected by the shootings—those who knew James Earl Green and Phillip Gibbs, those who were injured, those who were witnesses, those who fought to keep the memory of that night alive, and those who continue the work of commemoration and remembering.

Talking to people, having so many people entrust their story to me, was the most humbling experience I have had as a historian. I will never forget this gift, and the responsibility it carries.

I have felt my duty as a historian in an entirely new way with this work. With any project one needs the research to be comprehensive and careful, the story that is told complex and correct.  With this charged story of violence and loss, and with issues of white supremacy at its center, the responsibilities seemed dramatically heightened. 

Two young African American men were killed in the shooting: James Earl Green and Philip Gibbs. What would you like readers to know about these men?

People need to understand, most importantly, that they did not deserve what happened to them, that they were murdered by white supremacist members of law enforcement. And people need to know that these young men were full of life, with talents they did not get to develop in full.  And people need to know how beloved they were, how costly their deaths were for their friends, families, communities, and honestly their nation. 

More specifically, people should know that Phillip Gibbs was a junior at Jackson State, where he was studying politics and considering a career in law.  He and his wife Dale had a son, Phillip Jr., and she was, unknown to them at the time, pregnant with their second son, Demetrius. His friends remembered him as a “caring, sharing person,” someone who would “help anyone.” Gibbs was visiting with his sister and her roommate through the window of Alexander Hall just before he was shot.

James Green was just 17 years old, and was close to his high school graduation.  He was the middle of nine children, and had a wonderful sense of humor.  His sisters remember his loving personality, and how he could lift a person’s spirits no matter how down they were. And, they told me, “he could make a joke out of anything.”  He was on his way home from work at the Wag-a-Bag grocery where he had worked since he was eleven when he was killed.

The students at Jackson State were shot by notoriously racist officers of the Jackson police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol. In this instance, it seems the National Guard urged restraint. What are some things you learned about deep-seated white supremacist views of the police officers and their record of relationships with the African Americans in Jackson and Mississippi?

The Jackson city police had a long history of racism and of mistreatment toward African Americans, and were a constant source of harassment for the students at Jackson State.  They had brutalized civil rights activists throughout the decade. Though the force had added a few African Americans by 1970, none of them were officers, and black and white policemen still did not partner or ride together.  It had been the chasing of a student onto the campus that provoked two nights of unrest in 1967, ending in the shooting of four young people and the death of local activist Benjamin Brown. Brown had not been involved in the trouble, and was shot from behind as he ran away from law enforcement.

The Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol (MHSP) remained an all-white force in 1970, and was well known not only in Mississippi but also nationwide for its brutal white supremacy. Lloyd “Goon” Jones, the on-site commander at Jackson State on the night of May 14-15, might help illustrate this. On the force since 1956, he had been a part of several moments of abuse during the civil rights struggle.  He had arrested Freedom Riders in 1961, he had been among those who failed to intervene in the riots at the University of Mississippi in 1962, he had ordered the tear-gassing of one of the March Against Fear campsites in 1966, and in 1967 had fired his weapon the night law enforcement shot and killed Benjamin Brown. The tapes of his transmissions both before and after the shootings offer a visceral understanding of the utter disregard he felt for African Americans as he used derogatory language, and dismissed the importance of the slain and injured.  Interviews with eyewitnesses and victims, both those by investigators in 1970 and those I conducted, only confirm the absolute absence of humanity of this man, who commanded the MHSP that night.

As you detail, no police perpetrators of the attack were criminally charged or disciplined for their actions. Indeed, they won praise from the white Southern establishment for advancing “Law and Order.” You explore the “Law and Order” narrative and how it came to define responses to African Americans in the Jim Crow era and the recently desegregated South. What should we know about the racially-coded appeal of “Law and Order” to many Americans in 1970?

Perhaps most importantly, the appeal of this racism, cloaked in the language of “law and order,” reached well beyond Mississippi or the South.

Linked to longstanding historical stereotypes that framed African Americans as inherently dangerous, misrepresentations first used to justify slavery, this revised rhetoric of law and order emerged on the American political landscape in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run for the presidency. Though his candidacy failed, others recognized that some voters were attracted to his criticism of federal intervention on behalf of civil rights, and to his calls for law and order. The success in the 1968 primaries of George Wallace, reconstructed to evade the use of derogatory language even as he continued to appeal to white supremacy through the language of “states’ rights,” reinforced the idea that there were many white Americans who would welcome the opportunity to cloak their racism in the guise of a concern for law and order. 

Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy was based in part on the idea that this kind of racist appeal could bring white southern voters, once solidly Democratic, into the Republican party.  He was right.  Part of the tragedy is that these appeals did not go down with the Nixon presidency, but became standard practice across the political spectrum, but especially among Republicans, facilitating not only the ongoing crisis of state violence against people of color but also helping to build the carceral state.

What happened with official investigations of the Jackson State police shootings?

There were multiple investigations of the shootings.  The first was a local one, conducted by a bi-racial committee appointed by the mayor. It concluded that there was “no evidence that the crowd in front of Alexander Hall threatened the officers prior to firing.” A more fulsome investigation was carried out by the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest.  Supported by a team of investigators, as well as the materials gathered by both the FBI and the mayoral committee, this politically and racially balanced body released a special report on the Jackson State shootings that emphasized the role of racism in producing the shootings. It concluded, “The 28-second fusillade from police officers was an unreasonable, unjustified over-reaction” and “clearly unwarranted.” Neither of these bodies, though, carried any ability to indict or prosecute.

The justice system proved anything but.  Though US Attorney General John Mitchell assured the campus that he would order a full investigation, the appointment of Judge Harold Cox to oversee the federal grand jury undercut that promise. Cox was a well-known racist and segregationist who used racial epithets regularly. He had established his white supremacist credentials when he threw out the felony charge of “conspiracy to deprive the victims of their civil rights” against seventeen men in the murder of James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman during Freedom Summer. 

The federal grand jury produced neither a report nor any indictments.  The Hinds County grand jury modeled itself on the federal one, with the judge borrowing from the words of Cox. Suggesting jurors should see their work as a “bulwark against those who seek . . . to oppress,” the court concluded that no one who engaged in civil unrest or did not extricate themselves from it “has any right to expect to avoid serious injury or even death” if “extreme measures or harsh treatment” proved necessary. This grand jury, too, would return no indictments for the shootings.

It may surprise and upset some readers that wounded survivors of the shootings and families of the fatally-wounded men sued for some compensation, yet they never found justice or restitution. Why was it so difficult for these worthy plaintiffs to find some degree of sort of recompense in the post-segregation South of the early seventies?

In 1972, three of the injured students and the families of James Earl Green and Phillip Gibbs brought a civil suit.  Led by the gifted Constance Slaughter, the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Mississippi Law School, the case was a very strong one.  But it was not strong enough to succeed against the white supremacy of the defense, which relied on the rhetoric of law and order to depict the students as criminals, or of the all-white jury, which ruled for the defendants. 

A victory on appeal proved hollow when the court also ruled that the city, state, and their representatives, were covered by sovereign immunity.  When the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1974, the doors to justice were closed. 

 You are a distinguished historian and an expert on historical memory. How would you like to see the Jackson State shootings in our history?

This event needs to be part of the way we think about the black power era, the late 1960s and early 1970s.  We need to understand that in the aftermath of the civil rights successes of the mid-1960s, old-fashioned racist violence by law enforcement continued, even as it was dressed up in new rhetoric. 

By 1970 police in Mississippi and elsewhere could not, at least theoretically, gun down unarmed innocents, even if they were black.  The reality is that they could, so long as they could justify themselves as acting in the interests of law and order against a purportedly criminal element.  Being black in the United States was all it took to be cast as such. This reality is laid bare in the horrors of the Jackson State shootings and their aftermath.

Thank you Professor Bristow for your illuminating comments and for your original research on this overlooked history. Is there anything you’d like to add on your book or your work as a historian?

Mostly I want to thank you for your willingness to share this story with your readers, and to ask readers to hold the stories of those who were hurt—physically, psychologically, emotionally, and in other ways—in their minds and in their hearts. 

Also, I want to urge readers to recognize the direct linkages between this past and our present.  The crisis of state-sanctioned violence against people of color is ongoing. We must demand accountability when those who represent us as officers of the state--law enforcement officers--act on white supremacy and commit this kind of violence.

Fifty years is too long for these crimes to continue to happen, and to go unpunished by our justice system.

It’s an honor for me to share your thoughtful words Professor Bristow. I admire your humane and creative approach to history that breathes life into the past and inspires hope for a more tolerant and just world. Thanks again for your generosity and your pioneering history of the Jackson State shootings in 1970, a timely and provocative history. Congratulations on this important new book.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, NW Lawyer, Real Change, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, and more. He has a special interest in the history of visual imagery, medicine, law, human rights and conflict. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

In the face of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, Americans are understandably worried as they prepare for a new normal. The nation was unprepared for this novel virus despite warnings for years from scientists. The initial approach to the virus was halting and bumbling. And guidance from administration leaders often has been contradictory and ill-informed as the current president appears to prefer fabrications to science, blame to empathy, division to unity. As thousands die.

As we contend with the pandemic and our dysfunctional politics, the story of another fraught moment may offer hope and some solace as well as lessons on leadership and survival. Seventy years ago, with the constant threat of a Nazi invasion and the horror of deadly bombing raids during the Blitz, the citizens of Britain were famously stoic and unified. Clarity from Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the government on expected behavior and the national interest contributed to social stability and British resilience. At the same time, Churchill offered reassurance and inspiration even in the darkest moments. He was reliably honest about the price of the war and the necessary sacrifices as he encouraged unity and resistance to the Nazi forces that dominated Europe. His words bolstered the spirit of Britons as they faced the rain of bombs, the fear of invasion, the unknown.

In his compelling new book, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, bestselling author and master storyteller Erik Larson explores how Churchill, his family, and his closest advisors survived during his tumultuous first year as Britain’s prime minister, from May 1940 to May 1941.

On Churchill’s first day in office, German forces invaded Holland and the Netherlands, and had already occupied much of western Europe. Two weeks later, the huge British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. France soon fell. The RAF managed to hold off the Luftwaffe that summer, but then Britain faced months of relentless bombing.  As Mr. Larson details, the casualties of the Blitz were staggering. The German aerial bombardment, from September 7, 1940 to May 11, 1941, left 44,652 dead, including 5,626 children. Meanwhile, the war was going badly for British forces in the Mediterranean and North Africa, as supply ships were lost to U-Boats in the Atlantic. And, despite Churchill’s desperate pleas, the isolationist United States was only slowly granting aid. 

Through all of the setbacks and terrible losses, Churchill offered his fellow Britons lessons in what Mr. Larson calls “the art of being fearless.” Churchill remained steadfast: committed to bolstering the perseverance and confidence of his citizens while fighting onto victory over the Nazis. The German high command saw his pugnacious spirit as a form of insanity given Britain’s precarious military situation. 

While presenting this historical background, Mr. Larson brings this period to life with his focus on the more intimate saga of the Churchill family, capturing the human drama of their situation with his trademark moving and cinematic writing. Every moment he illuminates is based on meticulous historical research of archival materials, diaries, letters, once-secret files that were recently disclosed, and more. 

In The Splendid and the Vile, readers are privy to the private lives of Churchill and his beloved wife Clementine, as well as the youthful antics of their 17-year-old daughter Mary; the troubled marriage of their son Randolph and Pamela Churchill; the trials of Churchill’s lovelorn personal secretary John Colville; the mercurial service of air minister Lord Beaverbrook; and others. Further, Mr. Larson’s descriptions of the human carnage, the cratered cities, the terrible loss, are haunting and heartbreaking as the accounts of average Britons who survived the terror and constant fear to carry on shine through.

Mr. Larson is an American journalist and writer who is most well-known as the author of compelling nonfiction booksgrounded in history. Six of his eight books became New York Times bestsellers.  The Devil in the White City (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Edgar Award for the Best Fact Crime book. Hulu plans to adapt that book for a TV series. His 2011 book, In the Garden of Beasts, about how America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany and his daughter experienced the rising terror of Hitler’s rule, has been optioned by Tom Hanks for development as a feature film. He also wrote the bestselling Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania; Thunderstruck; and Isaac’s Storm about the giant hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas, in 1900, which won the American Meteorology Society’s prestigious Louis J. Battan Author’s Award. 

Mr. Larson was a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, and later a contributing writer for Time Magazine. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and other publications. He also has taught non-fiction writing at San Francisco State, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, the University of Oregon, and the Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham, Washington. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, a neonatologist and the author of the nonfiction memoir Almost Home. They have three grown daughters. 

Mr. Larson generously responded by email to a series of questions on his work and his new book, The Splendid and the Vile. 

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Mr. Larson on your compelling and moving new book The Splendid and the Vile. You recount a fraught year in Britain when the nation faced a relentless German bombing campaign and the fear of invasion as you detail the lives of the Churchill family and others during Winston Churchill’s first year as prime minister, from May 1940 to May 1941.

As we’re now hunkering down in the face of a mysterious and deadly pandemic, your book is bringing hope to readers as they learn of how exalted and average citizens coped with the anxiety and fear in wartime. What have you learned about reactions to your book during this current period of uncertainty?

Erik Larson: It’s really very gratifying. Readers tell me they find solace in the book. I think it’s partly because the story helps put things in perspective. At least we don’t have to worry about bombs falling through our roofs. But I think it’s also partly because it’s a classic story of good and evil, and they know it has a happy ending. Plus, it takes them out of today’s political dysfunction, to a time when a true leader was at the helm, something we dearly lack today. 

Robin Lindley: What inspired your new book? 

Erik Larson: About five years ago my wife and I moved to Manhattan from Seattle. Almost immediately upon arrival I had a kind of epiphany as to how incredibly more wrenching New York’s experience of 9/11 was, as compared to mine, even though I like millions around the world watched the disaster unfold in real time on television. Not only did New Yorkers see the towers on fire and hear the sirens and smell the smoke; they were further traumatized by the fact that this was their home city under attack. 

I started thinking about London in World War II, and how ordinary Londoners managed to endure the nightly attacks of the Luftwaffe—during the phase we know as the “Blitz,” the city underwent 57 consecutive nights of bombing. My first idea was to try to find a typical London family, and describe its experience. But then I thought, wait, why not write about the quintessential London family—the Churchills, and Churchill’s close advisors.  

Robin Lindley: In the acknowledgements section, you wrote of your own anxiety for your children. What do you hope they take from your book on this perilous year in Britain?

Erik Larson: Well, so far only one of my daughters has read it, and she tells me she actually really enjoyed it. But I don’t think she sees it as providing some instructive takeaway. I do hope, however, that readers at large will perhaps come away with a reminder as to what real leadership looks like. 

Robin Lindley: What was your research process? You’re known for finding often obscure details and overlooked records.

Erik Larson: One thing I realized early on is that there was no way I’d be able to read everything that had ever been written about Churchill. I don’t think I appreciated the volume until I actually got started on the research. You know the old saying, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” 

I made a strategic decision: I would read as much as was necessary to get a good grasp of the Churchillian landscape, but then immediately dive into the archives, which is where I feel most comfortable. I knew I would find new things, because I was asking a new question. Oddly enough, no one previously had done a book aimed at revealing how Churchill et al. actually went about enduring the Blitz and subsequent raids during that first year of his premiership. So, there’s actually a lot of new material in the book. As to obscure details: I live for them! 

Robin Lindley: I imagine you spent years on your new book. How did the book evolve from your initial conception?

Erik Larson: I realized that the narrative was much more complicated than I had envisioned. Suddenly I was juggling subplots involving love affairs, secret weapons, conniving advisors, even the bizarre arrival of Hitler’s number two man on British soil. I’d say this was my toughest narrative thus far. The big challenge was to wrestle it all into a book of readable size. It became an incredible journey. For my wife—not so much! She couldn’t wait ‘til I finished it. 

Robin Lindley: You wrote that “history is a lively abode, full of surprises.” What are some surprises that stand out for you from the creation of The Splendid and the Vile?

Erik Larson: Oh, well, what didn’t surprise me! But I guess the most surprising thing, and the most delightful, was that Churchill was a lot of fun. He had a great sense of humor and absolutely no sense of personal vanity. He could be a total jerk, yes, and his closest associates knew well that he could be rude, inconsiderate, overbearing, and capricious. But, he was funny, charming, affectionate, and his staff adored him. 

Robin Lindley: You present a warm and moving portrait of Churchill and his family. Churchill demonstrates firm leadership, an indomitable spirit, an encouraging and determined attitude in the face of devastating bombing and military defeats. Did you worry about romanticizing Churchill?

Erik Larson: No. There’s nothing to romanticize. In writing history, you have to go with what the record provides. No one’s a total hero, no one’s a total villain—with the exception, that is, of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels!  

Robin Lindley: Churchill had periods of severe depression throughout his life that he called his “black dog,” but it seems he had no serious symptoms in the period you cover despite the brutal aerial bombardment of England and the omnipresent threat of invasion. Was that your sense?

Erik Larson: He had his down moments, of course, and I mention those. For example, his mood just before he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But I did not come across any reference during his first year as prime minister to any significant period of deep or profound depression. He had a knack for being able to shake himself out of his periodic black moods. Alcohol helped. I describe one lunch where he was in a terrible mood, until the booze began to flow. Though I hasten to add that Churchill, while he liked to drink, was anything but an alcoholic. 

Robin Lindley: Through the darkest days you cover, Churchill was adept at bolstering the spirit of most Britons. Why was he so effective as a leader at this perilous time? What could our current president learn from Churchill’s example as we face a mysterious and deadly pandemic?

Erik Larson: What Churchill understood was that he had to be frank with his audience. The British public were in the thick of it. They knew a certain ground truth. If Churchill were to try to snow them with happy talk about miracle weapons or promises that the Luftwaffe would eventually just go away, he would have risked raising distrust and degrading morale, at a time when both were crucial to Britain’s survival. His approach was to give the country a sober appraisal of what was happening, followed by reasons for optimism—real reasons, not some fantasy. For example, an assessment of how rapidly the country was building planes, and how brilliant the RAF was at repelling attack.

Of course, to do any of this, he first had to have the words to express himself, and boy did he have the words. He dictated his speeches to his personal secretary, and that’s a talent that requires not only a deft grasp of the English language, but a mind that can manipulate phrases and syntax on the fly. He also had an ability to express empathy, which was an important element in a time of war. It was not unusual to see him openly weeping at the scene of a bombing, something I can’t imagine our current president doing on any occasion, ever.  

Robin Lindley: It’s obvious that Churchill had a deep understanding and love for history. And he had also written books of history. How did this respect for and knowledge of the past affect his leadership?

Erik Larson: This was a very important element. He understood the grand sweep of British history, and was able in his speeches to place his listeners in that story, so that they too felt a part of it and understood that only with their help would that grand story continue. He made his listeners feel bolder and stronger, and cast them as champions and guardians of that history.

Robin Lindley: You describe vividly the 57 consecutive days of bombing and other massive raids that Britons experienced. How was it that the spirit of resistance to the Nazis hardened rather than flagged during the days of these murderous attacks? Was this part of the stiff-upper lip, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” British spirit?

Erik Larson: Churchill seemed to understand that courage and confidence were infectious—that by expressing his own courage and confidence at all times, he could help the public find their own. 

It was also the case, I think, that under certain circumstances—good leadership being one of them—people adapt to prolonged crisis remarkably well. Case in point was Olivia Cockett, a young woman who, like most Londoners, was terrified after the first night’s bombings and remained so, until one night an incendiary bomb landed outside her home and she snuffed it out, as civilians were asked to do. It changed her outlook completely. She went from victim, to warrior, and lost her fear. One later night she’s out strolling with her boyfriend when they hear the telltale scream of two descending bombs. He shouts for her to “Get down!” But she thinks, “Not in my new coat, I’m not.”   

Robin Lindley: You mention the British Mass Observation Program that involved thousands of civilian volunteers. What was that project? Didn’t you find records of the MOP that were previously unavailable?

Erik Larson: These records were always available, and they are an incredible resource for anyone interested in the Blitz. Mass Observation was a social sciences organization founded before the war to try to get a better sense of what ordinary British life was like. It recruited hundreds of people to keep daily diaries and to submit them for analysis. Then came the war, and many members continued to keep their diaries. A number of these have been published as free-standing books, and are an invaluable reference. I use these accounts a bit differently than other scholars-- as elements of narrative rather than as static sources of quotations. 

Robin Lindley: There were some notable Nazi sympathizers in Britain and then Oswald Mosley’s fascist party before the war. Were there British efforts to make peace with the Nazis as Churchill counseled resistance?

Erik Larson: Hitler did send out repeated peace feelers, because he wanted to remove Britain from the war so that he could focus on the Soviet Union, but Churchill rightly understood that these would ultimately prove worthless once Hitler achieved his goals elsewhere. Whether the debate over peace reached the intensity depicted in the film “Darkest Hour” is open to question. Suffice it to say, Churchill chose a path of unstinting defiance. 

Robin Lindley: The air Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 is celebrated and, after the evacuation of Dunkirk, that boosted the spirits of many Britons, including Churchill. I think some people believe that this RAF victory of sorts ended the threat of a Nazi invasion of Britain. As you detail, however, the following months until May 1941 were horrendous for the British militarily. What are a few things you’d like readers to know about the British military situation?

Erik Larson: The invasion threat persisted. Popular myth tends to compartmentalize elements of the German air campaign into neat boxes, namely the so-called “Battle of Britain” and the “Blitz.” In reality, the campaign consisted of a seamless escalation that did not end until May 10, 1941. 

What we think of as the Battle of Britain resolved nothing, though it did lodge the RAF and its fighter pilots forever in the pantheon of British heroes. The Blitz followed soon afterward, with the first deliberate German raid on London, on Sept. 7, 1940, which was followed by another 56 consecutive nights of raids against the city. The British endured this phase, but even then the raids did not end. Winter weather forced interruptions, but the raids that did occur were even more severe, with possibly the worst of the war taking place on May 10, 1941. Over the winter the risk of invasion waned, because of weather, but with the advent of spring, the threat once again seemed grave—though intelligence began detecting a shift in Hitler’s attention toward the East. It was that shift, and Churchill’s staunch defiance, that ultimately ended the invasion threat, and caused the Luftwaffe to suspend its raids against London. 

That year of endurance constituted Britain’s first major victory. Of course, what followed was four more years of war, and many very dark days. What ultimately shifted the balance irrevocably in the allies favor was America’s entrance into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Robin Lindley: You are acclaimed for your vivid descriptions of every detail in your books, and each detail comes from your rigorous research of actual witness accounts and other resources. In your new book, you bring to life the post-bombing world: the dust clouds, the glittering broken glass, the cratered dwellings, the smell of cordite. I was struck by the shortage of wood to make coffins, and that evokes the recent problems in New York with treatment of the remains of COVID 19 patients. How did the British handle the remains of the massive number of dead from air raids?

Erik Larson: They dealt with it all in a very systematic matter, with ad-hoc morgues set up in the city’s neighborhoods—for example, in a public bath—and with systematic record-keeping. 

One story that did not make it into the book, alas, was about a three-month investigation by Scotland Yard into the disappearance of an employee of an architectural firm, after a bombing. It was important to determine that the man had indeed died and the precise cause of death, because without such a determination his grieving wife could not have claimed her death benefits or insurance. The Yard also had to eliminate the possibility that the man had faked his own death. Ultimately the formal conclusion was that he had been “blown to bits.” 

Robin Lindley: You intersperse the stories of the Churchills and others in Britain with responses of Nazi leaders to the pugnacious Churchill and their plans for air raids and invasion. It seems that invasion of Britain was a possibility until May 1941 when Hitler turned his focus to Russia. How did the Nazis see Churchill and the resilience of the citizenry in the face of murderous aerial bombing? Did you have particular sources you relied on for the views of the German leaders?

Erik Larson: Mainly I relied on intelligence reports and diaries, in particular the diary of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief of propaganda. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels simply could not understand why Churchill didn’t give up and seek some sort of peace. To them, he seemed like some kind of crazy person. Goebbels in his diary expresses surprise time and again at his unwillingness to seek a negotiated end to the war.   

Robin Lindley: Churchill was desperate for US aid and he frequently communicated with FDR and pleaded for help. As I recall, the two leaders had never met personally before Churchill became prime minister, but they admired each other. What would you like readers to understand about the Churchill-FDR relationship?

Erik Larson: The most interesting element is simply the fact that Churchill knew from the very beginning of his premiership that Britain would not be able to prevail without the full participation of America as a belligerent. He himself later wrote that he pursued Roosevelt the way a besotted lover would pursue the object of his affection. In the end of course it was  Pearl Harbor that brought America into the war, but even before that Churchill’s efforts undoubtedly helped increase the amount of aid that the U.S. was willing to contribute. 

Robin Lindley: In addition to Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, several other characters vividly emerge in your book. Their daughter Mary was in her late teens and you recount her adventures during the perilous year you describe. What drew you to Mary’s story?

Erik Larson: Early on I was lucky enough to receive permission to read and use her diary. At the time, apparently, I was one of two scholars to have been given that honor. (I don’t know who the other is.) 

Mary was 17 in May 1940. She kept a detailed daily diary, full of observations about the war, her father, and her own life. She wrote with great charm, and provided a very clear sense that despite the woes of the world, life went on. She went dancing at RAF parties; attended the annual debutante ball in London during an air raid; and in her diary makes periodic reference to episodes of “snogging in the hayloft.” What’s not to love! 

Robin Lindley: John Colville, Churchill’s secretary, also seems one of your favorite characters. Who was he and why was he so significant at this time?

Erik Larson: Colville was one of Churchill’s cadre of private secretaries, a group of very hard-working young men who served almost as apprentice prime ministers. He kept an incredibly rich diary of life at No. 10 Downing Street—a diary, by the way, that he himself acknowledged he should not have been keeping, because of the security risk it posed. Every Churchill scholar consults this diary—but I decided Colville wanted to step forward and become an actual character. I discovered that his published diary leaves out some key elements of his life that were very important to him at the time, namely, that he was in love, and the object of his desire did not love him back. Tragic, in a universal way! 

Robin Lindley: And then an American envoy, the reliably disheveled Harry Hopkins, entered the story in 1941. What was Hopkins’ role and why was he important to Churchill? 

Erik Larson: Hopkins was Roosevelt’s close friend and advisor. He actually lived in the White House. Roosevelt sent him to England so that he could provide an accurate sense of who Churchill really was and how Britain was faring. Churchill, recognizing this, took Hopkins with him everywhere, and wined and dined and charmed him, with an eye always to winning Roosevelt’s favor. It worked, too. 

Robin Lindley: Your book is based on your meticulous research. You have said you don’t consider yourself a historian, however. I think you’re too humble. How do you see your role as a writer who explores events from the past?

Erik Larson: As I’ve said before, my goal, strange as it sounds, is not to inform, though anyone who wishes can quote my books in their PhD theses. Rather, I’m drawn by story. My goal is to create as rich a historical experience as I possibly can—all true of course—in the hope that readers will be able to descend into the past and linger there a while as if they were part of whatever saga is unfolding. One lovely aspect of the reading imagination is that, if you tell a story right, readers will forget that they know the ending, and feel the same tensions and suspense as experienced by citizens of London. Or so I hope.  

Robin Lindley: Who are some historians or other writers that you see as inspirations or influences?

Erik Larson: David McCullough. Barbara Tuchman. Dava Sobel—her “Longitude” was one of the books that made me start thinking about writing narrative history. More recently I’ve become a huge fan of Andrew Roberts, a foremost Churchill scholar. He’s a sharp writer, and funny, and he’s got an eye for the kinds of detail that I love. 

Robin Lindley: Have you decided on your next project?

Erik Larson: Ha! No. I wish. I’m back in the “dark country of no ideas.” I’ve got a couple of contenders, however. And neither one has anything to do with World War II or Churchill! 

Robin Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add for readers about your book or thoughts on how the lessons of this history of Britain during the darkest days of the Second World War may help us as we confront the COVID-19 pandemic?

Erik Larson: I think the main parallel is that these times require us all to pull together, just as Londoners had to do. For us, the noblest thing is to stay home, and if we do go out, wear a mask. My home city of New York has millions of heroes, now, staying home, losing jobs, going nuts—figuratively and literally—all to help prevent the deaths of countless other souls whom they do not know and will never meet. It’s really quite dashingly heroic, even if it does require staying home. Churchill would have had much to say about it, with compassion and, without doubt, a tear or two at the pathos of it all. 

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your thoughtful comments Mr. Larson. It’s an honor to share your words with readers on your work and moving new book, The Splendid and the Vile. Congratulations.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, NW Lawyer, ABA Journal, Real Change, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, and art. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

In the late 1930s, German scientists were conducting experiments to create atomic bombs. In response, and fearing a German bomb, scientists and engineers in the United States in 1939 launched what became the Manhattan Project, an effort to develop the world’s first nuclear weapons. And to beat the Germans to the punch.

In early 1941, American nuclear chemist Glenn Seaborg discovered the radioactive element that he named plutonium, which has an atomic number 94. In the months after he isolated the element, he and others saw plutonium’s potential as a fuel for atomic weapons. American efforts to develop a nuclear weapon redoubled after the US entered the war with the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

As part of the Manhattan project, the US rapidly built a huge facility for plutonium production at Hanford in south central Washington State, an arid, desolate area on the banks of the Columbia River.

During the war, the Hanford nuclear facility attracted tens of thousands of workers from scientists and engineers to skilled workers and laborers. Except for a few project leaders, workers did not know the goal of their intense work at the plant until an atomic bomb fueled with Hanford-produced plutonium incinerated most of the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. That “Fat Man” bomb killed at least 80,000 people—mostly civilians—and injured many others. Three days earlier, on August 6, Hiroshima had been destroyed by a uranium-fueled bomb.

After the war, scientists determined that plutonium was a more efficient fuel for nuclear weapons than uranium. Hanford became the hub for the production of plutonium, the fuel for all of the nuclear weapons produced during the Cold War. 

After the raucous early work camp was shut down in 1944, the operators of Hanford lived in what historian Kate Brown calls the government-created and highly-subsidized “Plutopia” of Richland, Washington, where highly-paid workers and their families were provided first-rate education, health care, and other amenities. In this arrangement, workers produced the extremely dangerous plutonium and the government kept their work secret.

When the Cold War waned in the 1980s, plutonium production stopped at Hanford. The mission then shifted to environmental cleanup and restoration. Today, the facility continues to make news, especially on health concerns and the progress of the massive clean-up.

In his lively and lucid new book Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age (W.W. Norton), acclaimed author Steve Olson blends history and science to tell the story of plutonium and of the massive production facility at Hanford. He details how the nuclear facility was created and how it shaped the story of the region and the nation. And he persuasively argues that Hanford is the most important site of the nuclear age.

Mr. Olson’s new book is based on extensive research and travels to Hanford and other US site, as well as to Nagasaki—a trip that contributed to his vivid and moving description of the bombing 75 years ago and its horrific aftermath. 

Mr. Olson chronicles this nuclear era history through human stories from survivors of the bombing to the great nuclear scientists and military leaders as well as the humble laborers and citizens of the Hanford area. A native of eastern Washington, he presents a unique perspective on the immense Hanford facility that altered world history. 

Mr. Olson is an award-winning, Seattle-based science writer. His other books include Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens (Winner of the Washington State Book Award);  Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins (a finalist for the National Book Award and recipient of the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers); Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition (named a best science book of 2004 by Discover magazine); and, with co-author with Greg Graffin, Anarchy Evolution. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Science, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and many other periodicals. Mr. Olson also has served as a consultant writer for the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council; the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; the National Institutes of Health; and many other organizations. 

Mr. Olson generously responded to a series of questions in a conversation by email.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Steve on your new book on plutonium and Hanford. What inspired your new book? Did it grow out of your childhood in Eastern Washington or your past research on the many topics that you’ve explored in your writing?

Steve Olson: Several things had to come together for me to begin working on this book, but I doubt I would have started it if I hadn’t grown up in Othello, Washington, just 15 miles away from the nearest reactor at Hanford. We couldn’t see Hanford from Othello, because it was on the other side of a ridgeline from us. But we knew it was there, behind barbed wire fences and heavily guarded.

Also, I’ve always been interested in science, even when I was a kid, so I grew up wondering what went on at Hanford. And then, in 1983, when I was living in Washington, DC, a magazine editor sent me to Hanford to write a story about nuclear power, and I decided in the middle of that trip that I wanted to write a book about the place someday.

Robin Lindley: How did you and your family and friends think about Hanford when you were in grade school and high school?

Steve Olson: I grew up in Othello in the 1960s and early 1970s, and Hanford at that time was still an extremely secretive place. People had known since the end of World War II that it make plutonium for nuclear weapons, but they didn’t know much more than that. My grandfather was an occasional steamfitter at Hanford. But workers at the plant had to agree not to tell even their family members what they did.

Robin Lindley: Your book is wide-ranging, from the discovery of plutonium to the story of Hanford and the wartime use of plutonium to nuclear waste cleanup efforts today. How did your book evolve from your initial conception?

Steve Olson: Not long after I decided to someday write a book about Hanford, Richard Rhodes published his incredible book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. That book had a big influence on my thinking about what became The Apocalypse Factory.

I always wanted to tell the whole story of the nuclear age, from the discovery of fission and plutonium to the present day. But to make the book manageable, I knew that I had to tell the story from a particular perspective, so I chose to tell it largely through the lens of the people associated with Hanford’s construction, operation, and decommissioning.

Robin Lindley: What was your research process for the book? Did do archival work and interviews the major figures you discuss? Did you find any surprises?

Steve Olson: I did almost every kind of research I can imagine doing -- interviews, archival research, multiple days spent in Hanford and the surrounding area, trips to places like Oak Ridge and Nagasaki, and huge amounts of reading (I didn’t anticipate how much reading I would have to do). 

I was surprised by how much new material I found, even on a topic that many others have written about. Some of it is trivial, like the fact that Fermi built his first reactor in a racquets court rather than a squash court. But some is much more important. I make the claim, for instance, that the Manhattan Project would not have happened if Glenn Seaborg hadn’t discovered plutonium a few months before Pearl Harbor, which is a claim that hasn’t been made before. That’s the advantage of telling the story from the perspective of Hanford. Things that seem puzzling about previous historical accounts suddenly become clear.

Robin Lindley: Your writing on the experiments with uranium and the discovery of plutonium is vivid and engaging. You cover this history of radiation and nuclear physics from the time of the Curies to the work with atomic weaponry. The speed of development of atomic weapons was breathtaking.

Steve Olson: Maybe the most exciting thing I discovered in writing the book is how many scientific developments had to occur in relatively quick succession to make atomic bombs possible. The scientific story of plutonium’s discovery is amazingly compelling -- and also idiosyncratic. 

If you ran history again, it would almost certainly not work out the way it did. I’m glad you liked the scientific descriptions, because that section of the book used to be about twice as long. But my editor at W. W. Norton, Alane Mason, argued that readers would not be eager to plow through that much science before Hanford even appeared on the scene, and I struggled mightily to cut that material down.

Robin Lindley: Nuclear chemist Glenn Seaborg is credited with discovering plutonium and is a major figure in your book. What are a few things you’d like readers to know about him and his discovery?

Steve Olson: Many readers, I think, will feel a special affinity with Glenn Seaborg -- I certainly did. He was from a small town, was fascinated with science as a boy, worked his way into world-leading scientific institutions through perseverance and good judgment, and suddenly found himself in a position to change the course of world history. The discovery of plutonium in 1941 was not at all preordained. If Seaborg hadn’t had the knowledge and experiences that he did, plutonium might not have been discovered for several more years, and the Manhattan Project might not have happened. Counterfactuals are impossible to construct reliably, of course. But a historical account of its discovery makes clear how improbable this particular course of events was.

Robin Lindley: When did US nuclear scientists first realize that a world-altering weapon of war could be made from uranium and later plutonium? 

Steve Olson: The full awareness grew on them gradually, even if the path ahead seems clear in retrospect. Not long after the discovery of fission around Christmastime of 1938, scientists realized that an atomic bomb should be possible if enough of a rare isotope of uranium could be separated from uranium ore -- a process that seemed so daunting that the physicist Niels Bohr once said “it would take the entire efforts of a country to build a bomb.” 

But the realization that plutonium also could be used to make an atomic bomb took place slowly after Seaborg and his graduate student assistant first isolated the element on February 24, 1941. A committee at the National Academy of Sciences -- where I’ve worked as a consultant writer for the past 40 years -- considered the issue in three reports issued over the last half of 1941, and you can see the committee’s position change as the prospects for a plutonium bomb grew brighter.

Robin Lindley: A big part of your story is of how Hanford was chosen as the site for producing plutonium and how the nuclear facility there shaped history. What were the major considerations in choosing Hanford for this huge facility?

Steve Olson: I start the book with the selection of the Hanford site. In December 1942, a colonel from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer named Fritz Matthias was sent to the western United States to look for a place to build the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactors, which is what you need to produce enough plutonium for atomic bombs. He took a list with him of the necessary site characteristics: water and electricity for cooling the reactors, a rail line to transport equipment and chemicals, and enough isolation to limit casualties if one of the reactors blew up. As soon as he flew over the Horse Heaven Hills in south-central Washington State and saw the arid and sparsely populated plain that lies within a broad bend of the Columbia River just southwest of Othello, with powerlines from the Grand Coulee dam running through the site and a spur line from the Milwaukee Road, he knew he’d found what he was looking for.

Robin Lindley: How did Hanford fit into the overall development of nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project?

Steve Olson: Hanford produced the plutonium for the first nuclear explosion in human history -- the Trinity test that was carried out in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima used uranium produced at the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee, but that was a technological one-off -- almost no bombs of that design were ever built again.

The Nagasaki bomb, and future bombs then in the pipeline, were designed to use plutonium from Hanford. Along with a second facility built later in South Carolina, Hanford produced the plutonium that is used as a trigger in all the current nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. That’s why I call my book The Apocalypse Factory. If the plutonium from Hanford is ever used in a large-scale nuclear war, human civilization will probably end.

Robin Lindley: How did the US government deal with residents of the area including Native Americans in taking possession of the land for the Hanford facility?

Steve Olson: Callously, at best. The 1,500 or so residents of the area that would become Hanford all received a letter saying that the government was taking over their property and that they had a few weeks to a few months to move elsewhere. They were horrified, though many later said that they also felt a patriotic obligation to comply. But then the government tried to pay them much less for their land than it was worth, which set off new rounds of acrimony. 

Meanwhile, the land in that area had been used for millennia by various groups of Native Americans, including the Wanapum, who were the group closest to Hanford. Though they retained some rights to visit the land during World War II, they subsequently lost those rights. The Wanapum were treated as badly as Native Americans were all over the West.

Robin Lindley: Historian Kate Brown called Richland the biggest welfare program in US history. How did Hanford evolve from a rowdy work camp of mostly single men to a community of middle-class families in Richland? 

Steve Olson: I would characterize Richland, at least in the early days, as a kind of military installation or base, though one dressed up in the garb of a small American town. When people moved to Hanford, they went to work as employees of the large companies that had contracted with the government to build and operate Hanford. Military officials oversaw the companies and the town’s residents, and those officials felt that they had to provide a semblance of normalcy for people to do their jobs well and compliantly. The town depended on the government for its survival, but the handouts were indirect and targeted.

Robin Lindley: Apart from some high-ranking officials, the workers at Hanford didn’t know that their work would result in a plutonium bomb that would eventually incinerate much of Nagasaki, Japan. How was secrecy maintained on this massive project that employed hundreds of workers?

Steve Olson: The security was astonishing. I know, since my grandfather and some of my high school friends worked there. While building the reactors, crafts workers would know what they were doing but not what anyone else was doing. Workers climbing a ladder would have to show clearances to prove that they belonged higher up on a ladder rather than lower down. Billboards, water towers, and fliers were plastered with the phrase “Silence Means Security.” If people talked too much, informants among the workers would alert their superiors, and the talkers would be reprimanded or terminated. Even after most of the security restrictions came down at Hanford, the old sentiments prevailed.

Robin Lindley: On August 6, 1945, the US dropped its first atomic bomb, a uranium device, on Hiroshima. On August 9, Hanford’s plutonium bomb fell on Nagasaki. However, Nagasaki wasn’t the original target. What did you learn about the change in plans and the phrase, “Kokura’s luck”?

Steve Olson: Nagasaki was the backup target on the second bombing mission, and it was added to the target list in an amazingly capricious way. On July 24, the generals in charge of the atomic bombings in Washington, DC, received a message to add Nagasaki to the bombing list from air forces chief Henry Arnold, who was with President Truman at the Potsdam Conference. Nagasaki was not an obvious target, and no one knows who at the conference insisted that it be included in the list, but the generals in DC complied. 

Then, the day of the mission -- which had all kinds of things go wrong -- the primary target, Kokura Arsenal, was covered by clouds and smoke by the time the B-29 containing Fat Man arrived at the city. The Bockscar, which was piloted by 25-year-old Charles Sweeney, made three runs on Kokura, but the crew were never able to see the target and drop the bomb. Thus, the phrase that is still associated with the city: the luck of Kokura.

Robin Lindley: Your description of the Nagasaki through the eyes of a Japanese doctor and other witnesses is vivid and heartbreaking. What was the scope of the destruction in Nagasaki and the casualties?

Steve Olson: I did my best to describe the devastation and human carnage, but there’s no replacement for going to Nagasaki or Hiroshima and reconstructing in your mind what an atomic bomb can do to a city and its people. The Urakami Valley of Nagasaki is several miles wide and eight or ten miles long, yet almost everything in the central part of the valley was destroyed. 

My own sentiment is that any national leader who has the authority to drop atomic bombs should be required to go either to Nagasaki or to Hiroshima and witness the scale of destruction that the bombs caused. And those two bombs were very small by today’s standard!

Robin Lindley: What were the medical consequences of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki? 

Steve Olson: Casualties at both Nagasaki and Hiroshima are surprisingly hard to estimate. But deaths caused by the Nagasaki bombing could have exceeded 100,000. Tens of thousands of people were killed by the initial blast and fire. Tens of thousands more died in the succeeding days, weeks, and months from the radiation generated by the bomb. And tens of thousands more died prematurely in later years from cancers and other diseases caused by their radiation exposure. And this is just a small example of what would happen if nuclear weapons are ever used in warfare again.

Robin Lindley: You mentioned that you traveled to Nagasaki as part of your research. How did it feel to visit there?

Steve Olson: I spent a week in Nagasaki reconstructing the minutes, hours, weeks, and months after the bombing through the eyes of a surgeon at the Nagasaki Medical College Hospital named Raisuke Shirabe. I traced his steps in the hills above the hospital as he fled from the burning city. I had parts of his diary translated into English. I met with his daughter and granddaughter and talked with them about Dr. Shirabe, who subsequently spent decades studying the effects of the bomb on the city’s residents. It was the most emotionally affecting research I’ve ever done for a book.

Robin Lindley: How do you see President Harry Truman’s role in deciding to use atomic bombs? Wasn’t there disagreement on whether to use a second bomb?

Steve Olson: Leslie Groves, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who is one of the central characters of my book, once said that Truman was like “a boy on a toboggan” when it came to making decisions about the use of atomic bombs on Japan. Truman generally distanced himself from the decision making. He never made a formal decision to use the bombs. The course was set by Groves, and Groves wanted to use two or more bombs to end the war quickly. He had the additional motivation of wanting to demonstrate that both of the approaches he had backed -- uranium from Oak Ridge, and plutonium from Hanford -- worked so that he would not have to answer to congressional committees for wasting government funds.

Robin Lindley: Manufacture of nuclear weapons picked up during the first couple of decades after the Second World War as the Cold War with the Soviet Union heightened. The nuclear weapons built after the war were fueled by plutonium so Hanford became a busy production facility. Why was plutonium preferable for bombs as opposed to uranium—as used in the Hiroshima bomb?

Steve Olson: Plutonium produces significantly more energy, pound for pound, than uranium. In modern nuclear weapons, a small pit of plutonium is detonated to create temperatures high enough so that isotopes of hydrogen in other parts of the bomb begin to fuse together, which releases much more energy than the original plutonium bomb. Essentially, every nuclear weapon in the U.S. and Russian arsenals is built around a small version of the Nagasaki bomb.

Robin Lindley: What was Hanford used for once production of nuclear weapons slowed? Didn’t plutonium production end there in the 1980’s?

Steve Olson: By the 1970s, both the United States and Soviet Union had more plutonium than they would ever need. Each country had built more than 30,000 nuclear weapons, representing more than a million times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

With the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the insane size of these arsenals began to drop, and the excess plutonium was set aside either to use in future weapons or to be disposed of. Since then, most activities at Hanford have been directed toward cleaning up the horrendous environmental contamination caused by decades of plutonium production.

Robin Lindley: What have you learned about environmental damage caused by the Hanford nuclear plant?

Steve Olson: Hanford is the most radiologically contaminated place in the western hemisphere, matched only by the comparable site in the former Soviet Union. One hundred and seventy-seven tanks, most the size of a large auditorium, contain millions of gallons of highly radioactive and toxic chemicals generated in the process of producing plutonium. If you held a glass of that material at arm’s length, you’d be dead in a couple of minutes. 

The Department of Energy has made lots of progress in cleaning up Hanford, but it has just begun to deal with the tank waste. Current plans are to immobilize the waste in glass logs and deposit them in a long-term radioactive waste repository. But the technology has been difficult to develop, and the United States has not yet created a repository for the high-level nuclear wastes it has generated.

Robin Lindley: Is the US now making nuclear weapons?

Steve Olson: The United States and Russia are no longer adding to the size of their arsenals. But they are modernizing and miniaturizing their nuclear weapons, which could have the effect of making them easier to use, and if the United States refuses to extend the New START treaty, which expires next February, nations are likely to start building more nuclear weapons. 

As I say in the book, we are going in the wrong direction. Every action we take should be directed toward constraining and ultimately eliminating these moral abominations.

Robin Lindley: To me, the issues of the Hanford cleanup are very complex and seem overwhelming, especially when scientists talk about the extremely toxic substances at the site and the 24,000-year half-life of plutonium. What is the status of the cleanup now and what needs to be done?

Steve Olson: As I said, the Department of Energy has made important progress. Most of the sites right along the Columbia River have been cleaned up, though they are still largely off limits to visitors. Most of the contaminated equipment and soil have been transferred to a plateau in the center of the site, which is also where the tanks of radioactive waste are located. But completing the cleanup, which the federal government is obligated to do, will take many more decades and will cost hundreds of billions more dollars.

Robin Lindley: Hanford and the Tri-Cities have benefited from huge federal government expenditures for more than 70 years, yet the populace seems to be largely conservative and anti-government. How do you see the politics in the region?

Steve Olson: It’s a great contradiction, as are so many aspects of our political life these days. The adjoining cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, known as the Tri-Cities, were largely the creation of the federal government, and they remain heavily dependent on federal largess -- more than $2 billion per year flows to the area for the ongoing cleanup. But the area is generally conservative, even if many individuals and groups in the region are not. 

Many people think of the area as rural, even though the regional population is now more than 300,000. The population tends to skew white, older, and blue collar, since Hanford was for decades a production facility. 

I grew up surrounded by the conservative politics of the area, and they puzzled me even as a kid. I could see no obvious reason why people so distrusted government. I’m still puzzled. I’d like to write about it someday to try to understand it better.

Robin Lindley: You have a gift for bringing complex issues to life. Who are other writers you admire or see as influences? Are there rules you follow in your lucid writing about technical issues for a general audience?

Steve Olson: I dedicated this book to my wife and also to the memory of John Hersey, from whom I took a nonfiction writing course in college in the spring of 1978. All my books have been heavily influenced by what he taught me. He wanted us to pay attention to the structure of our writing, often by adopting a model that we would visualize in putting a story together. He taught us to pay attention to individual words -- we read poetry in his class to see how words fit together and acquire meaning from their context. 

John Hersey was also my personal connection to World War II.  He had been there in 1946 doing research to write his book Hiroshima.  Now I was in Japan 72 years later doing historical research in the other city destroyed by an atomic bomb.

It’s very kind of you to say that I have a gift for writing, but I see whatever success I’ve achieved as solely the result of practice and determination.

Robin Lindley: You deal with world shaking events in your book, and we are still faced with the threat of nuclear annihilation and an intractable nuclear waste mess, and now a novel virus that is devastating much of the nation. As an acclaimed writer and astute observer, where do you find hope?

Steve Olson: I remain a hopeful person, even though writing a book about nuclear weapons can beat the hope right out of you. But humans have not used nuclear weapons in warfare, as of August 9, for three-quarters of a century. Until recently, the United States and Russia were making steady reductions in their arsenals. 

Many people who have been or could in the future be in positions of authority recognize the need to eliminate nuclear weapons from the earth. And the ongoing cleanup of Hanford gives me hope. As I wrote in the book, “Hanford’s cleanup, if done persistently and well, could provide an object lesson in making the Earth whole again.”

Robin Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add about your new book or your writing for readers?

Steve Olson: Learning what happened at Hanford is, I think, the best possible way to learn about the nuclear age and what can be done to abolish nuclear weapons. I tried to write this book so that readers would end it with a sense of both understanding and purpose.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Steve for your generosity and thoughtful comments. And congratulations on your sweeping new book on Hanford, plutonium, and much more. It’s an honor to connect with you.

Adam Domby, an award-winning historian and specialist on the Civil War and Reconstruction, examines the role of lies and exaggeration in the Lost Cause narratives and their celebration of white supremacy in his timely and groundbreaking new book The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020). 

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Re-Markings, Documentary, NW Lawyer, Real Change, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights and conflict. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Members of the Minneapolis Police Department killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, on May 25, 2020. The shockingly brutal 8 minute and 46 second televised asphyxiation of Mr. Floyd sparked nationwide outrage and protests against police brutality and the many forms of systemic racism.

Mr. Floyd’s death also led to renewed efforts to remove Confederate monuments that celebrate slavery, treason, white supremacy, and racism. In several cities, public officials or protesters removed these memorials. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 2018 that more than 1,700 monuments to the Confederacy stood in public places. Many remain.

As the president shares racist talking points and vows to protect all memorials, including the Confederate tributes, many Americans are learning more about their history, particularly about the cruelty of slavery, the treason of the South to defend this brutal enterprise, the postwar defeat of Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era of rigid segregation and disenfranchisement of Black citizens.

The Confederate monuments were constructed as reminders to white citizens of their supposed racial superiority while they were meant to intimidate and even terrorize Black people and keep them subservient. Most of these statues were erected in the first two decades of the twentieth century and later during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the fifties and sixties. The monuments are points of discord as they dishonor the Black and white soldiers who died for the Union, while they demean and disregard the humanity of Black people.

The monuments that sentimentalize Confederate heroes who lost the war convey the Lost Cause myth of the Confederacy, a narrative that romanticizes slavery as benevolent as it recalls Confederate soldiers as gallant and chivalrous, rebel leaders as saintly, the South solidly united against Northern aggression, and Reconstruction as corrupt. Above all, the Lost Cause myth is built on a belief in the superiority of the white race and the need to forcibly control and subjugate Black people. 

Professor Adam Domby, an award-winning historian and specialist on the Civil War and Reconstruction, examines the role of lies and exaggeration in the Lost Cause narratives and their celebration of white supremacy in his timely and groundbreaking new book The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020). 

In his book, Professor Domby debunks the romantic Confederate myths by exposing the cruelty and barbarity of slavery; the ambivalence of many Confederate troops; the high rate of Confederate desertion; the extent of Union sympathizers in the South; the rise of Jim Crow; the brutal violence against Blacks; the monuments erected to intimidate Black citizens; the many lies about war service by white Southerners to claim veterans’ pensions; the myth of Black Confederates; and more. 

Professor Domby’s book reveals that much of our understanding of the Civil War remains influenced by falsehoods of the Lost Cause, lies perpetuated in popular movies such as the silent classic The Birth of a Nation and the lavish Gone with the Wind. As a historian, he sees an obligation to share the reality of history and put to rest longtime falsehoods that were used to justify white supremacy, Jim Crow segregation, and the disenfranchisement and subjugation of African Americans. 

Dr. Domby, an Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston, is an award-winning historian of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the American South. In addition to Civil War memory, lies, and white supremacy, Professor Domby has written about prisoners of war, guerrilla warfare, Reconstruction, divided communities, and public history. He received his MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after receiving his BA from Yale University.

Professor Domby generously discussed his work and his writing by telephone from Charleston, South Carolina.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for speaking with me Professor Domby about your work as a historian and your new book, The False Cause, a debunking of myths about the Confederacy and the Lost Cause narrative. 

I understand that you’re dealing with many media inquiries, and it must be somewhat surprising how newsworthy your book has become with the increasing focus on our history of racism since the brutal police murder of George Floyd in May. It seems many Americans are rethinking our fraught past as our president doubles down on his racist rhetoric.

Professor Adam Domby: Yes. I wrote the book knowing that the Lost Cause memory obviously still mattered. And I wanted the book out by the 2020 election in part because of the appeals to Confederate symbols.  

I didn't necessarily expect the president himself to be quite so blatant as he's been. I also didn’t realize how many monuments were going to be suddenly removed. I knew the book was would be somewhat timely, but I did not expect to have at least one reporter calling me a day, if not more, for about a month this summer. I have talked to reporters before, but now it's very busy, and it definitely caught me a little off guard. 

I felt the book needed to be written because it relates to the present issues. The historical narratives that these monuments are supporting are fundamentally undergirding systemic racism. And, so long as we have these falsely propagated narratives of history, the harder it will be to dismantle systemic racism. I see it as the start of a longer process—of first correcting the historical narratives so that we can actually address the ramifications of what has happened historically. 

Robin Lindley: You mention in the epilogue of your book that historians have a duty to question false narratives and myth, and you do a masterful and carefully documented, point-by-point, debunking of the Lost Cause narrative. How did you got involved in this project? Did you grow up in the South? 

Professor Adam Domby: Yes. I was born and raised in Georgia. In fact, my childhood home was not far from where Sherman's headquarters was during the siege of Atlanta. And I always had an interest in the Civil War. I saw the movie Gettysburg as a kid, and I followed other stories of the war.

But I went to college being a math major. I thought I would get a degree in math and that lasted all of one semester. I was fortunate that, on a whim, I took a class called “Wilderness and the North American Imagination” that was taught by Aaron Sachs, and I really liked this class. I picked another class that he was teaching, and that led me to eventually major in history. During college, I initially thought I’d be a colonial historian, but I fell in love with the Civil War again when I took a class with David Blight and started to see things that I had grown up learning in new ways. 

I grew up in a region where the Confederacy was still often romanticized. So it was eye-opening for me to take a Civil War class and additional seminars on memory that presented a different view of the war.

I hadn’t decided yet to be a professional historian. I was going to be a park ranger. I worked as a park ranger for a while, and then left that, worked in politics for a bit, and then decided to attend graduate school. Even then, I didn't think I'd write about Confederate monuments. I planned to write on prisoners of war. But, in my first year of grad school, I stumbled upon a document while working on a term paper, and that document sort of launched me on this process. The document was a [1913] dedication speech by Julian Carr for a Confederate monument [at the University of North Carolina]. 

I didn't realize at the time how important that speech would be in shaping my own future. I thought this was an opportunity to teach people a little bit about Jim Crow. But I put it out there and activists took it and ran with it, really educating people about these monuments. I didn't really think about social activism, and I didn't fully appreciate yet the impact these monuments have on students and faculty of color who have to walk by them. That only came later. I saw this as a side project, maybe for some articles in the future. 

I had two articles that I wanted to write. One was all about white supremacy and memory and the other was about lies and memory. And then I looked at those projects and it eventually dawned on me that this was actually the same project. The lies were part of the monuments and the white supremacy aspect was tied to the monuments and the Confederate fraud. 

I arrived at the College of Charleston just after the Mother Emanuel terror attack here. And then the 2016 election of Donald Trump led me to put aside my dissertation project and focus full time on this project. This was a book I felt was important to have out there that would be useful to people who are having to engage neo-Confederates to show how this Lost Cause narrative was propagated and continues to be propagated. I think it has something both for the public and for other scholars. 

Although it seems timely on some level, I did not realize how timely it would become, until it came out. I was actually worried it would come out too late. I really was hoping to have it out before the primary elections, but it turned out to be perfect timing. 

Robin Lindley: You begin your book with a description of the Silent Sam monument and that speech of Julian Carr, who you researched. From your book, it seems that Carr was a grandiose conman who misled people about his background as he celebrated the Confederacy. What did this Silent Sam statue represent to him?

Professor Adam Domby: Silent Sam was a Confederate monument put up by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  It came up at the same time as all those Confederate monuments at city halls and courthouses. In fact, this statue at Chapel Hill is across the street from a courthouse and Post Office, so it’s central in the town. It was put up in 1913, and other colleges have similar monuments such as the University of Mississippi. Increasingly they're being removed because they were put up at a time when the schools were segregated and there were no Black students at the time. Making Black students feel welcome was the opposite of what college leadership wanted to do at the time. These monuments were put up explicitly to celebrate white men and to teach white supremacy to the next generation. 

The state's future leaders and the next generation were being trained at UNC, according to Carr, and he wanted them to learn to be white supremacists. That's basically what he said. And this monument was meant to celebrate the success of overturning Reconstruction. And something we often forget about the Lost Cause is that it wasn’t just about how we remember the war. It's also about how we remember the antebellum era and how we remember the era after the war. 

You might say the Lost Cause narrative includes history all the way to the present. It’s an evolving memory of course, but the memory that they wanted and still want.  

Robin Lindley: How did Carr embrace the Lost Cause narrative? 

Professor Adam Domby: The Carr speech was unremarkable at the time, despite the fact that he was saying that Silent Sam was a monument to white supremacy. His speech was so unremarkable that the newspapers did not carry any note of it other than that he gave a speech and he had given so many speeches before. They ran the governor's speech and a few other speeches given that weekend, some of which also hinted at white supremacy, but the Carr speech was largely forgotten with a few exceptions because he'd given so many similar speeches. The only thing that stands out from this one was the statement he makes about his personal part. To Carr, this was a monument devoted to celebrating the overturning of gains that African Americans had made, and this was in the aftermath of the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. Carr wanted to celebrate that North Carolina was now a controlled by whites. He was helping create the solid South. It didn't exist in 1876. It was created by disenfranchisement largely and aided by false narrative of history. 

Robin Lindley: What would you like readers to know about the major aspects of the Lost Cause narrative?

Professor Adam Domby: The first is the denial of the cause of the war. Denying the central role of slavery is crucial for the Lost Cause myth because, if you fought a war for slavery, you were a loser. If you fought a war for states' rights and it's 1901 and state's rights still exist and are constantly being cited as a reason why the federal government shouldn't intervene in disenfranchisement, then you're a victor. In fact, you can be celebrated by continuing the fight for segregation, and you were a hero for segregation as well. This was overtly making Confederate soldiers into white heroes of white supremacy while also stopping them from being the losers. 

Lost Cause narratives also remember slavery as benevolent, while simultaneously remembering Reconstruction as a time of corrupt African-Americans and carpetbagger. The benevolent slavery aspect brings this idea that there were happy slaves. But slaves were actually brutally terrorized into labor. That is what slavery does. But in this false memory there was a time when the races got along, and everyone was happy before the war, and only the intervention of Northerners during Reconstruction caused poor race relations in the South. And by this narrative, disenfranchisement of African Americans can be seen as not the cause of race relations being strained but as the cure for it instead. To be clear, Reconstruction was also not a time of exceptional corruption.

Similarly, Confederate soldiers are remembered as the most heroic and devoted soldiers of all time who were only defeated due to overwhelming manpower. The problem with this, of course, is the high levels of desertion in North Carolina and other states. 

The conduct of the war is another aspect of the Lost Cause that is often overlooked.  How do we remember the conduct when we ignore racial massacres? Race and racism shaped every aspect of the war: how the war was fought and how that shaped Confederate strategy. So, with the Lost Cause, these Confederate soldiers are rewritten as noble men, despite what they fought for, how they fought, and that they in participated in racial massacres. 

And, returning this narrative of history, the lie is not just used to remember Confederate soldiers well, but to justify Jim Crow as a system, to defend Jim Crow, and to support Jim Crow. To me, that’s the central key to this whole thing. All of these lies are holding up the biggest lie of all: that races are different in that one race is better than the other. That that's the big lie at the top. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that explanation Professor Domby. When I was in grade school and high school in late fifties and early sixties it seems that these myths were the view reflected in our history textbooks. I grew up in Spokane Washington, and our texts shared a romanticized view of the South and slavery, and stressed the failures of Reconstruction.

Professor Adam Domby: It's a narrative that became the norm and was pushed very much. In the South, this Lost Cause version was appreciated as a way of defending the South from Northern intervention. That narrative of history allows you to also say that race relations in the South are a Southern issue. That's the message of the Lost Cause. Whereas, if you have a more accurate version and you're living in Washington, you might think, maybe we should intervene. Instead, this was all about convincing and exporting the views of the South to the North and West. 

Robin Lindley: And also, I think, so publishers could sell the same books in the North and South. Your book is very timely. The president has been criticized by many for seeming to care more about these monuments to dead racists and traitors than he cares about living Americans. 

Professor Adam Domby: Especially the lives of Black Americans. It's worth pointing out whose lives he cares least about. It’s true that many Americans are dying right now due to Covid-19, but communities of color are impacted at much higher rates of infection and death. 

He also ignores that police violence is similarly disproportionately borne by African Americans. And Trump is not a historical rarity. We see the same thing in Julian Carr’s language back in the early 20th century when Carr said, “lynching is bad but. . .”  There should be no “but” at the end of the statement, because lynching is bad. We should be able to stop there, but he didn’t. He said lynching is bad but, until all white women feel safe themselves, we can't even address it. For Julian Carr, the lives of Black men were less important than white women feeling comfortable. This seems reminiscent of Trump’s appeals to suburbia.  

The statement Black Lives Matter is so important right now because historically Black lives had been viewed by those in power as less important than things like monuments and every white woman feeling entirely safe at all times. 

We see something similar now with Trump as he focuses on monuments while ignoring the underlying meaning as a way of signaling either on purpose or not. But we're seeing that signaling again and again, and the roots of that racism are not new. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for pointing out the meaning of Black Lives Matter. After all this time, some people are still confused. You mention in your book that, when many of us read about Southerners, we immediately think only of white men while ignoring most of the other people there, particularly the non-white people. I do that at times.

Professor Adam Domby: I'm guilty of that myself. I think we all are. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a history teacher in this country, even a historian of the South, who doesn't occasionally mess that up when they're in class or writing. When I finished the book, one of the last things I did was go through and check every time I used the word “Southerner” and I caught myself multiple times in that final rewrite where I said Southerner when I meant white Southerner. It's short hand that we grew up with. That's what happens when you live in a society that is built around systemic racism. You don't realize you're inviting it, so it requires conscious effort to avoid these mistakes. 

Robin Lindley: What do you think should happen with the symbols of the Lost Cause such as the Confederate statues and monuments? 

Professor Adam Domby: The first thing I would say is that my own views are constantly evolving. One of the things that I've learned by talking to colleagues and students who are Black is that I can't fully appreciate the harm done by these symbols when they're seen by a person of color or a Black person. The closest I can imagine, and this is not the same, is my visceral reaction when I see a swastika, and I'm of Jewish descent. Another historian of the South phrased it like this: So, when I see a Confederate monument, it doesn't insult my personhood in what it says, but it insults my principles, which is a very different experience than if I were Black.

It’s important for us to realize the harm that these monuments do, and it’s very hard for a white person to appreciate it. A white person must listen and hear what harm is done by these monuments and what message these monuments represent, whether or not they believe that's what the monuments were meant for. With symbols send messages, there's always a subtext. The same goes for the Confederate flag. So I think that's the first thing to remember. 

The second thing to remember is that, when it comes to monuments, I don’t think I’m the most important person to ask. One of the things that I see is that these monuments were put up in an incredibly undemocratic fashion. I think that there isn't anything wrong with allowing communities to decide what to do with them. If they decide they want to put them in a museum, that’s on them. If they decide they want to try contextualization, that's on them. If they decide to pull the thing down and leave it broken in the park, that might be the best solution for them. 

In some ways, I feel like my job is to give the context of the monuments that allows communities to decide what to do about it. I try usually to avoid giving an opinion about what to do with monuments, except when the monuments are in communities that I've lived in. That being said, I think that these monuments are tools of racial oppression at times, as when they stand in front of a courthouse. And so those are especially problematic, and I don't think that they teach history.

Robin Lindley: And what should happen with the Confederate flag?

Professor Adam Domby: I think the Confederate flag has no place being put in front of schools or public buildings. It is a symbol that was from its creation designed to intimidate Black people and to celebrate white supremacy. From its earliest days, the flag was tied to white supremacy and that meaning has only grown over time. [Former Republican Governor] Nikki Haley liked to say that the symbol was appropriated. It wasn't appropriated by white supremacists. It was already owned by them. It just became even more so. 

It’s important for us to remember that fixing the narrative is the starting point to undoing systemic racism. It's not the endpoint to take down the monuments, but it is also not just a symbolic act because it undermines the Lost Cause, which upholds white supremacy. It’s more than a symbolic act because having a democratic landscape that is welcoming to all impacts how the next generation learns about how to understand who's worthy of admiration and what values we should emulate, and who we want to emulate. But it doesn't solve the problems society faces. 

Some political figures are perhaps hoping that, if we just remove the monument, the problem goes away. But the problem is still there. The problem is systemic racism. Getting rid of the monuments is a first step in being able to understand the sin of racism. And so long as you believe the Lost Cause, people will be able to claim with a straight face that systemic racism doesn't exist.

You literally have Republican politicians right now saying that systemic racism is not a thing and that these monuments teach history and have nothing to do with slavery. So long as you have that message going forward, I don't see this [monument removal] as solely symbolic action because the narrative they are upholding is both false and justifying white supremacy.

I would love to see a democratic process and see communities discuss and decide as a group where everyone has a say, but the reality of the situation is that Southern legislatures have made that nearly impossible. And so, perversely, what you have going on is that heritage acts are leading to the destruction of monuments because there is no democratic process. What do people do instead when all legal means are exhausted? There's only one option: they resort to extra-legal means. 

And the process has the potential also to be educational. I saw in Charleston over the last five years that the city has learned about the history of John C. Calhoun through debates, and that's the history that wasn't there when he was just a monument. In the process of removal, people were able to learn something. That being said, that it took five years is both upsetting and surprising. It should have been quicker perhaps but I am also a little surprised it didn’t take longer. 

I would love to see our landscape be one that is welcoming to all. That is more important than using monuments to teach history. I thought for a long time, that Silent Sam and other statues had the potential to be a teaching tool. I could use them to teach about Jim Crow and white supremacy, and racial violence during Reconstruction. And I thought that for longer than I should have. 

But I knew there was no going back when avowed white supremacists started showing up on the UNC campus to “protect” the monument. That's when I had the realization that this monument was making students of color and myself feel unsafe. And I don't need monuments to teach Jim Crow. I don't even need a picture of them. I can talk about it. But I can't teach about Jim Crow if my students and I can't get to the classroom safely. And to me that moment meant long term there was no solution that kept the monument on campus.

The other key thing that led me to shift my views was talking to students and faculty of color and listening to them, hearing them say that they would take a different route when they're going to Franklin Street [to avoid Silent Sam]. When they're walking through campus, they avoid that part of campus. Why are they doing that? The monument was harmful because students need to feel welcome on their campus. A fundamental aspect of being open to learning is to feel safe. It’s very hard to learn when you don't feel safe in that environment. 

Robin Lindley: It’s impressive that you consulted with Black students and Black faculty members on the Silent Sam statue at UNC. Now, with the current climate and the president's comments about race, people are learning more about history. 

Professor Adam Domby: I am not sure it is impressive. It seems UNC should have been doing that all along and they still aren’t. I don’t know about learning history, but with the president’s overt appeals to racism, it's become increasingly hard to deny racism as a problem in our society. 

There were plenty of people in the Obama era who wanted to say that racism is solved. We have a Black president. You will not find people on the left saying that anymore, but you will find people on the right saying that and pushing white supremacist talking points at the exact same time. Some are very clearly lying and are very clearly dog whistling at times. I think there's no question that, when the Trump administration does a lot of these actions, it's a purposeful dog whistle and becoming a foghorn.

Trump went to Mount Rushmore [on July 4, 2020] and announced his plan for a garden of heroes not including a single Native American [at this sacred Native American site]. And, if you look at the language of that executive order explicitly, it says it includes American citizens at the time of the action. If you look at who's considered an American citizen in the 19th century, Native Americans aren't included. Legally speaking, you cannot include Sacajawea who would be an easy choice. She's noncontroversial to whites as she helped white people; she's nonthreatening

The idea that America is a white nation is embodied in that historical narrative that Trump’s pushing. You'll also notice which African Americans are included. It's always whoever is perceived by the right as safe, at least in memory if not in reality, You have MLK, but you don't have Malcolm X. You have Frederick Douglas, but you don't have W.E.B. Du Bois. You have Booker T. Washington instead. You have Frederick Douglas, but you don't have Nat Turner. So, you have safe individuals. A lot of conservatives love to quote MLK and present themselves as being racially progressive. 

Robin Lindley: And they ignore the last three years of Dr. King’s life when he talked about militarism, materialism, racism and economic injustice. 

Professor Adam Domby. They also forgot what happened to him. He said all these great things, and then he got shot and killed. 

When we look at these larger questions of monuments and memory, again and again what we're seeing is that white supremacy is alive and well. And the narratives in history are being used to either signal or overtly state who belongs and who doesn't, who's included and who’s not. When Trump says we’re trying to celebrate our heritage, he's not talking about the heritage of Native Americans or the heritage of Black Americans. He's saying that heritage is about white Americans because it's a concerted, exclusionary perspective. I think that his speechwriter, who presumably was Stephen Miller, did it on purpose. Even though he knew exactly what he was dealing with, he chose to not have a single Native American on that list. The surprise to me is Phil Sheridan and George Custer weren’t on there. 

Robin Lindley: Yes, Custer didn’t make the final cut. Rev. William Barber recently mentioned that Trump focuses on statues but ignores issues of health care, education, economic inequality, and the cost of racism. 

Professor Adam Domby: It's a really important point that Barber made and it’s worth reiterating time and time again: no monument is worth more than a single life. I don't care what the monument is to. I value the life of a human that's living far more than I value any monument to someone who's dead. The idea that you're going to shoot someone for tagging a monument screams that the life of a dead individual from the past is worth more than a current life is very telling. 

Robin Lindley: You stress the extreme violence against Blacks with the massacres of Black Union prisoners of war by Confederate troops during the Civil War, and the postwar lynching of Blacks by the KKK and violence of other vigilantes. How do these crimes and violence against Black Americans tie in with the Lost Cause narrative? 

Professor Adam Domby: We see what the Lost Cause narratives tell us and who we're supposed to celebrate. Why the police violence toward Black men and women is so much more than toward white men and women, has a long history. 

I like to use the example of Nathan Bedford Forrest who grew up in a slave society and worked as a slave trader. He made a fortune off separating families and, to him, that was perfectly acceptable. It was more important to separate families than to keep families together. Let's remember that he sold children away from their families because his bottom line was more important than their lives. When he saw an enslaved person who was out of line in his eyes, his immediate reaction was toward violence. 

And it's no surprise that, during the Civil War, when Forrest sees armed Black soldiers, his immediate reaction is to consider this a slave revolt. And that was the Confederacy's reaction. Jefferson Davis orders said that when they saw Black troops, that was considered a slave revolt. So Forrest was directly involved in murdering Black prisoners of war because, for him, that was the appropriate response. 

And then after the war, when you see African Americans asserting independence and not doing what Forrest wants, he joins in the Klan violence and passes that on to his grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest II, who became a head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and was a Klan leader as well. What he learned growing up in that family was that the appropriate response to African-American asserting independence or being out of line was violence. Values get passed on another generation, not just by people saying you should be racist, but by observing what your father does and what your grandfather does and remembering how he's celebrated after the fact. And Forrest is still celebrated, and so it's no surprise. Then when we move forward to the 1960s, you have Bull Connor in Alabama thinking that violence is the appropriate response to Black children asserting that they had rights. We saw him use dogs and fire hoses and billy clubs. That is a historical legacy of a learned behavior: that a quick reaction with violence is the appropriate way to maintain order. Connor understood violence as how to maintain the status quo. 

And so, it's no surprise that today that police disproportionately shoot African Americans because they grew up in a society which was the society that Bull Connor came out of, which came out of the society that Nathan Bedford Forrest II came out of, and that Nathan Bedford Forrest came out of. And so, this is a long, drawn out process. You talk about fighting against white supremacy. This doesn't end overnight. This is a process that will take generations. And, I'd love for us to be able to declare racism dead tomorrow, but I don't foresee it. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those powerful words Professor Domby. Have you read historian Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, How the South Won the Civil War? 

Professor Adam Domby: It's a brilliant book There’s an old saying that the North won the war but the South won the peace. That is problematic. We must be clear. When we say the South won, what do we mean? We mean the white South, because Southerners also include Black legislators and governors and other as well. If you're talking about South Carolina, for instance, the vast majority of South Carolina was supporting the Union because the vast majority of South Carolinians were enslaved. 

Her book does a wonderful job explaining how we got to where we are today. I think it pairs quite nicely with my own book that looks at the underlying historical narratives of an ideology she studied. 

And our books bring the history to the present, unlike some earlier histories. Bringing the past into the present is actually important right now in this moment where the Lost Cause is present and white supremacy has seen a form of resurgence. And the tie to the president is something that historians should address, in my opinion. Some may say that is too presentist or too political. But you can’t ignore the fact that all of our history writing has an agenda. We all choose to write on topics because we think they matter. Being more upfront about it is actually the best solution. 

I appreciate that many books more recently directly tie into the present situation. I think there's a growing sense among historians that the act of writing history is political and, in the act of teaching of history, the narrative we choose is a political decision. And, to pretend it's not, is it in itself a political decision.  

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Domby for your thoughtful and illuminating comments. And congratulations on your groundbreaking new book The False Cause on the myths of the Confederacy.

Lawrence Matsuda portrait by Alfredo Arreguin

On December 7, 1941, forces of the Japanese Empire attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor and left hundreds of American military members and civilians dead or wounded. In response to the surprise attack, the United States declared war on Japan the next day. The attack on America inflamed anti-Japanese sentiment and hysteria that led to hate crimes, particularly on the West Coast, against aliens and US citizens of Japanese extraction—and those who looked like them.

Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s February 1942 Executive Order 9066, the US government forcibly removed 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes and incarcerated them in concentration camps.  Most of these interned people were kept in the camps until 1945, with the exception of early releases of a few, such as the valiant souls who volunteered to serve in the American armed forces, including members of the Japanese American 442nd Regiment that became the most decorated American unit of the war. Others were released to attend college or work in defense industries like munitions factories in areas away from the West Coast.

The unfortunate internees subjected to the harsh and dehumanizing conditions of the prison camps had committed no crime but were rounded up, dispossessed, and detained unconstitutionally based only on their ancestry and race. And about two-thirds of the internees were United States citizens. 

The detainees included Hanae and Ernest Matsuda who, with removal in 1942, lost their home and grocery business in Seattle. Like thousands of others, they were evacuated without due process and were incarcerated at the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho where Hanae gave birth to two sons and a stillborn child.

Hanae and Ernest Matsuda’s youngest son Lawrence was born in 1945 in Block 26, Barrack 2, of Minidoka Camp. Their baby’s prisoner number was 11464d. 

Now Dr. Lawrence Matsuda, a renowned Seattle writer and human rights activist, brings to life his mother’s travails, traumas, and triumphs in mid-20th century America in his debut historical novel My Name is Not Viola. The events experienced by the fictional Hanae of the novel mirror actual incidents in the life of his mother including her girlhood in Seattle’s Japantown; her pre-war journey to Hiroshima, Japan; her removal from her Seattle home and incarceration at the brutal Minidoka concentration camp; her quest for Hiroshima relatives after the atomic obliteration of the city; her marital woes; her severe depression and incarceration at Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility; her resilience grounded in Japanese and western beliefs; and her evolution as a force for good.

The novel captures the rhythm of life in Seattle’s Japantown, the unrelenting misery of internment at the Minidoka camp, and the pain and loss of internees as they returned home after the war to face dispossession and poverty. This history through the eyes of the fictional Hanae grips the reader with its lively writing and evocative imagery while sharing an important and heartbreaking chapter from our American experience. Yet it is also a story of hope and triumph despite recurrent traumas—and quite timely as we face an unprecedented pandemic and political crises today.

Dr. Matsuda is known in Seattle as a voice for social justice, equality, and tolerance. He is a former secondary school teacher, administrator, principal, and professor. He received an MA and PhD at the University of Washington.  

As a writer, Dr. Matsuda is most well-known for his poetry. His first book of poems, A Cold Wind from Idaho, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2010. He has published two other books of poetry, one in collaboration with renowned American poet Tess Gallagher, as well as a graphic novel about the Second World War experiences of the Japanese American 442 Regimental Combat Team. Chapter one and two of that graphic novel were animated by the Seattle Channel and both won regional Emmys, one in 2015 and the other in 2016. His poems have appeared in many publications including Raven Chronicles, New Orleans Review, Floating Bridge Review, Poets Against the War website, Nostalgia Magazine, Plumepoetry, Surviving Minidoka (book), Meet Me at Higos (book), Minidoka-An American Concentration Camp (book and photographs), the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, and many others. And he co-edited the book Community and Difference: Teaching, Pluralism and Social Justice, winner of the 2006 National Association of Multicultural Education Phillip Chinn Book Award. 

And Dr. Matsuda continues to work tirelessly for a more just and tolerant nation.

He graciously talked about his new novel and his writing career by telephone from his home in Seattle.

Robin Lindley: You had a successful career as an educator, administrator, and professor. How did your “encore career” as a poet and writer come about? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: When I got my PhD, I decided to take something fun because the PhD was tough sledding and not always enjoyable. So, I took a poetry class from Nelson Bentley. 

Robin Lindley: He was a beloved professor at the University of Washington.

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. I enjoyed it a lot. I attended his class several times and read for the Castilla reading series for several years. He always encouraged me to publish my poetry. He was a good person and took great pride in having his students published. 

I moved my energy into poetry after my PhD, and continued to write poetry when I was working. Most of it was not great, but mediocre poetry. 

In about 2008, I decided to get good at poetry. I worked with Tess Gallagher. She helped me with my first book of poetry A Cold Wind from Idaho. I thought I was done because I had worked with some other people who helped. I gave the manuscript to my friend, the artist Alfredo Arreguin, and he said Tess Gallagher was coming to his house, and that he would show the book to her. Evidently, she was taken by the manuscript, but decided it needed revisions. She worked with me for about a year, mostly electronically. We finally met and I submitted to Black Lawrence Press as part of a contest. It didn't win first prize, but received honorable mention, and it was published in 2010. Currently more than 1,300 copies are in print.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing that story. It’s wonderful that one of our great American poets, Tess Gallagher, helped launch your writing career. Now you've written this historical novel, My Name is Not Viola, based on the life of your mother. What sparked a novel at this time? Did you see it as a memoir for you as well as the story of your mother? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: It started as a play in the Minidoka [concentration camp] canteen where old guys were sitting around and talking in a general store--cracker barrel scene.

I decided that the play wasn't going anywhere. It was just talking, and it needed a little more action. So, I looked to my own life and I compared it to my mother's and my mother had a much better story. 

It's not a memoir because some of it is fiction, and it’s not an autobiography. It follows the same character in the first person from beginning to end. It’s a historic novel that looks very much like the memoir.

The bones of the novel are my mother’s story and that structure is true. My mother was born in the United States. She went to Japan and was educated there. She came back to the United States, and thengot married. She was incarcerated. And she went to a mental hospital. So, all the bones are true, and to add flesh, I borrowed some of the stories that she told me. I filled in the blanks and then, to move the story farther, I added stories that I heard from other people about Minidoka. 

I’ve made pilgrimages to Minidoka six or seven times. They have a story time when former internees talk about being there. I borrowed some of those stories, and then farther out, I brought in stories of my friends, and then way out farther it was just fiction. So, the book is historic fiction based on the general outline of my mother's life. 

What motivated me is, I have always thought that each person has a good story, and at least one novel. I decided I needed to write and find my one novel, but it wasn't my story. It was my mother's story. 

The other thing is that I’ve always felt an artist should keep moving. I went from poetry to a graphic novel, to a kind of a poetry exchange with Tess. and then to a novel. I'm always trying to do different things. I think an artist should always try something new. Because the incarceration is so powerful it is very tempting to dwell on it and not move forward.  For the novel, I wanted to present the context of the incarceration and the afterward to give a larger perspective. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for your words on your process. How did you decide on the novel’s title, My Name is Not Viola?

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I found my mother’s high school annual and there were inscriptions like “Good Luck, Viola.” I asked her who Viola was, and she said her teacher gave her that name. 

Robin Lindley:  In your novel, you take your mother’s life and add to the story. Picasso said that art is the lie that tells the truth. You share an engaging human story that deals on so many levels with the forces of history such as racism and injustice and the aftermath of war. It’s incredible how much she dealt with in her life.

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: There are 120,000 stories of people who were 

forcibly incarcerated and each one is different but similar. They all experienced the same thing at different levels. My story is only one of 120,000. 

Robin Lindley: You were born a Minidoka in 1945 so you must not have any direct memory of the internment.

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: No, but I do have borrowed memories. No matter what, at every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every New Year's party, every wedding, funeral, the evacuation and the incarceration always came up. It's just a part of life. And I have these borrowed memories that usually focus on the worst of the experience. 

I don't have clear memories in the traditional sense, but my friend, a psychiatrist, says that, when my mother was pregnant, more than likely some chemicals were sent to me in her womb and that affected me in terms of fear and stress that made up my personality. And he also has said that, when he talks to someone who has deep problems, oftentimes he asks if their grandparents suffered any problems? He says big traumas are passed down for three generations. He feels that what happened to your grandparents and your parents is relevant to your current situation. 

Robin Lindley: I’ve heard about studies on genetics and past trauma. There are several studies with grandchildren and children of Holocaust survivors. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda:  So the trauma is passed down, and somehow you adjust. The third generation of trauma can still affect you.

Robin Lindley: So, we’re haunted by the traumas of earlier generations. You deal with almost a century of modern American history in the book. What was your research process as you wrote the novel?

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I went to Minidoka about six or seven times. In 1969, I taught the first Oriental American history class in the state of Washington at Sharpless Junior High School—now Aki Kurose Middle School. So I was interested in history and, while there, a number of things happened. I met Mineo Katagiri, a reverend who founded the Asian Coalition for Equality, and we worked together. 

Later on, some members of the Asian Coalition for Equality and I confronted the University of Washington because they were not admitting Asian students into their educational opportunity program (EOP). At the time, it was called the Special Opportunity Program, which served poor whites, blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, but not Asians. 

And so, my interest in history took a step into activism. Ironically, it did again with the kids in the Oriental American history class. At that time, we were still referred to as “Orientals” and the term “Asian” was emerging. The class made a display of miniature barracks like those at Minidoka for an exhibit called “The Pride and the Shame,” a Japanese American Citizen League’s traveling exhibit for the University of Washington Museum. 

Bob Shimabokuro in his book, Born in Seattle, writes about how the traveling exhibit was the impetus for the reparations movement for Japanese Americans. So, my history interest moved me into activism, and my activism was rooted in history, especially anti-Asian, anti-Chinese, and anti-Japanese prejudice which culminated in the forced incarceration.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your work for change. To go back to your novel, I’m curious about the story of your main character Hanae, who is based on your mother, and your mother's actual experiences. Did your mother go to Hiroshima, as in the novel, when she was about nine and have a rather dismal experience with her relatives, especially her older brother’s wife?  

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: That was not true. She was born in Seattle and she went to Japan at age one and she returned with her mother and brothers about eight years later.  Her father stayed in Seattle and sent money home to Hiroshima when the family was there. And when she was nine years old, she came back to Seattle. When she was 21, she returned to Hiroshima to live with her older brother and that's when she couldn't get along with her sister-in-law and left after a year. 

Robin Lindley: And did she have an older brother Shintaro who was an officer in the Japanese Navy? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. He was a submarine officer. He was not a captain, but he was a high-ranking officer on a submarine. He mentioned that the warlords were feeling very confident because of the victory over a Western power in the Russo-Japanese War.

Robin Lindley: The militarists were building sentiment for war in Japan in the early 1930s. In your novel, you depict the removal, the evacuation, and the internment vividly. Was your depiction of Hanae’s story in the novel similar to what your mother experienced in the shocking removal and then the incarceration. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes, it was as described

I think most of the Japanese were shocked. They knew that the Japanese nationals were at-risk as non-citizen aliens. There was a law that wouldn't allow them to become naturalized citizens, so they were aliens. That would be her father's generation. But the initial thought among the Japanese was that they would not take the Nisei [second generation] who were US citizens. So, they were shocked when citizens were taken because it was totally unconstitutional and un-American. You don't round up and arrest citizens for no crime without due process, right?

Robin Lindley: Didn’t the US government contend that the order of evacuation and internment was to protect people of Japanese origin because of extreme anti-Japanese sentiment after the Pearl Harbor attack?

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Some people used that excuse, but that wasn't the reason that they were evacuated. If you read the actual evacuation notice, it says all persons of Japanese ancestry, alien and non- alien, were to report to designated locations. And overnight the Nisei, who were citizens, became non-aliens. 

Robin Lindley: And weren't the families and others of Japanese ancestry actually rounded up by troops armed with rifles with fixed bayonets? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. There were troops. The people were told to report to certain places.  The earliest pickups were done by the FBI. They took  mostly first-generation people who were leaders of the community shortly after Pearl Harbor while the bulk of Japanese were taken in April. 

Robin Lindley: It was a heartbreaking violation of human rights and the rule of law. What happened once these citizens and non-citizens were rounded up? What happened to their property and possessions? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: It was different in every region of the country, but here the Japanese obviously sold off a lot of their goods at fire sale prices. And they stored some items. My parents actually stored some goods at a storage company and also at the Buddhist church. 

There were people in rural areas who left their land to others to care for. For example, on Bainbridge Island, some leased their land to their Filipino workers. They did take care of it and when the Japanesereturned, the land was in good shape. And some of the Japanese split the land with the Filipino workers. Other Japanese left the land and it was totally in disrepair when they came back. Many couldn’t keep their properties because they couldn't pay the taxes. So it was lost. 

There are countless stories. One storeowner left his ten-cent store to a Jewish man to care for. I think he was a jeweler who watched the boarded-up store and took care of it. Nothing happened to that store, but other places such as farmhouses were destroyed, especially when they came back. A farm house was burned on Vashon Island. There were farm houses vandalized in anti-Japanese incidents in Hood River where the whole town signed a petition not to permit the Japanese to return--but the Japanese did anyway. 

Each place has a different story, but overall, most of the people lost their businesses. Most of them lost their jobs. Most of them lost their homes. Most of them sold whatever they had at huge discount. So it was a very difficult time. Goods were sold for a penny on the dollar and customers took advantage because they knew that the Japanese were vulnerable. 

Robin Lindley: You have some remarkable scenes in your novel. I was struck when some white person wanted to buy a piano for a dollar. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. The Japanese knew they couldn't take it with them. And, if a store was going out of business, they would sell at a huge discount on all goods. They were trying to make something, no matter how small.

Robin Lindley: Were their physical attacks on people of Japanese origin following the Pearl Harbor attack? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I hadn’t heard of any physical attacks. I know some Filipinos were beaten up because they were thought to be Japanese. The Chinese wore buttons saying “I am Chinese.” And I know that there was a man who was impersonating an FBI agent and he tried to do some bad things to Japanese women. 

Robin Lindley: That was such a time of fear and hysteria. What are some things you’d like people to know about the conditions of the concentration camp at Minidoka where your parents were held and where you and your brother were born? You describe the circumstances vividly in your novel. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: They were in the desert. The food was not always sanitary. The quarters were cramped. There was no privacy. People had to use the latrines instead of regular toilets. There were scorpions and rattlesnakes and dust storms. 

All of that was just a given, but the worst part of it was being betrayed by your country. I compare it to rape. The whole community was raped and we handled it like rape victims. Some were in denial and others tried to prove that they were good citizens. Some committed suicide. Others were just depressed. So, the worst part of it was the mental realization that the whole community was raped. And very few on the outside really cared. I compare it to a rape by your uncle--by someone you trust in your family. It was a rape by our Uncle Sam.

Robin Lindley: And wasn’t the internment out of sight and out of mind, without much press coverage or any outside attention? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. Minidoka was tucked into a ravine and 9,000people were imprisoned there. If you drove by, you wouldn't even see Minidoka even though it was the third largest city in Idaho at the time.

The physical conditions were bad, but I think the mental trauma was really devastating. The fact that your country betrayed you. And afterwards. Think about it. Who can you trust if you can't trust your government to protect you and maintain your rights? Who can you trust? 

Robin Lindley: That history is devastating. What sort of housing did your mom and dad live in there at the concentration camp? I understand the shelters were very crude and crowded with little privacy.

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: They lived in barracks that were hastily constructed. They had tar paper on the outside and weren't shingled or sided. It was like army barracks. It was open and they used blankets as curtains, and several families shared each building. The noises and the smells spread. The barracks were heated by a pot belly stove that burned coal.

At the first relocation center, my parents were given ticking and sent to a pile of straw to stuff a mattress. That's what they slept on at Camp Harmony in Puyallup, which was actually a county fairground. Some of the bachelors lived in the horse stalls that still had horse smells. My cousin got the measles and was quarantined in a horse stall. 

When they moved to the permanent camps, like Minidoka and the other camps, they lived in hastily-constructed, army-style barracks with cracks in the floors, cracks in the walls. The wind would blow through. And the barracks all looked alike so people could get lost and wander into your area at night. 

Robin Lindley: And there were extreme temperatures in the hot summers and cold winters. The weather must have been miserable. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: It was cold and muddy in winter. The residents had to walk on boards that were laid down on the mud. And that was how they got to the mess hall. My mother would never eat Vienna sausage because it caused dysentery several times. 

Robin Lindley: And wasn’t healthcare limited? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: There was a patient hospital on site. When there was an outbreak of dysentery, you had to line up at the latrine with everyone else, because everyone who ate at the same mess hall had dysentery. One night, the lines were so long and the internees were upset, the guards thought there was a riot. Soldiers were going to shoot. The residents shouted, “No, no, it's dysentery. We've got the trots.” And so, the soldiers left them alone.

Robin Lindley: When your parents were released from Minidoka with you and your brother, they returned to Seattle where they had been dispossessed. And your mother was facing the additional trauma of dealing with the probable deaths of her relatives in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: They actually released many people at Minidoka before the end of the war to work, attend college or join the army. My father left several times to find housing, which he never found.  So, they stayed in camp until it closed. The administration shuttered it down, turned off the electricity, and told them to leave, and gave them a train ticket and $25.  

Back in Seattle, my family stayed in the basement of my mother's friend's house for a while. We lived there until my dad could find proper housing, but it was in short supply because of the war and the GIs coming back. 

It was not an easy time. And, there was racial real estate redlining in Seattle, so we couldn't move to the best part of town. We could only move to certain parts of town. If those areas were taken, it was tough luck. And in fact, some of the Japanese who moved out of the Central Area returned and found that African-Americans who came up from the South to work during the war had moved into the redlined area.  

Robin Lindley: That’s another tale of discrimination in America, and we're still living with the results of racist red lining. Thanks for sharing that insight. I didn't realize the effect on the Japanese community. Your mother must have been shaken by the terrible atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the lack of news about her relatives. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. The first news they heard was that Hiroshima was bombed. Tokyo had suffered firebombing with more or less conventional bombs like napalm, but the residents did not understand what an atomic bomb was and the results.  

Recently, I read an article about how the US was suppressing news about the Hiroshima destruction until John Hersey visited Hiroshima and wrote his famous book, which revealed the aftermath. 

The news came in very slowly. It wasn’t like today when, if something happens, CNN is there by the next day. This news dribbled in. They knew that Hiroshima was destroyed, but they didn't know quite what that meant. It was the instantaneous destruction that was hard to comprehend. You could understand something being destroyed slowly, but everything in Hiroshima was vaporized or destroyed in an instant. 

My mother didn't know what happened to our relatives. It was only because of our relatives in the countryside that she found out the full story. But it was tough for her because she had lived in Hiroshima and she knew the city, so it was really devastating to realize that the city and many of her relatives were gone instantly. 

The people of Hiroshima were not soldiers. Soldiers expect to be put in harm's way and die, but these were civilians: old women, old men, young children, and workers.  They were evaporated and destroyed instantly or many died later of radiation sickness. 

Robin Lindley: Have you traveled to Japan and visited Hiroshima? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. I was actually in Hiroshima during the 50th anniversary of the bomb.  It is a strange city. Kyoto is very old. You see the shrines and the old architecture. Hiroshima is modern. It doesn't look like a Japanese city, but a modern city because it was totally destroyed. And in real life, our family home was only a thousand meters from ground zero. 

Robin Lindley: That visit must have been very moving for you then. Now it’s the 75th anniversary. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. But I was surprised too when I met my relatives, the children and grandchildren of my mother's oldest brother. They were all very positive, very healthy, and very energetic. They were generally happy people. I met Akkiko who survived the bomb. She was in the family home at the time.  I met her son, and her son’s son. So it seems life goes on. 

Robin Lindley: Yes, that’s encouraging. Didn’t Akkiko suffer radiation illness and severe burns?  

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. She’s mentioned in the book. 

Robin Lindley: Your description of Hanae’s treatment for depression at Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility, is very moving. It happened in 1962 and you juxtapose her experience with the Cuban Missile Crisis. You also destigmatize mental illness. Does your portrayal in the novel parallel your mother’s own “incarceration” at the hospital when she was admitted for severe depression? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I really couldn't say for sure because she never talked about it. But I did talk to my friend who is a psychiatrist.  He took me to the Western State Hospital Museum and I saw what it was like, and I knew what they did at the time. I studied the hospital’s history and learned that doctors specialized in lobotomies at the time.

Robin Lindley: Did you visit your mother when she was in the hospital? You must have been a teenager then. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I visited her once. They wouldn't let me go inside. We had to meet her in front of the hospital, in the parking area, at the turnaround. She came out to see us.

Robin Lindley: What do you remember about that visit?

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: She was very thin and she looked worse than when she entered. 

Robin Lindley: And what kind of treatment did she receive? Did she actually have shock treatment or electroconvulsive therapy? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I'm sure she did. My psychiatrist friend told me that was pretty standard. 

Robin Lindley: Did your mother seem depressed to you before she was hospitalized? Did she talk about suicide? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes, she seemed depressed, and she was very distant and not engaged. But she did admit to her sister-in-law that she was contemplating suicide. 

Robin Lindley: Wasn’t there almost an epidemic of suicide among the internees after the war?

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. There’s no real data on that because nobody kept track of it. But I talked to Tets Kashima, who was a professor of Asian American studies, and he said in California suicide was prevalent. There were just a lot of suicides. And the other thing was, few people talked about it. 

Robin Lindley: From some history I’ve read, such as The Nobility of Failure by Ivan Morris, it seems that suicide is honorable in Japanese culture and tradition. And in your novel, some characters see suicide as an acceptable way to cope with loss and depression. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: That's the samurai tradition. If you dishonor your master, or yourself, you must die too. That led to a custom of ritual suicide. Hara kiri, which translates into “cut your stomach.” And that’s what samurai did. And my friend, [the artist] Roger Shimomura had ancestors who were famous for a double suicide. They stood face to face and stabbed each other simultaneously. So, they committed ritual suicide together. 

Robin Lindley: That's an elaborate way to go. You indicate that Hanae and your mother were influenced by both Japanese and Christian traditions. Were those traditions a source of your mother’s strength and resilience through the catastrophes in her life? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. I think both of them helped her. She could call on Japanese tradition to deal with her stress if an American tradition did not help. So, she had a little more of an arsenal, if you will, or two toolboxes to pull from. However, some tools that helped her survive became counterproductive. Take the Japanese word shikatanganai. “It can't be helped.” That word helps you get through, but after a while it doesn't move you forward. 

Robin Lindley: Yes. “It can't be helped.” When I read that phrase in your book, it reminded me of Vonnegut’s refrain: “So it goes.” It can’t be helped seems a pessimistic adage rather than we can change this or we can do better. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: It isn't really. Japan was a harsh land of starvation, earthquakes, and typhoons. When your house fell down, no one in the village wanted to hear you crying because their house fell down too. And so it’s shikatanganai, it can't be helped. It's just what happened. 

And in America, a rich country, not a poor country like Japan, there is no shikatanganai. Here, your house falls and you call your lawyer. You sue the city. You sue the architect. You sue your neighbors. But it's not that it couldn't be helped. You’ve got to sue somebody. And it's really an irony that, in a poor country, they accept their fate but in a rich country, they always want to contest what happens. Not always, but there’s a different feeling. So this Japanese value helped my mother and others cope with overwhelming forces. 

Robin Lindley: Maybe that's akin to the acceptance stage of grief. 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes, you accept fate rather than get angry.

Robin Lindley: It’s a different perspective. I was interested in your influences, and you have mentioned the naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and his classic novel The Octopus. Naturalism concerns how characters deal with the forces of nature, the forces aligned against them, and you write beautifully of how your characters take on fate. Do you see the influence of writers like Norris in how Hanae deals with forces beyond her control and then, it seems, becomes a force herself? 

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: Yes. The naturalists felt that the forces of nature superseded human ambition. Human beings have to deal with natural forces at work in this world and these forces often overcame individuals.  In The Octopus, the novel by Norris, the railroad was a force which had to reach from coast to coast to deliver grain to the starving people in India. So that was another force to deal with. And even though the ranchers resisted the railroad, they couldn't stand up to it because the force was more potent. It had to deliver the grain to feed the starving masses. 

If you look at our situation today, there are numerous outside forces at play. One is obviously the pandemic. The other is the political situation. And these forces that are largely out of our control. But in the novel, Hanae managed to survive the adverse forces and learned to surf the waves of the tsunami and become a force herself--not a capital letter F force like feeding the starving in India, but a small force that is filled with equality and social justice. 

We're in that kind of a situation now. The large forces out there can destroy us, but we must learn to use them and to survive them and become forces for good. And if many people get together and become forces themselves, they can become a large force, like a natural force, like the starving masses in need of grain. We need to persevere and make it to the other side and become forces ourselves.

Robin Lindley: And you have been a force for social justice and for democracy in your writing and in your activism and teaching.

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I have tried.

Robin Lindley: I’ve read about your many accomplishments. You’re too humble. You’ve written now about atrocious incidents and the resulting trauma, but you have also shared triumphs of the human spirit. Where do you find hope today?

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: When I was a kid, I read all the Greek mythology in the Beacon Hill Library at grade three. And that helped me. I think that mythology is something like history. I recall that Pandora opened a box and unleashed all these horrible things. But the thing that was left in the box was hope. There is still hope.

Robin Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add for readers?

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda: I'd like to speak to why the Japanese were incarcerated. Three presidents, Reagan, Bush Senior, and Clinton, said in the letters of apology. They said the causes were racial discrimination, wartime hysteria, and failed leadership. And I ask you to take a look at what we have now regarding racial discrimination. My hope is that things get better. For wartime hysteria, which was called propaganda then, and is now called fake news. I hope that the network that peddles fake news crashes and burns. And the last one, failed leadership. I hope that our failed leaders are repaired or replaced soon. So those are my three hopes. 

Robin Lindley: Those are powerful thoughts to end on. Thank you for sharing your thoughtful comments Dr. Matsuda, and congratulations on your moving new novel, My Name is Not Viola. It’s been an honor to speak with you.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, NW Lawyer, ABA Journal, Real Change, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, and art. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Dr. Lawrence Matsuda, a renowned Seattle writer and human rights activist, brings to life his mother’s travails, traumas, and triumphs in mid-20th century America in his debut historical novel My Name is Not Viola. 

It’s been a season of uncertainty and dread in the United States as we contend with a deadly global pandemic, a reckoning with centuries of racism, bitter political divisions, historic environmental disasters, political corruption, and an unraveling of national institutions, among other challenges.

For another perspective on history and for words of encouragement, I consulted distinguished Indian author, scholar, editor, and public intellectual Professor Nibir K. Ghosh, a recognized and reliable source for knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration. 

In a lively dialogue by email, we recently discussed Professor Ghosh’s background, his literary study and works, and his thoughts on history and current events. He generously shared his views on the situation in India and its history as that huge nation now struggles with COVID-19 and approaches the number of cases and deaths that the US grimly has attained. With his background in American studies and his academic work in the US, his insights on our history and culture are particularly astute and timely. 

Beyond the sweep of history and this fraught moment, Professor Ghosh shares insights on the writers and thinkers he studies. His new collection of essays and other writing, Mirror from the Indus, is a treasure trove of his words and wisdom with timeless relevance. For instance, note the resonance now of his comments on the lives and work of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And, Professor’s Ghosh’s vision of the interconnectedness of all people in One World without discrimination is particularly instructive and inspiring today as both of our nations face the future with anxiety, ambivalence, and guarded hope.

Dr. Ghosh, D.Litt., is a UGC [University Grants Commission] Emeritus Professor and former Head, Department of English Studies & Research, Agra College, Agra, India. An eminent scholar and critic of American, British and Post-Colonial literatures, he has published over 180 articles and scholarly essays on various political, socio-cultural and feminist issues in reputed national and international journals.  

Professor Ghosh is also the founder and chief editor of Re-Markings (www.re-markings.com), an international biannual journal of research in English. Besides Mirror from the Indus, Professor Ghosh is the author of 14 other acclaimed books including Gandhi and His Soulforce Mission; Charles Johnson: Embracing the World; Multicultural America: Conversations with Contemporary Authors; Calculus of Power: Modern American Political Novel; Shaping Minds: Multicultural Literature; W.H. Auden: Therapeutic Fountain; and Perspectives on Legends of American Theatre.

Professor Ghosh was awarded the prestigious Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle during 2003-04. He is currently on the Review Panel of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) published by the University of Connecticut, and the African American Review, the Quarterly International Journal on Black American Literature and Culture of the Modern Language Association. During 1992-96, he was the Executive Member of the Board of Directors for the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC) in Hyderabad. Funded by the US government, the Centre was one of the most important institution for American Studies outside of the United States. For two consecutive terms, Professor Ghosh was elected to the ASRC Board with an overwhelming majority, an unprecedent achievement in the history of the organization.

In 2018, The Osmania University Centre for International Programmes, Hyderabad, conferred upon Professor the Lifetime Achievement Award during the Centennial celebrations of Osmania University.

 Professor Ghosh’s blogs www.nibirkghosh.blogspot.com and www.elsaindia.blogspot.com reflect his curiosity and his constant engagement with society, polity, culture, and more.

Robin Lindley: It’s a pleasure to hear from you Professor Ghosh. Congratulations on your fascinating new book Mirror from the Indus. You’re a distinguished professor and scholar of literature and history as well as a public intellectual in India. Did your family and early schooling lead you to your career pursuits? Did you have some especially influential teachers and professors?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Thank you for your keen interest in my work, especially in Mirror from the Indus.

When I look back from the vantage point of the present moment at my early childhood, I can easily recall how fond I have always been of reading for pleasure and wisdom. To my father, who served in the Indian Air Force, I truly owe the incessant urge to fall in love with words and ideas that came from reading fairy tales, illustrated comics, classical tales of adventure, stories of revolutionary heroes, pictorial books on Indian History etc. that I would receive from him as gifts. From my mother’s zeal in performing her pujas (worship), I developed an early interest in spiritual stories. As a student my favorite subjects were English, Science and Mathematics. I had my initial schooling in Air Force School in Delhi before the family moved to Agra where I joined the Air Force Central School.

In those days it was customary for bright students to have either Engineering or Medicine as appropriate career options. I fondly remember how my English teachers would always encourage me to participate and represent my school in debate, essay writing and elocution contests. When I stood first in V class, our principal, Mrs. I. Montes, gifted me King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table retold by Phyliss Briggs, a story that impressed me a great deal. However, you will be surprised to know that teaching as a career never figured in my wildest imagination. After my schooling, I did my graduation in Science from Agra College, Agra (founded in 1823 during the British rule). While doing my graduation I joined the Coca Cola company as a Chemist for a while. 

It was after my graduation that I was in dilemma whether to go in for M.Sc. in Physics or for M.A. in English literature. After a good deal of deliberate reflection, I finally opted for the latter. Though I had been reading literature for enjoyment for years, the post-graduation course opened a completely new universe because I was able to see in what I read the inevitable connection between literature, history, society and polity of numerous nations and cultures. When my name appeared in the merit list of the University, I began to receive offers of appointment as a Lecturer in English. That is how I entered the teaching profession. I had no regrets of not going for more lucrative jobs because the opportunity to teach literature gave me the happy satisfaction of being able to combine my vocation and avocation. 

Robin Lindley: That sounds like the ideal career choice. What was the subject of your doctoral dissertation and what did you learn from that study?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: The topic of my Ph.D. work was “W. H. Auden: From Communism to Christianity.” My doctoral work was a very exciting experience. It gave me access to a totally new way of looking at events, ideas and personalities beyond the limited confines of what I had been hitherto reading. It introduced to me the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives. 

In connection with my work I visited on a regular basis the British Council and American Center libraries in New Delhi and had long periods of stay at the American Studies Research Center at Hyderabad. The study of Auden’s poems made me delve into the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression of 1929, the Weimar Republic in Germany and the emergence of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War culminating in World War II, Existentialism as a philosophy, Psychology from Freud and Jung to Langland, besides various nuances of Christianity, all of which seemed necessary to get the right perspective to studying the writings of Auden. 

Robin Lindley: How do you see the arc of your career from professor and author and now to chief editor of your ambitious and lively journal of the arts and culture, Re-Markings?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: I see a natural evolution in the ‘arc’ of my career from a teacher to author to the Chief Editor of Re-Markings. 

As a teacher I enjoyed interacting with my students and in motivating them to see how the narratives they read were relevant to the lives they lived. My participation in seminars and conferences on a regular basis brought me into close contact with scholars and academicians from different parts of India and abroad.

Right from the time I joined the teaching profession, I got many opportunities for publishing my work in magazines and periodicals of repute. On many occasions it had struck me that I should do something in return for all the valuable space that my writings got in prestigious publications. That is how Re-Markings was born in March 2002 as an International biannual Journal of English Letters. I felt happy to provide a forum to aspiring scholars, academics, poets and critics to express their concerns. 

It is difficult to believe how time flies as in March 2021 Re-Markings is slated to complete 20 years of its publication. As for the international outreach and the prestige the journal enjoys, you are in a better position to judge. In starting and continuing the publication from Agra, I must acknowledge the ideational and graphic support and guidance I have constantly received from its Executive editor, Sandeep Arora. 

Robin Lindley: Much of your writing and research concerns British and American literature and history. What sparked this focus?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: My writings and research in British literature began with the study of authors and works prescribed in the master’s program and continued unabated to the study of Auden and beyond. In my M.A. course we had a special paper on Modern American Literature that introduced me to writers like Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neil and others. 

My knowledge of American History largely evolved from a course I attended at the American Studies Research Center, Hyderabad in 1978. The one-month long course was titled “Looking for America.” The faculty comprised distinguished professors from American universities in the domain of Literature, History and Culture. One professor, John G. Cawelti from Chicago University and author of The Six Gun Mystique, became a close friend. The discussions I had with him, when he visited Agra, and later through correspondence, proved very valuable in my enhancement of the knowledge of American literature and history. 

Robin Lindley: What’s it been like for you to live and work in the romantic city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal—a tribute to love? You rhapsodize about the remarkable city in your writing about the literary giant Rabindranath Tagore and in other work.

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Living, studying and teaching in Agra has been an enriching experience. Agra, having been the center of Mughal rule, is steeped in History. The monuments like the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri etc. make you feel a part of a bygone era. It is from Fatehpur Sikri that Emperor Akbar preached his philosophy of Sulaha Kul or the essential oneness of all religions. I used Rabindranath Tagore’s poem on Shajahan to say that if a poet could give eternal life to a monument made in alabaster, how greater must be his ability to give vibrancy to the nameless toiler and tiller of the land. 

Robin Lindley: In addition to your writing on literature, you have an excellent grasp of history and the context of the works you study. How do you see the role of history in your research and writing?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: I have always believed that no matter how much we talk about art for arts’ sake kind of writings, literature isolated from history and culture cannot exist on its own. An extensive study of the relationship between American history, literature and politics became the focus of my book Calculus of Power: Modern American Political Novel published 1997. In this book I have examined American literature from the perspectives of Economics, War, Women Empowerment, Race, and American Justice on Trial. While engaged in this expansive project, I made an in-depth foray into the history of the foundation and subsequent making of America into a super power. 

Robin Lindley: Your new book, Mirror from the Indus, presents a collection of your essays, tributes and memoirs. How would you like to introduce this remarkable collection to new readers?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: That’s an interesting question. The endorsements on the beautiful cover by celebrities like Ethelbert Miller, Dr. Tijan M. Salah and professor Jonah Raskin are bound to evoke great expectations in new readers. I would like to say that they will most likely find in my select writings a wide-ranging variety of themes, personalities and concerns. 

By exploring and examining the life and work of a very eclectic list of writers, poets, social reformers, spiritual giants, revolutionaries, freedom fighters, monarchs, statesmen, artists, and intellectuals, I have tried to show that compassion and sensitivity to human concerns, the ability of individuals to be the change they wish to see in the world, the courage and the grit to challenge the status quo, defending the right of individuals to exist as individuals, the ordinariness of the extraordinary pursuits of enlightened humans in the terrain of all the temporal as well as universal, are bound to keep them riveted to the collection.

Robin Lindley: The book is a gift to readers. I enjoyed especially enjoyed your introductions to several writers and scholars who were new to me. A subtitle for Mirror could be something like Writing Without Borders. 

In the introduction, you describe this anxious time during a deadly global pandemic, and conclude that section with this inspiring sentence: “Let us all come together as members of One World to fight and defeat the forces of pestilences and usher in a glorious Republic of peace, prosperity and happiness without any discrimination.” It’s obvious that transcending boundaries is important to you. How can the humanities, the arts, help do this?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Thank you for enjoying reading through Mirror. Yes, I agree that in keeping with the contents of the book, ‘Writing Without Borders’ could very well be taken as a subtitle. 

I have always believed from my own experience of interface with people from different communities, religions, nations, cultures and the like, that innately there is in all of us a craving for a world without borders. It is only when we begin to get out of what Robert Frost calls the “Mending Wall” syndrome that real communication takes place in a spirit of easy give and take. I may cite from my own life as a case in point. I was born in Poona (now Pune), the land of the Maratha ruler Shivaji, into a Bengali household. My mother tongue is Bengali. I have lived in the Hindi heartland most of my life. My wife (to whom I have dedicated the book) is a Punjabi. I have felt hugely enriched by not restricting myself to particular climes and regions be it national or international. I have loved and enjoyed reading Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway as much as Anton Chekhov, Albert Camus or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If you look at the titles – “Beyond Boundaries.” “Embracing the World,” “Shaping Minds,” “Erasing Barricades,” Multicultural America” etc. – of many of the books that I have authored and edited, you may notice that harmony and oneness constitute the essence of my creative and critical endeavors. 

As an instance of my approach to overcoming prejudices and stereotypes, I would like to share an experience with a Pakistani gentleman. On my return home from the Fulbright tenure at the University of Washington, Seattle, I received a call from one Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani requesting me to edit a collection of essays written by Fulbrighters from India to America and from America to India. Considering the enormity of the task and constraints of time, I said no. In the next minute, Zeeshan said that could I reconsider my decision in the light of the fact that his mother hails from Agra. I had no alternative. I named the collection Beyond Boundaries. The arts and the humanities can go a long way to create bridges between cultures. In 2017, Re-Markings brought out A World Assembly of Poets as its signature Special Number, guest-edited by Dr. Tijan M. Sallah. The contributors included poets from all the five continents and over sixty countries. Even a cursory glance at the volume will convince you how only in the true Republic of Poets all demarcations separating one individual from the other can disappear.

If you look at the list of contents in Mirror from the Indus, you may notice that the figures taken into account are from various communities, religion and culture: Hindu, Brahmin, Dalit, Muslim, Sikh, Jew, Christian, Anglo-Indian, French, Canadian, British and what have you.

Robin Lindley: Your work brings light and pulses with your love of humanity and justice. Do you consider yourself a humanist?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Yes, obviously. It is not a crime, I guess, to profess the love of humanity and justice. 

In our own era, from a pragmatic point of view, it may be gainful to avoid clichés like justice and human values because the majority always tends to remain in the mainstream and go with the flow of the current but I strongly agree with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement that “our life begins to lose meaning the day we become silent about things that matter.” I learnt very early from my experiences in several roles, that if one decides to fight for justice at any level one must learn to conquer both ‘temptation’ and ‘fear.’ I have always tried to portray this through my own actions and through all my writings, talks and lectures.

Robin Lindley: Your writing reflects those values. And, in your writing and well researched articles, you make me want to read and learn more, particularly from the authors and books you cite. Is it fair to call you a literary activist?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: If activists are not identified with any flag-carrying activities, I would not mind being called a literary activist. Each issue of Re-Markings in its 20-year journey has remained committed to its manifesto of highlighting broad socio-political and cultural issues of human import so as to promote harmony through healthy interactive discussions and debates. Even when I am lecturing or delivering a talk to audiences comprising the youth, I remain focused on what each of us can do in our individual capacities to reduce discrimination, disparity and prejudice that create yawning gulfs among one individual or group and another. 

Robin Lindley: Bridging gulfs between people is a noble goal in today’s world. In your tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and his relevance now, you note how he influenced the likes of President Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called Gandhi’s influence “inescapable.” What do you think Dr. King meant?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Please allow me to cite the words of Barack Obama on Gandhi that I have used in my tribute to Gandhi in Mirror: “He (Gandhi) inspired Dr. Martin Luther King. . . if it hadn't been for the non-violent movement in India, you might not have seen the same non-violent movement for civil rights here in the United States. . . He was able to help people who thought they had no power realize that they had power, and then help people who had a lot of power realize that if all they're doing is oppressing people, then that's not a really good exercise of power."  

Dr. King had reiterated that Gandhi had “lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk.” 

In a world torn by conflict and violence, Gandhi’s ideals of “truth and non-violence” may seem at times quite anachronistic but there is much logic in his simple observation that “an eye for an eye would make the whole world blind.” As a politician, Gandhi may have made mistakes but as a mortal he continued to perform his experiments with truth till the very end of his life. 

Robin Lindley: You’re well acquainted with the lives of Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi and others who have worked for social justice. To help readers understand their strategy in working for justice, how do you think nonviolent resistance now might advance the dismantling of systemic racism in the US—and perhaps quell the political and religious friction in India?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: That’s a complex question. In order to dismantle the solid structures of systemic racism in US and political and religious friction in India on the lines of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, it is necessary that leadership must spring from the youth who will be able to project and guard the interests and concerns of their respective communities without bothering about promoting their own vested self-interests. 

Mindsets cannot be changed with speeches and slogans; they can be broken only through sterling acts of self-sacrifice. Gandhi was forthright in pointing out in the “Introduction” to his Autobiography that “My experiments have not been conducted in the closet, but in the open…. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of Satyagraha, not to say how good I am. In judging myself I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be.” What is relevant to caste/race applies equally to religion. 

Robin Lindley: You comment on many literary giants in your new book with sensitivity and understanding. I loved the jungle stories and other writing of Rudyard Kipling when I was young but later came to see him, as George Orwell did, as a hidebound British jingoist and imperialist and thus came to ignore his writing. You have a more thoughtful and nuanced view. How do you see Kipling’s writing?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: I do not wish to contest your dislike of Kipling and his writings but do allow me to point out that George Orwell, in the same remark that you allude to, admitted that “During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” 

In my view, in spite of Kipling’s jingoistic imperialism, he commands admiration of readers by his sensitive approach to human problems. For over a century now, Rudyard Kipling’s poetic utterance, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” has been used time and again, both in and out of context, by all and sundry to define visible boundaries that demarcate civilizations characterized by the East and the West. Consequently, I thought of doing a bit of research to find out what led Kipling to draw such an inference.

It is indeed ironical that Kipling’s most misunderstood statement is generally used by those who have probably not read the poem at all. Through a single line, they are quick to conclude that there exists an unbridgeable gulf between the two civilizations – one supposedly ultramodern and the other gradually rising out of a relatively primitive past. Endowed by the bliss of ignorance, they tend to ignore, perhaps deliberately, the true import of Kipling’s observation that does not end with the line mentioned above but goes on to the length of a full quatrain that reaffirms human belief in synthesis and synchronicity by cutting across cultural barriers. The quatrain with which Kipling’s 1892 poem, “Ballad of East and West,” begins and ends reads thus:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,  Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;  But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,  When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.

In my piece on Kipling in Mirror I have shared my inference that Kipling sees the relationship between the ruler and ruled not permanently confined to master/slave binaries but one that can, through courage and daring, meet on the level ground of equality. 

In both spirit and flesh Kipling’s poetic statement ought to transform those who espouse the idea that civilizations should never mix and that cultural barriers are insurmountable. In the present era of communication and satellite revolutions it may be futile and superfluous to imagine that “mortal millions” should remain isolated and “alone” in inviolable cultural isles of their own. Also, you may have noticed from your reading of The Jungle Book how Kipling draws our attention to ways and means to deal with the environmental crises that we are now facing.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those comments on Kipling’s still relevant words. In discussing the work of Somerset Maugham, you state: “Above all, Maugham has succeeded in demonstrating through The Moon and Sixpence that masterpieces are eternal contemporaries of mankind and have value and significance beyond the immediate confines of a particular moment in history.” How do you see “the confines of history”?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Frankly speaking, what drew me to The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham was my deep interest in the life of Paul Gauguin. In school, I had read somewhere that when Gauguin had gone nearly bankrupt after quitting his job as a stock-broker in Paris, and his wife had scorned him saying that if his paintings couldn’t even buy some medicines and a glass of milk for their ailing son, they were really worth nothing. Gauguin had calmly accepted that, though she was right then, yet his paintings would someday adorn the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Somerset Maugham’s fictional biography reminds us that though, striving for the ‘Moon’, Paul Gauguin may have landed himself with only ‘Sixpence’ in his lifetime, but what is significant is how posterity has acknowledged his immortal creations. 

My reference to “the confines of history” suggests that immortality of an artist can never be judged by contemporary appraisal of art but must await the continuous assessment of time beyond the immediate moment in history.   

Robin Lindley: I enjoyed your tribute to the renowned English poet W. H. Auden, the subject of your dissertation. You write that Auden, though not a church-going Christian, saw the teachings of Jesus as “a strong reaction against the evil and absurdity of class and racial prejudice.” What did Auden see in the words of Jesus? 

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Thanks for your appreciation of my tribute to W. H. Auden in Mirror from the Indus. Auden’s views and his interpretations of Christianity are both descriptive and prescriptive. His prose pieces are as elaborately concerned with Christianity as his poetic outpourings. 

In numerous essays, Auden explores the theme of Christianity in its essence and tries to relate its relevance to man’s needs in contemporary society. For Auden, even a bleak post-war landscape attains significance when viewed through the perspectives of a Christian world. Though the chaotic conditions exist yet there is an undercurrent of hope that the situation is redeemable. 

Auden considers God to be “the cause and sustainer of the universe” and says that “our real desire is to be one with Him. . . Ultimately that is the purpose of all our actions.” He demands that God should be invoked to restore order and meaning to the universe: “Let us praise our Maker, with true passion extol Him/ For, united by His word, cognition and power, / System and Order, are a single glory.”

Auden affirms the value of faith and what it can achieve. He extols the idea of faith in a world devoid of spiritual values. In his personal life too, Auden was wholly devoid of self-importance or pretentiousness, and he often revealed a humility that was both deep and genuine. Kindness and generosity were traits of his individual behavior.

On the basis of faith in God, Auden is able to assess the nature of ‘Love’ in a deeper and more precise manner. It is my strong assumption that Auden believed in the solitary and silent mode of praying and not in prayer as a spiritual exercise. He criticized the sectarian spirit displayed by the churches but honestly believed in the quintessence of Christianity. Christianity, for him, stood for something more profound than the celebration of empty ceremonials. 

Robin Lindley: You’re a friend of award-winning author, professor, public intellectual, and all-around brilliant scholar and artist Charles Johnson, a University of Washington professor emeritus. You wrote a book about his work, Charles Johnson: Embracing the World, with American poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller. You also worked with Professor Johnson at the UW. How did you come to work with him and how do you see his place in the pantheon of American literary figures?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Many years ago, when the Public Affairs Section of U.S. Embassy, New Delhi, informed me that Charles Johnson—author of Middle Passage, Oxherding Tale, Dreamer etc., a MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Book Award—was visiting India on a lecture tour, and that I was to accompany him in India, I was thrilled by the prospect of interviewing him against the backdrop of the Taj Mahal.  My enthusiasm did not last long as his visit did not ultimately materialize on account of the Iraq war. Perhaps Fate had ordained that we would meet not in Agra but at the University of Washington, Seattle. 

Initially, when I was awarded the prestigious Senior Fulbright Fellowship, my choice as the place of work was City University New York with Professor Morris Dickstein as my faculty associate. When I was given an additional option by CIE in Washington, DC., I decided to join the University of Washington as my project was on contemporary African American Writings, with Charles Johnson as my faculty associate. 

Two days after settling down at an apartment at Furman Avenue (thanks to the kind courtesy of professor Richard Dunn, HOD English), we were pleasantly surprised to see at our dwelling none but the famed Charles Johnson himself who, accompanied by his daughter Elizabeth, came to visit us. I warmly welcomed him by wrapping a shawl around him as we honor scholars in India. Guess how he reciprocated! He gave me a huge packet he had brought for us. When I untied the fancy ribbons and opened the packet, there lay in front of us over two score books—novels, essays, interviews, photo-autobiography, and so much more—all of which he had authored. His endearing inscription on each one of them made them all the more valuable. I instantly realized the extent of his magnanimity and goodness that I had hitherto seen in his correspondence. I may also mention here that Dr. Sunita’s project, as a Visiting Scholar at the School of Asian Languages, UOW under the guidance of professor Michael Shapiro, was translating Johnson’s novel Dreamer into Hindi.

My frequent long conversations with him contributed significantly to my understanding of the nuances and complexities of certain basic issues confronting contemporary America and also inspired me to engage in fruitful conversations many other celebrities within and beyond Afro-America. 

We were truly privileged to be introduced by Charles to August Wilson who invited us to dinner at the Broadway Grill. The animated exchanges that I had with authors like August Wilson, David Guterson, Octavia Butler, Jonah Raskin, Ethelbert Miller, Kathleen Alcala and others besides Charles Johnson, flowered into a precious collection titled Multicultural America: Conversations with Contemporary Authors (2005). 

Before meeting Charles Johnson, I was very much familiar with the works of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin and many other African American writers, poets, philosophers and critics. In my view Johnson has created an enviable niche for himself in the pantheon of African American writings.

Robin Lindley: How would you describe Professor Johnson’s style and voice as a writer of fiction and nonfiction?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: As you may be aware, Johnson’s work, especially his fictional output, is firmly grounded in Philosophy. I truly admire his non-fiction where his voice is most pronounced and impactful. His Buddhist leanings have not only added to the glory of his writings but also contributed a great deal to his abiding generosity and compassion that one can instantly recognize on meeting and talking to him.

I had interviewed him for my book, Multicultural America: Conversations with Contemporary Authors and also for Re-Markings. It is very significant that hinting at the danger of living in a parochial cultural fishbowl, he lyrically resonates the need for a completely new outlook that makes some narrow race-centered complaints irrelevant in an increasingly complex multicultural and global economy. He not only loves to address the symptoms of change in terms of acute identity crisis but also tries to prepare the aesthetic ground for such a change. Our mutual bonds of friendship brought him to Agra where I enjoyed his and Sharyn’s loving company with the Taj as a backdrop in February 2018. 

Robin Lindley: You’re a sensitive reader with innovative views of the literature you consider. I was struck by an essay you wrote on Joseph Heller’s classic satirical and painful war novel, Catch-22. You mentioned Wilfred Owens’ famous words on “the pity of war.” How did you come to write about Heller’s book? Are there other works on war you’d suggest for readers?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: As I have mentioned earlier in this conversation, a chapter of my book Calculus of Power: Modern American Political Novel is titled “In the Theatre of War” where I have taken up for discussion four war novels: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 

Heller’s novel Catch-22 has always fascinated me for its unique approach to war and all that it involves. The central problem before the novel’s protagonist is to find means and devise a strategy to survive in the hostile bureaucratic system. It is through Yossarian’s inner conflict mainly that one gets a fairly good idea of what it means to be trapped in such a system. Heller exposes the hypocrisy of the bureaucratic enterprise based on the purely vested interests of those who are at the top of the hierarchy and who want the war to go on irrespective of the need for a motive. He is decidedly against the capricious self-seekers who are either making money or having fun at the expense of performing heroic deeds in order to win honor and worship for he feels he can easily be replaced by any of the ‘ten million people in uniform.’ 

Unlike Fortinbras (in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) who was prepared to risk the lives of twenty thousand men for an egg shell, Yossarian has only one passion: to stay alive and fight those in power who were about to get him. He lives in perpetual dread of everything he could possibly imagine.

In a carnivalesque spirit Heller exposes the hypocrisy of the military bureaucracy without undermining, of course, the military strength and superiority of the United States of America. Through the use of unconventional mode of aesthetic expression, blending pungent humour with the horrifying spectacle of war, Heller succeeds in conveying that the conventional heroics associated with war are no longer tenable in the modern era. 

Robin Lindley: I appreciated the introduction in your new book to the work of Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal. Decades ago, we were taught in my public school that the Indian caste system was extremely rigid and that Untouchables or Dalits were outcasts doomed to lives of drudgery and brutal discrimination without hope of social mobility. What is the reality of the caste system now and the situation of Dalits today?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: What you were taught decades ago about Indian caste system being extremely rigid has been in resonance with ground reality even in contemporary times. 

As the ambivalence of the “American Dilemma” continues to haunt the conscience of the most powerful democracy in the world, the USA, no less problematic is the issue of Caste for the world’s largest democracy, India. During elections it can be seen how important a role caste plays in determining the suitability of a contestant fielded by any political party.

According to many noted Dalit writers, it is true that oppression and humiliation of the Dalits have not ceased. They exist still in subtler variations in many segments of society and polity despite sweeping changes in legislations and legal sanctions.

I have specifically mentioned in my essay on Namdeo Dhasal in Mirror from the Indus that. though India can take pride in upholding its democratic credentials by installing two Dalit Presidents in the Rashtrapati Bhavan and electing a Dalit woman chief minister four times in the largest state in India besides numerous ministers to the union and state cabinets, it cannot be denied that Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s dream of liberty, equality and fraternity continues to elude the Dalit community in India.

My view is that the Dalits in India and the African Americans in the US who come from poor economic backgrounds must be made to understand the importance of upward mobility through education and work skills despite all the challenges that may threaten such initiatives. Also, the ones who have reached the higher echelons of power through affirmative action/reservation must take the initiative to encourage their less fortunate brethren to rise and shine in a grossly unequal world. 

A large measure of hope for the Dalits lies in the fact that they are getting increasingly articulate in projecting their rights and responsibilities through their writings in print and social media.

Robin Lindley: When Dr. King visited India in 1959, a school principal referred to him as an American “Untouchable.” King was stunned but, on reflection, agreed with that assessment. A big question, but from what you know of America and our history, is the view of Black people in the US comparable how Dalits or “Untouchables” are seen and treated in India?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Dr. King may have been surprised to be seen as a “Black Untouchable” in 1959 because he may not have been aware of the fact that Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit icon, had first brought to light the similarities between the predicament of the African Americans in the US and the Dalits in India in terms of oppression, discrimination and inequality. 

W. E. B. Dubois had written a letter to Dr. Ambedkar lauding his leadership in the Dalit cause. Dr. Ambedkar had inspired and encouraged several Dalit scholars to go to the U.S. to study African American literature and to interact with activists in the field. African American literature, consequently, served as a model for Dalits in India who wanted to give expression to their suffering and agony on account of centuries of exploitation and discrimination. Time and again, Dr. Ambedkar pointed out to his devout followers that they could learn from their African American counterparts how to articulate their emotions with boldness and daring. Using the activist model provided by the Black Panther movement, the Dalit Panther movement was created in Maharashtra.

There are close parallels where race in the US and caste in India are concerned though some, like Lama Rangdrol, may argue that the Dalits live in greater misery than the average black in America. 

Though atrocities against Dalits continue to be seen in India, it cannot be denied that changes in attitude are also visible in Dalit writings. New ways of thinking, the outlook of the new generation, scientific and technological advancement, the IT revolution etc. have affected a paradigm shift in peoples’ consciousness. 

The discriminatory modes too have undergone changes. The social media and the internet provide the opportunity to connect with everyone on earth without the prejudice of caste, creed, color, religion or nationality. 

Robin Lindley: Like me, many readers may be puzzled by the ongoing religious tensions and eruptions of violence on the south Asian subcontinent. Did the tensions today originate with the partition and independence in 1947, or was there always violence between the two primary religions, Hindu and Muslim? This topic is worthy of many books, but what’s your sense?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: It would not be correct to conclude that religious tensions and eruptions of violence between the Hindu and Muslim communities in India originated as a result of the partition of the nation in 1947. Of course, the partition drew a permanent wedge in the two communities and those who had lived in peace and harmony for ages turned foes overnight and participated in orgies of violence that remain unparalleled in the history of the sub-continent. 

In my opinion the Hindu-Muslim discord is a legacy of the divide-and-rule policy of the British Government. The First War of Independence (which the British designate as a mutiny), that took place in 1857 and literally shook the citadel of English rule in India, was fought with the Hindus joining hands with the Muslims to drive away the British. Consequently, after the failure of the combined forces, the British power realized that in order to consolidate their Empire, it was necessary to pit one community against the other. In fact, the English succeeded in their sinister design by creating pressure groups who advocated the partition of the country. It is, however, relevant to note that the Indian National Army (INA) under the leadership of the revolutionary leader Subhas Chandra Bose offers a unique example of Hindu-Muslim amity and brotherhood. 

Even today, the legacy of creating communal discord under the divide-and-rule policy seems to be a convenient tool in the hands of politicians to sustain their political existence. 

Robin Lindley: Our current president Donald Trump and India’s Prime Minister Modi are seen by some commentators as similar in that they both use fear and division to appeal to their political bases. Our countries are very different, but do you agree with that view of the two leaders? How do you see them? 

Professor Nibir Ghosh: History bears evidence to the fact that be it democracy or dictatorship, the leaders do resort to the use of fear and division to keep themselves in power. The strategy of the two leaders you mention may be quite similar when it comes to consolidating their respective political bases. But what makes Modi different is that he enjoys the admiration of people from the lower economic strata on account of his ability to connect with them on one-to-one basis through his emotional speeches and seemingly genuine concern.

Robin Lindley: Indian writing in English is gaining popularity in the United States. Who are a few Indian writers you’d recommend to American readers?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Since most American readers are already aware of the much-hyped works of Booker and Pulitzer Prize recipients who are immigrant US citizens, I would recommend writers like R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, U. R. Ananthamurthy, Mahashweta Devi, Munshi Premchand, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra among numerous others.

Robin Lindley: You thoughtfully consider this era of the COVID 19 pandemic in the introduction to Mirror from the Indus and in your recent blog entries. The United States now leads the world in COVID cases and deaths. What is the situation in India with the pandemic?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: India is closely following on the heels of the United States in the domain of rising COVID 19 pandemic cases. Population density is a major cause for worry in India. Poverty, unemployment, lack of health care and infrastructure facilities add to the challenge. In fact, the onus of protection from the Corona virus largely rests on individuals in terms of social distancing and sanitization. Ayurvedic medicine and herbs seem to provide some hope for increasing immunity to check the effect of the virus.

Robin Lindley: You offer many encouraging and wise words at this time of peril for the entire globe. Where do you find hope at this challenging time?

Professor Nibir Ghosh: I have elaborately stated in the Preface to Mirror from the Indus that what we need most in this time of peril is to heed the voices of philosophers, poet-prophets, writers and intellectuals who have warned us time and again to bring in a revolutionary change in our attitude and approach to halt our onerous march toward doom. 

Like mindless robots we have often refused to listen to the voices of sanity. In 1762, at the very beginning of The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau had asserted that “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” and had suggested that the only way we could break the fetters was to “return to nature.” Following Rousseau, William Wordsworth warned us to refrain from entering the whirlpool of the endless cycle of getting and spending. Rather than enter into a “Social Contract” to breach the unsurmountable gulf between affluence and poverty, mankind moved on, unmindful of impending catastrophes, presuming that the powerful, the wealthy and the affluent would always remain untouched by such storms of adversity. 

We are bound to feel pessimistic when we are reminded about the recent happening in Minneapolis where four white policemen attempted, in the manner of the deadly virus, to create respiratory problems leading to the death of George Floyd, a black American. The event clearly demonstrates the human resolve to continue with the status quo of the powerful asserting their dominance over the oppressed and powerless wings of society.

However, it can certainly be hoped now that the day is not too far away when one could assuage the accumulated guilt of centuries by inculcating the feelings of compassion and universal brotherhood toward the downtrodden and helpless masses. We must learn to accept the paradigm shift from the emphasis on integration and inter-connectivity of a globalized world to the new norms of social distancing, isolation and quarantine. COVID 19 has come with numerous lessons for mankind, the most prominent being the need for compassion, fellow-feeling of love and brotherhood for one and all. 

If we join our hands and hearts in this hour of grave global crisis, curb our own immediate self-interests, and work in communion for a society where individual happiness can coexist in harmony with the general good of all, there is enough room for hope and optimism.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Ghosh for your illuminating comments and congratulations on your compelling new book Mirror of the Indus. It’s sure to be a resource for many years to come. And, as renowned American poet and a past University of Washington professor Theodore Roethke said, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” At this anxious time, I find your words and your writing reassuring, and I know other readers too will appreciate the light you cast at this dark time. 

Professor Nibir Ghosh: Thanks Robin for your deep interest in my work. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I shall be happy if the light of my book illumines even a little corner of a heart in despair. 

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Re-Markings, Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, NW Lawyer, ABA Journal, Real Change, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, and art. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

A Teen Inmate, a Physician Liberator, and Crimes Against Humanity: A Conversation with Dr. Bernice Lerner on Her New Book: All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, A British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen

By April 1945, as the Second World War neared an end in Europe, it was obvious that Germany was losing. Yet, many Nazi death camp and concentration camp commanders were furiously bent on exterminating as many “enemies of the state” as possible before the collapse of the Third Reich. 

In an odd turn of fate in mid-April, the Germans surrendered the notoriously brutal and overcrowded Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to British troops on orders of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the official in charge of the Final Solution, the Nazi effort to destroy all European Jewry.

On entering the camp on April 15, 1945, Brigadier H. L. Glyn Hughes, Deputy Director of Medical Services of the British Second Army, was shocked. He was not prepared for the squalid hellscape that greeted him: 60,000 living but extremely ill, starving, and wasting prisoners, and 10,000 putrefying, unburied corpses, as epidemics raged through the camp. Hughes assumed the monumental task of setting up medical services for this city of pain, suffering, and death in the middle of a combat zone.

A highly decorated veteran of both world wars, Hughes served with the invading Allied forces in the bloody and costly campaigns through France and Belgium and into Germany. Once at Bergen-Belsen, he called for and coordinated medical units and employed innovative tactics to treat as many of the ill and injured prisoners as possible. Survivors admired his compassion.

The experience of witnessing the horrific conditions at Bergen-Belsen unnerved and profoundly moved Hughes. He testified about the horrors of the camp at the trial of accused Nazi war criminals from Bergen-Belsen: “I have been a doctor for thirty years and seen all the horrors of war, but I have never seen anything to touch it.” 

When the British arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, 15-year-old prisoner Rachel Genuth was critically ill. By then, she and her sister Elisabeth had survived deportation from their home in Sighet, Transylvania; two months at the Auschwitz death camp where the rest of their family was murdered; enslavement at the Christianstadt labor camp; and then a death march to their last site of imprisonment and abuse, Bergen-Belsen. Rachel was near death by the time rescuers attended to her, days after the British arrived.

Author and scholar Dr. Bernice Lerner juxtaposes the stories of her mother, Holocaust survivor Ruth Mermelstein (ńee Rachel Genuth), and heroic British physician and liberator Glyn Hughes in her moving and compelling new book, All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, A British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (Johns Hopkins University Press). 

In this first Holocaust history to focus on a high-ranking liberator and a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Lerner traces the separate journeys of Hughes and her mother during the final year of the Second World War. She documents the Allied advances and costly setbacks that Hughes and the Allied armies endured as she intersperses the vivid story of Rachel’s deportation from her home to her horrific and heroic journey through cruel incarceration and enslavement, from brutality and dehumanization to survival and renewal.

As Dr. Lerner stresses, although Hughes and her mother Rachel never met, Rachel was the beneficiary of Hughes’s commitment to saving as many prisoners as possible at Bergen-Belsen. The book reveals harsh truths about war and atrocities and human suffering, but a story unfolds ultimately about empathy and courage and the will to live.

The book is based on extensive historical research and a trove of resources including the papers of Glyn Hughes, oral histories, interviews, and more. Dr. Lerner masterfully combines the fruits of her scholarly research with gripping and engaging storytelling.

Dr. Lerner is a senior scholar at Boston University's Center for Character and Social Responsibility. She also wrote The Triumph of Wounded Souls: Seven Holocaust Survivors' Lives, and co-edited Happiness and Virtue beyond East and West: Toward a New Global Responsibility.  She earned her doctorate at Boston University's School of Education and her masters’ degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. A specialist in adult education, she has lectured extensively on ethics and character in the US and around the world. Among courses she taught at Boston University were Resistance During the Holocaust and Character and Ethics Education. She also designed and taught Ethical Decision Making for Education Leaders for Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies.

Dr. Lerner graciously responded to questions by telephone from her home. It was heartening to learn that her mother, Rachel Genuth—now Ruth Mermelstein—is living in her own home and thriving at age 90. Ruth is also a frequent and popular speaker on the Holocaust, and especially enjoys talking with school groups. She finally learned the details of her rescue at Bergen-Belsen from her daughter’s research.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Dr. Lerner on your groundbreaking new book All the Horrors of War that interweaves your mother’s Holocaust story with the story of British officer and physician, Brigadier Glyn Hughes, who supervised medical care during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, the last site where your mother was imprisoned. 

Before getting to your book, I want to ask first about your background as a writer. You're also a scholar with the Center for Character and Social Responsibility at Boston University.

Dr. Bernice Lerner: I was a previous director of the Center at Boston University where I worked for seven years after completing my doctorate in the School of Education. Many of the scholars I worked with were philosophers, so I became steeped in Aristotle and Plato and contemporary writers on virtue ethics. The Center trained teachers on principles and methods of character education. We worked with educators from all over the world, helping them to think deeply about goals for their students--at all grade levels, from preschool to college. 

I did a lot of teacher training stateside and I went as far as Indonesia and Singapore and Japan. Virtue ethics fascinated me because it provides a lens through which you can analyze any material that you're reading or viewing or teaching. It involves asking questions about people’s choices. What is the right course of action in various situations? How do our habits and dispositions show who we are, our character? What does it mean to act out of character? 

The study gave me a framework and a lens. And then of course, I was dealing with the most evil acts in the history of the world when doing my work on the Holocaust. And that subject has always been an interest—my parents are both survivors. I had a lot of questions, about what happened to them specifically, and what happened to my grandparents and my parents’ siblings. 

How did your new book evolve?

At first, I didn't tackle my parents or my own family at all. My first book was about seven Holocaust survivors who were very different from anyone in my family—after having missed years of schooling they went on to earn advanced or terminal degrees. (My relatives did not have much formal education.) Finally, I wondered what happened to my mother at the end of the war, after she fell unconscious. There was a hole in her memory—she could not tell me what happened. How actually was she saved? Why am I here? How am I here? That led me to more questions. What were the mechanics of it? What if the British had come in two days later? I wouldn't be here. My children wouldn't be here. And my grandchildren. None of us would be here. 

Of course, the tragedy is that so many lives, so many generations were cut short. And Bergen-Belsen was a dumping ground for people who had survived the entire war until the end. They were the ones who had evaded the gas chambers at Auschwitz and were doing slave labor and endured the death marches. It took so much to make it to the end of the war, and then people died by the thousands in Bergen-Belsen.

It was a miracle that your mother survived as you describe so vividly in your new book. I admire your lively writing and extensive research. What inspired your book apart from your mother’s story?

When I was trying to figure out exactly how my mother survived, that led me to Glyn Hughes. He was the man most prominently associated with the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

I set out initially just to write a biography of Glyn Hughes. I was interested in what his character was like and what he was thinking and feeling when he entered and surveyed Bergen-Belsen. I wanted to know about his background and what he brought to the experience. And how it affected him. 

Hughes was such an important figure to the Jewish survivors who knew him in Bergen-Belsen. He was a Schindler-type character in that he befriended survivors and he kept in touch with many of them for the rest of his life. He appreciated his role in their history. So who was this man? I tried to figure out who he was by meeting his surviving relatives and friends. So that was a journey, and that began almost 16 years ago. 

What are a few things you'd like readers to know about Dr. Hughes? 

He saw the humanity in the throngs of “living skeletons.” His motives were moral—immediately, he vowed to save as many lives as possible. As a doctor, he would have wanted to treat more people, but he had such a big responsibility. He faced an absolutely impossible situation that was unprecedented in the history of humankind. 

When he came into the camp, there were 60,000 people who were still breathing and there were 10,000 corpses. Many of the people were dying, emaciated skeletons. Inside barracks built to hold a maximum of 100 people, 600 to a thousand were crammed in and there were no sanitary facilities. Hughes described what he saw when he came into the camp, and he was totally unprepared, totally shocked. 

In Bergen-Belsen, the British liberators settled on a triage system, a factory-like approach that would help them save the most lives possible. Medics went into the huts and marked the foreheads of people who were still alive, who might have a chance. And they were dealing with contagious diseases. Typhus was raging and its germ was in the dust. 

I would never compare anything to that time and place, but we face a situation of medical rescue with COVID-19, and it’s not over yet. Back in April, doctors in Boston wrote about how they might have to triage patients and treat only a limited number. They were using ventilators and they didn't have enough. And they were going to have to make decisions about who to try to save and who they couldn't—who was not worth the effort. This sounded to me like a wartime decision. 

You describe Hughes’ duties when he was in charge of dealing with mass casualties suffered by British troops after the invasion of Western Europe and during the Allied push into Germany. You do an excellent job of juxtaposing the Allied military advances and setbacks with your mother's experience. Perhaps some younger people think that the Allies landed in Europe on D-Day and then got into Germany and that was it. As you chronicle, there were many losses and setbacks for the Allies and months of brutal combat before they got into Germany. You do a commendable job of reminding people of just how incredibly bloody that Allied advance was.

I had read a lot about the Holocaust, but I felt very ignorant about the battles and what it took for the Allies to advance. 

I traced Glyn Hughes’s journey and his responsibilities because I wanted to know what he had already seen before he got to Bergen-Belsen. He was in charge of medical services—first for the British Army’s 8 Corps, and then for the entire British Second Army. He had to decide, for example, how to efficiently evacuate casualties. And how to lift men's morale and make them feel that medical care was near and that they'd be taken care of. And they were facing the most feared units of the German Army. The Panzer and SS units were ferocious fighters and completely dedicated to Hitler. So many young men were maimed, so many died on the way to my mother's rescue. That's a personal way of putting it, but the sacrifices were enormous. 

So Hughes had big responsibilities and he was always looking at the mega-picture. Where can I commandeer a hospital? How should the transportation work? And he was always liaising with higher-ups and meeting with his assistant directors of medical services.

Hughes had overall responsibility for treatment of the wounded and sick and setting up hospitals and all sorts of logistics. So, this was far beyond what we see in a movie or television program like MASH. 

Yes. It was fascinating how he instituted down-to-a-science protocols and was also very innovative. His units had to learn to set up and take down casualty clearing stations and regimental aid posts very quickly. Everything had to be movable and they had to figure out ways of treating those who suffered wounds of various types and degrees. They computed exactly how long each surgical case would take. That was 48 minutes and 32 seconds or so. Attention was paid to every conceivable detail and there was a lot of practice and preparation. Finally, at Bergen-Belsen, he and his men met an unfathomable situation for which they were totally unprepared. 

And you describe vividly Hughes’ impressions when he entered Bergen-Belsen, and how this horrid experience changed his life. 

That was where you really saw his humanity because Hughes had seen every horrific aspect of military combat. He was a highly decorated veteran of the First World War. When he was a Regimental Medical Officer he would run onto the battlefield to try to save wounded men. He saw the bloodiest aspects of war, and he displayed great courage. 

When he arrived at Bergen-Belsen, he had seen nothing like it. He said that he had seen all of horrors of war, but nothing to touch Bergen-Belsen—it was so obscene and perverse. Many who were there describe it as being like Dante’s Hell with the gruesome visions inside and outside the huts. And the stench. Hughes broke down crying, and I think that says so much because he was a tough, hardened, military man. And he cried. He did not initially know how he would go about creating order.

Hughes didn't follow Army protocol and file reports. He just immediately went into action to find help and impress upon the Second Army that, even though there were ongoing battles in northwest Germany, this was a humanitarian disaster and they needed to divert some units to assist at Bergen-Belsen. And he put very good people in charge of procuring resources and readying a hospital, and brought in experts in typhus control and feeding the starved. He tried to get help from wherever he could. 

And the way people deal with disasters, as we see now with COVID-19, is to track numbers. Numbers are a way to get on handle on things, so that's what the British were trying to do when they arrived at Bergen-Belsen. More than 500 people were dying every day after the liberation for several weeks.

At the beginning of our current pandemic, not-yet-graduated medical students were pressed into service. In early May 1945, Hughes brought 97 medical students to Bergen-Belsen. They had been scheduled to do famine relief work in Belgium, but instead were diverted to Bergen-Belsen. And these young men did a very good job treating the backlog of patients remaining in the huts.

There were criticisms and questions about whether more could have been done.  If you put yourself in Hughes’s shoes, it was just an impossible situation. 

By a month or two after the liberation, some people began to recover. Some, who had been active in Zionist groups before the war, emerged as leaders. They started to organize the survivors, to build a community of  “displaced persons.” Many, in their twenties and thirties, paired up. There were a record number of weddings, and then, within a few years, of babies— born in the Glyn Hughes hospital. (Survivors who observed Hughes witnessed his compassion. They named the hospital that was set up near the camp for him.) 

Hughes saw this forlorn group of people organizing themselves. They brought in entertainment. They had a theater. They had their own police force. They had their own newspaper. And once people had food and clothes and some supplies, they started to show their true personalities and all this captivated Hughes. So even when he didn't have to go there anymore, he kept going every day to the Belsen DP (Displaced Persons) camp. He witnessed a remarkable transformation. The summer of 1945 was a watershed in his life.  

So the Glyn Hughes hospital was built at Bergen-Belsen? 

No, it was a short distance from the camp. It had formerly been a hospital for the Wehrmacht, the German Army, and there was also a nearby complex that had been used for German soldiers. There was a “roundhouse,” a large hall adorned with portraits of Hitler. All these facilities were taken over for use by the Jewish DPs. 

It’s striking that liberation didn't occur at the moment the British arrived. And the statistics you mention are staggering with more than 10,000 unburied dead when the British entered on April 15, 1945. And then 2,000 people died right after their first meal.

Yes. The British soldiers saw these starving people begging for food, and they gave them their rations. They gave them Spam and other foods that the digestive systems of the prisoners could not handle. Their intestines were all shriveled; their bodies were dried out and dehydrated. They were eating this very rich food and they had cramping and diarrhea and they died. They just died. That was very tragic. 

The British liberators did not initially know what kind of food to feed these people. They didn't have experience with this level of starvation and abuse. In India, the British gave starved people “Bengal Famine Mixture,” some kind of gruel that proved too sweet for the European palates of Bergen-Belsen survivors. Hughes eventually worked up five different diets for people in various stages of emaciation and starvation, with very gradual increases in nutrients. 

And one would expect the killing to stop with the arrival of the British, but it continued for days. Not just the Germans but also the Hungarian guards were shooting survivors. And didn’t Dr. Hughes witness shootings of prisoners by either the SS or the Hungarians guards? 

Yes. When he first came into the camp he saw some inmates running to a potato patch and the SS guards were shooting them. He saw it. He and the British officer he was with had to put an end to what was a matter of habit.

People think that the liberation happened in one day and prisoners were cheering when the Allied soldiers came in, but it didn't exactly happen that way. It was really a process. 

I would say that the liberation took place over an extended period. For the first couple of days in Bergen-Belsen, Hungarian guards were left in charge-- the British didn't have enough personnel to keep order and make sure contagious prisoners didn’t leave the camp. The Hungarian guards in watchtowers were shooting those who ran to the potato patches because they were starving. 

There was chaos. The liberators faced problems you might not think of: trying to bring in food and water, repairing the water main break, restoring the electricity that had gone down. The Germans sabotaged camp operations before they left. It was a crazy interim period and the British were struggling to set up the facilities. 

The cruelty you describe was horrific. You write that, shortly before liberation, SS guards baked ground glass into bread and fed it to prisoners as a way of eliminating more people before the Allies arrived.

Yes, and those who got the bread were so hungry that they ate it. I thought maybe that was a rumor that my mother heard, but I came across a survivor account and he said that's exactly what they did. It destroyed people's intestines, and so many died that way. The man who survived said he could feel the crunch of the ground glass between his teeth. 

And then to your mother’s harrowing story. Have you been collecting your mother’s stories and those of other survivors since your youth? 

Yes, since I was maybe 13 or 14 years old, but not intentionally or consciously. When I was a kid, maybe six or seven years old, I would ask my mother about her childhood because it was so interesting and different than how I was growing up on Long Island. She grew up in Romania, which seemed exotic and romantic to me. And then she would tell me about her postwar life in Sweden. 

She was smart in sharing her stories. She's just such a positive person. She never wanted to tell me how hard things were: how poor she was in Romania or how sick she was in Sweden. Mostly she told me about her adventures, the fun and daring things she did. And she talked about how kind the Swedish people were, and what a wonderful country it was. 

But when I was about 14, the age she was when she had been taken away, she started to tell me what happened during the war. What happened in Auschwitz. What she experienced as a 14- and 15-year-old. She said, What would it be like if someone were to tell you that in two months your family would be killed and you would lose your friends, your entire community, everything you ever had or owned? You'd think they were crazy. You couldn't imagine that happening. 

And she would tell me all this before the word Holocaust was out there. This was what happened during the war, and she wasn't talking about it to other people. She wasn't even talking about it with my father, who was also a survivor. But late at night, we'd be down in the basement laundry room, and she’d tell me. She was ironing one night and she put down the iron and she stretched her arms out behind her and knelt over. She said this was how she, then 50 percent dead, had to drag the dead to a mass grave. Some were not even dead-- they were still breathing. 

And I couldn’t shake that image from my mind. I was going to high school then and I wasn’t hearing anything like that in my history classes. Later, I studied and taught the Holocaust. But I knew little about the war. Finally, I started to research events—larger contexts—that bore on my mother’s fate. But I also held her particular story. By following an individual, one can begin to grasp the wider story. Writers and film producers understand that. 

The story of your mother and Glyn Hughes would make a gripping movie. Her odyssey was incredible. She and her sister Elisabeth were rounded up by the Nazis. They were taken to Auschwitz first and then to a labor camp and then marched to the horrific Bergen-Belsen. She experienced different forms of incarceration. Each was brutal and dehumanizing, but younger readers may not understand the different forms of imprisonment used by the Nazis. 

Yes. She was captured in the last year of the war. The Germans were losing the war, and already millions had been murdered. My mother and her family were taken in the massive Hungarian deportation in the spring of 1944 and deported to Auschwitz—the largest death camp where one and a half million people were killed. 

My mother was shocked and she might have been numb. In Auschwitz, those who were temporarily spared were given ersatz coffee or “food” laced with bromide, a drug that numbed their senses. 

There was a chance—for those who were fit—of surviving Auschwitz. There was this tension among German higher-ups between needing slave laborers and wanting to kill as many Jews as possible. About ten percent of the more than 424,000 arrivals from the Hungarian provinces who were deemed strong enough were siphoned off—they could be worked to death slowly. 

Some were tattooed—they were meant to be around for a while and given a number. My mother was not tattooed. She was among thousands of “depot prisoners” who were being held to see if they might be needed for the war effort or sent to the gas chambers, which were operating day and night. It must have been hell seeing the smoke from the ovens and the red sky and smelling the stench of burning bodies. When my mother asked a longtime prisoner where her parents were, the woman told her to look at the smoke. That’s where they are. 

It was just horrific. And to think she was a kid who had never been outside her little town. She had never traveled anywhere away from home. She had never slept anywhere else. And here she was in this inconceivable place called Auschwitz—a death camp. And everyone around her was in the same terrifying situation.

She missed her parents’ protection, but she was the type of kid who could fend for herself. She had had big responsibilities at home—heavy chores and helping with her grandmother’s butcher business. She had to deliver orders of poultry to distant parts of town, and made her way back in the dark after curfew. And so, once she somehow acclimated to Auschwitz-Birkenau, she looked to what she could do to survive. 

And she volunteered for different duties. She took out the pail of excrement at night to see if there was something useful she might find. She volunteered for work that would earn her a piece of bread. She dared to beg privileged prisoners for a bit of something they might have on them. 

For the two months she was in Auschwitz, she did not know whether she would die the next day. I describe in the book the various “selections”—to think that some SS officer would determine whether you would live or die by looking you over for a second is crazy making. Harrowing. And so difficult for we who were not there to imagine. 

Bergen-Belsen, this center of one of the most horrific atrocities in human history, had to also seem insane to an innocent young teen. 

Yes. And no matter where you came from, no matter what your background or profession, everybody was equal there. It didn't matter if you were rich or poor or had an education or not. Everyone was in the same horrifying boat. But some people knew better than others how to cope with hardship. I would ask my aunts and uncles—all survivors—about their experiences. They told me that those who were not used to hard work at home, those who had maids and had been pampered, had a harder time than people who had not been coddled.

That my mother and her sister Elisabeth managed to leave Auschwitz together was a miracle. They were selected to work in one of the thousands of labor camps because again, the Germans needed slave laborers.

Conditions varied by camp and much depended on the type of work that you were forced to do, the dispositions of the overseers, the rations that you were given—the Germans realized they had to feed prisoners if they wanted them to produce before dropping dead. 

At the Christianstadt labor camp, my mother was picked to work in the kitchen. This was like winning the million-dollar lottery. She could eat the SS officers’ leftovers. And that's probably the reason she survived ultimately because she had six months in this environment. It was still a very dangerous place, but she could take chances and get nourishment.

But at the beginning of February 1945 came the death march. During the final chaotic months of the war the Nazis evacuated camps in the paths of would-be liberators so no inmate would fall alive into Allied hands. 

That was the Nazi plan. You vividly describe the death march of your mother and her sister to the camp. So many people died or were killed by guards on that brutal trek to Bergen-Belsen. 

Yes. My mother and her sister were on this death march. After five weeks on the road and one torturous week in a cattle train they arrived in Bergen-Belsen. It was mid-March, about two weeks after Anne Frank died there. She was older than my mother. And death was the norm. About 17,000 people died in March in Bergen-Belsen.

Didn’t Anne Frank die of typhus? 

Yes. And probably of other things as well.

Many people don't understand the difference between Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a killing factory. You didn't see emaciated people there because people had come (in the case of the Hungarian transports) straight from their homes. Most inmates didn't last long. They were killed right away or within a short time. 

Bergen-Belsen was a camp of the war ravaged. It had the largest number of inmates at the end of the war. They had been through so much. Many were but musselmanner, living skeletons. And disease was rampant. At least three epidemics were raging in the camp at the time the British came in. 

Tens of thousands of prisoners congregated at Bergen-Belsen.  Didn’t the Nazis disagree on whether these people should be exterminated or still used as slave labor? And didn't Himmler suggest keeping the camp intact because he knew that the war was nearly over and he didn't want to be responsible for more extermination? 

Yes. At that point in the war, there wasn't a question of using the prisoners for slave labor. The focus was on getting them away from the liberators, on following Hitler’s orders: no inmate was to be left alive. That's why they were dumped in Bergen-Belsen and other camps inside Germany. 

In early April, Himmler ordered the killing of all the inmates in certain camps. Then, he turned Bergen-Belsen over to the British Army intact. This is a “truth is stranger than fiction” story. His masseuse played a part in it. As I describe in the book, it’s just an unbelievable story about how he was convinced to hand over this camp to the British Second Army rather than kill everybody. Maybe he thought that a show of humanity would somehow save him. But he killed himself when the British found him. 

Anyway, in this unprecedented move, the Germans handed over Bergen-Belsen to the British. It was a crisis situation, because if they bombed the camp or there was fighting in the area, some prisoners could escape and spread disease throughout the countryside and that was a risk for the people fighting in the area, the Germans and the British, as well as civilians. 

The handover occurred just three weeks before the end of the war. If that had not happened, my mother wouldn't have survived. I wouldn't be here. It was a race against time for her and other of the inmates to “hold on.” Tragically, the race was lost for too many. Thousands kept dying even after the liberation.

There are so many strange twists to the story. You write that the Bergen-Belsen Commandant Josef Kramer and a brutal SS guard Irma Grese conducted a tour of Bergen-Belsen for the first British troops who arrived on the morning of April 15. Kramer and Grese seemed quite proud of this hellscape they’d created.

It was bizarre. They were in the habit of killing. This was what they did for their jobs. And they believed in what they were doing. They regarded the inmates as subhuman.

And in the meantime, your mother registers the liberation and she was elated but, within a couple of days, she's very ill, and then some fellow prisoners beat her mercilessly. And so, your mother was actually dying? 

Yes. In telling the story, I wanted to show what was actually happening on the ground, behind the scenes. My mother was beaten to a pulp by her fellow inmates days after the British arrived. People treated so poorly had been reduced to this animalistic state, and they didn't just snap out of it on the day of the liberation. It was a long process to come back to life. My mother was near death after having been beaten so badly. I explain that in the book. 

My mother was placed in a makeshift hospital room for dying prisoners. Every day for three weeks, 11 of the 12 people in her room died and 11 nearly dead were brought in to fill their beds. She hung on. She described those details to me when I was a teenager. Later, when I wrote her story, I could calculate practically the day that she was evacuated to the hospital because I had read accounts of the evacuation. The bits of information she told me were windows into larger contexts. 

It’s an amazing survival story—a story of the narrowest escape. The rescuers presumed your mother would die, yet she hung on for weeks. If they used triage, then she was grouped with those who weren’t expected to survive. 

Yes. And she was unconscious when she was taken to “the human laundry.” She didn't know it was called that until I researched the rescue. 

Before she was beaten, but after the British arrived, she wandered to this warehouse that contained tons of clothing and she picked her way through seams and lapels and found all these treasures—gold pens, rings, currency—the deportees had brought with them. And her greatest heartbreak was the moment she came to and realized her precious stash had been taken away from her. There were all these heartbreaks. And then, when she came to full consciousness she thought, “I survived, but how lucky am I? I lost my home, my family, and my health.” 

Her sister Elisabeth also survived and Elisabeth was with your mother for much of the time? Helping each other must have had a role in their survival. 

Yes. It was very important to have a partner in one’s struggles. Elisabeth sacrificed her life for my mother at Auschwitz. She was ready to die with my mother when she herself was picked for possible labor. At that moment, Elisabeth showed her love and deep compassion for her sister. From that point on, my mother did everything in her power to help my aunt survive whatever trials they went through. She would “organize” food for the both of them. They helped each other. And when my mother was in that makeshift hospital, knowing that her sister was alive and in decent shape was a real driving force for her because, if she died, she would be leaving her sister all alone in the world. 

My mother mustered her will to live because of Elisabeth and because she was only 15 and felt she had not yet lived much of life. She didn't know how very sick she was or how long recovery would take, but she fought to have a chance. And her father's parting words to her in the cattle car before they got to Auschwitz came back to her—he had confidence that she would make it. She had to live up to his words.

Your mother was eventually evacuated from Bergen-Belsen to Sweden. What was the role of Sweden in helping survivors of the camps, and how did your mother, unlike many other people, wind up there and then live there for ten years?

The Swedes led a humanitarian mission to save these people and help them get back on their feet. Perhaps they felt guilt over their neutrality or how they helped Hitler during the war. Who knows? But they took in about 7,000 really sick people from Bergen-Belsen. The idea was to rehabilitate them and, after about six months of medical treatment, they would go on their way and maybe be repatriated in their home countries. 

When my mother got to Sweden, she was very sick. She had tuberculosis, and she was in various TB sanatoriums and rest homes in Sweden for ten years. I don't know any survivor who went to Sweden who didn't say that Sweden was wonderful and the Swedish people were kind, and that meant so much. These people had seen the worst of humanity and then in Sweden they were so well cared for. My mother had certain post-war experiences that showed her that there was still humanity in the world.

My mother loved Sweden. When we (my sister and I) were growing up, our house was a mixture of cultures, with certain traditions and foods from Hungary, Romania, and Sweden. Though my parents wanted to be American, they couldn’t help but transmit what they carried from Europe. 

Robin Lindley: You describe many moving moments in your writing. I can’t recall if this scene was from your new book, but after the liberation there were thousands of displaced persons left at Bergen-Belsen. One drop of supplies included a large shipment of lipstick. The soldiers thought that this shipment just useless, but women survivors were thrilled and eagerly accepted the lipstick. It was almost part of their resurrection—a restoration of human dignity after being dehumanized for months and years. That story was so moving. 

Yes, that was fascinating. 

Humanitarian organizations, such as the Red Cross and Jewish organizations, were sending shipments to Bergen-Belsen. And they got this huge box of lipsticks and whoever opened it thought that was ridiculous and completely useless. And then they distributed the lipsticks and that was the best feeling for the women when they started to put on lipstick. They felt like human beings again. And when they were given clothes or a needle and thread and some old garments that they could tailor, life came back to them. They wanted to make themselves look presentable and attractive to the opposite sex. Little things that you might not think about really mattered. 

Yes. A marvelous story of the renewal. 

And becoming human again. There are so many of those little stories. In one instance, a soldier turned to Jewish leader and said, “Look at that woman. She's crazy. She's combing her hair with a broken piece of a comb.” And the leader said, “You give her a real comb and see which she would choose. Then you could see if she were crazy.” 

These people were so deprived and they didn't have the basic supplies that we take for granted. If they had a choice, and they were given the real thing, they wouldn’t have looked crazy. And they were used to saving every little thing they could get their hands on—a piece of string had uses.

Adjusting to life after the war had to be challenging. How is your mother doing now? 

She's doing well. Thank you for asking. I worry about her because of the pandemic. I can't visit with her and she normally has a lot of speaking engagements. She’s really wonderful. She has such a great message when she speaks to kids, and she speaks to a lot of middle and high school students about the Holocaust. 

What did she think of your book? 

She read drafts of it, and I kept her abreast of the entire publishing process, so she learned a lot. She is happy that I achieved the goal of writing her story, and we are both happy to have saved members of our family—a few of the six million—from oblivion. 

She must be really proud of you. 

We are proud of each other. 

Does she live in a senior facility?

No. She’s going to be 91 in a few weeks, and she lives in her own home and takes care of everything in the home herself. 

That’s amazing. She’s still doing well after all of those narrow escapes. Please give her my best regards.

I will. Thank you so much for your interest and this interview.

It’s been a pleasure talking with you Dr. Lerner. Thank you for sharing your thoughtful and moving comments. And congratulations on your compelling and illuminating new book All the Horrors of War on the journeys of your mother and the liberator Brigadier Glyn Hughes, MD.  

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is a features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, NW Lawyer, ABA Journal, Re-Markings, Real Change, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, and art. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

The atomic bomb embodied the absolute evil of war, transcending lesser distinctions such as Japanese or Allies, attacker or attacked.

Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature (1994)

“Little Boy” was the innocuous code name for the uranium-235 atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM, Japan Standard Time. The bomb exploded about 2,000 feet above the ground with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT and incinerated much of the once thriving city. 

At detonation and in the ensuing months, Little Boy killed more than 100,000 people, at least 90 percent of whom were civilians. Estimates of the total deaths from the blast range as high as 280,000 people by the end of 1945, but exact figures could never be determined because of the immediate chaos and because so many people were cremated in the firestorm.

Initial news reports on the bomb indicated that it was powerful but similar to a large conventional bomb. The American public read sanitized reports and statistics on the tremendous toll of the bomb. Papers and magazines ran black and white photos of the mushroom cloud, aerial views of the remains of the city, and damaged buildings, and reported figures on dwellings, warehouses, factories, bridges, and other structures that were destroyed. 

However, the reports to the American public following the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and then Nagasaki contained little information on how the destructive new devices affected the human beings trapped under the mushroom clouds. Indeed, the US government celebrated the new weapons while suppressing reports on agonizing radiation injuries and poisoning, complicated thermal burns, birth defects, illnesses, and other novel and horrible medical consequences of nuclear war. And, after the war ended, the military closed the atomic cities to reporters.

Legendary reporter John Hersey, already a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and a renowned journalist by 1945, set out to learn about the human face of the Hiroshima bombing. His resulting August 1946 article for the New Yorker became a classic of journalism and eventually a book for the ages. By telling the story from the perspective of six survivors—a young mother, a female clerk, a minister, two doctors, and a German priest—Hersey’s report captured readers with a new form of journalism beyond cold facts and statistics to detailed personal accounts of witnesses that vividly conveyed the moments leading to a historic catastrophe and its aftermath.

In her new book Fallout; The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (Simon & Schuster), acclaimed author and journalist Lesley M.M. Blume recounts the story of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; government efforts to hide the nature of the terrible new weapon; and John Hersey’s journey to reveal the reality of the atomic bomb and how he came to write “Hiroshima,” a report of meticulous journalistic detail as well as an admired work of art that elevated the human voices beyond the soulless statistics and gray wire photos.

Ms. Blume writes vividly as she details this hidden history and demonstrates the value of independent journalism in holding the powerful to account. Her meticulous research included interviews and archival work that revealed new findings on postwar government press relations and on official actions to hide the reality of nuclear war from the public. Her revelations include the never before reported role of Manhattan Project director, General Leslie Groves, in reviewing Hersey’s provocative article.

Ms. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and biographer. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Paris Review, among many other publications. Her last nonfiction book, Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, was a New York Times bestseller, and she has written several other nonfiction books and books for children. Ms. Blume has also worked as a newspaper journalist and as a reporter-researcher for ABC News. And she has a lifelong interest in history. She earned a B.A. in history from Williams College and a master's degree in historical studies from Cambridge University as a Herchel Smith scholar. Her graduate thesis concerned the US government and press relations during the 1991 Gulf War.

Ms. Blume generously discussed her interest in history and her new book by telephone from her office in Los Angeles.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations on Fallout, your new book on author John Hersey and his classic account of the human face of atomic warfare, “Hiroshima.” Before I get to the book, I noticed that you have an advanced degree in history and that you often write about the past. What is your background in studying and writing about history?

Lesley M.M. Blume: I've always been a history obsessive, since I was a little girl. I read a lot of fiction then but, as I grew up, I gravitated toward nonfiction. I remember one time, when I was around eleven, one of my parents' friends came over and I was curled up in a corner and reading. She asked what I was reading, likely thinking that it was something like Babysitters Club, and I showed her the book cover. It was The Diary of Anne Frank. I've just always gravitated to history, especially World War II. 

I studied history at Williams College, like my dad did before me, and my focus there was 20th century history with a concentration on World War II. Then I went to Cambridge University for a graduate degree in historical studies. By then, I had become keenly interested in newsroom history and war reporting, and I did a master's thesis on the American media during the Gulf War in 1991. I looked at how that story had been rolled out to the public, and where that fell in the larger scheme of relations between the US government and the press corps and how that relationship had evolved since World War II. The thesis was about patriotism and war reporting and how patriotism waxes and wanes from conflict to conflict, along with the level of cooperation between the press and the military. 

Over the decades, I have had a continued interest in World War II and in war reporting and wartime newsrooms. So, in many ways, Fallout was the culmination of decades of study and interest in war history and reporting. 

Robin Lindley: What inspired your deep dive into the story of John Hersey and his book Hiroshima?

Lesley M.M. Blume: I knew I wanted to do a big, historical newsroom narrative, and there was also a personal motivation. 

The press has been under unprecedented attack in this country since 2015, and I have been disturbed and quite disgusted by the relentless attacks and the designating of journalists as enemies of the people. It was quite a shock when that vernacular first started to surface in 2015 and really got underway in 2016. 

I wanted to write a historical news narrative about America that would show readers the extreme importance of our free press in upholding our democracy and serving the common good. As these attacks have accelerated, not enough people have been defending the press or understanding what would happen to them specifically, not just to the country, but to them individually, if we didn't have a free press. 

It’s curious: the Hersey story found me as much as I found it. I was nosing around the European theater of World War II for a newsroom story before I came to this Pacific theater narrative. And, when I found Hersey's story, it seemed the purest example of the life or death importance of good, independent investigative journalism. I couldn't believe that the story, in the way that I ultimately approached it, hadn't been told yet. And, when a historian or journalist finds an untold story like that, you leap on it. 

Robin Lindley: The story is very timely and a tribute to the role of the free press in a democratic society. And there are many parallels now to handling of the deadly global COVID-19 pandemic as the administration attacks the press and spreads lies and misinformation about a health threat to all citizens, as tens of thousands die.

Lesley M.M. Blume: The pandemic is a global existential threat, which is exactly what I'm detailing in Fallout. Now, the administration is downplaying and covering up an existential threat just as the government in 1945 kept the American public in the dark about the reality of the bombs that were created in secret and detonated in their name. The parallels are uncanny and disturbing. 

Robin Lindley: That’s instructive on the role of the press. How did the book evolve for you? Is it the book now that you initially imagined?

Lesley M.M. Blume: The research surprised me, especially the extent of the coverup, and how concerted it was. 

I first approached the story from the point of view of a journalist covering another journalist. I asked how on earth did Hersey cover a nuclear attack zone in 1945? I was interested in how he got into Hiroshima and how he got people to speak with him. And then, when I started to really dig into the story, I realized that other scholars who preceded me had documented the coverup without really celebrating the critical role that Hersey played in revealing it. Nobody else had connected the dots in this way before.

Robin Lindley: What was your research process?

Lesley M.M. Blume: When I began the project, I told my agent and my editor not to expect to hear from me for months because I would be reading. I dug up a ton of reporter memoirs before I started with archival data. It was background, background, background. I read biographies of important figures such as General Douglas MacArthur and Manhattan Project head General Leslie Groves. 

I also reached out early to people to interview because, when researching people of Hersey’s era, I had to get to people fast who knew him. There were a few Hersey friends and colleagues who I spoke with a few years ago who are no longer with us. But there’s also a disadvantage in seeing them early, because I wasn’t as steeped in the material and in Hersey’s world yet, I wasn’t approaching them from a position of assured expertise yet.

After the initial reading and interviews, I had a better idea of what to look for in the archival records.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing your process. I noticed that you also traveled to Hiroshima. That must have been very moving. 

Lesley M.M. Blume: It was one of the most extraordinary experiences in my life, and one of the most disturbing. Hiroshima is now a fully rebuilt city, with around three million inhabitants. It was almost completely destroyed and there is very little left to indicate what it had been like before the bombing. 

When I got off the train station and a sign read “Welcome to Hiroshima,” I almost crawled out of my own skin. It’s a vibrant, modern metropolis, yet Hiroshima’s leaders and residents definitely see the city as a witness to nuclear Holocaust.  But they also see the city as a Phoenix that has risen from the ashes, and as a monument to human resilience. I respect the latter view, but going to that city was almost a traumatic experience for me. I couldn't eat or sleep almost the entire time that I was there researching—knowing what happened there. 

I interviewed the Governor of Hiroshima Prefecture and he admitted that they still find human remains every time they dig for a new development there. He said that, if you dig three feet, you hit human bones, so it’s a city that's built on a graveyard. I'll never forget that trip.  

Robin Lindley: That had to be haunting. Didn't you also speak with some survivors of the bombing? 

Lesley M.M. Blume: I did, including the last surviving central protagonist of Hersey’s book: Koko Tanimoto, the daughter of Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who was one of Hersey’s six protagonists. She and her mother also appeared in his article. Koko had been eight months old when the bomb went off; she and her mother were in their family home, not far from the point of detonation, and the house collapsed on them. Somehow, they survived and her mother was able dig them out of the rubble just before a firestorm consumed their neighborhood. It was an absolute miracle that they survived. 

Koko was 73 or 74 when I met her. We walked together through central Hiroshima and we went to the monuments there. She showed me where the exact point of detonation had been, which is actually quite an under-visited site.  There's only a modest marker there, but it's in front of a low-rise medical building and a 7-11, of all things. I don't know if I would have found it without her.

It was very emotional to walk through the city with Koko. Ironically, she considers America to be almost like a second home at this point. Her father, Reverend Tanimoto, had become an antinuclear advocate over the years, and she did a lot of traveling with him. She's also a peace advocate and has spent a lot of time in the US. For her to have been on the receiving end of nuclear attack at the hands of America, yet still have such generous feelings toward us, was astonishing to me.  Fallout is dedicated to her.

Robin Lindley: Your memories of Hiroshima are striking. Did you find any surprises or new government information in your archival research?

Lesley M.M. Blume: I'll try to be concise on this topic, but the short answer is yes. When I was doing my last book on Hemingway, coming across new information was like scratching water from rocks, but there was break after break with this book. The research gods favored this project. I don't know what I did to deserve it, but I'm grateful to them. 

My Leslie Groves revelation was huge – at least, to me. That came from a misfiled document in the New York Public Library’s New Yorker archives. I had very slim expectations about finding anything new in that archive because the New Yorker has had several biographical books written about it, and its editors have all had biographies, except for William Shawn. 

The very last day I was in that archive, I went through a file that I thought was irrelevant; it contained documents pertaining to stories that the magazine had submitted to the War Department for censorship – but in earlier years of the war. Hersey was reporting on Hiroshima in 1946, but I was curious to see how the magazine had interacted with censorship officials at the War Department, and how cozy the relationship had been. That’s when I found the first document that indicated that Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” had been submitted to not only to the War Department for vetting, but to General Leslie Groves – head of the Manhattan Project - himself. I freaked out right in the middle of the archive. I stared at this document and couldn't believe it. I sent a phone photo of it immediately to one of my research associates and asked, ‘Am I reading this right?’ Yes, I was. I had a call right away with my editor because it changed everything in this book. It changed Hersey’s “Hiroshima” from a subversive piece of independent journalism researched under the nose of Occupation officials to almost a piece of sanctioned access journalism. 

And then I found confirming evidence in Leslie Groves’ records – both at NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] and in the independent files of Groves biographer Robert Norris, who was helping me -- that this vetting had taken place. That set off a whole new realm of research for me in terms of assessing Groves’ position at that time, why he would have agreed ultimately to release the article, and how the administration and the War Department’s aims had evolved. They had been suppressing information about the bombing since that previous August, but a year later, they were finding new utility for accounts of the nuclear aftermath in Hiroshima. And so that was huge. 

I was also able to call up, through Freedom of Information Act, documents from the War Department, CIA, and FBI, which detailed how they tracked Hersey when he was in Japan and their attitude toward Hersey after the reporting came out. I was quite curious to see especially the CIA records and FBI records because I wanted to know if there had been any move to try to discredit Hersey after “Hiroshima” came out, because the reporting had embarrassed the government. 

While it transpired that the FBI did investigate and question Hersey a few years later, in the McCarthy era, it doesn't appear from what was released to me that there were any immediate efforts to discredit him, or his sources in Japan. The government took a different approach: downplaying.  They mostly ignored the story to a certain extent, and then, when it was clear that the furor caused by “Hiroshima” wasn’t going to calm down, government officials put out their own counterpoint narrative, in an article in Harper’s Magazine, asserting that the bombs had been necessary and trying to dismiss Hersey’s revelations as sentimentality.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for your extensive research. I didn't realize that you found that new material on Groves’ review of the Hersey article. That was a coup. Congratulations.

Lesley M.M. Blume: That was me. I will not tell you what I yelled in the middle of that silent archive, but it's a miracle that they didn't kick me out.

Robin Lindley: What an incredible find. You write extensively about Hersey’s background. Could you say a few things about John Hersey for readers who may not know his work? 

Lesley M.M. Blume: Yes, absolutely. He's an interesting and unique protagonist for sure. Hersey in 1945 was 31 years old, movie star handsome, and already a celebrated writer. He had been covering the war since 1939 for Time, Inc. Henry Luce, the head of Time, Inc., had been grooming him to take over managing editorship of Time Inc., but they parted ways because Hersey couldn't abide Luce's chauvinistic, hyperpatriotic views. Hersey was also a recognized war hero for helping to evacuate wounded Marines while he was covering battles between the Japanese and the Americans in the Solomon Islands. And he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1944 novel A Bell for Adano.  Hersey was incredibly well known by the end of the war, and living what seems like a glamorous life. There were invites to the White House and he was mentioned in gossip columns. But he was not entirely comfortable being a public figure. He was the son of missionaries. He grew up in China. He was always a kind of outsider when the family moved back to the United States, even though he had a very celebrated life. He'd gone to Hotchkiss and Yale, where he was in the exclusive Skull and Bones society, but still, even when he was accepted among ultimate insiders, he always felt like an outsider. 

Robin Lindley: And you write about Hersey’s view of the Japanese during the war. 

Lesley M.M. Blume: He had covered the Japanese during the war and, like most Americans, he had been outraged by Pearl Harbor and by the stories of Japanese atrocities in China and Manila, and he was appalled by the battles in the Pacific theater. He said later that he had personally witnessed tenacity of Japanese troops; that’s a word that comes up again and again when American military veterans and journalists of that period described the Japanese, whom they expected to fight down to the last man in the Pacific theater and in Japan, if it were invaded. 

Robin Lindley: How did Hersey react to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then the second atomic bomb drop on Nagasaki three days later?

Lesley M.M. Blume: He was really quite appalled by the Nagasaki bombing. He was chagrined by Hiroshima, but he felt that it would speed the end of the war. But he thought that the atomic bomb used after Hiroshima was a war crime – a “totally criminal action,” is how he put it later. He realized before most people the implications of humanity having violently entered into the atomic age. He said to his editor at the New Yorker, William Shawn, that if humans could not see the humanity in each other – and continued to dehumanize one another as they had during the Second World War -- that civilization had no chance of surviving an atomic age now. 

Again, Hersey had covered everything from combat to concentration camps during the war. He had personally seen how the Japanese had dehumanized the Americans and the Chinese, among others, and how the Germans had dehumanized practically everybody. And when he saw Nagasaki bombed, he saw an active American dehumanization toward the largely civilian population in Japan. 

And so, he was able somehow to overcome his rage at the Japanese military to document what had happened to the civilian population who were the first humans in history on the receiving end of nuclear warfare. That was not a popular mindset, to go into Japan and say, I'm going to humanize this population for Americans – but Hersey was extraordinary in his perspective. 

Robin Lindley: Was it Hersey’s idea or Shawn’s to cover what actually happened on the ground at Hiroshima?

Lesley M.M. Blume: Hersey and his editor, William Shawn at the New Yorker, met for lunch at the end of 1945, when Hersey was about to do a big reporting trip to Asia. He was going to China, but from there, he planned to try to get into Japan. 

When he and Shawn were discussing Japan, they talked about the fact that the public had been shown in the press images and descriptions of the landscape destruction in Hiroshima, and pictures of the mushroom clouds.  But Americans had been seeing such rubble pictures of devastated cities around the globe for years, and the Hiroshima landscape photos didn’t seem that differentiated. And we can't forget that, when Truman first announced that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, he immediately cast it in conventional terms saying that the bomb was the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. 

There was very little mention or reporting on what had happened to the human beings under those mushroom clouds, and how these experimental bombs were unique, and this really disturbed Hersey and Shawn. For them, there was a suspicious and disturbing lack of reporting on the human consequences the bombs -- even though major American news operations had bureaus in Tokyo since the earliest days of the occupation, or, at the very least, correspondents stationed in Japan.

Robin Lindley: What did Hersey sense that the government was hiding from the American people?

Lesley M.M. Blume: Hersey and Shawn knew something was going on about how the bombs affected humans. How could you have such a huge press presence, but have the hugest story of the war being under told or covered up? They decided that if places like the New York Times and the Associated Press and other big players either wouldn't or couldn't get that story, Hersey would try to get into occupied Japan and go to Hiroshima to investigate the story. 

Robin Lindley: Right after the bombing, General Groves said that the bomb was “a pleasant way to die.” That left the impression that tens of thousands of people died in a flash and they were merely statistics. But the atomic bomb continued to kill long after detonation. 

Lesley M.M. Blume: Yeah, that's exactly right. At first the administration and the occupying forces were reinforcing the narrative that the bomb was a conventional military weapon. A bigger piece of artillery, is how Truman would long characterize it. The U.S. government initially said that accusations of radiation sickness or radiation poisoning killing survivors were “Tokyo tales”—Japanese propaganda to create sympathy among the international community. 

Initially, there were a few original press accounts by Allied journalists who’d managed to get into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during the earliest, chaotic days of the occupation. A couple came out of Hiroshima that indicated that a sinister new “disease X” was ravaging blast survivors there.  One account ran in the UP and the other in London’s Daily Express.  After that, another journalist tried to file a report to the Chicago Daily News from Nagasaki, confirming that a horrific affliction was killing off survivors there too. That report was intercepted by the Occupation censors under General MacArthur and supposedly “lost.”  The occupation forces clamped down on the foreign and Japanese press alike after that – and quickly. Those kinds of reports stopped coming out of Hiroshima – until Hersey got in. 

In the meantime, General Groves had personally spearheaded a PR campaign downplaying and denying radiation poisoning, and portraying the bombs as humane.  Meanwhile, he and his team were privately scrambling to study the aftermath and aftereffects of the bombs, but publicly said that this aftermath was not so bad. 

General Groves also commented, privately, during this time, that perhaps there was something about the composition of Japanese blood that was making them react especially badly to radiation absorbed into their bodies at the time of the bombing. That was an astonishing mindset. 

Robin Lindley: That’s incredible. Hersey was cleared to go into Hiroshima for two weeks in 1946 and he collected information from survivors on the human consequences of the bomb and how the damage to humans was much different than caused by a conventional bomb. And he chose to tell the story mainly through six survivors of the atomic bombing. 

Lesley M.M. Blume: Yes. By the time he left Japan, he also had radiation studies that had been undertaken by the Japanese, and Japanese studies on the damage to the city.  He had initial casualty counts, and an initial study on how the bombs might have affected the earth and botanical landscape in the atomic cities. He even had the hospital blood charts of one of his protagonists. 

In his subsequent article, Hersey wrote in excruciating detail, not just about the minutes, hours, and couple of days after August 6, 1945, but also the eight or nine months after by the time he entered Hiroshima. He wrote about how the atomic bomb kept on killing well after detonation. Several of his protagonists whom he profiled were critically ill and suffered from extreme hair loss, relentless fevers, total enervation, vomiting, and were in and out of hospitals. Hersey was so detailed in recounting their experiences that there would be no denying, after his report came out, the true medical effects of atomic bombs. Never again could atomic bombs be billed either as a pleasant way to die or as conventional megaweapons. 

This was a turning point, not just in America but around the world, and a wakeup call about the reality of nuclear warfare and what these bombs do to human beings. 

Robin Lindley: As you revealed for the first time, General Groves reviewed and surprisingly approved Hersey’s heart-wrenching account with only a few minor changes. Why did Groves approve publication of the story?

Lesley M.M. Blume: That was an astonishing revelation. By the time Hersey got into Japan in May, 1946, and wrote his story that summer, General Groves was already anticipating a time when America would no longer have the nuclear monopoly and would need to prepare for a possible nuclear attack on our own population. Both he and General MacArthur were anticipating this future landscape, and saw studying Hiroshima’s fate as a way to create an infrastructure here to prepare ourselves for nuclear attack. For example, they saw how Hiroshima suffered because all the hospitals were concentrated in the city center. Therefore, the U.S.  should take care to spread its city hospitals out, so they couldn’t all be taken out in one bombing. Hiroshima suddenly had enormous utility in terms of trying to figure out how to medically treat future survivors of nuclear attack. I came to realize that the U.S. military’s and the government’s policies and uses for the information that Hiroshima had evolved significantly since the early days of ham-fisted cover up and suppression about information about the bombings’ aftermath. 

But what really blew my mind was coming across the evidence that Hersey’s “Hiroshima” article had been submitted to Groves for pre-publication approval and vetting, and was approved. I was just trying to understand the mentality. 

A year after the bombing, the official approach to the narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was becoming more nuanced. There were two developing considerations. First, we had to show the Soviets what we had. We still had a nuclear monopoly and wanted to keep them in their place. The more they saw us as a threat, the better. The Russians saw Hersey’s report as propaganda and hated him and “Hiroshima” duly.  

Second – and again -- General Groves and others in the US government and military were anticipating a moment when we didn’t have the nuclear monopoly anymore. And so, if Americans were reading “Hiroshima” and they were seeing, New York or Detroit or San Francisco or Toledo, Ohio, in the place of Hiroshima, they might have thought, ‘We need to ban nuclear weapons.’ Which was the reaction that Hersey hoped for. 

Or, they might thing that that we needed to build and maintain a superior arsenal, because someday the Soviets would get the bomb too, and likely others.  And this was the thinking that helped set off the arms race. Leslie Groves, at that point in 1946, was already arguing that it was imperative for the US to maintain its nuclear advantage. He may have read Hersey's article in the most cynical way possible: as an unlikely way of drumming up public support for the continued development of a superior nuclear arsenal. 

Robin Lindley: And Americans and people around the world were reading the Hersey article in the August 31, 1946 New Yorker, with its graphic descriptions of the ghastly medical and other human consequences of an atomic bomb attack. How do you see the reception and the influence of Hersey’s report? 

Lesley M.M. Blume: It wasn't a foregone conclusion that it was going to be well received because, when you think about the American attitude toward the Japanese then, most Americans hated the Japanese. They remembered Pearl Harbor and Nanking and Manila and the Pacific theater. They were bloody memories. 

When the article came out, Hersey left town. Maybe he feared for his life because humanizing Japanese victims – who had died in a hugely popular military victory - for an American audience was a dicey proposition, to say the least.

As it turned out, the impact of the article was instantaneous and global. People everywhere stopped to read this 30,000-word story – and even if they hadn’t read it, they knew about it and were talking about it. A survey of the article’s readers later revealed that the vast majority of those surveyed said that “Hiroshima” was not just fine reporting, but that it served the greater common good by revealing the truth about what had happened in Hiroshima and the truth about nuclear weapons. And, even if people weren't feeling sympathetic towards the Japanese victims, they were definitely seeing the perilous reality of the world that they now lived, the atomic age. It was an enormously effective wake up call. 

The article was syndicated in its entirety in publications across the country and around the world. And it was covered on the least 500 radio stations in America. It was read over four consecutive nights in its entirety on ABC, and later, on the BBC. Within a year, the article was translated into practically every language around the world from Spanish to Hebrew to Bengali. It was even in braille. You can hardly imagine an article today getting this much attention or having this much of an impact.

Robin Lindley: I remember reading Hiroshima in book form decades ago, when I was in high school. I still recall the graphic depictions of the dead and the injured, the pain and suffering. The article must have had an especially strong effect on people who read it for the first time and didn’t know of the human toll of the atom bomb. 

Lesley M.M. Blume: Yes. And it was extraordinary that Hersey was able to get people to read it when there was little incentive to do so, because, again, it humanized the Japanese. And while there may have been morbid curiosity about what it was like under the mushroom cloud but, at the same time, it was hugely disturbing material. The fact that Hersey was able to get people to stop and to bring the country almost to a halt for a few days after the article came out was just an enormous and astonishing accomplishment.  

One of the things that made the story unputdownable was Hersey’s writing: he made it read like a novel, complete with cliffhangers in between each of the testimonies of the six protagonists.  It draws you in; you’re totally engrossed.  “Hiroshima” basically became mandatory reading for the reading public across the country and around the world. 

Robin Lindley: And wasn’t Hersey’s innovative approach to the article perhaps a precursor of the New Journalism by telling the story of this historical atrocity through the eyes of several witnesses, rather than writing a straight journalistic account? 

Lesley M.M. Blume: The style and approach of “Hiroshima” was literally inspired, in part, by another, earlier novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey [by Thornton Wilder], which Hersey had read while he was sick in China before going to Japan. At that point, Hersey knew generally that he wanted to tell the story of the bombings from individual vantage points, but he borrowed an idea from Wilder’s novel, which detailed the lives of a handful of people at the moment of shared disaster.  

In Bridge, those individuals all died on a bridge when it broke; in Hersey’s story, it would be a handful of people – everyday people – whose lives intersected in real life, and who all experienced and survived the Hiroshima bombing together. Each of Hersey’s protagonists are documented as they are going about morning routines on August 6, 1945, when the flash comes and their city and lives are destroyed.  It differed widely from any other journalistic accounts that followed in the days after the bombing, which again, largely cited clinical casualty statistics and described landscape devastation. But those accounts and that approach to the story of Hiroshima hadn’t really penetrated the global consciousness, and just didn't hit on a visceral level the way Hersey’s account did. 

In terms of “Hiroshima” being a forerunner to the immersive approach taken by “New Journalists” – well, it’s sometimes cited as such, but Hersey really disliked the approach of people like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and other later journalists who made themselves the center of their stories.  Hersey thought it was an awful and dangerous journalistic trend.  And if you look at “Hiroshima,” you’ll see that Hersey totally absented himself from that reporting: no opinions, no rage; the voice of the story is very nothing-but-the-facts, and intentionally so.  

Plus, Hersey did not personally promote “Hiroshima” and had a lifelong aversion to self-promotion.  He felt that his work should speak for itself.  He never put himself on center stage.  Although he did leave a lot of documentation behind for historians like me to tell his story much later.

Robin Lindley: I appreciate those comments on Hersey’s approach to writing. Your book also demonstrates that you have a gift for storytelling and lively writing as well as research. Who are some of your influences as a writer?

Lesley M.M. Blume: Well, thank you for the compliment. First of all, I have to say that I have a vicious editor who kept me on the straight and narrow, or the book probably would have been twice as long as it is. 

On specific influences, at the risk of sounding like a cliché, I've been greatly influenced by both of the men who I've documented in my two main nonfiction books, Hemingway and Hersey. Both stripped down their writing to what was essential to the story. Hemingway’s tip-of -the-iceberg storytelling approach is still so damned relevant, so important. Hemingway is more stylized, but Hersey’s approach was honed with the New Yorker editors to a dispassionate recounting of fact. That has also been hugely instructive. 

In terms of other major journalistic accounts that I've read that absolutely floored me, there was David Remnick’s incredible account of the Bolshoi ballet when it was about to unravel. He reported on his protagonists just in their own words, but the characters were so outlandish and insane, and the cross-weaving of the hallowed Bolshoi history and the modern-day antics were unbelievable. It was written in a masterly way.  Something that all of these writers have in common is telling a big story through individual characters.

Robin Lindley: It’s also obvious that, like Hersey, you care about the human story behind statistics and other facts when you're writing or researching a story. 

Lesley M.M. Blume: It's all-important, and I've always known it, but this project has really brought that home: it always comes back to the human story. I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago about how Hersey’s approach gives journalists today a tool for telling the story of other catastrophes, including the story of the pandemic.  We’re now over 200,000 deaths in this country -- more than three times the number of the Americans who died in Vietnam – and over a million global deaths. How do you deal with these statistics, how do you fathom the toll and the tragedy behind the numbers? It's relentlessly important to bring it down to the human lives behind this unfolding tragedy – or any mass casualty situation. 

For example, my favorite Hemingway book isn’t The Sun Also Rises, which I documented in my earlier book, but rather For Whom the Bell Tolls, which documented the horror of a war that presaged World War II. In it, he depicted the interactions among individual people in a small town as that war unfolded, and the cruelties they inflicted on each other. If you can bring a story down to a handful of people who are experiencing a globe- or country-rocking event, then there’s a better chance your readers will comprehend the enormity of the event. Ironically, the more granular and human-focused the account, the greater the comprehension. 

Robin Lindley: That’s powerful advice for all writers. I appreciated also your quote toward the end of the book where you said “Nuclear conflict may mean the end of life on this planet. Mass dehumanization can lead to genocide. The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience.” That was powerful and heartfelt. We’re at a time when our free press is under threat when the administration is actually hiding information. Where do you find hope now?

Lesley M.M. Blume: In Dr. Anthony Fauci. As long as we can hear from him, we will get guidance on how to get through this time, and we'll have a sense of where we really stand. 

To be honest, this is a bleak moment. I have enormous trepidation in the lead-up to the election. Every day there's evidence that our society’s battle over information is basically the battle of our times. This battle will determine how things shake out for human civilization and the democratic experiment, not just for this country, but for all of the world. 

I try to remember that our ancestors stared down and overcame enormous existential threats, and I look to the World War II period not for hope, but for strength. Can you imagine being in London during the blitz, or being in that country just after Dunkirk, and having to find the strength to carry on? There were such dark moments during that conflict yet there was an end.

Today, as then, we do not have the luxury of being exhausted or being demoralized. You just have to see what is right and relentlessly pursue that and try to find the energy to do that. 

I’m trying to find pleasure in everyday things also. I have a young daughter who is smart and strong and hilarious. Being a parent is extremely motivating to keep fighting because, if you bring a human into this world, you damn well better try your best to be the best version of yourself, and help make the world as just as possible. 

I’m also reading a lot of “Talk of the Town.” And I'm doing an Alfred Hitchcock movie marathon, which has been fun and stylish. Quarantine stress briefly led me to consume a daily gin and tonic, but I’ve weaned off them because they’re too fattening. I'd like to maintain some semblance of a jawline. 

It’s discouraging that right now we go to bed each night and we don't know what is going to unfold the next day. But we have to remember that we're not the only humans who have felt that way, and we just have to fight because there's no other choice.  Exhaustion and surrender are not options. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks Ms. Blume for those words of encouragement and inspiration. Readers are sure to appreciate your thoughts and all the careful work you've done on this story. Thank you for this opportunity to discuss your work and congratulations on your groundbreaking new book Fallout on the intrepid John Hersey and his classic account of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Crosscut, Documentary, NW Lawyer, ABA Journal, Re-Markings, Real Change, Huffington Post, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, and art. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Dr. Peniel E. Joseph currently holds a joint professorship appointment at the University of Texas, Austin at the LBJ School of Public Affairs where he serves the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, and at the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. He is the author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books, 2020).

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Re-Markings, Real Change, Huffington Post, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, and art. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He also served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. King. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

There is no way to understand the history, struggle, and debate over race and democracy in contemporary America without understanding Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.’s relationship to each other, to their own era, and, most crucially, to our time.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield

In popular memory, Malcolm X is often caricatured as a fiery racial separatist and Black Muslim proselytizer, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is recalled as a saintly preacher who worked for civil rights and conciliation. This simplified, one-dimensional perspective also suggests that the two men were committed adversaries who disregarded one another.

However, the story of each of these American icons is much more nuanced and more complex, as acclaimed American historian Professor Peniel E. Joseph reveals in his recent groundbreaking dual biography, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books).

In many ways, as Professor Joseph writes, both men were kindred spirits and both revolutionaries in their unique approaches to racism, social injustice, violence, and democracy. And both evolved. And both sacrificed their lives.

In the months before his assassination in February 1965, Malcolm had dispensed with his racist rhetoric and shared a broad vision of anticolonialism and international human rights that he drew in part from Dr. King’s dream of a “Beloved Community.”

And, in the last three years of his life, Dr. King moved on from civil rights issues to campaign against the three evils of materialism, militarism and racism. He spoke with Malcolm’s passion against the war in Vietnam and against economic injustice and he drew scorn not only from old enemies but from former friends and allies in the media and even in the civil rights movement.

Professor Joseph illuminates and interweaves the stories of these two extraordinary men in his compelling and vivid narrative based on extensive research and years of experience studying the history of Black freedom movements. He fleshes out the humanity and passions of his subjects while presenting an intellectual consideration of their philosophies as well as the historical context of their struggles, their activism, their transformations.

Professor Joseph is, in the words of renowned historian and Professor Ibram X. Kendi, “one of the greatest historians of Black America.”

Dr. Joseph currently holds a joint professorship appointment at the University of Texas, Austin at the LBJ School of Public Affairs where he serves the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, and at the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. Joseph’s scholarship has focused on what he characterizes as Black Power Studies, the transnational movement for Black liberation in America and globally, whose reverberations are the site of both intellectual inquiry and ongoing political contestation against White Supremacy and anti-Black racism. Through six books, scores of essays and articles, and historiographical and theoretical critiques, Joseph has mapped out a genealogy of Black Power antecedents and influences that have impacted multiple fields of interdisciplinary scholarship.

In addition to his academic pursuits, Professor Joseph is a public intellectual who comments frequently on issues of race, democracy and civil rights in the print and broadcast media. He also has written several award-winning books, including Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America; Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama; and Stokely: A Life, a definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael. Further, he edited The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.

Professor Joseph generously responded to questions on his work by telephone from his home in Texas.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Joseph on your dual biography of Malcolm X and Dr. King, The Sword and the Shield. Before I get to your book, I’d like to ask about your background as a historian. You’re a leading expert in American history with an emphasis on the civil rights era, the Black Freedom movement, and related issues. What sparked you to choose a career in history?

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: It’s due to my mother’s influence. I grew up in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, and my mother was a hospital worker and a union member at Mount Sinai hospital. It was really from her that I became interested in social justice and racial equality. She is a feminist, a deep Christian, and a human rights historian. I was on my first picket line in elementary school with her so I learned really fast about movements to end social injustice so that people could get together and demonstrate peacefully and change policies, and protect workers and provide people with cleaner water to drink and more access to housing and health care.

In addition to my mother’s deep interest, I was then growing up in New York City, which was segregated with a lot of police brutality during the years of [Mayors] Koch and David Dinkins. Seeing this up close sparked my interest in social movements, activism and politics intellectually, but also as an active person, as a human being.

Robin Lindley: I read that you entered college at age 16. That's remarkable.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: No, I was 17 and graduated in three years. I finished at 20 as a double major in history and African studies and went on to get my Ph.D. at 27 at Temple University in Philadelphia.

I was very passionate about history and I think college and then graduate school led me to become a professor. It’s a privilege to read and study and learn for a living. And I've never lost my intellectual curiosity about these movements and the history.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that background Professor Joseph. You’re an admired teacher as well as an acclaimed writer and an award-winning biographer. You have mentioned that you find biography a useful teaching tool for historians. How does biography come into your teaching?

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Biography is really important because students and readers are captivated by stories. A great example of that is Barack Obama’s new book A Promised Land, as well as his earlier memoir, Dreams from My Father. He talks about basically his first three years as president but you get the campaign and get aspects of his family. And he tells a story that's very, very compelling with different anecdotes. He’s telling people a story, and through that story you get foreign policy, domestic policy, race, and the environment. You get so many different aspects of not only his life but the times and events that shaped him.

Biography is important because, when fleshing out a group of women or men through the actual lives of people who have lived in the past or who are living now, people come to better empathize with the struggles and the issues much more than if they have only abstractions. So even if there's this cataclysmic event, whether it's a civil war or a famine, if you tease out the life of one particular group of people or actors, people can actually connect with the larger story more than if the focus is at the level of abstraction and theory.

Robin Lindley: You accomplish that goal with history and lively storytelling in your new book, The Sword and the Shield, a dual biography of two iconic Americans, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. You debunk many popular misconceptions about both men who are often seen as polar opposites. Did you know when you began the book that you would find that they were kindred spirits in many ways?

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Yes. It was through doing research on other books that I started to see both of them differently and found out much more about King and breadth of his radical revolutionary politics as well as Malcolm’s political evolution. My research on Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power Movement eventually led me to write this book.

Robin Lindley: It’s a powerful story. In my view, you have intertwined two profiles in courage. Contemporary audiences may not know of their sacrifices. Dr. King and Malcolm X were under constant threat daily. They faced violence, death threats, and assassination attempts and, of course, both were assassinated. And both were under intense surveillance by the FBI. Dr. King was very aware that, when he traveled, the FBI bugged his rooms and tapped his phones, yet he always publicized his schedule. Their persistence is a study in resilience and courage. Their accomplishments came at a dreadful cost.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Yes. I think that you're right about what they faced at the time, the kinds of constant threats that they experienced. And most of us are never going to have to face those constant threats.

I tried in both their cases to give them the humanity that they and their families deserve, and also recount the risks they dared. And they definitely were very, very courageous people.

And it's remarkable that neither of them ever gave up. Malcolm X could have stayed in Africa and saved his life. Dr. King could have retreated as well. A lot of people wanted him to be a pastor and a public intellectual. They didn’t want him leading the Poor People's Campaign and the strike in Memphis.

But they continued their work. They were resilient and both were passionate about not just civil rights, but human rights. And that thought continues to resonate to this day in terms of the language they used with Dr. King stressing Black citizenship and Malcolm focused on Black dignity. But they came to see over time that both Black citizenship and Black dignity were required.

Robin Lindley: As you note in your book, Malcolm X and Dr. King met only once in person, at the US Senate in 1964. Did they keep in touch at all?

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Yes. Their people wanted them to meet but they never got around to the meeting they were supposed to have.

Malcolm knew Clarence Jones, who was Dr. King's attorney, and they were supposed to meet again but did not. However, in December 1964, Malcolm went to Harlem and was sitting next to Andy Young, the future UN ambassador and mayor of Atlanta, while Dr. King gave a speech right after winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Malcolm also went to Selma when King was in jail there. That was in February 1965, right before Malcolm died. He visited Coretta Scott King and told her that he admired her husband. He said he was just there to help and not hurt. He wanted people to know that if King didn't get voting rights, there was going to be an alternative. And that's what he'd been saying: the ballot or the bullet.

You could see the convergence in that final year of Malcolm’s life. In an interview, Malcolm also told the novelist Robert Penn Warren that he and Dr. King had the same goals for human dignity in mind.

Robin Lindley: Their work has so much resonance now. In The Sword and the Shield, you use a couple of metaphors with Malcolm X as a sword and a prosecutor for Black dignity and Dr. King as a shield and defense attorney for Black citizens. Can you talk about those descriptions?

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Yes, absolutely.

One of the interesting things about both of them is their evolution. As this prosecuting attorney, Malcolm is really prosecuting white America for crimes against Black humanity that date back to racial slavery. One of the most striking things about listening to their speeches, with Malcolm’s from 1952 to 1965, and Dr. King’s from 1955 to 1968, is that they both start to confront racial slavery. That's a real motif in their speeches along with race, democracy, and caste privilege.

King served, initially at least, a different function as the defense attorney defending white and Black people, and arguing that Black people just want an equal and fair shot and full citizenship. He tells Black people that Jim Crow segregation and racial slavery have not somehow made white people irredeemable, even though he said, look, it's impacted the soul of white people because we shouldn't be living like this. That’s why the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [headed by Dr. King] adopted the motto “To Redeem the Soul of America.” That language recognized that all people were affected by the treatment of Black Americans, even those who felt they were in a more privileged position. And whites were not giving away anything because society is not supposed to be like this.

Over time though, Malcolm grew into a radical statesman who frequents the United Nations and travels overseas. After going on the Haj [the pilgrimage to Mecca], he felt whites could be part of the solutions and civil rights should be a human rights movement.

Robin Lindley: You illuminate King’s transformation after the death of Malcolm.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: After Malcolm's death, King becomes the prosecutor. What's so interesting is that King, who had been the defense attorney, was still nonviolent but he attacked racism. He said that the biggest threat to peace in the country was white racism and white racial terror against Black people. The white people were producing the violence and there'd be peace but for the chaos from white people. 

One of the fascinating things about King’s life is when he evolves and speaks truth to power. He's still talking about nonviolence, but he's speaking in bold radical terms about the need to end militarism and materialism and racism. King is an anti-imperialist. He argues for ending the war in Vietnam and building the Beloved Community through a revolution of values that resists racism and white supremacy. And King starts to call people out. He calls out the president and he calls out the Congress. And he calls the United States the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. King is also an anti-capitalist. He pleads with the nation to undergo a revolution of values wherein the poverty he witnesses in, for example, Marks, Mississippi that moves him to tears, will leave the nation’s conscience so troubled that America will have no choice but to remake itself by ending poverty for good.

Robin Lindley: And King also attacks the economic system and economic inequality.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Yes, King also worked on the ground as an organizer during the course of this [Poor Peoples] campaign, even in Mississippi, in the poorest zip code (Quitman County) in the country. He was in tears seeing all these poor Black folks, and he said to them that the way they were living was a crime. So he said they were going to Washington and they were going to get a guaranteed income, and they would stay there until they did. He’s using the same language Malcolm X who said that Black people had been the victims of a series of crimes against them. And then King talked about the Homestead Act and how the Act gave 40 acres of land to white European immigrants, but added that Black people never got their 40 acres and a mule. And, to this same audience of poor Blacks, he talked about Reconstruction, and he said these people are the same people telling you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

This is what we're facing in this country. As a scholar, I'm endlessly fascinated by both of these men and the language they used. They were both brilliant in their way. They utilized history to present the historical context of the way life was then. They did this in a way that becomes extraordinarily powerful.

Robin Lindley: Despite his radicalization, King never abandons nonviolence as a tactic.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: For me, it’s always about King building a peace movement. I wanted to show in this book how King was a peaceful revolutionary who was going to Washington without a gun or a knife or even a curse word. He actually didn’t curse.

King was saying that we have to change the systems of domination and racial oppression or none of us are going to survive. So he's really remarkable. And this is where King and Malcolm converge in talking about citizenship and dignity. And by the end, King is saying Black is beautiful, and he's talking about Black pride. He’s using the words of Malcolm.

Folks like the Black Panthers misunderstood King. They failed to realize the revolutionary strength of massive non-violence civil disobedience. Stokely Carmichael was a Black Power icon who understood, admired, and respected King’s enormous power, even when, perhaps especially when, they disagreed. And he loved King even as he disagreed with his tactics vocally.

Stokely Carmichael realized that King was a revolutionary and that's why they were friends. King invited him to dine at his home, and King didn't do that to most people. Stokely was in the front row when King came out against the war again at Ebenezer [Baptist Church, Atlanta] and Stokely led the standing ovation. So, when you look at King and you see the fact that somebody like Stokely Carmichael respected and even loved him, it really is a much different portrait of the person that we celebrate on his holiday annually.

Robin Lindley: Yes. I didn't realize that King and Stokely Carmichael were so close until I read your book.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Yes. King is such a huge, capacious figure. I am very excited to just be able to delve deeper into his life. He's a real revolutionary, and he showed how you can be a revolutionary without also being violent, and how his revolution is about fundamental social change and transformation without any kind of violence.

Robin Lindley: It seems that the last three years of King's life, after his civil rights achievements, are often ignored in popular memory.  However, in those final years he called out the evils of militarism, materialism and racism, as you stress. He spoke out against the Vietnam war and he planned the Poor People's Campaign. At the end of his life, he was in Memphis to support striking garbage workers. And he had a long history of speaking out for workers and union movements.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: He absolutely did. Michael Honey had the great book on King and labor: Going Down the Jericho Road, as well as another book on King and labor.

King was a huge supporter of workers of all colors and backgrounds, but especially Black workers. He realized, as he struggled for racial justice and social justice for all people, that he had to look through the particular lens of the struggles of Black people.

King is a fascinating figure and we've turned him into this anodyne, milquetoast figure that everybody claims they love because he's not offensive. But he was somebody who fought for social justice, not just domestically but internationally. He spoke about violence, poverty, hunger, and racism, and how we could eradicate them if we had the right priorities. To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, is absolutely indispensable to a richer, more nuanced, and historically and philosophically contextualized understanding of King.

Robin Lindley: And King lost many friends and allies when he moved from civil rights to criticizing the government, opposing the Vietnam War, and campaigning against income inequality and economic injustice. He was maligned in the press and even by former colleagues in the Civil Rights Movement for expanding his critique of America.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: Yes. He lost that mainstream sheen and in those last three years. He had been a Nobel prize winner. He had been Time magazine’s man of the year. He had attended White House conferences with Kennedy and LBJ. He lost that sheen because he was  critical of US imperialism and racial capitalism. He was also critical of domestic and international violence as he spoke about deep institutional problems that we have yet to confront. He felt that confronting those things was the only way we would have peace.

For King, it wasn’t enough to pass the Civil Rights Act. You still had police brutality. When he testified before the president’s Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders in October of 1967, he said that the roots of urban rioting were poverty and exploitation and racism. He was very outspoken and that's where I think he and Malcolm converged.

King became this outspoken leader who people felt uncomfortable with where, in an early iteration, people felt more comfortable with him. And it's really quite striking and extraordinary to see.

Robin Lindley: I never thought I’d see Nazis and other white supremacists openly rally in 21st century America or that I’d see a president and other national leaders spew racist rhetoric. This year has been especially hard with a deadly global pandemic that has disproportionately infected and killed Black and brown people in the US. Where do you find hope today Professor Joseph?

Professor Peniel E. Joseph: I found profound hope in the BLM protests of 2020; the voting rights activism of Stacey Abrams and Black women in Georgia; the moral Mondays movement of Reverend Barber in North Carolina; and the global dimensions of movements for Black citizenship/dignity that have galvanized human rights movements the world over.

Sam Cooke reminds us that “A change is gonna come,” and we are experiencing and undergoing that long, painful process of change now. A new world is not only possible, but on the horizon of existence. We have to work for it, but it is being created in each act of resistance, organizing, suffering, and love.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those inspiring words Professor Joseph, and for sharing your thoughtful insights. And congratulations on your remarkable dual biography of two American revolutionaries, Malcolm X and Dr. King.

Dr. Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, where he is jointly appointed in the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Department of History. He specializes in U.S. foreign relations history and 20th century international history. He is the author most recently of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1963, the first part of a planned two-part biography. 

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, Writer’s Chronicle, Huffington Post, Crosscut, Documentary, NW Lawyer, ABA Journal, Re-Markings, Real Change, and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, and art. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Our 35th president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, remains an elusive figure often shrouded in myth despite thousands of books that consider his career and legacy. There are memories of a lionized hero and the glamor and triumph of a public life cut short by a horrific assassination. And there is also the record of his political and personal failings resulting in an image that has lost some luster over the decades.

Renowned foreign policy expert and professor of history Fredrik Logevall details and demystifies the life of Kennedy in his groundbreaking and extensively researched new biography JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1963 (Random House), volume one of a two-volume project.

Professor Logevall humanizes JFK as he illuminates how the future president responded to and was influenced by historical trends and events. He takes the reader from the struggles of the great-grandfather who fled Ireland at the time of the potato famine to Jack’s wealthy family, then through Jack’s education and war years to his early political career and his decision in November 1956 to pursue the presidency. Professor Logevall brings new light to the future president’s childhood and youth, his indiscretions, his interest in democracy and its challenges, his wartime bravery, and his early political machinations in the uncertain world of the Cold War.

As he illuminates JFK’s complex character, Professor Logevall charts the course of his life in the context of America’s rise to the position of international superpower. The biography reveals a better informed, braver, more serious, more curious, more reflective, more heedless, more ill person than previously explored. At the same time, the book candidly and unsparingly examines JFK’s personal and political failings.

For his critically acclaimed biography, Professor Logevall drew on a trove of newly released archival material as well as overlooked primary sources such as letters, diaries, personal files, and other resources. The result of his years of research is a lively and authoritative portrait of JFK and of mid-20th century America and the world.          

Dr. Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, where he is jointly appointed in the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Department of History. He specializes in U.S. foreign relations history and 20th century international history. He was previously the Stephen and Madeline Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University where he also served as vice provost and as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Before that, he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-founded the Center for Cold War Studies. He earned his doctorate at Yale University.

Professor Logevall has written several other books including Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History as well as the Francis Parkman Prize, the American Library in Paris Book Award, and the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations. He also co-authored America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (with Campbell Craig; Belknap/Harvard). His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, Daily Beast, and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. He is a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Society of American Historians.  

Much of his research for volume two of JFK is completed, Professor Logevall said, but he has more work to do and is eager for the archives to reopen for researchers.

Professor Logevall generously discussed his work by telephone from his home near Harvard University during a snow storm. He remarked that the 15 inches of new snow reminded him of his native Sweden.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Fredrik Logevall on your magisterial biography of John F. Kennedy. Before I get to the book, I wanted to talk with you about your background. You grew up in Sweden and then moved with your parents to Canada. How did you choose a career in history and then become an internationally recognized expert on American foreign policy?

Professor Fredrik Logevall:  We moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, not long before I turned 12. When you live right next door to the greatest power of all and like to follow current events, you automatically become interested in US politics and foreign policy. It was a step-by-step process for me. We subscribed to Time, and I remember jumping on each issue as it arrived in our mailbox every week.

If there was a particular moment of revelation, it was reading David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest [a critique of US policy in Vietnam] as an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University in BC. It just drew me in and I became obsessed with the book, with the vividness of the prose, and the sense that a great deal was at stake in the story Halberstam was telling; it just jumped off the page. I'm not sure I fully realized it at the time, but that book had an important impact on my decision to pursue graduate school ultimately where I studied foreign policy with a focus on the Cold War at Yale where I earned my PhD.

My doctoral dissertation was on Vietnam in the period from 1963 to 1965 on how Vietnam became a large-scale American war. I wrote it under the direction of Gaddis Smith, and revised it for publication during my first teaching position at UC Santa Barbara.  It appeared in print in 1999 under the title Choosing War.

Robin Lindley: Did Embers of War, your Pulitzer Prize winning history of the origins of the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1960, grow out of that earlier book? Your gifts as a historian and elegant writer are evident from Embers of War.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Thank you! I wasn't intending to continue with the war per se but an opportunity arose when I was approached by Random House to produce what became Embers of War. It certainly built on the work I had done for Choosing War, though it’s a kind of prequel covering the French war and the beginnings of US involvement.

Robin Lindley: I recently learned that you were involved with the PBS Vietnam War documentary produced by Lynn Novick and Ken Burns and that you did an essay for Geoffrey Ward’s companion book. There are mixed opinions, but I think most agree that the film was compelling, moving, and showed the human face of war from all sides.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Yes. It was a pleasure for me to be a member of their advisory board. They brought us to New Hampshire to watch and dissect the rough cuts, and I came away impressed by the seriousness of the endeavor. The decision they made to include the Vietnamese perspective was key, and the film is also excellent in bringing out the soldierly perspective.

There were suggestions later that the South Vietnamese views should have been better integrated into the film. That's a reasonable argument, and I have some other quibbles with the interpretations and emphases at various points. But it’s a powerful, moving film. I’ll show a portion of it in my class this spring, and also portions of the old WGBH documentary, Vietnam: A Television History, which to my mind remains incredibly powerful, even four decades after it first ran.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing that background. Now, to your sweeping new JFK biography. How did you come to write another book on JFK when so many already cover his life?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: First, I’m fascinated with his era in American history and American foreign policy. I had written about Kennedy in other contexts pertaining to the Cold War and Vietnam, so I had an intrinsic interest in him.

Second, although the literature on the Kennedys is huge—by one count there are 40,000 books on him and his family—we don't have a lot of biographies of him, and none that do what I attempt here, which is a full-scale “life and times” effort. It’s surprising, but it’s true. The books by Dallek, Parmet, O’Brien, and others are valuable, no question, and I of course cite them, but to my mind they give insufficient attention to Kennedy’s early years and to the broader context in which he came of age.  The conceit of the book is that one can use the story of JFK’s rise to also tell the remarkable story of America’s rise to superpower status, that each story fleshes out the other.

I suppose a third reason for doing this, Robin, is that the source materials are just fantastic, and many of them are just down the street from me at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. It’s a marvelous collection with a vast trove of letters, diaries, texts, oral histories, and official documents. It's really quite spectacular. So, in addition to the wealth of secondary sources which I've used with profit, the primary material is very rich.

Robin Lindley: Did you find that more family and government documents have been released for researchers in the past decade?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Yes, there is new material, no question. If not all of it is brand new, per se, much of it has only become generally available in the past few years. But I was also struck by the number of collections that have been available for decades and yet have not been widely consulted as far as I can see.

Robin Lindley: That’s certainly a gift for a historian. What was it like for you to follow in JFK’s footsteps at Harvard? Are there special sites where he lived and studied?

Professor Fredrik Logevall:  Yes. There’s Weld Hall, his freshman dorm in the Yard, and there’s Winthrop House where he lived in his sophomore, junior and senior years. They have a Kennedy suite, which is open to visitors and is really well done. And there are traces of JFK all over the university.

Though I signed the contract for this project before I joined the Harvard faculty, it’s certainly a blessing to live and work right here where he spent a highly important part of his life. I think I write better history when I can experience first-hand the places I’m writing about—and on a sustained basis, in different seasons, at various times of day. 

Robin Lindley: You mentioned that some of the primary JFK materials have been overlooked and there’s new material. What are some surprises you found?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: One of the things that surprised me was that this supposedly elusive figure actually reveals quite a lot of himself in his teens and twenties—critical years for him, as they are for most of us. That is to say, I could actually get fairly close to him because of the voluminous documentation, the letters that the family wrote to one another, the student papers, the diaries that he kept on his travels.

The second surprise is that JFK was less dominated by his father than many previous accounts have suggested. Unlike his older brother Joe Junior, Jack was willing and able to forge his own path, both in terms of his political philosophy and his views on foreign policy. For example, his view on what the American posture should be in the lead up to World War II was independent of his father's position in a way that I had not fully anticipated. Whereas the father was an arch appeaser both in the lead-up to the war and afterward, JFK determined well before Pearl Harbor that appeasement was untenable. He became, and would remain, an internationalist. Later, when the two men disagreed on political strategy during Jack’s campaigns, Jack’s view prevailed. Though JFK admired his father no end, and though the two of them were very close, at key moments he separated himself from his father and insisted on taking his own course. That surprised me and it’s an important theme in the book.

A final surprise is the one I mentioned earlier: to a degree I did not anticipate, I found I could use Kennedy’s life to illuminate the era. Many of the key historical developments I examine in this first volume can be better understood through his life—for example, the charged debate in the U.S. between so-called “isolationists” and interventionists in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor; the origins of the Cold War; the Red Scare and McCarthyism; the growth in importance of television in U.S politics; and so on. I anticipate that the same will be true in my second volume, when other issues will come to the fore. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those comments and on your groundbreaking research. You mentioned Joe Senior’s strong influence on JFK. How do you see his relationship with his mother Rose? One view is that she was distant and domineering with all of her children.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Rose Kennedy has not gotten her due, it seems to me. She was a highly important figure in young Jack’s life, as mothers usually are. His interest in reading, in history, in the world, got much more from her than from his father. Ditto his love of politics. As you say, she could be emotionally reserved, even distant, but she matters a lot in the story, and would be highly important in his rise in politics. His campaigns were family affairs, and Rose’s role in them should not be underestimated.

Robin Lindley: And you mention Jack’s older brother Joe Junior who, in the popular imagination, was the family member destined for greatness. How do you see Jack’s relationship with him? And why do you think Joe Jr. volunteered for a virtual kamikaze mission in 1944—which ended in his death?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: The relationship was highly consequential, and thus looms large in my book. There’s no question that Joe Junior was the golden child in the parents’ assessment, and in the view of many others. Over time, however, Jack began to outshine him, to show greater promise. The parents never quite accepted this reality, which is a fascinating thing, but Joe himself could see it all too well. And though we cannot know for sure, I suspect that a desire to match Jack’s heroic exploits in the South Pacific in 1943 contributed to Joe’s decision to volunteer for that fatal—and absurdly dangerous—mission in August 1944.

Robin Lindley: You do a superb job of describing JFK’s formative years, his childhood and education. You’ve alluded to your sense of JFK, but did your view of JFK evolve in the course of researching and writing the biography?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Yes, certainly. To begin with, I just know him better. Based on my previous work I had a broadly sympathetic view of JFK as presidential decisionmaker, especially in foreign policy. I have been critical of his actions on Vietnam, but overall I have tended in my past work to give him pretty high marks.

Now I understand his formative years much better, and have a better sense of personality, his strengths and his limitations. What I try to offer is a “warts and all” picture—or, to put it differently, I try to humanize him. He could be heedless of his friends, heedless of women (including his wife Jackie), and was not always a “profile in courage”—for example, in his cautious approach to the scourge of McCarthyism in the period 1950-54. But I also depict young man who was more substantive than previous accounts suggest, who cared deeply about policy and politics, who had a well-honed historical sensibility from an early age, and a commitment to public service.   

Robin Lindley: When you deeply research and think about a person, preconceptions may fall away.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: I think that's right. There are lots of examples with JFK. Here’s one: his experience in World War Two, especially when he was in the South Pacific in 1943, had an important effect on his outlook, as it did with many fighting men, and that caused him to think more deeply about his place in the world, about what should be the U.S. posture on the global stage. I lay out in the book the ways in which I think the war really mattered for him, and that’s another example of how my assessment of him changed in the course of the research and the writing of the book.

Robin Lindley: For me, your book is a profile in courage, an amazing story of young JFK’s resilience and courage and risk-taking. As you illuminate, he accomplishes so much, yet illness runs like a red thread through his life. He was often sick and in pain and he received the last rites on a couple of occasions. Yet his courage and strength are impressive as when he rescued his PT 109 crew after a Japanese destroyer rammed and sank his vessel. Despite his heroism and the admiration of his crew, he was always humble about that experience. I wonder if he felt some kind of responsibility for that collision?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: I think he understood that his own actions as skipper were partly responsible for allowing the ramming to occur, and he was determined in the hours thereafter to make amends. I also think, as you are suggesting, that his actions in helping to save the crew and himself were extraordinary, indeed genuinely heroic. The crew felt the same, both at time and in later years, as did his superiors.

And as you say, he demonstrated courage throughout his life. He was suffering from one malady or another almost constantly from early childhood on, yet seldom complained, and was always very active. And let’s not forget the crushing family tragedies. Consider that he loses his older brother, Joe Jr., in the war in 1944. Then the sibling to whom he felt closest, Kathleen, who was known as Kick and whom he considered his soulmate, dies in a plane crash in 1948. Earlier, he effectively loses the sibling who was closest to him in age, Rosemary, through a botched lobotomy in late 1941. So, of the four oldest children, he's the only one who's alive by the middle of 1948. It’s hard if not impossible to imagine how being in that position would have been for him.

Robin Lindley: You flesh out the complexity of his character. Despite his history of serious illnesses, he didn’t try to avoid danger. Even before the PT 109 incident, he joined the Navy—with the help of Joe Senior—and then volunteered for combat dirty. Then he saved his crew. He swam miles to drag a wounded crewmate to safety. He would have been exempt from any service with his medical issues, yet instead of avoiding combat, like most men with the choice, he served with distinction in a war zone.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Yes, I agree. It’s a remarkable part of this story, the degree to which he was determined after Pearl Harbor not only to get into the service but then, as you say, ultimately to be in harm's way on the front lines.

With his health history, it would have been easy for him to stay on in his desk job in the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington DC. His father had helped him get that job, and that's where he could have remained, but he didn't want to do that. He worked very hard and ultimately successfully to get to the heart of the action in the South Pacific.

Robin Lindley: JFK saw the horror of war and that experience affected his attitudes. He wasn’t a pacifist of course, but he wrote of his abhorrence of war and he had a jaundiced view of how the military works. How do you see these attitudes in his politics?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: It's an interesting point. His skepticism about the utility of military force to solve political problems really took root in World War Two and it was affected by his combat experience.

As I write in the book, he came out of the war with misgivings about what the military brass had decided on both the strategic and tactical levels; more broadly, he came out of it with questions about whether military force should be used in many circumstances. This skepticism certainly didn't make him a pacifist, as you say, and he always believed in the importance of having a strong US military, but it influenced his policy decisions as president. I will explore this theme more fully in volume two, for which I’ve done a good deal of research already.

His attitude about the utility of military force played out in important ways, including at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when almost all of his advisors pushed for a military solution to get the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. At key moments during the crisis, JFK was virtually alone among them in saying, in effect, No, we've got to look for a political solution here. He insisted on the need to see things from Khrushchev's perspective.  In a nuclear age, Kennedy believed, the idea of great-power war was an impossibility; every effort must be made to avoid it. He felt that deeply, and felt it to the end of his days.

Robin Lindley: JFK was more introspective than many American leaders and had a sense of his own mortality. I was struck that his favorite poem was Alan Seeger's “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Yes, I suggest in the book that he was to an extent an outsider within his own family. He was the reader, the introspective child, the one who looked things up, who loved history. He was the one with an interest in poetry. (He had an excellent memory and he could recall poems and long passages from books verbatim decades later.)  

Robin Lindley: And he also had this ready, ironic sense of humor and a willingness to make fun of himself.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: No question. I think that’s a key to understanding who he was and to understanding his success as a politician, culminating in his rise to the presidency. If you watch YouTube clips of his press conferences, for example, you’ll see many examples of this ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor that you're referring to. It really worked for him. But it was no latter-day development—one finds lots of examples of this humor in his letters when he was a kid and a young man, and in his diaries. Even when he was a boy, he had a subtle and ironic sense of humor that drew people to him.

Robin Lindley: I was impressed that, even in the 1930s, JFK visited Europe and wrote about the dangers of fascism and questioned whether democracy could survive. And, in recent years we've seen how strong and how fragile democracy can be.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: It’s an excellent point. I often think about how historical figures would respond to our current crisis if they were with us today. Kennedy would be deeply alarmed; I have no doubt.

From a young age he thought about democracy, and about the challenges of leadership in a democracy—it’s a fascinating thing about him. In his first political campaign, in 1946, he proclaimed on the stump that democracy required an engaged and informed citizenry. He further argued that it required a commitment to reasoned arguments drawing on empirical evidence and a commitment to good-faith bargaining between the parties. My guess is that if he were with us today—at age 103!—he would reaffirm his views on those points, and he would say they are vital if you want to have a democracy that actually works.

Robin Lindley: One may see many connections to our own day in reading your book on JFK. What do you think?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: I certainly felt that during the writing. A wise editor once told me that as a writer I don’t have to spell out those contemporaneous connections—the reader will pick up on it on her own. For example, when I wrote about [Senator Joe] McCarthy’s skill at identifying the resentments that bubble right below the surface in large parts of Middle America, his demagoguery, his disdain for decorum and for telling the truth, his intellectual laziness—well, it has a certain resonance! 

Robin Lindley: Yes. And it's striking that the Kennedy family was friends with McCarthy and that JFK didn't stand up to his bullying and lying.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: It wasn’t one of his finest moments. He did his best to dodge the issue, to bob and weave. Partly he did so because of the family connections with McCarthy. More importantly, there were a lot of Irish Catholic voters in Massachusetts who supported McCarthy to the end. So from a narrow political perspective there was logic in his position, but it certainly doesn't make him look good in history. He also created problems for himself with liberals in the Democratic Party, including Mrs. Roosevelt, who faulted his failure to stand up to a fiendish demagogue.

Robin Lindley: He also wasn't vocal on civil rights issues. It’s understandable politically with a need to mollify a bloc of segregationist Southern Democrats, but he didn’t come out strongly for racial justice until late in his presidency.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Yes. It’s true and I will grapple in volume two with a lot of this. It’s going to be an important part of the story. It’s ironic, too, because early in his career, as a member of the House and his first years in the Senate, he actually had quite a progressive record on civil rights. 

Robin Lindley: As you have written, JFK also stressed the need for a strong and informed leader in a democracy. It's impressive that he often knew more than his aides about arcane policy matters. Some authors see him as a lightweight in his early years in Washington, but you show that he was curious and he read voraciously and understood politics and government. Of course, we don’t see those traits in our current president.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: No, a theme in the book is that JFK was not the callow young man of our imaginations. There was a seriousness to him, as I noted earlier, from an early age. And he prided himself on knowing the details of policy and was insistent that his aides also knew the details of policy. Quite often he knew the particulars more than they did when they came in to discuss what should be done on say housing policy, or relations with Britain, or whatever the policy issue might be. He did his homework and I think his advisors, and people who served either on a cabinet or subcabinet level, respected that and he thought that knowledge was vital.

Robin Lindley: Theodore Sorensen was JFK’s speechwriter and also helped with Senator Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning history Profiles in Courage. How do you see Sorensen’s relationship with JFK?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: It’s one of the great political partnerships in the nation’s history, I’d say, certainly in the 20th century. Sorensen is vitally important. And it’s interesting that it was all about the work—that is to say, the two men almost never socialized together.

Robin Lindley: Your book ends in November 1956 when JFK decides to run for president. His family seemed all in for the run. What prompted his decision then?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: He had been thinking about running for some time already, and he could see that he came out of the Democratic National Convention that year as a star in the party. He felt that his time had arrived, and that there was a lane open for him for 1960. There would be moments of doubt in the three years to come, which I will examine in my second volume, but he had charted his course.

Robin Lindley: I was 11 years old when JFK called on us to ask what we could do for our country. He inspired me and many friends to consider careers in public service. He stressed a role for each citizen in his vision of America. How is his legacy seen today? Revisionist histories have critiqued his political decisions and often focused on his personal indiscretions.

Professor Fredrik Logevall: It’s a complex legacy.

He was a gifted and flawed figure, personally and professionally. Still, he has a powerful legacy, at least in part because his inspirational rhetoric still resonates among a lot of people. He believed in politics, believed in government. Though not a particularly partisan figure, and though a political centrist, he felt strongly that government has a vital role to play in making society function better, in creating a more just and equitable America.

And, as you point out, we associate with Kennedy a commitment to public service. That’s still a powerful message for many Americans. That most famous line from the inaugural address, and one of the most famous lines in any inaugural address, was “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Even in a deeply partisan time, that notion has real power, I believe. And, as I show in this first volume, that sense didn't just spring up from Kennedy and his speechwriters in January 1961. It was there at the beginning, at the start of his political career, in 1946. He warned his audiences that year against easy cynicism about politics and politicians, and he urged his audiences to consider themselves to perform public service of some kind. He never stopped doing so in the years that followed. That’s gripping and helps account for his outsized legacy.  

Robin Lindley: Now we’re living at a time of deep political division and racial strife and economic inequality. And we face a deadly global pandemic. At this fraught time, where you find hope now and how may the story of John F. Kennedy bring us hope?

Professor Fredrik Logevall: Though as a Swede I gather I’m supposed to have a gloomy outlook on things, I am ultimately hopeful. I heard someone say the other day that American democracy has been through a stress test in this election and ultimately passed it, if less comfortably than should have been the case; that sounds right to me. The stress test indicated areas that need our collective attention in the coming years if we’re to strengthen our institutions, our democracy.

Kennedy, again, thought a lot about this—from his college days right to the end in Dallas. What I see in him is somebody who took his job seriously, his responsibilities as president seriously, and who inspired Americans, not just in death, but in life. Consider that in the middle of 1963, significantly more people claimed to have voted for him in 1960 than actually had voted for him. That’s telling. Though a committed Democrat through and through, he drew support from a sizable number of Republicans and Independents as well.

Moreover, though it’s true that our divisions today run deeper than they did in the early 1960s, we shouldn’t exaggerate the point. Kennedy, it’s well to remember, endured sharp attacks from extremists on the right who called him a stooge of the Kremlin, or the Antichrist, or both. In the months leading up to his assassination, some in the administration feared for his safety. Still, he carried on. More than that, he employed in his speeches the language of inclusion, emphasizing to the end Americans’ shared goals and dreams. Perhaps there’s a lesson there for us, as we contemplate the future of this wondrous thing we call the American Experiment.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those words of encouragement and your thoughtful comments, Professor Logevall. And congratulations on your groundbreaking and illuminating new biography JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.

Director Agnieszka Holland (l) and writer Andrea Chalupa (r)

Director Agnieszka Holland is celebrated for her career in filmmaking and screenwriting and for her political activism in Poland. Among her achievements as a filmmaker, she collaborated on the screenplay adaptation of Andrzej Wajda's Danton (1983), then directed Angry Harvest (1985), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1992, she earned even greater international acclaim, including a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Europa Europa, based on the true story of a young boy who joins the Hitler Youth to hide his Jewish identity. In 2010, Holland was Nominated for an Emmy in Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for her work on HBO's Treme (2010). A year later, her feature film, In Darkness, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2017 she received Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) for her film Spoor at the Berlin International Film Festival. And, in 2020, she was elected President of the European Film Academy.          

Andrea Chalupa, the screenwriter of Mr. Jones, is a journalist and the author of Orwell and The Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm. She has written for TIME, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and Forbes. She has spoken widely on Ukraine affairs and is a founder of DigitalMaidan, an online movement that in recent years made the Ukrainian protests the top trending topic on Twitter worldwide. She also hosts the Gaslit Nation podcast she focuses on authoritarianism at home and abroad in her broadcasts. Her expertise includes Ukrainian language, history and politics.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared at Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, Writer’s Chronicle, Re-Markings, Crosscut, Documentary, NW Lawyer, Real Change, Huffington Post,  and more. He has a special interest in the history of human rights and conflict. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Starvation. A protracted, agonizing way to die. As described by Professor Anne Applebaum in her book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017), starvation follows a set course once the human body is deprived of food. The body initially consumes its stores of glucose as one grows hungry and thinks constantly of food. In the next few weeks, the body consumes its fats and weakens dramatically. Then, the body cannibalizes its tissues and muscles, and the skin thins, the eyes distend, and the legs and belly swell as chemical imbalances result in water retention. Even small efforts cause exhaustion. As the vital organs fail, infections or illnesses such as pneumonia, typhus, diphtheria, and others may hasten death.

Millions of Ukrainians died in this manner during the horrific famine in 1932-33. The Soviet government under Stalin engineered this genocidal atrocity through policies that killed mostly poor farmers and their families as the Soviet secret police eliminated Ukrainian leaders and intellectuals. Ukrainians refer to intentional famine as the Holodomor—meaning “death by hunger” in Ukrainian. Ukrainians were denied access to grain that was sent out of the region. Men, women and children were reduced to eating weeds, tree bark, wall paint, the corpses of animals. And there were also many incidents of cannibalism.

The Soviet crackdown was a response to Ukrainian resistance to collectivization of farms and other Stalinist policies. Casualty figures range from three million to an astounding fourteen million deaths. In Red Famine, Professor Applebaum contends that at least three million Ukrainians died because the Soviet state deliberately planned to kill them in the Holodomor.

The west knew almost nothing of this mass campaign to destroy the people of Ukraine. A Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, secretly and courageously gained access to restricted, famine-plagued regions of Ukraine and reported back to the Western press on this widespread catastrophe. Jones’s reports of the famine shocked readers, but the stories were undermined by Soviet propaganda denying his accounts as well as by Western journalists who reported uncritically on the Soviet government to gain Stalin’s favor.

In her recent feature film Mr. Jones, legendary Polish film director Agnieszka Holland depicts the Ukrainian famine through the perspective of the reporter Gareth Jones. The film captures the tenacity and bravery of Jones and the array of forces pitted against him to keep the brutal reality of the famine from escaping the boundaries of Ukraine. The film is based on archival research, diaries, survivor accounts, and other material, much of it uncovered by Andrea Chalupa, the screenwriter for Mr. Jones and expert on Ukrainian history and politics,

Ms. Holland and Ms. Chalupa graciously responded to a series of question about the making of Mr. Jones, the history of the Ukrainian famine, their research process, and more.

 Director Agnieszka Holland is celebrated for her career in filmmaking and screenwriting and for her political activism in Poland. Among her achievements as a filmmaker, she collaborated on the screenplay adaptation of Andrzej Wajda's Danton (1983), then directed Angry Harvest (1985), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1992, she earned even greater international acclaim, including a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Europa Europa, based on the true story of a young boy who joins the Hitler Youth to hide his Jewish identity. In 2010, Holland was Nominated for an Emmy in Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for her work on HBO's Treme (2010). A year later, her feature film, In Darkness, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2017 she received Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) for her film Spoor at the Berlin International Film Festival. And, in 2020, she was elected President of the European Film Academy.          

Andrea Chalupa, the screenwriter of Mr. Jones, is a journalist and the author of Orwell and The Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm. She has written for TIME, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and Forbes. She has spoken widely on Ukraine affairs and is a founder of DigitalMaidan, an online movement that in recent years made the Ukrainian protests the top trending topic on Twitter worldwide. She also hosts the Gaslit Nation podcast she focuses on authoritarianism at home and abroad in her broadcasts. Her expertise includes Ukrainian language, history and politics.

Robin Lindley: How did you both work together on this cinematic historical opus?

Andrea Chapula: Great! It was very easy to work on the script with Agnieszka. We both seemed to be on the same page about most things the entire time. I sent her the script and met with her by phone in August 2015, and she agreed to direct the film September 2015. Then we were off and running. It took us about three years to raise financing and cast the film. 

Agnieszka Holland: We have always worked well together. Andrea wrote the script by herself; and I started to do my own research and then participated in the consecutive versions of the script. I had my own extensive knowledge of Holodomor history, as I read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands and several other books about the Holodomor, Stalinian politics of collectivization, and Stalin’s other crimes.   

Robin Lindley: I sense that most Americans (including me) know little about the Ukrainian famine yet this crime against humanity was one of the greatest atrocities in history. How would you briefly introduce this horrific history to readers?

Andrea Chapula: The Holodomor, the Ukrainian word for death by hunger, is Stalin’s genocide famine that killed millions of people, the vast majority in Ukraine. 

Agnieszka Holland: I’ve always felt it as an injustice and that there is a universal gap in knowledge about communist and particularly Stalinian crimes. Even if some facts entered the conscience of the people during the Cold War, or after publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, it was forgotten and forgiven since. And in Russia itself, where in every family you can find a victim of Stalin’s crimes, the memory was washed out and the majority of Russians consider murderous Stalin to be the greatest leader in Russian history. It is unjust toward the victims and dangerous for misunderstanding what is the nature of totalitarian regime. We cannot fully understand the present and hope for a healthy future if we neglect the most important lessons of the past. And it is most important to understand the past to understand the current Ukrainian and world situations. 

Robin Lindley: Was the great Ukrainian famine the result of poor Soviet policy with agricultural collectivization or was it a deliberate genocidal war on the people of Ukraine engineered by Stalin? If the latter, why would Stalin want to eliminate Ukrainians?

Andrea Chapula: The Holodomor was genocide. I wrote and directed a short documentary featuring historians Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Norman Naimark, Serhii Plokhii, Frank Sysyn, and Alexander Motyl discussing the all-out assault on Ukrainian national identity that accompanied the Soviet-engineered famine. I’ve also interviewed and watched video testimony of survivors describing how their homes were searched by soldiers who confiscated the food they had hidden. One woman described to me how soldiers came and took away the pot of water she was boiling over a fire full of twigs and leaves she was planning to eat since there was no food left. So not only was Ukraine’s grain seized and sold abroad to raise money to help rapidly modernize Stalin’s empire, there were also terror squads of soldiers and agents that searched and destroyed whatever people used to try to feed themselves just to stay alive. This was state organized mass murder.  

Agnieszka Holland: I share the opinion of many historians, that the Holodomor was not only a side effect of the mistakes of collectivization, but also deliberate politics of Stalin toward richer paysans and toward Ukrainians. Ukraine had strong feelings of independence and identity, and had rich soil and the best agricultural organization in Stalin’s territory. Stalin wanted to break their pride and resistance, and reap the riches of their soil and productivity. 

Robin Lindley: The scenes of the famine in Mr. Jones are especially haunting and heartbreaking. What did you learn about the human reality of famine and starvation? How did the famine affect individuals and families?

Andrea Chapula: Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine goes into how starvation kills someone slowly and the gradual effects on the body. My grandfather described how his brother was driven mad by hunger and how he had to stop his brother from shoving dirt into his mouth when he was hallucinating and seeing food.

Starvation is a slow torture; it’s a painful way to die. There are horrific stories of cannibalism and packs of orphans wandering ghost villages. The actual history would require a horror film to show it more accurately. In Mr. Jones, we only give people a glimpse of the devastation. 

Agnieszka Holland: The human reaction to the famine is the same in every circumstances. We could see it during Irish famine, Mao’s Big Leap terrible famine, Leningrad’s siege… and it’s all the more violent and destructive when famine is caused by man rather than natural catastrophe. The Holodomor is now the focus of several extensive historical and psychological studies, and we now know that the mental and physical impacts of the famine remain present in the descendants of the survivors and their families, sometimes even many generations later. 

Robin Lindley: Do you have relatives or friends who experienced the famine or other personal connections to the Holodomor?

Andrea Chapula: My grandfather on my mother’s side survived the famine with his family in east Ukraine. 

Agnieszka Holland: No, but in preparing for the film, I read many testimonials of survivors and their descendants; and shooting the film in Ukraine, I had met many Holodomor survivors and spoke with them about their experience. 

Robin Lindley: The famine occurred during the Great Depression in the US. Did the US government know of the famine and did it somehow respond?

Andrea Chapula: Ukrainian diaspora groups knew and tried to raise awareness. As we show in the film, FDR granted the Soviet Union official recognition in 1934. The scene of a fancy banquet with [New York Times reporter Walter] Duranty being toasted in New York to celebrate the US/USSR actually happened. Applebaum goes into it here. 

Agnieszka Holland: The depression was not deliberately planned by the US government. The Holodomor was deliberately planned and enforced by Stalin. So, with the Great Depression, we can speak about an incompetent reaction of a capitalistic society. In the case of Holodomor, it was a conscious, programmed crime, serving a political and ideological agenda.  

Robin Lindley: How did the famine end? Did poverty and starvation continue through the Second World War or did food shipments resume to Ukraine?

Andrea Chapula: The Holodomor ended when the process of collectivization was complete, but the cover-up continued. People weren’t allowed to talk about it inside the Soviet Union. More info here.

Robin Lindley: What was the research process for the film? The sets, costumes, props and other details are very elaborate and it’s evident that great care was taken in assuring authenticity. Of course, Ms. Holland’s films are renowned for assuring historical accuracy.

Andrea Chapula: I studied History with a focus on Soviet History at UC Davis. I spent several years researching the history that inspired the film. We also had a team of historical advisors to vet the script and the finished film. We worked with an incredible crew that ensured that they were staying within the specific period in terms of props and costumes. Even stamps and packaging on envelopes and the articles the journalists present to Duranty were all created to fit that specific moment in time. 

Agnieszka Holland: We went through an extended research process in preparing for the film, consulting photos, paintings, movies, documentaries, documents. I like to be authentic, but in the first place, to know historical reality well enough to free my imagination. 

Robin Lindley: Your movie follows the journey of the intrepid Welsh reporter Gareth Jones, played by James Norton, who learned of the famine and brought the story to the West. You show Stalinist politics and the famine through the perspective of Jones. What are a few things you’d like readers to know about the Jones? How did you learn of his story? 

Andrea Chapula: The more I dug into the real Gareth Jones, it became undeniable that he was simply a good human being with a strong character. He’s a classic hero. After working on projects about anti-heroes, like House of Cards, Agnieszka was attracted to showcasing a morally courageous person, especially given the times we find ourselves in. She felt, as do I, that the world needs more heroes. 

Agnieszka Holland: When reading Andrea’s script, I thought that I never heard about Jones, but actually his story was told in the Holodomor chapter of Snyder’s Bloodlands, so I had encountered him before. After, I learned more through access to Jones’ notebook, and the documentary his grandnephew shot about the circumstances of his death. 

Robin Lindley: Mr. Jones stands as a tribute to the dauntless Gareth Jones and also stresses the essential role of a free press in a democracy. Was that part of your intention in presenting this story at a time when an American president described members of the press as “enemies of the people”?

Andrea Chapula: I first got the idea in 2003 to pay tribute to my grandfather and all that he had survived in Ukraine under Stalin. I of course never envisioned the story itself being so timely, and still find that surreal. 

Agnieszka Holland: The questions about the role of the media, and the importance of fact checking and investigating honest journalism, were among the main reasons.  Democracy will not survive when media can be corrupted. 

Robin Lindley: What did you learn about Walter Duranty (played by Peter Sarsgaard), the Pulitzer Award-winning New York Times Moscow bureau chief who undermined Jones and refused to report on the famine? Why was he determined—with other Western reporters—to cover up for Stalin’s regime? And did he actually host lavish sex orgies?

Andrea Chapula: The more I dug into Duranty, the worse he seemed. Peter Sarsgaard delivers a sympathetic portrayal. The real Duranty, who had a child with his live-in housekeeper, left both the mother and their child behind when he left the Soviet Union. The hedonism seen in the film is inspired by the drunken orgies Duranty regularly attended in Moscow, including at a club called “Stable of Pegasus.” His biographer Sally Taylor describes this. Duranty shared a lover with the Satanist Aleister Crowley and participated in his black magic sex orgies in 1920s Paris. 

Agnieszka Holland: I mostly used Andrea’s research from her writing process, books, press articles, other journalists’ statements. We are unable to fully know his real intentions, but the presented facts are quite incontrovertible.

Robin Lindley: Who was Ada Brooks (played by Vanessa Kirby), the journalist who befriends and helps Jones get to Ukraine in the movie? Was her character based on a real person?

Andrea Chapula: Ada was invented and based on my own experiences having an awful editor when I first started working in journalism. It turns out there was a young woman, named Rhea Clyman, who worked for Duranty for a time and broke away from him to report the truth about the famine. There’s a documentary that just came out about her. We named a character Rhea Clyman to pay tribute to her. 

Robin Lindley: George Orwell also makes an appearance in the film. Did he and Jones actually meet and become friends? Did Orwell’s Animal Farm grow out of the stories by Jones and the events of the Ukrainian famine, as the film suggests?

 Andrea Chapula: Orwell came into the story inspired by the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm produced by World War II refugees. It turns out that I have a copy thanks to my uncle who, when he was a kid, immigrated to the US with it from a European refugee camp. I wrote about this in my book Orwell and The Refugees: The Untold Story in Animal Farm. Here’s an overview of that story in a piece I wrote for The Atlantic. 

Orwell and Gareth Jones never met, as far as we know. They shared a literary agent and an independent spirit. They were both around the same age and idealistic. 

Robin Lindley: Filmmaking is a complex, collaborative process, and I appreciate the work both of you did to complete this pioneering work on Jones and the terrible famine. How did the technical making of the film evolve?

Andrea Chapula: Every film that gets made is a miracle. It seemed as though the entire project was about to fall apart and then suddenly, we found ourselves on set in Ukraine in the middle of a snow storm. It was a harrowing experience just to get the film made and finish it within budget and on schedule. This film especially needed a lot of miracles. 

Agnieszka Holland: Script, producers, director and most importantly, money. For this kind of difficult, ambitious, independent movie, the financing is the most difficult part of the story. Then the casting, and— last but not least—the creation of the movie itself. And then another difficult step: effective delivery to the audience. 

Robin Lindley: The cast of Mr. Jones is first rate. As a fan of Grantchester, I especially appreciated James Norton’s star turn as Gareth Jones. How did the casting process work?

Andrea Chapula: We originally cast another actor who then asked us to delay the project for about six months so he could do a TV series. We needed snow and to film that winter. So we had to scramble for another actor and our tenacious casting director Colin Jones found us James Norton who seemed born to play the role. 

Agnieszka Holland: This was a long process, as before our financing was closed, it was difficult to attract names. James came quite late to the game, but was immediately very enthusiastic. And he was the great trouper in this difficult adventure; creatively and humanely. 

Robin Lindley: The cinematography is striking, especially the muted scenes from famine-struck Ukraine. That remarkable transition in visual style was ingenious. I’ll always remember the glowing orange (in color) in the dark railroad cattle car. Can you talk about the decisions that go into cinematography on an epic film like Mr. Jones? I realize you’re a master Ms. Holland.

Andrea Chapula: The orange scene was taken from real life. Gareth Jones experienced that on a train headed into Ukraine. As for the colors and cinematography, that’s the genius of Agnieszka and our director of cinematography Tomasz Naumiuk. 

Agnieszka Holland: Thank you! We had a young, but very talented cinematographer, Tomasz Naumiuk, and we closely collaborated on making the detailed concept of the general visual style and the particular sequences. And then we were inspired by reality: weather, light, sets.

Robin Lindley: Where was Mr. Jones filmed? We’re you on location in Russia and Ukraine?

Agnieszka Holland: Ukraine, Poland, and Scotland. 

Robin Lindley: How have viewers responded to your film? The reviews seem very positive. Did you hear from Russian viewers? Was the film banned anywhere? Did you face any threats?

Andrea Chapula: The film received a huge reception in Ukraine, which was extremely gratifying. One Ukrainian journalist who interviewed me for around two hours had seen the film three times in one week when it premiered in Berlin, and sounded like she read every review and seemed to know the film as well as I did.

The reception in Ukraine was the most exciting part since this is their history that we want to help raise awareness of. We also received a lot of thoughtful questions from Russian journalists at the press conference for the film when it had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. These were of course independent journalists not affiliated with Russian state media. 

Agnieszka Holland: The film has had very good reception around the world, and especially in Ukraine. Unfortunately, it was not possible to sell this film to Russia, and most Russians today still believe the Stalinist version of the story.

Robin Lindley: The recent history of Ukraine is tumultuous, from the Chernobyl disaster and fall of the Soviet Union to the ongoing bitter conflict with Russia. The story of the Holodomor still seems resonant today.  How do you see the recent history of the Ukraine?

Andrea Chapula: Ukraine’s recent history is a cautionary tale of corruption as a human rights issue. As Biden told Ukraine’s parliament when he was Vice President: clean up your corruption the Kremlin weaponizes against you.

What’s important to know as well is that Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity -- EuroMaidan -- was driven by people from all walks of life in Ukraine who want to live in a more European society, away from Moscow’s orbit. Many people I interviewed in regards to the revolution told me that Moscow’s oppressive history plays a role in Ukrainians wanting to break free and join Europe. 

Agnieszka Holland: The political and economic situation in Ukraine is extremely difficult. The Donbas war never ended. The division of the country, the corruption, incompetent politicians, the “free world” which doesn’t pay any real attention to real Ukrainian challenges…these all add to the difficulties. But in creating this film, I met countless strong, motivated, educated young people in Ukraine that give me hope, and the Ukrainian identity becomes stronger every year.

Robin Lindley: Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine led to his first impeachment. How do you see the Trump-Putin relationship and its effect on Ukraine?

Andrea Chapula: Donald Trump admires and looks up to dictators like Putin, because he wants to be one. I have a podcast that examines the threat of authoritarianism in the U.S. and around the world called Gaslit Nation. It regularly covers this topic. After the horrific quid pro quo pressure campaign Trump put Ukraine through, it must be a huge relief for Ukraine to now have a Biden administration. Biden was and remains a staunch supporter of Ukraine. So the next few years should have a positive impact on Ukraine in terms of getting the support they need from the U.S. to resist Putin’s ongoing invasion and confront corruption through civil society programs from a rebuilt and robust State Department. 

Robin Lindley: Stalin was a master of keeping the story of the Holodomor from the outside world. Is Russia under Putin doing the same thing now in regard to stories out of Ukraine and other issues?

Andrea Chapula: Under Putin, Stalin has been resurrected as a hero. There’s a heartbreaking story of Yuri Dmitriev, a historian who nearly had his life destroyed after uncovering Stalin-era mass graves. Russia’s official state Twitter accounts sometimes like to muddle the truth about the famine. 

Agnieszka Holland: The attempt to kill Navalny and several political murders orchestrated by Putin, show the real nature of today’s Russia. Russia intervenes in free elections and political life in many free countries, USA included. I don’t have illusions about Putin’s intentions. Read Dostoyevsky’s Demons. It is again very relevant book.

Robin Lindley: What do you hope viewers take from your film?

Andrea Chapula: I hope Mr. Jones inspires people to learn more about the famine and read books like Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine and Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. When I watch historical dramas, I always want to know what was real and what was poetic license. As one reviewer wrote of Mr. Jones, the stranger elements of the film tend to be true. 

Agnieszka Holland: Some understanding of the world and its hidden tragedies; the respect for free journalism and the courage of individual reporters; and the knowledge that when the media are corrupted, and the political class is cowardly, lazy and opportunist, and the society is indifferent—the scene is set for evil to arise and take root.

Robin Lindley: What are your next projects? Will you be doing more on Ukraine and its history?

Andrea Chapula: I’m working on a script inspired by my father-in-law who led a student uprising in 1956 Romania in solidarity with the Hungarian Uprising next door. I like to write stories about individuals taking great risks against authoritarian systems. Given my family’s own history, those are the stories I’m attracted to. 

Agnieszka Holland: After Mr. Jones, I directed another film, dealing with the real historical figure, Charlatan, which premiered at Berlinale 2020 and was presented to international Oscars category as a Czech entry. And I am observing closely the reality, waiting for the new inspiration and the output of different processes. 

Robin Lindley: We’re now living at a time of a deadly global pandemic and democracy under threat in many nations. And you’ve explored one of the darkest moments in human history. What gives you hope at this challenging time?

Andrea Chapula: From my years of research into dark chapters of human history, I’ve learned to look at moments like the one we’re currently living in as times of moral courage. Heroes always emerge. There is fierce resistance, because most people are decent and committed to staying human. I have tremendous faith in people and believe that we’re ultimately going to evolve from this dark time that we’re in. 

Robin Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add about the film, the famine, Ukraine, or anything else?

Andrea Chapula: History is healing. The more we learn of our history, the easier time we have understanding the issues we’re currently dealing with in the world and how to navigate them. The nation that knows its past protects its future.

Spokane, Washington. 1909. The City Council bans downtown speeches to curb labor agitation. The Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW—the “Wobblies”) organizes a mass protest against this restriction of free speech. Local police under notorious Spokane Police Chief John Sullivan brutally break up the nonviolent labor protest. Hundreds of union supporters are arrested and jailed. Many are injured. IWW firebrand “Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arrives on the scene to secure release of the jailed workers and to organize for the IWW. She is just 19 years old and pregnant, yet she courageously organizes working people in her travels around the Northwest. She later becomes a leading suffragist and one of the co-founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. In union circles, she is exalted still for her leadership, humanity, and bravery.

Celebrated Spokane novelist Jess Walter brings to life this fraught history in his new historical novel, The Cold Millions, a titular reference to the many poor and forgotten souls of early 20th century America. With a cast of real and fictional characters, he takes on issues from more than a century ago that resonate today including intolerance, income inequality, police brutality, violence, and human rights. At the same time, the novel plumbs emotional depths as it explores the complexities of friendship, sacrifice, betrayal, lust, cruelty, and love.

The story unfolds through the perspective of two orphaned and jobless young men, the Irish American Dolan brothers from Montana, who seek new lives in the metropolis of Spokane. Police jail the idealistic brother Gig, 23 years old, who embraces the promises of the IWW, while younger brother Rye, 16, yearns only for modicum of stability and a home. Yet it’s Rye who accompanies the fiery Gurley Flynn on her fiery campaign for workers as he also becomes enmeshed in the dark schemes of a wealthy Spokane mining magnate. Other characters include a burlesque actress and her performing cougar, a hired assassin, anti-union scabs, hoboes, labor organizers, a crusading attorney, and more.

Mr. Walter’s extensive historical research is on full display in The Cold Millions. In the creation of his novel, he pored over period newspapers, maps, diaries, letters, postcards, and more. The novel captures the mood and rhythm of the time, the arcane language, the passion of average people for fairness and justice, as well as the moments of debauchery and humor. Walter’s writing conveys his affection for his hometown of Spokane with full awareness of its fraught history, a reflection of the larger checkered history of the United States.

Mr. Walter is best known for his literary novels including Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. He also wrote a critically-acclaimed book of short stories, We Live in Water, and his short fiction has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He began his writing career as a reporter for the Spokesman Review and wrote a nonfiction volume, Ruby Ridge (Originally entitled Every Knee Shall Bend). He lives with his wife Anne and children, Brooklyn, Ava and Alec, in Spokane.

Mr. Walter generously responded by email to a series of questions on his writing career and his new novel.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for connecting with me Mr. Walter, and congratulations on your powerful new historical novel, The Cold Millions. Before getting to your new book, I’m also interested in your writing career. You have a background in journalism and a career as a prominent literary writer. Did you want to be a writer when you were young? What drew you to a writing career?

Jess Walter: I wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember. I created a family magazine with my siblings when I was six or seven (called Reader’s Indigestion) and was the editor of my junior high and high school newspapers. I read voraciously and used to visit the library as a 13-year-old, imagining where my future novels would go.

In college, I was a young father, and so I had to switch from majoring in English and creative writing to journalism, so that I could support my young family. But that seven-year detour into newspapers made me a better writer, I think, and certainly a better citizen.

Robin Lindley: How does your experience in journalism inform your writing now?

Jess Walter: Journalism informs my writing in many ways, I think: certainly the ability to research, and to publish without fear or a kind of preciousness. You don’t come back from a newspaper assignment saying that the “muse didn’t strike.” Likewise, you learn a directness and an economy of style that translates well to fiction. As an early newspaper editor once told me, “You write beautiful descriptions. Now pick one.” But the biggest attribute that I gained from journalism, I would say, is a keen sense of curiosity, and the tools to satisfy it. I think I’m a more outward-looking novelist, with an understanding of systems and institutions, because I worked for newspapers.

Robin Lindley: What sparked your career as a novelist? Are there certain writers that have influenced your work?

Jess Walter: Hmm, I think of a spark as something external, but a novelist is his or her own spark. You just read and write. Every day. I’ve written pretty much every day since I was a teenager. I wrote fiction for fifteen years before I had much success at it. I wrote a nonfiction book, two unpublished novels, dozens of short stories and was a ghostwriter before I published my first novel.

My fiction didn’t support me until my seventh book, and still, I am incredibly lucky that it supports me at all. As for influences, there are so many it’s hard to know where to start. From the top, I’d go with: Joan Didion, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Don DeLillo and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 

Robin Lindley: Some of my favorites too. You’re praised for novels that are always different. As America’s Librarian Nancy Pearl has said, “Jess never writes the same book.” How do you see the arc of your writing career?

Jess Walter: Ha! Well, first let me just say that Nancy is a dream reader and a wonderful writer. But isn’t it strange that the anomaly is the person who “never writes the same book”? Shouldn’t that be the case for more writers? I would rather ask, “Why do so many writers keep digging the same hole?” As for me, when I finish a book, I’m ready to do something different. I strive to get better as a novelist, and I think I get better by trying new things. But once I get going on a project, honestly, I don’t think about any of that. I just let the story dictate its genre, style and tone. If I concentrate simply on writing the next book I want to read, the rest takes care of itself.

Robin Lindley: It seems that most of your books involve moments in history. How does history play a role in your work? Did you enjoy history as a student?

Jess Walter: I did, and I do. But other than The Cold Millions, I wouldn’t say that my writing is particularly tied to historical moments. In fact, I would say, like the journalist I was, I’m more drawn to the contemporary.

I was at Ground Zero in the days after the terror attacks of 9/11 and wrote a dark satirical novel about our reaction to those attacks (The Zero), and I wrote a farcical family drama about the financial crisis of 2008 (The Financial Lives of the Poets.) Even this historical novel rose out of my desire to address contemporary issues like income inequality and political and social unrest. With Citizen Vince, I chose to write about the 1980 presidential election in part because of its significance in swinging American politics so firmly to the right over the next forty years. So I guess I would say my interest in history is really about how it impacts the present moment.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those insights. Now, to go to your new, highly praised novel, The Cold Millions, what inspired this particular book? 

Jess Walter: It’s difficult to distill so many years of thought and research and writing into a few impulses of inspiration, but I’ll try.

Early on, I felt the political and social echoes of the last Gilded Age in our current economic climate, and I hoped to write about issues like inequality and nonviolent protest without being didactic. I also wanted to write a kind of labor Western, to collide those genres, the social novel and the adventure story, around the real free speech protests of 1909-10, and to recreate the thriving, boisterous Spokane that I found in old newspapers and postcards.

I was also taken by the figure of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and hoped to renew interest in her amazing life, while at the same time echoing the youthful activists that I saw leading the current political fights for sensible gun and climate legislation, and against police brutality against African Americans.

There were many novelists who inspired me, too, from Tolstoy to Steinbeck to E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime to William Kennedy’s Ironweed.

And finally, a big part of the novel was personal for me. I’m a first-generation college graduate from a working-class family. Both grandfathers were itinerant workers in the 1930s, and my dad worked for 40 years for Kaiser Aluminum, rising to president of his Steelworkers Union local. My dad has Alzheimer’s now, and is at the end of his life, and I wanted to honor his steadfast belief in unions.

Growing up, the fairness and egalitarianism of labor was as close as my family had to a religion. I saw this early period of labor as a kind of origin story, filled with idealism and courage, before the unions became tainted by corruption and Communism became connected to the brutal regimes of the twentieth century.

Robin Lindley: The novel is filled with history and you have a gift for evoking this age. What was your research process for the book? Did you find especially useful archives and other resources?

Jess Walter: I read dozens of books from and about that period, correspondence and academic papers, pored over maps and railroad schedules, but most of my research, honestly, was done bent over microfilm, reading old newspapers.

The Spokane Library was very helpful, especially its Northwest Room, and I took several trips to the Seattle Library and to the library at Washington State University. Research is incredibly helpful until it isn’t. At some point, the novelist just has to just create, and to imagine. You become fluent in a period and then you can allow the characters you’ve conjured to drive the action.

Robin Lindley: What are a few things you’d like readers to know about Spokane in 1909?

Jess Walter: If you can imagine the railroad in 1900 as the equivalent of the internet today—connecting the world in ways it hadn’t before—you can see how Spokane was one of the fastest-growing and most thriving cities in the United States at that time. Every northern railroad line pinched together in Spokane, before spreading out to Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. The incredible wealth from the area’s mining, timber and agricultural flowed through the city. Like Seattle, it was doubling in size every six or seven years, but unlike Seattle, it was known for being an island of sophistication in an empty part of the world, with great hotels and restaurants and one of the best theater scenes in the West, including the largest stage in the world. 

Robin Lindley: I’m a native of Spokane but never knew of the 1909 Free Speech Movement and the labor strife then. It’s fascinating and now more people will know about this past thanks to your novel. How did you come upon this overlooked campaign for workers?

Jess Walter: I can’t remember how I first came across the free speech action in Spokane, but I think it was in the morgue of my old newspaper. Perhaps I was grabbing files on Tom Foley (I covered his last election in 1994) when I pulled the file on Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and noted her story and set it aside as a topic for a later novel. The sheer audacity of Gurley Flynn and the ahead-of-its time inclusivity of the IWW seemed remarkable to me.

A few years later, I read that Dashiell Hammett had worked as a Pinkerton detective out of Spokane, investigating labor figures in Montana (the roots of his novel Red Harvest), and I began looking for ways to bring that period to life. For years, I gathered articles and books and mulled over how to tell the story.

Robin Lindley: When I was younger, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, were seen as bomb-throwing radicals, but you found a different story. What did you learn?

Jess Walter: Well, at times, there were bomb-throwing radicals and anarchists in the IWW, but usually the violence came in reaction to the IWW. The union was radical, definitely, pushing for a complete overhaul of capitalism, but it also preached nonviolence. Some members pushed for more direct action, like sabotage and general strikes, but it was actually the IWW’s pacifism that caused it to run afoul of the U.S. government, when the union objected to our entry into World War I.

There was awful violence involving the Wobblies, in Everett, in Centralia, in Butte, Montana, but almost always that violence came from the other side, from vigilantes or detectives who had infiltrated the IWW. In fact, the free speech actions in the Northwest were the first successful nonviolent protests in U.S. history, a model for civil rights activists decades later. 

Robin Lindley: The Free Speech Movement occurred in 1909, a decade before the better-known Seattle General Strike. What did workers gain from the Spokane Movement?

Jess Walter: They were very much connected. By 1919, the IWW’s profile in the United States had been greatly diminished, and they were seen as the most radical labor organization in the United States. The Seattle strike was groundbreaking because of its breadth, because more traditional unions took part in it: dockworkers and unions affiliated with the AFL. But city officials fighting the strike used the Wobblies as socialist bogeymen to try to turn public perception against this huge, broad social movement. 

Robin Lindley: A central character of The Cold Millions is Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a young labor activist—a real person—who spoke on behalf of workers and the poor. What are a few things you’d like readers to know about her?

Jess Walter: I write about Gurley Flynn at a fascinating time in her life. (She would go on to become a founding member of the ACLU, the chairwoman of the Communist Party USA, be jailed for her activism, and become a civil rights activist, among other things.) But in 1909, she was a fiery 19-year-old labor activist and suffragist who had been speaking in factories and rough work camps for three years, known as the East Side Joan of Arc and, by the establishment New York Times, as a “she-dog of anarchy.” I marveled at a pregnant 19-year-year-old, ten years before she can even vote, traveling west by herself to fight for workers’ rights against corrupt police and company goons.

Robin Lindley: You humanize real characters in your book such as the “Rebel Girl” Gurley Flynn and the brutal Spokane Police Chief John Sullivan. How do you create the fictional presence and world of a real character?

Jess Walter: There is a fine balance, I think. To make them come alive like the other characters, you have to treat them as fictional creations, inventing dialogue, motivations and actions. But I feel a responsibility to the historical figures, as well, and so, with all of those characters, I tried to research them, and to keep the invention to a real minimum. For instance, most of the speeches that Gurley Flynn gives in the novel come from accounts of her actual speeches, in newspaper stories and books. 

Robin Lindley: You tell much of the story through the eyes of a couple of young Irish-American vagabonds from Montana who are drawn to Spokane. Were they based on real people? How did you choose this point of view?

Jess Walter: Gig and Rye are entirely fictional characters. But their story parallels many of the hobos working at that time. And their sense of adventure comes from stories my grandfather used to tell about his own hoboing days a generation later in the 1930s.

Robin Lindley: And you etch the age through a range of characters including a Pinkerton detective who sees Spokane as “a box of misery” and “a syphilitic town” that metastasized, a hired killer, an actress who performs with her cougar, a righteous lawyer, wealthy tycoons, and more. Were there historical models for these characters?

Jess Walter: Other than Fred Moore, who was an actual labor lawyer who moved from Spokane to other free speech protests around the West, they are all fictional characters burnished by my research into the time. 

Robin Lindley: The brutality of the Spokane police, jailers, and anti-union thugs may stun some readers. What was the city like in 1909 for the poor, the dispossessed, the nonwhite?

Jess Walter: About like it was everywhere. Maybe the one difference was that the city was teeming with itinerant workers because of its location as a hiring center for mining, timber and agriculture jobs. Many of these were recent immigrants from Central Europe, and they suffered through waves of abhorrent racism and xenophobia, as immigrants as varied as the Chinese and the Irish had previously, and as Native Americans and African Americans continuously faced. The Spokane Police, during this period, were accused of everything from brutalizing traveling workers to shaking down the city’s brothels, again, not unlike police in other cities.

Robin Lindley: You also capture the arcane language and idioms of the period. How did you come to learn these expressions and obscure words?

Jess Walter: It was great fun, immersing myself in the language of the newspapers, the IWW speakers and singers, the Pinkerton detectives and others. Much of it came from newspapers and Wobbly accounts of the free speech protests in Spokane. In capturing the way a 60-something-year-old Pinkerton detective might sound, I read old mysteries to find words that had disappeared from the lexicon, like “the morbs” (a morbid feeling of unease) and “lobcocked” (bothered or blocked from action) … that language, in particular, began to feel like some missing link between Western and Hardboiled literature.

Robin Lindley: You present an unsparing account of Spokane history, including an account of atrocities against Native people. What did you learn about treatment of Native people?

Jess Walter: This is another thing I feel like I’ve always known. I grew up on the river, near Plantes Ferry and the horse slaughter camp, where in 1858, eight hundred native ponies were ordered shot by Col. George Wright as punishment and warning to the Spokane tribe. In the 1970s, when I was a kid, people were still finding bleached horse bones along that shoreline.

I live now just across from what used to be Ft. Wright, near the confluence of the Spokane River and a stream that for 120 years was called Hangman Creek, named for the spot where Wright had tribal leaders hanged when they came to beg for peace.

My family lived for a few years on ranch bordering the Spokane Indian Reservation, where the tribe was forcibly relocated. Anyone who doesn’t understand the brutal history of treatment of Native Americans in the place they live is just not paying attention. And not just Spokane. Seattle, Yakima, Manhattan, how many of us live in cities named for the people from whom it was brutally taken.

Robin Lindley: Your book is a tribute to human rights, the rights of assembly and free speech, and the struggle to preserve those rights, along with a recognition that all people regardless of social station or wealth or race, deserve access to justice and equal rights. Were you thinking of those values as you wrote The Cold Millions?

Jess Walter: Definitely. And I’d add one more, the old-fashioned idea of brotherhood, the kind that Gig and Rye share, and also the kind that they share with Jules and with Gurley Flynn and the leaders of the IWW.

Ten years before I was born, in 1955, about one in three Americans belonged to a union. Now that number is less than one in ten. And, not coincidentally, the middle class has eroded and the gap between wealthy and poor is as high as it was in 1909. The book is an elegy for labor idealism and perhaps a suggestion for the road back.

Robin Lindley: Are there other books and resources you’d recommend to help readers better understand the history behind The Cold Millions?

Jess Walter: Oh, so many. The book has an Acknowledgments section that is chock full of books that I used in my research. But I will suggest one that gives a broad sense of the labor wars of that period in the Northwest, Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas.

Robin Lindley: It’s clear from your work that you love Spokane despite its checkered history. You’re a native of the city and you still live there. I recall that the late, great Spokane artist Harold Balazs told me that friends asked him why he never moved from Spokane to an arts mecca like New York City or LA. He said, “You bloom where you’re planted.” It seems you share that strong sense of place.

Jess Walter: Ha, please point me to the American city that doesn’t have a checked history, and I will move there. Every city is born, as Spokane was, through some combination of brutality toward its Native people and the destruction of its natural resources.

I think some people in Seattle look with condescension at Spokane because it’s poor. But equating a poor city with a bad one is rank snobbery. In fact, I would argue that there’s something more fundamentally wrong with a city where a teacher or a police officer can never dream of affording a home. I happen to like Spokane’s grubbiness, its weirdness, its rough edges. Harold’s answer to that question is terrific, like everything about Harold, but I kind of wish he’d have just said, “Go pound sand.”

Robin Lindley: Outsiders may see Spokane as conservative bastion in a county that voted for Trump and is represented by a rightwing member of Congress, but the city also has growing arts, literary and higher education communities. Perhaps voting patterns don’t reflect the entire reality of the city. How do you see the social and political evolution of Spokane since 1909? Are younger people there now interested in social and political change?

Jess Walter: The city itself is quite liberal, went for Biden by almost 20 points, and has a city council with a 6-1 progressive bent. Because of the Spokane Valley and its more rural areas, Spokane County did tip for Trump, by about 4 points, half the margin of 2016.

But I think it’s misleading to think of Spokane as just another part of red Eastern Washington. The real divide is between urban and rural, like everywhere in the United States. And Spokane’s politics has always been far more complex than the West Side of the state wants to imagine. Even in Spokane’s more conservative periods, a Democrat, Tom Foley, represented the region and rose to Speaker of the House. And Spokane had a black mayor, Jim Chase, a decade before Seattle did.

As for young people, I think, like everywhere, they are more engaged than I’ve ever seen them, and personally, I can’t wait for them to take the wheel.

Robin Lindley: As we today face a politically divided country, a deadly pandemic, a political insurrection, and a history of systemic racism, among other issues, where do you find hope?

Jess Walter: Wow, that’s a hard question. I like what Kafka says: “There is infinite hope … but not for us.” Still, deep inside, I cling to an old-fashioned kind of humanism, and the belief in what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. But, as a novelist, you’d better keep track of the devils, too, because they make for better characters. 

Robin Lindley: You have a gift for breathing life into history Mr. Walter, and for blessing each of your characters with a sense of presence and humanity. Is there anything you’d like to add about your writing or your new epic novel and its resonance now?

Jess Walter: Thank you! No, those were wonderful questions. 

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your thoughtful words and generosity Mr. Walter. And congratulations on your epic historical novel The Cold Millions and the stellar praise you’re receiving. Well deserved, indeed.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle writer and attorney, and the features editor of the History News Network. His articles have appeared in many periodicals. He can be reached at robinlindley@gmail.com

If the past is a guide, how our law responds to contagion now and in the future will help decide the course of our democracy. John Fabian Witt, American Contagions.

At this writing, the deadly COVID-19 pandemic has killed a shocking 560,000 Americans and infected about 32 million Americans The United States remains the nation with the highest death toll in the world, and the death rates here betray stunning inequities for people color among other vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.

In March, former White House coronavirus response coordinator for the previous administration, Dr. Deborah Birx, told a CNN reporter: "There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."  Our nation suffered for months under a chaotic presidential administration that mocked science and public health experts as it politicized efforts to reduce infections and prevent spread of the virus.

The Biden administration has made the pandemic its top priority. Many Americans, particularly those in high-risk categories, have been vaccinated, but the pandemic has yet to abate. Communities of color and impoverished people continue to disproportionately bear the brunt of illness and death from COVID-19.

The experience of this novel pandemic in the past year has fueled questions about the role of the federal and state governments in addressing epidemics; the importance of public health versus individual freedoms; the inequities in access to health care; and more.

To help address these concerns, Yale Professor of History and Law, John Fabian Witt, has provided a comprehensive citizens guide to the history of law and epidemics with his recent book, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 (Yale University Press).

In his book, Professor Witt explores how infectious diseases through our history have shaped the law, and how law has shaped our response to these recurrent diseases. For the most part, since the inception of our nation, public health has held primacy over other interests such as individual rights. Court decisions often reflected the principle set forth by the Roman scholar and lawyer Cicero more than two millennia ago: “Salus populi suprema lex esto.” [The health of the people is the supreme law.]

But, as Professor Witt stresses, the results of health laws and court decisions have not always been experienced equally by all citizens. While laws may have protected white majority populations, vulnerable minorities and the poor were often ignored or were subject to harsh measures such as confinement and strict quarantines. The book offers stunning examples of past laws that penalized rather than prevented illness among marginalized groups such as Native Americans, recent immigrants, Black people, Asians, and others. As Professor Witt observes, the ostensibly neutral rules and laws that govern American life “contain the compounded form of discriminations and inequities, both old and new.”

And, there’s a new twist in the legal story since American Contagions was published. In recent months, the U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at public health law precedents with series of religious freedom cases. 

As Professor Witt notes, we can intelligently face the future, but only if we grasp our “often disturbing past.” He urges that the history of law and epidemics not only tells us where we have been but shapes the present moment and informs us on where we are headed. And epidemics can be used to illuminate inequities and correct them if we recall the lessons from our imperfect past.

John Fabian Witt is Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School where he teaches courses in American Legal History, Torts, History of the Laws of War, and Problems in Legal Historiography. He also taught for a decade at Columbia Law School, visited at Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin, and served as a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in history from Yale.

His other books include Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, which received the Bancroft Prize and American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; To Save the Country: A Lost Manuscript of the Civil War Constitution; Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law; and The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. He has also written for scholarly journals as well as the The New York Times, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Professor Witt generously responded in writing to a series of questions on his teaching and his new book, American Contagions.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Witt on your new and very timely book, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19. You’ve created a lively and clear guide for citizens on the history of public health, epidemics, and American law. Did the COVID-19 epidemic spark your book or were you already working on this subject?

Professor John Fabian Witt: Thanks, Robin!  The book took shape in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic set in.  I retooled a section of my course on American Legal History to include a unit on the legal history of epidemics in the U.S.  Thanks to some amazing RA’s I was able to gather some awesome materials and some excellent images and I turned my lecture on the subject into a public lecture.  My editor saw it and suggested that I turn it into a book – the rest is history!

My boys and I sat at the dinner table, they did school work on Zoom….  We called it our Covid Coffee Shop. 

Robin Lindley: An excellent working arrangement at a challenging time. I saw that the book was dedicated to your boys.

As you note in your book, under our federal system, state and local governments bear the primary responsibility for dealing with public health under their “police power.” What is the role for the federal government and Congress in dealing with a nationwide epidemic?

Professor John Fabian Witt:  Great question, and we’ve seen a big reversal on this over two administrations now. 

It’s a tough question.  On the one hand, the fact that germs don’t respect boundaries is a powerful argument for a centralized approach directed by the federal government.  My brilliant Yale colleague Nicholas Christakis compares a decentralized approach to letting swimmers urinate in one corner of the swimming pool and hoping for the best.  And of course, everyone recalls the period in which federal government inaction led states to be competing for one another for protective gear and ventilators. 

On the other hand, we’ve also had a powerful lesson in the dangers of centralized power.  The Trump Administration’s mix of malevolence and incompetence was a terrible recipe for pandemic management.  Centralized power in public health, as in other domains, is a high-risk arrangement. Our decentralized approach functioned as insurance against the real risk of failure in Washington, DC. Governors were able to adopt masking requirements, business closure mandates, and gathering limits that almost certainly wouldn’t have come out of the federal government. 

Robin Lindley: How do you see the national response to COVID-19 under the Trump administration?

Professor John Fabian Witt: The true crisis for any president is the one they are least suited to manage.  The pandemic was exactly that for the Trump presidency. 

We have a deep history of administration in public health in the US.  Public health measures in the mid-nineteenth century produced the modern administrative state.  But the Trump administration was deeply resistant to expertise and suspicious of the civil service and the state.  Part of this was specific to Trump, who is a kind of genius of self-promotion and who rightly identified the professionals in the federal bureaucracy as a threat to his unaccountable entrepreneurialism in the White House.  But Trump’s particular reasons for seeing the state as a threat connected to a more general phenomenon, namely the Republican Party’s resistance to the administrative state.  

Of course, it’s always important to observe that lots of countries around the world struggled with the pandemic.  But if you look at per capita death rates, the only developed countries with rates as bad as the US (countries such as the U.K., Spain, and Italy) are countries that had older and more vulnerable populations.  Some western countries did much better than the U.S. even though they had substantially older populations.  Austria and Germany are good examples.  Japan, Singapore, and South Korea boasted performances that put all these western countries to shame. 

Robin Lindley: At last, vaccines are gradually getting to the public. What more would you like to see the Biden administration do to protect citizens?

Professor John Fabian Witt: A competent federal government could set clearer standards for state public health guidelines on questions such as reopening.  The current spike in Michigan, for example, is one where local political pressures seem to have led state officials to abandon crucial public health regulations.  Tougher limits are unpopular, but the federal government can sometimes reduce or deflect those pressures. 

I also think the federal government and the Justice Department may be in a position to help states manage a new and emerging problem, which is the centralized policing of state public health regulations by the Supreme Court. 

Robin Lindley: The previous president and many of his partisans undercut science by openly mocking public health officials and scientific experts. Is this fierce politicization of a deadly virus and science denial unprecedented or were there earlier examples of such politicization?

Professor John Fabian Witt: This is a great question.  There are certain precedents for politicization, but the way in which politicization is playing out in national partisan terms is, so far as I can tell, completely unprecedented and incredibly dangerous.

It shouldn’t be news that unpopular public health impositions produce political backlash.  That is an old story.  My Irish and German Catholic ancestors in Five Points in New York City in the 1850s were pretty sure that Whig and then Republican administrations in City Hall discriminated against them in the administration of public health rules because they were Democrats.  The Democrats certainly urged them to think so.  Residents of Staten Island rioted when City Hall tried to locate a quarantine facility close to their homes.

 So political controversy and public health rules in epidemics go together historically.  What’s new is that the country’s political parties are polarized along ideological lines.  What used to be local fights have become national battles with much higher stakes.  

Robin Lindley: It seems our history shows that the courts usually uphold state efforts to protect public health in line with Cicero’s dictum that you note, “health of the people is the supreme law.” Yet, some recent US Supreme Court decisions indicate that religious freedom trumps public health protections. What do you see in these recent decisions?

Professor John Fabian Witt: If there’s one thing I would like readers to come away from my book with, it is that today’s courts have made a radically novel departure from the long history of judicial deference to public health officials. 

Going back at least to the time of Chief Justice John Marshall, courts have recognized that governments need to be able to protect the health of the people.  Courts have played a role in shaping and channeling public health limits, sometimes ruling out the abusive uses of government power.  But they have rarely if ever gotten in the way and blocked public health authorities from putting in place the measures they think important.  The paradigm case has been Jacobs v. Massachusetts from 1905, in which the Supreme Court upheld mandatory smallpox vaccination. In the novel coronavirus pandemic, by contrast, state supreme courts in places like Wisconsin and Michigan struck down state COVID-19 limits.  The Michigan decision was especially striking because it ruled the state’s emergency public health arrangements unconstitutional. 

At the U.S. Supreme Court, a series of religious freedom decisions starting just before Thanksgiving and accelerating last week have interposed individual rights against public health limits that, candidly, had colorable public health rationales.    

Robin Lindley: You note that public health measures often have protected white populations while targeting or neglecting the powerless: the underprivileged, minority groups, immigrants, and others. Are there examples of discrimination and public health that stand out for you?

Professor John Fabian Witt: A classic and dreadful example is San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, when local officials imposed a quarantine on Chinatown that was limited only to people of Chinese descent. Time and again, politically vulnerable populations have borne the brunt of the awesome public health powers of the state. 

There is a paradox here.  Those powers are dangerous and awesome.  But they are indispensable, too.  The public health power Cicero talked about – salus populi suprema lex – is like the power of national self-defense. Terrible things can be and have been done in its name even though we can hardly do without it.  

Robin Lindley: What changes in law and policy would you suggest to protect citizens, particularly minority groups and other marginalized people, during an epidemic? 

Professor John Fabian Witt: Epidemics are paradigm cases for panicked public policy making, and courts can play a valuable role in constraining the worst forms of arbitrary discrimination.  The Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, struck down the San Francisco plague quarantine of 1900. 

But today the most discriminatory features of the pandemic seem to arise out of socio-economic and health care inequalities.  Until we have better systems for the provision of basic social goods like health care, income, and housing, we will see poor Americans in vulnerable positions.    

Robin Lindley: It seems that economic inequity and systemic racism loom large in your accounts of vulnerable populations and public health.

You have a unique background as an academic historian with a law degree and you’re known for your groundbreaking and accessible books and other writing on how law has shaped the American past. What brought you to a career that combined law and history?

Professor John Fabian Witt: Is it true that everyone finds their way for a mix of personal and professional reasons?  My father is a brilliant lawyer in Philadelphia. He teaches now at Penn as an adjunct professor.  Early in his career, he pursued a Ph.D. in history.  I suppose I’ve been singularly uncreative in pursuing much the same path! At the same time, my curiosity about the law resists the usual disciplinary boundaries in the law school world.  I move from subfield to subfield, writing about and teaching about industrial accidents, constitutional law, contracts, war, and more. 

I think my secret project may be to try to make sense of it all by studying a little bit of everything.  The risk is that I’m an expert in none of it.  It can drive me to distraction, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Robin Lindley: This past year has been painful for many citizens, and often frustrating for those who look to science for answers when addressing a deadly pandemic. Where do you find hope in these challenging times?

Professor John Fabian Witt: I got my first vaccine dose two weeks ago in a pop-up public health clinic run by the New Haven Health Department.  After so much dreadful failure in our public health infrastructure, it felt like impressive evidence of reservoirs of state capacity and good citizenship.  

Robin Lindley: That had to be gratifying. Do you have any closing thoughts for readers on the law and epidemics or anything else?

Professor John Fabian Witt: One of the great challenges of the coronavirus pandemic is that it has revealed the limits of some of our most powerful and long-standing institutions.  In the U.S. we rely on private property and markets to deliver all sorts of crucial social goods.  People rely on markets to put food on their tables, keep a roof over their heads, and get medical care for themselves and their families.  Such markets have considerable virtues.  But the pandemic has made salient the limits of such markets in situations of public health risk. 

Collective risks press us to develop collective solutions.  (Think of the glorious democracy of New Haven’s pop-up vaccination clinics.)  Our private mechanisms have produced dreadful outcomes for the most vulnerable.  Consider that our overall death rates are double those of comparable western European countries like Germany.  Or consider that once we adjust for age, Black and Latinx people have accounted for twice as many deaths per capita as whites.  Such disparities are a result of legal arrangements and policy choices.  We can do better.   

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Witt for your thoughtful comments and congratulations again on your groundbreaking and timely new book American Contagions.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Re-Markings, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He also served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. King. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Director Lynn Novick (l) and Senior Producer Sarah Botstein (r)

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). When his name is mentioned, this iconic twentieth century American writer may be more readily recalled as a two-fisted, hypermasculine deep-sea fisher, big game hunter, war vet, brawler, and womanizer, rather than as a Nobel Prize-winning and groundbreaking author of genius.

In Hemingway, their new, unprecedented six-hour documentary series for PBS, co-directors Lynn Novick and Ken Burns and senior producer Sarah Botstein have created a revelatory and nuanced portrait of the writer. The film explores the myths about the author as it examines each stage of his life as a writer as well as his celebrity and his loves, his childhood, his wars, his marriages (times four), his children (three sons), his physical and psychic wounds, his mental illness, his suicide, and more.

The film is based on extensive research into Hemingway’s letters, diaries, and notes as well as books and papers of friends, family members, and colleagues, significant academic monographs, and a fascinating trove of rare photographic and film resources, many of which were only recently discovered by the Burns-Novick team.

The documentary frames scenes from Hemingway’s life with commentary from leading literary scholars and historians as well as prominent authors including Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Tim O’Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others. In addition, several acclaimed actors lend their voices to the film, such as Jeff Daniels who delivers the words of Hemingway, and Meryl Streep who gives voice to Martha Gellhorn, the brilliant journalist and author—and Hemingway’s third wife.

Director Ms. Novick and Senior Producer Ms. Botstein generously discussed their widely anticipated documentary Hemingway by Zoom.

Lynn Novick is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker. She has been co-director with Ken Burns for more than 25 years, and together they have created the most critically acclaimed documentary films that have aired on PBS including Prohibition (2011); The Tenth Inning (2010); The War (2007); Jazz (2001); Frank Lloyd Wright (1994); and Baseball (1994). Ms. Novick came to Florentine Films in 1989 to work on Burns’s landmark 1990 series, The Civil War, as associate producer for post-production.  She previously served as researcher and associate producer for Bill Moyers on two PBS series: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth and A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers.

Sarah Botstein, the lead producer on Hemingway, has worked for Florentine Films for more than two decades and has produced acclaimed PBS documentaries with directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, including The Vietnam War (2017), Prohibition (2011), The War (2007), and Jazz (2001).

Recently, Ms. Novick directed and Ms. Botstein was the senior producer of the groundbreaking docuseries College Behind Bars, a film that revealed the transformative power of education in a pioneering prison education program in New York State. That series was nominated for two Emmy awards.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Ms. Novick and Ms. Botstein on your illuminating documentary on the life of Ernest Hemingway. You both have created a remarkable study of this complicated and troubled literary giant. In the popular mind, Hemingway is recalled as this brawling, hyper-masculine big game hunter, war veteran, alcoholic, and womanizer. You present a more nuanced portrait, but wasn't Hemingway complicit in creating this myth? Did he not want people to see him as a disciplined and sensitive writer?

Lynn Novick: You probably just said it. He was absolutely complicit. This myth was his creation and he played into it. We see it from photos of him and from his author bios and articles about him that this was the way he presented himself to the world.

Maybe it goes without saying, but he wanted success. He was extremely ambitious. He wanted to be famous for being a great writer, but he also recognized that he wanted to sell books and make a living as a writer. On some level, whether it was conscious or unconscious, he knew he had to build a brand, and the brand was him as this character that you just described. And then he wrote characters that had some characteristics of that same type of person. And he himself did a lot of the things in front of cameras and wrote about them to perform that whole role. So he's at the center of it.

You almost can't separate the man from the myth because the myth is part of him. It wasn't imposed on him from without. He certainly embraced it. It was uncanny, but he had gifts for publicity, promotion, and branding--all these things that we talk about now, he knew how to do for better or for worse.

Sarah Botstein: I would stress his ambition. He didn't go to college and was self-made and read voraciously and had some intellectual discipline, and that ambition masked that whole aspect of his life. Then the myth of the man and who's going where and who’s taking turns is fascinating to unpack.

Robin Lindley: You devote six hours to your complex and deeply researched PBS film on the life of Hemingway. Can you talk about the evolution of the project? What sparked the series?

Lynn Novick: The project was a long time in gestation and we’ve been thinking about him and why he matters for decades. It was on a list of possible future projects that might happen on iconic American subjects.

When I came to work with Ken Burns, I started thinking about the iconic American subjects that we could do. I went to Key West, not to come up with a film idea but just on a vacation and went to Hemingway’s house. I went to the room where he worked and saw his typewriter and books. They didn't have a ton of stuff that belonged to him, but there was some, and I felt his presence in a different way. I thought how could we not do Hemingway if we're looking for epic American subjects.

After my vacation, I talked to Ken and Geoffrey Ward, our writer. This was before Sarah began working with us in 1997. Another big epic series came up that we needed to deal with, but about ten years ago, we decided we were going to definitely make a Hemingway film.

Sarah Botstein: We ended up talking to the Hemingway family and did the first of the two interviews with Patrick Hemingway [Hemingway’s son] in 2013.

Robin Lindley:  What was your research process for the film? I realize you worked with a team of scholars and acclaimed writers who talk about Hemingway's life and influence in the film. When did you get to the point of working with scholars and other writers as advisors?

Sarah Botstein: That’s definitely one of the top two or three favorite things that we do. And I get to do that as a job.

We start that in a remarkably similar way regardless of the subject. We try to figure out who the interesting academic scholars, writers, thinkers in the country who focus on a subject from a variety of perspectives. And then we make contact with them and meet them and read their writing and get to know them. And, some of them end up being advisors at certain stages of the project. Some become advisors through the entire series, and some of them end up on camera, some of them end up just behind the camera.

For Hemingway, Lynn and I spent a lot of plane rides and train rides and car rides, traveling around, meeting people, thinking about how to handle visually representing his writing and share conversations about his writing. I don't want to speak for Lynn, but finding the writers, from around the world who were interested in really diving deep and trying to understand both the man and the writer was the most fun and rewarding part of this job.

Many older biographers had died by the time we started writing, so we found younger, less expected biographers. It’s always fun to find who’s kicking up the dust around a famous person and what they have to say. And if the biographers are arguing, even if some are dead and some are alive, that's fun. The writers surfaced for us and they are the most illuminating, fascinating, generous, wonderful cast of characters. They were amazing and make the film what it is.

Lynn Novick: Another thing that has been happening since before we started the project and is ongoing is the Hemingway Letters Project, and that is an adventure. It’s a massive undertaking by Cambridge University Press. They have received grants and they are determined to publish a series of volumes of every letter Hemingway wrote with exact copies of the letters. And if he didn't have a carbon copy, a lot of people would save his letters. So, they have been amassing his letters, and now there's something like 6,000 letters, or may even be more. They started off thinking it was going to be ten volumes and now it’s up to 29. When we started the project, I think two of volumes had come out and now they’re up to six.

And some of the scholars who've been working on this incredible research project are determining who each letter is to, and annotating the references. They look at what Hemingway is talking about. These are often ongoing conversations about things that are happening in his life. It's like eavesdropping on Hemingway. It's incredible. You have him writing home from Kansas City to his parents about his new job [as a reporter for the Kansas City Star]. He also writes home during World War One when he's in the hospital. He writes love letters. Carlos Baker did publish some selected letters.

We could call up the head of the Letters Project at Penn State and ask what Hemingway said about some topic, and she would send us letters to choose from and things that hadn't yet been published.

Robin Lindley: What a great resource. I just learned about JFK Library collection of papers.

Lynn Novick; That’s the JFK Hemingway collection. We recently learned that the collection ended up there because Mary Hemingway and Jacqueline Kennedy met and basically agreed that his work belonged to the nation. They built a room for the Hemingway collection. They've been archiving and preserving the material for the last 50 years, and it is available to scholars.

Robin Lindley: You share some marvelous photos and film clips in the Hemingway documentary. And I know you do a great job of matching the visual elements to the narrative in the documentary.

Sarah Botstein: Well, we have an amazing team of co-producers and associate producers and researchers and interns who are brilliant. They never take no for an answer. They are charming and funny and, determined.

Lynn and I both come at the archival material. We both love to do that research. We both have very visual brains and love the still photograph and moving images and unearthing stuff people haven't seen before and thinking about different ways to the story.

One day our co-producer Lucas Frank said, I think I see Hemingway in this piece of footage. It was a great piece of footage from after World War One that we slowed down. It looked like Ernest Hemingway in a hospital after the war turning his head to the camera.

Ernest Hemingway loved the still camera. There are thousands and thousands of pictures of him. He's unbelievably handsome, certainly as a young man, but he ages so rapidly that it's sort of disorienting.

Robin Lindley: You’re masters of finding forgotten and overlooked material.

Lynn Novick: And we are lucky that the family, and not just Hemingway, but his mother and his sisters, saved everything. It's an unusual family archive. There's material at a library in Michigan and there’s a collection at Princeton and many other places.

I wouldn't say that there are many never before seen images, but before we were working on the film, a cache of photographs was discovered with long-lost rolls of film taken by renowned photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro in the Spanish Civil War. Magnum Photos has taken a deep dive into the representation of the Spanish Civil War and our team was able to go deep into that collection

Robin Lindley: You share very moving photos from the Spanish Civil War in your film. I’m interested in your location shooting and it seems you had access to Hemingway's beloved house in Cuba, the Finca Vigia.

Lynn Novick: Yes. We were able to make connections there through the Finca Vigia Foundation in Boston that was founded by the late Jennie Phillips and her husband Frank  Phillips (former bureau chief at the Mass. Statehouse for the Boston Globe). She was the granddaughter of Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway's editor at Scribners. Bob Vila, the host of This Old House, introduced us to the foundation. He was born in Miami to Cuban parents who immigrated in the 1940s and has a great affinity for Hemingway. The foundation helped us make contacts in Cuba with the curators of the house and also government officials. So, we got permission and our associate producer, Vanessa Gonzales Block, did yeoman's work in figuring out how we were going to film in Cuba. We were there at a time with travel restrictions and everything was very complicated, very difficult, but we had an incredible Cuban crew and they made it happen.

We were able to film in the house at all hours of the day and night. If you're a visitor who can't go inside, but they let us work inside the house and obviously around the grounds. I urge anyone who gets to Cuba to visit the house. It's an archive in and of itself. Everything Hemingway owned then is in that house.

Robin Lindley: And you show so much of Hemingway’s personal effects and his writing desk and books at the house.

Lynn Novick: It’s as if I went to the grocery store and someone filmed just after I left the house.

Sarah Botstein: The Idaho house is also very moving. Lynn and I both spent time in Idaho and filmed at the house. It's not quite the same because Mary Hemingway lived there afterwards [following Hemingway’s death there in 1961] and it's turned into a little bit more of one of those classic home museum places. It’s on this beautiful cliff and you get a sense of some of the big sky country that he loved, where he fished, and experienced that landscape. He's buried there and the cemetery is moving in a peculiar way.  

Robin Lindley: Many people now may not understand how groundbreaking Hemingway’s writing was about a century ago. He was seen as a literary Colossus bestriding the Victorian Age and the modern era. It seems two strong influences affected his writing: his first job was as a journalist with the Kansas City Star and also what he witnessed as an ambulance driver in a major episode of mass, industrialized slaughter: World War One. Why was his writing seen as so groundbreaking, so different than what other writers were doing at the time?

Sarah Botstein: This is a great period to look at the art and listen to the music. And this generation, the young people coming out of World War One, were interested in breaking traditions, and Hemingway was certainly one of them.

Lynn said some really smart things about him. He was in Paris, surrounded by all these extraordinary writers that we've heard of [Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, for example]. They were people from around the world with a European sensibility after World War One. And he broke from Victorian ideas, both in the way he was living his life and how he wrote. Yet in Paris he wrote about being a young boy in Michigan,

There was a big discussion even then of his writing and his craft. Steve Cushman, one of the wonderful scholars in our film, talks about Hemingway’s apparent simplicity. Modernist music and modernist painting and modernist writing are often seen as simplified, but it's actually extremely complicated to make something simple.

And, because Hemingway kept everything, we see his endless obsession with a comma or a semi-colon. As Lynn also often says, it's like being in our editing room, and the viewer can't see it, but we will spend half a day arguing about a sentence.

Lynn Novick: One thing interesting is that modernism predates World War One as a stylistic innovation breaking with the past and shattering the Victorian ways of doing things. It sees the world in fragments or in the way I think about cubism. It began about 1910, so it's before the war, but then the war is an acceleration. There was an urge to deconstruct and to overthrow and to reject the past and to make all things a new.

I am not a literary expert here, but Hemingway seems influenced by the pre-war art and by World War One. He was living in Paris after the war around Picasso and Gertrude Stein and E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound. He is influenced by all of them, yet his response is to do his own thing. He wasn’t doing what they were doing, but he's taking pieces of what everybody else is doing and he's synthesizing and creating something new. There's a radical difference in both his subject matter and his style. As Sarah was saying. he writes about ordinary life of regular people in Michigan but in situations that are taboo.

Hemingway was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, which is a modernist, post-World War One attitude. The older people can't be trusted. They hold no sway over how we should live.

If you look at In Our Time, his first short story collection, he frames the stories with vignettes. That's an extremely interesting modernist idea. It's not linear. Each short story is interspersed with a vignette, which he called chapters. And the vignettes are just little snapshots. The first time I read it and the second time I read it, I wasn’t really sure what to make of the vignettes and it was confusing. And very modernist. It’s post-World War One and it's radical. These are powerful images and scenes. By the end, you recognize that Nick Adams has been in the war and then wrote about it, if you follow the stories. It’s like a novel but he's breaking the form and he's reinventing it. He's drawing from everywhere. There's something I think Amanda Vaill says in the film that I really love, which is that, maybe not consciously, but he’s influenced by technology. Hemingway captures the way we understand the world by bringing the world to us in pieces as with a photograph perhaps and then hyper-focusing on that.

Robin Lindley: Those vignettes are like shocking and often gruesome and sardonic prose poems that don't relate to the Michigan stories that they bracket. His writing is ostensibly simple, but there’s this iceberg idea that the reader sees only one-eighth of the story on the surface and the other seven-eighths are submerged. That was his achievement. In that seeming simplicity, he's more complicated than a many other more wordy or scholarly writers.

Lynn Novick: Yes. That was his genius. That goes back to the myth that he wanted his work to be read by people who weren't literary scholars or readers of avant-garde literature. And, because of the kinds of stories he's telling and the language he's using, anyone could read them. People could take different things from them. So that's a kind of a genius of making his work accessible on many levels. And that is rare. I think that it contributes to his influence as well.

Robin Lindley: Do you have anything to add on your hopes for the documentary and what viewers take from it? I know you’ve both put a great deal of thought and work into the film. I appreciate your tremendous effort.

Sarah Botstein: It's been very interesting to make a film about somebody like Ernest Hemingway in the time that we're living in. We had an amazing team of women working on this film as well as men and we looked at Hemingway's relationship to women, to race, to antisemitism--to the more complicated things that our country is constantly thinking about, dealing with, and reexamining,

Hemingway is a fascinating lens through which to see those issues. I'm hoping that the film will spark conversations about not just his writing, but about the country we live in and how we represent the people who live in the country and the relationships between men and women and all of those complicated issues that are worth talking about that.

Lynn Novick: During this pandemic year that has been so trying and horrendous for so many people, and we all have different ways of getting through this. And for me personally, sometimes rereading Hemingway or reading other fiction has been rewarding.

I think a great literary work is such a gift because it gives you a chance to leave the world you're in and go someplace else for a little while. In our mediated world, most of us do that through television, through streaming, through watching something, but sitting down with a great book is such a solace, even if it's a book about difficult subjects, even reading about the difficulties of people in the past and the existential threats they faced. Whatever the theme, there’s something really profound that can happen, and I've been more aware of that because of what's gone on during the last year.

For all of his flaws and problematic aspects of his life, Hemingway left us with some beautiful, transcendent work. And, as Sarah just said, he’s a problematic figure and we very much understand that, but we're hoping that the film opens up a conversation not just about his work, but also reminds viewers of the power of written literature.

And one more point. The pandemic, I think, has made us all more aware of the dangers of addiction, mental health issues, isolation, and the worries that people have. And this film is ultimately a very sad and tragic story. Hemingway destroys himself in the end, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and ultimately takes his own life. It's very, very sad. That's another way that the film hopefully may help as we show the time he lived and the shame that people felt about mental illness and, when they needed help, they didn’t want to get help or didn’t know how to get help. I hope we're breaking down some of those barriers in this country and around the world now as well.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Ms. Novick and Ms. Botstein for sharing your thoughtful comments and insights on your illuminating new film on Ernest Hemingway that casts new light on the life and times of one of the iconic Americans of the twentieth century. Again, congratulations and best wishes on your future projects.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Re-Markings, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He also served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. King. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Editor's Note: This interview as originally posted contained errors related to the history of Finca Vigia. It mistakenly attributed the founding of the Finca Vigia foundation to Bob Vila. The foundation was established by the late Jennie Phillips and her husband Frank  Phillips (former bureau chief at the Massachusetts Statehouse for the Boston Globe). Ms. Phillips was the granddaughter of Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway's editor at Scribners. Also, the interview as originally published stated that Bob Vila was born in Cuba. He was in fact born in Miami to parents who emigrated from Cuba in the 1940s. 

Few other societies have revelled in and revered the deliberate and purposeful killing of men and women as much as the Romans.

Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

It’s no surprise to historians that ancient Rome was extremely violent, a martial society that thrived on a brutal, dehumanizing system of widespread slavery. Murder was common and, for the most part, the act was not considered a crime by the state. And murder prompted virtually every transformative moment in Roman history from the killing of Remus by Romulus at the founding of the city to the gruesome assassination of Caesar in the Senate, to the bloody homicidal deaths of many dictators and emperors and lesser notables. In one especially dark 50-year span, 26 emperors were murdered.

Historian Dr. Emma Southon brings this brutal world to life in her lively new book A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome (Abrams Press).

In her book, Dr. Southon explores some of the most notorious homicides and assassinations in ancient Rome as well as the little known or forgotten stories of murder as she presents the Roman perspective on violence and lethal crime in politics, law, and daily social relationships. While based on extensive research and scholarship, her book is written in a conversational tone for a wide audience and peppered with Dr. Southon’s humor, profanity, and irreverent asides. She combines her profound knowledge of ancient history with her scholarly yet entertaining take on centuries of Roman carnage and her perspective on how society’s leaders and ordinary people saw homicide in their daily lives.

Dr. Southon holds a doctorate in ancient history from the University of Birmingham. Her other books include of Marriage, Sex and Death: The Family and the Fall of Rome and Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World. She also co-hosts a podcast entitled History is Sexy with writer Janina Matthewson, and she works full time as a bookseller at Waterstones in Belfast. Her background includes teaching ancient history. She is devoted to bringing history to a wide public.

Dr. Southon graciously responded by email to questions on her work and her new book on murder in ancient Rome.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Dr. Southon on your new book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome. Before getting to your recent book, I wondered how you decided on a career in history and then chose a focus on ancient history? Did your interest begin as a child?

Dr. Emma Southon: I always liked stories and people. History didn’t interest me a lot in school and I originally intended to either be a wildly successful novelist or a psychologist. But I chose to do an A-Level in Ancient History when I was 16 because the course included trips to Italy and Greece and I just fell head over heels for the Romans and their contradictions and excesses.

I actually did six weeks of a degree in psychology to continue my original plan before I realized that ancient history was my true love, dropped out and started again the next year! What I love about it is the same as what drew me to novels and psychology: I love people’s stories.

Robin Lindley: You earned a doctorate in history. Who are some of your influences as a writer and historian? Did you consider a career in teaching?

Dr. Emma Southon: I realized at the end of my PhD that a career in academia wasn’t for me because I wasn’t willing to make the immense sacrifices necessary to succeed. Years of short-term contracts, instability and constantly moving was not for me! I loved teaching a lot, and I loved students but academia is hard if you have a thin skin (which I do) and are not willing to suffer for a while. For a few years I taught academic writing in a university writing centre which was a nice compromise for me!

I recently realized that my major influence as a writer is Bill Bryson. I loved Bill Bryson when I was younger. He has a real talent for making complex things entertaining, easy reading so the reader learns without even realizing they are because they are having such a good time.

Robin Lindley: Bill Bryson is a master storyteller. It seems you have a special interest in bringing history from beyond the walls of academia and to the public at large. I noticed that you co-host a podcast called History is Sexy. What’s the focus of the podcast and what are some topics? From what you’ve learned, are you exciting more interest in history with the podcast?

Dr. Emma Southon: In History is Sexy my co-host Janina (who is a real-life novelist) and I answer questions from listeners which they want to know more about than just a Wikipedia article. So we have answered questions about all kinds of things, from Nazi paranormal research, which probably undermined the Nazi war effort a lot, to the history of professional wrestling, to why people drank so much beer in the Middle Ages.

My main aim with it is to demonstrate how complex and big history is and that seems to resonate with people. A lot of history podcasts present nice, neat, linear narratives and ours is not like that at all!

Robin Lindley: You’ve written an acclaimed biography of Agrippina—the notorious wife of Claudius and mother of Nero—and other work. What sparked your new, rather gruesome book on Roman history?

Dr. Emma Southon: A Fatal Thing emerged from my interest in true crime, and from talking to a friend who is a high school history teacher in Georgia who also has a big true crime interest. She told me that she uses famous true crimes as a teaching tool. For example, Charles Manson is a great way to start a conversation about 1960s countercultural movements etc. And I thought this was brilliant, and went looking for a book which had discussed Roman true crime! When I didn’t find one, I decided I had to write one.

Murder is such an interesting way of exploring what and who a society considers to be important and worth protecting, and who is considered expendable. And that tells us a lot about the ingrained values of a culture which they might not even be aware of themselves.

Robin Lindley: Who do you see as the audience for your new book? It’s much different than a scholarly monograph and your asides and humor and colorful language put it in another category all together. You establish a conversational tone as you describe the horror and then remark on it casually.

Dr. Emma Southon: I basically just imagine myself! I am quite a lazy reader of non-fiction and I will skim unless there is something that really grips me, so I write books that I find entertaining and interesting! I want the reader to feel what I felt reading Bill Bryson books – that we are pals hanging out and I’m telling them a good story. And that story is partly what happened in the past, and also how we know about what happened and how I found out about it and how I feel about it.

I want the reader to be as interested and amused and appalled by the Romans as I am and being sensible or scholarly is never a good way to do that. Also, I am English and live in Northern Ireland so I conversationally swear a lot, which means it sneaks into my writing!

Robin Lindley: You note that modern Americans and Brits are particularly intrigued by murder. As you wrote, we love crime movies and television series and one-third of the books we consume are crime novels. How do you see our fascination with crime compared to what you found about killing among ancient Romans?

Dr. Emma Southon: I think that both cultures are fascinated by death, because violent death is fascinating and scary. Modern British and American people are, for the most part, quite detached from death. People don’t die young or in childbirth or of disease anywhere near as much as Romans did, and we have medicalized death into hospitals and care homes so we really don’t see it often at all.

I have only seen embalmed dead bodies, and I saw my first one this year, so we don’t need much to fascinate us. A podcast of a man describing a death or description on a page is quite enough.

The Romans, on the other hand, saw death and experienced death all the time. Executions, and death by disease, and horrible accidents and death in childbirth were common, and dead bodies were not a rare sight so they needed a little more to captivate them in gladiatorial shows and spectacular executions. But at the core, I think they come from the same human place of being titillated and captivated by the horror of death.

Robin Lindley: What was your research process for the book? Did it differ from creating a more academic work on ancient history?

Dr. Emma Southon: The main difference between this and academic research is that there is a lot less input from other people (who always made me take my jokes out) and it was a lot quicker to research! I spent a year on researching A Fatal Thing, instead of the three or four it would take in academia. And no one made me take my jokes out!

Robin Lindley: In your research and writing, were there a few murders or other incidents that were especially surprising or new to you?

Dr. Emma Southon: The part that was newest to me was the realization that there were a lot of Romans and people in the empire who believed that their loved ones had been killed with magic and curses. Roman culture was very religious and saw both divine activity and magical activity in just about everything, while their medical knowledge was not great. So, often, when someone died of a disease that they didn’t recognize the family believed that they had been cursed and sometimes they even wrote this on their epitaphs. This means that lots and lots of natural deaths were categorized as murders by the families and the Romans thought that their society was even more murderous than it actually was!

Robin Lindley:  From your book, Roman “civilization” was especially brutal and the people were bloodthirsty. You write that society “reveled in purposeful killing” and murder was not a crime. How was murder seen under Roman law?

Dr. Emma Southon: For the majority of the Republican period of Roman history the state didn’t legislate much. Most laws were concerned with property and civil disagreements. Morality didn’t enter into Roman law so murder never really came up.

It’s not until monarchical rule started to emerge under Sulla (82-79 BCE) that Romans started trying to control violence and began to develop a state which could – hundreds of years later – claim a monopoly on killing. This is largely because of the reliance of Roman society on slavery from the very start, where a great many enslaved people entered slavery as war captives. In order to control enslaved people, it is necessary for private citizens to be able to kill them. So Roman law had to legislate to allow for that, and once you make one subset of people “murderable” then it is very easy to allow lots of subsets of people to be murderable.

Robin Lindley: A related question perhaps: What did you learn about how Romans saw the value of human life? From your book, it appears there was not much sentimentality.

Dr. Emma Southon: Roman culture was incredibly martial. They are a war-loving people who define themselves by martial values, and their whole society is underpinned by slavery, so they are very unsentimental about large scale death. What they cared about very much was their hierarchical system and defending that system. Life was not valued and did not need to be protected, unlike an individual’s position within the social hierarchy.

And Romans were very interested in protecting their society but managing individual violence was not part of that. Individual murder was mostly a private, domestic affair which was no business of the state and was to be dealt with by the family of the victim. The state, such as it was, was only interested in violence when it involved someone with dignitas and fama. Fama is reputation and dignitas is prestige. Much like honor, a man gets them by achieving things in public, like political positions, military glory, winning court cases etc. When men with great dignitas are injured, then the structure of society is injured and that needs to be punished.

Robin Lindley: You found that murder within Roman families was seen as a family matter, to be resolved by the family.

Dr. Emma Southon: The family is the most important structure in Roman culture and individual behaviour is very much a family matter. The family, especially among the aristocracy, are basically large, sprawling clans all connected to one another and focused on honor and shame. Within this violence and killing were interpersonal issues to be dealt with by the paterfamilias. There is no police force or state prosecution apparatus to be harmed by violence or to resolves conflicts. There are only civil courts. This makes murder very hard to see because it is, except in the most extreme circumstances, a private matter to be dealt with quietly. 

Robin Lindley: Roman society was supported by slavery and you describe the cruel dehumanization of enslaved people and the torture and killing of slaves as a mere daily routine. What are a few things you’d like readers to know about slavery and ancient Rome?

Dr. Emma Southon: Mostly that slavery was absolutely critical to Roman society and culture. Everything they did, from aqueducts to pretty jewellery to philosophy, was built on the back of countless millions of enslaved people who were part of every facet of life. They couldn’t wear togas without enslaved people to dress them; that’s how embedded in Roman life slavery was.

And it was brutal. Enslaved people had nothing and no rights and could never truly be free even if they were manumitted, and they were subject to violence constantly. They are so often written out of our modern understanding of Rome, or made to be happy servants, but Roman slavery was really all encompassing and horrific.

Robin Lindley: You also note that Romans saw murder as sport, as with gladiatorial games or the feeding of slaves and state enemies to wild beasts. This was entertainment. What was it in the Roman psyche that accepted these gruesome “games” as mere sport and didn’t cause the human reactions of disgust and revulsion?

Dr. Emma Southon: Again, Romans did not value human life in and of itself. They only valued a person’s place in society. The vast majority of people who entered the arena were enslaved or criminals, they were infames, which meant they were legally unprotected as they had no fama so they could be killed at will. People who were thrown to beasts to be killed were all criminals, and their execution was a public reminder of the awesome power of the state.

The Romans, much like modern day America and various countries which still have the death penalty, believed that some people gave up their right to live through criminal activities, their profession (actors, gladiators and sex workers were all infames), or simply because they were enslaved. This turned their deaths from tragedies into righteous entertainments which reinforced the status quo.

Robin Lindley: Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when readers think of murder in ancient Rome is the assassination of Julius Caesar. How do you see his murder?

Dr. Emma Southon: I tend to fall on the side of Brutus and Cassius in this one and understand their reasoning for killing him! He was trampling, illegitimately and very rudely, all over the Republic and was about to leave Rome to fight Parthia for years, which would make him effectively untouchable. Killing him looked like the only possible option to save the Republic (that was already dead).

And there was a clear context and honorable model for the assassins in Roman culture: killing a person who “threatened the Republic” had, by the Late Republic, become a legitimate and heroic action. So, although it turned out to be poorly thought out and very short sighted, I understand what Caesar’s killers were trying to do. I think that their actions were a legitimate assassination of a tyrant!

Robin Lindley: How did the Romans view suicide?

Dr. Emma Southon: Romans saw suicide as a moral issue Suicide could be a heroic action, in the face of corruption or injustice. The emperor Otho, for example, killed himself in order to end a civil war and prevent further loss of life in battle and was seen as a heroic and moral character. Equally they considered people like Nero, who was too afraid to take his own life and tried to get other people to kill him, to be pathetic and cowardly.

In general, Romans liked people who faced death without fear, like gladiators and people who chose to take their own lives. They considered this to be brave and quintessentially Roman/masculine.

Robin Lindley: You mention judicial killings and the death penalty in Rome and you describe the special Roman use of crucifixion. What did you learn about crucifixion and why this form of torture and ultimately death became widely used by Romans?

Dr. Emma Southon: Crucifixion has three benefits to the Romans: it’s very horrible, very efficient and very public. People died slowly and then hung, rotting, in public as a sign for everyone else.

Crucifixion was saved for the lowest of the low criminals and enslaved people and for crimes which the ruling powers felt needed to be made an example of. The Romans liked to use extreme aversion methods to show people living within the empire what happened if you crossed a line and crucifixion, even more than executions in the arena, were the most efficient way to do that. The aim was to humiliate the victim and warn everyone who saw the victim.

Robin Lindley: How did Roman religion affect Roman law? Did religion condemn killing?

Dr. Emma Southon: Roman religion has no issue with killing, and – very occasionally – encouraged it in strange forms of human sacrifice. Roman religion was far more interested in keeping capricious gods happy than the morality of people.

When Christianity became the dominant religion, [killing] changed as Christianity is interested in the state of a person’s individual soul and their behavior. Certain forms of killing became much less prominent. Constantine I introduced the first law which made deliberately killing enslaved people illegal, which fundamentally changed people’s relationship with the enslaved members of their household. Later, gladiatorial games were phased out and then banned in 399 CE by emperor Honorius (although the ban didn’t take and had to be reissued five years later).

Capital punishment was very much still part of Christian-Roman culture but the notion of the individual soul made the culture less gung-ho about killing.

Robin Lindley: You stress how enslaved people and other marginalized groups were especially vulnerable to cruelty and thoughtless killing. We face some of these issues today in other contexts. As you report this history, do you see parallels to our present situation? What lessons does this history hold for us?

Dr. Emma Southon: There is a concept in modern criminology of the ‘less-dead,’ which refers to people who can be killed without state apparatus and society at large worrying too much. Sex workers are less-dead, with sex workers of colour being the least dead. These people can be murdered and there will never be an outcry and the police may not bother to investigate. These are the modern day infames and hopefully future societies will look at us as we do the Romans.

As for what I would like people to learn from the book, the main thing is that the Romans were not some pinnacle of “western civilization” that was all while columns and white togas. The Roman empire was a brutal, cruel place which ground up human life both for fun and for profit. There is a strong tendency to idealise and idolize the Romans and it’s my mission to make that difficult!

Robin Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add for readers about your book or your work? Do you have another project in the works?

Dr. Emma Southon: I am currently working on my next book, which is a history of the Roman empire in the lives of 15 women from around the whole empire: from Yorkshire to Syria.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Dr. Southon for your thoughtful comments and your fascinating new book A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Best wishes on your work.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Re-Markings, Huffington Post, and more. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black debasement and exclusion, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans.

 – Carol Anderson, The Second

In her groundbreaking new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury), distinguished American historian Professor Carol Anderson describes the history of how American gun laws, and the Second Amendment in particular, have been used to control and subjugate Black people.

Professor Anderson’s book is neither “pro-gun” nor “anti-gun” but instead analyzes the role of guns and racial violence throughout our history and the disheartening denial of rights when it comes to African Americans. As she notes, white fear of Black people was pronounced at the inception of the Second Amendment in the 1780s when one of the founders said that the provision was needed “to keep a fearful monster in chains.” She shows how the amendment was not about gun rights, but rather founded on “anti-Blackness” evidenced by the morbid fear of armed Black people.

As Professor Anderson chronicles, as early as the 1600s, white colonists in America legally banned all people of African descent from owning and possessing firearms. White fear of potentially rebellious enslaved people and free Blacks fueled these draconian laws. And the interests of Southern enslavers were preeminent in the adoption of the controversial Second Amendment.

In The Second, Professor Anderson vividly recounts the bloody history from the vicious treatment of enslaved people to the forgotten massacres of Blacks in the Jim Crow era and to the 21st century in cases such as the murders of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Breonna Taylor, and police killings of Black “good guys” with guns. To this day, as she illustrates, the rights of Black Americans have been denied under the Second Amendment.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her other books include White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner; as well as Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955; Bourgeois Radicals:  The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960; and recently One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.

Professor Anderson frequently speaks on and writes about history and race for the broadcast media and many scholarly and popular publications. As she has described, the core of her research agenda is “how policy is made and unmade, how racial inequality and racism affect that process and outcome, and how those who have taken the brunt of those laws, executive orders, and directives have worked to shape, counter, undermine, reframe, and, when necessary, dismantle the legal and political edifice used to limit their rights and their humanity.” For her, our fraught history must be told honestly and fully to understand how we got to where we are now.

Professor Anderson graciously responded by telephone to questions about her new book and her work as a historian from her office in Atlanta.  

Robin Lindley: You're a leading expert on the history, law and policy of race in America, Professor Anderson. Your award-winning book White Rage detailed episodes of relentless white resistance to Black progress since the Civil War. What inspired your groundbreaking new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America?

Professor Carol Anderson: It was the killing of Philando Castile. So let me back up. After White Rage, I wrote a book called One Person, No Vote on how voter suppression is destroying our democracy. And prior to that, I wrote Eyes Off the Prize and Bourgeois Radicals. And so, what has been in my wheelhouse is looking at African-Americans’ denial of rights and their fight for rights.

So this book was inspired by the killing of Philando Castile, a Black man who was pulled over by the police. The police officer asked to see his ID. Following NRA guidelines, Philando Castile alerted the officer that he had with him a license to carry a weapon. But, as he was reaching for his ID, as the officer had requested, the police officer just began shooting and Philando Castile was killed. He was killed not because he was brandishing a weapon, not because he was threatening the police officer or anybody around him, but simply because he had a weapon that he was licensed to carry.

And the NRA went virtually silent on the killing of Philando Castile. Now they didn't go silent at Ruby Ridge. They didn't go silent at Waco. And so that led pundits to ask, well, don't Black people have Second Amendment rights? And I thought, Lord, that's a great question. Right? And, and that's what got me on this hunt because I had explored so many of the other rights, but I hadn't explored this one. That was the genesis for this study.

Robin Lindley: That was a horrifying incident that was shared on video. Among other things, you detail the complex story of how the founders came to adopt the Second Amendment at the Constitutional Convention. What did you learn? It seems the non-slave states used the amendment to bribe the South to embrace the new Constitution.

Professor Carol Anderson: Part of what I lay out was that, at the Constitutional Convention, the South had already been playing hardball with the rest of the delegates. Basically, [Southern delegates argued that] if we don't get our way, if we don't get to enshrine and empower slavery in this new nation, we're going to walk and there will not be a United States of America. And so, this is how we ended up with 20 additional years of the Atlantic slave trade and the fugitive slave clause, as well as the three-fifths clause.

And the South playing hardball was standard operating procedure. When it came time for the ratification, the ratification had stalled, and James Madison was sent down to his home state of Virginia to get Virginia on board. And there, he ran into the buzzsaw of Patrick Henry and George Mason and the other anti-federalists who were really clear: they did not like having federal control of the militia, which is what Madison wrote in the Constitution, because they didn’t trust those people up north who detested slavery and they believed they would be left defenseless. If there is a slave revolt, we can't count on them and there would be no militia down here to protect us.

And so, the South was threatening to scuttle the Constitution and call a new Constitutional Convention. And Madison was absolutely afraid that this was going to open up a Pandora's box that would lead the nation back to the Articles of Confederation.

Mason was saying that we need to have a Bill of Rights that can protect us. Madison understood that Bill of Rights argument because, when Virginia did ratify the Constitution, it ratified with an addendum to the Bill of Rights that included the right to a well-regulated militia. And so, Madison understood his marching orders, and he was like a man obsessed with crafting a Bill of Rights. That is why you see this kind of weird [Second Amendment] when you also get freedom of speech; the right to freedom of the press; the right not to have a state sponsored religion; the right not to be illegally searched and seized; the right to a speedy and fair trial; the right not to endure cruel and unusual punishment. And then you get a weird right to a well-regulated militia for the security of the state. That thing is an outlier, and it is an outlier because that was the bribe to the South, to Patrick Henry, to George Mason, to the anti-federalists.

You had state protection of the militias and states could use their militias to control Black people the way that Southerners had consistently used militias. And they didn’t have to worry that the federal government would not protect them. So sitting in the Bill of Rights we have the right to control Black people.

Robin Lindley: That’s an incredible story from our founding. What does a well-regulated militia mean and what were ways that the South used militias to control enslaved people?

Professor Carol Anderson: So let me back up. One of the narratives that we currently have in this nation is that the militias are this heroic force that fended off the British and fought for American liberty and independence, and that militias would fight to end domestic tyranny. But at the time when they were writing the Constitution, the founders knew that the militias were not reliable as a force against a professional army. George Washington was beside himself because sometimes during the American Revolution the militia would show up, and sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would take off running. So how do you fight a war? You don't know if your forces are going to be there. So the idea of an incredible militia that could take on the British was not quite accurate.

And you had Shay's rebellion where white men were attacking the Massachusetts government, but when the Massachusetts government called out the militia, the militia [decided] no, we're not fighting them. In fact, some members of the militia joined in Shay's rebellion. This was occurring right before they were drafting the Constitution.

But what that militia could do consistently well was put down slave revolts. And one of the things that my research was unpacking and showing was the absolute fear of Black people that white people had in the burgeoning United States of America. You see this in terms of the fear of slave revolts and the architecture put up to control slave uprisings. You get laws that banned Black people from having literacy and the laws that banned them from having access to weapons. And you also got the rise of slave patrols, which were the smaller units that could go in and monitor the enslaved, and go into their cabins and hunt for tools of liberation, such as books and weapons. The role of militias was to really take on slave revolts and put them down.

In 1739, the Stono rebellion in South Carolina sent shockwaves through the South because Black folks rose up and they were willing to kill whites. So the fear that this could happen was actually realized and already on the books was a law saying that all white men had to carry their guns at all times. So when Stono blew up, the alarm rang and white men were in church and they got their guns as part of the militia, and they went after participants in the Stono rebellion and hunted them down.

Robin Lindley: What sparked the Stono rebellion?

Professor Carol Anderson: It was the quest to get to freedom in Spanish Florida, where there wasn't slavery and it was that quest for freedom that drove folks at Stono. The inflamed who sparked the Stono insurrection were on a road-building crew, a labor gang. They were there surveilling and paying attention, doing the intel. When are the guards here? How deep are the guards? Where are the weapons kept? They were getting that sense of the intel to know how to attack and get to freedom. And so the word came down that whites had to stop them.

And then came new laws. In 1740, a law was passed that required any enslaved person who was captured trying to get to Spanish Florida, had to be scalped. There was also the 1740 Negro Act, which became foundational in terms of slave codes. That law defined African descendants or the enslaved as basically absolute slaves for now and even for those not yet born. It also described limits on their freedom of movement. It basically banned literacy and banned access to weapons. And it defined Black people as inherently criminals who have to be subjugated by whites. And so that is so foundational for the framing of the anti-Blackness that I'm talking about that courses through to the 21st century.

Robin Lindley: And that provides the context for the adoption of the Second Amendment you describe. In your book, you also go back to early colonial times in the 1600s, when laws were already adopted to ban Black people from possessing weapons.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes. This research really began to lay out the fear of Black people, and you're seeing it in the laws. You're seeing it in the “thou shalt not have guns.” And, if Blacks have guns, it can only be in the presence of whites. That becomes conditional in terms of what whites need.

We see this as well when it comes to fighting wars. During the War for Independence, African-Americans were banned from the Continental Army in 1775. It was only because they couldn't get enough white men to enlist, and the British were just bringing it, that the Northern colonies began to relent and say, if you're enslaved you will get your freedom if you join and fight with us. This was also in response to what the colonists saw as the horror of the edict of Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor out of Virginia, who said the enslaved who were owned by these rebels would get their freedom if they fought for the King, and then you saw this mass Exodus to the British. The fear of Black people with arms was mitigated because of the exigencies of war. But what we also see is that, once the war was over, white leaders thought how do we disarm them? How do we reassert our authority?  This was part of the mechanism in the laws consistently.

Robin Lindley: And since colonial times, as you contend, there was no right of self-defense for Black people, whether they were free or slave.

Professor Carol Anderson: Right. One of the things that I do with the Second Amendment is I take it in terms of the way that we understand it and that is: the right to bear arms, the right to well-regulated militia, and the right to self-defense. And I ask: how do those principles carry through for Black people? And what I see is that they are overwhelmingly used against Black people and also that African Americans don't have the right to self-defense. I walk through the cases of that historically, and bring us up to the modern day, and the modern-day version of that is “stand your ground” laws. And stand your ground expands the castle doctrine that says that if somebody comes into your home, you have the right to defend yourself because you have an intruder. What stand your ground says is that, anywhere you have a right to be and you perceive a threat, you have the right to defend yourself and a right to use lethal force.

There are many problems with the stand your ground proposition, and a key problem is the perception of threat when Black is the default threat in American society. That perception of threat means that you can feel you are imperiled when you're really not simply because there's a Black person there. We see that, for instance, in the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case. In that narrative you had a 17-year-old who had gone to the convenience store to get Skittles and iced tea during halftime of the NBA All-Star game. He was on the phone, walking back, and George Zimmerman, a grown man saw him, saw a Black child, and saw him as suspicious. The gunman told the 911 operator that there was something wrong there, and ”these a**holes always get away.” And so, Zimmerman takes a loaded nine-millimeter handgun and gets out of his SUV, and he stalks this child through this neighborhood, and this unarmed child is killed by a bullet put into his chest by Zimmerman. And Zimmerman hollered self-defense and he walked.

Now, when you look at that unarmed child and that grown man with a loaded weapon, the grown man with a loaded weapon is the one who was the catalyst, the one who sparked the encounter. And he walked because of what we call the “thugification” of Trayvon Martin, where he becomes taller and heavier and, in photos, they darken him to create a scary Black guy, a dangerous Black guy.

Robin Lindley. That’s another horrific recent murder. In the Antebellum era, as you write, even freed Blacks in the North were not considered citizens, and white supremacy was the dominant attitude throughout the US. And Southern enslavers feared more revolts as with Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in the early nineteenth century as laws prevented Black people from owning or possessing weapons and even required that whites search Black property for guns.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes. In Georgia, for instance, the law said that slave patrols had the authority to search any Black person's home, enslaved or free. There was a Georgia Supreme Court Case in 1846, after the state passed a law, because there was so much violence, that banned open carry of weapons. In the Nunn decision, the Georgia Supreme Court decided that laws that banned open carrying of weapons violated the Second Amendment rights of white men, but it left in place the Georgia law that banned Black people, free Blacks and enslaved, from having weapons ostensibly because they did not have the Second Amendment right to bear arms. And that's one of the through lines you see coursing through history.

I'm arguing that, whether Black people were armed or unarmed, it was the fear of Black people that was the driver of laws here.

Robin Lindley: After the Civil War, even though enslaved people were emancipated, they faced tremendous violence and no right to bear arms. Carl Schurz investigated treatment of Black people in the South right after the Civil War. Can you talk about his journey in 1865 and 1866 and the atrocities against Black people that he documented?

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes. Schurz was a Major General in the Union Army of the United States of America. [President] Andrew Johnson sent him to understand the conditions in the South.

What Schurz found just shook him. He ran into a carnival of death. He described the Black bodies. The dismembered bodies. The severed limbs. The bodies decomposing, piled up on roadways. He described the torture such as being tied to a tree and set on fire to burn alive. And he reported the glee that whites took in putting these free people back in their place.

What Carl Schurz described in his work on the conditions in the South was a free-for-all of violence against Black people. And part of what is stirring the tumult is not just the defeat, but it is the leniency of Andrew Johnson who provided amnesty to many of the Confederate leaders who regained control of their state governments and began to pass laws like the Black Codes that try to re-install slavery by another name by requiring annual labor contracts from the freed people who weren’t permitted to leave that employer for somebody who paid better. And the Codes also required disarmament of Black people. That was to re-install slavery. So they required Black people to work for them, and required them to be disarmed. And the battle was on because Black people understood that the gun was all that protected them from the reinstallation of slavery by another name.

But, in many cases, Black people were outgunned and out-manned. And so, the slaughter was just horrific. And the Black troops stationed in the South as part of the occupying army tried to get in between the paramilitary forces and the freed people to provide a level of protection. But you had, again, whites hollering up to Andrew Johnson that yes, it's violent here, but it's because of those Black troops who just enraged so many whites seeing them in their uniforms, parading with their guns. They’re out here to kill all white people. If you got rid of the Black troops, then we would have peace in the South.

Andrew Johnson obliged, and the Black troops were removed. But that did not bring peace to the South.

We would later see slaughter after slaughter. We would see the Colfax massacre of 1873, which is a case where history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. There, whites in Louisiana were upset about the results of an election because a Republican government was put in place. These upset whites launched an assault against the courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, which was the citadel of democracy in that city, in that county. The Black militia tried to defend it but didn’t have the weaponry and the ammunition that they needed. They were overwhelmed and they were slaughtered. Slaughtered. And the government in Louisiana was so politically polarized and fractious that there wasn't the will to hold the men who did the killing accountable. So the federal government stepped in and charged eight of the leaders with violating the Third Enforcement Act, which dealt with domestic terrorism. Then the Supreme Court in the United States v. Cruickshank decision ruled that the Enforcement Act only applied to state actors, not to private groups like the Klan. Therefore, these killers did not violate the Third Enforcement Act because it didn't apply to them.

Robin Lindley: That was a terrible decision. You mention that as many as 300 black people were killed at Colfax, including 60 who were murdered after they surrendered.

Professor Carol Anderson: And Cruikshank was giving license to mass murder.

Robin Lindley: Didn't the Cruikshank decision also hold that the 14th Amendment didn't apply because that the acts of terror by the Klan were not state actions?

Professor Carol Anderson: Right. And the Supreme Court also decided under the 13th Amendment that segregation was not a badge of servitude, and that the 14th Amendment didn't apply to private citizens or to corporations, and that the 15th Amendment really was not about protecting the right to vote. And now, you see how the Court, the legal system, and the political system continue to treat Black people not as citizens and not as human beings, but as fodder for this nation.

Robin Lindley: You vividly chronicle the white resistance and violence that Black people faced after the Civil War and during Jim Crow era with intimidation, torture and mass lynching in the South. And when Black soldiers returned from the battlefields of World War I, the violent Red Summer of 1919 followed with whites attacking and injuring or killing hundreds of Black people in numerous US cities.  The horrible events in Elaine, Arkansas, are one harrowing and seemingly forgotten example of what Black people faced in the Jim Crow era.

Professor Carol Anderson: In Elaine, Arkansas, then, Black people were overwhelmingly sharecroppers. They hadn't received any of the extra money that was coming in to the land owners when the price of cotton had gone up. And there was one year when they worked and many didn't get paid. Imagine working for an entire year and not getting paid anything. And so that was wage theft, labor theft.

The Black sharecroppers began to organize a union that would see to it that they could get paid for their labor. They believed that if the white folks found out about the organizing, they’d be killed. And so, they held organizing meetings at a church in Hoops Spur, Arkansas. And armed sentries were placed outside for protection, for self-defense. When a sentry saw a car coming that was sent by the wealthy landowners, there was an exchange of gunfire. One white man was killed and another white man was wounded. The word got back to the town fathers that this was a Black insurrection. They're trying to kill all of the white people was the rumor. No, they were trying to get paid for their labor. And they were trying to assert the right to self-defense. A mob came and began slaughtering Black folks. Black folks shot back and two more white men were killed.

In this moment, the word spread that they killed more white people. And so, the governor put pressure on and got the US Army to come into Elaine, Arkansas, bringing machine guns that have been used in the war in France. And they used those machine guns. They would go to one cane break, which is an area of very thick, dense vegetation, where African-Americans were hiding for safety from the mob and from the troops. And they were just mowed down with these machine guns, mowed down in the cane break. According to some estimates, as many as 800 Black people were killed at Elaine, Arkansas.

Robin Lindley: I don't think many people have heard about that horrific massacre of fellow Americans. It’s somewhat heartening to know that more people are learning our history and about situations like the Tulsa massacre in 1921.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes. With Tulsa, you had Black men who were armed coming to the courthouse to ensure that there wasn't a lynching of young Dick Rowland who had been accused of attempted rape of a white woman. Having Black men with arms and Black men who were successful was just absolutely enraging to that white mob. There was some kind of scuffle, and a gun went off. Then the sheriff deputized the mob and they descended upon Black Wall Street and burned it down, just burned it down. Lots of looting, lots of killing, and even dropping bombs from airplanes on the neighborhood, leveling it.

Robin Lindley: And it’s estimated that more than 300 Black people—men, women and children—were killed in the Tulsa massacre. And Greenwood, their neighborhood, was burnt to the ground.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes, and again you're seeing that Black people had no right to bear arms. And they did not have the right to self-defense, and this is after the war to make the world safe for democracy.

Robin Lindley: Yes. And they also didn't have the right to prosperity because a thriving Black community was anathema in the time of Jim Crow.

Professor Carol Anderson: Right. You can see how that prosperity undercuts the narrative of Black inferiority and undercuts the narrative of Black subjugation. If you have white supremacy, that means that whites are always much more successful because they've got what it takes. And when you have Black folks who are doing really well and whites aren't, that just flips the evidence and flips traditional narrative, and that is disconcerting. It is like cognitive dissonance. And it is enraging to people who have been baptized in white supremacy.

Robin Lindley: You make that case powerfully. To bring your history to the present, even after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, you write that Black people still enjoy no rights under the Second Amendment. And you discuss some recent heartbreaking cases, such as the murder of Trayvon Martin, as you mentioned, as well as deaths of Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes. And juxtapose the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the white 17-year-old who crossed state lines with an illegally obtained AR-15 to go to a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after police officers had shot a Black man in the back seven times.

And when Kyle Rittenhouse rolled up there with his AR-15, the police officers didn't see a threat. In fact, they welcomed him. “We really appreciate you guys being here. Hey, it's hot out here tonight. You want some water?” Kyle Rittenhouse then shot down three [protesting] men, killing two of them and seriously wounding a third. He then walked back towards the police with his hands up as if to surrender. And they went right by him again. They didn't see a threat.

Juxtapose that case with Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black child in Cleveland, Ohio, who was playing in a park by himself with a toy gun. And granted, the gun did not have the orange tip on it that says, hey, I'm a toy, but it's an open carry state, and the laws say that, as long as you're not pointing a gun at someone or threatening someone, you can open carry. There was nobody in the park. He wasn’t a threat, but the police roll up, and within two seconds, they gun down this 12-year-old child saying he was dangerous. “He was a threat. We were fearful.” So how was it that this 12-year-old playing alone in a park with a toy gun, and not threatening anyone, was dangerous and had to die? And how was Kyle Rittenhouse, who illegally obtained an AR-15 and gunned down three men, killing two of them, not a threat?

Robin Lindley: Indeed. The NRA calls for support of good guys with guns, but it appears that this admonition applies only to good white guys. And the NRA, as you argue, doesn't come to the defense of the Black gun owners who have been shot by police officers or white citizens.

Professor Carol Anderson: Right. I also take on that good guy with a gun narrative by looking at two Black men.

 Jemel Roberson in Chicago, is one. After a shooting in a club where he was a security guard, he tackled the gunman. The police ran in and the patrons pointed to the security guard and were hollering, “Don't shoot, don't shoot. He is security.” His uniform even had security written on it, but police officers saw a Black man with a gun and shot Jemel Roberson and killed him.

Then there’s the case of Emantic Bradford, Jr., in Alabama. He was an army veteran. There was a shooting in a mall, and he took out his weapon and moved people to safety. Alabama is an open carry state but, the police ran in and they saw him, a Black man with a gun, and they shot him down. He was dead virtually immediately.

So this good guy with a gun doesn’t apply to Black people because Black is the default threat so Black can't be good. That’s the reasoning.

Robin Lindley: That’s alarming. In looking at the Second Amendment now, what do you think can be done? Should it be repealed? How would you address it? You establish that it’s an outlier amendment still today.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes. We need to remove the Second Amendment from its venerated hallowed ground that the NRA-crafted narrative has placed it on and we must treat the Second Amendment the way we treat the three-fifths clause of the Constitution--as something that was born of slavery and anti-Blackness.

And we need to begin to have a real conversation about what real security and real safety should look like in the United States. And that also requires that we dismantle anti-Blackness as part of our operating code.

Robin Lindley: And we have this year a record number of mass shootings, and nothing has been done legislatively at the national level. The Republicans, the party of the NRA and gun makers, have a stranglehold on Congress and will stop any meaningful gun violence laws. What do you think of efforts to examine gun violence as a public health problem?

Professor Carol Anderson: I know that there are de-escalation programs to deescalate the kind of violence and tension that happens in communities, but I can't speak to a lot of that to tell you the truth. But, as I wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian after we had another mass shooting, what prevents us from getting real gun safety laws is the fear of Black people, the power of anti-Blackness. And the power of “if you take my gun, I will be left defenseless.”  Republican Representative Lauren Boebert talks about how, if “you take our guns, we're going to be left defenseless against the thugs, the gangbangers, and the drug dealers.” And that sounds so much like George Mason in 1788 talking about whites being left defenseless.

And so, the combination of the pandemic of mass shootings with the pandemic of anti-Blackness has prevented us from really engaging in true gun safety laws that bring about real security. I think about Jonathan Metzl's book Dying of Whiteness. He did a study with whites in rural Missouri who had a member of their family who had been a victim of gun violence. Usually, it was suicide. He talked with family members and asked about gun safety laws, and they said absolutely not because their guns would be taken away. Those people from St. Louis would come down and try to take everything that we have. And you begin to think how that fear preys upon real issues of our safety, real issues of our quality of life, real issues of our citizenship rights.

Robin Lindley: I wish The Second could be read by every citizen.

Professor Carol Anderson:  That would be wonderful because again, we have this really flattened notion of what the Second Amendment is. Part of that has been driven by the ways that it is debated as a legal concept. Is this about an individual right to bear arms, or is this about a well-regulated militia? And so, when that has been the framework for our debates, what’s missing is the role of anti-Blackness in the founding of the Second Amendment and in the implementation of the Second Amendment, and that has so much to do with how we operate now as a nation.

Robin Lindley: As you describe it, the history of the Second Amendment provides yet another example of systemic racism.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes. And when you think about how intensely we have several of our state legislatures pushing to not teach accurate history about the way that racism has affected the development of the United States of America, we're in trouble.

Robin Lindley: The attack on the teaching of history continues.  I'd be derelict if I didn't ask you about how voter suppression plays into the history you've studied after your in-depth analysis in One Person, No Vote. The theme of anti-Blackness also comes through clearly in that book. Many states are passing laws to restrict the vote now. How do you see the state of our democracy right now?

Professor Carol Anderson: Our democracy is in trouble because what we have in the narrative of voter fraud is the narrative of illegitimate American citizens--that there are people who should not be voting and their votes shouldn't count. And so, you hear a Republican on the Board of Elections in Wayne County, Michigan, saying, “If we don't count the votes from Detroit, we can count all of the other votes in the county.” And you have Newt Gingrich talking about, “they stole the election in Philadelphia, they stole the election in Milwaukee, and they stole the election in Atlanta.” Well, those are cities that have sizable Black populations and targeting those cities that have sizable Black populations and calling those votes illegitimate by ineligible Americans means that you do not embrace a vibrant, multiracial democracy.

Instead, what we're seeing is this push from people like Paul Weyrich, the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, who said, “I don't believe in all this good government stuff where you want everybody to vote because I don't want everybody to vote because, quite candidly, our leverage goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Right?

So what we're seeing is that this wave of voter suppression bills coming through is a response to the massive voter turnout that happened in the 2020 election, in the midst of a pandemic, where you had 160 million votes cast. And then that massive turnout that happened here in Georgia in the 2021 Senate runoff race, where you had a 92 percent Black voter turnout that helped flip Georgia and helped flip the Senate.

But the response was not wow, we have a sizeable number of people who voted and look at the small number of irregularities that occurred with 160 million people voting. Georgia had three audits, one by hand. Instead, what do we get? We get Georgia’s SB 202, which targets the very means that African-Americans use to access the ballot box. One of the things that SB 202 goes after is the use of drop boxes in the city of Atlanta. The metropolitan area of Atlanta had over 90 drop boxes that were available 24/7, but SB 202 reduces that number to 23, and they will only be available in buildings during office hours. We’re seeing an effort to shut down voting.

And what is really frustrating and enraging is to know that we have some Democratic senators who care more about the filibuster than they do about democracy. They care more about a rule of the Senate that has been used consistently to undermine and stall civil rights legislation than they do about the right to vote in the face of seeing what these states are perpetuating and in the face of what the US Supreme Court ruled in the Brnovich decision [upholding Arizona’s restrictive voting laws].

Robin Lindley: It seems that much of the history you present in One Person, No Vote and The Second is unknown to most Americans. I saw that that you mentioned as an influence John Dower’s book, War Without Mercy, a study of the Pacific Theater in the Second World War and the racism and dehumanization of the enemy by both Japanese and Americans.

Professor Carol Anderson: Oh, absolutely. In War Without Mercy, John Dower looked at the power of racism in driving military policy and in driving dehumanization that allowed states to systematically destroy human beings at a kill rate that was absolutely disproportionate to the kill rate in the European theater. He looked at it not just in terms of policy, but in terms of culture, even at what was on the radio and the music. And he wrote about how the Japanese saw the United States as a mongrelized, weakened, feminized nation that, if hit really hard, would crumble and leave Asia to Japan. So you can see how policy driven by racist ideology can really do damage.

Another one of my influences was David Levering Lewis’s biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, a monument to research and analysis and being able to contextualize what happened over an arc of time. You can see Du Bois not just as this person who's a scholar and who's an activist, but you see him in his times and the impact that he had and the decisions he made and didn’t make, and the import of those choices. That book was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Then there's Michael Hunt’s Ideology and US Foreign Policy, and again, he looked at the role of race in formulating and implementing US foreign policy. For example, before the U S intervened in the Spanish American War, Cuba was depicted as this prostrate, beautiful white woman who was being ravaged by the Spanish. Then, when the US intervened and had to fight, you saw depictions of Cuba as a pickaninny, as blackened, as servile, and as needing the paternalistic benevolence of Uncle Sam to guide them out of the darkness of Spanish control. 

Robin Lindley: And at the same time, US troops were slaughtering native people in the Philippines.

Professor Carol Anderson: Yes, exactly. I appreciate books that look at how race and racism works in a policy and the way that it plays itself out and the impact that it has. And another one of my influences is Brenda Gayle Plummer who wrote Rising Wind that dealt with the role of African-Americans in US foreign policy. By deliberately looking at the ways that African Americans have engaged in US foreign policy, she shows how they saw themselves in this international context and that was foundational for me.

Robin Lindley: Thank you. Those books sound fascinating. I appreciate your exploration of some of the most disgraceful and horrifying aspects of our past. At times, the work must be difficult and must be deeply affecting for you. And you’ve mentioned so many complex problems that persist. Where do you find hope now?

Professor Carol Anderson: Interestingly enough, I find hope in the history, because what I see in history is that there are always people who stand up and fight against injustice. There are always people who say, not on my watch, and those people cover the range of classes and race, right? They stand up and they're using their instruments and playing into their best selves. If they're writers, if they're songwriters, they're fighting. And that's what I see today,

I'm not seeing any rollover. After 2016, it would have been really easy to go dang. Okay. And give up. Instead, folks mobilized, they organized, they strategized. And we had the massive midterm in 2018 and we had that incredible voter turnout in 2020.

And as I wrote in White Rage, we are getting that white rage backlash right now. But you don't see folks just rolling over. You see them continuing to organize and mobilize while imagining what a vibrant, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy looks like. That's where the hope is.

Robin Lindley: That’s hopeful indeed. Thank you for your passionate words and your thoughtful comments, Professor Anderson. And congratulations on your new book on the Second Amendment and your other groundbreaking work. Best wishes.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (hnn.us), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He also served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. King. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

[The 1921 Tulsa race massacre] could aptly be described as a community lynching. By this I mean that the incineration of every significant structure in the Greenwood District and the indiscriminate killing of its residents was meant to create a spectacle of violence so powerful that terrorized Black people would leave the city and never return.

Karlos K. Hill, The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History.

Most Americans now have some knowledge of the long-hidden history of the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre thanks to Tulsa community members, scholars, technical experts, and others whose work on this mostly overlooked history was widely covered by media as the nation observed the centennial of this horrific atrocity.

Major media outlets shared some details of what happened a century ago when hundreds of enraged white rioters attacked the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa—“Black Wall Street”—perhaps the most prosperous African American community in America in 1921. After armed African American men prevented the lynching of a young Black teen on the evening of May 31, 1921, local law enforcement deputized hundreds of armed white citizens to kill Black Tulsans as city officials called in the National Guard.

A fierce white mob attacked the Greenwood neighborhood with the aid of police officers and Guard troops with heavy machineguns. White civilians were armed with pistols, rifles, gasoline bombs, and more. In addition, snipers fired from airplanes that also dropped crude homemade bombs and incendiaries. The Guardsmen swept the area with machine gun fire, mowing down any Black person within range. And the mob created an inferno, igniting and spreading flames to homes and businesses alike.

By the afternoon of June 1, 1921, the white mob had killed as many as 300 Black residents of Greenwood, injured more than 800 other residents, and left the 35-block area of the neighborhood smoldering. Almost every structure—homes, shops, churches, and more—was gutted or leveled by fire.

News services recently covered these high points of the race massacre, but provided little context for the mass slaughter or what happened in the wake of the violence.

In his groundbreaking new book, The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History (University of Oklahoma Press), revered history professor and board member of the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission Karlos K. Hill examines this long-hidden history through a series of photographic images that reveal Greenwood life before the race massacre; the bloody and fiery human reality of the massacre; and the aftermath of this explosion of white hate. The moving and often heartbreaking images are bracketed with the moving words from survivors of the massacre.

Beyond the images of the white paroxysm of violence and the destruction, Professor Hill takes the history further than most news accounts by relating with photos of what happened to the survivors after the massacre. The photos reveal how Black people were rounded up by local authorities and marched through Tulsa as they were mocked and jeered by white bystanders. Most were then arrested and locked up in internment facilities without adequate food and water. At first, a Black internee could only be released if a white person spoke up for him or her.

And then Professor Hill shows how white leaders failed in their in the effort at permanent expulsion of Black people from Tulsa. He takes readers to a time of resilience and hope—what he calls “Greenwood’s triumph over hate.”

Tulsa City officials resolved to thwart Black people from rebuilding and resettling in Greenwood, but the Red Cross and other “angels of mercy” provided medical care and temporary housing for many of the survivors. In the months following the massacre, survivors who returned to the neighborhood began rebuilding homes and shops.

Gradually, Greenwood became a thriving community again by the 1930s thanks to the courage, persistence and resolve of Black survivors. Professor Hill tells that story too. Unfortunately, the neighborhood faded in the 1960s as the result of urban renewal that included construction of a freeway that ran through Greenwood and divided Tulsa.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor Hill and other scholars and community members, the term used to describe the horrific anti-Black violence in Tulsa in 1921 has shifted from the erroneous “Tulsa Race Riot” to the “Tulsa Race Massacre.” The Library of Congress and other institutions recently adopted the nomenclature “Tulsa Race Massacre” to replace the inaccurate “Race Riot” descriptor. The “race massacre” designation honors the victims and survivors of the mass murder while more precisely assigning responsibility for the 1921 atrocity to a brutal mob of white citizens abetted by local law enforcement and heavily armed National Guard troops who perpetrated the most destructive explosion of anti-Black violence in American history.

And now archeologists, forensic pathologists and others search for graves of the victims of the race massacre and work to identify remains of those who were murdered a century ago.

Professor Hill intended that his photographic history honor the Tulsa massacre survivors and their descendants. The book is based on extensive scholarly and photographic research and will remain an authoritative reference for scholars and the public.

Karlos K. Hill is Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Clara Luper Department of African and African-American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He is also a leading community-engaged scholar and historian and specializes in the history of lynching, racial violence, and their legacies in the Black experience. His other books include Beyond The Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Professor Hill also founded the Tulsa Race Massacre Oklahoma Teachers Summer Institute to teach the history of the 1921 Race Massacre to thousands of middle school and high school students. Hill also serves on the boards of the Clara Luper Legacy Committee and the Board of Scholars for Facing History and Ourselves, and is actively engaged on other community initiatives working toward racial reconciliation and repair.

Professor Hill generously talked by telephone about his work as a historian and his new book from his office in Oklahoma.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Hill for speaking with me, and congratulations on your groundbreaking new book on the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Before I get to your book, I’d like to hear about your work as a historian. First of all, what inspired you to study history?

Professor Karlos K. Hill: To be very honest and transparent, I had great mentors.

I went to Macalester College in Minnesota, and I had the great opportunity to work with Peter Rachleff, who is a historian of American labor history. I also had a chance to work with Professor James Brewer Stewart, who was a historian of anti-slavery and the anti-slavery movement. And I had the great honor and privilege to take classes from Mahmoud El-Kati who was also a professor in the history department from whom I had many African-American history courses. Between those three individuals, I gained a deep appreciation for history and the ways in which history could unlock and answer questions that come up today about our most vexing problems and issues. And I gained a deep love and appreciation for teaching because they mentored me and taught me the value of teaching.

And, for those reasons, I left Macalester on a mission to become a historian. I was fortunate to get into the graduate program at the University of Illinois and had other great mentors there, including David Roediger, who's still a friend and colleague, and Sundiata Cha-Jua, who was my primary advisor and who's been a blessing for me. I've had other people along the way for sure, but those [professors] would be the individuals that have propelled me to become the historian I am today.

Robin Lindley: What a superb team of influences from undergraduate and graduate school. Now you're a leading American historian on racial violence. Did you develop that expertise when you were a student?

Professor Karlos K. Hill: That didn’t happen until graduate school. My primary advisor, Sundiata Cha-Jua, is a historian of lynching, racial violence, and the Black Power movement, among other things. I was his research assistant for my first two or three years in graduate school, and it was under his tutelage that I began to learn about the research on the history of lynching and racial violence. And ultimately, after three years of doing research on his behalf, I essentially asked him, would it be okay to use some of the research that I had been doing for him to help me get off the ground with a research project. He said, of course. And the rest is history. So my advisor's work, that I became very close to as a graduate student, has propelled me to do this work professionally and to speak about this work publicly.

Robin Lindley: In your earlier writing, you focus on the lynched “Black body.” I think many people don't understand, as you’ve written, that after the Civil War and into the early 20th century it was virtually an accepted white ritual to harass and kill Black people. How do you see this brutal history?

Professor Karlos K. Hill: That’s an issue that many historians have tried to understand—the white psychology, the white culture during the post Civil War and post slavery eras. Why is it that white people, white communities, essentially killed Black people for anything and everything in public? Why does this happen? And, there are theories and there are some great arguments out there that are theoretically informed and historically informed that get into a lot of nuance and minutiae.

But I would say quite simply that this [racist cruelty] comes out of slavery. And slavery, if anything, was about dominating the Black body for the sake of profit. There had been 250 years of slavery which was literally a period of dominating the Black body for the sake of white prosperity, for the sake of profit.

When slavery ended, it didn’t mean the end of the desire to continue to dominate Black bodies. What ended was the way in which Black bodies were dominated, which was owning Black people, but this desire to master, to dominate, to dictate Black people's lives did not end with slavery. It continued into the Reconstruction era and certainly into the Jim Crow era. And so, the manifestation of the ways in which whites figured out a new system to dominate Black people economically, politically, socially, as they had done with slavery, took about a half a generation or so, but it came to full fruition with Jim Crow segregation and lynching within this culture of Jim Crow.

Robin Lindley: And you’ve studied white lynching culture. How did that culture evolve?

Professor Karlos K. Hill: Segregation was the ultimate symbol of white power, of white supremacy, as well as the white domination of Black bodies.

In our society, we don't understand how slavery and the power dynamics that were a part of slavery have persisted into the present and the ways it's encoded into systems and institutions. But lynching was its own system of domination.

I would argue that lynching was the most powerful symbol of white supremacy in the early 20th century. And you could see in lynching the ways in which whites sought to reassert the same dominance over Black bodies and Black lives that they had during slavery. And so, the will to master did not go anywhere. The desire to oppress and repress Black people did not die with slavery and instead continued into the future.

We must come to terms with the ways in which the slavery system ended. There is no sanction in our country today for involuntary servitude, but that doesn't mean it ended. It did not. It just continued in a new form, in a new way. And one way that domination was manifested was with Jim Crow segregation as Black people were restricted in their movements, in public accommodation, and other activities.

And lynching was also as a form of racial domination. Literally, being able to kill a Black person in public without any repercussions from the law became the ultimate symbol of white supremacy because there was no true accountability. There was more accountability for white slave holders who would have killed their slaves during the era of slavery than there was for a white person post-slavery who killed a Black person who was at that point a citizen.

You can just see how slavery militated against the senseless killing of Black people because slaveholders [valued their human property] and killing enslaved people could harm the system and certainly give ammunition to abolitionists to make arguments against slavery.

Slaveholders saw slavery as the future of American prosperity and they were doing everything in their power to protect their interests, and that meant holding accountable other slaveholders who deviated from the slave code. So there was more accountability for white slave holders who harmed an enslaved person than for whites following emancipation when a white person could kill a Black person with impunity. That's what we have to wrap our minds around to understand this country and the history of lynching.

So, the end of slavery not only did not bring to an end to the will to dominate and to oppress Black people who were deemed inferior, but it fully unleashed the violence of white people who had no monetary incentive to simply keep Black people alive. We then had lynching because whites lacked that economic incentive in which slave holders saw their futures tied to enslaved people that worked for them. And there was also a conviction that Black people were decidedly inferior. That’s the potent mix that produces the ugliness and brutality of the white lynching culture. We still aren't done with it and we still have a lot to unpack, but the work can only happen if we agree to do it together. As long as only people like me talk about it and activists talk about it, we're not having a conversation. We're talking at each other and we're not having a conversation.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those powerful words Professor Hill. Everyone needs to learn this history. What may stun some modern readers is that the lynching of Black people by whites in the Jim Crow era was essentially accepted and not legally barred. And white people were sharing with friends and relatives photographs and postcard images of horrible atrocities such as Black people burning alive or hanging from trees and bridges, often with groups of gleeful white people smiling on.

Professor Karlos K. Hill: Yes. It’s hard to understand why the violence was so vicious, why it was so brutal. Why did people have to be burned alive? Why did they have to be killed in the first place, but second, why were they burned alive or skinned alive or hanged, and after being hanged and shot repeatedly by onlookers?

Why were Black people, men and women, mutilated to the degree that they were? Why were those results of mutilation held as souvenirs? It wasn't just photographs that whites kept as keepsakes. It was also body parts, pieces of hair—anything that could tangibly connect to a lynching. Much of that material, such as hair, teeth, appendages, has never seen the light of day, but we know from newspaper coverage and diaries that white people certainly kept souvenirs like that.

I still, to this day, do not have a good answer for this why this brutality occurred. The only answer that I have is that it wasn't just about domination. It was about terror and social control—about terrorizing Black people into submission.

I wouldn't say that enslaved people were mastered by the lash, but certainly, there was the whipping post. More profoundly, there was the auction block. A loved one could be sent away and that forced enslaved people to get along as best they could to keep their families together. And there was a sense of hope that perhaps they would be sold to a more benevolent master or perhaps they would find a way over time to buy their freedom.

But what kept enslaved people from running away? What kept them from rebelling was that terror. I don't think it was fear for themselves, but for what that rebellion would mean for their families, their loved ones. And so, the auction block and the whipping post were the most potent means of social control that the slaveholder had. And the auction block was probably the most potent because sending someone “down the river” to a sugar plantation in Louisiana, or a cotton plantation in Mississippi was like sending someone to hell where life choices were going to diminish. And an enslaved person’s choices were already diminished.

And so post slavery, lynching became the mechanism for social control and terrorism. How do you convince a population to embrace or not to embrace white supremacy and Black inferiority without question? It's through terror. You convince whites that the terror is normal and right. This is how things are and should be. You create such a boogeyman so that Black people are not only inferior but they're dangerous, and then the only way to keep Black people under control, and especially Black men, is through terroristic violence, such as lynching.

The rallying cry under slavery was “we need the slave patrols because of the ever-present nature of slave rebellion.” Post-slavery, the rallying cry was “we need lynching.” We need lynch mobs to terrorize Black men who are attacking and harming white people and white civilization. And there was no invention of new arguments for why Black people should be oppressed and repressed. There was just simply a continuation of the same logic.

When you look at the particulars of an individual lynching, and you look at the ways in which an individual’s body was treated savagely, you’re left scratching your head. What did the excesses of white supremacist violence really serve besides sadistic pleasure? That certainly was a part of lynching culture.

Robin Lindley: This history is heartbreaking.

Professor Karlos K. Hill: Probably historians have dealt least with the sadistic quality of lynching violence. We tend to frame and understand lynching from political, social, and economic lenses, and less a sociopsychological approach. But the answer for me is that the excesses, as well as just the terroristic violence, revolved around maintaining white supremacy writ large, and lynching became the primary mechanism by which to terrorize and control Blacks in the aftermath of slavery.

And lynching culture has not passed just like the cultures that created slavery have not passed. We're still living through them in new guises, so it's up to us to try to tease out and understand this history. 

The history of slavery is no different from thinking about our own life history. There are things in our life that we need to confront, things in our life that we haven't dealt with, and they're always an issue for us and affect us in a negative way until we deal with them.

Slavery and lynching are the same. We don’t enslave people as we did 200 years ago, and we don’t lynch people as we did 100 years ago, but nonetheless, the culture, the values, the ideas connected to lynching and slavery did not die. And that's what we get confused with. The systems died, but the ideas and the culture that deployed them did not die.

Some people argue, “Slavery is over.” No, it's not. It's still here with us. It's still reverberating. And slavery will continue to reverberate unless we actually confront those attitudes that grew out of slavery. The ideas about white supremacy and Black inferiority did not begin with slavery, but they were institutionalized by slavery.

Slavery made Black inferiority common sense to white people, and even to some Black people who saw that this was how the world was, like having air and water. There are white people who are superior and Black people who are inferior. That's just how God made us.

You had 250 years of slavery in this country where it was common for Black people to be bought and sold like a car, or a boat, or a horse or a pig. Humans and animals were sold right alongside each other. You can see how over time the ways in which Black people as human beings were diminished and were treated as property. All that did was make repressing Black people commonsensical. And we must interrupt those cultural byways. We have made some progress, but we have not had an honest dialogue about it.

Things like the 1619 Project tell certain truths about slavery in unrepentant ways—some very bold and some would say harsh ways, and that’s exactly what we need. It does nobody any good to sugarcoat what actually happened and why it happened. If we try to make it sound less abusive and exploitative, all we are doing is going backwards rather than owning up to the sheer brutality and not just the brutality, but the ways in which slavery and the many cultures that produced slavery show up today. If we sugarcoat history, we're not having a serious conversation about the past. And that's what my work does.

I have to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to talk about this history in ways that are authentic and honest and highlight current day realities that the history has produced. In the nutshell, that's the work that I do. And I try to work with a community-engaged lens to shine a light on history and its present-day ramifications.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those illuminating words, Professor Hill. And you have worked for social justice as a historian, and you've called on other historians to do the same. How do you see that role?

Professor Karlos K. Hill: Yes. I do not see myself truly as an activist or an organizer for social change. My work is to align my scholarship with struggles occurring in my community and to be a resource and an asset for those who are on the front lines in the struggle against these systems of racial oppression.

My day job and my true passion is to teach college-aged students about history and, to the extent that I can, to teach people in the public and the people that I get connected with. I’m under no illusion that I’m an activist but I am saying to activists in my community and around the country that I can be a resource for you as an academic, if you need me. I'm at the University of Oklahoma which has a wealth of resources, including human resources, but also financial resources. My goal is to leverage my expertise and whatever the University of Oklahoma offers to be an asset to the struggle on the ground.

And in Oklahoma, of course, the Tulsa race massacre has been the biggest story of the last year. I did a lot of work on the Centennial Commission and with a few activists in the community to help people in this country understand why the Tulsa race massacre is such an important piece of American history. And we tried to not only to educate people, but to institute curriculum in Oklahoma schools to teach the next generation and for years to come. And so, I think we've been successful in doing that.

I just wrapped up a project with University of Oklahoma Professor Barry Roseman who teaches in the School of Visual Art. He had the great idea of creating an educational poster on the massacre go to every middle school and high school in the State of Oklahoma. I co-designed the poster and provided all the content for the poster, and then we found generous sponsors. So, in the next several weeks, we'll be sending out these educational posters with a nice letter at no cost to every middle school and high school in the state. I hope it will spark conversation and action around this history.

We have also created an institute over the last four years with numerous presentations for kids, community groups, and educational institutions, and there’s been a lot of outreach on the race massacre.

By being a resource, I joined movements and I support these movements, but I don't consider myself an organizer or an activist. What I do on a day-to-day basis is teach in the classroom. I'm on the lecture circuit, and I will show up when I’m called and needed, but I'm not often on the street in the thick of it.

Robin Lindley: You’ve been acclaimed for your work with the community on this terrible massacre. I’d like to turn to your book on the Tulsa race massacre. You’ve created a deeply researched photographic history that vividly reveals the horror and devastation a white mob, abetted by local police and the National Guard, brought to the African American Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa in 1921. The photos with your text and survivor accounts bring the terror to life.

It seems that creating a photographic history adds another level of complexity beyond the usual text-only history books. Can you talk a little bit about that research process? Finding photos and other evidence must be difficult a century after an event.

Professor Karlos K. Hill: I would say that it wasn't difficult to find photographs of the massacre in 2016 and 2017 when the book started to come to life. What was difficult was looking at them every day trying to understand what I was seeing and also trying to find the courage to continue to look at them.

Many of the photographs had no caption or didn't have really good captions, and I felt a deep sense of responsibility for getting this right. I wasn’t just representing myself but I was also connected with the Centennial Commission and the Greenwood Cultural Center. They provided me many of my images.

What kept me up at night was: Am I doing justice to the story of the community that I'm a part of?  Am I telling a community-oriented narrative, a community-focused narrative? That was my stress. And I was looking at the images over and over and that caused trauma, and there were many days that I cried, and so many days that I was just down, and so many days that I wanted to quit. And, through all of that, as I was working through the emotional turmoil and the feelings of vulnerability. I thought I could really mess this up and do a disservice to the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, the Greenwood Cultural Center, the John Hope Franklin Center—all those people and institutions that I was in daily conversation with.

That was my pressure because I wanted to create something that they were proud of and also told their story. Many people have said the book is beautiful, and well-written and well researched. As a historian who writes for a living, that's music to my ears.

Probably the best compliment that I've got on the book was from Scott Ellsworth who wrote the first scholarly account of the massacre in his groundbreaking book Death in the Promised Land. He's become a friend and a mentor over the last say two years. He called me out of the blue, after the book was published, and said, “I'm really proud of this book. I got my copy today. And I want you to know that, having talked to the descendants [of massacre victims and survivors], this is a book that they would have been proud of.” I'm almost about to cry right now, but that's what kept me up at night. I wanted to do justice to this history and to the community, and I wanted to tell the story in the most powerful way that I could.

I can tell you that. as a historian of racial violence, I did not understand the massacre in Tulsa before coming to Oklahoma, before teaching at OU, before becoming engaged with the Centennial Commission, and absolutely before I looked at those photographs and began to study them. I didn't understand the depth of the fatigue or the extreme violence. I didn't understand the loss of life or the loss of homes and businesses. I simply did not understand. And it's the photographs that made me understand and forced me to bear witness. I don't think I would have written a book had it not been for the photographs. The photographs transformed my thinking, and my hope was simply that they could have the same impact on other people who see what I saw beyond two or three stock images.

In 2016 through 2018, I was living in a world where we didn't know how much people would care about this history. It turned out that people cared quite a bit, but we didn't know that in 2016 and 2017 and 2018. Were we going to have to convince people that this was the deadliest massacre in American history, that hundreds of Black people died, and that the community they built was completely destroyed? Who was going to believe us? Who was going to care? The photographs became a key part of convincing people that this was one of, if not the deadliest, massacre of Black people and the story of survivors who lost their homes and their businesses. They lost everything.

The photographs became Exhibit A as a way to convince the public to care about this history, to bear witness to this history, and ultimately, to confront this history.

The book became my way of making the most compelling case for why what occurred was a massacre instead of a race riot. To the extent the book does that, it’s a success.

Robin Lindley: The book is a work of art and it's also extremely moving as well as a scholarly record in text and images of this horrific atrocity against Black people. Your words on lynching culture are pertinent to the white rampage in Tulsa. What sparked this massacre that led to the murders of more than 300 Black civilians—men, women, children—and the wounding of more than 800 people, and the leveling of their prosperous community of 35 square blocks by angry whites with torches and gasoline bombs? And local government abetted the carnage by deputizing hundreds of white mobsters “to kill Blacks” and calling in the National Guard to mow down Black people with machine guns and other weapons of modern war. What prompted this explosion of hysterical slaughter?

Professor Karlos K. Hill: I don't go into great detail about this in the book because I was writing to the general public and I was trying to create a very general framework that people could appreciate and understand. I didn’t go into great detail about the connection between Western culture and race, but for my response to make sense, I have to mention lynching culture because the race massacre was a mob attack on an entire Black community that resulted in that entire community being burnt to the ground.

We can't understand why a mob of thousands formed in the first place without mentioning lynching culture and that’s the key to what occurred. The spark for the massacre was the allegation that a young Black man, Dick Rowland, had sexually assaulted or attacked a young white woman, Sarah Page, in an elevator downtown. Per lynching culture, rumors began to circulate that a Black man had attacked and maybe even killed a white woman. People began to murmur about lynching the Black suspect.

And again, going back to what I said earlier, in early late 19th century America and early 20th century America, lynching took the place of slavery as the dominant mode of social white supremacy and racial social control. As these rumors spread around Tulsa, talk of lynching occurred as well, and as this talk of lynching began to filter into the Black community, Black people were concerned that a lynching was imminent. Black men then went downtown because of the fear that this Black teenager would be lynched by a mob of white men.

The desire to wreak vengeance on Dick Rowland and ultimately on the Black community for this affront was what sparked the massacre.

Lynching typically occurred for one of three primary reasons: the murder of a white person; the rape of a white person; or the theft or destruction of property of a white person. White people were lynched for the same things that Black people were lynched for, but Black people were lynched at a much higher rate for these alleged crimes. And certainly, there was not the same brutality visited upon a white person. In fact, after the turn of the last century, lynching of white people declined. Black people also engaged in extra-legal violence or Black vigilantism but that also declined by 1900. What skyrocketed in the 1880s and in certainly in 1890s, and the first decade of the 20th century was white on Black lynching for the crimes above. There were 5,000 lynchings of Black people documented in this country, and 66 percent were for those crimes. Lynching became a rallying cry by Jim Crow proponents who urged that segregation is necessary.

Lynching is ugly and there were all these apologists for lynching who believed they had a right to subdue and to control Black men. And obviously, in white culture there was no sense that a Black person could be innocent if a white person accused them of a crime against whites.

And so in Tulsa, when Black people heard news of about the arrest of Dick Rowland, they didn’t have to debate about whether he would be lynched. That was a part of American culture. They had witnessed lynching in other communities time and time again based on an allegation of sexual assault against a Black man.

Lynching became an expected and common practice in America. Therefore, you would often hear white men after a lynching say things like “we had to defend the honor of our community,” or “if we had not taken action, we would have been seen as weak.” Or, “We would have been seen as not doing our duty as white men to take justice into our own hands.” It becomes so common that if white people and white men in particular did not defend the honor of white women by taking vengeance on an alleged Black sexual deviant, if you will, that would have been a mark against the white community.

When you begin to understand this back story, this contextual story, the massacre makes sense. It’s horrific, but it makes sense that white Tulsans didn't end with shooting up the downtown area and killing some Black people in the process. Instead of doing that, they destroyed an entire African American community.

We have to understand that, even though a lynching did not occur in Tulsa because of the courage of the Black men who went downtown to protect Dick Rowland, that doesn't mean lynching culture didn't shape everything that happened. It certainly provided the rationale for why whites would come downtown in the first place.

For me, what was so helpful in writing a book on the race massacre, was my background, on the history of lynching and racial violence because everything about the race massacre was not an exceptional event and there were at least 12 other communities where similar attacks on Black communities happened just in Oklahoma.

But what makes the difference is the scale and the scope of what occurred in Tulsa, where a 35-block area was destroyed in less than 18 hours. Three hundred lives were lost. Many more were wounded. And those casualties were hidden. And not only was Greenwood a Black community, it was one of the wealthiest Black communities in America. It was known as Black Wall Street because of its prosperity. That wealth was liquidated in the violence. The National Geographic ran a story during the Centennial that estimated that $600 million in Black wealth went up in flames as a result of the massacre. That’s the scale and the scope of what occurred.

But certainly, Tulsa was not exceptional because it was a part and parcel of the lynching culture. It's just the scope and the scale the viciousness of the massacre that made it unprecedented.

Robin Lindley: The history is devastating. You deal with extremely traumatic issues. You're immersed in studying horrific atrocities in your work and racial violence continues. Where do you find hope today?

Professor Karlos K. Hill: I find hope in everybody who is committed to doing the work. I find hope in talking to white people who are waking up to these realities and are changing their lives to bear witness to this history. I find hope in my children who, I think, will create new realities that we haven't even imagined are possible.

But I'm also just a hopeful person. I couldn’t do this work without hope. It will beat you down if you don't have hope that we can learn racial history and then change the racial present. I find hope everywhere that I can, and doing work with people is where I get my strength.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your thoughtful comments, Professor Hill, and congratulations on your remarkable history of the Tulsa race Massacre. It’s a book for the ages. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney. He is features editor for the History News Network (history news network.org), and his work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He also served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see. – Edgar Degas

Professor Charles Johnson (Photo by Mary Randlett)

Most readers probably know Seattle’s Charles Johnson, the retired UW English Professor, as a celebrated scholar, beloved teacher, and literary icon. He has written four acclaimed novels including Dreamer and the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage, as well as numerous essays, short stories, screenplays, and studies of race, culture and eastern religion such as his book Taming the Ox. He is also recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and is recognized as an influential public intellectual.

After earning a doctorate in philosophy (emphasizing phenomenology and literary aesthetics), he then served for more than 30 years as a professor of English at the University of Washington where he taught literature and creative writing, directed the creative writing program, and held an endowed chair, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollack Professorship for Excellence in English. Students remember him for his encouragement, academic rigor, attention to individual needs, and devotion to excellence as a teacher.

Charles Johnson’s reputation in the world of writing and books thus is well established. And the prolific retired professor continues to write and speak for audiences around the globe from his home in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood.

However, many readers may not be aware that Johnson loves visual art and his first career was as comic artist. As he puts it, he’s been “addicted” to drawing since childhood.

Johnson’s early cartoon work recently gained renewed attention. A selection of his cartoons from 50 years ago is now on exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art along with the work of other Black Chicago cartoonists from 1940-1980. He wrote the introduction for It’s Life as I See It, the exhibit’s catalog. That title comes from his caption for his vintage cartoon that depicts a Black artist describing his painting of a pure black rectangle to a white observer. And next year, the New York Review of Books will publish a collection of more than 200 of Johnson’s cartoons in a volume called All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Comic Art of Charles Johnson.

Professor Johnson recently sat down at a northeast Seattle café and generously recounted his fondness for visual art and his lifelong, near obsession with making cartoons, a passion since childhood that he continues to indulge at age 73—among his many other interests.

Thinking in Pictures. Since childhood, the cerebral Johnson has always first thought in pictures. “Images and ideas fill my head where nobody can see then. I have to externalize them on the page. It could be a drawing. It could be a short story. It could be an essay. . .In these [creations], you can see through my eyes.” His universally admired vivid description and convincing characterization in his novels and short stories attest to his strong visual sense. And this ability to picture scenes in his mind enhances his artistic talent.

Professor Johnson’s First Love: Art. Johnson recalled that he began drawing in elementary school in his hometown of Evanston, Illinois, and never stopped. Drawing “was something I loved to do.” He described the sensual delights he still enjoys: the texture of paper, the smell of ink or paint, experimenting with various pens, pencils and brushes. He especially appreciates the process of coming up with ideas, then creating images and sharing them with others. And he likes the opportunity to play as he draws. He said, “Playfulness is an element of all art.”

His mother, a voracious reader who loved music, admired his drawings. His father also enjoyed his son’s creations but was skeptical about Johnson’s dreams of becoming an artist. At the time, his father worked two or three jobs at a time to support the family. Nonetheless, he bought art supplies for his son and even gave him a drawing table one Christmas. At twenty-five dollars, the table was a big splurge for his family and Johnson is still grateful for his father’s generosity. The drawing table “became my place of worship,” Johnson said, where he spent hours exercising his imagination as he sketched and drew almost daily.

Distance Learning. “Drawing was my passion all the way through middle school and high school,” Johnson said. “I drew everything I possibly could.”  

At the nationally renowned Evanston High—a temple for youthful scholarship— Johnson made cartoons and comic strips for the student newspaper and gave cards and other drawings to friends.

When he was just 15, about the time he began studying Buddhism and meditation, Johnson came upon an ad in Writer’s Digest for a correspondence course in drawing offered by prolific cartoonist and writer Lawrence Lariar, then the cartoon editor for Parade magazine and editor of the series Best Cartoons of the Year, as well as a former idea generator at Disney.

Johnson told his father that he'd decided on what profession he wanted to pursue, that of an artist, and his dad said, “Chuck, they don't let Black people like do that. You need to think of something else.” But his father eventually gave Johnson the money for the two-year course. Johnson noted that his hardworking father wasn’t familiar with the art world and also had grown up under unrelenting segregation and limited opportunity in the Jim Crow South.

Before starting the correspondence course, Johnson wrote Lariar about what his father said about Black people being precluded from art. To Johnson’s surprise, Lariar wrote back within a week, and he told Johnson that “your father is wrong.” He added, “You can do whatever you want with your life. All you need is a good teacher.”

Lariar became an important mentor for the aspiring cartoonist. Over the next two years, Johnson religiously submitted drawings for each correspondence lesson and Lariar responded with thoughtful critiques and encouragement.

Bus Trips East. In the summer breaks during high school, Johnson took a Greyhound bus from Chicago to visit his relatives in Brooklyn. He also made a point of seeing Lariar at his home on Long Island where Lariar would treat him to lunch and discuss art and stories of many of his friends, well-known cartoonists and artists who Johnson admired. Lariar, a liberal Jewish American, was quite open-minded with a special sense of humor. Johnson said, “I think he delighted in surprising his white neighbors by having Black guests.”

Pounding the Pavement in the Big Apple. On those summer trips to New York, young Johnson made appointments and visited publishing houses throughout Manhattan where he’d share samples of his illustrations and cartoons.  

Along the way, he met beloved comic artist Charles Barsotti, who eventually became a regular cartoonist for The New Yorker. Barsotti offered support and praised Johnson’s work. He also mentioned the need for more young African American cartoonists to share their perspectives. He believed Johnson could tackle issues about race that white cartoonists were reluctant to even consider. Later, Johnson took that comment to heart.

The First Art Sale. Johnson made his art first sale to a Chicago magic company in 1965 at age 17. He illustrated a half dozen magic tricks for one of the company's catalogs. Johnson proudly framed a dollar from that initial sale and it still hangs in his home study.

As a high school senior, Johnson won two second-place awards for his work, a comic strip he called "Wonder Wildkit" he co-authored with a friend, and a sports cartoon, in a national contest for high school cartoonists sponsored by the Columbia University School of Journalism. He only learned of the awards, however, during his first year of college when he returned home and saw a news story about it in his hometown newspaper, The Evanston Review.

College: Majoring in Journalism. As high school graduation approached, Johnson was set on studying art in college. “All I wanted to do was get out of high school and go to art school. And I got accepted in art school but, at the very last minute, I bailed out. I wondered then, in the spring of 1966, whether or not this would be a marketable degree.”

Thanks to the advice of a practical high school counselor, Johnson decided against art school and instead chose to major in journalism and, as it turned out, journalism was a “good fit,” he said. “In journalism school I could draw and write at the same time.”

Johnson started college at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale in 1966, a tumultuous time. During that year, tens of thousands of US troops headed to Vietnam, the Black Power movement gained momentum, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party, James Meredith was shot and wounded at the outset of his March Against Fear, and racist thugs threw rocks at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he led civil rights marches in the Chicago area.

In his first year of college, Johnson illustrated for the college paper and other publications. In his courses, he studied and wrote about the great cartoonists of America and Europe such as Nast, Daumier, Hogarth, Cruikshank, and Rowlandson,

During his undergraduate years, Johnson said, “I made every kind of drawing you can imagine. Editorial cartoons, single panel gag cartoons, comic strips, design work, illustrations, and even a commemorative stamp.” He also published cartoons in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and Southern Illinoisan, and magazines including Jet, Ebony, Players, Negro Digest, and others.

Intern at the Chicago Tribune. Johnson eventually worked as a summer intern in 1969 at the Chicago Tribune as a cartoonist and writer for that newspaper's "Action Express" public service column. After returning to college, he was a stringer for the paper at SIU. “I didn't really file any news stories at all until the following spring of 1970.”

The one big news story Johnson covered for the Tribune concerned peaceful demonstrations in May 1970 at SIU to protest Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War with the invasion of Cambodia. An editor added his opinion to the story that the protest was prompted by “outside agitators.” Johnson objected strenuously. That wasn’t true but, to Johnson’s chagrin, the paper printed the editor’s misinformation in the published story.

First Book of Cartoons: Black Humor. Also in 1970, Johnson published his first book, Black Humor, a collection of 89 cartoons that drew on Black history and culture as they targeted bigotry, hypocrisy, cruelty, liberal guilt, hate from any source, and more.

Johnson skipped classes to create Black Humor in just one almost sleepless week. Amiri Baraka sparked frantic work. At a reading Johnson attended, Baraka, by then a leading Black Nationalist figure, urged Black students to bring their talents back to their communities. Charles Barsotti had offered similar advice to Johnson a few years earlier. The result was this first book of biting and revelatory cartoons.

Thanks to a suggestion from acclaimed writer and book editor Bob Cromie at the Chicago Tribune, Johnson brought his Black Humor manuscript to Johnson Publishing (no relation), where Ebony and other periodicals of Black interest were produced. The publisher accepted the book and brought out Johnson’s debut humor collection.

Johnson finished other books of cartoons, including Half Past Nation Time in 1972. Unfortunately, a fly-by-night publisher never got this book to market. He also created a collection of cartoons on slavery, I Can Get Her for You Wholesale, and another on Buddhism entitled It’s Lonely at the Top.

 You sure you got the right retreat?

Johnson’s cartoons reveal the breadth of his interests including Black culture and racial reckoning and far beyond to philosophy, religion, science, the academic world, art, and every aspect of the human comedy. In a recent profile of Johnson in The Chicago Tribune, reporter Christopher Borrelli described Johnson’s wide range of literary work as “unclassifiable.” The same applies to his visual art.

A PBS Drawing Show: Charlie’s Pad. During his college years, Johnson even worked as an admired television performer.

In 1969, he called his local Public Broadcasting Station on campus at SIU and asked if they would like a program where he would teach drawing on the air. The local producers were enthusiastic because they needed content and the two-camera show with a host stuck at a drawing board would be cheap to produce.

Over the next year, Johnson taped fifty-two 15-minute episodes of Charlie’s Pad. The program was broadcast nationally and in Canada and rebroadcast for a decade. Often, Johnson would tape three shows, back-to-back on days when he wasn't attending his classes.

Charlie’s Pad received wide acclaim. Viewers sent him their drawings and notes of gratitude for his lessons. Johnson recalled hearing from one viewer in recent years who said he learned to draw from the program and, since then, he had taught his child to draw.

Charles Johnson hosting his PBS drawing show, Charlie’s Pad.

Despite favorable response to the show, Johnson tired of his performance role as a TV drawing teacher. “It had totally exhausted any interest in being on TV. I didn’t care about it and I wasn’t interested in looking at myself on television. Being in front of the camera wasn’t creative to me. It wasn’t fulfilling” But, he added, he has enjoyed working behind the camera and he has written screenplays for television and film projects such as the award-winning PBS film Booker.

On to a Doctorate in Philosophy. In addition to journalism and literature classes, Johnson attended “lots of philosophy courses” as an undergraduate at SIU. By his senior year, he said, “I was interested in writing and philosophy. I wanted to finish my undergraduate journalism degree and study philosophy.”

He was admitted in 1973 to the philosophy graduate program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and received his PhD in philosophy in 1988. His emphasis evolved from the study of the philosophy of Marx and his adherents to the abstruse realms of existentialism, aesthetics and phenomenology.

Becoming a Novelist. Johnson also began more creative writing in undergraduate school with his mentor, the legendary SIU Professor John Gardner, an acclaimed novelist (Grendel and The Sunlight Dialogues) and critic (On Moral Fiction). Gardner worked closely with Johnson on his fiction writing and the elements of storytelling. The two became friends and kept in close touch until Gardner’s untimely sudden death in a motorcycle accident in 1982.

In his years working with Gardner, Johnson produced six apprentice novels, all of which he discarded. His first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing, came out in 1974 to favorable reviews for its inventive storytelling and evocative prose. On reading Faith, his cartooning mentor and accomplished writer Lawrence Lariar wrote to Johnson and told him: “You have the touch.”

Critic Arthur P. Davis described Johnson’s groundbreaking novel Faith as “a fascinating mélange of classic philosophy, scholasticism, occult writings, folklore (including Southern superstition and Negro tall tales), surrealistic dreams, flashbacks, and down-to-earth realism.”

A Job at the UW. The University of Washington Department of English hired Johnson to teach creative writing and literature in 1976. He taught legions of grateful students at the UW for more than three decades.

As Johnson focused intently on academic affairs and on his students who admired his wide knowledge and caring instruction, his drawing also continued. He published cartoons widely in literary journals and magazines with themes from philosophy and current events to eastern religion and culture. Several of the cartoons on Buddhism appeared in a collection from Tricycle Press, Buddha Laughing.

Which comes first in cartooning—the idea or the image? In response to this question, Johnson immediately mentioned his admiration for Seattle-based editorial cartoonist and journalist David Horsey. “He's one of the best draftsmen I've ever seen and one of the best caricaturists. I compare his work to Mort Drucker who was spot on with every caricature he did for Mad magazine.”

Johnson and Horsey discussed cartooning, and both agreed that, “The most important thing for any editorial cartoon is a good idea to start with.”  Johnson added, “And the same thing goes for other forms of cartooning and commercial illustration. Now that idea might come to you as an image, but the idea is the starting point.”           

Beauty, Wonder and Mystery. In his fiction writing, Johnson has strived to create works of wonder and mystery, and he has encouraged his students to do the same. (See his guide to writing, The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling.)

Johnson still expresses some dismay that many of the writers and artists he met in his career have been “some of the most unhappy people I knew. If a person can create beauty, that means the person should be the happiest person in the world.”

 He added, “To me, if you can create beauty as a gift to others, what more do you want? No riches can surpass that gift.”

The Ongoing Work. Johnson emanates serenity and contentment in his busy retirement as he continues to write and juggle projects, speaking engagements, and requests for essays and interviews and lectures. And he inevitably returns often to his deluxe, glass-topped drawing table in his booklined study to create more art.

After retirement from the UW, Johnson with his artist daughter Elisheba created and published three books in their series, The Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder. The books are illustrated by Johnson and recount the adventures of a curious and science-enthralled African American school kid. Beyond sharing compelling stories featuring an inquisitive and daring young boy, the books are an effort to spark young Black students to consider STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) studies.

In his 2020 book Grand: A Grandparent’s Wisdom for a Happy Life, Johnson offers a series of heartfelt essays to inform and inspire parents and grandparents alike, as well as the children in their lives. He dedicated the book to his grandson Emery, now age nine. He wrote, "I feel hopeful that Emery will come to appreciate the unpredictable serendipity of life when it goes against our plans and delivers delightful surprises."

Recent projects keep Johnson occupied. In the past few months, he has written a preface for the late Ralph Ellison’s novel Juneteenth; edited an anthology of stories and essays by Black Americans for the Chicago Quarterly Review; worked with author Steve Barnes on a graphic novel, The Eightfold Path, due out in January 2022; sold his papers or literary archive to Washington University in St. Louis; and is at work on his first collection of cartoons in forty-nine years, the new book for next September, All Your Racial Problems Will Soon Be Solved.

Striving to Unite, to Enlighten. Johnson observed that “we’re a very divided country now. We live in dangerous times.” He cited recent reports on an increase in hate crimes against African Americans and Asian Americans, now at the highest level in the last ten years. 

He lamented that many of his cartoons from the early seventies on race and bigotry are still timely. “Some people think that these are historic problems and that all have been settled. But we haven’t solved them. We haven't evolved in certain ways.” He suggested that America is far from a post-racial society.

Johnson sees the extreme polarization in our nation as harmful to everyone.  “For moral reasons and because I’m a Buddhist, I’m not going to use art to stoke division or feed hatred.” Instead, his work will advance a more just and compassionate society and celebrate the interconnectedness of all humans.

As the late poet and UW Professor Theodore Roethke wrote: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Now, in our troubled time of division and unrest, Charles Johnson offers art to restore us, to illuminate the dark.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle attorney and writer, and features editor of the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org).

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Robert F. Kennedy, South Africa, 1966

America in the nineteen sixties: a time of turbulence, protest, division, war, and racial reckoning. Segregationists in the South brutalized activists who cried out for equal rights for African Americans as riots left urban centers around the country in flames and in rubble. At the same time, the catastrophic war in Southeast Asia drained funds from domestic programs to address poverty and inequality.

During that fraught period, Robert F. Kennedy became champion for human rights, and his specific achievements merit close attention today.

In her groundbreaking new book, Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White (Harvard Press), leading civil rights historian Patricia Sullivan looks at the struggle for racial justice through the lens of Kennedy’s work during his terms as attorney general and senator until his tragic assassination on the campaign trail when vying for president in 1968.

As Professor Sullivan recounts, Robert Kennedy made civil rights his top priority in his brief years as US Attorney General and as a US Senator. Immediately after he began work as attorney general in his brother’s administration in 1961, he and his talented team of young attorneys began pursuing cases to attack segregation and denial of voting rights of Black citizens in the Jim Crow South. He also investigated the consequences of racial discrimination beyond the South while laying the foundation for the historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. And, as Professor Sullivan describes, Kennedy explored conditions of the most desperate American citizens as AG and as a senator in his travels to meet impoverished Black families in the Mississippi Delta and in cities, as well as visiting white people living in Appalachia, and Native Americans and migrant farmworkers around the country.       

This revelatory book is based on Professor Sullivan’s extensive archival research as well as her interviews with RFK’s contemporaries, both colleagues at DOJ and in the Senate as well as activists, friends, and others. In addition, she uncovered overlooked material such as articles from the Black press and documents from Black writers and commentators and even unpublished notes and files of mainstream journalists.

With Justice Rising, Professor Sullivan proves a gifted storyteller who creates a sense of suspense as she unfolds this tumultuous history that continues to inform our present. Her book takes readers inside Kennedy’s Department of Justice and into Senate hearings and with Kennedy during his many investigations and fact-finding tours—as it reveals the major events of the civil rights movement, chronicling the activities of the leaders and activists of the movement for racial justice.

Patricia Sullivan is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and has codirected a twenty-year long series of summer institutes at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute on "Teaching the History of the Civil Rights Movement." Her other books include Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (2009); Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years (2003); and Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (1996). She also co-edited New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, with Armstead L. Robinson, and she co-edited Civil Rights in the United States, a two-volume encyclopedia, with Waldo E. Martin Jr. And Professor Sullivan and Waldo Martin are editors of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Professor Sullivan graciously responded by telephone and in writing to questions about her work as a historian and her new book on RFK and the civil rights movement.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Sullivan on your groundbreaking new book on Robert F. Kennedy and the civil rights movement. Before getting to your book, I wanted to ask about how history became your career. Were you interested in history as a child?

Professor Patricia Sullivan: I was one of five kids, and I was the one who was always interested in history. I loved listening to my father and his cousins talk about growing up in Brooklyn in a community of Irish immigrants, in tenement houses on Butler Street. And my mother's mother, Johanna Archer, lived with us. She was full of stories about her life as a young woman in New York at the turn of the last century and her experiences during the Depression.

I had a wonderful history teacher in high school, and she broadened my horizons. In college, I pursued a joint degree in History and Education, planning to teach history in grammar school or high school. As luck would have it, one of my professors suggested I think about going on to graduate school in history – which was something I had not been considering. I was the first person in my family to go to college and I had set my sights on getting a job. But, at his suggestion, I applied to Boston College, was awarded a graduate assistantship – and jumped at the chance to continue my study of history.

Robin Lindley: And then how did you decide that you wanted to focus on the history of the civil rights movement?

Professor Patricia Sullivan: I intended to study immigration history at Boston College – Boston seemed like a good place for that. However, my work as a research assistant for Professor Andrew Buni set me on a different course. Andy was just beginning research for a biography of Paul Robeson. Learning about Robeson – the internationally renowned artist, singer, and performer, a leading political activist for racial justice and human rights, and target of Cold War repression – exposed me to aspects of American history that I had been completely unaware of. I spent days researching in the Robeson archives in an office suite across from Carnegie Hall in New York and joined Andy on several interviews – including with Dorothy Burnham and Esther Cooper Jackson, who had worked with Robeson when they lived in Birmingham, Alabama and through later years in New York. (I’ve remained friends with both women, who have been regular speakers in our Harvard NEH seminars.)  

One of my assignments was to research Robeson’s travels in the South in the 1940s, just after World War II, for meetings and concerts sponsored by groups like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and later, in 1948 in support of the presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace. Robeson refused to perform before segregated audiences, which aligned with the efforts of these groups to challenge the Jim Crow system.

I met and interviewed a remarkable group of Southerners, Black and white, who Robeson worked with – all part of the first wave of the civil rights movement which gained momentum during the 1930s and 1940s. People I met included Mojeska Simkins in Columbia, South Carolina, Ruby Cornwall and Jesse Doster in Charleston, Virginia Durr, in Montgomery, Alabama, Arthur Raper, then living outside of Washington, DC, and others – all part of New Deal era generation of civil rights activists working to challenge segregation, secure voting rights and revive a biracial democracy in the South in response to the political energy released during the Depression and the New Deal. Their story ultimately became the subject of my dissertation and the basis for my first book.

Robin Lindley: What an inspiring beginning to your work as a historian. And later, with your book Lift Every Voice, you delved into the history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] and the civil rights movement.

Professor Patricia Sullivan:  Joe Wood, a brilliant writer and editor then working as an editor with the New Press, encouraged me to consider writing a history of the NAACP. That struck me as a daunting undertaking, but Joe persuaded me to approach it not as an organizational history, but a story of the women, men and communities who built and organized the NAACP, in effect creating the infrastructure for a national civil rights movement. That interested me.

The NAACP had emerged as a formative force in the work I'd done on the South during the thirties and forties, when Charles Houston launched the legal and community-based organizing campaign that would secure, among other major legal victories, Brown v. Board in 1954.

The book, which covers the period from the founding of the NAACP in 1909 up through the 1950s, explores how several generations resisted and challenged the color line, not only in the South, but in towns and cities across the country, as African American migration transformed America’s racial landscape. It is a story of how legal brilliance, grass roots organizing, the strength of Black culture and institutions, interracial alliances, and a fundamental faith in democracy built and sustained long term struggles to advance justice and uproot racial barriers and practices. It also became a story of the deep and tangled roots of racism in America, and the ignorance, indifference and opportunism that accounts for its resilience.

Robin Lindley: And now you have written a history of the civil rights movement in the 1960s through this lens of Robert Kennedy. What sparked your research in that direction?

Professor Patricia Sullivan: My book on the NAACP left me with questions about the sixties. When protests drew national attention to segregation and white violence in the South, nearly half of African Americans lived in the North and West, in communities where segregation was deeply entrenched. Unlike the South, segregation was not mandated by law in northern urban communities. It was created and enforced by public policies, private interests, and abusive policing, resulting in poverty, deteriorating housing, run-down schools, and high unemployment – intolerable conditions that would ignite widespread urban rebellions later in the decade.

I wanted to take a fresh look at a racial reckoning that reached into all parts of the country during the 1960s and I was drawn to the dynamic intersection of race and politics. Surprisingly to me, Robert Kennedy emerged as a national figure whose public life was shaped largely in response not only to the demands that the Black Freedom movement brought to fore but to the opportunities it created to confront the legacies of America’s racial past.

Robin Lindley: You worked on this book for almost a decade. How would you describe your research process? It seems you uncovered works from previously untapped sources, such as African American materials including articles from the Black press and writing from Black commentators and literary figures.

Professor Patricia Sullivan:  The research process moved along two major tracks. The contours of African American life in the United States during this era, particularly Black struggles for civil rights and freedom, is a major focus and informs the historical context of the book. My research relied on Black newspapers, articles in various periodicals, oral history interviews from several archival collections, along with ones that I conducted, memoirs and autobiographies, and a rich collection of secondary sources.

One of my most exciting discoveries was a series of interviews conducted by young reporters for Time magazine, who traveled to Black college campuses in the South during the spring of 1960 seeking out student leaders of the sit-in movement while the protests were ongoing. The transcripts of these interviews, which are archived in Harvard’s Houghton Library, offered a rare glimpse of the determination, courage, and democratic faith that inspired these young women and men, in the face of violence and even death. The interviews capture what it took to ignite the final stage of the southern-based movement, as well as how they marked a breakthrough in a political culture that had been dominated by Cold War fears and repression.

The parallel track focuses on Robert Kennedy. In considering his early life, leading up to 1960, I wanted to understand what prepared Kennedy to respond the way he did when his public life converged with the movement. One of the great finds in RFK’s papers at the JFK library were diaries he kept during a trip to the Middle East and Europe in 1948, fresh out of college, in the aftermath of World War II, and in 1951, to the Middle East and Asia, including North and South Vietnam, with JFK. The diaries reveal Kennedy’s concerns about the poverty and human suffering he witnessed, and sympathy with the wave of nationalist struggles sweeping Asia and the Middle East.

Most of the book focuses on the period from 1960 through 1968. In addition to the sources mentioned above, some of the most valuable and revealing sources are contained in the oral history collections at the JFK library. They include a surprisingly broad range of interviews conducted close to the period with individuals from James Baldwin, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and SNCC activists to Justice Department lawyers, government officials, RFK’s key Senate aides, and others, as well as Robert Kennedy.

Robin Lindley: And it’s impressive that you were able to interview many people from the RFK era, including his friends, DOJ attorneys and other colleagues, as well as activists and scholars of this period. Who were some of your notable subjects for interviews?

Professor Patricia Sullivan:  Among the most notable people I interviewed in terms of Kennedy’s immediate circle were: Ethel Kennedy, John Seigenthaler, one of RFK’s closest friends who worked with him in the Justice Department, Peter Edelman, who worked with RFK from 1963 until 1968, William vanden Heuvel, particularly for his work with RFK in setting up the Prince Edward County Free School in Virginia, and Frank Mankiewicz, RFK’s press secretary.

Bob Moses, who I had known for many years, was enormously helpful. Moses led the effort to register Black voters in Mississippi and worked closely with Justice Department lawyers who were litigating voting rights cases in the Deep South. Other activists who were especially helpful included John Lewis who began getting to know RFK in 1963 and ended up working on his presidential campaign in 1968. Marian Wright, a leader in the sit-in movement and later a civil rights lawyer, took Kennedy to see the desperate poverty in the Mississippi Delta. SNCC activist Martha Prescod Norman Noonan was always available to answer my queries; her insights have been invaluable. Finally, I was fortunate to interview Margaret Marshall, a leader of the anti-apartheid student group that invited RFK to South Africa in 1966, who served as his guide throughout his five-day visit.

Robin Lindley: You’re an expert on US civil rights history, but did you come across one or two surprises you’d like to share with readers?

Professor Patricia Sullivan:  I suppose the major surprise was the kind of role the Kennedys – both JFK and RFK--played during this period in relationship to the civil rights/black freedom struggles.

Historians have generally discounted the role of the Kennedy administration, concluding that they moved only when forced to by the rush of events, and that somehow RFK experienced an epiphany after his brother was assassinated. This is clearly not the case.

My research revealed that both brothers were prepared to respond not only to the demands raised by the sit-ins and mass protests that began in 1960, but to the opportunities they created. It is important to consider the obstacles they faced – in terms of a Congress dominated by Southern Democrats and a country where racial segregation was the norm. How they navigated these constraints, while pushing on various fronts, particularly but not exclusively in the Department of Justice, tells the story. When Birmingham exploded, they were prepared to seize that moment to push major civil rights legislation – at a time when many, including vice-president Lyndon Johnson, argued that it would be impossible to pass and would just cause trouble. My research demonstrates that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though it was signed into law by President Johnson after JFK’s assassination, was a major achievement of the Kennedy administration.

Notably, by 1963, both JFK and RFK realized the depth of America’s racial inequities and injustices, conditions that could not be remedied merely by legislation.

Another surprise was to realize the extent to which RFK’s public life from his Senate years through his brief presidential campaign intersected with the broad expanse of African American struggles and activism in the later 1960s. Kennedy’s trip to South Africa in June 1966 occurred around the same time as the March against Fear in Mississippi. His responses to the March and to “Black Power” are revealing. RFK supported the Watts Writers Workshop, established in the wake of the Watts rebellion, and his involvement with the Bedford-Stuyvesant community in Brooklyn led to the establishment of a major community-run redevelopment project.

Another significant episode was his trip to Mississippi in 1967 after Marian Wright testified in Washington on the failure of federally anti-poverty programs to begin to address desperate conditions in the Delta. Kennedy heard testimony in Jackson, Mississippi from movement veterans Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore and others, and then went to see conditions for himself, accompanied by Moore and Wright. Shocked by what he saw and heard, he secured emergency food relief for these communities and continued to press for a more focused and expanded war on poverty.

Robin Lindley: It’s an incredibly detailed and lively book. I learned a lot. It seems RFK was thought of as a fairly conservative young lawyer in the 1950s. I remember a story about him traveling with Justice William O. Douglas in Russia. Douglas saw RFK as somewhat rigid and judgmental and he advised the young lawyer to open his mind about people from other parts of the world.

Professor Patricia Sullivan: Yes, Kennedy traveled to Russia with Douglass in 1955, and looked at the country through the lens of the Cold War; he was suspicious of Russian leaders and he was anti-communist. However, his exposure to the people and culture persuaded him that efforts should be made to cultivate greater understanding between the citizens of both countries. This was one of his most interesting qualities – as one friend said, he had “an experiencing nature.” As I mentioned earlier, he traveled to the Middle East, Europe, and Asia in 1948 and 1951 – and what he saw and experienced had a significant impact on his understanding of the postwar world. While not dulling his suspicions about communism, he became sympathetic to nationalist movements, and concerned that U.S. policy was not attuned to the poverty and repression along with the desire for freedom, driving these struggles. As a friend remarked to me, “he was international before he was national,” insofar as recognizing these injustices in other countries during the 1950s while not yet showing awareness of racial problems in his own country.

Robin Lindley: What do you think sparked Robert Kennedy’s interest in the conditions of Black people and civil rights?

Professor Patricia Sullivan: I think there are several factors at work. Timing is important, namely the fact that JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960 coincided with the mass protests sparked by the sit-ins and, due to the large migration during the 50s, Black voters in the North would be a more powerful factor in a national election than any time previously.

A major question I had from the start was what prepared Robert Kennedy to respond in the way that he did. Based on my research, I’ve concluded that it’s a combination of things: personal characteristics, his education, and his experiences. He was independent-minded and had a capacity to question his own assumptions and beliefs. An incident in 1951, while a third-year law student at the University of Virginia, is notable. RFK invited Ralph Bunche to speak at the university shortly after Bunche had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Bunche accepted on the condition that he would not speak before a segregated audience. Segregation of public meetings was the law in Virginia at that time. Kennedy went all the way to the president of the university, Colgate Darden, making the case for a non-segregated meeting in a five-page letter, in his determination to meet Bunche’s demand. Darden finally agreed. Bunche spoke before an audience of 1,500, roughly a third of whom were African American, the first integrated public meeting on the campus of the University of Virginia.

Robin Lindley: It struck me and it may surprise some readers about how soon, as attorney general in 1961, RFK started working on desegregation and voting rights cases. He also assembled a team of creative and progressive people at the Justice Department. How do you see his beginnings at Justice and how his staff related to him?

Professor Patricia Sullivan: It is apparent that by 1960, and during the campaign, both John and Robert Kennedy had been exposed to racial conditions around the country. Their interest and awareness were undoubtedly sparked in part by an understanding of the critical importance of the northern Black vote in the election. But evidence indicates that they had both begun to see and reckon with the deep racial injustices in the country.

In April 1960, as a presidential candidate, JFK invited Thurgood Marshall to meet him for lunch in his Senate office – Marshall ended up staying all afternoon. He later recounted in an interview that JFK knew all the problems concerning voting and registration in the South and had a full grasp of the school situation. After spending several hours with JFK, Marshall had no doubt that he was committed to civil rights and the full equality of all Americans.

John Kennedy knew that civil rights would be the dominant domestic issue, and that is one of the reasons why he wanted his brother to serve as Attorney General. He told Bobby that he needed someone he could trust, someone that would join him in taking whatever risks, and deal with the problem honestly. “We’re going to have to change the climate in this country,” JFK said. It proved to be a brilliant appointment.

Robin Lindley: Those young lawyers were a new breed and RFK even brought in writers, like his chief aide, John Seigenthaler, a journalist.

Professor Patricia Sullivan. RFK brought together a group of remarkable lawyers. Many of them were veterans of World War II. None of them were yet 40 years old, and they were smart, energetic, and committed to public service. One of them, Nicholas Katzenbach, recalled, “people were excited about being part of something that would do some good for the country. This is really the gift Bobby had. I’ve seen it not only there but in anything he got into. He just engendered tremendous loyalty.” 

Kennedy and Burke Marshall, who headed up the Civil Rights Division, formed a partnership which would mark the beginning of a sea change in the civil rights polices of the federal government. In John Doar, who had joined the Civil Rights Division during the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy found someone who had already made inroads investigating voter discrimination in the South. Shortly after taking office, Kennedy told the Civil Rights Division lawyers that he wanted a concentrated effort to enforce voting rights laws in the most recalcitrant states – Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. To implement this effort, he quadrupled the number of lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, and Burke Marshall and John Doar built what was in effect a field operation in the Deep South, with lawyers spending weeks at a time investigating voting rights violations, interviewing people, and developing cases. Their efforts quickly aligned with the work of Bob Moses and other SNCC activists, who initiated a voter registration campaign in Mississippi in the summer of 1961.

I talked with Bob Moses at length about his experiences with Justice Department attorneys, especially John Doar, during this period. Early in 1963, he and other SNCC activists confronted the limits of the federal government’s ability or willingness to fully support their effort during a violent showdown in Greenwood, Mississippi; that marked a major rupture. Years later, Bob formed a close friendship with John Doar. The last time I saw Bob in spring 2019 he was working in John Doar’s papers at Princeton, researching what had happened in Mississippi around the voting rights effort.

Robin Lindley: I think many people, especially younger people, may not understand how violent and entrenched segregation was in the Jim Crow South. And, as you note, the North was also segregated. You have violence in the sixties around race, with state- sponsored violence and oppression notably in the South. A couple of examples that you vividly describe in your book were the attacks on the Freedom Riders, and the white supremacist violence at the University of Mississippi, “Ole Miss,” over the admission of Black student James Meredith.

Professor Patricia Sullivan:  Widespread defiance of the law and mob violence in defense of the segregation system peaked during the early 1960s, as civil rights activists refused to back down in their demands for full civil rights.

The Freedom Rides in the spring of 1961 marked an important turning point. An interracial group of young men and women traveled by bus into the South to test the enforcement of a recent Supreme Court decision barring segregation in facilities serving interstate travel. (In 1946, the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation on interstate carriers, though it was rarely enforced in the South). In Alabama, one of the buses was firebombed, and in Birmingham a mob wielding steel pipes and bats assaulted the riders as they left the bus while the police stood by. When it became clear that Governor John Patterson would not intervene to protect the riders, Robert Kennedy sent a team of 500 federal marshals into Alabama. It was only the intervention of the marshals that kept a mob of more than 1,000 people from invading the First Baptist Church during a mass meeting where Martin Luther King and others celebrated the Freedom Riders.

Commenting on Alabama’s public officials and the mob action they condoned, an incredulous Robert Kennedy told John Doar, “Those fellows are at war with this country.”

The Kennedy administration faced another major showdown with state authorities in the fall of 1962 when Mississippi governor Ross Barnett challenged a federal court ruling mandating the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi.  When federal marshals escorted James Meredith onto campus, Barnett withdrew all law enforcement from the area, allowing more than 1000 people to riot.  Two people were killed, and it took 25,000 troops to restore order.

Robin Lindley: I appreciate your comments on state-sponsored violence at a time when white people in the South could lynch Black people with impunity. That says something powerful about the culture of the country and many people may not understand this dark past unless they have studied this history.

Professor Patricia Sullivan: What is striking when you look back at this history is how forces were allied at every level of government to sustain and enforce the segregation system in defiance of court rulings and existing laws. Southern Democrats wielded tremendous power in Congress by virtue of their seniority and the united front they presented, routinely relying on the filibuster to block strong civil rights legislation.

Robert Kennedy believed that the political empowerment of African Americans, long disenfranchised in Southern states, was key to tackling this deeply entrenched segregation system. The Justice Department had the power to sue officials who unjustly barred Black citizens from registering, and Kennedy set about using it. As noted earlier, his Civil Rights division created a field operation with attorneys spending weeks at a time in the South investigating voter discrimination, collecting evidence, and litigating cases, county by county – filing more than thirty-five cases. Like the civil rights activists, the Justice Department quickly found that the entire process, from the registrars to the courts, was geared to stall and obstruct the registration of Black citizens.

During this time, Robert Kennedy was attentive to the national reach of segregation and racial discrimination. In the spring of 1961, he went with an aide to East Harlem, where he met with Black and Puerto Rican youth, several who had been in prison. He asked them about their lives and what the government could do for them. Soon after, he established a federally funded program that created 16 community-based projects in cities across the country, focused on job training, education, recreation, and other needs identified by the communities. Kennedy visited each one of them. These programs laid the groundwork for what would later become the community action programs of the War on Poverty.

In March of 1963, Kennedy delivered a speech marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation which reveals an understanding of the depth and far-reaching consequences of racial segregation and discrimination. He observed that after a brief period of progress following Emancipation, the doctrine of “separate but equal” became enshrined into law only to “lay like a dead hand on the springs of progress.” Now, he said, “we can see the toll extracted by discrimination – wither overt segregation or covert bigotry.” Speaking to those who had devoted themselves to the cause of racial justice, he cautioned that meeting the challenges would take an outpouring of energy unlike any other to date. The problems were massive, he said, “the results of discrimination carry on for generation after generation. To confront this openly is the challenge of this decade.”  

Robin Lindley: You also detail the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and the horrific images of how local police under Chief Bull Connor treated protestors. That story also ties into the origins of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Professor Patricia Sullivan:  Birmingham marked the breaking point. Early in May 1963, scenes of Bull Connor’s police attacking protesters as young as seven with dogs and high-powered fire hoses were front page news across America. Street demonstrations erupted in Black communities around the country, while Klan bombings and violent confrontations between the police and protesters continued in Birmingham, pushing the city to the verge of a race war.

The violence and brutal police action focused national attention on conditions in the South. The Kennedy brothers saw the opportunity to push for major civil rights legislation outlawing segregation in public places and accommodations and other provisions. Robert Kennedy’s team drafted legislation over a weekend in mid-May, and the administration began a multi-front effort to mobilize public opinion behind the bill and build a bipartisan coalition in Congress capable of defeating a southern filibuster.

I was surprised that Vice-president Lyndon Johnson, along with nearly all of JFK’s aides, was against introducing a civil rights bill. It was because they did not there was any chance of it passing and that it would only derail the rest of the president’s legislative agenda. Robert Kennedy was the conclusive voice within the administration. As Burke Marshall recalled, “he urged it, he felt it, he understood it and he prevailed. I don’t think anyone else – except the president himself – felt that way.”

On June 11, Kennedy delivered a speech to the nation, which he and his brother drafted – a remarkable speech which I urge everyone to read. He ended by saying that he would “ask Congress to act and make a commitment it had not fully made in this century – to the proposition that race has no place in American life and law.”

The support of at least twenty-five Republicans would be necessary to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. During this time many Republicans were sympathetic to civil rights but not inclined to let a Democratic administration get the credit. The Kennedy team succeeded in enlisting the support of key Republican leaders as the bill made its way through hearings. The whole thing nearly unraveled during the House Judiciary Committee hearings, but President Kennedy managed to bring Democrats into line and hold onto key Republicans – a delicate balancing act. On November 20, 1963, the House Judiciary Committee approved the president’s civil rights bill sending it on to the full house. The basic content of the bill would remain largely intact, and the bipartisan coalition would hold – culminating with LBJ signing the bill into law on July 2, 1964.

Robin Lindley: How did the death of President Kennedy in Dallas affect Robert Kennedy? The assassination shocked the world. Your book indicates that RFK continued his work as attorney general, even though he was grieving. And he did his work as AG under President Johnson who disliked him and wasn't necessarily supportive of everything he was doing.

Professor Patricia Sullivan: Yes. I think one important thing to point out is that, by the time president Kennedy went to Texas, in November 1963, he and his brother and their team had civil rights legislation on track.

After President Kennedy was killed, Robert Kennedy along with Burke Marshall, Nicholas Katzenbach and other attorneys in the Justice Department led in moving the bill through Congress – an arrangement that Lyndon Johnson supported. While President Johnson was fully behind the legislation, he left it to Kennedy and his team to implement their strategy. They educated members and their staffs about the content of the bill, debunking the false information being floated by George Wallace and groups organized in opposition to the legislation. Burke Marshall was shocked to find that the chief of staff for Everett Dirksen, the key Republican in the Senate, had no idea about what conditions in the South were like.

During the spring of 1964, Robert Kennedy devoted much of his time speaking about the bill and what it would do. Addressing a group of journalists, he warned that the mere passage of legislation would not make racial difficulties disappear. “We are going to have to pay for what has gone on in the past,” he told them. One of the most important consequences of the bill, he said, would be to demonstrate that white and Black people can work together. Failure to do so, he said, would confirm eh feeling of many African Americans, especially young people, “that there is no future in this system.”

Robin Lindley: As attorney general and then in the Senate RFK laid the groundwork for the 1965 Voting Rights Act as well.

Professor Patricia Sullivan: John Doar, probably the leading Justice Department attorney in the field of Voting Rights, has publicly stated that the Voting Rights Act was in large part a product of Robert Kennedy’s work as Attorney General. The legislation was written based on the experiences of the field teams of attorneys who worked in the South in the early 1960s, investigating voting rights violations and litigating cases and seeing the endless variety of tactics Southern officials used to obstruct voting, even in violation of existing laws. Burke Marshall had left the administration by this time, but he returned to work with Doar and others to draft the bill, which included strong provisions for federal oversight. Notably, Section 5 required preclearance of any changes in voting procedures by states with a history of voter discrimination.  The rush of voter restrictions enacted after the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 in 2013 underscores how critical that provision was.

Robin Lindley: In his term as attorney general, Robert Kennedy approved FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s request to wiretap Dr. King. RFK also must have known about Hoover’s campaign to spy on and undermine other Black leaders and celebrities. Some commentators thus find RFK’s record flawed on civil rights. What did you learn and what do you think about Kennedy’s leadership in terms of Hoover’s campaigns?

Professor Patricia Sullivan:  J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed by Martin Luther King Jr. After King’s widely acclaimed speech at the March on Washington, Hoover increased his efforts to destroy King. His main tactic at that time was to charge that King was influenced if not controlled by the communists, making him a national security risk. Neither John nor Robert Kennedy believed King was influenced by communists – though they had asked him to cut ties with Stanley Levison, one of his key advisers. Hoover had let it be known that Levison had been involved with the Communist Party in the 1950s, and the Kennedys realized this could be used against King and in turn help mobilize opposition to the civil rights bill.

That fall of 1963, the FBI produced a report, “Communism and the Negro Movement.” Hoover told RFK that King was still in contact with Levison and insisted that King was linked into the Communist movement. He wanted the Attorney General to approve a wiretap on King’s phones to expose the nature of this relationship. Kennedy hesitated at first, but in mid-October 1963 finally agreed to wiretaps on King’s home and office phone on a trial basis to be reevaluated after 30 days.

Why did he do it? Scholars and close associates speculate on several factors that were probably at play. Hoover consolidated his power through the implied threat of blackmail based on FBI surveillance. He had sent RFK reports of JFK’s sexual indiscretions, most recently of his long-term relationship with Judith Campbell, the girlfriend of mobster Sam Giancana. Another consideration may well have been the civil rights bill. A leak by Hoover to the press implying King’s association with communists could easily doom the legislation. By authorizing a thirty-day window, he may have hoped to satisfy Hoover in the short term – and long enough to get over the civil rights bill’s first hurtle in the House Judiciary Committee.

Hoover wielded power and someone in Kennedy’s position had to navigate it. While there is no way to justify the wiretap, the circumstances shed important light. It should be noted that after JFK was assassinated, Hoover never again reported to Robert Kennedy while he was Attorney General – but dealt directly with Lyndon Johnson, who was much more tolerant of Hoover’s obsession with King.

Robin Lindley: Some biographers think that Robert Kennedy changed after the death of his brother, that he became much more reflective and even more empathetic. And he got involved as attorney general and then as senator in addressing problems of poverty and civil rights of African Americans, as well as indigenous people and Latinx or Hispanic people and impoverished white people. And he visited places like the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia and California farms to raise awareness about American poverty.

Professor Patricia Sullivan: While many have suggested that RFK changed after his brother’s assassination, I think that claim is exaggerated. My research demonstrated that by 1963, Robert Kennedy’s concerns about race and poverty were well developed, and deeply held. What is notable is that his experiences as part of his brother’s administration prepared him for what was to come, as cities around the country became the front lines in the battle against the brutal manifestations of entrenched racial inequities and injustices.

By the time he entered Congress as the Senator from New York in January 1965, the country was moving into one of its most tumultuous periods. That March, Lyndon Johnson dramatically expanded America’s involvement in Vietnam, initiating a bombing campaign against North Vietnam and sending in thousands of American ground troops. And, at the end of, in August of 1965, barely a week after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts area of Los Angeles exploded. The desperate conditions and policing abuses in the cities had reached a breaking point by then. So that was the environment when Kennedy joined the Senate.

There had been urban uprisings sparked by policing incidents the previous summer, but the scale of the Watts rebellion shocked the country. It left 34 people dead, mostly African Americans, 1,000 injured and large sections of the city burned out. The dominant response across the country was calls for law and order. Robert Kennedy pushed back. “There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes, the law is the enemy. In Harlem, in Bedford Stuyvesant, it has almost always been used against him.”

Watts marked a turning point in the later 1960s, similar to how the sit-ins in 1960 marked a new phase of the civil rights movement. What happened in Watts, Kennedy believed, signaled a crisis “unparalleled in our history.” The challenge of meeting the expectations raised by the civil rights movement and addressing the conditions that defined the everyday lives of many African Americans living in segregated urban areas was enormous. The problem, Kennedy believed, was rooted in the prejudices, fears and indifference that prevented many Americans from facing the consequences of generations of racial discrimination and segregation.

As a Senator, Kennedy worked to expose the human costs of racial and economic inequality and injustices, pushed for government action on a massive scale, and moved through the country, seeing, listening, and engaging individuals and organizations in the effort to find a way forward. The depths of poverty during a period of unprecedented economic prosperity in the United States became a major focus of his attention. He witnessed its bleak manifestations in the Mississippi Delta, in the barren coalfields of Appalachia, migrant labor camps, and on Indian reservations as well as in America’s blighted urban areas.

America’s deep racial wounds, however, remained central to his concerns. In October 1966 Kennedy told 15,000 students at UC-Berkeley that there was no area of national life more in need of attention and leadership, than “the revolution within our gates, the struggle of the Negro American for full equality and for full freedom.” That month, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in neighboring Oakland.

Justice Rising shows that Kennedy’s efforts during these years are best understood within the context of the broad and dynamic expanse of African American struggles and activism in the later 1960s, as the more intractable consequences of America’s racial past commanded attention. Stokely Carmichael’s widely publicized call for “Black Power” during the 1966 March against Fear drew condemnation from the press, from liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. When asked about it, Kennedy commented that the phrase could mean many things. He said he supported the idea of black self-determination and empowerment and noted that “surface integration” was not the solution to America’s race problems. Later that summer, he published an article in Look magazine on his visit to South Africa. The title, which was prominently displayed on the magazine’s cover, asked: “Suppose God is Black.”

Robin Lindley: You begin the book with the meeting in New York City that Robert Kennedy had with James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and other African American luminaries. Why?

Professor Patricia Sullivan: That meeting occurred on May 24, 1963, in the immediate aftermath the Birmingham crisis, which had sparked demonstrations across the country. The Kennedy administration had begun work on a civil rights bill with a great sense of urgency and against long odds of it passing, and they were preparing for showdown with George Wallace over the desegregation of University of Alabama. It was an explosive period.

When someone had suggested that RFK and Baldwin meet, Kennedy agreed. They had met a year or so before, and Kennedy had read Baldwin’s essay which was the basis for The Fire Next Time. A meeting was hastily put together and included several leading African American artists and public figures, and Jerome Smith, a young activist from Louisiana. Smith had been on the front lines of the movement for three years and bore the scares of a soldier in battle. Kennedy intended to discuss the administration’s efforts to secure a strong civil rights bill and seek advice on how to calm tensions in northern cities.

Jerome Smith was in no mood for pleasantries. Being in the room with you, he told the Attorney General, makes me want to vomit. Kennedy looked to the others. But moved by Smith, they joined in a litany of charges about the government’s failure to protect the rights and lives of Black citizens and its complicity with segregation. Kennedy tried to respond, but he was cut off. Finally, he just listened. It went on for three hours. Kenneth Clark described it as the most violent verbal assault he ever witnessed.

It was a searing experience for all involved. Kennedy left frustrated and angry. By 1963, he knew that conditions were intolerable, and he knew about the failures and limitations of the federal government. But he represented the government to this group, and once Smith began, the outrage and urgency released in the wake of Birmingham fueled the impatience and tension in the room. The heat of that moment reflected the enormity of the racial crisis, a situation that did not lend itself to a policy discussion.

Afterward, Kennedy commented to a close aide about Jerome Smith—and the horror he had experienced. Smith had reached him. When a group of reporters, referencing the meeting asked Kennedy if he was considering future meetings with Black groups, Kennedy said yes, before adding “but the main problem lies with the whites – they’re the ones who are denying Negro rights.”

Robin Lindley: Kennedy was curious and eager to learn, as you describe. As a senator he went to many different communities and investigated problems to learn more about what was happening in the country.

Professor Patricia Sullivan: Yes, as I noted earlier, for him, there was no substitute for seeing conditions firsthand and talking with people. As one civil rights activist said about Kennedy, “he went, he saw, he listened, he grew.” As a senator, he also used hearings as a platform – to gain information, to put a national spotlight on the conditions he was concerned about, and to help inform legislation and federal programs.  

One of the most fascinating episodes I came across in my research were hearings by a Senate subcommittee Kennedy served on, which focused on the crisis in America’s cities. The hearings stretched over six weeks, divided between the summer and fall of 1966. The Senators heard from seventy witnesses, including cabinet officials, civil rights leaders, city planners, labor leaders, foundation officials, African America urban activists, police officers, clergy, and housing experts.

Although he was a member of the committee, Kennedy was the first person to testify, as the Senator from New York. He focused attention on the “epidemic” of poverty and unemployment, substandard housing, segregated and unequal education, and poor health care that plagued the segregated confines of African American urban areas. Towards the end of his testimony, he described plans for what would become the Bedford Stuyvesant project.

During the hearings Kennedy and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who chaired the hearings, drew out testimony that illuminated the nature and depth of the crisis in urban areas and the need for expansive and targeted federal programs. The hearings exposed the inadequacy of the War on Poverty – both in terms of funding and coordination -- in beginning to meet the crisis.

There were many revealing moments, including when Kennedy engaged writer and long-time Harlem resident Ralph Ellison during his testimony. But the most powerful one occurred on the last day when Martin Luther King Jr. testified. The exchange between Kennedy and King illustrated how closely their understanding of America’s racial crisis aligned, and their concerns for the future. During his testimony, King famously warned that “Riots in the final analysis turn out to be the language of the unheard.”

Robin Lindley: And many of these issues of poverty, economic inequality, and systemic racism are still with us, unfortunately. You delve into the Kerner Commission report, which found that the US was two nations, separate and unequal. In many ways, that still seems to be the case. How do you see the timeliness now of Robert Kennedy and the meaning of his work, particularly in terms of civil rights?

Professor Patricia Sullivan: I completed Justice Rising at a time of reckoning that echoes the 1960s. Once again, mass protests have focused national attention on deep racial injustices and elevated demands for change. And states across the country have enacted an array of laws limiting access to voting after the Supreme Court overturned a major provision of the Voting Rights Act.

In the late 1960s, aggressive policing and mass incarceration ultimately prevailed in response to the urban rebellions sparked by intolerable conditions, lack of opportunity and police brutality. Underlying conditions in urban areas went largely unaddressed, and a bipartisan “War on Crime” came to dominate the politics of the post-civil rights era, with devastating consequences particularly for poor black and minority urban communities.

In recent years, cell phone videos brought instances of police violence to national and international attention, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement and culminating with demonstrations across the country. Protests have focused attention not only on police violence, but on deep and persistent racial inequities and their consequences.

As enduring racial injustices command attention and action, and the basic functioning of democracy is restricted by state legislatures and threatened by mob action, we should not lose sight of what was achieved during the 1960s and the legacy that endures. One of the most powerful social movements in American history, with deep roots in African American culture, through protests, organizing, and insistent demands, broke through. It elevated the consciousness of many and created both the pressure and the opportunity for government action to dismantle the Jim Crow system in the South and enact legislation broadening federal protection of citizenship rights and the right to vote. At the same time, the Black Freedom struggle grew, exposing the deep roots of racial inequality and its structural manifestations, and changing American culture in fundamental ways. America is once again in a racially and civically charged moment and this is a history with crucial lessons for a continuing struggle.

Robert Kennedy’s public life was forged in the reckoning of the sixties. Circumstances prompted him to face the consequences of the country’s racial past and the formative role of race in American life. His capacity to see, to learn, and to grow is testimony to what is possible. While Kennedy is often remembered for what he said, what he did and what he tried to do are most instructive.

After RFK’s assassination, James Baldwin reflected on how Robert Kennedy had helped foster faith in government and politics. He had a mind “that could be reached,” Baldwin commented. “He was somebody in the twentieth century with enough passion and energy and patience.” Such qualities remain essential in the meeting the challenges we face today.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those are powerful and inspiring words Professor Sullivan, and for sharing your insights on your work and your new book on Robert Kennedy and civil rights, Justice Rising. Congratulations on this extensive work of history. It’s sure to remain a significant reference and readers of all backgrounds will appreciate your compelling view of the sixties through the lens of RFK’s life and work.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He also served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. He can be reached by email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Congressman Adam Schiff

Freedom is not assured. It is, as ever, something we have to fight for every day. So let us fight. Unlike Trump’s violent insurrectionists, our weapon of choice must be the truth, wielded relentlessly.

Congressman Adam Schiff, Midnight in Washington

Over the past five years, California Congressman Adam Schiff has been one of the foremost defenders of the rule of law and American democracy as he has exposed the autocratic presidency of Donald Trump and the evolution of the Republican Party from a home for voters with conservative values to “an antitruth, antidemocratic cult organized around the former president.”

In his powerful and engaging new book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could (Random House), Congressman Schiff offers an account of the Trump presidency from the perspective of Capitol Hill. He relates how close the Trump regime came to ending our democracy, and he warns about how our system remains imperiled by a Republican party that embraces Trump’s big lie about winning the 2020 election and then uses false claims of voter fraud to adopt a “new generation of Jim Crow laws targeting minority populations and seeking to cut off their access to the polls.”

The revelatory book begins on one of the darkest days in our history: January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of hundreds of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election of President Joe Biden. Congressman Schiff vividly describes the chaos in the US House Chamber as the rioters breached the building. The deadly assault by Trump-inspired insurrectionists left several dead and more than 140 police officers injured. This act of domestic terrorism stunned many members of Congress, including Congressman Schiff, who was well aware of the danger posed by Trump as he and his allies presumed they were above the law.

Midnight in Washington records Congressman Schiff’s own story of how he chose a life of public service and loyalty to the rule of law. Schiff, who has served in Congress since 2001, was famously known for working across party lines for needed legislation. He was seen as a collaborative figure, not a rigid partisan, but his ability to deal with the other side ended with era of Trump.

Congressman Schiff’s fearless efforts to expose the lawlessness of the Trump regime have won admiration of his party as well as scholars and many independents, but he has drawn the ire and juvenile mockery of the ex-president, unrelenting denunciation from many congressional Republicans, and constant threats to himself and his family from rightwing fanatics.

In his cautionary account of recent years, Midnight in Washington, Congressman Schiff proves an engaging and gifted storyteller. In lively prose, he brings the reader inside his experiences with the congressional investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election and his role as lead investigator and House manager in the first impeachment and trial of Trump for threatening to withhold approved military aid to Ukraine unless the embattled nation interfered in the 2020 presidential election by supplying negative information on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.  

Congressman Schiff’s book is certain to become an invaluable resource for scholars of our recent history and has been praised by historians such as Michael Beschloss and Ron Chernow. Acclaimed professor of history Timothy Snyder—an expert on democracy and tyranny—commented on Midnight: “If there is still an American democracy fifty years from now, historians will be very grateful for this highly personal and deeply informed guide to one of its greatest crises. We should be grateful that we can read it now.”

Congressman Schiff has been the United States Representative for California’s 28th Congressional District since 2000. In his role as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, he led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump stemming from the Trump–Ukraine scandal. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi then named him the lead House impeachment manager at the helm of a team of seven House members responsible for presenting the impeachment case against Trump during his trial before the United States Senate. Congressman Schiff is also a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Congressman Schiff graciously talked by telephone about his work and his new book from his office.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Congressman Schiff on your powerful new book on how we almost lost our democracy, Midnight in Washington. And thank you for taking time from your hectic schedule to speak with me.

I have a special appreciation for your work on the Select Committee on the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Full disclosure: I was an attorney with the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late seventies. I realize that investigative select committees pose special challenges for members of Congress, and I respect your persistence and passion with this investigation now in the face of constant vilification and threats from the right. It must be difficult for you.

Congressman Adam Schiff: It has been an ordeal, but I work with a great group of members and the staff is terrific. And it's very much a team effort.

Robin Lindley: The deadly January 6th assault on the Capitol was heartbreaking for me. I love that marvelous old edifice, the symbolic center of our democracy where I worked and where you now work. As we watched the live-televised, violent attack on the Capitol, I told my wife not to worry because the mob of insurrectionists wouldn’t get into the building. I said the National Guard would intercede and assured her that Guard units were probably on hand in the Capitol basement or in nearby office buildings. But that didn’t happen, and I know the select committee is looking into that now.

Congressman Adam Schiff: Yes, we sure are. And, ironically the January 6th Committee is a really bright spot in an otherwise pretty dark place in that we are working in a completely nonpartisan way with two conservative Democrats and two conservative Republicans among our ranks. There's no division in our purpose. We're all united in wanting to get to the truth and expose the truth to the American people and then legislate in a way that protects our country going forward.

Robin Lindley: What was your experience when the Capitol was attacked? In your book, you recount that you helped people get to safety, but you didn’t realize the danger you were in until Republican members of Congress told you to protect yourself.

Congressman Adam Schiff: Yes. I really hadn't been paying attention to what was going on outside the Capitol. I was speaking that morning and I was preparing my rebuttals for what the Republicans were saying. I knew they would be challenging electors in up to six states, and so I had written a bunch of opening statements and a few rebuttals to take into consideration what was being said very specifically.

And so I wasn't paying attention to events on the Mall. And I only noticed that things were awry when I looked up and saw that the Speaker was not in her chair. And then I watched police come in and quickly usher [Congressman and House Majority Leader] Steny Hoyer out of the chamber.

Then the police made increasingly dire warnings to the members that rioters were in the building, that we needed to get out our gas masks, and finally, that we needed to get out of the chamber.

I did hang back, in part because I felt reasonably calm and I could see how agitated other people were. And there was a bottleneck to get out of the House chamber. I remember thinking to myself that it was surprising because only 40 members were allowed to be present on the floor because of COVID with a number of others permitted in the gallery. But people must have come from other places and suddenly it was very crowded. I also didn’t want to go through the doors shoulder to shoulder with a number of Republicans who refused to wear masks. This was pre- vaccination.  And some of those Republicans came up to me and told me that I needed to make sure that the attackers didn't see me because I was in different category. And of course, I understood exactly what they were saying. And I had that strange reaction that I wrote about in the book, at first feeling touched by their help and then quite angered about the reason I was at risk was because they had been lying about the election lying and about me too but, in particular, about their lies about the election, which caused this attack on the Capitol.

Robin Lindley: Most Congressional Republicans, including those who seemed interested in your safety, continue to embrace Trump’s big lie that he won the election.

Congressman Adam Schiff: And yes, after our session that night, and in the weeks that followed and to the present day, they have persisted in this big lie and in undermining our election system and questioning its integrity. And it's really an inducement to further violence. After seeing where that led, to continue with that lie is an even more willful assault on our democracy.

Robin Lindley: I appreciate your courage at this fraught time and your service on the Select Committee on the January 6th attack on democracy. I don’t know many details, but I understand that the Committee is working intensely to understand every aspect of the attack on the Capitol and its making progress each day.

Congressman Adam Schiff: Thank you. We are moving with great diligence. We have interviewed now over 300 people and those are cooperating witnesses. Of course, there are very high-profile exceptions who are employing many of the same tactics that Trump used while in office by suing to avoid complying with the law in the hope of delay, in the hope that justice delayed can be justice denied. But we're moving quickly to hold them in criminal contempt and we hope and expect that the Justice Department will also move quickly to prosecute these people.

Robin Lindley: Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows are two notable examples of those held in contempt. On another issue, could the Constitution and federal law be used to prevent former President Trump and his insurrectionist allies in Congress from holding public office again? What would trigger section three of the 14th amendment or 18 US Code at section 2383, for example, regarding preclusion of those who commit insurrection from holding office?

Congressman Adam Schiff: Yes, it's a good question. We’ve discussed that internally and I've discussed it with constitutional experts. I'm not sure that I have a clear answer to that question. I think it was last used during Reconstruction and I don't think it's ever been used to prohibit someone from seeking the presidency again. The short answer is, as with many other things that have come to light in the last four years, it’s an open constitutional question.

Robin Lindley: I wanted to go back to your story Congressman Schiff. You are guided by an impressive public service ethic. You graduated from Harvard Law School and you could have worked at a very lucrative job at a prestigious law firm. Instead, you devoted your life to public service, first as an Assistant US Attorney, then as a legislator in California, and now as a member of Congress. Where did your values of selfless service and working for the common good come from?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I really think they come from my parents, and they would tell you that they came from their parents. My folks instilled in me and my brother an ethic of service and an ethic of leaving a world better off for the next generation. We also had the confidence of knowing that, if we could be good at something and we could make our living, we could get by, and that there are more important things than material wealth, and doing a service for others was something of great importance. And so in my case, that came from my folks and from my grandparents as well.

Robin Lindley: You’ve been in Congress for two decades and you were known as a person with a collaborative spirit who worked across the aisle. But it seems that compromise and bipartisanship haven’t been possible with the other party since Trump became president.

Congressman Adam Schiff: That's very true. And that’s something that I have to explain to people who only know me from the last few years. I had a very different reputation from the perception of the Trump years.

Before Trump, I was not viewed as a partisan. Indeed, I don't view myself as a partisan. And I don't think opposition to authoritarianism or corruption of the variety that Donald Trump represents is partisan. I think you can see that in some very conservative Republicans such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who feel the same way. Certainly no one would've described me as a lightning rod of any kind including a liberal lightning rod. But if you stand up to Donald Trump, then you become public enemy number one in MAGA world. And that's certainly made it much more difficult for me to work across the aisle on things having nothing to do with the former president.

That work still goes on. We produced the intelligence authorization goals in my committee that passed in the committee on a bipartisan basis for years now, even with my differences with [Republican Congressman Devin] Nunez. But, as long as Donald Trump is on the scene and as long as the Republican party leadership has given up its devotion to our democracy and made itself a kind of cult of the former president, there's no accommodating that.

And there's no accommodating a Republican party that doesn't believe in our democracy anymore as its priority on a whole set of issues. They're just going to have to be beaten at the polls. There are still areas where we can work together, but not on the big issues that affect our democracy such as voting rights, as [Democratic Senator] Joe Manchin is finding out the hard way. There's no accommodating them because their goals are completely different. Their goal is to tear down our democratic system in the hopes of gaining power and keeping it.

Robin Lindley: One of your legislative efforts to strengthen democracy is the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which recently passed in the House. That Act would address presidential abuse of power, separation of powers, and foreign interference in elections. That seems an important development.

Congressman Adam Schiff: That came from a discussion I had with Speaker Pelosi a couple years ago where I suggested that we fashion our own sort of post-Watergate reform to attack the many abuses of power that weakened the guardrails of democracy and that had been exposed to us for years. And so that's what we put together. Many of the pieces have had Republican support in the past, and they probably enjoy Republican support now, particularly since we have a Democratic president. But so many of the Republicans are just too scared. This too we learned in the last four years that, while courage may be contagious, cowardice is too, and there has been an epidemic of cowardice among the leadership of the GOP.

Robin Lindley: Many people I talk with fear for the future of our democracy. Where do you find hope today?

Congressman Adam Schiff: I entitled the book Midnight in Washington in part because that was the part of one of my closing arguments in the trial, but also because midnight may be the darkest hour of the day everywhere in the world, but it's also a hopeful time because we know that what follows is the prospect of light.

I have every confidence we're going to get through this. I derive that confidence from some of the heroic people that have emerged over the last several years: the [former US ambassador to Yugoslavia] Marie Yovanovitches, the [director for European Affairs for the National Security Council, Lt. Col.] Alexander Vindmans, the [former senior director for Europe and Russia on the NSA] Fiona Hills, even the [former Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coatses, and others, who risked their careers to stand up to this most unethical president as defenders of democracy. There are millions and millions more like them around the country who far outnumber those who are trying to tear down democracy right now.

So, we're getting through it. But I do think what we do in this moment will determine how quickly we get through it and how much damage we're forced to suffer along the way.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your thoughtful comments Congressman Schiff and congratulations again on your powerful book, a wake-up call for America. And thank you for your work in Congress and your steadfast commitment to our democracy.

Congressman Adam Schiff: Thank you, Robin. And thank you for your interest in the book and for reaching out.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

I grew up with a series of lies that helped further white supremacy. That’s uncomfortable. To see the real agony, think about the millions of people who lived their entire lives enslaved, knowing that enslavement would be the future for their children and their children’s children. Think of living with the violence of the Jim Crow era as an African American.

 Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me

In his candid and searing recent memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (St. Martin’s Press), retired US Army general and renowned professor of history Ty Seidule recounts his odyssey from youthful hero worship of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and an indoctrination in racist myths of the Lost Cause to acclaim as a historian devoted to challenging the poisonous white supremacist lies about slavery, the Civil War, African American inferiority, Jim Crow segregation, and the deified Lee.

As a distinguished scholar of history, a decorated soldier, and a native of the South, Professor Seidule writes with rare authority about race, the Civil War, and the myths and lies about the war that he learned from an education presented through the lens of racism and Confederate mythology. He explains how his early beliefs were shaped by white supremacist ideology that demeaned and dehumanized Black citizens. These racist views imbued Southern culture and were widely shared throughout the country in textbooks, popular periodicals, and the media, with movies such as the award-winning Gone with the Wind and Disney’s Song of the South rife with degrading stereotypes of African Americans.

And Professor Seidule vividly describes his path to understanding and his emergence as a leader for historical truth and for a reckoning on race. He demolishes the myths about the saintly Lee and, based on extensive research and overwhelming evidence, concludes that Lee was a traitor to his country who fought to preserve slavery. And, as Professor Seidule describes the military’s veneration of Confederate leaders in naming of bases and other actions, he rejects honoring of those who fought to preserve slavery and committed treason in the effort.

He further details how he became a scholar of our deeply conflicted past, and how that study revealed the noxious, insidious influence of racist ideas that have poisoned white minds since the dawn of slavery. And he considers the timely and vexing issue of how otherwise seemingly admirable people could embrace the odious tenets of white supremacy and the oppression of others.

Professor Seidule’s powerful personal observations and insights are especially timely as our nation continues to suffer serious divisions on issues of race and democracy. He urges that understanding our past is critical to confronting and stopping the generational transmission of pernicious racist ideas.

Ty Seidule is Professor Emeritus of History at West Point where he taught for two decades. He served in the U.S. Army for thirty-six years, retiring as a brigadier general. He currently teaches history and serves as the Chamberlain Fellow at Hamilton College as well as a New America Fellow. He is the author or editor of six books of military history, three of which won distinguished writing prizes, including The West Point History of the Civil War. Also a leader in digital history, Professor Seidule created and co-edited the award-winning West Point History of Warfare, the largest enhanced digital book in any field. His video lecture “Was the Civil War About Slavery” has had more than 30 million views on social media. He also serves as the vice chair of the Congressional Naming Commission, which will rename Department of Defense assets that honor the Confederate States of America. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and earned his doctorate at Ohio State University.

Professor Seidule generously responded to questions about his work and his new book by email.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Seidule on your candid new memoir Robert E. Lee and Me and thank you for considering questions. You have a distinguished background as a military historian and author. What inspired you to write your revelatory memoir now on your indoctrination in the myths and lies of the Confederate Lost Cause and your rigorous exploration of the reality of our history of racism and white supremacy?

Professor Ty Seidule: When I was at West Point, I chaired our memorialization committee. We created a new memorial room to the 1500+ Academy graduates who “gave the last full measure of devotion” to the nation from the War of 1812 to the present, including more than 100 alumni killed since 9/11. One decision caused a ruckus. Should the West Point graduates who fought and died in Confederate gray be included in the new Memorial Room? I argued, stridently, no! After all, Confederates abrogated their oath, killed US Army soldiers, and committed treason for the worse possible reason: to create a slave republic. Yet, I lost. The superintendent wanted to include the names.

I went home, defeated, to tell my wife. She asked me if I had told everyone why I was so passionate. Why the issues were so important to me? No, I told her. I’m a historian. I tell other people’s stories. She told me if I wanted to convince anyone, I needed to be honest and tell my story.

Then, in 2017, Washington and Lee University invited me to give a talk in Lee Chapel, where Robert E. Lee is buried. I told my story and called Lee a traitor for slavery. The audience gave me a standing ovation. I realized that if I was honest about my own story, I might be able to convince others about the facts of the Civil War and the Lost Cause more readily. So, I decided to do what few historians do. Use my own story to try to reach a broader audience.

Robin Lindley: In your new book, you describe your virtual reverence for Robert E. Lee, and how your education as a child and young adult was imbued with Confederate myths and racist history. At one point as a child, you ranked Lee as an “11” out of a scale of 10, and ranked Jesus at five. How do you see the origins of your adoration of Lee? Did your parents and teachers encourage your embrace of Lost Cause myths and the veneration of Lee when you grew up in the 1960s?

Professor Ty Seidule: Every aspect of my life encouraged me to see Lee as the epitome of a Southern gentleman. I wanted to be a Virginia gentleman because that meant status. My first chapter book was Meet Robert E. Lee. Lee looked like a military god on loan from Mt Olympus, framed by a gigantic Confederate flag. Today, it’s hard to imagine just how reverential Lee was to the white South, especially in Virginia.

Robin Lindley: What was your view of the causes of Civil War and its outcome as a child and young adult?

Professor Ty Seidule: It wasn’t something I remember thinking about. My culture focused on the romantic, underdog Confederates who fought nobly for a doomed cause. But honestly, I don’t remember thinking or hearing anything about the cause, the purpose. That was the problem. The purpose of the war and the war itself weren’t linked.

Robin Lindley: You vividly describe your college experience at Washington and Lee University—a veritable shrine to Robert E. Lee, who was seen as the paradigm of the Southern Christian gentleman. What did you learn about Lee and the college’s efforts to deify Lee, the former president of the college?

Professor Ty Seidule: The entire history of the school revolved around deifying Lee until very recently. Fundraising was successful for years by its association with Lee. Lee Chapel was called by the University in the 1920s “The Westminster Abbey of the Confederacy.” In fact, Lee Chapel is more a reliquary to a saint than a chapel. His basement office remains untouched from the day he died in 1870. Traveller, his warhorse, buried outside Lee’s crypt, often has apples left by tourists.

The fact that Lee’s statue lies on the altar in the Chapel’s apse clearly shows who is venerated – and it’s not Jesus. When my wife saw it for the first time, she understood that the school literally worshipped Lee. Her reaction? “Get me out of here!”

Robin Lindley: It may surprise some readers that so many bases and other US military facilities are named for Confederate leaders. Why did the US military honor traitors to the US in this way?

Professor Ty Seidule: Yes. Several of our most prestigious army posts honor the enemy. The War Department named them during WWI and WWII when the army was a segregationist institution, and the South was a racial police state.

Black people did protest these names, but they had been violently excluded from voting and could not change it. But to me it’s outrageous that the US Army, the most diverse workforce in the country, honors the enemy. An enemy who fought for slavery and killed US Army soldiers. Some like Henry Benning and John Brown Gordon never served in the US Army. Others like Braxton Bragg, Leonidas Polk, John Bell Hood and other West Point graduates chose to fight against the country that educated them. Lee served in US Army for over 30 years before choosing treason to preserve slavery.  

Robin Lindley: You had a distinguished teaching career at the US Military Academy at West Point. You note that Lee casts a long shadow there with numerous tributes to the Confederate general. What are a few examples of this admiration for Lee at West Point that struck you?

Professor Ty Seidule: I lived on Lee Road, by Lee Gate, in Lee Housing area. At West Point our barracks are named for America’s greatest military heroes, Washington, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Bradley, Scott, Sherman, Grant, and Pershing. We recently named our newest barracks after Benjamin O. Davis, Jr, the first Black West Point grad in the twentieth century. But one barracks bears Lee name. When was it named? The early 1970s. I counted more than a dozen memorials to Lee at West Point.

The first Lee memorial came about in the 1930s and the last in 2002. That’s part of what changed me. West Point was an anti-Confederate monument in the nineteenth century. No Confederates in the prestigious cemetery. No Confederates in the Memorial Hall. None on the towering Battle Monument to the US Army dead from the “War of the Rebellion.”

“Duty, Honor, Country,” West Point’s motto is anti-Confederate. West Point in the nineteenth century saw Lee and his Confederate comrades as traitors. Lee made a comeback when West Point moved towards equal rights and integration. And that really informed my understanding of Confederate memorialization. It’s always about white supremacy.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that striking observation. You’re a retired general and renowned expert on military history. Was Lee a good soldier and general?

Professor Ty Seidule: For years, I let the smell of gunpowder seduce me into answering that question. No more!

Lee chose treason to preserve slavery. His army kidnapped Black people during the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns and brought them back for sale in Virginia. Lee’s army depended on enslaved people for much of their logistics – cooks, teamsters, nurses, engineers, farriers, and servants. The Army of Northern Virginia was an enslaving army. And Lee desperately wanted more enslaved labor throughout the war. Think of that for a minute. What other army depended so thoroughly on enslaved labor for its logistics? Also, Lee’s army routinely executed Black prisoners of war. Too often, we look at the tactics of war and forget the purpose.

I cover Lee as a strategist and tactician only after I clearly talk about treason and slavery.

Robin Lindley: Lee was an enslaver. How did he treat enslaved people? Did he ever emancipate slaves or call for abolition of slavery?

Professor Ty Seidule: Lee was a cruel enslaver. He enslaved people from the time his mother died soon after his graduation until 1863. When Lee’s father-in-law died in 1857, Lee took control of three enslaved labor farms for more than two years (I won’t call them plantations, which evoke images of the wind whispering through the Spanish Moss. Plantations are more Dachau than Disneyland).

Lee’s father-in-law recognized enslaved marriages and kept families together. Lee tried to maximize his profits at the expense of enslaved people by using the hiring system to break apart all but one family. He also ordered Wesley Norris and his sister whipped, telling the constable to “Lay it on well.”

As for emancipation, he once said that freedom would come on God’s time. He certainly fought for slavery, not emancipation. Lee’s actions are what count to me.

Robin Lindley: Your verdict on Lee is straightforward: He was a traitor who fought to preserve slavery. What was the most important evidence you considered in reaching this verdict?

Professor Ty Seidule: For treason: The US Constitution lists only one crime. In Article III Section 3: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” No court convicted him, although he was indicted.

I write as a historian but also as a US Army officer who served nearly 36 years. Lee also abrogated the oath he had taken only three weeks earlier on his promotion to colonel. In fact, he didn’t even wait three days to let his resignation process before he accepted a commission in the Virginia militia. Of the eight US Army colonels from Virginia in 1861, all West Point graduates, Lee and only Lee chose to fight for the Confederacy, chose treason.

As for slavery, that’s easy. Everyone knew that’s why the white South seceded. They told everyone. It wasn’t a secret. If senior officers fought for the Confederacy (especially one as smart as Lee) they knew damn well what they fought for – slavery. Then there are Lee’s comments after he heard about the Emancipation Proclamation on January 10, 1863, calling it,

A savage and brutal policy … which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction.

He fought for slavery because he believed in slavery.

Robin Lindley: Was there a moment or incident that sparked you to challenge your admiration of Lee and question the Lost Cause lies?

Professor Ty Seidule: Like many changes in life, it came gradually and then very fast.

First, my identity became army officer, not Southern gentleman. Second, I married a woman incapable of lying. My culture lied constantly. She really changed me. Third, I became a historian at West Point and then a historian of West Point.

I understood the Civil War was about slavery, but for too long, I held romantic notions of Lee. Then, when I started studying West Point’s memorialization of Lee, I just became outraged that tributes to Lee came at the same time as integration. That made me not just a historian but an activist for change.

Robin Lindley: How do you see views of the Confederacy and Lee evolving, if at all?

Professor Ty Seidule: Radical change! The US Congress created a commission to change the names of the army posts that honor Confederates, and then overrode President Trump’s veto by a supermajority. I serve on that commission. Memorials to Lee in Richmond, Charlottesville, and the US Capitol are gone. Wow! I would not have taken a bet with high odds in my favor that those iconic statues would be taken down in one year.

In a very short time, many (but not all) Americans see the values of the Confederacy as antithetical to our values and that gives me hope. My home state of Virginia is leading the way.

Robin Lindley: You write powerfully of how you felt betrayed by your education, your indoctrination with the lies of the Confederate Lost Cause, adoration of General Lee, and more. What would you like to see today’s students learn about our history?

Professor Ty Seidule: Everyone has a history. Every school has a history. Every town has a history.

I would love to see more students research their own lives. I taught a course on West Point’s history for years. We become better citizens, better people when we understand the history of where we live. And not just the myths, but the tough history: slavery, segregation, and redlining. A better understanding of our local history will, I think, make us more empathetic.

At West Point, our mission is to educate and inspire leaders of character for the nation who live the values of duty, honor, country. How do you teach character? Nothing works better than history. What we research and write can change our character, at least it did for me.

Understanding local history, through primary sources, made me a more empathetic and honest person.

And, for anyone teaching the Civil War, please, please have students read the Southern States Ordinances of Secession and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech. If you start with those documents, a teacher is on the right path.

Robin Lindley: I was struck that you received hate mail and even death threats in 2015 after you stated your view—and that of virtually all academic historians—that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. How are readers responding to your candid new book on Lee and the Lost Cause?

Professor Ty Seidule: The reception this time is far better, mostly. For the 2015 video I did on the cause of the Civil War, the online comments ran at least 20 to 1 negative. Now, it’s probably 10 to 1 positive. However, I still have plenty of one-star reviews on Amazon. There also seems to be a few folks who make videos debunking my argument.

If I receive hate mail in any form, I take it positively. I hope that my writing is clear enough that no one would mistake my message: treason for slavery. The Lost Cause, Confederate monuments, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, and lynching all created a system of white supremacy to ensure white political power. Of course, history is dangerous because it challenges our myths and identity. When I challenge people’s identity, the reaction can be ferocious, but I’ve faced far tougher foes than on-line trolls.

Robin Lindley: Your book Robert E Lee and Me is bound to become a classic study and it deserves a wide audience. Is there anything you’d like to add about your book or your insights on history and the time we live in now? Where do you find hope as a historian and professor?

Professor Ty Seidule: I have no shortage of hope. Through the political process, statues dedicated to white supremacy have come down all over the country. Remember that commemoration is about our values. These statues’ demise tells us that our values, at least in many places, no longer tolerate traitors who fought for slavery. The military is now in the process of ridding itself of Confederate commemoration. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean we’ve ended racism; we still have far, far to go, but for me as a soldier and a scholar, it’s a start. The only way to prevent a racist future is to first understand our racist past.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Seidule for your thoughtful comments and insights, and congratulations on your moving and powerful new book. And best wishes on your new position at Hamilton College.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (history news network.org. His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

In the wake of the horrific slaughter of the First World War, artists struggled to make sense of the tremendous loss and suffering from the brutal industrialized war. Thanks to German psychiatrist and doctor of art history Hans Prinzhorn, many artists found inspiration in the art of mental patients that broke boundaries while expressing psychological pain and unbridled emotion without regard for convention or tradition.

Prinzhorn encouraged his psychiatric patients to draw and paint as a form of therapy, and then he published a groundbreaking collection of their work in 1922. Modern artists such as Paul Klee, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst were influenced by these raw, unfiltered images.

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler—a megalomaniac who saw himself as a great artist— condemned the work of the artist-patients, as well as most forms of modernist art, as an “insane deviation” from the traditional realism he admired. In the late thirties, Hitler’s Nazis mocked avant-garde artists and compared them with the mentally ill artists in their exhibits of “Degenerate Art.” And, by the early 1940s, the Nazi regime had murdered the more that 70,000 psychiatric patients, including several of Prinzhorn’s patient-artists, in a euthanasia program designed to exterminate so-called “life unworthy of life,” meaning the mentally and physically disabled. Aktion T4, as the program was known, paved the way for the Holocaust.

In his moving and riveting new book, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art (Random House), acclaimed author Charlie English presents this complex history. He weaves together the life of Prinzhorn, his artist-patients, the rise of failed artist Hitler, eugenics and “The Master Race,” and the horrific Aktion T4 to advance “racial hygiene” and create an Aryan master race by killing those with disabilities.

Based on extensive research, Mr. English’s book takes the reader into the lives of Prinzhorn and talented patients such as Franz Karl Bühler and Agnes Richter, and then illuminates Hitler’s cruel world. The gripping storytelling creates suspense even though the reader knows of the tragedy to come.

The Gallery of Miracles and Madness is an urgent tribute to the creative spirit as it exposes the horrors of totalitarianism. Mr. English provides a humane and timely historical account with cautionary lessons for readers today and into the future.

Charlie English, a celebrated British nonfiction author, has written two previous books, The Storied City (published in the UK as The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu) and The Snow Tourist. He is a former journalist for The Guardian, where he served in several positions including arts editor and head of international news. Also, he has appeared on NPR and the BBC and written for numerous newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Telegraph and The Independent, and lectured at the Royal Geographical Society, where he is a Fellow. He lives in London with his wife and children.

Mr. English generously responded by email to a series of questions on his recent book.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Mr. English on your powerful new book The Gallery of Miracles and Madness. You take a deep dive into art, psychiatry, and the policies of Nazi Germany. This book seems a departure from your previous work. What sparked your interest in this often-neglected history?

Charlie English: Thank you Robin. I realize it seems a long way from The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, though in fact there are similarities. Both books are about culture under totalitarianism, one being set during Al Qaeda’s rule over Timbuktu, the other in Nazi Germany.

I’m drawn to cultural stories, and when I discovered the Prinzhorn collection some years ago it seemed to speak to me. A history that directly links so many fascinating areas of twentieth century history–from modern art’s interest in insanity to Hitler’s ability as a painter to the Nazi mass-murder programs–was one that I thought that deserved to be told and understood.  

Robin Lindley: Your book begins with a focus on Dr. Hans Prinzhorn, a psychiatrist who collected the art of mental patients in early twentieth century Germany. He was also trained in art history. What are a few things you’d like readers to know about Prinzhorn?

Charlie English: I guess you’d say Prinzhorn was a Renaissance man, a war veteran, a medic, a baritone singer, an intellectual. He achieved something really astonishing in the space of two to three years, rather less time in fact than it took me to write my book. But his brilliance did not lead him to a good place, and he made a lot of poor decisions, not least his support, for a short time, for Hitler, who still seems to me to represent the polar opposite of Prinzhorn’s earlier work, which promoted psychiatric art as valid art. His biography shows, I think, that people are usually flawed and the truth is always complicated.    

Robin Lindley: Why was Prinzhorn interested in inspiring and collecting the art of mental patients?

Charlie English: Several reasons. One is that this was an active field of enquiry for art at the start of the 20th century: Freud had revealed vast hidden depths inside every human being, and modernists saw mental illness or perhaps madness as a way to explore that, while escaping all the hated trappings of the bourgeoisie and so-called civilization.

Beyond that, Prinzhorn was psychologically fragile himself, perhaps a sufferer of PTSD, and an art critic and a medic. The stars aligned for him, you could say. His education meant he was unusually, perhaps uniquely qualified for the task of exploring the art of schizophrenic patients. 

Robin Lindley: Several of the psychiatric patient artists you discuss were already recognized artists. Who are a few of the patient artists that stand out to you?

Charlie English: There are hundreds of artists in the collection, and for the book I needed to focus the story on a handful at most. The hero, if you like, is Franz Karl Bühler, an artisan-blacksmith before he was incarcerated as a schizophrenic. He had been a genius at metalworking, and won a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, so he was trained in the design aspects of his craft, but he also managed to teach himself to become a great fine artist after his mental collapse. Others in the collection include Else Blankenhorn, a very great talent whose worked inspired Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, among others. The Surrealists’ favourite Prinzhorn artist was August Natterer, who depicted his psychotic episodes in his work. Like many Prinzhorn images they have an intriguing, uncanny quality. 

Detail of Hexenkopf (The Witch's Head), c. 1915, August Natterer

Robin Lindley: You write about how some of these mentally ill artists influenced surrealists, expressionists and other modernists. What did you learn about the influence of these ill “outsider” artists?

Charlie English: I was astonished by their influence over the major art movements of the time. If you think how substantial Surrealism was, for instance, and then discover how dependent those artists were on psychiatric patients’ art, it gives you a whole new understanding of where certain iconic twentieth century works came from. Evidence for artistic influence is often hard to pin down, as few artists are keen to discuss or write about the people they borrowed ideas from, but the Prinzhorn collection’s influence is really very well documented by dozens of art historians. Prinzhorn’s achievement, you could say, is to have expanded the idea of what art is, and widened the circle of permitted art-makers. 

Robin Lindley: How did other medical professionals view Prinzhorn’s interest in the art of his psychiatric patients?

Charlie English: You have to remember that at the time opinion was highly polarized between arch-conservatives and the avant-garde, rather as I think it is now. Conservative psychiatrists really hated the idea that madness was polluting fine art, which they held up as something spiritual, superior, quasi-religious. The far right realised that they could capitalize on this natural distaste for the “moderns”.

Robin Lindley: Wasn’t Prinzhorn attracted by some aspects of Nazism before his death in 1933?

Charlie English: Yes. During the economic crisis of the early 1930s there was a sense of pending catastrophe, which Hitler did his best to encourage, blaming the Jews and the left and the avant-garde. Prinzhorn, like other conservatives, felt Germany needed a strong leader, and thought Hitler could be that person. It seems very surprising given Prinzhorn’s earlier ideas, but he even offered to work with Hitler on a program of German cultural renewal. He was politically naive, and later realized he had made a mistake. He died soon after Hitler came to power, so we can’t know what would have become of him during the period of Nazi rule. 

Robin Lindley: Hitler also looms large in your book. The young Hitler was a starving artist. You stress that he saw himself as an artist through his life. Some readers may not be familiar with his actual art. How did his contemporaries see his art work and his personality?

Charlie English: As a teenager Hitler was determined to become an artist. He believed he was brilliant, of course, and that it would be “child’s play” for someone of his great talent to get into Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, so when they rejected him, he was devastated and furious. There’s no doubt that he had some ability for drawing buildings, but he was terrible at figures. Read into it what you will, but the people in his paintings just don’t seem to have interested him on any level.

After his rejection, he was homeless for a time, and made a living copying out tourist postcards depicting famous buildings, but even he would later dismiss these works as of no value. His real talent—as observers from Albert Speer to Thomas Mann have pointed out—was for the art of politics, the spectacle, the rallies, the insignia, the speeches, the set designs…

Robin Lindley: How did Hitler’s artist persona play into his leadership style and beliefs about himself?

Charlie English: Hitler came to believe he was an artist-Fuhrer, a mythical Romantic idea for a type of leader that Germany was said to produce in times of crisis. This combined politician and seer would allegedly be able both to envisage the future of the German people and to bring it about, however abhorrent the methods. Hitler’s propaganda consistently presented him in this way.

Goebbels once wrote that for the Fuhrer the people were no more difficult to work than clay was for the sculptor. It seems clear that Hitler took this almost literally, as he would try to genetically reengineer the Germans to fit his Aryan ideal.

Robin Lindley: After a failed putsch in 1923, Hitler was arrested and—as you write—he was examined and diagnosed as a psychopath. What brought evaluators to this conclusion?

Charlie English: I wouldn’t say this was a formal diagnosis, but the prison psychologist Alois Maria Ott spoke with him after he was admitted to the jail and described him much later as ‘prone to hysteria’ and ‘a morbid psychopath’, with flecks of spittle showing around his mouth. Of course, Hitler’s first great political gamble had just gone catastrophically wrong.

The issue of his sanity has been controversial since none of the many formal psychiatric opinions that exist come from people who actually examined him. Also, it used to be argued that calling him “mad” somehow let him off the hook for his crimes. These days, the binary concept of “mad” or “sane” seems less relevant, and I don’t think many people who know his biography would argue that Hitler wasn’t a deeply disturbed individual. 

Robin Lindley: During his year in jail, Hitler wrote his hated-filled screed Mein Kampf. He was already attacking Jews and the weakness of the Weimar state. When did he become acquainted with eugenics and the idea of a German Aryan master race?

Charlie English: Eugenics was already a popular scientific concept at the turn of the twentieth century. A British polymath, Sir Francis Galton, invented the term in the 1880s, and sterilization was enthusiastically practiced in the United States. Hitler is said to have been inspired by some of these American programs.

The idea of an Aryan master race was older: it grew out of mid-nineteenth century concepts of so-called “scientific racism”, which separated people into a hierarchy of races, with the Nordic whites and Aryans at the top and the Jews at the bottom. One of the most bizarre aspects of these theories was that the only people who could have good ideas were the Aryans, and every other world culture could only continue what the Aryans had taught them or else destroy it by their bungling. One conclusion of this theory required that the ancient Greeks be categorized as Aryans, and in fact the Nazis did try to co-opt every “good” thing that had ever happened in history—including classical culture—for the German-Aryans.

You wonder at people’s credulity when faced with this nonsense, but, a bit like QAnon or another conspiracy theory, it didn’t really have to make sense, it was just a labyrinthine way of justifying the emotional prejudices people felt about a particular issue. The Nazis adapted the language to support these racial concepts, promoting words such as “Volksgemeinschaft” (ethnic cultural community), “Rassengefuhl” (racial feeling), and “Kulturbolschewismus” (cultural Bolshevism). 

Robin Lindley: What was the “Degenerate Art” exhibit that Hitler promoted? How did Hitler view works by recognized modernist artists and the mentally ill? Why was Nazi mockery of modern art so important to Hitler? What threatened him about expressionism and other styles?

Charlie English: “Entartung”, or “degeneracy” was another nineteenth century concept that went hand in hand with eugenics and race theory.

Degeneracy theory stated that a people’s racial health could be read in its cultural output, and that a race that had been polluted by “foreign” genetics—i.e., by racial intermarriage, notably with the Jews—produced symptomatic art that no “pure” Aryan could understand. Art, then, was a barometer of cultural health and —surprise, surprise—modern art was an indicator of the excessive Jewish influence on German culture.

It was Goebbels’s idea to capitalize on this theory by organizing “shaming shows” of modern art designed to reinforce the idea that modernism=Jewishness=mental illness. These “Degenerate Art” shows included works from the Prinzhorn collection, as further evidence that madness and modernism were a Jewish conspiracy against the German people. They would be included in the exhibitions alongside professional works with sarcastic captions claiming that a “really sick” patient’s effort was better than that of the professional modern artist.

Josef Goebbels inspects the Degenerate Art Exhibition, February 1938

Photo Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The Degenerate Art shows were vital for the Nazi propaganda effort. They toured the country for years, and are still the most popular art exhibitions of all time in terms of footfall: around four million people are believed to have seen them. 

Robin Lindley: The Nazi’s T4 program, a precursor of the Holocaust, involved destruction of “life unworthy of life,” including those with genetic illnesses, the mentally ill, and others. How did Nazi eugenics evolve from sterilization policies in the mid-1930s to mass murder by 1939?

Charlie English: Once the principle of racial cleansing was established—and Hitler had hinted at such a program in Mein Kampf in the mid-1920s—the question was how to do it without attracting too much public protest.

Months after Hitler came to power, a sterilization law was passed which meant that psychiatric patients with particular conditions could be forcibly neutered. As war loomed, Hitler decided to go further, starting to actually murder the mentally ill, to eliminate them from the gene pool and save the cost of their care. He knew that the conflict would provide political cover for this program, which could be explained as the sort of emergency measure required in times of war. A group of administrators in his private office were tasked with establishing the program, later known as Aktion T4. They brainstormed methods of mass-murder, and came up with the idea of gas chambers. These were put into action from early 1940. These tools and methods would later be used in the Holocaust, often by the same people.

Robin Lindley: It’s heartbreaking that there was little public outcry about the T4 mass killing of disabled people. Did most Germans know of the mass murder? Who cared about it?

Charlie English: A large number of people knew. It was impossible for instance to disguise the smell of burning corpses that emanated from the incinerators, or to stop the soot gathering on people’s houses.

There was some resistance to Aktion T4 but this was entirely insufficient to prevent the murder of 70,000 or so people by the state. Only a few individuals spoke up, including the Bishop of Munster, and Lothar Kreyssig, a district judge in Brandenburg. The propaganda had been highly effective: people mostly either did nothing or tacitly supported the killings.  

Robin Lindley: Your description of the last days of the Prinzhorn’s psychiatric patients is poignant and moving. Karl Bühler, a once prominent artist, was one of victims. How were the T4 victims located and then killed? What did you learn about the killing centers?

Charlie English: One of the most shocking aspects of the story is that the victims were identified, judged and murdered by the medical profession. Asylums were told to report people who had been diagnosed with certain conditions, including schizophrenia and alcoholism, or people who had been in the care system for several years. The names and medical notes of such people were sent to medical reviewers, who then decided if they fit the criteria for murder that Hitler’s office had set out. Most of them did. After that, lists of selected patients were sent back to the asylums, and a special transport squadron came to pick them up on the appointed day. They were taken to the killing centers, which had been designed to look like hospitals, and put in sealed chambers disguised as shower rooms. A doctor turned on the gas and killed them all. The bodies were robbed of gold teeth and burnt.

Robin Lindley: What was you research process? Did you search for resources in museums, galleries, hospitals, and other archives? Did you interview survivors and experts?

Charlie English: I was helped greatly by the Sammlung Prinzhorn, part of the Heidelberg university psychiatric clinic, where Prinzhorn had worked from 1919. They have an archive of art and patient records and letters written by Prinzhorn and others. I found other documents all around the world, from the Library of Congress to the British Library to the small city archive in Offenburg, where Franz Karl Bühler grew up. In all, the research phase lasted around two years.

There are sadly no survivors of Aktion T4 or living eyewitnesses to the story. It all happened too long ago, and many of the patients were already elderly. 

Robin Lindley: Can people still view some examples of the psychiatric art collected by Prinzhorn?

Charlie English: Yes, there is a gallery at the Sammlung Prinzhorn in Heidelberg. I highly recommend a visit.

Robin Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add for readers about your book and how this history resonates now?

Charlie English: This book is not about the present day, but as I was writing I felt it resonated strongly with the period we are living through now. Readers will draw their own conclusions, but I hope they might recognise some of the parallels. Mostly, though, I want them to enjoy reading it and hope it will inspire them to explore the art.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your insights and thoughtful comments Mr. English and congratulations on your gripping and humane study of art, tyranny, mass murder, and psychiatry. Best wishes for your new book and future endeavors.

Charlie English: Thank you Robin.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (history news network.org. His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Nick Licata, former Seattle City Council President and Author

Education at every level must allow students to openly express their opinions on taking responsibility for becoming citizens in our nation. Only when an engaged citizenry makes the government accountable to all without bias or perpetuating privileges can a democracy survive. That challenge is as real today as it was in the sixties.

Nick Licata, Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties

The nineteen sixties in America: a time of turbulence, activism, protest, and rapid change. Citizens came out of the seemingly quiescent fifties and woke to stark examples of corruption, inequality, and injustice. Many came to advocate for civil rights or women's liberation or environmental preservation or resist US militarism as a dubious and bloody war flared in Southeast Asia. 

And students on campuses across the country also cried out for their rights as they challenged archaic policies and rules and fought for democratic processes and inclusion in decisions that affected their lives. The student power movement charted a new course for accomplishing change and provided a template for action. And students today overwhelmingly believe that they can change the direction of our troubled nation.

In his riveting new memoir, Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), acclaimed municipal leader and author, Nick Licata, chronicles his experience as an undergraduate student activist and leader in the sixties at the Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which he describes as "one of the most conservative public universities outside the Deep South."

With lively prose and humor, Mr. Licata takes the reader into his college experience with the student movement at Bowling Green, from his wide-eyed first year of acclimation to his embrace of "participatory democracy" as proposed by the Students for a Democratic Society. He led a chapter of the SDS by his second year, an unlikely progressive organization at his hidebound college. Licata became a campus leader determined to help students challenge restrictive school policies from dress codes to curfew hours to beer and even sex. He also illuminated discrimination and injustice on campus. And students at this conservative college responded to his activism. They elected him student body president in his senior year—a tribute to his astute activism and his understanding of how to advance social change with an inclusive, enlightened student movement. 

In his book, Mr. Licata shows how a 99-percent white student body from working-class and middle-class families spoke out and accomplished lasting change. Among other things, Mr. Licata's efforts helped end discriminatory university practices affecting minority and women students. Beyond that, he showed how his fellow students could each become active citizens in a democracy.

Students and other readers are sure to find inspiration and wisdom relevant to today's struggle for a more just, healthy, and peaceful world from Mr. Licata's words, experience, and unfailing optimism for the future of democracy. 

Mr. Licata is an acclaimed progressive grassroots leader and an accomplished local official. He served as a Seattle City Council member for 18 years, eventually becoming Council President. During his tenure, he was named Progressive Municipal Official of the Year by The Nation magazine, and the Seattle Weekly named him Best Local Politician. He wrote or supported legislation for the $15-dollar minimum wage, paid sick leave, housing for the homeless, immigrant rights, environmental protection, arts and culture, and police accountability, among other issues. Eric Liu, author and founder/ CEO of Citizen University, has described Mr. Licata as "a rare combination of things: a thinker who knows grassroots activism, an idealist who can pragmatically wield power, and a politician who knows how to change culture."

Mr. Licata earned a MA degree in Sociology from the University of Washington and has been a Guest Lecturer at many universities. He also was the founding Board Chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 urban elected officials, and served on the board of National Municipal Democratic Officials. His publications include his previous book that encourages civic engagement, Becoming a Citizen Activist, which won the Gold Medal for Social Activism. He also writes his newsletter Citizenship Politics, covering political and social issues, with 10,000 national subscribers and more than 70 percent teaching political science or sociology in 262 universities and colleges in all 50 states. He also wrote Princess Bianca and the Vandals, a children's book dealing with environmental issues.

Mr. Licata generously responded to a series of email questions about his new memoir. 

Robin Lindley: Congratulations, Mr. Licata, on your fascinating new memoir Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. What sparked your book now, more than a half-century since the events you describe?

Nick Licata: Releasing the book was unplanned. I had written it about eight years ago and had only shared it with a handful of friends since then. One of them passed it onto his publisher in England that specialized in academic books. They read it and were excited to publish it. They recognized that the current student movement is like the mobilization in the sixties and, therefore, would be an informative textbook for today's students. 

Robin Lindley: How did you research this very personal account of your life in college? The details you recall are fascinating.

Nick Licata: I had saved a massive number of issues of my college's student newspaper along with alternative newspapers and the national paper for Students for a Democratic Society, New Left Notes. They all contained articles covering the day's social conflicts and political events. It was a dormant pile of papers until I stumbled across it and started reading them. I realized that they provided an inside narrative on the emergence and growth of student activism on my campus and other university campuses through the last half of the sixties' decade. I then interviewed former students and dug through the university's archives of internal memos among the administrators.             

Robin Lindley: A remarkable project. Your book focuses on the student power movement of the 1960s through your experience. What was the student power movement?

Nick Licata: The student power movement began with the Free Speech Movement (FSM) on the Berkeley University of California campus in the fall of 1964. There were sit-ins in response to the administration banning organizing and soliciting funds for off-campus political action groups. Police subsequently arrested 773 students, and a student strike shut down the campus for five days. 

The core movement philosophy was that students, and workers by extension, should have some say over the governance of the places where they studied and worked. That belief spread across the nation's universities resulting in student organizing for institutional changes on and off-campus for a decade. 

Robin Lindley: You detail your undergraduate odyssey at Ohio's Bowling Green State University from a quiet first-year student to student body president your senior year. When you were a small boy, did you see yourself as a future activist and political leader?

Nick Licata: Not at all. I just wanted to go to college. I didn't have any ambition other than to learn about the world outside of my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.

Robin Lindley: You overcame many obstacles to achieve academically and get to college. Readers may be surprised that you were failing in early elementary school because of dyslexia. How did that condition affect you, and how was it treated in the 1950s? 

Nick Licata: Dyslexia was not a commonly recognized affliction, so anyone who exhibited its characteristics was assumed just to be a "slow learner." I couldn't read until the fourth grade. I had the fear that I'd never be able to graduate from high school. Neither of my parents did, so I knew that was a real possibility. Going to college was like a utopia that seemed unreachable. But by my senior year, I got barely above average grades and was admitted into a public university.

Robin Lindley: When we spoke a few years back about your previous book, Becoming a Citizen Activist, you mentioned that a nun at an elementary school you attended failed to intercede when you told her about a bully abusing another student. Was that the origin of your belief in questioning authority?

Nick Licata: It was probably more motivated by self-preservation. There was a game called "pile-on." Essentially a roving band of hyperactive boys would swarm through the playground and spot some weakling or fat kid or someone that stood out. There were no minorities, so that wasn't a factor. Then they would pile onto the kid. I figured I would probably end up looking up from the bottom of a pile. So I felt there had to be some way to avoid such a fate. 

Hey, it was a Catholic school; the nuns were in charge. So, I approached one and suggested she do her job and get some control over the playground. She looked around, shrugged, turned to me, said, "Good luck," and walked off. That's when I figured out that authority had to be achieved by uniting the weaker ones to form a group for protection. 

Robin Lindley: It seems you've always exhibited a concern for others, a willingness to question the status quo, and a sense of fairness. What was the origin of those values for you?

Nick Licata: I think the above story best illustrates how I've come to see that through unity, there is strength; without an agreement, there is chaos. Suppose the status quo doesn't allow for fairness in how we should all be treated, then by necessity, that status quo must be challenged and changed. And a united front is the best chance of achieving that change.

Robin Lindley: Were you involved in activism or student politics before college? It seems you were almost apolitical when you entered college at Bowling Green in 1965.

Nick Licata: I wasn't political in the sense of joining student government in high school. But I had started organizing back in junior high. So I formed different clubs: an astronomer's club, a coin collectors club, and finally, a small, printed paper that didn't last long.

Robin Lindley: How did your parents influence your decision to attend college? You note that they were not college-educated.

Nick Licata: Both saw college as a ticket to getting a better job. They didn't have the slightest idea of what was taught at a college. But they firmly believed that if I could get in, I would try my hardest to graduate. And then I could have a good-paying job. 

Robin Lindley: You stress that Bowling Green was extremely conservative when you attended and that there were virtually no minority students. You also write that segregationist George Wallace and Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell attracted more interest than moderate voices. How did you cope?

Nick Licata: I was familiar with conservative politics because the anger of feeling ignored and disrespected was what I experienced in my youth. My parents and neighbors usually voted for Democrats, but they were very socially conservative. They were afraid of how other ethnic groups, which they thought of as races, were getting favors from the government while they weren't. When I went to college, I saw how many of the students came from similar social-economic backgrounds as mine. So, I was very familiar with that political point of view. 

Robin Lindley: How did you learn about Students for a Democratic Society, and why did this organization appeal to you as a young college student? Many now recall SDS as extremely radical and associated with bomb-makers and loud revolutionaries.

Nick Licata: The image of SDS as a radical, disruptive movement was stamped in the public's mind because of widely covered events like the students taking over Columbia University in New York City. 

SDS began as a very democratic organization that rejected ideology and violence. Its main philosophical underpinning was "participatory democracy," which was a term that became popular in the early sixties. Students were attracted to it because it offered an opportunity to influence their lives. It motivated students to challenge and demand changes at universities in their curriculums and eliminate many restrictive social rules.  

Robin Lindley: And how did you become a Bowling Green SDS chapter leader at this conservative college? 

Nick Licata: I became the leader of the Bowling Green State University SDS chapter mainly because I had perfect attendance at our meetings, and the other prominent leaders had been arrested or feared being arrested. But to be fair, we did rotate being the president of the chapter regularly. In addition, we practiced participatory democracy, and as such, we shared decision-making as much as reasonably possible within the organization. 

Robin Lindley: Didn't you face tremendous opposition from the administration and fellow students?

Nick Licata:  Before forming our SDS chapter, the most radical organization on campus was the Young Democrats, an official part of the Democratic Party. No independent Black, gay, or women organizations were represented on campus. So, we were the first one depicting a national organization that espoused fundamental change in government. Given that message, we were accused of being communist sympathizers by some students, faculty, and administrators, and a considerable debate started as to whether we should be allowed to exist. Finally, one professor gladly stepped forward to be our sponsor, and SDS was not on the US Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, so we were sanctioned. 

Robin Lindley: Who were some of your political allies as you led the SDS chapter? You've been recognized for your collaborative style as a local leader in Seattle.

Nick Licata: Most anyone could become an ally if they felt something was in their effort. Conservative students were as bored with classes as liberal students were. So, we talked about changing the content of courses. All students were opposed to the extreme social restrictions, and they united in changing them. Many conservative students became more open to national issues by working together to understand how people wanted more freedom.

Robin Lindley: How did you see the growing counterculture and the seeming embrace of free love, drugs, rock, and roll? A time of many temptations, as I recall. 

Nick Licata: The counterculture was an explosion that shocked the very foundations of a stolid status quo that was no longer relevant to most students' lives. For instance, it required women to wear a dress or skirt to eat dinner in the cafeteria. The counterculture press offered multi-colored covers that often presented sexually liberating imagery out of character from any other publication with wide circulation. The music was as liberating as the imagery. Sometimes, the open-air gatherings were nothing more than gathering folks together to play games and have picnics, even without a band playing. 

Robin Lindley: In the rapidly changing world of the sixties, you led efforts to assure student rights to free speech, beer, sex, and other issues. What do you see as some of your successes?

Nick Licata: We opened the dorms to allow both men and women to visit each other. We helped introduce new programs, like Black Studies and Women Studies. We got speakers on campus that talked about the outside world that was not just a promotion of a business-dominated one. We got birth control information freely distributed where it had previously been banned. 

Robin Lindley: Those were sweeping changes. You noted too that the campus newspaper was helpful in your efforts to speak truth to power, to officials such as the administration and college trustees. How did you see the role of the free press during college?

Nick Licata: It was critical. Without a newspaper willing to print something that covered national social justice movements and our foreign wars, students would have been ignorant of them or just would have received one-sided views.

Robin Lindley: And the press remains critical. You write that the SDS did not focus on the issues of student rights. What happened?

Nick Licata: SDS initially did address the issues of student rights; it was one of the primary reasons it became the largest student organization in the nation. But other events that were more important in the national arena, like civil rights, stopping the Vietnam War, and protecting worker rights, eventually overshadowed the more prosaic issue of student rights on campuses. But that was fine because the students began to think of themselves as citizens of a larger national community.  

Robin Lindley: You vividly describe how the war in Vietnam affected students when you were in college. How did opinions evolve as the war widened?

Nick Licata: Initially, pretty much all the students were supportive of the war. It seemed like we were doing a good thing stopping the communists from taking over a poor little country. But as the war continued, students, like many adults, began to question why are we there? The difference between the good guys and the bad guys was blurring. And then it was announced that college students would be drafted to fight in the jungles after they finished their four years or if they dropped out. So, as a result, while our campus remained still overall supportive, other campuses saw resistance to the war grow. 

Robin Lindley: You were very aware of racism and unequal treatment in college. How was it that a Black Student Union formed at your conservative, more than 99 percent white college? Did you have a role in recognizing the BSU? 

Nick Licata: Bowling Green's BSU was formed about the same time as ones were created at other college campuses. On our campus, it was a local effort, although the national fight for civil rights and Black identity were the movements that prompted local organizing. Our campus held its first Black Cultural Week in 1968. Some hostility from white students met it, but most students were either oblivious to it or curious. I persuaded the student council to amend our rules to seat two Black students immediately on the council. That generated a lot of very racist propaganda from disgruntled white students. But no violence resulted.

Robin Lindley: It's hard to believe now, but when you started college at Bowling Green, women students had a much more restrictive code of conduct than men. What were some of the rules that bound women students, and were those sexist strictures eliminated by the time you graduated in 1969?

Nick Licata: The rules were so restrictive that even though BGSU was a public institution, its social rules would have mirrored a strict Christian college's. Women had to return to their dorms by 11 pm on weekdays and one or two hours later on weekends, or they could be suspended. I knew of one or two who were. Men, of course, had no hour restrictions. Women also had a dress code, and men did not. There was a department of Home Economics, which I think was about being a good housewife. By my senior year, it was transformed into a general economics department. 

Robin Lindley: What tactics successfully challenged the college's rather hidebound administration and board of trustees?

Nick Licata: The tactic was to appeal to students' most immediate and basic needs if they did not infringe on the rights of others. In taking that approach, our SDS chapter became a champion of all students, not just the bohemians and hippies. 

Robin Lindley: As a vocal SDS leader, it seemed unlikely that you'd be elected student body president at Bowling Green. But you won. How did that happen? What were some of your achievements as president?

Nick Licata: I won because, as an activist, I promoted legislation in the student council, even though I did not have any elected position. I also wrote a column in the student newspaper about campus and national issues. And I frequently gave talks in the dorms about the politics of running a university that must involve student participation. I was openly and vocally opposed to the Vietnam War, but it wasn't the central theme of my campaign. 

I was surprised that I won; so was the president of the university, who couldn't believe it. I just seemed to have tapped into a sense of needing change, and given my record, I'd be a good person to lead what had been a somewhat dormant student council. 

One of my achievements was writing a Bill of Student Rights, which the student council endorsed overwhelmingly. I also supported efforts to start a Black Studies Program, offering birth control information on campus and having a counselor available on being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. 

Robin Lindley: Your book concludes with your summer of 1969 trip to the Woodstock Rock Festival just a few weeks after your graduation from college. What did you learn from that experience? You're notoriously optimistic. Did Woodstock contribute to that attitude?

Nick Licata: Woodstock was a fantastic event, not just for the phenomenal artists who appeared there but also for the overall spirit of community that enveloped the gathering. For three days, people were spontaneous helping each other. Over 500,000 kids lived on the grounds in rudimentary tents, some even in cars.  I did part of the time. Amazingly for the entire time, I never saw a police officer. Nobody was searching for alcohol or drugs. It was probably the largest peaceful concert gathering with a political message to have ever occurred in the US.

Robin Lindley: How would you summarize the legacy of the sixties' student power or student rights movement?

Nick Licata: It altered the minds not only of the participants but of those who just stood were watching. It allowed everyone to think about what they needed from the "system." It led them to ask questions that they might not ever have asked. They began challenging the immediate university educational environment. Still, their energy burst across the nation within a few years, linking to the already existing civil rights movement. Students moved on to fuel the movements pushing for recognizing the rights of all minorities, women, and gays. It also opened opportunities to live within intentional communities by encouraging communal living.

Robin Lindley: You are a champion of democracy and building coalitions through compromise. Now it seems that we have two parties: the Democratic Party and the Anti-democratic Party. Democracy in the US seems imperiled. How can we save democracy? Where do you find hope?

Nick Licata: Democracies throughout history have been limited to an upper class of property owners. America began that way and was that way for the first hundred years. Our democracy was a unique experiment. It was conducted by the largest populated country ever to have gone down that path. Now we just need to stay on that path because democracy is fragile. It can crumble. 

My goal is to spread the understanding of what it means to be a citizen by preserving individual rights while protecting the broader community's welfare. Unfortunately, ignorance of the need to balance those objectives feeds the fear of the unknown and dependence on simple solutions that usually weaken, not strengthen, a nation. 

Robin Lindley: How did the lessons you brought from the sixties inform your work as one of the most admired local politicians in Seattle history?

Nick Licata: It taught me not to be afraid of failure. Funny, I supported so many lost causes during my five city council terms that I dubbed myself the saint of lost causes. But in those efforts, strangely, I grew more optimistic. I survived. Life did not end. There was always another day. And if you enjoy the game of life, making the most of it not only for yourself but for all that you encounter, then you are indeed not only pursuing happiness but appreciating the time you can spend doing so. 

Robin Lindley: Is there anything you'd like to add for readers about your new book or your concerns today?

Nick Licata: I often end my letters with "Ever Onward," which is my version of "Further," the nominal name of Ken Kesey's 1964 psychedelic hippie bus, which drove across the nation, being the freeway that led from the corporate world to counterculture world. Enjoy the trip. Don't grind your teeth. Keep your eyes open for something different. Learn from looking back but keep moving forward. 

Robin Lindley: Thank you, Mr. Licata, for your insights and comments. And congratulations on your new book, Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. Your book sparked many memories for me, and I think young and old alike will appreciate your observations. Best wishes on the book and your continuing work.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin's email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War and the protests against it, author Kurt Vonnegut published his most celebrated novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.  His tale of the neurotic, time- traveling, war-traumatized veteran Billy Pilgrim struck a chord with readers around the world. And the novel became a touchstone for future writers on war such as Tim O’Brien, Karl Marlantes, and Kevin Powers.

Based in part on Vonnegut’s own experience as a prisoner of war who survived the February 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, his landmark novel captures the cruelty and waste of the war while punctuated by his trademark sardonic humor and riffs of marvelous hallucinatory fantasies.

Author and journalist Tom Roston considers Vonnegut’s life, his war experience, and the creation of Vonnegut’s iconic war novel in his captivating recent book The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five (Abrams Press). In addition to assessing Vonnegut’s literature, Mr. Roston investigates the psychological effect of war experiences on Vonnegut and explores whether the writer suffered from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Mr. Roston finds Slaughterhouse-Five a “rare, true war story,” as described by Vietnam veteran and revered novelist Tim O’Brien. The Writer’s Crusade details Vonnegut’s exposure to the horrors of war, to the absolute “obscenity and evil” of war. As a young GI, Vonnegut witnessed fellow soldiers suffer and die in combat. German soldiers captured him during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. Allied planes strafed the train he was riding to a POW camp and dozens of his fellow prisoners were killed. Vonnegut was transferred from a prison camp to the historic and ostensibly safe city of Dresden. He was held in a meat cellar/air raid shelter, the Slaughterhouse-Five, during the historic Allied firebombing of Dresden that left 25,000 dead. After the firestorm, his captors ordered Vonnegut find the dead, heap the corpses on a horse-drawn cart, and cremate them. The incinerated remains were mostly civilians--many women and many children.

Based on his extensive research and interviews with Vonnegut’s family and friends as well as prominent writers, Mr. Roston’s book considers how the war and memory affected Vonnegut’s creative process and his powerful storytelling. In his research, Mr. Roston gained access to resources such as personal papers and several early drafts of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Vonnegut’s words on war are still timely, as Mr. Roston notes. Now, another brutal European war of extermination rages in Ukraine. The stories of atrocities from there are heartbreaking and chilling as civilians are purposely targeted and slaughtered by Russian troops. According to recent reports, civilians have been raped, tortured, mutilated and murdered by enemy forces in Russia’s bid to destroy and dominate an independent, sovereign nation. Again, as in our “Good War,” the innocent are casualties, the collateral damage of industrialized warfare.

The Writer’s Crusade stands as a timeless and provocative study of war and art as well as a tribute to the genius of Vonnegut. With Slaughterhouse-Five, the legendary author fashioned a masterpiece from his memories and his creative spirit. Mr. Roston’s book plumbs the depths of Kurt Vonnegut’s humanistic and moral fiction as it addresses the effects of trauma on Vonnegut and other survivors and reflects on how war mirrors the human condition in Vonnegut’s potent antiwar novel.

Mr. Roston, a veteran journalist, began his career at The Nation and Vanity Fair magazines, before working at Premiere magazine as a senior editor. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Fast Company, The Guardian, and other publications. His other books include I Lost it at the Video Store: A Filmmakers’ Oral History of a Vanished Era and The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World. Mr. Roston lives in Brooklyn.

Mr. Roston generously responded to a series of email questions on his work and his new book on Vonnegut, The Writer’s Crusade.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Mr. Roston for discussing your work and your illuminating book on Kurt Vonnegut and his iconic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Your book seems a departure from your previous writing, although you have dealt with a wide variety of subjects in your articles and books. What inspired you to research and write this book?

Tom Roston: It came about when I was discussing ideas for my next book with my editor, Jamison Stoltz, at Abrams Press. Jamison had been working on a series of “books on books,” the previous ones being about 1984 and The Color Purple. We agreed that Slaughterhouse-Five would be a great novel to chew on.

Robin Lindley: You focus on the trauma of war in your book. My dad was a veteran of horrific combat in New Guinea in World War II. After the war, he displayed many signs of what we now call post traumatic stress disorder. Did you have friends or relatives that experienced stress issues from combat or other traumatic events? Have you experienced signs of PTSD?

Tom Roston: Not that I know of. My father, who also served in World War II, was killed in a car accident when I was ten years old. Did that traumatize me? Some would say, “Of course.” And perhaps that’s true. But, like Vonnegut, I have never lived my life thinking that this was the case. Of course, I was irrevocably changed by it. Hurt by it. But traumatized? It’s such a loaded word. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write about trauma when writing about Slaughterhouse-Five; to examine the meaning of trauma.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those illuminating comments. I’m sorry about the early loss of your father. Vonnegut experienced devastating events during World War II in his short months of combat service in the Army and his capture and imprisonment by the Germans. He eventually survived the firebombing of Dresden, where he was held prisoner in a slaughterhouse. Many readers, especially younger people, may not know the historical context of Slaughterhouse-Five. What are a few things you would like readers to understand about Vonnegut’s war service? What did he see?

Tom Roston: He saw how ridiculous and awful war is. And how it could and should never be glorified. My book came out before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So, until recently, the notions of the horror of war were fading in Americans’ minds, despite the recent disastrous pullout from Afghanistan. Now, we are being exposed to the brutality of war in a way that feels unprecedented. As sad as it is, the mass killings of people in Rwanda or Syria just haven’t had the same impact as what’s happening in Ukraine. So, this is my way of saying that Vonnegut saw in World War II what we are now seeing in Ukraine. And it should turn our stomachs the way it did his.

Robin Lindley: I appreciate your extensive research. You interviewed an array of experts on war trauma as well as authors who have written about war and even some Vonnegut family members and friends. You also found valuable archives. What was your process?

Tom Roston: I am not academic but I was writing a book about a book so I wanted to make that a strength: I wanted to go at Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five as a living, breathing cultural entity. I wanted to do some literary criticism but I also wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Kurt: I talked to academics but also his children and friends and fans and also used first-person. Vonnegut was a deeply populist, democratic guy. I felt like I could channel his ethos by approaching him with a similar spirit.

Robin Lindley: Did you ever meet Kurt Vonnegut or communicate with him?

Tom Roston: When I was just starting out in journalism, I was an intern at The Nation magazine. Vonnegut, by chance, called the magazine’s offices and asked for a favor. I was lucky enough to be available and gladly jumped at the opportunity. I translated some words into Khmer for him. He sent me a $50 check. It was a thrilling way to start my career.

Robin Lindley: At your suggestion, I re-read Slaughterhouse-Five last week. I hadn’t read it since around 1970. I was in college then at the University of Washington in Seattle as anti-war protests were an almost daily experience, often as tear gas wafted through campus. I wasn’t drafted, but was in danger of selection under the lottery system. An age of anxiety for many. How do you think the turmoil of the sixties—especially the war in Vietnam—influenced Vonnegut in writing Slaughterhouse-Five?

Tom Roston: He said it himself. I’m paraphrasing but he said that Vietnam showed how awful the war generals looked, how terrible the common soldiers were treated. It created an opening for him to write about how awful war was, even though he was writing about World War II, the supposedly “good war.” There are no good wars. Vietnam softened the culture to better recognize that fact.

Robin Lindley: Billy Pilgrim is the main character of Slaughterhouse-Five. Like Vonnegut, he survives capture by Germans and the firebombing of Dresden. Some people think Pilgrim represents Vonnegut. What did Vonnegut say about creating Pilgrim and whether he was Pilgrim or if Pilgrim was based on a real soldier?

Tom Roston: For more than thirty years, Vonnegut didn’t talk publicly about the real-life person, Joe Crone, whom he based Billy Pilgrim on. He waited until Crone’s parents had passed away.

Crone was in Vonnegut’s POW camp in Germany. Crone was a sad-sack soldier who wasted away and eventually died of malnourishment. But, in Vonnegut’s eyes, Crone had given up on life. Vonnegut saw in Crone all of the inhumanity of war, the waste, and destruction. And he fictionalized him to create Billy Pilgrim.

There are clearly elements of Vonnegut himself in Pilgrim but Vonnegut was a fighter, not a waif. He was punished by his Nazi captors for talking back to them. Pilgrim is totally passive.

Robin Lindley: Vonnegut was obviously haunted by the war and you sought, I think, to determine whether or not he had PTSD. In public, he often indicated that his war experience wasn’t a big deal, but you also found several early drafts of his landmark novel and other evidence of his near obsession with his memories of war. What do you think of his public comments versus his actions?

Tom Roston: I think Vonnegut was very much a product of his generation. Which isn’t to slight him in any way, but most men who went to war tried to put it behind them. They repressed it. Or they became alcoholics. Some used their war experiences to fuel them. In a way, Vonnegut achieved all of the above. He was a high-functioning, depressive alcoholic who wrote some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century! PTSD is a diagnosis that arose long after his war experiences. I think it’s fair to say he was traumatized by the war if you have an open definition of the word. But to outright say he had PTSD is something I don’t feel comfortable saying. Some of his kids do, however.

Robin Lindley: You indicate that Slaughterhouse-Five anticipated the diagnosis of PTSD that psychiatrists adopted in 1980. Is there anything you’d like to add on how the book relates to the diagnosis?

Tom Roston: I just want to reiterate what I established in my book; that part or the mastery and brilliance of Slaughterhouse-Five is how perfectly it anticipated the diagnosis. And it’s not a mystery or magic. Vonnegut understood war and what it does to people. And the rest of the world, including the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders], had to catch up with him. And that’s partly why people loved the book when it came out. It fictionalized the trauma of war before we understood it as well as Vonnegut did.

Robin Lindley: In Slaughterhouse-Five, Pilgrim periodically comes “unstuck in time.” He can travel randomly from his birth to his death. And he also travels to the planet Tralfamadore. What do his time travels represent? Do the episodes equate to hallucinations or the dissociation seen with PTSD?

Tom Roston: They are both hallucinations and disassociations caused by Pilgrim’s damaged mental state. They don’t actually happen. But, for Billy, and for many readers for that matter, they are real. That’s the wonder and beauty of the novel. I don’t think people are “wrong” for thinking they’re actually happening to Billy. But I hope that by the second or third reading of the novel they come to think that they are. It’s an indication of how fluid and delightful the novel is.

Robin Lindley: After each death in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut punctuates the death scene or account with the phrase “So it goes.” What did you learn about this phrase? Did Vonnegut explain his use of these three words?

Tom Roston: I’ll pull this right out of my book: “So it goes” is repeated over a hundred times in the novel, after every death. Vonnegut later said he was inspired to use “so it goes” as a refrain by Céline’s book Journey to the End of the Night. “It was a clumsy way of saying what Céline managed to imply,” Vonnegut writes in Palm Sunday. “In everything he wrote, in effect: ‘Death and suffering can’t matter nearly as much as I think they do. Since they are so common, my taking them so seriously must mean that I am insane’.” In Vonnegut’s hands, this grim thinking turns into a paradoxically indifferent lament. It is resignation, rage, sorrow, and laughter.

Robin Lindley: One of the most moving scenes for me in Slaughterhouse-Five is the war newsreel recounted in reverse as Billy Pilgrim views the film on television. Bomb blasts on the ground shrink and disappear as bombers suck bombs back into their bomb bays, aviators become babies, and so forth, until the minerals that were used for steel and other metals to make bombers and bombs are returned to the mines where they are hidden so they won’t hurt anyone again. You write about this moving scene. What do you make of it?

Tom Roston: It is brilliant in its accessibility and poignance. As Cher sand it best, “If we could turn back time!”

Robin Lindley: You call Slaughterhouse-Five a work of metafiction. What does that mean and how is that category different from say a work of science fiction or fantasy or war novel or a literary novel?

Tom Roston: The fictional character Billy Pilgrim’s experiences loosely parallel Vonnegut’s, which makes it metafiction, meaning it upends the conventional fictional narrative by blurring the line between the author and the story being told. Vonnegut does this throughout the novel. He opens the book in the first chapter, speaking to the reader. He ends the book again talking to the reader and speaking of his father and Billy Pilgrim as if they are on the same plain of reality. He drops himself into Billy’s story four times. He is breaking the wall between fiction and nonfiction in a way that is mischievous, delightful and illuminating. It’s one of the main reasons I love the novel so much.

Robin Lindley: While not lighthearted, Vonnegut’s voice in his novel is sardonic and there are many comic moments that relieve the sense of horror and loss and sorrow of many events in the book. How do you see Vonnegut’s use of humor in this anti-war masterpiece?

Tom Roston: I’ll turn to my book again: He was asked in an interview for Playboy in 1973 why he chose to write his Dresden novel as a work of science fiction. “The science fiction passages in Slaughterhouse-Five are just like the clowns in Shakespeare,” he said. “When Shakespeare figured the audience had had enough of the heavy stuff, he’d let up a little, bring on a clown or a foolish innkeeper or something like that, before he’d become serious again. And trips to other planets, science-fiction of an obviously kidding sort, is equivalent to bringing on the clowns every so often to lighten things up.”

Robin Lindley: Your book is timely and is sure to strike a chord with readers who are concerned about collective anxiety from COVID and now war in Ukraine. Can most of us now be experiencing a sort of PTSD in the wake of the life changing measures and massive losses during the last two years of the pandemic?

Tom Roston: People can choose to call their experiences what they like. PTSD is such a buzz word so it makes me shudder sometimes, especially because it’s such a spectrum diagnosis. Do you have PTSD when your barista keeps getting your coffee order wrong? Some people say so. But we live in a world now that some are really terribly traumatized by COVID or the terrible war in Ukraine. So I hope it makes people more appreciative of those who are really truly damaged by the horrors that can happen. I don’t want to end on a buzzkill but that’s the miracle of Slaughterhouse-Five. He tells a horrific story of war but it comes off as funny and strange. And thoughtful. Man, did Vonnegut have a talent to make us laugh and think. We need that now in these crazy times.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your generous and illuminating comments and insights Mr. Roston. I hope your book and Slaughterhouse-Five find many new readers at this fraught time. Congratulations on a superb study of an iconic author, his anti-war masterpiece, and the puzzling medical condition we now call post traumatic stress disorder.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin's email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

“I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.” Smedley D. Butler, major general, U.S. Marine Corps (ret.), 1935

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States began building a powerful empire beyond the contiguous states on the North American continent. The US military—often at the behest of American businesses and financial institutions—was at the forefront of interventions in numerous countries from Cuba and Haiti to China and the Philippines. In some cases, the nations were annexed, the usually nonwhite populations were subjugated, and puppet governments that protected American interests were installed through force or other persuasion.

Most of these violent campaigns are now forgotten. For most Americans, this bloody history of American conquest is presented, if at all, as a series of heroic adventures to bring seemingly less advanced peoples our ideals and to prepare them to govern themselves.

The US Marines played a prominent role in making safe for democracy the far-flung targets of American imperialism. And Marine officer Smedley Butler (1881-1940), known as “the Fighting Quaker,” served with distinction in virtually all of these actions to expand American empire.

Butler was the most highly decorated Marine before the Second World War and attained the rank of major general by the time of his retirement in 1931. In the last years of his life, however, he became an unlikely voice against war, fascism, capitalism, and imperialism. Although Butler was a widely revered American hero and darling of the press during his military career, today he is almost unknown, as are the actions he served in and later disavowed, including participating in brutal invasions, improvising terror campaigns, installing puppet leaders, creating militarized police forces to protect American profiteers, and erasing history by destroying archives and silencing anti-American opponents.

Smedley Butler in China, 1900 (Marine Corps History Department)

Award-winning author Jonathan M. Katz follows in the footsteps of Smedley Butler as he recounts the early history of American imperialism in his revelatory and groundbreaking new book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Martin’s Press). Mr. Katz chronicles Butler’s evolution from his Quaker youth to his military service to his surprising repudiation of war and imperialism in his later years.

Mr. Katz also brings the legacy of past US interventions to the present with his firsthand reports back from his travels to the sites of Butler’s service, the targets of conquest and colonization. This vivid history is based on Mr. Katz’s meticulous research into sources such as Butler’s personal letters and diaries and documents from fellow Marines and political and business leaders, as well as materials from those who fought the Americans and lived under American rule.

 Mr. Katz is a widely acclaimed foreign correspondent and author. His first book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, was a PEN Literary Award finalist and won the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award for the year’s best book on international affairs. He is also a recipient of the James Foley/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism. Further, he regularly contributes to the New York Times and other publications as well as offering broadcast commentary on radio and television. He has been a National Fellow at New America and a director of the Media & Journalism Initiative at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.

In addition, as the Associated Press correspondent in Haiti in 2010, Mr. Katz survived the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, and he provided the first international alert of that disaster. He later uncovered evidence that United Nations peacekeepers had caused and were covering up a devastating post-quake cholera epidemic. His initial stories prompted him to conduct six more years of investigation along with epidemiologists and legal advocates for the victims.

Mr. Katz generously discussed his work and his new book by telephone from his office in Virginia.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Mr. Katz on your wide ranging and groundbreaking book Gangsters of Capitalism on the history of American empire. Before getting to the book, I’d like to ask about your background. You really took a deep dive into the research on these overlooked or forgotten American military engagements, wars, occupations, and massacres during the early 20th century. Your research is meticulous. You are an award-winning journalist, but did you also have a background in history?

Jonathan Katz: Thank you. I have a bachelor's degree in American studies and history, and I studied history at the undergraduate level. My wife, Claire Payton, is a professional historian with a PhD in history, so I hesitate to say that I'm trained in history after seeing what it looks like to be trained at the doctoral level.

But I studied history and was inculcated in basic historical methods as an undergrad. I had to re-educate myself with this book. I had never worked in an archive before I started this project, for instance. I had to learn all of that – it was really my wife who gave me my formative instruction on how to navigate the first archive that I went to, the National Archives. Then I went on from there.

And I had some other tools in my background because there’s quite a lot of overlap between the methods of doing journalistic research and historical research. Certainly, in the parts of the book when I’m doing oral history and interviewing people, I drew much more on my experience as a journalist.

I should also acknowledge a great professor from my freshman year at Northwestern. I took an eye-opening course on U.S. diplomatic history with Ken Bain, who is a historian, though these days I believe he mostly teaches other professors how to teach.

Robin Lindley: Your writing about history is lively and accessible. I’m older than you, but I didn’t get much of the American imperial history you share when I was in high school or college. It seems that American foreign policy was framed then in terms of civilizing other nations and bringing the gifts of our idealism to less fortunate people. And I now thought that I knew a lot about the history of American imperialism, but your book revealed much more for me.

Jonathan Katz: I also didn’t learn the history that I cover and recount in this book in my own education growing up. It was a huge blind spot for me as well, despite the fact that I did study some things that you could certainly describe as American imperialism in school. I took Prof. Bain’s course in the mid-nineties on the history of foreign and diplomatic relations from 1945 to the present, but in that one I learned about American imperialism mostly during the Cold War. Even then I knew very little about American imperialism that could really bridge my gap between the end of Reconstruction to World War II. That was just a blind spot in my learning.

Robin Lindley: I realize that you had your own firsthand, personal experience with American imperialism from your years in Haiti. Your powerful earlier book, The Big Truck That Went By, is a brilliant account of your experience there. Did your interest in the history of imperialism grow from your experience in Haiti?

Jonathan Katz: I first encountered that history in my own life when I was based in the Caribbean as an Associated Press correspondent—first for two years in the Dominican Republic, and then for three and a half years in Haiti. I had no idea that the United States had occupied both of those countries for as long as they had. It was a very, very visceral lesson in the endurance and profound effects of American imperial control on those countries and on the people in them. And I experienced that in real time when I was reporting there.  

That’s how I came to do this book. I put together the things that I had in my head with history such as the CIA coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala [in 1954] and other things that happened earlier that made sense as an arc. I picked up bits and pieces and then had to assemble them together.

Robin Lindley: Then you focus on the history through the lens of the “Fighting Quaker,” the once revered US Marine officer Smedley Butler, who eventually attained the rank of major general and was the most decorated Marine before World War II. How did you decide to follow in Butler’s footsteps and then become a character yourself by traveling to each country and bringing up to date in the different areas where he served?

Jonathan Katz: I was trying to solve a couple of different problems from a writing standpoint. When I first embarked on the project, I didn’t know if there was going to be enough material directly from Butler’s journals or letters. I was also afraid that the account was going to feel remote to a modern-day audience. And the last thing was that I’m not a professional historian. I'm a journalist, and my core competencies that mark the good parts of my work today are being out in a country, smelling the air, talking to the people, and observing things in real time. I wanted to bring that sensibility to the book.

As it turned out, I actually started digging into the archives, and I learned—much to my shock and glee—that there was a ton of material. Butler had written incredible letters in incredible detail. And there were things written by other Marines, and then by the people that the Marines were fighting against or serving among.

So, the Butler era parts of the book were much richer and much more accessible than I thought they were going to be. That created a new and unexpected writing problem, which was that I then had to make certain that the modern material I was writing would be as interesting and as engaging and as revelatory as the historical stuff. I hope I pulled it off.

Initially, I was trying to solve the problem of keeping a mass audience engaged as if they were there, and it turned out that I had an embarrassment of riches with all of this amazing historical material. I was doing journalism and oral history in the modern day to follow up on the history. That created a writing issue of trying to figure out the structures of all of these themes which was a negotiation that lasted five to seven years. And it wasn't smoke and mirrors to make things seem more relevant. I wanted to show that this era is relevant and the things that happened in Butler’s Day continue. They didn’t begin with him and didn't end at the end of his career or with the Second World War.

Robin Lindley: It's an innovative and engrossing book that has such resonance now. What are a few things you might say to introduce readers to Smedley Butler? He was a distinguished Marine officer who surprisingly dedicated the last years of his life challenging militarism and more.  I don't think most people now remember him.

Jonathan Katz: Butler was a Marine who joined the Marine Corps in 1898 during the war against Spain. He was 16 years old, and he lied about his age to join the Corps. His first duty posting was the freshly seized Cuban port of Guantanamo Bay, which the Americans had just taken and have not relinquished since. And from there, he went with very few exceptions to every invasion, intervention, occupation, and war that the United States fought from 1898 on. He retired in 1931as a major general. He was twice the recipient of the Medal of Honor and a number of other awards.

But the thing that really makes him stand out in American history is that he spent the last ten years of his life in the 1930s speaking out against American imperialism and crusading against war in general as well as fascism. The book begins and ends with this episode in his life in 1933 and 1934 when he was approached by a bond salesman who claimed to be representing a group of powerful capitalists, industrialists, and bankers with a plan to essentially overthrow Franklin Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist dictator.

Butler testified to that effect before a congressional committee. Obviously, that plot never came to fruition, but the bond salesman alleged that many people were involved. Today, there are many around the world who have heard of Butler, but the groups that most retain his memory are the Marines who learned about the two Medals of Honor in boot camp; conspiracy theory nuts who learned about “the business plot,” as it has become known; and antiwar activists who like to pass around the pamphlet that he published in 1935, War is a Racket.

Robin Lindley: You vividly recount the many different campaigns that Butler was involved with from Cuba and the Philippines to China, the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond. There were many invasions, wars, coups, and occupations that most people never learn about. For example, I think many people know little or nothing about the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) when the US military crushed a Filipino rebellion for independence and massacred combatants and civilians alike.

Jonathan Katz: It’s very hard to encapsulate all of Butler’s campaigns. That’s why I wrote an entire book about it. But there are multiple ways to speak to the history.

When talking specifically about the Philippines, what happened there was that the United States declared war on the entire Spanish Empire in 1898, which meant not just in Cuba, but in all of Spain's holdings including Puerto Rico, which we took, and then the really big prize of the Philippines, an enormous group of islands 7,000 islands. And the Philippines are across the South China Sea from China, and the big goal of American capitalists was markets that, to this day, people still dream about. If they could just sell goods to one percent of all the people in China, they would get rich. So, people were thinking of that, even then.

The Philippines had been a colony of Spain for three centuries at that point. Like the Cubans, the leaders of the Philippine revolutionary movement against Spain welcomed the Americans at first as partners in their fight for independence only to be betrayed by the Americans. Congress, responding to internal pressure in American politics, had indemnified the US against annexing Cuba. But there was no protection for anywhere else in the Spanish empire, including Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.

So, at the end of the war against Spain, the Americans staged a mock battle against the Spanish in which Spain surrendered to the Americans but not to the Filipinos. And the McKinley Administration paid off the Spanish government to the tune of 20 million 1898 dollars. The US then declared itself the colonial master of the Philippines. We annexed it outright and Filipinos clearly did not like that. A war broke out between the Americans and the Filipinos, and that lasted into 1902, with the fighting continuing in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago for another ten years after that.

It was an extraordinarily bloody war. The Americans won and the Philippines became a wholly-owned U.S. colony until World War II. And a year after World War II ended, once we had properly demolished Manila in kicking out the Japanese, the Truman administration finally gave the Philippines its independence. But the country remained, to a large extent, a client state of the United States for decades after that.

The other thing that I would say as an umbrella way of looking at all of these actions is that there were very clear material and political reasons for why American leaders at that moment were so interested in expanding the reach of the United States into all these different territories. A lot of it, as Butler identifies in his writings in the 1930s, comes down to capital. It comes down to specific resources that Americans could gain control over. There were ports and shipping lanes that Americans gain control over. For some people. like Teddy Roosevelt at the beginning, it's very much a political project. He saw an opportunity to use American commercial and military power to create a nation that would rival the major states and empires of Europe. And a lot of other people were along for the ride: bankers, industrialists, shipping merchants, and others.

All of these military episodes provided an opportunity to get in on the commercial ground floor, as Butler said about China, and to control either outright or informally local governments who would defend American access to their markets and their resources against all others. That is what marks essentially all of the episodes that I talk about in the book.

Robin Lindley: And it’s interesting that Butler, in addition to participating in invasions and bloody massacres and occupations, also had a gift for erasing history. You go into that activity in some depth in writing about Haiti around 1915, when the US actually took over the Haitian government.

Jonathan Katz:  Yes. The US invaded Haiti in 1915 and declared a formal, official occupation of Haiti. Occupation was a euphemism to suggest we were not colonizing them but were just occupying them for a little while, and that little while ended up being until 1919.

The episode that you're talking about in particular was in 1917 when Butler stormed the Haitian parliament. And remember, Haiti as a country was born in a revolution of enslaved people against slavery and their French colonial masters. They had been a country for over a hundred years at that point in Butler’s career.

Haiti prohibited foreigners from owning land there, and American capitalists don't like that prohibition. Because the US was occupying Haiti, Americans wanted to make money there. They wanted to own land. To own sugar plantations and pineapple fields. Then the State Department crafted a constitution for Haiti. When he ran for vice president in the 1920s on the campaign trail Franklin Roosevelt actually claimed that he personally wrote the constitution, although that's hard to believe considering that this constitution most likely would have come out of the State Department and not the Navy Department where FDR served.

The Haitians didn't want this constitution but we had already decapitated the executive and we selected a puppet president. However, the Parliament was still nominally independent and was preparing to reject ratification of this document. Butler then assembled a column of Marines and Haitian gendarmes, which were the client military that Butler set up in Haiti. They ended up being the model for the future client militaries in places such as the Caribbean and Vietnam and all the way to Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, Butler led the client military, the gendarmes, and his Marines onto the floor of the Haitian Parliament and declared the Parliament shuttered, and the Parliament didn't meet again for another 12 years. In the absence of the Parliament, the Marines and the gendarmes then oversaw an election in which the people were essentially coerced to vote for this constitution.

In the immediate aftermath of the shuttering of Parliament, Butler called all of the newspaper editors in Port au Prince to his office and ordered them not to breathe a word of the details of how Parliament was shut down and how this vote went down. Butler also went to the Parliament building and personally removed from the Parliamentary archive records of the last votes that the Parliament had been undertaking to reject this constitution.

We know about this coup by Butler now because, when Republicans took power in the US in the 1920s, one of their first orders of business was to hold hearings in the Senate to investigate the details of what happened during the occupation of Haiti – which up until then had been overseen by Democrats. They called to testify a witness who would become the first post occupation president of Haiti. He and his colleagues told Senators what happened, which is the only reason that we know. This was a very clear example of the US suppression and destruction of the historical record—in real time.

But the Republicans did nothing to end the occupation of Haiti. It ended up being Franklin Roosevelt who ended the occupation in 1934.

Robin Lindley: As you vividly recount, Butler’s evolution was incredible. He was a devoted Marine who was decorated for serving in brutal campaigns usually against non-white populations in numerous countries. The title of your book, Gangsters of Capitalism, captures a lot about the evolution of this dedicated military officer who turned around in the 1930s to become a voice for anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and the anti-war movement. And, as you mentioned, he exposed a fascist coup planned by far-right business leaders. That story is especially timely in view of recent anti-democratic movements and the rightwing coup to reverse our free and fair presidential election in 2020. Who was behind the business coup in the 1930s to overthrow the FDR Administration and how was Butler involved?

Jonathan Katz: The bond salesman who approached Butler in 1933 was Gerald C. MacGuire, and he sold bonds for a Wall Street firm headed by a guy named Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy who, as I found in my research, was really the linchpin of this plan that evolves over the course of 1933 and 1934.

As it starts out, they want Butler to go to an American Legion meeting and denounce Franklin Roosevelt for taking the dollar off the gold standard. And they try to convince Butler by appealing to him on the basis of what they knew was his immense sympathy for the veterans who were demanding what was known as “the bonus,” the back pay that they had been promised by a succession of presidents going back to Woodrow Wilson for their service in the First World War. To Butler, however, that made no sense. What did the gold standard have to do with the bonus? Nothing.

But the courtship of Butler continued, and by August 1934, MacGuire had been on a junket across fascist Europe. He visited Rome and Berlin, where Mussolini and in Hitler respectively were in power. Also in 1934, MacGuire crucially visited Paris just a couple of weeks after a proto-January 6th moment in which a loose and often infighting confederation of French fascists, far right groups, and a group of breakaway communists stormed the French legislature to prevent essentially a handover of power to a center-left government on the basis of a bunch of conspiracy theories. The idea was that that French Centrists were going to somehow turn France into a new redoubt of Bolshevism.

MacGuire told Butler that [the business plot] would basically do here what they did in France, modeled on a group called the Croix de Feu which was a far right, quasi-fascist, French veterans’ organization. And this business group wanted Butler to lead half a million armed World War I veterans up Pennsylvania Avenue and then surround the White House to intimidate Franklin Roosevelt into either resigning or delegating power to a cabinet secretary who the plotters would name.

MacGuire told Butler, among others, that a group would emerge to back this effort, and Butler identified the group as the American Liberty League which took shape in the weeks after a meeting between Butler and MacGuire in Philadelphia.

Robin Lindley: I don’t recall learning about the Liberty League before reading your book.

Jonathan Katz: The American Liberty League was essentially a political activist group led by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in America then. It was the brainchild of one of the DuPont brothers of DuPont Chemical, one of the leading weapons manufacturers in the world at the time. There was also Alfred P. Sloan, the head of General Motors, and the heads of McCann Erickson ad agency, Phillips Petroleum, Sun Oil, etc. There were also powerful politicians including the last two Democratic presidential candidates, Al Smith and John W. Davis. And crucially, in terms of our story here, Gerald MacGuire's boss, Grayson Murphy, was the treasurer of the Liberty League. Murphy told Butler that this group would provide the financial muscle, the weapons, the strategy, and so on.

It was with Murphy's allegation to Butler and then Butler's testimony to Congress that the Liberty League would be involved. That is how the business plot involved all of these extremely powerful figures in the Liberty League that sold itself as a society to protect the Constitution, but was actually an anti-New Deal front. These businessmen were capitalists who were afraid that their fellow patrician President Roosevelt would sell them out and basically turn America into a Bolshevik state. That was the way they saw the world, which is still the way that a lot of conservatives today in 2022 see any attempt at social democracy or democratic socialism, including programs like Social Security and the Civilian Conservation Corps and other projects that were part of the New Deal. And that was the Liberty League view.

The Liberty League itself didn’t last for very long as a major force in American politics. The New Deal was so successful that attempts to create coalitions to dismantle it weren’t very successful for the rest of FDR’s presidency. By the time he ran for his third and fourth terms, the Republicans who ran against him had to fashion themselves as liberals to be taken seriously because conservatism was looked down upon. But MacGuire was courting Butler in 1933 at the very beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency when those tendencies had not yet gelled. And Grayson Murphy was a longtime financier with extensive experience in military intelligence. He had been all over the world as part of America’s imperial project. For him or a DuPont or any of the other big, powerful figures of the Liberty League, there was then an opportunity to end the New Deal. They knew that they wouldn’t be able to do it at the ballot box even by 1934, but at least some of them plausibly thought that they could do it using violence, and that’s what we see in the Liberty League.

Robin Lindley: Butler’s testimony put an end to the business coup, it seems. What do you think happened with Butler that caused his evolution, that prompted his antiwar and anti-fascist views in the 1930s? He conceded that, as a Marine, he had been “a high class muscle man” for American business. Did he discover his conscience?

Jonathan Katz: He was a Quaker who came from an antiwar and egalitarian tradition, which was part of the reason, ironically, that he got involved in the Marines in the first place. When he went to war in 1898 against the Spanish, he was fighting an anti-imperialist war. He, like a lot of Americans, had learned about the horrific things that the Spanish were doing in Cuba at that moment. Most notoriously, the Spanish governor general in Cuba invented concentration camps the 1890s.

Butler, in a contradictory, blinkered way, totally disregards the Quaker’s peace testimony, which bans [participation] in all wars and all military actions for any pretense whatsoever. But there was a Quaker route for Butler in his mind as he went to help free “little Cuba,” as he put it, from the Spanish. And, maybe to a certain extent and for his own material reasons, he lost sight of his original reasons for joining the Marines.  He became obsessed with proving himself as a man and as a Marine.

He accrued status and fame and attracted his wife Ethel, and all of these other things as a Marine officer. But by the 1920s he was starting to turn back a bit [to Quakerism]. I think also that he suffered from what's now known as moral injury. He was someone who grew up with a deep moral code which he was violating over and over again.

On his last Marine mission [in 1927], Butler returned to China for the second time, this time as a general, and he was there basically for first moment of the Chinese Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists. He spent a couple of years in China and also saw the coming Japanese invasion and occupation. The Japanese were also involved and were there alongside him. He uses power as a general to keep his Marines out of battle and to do everything that he can to prevent the outbreak of what he sees coming: a potential world war in the Pacific, which of course later occurs.

Robin Lindley: And Butler also was defending Standard Oil in China then.

Jonathan Katz: Exactly. He was deployed to Shanghai, and he ended up in Tianjin, the port closest to Beijing, on the Grand Canal near where it hits the ocean. Standard Oil gave the Marines space to station on their compound. Basically, the only real action that his Marines saw in his years in China during that mission was putting out a fire at the Standard Oil compound, which won acclaim.

Standard Oil in particular, and other American business interests, were the main reason the Marines were sent to China because there was spiraling violence in China and Americans wanted defense. And there was a long track record of Marines defending oil interests, most notably in Mexico in 1914, the place where Butler received his first Medal of Honor. He was called into Mexico by the lawyer for Texaco and Standard Oil, William F. Buckley, Sr., who actually asked for the invasion of Mexico in 1914.

Robin Lindley: Did Butler ever express second thoughts about racism and or write with sympathy for the non-white populations that he often engaged with military force?

Jonathan Katz: I found no indication that he ever did any real soul searching on race. What we today call structural white supremacy was all around him, including a very overt white seal on his Marine collar. I think that race remained a major blind spot for him.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing those glimpses from the complicated history of American empire. I appreciate that you traveled to each of the locations where Butler served and that, in addition to your archival research, you were on the ground and updated these stories with reports from these areas now. You learned that even if people in America don't know much about Smedley Butler and the Marines, certainly people in these far-flung sites of empire do.

Jonathan Katz: Yes. To a great extent this was a book about historical memory—the things that get remembered and the things that don't. The epigraph of the book is a Haitian proverb: “The one who deals the blow forgets. The one who carries the scar remembers.”

I wanted to go to all of the places where Butler and his Marines went. There's no replacement for getting out and being in a place and talking to people and then feeling the air and seeing what things look like. You can't really recreate through photos and letters, especially very old ones.

I also knew that the people in these places carry with them in some cases personal memories, and in other cases familial and communal memories of these moments that Americans don't know anything about for the most part. They are relegated to very specialized areas of academic and historical and military studies.

One of the most telling experiences that I had along those lines was in the Philippines on the island of Samar. I went to the village of Balangiga, which was a place where there was an enormous massacre of an occupying US Army unit by some local insurgents and villagers. Then there was a revenge massacre carried out by Littleton Waller and the Marines on orders to turn the island into a “howling wilderness.” That’s a place that people may know because, over the course of these reprisals, American troops took the church bells from the main church in of Balangiga and held onto them until they were returned in 2018. When I was there, I met with the mayor of Balangiga. I asked how he understood this period because, in the middle of Balangiga, there is an incredible monument with life size statues in gold depicting a diorama of the massacre of the American soldiers in 1901.

While I was there, the mayor told me about a pageant that the town puts on in which they recreate both the initial massacre of Americans and then the US revenge massacre of local people. I asked him how he looked at Americans today when he leaves his office every day and sees this statue and the town puts on this pageant. He talked about how he actually has family in the United States and he has a brother who was a US Marine. Because of the long period of US colonization in the Philippines, there's a very deep and very profound relationship between Filipinos and Americans that involves a lot of allyship and sympathy. I also asked him about the pageant and he said it is very important that we remember the past. And when I asked how he felt about Americans today, he said this is all in the past, and we can forget it. And then I said it sounds like you're saying that we have to remember and forget the past at the same time. He didn’t hesitate. He just said yes. And I think that captures the complexity and all of these issues, even for Smedley Butler.

America represented a lot of good things and some terrible events. The past is useful in some ways, and the past is destructive in other ways, and remembering these things can be destructive to other people's goals in the present, so there is a real negotiation between remembering and forgetting, and that reality infuses all of these circumstances right up until today.

Robin Lindley: And we’re still empire building in other ways now. And our democracy is under threat as demonstrated by the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And the Big Lie of the former president persists.

Jonathan Katz: Exactly. When I set out to write this book in 2016, I thought I would be writing about the roots of, of America's neoliberal empire in the early 20th century as we were about to experience the presidency of Hillary Clinton. Instead, history in our own time turned in a very different direction. All of the time that I was writing this book, the fault lines widened in America. It was only by doing this very granular and in-depth history that takes very seriously the material reality of both the reasons for and the practice of American imperialism in many different circumstances, that I could really see that the ties between the things that we normally relegate to either the realms of foreign policy or domestic policy.  I could see how those things come together and the ways that wars and the other things that we do out there have this overwhelming tendency to always come back home.

We are seeing in America, at this moment, the effects of over a century of imperialism and dehumanization and using violence to get our way. We're seeing those things come back here. That was good for my book as a writer, but very bad for me and everybody else who is an American. And it reached its contemporary height on January 6th.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your sharing your insights and thoughtful comments Mr. Katz. Gangsters of Capitalism is a groundbreaking and carefully researched examination of American empire. Congratulations again on the book and the glowing reviews. Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin's email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

The immense casualties of World War I shocked a generation that believed at the outset in 1914 that the war would last only a few weeks. Almost ten million soldiers were killed in combat and 21 million were wounded in the slaughter that dragged on until November 1918. Great Britain alone lost one million combatants killed and more than two million wounded. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, the British suffered almost sixty thousand casualties including 19,240 men killed -- the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.

This first large-scale, industrialized conflict produced gruesome carnage and massive casualties in enormous battles as the technology of war far outpaced the progress of modern medicine. New weapons such as machine guns, powerful new bullets, heavy artillery, flamethrowers, tanks, poison gas, and strafing airplanes tested the skills of medical personnel charged with treating wounded and dying men. The innovative weapons lacerated, punctured, macerated, incinerated, tore apart and atomized soldiers who fought from fetid, wet trenches, breeding grounds for infection and sepsis.

Disfiguring facial wounds became prominent and feared injuries because helmets left the face unprotected and the face was especially vulnerable to projectiles and shrapnel in trench warfare. The injuries were not only destructive to a patient’s appearance and expression but also interfered with function and sensation from breathing, swallowing, speaking and eating to seeing, smelling and tasting.

Early in the war, pioneering surgeon Dr. Harold Gillies took on the challenge of mending and restoring the mutilated faces of wounded British soldiers. The Cambridge-educated New Zealander developed a range of techniques to reconstruct broken faces as well as to restore function and optimize appearance. Each patient required novel approaches to address trauma such as crushing facial fractures, broken or lost jaws and noses, broken eye sockets, severe burns, bone loss, tooth loss, and other injuries.

Dr. Harold Gillies (Illustration by Robin Lindley)

Gillies’s innovations in skin and cartilage grafting, aesthetic repair, prosthetics, infection control, anesthetic use, and other advances transformed the rudimentary discipline of plastic surgery, and still inform surgeons today. He also was celebrated for his compassion toward all patients, regardless of rank, and his efforts to address the psychosocial aspects of disfiguring injuries.

Award-winning medical historian Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris recounts the inspiring story of Harold Gillies’s innovative medical work and the men he treated in her groundbreaking new book The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). As she describes, the legendary Gillies transformed many lives as he treated the complicated physical and psychological trauma of grievous wounds. As Dr. Fitzharris stresses, he addressed broken spirits as he mended broken faces.

The Facemaker brings history to life thanks to Dr. Fitzharris’s gifts for lively storytelling, accessible scholarship, and extensive research. The book takes the reader into the sodden trenches of World War I, the shell cratered battlefields, the blood-stained aid stations, and the operating rooms of Queens Hospital in Sidcup, England, where Gillies performed his complex reconstructive operations. The book also captures the excruciating pain and suffering endured by the wounded as well as how Gillies and his remarkable team of physicians, dentists, nurses, artists, sculptors, mask makers and others brought empathy and profound caring to each patient through numerous surgeries and the protracted healing process.

Dr. Fitzharris’s book is based on meticulous scholarly research. She drew on a trove of material on medicine and the war as well as on Gillies and his patients, including previously unpublished letters, diaries, and other primary documents that inform this heart-wrenching yet inspirational story of the war.

The Facemaker seems destined to stand out not only a brilliant work of history and research, but also as an unflinching antiwar work as Dr. Fitzharris literally reveals the human face of war and the futility and waste of modern combat—concerns that resonate now as another brutal and senseless war rages in Ukraine.

Dr. Fitzharris is a medical historian who now focuses on sharing stories from the past with a general audience. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and completed postdoctoral studies at the Wellcome Institute in London. Her debut book, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science in the United States; and was shortlisted for both the Wellcome Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize in the United Kingdom. She also created the popular blog, The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, as well as the YouTube series, Under the Knife. She also hosts the TV series The Curious Life and Death of . . . that airs on the Smithsonian Channel. And she contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other publications.

Dr. Fitzharris generously discussed her background and her new book The Facemaker by Zoom from her office in England.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Dr. Fitzharris on your new book The Facemaker and the many positive early reviews. Before getting to the book, I was interested in how you initially became interested in history?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: That's a good question. I have a PhD in the history of science and medicine from Oxford University, but these days I consider myself first and foremost a storyteller.

When I think back to my childhood, I always was a bit of a storyteller. My grandmother raised me and she always had a lot of objects in the basement that were related to the past. I always loved going through these objects and learning their stories. And we would go to the cemeteries and she would tell me stories about the people who she knew who were by then long gone. I just was always interested.

And there's always been a sort of tactile element to history for me. Obviously, it's a living history to walk around the streets of Oxford. You feel like you're really in the past on some level and you get access to these incredible libraries where you can touch to these old books.

For me, I’m always immersing myself in the past. As you can see, even in my office, I have these World War I artifacts here that I use to tell stories in interviews.

So, I was always interested in the past and I ended up doing all my degrees at once. I did my postdoc at the Wellcome Institute in London but I got a bit burnt out in academia and I decided to move into the realm of storytelling through my blog, The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, and through The Butchering Art, my first book, and now The Facemaker. I love connecting with a general reader with these incredible stories from the past.

Robin Lindley: Your work is a gift to readers. What sparked your interest in medical history? Did you have a desire to work in medicine or did you have medical professionals in your family?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Well, my mom was a nurse so there was always that kind of buzzing around in the background. But actually, when I went to Illinois Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, I had a professor named Michael Young who taught courses on intellectual history and on the scientific revolution, so I got really interested in the history of science first.

And when I went to Oxford, I got to study the history of science under Professor Robert Fox and my interest flourished and developed.

I always tell people of that, if you're not interested in history, you might be interested in medical history because everybody knows what it's like to be sick, especially today when we've been living through a pandemic. It's so relatable in that sense. What was it like if you had a toothache in 1792 or what would happen if you had to have your leg amputated in 1846? That's where I, as a medical historian, can fill in those gaps. In that sense, maybe military history or political history isn't as relatable to the people. The everyday experience of being sick and being scared and having to turn to the medical community for help is very understandable.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those reflections, Dr. Fitzharris.  Did your award-winning first book, The Butchering Art on Joseph Lister and those grimy Victorian Era hospitals, grow out of your doctoral studies at Oxford?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: My dissertation was actually on 17th century alchemy, so I was an early modernist. When I wrote The Butchering Art my supervisor asked why would you go into the 19th century? And now I'm in the 20th century with The Facemaker.

I go where the story is. And I was surprised that nobody had told that story of Joseph Lister to a general audience, which is such an incredible, world-changing story. And people weren't really familiar with who he was except through the product Listerine, which he never even invented. So, I felt compelled to tell that story, and there were so many great scenes and atmosphere. Walking into an operating theater of the Victorian period is so different from how we operate today. And I really wanted to paint that picture for readers and I had such a good time doing it, but my training is in much earlier, in 16th and 17th century history.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that explanation, and congratulations on The Butchering Art, an evocative and vivid read.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: That one and The Facemaker are very different. They're both narrative nonfiction for a general audience and I fell into both stories, but they are very different.

Robin Lindley: In The Facemaker, you follow the career of Dr. Harold Gillies. I've always had an interest in him and fellow physician/ artist Dr. Henry Tonks and their work on facial reconstruction, but I haven’t seen many resources on them, so I appreciate your groundbreaking book now.  Are there a few things you'd like to say about Gillies to introduce him to readers?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. What's nice was some of Gillies relatives now contacted me when I first announced this book. He has a great, great nephew who is a Hollywood actor named Daniel Gillies and he's the reader for the audio book. I was told that occasionally, he'll stop and say he didn't know facts about his ancestors, and he learned about Harold Gillies through reading the book. It’s been really lovely to bring that to life for him and some of Gillies’ other relatives.

If people are familiar with Harold Gillies today, they might know him as the father of modern plastic surgery. Plastic surgery predated World War I and, in fact, the term plastic surgery was coined in 1798 by a French surgeon named Pierre-Joseph Desault. At that time, plastic meant something that you could shape or mold—in this case, the skin or the soft tissue of a patient. So, it predated World War I, but it was really through Gillies’s work and through the enormous need for facial reconstruction that came out of the war, that plastic surgery entered this new modern era where new methods were developed and tried and tested.

If you were to call Gillies anything, you might call him the father of modern plastic surgery. And he did incredible work. He was rebuilding these soldiers’ faces during the First World War when losing a limb made you a hero, but losing a face made you a monster because of the societal biases against facial differences.

He was able to not to just mend these soldiers’ faces but also their broken spirits because a lot of them would've ended up living a life of isolation. He's an unsung hero in that sense. I think a lot of people, when they think of the history of plastic surgery, they think of the Guinea Pig Club during World War II and the reconstructive work [on aviators with injured faces] that was done by Gillies’s cousin Archibald McIndoe who became quite famous. But it started with Gillies in World War I, so I tell people this is the prequel to the Guinea Pig Club, if they’re familiar with that.

Robin Lindley: Yes. Historian Emily Mayhew wrote a book on the Guinea Pig Club and McIndoe’s work.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. And she also wrote Wounded on the [British World War I] stretcher bearers and the medical evacuation chain. I hope people will find that The Facemaker is a compliment to what has already been done on the subject.

Robin Lindley: I interviewed Dr. Mayhew on Wounded. I appreciate your meticulous research on this book. You comment in the introduction that all of the observations and comments in the book are based on documents you found and were not conjecture on your part.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. I write narrative nonfiction, which isn't a style all historians even agree with.  But I very much write a book like a novel. And here, if Gillies is saying something and it seems like dialogue, that’s because it's documented somewhere. Or if I note a gesture, then someone witnessed that gesture, and so I put that in. I love that storytelling technique because I want people to feel like they're right there: they're in the operating theater or they're in the trench with these men. How does it smell? What does it feel like with all of those sensory experiences? I hope people can understand that better after reading The Facemaker.

Robin Lindley: And it seems that you uncovered archival material such as personal letters and diaries and family papers as well as other documents that hadn’t been previously recounted by authors.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. With Percy Clare, who opens The Facemaker, I used his diary and some academic historians have used a little bit of what he said, but not to the extent that I've written his story. I was in touch with his relative and I asked, do you know this and that? She didn’t know anything about him. It's going to be fun for her to learn about her ancestor through this book. I think she said her father had found the diary in the garage and donated it.

I chose Percy Clare because he wrote beautifully and extensively about his facial wounds. That was unusual because sometimes a soldier might mention it, but it's only a letter and not a full account of that whole experience.

Unfortunately, a lot of patient records were destroyed during World War II. It’s ironic that these men couldn't escape injury even in World War II. Percy Clare's records were lost, so I only know about him getting to Gillies at the Queens Hospital through his diary. Otherwise, we wouldn't have known that he was even a patient at the Queens Hospital. So that's an interesting challenge for a historian in trying to piece together a story like this.

Robin Lindley: And Percy Clare had horrific facial wounds, but from the photographs in your book, it seems his appearance came out really well.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Amazingly so. I don't know what he looked like before. I can only share his description of the blood loss and wounds to both cheeks. I didn’t have his patient records. I asked his relative, Rachel Gray, do you have a photo album? And she said, I do, but she just had this flood in the garage a couple months before. She sent the album to me and, and these photos were in plastic so I couldn't take them out because that would ruin the photos. A friend of mine actually ended up restoring those photos for me. They were in terrible states, and he did amazing work. Again, there are all these kinds of unforeseen challenges when you're trying to piece together this kind of history. Luckily there were photos of him later in life and his face looked amazing.

Percy Clare, in later life (Courtesy of Rachel Gray; Restored by Jordan J. Lloyd).

Robin Lindley: I wanted to get a sense of your process when writing for a general audience. You provide detailed and accessible historical context to help the readers understand the past moments you present.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: I went into The Facemaker knowing very little about World War I. If anybody out there is not familiar with World War I, don't worry. I was right there with you. This is why I took five years to research. It took an incredibly long time because I was really starting from zero, but I knew that there was a very human story.

I also knew that, although this is a book about Harold Gillies, it's really a story about many men. And I think that's reflected very well in the cover design of a surgeon's hand holding a scalpel and in the reflection is a bandaged soldier. I really wanted their voices to come through in this narrative.

One of the differences between writing this kind of book or writing an academic history is that part of my job as a narrative nonfiction writer is not to overwhelm the general reader with too much information. When it comes to World War I, there's a lot of information. There are so many letters and so many diaries, and it goes on and on. And, as an academically trained historian, it can get overwhelming because you could spend literally 15, 20 years just reading and not be ready to write the story. As a commercial writer, I don't have that luxury of time, but this book ended up taking about five years. A lot of what I do is trying to find the pulse of the story.

If someone picks up The Facemaker and they know nothing about facial reconstruction, and know nothing about medical history or World War I, I want them to be able to feel that they can read this book and understand it and enjoy it. They don't need to come to it with any prior medical knowledge or any historical knowledge.

Robin Lindley: Your academic background and your gifts as a storyteller are a powerful combination in writing for television and writing non-fiction for a general audience.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: It's funny though because television executives have no imagination. It's really hard to convince them that medical history is something that people would be interested in, which is to me is confusing because there's so many medical shows on television. People love them. ER was a huge drama. In fact, when I was going around with The Butchering Art, I was telling people that the Victorians used to buy tickets to the operating theater, and people just thought that was crazy. And I said, but we're still buying tickets because we're tuning into ER, we're tuning into reality shows about hospitals, or whatever it is.

We still have that morbid curiosity. I think my job as an academically trained historian as well as a storyteller is to make sure that it's entertaining, but also in a way that isn't exploiting the past and that people. We can look back in the past and say, I can't believe they used to do that, but I always ask my audience what will we say in a hundred years? What will be the medical treatment that in a hundred years that people will just not believe that we used to do because that's what will happen. What we know today isn't what we're going to know tomorrow. I hope that when people pick up The Butchering Art or The Facemaker, they see that evolution or that revolution in medicine that's ongoing even today.

Robin Lindley: You mention in The Facemaker how plastic surgery has evolved and you conclude the book with the very recent face transplant procedures. In discussing the history, you vividly bring the reader right into the horror of the fighting in the trenches on the Western Front, and you stress the difficulty of getting medical care for the wounded in No Man's Land. Many with severe facial injuries waited for hours or even days just to be removed from the combat zone. If they got help, they were carried to aid stations and then to hospital ships and then to a hospital in Britain for treatment of their facial wounds.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. The chain of evacuation was so difficult because the face is so vascular and the injuries bleed a lot. And a lot of times these stretcher bearers would step out onto the field and they're being shot at and they can die. They were making very quick decisions about who to take off the field and who to leave behind. And if you look at one of these wounds, they look very ghastly as you see in photos of the patients. I worked with a disability activist actually to discuss the inclusion of photos and the language to make sure that that was also inclusive.

And it was hard to get [the wounded] off the field. In fact, Private Walter Ashworth, you might remember, laid on the field for three days without a jaw, unable to scream for help. So that was a real difficulty.

I knew going into this book that I wanted to drop the reader right into the trenches. What was that like to be there into the middle of that action? And then to watch how difficult it was for one single patient.

The book opens with Percy Clare, and describes how difficult it was for him to get from being shot to getting to Harold Gillies back in Britain. There were a lot of detours along the way, and it could be a very frustrating process. And of course, some of these soldiers never ended up in Gillies’s care, and were probably worse for that.

Robin Lindley: Can you talk about the prevalence of facial wounds in this first modern industrialized war? You write about how medicine hadn't caught up with the technology of many terrible new weapons. Why there were so many facial wounds to treat?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: As I said, plastic surgery predated World War I. There was a bit of facial reconstruction during the American Civil War, which I discussed in the book, but not on the scale that it was happening in World War I. The nature of warfare at that time led to high rates of injuries. There were huge advances in artillery and weaponry so that a company of just 300 men in 1914 deployed equivalent firepower as a 60,000 strong army during the Napoleonic Wars.

There were huge advances. You have the invention of the flamethrower and the invention of the tank, which left their crews vulnerable to new kinds of injuries. You had chemical weapons, even as gas masks were being rushed to the front. These lethal gas attacks became instantly synonymous with the ghastliness and savagery of the First World War and the medical community was struggling at first to keep up.

And these men weren't really given much protective gear, certainly in the first year. The Brody helmet [British “soup bowl” metal helmet] was invented in late 1915, and was the first helmet that was given to all men regardless of their ranks. It was an improvement over the soft caps that had been issued in the beginning of the war, but even so it didn't really protect the face as much as needed.

For all of these reasons, facial wounds were prevalent. And before the war is over 280,000 men from France, Britain and Germany alone suffered some kind of facial trauma. They were maimed. They were gassed. They were burned. Some were even kicked in the face by horses. So, this was a real problem in World War I, and of course it laid open this opportunity for plastic surgery to evolve.

Robin Lindley: To go back to Dr. Gillies, what motivated him to specialize in plastic surgery and then to mend the terrible facial wounds of soldiers—many wounds that were probably new to most surgeons at the time?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: With The Butchering Art, Joseph Lister was the right man at the right time. And I feel like Gillies was also that person for his time. There were other surgeons who were working on facial reconstruction. It was a huge need and many required this kind of surgery.

Gillies was an ENT [ear, nose and throat] specialist going into the war. And he came across a figure named Charles Valadier, who was this French American dentist. He was a bigger than life character and one of my favorite people in the book. He had a Rolls Royce that he retrofitted with dental chair and he drove it to the front under a hail of bullets. Who does that?

And World War I was this crazy time when pilots were going up only several years after the Wright brothers had flown and they were bringing pistols with them. Nobody really knew what they were doing. Charles Valadier ended up working throughout the war for free, and he showed Harold Gillies the desperate need for facial reconstruction at this time.

And Gillies was well placed because he was actually one of those annoying people who was good at everything he did. He was a competent artist. He was a very good golfer. He was very well rounded, which I think is unusual for a surgeon. And facial reconstruction is partly a creative process. You have to be a very visual thinker. And Gillies was doing this without any textbooks. And he was working in a very collaborative manner, which was unusual as well for the time. So, he brings dentists on board, which a lot of surgeons wouldn't have done because they wouldn't have rated dentists highly at the time. He brings on artists who paint masks. He brings all kinds of people on his team and that's why the standards rose and he was able to do such amazing work in the end. So, he really was the right person at the right time.

Robin Lindley: Gilles was very creative and a remarkable visionary, as you recount. And he was dealing with horrific wounds that you describe vividly. These men came in without jaws or noses or broken eye sockets or completely cratered faces, or all that. He dealt with compromise of breathing, eating, vision, speaking, taste, smell and more. And Gillies had to create new types of surgery for every unique disfiguring wound that came to him.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. The earlier attempts at altering someone's appearance really focused on small areas of the face. Rhinoplasty was one of the most ancient procedures in medical history. But, as you say, Gillies really had to reconstruct almost entire faces. In some cases, the damage was so extensive that he had to be very creative.

Bringing on dental surgeons like William Kelsey Fry, who worked on the hard surfaces as Gillies worked on the soft surfaces, helped the reconstructive process. In fact, one of Kelsey Fry’s grandsons tweeted me on Twitter and asked if Kelsey Fry was going to be in the book. I said, actually he is in the book because he ended up having this horrible experience on the battlefield when he was rescuing a man with a facial injury. He had the man lean forward onto his shoulder and carried him to a casualty clearance station and the medics put the man on his back and he ended up drowning in his own blood. And so, it was Kelsey Fry who ended up getting the protocols and the advice changed so that if men had facial injuries, they were supposed to be laid face down on the stretcher. And so, I said [to Kelsey Fry’s grandson], think about how many lives your grandfather saved just by changing that advice alone.

So, Kelsey Fry was an important part of Gillies's team. He doesn't [get the same attention as] Gillies, who was a bigger than life personality. And a lot of people who know about this period tend to focus on Gillies. But definitely other people contributed to the enormous advances of this time and are featured in The Facemaker.

Robin Lindley: As you point out, each facial surgery was unique and demanding and took a very long time. Gillies must have had enormous energy and resilience.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. And there were setbacks too. Some of his patients died in his care as I document in The Facemaker. There were setbacks and there wasn't at all a linear progression, but certainly he never gave up on them. I think it's fair to say they never gave up on him either. They continued to believe in him and in what he could do. And that built a really strong bond and the result was amazing in the end.

Robin Lindley: You also emphasize that Gillies early on decided to create an interdisciplinary team. I find the trained physician and renowned artist Henry Tonks fascinating.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: I love Tonks. Another character, like a lot of the people in The Facemaker, who had a big personality. Joseph Lister in my book The Butchering Art was a Quaker and a quiet, solemn figure. But in The Facemaker, everybody has a bombastic personality.

Tonks was a famous artist before World War I and, as you say, he was actually a trained physician as well. He was known to be extremely critical of his art students and his students really feared him. He was brought on board by Gillies by happenstance. He was working at the same hospital in an administrative role and someone told Gillies, you know, Henry Tonks the artist is working here. And so, Gillies brings him on board. And several other artists are eventually brought on at the Queens Hospital at Sitcup, the hospital that Gillies founded for facial reconstruction. And thank goodness for them because they created amazing pictorial records.

I didn't include the Tonks portraits of these men in the book because I felt they should be reproduced in color as they were meant to be seen, and to do that drives up the cost of the book. But you could find all of his wonderful artwork online if you just Google Tonks and World War I. His portraits are beautiful because they are in color and they allow you to see [Gillies’s patients] in a more vivid way than the photographs allow.

Robin Lindley: It’s powerful art. I've seen some of Tonks’ color drawings that portray the wounded men, usually showing the wound and then the reconstructive process and the results after healing.  

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. He would be in the operating theater and be sketching and drawing. And sometimes he did formal portraits of the men. There's one of Walter Ashworth who's injured during the Somme offensive, and the expression on his face is just so human. I think that the portraits are really lovely in a way that the photographs can't be because the photographs are more clinical. They are staged and their purpose is to document the reconstructive work whereas Tonks really captures the humanity of these men.

Robin Lindley: Gillies was aware of the psychological trauma as well as the physical damage caused by these wounds. These men were suffering and usually endured a long series of operations. And Gillies had great compassion for them and their plight as they returned to society.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Absolutely. Surgeons working near the front were hastily doing surgery. They were trying to stop the hemorrhaging. They were trying to save lives. They were not developing relationships with these patients. A lot of times they don't even know these men's names, whereas Gillies was operating on these soldiers over a long period of time, sometimes even spanning over a decade. He really develops friendships with these men. Some of them even go on to work for him. There's a guy named Big Bob Seymour who ends up being his personal secretary for the rest of his life. So it's nice to see that kind of relationship.

I had a disability activist named Ariel Henley who was helping me with the language. We were having a great discussion about the word disfigured, which might not be used today. But the feeling was that these men were disfigured to the society that they lived in, and I didn't want to lessen that experience by using a more modern term. But I think it's valid to talk about whether that term is useful today. Some people say facial difference rather than disfigured. Ariel has Crouzon syndrome and she lives with a facial disfigurement. Those are her words. That's how she describes herself.

She pointed out a lot of things that maybe I wouldn't have noticed. For instance, Gillies banned mirrors on his wards. This was done to protect the patients from getting frustrated throughout the reconstructive process because a lot of times the face could look worse before it looked better. Ariel pointed out also that that could be really isolating and that it instilled in these men this belief that they had faces that weren't worth looking at. I think that kind of perspective was really helpful for me as a writer in bringing The Facemaker to life and making sure that these men were always at the front of that narrative and that their voices and their experiences were always being honored.  

Robin Lindley: And your book brings forth the stories of the patients and their concerns. The blue benches are such a powerful image. The men with facial wounds sat on these blue benches around Gillies’s hospital and the benches were a warning to members of the public that these men had injuries that might be disturbing to see.

 Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. And mask makers offered nonsurgical solutions to these disfigured soldiers. Someone tweeted me and said that she couldn't imagine that these men would ever have wanted to get rid of them, but the masks broke and they didn't age with the patient. So, ultimately a lot of these men did actually turn to surgery. I told this woman that a lot of these men hated the masks and they weren't wearing the mask for themselves. They were wearing it to protect the viewer and they were uncomfortable to wear and they were hot. And there were a lot of reasons why they wouldn't be the best thing put on your face.

People have to remember that the mask is for the viewer. It's not for the person wearing it. And they did it to blend into society.

Gillies himself hated the masks because they reminded him of the limitations of what he could do as a surgeon. But he also understood that sometimes a patient needed a mask. Perhaps Gilles had taken surgery as far as it could go. He also employed mask makers in between in the process because the surgeries could span several years. So perhaps while you're awaiting your next surgery, you would feel more comfortable wearing a mask when going out into society so people wouldn’t stare at you.

The masks were wonderful on one level. The artists were able to produce very startling, real masks for these patients. But on another level, they were really sad because, if society could have accepted these men and their injuries, then arguably we wouldn’t have had to have the mask makers.

Robin Lindley: Your description of the masks and the artists in your book is fascinating. You note a woman in France who made extremely realistic masks.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. Anna Coleman Ray. She was amazing. And photos of the masks go viral because they look very realistic. But if you were sitting next to someone wearing one, it could be unsettling because it doesn't move like a face. Ultimately, a lot of the soldiers found that the masks scared their children. In a still photo, the masks look amazing and realistic, but if you were talking to someone wearing one, I think it could be quite unsettling.

Robin Lindley: And you have heartrending accounts of what these wounded men went through once they'd completed the surgical process. Many didn't want to see their relatives or friends again because they thought their wounds were too horrifying. And, you have patients breaking off relationships. And there were also suicides.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes, there were. One of the things I really wanted to show was that a lot of the men, especially those in Gillies’s care, did go on to live very happy and fulfilling lives. They went through the reconstructive process.

But there were other stories. A nurse that worked for Gillies's told of a corporal who caught sight of his face and he ended up breaking off his engagement. He told the woman that he had met someone else in Paris because he felt that it would be too much of a burden for her to be married to him.

But on the flip side of the coin, you have Private Walter Ashworth whose fiancé breaks up with him. But then her friend gets wind of this and she begins writing him and the two fall in love and they end up getting married, which is a really kind of lovely alternative story.

A lot of these men were able to go on and rehabilitate, but certainly there were a lot of prejudices at the time. And probably some of the prejudices that that corporal was facing in 1917 would not be that dissimilar to what someone with a facial difference might feel today.

I'm certainly not a spokesperson for that community, but all you have to do is look to Hollywood to know that this is true. A lot of movies portray villains who are disfigured. You have Darth Vader. You have Voldemort. You have Blofeld. You have the Joker from Batman. So, it's a really lazy trope about evilness that continues in society today. We haven't moved on in some ways. I think that the men who were disfigured in World War I would feel very similar prejudices today.

Robin Lindley: I appreciate you emphasizing that, more often than not, these men who were disfigured in war went on after Gillies’s work to heal and to lead normal lives.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Some of them went on to serve in World War II—even after those earlier wounds. One was a patient named Lieutenant William Spreckley who had one of Gillies best nose jobs. Gillies tried a new technique on him, and none of his colleagues thought this would work. And when Spreckley came out of the operation, his nose was so big, they said it was like anteater’s snout. All Gillies’s colleagues laughed at him and said this didn't work. But once all of the swelling subsided, and he began to heal, actually the nose looked amazing and it became one of Gillies star cases. And he said in his case notes something like Spreckley and his nose went off to serve in World War II. So some of these men went right back into the act.

And some of the men who were patched up by Gillies went back to the front in World War I, and they ended up dying later. It's really harrowing. I can't imagine experiencing what these men did and then also signing up to fight in World War II. That to me is very extraordinary.

Robin Lindley: You note in discussing these patients that many of the wounded were left with deformed noses and other damage—damage that in earlier times suggested a history of syphilis or other dread diseases connected with supposed moral weakness.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes, exactly. That’s where this idea it comes from and why Hollywood can lean so heavily into the idea that morality is connected to a facial appearance. Even our language: someone's two-faced, or they tell a bald face lie, or you take them at face value. Our language reflects how important the face is still, and this is linked to older beliefs.

And as you say, morality and disease are reflected in the face, because if someone contracts syphilis and it's allowed to continue on into its final stages, something develops called saddle nose where the nose caves into the face much like the Harry Potter villain Voldemort, and it looks very similar to that kind of disfigurement.

People aren't aware today of where these ideas come from, but they're still alive and reflected in our culture, and certainly in the movie industry.

Robin Lindley: I appreciate your comments on our attitudes toward disability and difference. As I wrote to you recently, I think your book will stand as a great antiwar book as you literally reveal the human face of war.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: I found it really interesting that you called this an anti-war book, which I love by the way. I love if people think of it that way, but I did another interview with someone who's in the army and he said that this was a book about heroes, which of course it also can be seen as that.

I lean heavily into the violence of the First World War because I don't want to sugar coat it. I don't think I'm doing the patients any favors by not telling the readers exactly what it was like in that time.

It certainly should be seen as anti-war. What we do to bodies in conflicts with the return of old school warfare like we're seeing in Ukraine at the moment, we need to all be thinking about that. But it is interesting because everybody has a slightly different take when it comes to a story like this.

For me, I just tell the story as I feel it should be told and let everybody make their own decisions about what that story is. It was nice to hear that you felt it was a great anti-war book.

Robin Lindley:  Yes, it is. I think it may be illuminating for some people to think about the cruelty and brutality of war in these visceral and painful terms. Didn’t the Germans have a different attitude about the facially wounded?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: The Germans really embraced that, whereas in Britain, the disfigured face certainly was hidden for a really long time. People didn't engage with that and it was very sanitized, but the Germans leaned heavily into it. The images of wounded bodies disappeared in Britain, and certainly the disfigured face doesn’t make it into the public.

Robin Lindley: And it was moving for me to learn from your book that there were French veterans called “the mutilated” with severe facial wounds who had a place of honor at the conference table during the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: It was amazing. And there’s a picture of those men that were at the signing of the treaty in The Facemaker. I think it’s incredible that they were included and they should have been. It should make us question war and conflict.

People say to me but all these amazing medical advances came out of the war, which is true, and all of this has served us long after the guns fell silent on the Western Front. But also, I came to the grim realization halfway through my research that it also prolonged the war. As doctors and nurses got better at patching these men up, they were being sent right back to the front. It was really feeding the war machine. It was a vicious cycle that definitely needs to be acknowledged again, as we see the return of this old school warfare. We have to realize that even if advances do come that benefit us, they tend to prolong these conflicts as well.

Robin Lindley: As you note, Gillies goes on after World War I to continue work as a plastic surgeon, and he does both cosmetic surgery and complex reconstructive surgery. He treated one woman who fell on her face into a fire for hours. You capture the horror of her injuries.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris:  Awful. I didn't include her photos, but they can be found in his published book. The woman had epilepsy and she had a seizure. She fell face first into the fire with her infant child and they laid there for some time. And by the end, she just had no face. I can't even describe the photos. There was no skin there. It was just completely gone. And there was a moment when Gillies's was approached about this patient and he wondered if he should even do anything because obviously reconstructive surgery is painful. He didn't know if he would be able to help her, but in the end, he was able to reconstruct a face of sorts for her.

She does end up healing but she had another seizure later and she died. Gillies is told about this on the golf course, and he had a moment of reflection about this poor woman that he had helped.

Gillies continued to do reconstructive surgery and moved into the cosmetic realm, as you say. And he also operated on soldiers in World War II. He introduced his cousin Archibald McIndoe to plastic surgery with the burnt aviators of the Guinea Pig Club. I'm guessing Gillies felt his nose a bit out of joint because McIndoe overshadowed him later. Some of that was because it was such a romantic thing to be a pilot in World War II, and McIndoe’s extraordinary work got a lot of media coverage. Gillies work in World War I didn’t get that same kind of attention and he was overshadowed a bit.

People ask if my book is about the Guinea Pig Club. I say, it's the prequel to that. But Gillies is definitely part of that story because he actually convinces McIndoe go into plastic surgery. It's all interconnected.

Robin Lindley: And I learned from your book that Gillies wrote groundbreaking plastic surgery textbooks that represent foundational works for the specialty now.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. They're extraordinary. I have the two-volume set. He documented everything and his personality really shines through. Even if you don't have any interest in a medical textbook, it's the way he talks about his patients and jokes about some of them and his relationships with them that is quite amusing at times. And I'm guessing there's still value in these texts today. Plastic surgery really isn't that old, so a lot of these techniques are probably still used on some level or they've been adapted. The ghost of Gillies is still lingering around in those operating theaters.

Robin Lindley: And wasn’t Gillies actually called “The Facemaker” during his lifetime?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. I didn’t have a title for this book for five years. I was finishing up, and I came across the letter to Harold Gillies congratulating on him on his knighthood after the war, and it was addressed to “Dear Facemaker” and I thought that's perfect because he was certainly was the face maker.

Robin Lindley: Do you have another book in the works now, Dr. Fitzharris?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes. I'm not an academic anymore, so I have to keep writing in order to keep feeding myself. My next book actually is a children's book called Scourge, which my husband Adrian Teal is illustrating. He's a caricaturist over here and he works on Spitting Image, a quite a famous television show.

And my next adult nonfiction project is Sleuth-Hound on Joseph Bell who was a 19th century surgeon and the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. His student Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on Bell, and I'm making my way through his 500-page diary as we speak. It’s going to be a really fun kind of romp through Victorian forensics and this fictional character and the real-life inspirations.

I hope that it’s not five years between books this time. I'm going to speed up the process. Going back to the 19th century is like slipping into a bath. It's comfortable. I know that world because of Joseph Lister. I've done a lot of research in the 19th century and it should be a little bit faster process this time.

Robin Lindley: I'll look forward to that one. And please tell Adrian that I admire his work. The Spitting Image caricatures are amazing. It seems that you've taken a deep dive not only into medical history, but also the history of surgery.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Yes, and again, I didn't do anything like that for my PhD. So, my supervisor is completely baffled, but also delighted that I'm enjoying engaging with people with medical history and where the stories are. And people seem to really love the surgical stories as well. I think Joseph Bell is more of a forensic story, so that will have a slightly different feel to it, but I don't know until I start writing. I'm just at the research phase right now.  

Robin Lindley: I wish you the best on this new project. Who are some of your influences as a nonfiction writer and a historian?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: One of my favorite writers is Erik Larson. I've actually become friends with him which has been a joy because I've been reading his books since I was in high school. He wouldn't call himself a historian. He has a journalism background, but the way he tells a story is incredible.

I read his book Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania when I was going through a rough time in my life. I couldn't get out of my bed and I was involved in my own problems, but that book got me to forget everything. It was told in such a gripping way. So, I love Eric Larson. And I love Karen Abbott who wrote a book called Sin in the Second City, which is about a famous brothel in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. That's a ripping book. So, there's a couple of people who it's a privilege to call friends now and they just write incredible narrative nonfiction.

Robin Lindley: I also admire Erik Larson’s work and have talked with him about a couple of his books. He was very thoughtful and generous and has a gift—like you—for bringing the past to life.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: He's loves storytelling, and he goes where the story is. And he's given me a lot of advice in my own career. He blurbed this book and it was good to hear his thoughts. It's so good to follow in his footsteps because he's incredibly talented

Robin Lindley: Thanks Dr. Fitzharris for your thoughtful comments on Dr. Gillies, plastic surgery, the wounded in the Great War, and more. Is there anything that you'd like to add that you want readers to know?

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: I hope that people will find that I've done these men's stories justice. I entered into the book hoping that I could bring this history to life for people. As I said, you don't need to know anything about World War I and you don't need to know anything about medical history. Hopefully you can pick up The Facemaker and fall in love with this story, with these men, and come away with a better understanding of this incredible period.

Robin Lindley: Thanks again for sharing your insights Dr. Fitzharris. I know readers will appreciate your generosity and thoughtfulness. And congratulations on your engaging and groundbreaking new book The Facemaker. Best wishes on this book and your upcoming work.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin's email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Recently, a poet friend said, “To think of peace now is bizarre.” Perhaps a perceptive comment in light of our history of violent conflict. In a 2019 address, former President Jimmy Carter called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” because of Washington’s tendency to force other nations to “adopt our American principles.” He also observed that America has enjoyed only about 16 years or so of peace in, at that time, our 243-year history. And now our “Forever Wars” against terror rage on.

And our policy makers seldom call for an end to war making. For example, President Barack Obama—a 2008 peace candidate—in his 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, accepted that violent conflict cannot be ended and instead pledged to follow the rules of war or “humanitarian law” when military violence becomes necessary to protect American interests. In particular, he focused on waging war in conformance with international law to minimize brutality, reduce civilian losses, and prevent other horrors. His successor essentially followed suit.

Celebrated Yale Professor of History and Law Samuel Moyn grapples with the question of whether making war more “humane” actually makes war more inevitable in his recent groundbreaking book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Professor Moyn surveys the history of war-making and peace movements over the past 150 years in Humane as he takes the reader from the efforts during the eighteenth century to regulate war and make war less brutal as pacifists such as iconic author Leo Tolstoy and activist Bertha von Suttner called for an end to all war. As Professor Moyn stresses, Tolstoy warned that the rules to temper the brutality of military conflict would make war only more acceptable.

Humane also presents an overview of the brutal conflicts since founders of the Red Cross proposed the first Geneva Convention in 1864, while in the United States, Franz Lieber—at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln—developed rules of conduct to govern the Union Army during the bloody Civil War.

Over the decades, the law of war covered treatment of prisoners of war, illegal weapons, civilian targets, and more, but the rules were ignored or forgotten for the most part in colonial conflicts as well as in the apocalyptic twentieth century world wars that left millions dead. In the costliest war in history, the Second World War, the civilian deaths far exceeded the toll for combatants as the martial technology of every combatant nation slaughtered civilians as well as military personnel.

With this historic background in mind, Professor Moyn turns his focus in Humane to American war-making during the Cold War and up to our recent “Forever Wars.” He notes that after US atrocities in Vietnam, such as the My Lai massacre of hundreds of civilians, came to light, the military responded to public scorn and paid special attention to humanitarian law. The post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, although destructive and bloody, led to fewer casualties caused by American troops. The military was scandalized again, however, by atrocities such as the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech, President Barack Obama—as Professor Moyn stresses—acknowledged the “hard truth” war as an omnipresent reality and promised that, rather than ending war, American conduct in war would be more humane by conforming to the laws of war. He said, “I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don’t.” That statement concerned Professor Moyn and prompted his scholarly probing into the effects of more limited and more “humane” wars that employ targeted drone strikes or Special Forces operations against specific perceived foes.

The Obama and Trump administrations pursued a new kind of “humane war” with impunity and without much public scrutiny. Professor Moyn assesses the results for American military and foreign policy as war became an endeavor of sophisticated killing machines and a cadre of highly-trained soldiers. He also dissects the "lawyerliness" of the Obama administration and the sense of recent American policy that “endless and humane war” is “morally wholesome.”

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His highly-regarded writing and teaching consider intellectual history, international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought in both historical and current perspective. His other books include The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History; Christian Human Rights; and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. He also has written articles for numerous publications such as Boston Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. His books have won the Morris Forkosch Prize of the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize of the German Studies Association.

Professor Moyn received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. Before coming to Yale, he was Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard University, and before that he taught for thirteen years in the Columbia University history department where he was most recently James Bryce Professor of European Legal History. At Columbia, undergraduates honored him with the Mark van Doren Teaching Award (46th Annual).

Professor Moyn graciously responded to a series of questions by email on his background, intellectual interests, human rights, and his recent book Humane. 

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Moyn on your compelling and groundbreaking new book Humane and on your many distinguished works on the history of law and politics. Before addressing your recent book, I had a few questions about your background. You have a doctorate in history as well as a law degree. What inspired you to study history?

Professor Samuel Moyn: I had fantastic professors at Washington University in St. Louis, where I went to college, who convinced me that studying history meant you could study anything. I was interested in literature, philosophy, and social thought, but I could combine my interests in them by learning how they developed and were related to one another.

Robin Lindley: What did you focus on in your graduate studies on history?

Professor Samuel Moyn: I trained in modern European intellectual history at Berkeley, where I became a specialist in twentieth-century European thought, and the history of moral philosophy in particular. But I also learned a lot from the start about the history of Western Europe in general, and focused like many people in the 1990s on Holocaust memory (which was going to be my dissertation topic before I switched to something on the history of philosophy).

Robin Lindley: And you also earned a law degree from Harvard just a year after receiving your history doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. That’s amazing. How did you come to study law? Did you have dreams of becoming an attorney?

Professor Samuel Moyn: No, I dropped out of grad school after three years because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a scholar, but I liked the first year of law school even less. I don’t really have a convincing response to why I committed to finishing either or both degrees. But at a certain point I realized that if I wanted to write my doctorate, being in the latter stages of law school was a good time to do so: the coursework is only as hard as you make it, and summers are free if you choose. That said, going back to finish law school proved consequential. I met some of my most influential teachers as a result, and I doubt I would have become a law professor later had I not done so.

Robin Lindley: You worked as an intern in the Clinton White House and had a role in foreign policy regarding Kosovo and Serbia. How did you come to work at the White House, and what was your job?

Professor Samuel Moyn: Most law students do things over summers to explore possible careers, and at one point I was interested in working in government—so I gave it a try. I worked formally for the European directorate of the National Security Council, under Antony Blinken (now secretary of state). But in a very short-staffed office, I was quickly assigned to the subdirectorate on southeastern Europe, then occupied with the bombing of Serbia to protect Kosovo from its assault. It wasn’t planned. I was actually supposed to work the summer before but wrote some of my dissertation then because my security clearance took too long, and by the time I arrived at work in Washington, the Kosovo bombings had begun.

Robin Lindley: Your writing on human rights law is thought-provoking and at times controversial. I hope I get this right, but it seems you argue that human rights law only took hold beginning in the 1970s despite earlier laws based on Enlightenment thought, and laws since then to abolish slavery and torture, and even the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, to name a few examples. I apologize for this huge question, but why do you think that human rights law only originated or was recognized about a half century ago? Does your view come out of US atrocities committed in Vietnam such the My Lai massacre in 1968?

Professor Samuel Moyn: I don’t deny that there are early sources for human rights: human universalism in different versions teems in the moral annals of humanity, and certainly the basic idea that individuals enjoy “rights” against the community and state in virtue of their humanity is old (though how old remains controversial). I was struck, though, by the mythmaking that came out of the 1990s around how old human rights were as an active and widespread political cause. Clearly, they underwrote Atlantic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century—but only in the sense that they justified founding or refounding a state by means of violence if necessary.

The newer idea of human rights and the politics around it were absent from the Vietnam war, when different forms of politics were available, such as peace agitation or socialist internationalism. So, the real story, I realized, had to be how those evaporated and human rights ideals and movements took their place.

Robin Lindley: In your challenging book on human rights and inequality, Not Enough, you argue that human rights law privileges the rich while ignoring concerns for social justice and economic equality. You critique neoliberal globalization and market fundamentalism as well as nationalism. Another large question, but how does human rights law further inequality?

Professor Samuel Moyn: I don’t argue that human rights law privileges the rich or ignores all economic concerns. Indeed, Not Enough tries to provide one of the first histories of the idea that human beings have not just civil liberties but also rights to welfare and work. But I do contend that human rights have ended up focusing on a floor of provision, lacking any confrontation with the victory of the rich in our time, in particular by directly requiring a ceiling on economic unfairness.

Robin Lindley: Sorry for my gross misinterpretation on Not Enough. Thanks for clarifying. And now, in your new study of the law of war Humane, if I understand it, you posit that US policies that make war more ethical and more humane—less cruel, less barbaric, perhaps less lethal for noncombatants, more tolerable—also make war more inevitable. Is that the core of the historical problem you’re addressing? I apologize if I’m misstating your view.

Professor Samuel Moyn: It’s hard to establish the exact connection between the endurance of war and its changing form. But I embarked on Humane struck by the fact that Barack Obama’s main speeches on how he proposed to transform the war on terror — first in Oslo in 2009 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and then in 2013 when he rolled out his targeted killings program — emphasized the exceptional humanity of American war. Of course, it had to be corrected, with torture of detainees edited out of the equation and civilian death in drone strikes and other targeted killings contained.

I wanted to show that the campaign to make war more humane (which originated in the nineteenth century) was far more regularly challenged at the start by people who called for not having war than it is today. And I hoped to understand how our own experience of “endless war” has coexisted with a serious concern — even within governmental and military circles — to provide humanity in war rather than peace instead of war.

Robin Lindley: Your new book on war and peace follows your major works on human rights. Did Humane grow out of those works? What inspired your book now?

Professor Samuel Moyn: It is definitely a sequel of sorts, but also an attempt to step beyond the theme of human rights, about which no one needs to hear more from me. Most of all, it reflects on our recent political experience, as an attempt to reckon with the continuation of the war on terror, by placing Obama’s presidency in a long historical arc that may not have bent towards justice.

Robin Lindley: You are very aware of the history of the extreme violence of US wars and are obviously interested in policies that promote peace. Do you see yourself as a pacifist or as somewhere else on the peace-war spectrum?

Professor Samuel Moyn: I offer a distinction between an antiwar and a pacifist stance in the book. You can get pretty far by declaring yourself against wars that set your country or humanity or both back, without condemning all wars. And as a law professor, while I wanted to give pacifism a great deal of attention in the book, I also wanted to chronicle the star-crossed attempt to build institutions and pass laws that control war, both keeping it from starting and trying to ensure it is less brutal if it starts.

I conclude from my survey that there is a great deal of nobility in striving for more humane wars, but even more in cutting off wars that are generally better not to have. I think a lot of Americans and others share my views, since it’s very hard to find “good wars” in history, and practically none in our lifetimes.

Robin Lindley: In Humane, you highlight the work of several individuals as the laws of war and peace evolved over the past 160 years or so. The legendary novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy looms large in your book. What did you learn about Tolstoy’s view of war and laws of war?

Professor Samuel Moyn: As the most famous pacifist in his time, Tolstoy fit with my agenda to give the aspiration for peace attention—but I also discovered he developed a set of disquieting worries about making war humane that have turned out to be prophetic of our partial success in doing so in our time. So, I spend the first chapter of Humane reconstructing Tolstoy’s qualms about what might happen, not if wars continue to be brutal (which they do), but if people succeed in making them less so (which they also do sometimes).

Robin Lindley: It seems that modern law of war or “humanitarian law” has grown from the work of Henry Dunant, Swiss founder of the Red Cross. How did he come to address the inhumanity of war and what were the major issues he outlined in the Geneva Conventions?

Professor Samuel Moyn: That treaty (it was originally one convention) dealt with protecting wounded soldiers. The goal of successor treaties was to strengthen protection for combatants (especially in cases of their internment) and to extend it to non-combatants. There was a separate branch of later treaty known as “Hague law” that exempted targets and controlled weapons. What was of most interest to me was how Dunant (the first Nobel Peace Prize co-winner in 1901 whom Obama actually name checked in Oslo himself) was conscripted into the peace movement when he won, and how most of the laws of war between his first Geneva Convention and the 1970s did not do a great deal to humanize war. I spend most of the book substantiating this claim.

Robin Lindley: And in the US Civil War, Francis Lieber developed a code for wartime conduct for the Union Army that was more permissive about military actions than what Dunant proposed. How do you see the Lieber Code?

Professor Samuel Moyn: It came from a different tradition. A Prussian émigré to the United States, Lieber was, as recent historians have shown, a disciple of Carl von Clausewitz who believed that war is good for us, and licensed lots of brutality in the course of it. The current consensus is that Lieber is best seen in counterpoint to the aspiration of humane war rather than one of its founders. He did follow Clausewitz in claiming that short wars conducted with massive violence would end more quickly, and thus end up being less cruel in the long run than humanized wars might.

Robin Lindley: Another pacifist who I didn’t know much about was Bertha von Suttner. She advocated for an end to war and raised concerns about air war early on, I believe. How does she fit into the history you present? Why did she disagree with Dunant’s nomination for the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901?

Professor Samuel Moyn: She was once the most famous woman in the world, and epitomized how fundamental women were to early peace activism. She contested the goal of making war humane, and — because she was horrified he won the Nobel prize — got Dunant to say he was actually part of the peace movement.

Robin Lindley: Western powers completely ignored any rules of humane or more ethical conduct in colonial and imperialist conflicts, usually against nonwhite populations, such as the Indian Wars in the US and the wars of European empire in Africa and Asia. What did you learn about “humane rules” in these wars?

Professor Samuel Moyn: There is an ongoing debate about this, though I think most every historian agrees that law and international law were racialized to their core in the century from Dunant to Vietnam. As a result, what constraints there were tended to be applicable in principle or practice to transatlantic wars of white Christians with one other, rather than imperial or other global wars. Part of the reason was that the laws of war long allowed irregular combatants to be shifted onto a second track of conflict on which with fewer or no rules applied— and enemies in the colonial wars more frequently were treated that way. And, of course, aerial bombardment, which became grievously unregulated everywhere in the middle of the twentieth century, was invented for the sake of controlling subject peoples. It also lasted longest in places like Korea and Vietnam even when America had signed up to provide the transatlantic “white” peace after 1945.

Robin Lindley: You note that the Korean war was the most brutal war of the twentieth century in the intensity of violence and per capita civilian deaths. I was surprised. What did you find?

Professor Samuel Moyn: It used to be known as the forgotten war, but the data we have clearly show that death and injury in Korea were far worse per capita than any subsequent American war. I was amazed that, after Vietnam when Americans finally began to complain in large numbers about such brutality, one marine responded that Vietnam was nothing compared to what he had seen in Korea. And he may have been right.

Robin Lindley: The Vietnam War, a war involving a nonwhite population, was extremely brutal with enormous civilian casualties. And it was a US defeat. And US soldiers committed war crimes. What were the lessons of Vietnam for the US military and the application of law of war? How did this experience and others lead to law of war changes in the 1970s?

Professor Samuel Moyn: The reason that even the American military after Vietnam resolved to take steps to make American war more humane — and a lot of American citizens insisted on it — was because political consensus broke down like never before on the propriety of a foreign war.

The consequences remain enormous. But the aftermath also led to new humanitarian and human rights movements that forsake the antiwar aims of the Vietnam era in order to monitor crimes of war alone. Self-evidently, those in the military who take the laws of war more seriously than before Vietnam have less serious a foe than movements that challenge American war-making as such.

Robin Lindley: You have described a “Nuremberg reversal” in recent decades. What does that mean?

Professor Samuel Moyn: At Nuremberg the gateway crime the Nazis were charged with committing was “crimes against peace.” And no wonder: if you commence an aggressive war, you are likely to commit atrocity illegally too. Not to mention that aggressive wars allow the legal killing of combatants in large numbers, and civilians too up to some limit, as well as the allocation of resources to war rather than welfare and the cascade of unintended consequences around the world that no one can foresee but which are generally regrettable.

Our moral consciousness and political movements tend not to proceed in the way Nuremberg did. You might say that instead of prioritizing keeping war from starting or stopping it once it starts, we prioritize making it clean if we can and picking up the pieces in the aftermath. It’s a crucial set of tasks, but not if we can criminalize, deter, or punish starting illegal wars. Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine suggests the same lesson.

Robin Lindley: In his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Barack Obama seemed to concede that war is inevitable but promised that the US would follow the laws of war and ethical principles to somehow make war less brutal and more humane. How do you see President Obama as a former peace candidate who became a wartime leader?

Professor Samuel Moyn: He’s a fascinating moralist and rhetorician who, as I said earlier, inspired this book. I wanted to show how many people took him to be a peace candidate and reconstruct how shocking it was that he became one more endless war president. At the same time, I wanted to explore how he understood that replacing George W. Bush’s form of the war on terror with a new “humane” form could provide it legitimacy in some quarters.

Robin Lindley: In America’s “War on Terror,” you note the use of novel tactics that involve US Special Forces and drone warfare. With drone warfare, it seems that attacks can be more precise and the “combat” more clinical and sanitary. More “humane” than traditional warfare. It seems that the public is generally unaware of most Special Forces operations and drone attacks. Can you give readers a sense of how many of these far-flung operations have taken place in the past decade or so? I was stunned by some of the statistics.

Professor Samuel Moyn: They are stunning. Drones are obviously new, and Obama (who ordered them to strike hundreds of times) built a drone empire infrastructurally, with new bases across a big swathe of the earth. Special Forces are older, but their deployment escalated even as Bush, Obama (especially after his Afghan “surge”) and even Donald Trump showily withdrew troops from some theaters. The escalation in the use of Special Forces meant they were touching ground in seventy percent of all countries on earth by the time Obama’s term ended — and eighty percent by the time Trump’s did.

I merely wanted to show how this new light- or no-footprint form of the war on terror was also placed under more humane controls, notably in a 2013 Obama policy guidance document that required that no targeted killing take place if there was any expectation of civilian death or injury — a requirement Trump retained. Of course, that rule wasn’t followed, but what interested me is that it was propounded in the first place.

Robin Lindley: Did our “Forever Wars” end with President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan?

Professor Samuel Moyn: Clearly not. In his speeches on the withdrawal (which Obama commenced and Trump struggled to complete), Biden made very clear that he retained the power to kill over long distances. And, even while the drone program has been under some kind of review, several drone strikes have taken place, in Somalia and Syria.

In fairness, Biden has reduced the overall number substantially. But American counterterrorism globally is not a thing of the past, nor have new constraints been introduced on it.

Robin Lindley: Your book focuses on US policy, but I’d be derelict if I didn’t ask about the brutal war in Ukraine now. Thousands of war crimes have been reported and Russia’s unprovoked attack itself violates the constraints on “aggressive war.” Russian leader Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he cares little about international law. How do you see the war in Ukraine: the atrocities, the demolition of civilian targets, the stubborn defense by the Ukrainian military? How do you see the end of this war?

Professor Samuel Moyn: Actually, Putin made his case for invasion by arguing that the West broke international law first. Far from cynically dismissing international law, Putin rhetorically embraced it. Obviously, two wrongs don’t make a right, and the Ukraine war has been sickeningly brutal. Most at stake, once again, is how to keep great powers from engaging in aggressive war and facing no consequences other than military defeat, and how to organize a fair and rapid peace instead of allowing great power confrontation to devolve into endless wars around the world.

Robin Lindley: In closing, I wanted to ask about the future of world peace. I was chair of the Washington State Bar Association’s “World Peace through Law Section” a few years ago. We presented programs on war crimes’ tribunals, international forensic investigations, human rights, law of war, peace movements, and more. Do you see a future where ending war will be favored over making war more humane? Are their models from history we can use to achieve a more peaceful world? What can average citizens do?

Professor Samuel Moyn: I don’t see any immediate future in which peace movements suddenly materialize, but it is heartening to me that only a couple of hundred years ago people accepted the inevitability of war, much as they accepted poverty and slavery. I don’t mean at all to minimize or trivialize the agenda of making war more humane, but I do want to call out its potential risks so long as people give up hope on constraining states from wars they should not be allowed to wage, no matter how humanely they do so.

Robin Lindley: Humane is already influential. I understand that your book Humane has been referenced by members of Congress in communication with President Joe Biden on counter-terrorism and other issues. Congratulations.

Professor Samuel Moyn: I’m sure it wasn’t referenced that often! And the book has inspired a good bit of legitimate pushback that I have found valuable in the continuing discourse about how to think about our morality and politics between our past and our possible futures.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for bearing with me Professor Moyn. It’s an honor to hear from you on these life and death issues. I appreciate very much your thoughtful comments. Congratulations again on your groundbreaking new book Humane and on your body of work on history and law. Your words deserve a wide readership.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin's email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

The Filipinos of my dad’s era were an especially tough bunch. All had experienced racism and hardship, many had joined militant labor unions, many had survived combat. Years of adversity helped to build backbone—their intense pride, their edgy, don’t-mess-with-me attitude—and a powerful sense of community. These were distinctive features that marked my father’s generation and allowed them to survive in this new and often hostile land. . . I would like to think that some of those traits have been passed on to us—their American-born sons and daughters.

Peter Bacho, Uncle Rico’s Encore.

I met Professor Peter Bacho a half century ago. We were classmates at the University of Washington School of Law—long before he became an inspiring professor, a daring foreign correspondent, and a widely acclaimed novelist and short-story master.

When I heard this spring that Professor Bacho had published a new memoir, Uncle Rico’s Encore: Mostly True Stories from Filipino Seattle (University of Washington Press), I immediately wanted to catch up with my esteemed classmate from decades ago.

In his new book, Professor Bacho celebrates the overlooked, mid-twentieth century story of the Seattle community of Filipinos or Pinoys (Filipinos in America—who work with their hands, per Professor Bacho). His heartfelt, poignant and often humorous accounts are informed by the struggles of his first-generation parents and relatives, his friendships, his curiosity, and his desires and dreams. And the stories he relates are set against the backdrop of America in an age of seismic societal changes, protest, racial reckoning, and a bloody, divisive war in Asia.

He takes the reader through his old Seattle neighborhood and environs: the Central Area, the International District (Chinatown), Mount Baker, Rainier Valley, and beyond. He brings to life the reality for many Pinoys of poverty, racial oppression, brutal working conditions, and sporadic violence, but also shares triumphs built on toughness, resistance and resilience that were the lifeblood of the first- and second-generation in Seattle.

This early Filipino community has dispersed and disappeared in recent years as the young progeny of earlier generations have moved on from the old Seattle haunts. In many ways, Uncle Rico’s Encore may be read as an elegy for an embattled but determined group of men and women who sought their roles in an imperfect nation.

Professor Bacho teaches writing and Asian American studies now at The Evergreen State College, Tacoma Campus, and previously taught at the University of Washington, Seattle and Tacoma campuses. He is the author of six previous books: Cebu, American Book Award winner for fiction in 1992; Dark Blue Suit, winner of the Murray Morgan Prize and the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award; Boxing in Black and White; Nelson’s Run; Entrys; and Leaving Yesler. Seattle University named him the Distinguished Northwest Writer in Residence for 2005. The Northwest Asian Weekly honored him in 2008 as a literary “pioneer.”

Professor Bacho was born in Seattle and grew up in Seattle’s Central District. He earned two law degrees from the University of Washington, a JD and an LLM, and he later worked as a staff attorney for the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He also began teaching in the nascent Asian-American Studies program at the University of Washington in the late 1970s, and has continued teaching since then. And he also worked as a contributing editor for the Christian Science Monitor, specializing in Philippine politics and society, and later worked for several years as an editorial writer for the Tacoma News Tribune. His articles also have appeared in major foreign policy journals including the School of International Studies Journal (American University) and the Journal of International Affairs (Columbia).

Professor Bacho generously agreed to converse with me the old-fashioned way—by phone from his home office near Tacoma— after I fumbled in connecting with Zoom, alas. We discussed his multifaceted career, his perilous adventures, his new book, history, and more.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations on your new memoir Peter. Uncle Rico’s Encore is a riveting read. You’ve captured the story of the first two generations of Filipinos or Pinoys in Seattle—a welcome addition to a mostly overlooked history. You share vivid glimpses from your life and from the Filipino community in Seattle that are certain to enrich readers and add a new perspective on the history of the region.

Professor Peter Bacho: It was a vital community to me. It nurtured me, and the memories are very powerful and very, very strong to this day. Some of my friends are emailing me about the book and I respond: “Hey, it's not my story. It's our story.”

I had to tell this story. Every one, every community, every generation needs a griot [storyteller]. And I guess I've fallen into that role.

Robin Lindley: What sparked your memoir now? We've both had heart issues recently. Did your 2019 heart attack that you describe vividly in Uncle Rico’s Encore play a role in writing the memoir now?

Professor Peter Bacho: Actually, no. It didn't play any role whatsoever. It just basically was the spur for three pretty good stories.

Robin Lindley: Your heart attack story is an inspiration. As you relate in your book, your wife Mary was a lifesaver. She immediately responded to your emergency when you were struck with the attack and she got you to the hospital immediately. And Mary helped you through your recovery. Your heart stories warmly acknowledge Mary’s caring and love.

Professor Peter Bacho: Mary is a wonderful, wonderful human being. I had a widow-maker blockage but the vessels did a workaround. I didn’t need surgery.

Robin Lindley: That sounds miraculous. I’m glad you recovered well without surgery. As you know, I also had a severe blockage and required urgent open heart surgery last year. Avoid that if possible.

So, what did prompt your memoir now?

Professor Peter Bacho: The earliest story in the collection “September 20th, 1968” sparked the book. I realized in 2018 that it had been 50 years since I thought I had fooled the draft by going down to enlist in the Army. The best and worst thing I've ever done in my life. I never told anyone.

I signed the enlistment papers and went to the induction center because all of my friends—particularly the Filipino guys who did not get college deferments—were getting drafted and they were sent to the bush in Vietnam, and I really had no desire to be an 18-year-old infantryman. I wanted to choose my military occupation specialty, and hoped it would be a very civilian-like position where I could type and file reports and avoid shooting people and getting shot in return. If the military was inevitable—I assumed I’d flunk out of college—then I wanted to go on terms that I could dictate, which to me was very logical.

But, when I went for a physical, a kindly Army doctor asked about my medical history. I thought I was in good shape, but I mentioned my history of asthma. He said that asthma meant I couldn’t serve in hot, humid or dusty climates. I didn’t react, and he repeated himself, talking more slowly this time like I was an idiot. I finally got it and nodded yes. I couldn’t serve for medical reasons, he said.

I couldn’t be drafted. I was 1-Y. The doc saved my life.

Robin Lindley: What a relief after seeing the drafting of your young Filipino friends. You stress that the Filipino men you knew who went to public schools were often ignored and left floundering in school. Many dropped out and were drafted.

Professor Peter Bacho: They were typecast like Black kids were. They weren't encouraged at public schools. I was at O’Dea [a private parochial high school] with another group of Filipino guys. The Christian Brothers at O’Dea were notorious for meting out physical punishment and either you got good grades or you were whacked. I preferred not to get whacked and I did the best I could, but there weren't any easy classes. You didn't get easy classes or the shop classes or the vocational classes. You had no excuse not to take physics. I had an easier time in college than I did in high school.

But the attitude of too many Seattle public school teachers at that time was that Filipino students of my generation were just not college material. Some of those guys were really smart but they weren't encouraged.

Robin Lindley: That’s tragic. And some of your friends were seriously wounded or killed in the military. It says so much about the racism then. But you were encouraged and your parents played a big role by sending you to O’Dea rather than your local public school.

Before getting to your family and friends, I wanted to catch up on your career since we met at UW law school in 1971. You touch on your transitions in the memoir and, since our law school experience, you've been a lawyer, a gifted professor, a globe-trotting journalist, and now an award-winning writer.

Professor Peter Bacho: Lawyer! I was the world's worst attorney. I didn't care.

Robin Lindley: I doubt that. Did you want to be a lawyer when you were a kid?

Professor Peter Bacho: No, not at all. It was nothing young people of my generation were dreaming of becoming. I never thought about actually being a lawyer and how that would fit. It turned out it just wasn't interesting. I worked for the city attorney's office for about six months. I didn’t submit motions on subjects such as constitutional law like great attorneys in the vein of Thurgood Marshall. Instead, I was a city prosecutor handling third-degree assault cases. Or prosecuting a person who was pulled over for drunk driving. Did I care? And the answer quite frankly was no.

And I love law actually as a discipline. It's fascinating, and it’s very good training for other things, but the actual practice was a disappointment to me.

Robin Lindley: But you also worked as an attorney for a federal appellate court, a very prestigious position for a young lawyer.

Professor Peter Bacho: I was a staff attorney at the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco after I started teaching at the college level. By then, I became very comfortable teaching, but wondered if I had left law too soon.

At the Ninth Circuit, I worked with younger, very white people on the way to six-figure incomes. I did well and knew I could be a lawyer, but I also answered that question about law and I closed that door. I decided not do that anymore. But the study of law fascinated me, and I don't regret that at all but I just didn't have the temperament to be a lawyer. And, when I recognized that, fortunately, I have an active imagination and made the next step.

It's basically the story of my life. I wandered as a young person from situation to situation wondering how I would do, and once I found the answer, it was no longer intriguing,

Robin Lindley: What drew you to college-level teaching, and how did that come about?

Professor Peter Bacho: I just stumbled into it. It was just luck that I found something I loved doing, I was good at it and I’ve had an impact on the thinking of thousands of students. In the seventies, I was picked up by the University of Washington for a little program in Asian American studies, which is much bigger now. I was there basically at the beginning and we were inventing things as we went along. It was all fun and interesting but, after a while, I was getting too comfortable and uneasy and wondered what else I could do. What other things were interesting to me? For a couple of decades, my own curiosity was the governing engine.

Robin Lindley: That’s inspiring if not disconcerting at times. And that gets to your journalism career. As you write, you had some thoughts of that career even as a child.

Professor Peter Bacho: I did. I have this piece in the book on Arnaud de Borchgrave, a foreign correspondent I admired. He was writing from every global hot spot you could possibly imagine. I was thinking to myself, what if I did that? Well, I did it, and I was in a hotspot at least a couple of times. I did that pretty well and decided I didn’t have to do it anymore. So that door closed.

Robin Lindley: You traveled to the Philippines a couple times for stories on Ferdinand Marcos and then the Corazon Aquino administration. You detail some of your assignments in your memoir. As a journalist, you had a remarkable and dangerous career and you actually survived combat in the Philippines in 1987.

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes. One hour and 30 minutes. I learned how I would do in that situation. I did okay. Everything slowed down and I kept my head about me and made sure that I was safe. The difference between being a journalist in a firefight and a soldier in a firefight, was that I didn’t have to shoot anyone. That's something I'm very, very thankful for. All I had to do was get the story and make sure I was safe. And I was pretty good at that.

Robin Lindley: That must have been traumatic. What happened?

Professor Peter Bacho: I had interviewed the head of Philippine military intelligence the day before I found myself in a pitched battle. He had told me that his soldiers were loyal to President Aquino.

When I woke up the next morning, Manila was under siege. About 500 rebel soldiers had attacked government sites, including the presidential palace. They took over key centers including the communication center with the government television station.

That day, I was supposed to interview Luis Taruc, the Huk Supremo who led the resistance against the Japanese during World War II. After the liberation, landowners with enormous influence realized that there was an armed peasant army, and they turned all the forces of the government against them and basically started killing Huk veterans. And then Taruc took his boys and said we’re going to the hills, to the swamps, and we’re going to fight a war of resistance. That's precisely what they did. Taruc was captured and arrested in the 1950s, and he had been recently released when I met him.

Even though Manila was under siege, I wanted this interview. We drove past the checkpoints and it seemed the rebels would negotiate some agreement and lay down their arms and then everything would return to normal.

The interview with Luis Taruc went well and then, as I was heading back to Manila, I saw three armored personnel carriers speeding their way to the government media center. I said, “Follow that car,” or something like that. It was one of my favorite sayings from I think it was Broderick Crawford [lead actor in television’s “Highway Patrol”], and we pursued the APCs.

Civilians were cheering the government soldiers in the personnel carriers. We got to a rear staging area and I left the car and I ran like crazy to follow the APCs. They took a left and were going parallel to the wall of the compound. And then I realized for about three seconds into my run along the wall that no one else was there. The civilians were all out of the line of fire and I ran like crazy to catch the APCs. The government soldiers entered the compound through a gate and then there were explosions and these soldiers attacked the rebels with bazookas and other weapons.

Robin Lindley: You describe the battle in your book. You reported on the initial explosions, the firefight, and the government retaking of the government media center. Weren’t there several fatalities in this attack?

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes. There were more than one hundred casualties overall in the fighting during the day.

Robin Lindley: What a terrifying experience. I’m glad you weren’t hurt. And your mom didn’t know you’d left for the Philippines?

Professor Peter Bacho: She did that time, and after the battle, I’d managed to contact her. But another time, a few years earlier, I’d heard rumors that Marcos was dying. By then, I had been writing pieces in the press criticizing the regime, and Mom told me to be careful, that her sources said that I was on a Philippine government watch list. Going to the Philippines was a risk, but a calculated one. And this potential story was too good to pass up, so I booked a flight to Manila over Thanksgiving to check it out. In those days, US citizens needed just a passport, no visa. So I flew in, talked to my sources, and flew out.

There was no story.  So, when I got back home, I went to my parents’ house the day after Thanksgiving and said, “Hi, Mom, I just got back from Manila.” And she looked at me and she said, “You are a bad, bad boy.” 

Robin Lindley: Your mom must have been relieved. And you also had a scary and somewhat narrow escape on the island of Samar, another hotspot in the Philippines. When was that and what happened there?

Professor Peter Bacho: 1980, I think. Samar was a front in the NPA [New People’s Army] rebellion against the government [of Ferdinand Marcos]. But we happened to arrive in this town, Taft, on the day of some sort of fiesta. It was a surreal scene, nothing but mud, a marching band, and lots of soldiers. Looking back, we lucked out because we came on a day when combat operations had been suspended. How lucky is that?

Robin Lindley: I read your memoir as a tribute to your parents, among other people.

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes. It’s a tribute, to my mom in particular. She was out there, standing up for little people. She was an inspiration.

Robin Lindley: Your parents were both first-generation immigrants from the Philippines and you lived with them in the Filipino community in Seattle’s Central District. Your dad came to the US long before meeting your mom, years before the World War II. Why did he move here? Did he envision a better future in the United States?

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes. The Philippines was poor and Filipinos grew up with a rosy image of America. The Philippines was a US colony and its citizens were American nationals, a bastard category, but they carried US passports, which meant the United States is obligated to intervene on your behalf if any harm came to you from a foreign country. They weren’t citizens, so they couldn’t vote and they couldn’t own land in many jurisdictions. But coming to the United States, this wonderful place that their teachers had raved about, was a dream of most of the people. And most of the first generation of Filipinos who came here, came from poverty.

Robin Lindley: When your dad arrived in the US in years of economic depression, he worked hard as a migrant farmworker and cannery worker and other taxing jobs. And he married his first wife and they had three children. Why did he return to the Philippines after World War II?

Professor Peter Bacho: Because his marriage to an Alaska Native woman was falling apart and he still wanted to marry someone. He decided to return to the Philippines. And sure enough, he met and courted my mom. She had other opportunities, but there's something about my dad. He was very confident and sure of himself with a certain animal magnetism. And I'm sure he lied about being a big shot in the United States. Hey, we ended up on Skid Road for the first couple of years here. And I have two half-sisters and a half-brother from his first marriage. My half-sister Virginia and I were very close. And my dad wasn’t clear with my mom on the realities of his life, including his first marriage and his three children.

And my mom was 17 years younger than my dad. She was beautiful in those days. And she had her choice of very wealthy men, but the Philippines was a devastated place after World War II and the American dream was still very, very powerful, particularly if you wanted to live in a richer country that wasn’t war torn.

Robin Lindley: And your mom survived the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes, she did. She lost two brothers, but she managed to survive. She was never really specific about the war. All three of her brothers, one of whom survived, were part of the resistance, the guerrilla movement. I can imagine them moving, staying a step ahead of the Japanese occupation forces. They lived on Cebu, an island which was occupied by the Japanese with a pretty healthy detachment there. Their main forces were up north around Manila and in the central provinces, but there was heavy fighting in Cebu as well.

Robin Lindley: Your mom and dad married and returned to Seattle. You introduce mid-century Seattle through the story of your parents, and you track their first generation and then your generation of Filipino or Pinoy kids. You grew up in the Central Area, which was diverse but seen as mostly African American in the fifties and sixties.

Professor Peter Bacho: Oh, no. It was a very diverse community including the heart the Filipino community and our church, Immaculate Conception, and you had other Asians communities and mostly working-class whites. And the second Filipino generation was often mixed race, mixes of different kinds: Pinoy and Black or White or Latin or Native. And blood type didn't matter, and we didn’t do that percentage of blood thing. But the culture was very strong and it bound us all together. We were a good community.

Robin Lindley: What drew Filipinos to Seattle?

Professor Peter Bacho: My dad's generation was migrant and they traveled up and down the coast for seasonal jobs in the fields and so on, but the real money was in Alaska, and Seattle was a dispatch point for Alaska canneries where you could make enough money to last a goodly part of the year. And because of the cannery union, they got decent wages compared to work in the fields. My dad was a cannery worker and he became a foreman.

The cannery workers union was strong and, in my opinion, was the key to allowing guys of my dad's generation to get off the migratory cycle and buy a house and start a family.

Robin Lindley: I was surprised to learn that the leader of the cannery union (Local 37 of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union—ILWU) during the McCarthy era was a communist, which must have been awkward during the Red Scare in the fifties.

Professor Peter Bacho: That was Chris Mensalvas. That's a remarkable story and that’s why it's such a remarkable community. Basically, Chris and the union guys told the federal government to go fuck themselves. Something I'm very proud of.

Robin Lindley: That really says a lot about the resilience and stubbornness of these Pinoy workers. It's hard to imagine that tense time when people were turning on friends and relatives.

Professor Peter Bacho: Some were betraying friends, naming names, all that stuff. But the Pinoys who were members of that union just didn't do it. The state had loyalty hearings. My dad wasn’t caught up in those hearings but he was a member of the union.

Robin Lindley: What did you learn from your dad and others about cannery working conditions? It seems the work was monotonous, grueling, and dangerous.

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes, it was, but it was better than cutting asparagus in California or Eastern Washington.

Robin Lindley: Didn’t your dad and fellow Pinoys face intense discrimination? What could the union to do protect workers?

Professor Peter Bacho: I mean, the canneries had segregated bunkhouses, but the old Pinoys were not that concerned about that. What they wanted was a decent contract, and that's what work in Alaska provided.

Robin Lindley: And Local 37, the cannery union, was a target of Philippine President Marcos in the 1980s. In 1981, two young progressive union members were assassinated in Seattle and later investigation tied Marcos to the murders. Why was Marcos interested in this Seattle union?

Professor Peter Bacho: Because any bad publicity put at risk his American money pipeline for the US bases. He was struggling to keep Filipinos pacified, but the more important battle was for him to be able to depict a contented nation under his dictatorial rule.

Robin Lindley: And Filipinos in Seattle—like African Americans and other nonwhites—also faced discrimination in housing in the fifties and sixties, as you describe.

Professor Peter Bacho: There was redlining and restrictive covenants to keep nonwhites out of many Seattle neighborhoods.  In the sixties, my parents wanted to buy a larger house near Montlake [north of the Central Area] but the realtor said no.

Robin Lindley: And your parents were active in the community too. And there were some particular issues they supported such as dedicating a bridge to a Filipino hero.

Professor Peter Bacho: That was a bridge and a park. Jose Rizal was an activist in the Philippines who challenged Spanish colonization in the late nineteenth century, and he was a hero to the first generation here. My Uncle Vic and Trinidad Rojo got that project done. It was remarkable in Seattle to have the 12th Avenue South Bridge and a park a couple of hundred yards away renamed for Jose Rizal. And it was a small group of aging Filipinos who had enough political force to get this done in a city that had no connection to Jose Rizal.

My parents also were involved in Filipino community groups where they would socialize and talk politics and maintain friendships.

Robin Lindley: You mentioned that your mom stood up for other people. Your eulogy for her at the close of your book is very moving. You and your mom both took part in protests in the seventies. What issues were involved and what did the protests accomplish?

Professor Peter Bacho: In the 1970s, we were able to get decent housing and social services for Chinatown's poor, which included old Pinoys. They were able to live out their lives in the only neighborhood they felt comfortable in.

Robin Lindley: You have studied and taught the history of the Philippines. The country became a US colony after the Spanish American War. It seems that many Americans don’t know of the bloody Philippine-American War (1899-1902) that followed the US victory over Spain in 1898. Did your parents or other people in your community talk about that war of American imperialism?

Professor Peter Bacho: No, not in my community. But, as a young man, I became obsessed with learning as much as I could about it and became well versed in it.

That war was ignored also in the Philippines. The American schoolteachers there focused on American ideals. You're not going to teach the brutality of a war to the people you’re hoping to convert. You're not going to say this was basically a very brutal land grab. That defeats the purpose of trying to educate hearts and minds, right?

And in that war, anywhere from 250,000 to a million people, mostly civilians, were killed by American troops or by diseases, starvation, and so on. It’s a hidden history for I'd say 99.5% of the American people. It's just one of those little scuffles Americans got into at the turn of century.

Robin Lindley: I love the way you start your books with the “Maps,” your dreamlike walks through old Seattle neighborhoods where your family and Pinoy friends lived and worked. You take the reader to specific places.

Professor Peter Bacho: That was a last-minute addition. I wanted something to alert the reader that this was a physical space where we used to live. These are the neighborhoods that we used to haunt in the fifties and sixties, and I wanted to give back those places.

This was home. I loved the Central Area and Mount Baker and I loved Chinatown where my Uncle Rico lived in a small room with a hot plate.

I knew a lot of people. I knew the joints. I knew where they gambled and I knew where they ate and where they drank. My mom and dad had lots of friends there, and every week or so we'd be down there just hanging out with friends. Most of them were my dad's friends, and they eventually became my mom's friends too.

Robin Lindley: What was life like for your Uncle Rico and other single Pinoy men? Can you say more about their living situation and activities?

Professor Peter Bacho: They were resigned to their lot in life. Their early dreams and aspirations were dead. All they asked was that they not be bothered. And that's what the activism of the 1970s got them - to stay in place, to not be bothered.

Robin Lindley: And you stress that the Catholic Church was also a center for the Filipino community in Seattle.

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes, it was. Immaculate Conception in particular was a center for the old community. It was a very Filipino parish with lots of African Americans and some white parishioners, but the Filipino influence was palpable either.

Maybe the old Pinoys weren't especially religious, but the women they married after the war sure were. Mom was religious, Dad, no way. So she dragged him to Sunday Mass, and he went along. Not a peep of complaint. I am sure he's not the only old Pinoy who got dragged to church on Sunday by their mass-loving wives.

Robin Lindley: When you were just eight years old, as you recount, you believed that you had killed Pope Pius XII and you felt so guilty that you confessed. You now say you’re culturally Catholic but I sense you're not a strict believer anymore

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes. But it’s part of my identity. I cheer for the [Catholic school] football and basketball teams, but I did away with all of the Catholic guilt a long time ago.

Robin Lindley: You still teach, and your last major career transition was becoming a fiction writer. And, in 1992, your first novel Cebu won the American Book Award for fiction. That must have been encouraging.

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes. And I thought this must be easy. But I learned it's not. It's hard. You work at it. Fortunately, I have an active imagination.

Robin Lindley: I think that keeps you young. I tried and floundered with creative writing. I appreciate people with your talent for creating imaginary worlds, believable characters and stories that somehow hang together. You’re a master of that art. What is some advice you share with your aspiring student writers?

Professor Peter Bacho: If you are going to write a book, first, learn the rules, and understand when you can break them. Second, you had better love the project because writing a book of fiction or creative nonfiction is a two- to three-year wrestling match. The process of creating is intense.

Robin Lindley: Who are some of your influences as a fiction writer?

Professor Peter Bacho: James Welch for his depiction of 19th Century Blackfeet life and their worldview; Jim Harrison for his sprawling and engaging narratives; Faye Ng and Bienvenido Santos for their subtlety, especially the latter, because in Scent of Apples, he evokes and does not overexplain. There are others…

Robin Lindley: Readers are certain to enjoy your memories. You’re very candid about your personal life, your intimate relationships, and your various professions. And you have a disarming humor about your own mishaps and foibles. Where does your humor come from?

Professor Peter Bacho: Oh, I think my mom, mostly. But also from my pals and their parents. We lived in the margins and could see the absurdity of things.

Robin Lindley: And you seem a gentle soul Peter, but you're also an athlete and a fighter too. What was the attraction of martial arts and boxing for you?

Professor Peter Bacho: That's another door there. I needed to figure out how to deal with aggressive guys. I wondered how I would do in certain situations. Boxing by its nature is violent, and it prepped me well for the ring and the street. And the most that you can hope for is hey, I got a chance. So, I prepared.

Robin Lindley: And, as you lament, the Filipino community in Seattle has dispersed widely since your youth.

Professor Peter Bacho: Yes, and the dispersal brought with it a rupture in community. One of the things that growing up in that era of segregation and blatant racism allowed is for folks in our community to see beyond stereotypes. It's hard to have negative stereotypes of African Americans, for example, if you're over at their house all the time, eating all their food. And I did that often. We couldn’t be conned by today’s race baiters and haters. I grew up with people that were depicted as the bad guys. They weren’t the bad guys. They were human beings, for goodness sakes.

Robin Lindley: And you’ve gone on to write several other books as well as award-winning short stories. You’re also a master of literary non-fiction writing as evidenced by your memoir and other books, as well as your journalism work. Do you have any other comments for readers on your memoir, your writing, or anything else?

Professor Peter Bacho: I’m not sure, but I don’t think I could have written this memoir if I had lived a more conventional life.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing your insights and thoughtful comments Peter. I hope many readers enjoy your new memoir especially for your perspective on a group of steadfast immigrants and their children who surmounted significant challenges and contributed to building a thriving American city and region. Congratulations and best wishes.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin's email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.

--Elie Wiesel, Human Rights Activist, Author and Holocaust Survivor

The word holocaust derives from the ancient Greek for “burnt offering.” The term “the Holocaust” refers to Nazi Germany’s systematic, deliberate, state-sponsored campaign of dehumanization, terrorism, persecution and mass murder that resulted in the deaths of at least six million European Jews during the Nazi era (1933-1945). This horrific, genocidal Nazi initiative is also called “the Shoah,” Hebrew for “catastrophe.”  

The roots of the Holocaust ran deep in the centuries-long history of antisemitism in Europe, with a ferocious escalation of persecution of Jews under Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler during Third Reich that began with harassment and deprivation of rights of Jews leading to physical attacks and destruction of Jewish property, to isolated atrocities, to segregated ghettos, and then to mass murder on an industrial scale with the “Final Solution,” the Nazi plan to exterminate all European Jewry. By 1941, death camps for mass killing sprouted in Eastern Europe. By the end of the war in May 1945, the Nazis had exterminated two thirds of the Jews in Europe. 

In the United States, as one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history unfolded, Americans were confronted by the fate of the Jewish people in Europe. Jewish pleas for sanctuary in America to escape Nazi persecution and likely death tested American ideals. Debates raged throughout the prewar and war years about America’s responsibility to assist imperiled refugees as leaders balanced domestic needs during the Depression with military considerations, as well as popular sentiment influenced by pervasive antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, and racial “purification” based on the pseudoscience of eugenics. 

The popular understanding of the US response to the Holocaust combines a sense that Americans were unaware of the Nazi atrocities against Jews in Europe and the idea that Americans were simply unable to help while ignoring the anti-immigrant and isolationist sentiments of the time. 

The story is much more nuanced and complicated as reflected in a groundbreaking and moving new PBS six-hour documentary series The United States and the Holocaust, directed by the iconic filmmaking team of Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein. The series is set to debut on PBS on September 18. 

By carefully examining the period from the early twentieth century through the Second World War in the US and Europe, this series dispels competing myths about the American response to the Holocaust and explores the reality of that period.

As always with previous Burns-Novick film collaborations, the series draws on extensive and groundbreaking research to help viewers understand how American perceptions of the persecution of European Jews were shaped by circumstances in the United States including a severe economic crisis, fear of immigrants, deep-rooted antisemitism and racism, and popular isolationist tendencies. Among other materials, the series presents the fruits of an intensive exploration of the past and includes the commentary of expert historians and Holocaust survivors, as well as rare photographs and films, home movies and family photos and personal memorabilia, official records, newspaper and magazine articles, and popular cultural materials.

Lynn Novick, co-director of the series and a distinguished filmmaker in her own right, graciously responded to a series of questions on the creation of this revelatory and engaging documentary by Zoom. 

Ms. Novick is one of the most renowned documentary filmmakers and visual storytellers working in the US today. She has been honored with Emmy, Peabody, and Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Awards for her extraordinary work. She has served as co-director with Ken Burns for more than 25 years, and together they have created the most critically acclaimed documentary films that have aired on PBS including Hemingway (2021); The Vietnam War (2017); Prohibition (2011); The Tenth Inning (2010); The War (2007); Jazz (2001); Frank Lloyd Wright (1994); and Baseball (1994). Ms. Novick came to Florentine Films in 1989 to work on Burns’s landmark 1990 series, The Civil War, as associate producer for post-production.  Her 2019 series College Behind Bars on a unique education program in prisons was her debut project as solo director and the series was nominated for two Emmys. She previously served as researcher and associate producer for Bill Moyers on two PBS series: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth and A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers.

Robin Lindley: It’s a pleasure to talk with you again Lynn. Thanks for your previous thoughtful conversations with me on your Vietnam War and Hemingway documentaries.  And now, congratulations to you and Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein and your crew on your new documentary masterpiece The United States and the Holocaust. For me, the series was extremely moving and illuminating, and I think it will surprise viewers as it addresses many preconceptions and flawed history about this period in the United States and in Germany. What was the inspiration for this documentary? 

Lynn Novick:  Ken and Sarah Botstein and Geoffrey Ward (author, historian and screenwriter) and I have all been interested in the Holocaust in different ways and for different reasons for years. We've touched on it in glancing ways in some other projects we've done, but we weren't especially focused on tackling it as its own distinct topic until 2015. That’s when we were approached by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, when they were planning an exhibition called “Americans and the Holocaust” for 2018. They asked if we thought it would be interesting to do a documentary that might come out around the same time as the exhibition. We said immediately, that is a terrific idea. But we added that we probably couldn’t get it done so quickly because of other projects we were all working on. 

We put the project in our pipeline and began to think about it and do the research and assemble the advisors and look for survivors to interview and all of that. But we didn't really dive into it full time for a few years. We didn't get it done in time for 2018, but the exhibition is still up. The museum did a beautiful job and we were able to benefit from their research and scholarship. We also did our own research into the topic and took it in some different directions. 

Robin Lindley: How did the project evolve from your original conception to the final series? I appreciate your deep dive into American history in particular. 

Lynn Novick: One of the big questions with a project like this is always where do you start?  Do we begin with Hitler coming to power or do we begin with the Kristallnacht or other events once the Nazis had taken over Germany? 

But, since we were focusing on the American response, it became clear pretty quickly that we would have to lay out for our audience what our policies were towards immigrants and refugees before this crisis happened. To get our arms around the context for the story, we decided we had to go back to the 19th century—to the ideals behind the Statue of Liberty and our values as a society. And then we looked at how we lived up to or did not live up to those values when push came to shove in the 1930s and 1940s. 

It was really a process of rewinding or pulling back the threads to get where we wanted to start, and then lining up the history of the Second World War; the history of America's involvement in the Second World War; and the history of the Holocaust itself. When it happened? How it happened? Where it happened? Who was victimized? Who were the perpetrators? All of these questions.

I'm not sure I could have fully explained these concerns before we began to work on this project and then simultaneously lay out what information Americans had about all of this, both at the highest levels of government and just among ordinary people reading the newspaper, going to the newsreels, or people who had family members in Europe and were hearing through informal networks about what was happening.

That was the ambitious scope of what we were trying to do. To do that, we heard from scholars and historians who have studied this period and know a lot more about it than we will ever hope to know. And we also had to make it real for ourselves and for our audience so we wanted to find people who actually could still bear witness to it, who had lived through it themselves. And these were people who would now be in their eighties, nineties, and were children at the time. 

All of those things were happening simultaneously for us. 

Robin Lindley: You cover an amazing range of history in six hours. I appreciate, as always, your meticulous and extensive research from film and photographic resources to archival material, to actual location visits, to the presentation of experts and witnesses. And you follow many story threads. How do you see your research process? 

Lynn Novick: First, I can't say enough about the beautiful script that Geoffrey Ward wrote for us. We must give him an enormous amount of credit for helping us establish the overall structure; in figuring out the chronologies and how these stories would intertwine; and writing about such difficult materials. He did so beautifully, and in an understated way. We're so grateful to Geoff for everything he has done for this film. 

The research is done throughout the project by many people. Geoff does his own research in terms of often reading published material, including secondary sources. He looks online for material as well. We have a team of producers that do the archival research, which is looking for the photographs, the footage, the documentary evidence, including letters, telegrams, and many newspapers in this case, to help tell the story. 

And then there's the research to find the people whose stories we're going to tell. We collect their first-person accounts and archival materials that they have so that their stories can also become real. 

So there's many different dimensions to the research and it goes on throughout the project. And we had several aces in the hole for this project. Some of the scholars who we worked with most closely also had worked on the [Holocaust Museum] exhibition and some are connected to the museum. They know this story better than many, and we could call them with questions. They could make suggestions and let us know of finding materials that we didn't know about and sharing that with us. I'll just give one example. It’s a small one, but it represents what you could multiply for every story in the film. 

As we put the series together, we sometimes recognize, for example, that we’re not finding ways to connect the dots between stories. Here, we had two stories with what's happening in Europe and what's happening in America. How do we bring them together besides just alternating between them? And one of the ways we wanted to do that was to find a family that came to the United States before 1924 and had made a life for themselves and had gone back to visit Poland or Ukraine or parts of the former Soviet Union with their movie cameras and had taken pictures or footage of the places where they were from the way you would when you are on vacation. And there's a small collection of this type of material and, we realized about halfway through editing, we really wanted to put in a scene about a story like that, but we didn't have one. 

We reached out to the Holocaust Museum and they had been collecting all manner of oral histories and archival records from different people. They showed us the story of the Bland family, and we were able to look at their home movies that the teenaged son filmed when they went back to the villages where the parents were from in Poland. And we had the oral history of the younger child who was there with his memories of that experience. And we built a scene from that. And that's just one example out of six hours, but you could multiply that across many moments in the film and it speaks to how open our process is. Sometimes we are looking for something and sometimes material just comes up, and it's a little bit of both. 

Robin Lindley: That’s fascinating background on the rigorous work that went into this series. Viewers will be amazed by much of this history. 

Lynn Novick: We were amazed by it.  

Robin Lindley: I appreciate the powerful storytelling and the many threads the series follows. You frame the series with the especially poignant story of Anne Frank's family. She’s perhaps the most well-known victim of the Holocaust for American viewers.

Lynn Novick: Thank you for asking about that story. When we were developing the project and set out to try to tell this story and to find ways for our audiences to understand how interconnected the stories were, some materials came to light, including some letters that Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, had written to a friend in the US who was a well-connected New Yorker who he had known. Otto Frank begged him for help to try to get his family out of the Netherlands. They had already fled Germany for Amsterdam, and they were trying to get out of Amsterdam. We immediately seized on that as a powerful framing device because, as you say, Anne Frank is the most well-known representative of the Holocaust for most Americans, or certainly for many.

I know for myself, when I read her diary in school and even subsequently reread it before we were working on the project, I read it as a document of something that happened far away that had nothing to do with me except that, when I read it, I was a girl and she was a girl. I was very interested and moved by it and devastated by it, but I didn't think about it as anything to do with America at all. 

And so, we wanted to show from the beginning that America was part of the story, or that this story is part of us in ways that we don't fully understand, and that story showed one family of many people who tried to get here and were not able to. And why was that? If we find out that one of those people was Anne Frank and then realize she might still be here today if our policies had been different, we can then explain all the reasons why they weren't different. We’re not saying America is responsible for what happened to Anne Frank in any way, shape, or form, but we're trying to help our audience and ourselves see that these narratives are connected and that in America we have to look at ourselves in this story. 

Robin Lindley: The series provides context for her story that most people probably don't know much about. 

Lynn Novick: The film is six hours long and it could have been ten hours, but a lot of material that we had originally included ended up on the cutting room floor, including one of my favorite scenes. 

We couldn't fit it into the film, but we found out also that Anne Frank’s Montessori school teacher arranged for her and her sister to have pen pals in America. So, she and her sister exchanged letters with sisters in Burlington, Iowa—another connection with the US. We have a beautiful letter from Anne to her pen pal saying my name is Anne and I'm in this grade and I don't really speak English that well, and tell me about yourself. And I found Burlington on the map after I read this normal pen pal letter. It's very moving and it speaks to how much of this history we really don't know and how difficult it is to excavate, especially from the Holocaust, an act of erasure or an attempted erasure. And Anne’s diary is so powerful because she refuses to be erased. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing that moving moment in your research. You also worked with a panel of experts, mostly renowned American historians. 

Lynn Novick: We were grateful to have such a distinguished and brilliant and well- informed and thoughtful group of advisors who know the story of the Holocaust and also American history and how they connect. 

Some of our most treasured experiences on a project like this are the times when we sit down in person and share the film with our advisors before it's done. That gives us a chance to make adjustments after the screenings. We had only one meeting because of COVID. This project was unfortunately put together during the worst of the pandemic. 

We had our only in-person screening in the summer of 2021 when things opened up for a little moment. We were able to bring several of our advisors to New Hampshire to screen the film with us and they gave us their full attention, their depth of knowledge, and the nuances of language and image and the other choices that make the series so powerful. 

Rebecca Erbelding, for example, a young scholar at the Holocaust Museum, has an interesting story of how she got interested in this topic and involved in the scholarship. She wrote her dissertation on the War Refugee Board, which I had never heard before their exhibition went up. She worked with us, and she is a scrupulous historian who understands American history and the Holocaust with all the pitfalls and tropes and oversimplifications. And she was just unstinting in demanding that we get it right. She has been a huge help. 

We also have Peter Hayes, a preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, who has a beautiful way of explaining what happened very matter-of-factly and also pushing back on the idea that it was unthinkable. It was impossible. It was unimaginable. All those words, and he holds us to account to say this did happen. It could happen. It's not unthinkable. He was reframing the way that we think about this catastrophe. He's brilliant. 

We also appreciated having Nell Irvin Painter who is a retired history professor, and now an artist. She made time for us and gave us a great interview and helped us situate the entire conversation and the framing of the film within the context of the powerful undercurrent in America of white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. How does this story fit into that history? And we're enormously grateful for her perspective. 

Robin Lindley: I was impressed that Professor Nell Painter was part of the series. She’s a legendary professor of American history specializing race relations. I interviewed her a couple of years ago on her history teaching and her “encore career” as an artist. Her inclusion in the series is evidence of the deep dive the film takes into our ugly history in the early 20th century with the discriminatory laws, racism, xenophobia, and eugenics—with US laws and policies that served as models for Hitler’s Third Reich. 

Lynn Novick: It's very ugly and deeply disturbing to work your way through that material, but it was part of our story. To tell this story without exploring all of that would be strange. And we were also fascinated and repelled by the interplay. 

We could have done more, but I think we gave our audience an understanding that eugenics was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The Germans embraced it and we embraced it. And Nell has written about this as has Isabel Wilkerson and James Whitman. There was a cross-pollination of racist ideas between Germany and the United States and England and France and other parts of Western Europe. How mainstream those ideas became based on a pseudoscience is appalling. There was nothing scientific about eugenics whatsoever.

Robin Lindley: Yes. A professor I know asked, do you know the abbreviation for eugenics? It's BS, he said. 

Lynn Novick: Exactly. That's perfect. BS is exactly right. And yet we had all these very eminent Americans on the bandwagon hyping it. 

Robin Lindley: Yes. You note in the documentary that Rockefeller, Carnegie, and a lot of renowned academics embraced eugenics. The research in the United States and the United Kingdom, I believe, brought eugenics to the attention of Hitler and the Nazis, and they used it in their master race formulation. 

Lynn Novick: I believe so. And then we also have to account for the fact that again, and other scholars have explained this much better than I can, that when the Germans were trying to figure out how to structure their society so that Jews would be stripped of their citizenship and their rights and do it little by little and do it legally, they looked to us for how to do that. And we had set quite an example over many years. 

Robin Lindley: Exactly. And Hitler, in his hateful, 1924 screed Mein Kampf, applauded America’s restrictive and racist immigration laws as well as the Jim Crow segregation laws and other policies that made Black Americans second-class citizens including a ban of miscegenation. These American ideas were an inspiration for Nazi race laws which deprived Jewish people of all rights and embraced Aryan supremacy with a whole categorical scheme of Jewish ancestry and blood to determine who was truly German and who was not. And, according to several historians, the American laws were actually harsher in some ways than the Nazi edicts. 

Lynn Novick: Exactly. I knew that from visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington. They have artifacts that speak to those laws. And it wasn't news to me that there were Nazis looking to our laws as a model, and the degree to which they emulated us in that regard handicapped our ability to criticize them. They could throw it back in our face and say, you can't criticize us for oppressing a minority. You do the same thing. I'm talking about before the mass killings and the extermination of people, but right up to that moment, there wasn't that much we could say in response to their laws. 

Robin Lindley: The widespread American embrace of the racist principles of eugenics many surprise many viewers. I recall reading that families who were adjudged the most “Nordic”—the apex of the eugenics race hierarchy—would win ribbons at county fairs like animals or produce. And your series notes that 43 of 48 states had legalized the sterilization of defective or “feebleminded” people as well as some criminals. 

Lynn Novick: Yes. That’s really horrifying. And some of those laws were not really rescinded until very recently. 

I'm actually going to tackle that topic again because I'm working on another project on the history of crime and punishment in America. We're going to show that people who were under the control of the state in mental hospitals and prisons and other places of confinement, were subject to the idea that they should be prevented from reproducing and that idea was a very durable one. It was quite horrifying. They called these ugly ideas racial hygiene and racial purification and social engineering according to some construct of the pseudoscience of eugenics. This horrific engineering of humanity is basically racism, and it was not unique to Nazi Germany. 

Robin Lindley: And speaking of racism, how do you see American immigration laws in the early 20th century? You recount a backlash against immigration and refugees after World War I and the extremely restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924. 

Lynn Novick: That's a critical piece of our story. To understand why it was so difficult for refugees under Hitler to enter the United States, we have to know that immigration laws changed dramatically in 1924. 

Before 1924, there had been other restrictions, specifically the Chinese Exclusion Act and some specific rules targeting people from Asia. But for the most part, until the early twenties, anyone could come here from anywhere without any real process. My ancestors all just got on a boat and came here. And if they hadn't, I wouldn't be here today because they were from the places where a lot of the killing took place when the Nazis overran Soviet Union. 

So why did we decide as a society to change our policy and make it very difficult for people to come here from certain parts of the world? There was a backlash that I didn't understand, and it had been building for quite a while. You had wave upon wave of millions of people coming to the United States from 1880 or so to 1920. I think 25 million people came here from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. And the people who ran this country really felt that America was being destroyed—that something innately, inherently good about America was being eroded. And I would argue that the exact opposite was true, but that's how they saw it and they were determined to stop the wrong people from coming here. And it does tie into eugenics and a sense of racial hierarchy that they wanted to preserve. And they used this umbrella of science, of eugenics, but it wasn't scientific at all. It was just pure bigotry.

And sadly, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act passed handily without a lot of resistance to it. The law set quotas for every country that were carefully apportioned according to the ideals that the people who wrote the law wanted America to represent. The Act permitted immigration of a lot of people from Northern Europe: Germany, England, and Scandinavia. That's the people that they thought should come here. Everybody else was restricted to little quotas. If you were from Poland, or if you were from Italy, or if you were from Eastern Europe, your chances of immigrating were very small.  

Robin Lindley: That’s another sad aspect of this story. And after the First World War, as your film shows, the white supremacist and anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan held surprising political sway in many states in both the South and the North.  

Lynn Novick: Indeed. They had reinvented themselves as an anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic organization and were much more “mainstream” than they had been as a violent terrorist organization after the Civil War. In the 1920s, they called themselves “The Invisible Empire,” but there was nothing invisible about them. They marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. And they strongly favored immigration restrictions, and they were hugely popular. Politicians had to reckon with that. 

Robin Lindley: And, by the 1930s, the US Department of State rigidly enforced the immigration quotas and restricted visas and thus severely limited immigration, especially from unfavored nations. And some upper-level officials in the State Department were openly antisemitic. What did you learn about the State Department?  

Lynn Novick: I knew a little bit about this particular character named Breckenridge Long [Assistant Secretary of State—responsible for refugee visas] who is certainly one of the villains of the story. He seemed to have no compassion for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, and he saw them all as a threat to the United States. To some degree, we could say that perhaps there was a fear that refugees coming here would become spies or other security risks. That was the argument, but Long seems to have been just unapologetically antisemitic, and he felt he was doing his patriotic duty to keep the wrong people out of his country and to use the power of his position to do so. And the people under him mostly went along with that. 

On the other hand, there was no great pressure being put upon Long from the White House or from Cordell Hull who was the Secretary of State. The Department went out of its way to enforce the immigration rules to the letter of the law and to delay and to not make things easy for refugees. 

And also, some of the worst offenses beyond those—which were pretty bad—was when the State Department basically suppressed reports of Hitler’s mass extermination of people in 1941 after the invasion of the Soviet Union. These credible reports never made their way beyond the Department. State Department officials in Washington wrote back to their offices in Switzerland, where someone in the Department had sent a sent a detailed report [on mass murder of Jews], and ordered, “please don't send us any more of these reports.” They had no interest. They didn't want this explosive information that could have been used perhaps to raise awareness of the crisis. And instead, they just concealed it. There's no good way to see that story. 

Robin Lindley: And the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, knew of atrocities against Jews in Germany and beyond, but was reluctant to speak out on behalf of Jewish refugees, even though Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, and Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, were arguing essentially that providing a haven for refugees was the purpose of America. 

Lynn Novick: FDR didn't leave behind a diary or audio tapes or much of a record of exactly how he felt about what he was doing or why he made the decisions he did or why he embraced or not the policies he embraced. We have to go with what he did and didn't do and try to infer what we can, and that's a risky business.  

We know that FDR was aware of the crisis. We know that people in the Jewish community in particular and Eleanor and others were pleading with him to do something. And we also know that he was a very astute politician who understood the American political scene better than most, and he was the leader of a deeply antisemitic country that was also xenophobic, as we have said. 

In the 1930s, we were coming out of the Depression and he was not a king. He didn't get to make all the rules. And, to get reelected, he had to bring the public along with him. He was trying to do a lot of different things to get the country out of the Depression, for one, and then move us toward a war footing, and to try to help England and France in particular defend themselves as he began to see the Nazi threat emerging, and then ultimately prepare the nation to fight a war.

And I think it reflects not on him, but on our whole nation. If FDR had said in a Fireside Chat, “I have it on good authority that the Jews of Europe are facing the threat of annihilation, and we know this is happening and Americans have to rally to do everything we can to save them,” I think that would have gone over like a lead balloon. He knew the country very well. He was walking a tightrope trying to move the country forward, but he also knew that if he got too far ahead of public opinion, he’d get nowhere. I'd like to think he could have done more or I wish he had done more, but I also think it's not fair to pin this failure on FDR alone by any means. 

Robin Lindley: There were also some heroes in American officialdom. The series mentions John Pehle who stood up to the State Department and became director of the War Refugee Board late in the war. Who was he?

Lynn Novick: Yes. John Pehle is one American who was not indifferent to the plight of Jews and refugees. He grew up in Omaha and his father was a German immigrant and his mother was the child of Swedish immigrants. He worked for the U.S. Treasury Department as the director of the Foreign Funds Control and, when Gerhart Riegner’s report about the mass murder of Jews came across his desk, he was prepared to do anything in his power to help.

However, as I previously mentioned, the State Department and Assistant Secretary Breckenridge Long, in particular, were deliberately obstructionist and not willing to send any aid abroad. Rather than stand by idly, Pehle worked with Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and others, to draft an executive order for President Roosevelt. The result of their efforts was the establishment of the War Refugee Board, which was signed into effect in January of 1944. Pehle acted as the first director of the board and it was estimated that the WRB saved tens of thousands of lives by providing materials and sending money. Pehle is an American hero who used his position of power to save individual lives and make a difference.

Robin Lindley: You mention the deep antisemitism in the United States at this time. What explains this attitude? Why did many Americans find Jewish people a threat? 

Lynn Novick: I'm not an expert on that topic. I think we have to see it in the context of a white supremacy and ideology. There was lots of prejudice and bigotry to go around. It was not only targeted towards Jews. There was racial hatred towards African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Italian Americans. There was dehumanizing language and othering of many groups.

I don't know that Jews were singled out as being more benighted, as more of a target of this hatred, than other groups, except to say that there was long history of antisemitism from the Catholic Church and, as we see today, from a part of Christian heritage. That's part of the story we have to deal with. And that was true here. 

But what was interesting to me was that antisemitism in America became a much more powerful force only after Jewish immigration increased. When you see large numbers of Eastern European Jews coming here in the 1890s and up to 1920, that antisemitism becomes much more powerful. And that's when you start to see quotas and restrictions, and the overt, explicit antisemitism became much more pervasive when there were more Jews here. 

And Henry Ford, an American icon with an enormous amount of social capital not to mention actual capital, was a big part of this. We cannot let him off the hook. I had heard of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and I knew it was as horrendous antisemitic hoax. I didn't appreciate the degree to which Henry Ford was involved in spreading this hoax. He printed this antisemitic filth in his newspapers and published it as a book and promoted it for years. And he had a lot of credibility. And we're seeing that today. You repeat a lie enough times and people start to believe it. 

So, what you have in our story on American antisemitism, on the one hand, was more of Jewish presence, and then you also had a credible, powerful person spreading hateful ideas. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising. 

Robin Lindley: And we are still faced with Big Lies, as effectively used by Goebbels and Hitler in Nazi Germany, and now employed here. I was surprised by the story from the series about Catholic gangs in the US who assaulted Jewish people and destroyed their property even as the persecution of Jews was happening in Germany.

Lynn Novick: Yes. Father Charles Coughlin is another powerful antisemitic person to pull into this because he incited Nazi-aligned and proto-fascist organizations of both Catholics and Protestants. And we have a tradition of vigilantism here that's often been directed at other people, specifically African Americans, but other groups as well. So, there's a context for that, that we can't ignore. It’s not happening in a vacuum, but it's certainly true that there were self-appointed vigilantes that went out to try to exact violence on Jewish people in America. It’s devastating. 

Robin Lindley: How aware were most Americans of the oppression of Jews in Germany in the 1930s before the war such as atrocities like the destruction of Jewish property and murders during Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” in 1938?

Lynn Novick: One of the many misunderstandings I had of this history before we worked on this film was that Americans didn't know much about what was happening in Europe. The Holocaust was carried out theoretically in secret. 

I incorrectly thought that the world discovered the atrocities only after the war, after the spring of 1945. But the Holocaust Museum exhibition belied that notion. And then we were able to benefit from that as well as from a book by historian Deborah Lipstadt—one of our advisors—who wrote Beyond Belief that showed that the coverage of Nazi oppression of Jews and persecution of Jews and other groups was quite significant. There was a lot of coverage in US newspapers, magazines, and on the radio. Reporters were there and they were telling the story of what they saw. It got harder and harder, but Kristallnacht made front-page headlines all around the country and the world. 

The presence of killing centers like Auschwitz was a different story. That news didn't come out simultaneous with the process of new killing happening, but it did eventually come out before the war ended.

So, the American public was well aware of what Hitler was saying and of everything the Nazis were carrying out in public, which was horrendous. Before the mass killings, there was a lot of coverage of the condition of Jews, and Americans were understandably very upset about it, but it didn't change American attitudes toward immigration. 

Robin Lindley: I think the fateful 1939 voyage of the Jewish refugees aboard the ship St. Louis encapsulates American attitudes then, just a few months before the war started. What did you learn about this tragic voyage? 

Lynn Novick: The story of the St. Louis was very well known at the time, and maybe less well known now, but certain generations of Americans who were alive during the war or soon after have heard of it. And there was a Hollywood movie called The Ship of the Damned. So, it got some attention. 

There are a lot of misconceptions about the voyage. It didn't come down to us exactly accurately so we really were grateful to be able to tell the story with the benefit of all of the historical records that we could put together. 

There was a steady stream of ships across the Atlantic bringing mostly German Jewish and other Jewish refugees to the Americas. You had to get a visa for US entry, and there was a whole legal process to get permission to come here or to Cuba or to some other place. But there were ships going across until the war began, and the St. Louis was one of them. There were 900 something people aboard and they had not been able to get visas to America because that was so difficult, but they had been able to buy visas to go to Cuba, which was a very close ally of the United States at that time—long before Fidel Castro took over. 

For those of us who maybe aren't so clear in Cuban history, Cuba then was almost a satellite country of the United States in some ways, and a lot of refugees thought that if they got to Cuba, they could wait there, and then eventually their visas would come through for the United States and then they could come to America. I know several people whose families did do that. In fact, the COO of PBS, Jonathan Barzilay, said that's what his mother did. So this is a common thread. I know some other families that went the Cuba route, and there were already thousands of Jewish refugees in Cuba at this time. 

But unfortunately for the people aboard the St. Louis, from the time they bought their visas to the time they got to Havana, Cuban policy changed and the government decided they didn't want to let them in. There were many complicated reasons for that, which I will not get into, but it was corruption and internal rivalry between different factions there and the Cuban leader Batista, who literally became dictator, was part of this. Regardless, the refugees were now stranded and the Cubans would not let them off the boat. So, you had this ship full of 900 people who didn’t want to go back to Germany and they had nowhere to go.

The media was in Havana harbor for several days trying to figure out the situation. They were telegraphing to people in the US and around the world, and it was quite an international crisis. And a lot of people who witnessed it then and who think about it now hold the United States to account. Why couldn't we just let them in? And of course, potentially we could have, but there was a process and there were other people who were waiting on lists, and these refugees would have jumped the line, and that would have created some problems in the process for admitting immigrants. I'm not saying it couldn't have been done, but they unsuccessfully appealed to President Roosevelt and the State Department. 

For the people on the ship, the situation was just excruciating. In the end, with a Jewish aid organization and some political connections, they were able to get other countries to agree to take them. They raised some money, about half a million dollars. But they had to go back across the Atlantic. They didn't go back to Germany, but ended up in Belgium, England, France, and other countries, and a good portion of them survived the war, but a third of them were killed by the Nazis, and that's a tragic story. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that account, Lynn. That’s another grim chapter in this horrific history. I haven't got to the mass murder of Jews and others in the Holocaust yet. I learned from my reading, if I may add, and from your series, that Hitler openly called for extermination of all Jews in Europe by 1941. The mass murder of Jews and others grew out of the Nazi T4 program in 1939 to euthanize “defective people,” the disabled and the criminal, or “life unworthy of life,” as the Nazis put it. That program was the precursor of the mass extermination at death camps during the Holocaust. 

Lynn Novick: Right. 

Robin Lindley: The mass exterminations of the Holocaust began in earnest after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. SS Einsatzgruppen troops killed thousands of Jews people in mass shootings or in mobile gas chambers in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And the death camps were operating by 1942 after the Wannsee Conference where Nazi leaders planned the “Final Solution.” And you recount that Rabbi Wise reported to FDR that the Nazis began using lethal Zyklon-B gas at places like Auschwitz to kill thousands of Jews and other prisoners.

And it may surprise many viewers that 4.5 million of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were already dead by the autumn of 1943. 

Lynn Novick: I agree with everything you said. That was a very good summary. 

What I would say when we think about America's response is that we didn't have boots on the ground in Europe then. Once the mass killing started, it happened very quickly. And that industrial scale was quite chaotic, but it turned out horribly because it was not that difficult to kill a lot of people quickly if that's what you wanted to do and you were determined to do it. 

As this was happening, there wasn't much we could have done to prevent it or to stop it given our military situation on the ground. This killing was happening in parts of Europe that were quite far from anywhere American soldiers would ever get to. We never got deep into Germany really. 

The Germans did some killing in Germany and the horrible camps that were liberated there at the end of the war were really the remnants of the process. The massive killing happened in what we would call now killing centers and they were deep in Poland, in places that Americans never got to. For us, it was important to line up the timelines of what happened and when and where when in thinking about the American response.

The challenge here is that nobody knew what was going to happen. The war started in 1939 and America didn't get involved until 1941. Before 1939 would have been the time to encourage people to get out of the parts of Europe where Hitler was going to go. But that's all that can be said with the benefit of hindsight. 

Robin Lindley: Your series does not shrink from portraying the ghastly and horrific reality of the Holocaust. You present images of the mass killing centers and heartbreaking films of dead and sick and dying prisoners during the liberation of the death camps. 

Lynn Novick: That was important to us in terms of the visual representation of the story, and we could not show our viewers very much of what Americans had not yet seen. So, most Americans didn't see any images of what we think of as the Holocaust, until the spring of 1945. Auschwitz was liberated in the winter of 1945, and there were some brief mentions of that, but Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops.

The true horror was not clear to Americans until Buchenwald and Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen and other camps were liberated and Western cameras were there. We held off on showing that material until the end of the film. When we're talking about the killing earlier in the film, we show some of the sites where it happened and the memorials there, which we filmed ourselves. 

I think seeing is believing and we are trying to get the point across that not just for Americans but probably for people around the world the mass killing was covered in the media in print and, little by little, the realities began to accrue on the scale of killing and the scale of persecution, but it wasn't until the images came out that people could understand it.

Robin Lindley: And it’s stunning that, even after the war, there were still severe restrictions on refugees to the United States when there were millions of Jews and others who were displaced in the ruins of Europe. 

Lynn Novick: For us, that's one of the saddest parts of the story in a way, because then the US couldn’t say that we didn't know. We couldn’t say that, if we had known, we would have been more welcoming, more generous, because at that point we did know what the people who had survived had been through, what they had lost, why they couldn't go home. They had lost their families. They had lost their possessions. They had lost their livelihoods. All they had left was just the fact that they were alive in many cases. And they had nowhere to go. 

And there weren't that many people left, frankly, who had survived and still Americans were not disposed to make any exceptions to the policy to let them in. Little by little we did let some in, but it was a battle that shouldn't have been, in my opinion. 

Robin Lindley: You share a much more nuanced story about the United States and the Holocaust than most of us have learned. I think viewers will be struck by the extensive research and the riveting story the series presents about how the United States responded to an international crisis brought on by a brutal dictatorship in Europe, and how the response was influenced by our own history. How do you see the resonance for the story today as we continue to struggle with racism and white supremacy, restrictive immigration laws, domestic terrorism, foreign policy challenges, and serious threats to democracy?

Lynn Novick: When we started working on the film or thinking about it, it was 2015, and Barack Obama was still president. Now, that feels like a lifetime ago, frankly, with everything that has happened since.

I wish the film were not so relevant to today. I really am deeply disturbed, and I know that Ken and Sarah are and everybody who we worked on the series is disturbed by what we see happening all around us, not just in the United States, but around the world. 

But if we speak about America, there will be surges of white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, hate speech, and bigotry. It has become mainstreamed and moved from some fringe corner of the far right to “mainstream media” and to the White House under the previous occupant. He and his allies continue to use the rhetoric of hate and dehumanization of immigrants with racist tropes and fear to attain the goals they have for the society. The breakdown of social norms, the breakdown of democratic norms, the breakdown of civil society, and the rise of propaganda and lies to serve them is truly frightening.  

This film is relevant in so many ways and we wish it weren't, but we're eager to share it with the public for all those reasons. We stopped editing the film last winter when we had to finish it to get it ready for broadcast, but more events have happened that could still be relevant, and there will be more things that happen next week. In other words, it's hard to put a pin in when we will have an ending to our film and we stand by that. But since we made the film, I feel there's still more. 

The story continues in ways that are very worrisome. We're grateful to share it and hope that it can contribute in some ways to at a deeper understanding of the fragility of our democracy and the vulnerability of the institutions that many of us take for granted and the hard work it takes for every generation to preserve them and not to take them for granted. 

Robin Lindley: I appreciate those heartfelt comments, and the timeliness of the film when our democracy is imperiled. And your expert, Professor Timothy Snyder, has written brilliantly about the fate of democracies and reality of fascism in history. 

Lynn Novick: Indeed. I was listening to another historian earlier who studies the rise of fascism and he pointed out that, in many cases, or maybe all cases, fascism has emerged in democracies. Countries that have fair elections and an open society and a free press also have stresses, dislocations, insecurities and tensions in the society. That's fertile ground for fascism to rise and to once it rises, then all bets are off. 

Robin Lindley: Your documentary represents an opportunity for viewers to reflect on the fate of our democracy and our checkered history as these threats again emerge.

Lynn Novick: It's been quite a journey for everyone to work on while this has been happening. It’s been very, very sobering.

Robin Lindley: I really appreciate you bearing with me and sharing the remarkable back story of your powerful new series, Lynn. Congratulations. 

Lynn Novick:  I was just going to say I always enjoy our conversations. I think you are so thoughtful and it's really great to be able to go in depth and explore some of the things that we have tried to explain in the film. Thank you for taking the time to watch it and to have this conversation. 

Robin Lindley: That’s very kind Lynn. It’s a gift for me to talk with you and other bright people who add so much to our understanding of the past and where we are now. Thank you for your brilliant contributions, Lynn, and especially for this revealing and powerful new documentary. I wish every American could view this illuminating and timely film on our history.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service including as a staff attorney in federal agencies and with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, medicine, art, social justice, and culture. His email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.       Representative John Lewis, New York Times (2020).

Twice-impeached former Republican President Donald J. Trump, along with his devoted allies, again and again challenged the American democracy imagined by the framers of the Constitution and by those who through our history have revered the rule of law. He found weaknesses in our system of government, and even broke through some of the most significant safeguards for our democracy in stunning breaches including abuses of power that the framers could not have foreseen.

No other president has transgressed so many of our institutional norms. No other president has rejected the results of a free and fair election and then incited mob violence to end democracy. And Trump and his followers, including many in his complicit major political party, persist and remain a threat to the future of our democratic republic. At this writing, he has just become the focus of a federal investigation of possible violations of the Espionage Act and other laws on government documents.

In his sobering and deeply researched new book 13 Cracks: Repairing American Democracy after Trump (Rowman & Littlefield), renowned historian Professor Allan J. Lichtman recounts how Trump exploited the most vulnerable weaknesses of our democracy. As he details Trump’s many abuses, he also provides detailed historical context on challenges to democracy from other American leaders.

Professor Lichtman shares his profound concern for the fate of our democracy. In the introduction to 13 Cracks, he stresses the words of legendary civil rights champion Representative John Lewis who wrote that democracy is “not a state” but “an act,” an act that requires renewal with each American generation.

American democracy has always been fragile and now—after four years of Trump and his complicit party—it seems dangerously close to slipping away, Professor Lichtman contends. As he notes, the Economist’s highly regarded Democracy Index in 2020 ranked the US only twentieth-fifth of democratic nations and described our country as a “flawed democracy.”

And in this cautionary book, Professor Lichtman not only assesses the history and state of our democracy, but he also advances detailed proposals to shore up our institutions at this fraught time. His remedies to strengthen some of the current “loopholes” in our policies and laws consider problems from presidential overreach, nepotism, conflicts of interest, presidential lies, and lack of transparency, to voter suppression, presidential transitions, foreign interference in elections, and protecting election results.

In another equally powerful recent book, Repeal the Second Amendment: The Case for a Safer America (St. Martin’s Press), Professor Lichtman presents a carefully researched account of the history of American gun ownership and legal developments on the right to keep and bear arms. In addition, he chronicles the horrific human cost of gun violence in America now as more than 100 citizens die each day from gunshot wounds. And he focuses on the efforts of the gun lobby, particularly the National Rifle Association (NRA), along with gun makers and rightwing politicians, to oppose any reasonable provisions that would make Americans safer from gunshot trauma. He argues that meaningful legal measures to protect Americans from the scourge of epidemic gun violence will come only with repeal of the Second Amendment.  

Professor Lichtman may be most well-known for predicting the outcome of every presidential election since 1984 using the system he developed and described in his book The Keys to the White House. As a Distinguished Professor of History at American University, Professor Lichtman focuses on American political history and quantitative analysis and history. He has been a recipient of AU’s Scholar/Teacher of the year award.

In addition to the previously noted titles, some of his other acclaimed books include White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; FDR and the Jews (with Richard Breitman), winner of the National Jewish Book Award Prize in American Jewish History; and The Case for Impeachment. Professor Lichtman also has lectured in the US and internationally and has provided commentary for major US and foreign media networks as well as leading newspapers and magazines. And he has served as an expert witness in more than 100 civil rights and voting rights cases.

Professor Lichtman generously discussed questions about his work, our current political situation, his recent books, and more in a lively recent conversation by telephone.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Lichtman your recent work. It's an honor to talk with you today. Before getting to your books 13 Cracks and Repeal the Second Amendment, I’d like to hear about your sense of our political situation today. You’re renowned for your predictions of presidential elections since 1984 using the 13-key election prognostication process described in your book The Keys to the White House. Do you have a prediction yet for 2024?

Professor Allan Lichtman: It’s still a little bit early and I don't have a solid prediction, but I will tell you that, as always and just like it was in 2016, the conventional wisdom is all wrong. The conventional wisdom is saying, oh my God, Biden is unelectable. He should never run again. That couldn't be more wrong.

One of my keys to the White House is incumbency. So, if Biden doesn't run, Democrats lose the incumbent key. The second key is that there will be a huge internal party fight for the incumbent party if Biden doesn't run. So absent Biden, you're already down two keys before you even start. And it only takes six keys to count out the incumbent party.

What's so wrong with the punditry is that it's off the top of the head. It's not based on any grounded theory of how American presidential elections really work. It's just based on the whims of the moment.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those insights. Do you have any thoughts on vice president for 2024?

Professor Allan Lichtman: None. It doesn't matter. There is no key for vice president.

And another thing I've said in commenting on current politics and the upcoming election is yes, we have inflation and that's sad because inflation affects everyone. But I also say several things about that. One, it's a worldwide problem and not something that's unique to the United States. Two, it's not caused by Biden. Presidents don't control the economy. Three, Republicans have no answer to inflation. So, my elevated view of the next election is you can vote for the Democrats and you may well have inflation, but you also have your democracy, or you can vote Republican and you still may well have inflation and you're going to lose your democracy.

Robin Lindley: Thank you. And congratulations on your new book 13 Cracks on tangible ways to clean up the political mess left by Trump. You advance programs and policies for saving or restoring democracy after the persistent election denial from the right and the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. The January 6th Select Committee is making lots of news recently. What’s your sense of where the committee's going, what it's done so far, and what the justice department may do?

Professor Allan Lichtman: I think that, even though they don't have prosecutorial powers like Mueller did, the January 6th committee has made up for the multiple sins of the Mueller investigation and the Mueller Report.

I thought the Mueller investigation and report was one of the great disappointing moments in American history. He did an awful job of investigating. An in-person interview of Donald Trump was left out. A lot of other key witnesses were let off the hook. And he wrote a report that that reached no clear conclusions, and that William Barr could spin as he pleased.

The opposite is true of the January 6th committee. They've done amazing research. They have brought out all kinds of information that none of us, even those of us who follow things, knew about. And, as I often put it, they brought it down to where the goats can get it. They made it a comprehensible, clear, compelling presentation. And everybody says, oh, all the views are baked in. No one's going to move. That’s just another one of these off the top of a head, miserable punditry responses that unwise people give. Not drastically, but our politics are so closely divided that even a very small movement could make a difference.

And sometimes you get big movements. In Kansas who would ever have imagined even a month ago that 59 percent of the voters in a primary, which usually draws a Republican turnout in a Republican state, would vote against an abortion ban.

And so, I do think maybe the January 6th committee has not moved huge numbers of voters, but it has moved some, and that makes a huge difference. And they may well give Merrick Garland a basis for prosecuting. I don't just mean an evidentiary basis. I mean politically turning up heat on this guy so he gets off his duff and actually does something.

Robin Lindley: I appreciate your take on the Select Committee. In 13 Cracks, you share ideas on retaining and restoring our democracy. What do you think is most important for protecting elections and for preventing another attack on the Capitol or similar violence?

Professor Allan Lichtman: Number one, and currently they may be doing this, is rewriting of the Electoral Count Act to make it crystal clear. It’s impossible to read the in 1887 Act. So again, bring it down to where the goats can get it. It must be so clear that no one can do any of the things that Donald Trump wanted to do, such as have Mike Pence unilaterally change the election results, or submit fake electors from a legislature to overturn the verdict of the people.

In the same spirit, a new law should make it crystal clear that state legislatures are not unilateral powers that can just declare winners of elections. They have to follow their own laws and their own constitutions, and they have to be checked by courts. That's the American way. Legislative bodies were never granted total power over everything and yet the Supreme Court is taking up a case that could well yield that result.

Robin Lindley: Then how do you deal with an extremist majority on the Supreme Court? Do you have thoughts on proposals such as expanding the court or imposing term limits?

Professor Allan Lichtman: I’m not in favor of expanding the Court. I am in favor though of some way of term limiting justices.

And there are ways, by law, to restrict the ability of the courts to take away fundamental rights. Whatever you may think about abortion, the Dobbs decision is the only time in the history of the country going all the way back to the founding that the Court has taken away a constitutional right. That never happened before

Robin Lindley: It’s ironic that the Supreme Court struck down a New York state concealed weapons law in the Bruen case this year and shortly after decided in Dobbs to leave matters of abortion up to the states.

Professor Allan Lichtman: Yes. That's just remarkable hypocrisy. They want the women's reproductive decisions to be decided by the democratic process of the state, but the states can't try to protect their citizens with gun laws. Oh no. That's beyond the province of the states.

You really put your finger on a fundamental contradiction. Unfortunately, our politics today is result-driven and nothing is more indicative of that than the interpretation of the Second Amendment. As I point out in Repeal the Second Amendment, Clarence Thomas has said the framers made a clear decision to constitutionally protect the individual right to keep and bear arms. That is one of the most historically inaccurate statements I've ever heard from a serious leader in the United States. Not a single individual of the many thousands involved in drafting, adopting or ratifying the Second Amendment ever said it protected an individual right.to keep and bear arms. None of them. Not one.

With the Heller decision [finding an individual Second Amendment right], Scalia couldn't turn to any original contemporary evidence to support that decision. That's why distinguished conservatives like Judge Posner, maybe the most distinguished conservative jurist in the country, blasted Scalia. Posner said that Scalia did the same thing he accused liberals of doing by reading his own values and politics into the Constitution.

In the decision overturning Roe, Alito said the Court had to see if abortion rights are embedded within the tradition of the country. It won’t do that of course with the Second Amendment. But if you look at tradition, nothing is clearer than, of the state constitutions adopted just before the Second Amendment, only one establishes an individual right to keep and bear arms. All of the others, every single one of them, either is silent on arms or makes it clear that the right is tied to a militia and the common defense.

And finally, it doesn't cast a great light on the framers. Don’t forget that a lot of them were slaveholders, including James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment, and so were thousands of congressmen and state politicians who adopted or ratified the Amendment. Do you believe that, for one moment, slaveholders would have voted for an Amendment that gave Black people a right to keep and bear arms? Not for a second, but the reason they could swallow the Second Amendment was because it was tied to the militia. And guess who was banned from the militia? Black people. I think that is an irrefutable argument. I don't see how you could deny that.

Robin Lindley: You touch on history professor Carol Anderson's argument in her book on this troubling amendment, The Second. She traces the history of the Second Amendment, as you do, but with an emphasis on how it's been used since its inception to oppress black people. And then you also have the history of gun violence against Native Americans.

Professor Allan Lichtman: I don't disagree. That's not the thrust of my book, although I do touch on that. But no question, whites were keeping arms from Blacks. From the very beginning, who was armed in the state militias? The state slave patrols. So the whites got all the weapons and blacks were left out.

Robin Lindley: Yes. Legislation in several states prevented Black people from possessing guns. And state militias of white men would search the homes of Black people and, if guns were found, the militia would immediately confiscate them.

Professor Allan Lichtman: Right. And since there was no recognized right to bear arms individually, except for the militia, which Blacks couldn't join, there was nothing to stop state militias, which were often all-white slave patrols, from confiscating guns. And this reverberates, of course, into Reconstruction. Even when the slaves were free, they were not armed. They may have had few old shotguns or fowling pieces, but they were outgunned by the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups.

Robin Lindley: The title of your book, Repeal the Second Amendment, is quite provocative. Were you the target of harsh, angry pushback on the book?

Professor Allan Lichtman: No. And I was inspired by the late Justice John Paul Stevens who, by the way, was appointed by a Republican president. He wasn’t a crazy liberal. He wasn't at all. He was kind of a Justice Kennedy or a Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a swing vote. He wrote an op-ed piece advocating for repeal of the Second Amendment. And I saw that, and I said, Wow.

I have to tell you, a lot of my good liberal friends told me not to write the book and said, hey, you're playing right into the hands of the NRA that’s been claiming that the gun control movement really wants to get rid of the Second Amendment. And here's my response. I called it the book I had to write. For decades, gun control advocates have been saying we support the Second Amendment but, as we've seen, that plays right into the hands of the gun rights advocates and it provides no basis for building a real gun control movement, despite overwhelming public support for gun control.

And, at the time I wrote the book, it had been almost 30 years since there had been any national gun control legislation with the ban on semiautomatic weapons, and it even had been repealed. So ground was lost and, I argue, the game has to be changed. We cannot keep saying, we support the Second Amendment, particularly when the gun advocate interpretation of the Second Amendment is a hoax. I call it the greatest hoax in the history of the country.

I also made it very clear in my book that, until the 2008 Heller decision, the Second Amendment was never interpreted by the courts to establish an individual right to keep and bear arms. And, just because you repeal the Second Amendment doesn't mean you confiscate guns any more than when you don't have an amendment on automobiles means you confiscate automobiles. That's never been part of the history of the country. It just means you open the door to reasonable gun control like we've already had.

And Clarence Thomas and company have banned this gun permit law in New York State. So, there are six states with similar laws, and the death rate from firearms in those states was 6.6 per 100,000 compared to 16.3 per 100,000 for the remaining 44 states. In other words, the death rate is two and a half times, not two and a half percent, but two and a half times higher in the states without permit laws than it is in the states with permit laws. In other words, these measures work. And what's the harm of them if they're cutting down on deaths and injuries. This is another fundamental flaw of the NRA and gun advocate movement, which by the way, is heavily financed by the gun industry, which heavily advertises to young people and people wanting to be semi-soldiers and all of that.

Robin Lindley: Were you ever threatened because of your call to repeal the Second Amendment?

Professor Allan Lichtman: No, I'm kind of surprised. Maybe three were one or two bad reviews in Amazon, but I was expecting a torrent of scathing, one-star reviews. I didn't get that many maybe because my book is measured, and I mean that in a positive way. I don't mean it’s dumbed down, but it's not a polemic. It's a carefully reasoned historical and contemporary analysis. Everything I say is backed up by history and fact and figures, and not denouncing gun advocates. I'm certainly not even criticizing people who own guns by any stretch of the imagination.

But you have gun advocates in the gun industry, and what are they telling us? America should be the safest country in the world among other advanced democracies. Plus, we have the greatest access to guns. So, by their logic, we should not be compared to Guatemala, but compared to other democracies. We should be by far the safest country in the world. And of course, the opposite is true.

You look at the most comparable, G-Seven nations plus Australia, and you are 20 times, not 20 percent, but 20 times more likely to be murdered by a gun in the US than in these other countries that have gun controls. In Japan, which arguably has the tightest gun controls in the world and has about a third of our population, you measure gun murders in the single digits as opposed to more than 15,000 here in the US.

Robin Lindley: The statistics on gun deaths and injuries are heartbreaking. Since you've written the book, we've had this year a record number of mass murders with guns and some of the bloodiest incidents were with assault weapons that use devastating high-velocity ammunition and have become deadly weapon of choice. I just learned that, in the last ten years, gun manufacturers have made more than a billion dollars in profits just from selling assault weapons like the notorious AR-15.

Professor Allan Lichtman: So that's their big market now. In researching the book, one thing I looked at was gun magazines. And you can see over time how these magazines and the advertising has evolved from all guns are dangerous, but the guns were designed for target shooting or hunting, not mass killing, and now that’s migrated to and is almost entirely dominated by guns designed for nothing more than mass killing.

Robin Lindley: I wonder if banning high velocity ammunition, as opposed to the weapons, might be effective.

Professor Allan Lichtman: That would be fine. That would really help a lot. But there’s been a lot of proposals like that and it just hasn't happened. The ideal would be to ban both, but the gold standard is the state gun permit laws that confirm 6.6 gun deaths per thousand, including suicides, murders, and accidents, in states with permit laws versus 16.3 deaths per thousand in states without those laws. That is one of the most compelling statistics I've ever seen.

Robin Lindley: The argument that gun violence is a public health epidemic intrigues me. It seems very powerful and compelling that a right to bear arms must be balanced against the public interest in safety and health. And we see here that virtually unlimited access to guns endangers safety and health of citizens daily—and much more so than in other democracies. Shouldn’t public health be the paramount consideration?

Professor Allan Lichtman: Yes. As I have said, that balance is great. And no one's talking about confiscating people's guns. No one's talking about taking guns away when you go to the gun range and do target shooting or taking away your gun to hunt.

We're talking about reasonable laws that keep guns from getting into the wrong hands and reasonable laws that prevent the proliferation of firearms that have no purpose other than to kill people in the mass shootings.  And the injuries inflicted by these firearms are just horrific. I talk about that, and I share some medical testimony.

It's just barbaric that we allow this carnage, and what's the balance on the other side? What is the value of anyone having such a combat gun other than law enforcement or the military? None. You don't need an assault weapon to hunt. You don't need one to target shoot. You don't need to protect yourself with mass-killing weapons.

Robin Lindley: The purpose of those military-style weapons is to kill as many people as possible in a short time. These are combat weapons and their high-velocity bullets cause devastating injuries by shredding and bursting internal organs, shattering and splintering bones, and leaving cavernous wounds. Even survivors are left with horrific injuries and often lives of disability.

Professor Allan Lichtman:  Absolutely. And even those who are not directly injured suffer trauma too. Even if you're one of the kids who wasn't hit by a bullet, you’re traumatized for the rest of your life by being at Parkland or Sandy Hook, or even knowing kids who went to Parkland or Sandy Hook. Come on.

Robin Lindley: You have kids very worried about even attending school now.

Professor Allan Lichtman: Yes. Kids are afraid to go to school. Imagine that in the United States of America in the 21st century. And to what end?

Robin Lindley: Mental health seems a red herring in the gun debate. Other nations have mentally ill people yet function without daily mass shootings. And most of these mass murderers with assault weapons in the US don't have documented mental health problems before they shoot and kill lots of other people, including children in some cases.

Professor Allan Lichtman: A complete red herring. You will never, ever reduce gun violence by focusing on mental health. There are other great reasons to focus on mental health, and I'm all for it, but it's a red herring. It's a distraction. All these other countries have mental health issues comparable to the United States.

We are not a unique a country awash with mental health problems. But the difference is gun control, not mental health. Plus, the vast overwhelming majority of people with mental health problems, 99.9 percent, don't go out and shoot someone. There are a few extreme cases but, except in those most extreme cases, there's no predictive relationship between mental health and gun violence. And, most of the worst perpetrators of gun violence didn't have a history of mental health issues, like guy in Las Vegas who I think perpetrated the worst ever shooting massacre [leaving 58 dead and almost 500 with gunshot wounds] at a music concert, and he had no history of mental health problems. He was a perfectly decent stable citizen.

Robin Lindley: Yes. And gun advocates stress the need to arrest criminals, yet most of these gun-wielding mass killers were not criminals before their mass shooting incidents.

Professor Allan Lichtman: Yes. They're not criminals. That's right.

Robin Lindley:  Your book clarified for me the role of the NRA. You describe the “iron triangle” of the gun lobby, the gun industry, and politicians. I think people are confused about what the NRA is, and what the gun lobby is, and what the role of the gun producing industry is.

Professor Allan Lichtman: In his farewell address, President Eisenhower talked about the military-industrial complex as posing an enormous threat to America. And the military-industrial complex is marked by the iron triangle of the gun makers or the weapons makers of all kinds, and the military, and the politicians. The politicians benefit, of course, by having military contracts in their districts or states and by touting their support for the military.

I think I'm the first one to point out that there is also a firearms-industrial complex. It consists of course of the gun makers who, as you point out, enjoy enormous profits by selling these military weapons that have no purpose other than to kill people quickly and efficiently. And they are tied to the gun lobby. The NRA is not the only part of the lobby, which includes Gun Owners of America and others, but the NRA is the primary lobby and the other groups are normally tied by a commonality of interest. They're tied by their financial interest in that the gun makers are contributors to the gun lobby as represented by the NRA, which in turn enriches the gun makers.

I have a whole section in the book on how top NRA executives prosper while stepping on its ordinary employees. And then in turn, the NRA’s financial contributions have a tremendous influence on the politicians, particularly conservative Republican politicians who benefit from the support of the gun lobby and their members.

Robin Lindley: You trace the history and evolution of the NRA. It seems that the stranglehold of the NRA on the Republican Party goes back to the days of Nixon, more than a half-century ago, with the increasing extremism of the GOP and its Southern strategy that embraced racist tropes. And the NRA stranglehold has become increasingly strong.

Professor Allan Lichtman: Yes. Here's what's really going on, and again, no one else has discovered this. As I write in Repeal the Second Amendment, in 1955, the NRA’s constitutional expert wrote a memo to the NRA’s CEO saying that the Second Amendment was no help to stopping gun control. The consensus has always been that the Second Amendment is only tied to establishing a well-regulated militia. In 1975, the NRA handbook said the Second Amendment is not of much value in combating gun control.

Then, in 1977, you have what's called the “Revolt in Cincinnati.” A new militant leadership took over the NRA and it decided to gain power in what I call “the Great Second Amendment Hoax” by perpetrating the myth that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to keep and bear arms. And the NRA shared its propaganda through [screen actor] Charlton Heston—Moses.

For the first time ever, the NRA made the Second Amendment the fundamental base of their gun advocacy appeal. And then this appeal became tied to the Republican Party as a club to use against liberals. And the NRA doesn't just support gun rights. It supports the whole right-wing agenda by calling Democrats socialists and saying they're trying to take away your guns, and to take away your freedoms. So, the NRA became an essential player, not just in the gun rights movement, but in the whole conservative movement. And because it has all these local members all over the country, it's uniquely positioned to benefit Republicans in their districts and their states.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that background, Professor Lichtman. The idea of repealing the Second Amendment sounds extremely complicated. And you have this stumbling block now of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision that recognized a private right to keep and bear arms. Is the idea of repealing the Second Amendment catching on at all?  

Professor Allan Lichtman: I think, after the recent gun permit decision, it is catching on a bit. The problem is, as I have said, a lot of those who believe in gun control are not willing to take the risk, even though they've been moving a stone for decades.  They think it's playing into the hands of the NRA, but I think saying we support the Second Amendment is playing into the hands of the NRA and Clarence Thomas.

And I'm not naive. I talk in my book about how incredibly difficult it is to pass a constitutional amendment. I understand that in order to repeal an element of the constitution, it takes two thirds of both houses of Congress and three quarters of the states so you'd have to have a lot of red states coming along. But the women’s suffrage movement took almost 80 years. The civil rights movement took about the same time to get rid of Jim Crow.

Even if things don't happen overnight, they're still worth pushing for. By changing the terms of the debate maybe, even if we don't get the repeal, we'll develop some real momentum in this country for change. My basic point is that I'm not claiming this is necessarily going to succeed, but I am claiming the game needs to be changed.

Robin Lindley: Would it be helpful to have a replacement amendment for the Second Amendment?

Professor Allan Lichtman: I'm not opposed to that if you could come up with one that Clarence Thomas or a future Clarence Thomas could not twist as the Court has twisted the current Second Amendment. I'm not opposed to that, but you must be careful.

Robin Lindley: Would you like to add any other comments about the Second Amendment?

Professor Allan Lichtman: Yes. Repealing the Second Amendment may seem like a daunting goal, but protecting the lives and safety of the American people makes it very much a worthwhile goal. And repeal of the Second Amendment does not mean the confiscation of guns. It simply means that we will stop courts and hopefully politicians from striking down laws that would make America a much safer place,

Forty thousand lives are lost every year to gun violence. The chances of being murdered by a gun today in America are 20 times higher than our closest peer nation. We are not the safest among our peers because we have the Second Amendment. We are the least safe. And that's the best argument possible for repeal.

Robin Lindley: Thanks very much Professor Lichtman for your thoughtful comments and insights on presidential politics, gun violence, and more. Congratulations on your recent books and your stellar career as a professor, author and scholar.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, conflict, social justice, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

The racially pure and unmixed German has risen to become master of the American continent, and he will remain the master, so long as he does not fall victim to racial pollution.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

[O]ne drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and strikes palsied his creative faculty.

US Senator Theodore Bilbo (Mississippi, 1935-1947)

German dictator Adolf Hitler was notoriously and fiercely anti-Jewish, and he and his Nazi followers in the 1930s fashioned race laws that were designed to degrade and deprive Jewish people of all rights, making them second-class citizens.  At the same time, American laws often enshrined white supremacy and discriminated against non-whites, and Black Americans in particular were seen as second-class citizens under law. Historians and others have long debated about the influence, if any, of racist American law and history on Nazi race policies.

The unsettling idea of American inspiration for the German Nazis was recently broached in the new PBS documentary series The US and the Holocaust, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein (See my recent interview of Director Lynn Novick on creation of the series on History News Network: https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/154633). From feedback I read and heard, many viewers were stunned by the depth of racism and xenophobia in the US in the early twentieth century preceding World War II, as vividly depicted in the series.

Even before he came to power in Germany, Hitler and his followers were aware of the shameful racism in or behind American laws and policies. Prompted by Hitler’s own words on American law in his hateful screed Mein Kampf and other sources, celebrated Yale professor of comparative law and history James Q. Whitman conducted a meticulous study to determine the influence of American sources on Nazi jurists and scholars in the early years of Hitler’s Reich preceding World War II.

As set forth in his groundbreaking and disquieting 2017 book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press), Professor Whitman found—contrary to many previous historians—that the Nazis had carefully studied American race law and social policies in developing the notoriously racist and antisemitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and other racist policies. He cautions, however, that whatever the influence of American law, the Nazis were ultimately the authors of their own monstrous schemes.

The history Professor Whitman reveals is profound and often heartbreaking. Hitler and his Nazi adherents admired many aspects of US law and history while ignoring our constitutional restraints and the ideal of egalitarianism. In Mein Kampf, penned almost a decade before he became German Chancellor in 1933, Hitler openly praised the United States as the world leader in racist policies and laws and in establishing a racist social order. Hitler admired restrictive US immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans and mostly excluded other nationalities, ethnicities and races. He admired American criminal laws forbidding miscegenation and particularly the mixed marriages or sexual relations between white and Black citizens. He admired Jim Crow segregation laws and other white supremacist provisions that effectively robbed African Americans of civil rights and made them second-class citizens. He admired American eugenics that prized white supremacy and led to laws that encouraged sterilization of the “feebleminded” and others found somehow defective. And, as a devoted reader of Karl May—the German pulp fiction writer who romanticized the conquest of the American West by bold white men—Hitler admired the mass extermination of Native Americans by “Nordic” settlers in the nineteenth century and the subsequent isolation of most Indigenous survivors on reservations.           

In his book, Professor Whitman carefully examines the evolution of American laws that discriminated against non-whites from the Naturalization Act of 1790 that specifically opened naturalization to “any alien, being a free white person” to the post-Civil War Jim Crow segregation laws, as well as miscegenation laws from as early as 1691, and extremely restrictive immigration laws such as the racist Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. He also notes the power of American eugenics and legalization of sterilization for the “unfit” in most states.

Professor Whitman also recounts the Nazi fascination with, and reference to, our law as they drafted racist laws that deprived Jews of rights of citizenship and, eventually, included other non-Aryans. He found ample evidence of serious discussion and frank modeling of legislation based on US law and policies that privileged white citizens at the expense of others. A notorious example, the Nazi Nuremberg laws of 1935, essentially robbed Jews of all rights of German citizenship and criminalized mixed marriages and sexual relationship between Jews and Aryans.

Ironically, Professor Whitman found that some Nazi race laws were less harsh than American legislation. For example, the Nazis found too extreme the American rule that “even one-drop” of African American blood made a person Black, as touted by fierce segregationists such as Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo. The Nazis went back two generations in tracing Jewish heritage rather than back countless generations as the American “one-drop” rule permitted.

Hitler’s American Model presents a thought-provoking and often chilling view of our past and the embrace of white supremacy in our law and policies that unfortunately inspired some similarly draconian and discriminatory laws in Nazi Germany.

As Professor Whitman concludes, there has always been “tension between two racial orders in America, a ‘white supremacist order’ and an ‘egalitarian transformative order’.” That struggle continues, as do other challenges to our endangered democracy. Professor Whitman’s book provides an illuminating view of how racism can infect the political and institutional order of societies—and the wider world. The book is also a potent reminder that there are two currents in America—a commitment to equality for all and a competing tradition of deep racism—and we must be constantly vigilant against racism.

Professor Whitman’s book has been widely praised by historians and other readers for its extensive research and thought-provoking, original perspective on the past. For example, legendary journalist Bill Moyers commented: “Carefully written and tightly reasoned, backed up every step of the way with considered evidence and logic, Whitman reminds us that today is yesterday’s child, and that certain strains of DNA persist from one generation to another.” This history is especially relevant now in the wake of the recent emboldening of rightwing terrorists and white supremacists by former President Donald Trump.

James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School and also earned a Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago. From 1988-1989, Professor Whitman served as a clerk for the Hon. Ralph K. Winter of the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals, then began his teaching career at Stanford University Law School.

Professor Whitman's has published many articles internationally and across disciplines, and has been honored with numerous prizes and fellowships throughout his career. His other books include Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe; The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial; and The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War.

Professor Whitman generously discussed his work and his writing by telephone from his office.

Robin Lindley: I just came across your groundbreaking book, Hitler’s American Model, a few months ago thanks to an enthusiastic recommendation from a history professor at the University of Washington. I was very impressed by your book and it's so timely now. Congratulations on this illuminating volume.

Professor James Q. Whitman: I wish it weren't timely, but thank you.

Robin Lindley: I thought I knew something about this history, but you detail minutely the Nazi fascination with American history and law based on your meticulous, original research. I learned a lot. Before going to your book, I wanted to ask about your very impressive background. You have a law degree and a doctorate in history. What was the focus of your graduate work in history?

Professor James Q. Whitman: I mostly wrote about the history of Roman law, but in the modern world. The question that I tried to answer in my dissertation, which turned out to be my first book, was why Roman law was revived in Germany in the 19th century in the midst of industrialization. You would have thought that ancient law obviously had no direct bearing on the industrial society. I wrote a book about that and earned a law degree and got more deeply involved in understanding legal history.

Robin Lindley: Yes. You have a law degree and you had a prestigious position after law school as a clerk for a US Court of Appeals Judge.

Professor James Q. Whitman: That's right. I did. And he was a wonderful human being too.

Robin Lindley: Did you practice law after your clerkship?

Professor James Q. Whitman: Not really. Just in the summers when I was in law school. But I really wanted to be a professor. The clerkship itself was of course a kind of practice, but a very rewarding and elevated kind of practice compared to what young lawyers mostly get to do.

Robin Lindley: Did the law degree come after your doctorate in history?

Professor James Q. Whitman. I finished the PhD while I was in law school.

Robin Lindley: Wow. You're a dynamo.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Well, a nerd I think is the way we usually would put it.

Robin Lindley: You’ve written a range of books on comparative law and criminal matters. Did Hitler’s American Model grow out of your past research?

Professor James Q. Whitman: It did in a way, I was interested in the question of how not just race but the hierarchical ordering of human societies. And, for better or for worse, most human societies have not been egalitarian in the way that we like to think modern societies are. And there's been lots of law on who counts as the upper class and who counts as the lower. But I was just curious about these things.

In the 20th century it seemed natural to compare two examples, namely Jim Crow laws in the United States and the race law of Nazi Germany. I started out just wanting to compare them, and honestly, I didn't think that I would discover what I ended up discovering, namely that Nazis had actually taken not just interest in American law, but a kind of active, studious interest in American law with a desire to learn from what the Americans had done.

I went to the library and found Mein Kampf, and in the relevant chapter Hitler says that only one country has made even tentative progress for the creation of a healthy race order and, of course, that's “the United States of North America,” as he put. So, I got interested and I started poking around to see what was there and, boy, was there a lot

Robin Lindley: I knew that the Nazis had applauded Jim Crow segregation but I didn't know the depth of their focus on the US as a model, as you chronicle. You've been praised deservedly for the research you've done. You found documents that apparently had been overlooked or ignored by other historians. What was your research process?

Professor James Q. Whitman:  Some of this material people had not looked at it all, but a great deal of the work had been done by German scholars. There was one particularly good German dissertation that I made use of. I took other routes of course to find material beyond it.

But Germans are generally very uncomfortable with any sort of argument that points to parallels, let alone influences on the Nazis, for very good reasons. They don't want to be perceived as denying the unique horror of the Nazi experience. They just don't want to talk about it. So, in that 500-page dissertation [I found] buried in a long footnote, on something like page 370, a reference to some of this material. I had to look through the whole dissertation to find that.

Also, one of tools that that was very useful is a tool that people didn't used to have at all, and that's Google Books, Advanced Search. You can do word searches. If you want, you can go through the entire 18th century, but also just for this period in Germany, you can find German material. It may not have as much detail as you want from that period, but you get snippets. You'll get titles without really knowing what's in them, and then you have to find a good library or more than one good library to find the books and articles. To find the material required some serious work. There's also material in the German archives, and all of that involves what scholars have always done: travel and breathe in the dust of old books.

But I will say that having Google Book's advanced search is like having nuclear weapons for scholars. A horrible comparison, but it's a form of technology that makes discoveries possible that would have been extraordinarily difficult in the past

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those tips on research Professor Whitman—and especially your use of the internet. In terms of what you found, I think that many readers will be surprised about how much our racist laws inspired the Nazis and how much the Nazis admired our history and racist policies. You recount that the Nazis saw the United States as the most innovative leader in racist law. And they saw our founding as a turning point for Aryan world domination.  

Professor James Q. Whitman: It’s that awful.

Robin Lindley: In your book, you recount our racist laws back to the colonial period in the seventeenth century and then in laws since the Constitutional Convention, such as the 1790 Naturalization Act that referred only to “white persons” as candidates for naturalization. What did you learn about the foundations of racism in our laws?

Professor James Q. Whitman: This topic worries a lot of people these days, and the conventional phrase for describing not just the American founding, but the foundings also, for example, of Australia and Canada, to some extent, is white settler colonialism.

British settlements in America and elsewhere were self-understood as representing European civilization over and over again, whatever was found in the place settled. And, in the United States, the form that this took was strikingly different from the form that colonialism took in Latin America, especially south of the border. Most of the Spanish settlement was not done by entire families, but by individual males. As a result, you had a lot of intermarriage and a much more complex racial scene, and much more so than you did in the United States where entire families came over to settle. As s a result, you got a society with a different complexion. We see that certainly in the 17th century, and certainly as mentioned in the first Naturalization Act, a self-understanding of America as a venture of white people and especially Northern European white people. That notion has survived for a very long time and, for some people, it still survives in the United States.

In some ways, what seems ugliest to us about this history was even more pronounced in Australia in the nineteenth century than it was in the United States. In fact, Australia was in some ways was the first pioneer with some of the legislation that I write about. And South Africa is obviously another example.

You don't want to go full “1619 Project” on this history. American traditions are very complex. There were many persons of very high ideals that we would still admire involved in the making of the United States. It’s just a mistake to imagine that there was nothing but a kind of Hitlerism in America and, of course, there wasn't. But this strain was strongly there. And you're absolutely right in saying that historians, especially German ones of the history of white supremacy in the 1920s and 1930s, were aware of all of this and would say yes, the great turning point for the creation of the first of the great white policies was in the United States.

Robin Lindley: And, so we have this conflict between racism and unequal treatment versus the ideals of liberty and freedom and equal justice for all.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Yes. I think we do, and obviously there's a problem we're still living with the United States.

Robin Lindley: The pseudoscience of eugenics was widely embraced by many American and British scientists and others in early twentieth century. How do you see our infatuation with eugenics as an influence on the Germans and the Nazis in particular.

Professor James Q. Whitman: This is a very important story and we've been aware for a while of the strong Nazi interest in American eugenics. But a couple of things have to be said. You mentioned Great Britain. Sweden has to be brought into the picture here too. And then other countries as well. Eugenic ideas were very widespread in early 20th century. You find them all over the place.

What was distinctive about the United States, according to the work of other historians, was American interest in legislating eugenics, and coming up with a legal framework that would enforce and effectuate the creation of a genetically healthy general population. Almost everybody was in favor of something like that, but in Great Britain that mostly involved preaching and not law. The Swedes were more interested in passing actual laws and other aspects of race law. And, of course race law is not just about eugenics, but it’s also about creating social hierarchies and humiliating people and developing notions of second-class citizen status and all those sorts of things.

But what made the United States such an interesting model to a regime like the Nazi regime was that the Americans were really unembarrassedly interested in passing laws on these topics and spent a lot of time developing legal doctrines that could be used not only to the ends of creating a eugenically healthy population--which I don't endorse myself--but also to develop hierarchical laws.

Robin Lindley: And we had laws that permitted sterilization of the so-called the feeble- minded or criminals or others seen as somehow inferior or genetically damaged.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Yes, you bet. And there's the famous line from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  So that was from the Supreme Court [Buck v. Bell (1927)] in a case upholding a sterilization law, whereas European countries before the appearance of the Nazis had the legal systems that simply could not accommodate that sort of racism.

The law in a country like France or Germany before Hitler spoke of plaintiffs and defendants, of citizens, and so on. The general understanding of lawyers was that one couldn't draft laws that made reference to racial differences or regarded them of any legal consequence. That's still the case in France and the state makes a point of not keeping records on the racial composition of the population.

Robin Lindley: You’re very careful in your writing about the American law. Although the US endorsed some of the principles of eugenics, we never got as far as the Nazis with their campaign of euthanasia of those “unworthy of life” and then mass extermination.

Professor James Q. Whitman: We certainly never did. And again, it's important to emphasize, even though everything about American eugenics looks pretty ugly to me, that doesn't mean that we got as ugly as the Nazis did with regard to extermination.

When we read what Hitler had to say in particular, and other Nazis, the model for extermination policies in Eastern Europe didn't have to do with eugenics as such. It had to do with the American conquest of the West in particular.

Robin Lindley: As you wrote, Hitler admired the extermination of millions of Native Americans and then isolating the survivors on reservations. And he saw that conquest of the West as a “Nordic” victory.

Professor James Q. Whitman: He did indeed. And, of course, the US looked like a model for a German like Hitler because the American empire was, for the most part, not an overseas empire like the British one, but was a continental empire. And the view of the Nazis was that Germany should be spreading east in the way the American spread west, and they should be at a minimum displacing and possibly eliminating the local populations as they did it.

Robin Lindley: As the Nazi campaign of mass killing began, Hitler supposedly said that nobody remembered the genocide targeting Armenians in Turkey beginning about 1915. But he had an even earlier model for genocide—the American “winning” of the West and conquest of Native Americans.

Professor James Q. Whitman: He did. And, if I may emphasize it, that was a more attractive model to the extent that the US had made itself the dominant superpower in the world, and that's what Hitler wanted for Germany as well. Being a Nazi, like other Nazis, and like other hard right-wingers, in trying to explain America's tremendous geopolitical success, Hitler ascribed it naturally to American racism.

Robin Lindley: And our history of taking the continent ties into Hitler’s plan to expand Lebensraum or “living room” and by conquering more territory for Germany.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Yes.

Robin Lindley: You also explain in your book how the United States became a leader in adopting racist immigration laws in the early 20th century. What did those laws accomplish?

Professor James Q. Whitman: The laws in the early 20th century in particular were Hitler’s special focus in Mein Kampf. These were not expressly racist because it was difficult to make them expressly racist given the terms of American law. Instead, the laws introduced national quotas. There were earlier laws that directly and expressly targeted Asian immigrants. But these 20th century laws created national quotas with the open intent of keeping out the wrong kind of people—those who didn't fit the Nordic ideal.

Robin Lindley: You go into that in some depth in your book on the exclusionary treatment of some Asians under immigration laws from the nineteenth century. And you describe how the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established immigration quotas that basically favored Northern European countries with strict quotas for most other nations, including those in eastern and southern Europe.

Professor James Q. Whitman: That 1924 Act was repealed in 1965, and the repeal didn't take effect, I think, until 1968. So that law was in effect from the mid-twenties until then and American immigration was entirely governed by these ideals during that time. Things changed radically at the end of the 1960s.

Robin Lindley: And, as you write, Hitler takes from our laws that the US sees itself as “a Nordic German country.”

Professor James Q. Whitman: And many Americans also did. Although, if I can just add once again, all of this is but one side, the nightmare side of the American story, and the Nazis were aware of that too. They were often puzzled by the competing currents in American political lives, some of which looked very much like the Nazi currents that they owed allegiance to, and some of which looked entirely incompatible with Nazi ideals. They thought two souls dwelled within the American breast and they had a hard time knowing how to interpret that.

Robin Lindley: In addition to the immigration laws, Hitler and his Nazi advisors also studied Jim Crow segregation laws that created second-class citizenship for Black people. Blacks were effectively deprived of political rights. And Nazis admired those laws, as you stress.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Yes, they did, although I must emphasize one thing that’s important to note is that the Nazis were not only interested in Jim Crow laws, but there were plenty of other American race laws that weren’t necessarily directed against African Americans. The Nazis were interested in the entire suite of American race practices. Some American laws targeted Asians and some of them, of course, targeted Native Americans, and there was a whole lot there. They were just everything.

Robin Lindley: You mentioned that Hitler and the Nazis looked to our Indian law as well.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Oh, yes. Did they ever. But with regard to second-class citizenship, the Americans faced the problem that the 14th amendment makes it clear that you can’t deprive someone of citizenship and, as a result, the American creation of the second-class citizenship of the kind where you're depriving someone of voting rights and the like had to be done through subterfuges. And it was done very effectively through subterfuges, but the Nazis didn't feel the need for subterfuges themselves. They could find the American policy inspiring, but there was nothing they needed to copy from American law because they were entirely open about the creation of second-class citizenship for Jews especially, of course.

Robin Lindley: And of course, as you stress, our laws forbidding and criminalizing miscegenation were very attractive to the Nazis.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Boy, were they ever. It’s astounding. And those laws were expressly racist and directly served as inspirations for Nazi legislation. And we know this in particular because of one of the most telling bits of archival evidence I found was the transcript of a meeting in the summer of 1934 in which the Nazis discussed what sort of criminal law they should create in order to bring the new Nazi order into existence. And there, they specifically studied American laws and particularly American anti-miscegenation laws.

And you're absolutely right. The desire of the most radical Nazi was to criminalize mixed marriage, and America offered not only a model, but pretty much the only model in the world for doing that. And some of the penalties were extraordinarily tough.

Robin Lindley: What did you learn about the United States and antisemitism in the pre-war period? We had laws regarding Black people but it seems that Jewish people weren’t discriminated against specifically in most US laws. You mention, however, that Jews were deprived of opportunities such as many jobs and promotions in academic and other settings because they were seen as occupiers of “subordinate social positions.” How did that work?

Professor James Q. Whitman: Right, and the Nazis were aware of that and they wrote about it. The Nazis said that the Americans have a lot of race law, but they don't have race law targeting Jews. Yet. The expectation was that, given the noticeable prominence of antisemitism in American daily life, eventually antisemitic laws would happen. The Nazis were quite aware of the disabilities that Jews effectively faced. For example, in trying to join prestigious law firms and things like that, they were precluded.

I'll say one more thing about it. I didn't really talk about it in the book because I wasn’t sure quite what to say about it, but when the Nazis first came to power, they did talk about Jews some of the time, but they actually used a larger category, which was “colored.” They said they were going to keep the colored people out of the corridors of power in German society. They gave up that language of colored because there was a threat of boycott against German industries, particularly in India and in Japan.

In the summer of 1933, Nazis were calling Jewish people colored as well, and some Jews said, at the time, I can’t understand why they're calling me colored. That is possible, but I don't know that it's true. And Jews were not the only ones baffled by the idea that they were called colored under the German laws. There was a debate among the Nazi officials about that too. The Nazi idea of classification of the subordinate peoples was colored. They would have been barred from the United States too because we use the term colored all the time.

Robin Lindley: And our miscegenation laws were not found unconstitutional until the Loving v. Georgia case in 1967.

Professor James Q. Whitman: And that constitutional reasoning was just rejected in the Dobbs case [on abortion].

Robin Lindley: In fashioning the so-called Blood Laws of the 1935 Nuremberg Code, The Nazis found the US law on race and Black people was too harsh—particularly the “one drop” rule. How were our laws more harsh than Nazi law?

Professor James Q. Whitman: That was a shocking discovery on my part. Some states, not by any means all, defined any person as Black if that person had even one drop off Black blood, which meant looking to any Black ancestor at all however far back who was Black. Other states had less far-reaching definitions, such as having one Black grandparent or something like that, but every single American definition went beyond what the Nazis themselves ever embraced. When Nazis discussed the far-reaching notorious American one-drop rule, they said things that you would never imagine hearing from a Nazi, such as, “That's completely inhumane. How could you do that?”  So, in that sense, Nazis thought Americans went too far in their racism and refused to go as far themselves.

Robin Lindley: How did the one-drop rule work in the US as a practical matter? Was it just basically looking at physical characteristics of people in determining that they were Black or looking at their family lineage?

Professor James Q. Whitman: Sometimes American courts would just look at physical characteristics, and that’s something that the Nazis also refused to do. The Nazis thought you needed more scientific evidence. And sometimes courts in the United States would just base their decision on whether a person was widely thought to be Black in the community in question. The Nazis thought you needed a better basis than that, something that would give you more secure information about the genetic background of the individual in question.

Sometimes American courts just made seat of the pants decisions, and that seat of the pants approach was very much admired by the very radical Nazis, but was inconsistent with basic German legal principles. The Nazis, being German—excuse me, I hope I don't offend any of your readers saying this--were committed to doing a very, very thorough, careful bureaucratically ordered job of determining who counted as a member of which ethnic group. And for that reason, they had a whole bureaucratic setup for determining the ancestry of the population of Germany and in other parts of Europe, as well, as they conquered. Their decisions were supposed to be based on well-established material found in the bureaucratic records or offered through proof by persons whose racial identity was in question.

In the US, the definitions were much more open-ended than that in ways that made it especially difficult for Americans to contest their classification as Black or African American.

Robin Lindley: Do you have a sense of how often racially mixed couples were prosecuted in the United States under miscegenation laws?

Professor James Q. Whitman: It’s been a little while since I did the research and I relied on the secondary sources, but the severe criminal penalties were not applied, but there were also lesser criminal penalties, which were applied for most people.

The critical issue was not whether they'd be exposed to criminal prosecution, but whether they could form a valid marriage at all. In most cases, that was much more the live issue. They couldn't find officials who would perform the marriage and any prohibited marriage would not be regarded as valid, so none of the rights and duties that follow from having a valid marriage would apply in their case. That was much more frequent than criminal punishment, but there was criminal punishment at the time.

Robin Lindley: And that approach also interfered with the idea of preserving families.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Oh, sure. It was deeply inconsistent with respecting family autonomy, as the Supreme Court understood in the Loving v. Virginia decision. And once again, the constitutional basis for respecting privacy and autonomy was rejected in the Dobbs decision about abortion.

Robin Lindley: Yes. Dobbs was a stunning decision. What’s your sense of how the Nazis viewed mixed marriages between Jews and Aryan “Germans?” Were the couples punished, and did the Jewish spouse face harsher punishment that the “German?”

Professor James Q. Whitman: Mixed marriages that had been formed before the Nazis came to power were respected and, indeed, the Jewish spouses were protected against some of the Nazi persecution until quite late in the history of the regime. Some of them were still in effect in the last years of the war and survived.

But the Nazis did not permit later mixed marriages to form at all. And there was a big debate about when the last day was before which you had to have entered into the mixed marriage when you should have understood that this was a violation of healthy norms of the German people. Basically, you weren't allowed to marry, but people occasionally tried to. There was a big decision in about 1938 that I talk about in the book, which made it clear that violating this law was violating a German principle of the highest constitutional magnitude and that people would be criminally prosecuted. And they were criminally prosecuted. They were also just criminally prosecuted, of course, for having interracial sexual relations, and there was probably a lot more of that.

And sometimes, the accusations of prohibited relationships were based on entirely false information. In the US, that happened to Black males all the time, and it happened to Jewish males in Germany. But sometimes, it was based on actual sexual relations and there were criminal and extra-criminal penalties. By criminal I mean not running through the ordinary criminal justice system, but just involving casual brutality.

Robin Lindley: Jewish people are as light skinned as the Nazi “Aryans” with the same physical features for the most part despite contrary Nazi propaganda. So, the issue in Germany was quite different than in the United States with Black people who are usually readily identifiable based on skin color and other physical characteristics.

Professor James Q. Whitman: Of course, there are differences. The Nazis were very concerned in a way that Americans were not concerned to the same degree about Jews deceiving others by not revealing their Jewish identity because it was, of course, possible to pass in a way that was much less commonly the case with Black people in the US.

Robin Lindley: How did the Nazi blood laws work as a practical matter? Were the Nazis basically looking at family history to determine Jewish ancestry? If so, how far did they go back to trace Jewish lineage?

Professor James Q. Whitman: As a matter of law, they went back two generations. As a matter of social status, some people could show that they had been in Jewish families since the 13th century, or whatever, but that wasn’t important as a matter of law to demonstrate anything like that. And the people did their own research into that. I don't think that the Nazis did that research.

Robin Lindley: Why were Jewish people seen as a serious threat?

Professor James Q. Whitman: That's one of the great mysteries of Western history. I don't have a good answer to it. I honestly don't know. Some people devote their careers to try to explain this. But this hatred and fear was very deep hatred.

There's a very deep history of antisemitism in the Christian tradition that goes back to antiquity. There's no doubt about that. The difficulty is in explaining just how it did or didn't motivate what happened in Germany, beginning in the late 19th century.

Human behavior is difficult to explain. Of course, there’s a long history of antisemitism. David Nirenberg, a medievalist, has a recent book on antisemitism and he traces it back to Alexandria in the fourth century BC. There are other ideas and it’s a topic of ongoing research and it's hard to be confident that we’ll ever come up with a secure answer.

Robin Lindley: I never thought we’d see Nazi rallies in 21st century America. And we’ve seen incredible attacks on our venerable democratic institutions in the past six years. Given the tenuous state of our democracy and ongoing struggles with racism and antisemitism and xenophobia, how do you see the resonance of your book now?

Professor James Q. Whitman: In my view, we must recognize what happened in Germany and understand how intriguing Germans found the American example as ways of reminding us of the basic, really terrifying truth that it can happen here. It did not happen here in the 1930s, although we don't remember how dangerous and uncertain the situation was in 1932 or 1933. But despite the danger and the uncertainty, it didn't happen then. And, one hope is that there are foundations to American liberal culture that are ultimately unshakeable. And I hope that's true.

But I think we would be very foolish not to recognize that there are very great dangers and more uncertainties now than there were in 1933 so that we must stay on our guard.  I don't think that any thoughtful historian would claim to be able to predict the future, and I wouldn't claim to predict the future, but the history certainly can bring home to us the full and uncomfortable range of possibilities in the making a human society.

Robin Lindley: I sometimes wonder if we’re at a moment as when the democratic Weimar Republic in Germany collapsed.

Professor James Q. Whitman: The experience of Germany with the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the interwar period had an awful lot to do with the defeat of Germany in World War I, and also with the militarization of society that took hold during World War I.

The experience of defeat and the desire for revenge and for restoration of German power played an enormous role in what happened. That's something that you see going on in Russia right now. The US just hasn't had that experience of defeat. That doesn't mean that we can't see American democracy collapse, but at least one of the critical factors in the emergence of fascism and Nazism in interwar Europe is not present in the US right now.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your insights. Is there anything you’d like to add for readers about your book or your work as a historian?

Professor James Q. Whitman: This takes away from the topic of the book, but I'd like to wait and see how the election of 2022 turns out.

Robin Lindley: It’s an anxious time, indeed. I appreciate your devotion to illuminating our past for readers so we can better understand our present. Thank you very much for bearing with me and for your thoughtful comments and insights Professor Whitman. And congratulations on your powerful groundbreaking book.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, war and peace, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Professor Matthew Delmont (Photo by Eli Burakian)

Throughout the war, Black Americans expressed outrage that they were fighting to secure freedom on far-flung battlefields while being denied freedom in their own country. Every day brought new evidence that they were fighting for a country that did not regard them as fully human.

Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.

More than a million African American men and women served the United States during World War II. Since then, most mainstream books, newspapers, magazines, and movies about the war have largely ignored or obscured the contributions of Black Americans in the military and on the home front.

Acclaimed Dartmouth Professor Matthew F. Delmont offers a necessary corrective to this largely overlooked history with his lively, meticulously-researched chronicle of the war from the African American perspective, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking). He urges that the full scope of the war cannot be understood without considering the role of Black Americans.

Professor Delmont vividly illuminates how, as they fought to end fascism abroad, African American troops and civilians—at home and overseas--faced virulent racism, segregation, ostracism, incarceration, brutal violence, and even murder. For its compelling writing and its transformative view of the “Good War” and the so-called “Greatest Generation,” Half American has earned exceptionally high praise from historians and other reviewers.

Black men and women served under shockingly oppressive conditions during the war, as Professor Delmont details. The US military was segregated—and even blood supplies were separated by race. This awkward and wasteful duplicative effort was found necessary at a time of rigid Jim Crow segregation in the South and other discriminatory policies and laws that resulted in second-class citizenship for Black Americans.

The book recounts the full scope of wartime African American military and civilian service. Professor Delmont chronicles the distinguished achievements of Black combat units that are merely a footnote, if mentioned at all, in many histories of the war. He highlights the record of courage and sacrifice of African American units such as the Tuskegee Airmen, the “Black Panther” Tank Battalion, the Montford Point Marine Detachment, and the 92nd Infantry Division’s “Buffalo Soldiers.” And despite exceptional service in action, as Professor Delmont illuminates, Black soldiers and sailors often were subjected to degrading treatment, hostility, and contempt from white officers and the open racism of some high-ranking commanders.

But, as Half American describes, in the segregated armed forces, most Black men and women fulfilled unheralded support roles, often in supply and logistics units, and they were not considered combat troops.  Professor Delmont honors the contributions of these soldiers and sailors by detailing their unsung and grueling work as truck drivers, engineers, quartermasters, construction workers, cooks, and other duties. He emphasizes that this work was crucial to Allied victory in the European and Pacific theaters because American military units could not function without food, ammunition, gasoline, medical material, and other supplies.

And these vital African American support troops served under fire in combat and were exposed to the full brutality and lethality of war. They were captured and wounded and killed just as the troops they supported. And Black troops performed Herculean tasks from carrying supplies from besieged and bombed out ports and across perilous war zones to mammoth construction projects such as building the Ledo Road from India to Burma and creating a major highway from the US, through Canadian wilds, and into Alaska. At the same time, Black women served with distinction in the military as nurses and as WACs (Women’s Army Corps) and in other units, including the admired armed forces postal service.

Half American shares also the contributions of African American men and women on the home front, particularly those who worked in the defense industry where they struggled for equal rights as they made products to support the war effort. Professor Delmont documents stunning wartime incidents when devoted Black defense workers faced raw racism and violence from fellow white employees who seemed to value white supremacy and segregation over winning the war.

While Black members of the military and the civilian work force struggled to fulfill their obligations as they contended with degradation and dehumanization, Professor Delmont reminds readers of some heroes for justice such as NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] luminaries Walter White, Ella Baker, and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who investigated deprivations of rights and acts of violence against African Americans as they fought for equal and fair treatment in the courts..

Professor Delmont also describes how life was extremely troubled for Black troops and civilians at home. During the war, Black soldiers, especially those based in the South, were vilified by white supremacists and were jailed and injured and even murdered in local disputes. And heartrending episodes of brutal violence also plagued Black veterans returning home after the war. For a Black person, merely wearing a military uniform could trigger an arrest, a beating, jail time, or worse. Professor Delmont shares haunting, atrocious incidents. For example, in Texas in March 1946, when Navy veteran Kenneth Long refused an order to tuck in his shirt, he was shot and killed by a white highway patrol officer. In August 1946, Army veteran Maceo Snipes was shot and killed by four Ku Klux Klan members after voting in a primary election in Georgia. And, in 1948, Isaiah Nixon was shot and killed by two white men after voting in a Georgia state primary. And the list goes on. To add insult to injury, in another postwar development, most returning Black veterans were denied state-administered GI Bill housing and education benefits as well as access to other helpful programs.

Professor Delmont’s engrossing and comprehensive history of the war from the African American perspective is based on extensive research including study of rare military and government records, diaries, letters, and journals. His careful examination of a trove of publications from the Black press from the days of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and through the post war years was especially fruitful.

Matthew F. Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights. His other books include: Black Quotidian; Why Busing Failed; Making Roots; and The Nicest Kids in Town. His writing also has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post, and several other periodicals and academic journals. Professor Delmont is originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned his doctorate in history from Brown University.

Professor Delmont graciously responded to questions about his new book and his work by telephone from his office at Dartmouth.

Robin Lindley: It's an honor to talk with you Professor Delmont about Half American, your new groundbreaking and heartbreaking book on African Americans at home and abroad during World War II. Congratulations on the stellar reviews. Before discussing your book, I wanted ask about your background. What inspired you to become a historian and a professor of history? Does that interest go back to your childhood?

Professor Matthew Delmont: I wish I could claim it goes all the way back to my childhood. I think I was always interested in history as a subject in high school and even through much of college, but I don't think I fully appreciated how interesting and complex history is. I focused too much on names and dates and trying to memorize facts or texts and didn't really understand the messiness of history until I got to graduate school.

So, when I graduated from college, I worked in business for a few years and realized I didn't love that. And I realized I was a lot more passionate about what I was reading, things that were broke in the newspaper or in The Atlantic.

I ended up applying to the Graduate School of Brown University. I was in graduate seminars in African American history and other field history topics, and came to understand how historians actually practice their craft—the process of going into archives and trying to put different pieces of evidence in conversation with each other, and engage with the past work other historians had written, and then put the puzzle pieces together. That's when I really fell in love with history. I came to appreciate the complexity of history and that has captured my interest to this day.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for describing your path to history. What was the focus of your dissertation in graduate school?

Professor Matthew Delmont: My dissertation turned into my first book, which was on the TV show called American Bandstand and how it came out in Philadelphia in the 1950s and how it was part of a larger debate in the struggle over civil rights in the city. So that first book project was called The Nicest Kids in Town, and it tells the story of the development of American Bandstand and rock and roll culture in Philadelphia alongside the story of school segregation in Philadelphia and the fight over residential segregation and civil rights in the city.

Robin Lindley: What a fascinating project. I was in grade school in the fifties, and American Bandstand was a national phenomenon. I ignored it for the most part but girls my age seemed devoted viewers. As I failed at coolness in Spokane, my future wife Betsy was rocking out to the Bandstand tunes at her home in New Jersey. Little did I know. That was probably long before your time.

Professor Matthew Delmont: The later iterations were still on when I was growing up, but the Philadelphia version was before my time, but my mom, who is from Minneapolis, she told me stories about when she was ten or twelve years old and she would turn on American Bandstand and dance in her living room to the show. That was partly the motivation for starting that dissertation project.

Robin Lindley: I’ll look for that book. I must get it for my wife. I read that you attended a military school high school and were one of the few students of color there.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. For high school, I went to St. Thomas Academy, a military academy in Minnesota that has junior ROTC program that all the students participate in. My entire high school experience was wearing a junior ROTC uniform, lining up in formation every morning, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Our Father, because it was also a Roman Catholic school. We had military classes and leadership classes taught by retired military sergeants and colonels. So, it was a unique high school experience.

In part, that education certainly shaped my later interest in this topic of Half American because the story of World War II was really part of the story of the school. The most important part of each year was the awarding of what they called the Fleming Saber, that was named after a Marine Corps captain who died in the Battle of Midway. These stories were ordered to always figure very prominently in the life of the school during my high school education.

Robin Lindley: So, you became very familiar with military history and protocol as a young person. How were you treated as student of color at this military school? Did you see any difference in your treatment?

Professor Matthew Delmont: I did not see any significant difference. And I should make sure I clarify that it was a high school military academy, and I wasn’t serving in the actual military. All the same, what I appreciated about that experience was that I felt, once all of the Junior ROTC cadets put our uniforms on, there was a certain unifying factor to that. I felt I could be evaluated based on how I did in my schoolwork and how well I polished my shoes and my brass and how well I memorized facts I needed to know for our military inspection. That leveled the playing field in many ways.

I understand now that things were always much more complicated than that. But certainly, going through high school, I felt like I was treated fairly by all the military personnel who ran the school. It was also the case that there were only a handful of Black students at the school, so that did partly shape my experience as one of a very small number of Black students and students of color at a predominantly white school.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing that background. It helps to understand your interest in the history you present in Half American. What inspired the book? Did your past research on prior books influence this book?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Absolutely. I'd say the inspiration came from two pathways. One, it did emerge pretty directly from the last project I worked on: a digital book project for Stanford University Press called Black Quotidian, where I dug deeply in the digitized archives of Black newspapers. One of the things I found in that project that surprised me were all of these images and stories of Black soldiers and sailors from World War II that were featured in the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier and Baltimore African American. These were just everyday folks, not people who went on and became famous. These were stories about how people got drafted or volunteered for the military. There were just little head shots of them, and then little blurbs about what neighborhood they came from.

After seeing first dozens and then hundreds of these articles and all these names and images I'd never seen before made me think differently about the war. I had taught about World War II for more than a decade at that point, but these were all different little snapshots that told different stories about the war. That made me think, what would the war look like from the Black perspective, and was it possible to tell that story more broadly than it had been told before?

The other influence was looking at some of the oral histories that the National World War II Museum in New Orleans had collected. And one really stuck with me. A gentleman named Robert P. Madison who had served in Italy and earned a Purple Heart in combat, went on to earn architectural degrees from Case Western and Harvard and became a really important architect in Cleveland. He designed a number of buildings including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But in his oral history, he described being in his business and going to a bookstore, picking up this big book on World War II and flipping through it and not seeing anything at all about Black soldiers or airmen. He said, “We were a forgotten group of people.” That stuck with me, and that's largely what motivated me to work on the book and to try to make sure that Black veterans and Black civilians who played an important role during the war would become part of the larger story we tell about the war.

Robin Lindley: You’ve done a remarkable job of creating a comprehensive history of African Americans during the war. Your book was eye-opening to me, and I thought I knew this history. How would you describe your research process for this wide-ranging book?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Broadly speaking, the most important sources for the project were historical articles from Black newspapers, archival documents--primarily the papers of the NAACP in the national archives—and from the US military. And then there were a number of oral histories that were collected either by Library of Congress or by the National World War II Museum of Black Veterans.

Focusing just on the Black press, Black newspapers like Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier were extremely influential, particularly in the 1940s. It was kind of like the golden age of the Black Press. And what's important about those as historical sources in the context of World War II are a couple of things. One, they really helped to shape the story. They weren't just reporting on the stories that developed but they helped to shape history. I think the Pittsburgh Courier is the best example of that by helping to launch the Double Victory campaign: victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. And that really became the rallying cry for Black Americans during the war. I think that's a really good example of a newspaper not just reporting on things that happened, but really taking an active role in shaping the trajectory of how the war would be understood.

And Black papers were instrumental in working with activists to call for the desegregation of defense industries, and later the desegregation of military, and to put pressure on politicians and military officials to make sure that Black Americans were being treated fairly in the military.

The other thing that was important about the Black Press was that they had a number of war correspondents who were embedded with Black units. That provided me with a set of on-the-ground accounts that just tell a very different story about the war than what you would typically find in white newspapers or in a lot of other accounts that focused more on white units. It really shifts the focus of where the war was taking place because, by and large, Black troops were excluded from combat roles. And so, while these war correspondents were embedded with quartermaster units and engineering units that were working behind the scenes on the supply and the logistical work. That's where the majority of Black troops were stationed.

It turns out that that this support work was really important to the Americans and the allies in winning the war. The writing and documented evidence from these war correspondents reveals the vital role that Black Americans played.  And these war correspondents brought those stories and the people they reported on to life. For me, these historical newspapers were just a treasure trove of information about the war.

Robin Lindley: And you point out that, even before the war, the Black press and the African American community were very aware of the dangers of fascism and eugenics, and they wrote about the persecution of Jews in Germany. The Black press also had astute reporters such as the legendary poet Langston Hughes who covered the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Exactly. That's an important part of telling the history of World War II. For Black Americans especially, World War II didn't start with Pearl Harbor. It started years before that.

By 1933, as soon as a Hitler's regime began rising to power in Germany, Black activists in the Black press recognized what a tremendous danger Nazism and that racial ideology posed to the world because they saw the commonalities between how Jews were being treated in Europe and how Black people were being treated in the American South. And they called out those similarities explicitly. They pointed to policies that required Jews to sit in certain sections of railway cars, that deprived Jews of property, that threatened Jewish lives, and that exacted violence against Jewish communities. The Black press pointed out that the exact same things were happening to Black people in the South and also to the ways that Nazi were drawing explicitly on American racial policies to justify their actions.

And it was important for me to start the book with the Spanish Civil War. More than 80 Black Americans to volunteered to fight for the Spanish government and they were among the first to literally take up arms to try to defeat fascism. They recognized that fascism wasn't just a threat to Europe, but it was a threat to the world. What was important about their service was that they had the opportunity to serve in combat units, but they wouldn't have been able to participate that way in the American military at the time. And these units were integrated, unlike the American military. This service provided a vision for how Black Americans could participate in the military in ways that weren't permitted in the American military. That caught the attention of a lot of Black Americans who read these stories and followed the news through the reporting of people like Langston Hughes in the Baltimore African American.

Robin Lindley: And you recount that Black officers served with other Americans in Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, and you didn't see virtually any Black officers in the American military a few years later during World War II.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Exactly. There are multiple points throughout this history when Black Americans were just deeply upset by the hypocrisy they saw. At the time, the American military truly didn't believe that Black Americans had the intelligence, the leadership capabilities, and the courage to serve in combat or to be officers. The military largely blocked Black people from those opportunities. But at the same time, you have these Black volunteers who are doing exactly those roles in the Spanish Civil War. And those examples highlighted for a lot of Black Americans that the American military didn't appreciate the tremendous capabilities that Black Americans could bring to the war effort.

Robin Lindley: That hypocrisy comes through vividly. You capture the brutality and the unfairness of segregation by the military. It’s stunning that, during the war, even blood supplies were segregated. The unfairness and double standards must seem almost medieval to younger readers with the shocking abuse that Black soldiers and sailors faced. You describe life in training camps in the South, for example, where white citizens would attack Black troops who suffered severe injuries or death—and then Black troops would be blamed for the violence by both military officers and civilian leaders. Weren’t these stories appalling to you? Were you surprised by these repeated incidents of white violence against Black Americans in the military?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. In working on this history, I was surprised by the depth of racism that Black troops encountered.  I've taught this history and knew at a broad level what this looked like, but once I dug into the individual stories, it was really shocking. It made me stop and pause and reconsider things that I hadn't really understood or taken the time to fully process.   

With the example of the blood supply being segregated meant that Black blood was separate from white blood and they military wouldn’t give “Black blood“ to white soldiers who needed blood transfusions.

It’s one thing that say the military was segregated, but then you actually pause, stop, and think about what that meant and how it made no sense from a military or strategic perspective. In fact, it was the exact opposite. It was more logistically complicated to do everything in duplicate. There was no tactical advantage gained by segregating the military. It took forever to prepare segregated training facilities, and dining facilities, and recreation and living facilities. And the only reason to do it was to appease white racial prejudice. Things like that in the research made me stop and reconsider what I understood but hadn't really appreciated the depth of.

Robin Lindley: It’s a lot to take in. And Black soldiers were actually lynched in the South and elsewhere. By the end of the war, when you consider the Double V campaign, there was a US and Allied victory against fascism but that didn’t lead to a victory against racism in the US.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. The Double Victory campaign is an example that I have taught for years. With victory over fascism as the US defeated Germany, we can say that the military battle was successful. But with the other part of that campaign, victory at home over racism, it was clear that that aspect of the campaign wasn't a victory.

Black troops came home and they were disrespected. In some cases, they were lynched, largely because of their military service, because they were seen as a threat to the status quo.  That really forced me to reconsider both what the war was about and the fact that it was only a partial victory.

Black Americans came home and they were still fighting for that other victory. They still were in a country that treated them as half American. They were still second-class citizens. They still had to fight for the freedom and democracy that they had tried to bring to Europe. They had to fight for that at home.

Robin Lindley: That continued struggle stands out in the story. You capture, again, the terrible treatment of African Americans both at home and abroad. What tasks were most African American soldiers were assigned to in the segregated military? Weren’t most Black troops excluded from combat roles?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Black Americans had important roles in combat. The Tuskegee Airmen are perhaps the most famous example. They broke barriers in the Army Air Corps and played important roles in air battles, in the Mediterranean in particular. Later in the war, there was an integrated unit of Black Marines that played important roles in the battles of Saipan and Iwo Jima. And there were some Black infantry and tank units in Europe that saw combat.

But by and large, the, the story of African American troops during the war was that they were largely in supply and logistical units or with the engineers and quartermasters. They served with the Seabees [construction units] and as cooks and messmen in the Navy. They did grueling, unglamorous work. They loaded unloaded ships and trucks. They cleared jungles and built airways. They built ports.  They built these tremendous roads through rugged inhospitable terrain such as the Al-Can highway to Alaska and the Ledo Road to Burma. They drove trucks all across Europe to make the supply effort possible as the Allied armies pushed toward Germany. They were really the backbone of the American and Allied supply effort.

One of the things that I came away from the book with that I didn't know at the outset is that World War II wasn't just a battle of strategy and will, but it was about supply. When you take that perspective and understand the important role supply played in this global war, and you understand that Black troops were the backbone of the supply effort, then it's clear that Americans couldn't have won the war without the vital roles that Black Americans played in supply and logistical units.

One of the best examples we can we have of this vital role was after D-Day in Europe. The Allies invasion started on June 6, 1944, but there was still D-Day plus one and D-Day plus two. And the big challenge in those weeks and months after June 6th, 1944 was supplying the thousands of troops who were now pushing from the Normandy beaches through France and into Germany. All those troops required a huge amount of supplies. They had to have ammunition, and boots and clothing, and food, and fuel for the tanks and for the trucks. And all that had to get moved. And by and large, it was Black troops who were doing that moving.  And there were Black troops across the Channel who were loading the ships that crossed to Normandy and the port of Cherbourg. There are Black troops unloading those ships there. Black troops driving on the Red Ball Express were truck drivers who moved all these goods to troops. Nothing arrived at the front without passing through the hands of at least one Black soldier.

That's a different story about how the war was won than we typically see. It's not a glamorous story. It doesn't make for a good Hollywood movie necessarily, but it's an honest accounting of what it really took to fight and win this global war. And the same was true in the Pacific theater. For example, the battle of Iwo Jima lasted a lot longer than military planners expected, and they had to supply the troops who were already on the island. And that happened because Black Duck operators drove between ship and shore to make sure supplies reached the beach.

I didn't know that set of stories would be as prominent in the book. I'm really happy to have made those accounts a centerpiece of the book. That’s an important part of the history of World War II that more Americans need to understand.

Robin Lindley: As you note, this important work and the Black troops who made it possible has been ignored in popular histories and in popular media. As you stress in your book, these Black soldiers weren't just handling supplies or driving trucks or toiling at hard labor, but they were doing these unsung jobs under fire as well. People need to understand that they were in combat too. My dad was in New Guinea during the war, and there were many African American troops who supported that bloody but often overlooked campaign as well. I appreciate what you've done to bring out the reality of service in a war. It's also haunting to me still, and it may go back for me to Civil War stories on Black troops who were assigned to bury the dead. After D-Day and other huge campaigns, Black soldiers bore the brunt of burial duties and dug graves for thousands of US troops and other casualties.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. That's another important part of the story that has fallen out of the popular treatment of the war.

Robin Lindley: And these Black troops were serving under fire, either in combat units, as you mentioned, or in these support positions. They were often belittled by their fellow soldiers and many of the commanding officers in the military, even though they were performing this vital service at great peril. And members of Congress and other American leaders at home were labeling them as inferior and inept rather than honoring their service.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. The sense that you could somehow clearly delineate combat roles from non-combat roles obviously fell apart when in war zones. If you're driving a truck through hostile territory and you're being shot at, you might technically not be in a combat role, but you're obviously in combat. The same for messmen in the Navy, the folks like Doris Miller, the Black hero of Pearl Harbor. He was a messman, and his job wasn’t to be in combat. But once the battle starts, you're in combat, whether you like it or not. That's an important part of the story as well.

And then absolutely, some of the most disturbing things to define in terms of historical sources and to write about is the depths of disrespect that Black veterans or that Black troops faced while in the military, and then what Black veterans faced when they came home. We like to think that service in the military is among that the highest forms of patriotism in our country and that everyone would regard it with the respect that it deserves. But the historical record has too many examples otherwise of Black troops being harassed by their officers or fellow enlisted troops, by townspeople, and others, sometimes explicitly because they're wearing a uniform.

In theory, the uniform was the reason they were called GIs. That’s means “general issue” and it was meant to have a unifying impact on their identities. But it was just the opposite in many cases. During World War II, many white Americans were upset by the idea of Black men and women wearing uniforms, and they were harassed even more so because of that.

Robin Lindley: That’s a striking and heartbreaking story that must be recalled. One of the things that surprised me was that we actually had an integrated service, and that was the Merchant Marine. What did you learn about this organization?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. Thank you for asking that.

The Merchant Marine was a great example of how a service could be integrated. The Merchant Marine didn't have the same pattern of segregation policies as the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps. In fact, they would almost appear like United Nations style crews on board ships. You had a range of European ethnicities as well as Filipinos, people from Latin America and Black Americans all working on the same ship. That included ships with Black captains who were in charge of these multiracial crews. The Merchant Marines were not technically combat troops, but they had extremely dangerous missions to transport troops and supplies between the United States and the war zones in the Pacific and European theaters. And the Merchant Marines had casualty rates that outpaced the other branches of the military.

Throughout the book, I was looking for examples that provided counterpoints to what was possible during the war. I think it sometimes it's easy to say that we could not have integrated the military during World War II because that just wasn't possible. No one would have stood for it. But I think the Merchant Marines provide a good example of why that's just not true. Those Americans, whatever their backgrounds, whatever their individual prejudices might have been, banded together to do the work that had to be done, and I think that's what's so powerful about finding historical examples that provide a counterpoint to the segregation that was true in the other branches of the military.

Robin Lindley: A great example of true patriotism. To go back to this idea of leaders and where they stood in terms of African Americans and their service in the war, how do you see President Roosevelt's role?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Roosevelt had such a complex time in office, and particularly during the war. There were so many facets to it.

In terms of the Black experience of the war, Roosevelt recognized he was caught between a rock and a hard place. He was getting a great deal of pressure from Black activists, particularly [union leader] A. Philip Randolph early in the war with the threatened to March on Washington to take more meaningful and dramatic steps to have anti-discrimination provisions for the defense industries and to integrate the military. At the same time, Roosevelt understood that a large portion of the Democratic Party’s base of power was in the segregated South where they were explicitly opposed to any sort of equality for Black Americans. They wanted to maintain their traditions of Jim Crow segregation.

And so, Roosevelt was walking a tightrope with regards to the civil rights policies throughout the war. That came to fruition with efforts like executive order 8802 that he signed in 1941 that put in place anti-discrimination provisions in terms of defense industries and created something called the Federal Employment Practice Commission. At the time, that executive order was initially hailed as the second Emancipation Proclamation. But once reality set in, it turned out that the FEPC didn’t have the manpower to investigate the thousands and thousands of claims of discrimination that were filed.

I think the reality for Roosevelt was a kind of one step forward, two steps back, from the African American perspective throughout much of the war. At the same time, I have to recognize that, with the amount of racism and segregation that existed in the country, it was impossible for a president to overturn that reality from the White House. Roosevelt put in place some policies and measures that were definitely steps forward that opened up some doors that were by no means far enough, but what he was up against politically was a mess.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those thoughts on FDR. You also discuss the plight of Black Americans who worked in the defense industry, thanks to A. Philip Randolph and FDR’s Executive Order 8802.  That story is also fraught, however. What did you learn about the treatment of African American employees in the defense industry? And I’d never heard of hate strikes by white workers against their fellow Black workers.

Professor Matthew Delmont: This really important part of the story reveals why it's so important to tell the story of the war front at the same time you're telling the story of the home front. For Black Americans, those are two parts of the same story.

At home during the war, the defense industries were hugely important because they represented a huge number of new jobs and presented new economic possibilities for Black Americans, as well as for a lot of white Americans. There was a lot of competition for Black Americans to get equal access to these jobs. Battles were fought factory by factory and city by city. And there were a lot of the different local workers organizing cities such as Los Angeles and Detroit, Chicago and New York, to achieve meaningful integration and get meaningful jobs in these defense industries.

There was some progress from 1941 through 1943 and 1944, largely because the need for workers was so great. Black Americans were able to finally get their feet in the door. But a few things hindered more equitable treatment in these workplaces. An important problem was that too many white workers either refused to work alongside Black workers, or they refused to permit Black workers to have any sort of promotions or supervisory roles. And the way white workers expressed their animosity to these Black workers was through a series of hate strikes, where they would just stop working. These strikes were not authorized by unions. The strikers would stop work for a period of time to demonstrate that they refused to work with Black workers. What's so striking about these hate strikes was that often only one or two or maybe a dozen Black workers had entered a factory and that prompted a thousand plus white workers to walk off the job. And that could happen if one or a handful of Black workers were promoted to new roles within a factory, and that would prompt a thousand plus white workers to walk off the job.

This racism was dramatized by Black activists and by the Black press at the time by arguing that white workers would rather see the Nazis win the war than work alongside Black Americans. And it's hard to argue with that claim. We would like to think that Americans were putting aside whatever prejudices or biases they had in support of this larger war effort, but the reality was that there were too many white workers for whom their individual racial prejudices were more important than their sense of duty or their patriotism for this larger war cause.

Another thing that came through about these war industries was that it was also often the case that Black workers who had training in specific skills such as electricians or carpenters couldn't get those jobs within the war industries. They were put in lower, entry-level and dirtier jobs, and again, it was just a point of frustration throughout the war that within the military and the defense industries. Black Americans had tremendous skills and capabilities to offer to make the war effort more successful, but too often those skills and capabilities they had to contribute were not taken advantage of.

Robin Lindley: And you highlight role of African American women in the defense industries and in the military. What did you see in terms of their contributions and treatment?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Within the military, there were thousands of Black women who served in the Women's Army Corps, who played really important roles on the home front, who were filling in for roles that had been left by men who been deployed to the service. And then a number of these Women's Army Corps draftees and volunteers deployed to theaters overseas as well.

The most famous and one of the largest female units was the 688th Central Postal Directory Battalion that was under the command of Charity Adams. When these women got to the European theater, their job was to make sure that troops throughout the European theater received mail. This work was really important for morale. Both white soldiers and Black soldiers talked about the importance of receiving letters from home, and this postal battalion helped to make that possible. They developed systems to get the mail to its intended recipients, which was  no small task, because units were moving constantly. The soldiers also had very common names like Charles Adams or Joe Smith, and the battalion did really important work to get a mail distribution system throughout the European Theater.

On the home front, Black women played extremely important roles in fueling some of the activism that emerges in the Civil Rights movement after the war. The book highlights Ella Baker, a very important grassroots activist, who really cut her teeth as an activist during the war years. She traveled to local communities throughout the mid-Atlantic, southern and northeastern states working for the NAACP and starting NAACP branches. She presented leadership training classes and recruited more local people for civil rights organizing within their communities.

And what I think is so powerful about Ella Baker’s example is that she had this vision of leadership that you didn't have to be college educated or a lawyer or doctor or a professional to be a leader of your community. She believed that anyone had the capacity to be a leader. That was a profound vision of grassroots leadership that was directly at odds with how the military viewed Black Americans at the time.  The military, by and large, didn't think Black people had the capacity to lead, but Ella Baker in the civilian world really proved them wrong. She showed how Black people from the small towns throughout the South had the capabilities to be dynamic and powerful leaders.

Robin Lindley: Wasn't Ella Baker also involved with the NAACP leaders Walter White and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the investigations of violence against Blacks Americans in military and in civilian roles during the war?

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. She was director of branches for the NAACP during the war, and she was campaigning in that capacity. She was working alongside Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP at the time, who was barnstorming across the country and investigating cases of violence against Black troops, trying to assure that Black troops were being treated equitably on Army bases. At the same time, he was laying the groundwork for voting rights cases legislation that would come later. And so Thurgood Marshall and Ella Baker and the people they were in contact with brought the home front aspect of the Double Victory Campaign to life.

Robin Lindley: I only learned of the tragic Port Chicago disaster a couple of years ago. As you describe in your book, in July 1944, there was this tremendous explosion in Port Chicago, California, near San Francisco. The explosion resulted in the deaths of 320 people, including 202 Black sailors. And then there was a court martial after this horrible incident, and many African Americans were prosecuted for mutiny. What did you learn about this tragedy and the subsequent trial?

Professor Matthew Delmont: The incident at Port Chicago was the largest home front loss of life during the war. Some of the things that came out after the explosion, were that these Black troops were handling very dangerous ammunition and explosives and they hadn't received the appropriate training to do this work. And, they were being challenged by their officers to go as fast as they could. In some cases. the officers were racing units against each other while they were trying to load ships and load trains with extremely explosive materials. So the workplace dynamic was very bad with a lack of training and supervisors pushing people past their limits and past their expertise.

The explosion killed more than 200 Black sailors. Those who survived were deeply traumatized. They had seen their friends killed. Some who had witnessed the horrific explosion and had lost friends, were ordered to go back and do the exact same work knowing that it was still just as dangerous. And, knowing that they still don't have the appropriate training to do it, they met and decided that a number of them were not going to return to do that work. They refused the orders from their white commanders. Some 50 African American leaders were charged with mutiny for disobeying orders. They were court martialed and found guilty of mutiny and they were held in military jail through the remainder of the war.

Thurgood Marshall became involved with the case because the NAACP recognized that, as the case unfolded, Black troops were not being accorded a fair chance of justice as they were being rushed into the legal proceedings. Even the question of whether what they had done could be considered mutinous conduct was questionable. Thurgood Marshall worked with others in the NAACP to help with the case, and they were able to get the sailors’ sentences initially reduced, and then, after the war, the sentences were shortened, and then the sailors were released sooner than expected. But it was a harrowing experience for those who lived, and it was obviously a devastating experience for everyone who witnessed or was injured in the explosion.

Robin Lindley: The disaster scene was just horrific, as you vividly describe in your book. I didn’t know about the World War II service of Medgar Evers, the legendary civil rights activist. What did you learn his wartime days and how that influenced his later work as an activist for equal rights that led to his assassination?

Professor Matthew Delmont: When Black veterans came back from the war, a huge number of them went on to directly fight for civil rights at home. Medgar Evers is a great example of this. He was part of the Red Ball Express. He loaded trucks and unloaded trucks and drove supplies across France day after day.

He came home and, on his 21st birthday in 1946, Medgar Evers led a group of other veterans and citizens to try to register to vote in Decatur, Mississippi, only to be turned away by a white mob with guns. For him, part of his service in World War II was that he saw other futures were possible. He described his experience meeting people in France as being the first time he ever felt that he was treated as fully human by a white person. That kind of treatment in France was entirely different than how he had been treated in Mississippi and throughout the Jim Crow South. That steeled his resolved to fight for equality in the US.

Evers continued the fight for voting rights throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s. He took on increasingly important roles in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, including becoming a leader of the branch of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi. Throughout that period, Evers and others in leadership positions were targeted. The kind of equality and democracy that he and other veterans tried to bring to Mississippi was dangerous. It was not wanted by a lot of white citizens of segregated states.

Ultimately, Evers was assassinated in 1963, and it's important to note he was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a white veteran whose fingerprints from when he registered for the Marines helped provide proof that he was the shooter.

Medgar Evers’s trajectory was from Normandy and serving proudly in the military, and then coming home and immediately fighting for voting rights, and then risking his life in the battle for civil rights at home. His story illuminates what was true for that generation of Black veterans. They knew it wasn't enough to win the battle militarily. They then had to also secure democracy at home.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for sharing the experience of Black Americans who returned from the war to face continued segregation and racism. You also stress how most African Americans were denied GI Bill benefits for housing and education. And you describe the terrible toll of African American veterans who were either severely injured or killed after the war.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Yes. The homecoming chapter was one of the most difficult to write.  The depth of disrespect that was shown to Black veterans when they returned to this country is hard to fathom and it's still hard to write about now.

I share in the book more than a dozen examples of Black veterans who were murdered or severely beaten after the war. Those stories are horrific, but as troubling as they are, they need to be part of the story that we talk about World War II.

In terms of the GI Bill benefits thing, there was policy violence against Black veterans and a large number of Black veterans weren't able to access the GI Bill benefits that helped propel so many white veterans into the middle class. That’s because the legislation was set up so that benefits were distributed at the state and local level. That meant that discrimination could still take place, particularly in the South. There were numerous instances of Black veterans trying to access the employment benefits and the education benefits, and being turned away or being diverted to less beneficial programs.

And the mortgage industry still condoned racism throughout the country, which meant that VA-backed mortgages that were freely available to white veterans weren't as easily accessed by Black veterans. Some recent studies show that lack of access to the GI Bill had a significant impact in terms of fueling the racial wealth gap that has emerged in the country.

But I also do know that thousands of Black Americans were able to take advantage of the GI Bill and they went on to do tremendous things. They were able to use those benefits to pursue educations that helped them become doctors and lawyers and engineers and architects. But there was a real opportunity cost to the country based on discrimination because GI benefits were not distributed equally to all veterans. We could have had a whole generation of Black doctors and engineers and scientists and professors that we didn't have because of discrimination.

Robin Lindley: That’s another disheartening aspect of the postwar story. And you describe surprising postwar efforts to ignore or erase this history and to obscure or disparage any efforts or contributions by Black Americans either in the military or in civilian life. How did most historians and other writers ignore or miss this entire story that's so compelling and important and heartrending?

Professor Matthew Delmont: One thing that's interesting for me is that, when you look back at the war period, there's substantial evidence about the important role that Black troops played during the war. Obviously, the Black press covered it. Obviously, civil rights activists called attention to it. But even in a number of mainstream publications, such as the New York Times, Time Magazine, and Life Magazine, ran articles during the war that spoke to the important role Black troops played. Even military leaders spoke to those important roles as well.

Unfortunately, after the war the examples of the service and the courage and bravery of Black troops were whitewashed from the history. After the war, Life and Colliers published these large, handsome volumes of pictures of World War II, but there are almost no pictures of Black servicemen and women. They were almost completely written out of that history.

And, after the war, you had politicians like Senator James O. Eastland who openly disparaged the service of Black troops. And you had academics in different fields downplaying and doing whatever they could to disparage and or ignore the important roles that Black troops played. Black historians at that time understood what was going on. They saw that the story was being written in such a way that Black troops were being left out of it, and they understood that this would have a negative impact on the civil rights potential for Black Americans after the war. Part of the disparaging of Black troop service during the war was saying that they weren't fully American, that they didn't deserve to be equal parts of this nation.

Unfortunately, that erasure influenced how the popular history of the war was written and how movies about war were presented. Books and movies often focused on the white experience of the war without any real attention to Black experience of the war. But I would definitely say that there are a number of good books on specific Black units that served in the war.

I hope that my book tells a fuller story, both of the military aspect and of the home front aspect, and helps readers think about what the war looked like from the African American perspective.

Robin Lindley: I think you do a superb job, Professor Delmont. I just wanted to finally ask if you had anything to add or, after digging into this troubled history, I wondered where you find hope now because we still face many of these issues.

Professor Matthew Delmont: That’s a challenging question. I think where I find hope in this story is that I'm inspired by the, the resolve of Black veterans and Black citizens of that generation who fought for their country. I mean that every sense of the word: to fight militarily for the country, but also to come home and fight for the country to actually live up its professed ideals.

It's a very strange time to be a historian now and, obviously, there's lot of debate about how American history should be taught and discussed and written. The history is important because it gives us a clear example of how patriotism and defense have almost always gone hand in hand for Black Americans, and I find that inspiring. I think hopefully readers will be inspired in the same way.

Robin Lindley: Thanks so much for bearing with me, Professor Delmont, and for your thoughtful comments. It's been an honor to talk with you. I hope your revelatory new book reaches a wide audience. And congratulations again on the outstanding reviews.

Professor Matthew Delmont: Thank you. I really appreciate that and I really appreciate all your questions. I'm hoping that the book will reach as many people as possible because I'm obviously passionate about this history.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

For more than 40 years, Jim McDermott has worked tirelessly on behalf of the people of Washington State. As a state legislator, he helped pass laws that offered healthcare to unemployed and low-income Washingtonians, the first such program in the nation. In the United States Congress, he continued to be a much-needed voice for his most vulnerable constituents. Across America, you'll find families that are better off because Jim McDermott was fighting for them.

 – President Obama in 2016 on Congressman Jim McDermott’s impending retirement.

For many of us, politicians are a confounding and often frustrating mystery. What makes these people tick? What do they want? Why can’t they get along? Is politics merely a game for money or love or power? Can an idealist with a vision for the common good survive in politics?

Thanks to former Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott’s engaging, candid and often humorous new book Money, Love and Power: A Guide to Understanding Congress, readers are treated to the perspective of a veteran legislator with the instincts of a psychiatrist on the motivations of politicians and the complexities of their profession.

In his book, Congressman McDermott confronts the contentious issues of corruption, greed, and hypocrisy in politics, but he also shares accounts of his mentors and friends, his accomplishments to help millions of citizens, his hopes for our fragile democracy, and his clear and humane vision for rising from our current tribalism and polarization. He also describes the personal challenges in balancing a life as a career legislator with demands of family, colleagues, and constituents.

For nearly a half century, Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott was a powerful force in Washington State and national politics. He served 14 terms (1989-2017) in Congress representing Seattle and environs in Washington’s 7th Congressional District.

He began his legislative career in 1970 when he was elected to the Washington State House of Representatives. Four years later, he was elected state senator and served in that role until 1987 when he left the legislature for a position as a medical officer in Zaire for the US Foreign Service. He returned to politics in 1988 when he answered the call to run for Congress.

Renowned as the “Liberal Lion” of the House of Representatives, Congressman McDermott has devoted his career to working tirelessly for a healthier, safer, more peaceful and more just nation and world. As a medical doctor with a specialty in psychiatry, he was especially focused on health care reform for accessible and affordable medical care for all citizens regardless of financial situation. He led a successful effort to provide health care for the most vulnerable citizens of Washington. In Congress, he was a principal architect of the Affordable Care Act and he also addressed other complex issues such as expanding Medicare coverage, HIV/AIDS funding, elder care, and more.

Congressman McDermott also mastered foreign policy in his work to improve and deepen US ties with our allies and the developing world. As he sponsored legislation to improve the safety net for citizens at home, he also advanced laws to relieve poverty and suffering in the Third World.

His staunch opposition of American “Forever Wars” in the Middle East is legendary. He brought a unique perspective to Congress as a veteran Navy psychiatrist who served during the Vietnam War and saw firsthand the brutal toll of the war on soldiers, Marines, and sailors. He remembered the losses and veterans of that disastrous conflict as he questioned the costs and wastefulness of twenty-first century military campaigns Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, Congressman McDermott honored the service of those who fought in the recent Mideast wars, and repeatedly reminded Washington State residents of their fellow citizens who had fallen. As detractors insulted and mocked Congressman McDermott as “Baghdad Jim,” most of his constituents and many other citizens admired his courage and hard-fought efforts to protect our troops and our nation with alternatives to a militant foreign policy.

As only the second psychiatrist who ever has served in Congress, he presents specialized understanding and thoughtful consideration of that august body and its members with his new guide for citizens, Money, Love and Power. (Congressman McDermott acknowledges pioneering physician Dr. Benjamin Rush as the first psychiatrist in Congress. Dr. Rush was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and member of the Continental Congress who became the face of the logo of the American Psychiatric Association because he finished his career taking care of patients in the mental hospitals and prisons of 18th century Philadelphia. He is seen as a founder of American psychiatry long before that medical discipline was widely recognized.)

Congressman McDermott generously responded by email to questions about his book and more from his home in France. His persistent efforts to connect from his remote village are greatly appreciated. There were some hiccups, but he generously observed how “hilarious” it was for two old guys to do an interview by email. Indeed. LOL, as the tech savvy young people might add.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Congressman McDermott for discussing your new book Money, Love, and Power. Congratulations on this engaging, thought-provoking and often humorous work. You served in Congress from 1989 until 2017. What inspired your book now on understanding Congress?

Congressman Jim McDermott: When I entered the state legislature in 1971, I was a psychiatrist who had spent many hours of training and experience in working in groups and watching how information was shared. I also had the experience of being totally unaware of the situation that I was coming into and, realizing my ignorance, I had to listen to all kinds of people to put together an understanding of what was going on. As I did that, I began to realize I was gathering the material for a storybook about the education of a member of a legislative body. That process started in January of 1971 and I irregularly dictated or jotted down or wrote in long-hand the stories I heard over the course of my 46 years in the legislative process from 1971 to 2017. I had a hard time knowing when I had written enough.

As I began to write a book, I tried to organize it but I could never get it done. By the time I got my manuscript into the hands of an editor I had written more than 150 chapters.

One other aspect of my book may be of some interest. The Irish, because of the oppression by the British, were forbidden to speak or write their own language—Gaelic or Irish—and therefore all their history was oral history. The most respected person in any village was the oral historian. The term in Gaelic for that person is seanchai. My father was a seanchai and my brothers as well. I saw storytelling as a natural way of expressing wisdom and history at the same time

Robin Lindley: You warn that your book is not a memoir, but I wondered about your background before your political career. It seems you’ve had a long-term interest in international relations. You include in the book your photo in Ghana in 1961 with a group called Operation Crossroads-Africa. You also stress your long-term desire to serve “the underprivileged of the world.” What sparked your early interest in world affairs and in serving the less fortunate?

Congressman Jim McDermott: When one reviews one's life it becomes clear that the roots of what you are as an adult started when you were a kid.

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian evangelical home where the values were around following in Jesus’ footsteps. Missionaries often stayed at our home. I decided as an eight-year-old child to become a medical missionary to the Chinese. That decision was made in 1944, after watching slide presentations by returning missionaries from China about the atrocities that were committed against the Chinese by the Japanese in their attempt to conquer China before the Second World War began.

The world order changed dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s. China was no longer an option for missionary work, but the impulse to take care of those who were least able to take care of themselves was deeply embedded in my upbringing.

I went to Wheaton College, which was a center of Christian evangelical fundamentalism. The Christians I met had been sent there to prepare themselves for service. The things that I was raised to believe were simply cemented into my life by that experience.

My first trip to the Third World came in my sophomore year in medical school when I went with Operation Crossroads-Africa and lived in a village [in Ghana] at the level of the people of the country. That meant boiling water to drink and using a latrine and eating native food and sleeping under a net to avoid being infected with malaria by the ever-present mosquitoes. That was perhaps the most formative experience in my adult life for it exposed to me the real problems that most of the world faces.

Robin Lindley: What a powerful experience. What inspired you to become a physician and then to choose to specialize in psychiatry?

Congressman Jim McDermott: My decision to become a physician, as I look back on it, was driven from my own experience of having asthma as a child. I was taken to the doctor's office when I was unable to breathe and received a shot of adrenaline, which relieved the spasm in my lungs. My mother also had asthma and I saw her in extremis on several occasions. These two experiences I think drove my desire to be a physician so that I could prevent my mother from dying and also help people like myself who had had this horrible experience of fearing never to have another breath.

My role model was a military general practitioner who had been in the Second World War. His name was Bernard Rodkinson and I'll never forget it. He gave me a shoulder patch from the First Cavalry Division. Dr Rodkinson was a gruff but warm and caring MD who knew how to talk to scared little nine- year-old kids. That shoulder patch emblazoned with a black horse on yellow background was our bonding.

And, like most students in the 1950s and 1960s I was driven educationally toward what I thought would be a useful way to spend my life. I became more and more interested in the human mind and I decided to go into psychiatry when I was 15 years old. I had read widely, and when asked to write what my career would be when I was older, I said that I was going to be a psychiatrist.  I'm sure I didn't really understand everything about psychiatry or what it meant but I was driven by the desire to understand the human mind.

Robin Lindley: You were precocious. I decided to be a brain surgeon in sixth grade and interviewed the two neurosurgeons then working in Spokane, but my deficiencies in chemistry and mathematics became apparent in high school and ended that dream. Patients should be thankful.

Your book is candid and often self-deprecating and wryly humorous. You’ve taken on the task of explaining how politicians think and behave. What is most important for readers to understand about the people who seek public office?

Congressman Jim McDermott: My book is not a tell all book designed to destroy this or that personality or tell stories that would be demeaning or hurtful but rather to help a student or someone who's interested in the subject understand what goes on in the mind of the congressman or congresswoman.

I don't think I've ever met anybody who didn't have some idea about what he or she wanted to accomplish as a congressperson. The election process is one in which people choose whether they want to send a person who has this goal or that goal to represent them in the national legislative assembly. The book is about the things that happen to people as they participate in that experience, and much of it is a surprise to the person who enters into the process.

Robin Lindley: What motivated you to seek public office, first at the state level and later with Congress?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I came out of the United States Navy absolutely enraged by what I have seen through the eyes of the soldiers and sailors and marines that I treated in my clinic. I saw the insanity of the war in Vietnam and wanted to do everything I could to stop it.

I actually thought before I went into the military of leaving the country and was offered a job in a psychiatric hospital in Tromso in northern Norway, above the Arctic Circle. I thought long and hard about leaving my country and finally decided that I wanted to stay and try and change it. That's really the driving force that took me from the Long Beach Naval Station on June 30th to a state legislative race in the 43rd district of Washington on the July 1, 1970.

Robin Lindley: Fred Rogers—Mister Rogers—advised troubled kids to look for “the helpers.” In looking at your career of service, it seems you fit that helper mold. What do you think?

Congressman Jim McDermott: The old joke about when you find yourself in a deep hole the first thing to do is stop digging. That principle applies to anybody who gets into something they don't understand.

I looked for helpers to help me avoid the problems that inevitably come in the legislative process. I, in turn, did all I could to help people, both Republicans and Democrats, to effectuate the system in the way that made the most sense to them. I often told members when they asked me, “you should vote yes on this issue but I think you're wrong.” By saying that, I let them know I wouldn’t mislead and that I actually knew what was the best vote for them, even if it didn’t fit for me. I learned that one should never mislead another legislator for a momentary advantage. It'll come back to bite you.

 The other part of being a helper in going to the legislature was that I saw that, as a member of Congress or of the state legislature, I could help all the people in the society if I could figure out what was an adequate and effective way to make their lives better. Being a doctor, I could help people one at a time, but being a legislator gave me more power.

Having been trained as a pediatric psychiatrist, I saw the world very much from the eyes of children and wondered how problems were going to affect kids and their families and their development for the future. Much of my effort was spent on trying to make a better place for them to live in the future.

Robin Lindley: What lessons did you bring from your medical training and career as a psychiatrist that were helpful in politics?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I only ran once as Doctor Jim McDermott and most of my career I was just plain Jim.

The fact that I was a psychiatrist made many people uneasy and was one of the reasons I lost the governor's race in 1980. The campaign against me advertised “Do you want a liberal Seattle psychiatrist to be your next governor?” Sounded like a good idea to me but the people of Washington weren’t ready for me. It's when I learned that the election was not about me but about the people making the choice of the person they felt most likely would represent them.

Coming to understand that elections are not about you is probably the most important thing you can learn from elections. A friend of mine who was Prime Minister of Ireland said the most important thing to have in politics is humility.

And, after experiencing that critique, I was very careful not to use psychiatric jargon or in any way make people uneasy because of my background. I couldn't change who I was, and I used the skills that I had learned of observing people and looking for evidence to explain why certain things happen, but I tried not to give people the impression that they were all patients. I wanted them to think of me as a colleague in the pursuit of good public policy.

Robin Lindley: You contend that most politicians do not set out to be scoundrels but are motivated by money or love or power—or a combination of those factors. Where do you see yourself in that mix? How do you see your evolution as a politician?

Congressman Jim McDermott: It was St. Ignatius who said, “if you give me a boy to the age of six, you could have him for the rest of his life.” The meaning of that aphorism is that the things that we build into children by the time they're six or eight years old are the roots of the way they will behave for the rest of their lives. That is why preschool education is so important.

My parents were very religious and strove very hard to live their lives as they thought Jesus wanted them to live. I never agreed with much of the trappings of religious denominations whether Catholic or Protestant or Jewish, but the roots had been planted at a very early age and followed me through my entire life.

Money was important of course—to have enough to live, but the accumulation of money was not something to be honored. What was to be honored was the self-service to other people: that one was able to do as Christ had done for the world by giving himself as a savior for all of us.

As most people do, I took those parts of the religion that made sense to me and carried then with me for 46 years and only now, as I look back, can I see some of the connections to the religious upbringing that I had.

If one's view of life is swayed by the acquisition of money or power, one is in danger of wandering into becoming a scoundrel. My favorite verse in the Bible is, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. Or what shall he give in exchange for his soul.” Faust is just around the corner.

Robin Lindley: You ran for governor of Washington State three times as a neophyte politician. You vividly describe your losses in those statewide races. What happened?

Congressman Jim McDermott: It was a greenhorn in politics but determined to have an impact on the way things went in the world. I was angry at what I had seen in my clinic about the war, and I wanted to change the world. I decided to run for governor which would make me one of 50 governors rather than one of 435 members of Congress. It seemed like I would have a better chance to talk to the president about getting us out of Vietnam. As I look back on it, I can't believe how naive I was.

Robin Lindley: Before running for Congress, you had a successful career as a state legislator. What do you see as your major triumphs in state politics?

Congressman Jim McDermott: Reaganomics turned the country upside down in 1981. The state of Washington was in deep financial trouble.

I lost the election in 1980 for governor but became the Ways and Means chairman in 1981. My job as the chairman of the most powerful committees in the legislature was to control the expenditure of money and provide for the safety net and education for all the citizens.

In 1984 I ran for governor for the third time and was defeated and it was clear to me that my progressive politics or my campaign style or my personality was not going to be accepted ever by the entire state. I returned to the state Senate and put together the Washington Basic Health Plan and the funding for the cleanup of Puget Sound and had hearings on reform of our nursing homes and so forth.

I got frustrated with the inability to reach a greater level power because our congressional seats were taken and the governor's race was closed, so I decided to go back to medicine. That's when I became a Regional Medical Officer for the US State Department based in Kinshasa, Zaire. I had always loved medicine.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for those comments on your work at the state level. Weren’t you a reluctant candidate for Congress in 1988 when you first ran? You were tapped to run when you were working in Zaire as a medical officer with the State Department.

Congressman Jim McDermott: I had a great job working in Africa for the State Department and, for the first time in my life, I had a stable income so that I could put two kids in college and pay for their education. I told my kids that the only thing that I would leave for them for a legacy would be a free college education so that, when they came out of college, they could do whatever they wanted without thinking about having to retire a monstrous debt.

I had already had the experience of picking myself up off the ground having lost three times for governor and knowing what it would be like if I came back from Africa having given up a great job and having to start all over again so I was scared. I wasn't sure that I could get elected to the United States House of Representatives.

Robin Lindley: What are a few of your proudest accomplishments as a member of Congress?

Congressman Jim McDermott: Every time I try to answer this question, I give different answers because I remember stuff I forgot after 28 years.

My biggest desire was to see national health care guaranteed to all Americans. Obama Care was a down payment. While I was there, I played a big part in the response to HIV-AIDS. HOPWA (housing for people living with HIV-AIDS) was very important in keeping people alive until treatment for AIDS came along.

My subcommittee of the Ways and Means committee was charged with rewriting the provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act.  I upgraded unemployment insurance and care for foster kids (500,000) and welfare for families. I also wrote the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which was the first trade policy for Africa.  At home, I finished the process of getting the Seattle’s Cedar River Watershed completely protected.  I also passed the bill in the Natural Resources Committee to resolve the land claim between the Puyallup tribe and the Port of Tacoma so the port could reach its present size.

I did lots of other smaller things, but it is important to say: none of this I did alone.  I worked with members from all over the country and, despite our political and social differences, we got stuff done. I also must say my staff did most of the work.  It really came to a screeching halt in 1995 when Newt took control and tried take all the power to himself. It was almost impossible to get a Republican co-sponsor on a bill so then you couldn’t even get a hearing on an idea. You had to get very creative and seed an idea in a Republican mind to get it to go anywhere.

Robin Lindley: You mention the cautionary words of legendary physician William Osler, “Listen to the patient.” How did that advice inform your work in politics?

Congressman Jim McDermott: If one believes in democracy and the principle that you are elected to represent the people of your district, it is imperative that you listen to what 700,000 people are trying to tell you. It's not always clear and it's never easy to do but that is your goal.

The aphorism that I learned in medicine in tandem with William Osler, was what one of my supervisors in psychiatry said to me. “Jim, listen to the patient no matter how crazy he sounds or she sounds because buried in their confusing communication is the truth that you need to know in order to help them.” He finished by saying, “a stopped clock is right twice a day. Your job is to figure out when the clock is telling the right time.” I thought of that whenever my staff would say to me, “You spent too much time listening to so and so.” I was waiting to find out what time it was.

Robin Lindley: You served in Congress for 28 years. How would you compare your Congressional legislative experience to what you did at the state level?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I'm sorry, but the only way I can answer this question is by an analogy to baseball. The Washington State Legislature was like being in the Pacific Coast League in baseball. I batted about .375 and hit about 40 home runs. In 1989 when I went up to the Major Leagues as a congressman in Washington DC, I was lucky to hit .290 and hit 15 home runs. The game is the same as in the state legislature in that the ball is the same shape and size and the distances between the bases and the pitcher’s mound and home plate are the same, but the players have skills that you have never seen before. Congress is a collection of the best players from all over the country who all have different styles. You have to learn a whole new game.

Robin Lindley: Who were some of your significant helpers in your career in Congress as you fought for average citizens, for better health care and education and housing, and more?

Congressman Jim McDermott: Let me start with Tom Foley who was the Speaker of the House. He and his wife Heather took me under their wings and taught me innumerable things. The rest of the Washington delegation were helpful, even [Republican] Sid Morrison who I had known from the state legislature where we had worked together on writing the bilingual education bill in 1973. When Sid left the Congress, he sold me his car.

I came to Congress with Nancy Pelosi, and so I knew her from practically the first day I was started. She and her colleague from California, George Miller, were perhaps my most helpful guides in how to proceed in Washington DC. Danny Rostenkowski and Dick Durbin from Chicago shared my Chicago background and were very helpful.

To begin to name other members is to recite the membership of the House because, from each of them, I learned things that helped me while I was there. Jim Ford, the chaplain of the House, was also a great friend.

Robin Lindley: You mention that the revered civil rights activist, the late Congressman John Lewis, was also a good friend of yours. How to you see your friendship and his approach to working in Congress?

Congressman Jim McDermott: John and talked almost every day.  I was senior to him on the Ways and Means Committee, so I usually spoke before him.  He would always be complementary to me and often take my ideas and make them more acceptable to the committee.  He took some of the edge off my style but he was never afraid to take ideas and improve on them.  He “made trouble” with a velvet glove after I used my fist to make a point. He and I shared the deaths in our family and our aches and pains as we got older.  He was a friend that I admired enormously as I watched him deal with the racism of the world.  He was made of cool steel.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for sharing those memories of Congressman Lewis. In your book, you share stories of ineptitude and corruption and vicious political schemes in Congress. That has to be frustrating when you’re working to help the people in your district and beyond. Are there a couple of particularly egregious incidents that especially surprised you?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I was raised in Chicago area and served in the state legislature for almost 16 years and had worked as a psychiatrist in a number of different settings in which I saw human foibles.

Coming to Congress simply exposed me to a wider variety of the things that people can do to get themselves in trouble because they didn't think about how it would look or how it would affect other people.

Robin Lindley: Right now, our country and Congress are extremely polarized, but you point out how this polarization in Congress really began in the 1990s with Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich and his “Contract for (on?) America.” That was years before the Tea Party far right extremists. How do you see Gingrich’s role in creating today’s divided Congress?

Congressman Jim McDermott: The election of Lyndon Johnson and his promise to bring the Great Society to the country threatened the conservatives and they planned, beginning in 1970, on how they were going to change the country. There are a dozen books you can read about what they did, but Newt Gingrich was simply the first very visible and most powerful prophet of our time to turn the Right away from democracy. He was unabashed in his willingness to bend the rules or to ignore the customs of the democracy in which we lived. It's hard to measure how important he was, but one can say that had he not led the Congress in 1995 in the way he did, we would not be anywhere near where we are today. The conservative wave was coming in the country and Newt Gingrich rode the wave like a surfer. And everyone saw him do it and began to follow suit.

Robin Lindley: Compromise in Congress is virtually impossible now. And you advise, “If you want to be a star, forget bipartisanship.” How does that work?

Congressman Jim McDermott: Two principles are essential for democracy to work: one principle is that of compromise. Everyone everyday compromises in multiple ways to make this society work. People very rarely get life exactly as they want it whether it's in their work or their profession or their personal life. Autocrats don't have to compromise.

The second principle is that there has to be honest debate over an agreed upon set of facts. You cannot have a useful discussion with someone if you cannot agree on the fundamental facts of the problem. You could have your own view about why the facts are the way they are but you and I have to agree on the facts if we're going have a sensible conversation about the problems.

When one side of the political process decides that compromise is not acceptable, partisanship is a direct result of that. Both sides of an argument go to their corner and never talk to the other side.

Diplomacy between nations is the attempt by leaders to bridge this gap between what one side thinks the facts are and what the other side thinks the facts are. If they can come to an agreement on the facts, they can probably work out an agreement. For example, the Good Friday Accords in Ireland settled 800 years of dispute between the British and the Irish. If either side had walked away from the table, you would still have mass killings in the streets of London, Dublin and Belfast.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those words on the value of compromise. As you detail, it’s expensive to run for Congress and, if you win, it’s challenging to maintain homes in your district and Washington DC, and address other pressures. What did you learn and what would you advise prospective members of Congress regarding expenses?

Congressman Jim McDermott: Becoming a public official is not a way to become wealthy! If you want to be wealthy, go into business or a profession where the compensation is high.

If you go into politics and expect to come out wealthy, you are in grave danger because the temptations to enrich yourself directly or indirectly are everywhere. You will operate on a daily basis with people who have much more of the world's wealth than you do, and as you begin to envy what they have, you open yourself up more and more to be corrupted.

When I came to Congress, buying a house in Washington DC in certain areas was not prohibitive but now housing is out of sight for an ordinary member of Congress. If you're wealthy before you come, it's no problem. You just have a second house in Washington DC. Absent that good luck, you are going to be stretched in your living style. There should be housing provided for members just as we do for diplomats or military personnel so poorer members could bring their families to DC.  The divorce rate might even go down then.

Robin Lindley: You detail in your book the Republican vendetta against you regarding release of an audiotaped recording—and the resulting complex litigation. It seems that you violated no laws but you lost several appeals, etc. What lessons did you take from this experience? As a result of your situation, you argue that all members of Congress have surrendered their First Amendment rights. Why is that?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I would advise anyone going into Congress to begin by studying the genesis and the operation of the Federalist Society. I was an ordinary citizen who had a couple parking tickets and a speeding ticket but that's all I knew about the justice system when I got to Congress.

The first goal of authoritarian leadership is to wipe out any aspect of free speech. You'll hear lots of speeches about support for the First Amendment, but the actions done in the process gradually take away the right of any citizen in the process to speak freely against the government. It's called the First Amendment because it is the first principle of any democracy. Behind that is a government that wants its activities to be as invisible as possible because the scrutiny of the people will lay bare the way things are actually operating.

Congressional oversight is the essence of making democracy fair. Congress tries to pass laws that they think are fair and deal with problems. The executive branch writes the rules and regulations to implement the laws that have been written. That process of writing rules and regulations is arcane and opaque and requires vigilance on the part of both to Congress and the people. There many slips between the lip and the cup, as the saying goes.

Whistle blowers are citizens who are exercising their right of free speech. If they see something in the process that they disagree with, they talk about it with someone. At that moment they have become a problem for the government and can be dealt with in a multiplicity of ways, none of which are pleasant.

My 11-year legal involvement over the release of a tape which I made for The New York Times was the result of an open attempt by the Republican leadership in the House to hide their duplicity from the world. Newt Gingrich said he would not do something and signed an agreement and then got on the phone and did exactly the opposite of what he had said in his declaration. The fact that I became aware of that phone call was truly accidental. I never went looking for it. It was brought to me and I thought the people had a right to know what the behavior of this Speaker of the House really was. Understandably he was quite angry and said “I was violating his privacy.”

At that time, now King Charles had been exposed by a cell phone call to his now wife. Everyone in the world knew that you could capture cell conversations. And the Speaker put everyone on his leadership team in jeopardy by making a call. He gave John Boehner the responsibility of pursuing a lawsuit and the lawsuit was decided with a very novel interpretation of the Constitution. The court decided that I had broken the rules of the House. The Constitution specifically separates the House and its rules from the purview of the courts. That means that when you become a member of the House, you are subject to a set of rules that can be written by the majority with no consultation with the minority by a simple vote on the floor of the House, and that you can be deprived of your First Amendment rights. That is a dangerous precedent to have been set in the House.

Robin Lindley: You have been outspoken on our “Forever Wars” in the Middle East. Many voters appreciate your views on war and peace and the bloated military budget. You mentioned your toughest vote and it involved a yes vote on the US response to the September 11, 2001 attack on America with a Declaration of a War on Terror. Only Representative Barbara Lee voted against the bill in the House. What did you do at this perilous time?

Congressman Jim McDermott: If there is one vote I would like to take again with the benefit of hindsight, it is that one. A group of 30 or so of us went round and round on Yes or No. I gave away my right to object fully to what followed.

The invasion of Iraq and problems with Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan all came from that decision.  What we see today in Ukraine and China and Russia is the result of what happens with countries whose economies are built on continual war making.  

Robin Lindley: You dedicate the book to the late Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening as well as acclaimed author Karl Marlantes. Morse and Gruening voted against US involvement in the Vietnam War, so I think I understand that part of the dedication. Why did you also mention Mr. Marlantes? I realize he has written vividly about the human cost of war.

Congressman Jim McDermott: Karl and I are good friends and I know the struggles he had to get his novel Matterhorn published. He said to me once,” Jim, if I had a nickel for everyone who has told me, ‘Karl, I feel a book in me,’ I could retire forever.” He encouraged me through the process of writing, editing, and finding a publisher.  I finally had to self-publish, and he was an inspiration for my struggle with the book in me.  He said, “No matter what happens you can be proud because you did it. Two hundred or two million copies make no difference. You made it to the top.” 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that nod to Karl Marlantes. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency had to be heartbreaking for you. He and his allies worked to undermine American democracy and the rule of law throughout his four-year term. What’s your sense of our fragile democracy today and where do you find hope in these fraught times?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I am worried sick about the midterms because I listen to Kevin McCarthy and I believe he is honest about his intentions.  What he says should turn your blood cold.

I listen to people I dislike or distrust as carefully as I do my pals. I find hope in the ability of the people to see what’s happening.  Look at Kansas. It’s a red state that added abortion protection into its Constitution by a vote of the people.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that optimistic perspective. What do you miss about Congress since your retirement in early 2017?

Congressman Jim McDermott: My friends and all the trappings of power. People answer your cell calls or emails. I had 16 staff members to help with a thousand details of life.

But what is hardest is the realization that it is so hard for an ordinary citizen to get a change in policy.  I pick up The New York Times every day and see something my friends should be aware or know exists but wonder how I can get their attention.  It is analogous to being a parent and seeing the peril of your child of whatever age and being unable to get them to see it before the fall.

Robin Lindley: You’re living in France now. Do you still have a home in Seattle? What drew you to France?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I have an apartment in the city of Seattle. I still believe Seattle is the best place to live in the USA since I chose to leave Chicago in1966.  I never looked back.

I came to France after I retired to go to a French cooking school. I was single and no one asked me out to dinner every night, so I decided to learn a new skill. I wanted to be able to ask them to dinner.

I came to the Medoc wine region to a town of 661 people and found peace and tranquility.  I don’t speak French, so I was not bothered by press and radio and TV.  I could unwind after racing at breakneck speed for 46 years. It was a place I could actually think about my life as I walked around in 400,000 acres of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and could concentrate and finish my book.

Medoc wines are all blends of these two grapes with some Petit Verdot. I liked it so much that I bought one hectare of vines (approximately 2.25 acres). I invite my American friends to come taste my vintage. 

I have made a whole community of new friends and I’m gradually learning to speak French. The best part, though, is becoming a part of French society.  I prefer Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité to life, liberty and the pursuit of my happiness only. Within six months of arriving here, I have full health coverage with a Carte Vitale, which every French person has. Even a long-term visa (one year) person like me gets health coverage.  I tried to guarantee this to Americans for 28 years and I never got it done. Here I get in within six months.

They say the French work to live while Americans live to work.  It is true. The schedule is 8AM -12:30PM, then closed until 1:30 for lunch, Open up again 2:00-7PM. Then home to dinner. I could go on and on.  Do they have problems? Of course, but the only guns are for hunting.  On Saturday hunters go out to get wild boar from the fields.  You hear a gun but that’s it. Election campaigns take two weeks or so. No huge and long money expenditure to buy your eyes.

Finally, foie gras, fromage and vin rouge.     

Robin Lindley: What’s your typical day like now?

Congressman Jim McDermott: Every day starts the same in retirement.  You decide what you will do. You take a blank sheet of paper and write down what you are going to do. You are the only one who writes on the paper.  I start each day with a cup of coffee, a chocolatine, and The International New York Times followed by a walk in the vineyards. Amazing what a 6000-7000-step walk does for your soul. The rest of the day is yours to enjoy.

Robin Lindley: I read that you are also an artist and enjoy sumi-e painting (an ink-wash technique involving applying black ink to paper in varying concentrations with a brush—ed.). Have you enjoyed making art since childhood? Who inspired your interest in art?

Congressman Jim McDermott: During the Vietnam War, I got interested in Zen Buddhism.  I couldn’t meditate but I gradually taught myself to do Sumi-e painting which was a part of understanding the religion. I didn’t think I had any talent until a friend who was an artist encouraged me at age 45.

Tom Foley had given me the responsibility to attend meetings with legislative exchanges with Japan when I came to Congress in 1989 and so I travelled to Japan more than 40 times over the years. I became good friends with a number of Diet members.  One told me to bring some of my painting to Tokyo.  He took me to one of the emperor’s scroll makers. His artistry in turning my paintings into scrolls raised me to another level and I began giving my paintings as auction items and on and on it went. The Confucian and Buddhist philosophy behind the paintings stirred my soul.  “The bamboo is the perfect gentleman; he bends in the wind but never breaks.”

Robin Lindley: You’ve also been teaching at the University of Washington in recent years. What’s the focus of your courses?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I teach because I am recruiting the best and the brightest into government. Our best and most thoughtful should go into public service. I try to teach the things that are in my book. I have had lots of experience and like to share with students because they make me think about what I really am sure of.  They challenge me as I challenge them.

Robin Lindley: You could rest on your laurels. What inspired you to teach now?

Congressman Jim McDermott: Keeping your mind alive by continually challenging yourself has been a lifelong occupation and I intend to keep offering what I know to those who are interested.  It is fun now because I have nothing to prove and don’t need to compete with others. Gandalf the Wizard said, “You must be the change you want see in the World.”  Or was it Gandhi?  Ha ha.

Robin Lindley: Legislators and other politicians are increasingly facing death threats and actual violence. You have the recent assassination attempt on Speaker Pelosi in which her husband was assaulted and severely injured. What advice to you have for prospective public servants who are concerned about the escalation of hatred and violence in the political arena?

Congressman Jim McDermott: This question is very tough to answer succinctly. I had three death threats made on me.  The first was by mail in a governor’s race.  I told the state police and I don’t know the resolution.

The second threat was by phone from someone upset with my advocacy of a tax on a trust baby’s income.  I was in Congress and the caller was very helpful in that he called twice and left his name and phone number.  He was convicted and served a period in jail.

The third threat occurred because I would not change my support for Hilary Clinton to Bernie Sanders in 2016.  The threat was very graphic and was delivered over the phone and then the caller followed up with an appearance at my office where he terrified the employees who were there. My office had bullet proof glass as a result of the previous threats. The police arrested him as he stood outside my office trying to break in by beating on the windows. He was also convicted of a felony.

I think it was von Clausewitz who said,  “War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition means.” If you enter the political arena, you must be aware that you are going to war. Many citizens have no idea where the interface between diplomacy and conflict begins and, if you enter the arena, there is always the possibility that physical harm may be the result. 

I never had or was offered physical protections.  We took precautions like door locks and bulletproof glass. 

Many people don’t enter the arena because of their or their families’ fear. Courage is a prerequisite for a candidate.

Would I run again? Yes, without hesitation. 

Robin Lindley: Thanks for your years of service. I really appreciate you bearing with me, Congressman McDermott. Is there anything you’d like to add about your book or your life in Congress and since then?

Congressman Jim McDermott: I have probably said too much already, but I just read Hold the Line by Michael Fanone [A police officer injured by pro-Trump rioters in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol].  It is a terrific book and made me think that my whole career from 1970 to Trump was trying to hold the line for democracy.  We are in real peril today.

Since I wrote the first draft I have been reading a fabulous book about a real French heroine. Not Joan d’Arc. Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy by Damien Lewis. If you read it you will begin to see why I live in France today.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for your patience and thoughtfulness Congressman McDermott, and for the many ways you have served the country through the years. And congratulations on your lively and insightful new book—a reference on politics and human behavior for the ages. Best wishes on your very active life in retirement.

Congressman Jim McDermott: Best wishes to us all.  The world is looking for its soul.  Materialism and science and tech have left a void. The turmoil we see around is evidence of people looking for something to believe.

Abientot.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

World War II left behind the dangerous and seemingly indestructible fantasy that our military intervention will naturally produce (an often underappreciated) good. Each succeeding conflict has led to the reprise and reinvention of the Good War’s mythology to justify or otherwise explain uses of American power.

Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War

Eighty years ago, Americans were fighting fascism abroad on the battlefronts of the Second World War. Now the conflict is largely recalled as “the Good War,” a noble fight to rid the world of tyranny, and the last clear American military victory. But the history and evolution of the national memory of the war is much more complex and clouded by sentimentality, nostalgia and exceptionalism.

Acclaimed author and West Point Professor Elizabeth D. Samet wrestles with the mythologizing of the war and the risks that poses for policymakers, military leaders, and citizens alike in her recent widely-acclaimed book on America and the war, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). She confronts how misconceptions and romanticized versions of the war have shaped American identity and policy and influenced conduct of subsequent fraught wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the “Forever Wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To understand perceptions of the war over the past eight decades, Professor Samet studied a trove of cultural material including movies, novels, comic books, poetry, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, official documents, and even travel guides produced by the military. She found many standard tropes of triumphalism in popular media that cemented the idea of “the Good War,” but also uncovered sources in films and books and other resources that revealed ambivalence about violence and veterans and even the reasons for fighting.

As she reaffirms the sacrifice of American troops and the necessity for opposing totalitarian regimes during World War II, Professor Samet finds that popular culture, from films to comic books, inculcated audiences with the strong message that problems are best solved with violence. And also, confidence arising from the victory over fascism and new superpower status often led to an American preference for using martial violence in addressing foreign policy issues. Bringing to bear her years of experience as a professor of future Army officers, Professor Samet observes that our often-flawed war making since 1945 reflects the risks to our military and our nation of sentimentalizing and mythologizing the Good War.

Professor Samet teaches English literature at the US Military Academy at West Point. She is a renowned author and critic whose other books include No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America; Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and voted one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times); and Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898. She also was editor of Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers; The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant; and World War II Memoirs: Pacific Theater. Her articles have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. In addition, Professor Samet has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant; the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She earned her doctorate in English Language and Literature at Yale.

Professor Samet graciously responded by email to an extensive list of questions on her career and on her widely praised recent book.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Professor Samet for considering questions on your work as a professor and on your groundbreaking book, Looking for the Good War. I also read your moving memoir about teaching at West Point, Soldier’s Heart. Before getting to your new book, what are a few things you’d like readers to know about your experience as a civilian professor of English at the US Military Academy? Does dealing with students in a military environment of strict discipline and regimentation affect your teaching? Do the responsibilities of the cadet-students differ from expectations in a civilian university?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Thank you very much for the invitation. I look forward to answering your questions. First, I should make clear that my answers do not reflect the opinions of West Point, the DOD, or the US Government.

You could walk into one of my classes at the Military Academy and, were it not for the uniforms, probably think you were in a typical college classroom. Yet if you sat there long enough, there would be some chord struck, some observation made, some connection drawn that would disclose the particular context in which my students and I work and learn. All else may be uncertain, but the cadets in my courses know that on the very day they graduate they will also be commissioned as second lieutenants in the US Army. As a result, they have things on their minds that not all of their civilian peers do: not only the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or the possible time and place of future conflicts but also ways in which literary and cinematic representations of war and peace can shed light on their chosen profession.

Robin Lindley: How did you come to teach at West Point? Did you have a military background in your family?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: The short answer to that question is my father and Ulysses S. Grant. To amplify: My father served in World War II, about which I acquired great curiosity even as a child. His army bears little resemblance to the army of today, but our many conversations about his war certainly primed me to take seriously the possibility of teaching those who might fight future wars in our name.

Many people assume it must have been West Point that introduced me to Grant, but it was Grant, whose Personal Memoirs I first encountered in graduate school and later edited, who introduced me to the Military Academy. Like many cadets, he had a deeply ambivalent experience. An army life takes some getting used to, and Grant never took to military discipline or the study of tactics, but he enjoyed reading, drawing, and riding horses, and he also excelled at mathematics.

Grant devotes only a few pages to his West Point experience, but the book as a whole was such a revelation to me and so important to my developing understanding of the American military that I became curious about the institution that helped to shape him. That made me pay attention I otherwise would probably not have done to the announcement of an assistant professor position at West Point toward the end of my graduate work at Yale.

Robin Lindley: In both Soldier’s Heart and Looking for the Good War, you describe books you use for your courses with cadets. Many readers may be surprised that you include great works that present sardonic views of the military and war and books that many consider as antiwar. As I recall, you include writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Joseph Heller, E. B. Sledge, Tim O’Brien, and more. How do your students who have agreed to serve in the Army respond?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Perhaps such surprise is natural, but when people consider deeply who my students are and the often-brutal work for which they are preparing, they usually come to understand the necessity of teaching the full range of war writing available to us.

In important ways, my students are idealists, admirably committed to ideas of duty and service, but as officers they will also be confronted with the grim realities of warfare itself. Sorrow, loss, and confusion—often disillusionment—are inextricable from that experience and form the subject of some of the world’s richest literature and art. To encounter the representation of war in such works is to recognize that others have endured or sympathetically imagined war’s attendant suffering and created something valuable from its destruction.

I often think of our charge as enabling future officers not only to go war but also to come home. Neither journey is easy, and in addition to good training and good fortune, my students will need all the help that literature might provide along the way.

Robin Lindley: Your book offers a sobering look at war, and the Second World War in particular. You address how “The Good War” has been romanticized and sentimentalized. You contrast the nostalgia by giving a human face to the reality of war. What prompted you to write Looking for the Good War now? Was there an incident or a person who sparked your new study?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Here, again, the answer is, in part, my father. As I write in the book’s acknowledgments, I first knew the Second World War as his war. I grew up asking him to tell me stories about it, and I prize the anecdotes he shared with me. I also grew up with the impression that his war was somehow different from all the wars that followed—the cause more clearly justified, the outcome more definitive, than those of its successors—as indeed it was. But I also began to understand that World War II was of course just as brutal and grim and full of misery as every other war. The epithet “good war” came to seem misleading at best.

When the country found itself at war several years after I arrived at West Point, I began to see the kinds of damage our collective memory of that earlier war had done to the United States even as remembrance provided a powerful, fortifying national touchstone.

At this point in the discussion, I usually find it helpful to clarify that my book is not a history of World War II; it is not an argument that our participation in that war was unnecessary or unjustified; and it is not an attempt to diminish either the cruelty and crimes of the regimes ultimately defeated by the Allies or the significance of their victory and of the postwar liberal international order. Rather, it is an investigation into the ways in which our complicated participation in the war—a participation that was belated, ambivalent, reactive rather than proactive—has been distorted and distilled into the stuff of myth.

Robin Lindley: How do expressions such as “The Greatest Generation” and “The Good War” distort the history, the reality of the United States role in the Second World War?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: World War II was an aberration in so many ways: the existential threat posed by fascism, the unequivocal necessity of our participation, the decisiveness of Allied victory—these are only the most obvious.

In the book I explore the process by which the consequences of Allied victory—the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny most prominent among them—subsequently came to be conceived of as the animating causes of our participation. It explores the way in which our celebration of ourselves as righteous liberators came to obscure the truth that so many Americans, wedded to isolationism after the First World War, largely ignored the rise of fascism in the 1930s (some prominent figures even celebrated it). “Good War,” “Greatest Generation,” and other self-congratulatory phrases obscure certain compromising details: our initial reluctance to enter the war on behalf of liberating anyone; our callousness toward the fate of European Jewry even after the war, in our administration of the Displaced Persons camps; and our exportation of Jim Crow segregation to postwar Europe.

The idea of the “good war” likewise emphasizes home-front solidarity while ignoring the reluctance that survived even Pearl Harbor in some quarters as well as the diversity of motives, including cynical opportunism, at work among supporters of the war. Only months after Pearl Harbor, the government was worried that the public had already lost a sense of urgency about the war effort. Moreover, the myth exaggerates the economic sacrifices of a country that the war actually brought back to work for the first time after the Depression. Many Americans suddenly had more money than ever.

This extraordinary instance of American military might leading to the liberation of so many gave rise to a faith that whenever we employ violence abroad it will be met with the world’s gratitude and will yield a similar result—and that if it doesn’t, it is somehow not our fault. The myth of the “good war” turns American violence into a special case, its brutality almost miraculously mitigated by national temperament. The myth insists that war, at least when we prosecute it, is not a tragedy but a comedy, in the rich literary sense of comedy as a plot that ultimately restores order to chaos, sorts out winners and losers, enlarges the circle of justice, and thereby declares victory. This is a symptom of what Reinhold Niebuhr recognized in the 1950s as an American tendency to regard tragedy, like feudalism and fascism, as European—attributes of the Old World that we have somehow transcended. It also obscures one of the most crucial senses in which World War II was unique: its scope and modes of destruction.

Robin Lindley: As you write, it seems that there was a shift in our memory of the war around the time of the 50th anniversary of the war—in the early nineties. It was almost as though as switch was flipped. You cite Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose and others as popularizing “The Greatest Generation” and “The Good War.” What happened to cause this sentimentalizing of the most brutal war in human history?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: The fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of the war crystallized ingredients that had been circulating for years into a coherent mythology, which held that the United States went to war in order to liberate the world from fascism and tyranny; that all Americans were absolutely united in their commitment to the war effort; that everyone on the home front made tremendous sacrifices; that Americans are liberators who fight decently, reluctantly, and only when they must; that World War II was a foreign tragedy with a happy American ending; and, finally, that everyone has always agreed on these points.

The anniversary coincided with our stunning demonstration of military superiority in the first Gulf War, which President George H. W. Bush celebrated in March 1991 as having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Bush saw in the war over which he presided a way to erase the shame of Vietnam from the national record. And his status as a World War II veteran seemed to accord him special clout and credibility.

Our most recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, lacking as they did focused popular support, conventional or definitive measures of victory, and clear ends, have now left us with another “syndrome” that some future administration might seek to “kick.”

Robin Lindley: You mention Studs Terkel’s book The Good War that offered dozens of interviews that captured the complexity of the war—and rather than waxing nostalgic, it seems Terkel used the expression “Good War” in an ironic sense.

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Terkel was a magnificent storyteller—no one like him—because he refused to make things neat, to iron out the contradictions. There’s a note at the beginning of the book in which he explains his use of the term, which he places in quotes: “Quotation marks have been added, not as a matter of caprice or editorial comment, but simply because the adjective ‘good’ mated to the noun ‘war’ is so incongruous.” One of the things that emerges clearly from his book is the way the Vietnam experience encouraged American nostalgia for World War II and energized the mythmakers.

Robin Lindley: For me, your book evoked the work of Paul Fussell, a combat veteran of the Second World War, who also wrote brilliantly and bitterly of his combat experience as well as how the world wars of the twentieth century influenced literature and art. You mention his work also. How do you see Fussell’s work? Did his writing influence your study?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Fussell’s work is polemical, deeply angry, and deliberately provocative. He was willing to say what others are not, and even when his readings are incomplete or overdetermined they force a reader to grapple with the horror that is elemental to any war no matter its causes or moral justifications.

Robin Lindley: In popular culture, the US war in Europe is much better known to most Americans than combat in the Pacific, the “War Without Mercy”—as John Dower called it. My dad was engaged in horrific campaigns for weeks and months at a time in New Guinea. His war was not the island hopping of US Marines. You also mention the unique brutality of the Pacific Theater. A big question, but what did you learn about the experience of war in the Pacific when contrasted with Europe? Did the different experiences affect memory of the war as reflected in popular culture?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Conceived and marketed on our side as a war of vengeance for Pearl Harbor, animated by racial animosity on both sides, exceptionally brutal, the war in the Pacific never fit as well with the myth. Despite the attention historians such as Dower have devoted to it, I think it is fair to say that the Pacific Theater is less familiar to most Americans. The experience of the American combatant in it is expressed nowhere more forcefully than in the Marine E. B. Sledge’s observations to Terkel: “It was so savage. We were savage.” Of the fighting on Peleliu Sledge recalled, “It was raining like hell. We were knee-deep in mud. And I thought, What in the hell are we doin’ on this nasty, stinkin’ muddy ridge? What is this all about? You know what I mean? Wasted lives on a muddy slope… What in the hell was glorious about it?”

Robin Lindley: I could spend hours with you—but I’d like to give readers a sense of a few movies and books you describe and how they portray war. You write about how the war has been depicted in movies. For example, you contrast the seemingly realistic Saving Private Ryan (1997) and the postwar classic about American bomber missions over Germany, Twelve O’Clock High (1949). How do you see the portrayals of the Second World War in these two films? How do they fit in your assessment of the war and memory now?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Saving Private Ryan is a fascinating case. The men ordered to retrieve Ryan are deeply resentful of their mission: they wonder why their lives are worth less than his, why their mothers deserve less consideration than does Mrs. Ryan. But all of their questions, and all of the doubts expressed by their commander—Tom Hanks’s schoolteacher-turned-infantryman Captain Miller—are erased by the film’s frame story, in which Ryan, now an old man, returns to the American Cemetery at Normandy, surrounded by his family, to pay his respects. He asks his wife whether he is a good man—whether his life was worth all this sacrifice—and, assisted by the film’s score and by the image of the waving flag, we are meant to stop calculating and reasoning and simply to accept that the answer is “yes.”

The fundamental, unexplored irony is that wars of mass mobilization not only don’t encourage but effectively prevent the celebration of the individual life. It is the unit, the group, that matters, and the individual is subsumed within it and often sacrificed to keep it whole. That’s the message of Twelve O’Clock High, which reveals the almost-inhuman discipline required to preserve the corporate identity of a bomber group in which only cooperation can ensure maximum effectiveness. Breaking formation to save a plane in trouble endangers the entire group. And the pilot’s “obligation to the group,” the commander, General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck) tells a pilot who pulled out of formation to go to the aid of his roommate, is “the one thing that is never expendable … That has to be your loyalty—your only reason for being.” There is a bitter episode late in the film that serves to validate Savage’s unromantic approach. Over the objections of his now thoroughly disciplined executive officer, Savage turns back after a bombing run into heavy flak to protect some damaged planes. The executive officer and his crew are killed as a result, and this plunges Savage into a catatonic crisis.

Robin Lindley: You take a deep dive into postwar movies and how they reflected the war experience. The Best Years of Our Lives was an award-winning Hollywood film from 1946 that dealt with the trials and tribulations of returning veterans. How do you see that film and similar works on the experience of vets right after the war?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Best Years delves deeply into veteran suffering, yet, as Pauline Kael pointed out (also in conversation with Terkel), even this “sensitive … by no means cheerful” film has the “patriotic and shiny-faced … look of a Life magazine cover.” For me, it’s the ending rather than the production values that is most telling: the final scene presents us with one marriage and the promise of another. It has, in other words, the ending we expect from a comedy rather than a tragedy. Patience, fidelity, and love win out over confusion, disillusion, and disgust. There’s a lot of wish-fulfillment at work in that conclusion.

Robin Lindley: In the 1947 novel The Gallery, as you discuss, the war veteran and author John Horne Burns writes about American soldiers in Naples. This novel isn’t well known, but you note that it provides a sense of the complicated reality of the war. For me, it deals with some of the same issues that Joseph Heller’s book Catch-22 explores. What would you like readers to know about Burns and The Gallery?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: This is a fascinating, experimental novel that reveals that profound suffering and confusion of wartime Naples. It was published in 1947, became a bestseller, and was soon forgotten perhaps because it doesn’t tell the story of the “good war.” We tend to think of the American experience in Europe as a monolith, but the GI’s experience in Italy was very different from that of France, France from Germany, and so forth. Burns depicts war as a vast network of corruption, from the GIs who live “off one another like lice” on a troop ship to the exploitation of the Neapolitans by the Americans, who manage to destroy whatever the Germans left. And the Neapolitans resort to selling themselves to survive. The novel is full of liars, grifters, schemers, and thieves. On the home front, meanwhile, one young lieutenant notes that the country has grown “sharp and young” since the war brought it out of the Depression: “Washington was a garden party.” No one escapes unscathed. In the final episode, arguably the most decent character in the entire book, Lieutenant Moses Shulman, is killed—cruelly, with his guard down, surprised in a farmhouse by his enemy.

Robin Lindley: And post WWII movies about the West also tapped into the war experience. What do you see in some of those movies that reflect memories of World War II—and even the Civil War?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Of course, the resurgence of this genre in the late 1950s owed much to the new widescreen technologies so well suited to the wide-open vistas of the American West. These films are often read as Cold War allegories, but I find in them a commentary on the war recently ended. Often, they use the Civil War as a way of obliquely examining World War II.

Disaffected veterans roam the frontier in these films, just as their World War II counterparts wander the city in the contemporaneous film noir tradition. Often but not always Southerners, these soldiers come home to find that their prewar lives have been stolen from them and that they are unwelcome presences in a postwar world that does not want to be reminded of the catastrophe from which it has just emerged. There is a similar dynamic at work in film noir, where veterans tend to be regarded with great suspicion, wrongly accused of crimes, mistrusted as men who have grown used to solving problems through violent means. Their war records are brought in as proof simultaneously of their heroism and of their status as a threat to peacetime society.

The other issue that the Western forces us to reckon with is the misremembrance of the Civil War and the domination of the Lost Cause narrative, which used the weapons of nostalgia and sentimentality to turn slavery into something benign, to displace the story of African American emancipation, and to propagate a tale of industrial Yankee tyranny imposed on a bucolic South. The legacy of Civil War mythology includes the surface phenomena of statues and monuments but also a deep-rooted racial injustice cloaked for years in euphemism and hypocrisy.

World War II is only half as old as the Civil War, and although we have gone quite far down the road of sentimental remembrance, I hope there is still time to recover that less-distant past in all its complexity, ambiguity, and difficulty as opposed to looking to it as some kind of finest hour dominated by a greatness and goodness we look to recover. There’s a cruel irony that a country founded on the promise of the future now seems to dwell so stubbornly in the past.

Robin Lindley: You necessarily deal with a lot of sorrow and dark history in your teaching and you also have had students who have died in service and in combat. How do you deal with loss? And now our democracy faces serious threats. Where do you find hope and how do you convey that to your students who pledge their lives to defend our country—our democracy?

Professor Elizabeth Samet: Despair is the common legacy of all wars, and I suppose the chief way I combat it is by writing and teaching. To engage in such creative, generative activities—the latter in the fine and rewarding company of deeply thoughtful young people who will, if necessary, fight our wars in the future—is an act of hope.

Robin Lindley: Many thanks Professor Samet for your patience, consideration and thoughtful comments. And congratulations on Looking for the Good War and the overwhelmingly positive response to your book. It’s sure to prompt discussion and I hope you have many engaged readers. And best wishes to you and your students at West Point. They’re fortunate to have you as a professor.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Ken Burns (Cover Photo by Jerome Liebling; Author Photo by Michael Avedon)

I have had the great privilege and opportunity of operating in that special space between the U.S. and “us” for decades—and if I have learned one thing, it is that there is only “us,” no “them.”   Ken Burns, Our America

Renowned American visual historian and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’s love affair with photography began when he was a toddler, as he describes in his powerful and arresting new book, Our America: A Photographic History (Knopf). As a young child, he watched his father, a professor of cultural anthropology, perform magic in a darkroom by simply dousing blank photographic papers in pans of chemicals and then revealing the slow emergence of stunning images.

The engaging and often moving photographs in Our America are the product of years of Mr. Burns’s extensive research and meticulous selection from tens of thousands of images. The book reflects the same qualities that characterize his award-winning documentaries: painstaking attention to detail and historical accuracy. And still photographs are the building blocks for his films.

The book presents 251 black and white photographs in chronological order that span our history from 1839 (with the first known American selfie) to 2019 (with a striking portrait of civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis). The photos appear one per page and are captioned with only the location shown and the year of the image. At the back of the book, a section of “Illustration Notes” offers information on provenance and the historical context of each photo, often revealing facts that deepen the mystery of our past or heighten the contradictory nature and wonder of our history. The book tracks themes that are familiar to viewers of Burns’s films—from race and conflict and brutality to moments of innovation and genius and justice.

With this powerful collection of images, Mr. Burns captures our democratic spirit and our at times confounding past. He writes of the book: “Here is our authenticity, our sacrifice, our playfulness, our curiosity, and our grief. Here is our beauty, fragility, grandeur, and cool. Here is reflection and perseverance, industry and nature. Our harmony and our dissonance. Our forgetfulness and our memory.”

Our America can be viewed as a visual poem and, as with great poetry, each reading is likely to inspire new insights and revelations. It can be seen as a kaleidoscope of frozen moments in time.

A few of the images may be well known to some readers, but most are rare and often deeply personal. The book includes work by legendary photographers from Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner from the Civil War era to Lewis Hine and Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange in the early 20th century, to more recent photos from the likes of Sally Mann and Keith Dotson and Michael Avedon, but in many cases the photographers are unknown.

The juxtaposition of photos on facing pages is intentional and certain to arouse varying interpretations and musings from readers who read and reread the book. For example: A photograph of the 1861 inauguration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis faces an interior shot of Fort Sumter from the same year. An 1890 portrait of an aging Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota nation is juxtaposed with a photo made in the 1890s of a tourist summer colony in Maine. A 1914 photograph of very young children working at machines in a hosiery mill in North Carolina faces a 1914 portrait of renowned American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in a bucolic setting in New York State. A gripping photograph of the Japanese bombing of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor faces a 1942 photograph of Japanese Americans lined up for state-sponsored relocation and incarceration at American concentration camps.

Our America is an unsanitized journey and a vital document now as forces in the country challenge the dream of equality for all and the very foundations of our democracy. Contrary to those who seek to erase our past and divide our citizenry, Mr. Burns shares in his book a history of “us,” through times of despair and horror and times of healing and triumph, with moments of justice and grace and hope. As he writes, “there is only ‘us.’ No ‘them.”

The images that Mr. Burns chose from “our” past also have a special resonance and timeliness now. In her prologue to the book, Susan Hermanson Meister—Executive Director of the Aperture Foundation and a former photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York—describes Mr. Burns’s book of photographic history as follows: “Our America is an intentionally idiosyncratic, deeply personal collection of photographs that have shaped our understanding of ourselves and our history. It is, too, a powerful monument to our moment.”

Ken Burns has been making acclaimed documentary films for over forty years. Since his Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, he has directed and produced some of the most renowned historical documentaries ever, including, The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; Jackie Robinson; The Vietnam War; Country Music; Benjamin Franklin; Hemingway; and The U.S. and the Holocaust. His films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 16 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations. And, in September 2008, at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, Mr. Burns received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Mr. Burns graciously responded by telephone from his New Hampshire studio to questions about his career and his new photographic history of America.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations, Ken, on your heartfelt and deeply researched book of photographic history, Our America.  It’s a beautiful book. How did the project evolve and why did you bring out the book now?

Ken Burns: I've been thinking about this book for decades. I've been working on it for 15 years at night and on the weekends—refining it, setting it aside, thinking about it. I finally found a space in the schedule where I thought I could get it done. I worked with three of my colleagues, Susanna Steisel and Brian Lee and David Blistein, to help refine it.

But I always have known that the still photograph is the basic building block of each of the films that I've made—in essence, the DNA of it. And I have been, since I was a little boy, captivated by photography.

I've been trained by still photographers, particularly my mentor Jerome Liebling, who took the picture on the cover of the book. And I've been drawn to using still photographs for the complex information that they convey. And so, even when we've got a film project that might benefit from a lot of motion pictures, like the Holocaust or the Vietnam War or World War II, we still go back to still photographs as that basic building block of communication.

I've dreamt [of this book] ever since I was a college student looking at the photography books of Jerome Liebling—the books that were weighing down and sagging the bookshelves of his office and his home. And, as I was avidly looking through them, I wanted to do a book like that.

And that book would become this history of the United States, beginning with the first self-portrait ever taken in 1839—the same year that Louis Daguerre was pioneering his daguerreotypes in Paris—and moving forward chronologically with black and white only basically to the present. The last 30 years are much more open-ended and impressionistic. That's not the territory of historians.

And the book covers every state and the subject matter of most of the films that I've done. But more important, putting one photograph per page with a minimal caption and letting it speak for itself. There is back matter [“Illustration Notes”] that shows a thumbnail of that photograph and as much information as we have on the photographer, if we have it, and sometimes the story behind the photograph or, more significant, the story of the subject matter of the photograph so that people do have a place to find information on it.

But what we want is for the experience of the still photographs to just wash over you: the unknowingness of it, the beauty of it, the ugliness of it, the poignancy of it, the grief of it, the joy of it, the playfulness of it. Whatever it might be, let that wash over you. And so, you can work your way through the 250 or so photographs and then go back and now have a relationship thumbing back and forth between the photograph and the more full description.

So there will be something like [the caption] “Washington, D.C. 1865,” and it is a gorgeous photograph by Alexander Gardner of Abraham Lincoln. It turns out to be the last photograph ever taken of Lincoln, and so it has its own kind of poignancy. And it's the very best photograph ever taken of Lincoln, everything that he was.

washington, D.C. 1865 (PHOTO CREDIT: Library of Congress)

You can look at the beauty of the photograph for as long as you want, and then you can go back and find out a little bit more about the circumstances under which the photograph was taken and what it means.

And that was the idea—that people would have this relationship to photographs. So we've been working on it for years and years and years, on evenings and on the weekends, whenever we could catch a moment in the midst of quite a lot of film work.

Robin Lindley: The story of your father’s inspiration for your interest in photography is very moving. Can you talk about his influence?

Ken Burns: I’d be happy to. My dad was a cultural anthropologist and in 1955, when I was two years old, we moved into a small development in Newark, Delaware, where he was teaching at the University of Delaware. He was the only anthropologist in the state of Delaware, but he was also, and had been since he was a kid, an avid but amateur still photographer. And so, my very earliest memory is first of him building a dark room in the basement of this tract house in the development at 827 Lehigh Road in Newark, Delaware. And then, one second later in my memory, at two and a half or three years old, being held in his arm as he was developing something in the dark room and the magic of that. That stuck with me for a long time.

And then my mother got sick about that time with cancer and died 10 years later. After she passed away, my dad had a pretty strict curfew for my younger brother and me. But I remember staying up and watching a movie with him, and I watched my dad cry for the first time. He hadn't cried when my mother was sick and he hadn't cried when she died and he hadn't cried at the funeral, and that was something that everybody had noticed. But I realized, for what was bottled up in his too short and also tragic life, that the movies had provided him with a kind of emotional outlet. And so I vowed, just a few months after my mom died, just before I turned 12, to be a filmmaker. I realized that that's what I wanted to be, which at that point meant Hollywood.

And thank goodness I ended up at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, still a very thriving, wonderful experimental college where I met Jerome Liebling and his colleague Elaine Mayes. And they were both still photographers more than they were filmmakers. That’s where I got my interest in documentary filmmaking, but it begins with my dad and that’s why the book is dedicated to Jerome Liebling and my father.

Robin Lindley: Thank you for sharing the moving story of your father. You’ve done a tremendous job on the book, and I'm struck by the power of the photographs you chose. I don't think any political figures are portrayed in the book after the 1968 photo of Robert Kennedy with Cesar Chavez except for the beautiful portrait of civil rights champion, Congressman John Lewis, at the conclusion of the book. I thought there might be a Barack Obama picture in the mix. But they were your choices. Can you talk about the selection process?

Ken Burns: Yes. We never said we wanted to have X number of political figures in it. It was just the photographs that would speak to us and it might in fact be that whole swaths of American history would not be covered. This is not an encyclopedia. It is not a dictionary.

And so we toyed around with photographs of Obama coming out at Grant Park when he was elected, as well as other photographs. The young kid feeling his fuzzy hair at the White House. But this is where we had our discomfort with the near past.

You hit the early seventies with the construction of the World Trade Center, which itself is a kind of ironic visual trope of these two towers being built up at a moment when we know one of the central moments of our history is those towers coming down. Once we get to that point, everything is pretty open-ended. And we didn't feel that we wanted to go year by year even. We say we're coming into the modern era and we want to be more impressionistic and, most important, brief. All of our films are historical films and do the same thing as well. When we come up to the near present, we're more impressionistic.

Robin Lindley: The photographs you chose are all black and white. You retained the sepia tones for a couple of photographs. Did you consider including color images?

Ken Burns: Yes, we talked about it. We argued about it, and I finally in the end said that would open us up to so many other avenues and possibilities. First of all, there was non-representational abstract photography, all sorts of the manipulations that had taken place, mostly in the post-World War II era in photographs. We decided on the photographs that we used and, while we have employed color [in films], I thought that color would overwhelm.

And there is an elemental simplicity to black and white. And so that was a discipline that we ultimately imposed on ourselves, knowing there are going to be a few “yes buts” out there, including among ourselves and myself as we were debating about it. But it was a pretty easy decision to stick with it.

And I also insisted that Knopf have it be essentially full color so that the book would reflect whatever particular coloration or discoloration or anything that happened to the photographic original that we are borrowing. So sepia is only one degree of allowing a photograph to be what it looks like.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining that process. A major theme that you explore in virtually all of your documentaries is race and diversity. And that perspective is very evident in your book. I was impressed that, even in the first half dozen images or so, you plumb this deep history that's often forgotten or overlooked. You begin with the 1839 self-portrait, but then you have a photograph of Isaac Jefferson who grew up as a slave of Thomas Jefferson and was later freed; and then the hand of an abolitionist branded “SS” that meant “slave stealer”—a new practice to me; and a photograph of an enslaved Black nursemaid and a white child; and then a Native American couple with their child. So much is revealed in the first few pages, and race is one prominent theme through the book.

Petersburg, Virginia c. 1845 (Photo Credit: University of Virginia)

Ken Burns: I think that Americans have tended to tell a history that has been sanitized and superficial.

The reason why I think the Holocaust film was so popular was the fact that the history that Americans like to tell themselves is we ended World War II and then we discovered the concentration camps, and we were shocked. But, point of fact, we'd known back in 1933, the first year that Hitler came to power, that there were 3,000 American articles about discrimination against the Jews in Germany. Even then, in Hitler’s first early steps, we knew what was going on, and we didn't let anybody [Jewish refugees] in. We could have let people in. And even after the horrible footage of the concentration camps was finally released in 1945 at the end of the war and the big sigh of relief, only five percent of Americans wanted to let in refugees.

So, there's a reality for this, and I think there's an important thing to understand that the man [Thomas Jefferson] who wrote our catechism, the man who in one sense distilled a century of enlightenment thinking that begins, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” owned hundreds of human beings, and never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. And so there are a group of people who have a peculiar experience. As the scholar Gerald Early says in our film Jazz about being unfree in a free land, which requires Black Americans to work that much harder than the rest of us to live in what is a complicated space.

You begin to realize this new thing that they [Jefferson and the Founders] were proposing, a republic, a democracy, is going to take work and effort, but then imagine the people who are unfree in the supposedly free land. And having to work that much harder still applies today.

So, I'm not superimposing anything. You just cannot do an investigation of the United States that's accurate and deep, in whatever form it is—a documentary or a photographic history book—without delving into questions that inevitably go to our treatment of the Native population that occupied this continent before us. And in the most important way, we look to the way in which Black people have been treated all the way through our history, and the way they intersect and the way they transcend that history.

Omekah, Oklahoma 1911 (Photo Credit: Oklahoma Historical Society)

Look at the picture of Lew Alcindor who will become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Look at the picture of Jackie Robinson rounding first base. Bat number 42. Look at the picture of Louis Armstrong, the most important person in American music in the 20th century and maybe the most important person in music period in the 20th century—not just jazz. And look at the way in which he does it.

Look at the photo of Dr. King and at the way Lincoln in the photograph “listens” to Dr. King. That’s a picture somebody took from behind Lincoln's head in the Lincoln Memorial as outside Martin Luther King is giving his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963. These are important ways of understanding and seeing and connecting American history purely visually without words and without description.

Robin Lindley: The images express our past on many levels. Even some of the beautiful landscapes are ominous, with a recognition of the grandeur while often hiding a deeper and darker history of a locale. For example, the photograph of “Canyon de Chelly, Arizona 1871,” portrays a vivid landscape but, in the description at the back of the book, the readers learns that this picturesque canyon was the site of the brutal “Long Walk,” a forced march to displace the Navajo Indians, part of the American state-sponsored effort to supplant and destroy Indigenous people.

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona 1871 (Photo Credit: Library of Congress)

Ken Burns: This is the story. At one point, Wynton Marsalis said to me in the Jazz series that sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. And so that’s what a photograph, what a work of art, can do, if it's unmanipulated.

We just have the most basic and simple of captions. It might show Arizona and a particular year, and that's it. So, you have to then read the photograph, if you will, in its own language, which is different from reading the printed word, and then go back and perhaps be satisfied by a caption, a lengthy caption, or a story about it in the back matter that connects it or enriches the understanding. But it's still the photograph that can convey complex information without undue manipulation. And so that's what we were looking for.

Robin Lindley: I’m just beginning to savor the book, but I was struck by many of your juxtapositions. You have a photo of the kids at a Shaker School (and Shakers believed in celibacy) juxtaposed with a view of the frozen Niagara Falls. And a photo of the Washington Monument juxtaposed with the Carlisle Residential Indian School. I thought many of the selections and placements were ingenious.

And you're also absolutely right to bring up juxtaposition because—with the exception of the first photograph, which is alone on the right-hand page opposite a quote from my ancestor, Robert Burns, and the last photograph that we've described with John Lewis on the left page with nothing on the right—all the remaining photographs are paired with one another, and they not only talk about themselves, but they're basically having a relationship with each other.

The reason why this took years and years to do is just to find the right pair. Some of them are obviously related, like the saguaro cactus in Arizona next to the smokestacks and conveyor belts of an industrial plant in Michigan. And they just have the same kind of architecture. Others are more subtle, but also sometimes playful. There's a picture of a sex worker in Storyville in New Orleans in her camisole and very attractive, and opposite it are the pillars and foundations of Wall Street and the financial system. And there's a kind of playfulness talking about those two, seeing those two across from each other.

And there's nothing unintentional in this, and people will forge ahead and find their own connection between the two facing photographs and their juxtaposition.

What happens is that, if you did this in a year, it would be one-one hundredth of the book. You actually need to let the whole thing marinate and mature and pull out the ones you're proudest of, or the ones in which you think there's a big gigantic wink. You've got to just be self-disciplined.

We probably looked at 30,000 photographs to select the 250 that are here. And we were familiar with many of them in various projects, but it's very interesting that we discovered new ones along the way. And a photograph that covers the subject that we've covered in a film may have never been in that film. Others, like this beautiful shot that's on the back cover of kids playing a form of baseball in an alley in a tenement area in Boston, is just a classic one, which we used in our baseball series to really great effect.

The cover photograph by my mentor, Jerome Liebling, is an amazing shot of this kid standing in front of a car in 1949 in New York City. He is holding his coat in his arms with this rakish attitude and hat and his shoelaces sort of frayed and untied and he has this improbable hockey shirt on. And behind him, the curve and the beauty of the old car, the sweep of the bumper and the wheel housing. It's just great.

I was on a television show and somebody asked, “Who's the most important person you can name?” That may be Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, as seen in the beauty of that exquisite photograph of him in 1865. But I said the kid on the cover is no less American and no less critical to understanding who we are than Abraham Lincoln.

Robin Lindley: That’s an arresting photograph on the cover.

Ken Burns: I love the kid, and it's a way to honor my mentors. The book is dedicated to my mentor, Jerome Liebling, and my father.

Robin Lindley: What was your formal training in photo research and historiography? Some of that probably came from Jerry Liebling when you were in college.

Ken Burns: I have no formal training in research, and I have no formal training in historiography. I've been a storyteller, and photographs are one form of storytelling.

I've been a filmmaker, which is what I’ve wanted to be since I was twelve. Jerome Liebling helped change my mind from becoming a Hollywood director to somebody who makes films about the power of what is happening and what has happened: history. And I just learned to doggedly pursue these stories.

I also collect American quilts, and they're mysteries. I get them because they're beautiful works of art. I may be attracted to a particular design, and sometimes I know nothing or next to nothing about the quilt, and I just have to accept it as it is. And in some ways, the photographs with the minimal captions are like that, too.

I might have a quilt that says “Hannah, 1856.” So, I don't know where Hannah lived. I may have bought it in Pennsylvania, so it's reasonably likely that it comes from Pennsylvania, maybe Lancaster. But is she a Mennonite? Is she Amish? Is she something else? Is she young? Is she a little girl? Is she a teenager? Is she a young mother? Is she working on it with somebody else? Is she a widow? Is she alone? Is she older? These things I don't know. And I have to just accept, whereas in my own work, being essentially self-taught by trial and error about finding photographs and about finding out what actually happened, I investigate the past with my team to the best of our abilities.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 1863 (Photo Credit: Library of Congress)

With the photographs, I wanted to go back to the open spirit of just looking at a photograph. Minimal caption says “New York in 1863,” and there's a beautiful shot of people looking at some sign. It’s on the right-hand page. It’s a photo of people outside of a newspaper office reading the list of the dead from Gettysburg. And on the left-hand page is Timothy O’Sullivan's famous photograph “Harvest of Death,” as he called it, which is several American bodies lying out in a field at Gettysburg. And so those photographs are definitely talking to one another in a kind of thematic way. Are people reading death notices about specifically those people? Probably not. The chances are infinitesimally small that they are. But in our configuration in this book, they are deeply related to one another.

Robin Lindley: You do a wonderful job of introducing people to primary sources with the narration in your films. And you’re renowned for your scrupulous use of photographs that match the narration. I had a professor who didn't like a lot of American documentaries in the sixties and seventies because they repeatedly used stock footage that wasn’t specific to the story, but he enjoyed BBC documentaries such as The World at War series because—as you do—they obviously took pains to match the photographs and film segments with the narration. And I noticed that you had worked for the BBC early on in your career.

Ken Burns: Yes. My work for the BBC was just to pay the rent and it was usually something they were shooting in the United States. I learned nothing about archival research from them, but we did decide, for example, in The Civil War that, outside of introductory paragraphs, we would never show a dead body that wasn't from the battle we were talking about because somebody's mother, however long she’d been gone, deserved to have the dead from Shiloh not appear at, say, Antietam, and vice versa.

Robin Lindley: We’re living at a time of deep polarization and peril to our democracy. You mention in your book’s introduction that “assembling photographic evidence of our collective past might help heal our divisions.” What do you mean? How can photos do that?

Ken Burns: I wanted to do this book because I wanted to express our history in this way. Once the book is done, it's really no longer mine. It's whoever has it in their hands. And while yes, we are deeply divided, we also know spectacularly how to come together again.

And what I wanted to do is very important in that I use the word “our,” and it goes along with “us,” which is the lowercase two-letter, plural pronoun that has as in its capitals, its partner, the U.S. And so I've been studying the U.S. for decades and decades, but I've also been studying us. And as the introduction says, I've come to the conclusion there's no them. And that's important because, if anyone calls you them, that's a hallmark of division, but there's always somebody other than you.

A book like this is just an attempt to gather the entire family of people together and say, “This is all of us.”  And if we could see it in that way, many of the things that we find so agitating in the moment dissolve in the face of seeing a young mother with her ebullient child on a stoop in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1915. There's no mother on earth who doesn't know the joy of being connected to someone who is exhibiting so much joy regardless of what color their skin may be. And that's an important part of erasing the silos that we put ourselves into that exacerbate the division. So, I think photography is a great leveler. It's a wonderful small “d’ democratic tool.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for those inspiring words, Ken, and for your thoughtful comments. And congratulations on your illuminating new photographic history, Our America, and on your tremendous contribution to sharing our history in moving and meticulously researched documentary films. You’ve brought history alive in ways that have fired the imaginations of people of all ages and backgrounds. Best wishes on all of your inspiring work.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Author photo by Linda Maraniss

I’ve had a special fondness for the phenomenal athlete Jim Thorpe (1887-1953) since grade school in the late fifties. I read all I could about his incredible story. I almost never kept track of sports and I was the worst athlete ever, always the last chosen for teams, if at all. But Jim Thorpe was an inspiring presence—a Native American from humble roots who came out of obscurity to master every sport he attempted.

After he won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the Swedish king called Thorpe “the greatest athlete in the world.” In addition to his prowess in track and field, he was an All-American collegiate football player, a star of the first pro-football Hall of Fame, and a major league baseball player, among many distinctions.

But I never knew much about my hero beyond his athletic achievements and yearned to learn more. And when I mention Thorpe to younger people, to my surprise, most have never heard of him. He loomed large for many of us baby boomers.

Thanks to prize-winning author David Maraniss, we now have a magisterial account of Thorpe’s extraordinary life with the meticulously researched, riveting, and first comprehensive biography of this mythic athlete, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe (Simon & Schuster). The book not only recounts Thorpe’s athletic triumphs but also presents his life in the context of the history of Native Americans and sports in first half of the twentieth century. The result is an engaging and assiduously detailed portrait of a man who negotiated between two worlds, between traditional Indigenous society and majority white America that offered opportunity as well as exploitation and racism with the attendant degradation and stereotyping of the internationally renowned sports icon.

Readers of Path Lit by Lightning (Jim Thorpe’s American Indian name) will learn of Thorpe’s childhood challenges with his Native family in Oklahoma, his schooling at soul-crushing Indian residential schools, his spectacular gold medal performances at the 1912 Olympics, the painful rescinding of his Olympic records and medals a year later, and his triumphs in intercollegiate and professional sports.

But after the days of athletic glory, as Mr. Maraniss details, Thorpe became an itinerant “athletic migrant worker.” He endured a Sisyphean cycle of hope and disappointment as he repeatedly made false starts in ventures involving sports and other enterprises. To provide for his growing family, he took on many odd jogs with minimal pay such as playing bit parts in dozens of movies, usually without credit, and even digging ditches during the Depression.

A parade of swindlers and speculators exploited Thorpe’s fame and then abandoned him. His peripatetic life and alcoholism also interfered with work and disrupted his relationship with his family that he seldom saw. And the press tended to romanticize and patronize Thorpe as it dehumanized and mocked him with coverage that was rife with misunderstanding and overtly racist stereotypes.

Despite many disappointments and the disadvantages of life for a Native American in a racist society, Thorpe persisted. As Mr. Maraniss stresses in Path Lit by Lightning, Jim Thorpe was a model of fortitude and resilience and grace despite setbacks. He never gave up.

David Maraniss is a fellow of the Society of American Historians, a visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University, and an associate editor at The Washington Post where he has worked for more than forty years. The Thorpe biography is his thirteenth hook, the conclusion of a trilogy that includes his previous biographies of Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi. He has also written authoritative biographies of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and a trilogy on the 1960s with Rome 1960, Once in a Great City, and They Marched into Sunlight.

As an editor and writer for The Washington Post, in 1993 Mr. Maraniss received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton and, in 2007, he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for his book, They Marched into Sunlight. He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award.

Mr. Maraniss generously responded by email to a barrage of questions on his career and his new Thorpe biography.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Mr. Maraniss for discussing your work and your illuminating new book on the life of phenomenal athlete Jim Thorpe. You’re an award-winning journalist and you’ve also written widely acclaimed books of history and biography, always based in painstaking research. How did you come to write these comprehensive books on the likes of Presidents Clinton and Obama, on sports figures such as Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente, and on historical incidents?

David Maraniss: For each of the books you mention, there had to be an obsession and a strong theme that drove me to devote years of my life to the subject, and in each case, it was somewhat different.

I had covered Clinton during the 1992 campaign and thought I understood him as deeply as anyone. That was my first biography. My obsession was to capture his duality and at the same time use him (and Hillary) as a means for writing about that generation, my generation, the Baby Boomers. I also wrote about Obama for the Post in 2007-8 and again felt I understood him. My obsession in that book was to understand the forces that shaped him and how he eventually reshaped himself.

I have come to consider the Lombardi, Clemente, and Thorpe biographies as a trilogy. In each case, I was looking to use the drama of sports and their unparalleled lives as a means of illuminating sociology and history.

Robin Lindley: You have a gift for breathing life into the history you recount. Who are some of your influences as a writer of history and biography?

David Maraniss: Before I wrote my first book, I had long conversations with Robert Caro and Taylor Branch about how they did what they did, and I would say they were major influences in both methods of organization and writing. Other influences were my father, a newspaperman with a wonderful ability to write intelligently but fluently and accessibly, and Richard Harwood, my first editor at the Trenton Times and the Post, who had that same skill. Also, I tried to model my work to some degree after George Orwell, not his novels but his essays, which I find models of clarity.

Robin Lindley: What inspired you to take on what has been called already “the definitive biography” of the legendary Jim Thorpe?

David Maraniss: The Thorpe story was first mentioned to me by a writer from the Oneida Nation, Norbert Hill, more than twenty years ago, but I had many other projects at hand at that time. He planted a seed that took a long time to grow. By then I had written Lombardi and Clemente and saw Thorpe’s incredible story as a means of exploring the Native American experience.

Robin Lindley: I’m surprised that several younger people I’ve talked with don’t know of Thorpe. He loomed large in my childhood in the fifties and sixties. How would you briefly introduce him to readers?

David Maraniss: Jim Thorpe rose from the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma to become the greatest athlete in the world. It is impossible to compare athletes from different generations but he accomplished a trifecta that has never been matched: an All-American football player, a gold medalist in the decathlon and pentathlon [at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics], and a professional baseball player. The struggles he faced during his life from 1887 to 1953 mark the struggles of his people.

Robin Lindley: Your meticulous research on Thorpe’s life and times is astounding. You get down to details from ten-dollar loans to parking tickets, as well as recounting many, many major (and minor) events in his life. What was your research process for this magisterial biography?

David Maraniss: I try to use the same research methodology for all of my books, what I call the Four Legs of the Table, but in this case there were some limitations. For instance, the first leg is “Go There,” but for this book I was limited by COVID. For Lombardi, I moved to Green Bay. I could not live in Oklahoma or get to Stockholm, where Thorpe won his gold medals, because of COVID.

The second leg is “Interviews,” but in this case, Thorpe was from an era where none of his contemporaries are still alive. In fact, even his seven children were gone by the time I started, so interviews were less important.

I relied more on the final two legs, “Archives” and “Looking for what is Not There,” meaning breaking through the encrustation of mythology to find the real story. Archives were essential in this case, providing letters, oral histories, and all of the documents of the government boarding schools that Thorpe attended. The archives ranged from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale to the Cumberland County Historical Association to the National Archives to the Library of Congress and many more.

Robin Lindley: Thorpe died almost 70 years ago, but I wondered if you had a chance to interview any surviving family members or friends of Thorpe? The challenges of a biography of a past celebrity must be much different than writing about living subjects such as Presidents Clinton and Obama.

David Maraniss: As I said, none of his children were alive. I did not rely on the family but I talked to a few great grandchildren. It was an entirely different process than writing about live figures such as Clinton and Obama, but my search for understanding the subject is pretty much the same.

Robin Lindley: As you recount, Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox nation and was raised in Oklahoma. What are a few things you’d like readers to know about his childhood? Were there events as he grew up in Oklahoma that presaged his astounding athletic abilities?

David Maraniss: Throughout the book, I connect the story of Jim Thorpe to the larger plight of the American Indian. That starts with the year he was born, 1887, which was the year of the Dawes Act, which took communal tribal lands away from many Native peoples and gave them private parcels instead with a land grab that led to the Oklahoma Land Runs and was essentially another act of forced assimilation.

The Sac and Fox among other tribes lost much of their land. One thing most people don’t know about Jim is that he was a twin. His twin brother Charlie died when they were nine and boarding at the Sac and Fox Indian school when a disease swept through the institution. It was the first of many grievous losses in Jim’s life. There were few indications of his later athletic prowess yet, but it is apparent that he took much of his strength and stamina from his father, Hiram, who was so strong he could walk home 20 miles from a hunting trip with a felled deer on each shoulder.

Robin Lindley: How did Thorpe come to leave his family in Oklahoma as a teen and then wind up at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania?

David Maraniss: The Sac and Fox boarding school was the first of three Indian boarding schools Jim was sent to. The second was the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Jim began to love football there; but did not like the school and ran away. His father then sent him to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Jim was not quite 16 when he arrived. Unbelievably, considering his later stature, he stood 5-5 and weighed about 115 pounds when he arrived.

Robin Lindley: The goal of the Carlisle residential school was to prepare Native American students for assimilation into the majority white society. Its motto was “Kill the Indian. Save the Man,” as you stress. What was the historical context of this philosophy for addressing American Indian students in the early twentieth century?

David Maraniss: The “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” philosophy was developed by the founder of the Carlisle school, Richard Henry Pratt, who thought he was doing good – that it was better to force Indigenous students to assimilate into white society as a means of survival rather than literally kill them, as the wars of the mid-nineteenth century had done. This became the government policy throughout the boarding schools. Take away their culture, religion, language, shear their hair, dress them in military uniforms – this was the way to “save” the poor Indians from annihilation. There was no consideration given to the grave and long-lasting damage done by this approach.

Robin Lindley: There was a similar educational philosophy in Canada, and Pope Francis recently apologized for the abusive treatment of Indigenous students at residential schools there. Were US schools comparable to those in Canada?

David Maraniss: There were all sorts of Indian boarding schools. Some run by the federal government, some by local governments, and some by religious institutions, including Catholic, Lutheran, and Quaker schools. The pope came to Canada because so many of the First Nation boarding schools there were Catholic. But in Canada and in the US, much like in Australia and New Zealand with their aboriginal populations, the nefarious idea was much the same – involuntary assimilation through the boarding schools.

Robin Lindley: You tell the story of Thorpe in the context of the Native American history of dispossession, genocide, and ethnic cleansing (as embodied in residential schools).

Even Thorpe, perhaps the most accomplished and celebrated Indigenous person of his time, could not escape racist stereotyping and degrading mockery. How was he covered by the press after his days of athletic glory? How does his life echo the experience of other Native Americans during his life?

David Maraniss: Like his people as a whole, Thorpe was romanticized and diminished at the same time. Sportswriters for the most part supported the movement to restore his medals and thought they were championing his cause, yet they routinely resorted to stereotypes when writing about him. He was on the warpath and taking scalps and was called chief or the big chief. The common phrase when writing about him was “Lo, the poor Indian " taken from a line in an Alexander Pope poem.

On Hollywood, where he was an extra in more than 70 films, he tried to push back against the stereotypes perpetuated in many westerns and to force the studio to hire real American Indians to play Indians.

Robin Lindley: The feature-length movie Jim Thorpe—All American, starring Burt Lancaster, a white actor, in the title role came out just a couple of years before Thorpe died. How did Thorpe view that movie and Lancaster’s portrayal?

David Maraniss: The 1951 movie about his life, Jim Thorpe – All American, was for the most part a sympathetic portrait. It was directed by Michael Curtiz, who also directed Casablanca, and starred Burt Lancaster, a dynamic actor who was also an excellent athlete.

Many people I’ve talked to since the book came out said they were first attracted to Thorpe because of that movie. I understand that sentiment, yet the movie is wrong in ways small and large. The opening scene for instance shows Jim supposedly at his home in Oklahoma as a boy, yet the San Gabriel Mountains of California are in the background. That is a minor mistake. The big one is that the narrator of the film, and in essence its hero, is not Thorpe but his coach at Carlisle, Pop Warner, and the implication is that if only Jim had listened to Pop more and more successfully, and assimilated into white society he would not have had the post-athletic troubles that he had.

This is not only wrong but maddening, because in reality, when Jim faced the biggest trauma of his career, when his Olympic gold medals were rescinded [in 1913] after it was reported that he had played bush league baseball for two seasons, Warner lied about his knowledge of that to save his own reputation. He knew exactly what Jim and many of his Indian athletes were doing, and that scores of other college athletes were also playing pro baseball in the summers, though most of them were doing it under aliases while Jim played under his own name.

Robin Lindley: Thorpe navigated between Native and white worlds. He never gave up his search for a place in America. His story can be seen as a tragedy, of early glory and ensuing false starts and failures, or as a life of survival, resilience and inspiration. How do you see the arc of his life?

David Maraniss: As I was finishing the book’s final chapter, I kept hoping for something better to happen to Jim even while knowing that it would not. His “afterlife” after his athletic days were done was a struggle. He roamed from state to state looking for stable work, his first two wives divorced him, he did not see his seven children as much as he might have, he tried to overcome his addiction to alcohol, he had two heart attacks before a final one killed him at age 65 when he was living in a trailer park in southern California.

But was this story a tragedy? I decided it was not. It was more a story of persistence against the odds, emblematic of the struggles of all Indigenous people.

Robin Lindley: Is it fair to call Thorpe the greatest athlete of all time? He excelled in virtually every sport or athletic pursuit he tried.

David Maraniss: It's fruitless to compare athletes from different generations because of differences in training, diet, equipment, and other advancements in the sports world. But no one before or since accomplished all that Thorpe did in the trifecta of football, track and field, and baseball. His feats were unparalleled. In the modern world perhaps, only Bo Jackson comes close.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Mr. Maraniss, and for this comprehensive biography of Jim Thorpe, the greatest athlete of all time. And congratulations on the overwhelmingly positive response to your heartfelt, engaging and extensively researched book, Path Lit by Lightning. Best wishes.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, art, and culture. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

The nostalgia that infuses current thinking about Seattle’s past not only erases the exclusionary roots of the city’s founding but also ignores how these forces continued, and continue, to structure racial inequalities. Our current moment of heightened inequality and rampant gentrification underscores the dire need for critical historical analyses that refuse to romanticize the past. It’s through the routes of the past that we can begin to reimagine our present and chart new paths toward more equitable futures.

Megan Asaka, Seattle from the Margins

The labor that built and transformed Seattle from a tiny settlement in the 1850s to a modern American city was powered by a migratory and transient workforce that has been largely forgotten or ignored by history. Many of these workers were Native Americans and Asians, including Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos. The city accepted the fruits of their labor but denied their full inclusion in the evolving urban society.

Thanks to history professor and native Seattleite Megan Asaka, we now have a meticulously researched and revelatory history of the communities that built the city in her new book Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (University of Washington Press). The book intertwines the labor, urban, racial, political and social history of Seattle.

With a fresh perspective, Professor Asaka presents new ways of understanding Seattle as she recounts a lost history of multicultural workers who transformed the city and lived under a discriminatory local regime that separated them from white neighborhoods. The book presents a fascinating and lively account of how Native people and Asian immigrants nonetheless provided essential labor from the beginnings of this major west coast city to the dawn of World War II.

Professor Asaka describes a city that has been segregated since the first years of white settlement in the 1850s as the founders and employers of the city were ever seeking a pool of workers that was readily available and preferably cheap—while excluded from the society and the geography of white Seattle.

First, the Duwamish and other Native people provided labor and then, as Professor Asaka recounts, waves of Asian immigrants—first the Chinese and later the Japanese and Filipinos—were exploited by local employers while facing discrimination imposed by local regulation, as well as dehumanizing and racist treatment in many aspects of their lives. As the city benefitted from this mobile labor force, municipal authorities and elites saw these non-white people as “undesirables” and the spaces where they dwelt were deemed a threat to health and safety and an obstacle to urban progress. 

Seattle from the Margins is a feat of original and exhaustive research and interpretation. While the history of this vital workforce is virtually absent from traditional archival sources, Professor Asaka pieced together her book by studying available diaries, family memorabilia and letters, as well as studying the background of the sites where the forgotten workers and their families lived and worked such as logging camps, lodging houses, city buildings, farming and lumber towns, the waterfront, and areas designated by authorities as “slums.”

With creativity and resourcefulness, Professor Asaka recognizes the significance of marginalized people in the complex history of a major American city as she challenges the dominant, often sentimentalized narrative of its history. As she notes in the introduction of Margins, her book was inspired by her family history in Seattle and by her work as an oral historian and archivist for Densho, a community-based organization that seeks to preserve and share the stories of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

Dr. Asaka is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, where she focuses on Asian American history, urban history, and public humanities. She has been recognized for developing new methodologies and frameworks of analysis for understanding the past and the present. She earned her doctorate at Yale. Seattle at the Margins is based on her dissertation that won awards from the American Historical Association (Pacific Coast Branch) and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. The Seattle Public Library recently featured a lecture by Professor Asaka and selected Margins as a “Peak Pick,” a special status for new and notable books.

Professor Asaka graciously responded to questions by phone from her office in California.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Asaka on your groundbreaking new book Seattle from the Margins. I’m a baby boomer in Seattle and I found your words on marginalized people original and enlightening. It’s great that you’re doing this research on erased or hidden history. It's a remarkable book and offers a new perspective on our regional history as well as urban, social, racial and labor history.

Before we get to the book, I wanted to ask you a few questions about your background. You cover some of this in your book, but I wondered about your childhood in Seattle—where you lived, the schools you went to and how you felt yourself as a Japanese American in Seattle?

Professor Megan Asaka: My parents were divorced, so I grew up in a couple of different places. So, my mom lived in Montlake for a long time. My dad lived in various places around Capitol Hill. He lived one block off Broadway in this really cool apartment when I was little. Those were the two main areas.

I went to Madrona [elementary school]. I was in a program like AP [advanced placement] that you tested to get into. Then I went to Washington Middle School, and then I went to Lakeside for high school. That’s a private high school, and that's where I first started thinking about my identity and feeling like an outsider in some ways in that environment. My dad's family is Japanese American. My mom's family is white, mostly from Iowa and the Midwest.

And I was always very interested in family history on both sides. My grandparents on my dad's Japanese American side were very open, and my grandmother talked about her experiences during the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. I interviewed her for a paper when I was in middle school, and she talked to me about her experience. I knew about that history and how it had shaped my family, and they were very open about it. And I knew about my dad's history too. He was born right after World War II, and he grew up in the Central District and Beacon Hill neighborhood. And I was also very rooted to those neighborhoods as well.

I didn’t really come to understand my identity as a Japanese American and what that meant until I went to college. I think that's really typical journey for people. They go to college and they start to think about their lives in different ways, and that was true for me. I became very involved in ethnic studies in college and just seeking out classes that would speak more to my own family history and my own identity. So that's when I started to contemplate in a more conscious way than I had in the past about what it meant to be Japanese American and Japanese American history.

Robin Lindley: It seems you were inspired to study history since childhood.

Professor Megan Asaka: Yes. I really was. I always loved hearing stories from both sides of my family about their experiences. I loved learning about things that had happened in the past, but I didn't connect that with history as an academic discipline until later on. In school, you learn about history and it's about memorizing and about facts and about presidents. That sort of thing. And I never felt what I was interested in about the past was the same as what I was learning in school and what was presented to me.

I never thought of myself as a historian or that history was ever a path for me until, in fact, I started working at Densho [a Seattle non-profit dedicated to studying the incarceration of Japanese Americans] where they were doing a critical history. And I started seeing myself as a historian for the first time through that work, even though I was interested in history even as a child through conversations with my family and family history. And that’s how a lot of my students at UCR also become interested in history. But they're turned off by the way it’s often taught.

Robin Lindley: I realize history can be made dull and off-putting. My wife said she never liked history until recently because it was about politics and war and male oriented.

Professor Megan Asaka: Yes. It was very much like that for me, but that's changing now, even though there’s still a lot of focus on memorization. Students just don't like that, obviously. It's not stimulating to just sit and memorize fact and dates. When I had that experience too, I said I wasn’t interested in history. I said I'm not a historian because it was for other people interested in these other things.

But again, being at Densho really helped me. It was an empowering experience in the sense that I started to actually see myself as a historian for the first time.

Robin Lindley: I understand that you were an oral historian for several years at Densho in Seattle and you interviewed many survivors of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Was that experience before graduate school?

Professor Megan Asaka: Yes. I first started working at Densho in college. I was a summer intern there. And then I returned after I graduated from college as a more full-time member. I worked there for about five years after that and I even continued to do interviews with them when I was in grad school. I wasn't initially involved in oral history but was working more on the archival part of Densho by gathering documents and working with especially families and community groups to digitize their materials.

I had a lot of really cool projects, but I became interested in the oral history work that they were doing. And so, I just asked Tom Ikeda (former Executive Director of Densho) if I could do this, and he said sure. And I began by observing interviews and then I started getting into it myself. It was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot about Japanese American history and history in general from these conversations. It was also interesting to see behind the scenes of what happened because interviews were videotaped and recorded. And oftentimes, the narrators would say things to me before the interview or after the interview that they wouldn't want recorded and put out there and publicized. So, it was more than hearing people's stories. I had to learn what are they were willing to talk about on the record, and what they were not willing to talk about. And so, it was interesting to see that process. It was amazing.

Densho's approach to oral history is very much rooted in the community and in developing relationships with the people they're interviewing. And so, it's not just we're going to interview you and then never talk to you again. It's about developing a relationship with the person. And they share the interview and then give all family members copies of the interview. With interviews outside of Seattle, we would have viewing parties and invite people to watch clips from their interviews. That work taught me a lot about the importance of community engagement

Robin Lindley: What a fantastic experience. Thanks for describing your contribution. What was your focus in your graduate studies at Yale? How did your studies lead to your award-winning dissertation that is the basis for your new book?

Professor Megan Asaka: I was not actually sure that I was even going to graduate school. I wasn't ever like, oh, I'm going to become an academic or I'm going to become a professional historian. That's my path, but it just happened that way.

I got into the American Studies Program and was able to work with some just really amazing scholars. Dolores Hayden, Mary Lui, and Ned Blackhawk were on my dissertation committee and they were all scholars who had connections to the West Coast, or even directly to Seattle. They really understood my project. I was lucky to have that because there is a very much an east coast bias in places like Yale, and if you're not talking about New York, it's like what are you doing.

I had started my Densho career by then, and had these questions about my own family history and what was missing from what I had learned from Seattle history. And so, there were lots of questions. Why is Seattle history told this way? And why does it not reflect at all what I know about Seattle history based on my family experiences? And so, in grad school, I was able to pursue that project, and I was exposed to different kinds of scholarship that I probably wouldn't have found if it hadn't been for grad school such as Native American history. I was exposed to a lot of that literature as well as urban history.

I also had the opportunity for research and the time that I had to conduct the research was great. I had two full years just researching for the dissertation, and a lot of it did end up in the book. And I wouldn't have been able to write the book without that experience at Yale and the PhD program. It helped me tell the story that I wanted to tell, and also to broaden the story beyond Seattle to make it more relevant to other cities as well—to try to tell a bigger story.

Also helpful at Yale was that I went through an interdisciplinary program, which was incredibly helpful for this book because telling the story of this particular workforce requires creative methodologies and research. I drew on architecture and the built environment and a lot of geography and photography and all kinds of interdisciplinary methods that I was encouraged to use in my program. It gave me a lot of freedom to explore different approach and to see what worked and that was an important part of how I told the story.

Robin Lindley: That's inspiring. I think it'll be helpful for young people to know there are creative approaches to history as you reveal in your work on people at the margins. And oftentimes there’s not a lot of traditional archival documentation available. How did you go about research when you often lacked documentary evidence?

Professor Megan Asaka: This is was a huge challenge and it was very hard and took a very long time.

I started the research in grad school and I continued on after grad school and to when I got my job at UC Riverside. It was a years-long process of research and it was very difficult. In some cases, I had to be really creative about where I was looking for records and also what I was considering as an archive. I have moments in the book where a building is an archive. We think about a building that stood in 1920s, and imagine the conditions then and people’s experiences and the living environment

When I couldn’t find records of these groups, I’d considered their buildings, their living conditions, and then try to imagine it from there, and then be creative about what I was looking for and where I looked. For example, I found fire department records, and that happened when I found information about Japanese hotel operators. I never would've originally thought of the fire department in researching a hotel business, and that ended up a valuable archive for me.

I also drew on the scholarship of historians who wrote about similar topics. And I think the cutting edge of history right now is work on the margins of history itself, such as [studying] people who didn't leave a lot of records, or their only records are mediated through the police or through other agencies. It’s about how do we make sense of that and what do we do with the tiny amount of information that we have. I drew from that scholarship. For example, historian Nayan Shah has written a lot about transient men. He talks about how historians have privileged stationary people and middle-class families because those are the people that leave behind records. Whereas, if you're moving around and you're poor and you're an immigrant, there aren't many records that can tie you into one place, which is how records are produced.

I was able to also use some of that scholarly work to think through how I was going to write the book, while also being creative about where I was looking and what I was considering to be an archive. But that was a lot of work. I'm working on a project now on Japanese American farmers after World War II, and it's so much easier to trace the history. If you go pre-war, and some of these families by then were in the same place for 30 years, you can trace them in census records. It’s much easier to look at people who were in one place over time.

It was difficult and took a long time to piece together the history for my book. To find records and then piece the research into a larger story was also a challenge. You have little glimpses here and there, but thinking about how it all works together was also difficult.

And it wasn't only the research, but the interpretation of it too. That was hard because I had to figure out where the different industries were located, and then how the workers were getting there. That was actually what I started with. I was able to figure it out, but it was a very time-consuming, lengthy research process and interpretation process.

Robin Lindley: You did a wonderful job without a lot of obvious resources. You're also a talented storyteller. Your book deals with several groups ignored and stigmatized people. I was struck by your comment in the introduction that the incarceration of the Japanese Americans during World War II, this “racialized exclusion,” is a key to understanding Seattle. What do you mean?

Professor Megan Asaka: The wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans is often treated as an aberration, an exceptional moment, that had to do with Pearl Harbor. And there was this wartime hysteria and nationalist fervor, and the Japanese Americans looked like the enemy and they were targeted. And once the war was over, it was back to normal. That has been for a long time how the incarceration has been talked about, both on the national level and in Seattle.

I actually started this project wanting to write about Japanese American history, and that was the entry point for my dissertation. I wasn't thinking that I was going to write about other groups or that I was going to write about the life of workers. I wanted to tell a different story about Japanese American history because it always bothered me that the incarceration was treated as an exceptional event. I knew, based on my family's experience, that there was a much longer history that helps to explain why Japanese Americans were removed and why local officials and the general public in Seattle supported it. That always bothered me. But the more that I researched, the more I was required to go back to how much Japanese-American experiences related to other groups, including Chinese Americans, Filipinos, and Native Americans, and how they all shared this experience of marginalization, exclusion, and displacement.

I began to realize that this wasn't just a Japanese American story. This was actually a bigger story, and the entry point for me personally was the incarceration of Japanese Americans. But then I began to connect it with these different groups who all shared the experience of racial segregation and physical exclusion in the city. They shared also their status as marginalized workers. I started broadening the scope beyond Japanese Americans because I kept seeing so many parallels with other groups. And not only the shared histories such as social histories, interracial families, and people working in the same jobs, but also their shared history of marginalization and exclusion that was so clear to me. So that's what I meant in the introduction and I wanted to connect something that people often associate with the federal government as actually a local story.

And we can't understand what happened with Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor without actually going back to the origins of the city and without understanding the city’s role in the workforce, their relationship with other groups, and more. All of those questions arose, and it became a much bigger project as I researched and thought about it.

Robin Lindley: It comes across strongly in your book that Seattle was segregated from the founding of the city in the 1850s when white settlers displaced the Native Duwamish people from their homeland. You mention how white settlers treated the Duwamish and other Native people and describe a ghetto for Native Americans and other non-whites called “The Sawdust,” to the south of what is now Yesler Street. What struck you about this early exclusion and racism?

Professor Megan Asaka: What struck me was that white settlers displaced [Native people] and were appropriating their land. This is the story of that time. Yet the city needed them as labor and they were the first workforce and they provided labor to the city. Coll Thrush touches on this issue in his book Native Seattle, and he talks about the Duwamish as the city's first labor force. That was striking to me and that helps to explain the particular form of segregation that evolved in Seattle because it wasn't just that they were just displaced but the city founders wanted them far away from the city but actually had to keep them close because they needed them as workers. They needed them far enough away to separate them from the white settler residential district, but close enough to actually use them as workers--to work in their homes as domestic servants and to do the laundry, to cook. And to build the buildings and to work in the sawmills. What really struck me was how they were very present in the city. We tend to think that they vanished away, and yet they didn't.

And the other thing that struck me was how much Native people shared with the Chinese workers. It was very different because the Chinese were coming as immigrants, but they shared something in terms of their marginalization in the city. They were both pushed into the same areas. I felt through the research process, especially for that first chapter, how much Chinese American history is interwoven with Native American history, and you see this very clearly in Seattle. They were working in the same jobs, they were competing over the same jobs, and they were also subjected to very similar forms of discrimination and segregation and policing in the city. So, it struck me how intertwined these two communities were, and especially how much Chinese American history and Asian American history was intertwined with Native American history in a place like Seattle. That was surprising because I didn't know that going into this research, but I kept seeing the similarities and the parallels.

Robin Lindley: Do you see the founders of the city in the years before 1900 as white supremacists who forbade non-whites from living north of The Sawdust area? Professor Megan Asaka: It was very intentional and very clear. It was intentional to have this dividing line that protected the settler residential district from Native peoples and other workers. And it happened in a variety of ways with various municipal laws and policies. And again, the settlers were the ones who were in the positions of power, especially in the early years. And it happened through petitions, for example, that I talk about in the book when the sellers came together in the 1850s and said that the Duwamish cannot have their reservation that they wanted near the Black River, which was where their ancestral homelands were, because they were needed for labor. And so, they intervened and went against what the Duwamish wanted and there were many examples of that.

I also found examples of the Chinese moving into the northern district, and the residents who were living there, even as early as the 1860s, banded together and said you can't be here. You have to go back to the south end. You have to go back to The Sawdust. And vagrancy laws were very explicit. I wanted to highlight that because oftentimes the story that you hear about Seattle, as well as the west coast in general, is that racism was more covert--it was hidden and we didn't see it. But actually, it was more overt than I thought, especially through the actions of people living in the residential district who were literally trying to expel people such as the Chinese. And settlers also burnt down Native homes in certain areas of the city.

What my book tries to unpack is that whiteness means different things at different moments. And there was this effort to divide and to separate white people from workers and other quote unquote “undesirables.” And in that process of trying to divide, it reaffirmed an emerging racial hierarchy,

Robin Lindley: Thank you for sharing what you learned about racial disparities. What was bringing the Chinese to Seattle before 1900 and early on in the 20th century?

Professor Megan Asaka: It's interesting and I feel there's not a lot written about Chinese American history in Seattle compared with other cities like Vancouver, San Francisco, etc. Seattle had a smaller Chinese population certainly than San Francisco, but they were an important workforce certainly in the Puget Sound region very early on.

Initially, the Chinese came to Seattle a bit later than they did in San Francisco, where they came in the 1850s because of the gold rush in the late 1840s and 1850s. They came a to Seattle about a decade later in part because there was a gold rush on the Fraser River in Canada, and from there, they came to Seattle. In the 1870s, the Chinese were becoming an industrial workforce, whereas before, they were certainly a workforce yet they worked running laundries and as domestic workers and at the sawmills and on steam ships.

But by the 1870s, in that post Civil War period, the whole country was industrializing, and that's when you see more Chinese migration and the Chinese then became more of a backbone of the industrial workforce. And there was a transition away from employers relying exclusively on Native labor and then turning towards Chinese labor because of the way that Chinese labor was structured with employment agents and labor contractors who worked with railroad companies, canneries, and the lumber industry to recruit and manage Chinese workers.  During the Fraser gold rush, there was a trickle of Chinese workers, and it started to get going in the 1870s.

But the Chinese population was never as large as the Japanese population which was much bigger because Seattle had a direct shipping route to Japan. In the early years, the Chinese workers were coming through Vancouver and hence, Vancouver had a larger Chinese population. People would come from China to Vancouver, or from wherever to Vancouver, and then take smaller steamships to Seattle. And, of course, you had anti-Chinese violence in the mid-1880s that drove a lot of Chinese people out of the Puget Sound region. Some returned and remained in Seattle and I wouldn’t imply that the Chinese community disappeared, but the violence had an effect on the community over time.

Robin Lindley: And then there's a wave of Japanese migration in the early 20th century. What was bringing Japanese to Seattle?

Professor Megan Asaka: The Japanese migration again was much bigger for two reasons. First, Seattle was aggressively trying to initiate a trade relationship with Japan. Shelley Lee writes about this in her book Claiming the Oriental Gateway on Japanese Americans in Seattle and their relationship with Japan. Seattle was pursuing this commercial relationship with Japan and initiated it through shipping routes.

The other reason too was for workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, and there was anti-Chinese violence a few years later, and employers needed a new source of labor. Japanese workers became, in some ways, a replacement for Chinese workers whose population had dwindled because of immigration restrictions and anti-Chinese violence.

That's why the Japanese came to Seattle in an era when Seattle's economy was expanding in the late 19th and early 20th century. And this labor force from Japan enabled Seattle's economy to really expand dramatically. And when they came, they didn't have any rights in the US, and the companies were able to expand based this marginalized labor force.

Robin Lindley: And the Japanese seem more successful compared to other non-white populations. They were business owners. They owned many hotels in Seattle eventually. And they also were farmers. I was struck by the hierarchy between ethnic groups, and you write that many Japanese immigrants felt superior to Filipinos and Chinese. Perhaps that was because Japan also was expanding its empire and industrializing like the US. What did you learn?

Professor Megan Asaka: I wanted to make clear in the book the differences between the various Asian groups. I write about the Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino experiences, and they did share a lot. Yet there were many differences. One difference was that Japan was a powerful empire, and the United States was careful in how it dealt with Japan. And Japan had more influence in shaping the lives and opportunities of its overseas communities than was true for other groups. And we see that Japan intervened in immigration laws and pressured the US to allow Japanese women and children to come to the US, which meant that Japanese men were able to have families and that they were able to open businesses that revolved around a family workforce like farms and hotels--unlike their urban counterparts.

The relationship between Japan and some Japanese immigrants is a little taboo but that's changing. But for a long time after World War II, many in the Japanese American community disavowed any ties with Japan. They denied any ties with Japan. They said we're one hundred percent American. That’s because they were basically treated as the enemy during World War II. And that was the whole logic of incarceration after mobilization. And so, they denied any relationship to Japan. That was false. There were many early transnational ties that were suppressed. We have more historical distance now and scholars are interested in that piece of Japanese American history.

But Japanese people in Seattle had a more privileged position economically over other groups, especially other Asian groups. And there were discriminatory attitudes against other people, especially Filipinos, but also Chinese as well. That came from the prevailing racial ideology of Japan. We have to understand them not as being the same as people in Japan, yet they did maintain transnational ties and were very much affected by and participating in those networks.

I wanted to emphasize those tensions between the different groups. People didn’t talk much about this. There’s a tendency to want to say we all got along, and we all recognized that we were struggling together. There's an element of truth to that, yet it papers over much of the complexity of what I found important when doing my research. I think this also helps to explain why, on a national level too, Japanese Americans were seen as more threatening than other Asian groups. Because of the role of Japan and the rise of the Japanese empire, Japan was seen as a threat and, by extension, Japanese people in the US were seen as more threatening too.

Robin Lindley: I was struck that some of the Japanese owned hotels had a policy of refusing to serve African American and Filipino customers. It seems that the dominant white culture in Seattle influenced that discriminatory response.

Professor Megan Asaka: Yes. It’s complicated because there were tensions between different Asian groups because of what was going on with Japan and the Japanese empire. But there was also, within the dominant society, a racial hierarchy. “Undesirables” were not permitted in Japanese businesses so that the owners would not be seen by the people in power as similar to [other marginalized people]. So that was part of it too. And yet, at the end of the day, the city saw them as the same anyway.

There were efforts by some Japanese to distance themselves and to exclude African Americans and Filipinos or try to distance themselves from others, especially from Filipinos. But they still experienced incarceration. They were still viewed in the same ways as these other groups.

In my last chapter on slum clearance, I reflect on how [Japanese] were trying hard to say we're different, and yet they weren't really that different. That was a point I wanted to make—it didn’t change how the dominant society saw them. In my opinion, it’s only by building solidarity with other communities that you can actually become powerful. But Japanese Americans didn't do that for reasons that are totally understandable, and that’s an undercurrent of the book.

Robin Lindley: It’s such a challenging history. You also write about the migration of Filipino workers and the role of US imperialism. You state that Seattle was seen, at least according to one historian, as a “colonial metropol.” How do you see the wave of Filipino immigration to Seattle beginning in the early 20th century, and this idea of a “colonial metropol”?

Professor Megan Asaka: It’s Dorothy Fujita-Rony, an Asian American Studies scholar at UC Irvine, who I quote on Seattle as a “colonial metropol.” She wrote a great book about Filipino migration to Seattle within this broader context of US imperialism. She found that Seattle was an important hub of Filipino migration, in part because of the military presence and because of the education network. The University of Washington actually recruited a lot of students from the Philippines. And she sees Seattle as a main hub within the broader US empire of drawing Filipinos in the same way we would think of London as an imperial metropolitan hub for the British Empire as well.

I wanted to stress that one of the things that distinguishes Filipinos from the other Asian groups was that they were coming to the US as American colonial subjects. They were US “nationals,” a category created after our colonization of the Philippines to signify that they weren't citizens and they weren't aliens, but had this in-between status. They were able to migrate to the US. They had US passports during a period when immigration was pretty much cut off from Asia and restricted around the globe. And so they came as another labor force during a time in which labor from abroad was heavily restricted. And other Asian groups weren't coming from American colonies. That makes the Filipino experiences very different from other groups.

And, as colonized people, they actually shared many commonalities with Coast Salish people, with Indigenous peoples, not only in terms of the work they were doing, but also in the experience of colonization. Being forced to learn English, for example.

I wanted to make the point that we tend to think about Asians--Japanese, Chinese Filipinos--as one group, yet I found that if you look back in time like in the thirties, the Filipinos had much more in common with Native people than they did with other Asians that we tend to think about today. I wanted to emphasize that how we think about racial categories today doesn't necessarily make sense and we can't use the same categories that we use today and put them on people in the past. We have to think about the categories as fluid and meaning something very different in different moments in time.

But Seattle was a huge hub of Filipino migration, and they came when jobs that had sustained previous generations of migrant workers were declining. And the city's economy had really transformed to other industries like Boeing, which became the largest employer at this time. And Filipinos were restricted from most higher paying jobs. And they were coming during the Great Depression, which was devastating for the communities that I talk about in the book.

The Filipinos were often forced to travel really long distances in search of jobs. They were going from Northern California to Alaska to eastern Washington and back, and all in one season. In some ways, they experienced migration in a more intensified way than the other groups of the previous generations.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that insight on the challenges of Filipino migrants.  I hadn’t heard the story of Profanity Hill. Who lived and worked there? Why was it considered a slum? It’s now First Hill and probably among the most spectacular places in Seattle for a view of Puget Sound.

Professor Megan Asaka: Yes. I know. My chapter [on Profanity Hill] was actually the chapter that I worked on longest because the 1940 census was not made public until 2012. I had started the research very early on in grad school, about 2009. Once the census came out, I revised that chapter because I could see who was living on Profanity Hill in 1940 and I didn't have that information before.

Profanity Hill was once a place where many white settlers lived, like Henry Yesler who had his home there after he moved from the waterfront area. And it was seen as a very desirable area because of the views of the sound. And many old Victorian mansions had been built there for wealthy Seattleites.

But over time, the area of the Sawdust and the south end started to expand and push eastward up the hill. People moved from the crowded waterfront area and the city center and into Profanity Hill so the elite started to leave the area because the workers were getting close. And there was a population of a very mixed group of people who were moving to that area for a variety of reasons. It’s interesting that Profanity Hill was called a slum, and indeed it gained the name Profanity Hill after the elite left and multiracial communities moved in.

Yet this was one of the only places where people could move that was open to anyone. There were no restrictions on the housing. And also, it had more space than the more crowded conditions near the waterfront and the Pioneer Square area. And they wanted more space. For example, many Japanese Americans had gardens. And this area didn’t have quite as much activity. And a lot of single men who had once worked in the seasonal jobs and other people including single women, female heads of households, and interracial families found permanent places to live on Profanity Hill. It became a place where many people who couldn't find housing elsewhere moved to leave the more crowded waterfront.

The housing conditions were not stellar, and yet I do think calling it a slum was unfounded. I found in my research no technical definition of a slum in any federal or state or local law. That was deliberately left very open to interpretation. It was deemed as slum because people in charge of this Seattle Housing Authority basically saw it as an expendable neighborhood and wanted to clear it away and build something else on top of it.

I wanted to tell that story and humanize the inhabitants. I think people have largely accepted what the housing authority has said about that area having terrible housing conditions without trying to understand why people moved there and what it meant as a really important place for a lot of people. And many of them were renters who didn't have much power when the city came and told them they had to move.

I felt their stories were never really acknowledged and a stereotype of the inhabitants of Profanity Hill led to a sense that it was probably in their best interest that the neighborhood was cleared.  And yet many people were displaced and then were excluded from new housing in the Yesler Terrace development. So that was an important point I wanted to make in the book that not only slum clearance happened, but that the people who were displaced were not allowed to live in this new housing project that was developed because they didn’t conform to what the city believed to be model tenants: white families, married with kids.

Robin Lindley: Your account of the displacement of people who were seen as expendable is heartrending. How do you see Seattle now in terms of the issues you reveal such as segregation, discriminatory local policies, racial tension and hatred, and the treatment of non-white and working people? Has there been progress in some areas? What else could the city do now to improve the situation for marginalized people?

Professor Megan Asaka: The story I tell is obviously one of a past Seattle and yet what I wanted to emphasize is that history reverberates into the present.

One of my main motivations for writing the book was to combat the nostalgia that I see about Seattle history – that somehow it was “better” in the past compared to now. The importance of critical history is that it offers a way to learn from the past, to understand the forces of inequality, exclusion, and marginalization and how those are persisting.

Even from a very practical policy perspective, there are lessons in the book that I hope are useful. The chapter on Yesler Terrace, for example, is a case study of a public housing project that was in some ways very radical, very progressive for its time – I don’t think we would even see this kind of project today – and yet the way it was implemented reinforced, rather than disrupted, racial hierarchy and exclusion. It didn’t have to be that way, though, and I hope readers can use the examples from the book to imagine a different path forward. 

Robin Lindley: Your revelatory book takes the reader to some dark places in the history of an American city. Some of the material you present on the treatment and conditions of the groups you cover are gripping and heart-wrenching. But you’ve restored a history that most of us know little about. Where do you find hope after your years of research on this book?

Professor Megan Asaka: In a way, writing the book did give me hope because at the end of the day this project is about people making the best of what they had in difficult circumstances. It was difficult and yet also gratifying to uncover and illuminate these stories of persistence and of people continuing to pursue autonomy and create beautiful worlds of their own.

While I wanted to highlight the forces of inequality and power, the book is also about how marginalized people did not allow these forces to completely define them. They lived full, interesting, and complex lives and in doing so they resisted and refused to conform to what dominant society wanted to them to be, which was invisible, expendable labor. I hope the book can open up new ways of thinking about the past and who we consider to be “worthy” of historical analysis and reflection.  

Robin Lindley: It’s been a pleasure talking with you Professor Asaka and learning about your creative and original perspective on Seattle history—through the eyes of marginalized and largely forgotten people. Thanks for your thoughtful comments and congratulations on your groundbreaking book, Seattle at the Margins. Best wishes.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

We are in the middle of a metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history.—James Baldwin

Acclaimed professor of law and author Kermit Roosevelt III calls for a reexamination of America’s past and our myths in his provocative and illuminating recent book The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (University of Chicago Press).

The book challenges the “standard story” that most of us learn in school: that our nation’s Founders stood for ideals, reflected in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, such as the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Yet, based on careful textual analysis of those documents and their historical context, Professor Roosevelt contends that this “standard story” is not only exaggerated, but patently false. The Founders, many of whom enslaved other human beings, did not envision equality for all—or even a majority of inhabitants of the new nation. Indeed, as Professor Roosevelt’s incisive analysis reveals, the founding documents enshrine white supremacy and protect the institution of slavery. Only white males are equal, under the Declaration, and segregation, enslavement and denying Black people the vote are consistent with that document.

For a more hopeful story of America that makes real the values of justice and equality regardless of race or color, Professor Roosevelt looks beyond the Founders to President Abraham Lincoln’s words on equality from his Gettysburg Address and other remarks, and to the post Civil War Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution that ended slavery, protected individuals from abuse of state power, and assured the right to vote for all (males), including Black citizens.

In effect, we are not the heirs of the Founders, but instead the heirs of those who threw off the beliefs of the Founders and dismantled that old order with a new Constitution, argues Professor Roosevelt. And he celebrates this proud past rooted in the war to end slavery and the postwar Amendments that provide a foundation today for a country that embodies the principles of justice and equality—for all.

Professor Roosevelt’s book is especially timely and urgent as some right-wing political leaders advocate for censoring or whitewashing or erasing history and defeating “wokeness,” a vague concept which seems to embody the values that frighten the right such as historical truth, justice, tolerance, democracy, knowledge, equality, and more. The Nation That Never Was suggests, I believe, that we can advance as a nation only with full knowledge of our history, including the harsh reality of human enslavement, the treasonous Confederate secession, the legacy of white supremacy, emancipation and Reconstruction, lynching and mass white racial violence, Jim Crow segregation, the lethal myth of Confederate Lost Cause, the Civil Rights Movement, and ongoing racist violence as well as discrimination and inequality.

Professor Roosevelt’s innovative study has been praised by legal scholars, historians and political commentators alike as a historical corrective with a more nuanced and accurate view of our past, as well as a possible blueprint for a more just future. His thought-provoking book is based on extensive research, rigorous analysis of historic documents, and a passionate commitment to social justice.    

As the David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Professor Roosevelt’s teaching focuses on constitutional law and conflict of laws. He has written several scholarly books, including The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions, as well as numerous law review articles, and two acclaimed novels, In the Shadow of the Law and Allegiance (on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII). He is also a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, and he frequently comments in print and broadcast media on the Court and current affairs. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, and The Hill, among many other publications. After law school at Yale, he clerked for the Honorable Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then for the Honorable Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Professor Roosevelt graciously responded by email to a barrage of questions on his career and on his new book The Nation That Never Was. Many thanks Professor Roosevelt.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Professor Roosevelt on your engaging new book The Nation that Never Was, a revelatory exploration of the beginnings of our republic and how the vision of equality of all Americans arose in our history. Before getting to the book, I wanted to ask about your background. How did being a member of the distinguished Roosevelt family influence your interest in history and law? It seems you were almost be predestined for a career in law or politics.

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, to be honest. On the one hand, I think TR and FDR were great presidents, and they’re inspirational figures, and it’s nice to feel connected to them. And certainly, I never looked at politics and thought "Someone like me couldn’t do that.” On the other hand, I did look at politics and think “I could never do that as well as they did,” and I got into law, and constitutional law, in a slightly roundabout way.

My first love was creative writing, really, and I wanted to be a writer. But that’s a risky and speculative career, so I was pursuing it on the side, while also following a more conventional track. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and I decided I wanted to teach, so then my choice was between law school and philosophy graduate school as a way into academia. I chose law, and then actually I was thinking I’d become a tax professor, because people had told me there was always demand for tax professors. I ended up in constitutional law mostly because of my Supreme Court clerkship.

Robin Lindley: Yes. After law school, you had a prestigious position as a clerk for admired Supreme Court Justice David Souter. What are some things you learned from that work and from Justice Souter? Did that work inspire you to seek work as a professor—or did you practice before you began your teaching career?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I learned an enormous amount from Justice Souter—about what it takes to be a good judge, and a good lawyer, and a good person. I admire Justice Souter more than anyone else I’ve worked for or with. In terms of judging, he taught me to be aware of the practicalities of a decision. Law clerks are smart young lawyers, and we often like to come up with complex and sophisticated theories, and Justice Souter reminded me that what the Supreme Court says has to work in the real world. As a lawyer, he taught me the importance of clarity and candor. And as a person, he treated everyone with kindness and respect and a constant focus on how they, not he, could benefit from the relationship. The way he treated his clerks is what I keep in mind as a model for how I should treat my students.

The clerkship led to me teaching constitutional law, because it was my time working at the Supreme Court that made schools take me seriously as a potential constitutional law professor. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Justice Souter encouraged me to teach. He did send a very high percentage of his clerks into academia, I think because he hired people with an academic temperament. But he actually advised me to spend a couple of years in practice first, which I did. I practiced appellate litigation with the Chicago office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw.

Robin Lindley: How did you come to teach at the University of Pennsylvania Law School?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: Some schools sent members of their hiring committees to the Supreme Court to talk to clerks who were interested in teaching, and the people from Penn said that they thought I was ready to come and give a talk and be considered for an appointment. I thought that was a great opportunity to get a position at an elite law school without going through the normal process, which can be pretty arduous. I talked about conflict of laws, which was what I had focused my scholarship on, but they also needed someone to teach constitutional law and I had been working on constitutional issues at the Court, so they also hired me for that.

Robin Lindley: You’re a multitalented writer and deft storyteller, as evidenced by The Nation that Never Was. In addition to books on law and history, you’ve written two novels. What sparked your interest in creative writing?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: As I said, fiction was really my first love. I was writing novels through college and law school, but I couldn’t get them published—probably because I didn’t really have stories that were interesting to a lot of people. (My early novels were heavily autobiographical.) After law school, I realized that I had developed an understanding of a world that people were interested in but that most of them didn’t really understand—the legal world. So, I started writing about law—first about ethical issues in big firm practice, in In The Shadow of the Law, and then about the conflicting duties of government lawyers during World War II in Allegiance.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for mentioning those acclaimed novels. What inspired The Nation that Never Was? I wondered if there was an incident or event that prompted your innovative look at our history and law at a time when the country is deeply polarized and some leaders appear to embrace a kind of neo-Confederate thinking.

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I don’t know if I can identify a particular event. I tend to look back to a book review that the Texas Law Review asked me to write, of two books by Jack Balkin, who’d been a professor of mine at Yale. Writing that review started me thinking more about the Declaration of Independence, and what it actually meant to the people who wrote and read it in 1776, and how its meaning has changed over time. For a while I thought this was just sort of an academic point—isn’t it interesting that we’ve read into the Declaration a lot of values that weren’t really there at the beginning? And then I started thinking that it’s actually very important—and very harmful—that we locate our fundamental values in the Founding and the America of 1776 rather than Reconstruction and the America of 1868.

Robin Lindley: You stress that the value of unity has taken precedence over justice throughout our history. What are some ways this tension plays out in our past?  Is that the major theme of your book?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I think it’s the major theme of American history—that at crucial moments we have to choose between unity and justice, and too often we choose unity. I think the early examples of this choice are understandable, because the alternative is no America. With the Declaration of Independence, for instance, there’s a passage in an early draft that criticizes the international slave trade. But the Continental Congress takes it out, because that won’t help unify the colonists. A complaint about the British freeing enslaved people and encouraging slave rebellions, by contrast, does help unify the colonists, because they all feel threatened by these dangerous outsiders, so that stays in.

Much the same thing happens with the Constitution written in 1787. There are both pro- and anti-slavery drafters, but the pro-slavery people are willing to sacrifice unity to protect slavery—the Southern delegates keep threatening to walk out if they don’t get what they want. The anti-slavery people are willing to accept slavery to get unity, so they make several compromises that favor slavery. And again, it’s understandable, because the alternative is no America.

Then, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, America briefly chooses justice over unity. We’re willing to tolerate conflict among white Americans to promote equality. But that ends with Redemption, when we abandon the integrated governments of the South to white supremacist terrorism. White America comes back together; Black America is left behind. That wasn’t necessary to save the American nation, so I consider it a significantly greater failing than the Declaration or the 1787 Constitution.

And then later we see racial inequality being promoted almost for its own sake, because heightening the salience of race is a way to bring whites together and win elections. That’s the Republican Party’s infamous Southern Strategy. So, we see unity—and I call it a false and partial unity, unity of just enough people to take and hold power—being built on inequality.

Robin Lindley: You also note two visions of America: one of inclusive equality and one of exclusive individualism. How do you see these competing perspectives in viewing our history?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: Exclusive individualism, to take that one first, says that there’s a sharp line between insiders and outsiders—between the people who count, whose rights the government must protect, and the people who don’t, who are different and dangerous. And it says that the government must consider people as individuals—it can’t think about the welfare of the community in general. More specifically, what that means is that redistribution is generally considered a bad thing, in particular if it’s done to promote equality. Taking from one person because they have a lot and giving to another person because they have little is bad according to this vision because it’s violating individual rights.

Inclusive equality says that outsiders aren’t necessarily that different or dangerous, and they can become insiders. Maybe automatically, even if some people want to exclude them—maybe they become insiders just by being born here. And it says that promoting equality, even by redistribution, is a legitimate and even important thing for the government to do.

These visions, I say, are fundamentally the ideologies of the Founding (exclusive individualism) and Reconstruction (inclusive equality). You can see this in the fundamental documents from each period, and in the political debates, too. The Declaration of Independence talks about the purpose of government as securing the rights of individuals, and it shows outsiders as threats to the colonists’ lives: rebellious enslaved people, Hessian mercenaries, and Natives.

In the Founding era, there was a lot of debate about whether the federal government could fund infrastructure projects or provide disaster relief, because people thought it was redistribution that violated individual rights. By contrast, the Fourteenth Amendment gives us birthright citizenship, which makes outsiders into insiders against the will of some states. And it’s about equality, and so is the Gettysburg Address, and Lincoln talks repeatedly about how important equality is as a goal for the government to promote.

Robin Lindley: You write of a standard story about America that most of us learn in school. To simplify, isn’t that the idea that the Founders in the Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal” and that the Founders Constitution embodies that value, and we grow up thinking that the Founders envisioned equality for all. What would you like readers to know about the standard story?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I’d like them to know that Founding America really was not dedicated to equality for all people. The Declaration of Independence was primarily concerned with the independence of the colonies, not the equality of people. “All men are created equal” was a shorthand invocation of the social contract theory of John Locke, and it was basically a rejection of the divine right of kings. It plays a role in the argument for independence, but it doesn’t mean much about how society should be structured. In particular, it doesn’t condemn slavery.

The Founders were opposed to the idea of a superior class of insiders—they didn’t like hereditary privilege, and you can see this in the Founders’ Constitution, which prohibits titles of nobility. But they were okay with the idea of an inferior class of outsiders—most obviously, the people they enslaved.

Robin Lindley: How does the standard story protect “insiders” from “outsiders.”

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I think once you start looking for this distinction, you see it over and over again. The basic political theory of the Declaration of Independence is that people start out equal—no one has authority over anyone else. But some people might use force to violate the rights of other people. So people form governments to protect their rights from other people, and that’s what government is supposed to do: protect the rights of the people who formed it. The insiders. And if you look at what people said about slavery at the time of the Declaration and later, this is it. Enslaved people didn’t agree to form the government. They aren’t part of the social compact. They’re outsiders. So the government has no duty to respect their rights. This is why the colonists could complain that King George was trying to make them into slaves while they enslaved half a million people—the colonists were subjects of the British Empire, but enslaved people were outsiders.

So the colonists were hypocrites here in a way—they thought that their liberty was important and the liberty of black people wasn’t—but their argument wasn’t self-contradictory. Fast forward eighty years, and what is the big conflict over the Fourteenth Amendment about? Why does John Wilkes Booth say he’s going to kill Abraham Lincoln? Black citizenship—making the outsiders insiders. Fast forward another hundred years, and what’s the basic neo-Confederate complaint? What did interviewers find motivating Trump voters? The idea that the government is taking things that belong to the real Americans, the insiders, and giving them to undeserving others—immigrants, who are outsiders, or black people, who are technically insiders but not fully accepted.

Robin Lindley: And of course, you debunk the standard story. Indeed, as you write, the Declaration’s author, Thomas Jefferson, stated that “all men are created equal” but he saw Black people as inferior and he and many signatories of the Declaration were enslavers of Black people. You offer an extensive analysis of the Declaration. Rather than a statement on equality, what did this document really mean?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: So, it is a little technical, and people who read the Declaration in 1776 were more familiar with Enlightenment social contract theory than people are today, which is why the Declaration could give as compressed a version as it did. But the way to understand the Declaration, I think, is just to walk through the argument. Jefferson is trying to establish that the colonists are justified in declaring their independence. That’s the purpose of the Declaration—not to make bold new statements about moral principles like equality, but to make an argument, within a framework that was generally accepted at the time, about independence.

To do this, he needs to do three things. First, explain where legitimate political authority comes from. Second, explain when it can be rejected. And third, show that the colonists’ situation fits that description. And this is exactly what the Declaration does.

“All men are created equal” doesn’t tell you where authority does come from; it tells you where it doesn’t come from. It’s not the case, this says, that some people are chosen by God to rule over other. If you imagine a world with no government and no laws—and this is the “state of nature” thought experiment that Enlightenment social contract theory generally started with—no one would have legitimate authority over anyone else. It’s a rejection of the divine right of kings. And basically, that’s all it is in 1776. (I’m confident in saying that it’s not an antislavery principle because an antislavery principle doesn’t help the argument for independence—it actually weakens it by showing that the colonists are acting wrongfully—and because we know that the Continental Congress deleted a passage that criticized the international slave trade.)

So then we get the theory that people form governments to protect their rights, and governments get their just authority from the consent of the governed. And it follows relatively easily that if the government strays from its purpose and starts oppressing people rather than protecting their rights, then they have a right to alter or abolish that government and make a new one that will do its job.

That’s what the Preamble says. What remains is to show that the British government has become oppressive, and that’s what the list of grievances against King George does. So it’s pretty easy to reconstruct the argument for independence, and once you do that, you see that the issue of how the government should treat outsiders—whether it can enslave them, for instance—just isn’t in there. And obviously this makes sense, because a broad antislavery principle would undermine the argument and also divide the colonists.

Robin Lindley: You also describe how the Founders Constitution is, in many respects, a pro-slavery and white supremacist document. What are a few things you learned about the protection of slavery in our founding documents? Weren’t the drafters sly in not literally mentioning slavery?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I think in retrospect it’s unfortunate that the Constitution didn’t use the word “slave.” The pro-slavery people didn’t care about this: they wanted legal protections for slavery, and they got them. The anti-slavery people were able to feel better about what they were doing, or not admit it, and that made it easier for them to make these deals with the devil.

There are several pro-slavery provisions, but the most important one is the three-fifths compromise, which gave slave states extra representatives in congress based on people they enslaved. That gave them extra influence over the federal legislature, directly, and then because a state’s number of electors is determined in part by its number of representatives, it gave them extra influence over the executive, the president. And then because the president appoints judges, it gave them extra influence over the judiciary. So the whole federal government tilted in favor of slavery.

Because the constitution didn’t use the word “slave,” some people argued that it was in fact an anti-slavery document. I think it’s important to understand that anti-slavery constitutionalism, while it was growing in influence, was still not doing very well right up until the Civil War. Dred Scott, which is an aggressively pro-slavery interpretation of the Constitution, was a 7-2 decision in 1858, and afterwards one of the dissenters resigned in disgust and President James Buchanan appointed a pro-slavery replacement. So reversing Dred Scott was going to be a heavy lift, and of course what ended slavery was not the Founders’ Constitution but the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Thinking about the Founders’ Constitution and slavery highlights another choice that recurs in American history: make the best of what you have, or tear it down and make something new. My big point is that we did in fact tear down the legal structure of Founding America and make something new with Reconstruction. But because we had spent eighty years trying to make the best of what we had, we had trouble admitting that we had destroyed it.

Seeing the past clearly lets us understand whether we are the heirs of Founding America, as the standard story tells us, or the heirs of the people who destroyed it, which is my claim. And that’s why we’d be better off if the Founders’ Constitution had used the word “slave.” If it said what it meant, we would realize that we have rejected it.

Robin Lindley: Can constitutional provisions such as establishment of the Electoral College and the Second Amendment right to bear arms (in a well-regulated militia) be seen as efforts to protect slavery and exclude Black people from government protection and rights?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: Absolutely. The Electoral College is a structural feature that tilts the national government in favor of slavery, because the states’ electors are determined in part by their number of representatives, and the three-fifths compromise gives slave states more representatives than they should have. States are supposed to have more representatives when there are more people that they represent. But the extra slave state representatives didn’t represent enslaved people; they represented enslavers. And the Second Amendment is supposed to protect state militias so that they can, among other things, suppress slave rebellions.

Robin Lindley: How do you see the role of abolitionists and others before the Civil War in addressing the work of the Founders? How did they view the Declaration of Independence and its apparent promise of equality and the Constitution?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: Abolitionists actually took two different tacks, which I alluded to before. Some of them said, let’s take what we have and read it in the best light and see how far we can get. That’s the antislavery constitutionalism of the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln. But others said that the system was fundamentally corrupt, and they weren’t willing to compromise with slavery, and they actually wanted free states to leave the Union. That would be someone like William Lloyd Garrison, who burned a copy of the Constitution and called it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

Frederick Douglass, interestingly, started out on the Garrison burn-it-down side and then shifted closer to Lincoln. Also interestingly, all the abolitionists read the Declaration as anti-slavery. It’s abolitionists who are chiefly responsible for our modern reading, who took the phrase “all men are created equal” and started reading it to mean something about how the government should treat outsiders. I view this as mostly the product of necessity. Before the Civil War, if you reject the Founders’ Constitution and the Declaration, there’s really nothing left of America. So you can’t do that and then argue that America is devoted to equality. But now, of course, we can do that—because instead of the Declaration and the Founders’ Constitution, we can base our American identity on the Gettysburg Address and the Reconstruction Constitution.

Robin Lindley: You analyze the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision and stress how Chief Justice Roger Taney and six other justices found that Black people were not included in the Declaration and also that the Declaration prohibited abolition of slavery. How did the decision use our founding documents to support the majority’s white supremacist perspective?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: Dred Scott says two things. First, black people cannot become citizens of the United States. Second, Congress cannot ban slavery in territories controlled by the federal government—places that haven’t yet become states.

There’s one explicit discussion of the Declaration in the context of the first issue, where Taney says that black people weren’t included in its promise because, if they had been, the Founders would have been hypocrites for enslaving them. I think that’s mostly true, although Taney didn’t get the argument quite right. I think that the Declaration is about the rights of insiders, not outsiders, and enslaved people were outsiders. Making that a racial line, the way Taney did, is a little harder, because there were some free blacks who participated in the ratification of the Constitution, so they were insiders. But I think Taney wasn’t clearly wrong that there was some racial limit on national citizenship, because I think it’s true that the slave states wouldn’t have accepted a Constitution that meant that black citizens from Massachusetts could go to South Carolina and have the rights of citizens there—like the right to bear arms. The Founders’ Constitution didn’t answer that question clearly, but Taney went with what was probably the implicit Southern understanding.

What most people don’t know, even law professors who’ve studied this, is that the Declaration plays a role—and a more significant one—with the second issue. Why can’t Congress ban slavery in the territories? Because, Taney says, that’s an arbitrary interference with the right to own property. You can’t say that someone loses their property just because they bring it to a particular place.

Now, I think that’s wrong—I think that making a compromise about where slavery will be permitted and where it will be banned is exactly the kind of thing the federal government was supposed to do under the Founders’ Constitution. But what’s important to understand is where that argument comes from. An arbitrary interference with people’s rights is unconstitutional—it’s no law at all, Taney says. Why is that? Because the purpose of government is to protect people’s rights, so they wouldn’t give it the power to restrict those rights in arbitrary ways. And that’s the theory of the Declaration of Independence—that government exists to protect the rights of the people who create it, and loses its legitimacy if it goes against those rights.

Robin Lindley: Slavery ended only with the horrific violence of the Civil War. You note that President Lincoln initially was more interested in re-uniting the nation during the war than in ending slavery. How did his views evolve as the war continued?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: Lincoln’s views change in two very important ways. First, he shifts from the goal of union to the goal of justice, meaning the end of slavery. Before the war, he said he had neither the power nor the intention to interfere with slavery where it existed. He wrote a famous letter to Horace Greeley in August, 1862, in which he said that if he could save the union by freeing all the slaves, he would do it, and if he could save it by freeing none, he would do that. But sometime around the end of 1862 and the beginning of 1863, that changes. The end of slavery—the new birth of freedom Lincoln mentions in the Gettysburg Address—becomes a war goal.

And that raises another question: what will be the place of the formerly enslaved in the new America? This is an issue on which Lincoln also changed his mind, and it’s maybe even a more important issue in terms of what kind of a nation we became. One possibility was to end slavery but not include black people in the American political community—not make them citizens. Lincoln for quite a while believed that it was impossible for blacks and whites to live together, and he notoriously supported colonization. The preliminary emancipation proclamation talked about colonization. But the final emancipation proclamation said that black people would be received into the armed services of the United States, which was a traditional path to citizenship, and by the end of his life Lincoln was talking about black citizenship.

Ending slavery took a war, of course, but by the end of the Civil War everyone knew it was pretty much inevitable. Black citizenship was another step, and it was intensely controversial, too. I would say, it took a revolution, because I understand Reconstruction as a revolution.

Robin Lindley: You find Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address transformative—the beginning of a new understanding of America. How did Lincoln depart from the Founders? Why was this speech honoring the American military dead so important? Is this when Lincoln began to see “a nation” rather than “the Union”?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: It is around the time of the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation that we see this shift in the nature of the war. One of the markers of the shift is that Lincoln stops talking about “the union” so much and starts talking more about “the nation.”

The United States is a plural phrase in the Founders’ Constitution; it’s a union of states and not a single nation. But the Gettysburg Address tells us it is a nation, and a nation dedicated to the ideal of equality, and that ideal is what Lincoln’s side is fighting for.

Lincoln, he attributes that ideal to the Declaration and the Founding, which I think is inaccurate. And even he admits that realizing it requires change. The Gettysburg Address promises a new birth of freedom. Not a rebirth, but a new birth, which I think is the right way to put it. The Founders really didn’t think that protecting individual rights was the job of the national government—but the Reconstruction Congress did.

Robin Lindley: You stress the importance of the Reconstruction Amendments—Amendments XIII, XIV, and XV—in truly embodying the value of equality. Of course, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery and the Fifteenth Amendment protected the right to vote for citizens including Black people. How does the Fourteenth Amendment protect citizens beyond the provisions of the Founders’ Constitution?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: The Fourteenth Amendment does two incredibly important things, both of which are stark breaks with the vision of the Founders. First, it says that states can’t decide who their citizens are. Everyone born in the United States is a citizen of the United States, and then also a citizen of whatever state they decide to live in. This rejects one of the ideas of the Declaration, which is that political societies are formed by mutual agreement and can exclude who they want. The Fourteenth Amendment tells states that their political communities are defined from above—not horizontal agreements among the state citizens but direction from the national government.

And then the second thing is to say that there are federal constitutional rules about how the states must treat their citizens. The Founders were aware that states might mistreat the citizens of other states, and so the Founders’ Constitution has some provisions that protect against this danger. But they really did not imagine that the federal government would tell states how to treat their own citizens, and there are almost no provisions in the Founders’ Constitution regulating that relationship.

But after the Civil War, and after Congress has declared that the formerly enslaved are citizens of the former Confederate states, this is obviously an extremely pressing issue. The former confederate states resisted black citizenship, and they resist black equality, and that’s what the Reconstruction Amendments are meant to overcome. Black people will be full and equal citizens of the new American nation, and the national government and the U.S. Army will protect their rights. But of course, the former Confederates didn’t accept that, and their resistance outlasted the national will to fight for equality.

Robin Lindley: Despite the Reconstruction Amendments, Southern states violently defeated Reconstruction and soon successfully implemented Jim Crow segregation and denied Black people the right to vote. How do you see this defeat that white southerners called “the Redemption?” And Reconstruction ended despite the “new Constitution” with the Reconstruction amendments.

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I see Redemption as a counter-revolution to Reconstruction. It’s an attempt to restore the political regime that Reconstruction destroyed, the regime of white supremacy. And it’s an interesting question whether we should identify that regime as the Confederacy or the Founding. My view is that there’s much greater similarity between the Confederacy and the Founding than we like to admit. When the Confederates wrote their constitution, for instance, they basically copied the Founding Constitution. They made explicit a few of the things that they had argued were implicit in that constitution. But they did not see themselves as rejecting the U.S. Constitution—they claimed that the free states and the Republicans were distorting it.

And there’s one terminological point that I think has some broader significance. People are often surprised when I refer to the overthrow of Reconstruction as Redemption. They’re surprised because redemption is supposed to be a good thing, but the overthrow of Reconstruction was bad. I use that label because that’s how historians refer to it. But historians refer to it that way because that’s how the people who did it described it. And I think it says something about our approach to history that we have accepted the label used by white supremacist terrorists—it shows how much we accepted their perspective. For most of the twentieth century, mainstream historians would tell you that Reconstruction was an oppressive overreach and Redemption restored the natural and appropriate order.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining the term Redemption in this account. You take the story of America into the twentieth century and to the Civil Rights Movement. You detail how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X viewed the Declaration and the Founders Constitution. What are a few things you learned?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I learned so many fascinating things! I said before that I think we misunderstand the Declaration of Independence, that we overread the phrase “all men are created equal” and lose sight of its historical context. When I started thinking about the way that claim works in the Declaration (I say it’s a rejection of the divine right of kings and nothing more), I was very interested in the question of whether this was the original understanding, and whether other people had described it that way. Pauline Maier’s article The Strange History of “All Men Are Created Equal” does a great job, I think, of showing that it was the 1776 understanding. Then the abolitionists started reading it differently. But did anyone keep asserting the original understanding?

Yes, it turns out. In the years before the Civil War, you did see some people arguing for what I call Jefferson’s version of equality, rather than Lincoln’s. And it shouldn’t be surprising that these were supporters of slavery, people like John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Alexander Smyth of Virginia, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. (Just to be precise, this is not the same thing as saying that “all men” doesn’t mean “all people.” That was another argument that supporters of slavery made, people like Stephen Douglas and Roger Taney. I think that argument is stupid and wrong. What I believe is that “created equal” does not have the significance we assign to it now.) Then that understanding goes away, almost totally. But you do find someone else saying it in the 1960s: Malcolm X. And this is a very powerful illustration of the point that the significance of a particular reading of the Declaration might change over time. It might change depending on what else you have to rely on. If there’s nothing else, then reading the Declaration to be consistent with slavery supports slavery. But if you have Reconstruction, then you don’t need to argue that the Declaration is anti-slavery.

Which brings us to Martin Luther King, because Martin Luther King relies on the Declaration of Independence in much the same way Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address—but unlike Lincoln, he had alternatives. So in the I Have a Dream speech, King argues that racial segregation and race-based denial of the right to vote are inconsistent with American values, and he calls on America to live up to its promise of equality—the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. And all of that makes perfect sense from a constitutional law perspective, right up until the end. I’ve argued that the Declaration of Independence doesn’t actually make a promise of equality, but even if it did, everyone agrees it has no legal force. But the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution do, and they ban exactly what King is complaining about, racial segregation and the denial of voting rights to blacks. So it’s very odd that King is looking back to the Founding, rather than to Reconstruction.

It becomes still odder when you learn that nineteen years earlier, as a junior in high school, King had entered an oratory contest with a speech called The Negro and the Constitution in which he addressed the same question as I Have a Dream—what determines how black Americans are entitled to be treated. But that speech is all about the Civil War and Reconstruction. We are fighting to translate the Reconstruction Amendments “from writing on the printed page to an actuality,” he said, and if blacks are given the rights they are owed, they will “defend even with their arms, the ark of federal liberty from treason…”

So why did King switch from Reconstruction to the Founding? The answer, I’m pretty sure, is that he learned that Reconstruction was divisive. He wanted to appeal to whites who wouldn’t listen to an appeal in the name of Reconstruction but might listen to one in the name of the Founding. And then, later, I think he learned that this strategy didn’t work, after all, and that a focus on the Founding tended to support the status quo. And that strategy is what we’re still pursuing today, and we have to learn the lesson that King did.

Robin Lindley: And you write of a Second Reconstruction and then a Second Redemption. How do you see those periods?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: The Second Reconstruction is the Civil Rights movement that King was a part of, when the Reconstruction amendments are brought back to life and Congress passes antidiscrimination laws and maybe most crucially the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s a real step forward for equality. But equality movements are always divisive—that’s part of what King learned—and there’s a backlash. I date that backlash to 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan famously endorsed states’ rights and promised to shrink the federal government. He promised to appoint Supreme Court Justices who would read the constitution the way the Founders intended and undo the Second Reconstruction decisions of the Warren Court. This is what I call the Second Redemption, because it’s an attempt to undo or roll back the Second Reconstruction. And that’s the era we’re living in now.

Robin Lindley: Is it fair to see Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump as neo-Confederate presidents who advanced racists policies to appeal to their voters and for other political gain?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I think so. Broadly speaking, I think both of them advance a vision of what I called exclusive individualism, rather than inclusive equality, and exclusive individualism is what I see as the ideology of the Confederacy—though also the Founding. Both of them tell white Americans that undeserving others—chiefly blacks and immigrants—are taking what rightfully belongs to the real Americans. And there’s a very direct line from those sorts of dog whistle political appeals to the earlier determination to exclude blacks from national citizenship. It’s an attempt to draw or maintain the line between insiders and outsiders, and to say that the government mustn’t give benefits to the outsiders. And both Reagan and Trump use the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which I think is also an appeal to an era when the government protected the right people and outsiders were kept outside.

Robin Lindley: How do you see the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol to overturn a democratic presidential election? The evidence now indicates that the deadly assault was instigated by a sitting president who sought to retain office by sparking a violent coup. And this former president persists in the Big Lie that he won the election. How do you see the January Sixth attack and ongoing lies about the election in the context of the history you present?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I think the January 6 attack looks a lot like Redemption: it’s the refusal to accept the legitimacy of a democratic election because people don’t like the outcome. And this connects in an interesting way to bigger questions about the Founding and Reconstruction, because the Declaration of Independence isn’t pro-democracy. It’s not anti-democratic, but the test that it sets out for whether a government is legitimate doesn’t require democracy.

The Declaration says that to be legitimate, a government must be formed by consent, and it must protect the rights of the people who formed it. It’s the Gettysburg Address, with its invocation of government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” that makes a commitment to democracy. So what is the complaint of the January 6 insurrectionists? It’s that the government isn’t protecting the right people, the real Americans. That’s the Trump politics of white grievance, but it’s got a basis in the Declaration. And if that’s what you care about, democracy doesn’t matter. All of this makes sense and actually hangs together pretty well if you accept two premises—the government has to protect insiders and not outsiders, and black people are outsiders. And those are ideas that you can get from the Declaration and the Founders’ Constitution—that’s what the Supreme Court said in the Dred Scott decision—but they’re rejected by Reconstruction. So January 6 is a crystallization of the Second Redemption.

Robin Lindley: To realize the “better story” of America and the vision you present, what should happen next? Are reparations appropriate for Black citizens now? What other measures involving education, housing, healthcare, mass incarceration, militarization of police, etc. may be required to assure equality and justice?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I’m in favor of reparations, although as a strategic matter I probably wouldn’t use that word. And I wouldn’t frame it as payments from wrongdoers to victims, because I think that’s politically a non-starter.

What I would suggest is targeted investment: take some of the massive amounts of money that the federal government spends, and look for ways to spend it that would reduce, rather than increase, the racial wealth gap. I don’t know if that would strike people as radical, but once you realize that for the past century we’ve been working in the opposite direction—for a hundred years or so, we’ve engaged in massive federal spending that quite deliberately tended to exclude black people—it seems very reasonable to me. This could be an intervention in housing, or education, or healthcare, or all of them. There are so many ways that we could try to decrease rather than increase racial inequality. The militarization of police is a slightly different issue, but it’s also a problem I’m concerned about, and it’s also one that, when you look at the history, turns out to have a lot to do with race.

Robin Lindley: You find hopeful the vision of liberty and equality that came out of Reconstruction. Where do you find hope now, particularly in view of our divided political landscape and a majority rightwing Supreme Court? It’s worrisome for many that the Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and eliminated a woman’s right to choose in the recent Dobbs as our fragile democracy hangs in the balance.

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I find hope in my students, and in younger people generally. I like the generation that’s coming into adulthood now quite a lot. I think that generational replacement is moving us in the right direction, because it looks as though these younger people are staying progressive as they age.

I think that demographic change is generally positive—as the white percentage of the population declines, I think we’ll see greater racial equality. In some ways conflict is a positive sign: sometimes conflict means that a hierarchy is being challenged, and that those in power feel a threat. The easiest way to see if an equality movement is making headway, maybe, is to see if it inspires a backlash.

Robin Lindley: You suggest, I think, that some parts of the Constitution deserve reconsideration and perhaps repeal or amendment such as the Electoral College provision which, as you write, “creates a false unity,” while excluding some voters and giving others a disproportionate voice. What must be re-examined in the Constitution?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I think the Constitution has some unfortunate and antidemocratic features. These didn’t matter so much until they started having a partisan valence, but now they’re empowering a rural white minority and, in some cases, allowing it to control branches of the federal government that should be controlled by the majority. The electoral college is one, and I’m in favor of trying to circumvent that with the National Popular Vote Compact. Equal state representation in the Senate is another, and while we can’t change that without a constitutional amendment (or maybe even with one, since article V says that can’t be changed without the states’ consent), we could ameliorate the problem by admitting some small blue states, like the District of Columbia. And I’m in favor of term limits for Supreme Court Justices, as a way of tying the composition of the Supreme Court to presidential elections.

Robin Lindley: I think you suggest that there’s a more important musical than Hamilton that should be produced now. To tell your story of reconstruing and reconstructing our past, who or what should a new artistic endeavor focus on? Frederick Douglas or Lincoln or Charles Sumner? Dr. King? John Lewis and Selma? Other people or events?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: It’s hard to pick the right person, but using Hamilton as a model—and I’m actually pretty serious about this—I think that Frederick Douglass would be a great through-line. He’s born into slavery, he attains freedom, he becomes an abolitionist, he has both a pro- and anti-slavery reading of the Constitution, he sees the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and Redemption—we could tell the whole story through his eyes. There’s a musical now, American Prophet, that does tell some of that story.

Robin Lindley: I liked your idea of changing our national anthem from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” How is the latter song a better choice and more in keeping with the rethinking of our history you posit?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: “The Star-Spangled Banner” is about the War of 1812, not the Revolution, but that war has all the same problems as the Revolution. Enslaved people escape and join the British forces to fight against their American enslavers, and the Americans think this is terrible. There are complaints about that in the Declaration of Independence, and in “The Star-Spangled Banner” there’s a reference to American victory over “the hireling and slave.” So I don’t think that’s something we should celebrate in our national anthem.

We should celebrate the war that ended slavery, which of course is the Civil War. And “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is about that. It’s about making sacrifices to help other people, which I think is a better message. As Christ died to make men holy, it says “let us die to make them free.” And by the way, when I say that Martin Luther King eventually moved away from the Founding and back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, this is where he landed. The last line of his last speech, his last words to America, is the first line of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Now, when I said this in an interview a lot of people pointed out that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is very religious, which of course it is, and they objected to it as a national anthem on that ground. I have to concede that’s a fair point.

Robin Lindley: Some also people also like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is You Land” for an anthem.

Many thanks for hanging with me Professor Roosevelt. I appreciate your generosity. We’ve covered a lot. Is there anything you’d like to add for readers about your work or your book that we haven’t covered?

Professor Kermit Roosevelt III: I think we’ve covered a lot! I’d like to add that I’m working on a Coursera course that develops the themes of the book, which I hope will be available in the summer of 2023.

Robin Lindley: That course seems an excellent way to continue the conversation on our Founding, Reconstruction, and equality.  Thank you, Professor Roosevelt, for your generosity, thoughtfulness and insights. And congratulations on your new book of law and history, The Nation That Never Was, an outstanding starting point for discussion of our past with a new understanding of where we have been. You have shared a vision of a more just and equal nation that grows out of Reconstruction rather than from the Founders’ documents that ignore racial equality and oppression. Best wishes on your continuing work.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

It’s not unusual now to see or hear or read reports from women correspondents who cover the news in combat zones and other perilous situations. They bring home the harsh and chaotic reality of fighting from war-torn places like Ukraine, Syria, the Middle East, and beyond. This new generation of reporters includes distinguished newswomen such as Clarissa Ward, Christiane Amanpour, Jane Ferguson, the late Marie Colvin, Holly Williams, and photojournalist Lynsey Addario.

But women reporters just a few decades ago during the bloody American military conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia were scarce at best and were often undermined, mocked, belittled, and even sabotaged. Only the most intrepid and resolute persevered to share the news and reshape public understanding of the cruelty and complexity of this foreign policy debacle. But these extraordinary women broke down barriers and created a new path for future generations of female reporters on the frontlines who courageously and routinely cover the terrible consequences of war.

A trailblazing war correspondent in her own right, celebrated journalist and author Elizabeth Becker pays homage to a trio of women reporters who covered the Vietnam War in her recent book You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (Public Affairs). The book focuses on the lives of the daring French photojournalist Catherine Leroy, American intellectual and author Frances FitzGerald, and iconoclastic Australian war reporter Kate Webb. Each arrived in Vietnam without significant experience in reporting or international affairs, and each navigated the masculine world of war and loss and each suffered and sacrificed to bring their unique perspectives on the chaotic conflict to the world. They brought new approaches to covering war and its horrific human toll on combatants and civilians alike.

The book also provides a new view of the war as it blends the individual stories of these stalwart women within the historical context of the war. Ms. Becker adds her insights as a fellow reporter and veteran of the Southeast Asian wars. The riveting narrative is based on her meticulous research that included study of voluminous military and other official records as well as her special access to the personal letters, diaries, photographs, and other documents from the three heroines of the book as well as their colleagues and others.

In addition to stellar reviews, You Don’t Belong Here won Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for the best book on politics, policy and journalism as well as the Sperber Prize for the best biography/memoir of a journalist. And Foreign Affairs named it the Best Military Book of the year.

Ms. Becker’s groundbreaking reporting from Cambodia during its war and the Khmer Rouge revolution is legendary. She covered the American bombing of Cambodia, the vicious combat there, and the genocidal violence of the Khmer Rouge revolution. She was the only western reporter to interview Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, and she escaped an assassination attempt by the Khmer Rouge.

When the War was Over, Ms. Becker’s acclaimed book on Cambodia, won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. That book was based on her first-hand war reporting and extensive subsequent research including her historic interviews with Pol Pot and other senior Khmer leaders. Her exhaustive six-year investigation of the historical and political roots of one of the 20th Century’s worst genocides remains in print more than three decades since its first publication and is relied on by historians and others for its exhaustive and definitive research.  The New York Times called her Cambodia book “a work of the first importance;” the Financial Times said “Becker writes history as history should be written;” and the Washington Post praised it as “an impressive feat of scholarship and reporting: intelligent, measured, resourceful.”

The prosecution for the for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia recognized Ms. Becker’s unique expertise and called her as an expert witness in the trial of Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide. She testified about her experience and knowledge of Khmer Rouge atrocities and other war crimes before the tribunal in 2016, and the two defendants were convicted.

Ms. Becker began her illustrious career as a war correspondent for the Washington Post in Cambodia in 1973. She subsequently became the Senior Foreign Editor of National Public Radio, and later worked as a New York Times correspondent covering national security, foreign policy, agriculture and international economics. She has reported from Asia, Africa, South America and Europe while based in Phnom Penh, Paris and Washington.

Her honors for her journalism include an Overseas Press Club Award for her Cambodia coverage, the DuPont Columbia Award for her work as executive director for coverage of Rwanda’s genocide and South Africa, and the North American Agricultural Journalism Association Award. She also was a member of the Times staff that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for public service in covering 9/11.

Ms. Becker graduated from the University of Washington in South Asian studies, and was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the boards of Oxfam America Advocacy Fund and the Harpswell Foundation.

Ms. Becker generously responded by email to a barrage of questions about her career and her compelling book on the Vietnam War and women reporters who covered it. I am very grateful for her thoughtful remarks and insights.

Robin Lindley: Thank you Ms. Becker for discussing your work and your illuminating book on pioneering women who reported on the American wars in Southeast Asia, You Don’t Belong Here. Before getting to your book and the three women you profile, I’d like to first ask about your background. You were a trailblazing journalist in Southeast Asia and were honored for your reporting on the war in Cambodia. How did you come to pursue journalism as a career?

Elizabeth Becker:  At the University of Washington, I became enamored with classes about South Asia and petitioned the university to create a major in the field. I graduated in 1969 with a degree in South Asian studies. (It is now a major field in the UW’s Jackson School). I and then spent a year in India traveling and studying Hindi at the Kendriya Hindi Sansthaan in Agra.  I returned to the UW for graduate studies in the same field, centered on political science, with the aim of completing a PhD

Robin Lindley: And what prompted you to travel to Cambodia in 1973?

Elizabeth Becker: The answer to that question is in the preface to my book. My thesis professor rejected my Master’s thesis after I refused to have an affair with him. He insisted my rejection of him had nothing to do with his rejection of my thesis. And he then asked me to reconsider. It was clear that my academic career was over. So I cashed in my fellowship check and bought a one-way ticket to Cambodia. A friend I met in India was working for United Press International there and had been lobbying me to come and become a reporter with her.

Robin Lindley: You’re renowned for your reporting on the war in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge revolution. Your vivid book on that experience, When the War was Over, was acclaimed by scholars and general readers alike. When you reported on the war and the genocide, you capture the often horrific and painful experience of the Cambodian people. You witnessed the US carpet bombing and the brutal fighting on the ground and atrocities of war. Your courage and resilience are remarkable. When did you arrive in Cambodia and what was happening in the war then?

Elizabeth Becker: January 1973. The US had just signed the Paris Peace Accords and more than a few reporters said I had come too late. The war was ending. In fact, Cambodia did not sign the Accords and the fighting intensified immediately. US bombing from March through mid-August was the most intense of the war. It caught the world – and news organizations – by surprise.

There were very few reporters living in Cambodia. Most staffers lived in Saigon, Hong Kong, Singapore or Bangkok. They needed someone on the ground at all times. After three months writing for the now defunct Far Eastern Economic Review, I was hired by the Washington Post, Newsweek and NBC radio as the local reporter or stringer. The fighting was close to constant.

Robin Lindley: What kind of support did you get when you were reporting from Cambodia? Did you have supportive colleagues or government support? 

Elizabeth Becker: Some of my colleagues who lived in Phnom Penh were superb:  James Fenton, the British poet, was there as a stringer for the New Statesman; Ishiyama Koki, of Kyoto News Service; Neil Davis, the Australian television reporter; and Steve Heder who became the greatest expert on the Khmer Rouge.

Robin Lindley: When did you leave Cambodia and what led to your departure during the brutal war with the Khmer Rouge?

Elizabeth Becker: I left in September 1974. Phnom Penh was dangerous so we would go to Saigon for R&R. Two of my friends disappeared behind Khmer Rouge lines. Every day I chronicled and witnessed how the people and country of Cambodia were being destroyed and I finally couldn’t bear it. I wrote my family back in Seattle that, if I didn’t leave soon, I would be carried out in a straitjacket or a body bag. 

Robin Lindley: You are one of the few western reporters who was invited to meet Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and you interviewed him. How did that 1978 assignment happen and what did you learn then about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot?

Elizabeth Becker: Over three years I petitioned the Khmer Rouge for a visa – sending letters to their embassy in Peking (Beijing now) and going to the UN every October to see the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, the only time he came to the US. Finally, they invited Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and me, for the Washington Post. Malcolm Caldwell, a British scholar sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge, rounded our group.

We were the only Western reporters to visit Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. We had no freedom while there – we only saw what they wanted us to see and spoke to people they chose and under their supervision. We were essentially under house arrest. If you don’t mind, here is a link to the best summary I wrote about what I saw and why it became so contentious.

Robin Lindley: You escaped an assassination attempt on that trip, and one of your fellow correspondents, British Professor Malcolm Caldwell, was murdered. Who were the assassins? How did you and fellow reporter Richard Dudman escape and depart from Cambodia?

Elizabeth Becker: Our last day we were given an hour’s notice to dress up for an interview with Pol Pot. Dudman and I went first. Caldwell had a separate interview after us. Back at our guest house we packed our bags for the flight out the next day, had supper and went to bed.

Around midnight I heard gunshots, ran to the main room and met a gunman who threatened me. I ran back to my ground floor bedroom while he ran up the stairs, shot at the feet of Dudman and then stormed the bedroom of Caldwell and murdered him. He escaped and we were left each in our separate bedrooms not knowing what had happened for several hours that felt like a lifetime. Finally top officials came to see us. We were taken to another guest house after viewing Caldwell’s body and then flew back on a Chinese plane to Peking the next morning.

Robin Lindley: What a harrowing experience. I’m glad you weren’t physically injured. More recently, in 2016, you testified at the war crimes trial of two surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. How did that happen and what did your testimony concern?

Elizabeth Becker: I was asked to testify at length about my book When the War was Over since it had become a classic history of the Khmer Rouge and includes exclusive interviews of Khmer Rouge officials as well as foreign officials who played key roles in the story. I also wrote an entire chapter about my reporting trip to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge that proved to be so rare.                    

Robin Lindley: Thank you for sharing that experience. The prosecution was fortunate to draw on your expertise.

And now, to You Don’t Belong Here. How did you come to write this book on trailblazing women reporters? Was there an incident or a person that sparked your interest?

Elizabeth Becker: It was in the back of my mind for years. The spark was my testimony at the Khmer Rouge tribunal when I realized our history – the women who broke through during the war – had been lost.

Robin Lindley: Your book is deeply researched and, of course, you were also a prominent woman reporter during the Southeast Asian conflicts. What was your research process and what was some of the source material you found?

Elizabeth Becker:  My goal was to write full biographies of the three women – their earliest lives, their education, what drove them to become war correspondents, and then their complete lives during the war – letters to family, friendships, horrible romances, self-doubts, etc. At the same time, I wanted to provide the reader with the story of the war. It had to be the strong spine of the book so the reader understood what these women faced and how difficult it was to cover the war.

Ultimately, you can read the book and have an intimate and deep understanding of the women, what they faced, and the war itself. I wanted to eschew what I felt was the confining, swashbuckling model where the focus is fully on the horror of war and how the reporter covered it.

Robin Lindley: Your book focuses on three women correspondents: Catherine Leroy, a fearless French photojournalist; Frances FitzGerald, an acclaimed American journalist, intellectual and author; and Kate Webb, an innovative daredevil Australian war reporter. How did you decide to share in-depth accounts of these women in your book?

Elizabeth Becker: I knew one woman couldn’t tell this story of how women reporters defied the odds and permanently broke the glass ceiling preventing women from being true correspondents. They did that by working around rules and really changing how the war was covered.

The main research was to determine who were the standouts and innovators. I did it by category – photography it was Catherine Leroy; long-form it was Frances FitzGerald; and daily reporting it was Kate Webb.

For Catherine I went to the foundation dedicated to preserving her legacy, even though it was largely forgotten. There I had free rein to go through her letters, papers, photographs, etc. I dug into the Frances FitzGerald collection at Boston University. I spent a week rifling through Kate Webb’s papers kept in plastic storage bins at the home of her sister in Sydney, Australia. I interviewed everyone in their lives, dug up books, documents and journalism from the period at the Library of Congress (which is four blocks from my home in Washington, DC) and then dug out my papers.

Robin Lindley: Weren’t these women all really outsiders lacking academic journalism training and experience reporting?

Elizabeth Becker: It’s more basic than that. Few if any women at that time (the 1960s) were staff foreign correspondents, much less a war correspondent. Women covered women’s issues usually in a separate area from the newsroom – dubbed the pink ghetto. US military rules prohibited women from covering battles on the battlefield (In WWII Martha Gellhorn was assigned to the military nurses, like other women, and had to sneak onto Normandy Beach).

So, no, these three had no real experience. FitzGerald had written freelance profiles for the New York Herald Tribune. Webb had been the equivalent of a copy boy for the Mirror in Sydney. Leroy had never taken a professional photograph.

They paid their own way to Vietnam. Had no jobs when they arrived. No place to stay and no insurance should anything happen to them. Everything they did was on spec for the first few months. It was sufficiently difficult that, over the ten years of the American war, only a few dozen women actually lived and worked in Vietnam as successful journalists.

Robin Lindley: What were the Pentagon rules for women reporters covering combat in Vietnam? Weren’t women correspondents strictly prohibited from combat in the Second World War?

Elizabeth Becker:  Since President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to officially declare war in Vietnam the rules regarding journalists were suspended. It was the first and only war where there was no US censorship, where journalists could go in and out of battlefields as they wished long as a commander approved (no embedding required). All that was needed was a US approved press card.

The Pentagon didn’t imagine that women would be among the press corps. It wasn’t until General William Westmoreland, commander of all US troops in Vietnam, stumbled across a young American woman reporter covering a unit that the top officials realized that women were breaking the rules. But the women successfully petitioned to be allowed to continue covering battles – arguably since most of the traditional rules about the media had been suspended. This was THE turning point. Ever after women reporters were allowed on the field. However the women in Vietnam kept their victory quiet and didn’t describe how they had broken that glass ceiling for thirty years. 

Robin Lindley: I was very glad that you included Catherine Leroy in your book. I’ll never forget her stunning images of war. She is known for her close-up photographs of the sorrow and the pain of war for both soldiers and civilians. Her photos for me are some of the most powerful and heart-wrenching ever on the price of war and the human condition. I’ll never forget her haunting images from a 1968 Look magazine. How do you see her innovative work?

Elizabeth Becker: I chose her because she broke all the rules. Without any training she took photographs her way, spending more time outside of Saigon – with soldiers and with villagers – than others. She said she strained to photograph the eyes of people, which meant she got closer than others on the battlefield. She became the first woman to win the George Polk award for war photography and the first to win the Robert Cappa Gold Medal Award for excellence in photography and courage.

Robin Lindley: Leroy it seems had almost no regard for her personal safety. She parachuted into combat zones with US troops and she was wounded and even briefly captured. What stands out for you about her commitment to reporting on the war at such great personal risk?

Elizabeth Becker: She didn’t take wilder risks than many of the men. She was a seasoned jumper so, while her photography while parachuting would seem impossible for most of us, it played into her strengths. She also understood that she was the only woman photographer in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968 and, the year before, Dickey Chapelle was killed covering Marines the year before—and was the first female journalist killed in combat.

Media outlets were adamant that they did not want another woman journalist hurt in Vietnam. Finally, when Leroy realized that she was mentally and physically worn out from the war she was wise enough to leave, which was not always the case with other photographers.

Robin Lindley: Despite her stunning photography, Leroy faced many obstacles from her male press colleagues and military officials. Despite threats and often lack of support, she persisted. Your extensive research speaks volumes. You found an employment file on her that revealed an attempt by male colleagues to undermine her. What did you learn?

Elizabeth Becker: I filed a freedom of information request to be shown the secret “black file” on her held in the National Archives. Behind her back, the head of Agence France Presse, other male journalists and several American military officials organized petitions to have her press credentials taken away. She was sent a letter saying she could no longer work as a journalist. She fought back, enlisting the great [photographer] Horst Faas to speak up for her, and got the ban lifted.

Robin Lindley: How did Leroy respond to the sexism and misogyny she experienced?

Elizabeth Becker: She stood up to it.

Robin Lindley: As you mention, Leroy was honored with prestigious awards for her photography but, despite her pioneering work in Vietnam and later in life, she never seemed to get the wide acclaim she deserved. You note that some documentaries and histories of the war fail to mention her exceptional, provocative visual art. Thank you for featuring her story. Did you ever meet Leroy and discuss her work with her?           

Elizabeth Becker: I met her years ago – that was all – but I knew of her while I was covering the war. I knew where to look and who to talk to. She died in 2006.  

Robin Lindley: Another reporter you profile is celebrated author Frances FitzGerald, who wrote the critically acclaimed Fire in the Lake, a groundbreaking book on the Vietnam War and US involvement in the ill-fated conflict. You take us back before that award-winning book. Many readers may not know that FitzGerald also was a correspondent on the ground in Vietnam who reported from crowded hospitals and devastated villages and violent urban neighborhoods. In view of her privileged family background and her Ivy League education, becoming a war reporter seemed an unlikely career path. What sparked her interest in journalism and then reporting from Vietnam? What are a few things you’d like readers to know about FitzGerald’s experience as a war reporter?

Elizabeth Becker: I wrote a triple biography because each woman in her own specialty was responsible for changing how war was viewed and reported.

FitzGerald wrote about Vietnam as a country, not just a war. Even though her father was a top CIA official deeply involved in the war back in Washington, she felt no allegiance to US policy. Instead, she cast a critical eye on it, largely by going out in the field and examining the effect of the war on the people. That is why she wrote about the hospitals, the growing slums in Saigon, spending time in one village to show how one side controlled the territory by day, the other by night, etc.

Robin Lindley: You vividly capture how the conditions in wartime Vietnam stunned FitzGerald. Even as early as 1966, FitzGerald was seeing that the war was misguided. What was she seeing that others seemed to miss?

Elizabeth Becker: She saw the war from the Vietnamese point of view as well as American. Most reporters only covered the battles. What she did was put the war in the Vietnamese context – its history, culture and society – whereas other reporters put the war in the context of American Cold War ideology and how Vietnam fitted in to those goals. At that time there were very few American scholars knowledgeable about Vietnam so she instinctively knew where to search for the war’s meaning.

Robin Lindley: FitzGerald’s journey involved significant personal sacrifice as well as the obvious risks of a war zone. How was she seen by male counterparts, and did she face the same obstacles as Leroy? The same “you don’t belong here” attitude?

Elizabeth Becker: The same but different. The reporters presumed that her success was due to her privileged position in American society. Nothing could be further from the truth. The American officials in Vietnam didn’t take her seriously, to her dismay. She was considered a debutante tourist by many. So, she “didn’t belong” for other reasons. 

Robin Lindley: FitzGerald also knew Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon aide in Vietnam, and Kissinger admired her. She became friends with Ellsberg. Was he helpful to her? How did she come to know him? Did she influence Ellsberg’s view of the war?

Elizabeth Becker:  Ellsberg was an intelligence officer who mingled with reporters and met FitzGerald as others did.  The difference was Ellsberg took her seriously. She was impressed by the books in his apartment. He supported his country’s mission in Vietnam and was comfortable answering her questions challenging how the US was succeeding or failing. They eventually came to agreement on the war and why the US would lose.

Robin Lindley: I think FitzGerald shares something of Martha Gellhorn’s sharp observation and moving depictions of war and those who suffer. How do you see FitzGerald’s writing and her approach to the war?

Elizabeth Becker: Her book Fire in the Lake had an extraordinary impact. The New Yorker published an unusual five-part series of excerpts from the book. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize for history – the most honored book on the Vietnam War. She took an historic view of the war from the Vietnamese and US perspective—the only book at the time to do so.

Robin Lindley: And thanks also for sharing the account of Kate Webb’s experience in your book. I didn’t remember her story. She was from Australia, and by the time she began reporting on the war, she had already suffered significant personal losses. What inspired her work as a reporter? How did she wind up reporting on the war?

Elizabeth Becker: This is the first biography of Kate Webb as well as Frances FitzGerald and Catherine Leroy. I wanted to give their full stories to the reader could understand the remarkable courage it took just to go to Vietnam on their own. The personal as well as professional slights they endured all while learning to be journalists in the most dangerous circumstance.

Kate witnessed the suicide of her best friend while a teenager, and during her college years both of her parents died in a car accident. So she was familiar with grief. She got the idea of going to Vietnam as a “copy boy” in the Sydney pressroom of the Mirror. Australia had agreed to fight with the US in Vietnam – the only other ally to do so besides South Korea. Kate thought someone should cover the war and volunteered. She got laughed out of the editor’s office so she bought a ticket and went on her own.

Robin Lindley: Webb’s writing was innovative and moving. And she was a dynamo—often in the most dangerous areas during the war, including at the American Embassy in Saigon during the bloody 1968 Tet offensive. How do you see her writing about the war and how it stood out from what other reporters were writing?

Elizabeth Becker: She was an artist and an intellectual who read deeply and she brought those qualities to daily battlefield reporting. She reported all the details, investigated all leads and covered the South Vietnamese Army, which most reporters ignored. She wrote with humanity when that was unusual, and with an eye for detail. Here is her oft-quoted description of the US Embassy at Tet:

It was like a butcher shop in Eden. At the white walled embassy, the green lawns and white ornamental fountains were strewn with bodies. The teak door was blasted. The weary defenders were pickaxing their way warily among the dead and around live rockets.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that powerful excerpt from her writing. Webb did not shrink from reporting combat and following military campaigns. In Cambodia, she was captured by the North Vietnamese and held prisoner for several weeks. She was presumed dead and the New York Times printed her obituary. You describe her captivity and escape. What was she doing when she was taken prisoner and what happened during captivity?

Elizabeth Becker: By then Kate was the UPI bureau chief for Cambodia – as far as I can tell, she was the first woman to ever run a bureau in a war zone. She was captured following up on a new offensive. Her three weeks of captivity were tough – she and three others captured with her had to eat what the North Vietnamese ate and only had the primitive medical care that they had. Otherwise, they were not tortured and she was not molested. She was impressed with the North Vietnamese discipline.

They were released on May 1 – possibly because she was a woman (and not American). Kate considered whether Americans would have treated a North Vietnamese journalist with the same equanimity.

Robin Lindley: After her release, Webb was praised as a hero in Australia. But didn’t she still run into the same problems with male colleagues and officials as other women reporters—the lack of support and sexism?

Elizabeth Becker: She was a full-time staff member of UPI at war’s end and promoted to run the Singapore office. But her direct boss insisted she have an affair with him. She refused. He reported her as insubordinate to New York headquarters without saying why. She quit and didn’t go back to full-time journalism for ten years.

Robin Lindley: It seems that the war haunted Leroy and Webb for the rest of their lives. They struggled with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after their experience in the Southeast Asian combat zones. I imagine that you and FitzGerald also experienced difficulties adjusting to life after the war. Was there any support for women correspondents who experienced war trauma?

Elizabeth Becker: No – not for female or male journalists.

Robin Lindley: We now see many women reporting from war zones and other perilous places. How has the situation evolved for women reporters in war and disaster coverage in the past fifty years?

Elizabeth Becker: Dramatically. Women are staff members with all the support that entails. They are treated more or less equally.

Robin Lindley: What do you hope readers will take from your book on the war in Vietnam and how the US pursued this ill-fated conflict?

Elizabeth Becker: That it wasn’t so long ago that women were considered incapable of covering a war and prevented by the military, the media and even their male colleagues from doing so.

This book is a coming-of-age story that portrays in the lives of three women how difficult and rewarding it was to break through. Moreover, I placed the women in the story of the war – the backbone of this book is the history of the Vietnam War. You can’t appreciate what they accomplished without placing them in the war. In fact, several colleges are using the book as a history of Vietnam War.         

Robin Lindley: I’m glad that colleges are using the book. It deserves a wide audience. Your recent awards for You Don’t Belong Here are well deserved. And I appreciate very much your courageous work as a devoted reporter, Ms. Becker, and the risks you’ve taken to report to your readers. Congratulations on your groundbreaking book on a forgotten aspect of the history the Vietnam war: the trailblazing women who brought another dimension to the story of war to the world. Best wishes.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Professor Vicente Rafael of the University of Washington

If you lose your job, I’ll give you one. Kill all the drug addicts. . . Help me kill addicts. . .Let’s kill addicts every day. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (2017)

Rodrigo Duterte served as president of the Philippines for one term, from 2016 to 2022. He was often outspoken, bombastic and threatening. In his election campaign, this former mayor of the city of Davao in the south of the country openly boasted about his bloody municipal war on crime that led to hundreds of deaths of alleged drug addicts and criminals as well homeless street children. He also mocked human rights rules, threatened political adversaries, demeaned women, and often shared scatological humor and personal accounts of fierce machismo and obscene misogyny. And he was wildly popular.

Duterte was elected president with a landslide victory in 2016, and remained extremely popular through his six-year term. Many citizens not only accepted but welcomed his “war on drugs” that targeted both drug dealers and users. Police or civilian vigilantes committed extrajudicial executions at Duterte’s behest. Estimates vary, but between six thousand and twenty-seven thousand suspected drug dealers and addicts were killed by death squads during Duterte’s term in office. Rather than deny responsibility for the killings, Duterte boasted of the executions and proudly shared gruesome photographs of the corpses of the dead.

Given his use of terror and violent threats combined with his demeaning of women and self-aggrandizement, some observers called Duterte “the Trump of the East,” another populist authoritarian at a fragile time for democracies around the world.

Professor Vicente Rafael, a specialist in Southeast Asian history, sought to better understand Duterte’s allure despite his extreme violence, coarse humor, threats, intimidation, and rule based on fear. In his new book, The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke University Press), Professor Rafael places the Duterte phenomenon in the context of the history of the Philippines from the Spanish and American periods of colonial rule to the authoritarian leaders of the island nation since independence. He finds that Duterte was not an exceptional leader in the course of Philippine history.

Rather than a traditional biography, Professor Rafael offers a “prismatic” view of Duterte and his place in history.  He stresses that Duterte’s weaponizing of violence to control conditions in his country with the use of death squads for extrajudicial killings and other extreme policies is not unique but grows from the period of Spanish and then American colonization and has been a feature of other oligarchic authoritarian leaders in the Philippines in recent decades.

Professor Rafael also examines Duterte’s “phallocentric” strongman humor of threats and bluster with elements of self-pity that heightens his appeal to many who appreciate his “folksiness” as well as his brutal, state-sponsored campaign of “social hygiene.”

The Sovereign Trickster is the result of Professor Rafael’s painstaking research into archival documents as well as modern news and social media sources and interviews with many witnesses in the Philippines.

A professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, Professor Rafael’s research and teaching focus on the history of the Philippines, comparative colonialism and nationalism, language and power, translation and the historical imagination, and comparative formation of the post-colonial humanities. His other books include Contracting Colonialism; White Love and Other Events in Filipino History; and The Promise of the Foreign. He also has edited Discrepant Histories and Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam.

Professor Rafael was born and raised in Manila, Philippines, and received his MA and PhD from Cornell University. After teaching at the University of Hawai'i in Manoa and at the University of California in San Diego, Professor Rafael joined the UW faculty in 2003. He has had post-doctoral fellowships at the University of California, Irvine, and the Stanford Humanities Center, and also has been a Guggenheim fellow and a Rockefeller fellow.

Professor Rafael generously discussed at length his work and his new book at a café in Seattle.

Robin Lindley: First, I want to congratulate you on your illuminating book on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, The Sovereign Trickster.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Thank you, truly. It really took me to a lot of different places.

Robin Lindley: Before we get to the book, I wanted to ask first about your background. What sparked your interest in history?

Professor Vicente Rafael: I grew up in the Philippines, and went to a couple of Catholic universities there where I had some really wonderful professors, especially at a Jesuit University, which is very similar to Seattle University here. I did a double major in philosophy and history. I liked history because it allowed me to think about the world as it provided a coherent narrative about how things came to be. And, ever since I was a kid, I was always interested in interested in the way things happened and came to be. And, for the longest time when I was growing up, I thought I would be an archeologist because I thought archeology provided that answer about how certain civilizations came to be.

And when I was in my junior year in college, I had an American professor who was working at the US Embassy then and had gone to Cornell. He was teaching a course on Southeast Asian history. I talked with him and he said I could try applying to Cornell. And I knew a couple of other people who had gone to Cornell, and they encouraged me to apply. I did apply and I got a scholarship and that's what happened. Like many things in my life. it was pretty accidental. But it was also a good time for me to leave the country because it was in the middle of martial law during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. I left in 1979.

Robin Lindley: That had to be a scary time. 

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. And for some people, it's still pretty scary. And a lot of my friends, in fact, had decided to either go to the mountains and join the rebels or go underground or leave the country to go to graduate school. And so, I was one of those who had the opportunity, and that's how my career in history started.

Robin Lindley: When you went to Cornell for graduate school was your focus Southeast Asian history?

Professor Vicente Rafael: That was the program I was admitted to in the history department. I took courses in the history department, but I very quickly got interested in a more interdisciplinary approach. I took a lot of courses in English, and also in French and Italian, because they offered a lot of theory. And this was a time when a lot of French theory was circulating. I also was very interested in Spanish history because I figured I would write something about the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines, and my first book was on the Spanish colonial period. I also was very interested in psychoanalysis and took a lot of classes on Freud, and some of that comes through in my writing now. And I minored in anthropology withe a couple of professors who were very good. And comparative lit was also an interest of mine.

Robin Lindley: You are a Renaissance man.

Professor Vicente Rafael: (Laughs) And when I went to Cornell, I felt very ignorant because all of the students around me had read all the classics. I felt like I had to do all this catching up. So, my first summer there, I decided to read all of Proust because everyone seemed to have read it. Then I got very interested in Marx because I thought he was very important to understanding the world. He provided a good lens to do that. And I was involved in Marx reading groups.

So, you can see that I had a promiscuous intellectual training. I remember my first day in graduate school when I talked to my advisor. If you remember, that was horrible time in the American economy. Reagan was elected during a huge recession in 1980. Nobody was getting jobs. And my advisor said, “I got news for you. You're not going to get a job.” So I thought, that's great. I failed even before I started. I decided then I might as well use this time because I had a fellowship. So I thought I would use this time to basically get into anything and everything that looked interesting even if it had nothing to do with my field because I wasn’t going get a job in that field anyway. I might as well just have fun. So I took different courses. I read all the fun books and talked to really intelligent people. And that's exactly what I did. I don't necessarily give my students this advice today, but I felt committed to a certain intellectual irresponsibility.

Robin Lindley: Wasn’t your dissertation on Southeast Asian history?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. My dissertation was on the relationship between language and Christian conversion in the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. The dissertation was called Contracting Christianity. But the book was called Contracting Colonialism. It was about the role of translation and Christian conversion during Spanish colonization in the Philippines. And it's still in print 35 years later.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations. Did you get any criticism from politicians in the Philippines about your work under President Ferdinand Marcos or any of his successors?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Not really because my work isn't polemical or aimed at a popular audience, except maybe this new book has a certain appeal to a wider audience. But all my other books have been very academic. The only pushback I got was from other academics who didn't agree with my approach or who didn't agree with my arguments. But those academic arguments were very limited.

Robin Lindley: You probably know the case in Seattle of the two Filipino-American labor leaders were murdered in 1980. Marcos eventually was linked to those killings. That’s why I worry about people who were from the Philippines during the Marcos era.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes, I knew of the murders. I'm interested in activism, but I'm not an activist. I'm an academic who's very interested in what people try to do in order to push back against the oppressive forces around them. And I will help if I can, but I'm not part of that. I’m like Groucho Marx: I wouldn't want to be part of an organization that accepted me.

Robin Lindley: I understand. Your book The Sovereign Trickster was eye-opening to me. You may not be an activist but you’re a powerful writer on authoritarianism and colonialism. What inspired your book on Duterte now?

Professor Vicente Rafael: I go to the Philippines a lot. I have family there, and I do research. And for a while, my wife was in the Philippines where she was working with UNESCO there. I would visit her and we would go back and forth. Now we're together here in Seattle, but at that time, in the mid-2010s, I would go back to the Philippines a lot where I was just hanging out and trying to catch up with what was going on. And I've always been interested in contemporary politics.

I started writing short journalistic pieces about Duterte and Marcos, which then eventually grew into longer essays. Then the essays started to become more connected to each other. In around 2017, I realized that I had actually written a lot that could be put together in a book, and hence, this book.

This book emerged accidentally. It wasn't something that I sat down and planned to write. There were many interesting things happening. I would write a 800-word piece for a newspaper or l would write a 1300-word for a magazine. Some questions merged. Then I did more research, and pretty soon I had a 10,000-word essay that I would submit to a journal and on and on. So this book grew piece by piece and, as you see in my introduction, it a prismatic history.

It’s not an overarching biography of Duterte, but certain consistent themes emerge. I was very interested in his use of death threats. I was interested in his fascination with violence. I was interested in his use of humor to threaten people and to project his authority. And this was happening, of course, when Donald Trump was emerging in the US, when Bolsonaro was coming in Brazil, when Orbán was emerging in Hungary. You had all these authoritarian figures, and I thought, there's something going on here, and I wanted to be able to connect to Duterte to these global developments.

Robin Lindley: I have to admit that I didn't know much about Duterte and this may be the case with most Americans. Most people may know about his death squads and the killing of drug dealers and users and his obscenity and misogyny, but that may be all most people know of him. How would you introduce Duterte to readers?

Professor Vicente Rafael: First of all, I want to emphasize the fact that he's not an exceptional leader of the Philippines. People tend to think of him as this weird phenomenon that just emerged out of the blue. He’s seen as unhinged, as some people see Trump.

But Duterte is not some exceptional, once in a lifetime figure that just came out of nowhere. Like everything else, there was a history behind him and a political and economic context around his popularity, and that's what I tried to illuminate in the book. I wanted to emphasize the fact that Duterte’s emergence was part of a long history of colonialism in the Philippines.

Duterte comes from a part of the country in particular that has always been riven by conflicts between Christians and Muslims, between settlers and natives, and I wanted to point out that his penchant for violence is something that is shared by many other local warlord types in the country.  And it’s precisely this use of violence that's absolutely crucial for holding onto power for a lot of people. Marcos was a great example of that, but all you have to do is look at all the local mayors and governors and various other people around the country who use many similar tactics: threatening opponents and using private bodyguards as well as police forces to mobilize death squads and kill people. At the same time, you see many of these people engaged in many criminal activities just as Duterte’s family and Marcos's family have been, including smuggling, especially drug smuggling, and using extortion, extraction of resources. All of these things are to make money, money that they need to pay their private bodyguards and military forces and to stay in power. Duterte in some ways follows that pattern

Robin Lindley: How could Duterte get elected in an ostensible democracy? 

Professor Vicente Rafael: He was popular. He left office with an over 80% approval rating. It's because people saw something in him that they recognized. They saw a reassuring figure—the figure of the strong man—which has great appeal not only in the Philippines, but in many parts of the world. They love these strong, patriarchal figures.

Robin Lindley: You call Duterte a sovereign trickster. You mention trickster legends in the Philippines such as a Pusong story. How is Duterte a trickster?

Professor Vicente Rafael: The tradition of trickster is a global one. You have Native American tricksters, and African tricksters and so forth. In Southeast Asia, you have trickster figures everywhere, and in the Philippines every single ethnic group has this notion of a trickster. But they all share something in common. Number one, they're all men. Number two, they all tend to be young or middle-aged. The age itself is not that important, but what's important is that they all seem to be able to finagle themselves into getting what they want whether it's food, whether it's women, whether it's power. Part of what makes them tricksters is they're capable of performing, fooling people into thinking that they're someone other than who they really are for them to get what they want. And they're heavily reliant on humor, and part of the trick is humor.

Duterte was popular because he was recognizable. He fit into this idea of a trickster who could get what he wanted through a combination of humor and terror, and hence death and laughter. The reason I refer to him as a sovereign trickster is because he was, of course, the sovereign as the president. And people like the idea of having a clown when you can’t necessarily predict what he will do.

When you think about Trump. one of the things that makes Trump so weird is he doesn't care for convention and he won’t abide by rules. He doesn't care about the rule of law. He's that trickster figure himself, except he's not as funny as Duterte.

Robin Lindley: Duterte seems frightening, so you'd think that there would be more resistance to him. And Duterte preferred China over the US and didn’t trust the US. At the same time, he seemed to admire Trump and so you’d think he’d feel closer to the US.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes, he loved Trump. They admired each other. And Duterte had a standing invitation to visit Washington during Trump's administration, but he never got around to it because he doesn't like traveling. And he didn't want to go to the US. He didn't care about a standing invitation. But Trump visited the Philippines, if you remember, and met with him, And they got along really well in the way Trump got along with a lot of authoritarian types, and you see so many of the same traits

Robin Lindley: Yes. The hatred of the press, the  bombastic language, ignoring human rights and the rule of law, misogyny.

Professor Vicente Rafael: The both have a real hatred of women, especially women who are criticizing, as well as a real penchant for encouraging violence.

Robin Lindley: And you see Duterte in the context of the myth of a benevolent dictator and how a dictator’s promise of benevolence inevitably turns to brutality.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. The idea of the benevolent dictator was introduced by us when the United States colonized the Philippines. They did so under the guise of what President McKinley called “benevolent assimilation.” He said that the Americans were coming to the Philippines not to terrorize and colonize, but to uplift, and to civilize and to Christianize— because most people were Catholics, and he thought, that's not Christian.

Robin Lindley: I don't think most Americans know about the American-Philippine War from 1899 to 1901 or so. And hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died, mostly civilians, in that horrific conflict.

Professor Vicente Rafael: There were 250,000 deaths. And if you add people who died from starvation and illness because of the war, you're looking at 500,000 people. It was a very violent conflict and nothing about it was benevolent. And in some ways, as I argue, the United States set the pattern for dictatorship in the Philippines and for the following years, because what is colonialism if not authoritarianism by other means.  And the death squads and extra judicial killings, all that, were introduced by the US military. 

Robin Lindley: In school, most of us American kids were taught that colonial European powers and America brought civilization to underdeveloped countries, but there was no emphasis on the role of subjugation of people who lived in colonies.

Professor Vicente Rafael: The routine use of death squads or extrajudicial killing goes back to the Spanish colonial period and then to US empire. But of course, in the United States, if you were Black, that's not news for you. There’s the history of the Ku Klux Klan and the local police forces acting like death squads to kill people, to lynch people. And you have to remember the US empire is very much a racial empire. The targeting of Filipinos bore an enormous resemblance to the targeting of Native Americans and the targeting of Black Americans. And the tactics used to keep them in line had many interesting similarities,

Robin Lindley: We have a history of excluding “outsiders” in the US. Our constitution was drafted by our founders for insiders—white males—and didn’t take into account Native Americans or people of color or women. It seems that Duterte created and demonized a class of “outsiders” in the Philippines. He said, these people don't belong here. They're outsiders. They’re criminals and drug addicts.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. They've had to fight for their place so you dehumanize some group, and in Duterte’s case, it's drug users and drug dealers. People charge that Duterte has committed all these human rights violations. And he was very fond of saying, “I don't care about human rights. I care about human lives.” But of course, what he doesn't tell you is which lives. Human rights embrace a much more expansive notion of human lives, whereas his idea is to only care for the people “who like me, who vote for me. My constituents. Those are the human lives I care about, so I don't care about human rights.”

Robin Lindley: When Duterte campaigned for president in about 2015 or so, wasn’t  he talking openly about killing drug addicts and dealers?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Absolutely. In fact, people were voting for him because he was promising violence. His favorite campaign line that always got a lot of applause was, “If you elect me, I can promise you that the fish in Manila Bay are going to grow fat because that's where we're going to dump all these scumbags, and the funeral parlors will become very wealthy because we are going to be sending all these dead criminals to them.”

Robin Lindley: How were people responding to Duterte’s self-proclaimed brutality and cruel humor during his campaign? Weren’t you in the Philippines then?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. I was very frightened, not only because of what he was saying, but frightened because I knew what his record was. He had been mayor of Davao and a lot of people died. He would brag about that, but people would say, there's nothing wrong with that. Look at his city. His city seems to be orderly. The criminals are on the run. And it’s clean and it’s got businesses coming in. It's considered one of the “safest” cities in the country. So, if he can do that for a Davao, he'd probably do that for the Philippines.

Robin Lindley: So, as a mayor, Duterte was involved with extrajudicial killings?

Professor Vicente Rafael: No question. Not only that, he bragged about it. He had his own TV show that aired every Sunday morning, so instead of going to church, people tuned in. On the show, he would sit there and threaten his enemies. He would threaten criminals. He would use profanity on TV. And he would say so and so is a horrible person, and he really should be killed. And two days later, that guy's body would turn up somewhere. He’d make the threat on TV.

It wasn't like people were ignorant of his record. Everybody knew what he would do, and people voted, and he did exactly what we all thought he would do when he became president.

Robin Lindley: You open the book with a chilling scene: the only time you met Duterte at a family gathering. Can you talk about that experience?

Professor Vicente Rafael: I have to admit, I was a little nervous. I was at mother-in-law's funeral. Duterte came because my mother-in-law was quite a very well-known public figure. She was a diplomat, a state senator, and she was also the sister of a former president of the Philippines, Fidel Ramos who also had a certain bit of fame because he had turned against Marcos during the uprising of 1986.

And so Duterte came to pay his respects. It was a little nerve-wracking to have him around, but it was actually a seminal moment in thinking about this book because I decided I had to write about this moment and how he produced these vastly contrasting effects. I didn't even want to shake his hand because I kept thinking of all the blood that must have gone through that hand.

But he goes out and all these people at the funeral were cheering him on. He was like a rock star, and people wanted to get selfies with him. They were all thrilled. And this was actually quite common. Every time he went out in public, people would clap, they would cheer. I thought something is going on here that I have to figure out. Why is a confessed mass murderer so popular? So that's why I wrote the book.

Robin Lindley: So, you shake his hand and guests there are doing a sort of fascist fist salute. Did your family feel imperiled at all?

Professor Vicente Rafael: They were a little nervous. In fact, my brother said, do you mind not putting our names in the acknowledgements for the book? And there were many people who asked me to not add them to the acknowledgements. And I said that's fine.

But the thing with Duterte is that he is very brutal, but he didn't have the massive national security state that you would associate with other dictators. Instead, he relied on local officials to get the information he needed to go after individual drug dealers, drug users, and left-wing folks. So, he operated through local rather than through a national network. That’s a contrast to someone like Marcos.

Robin Lindley: How do you see Duterte versus Ferdinand Marcos? Wasn’t Marcos was using the military for extrajudicial executions while Duterte relied on local police and local officials but not the military?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Correct. With Marcos, the military pretty much served as his own private army. And remember, there was a quite a gap between Marcos, who was dethroned 1986, and Duterte who came to power in 2016. By then, the military itself had undergone considerable transformation. They became more professionalized and more deeply politicized. They tended to operate within a much more constricted sense of what they are supposed to do. The radical figures in the military had mellowed or had left or had been killed. So, you had a military that was much more careful in following the constitution and following civilian authority, rather than launching coup attempts and so forth as they did during the Marcos era and immediately after Marcos under Cory Aquino.

When the Duterte came into power, he was actually nervous about the military. He wasn't sure if he could trust them, and the generals were not entirely sold on him. And another reason is because Duterte had become very partial to China and against the US. He didn't like the United States much, and this anti-US stance didn't sit too well with the generals because the generals liked the US. They had been trained in the US, and they spoke English, and they had been supplied with American weapons. So, they were partial to the United States. They weren't sure about this guy who seemed to be very anti-American, so Duterte couldn't depend on them. Instead, he depended on the local police and on the local officials. And that was a difference from Marcos.

The killings under Duterte were always carried out locally from community to community, and always involved close relationships between the local officials and the local police. The problem with that, of course, is that the local police themselves were often very much involved in the drug trade. They would raid drug lords and take the drugs, flip them around, and sell the drugs themselves.

Robin Lindley:  And it struck me, as you wrote, that the police were getting kickbacks from places like funeral homes that handled the bodies of those they killed.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes, All the time. I think part of it has to do with the fact that, in many third world countries, law enforcement makes very little money. In fact, the typical cop makes about as much money as a domestic driver.  It's not a lot of money, and they have families, they have mistresses, they have all these people they need to support. And so, they need to make extra money. How are they going to make extra money? They turn to all kinds of illegal activities: the drug trade, extortion, number games--all kinds of activities where they can collect extra money. So, being a police officer in the Philippines necessitates working both sides of the fence--going after criminals, but becoming a criminal yourself.

Robin Lindley: And pro-Duterte civilian vigilantes also act as death squads.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Absolutely.

Robin Lindley: In addition to targeting drug users and dealers and “criminals,” did Duterte also order killings or other violent actions against political rivals? I realize he humiliated political foes in the vein of Trump, but did Duterte use violence against his opponents such as communists and Muslim groups?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Absolutely. Let's start with Muslim groups. Muslims in the Philippines are about five percent of the population, and they're mostly concentrated in the south. And there's a long history that goes back to Spanish imperial period of conflicts with “the Moros,” as they called themselves. They refused to submit to colonial rule and they asserted their sovereignty for centuries in the face of Spanish, and then American, and then Filipino Christian rule, and so they've always been targeted by governments, whether it was the Spanish colonial government, the American colonial government, or the Filipino Republic.

The Muslims always have been seen as outsiders and enemies who have been targeted. For example, in the American colonial era, when the Muslim groups would resist them, the American military would massacre them under folks like John Pershing, Leonard Wood, and others who commanded the American forces and who eventually became very popular in the United States. They would say things like,” it's good to massacre these people once in a while to teach them lesson,” because there was this idea that violence is the only language they understand, and if you're not firm with them, they think you're weak. So once in a while, there were mass killings. For the Americans, the massacres were pedagogy to teach a lesson. And, independent Philippine governments followed that pattern after the Americans left.

And people tend to think, for example, that martial law atrocities under Ferdinand Marcos were limited to North Manila. Actually, the earliest atrocities were committed in the South against the Muslims. Marcos killed over 300,000 of them. He would unleash the military who would attack villages, then burn and destroy and rape and plunder. And a lot of this destruction has never been acknowledged. Even human rights groups would tend to focus on abuses of Christian groups, but not on the non-Christian groups such as Muslims.

And Duterte came from that part of the country and he’d always brag, “I'm part Muslim myself, and my mother was part Muslim, and I know how to deal with them.” But that didn't stop him from killing these people either.

Robin Lindley: I was hopeful when Cory Aquino replaced Marcos as president, but I didn't know much about her term in office. You write that, in addition to some reforms, she also unleashed extra-judicial violence and was executing perceived foes.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Absolutely. She was confronted with a rightwing military, and with left-wing communists and she figured this was the only thing she could do. And so, she did it, but she got bad advice among other things.

Robin Lindley: Has life ever been stable for anyone in the Philippines?

Professor Vicente Rafael: It depends on if you're wealthy, if you live in one of these exclusive enclaves. But if you're not so rich, and if you're struggling, it's difficult for you.

Robin Lindley: Duterte’s humor is striking. As he incites violence, he also openly and brazenly shares what you call “phallocentric humor” with profanity, threats, rape jokes, and demeaning of women. What does he get from this sort of spectacle?

Professor Vicente Rafael: If you look at the videos of him doing this, the audience is just totally enthralled. They love it. They're laughing, they're cracking up, because they see him. His jokes are not just about, for example, women or rape. He'll also joke about himself. He'll joke about how large his penis is or all kinds of other things. And, the audience feels he's  an interesting guy.

He literally and figuratively exposes himself. And so, he shows himself to be somebody who's just like everybody else. It’s like we're just sitting around and having a round of drinks and shooting the breeze and can talk about anything. And the people love that common touch.

But there's a flip side to that. The common touch has a dark lining to it, because he can joke about you and he can joke about other people, but don't you dare joke about him. Nobody does that, because if they did, they would be in trouble. But but he was always like this. I have friends who have met him. The first thing he'll tell you, and he doesn't even know who you are; “I've killed a lot of people. What do you think of that?” He seems like the uber-bully.

Robin Lindley: That’s chilling. In another twist, he talks about a priest who abused him when he was 14.

Professor Vicente Rafael: He shares that memory and it's almost like he's bragging about God, because the whole point of that story is to say I was abused, but guess what? I turned it around. I got over it, and I went off and abused others.

Robin Lindley: And he boasts about his personal acts of violence. Didn't he shoot a law school classmate?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. He was making fun of Duterte’s provincial accent, and Duterte said, “I taught him a lesson. I shot him. I didn't kill him, but guess what? He never made fun of me again.” It's his outlook: violence fixes everything. You must be a tough guy and, if you're a tough guy, people will believe you. People will follow you. And most important, people will be scared of you. And that's what political power is all about.

Robin Lindley: He also encourages the display of gruesome photographs of the corpses of supposed drug dealers and users who suffer extrajudicial executions by police and vigilantes. You include some vivid images of the dead in your book.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. And Duterte is proud of those murders and he wants these pictures displayed.

Robin Lindley: And rather than appall most people or cause resistance to what Duterte was doing, it seems the grisly photos routinized the violence and Duterte remained very popular. Why is that?

Professor Vicente Rafael: And it's not just in the Philippines, but anywhere you end up normalizing the violence by exposing it, by making it plain.

I was thinking about this today with the school shootings in this country. And people respond that they can't do anything about it. And what that does is make us believe that the victims aren't human anyway. They're outsiders. It’s the idea of normalizing school killings and massacres in the name of “protecting” the Second Amendment right.

In the Philippines, it was something like that too. They had these people who were criminals, and they were garbage. And so, killing them was actually an exercise in social hygiene, in cleaning up. So, it's not really murder, but just bringing order to chaos. And people like that about Duterte.

When I would go back to the Philippines and asked people about Duterte, these cab drivers and these greeters would say “He's great. I can go home at 10 or 11 o'clock at night, and I don't have to worry about these sleazes anymore because they're all dead or they've all run away. So, I love Duterte.”

Robin Lindley: But doesn’t that reflect public numbness or acceptance of these killings?

Professor Vicente Rafael: It's not so much public numbness, but a particular notion of justice. This is what justice is about. Justice is about revenge. Justice is about settling things without having to depend on courts because courts take time. You could be sitting in court for a year before you're tried. Or someone could just simply bribe the judge and be set free. But this is instant justice that some people find gratifying and there's a certain pleasure in seeing these things happen. People will say it’s too bad that people are dead, but they’re probably better off.

In my book, I write about the family whose son was killed in an extrajudicial execution. When they were interviewed, I asked what they thought about his killing? The mother said, “I'm really broken up about this. But we warned him again and again. He’s going stop using drugs now. He's dead. It was coming. And now we just have to get over it. They took care of that. It's very sad, but it's also understandable in some ways.”

Robin Lindley: An alarming level of acceptance. It’s heart wrenching. Can you talk about your research process? I realize you travel and you interview many people to get firsthand information as well as doing exhaustive archival research.

Professor Vicente Rafael: For my earlier work, like my first book was about the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a lot of archival work, like traveling to libraries and so forth. And a lot of my other books involved that work.

But with this book on the contemporary period, my archive was more in the way of newspapers, media reports, and interviews with people. It's a different archive than I was using.

It's pretty tough to work on contemporary issues. The closer you are to the present, you have to be able to adjust and shift your research. I do a lot of  historical background research on areas that I already know, and  I can draw from my earlier work, as on the American colonial period, the Spanish colonial period, and so forth. But for the contemporary period, I use a lot of contemporary media.

Robin Lindley: It’s a gift for readers that you can discuss current events in a historical context.

Professor Vicente Rafael: You may think an event is out of the blue and doesn't relate to our history at all, but in fact it's a contemporary concern that has a long history. For example, you can't understand the return of the Marcos family with the 2022 election of Ferdinand Marcos’s son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., as president. As I've argued, you can't understand his election without understanding the colonial background that allowed oligarchs to control the country. You have what I call an oligarchic authoritarianism that rules the country. And, I think it has many similarities in different parts of the world. You ask yourself who's the ruling class? Who gets to call the shots? Who gets to determine, insiders, outsiders, laws, et cetera.? The ruling class, of course, and the rich people, and so forth. So, it’s not surprising that Bongbong Marcos, the president now, is a gentler authoritarian Duterte.

Robin Lindley: Are things changing in the Philippines since the election of Bongbong Marcos in 2022?

Professor Vicente Rafael: I think you have many of the patterns from under Duterte that are still in place. The drug war, for example, still goes on, but it just doesn't get as much attention and the bodies aren't as blatantly displayed. You could say the killings are a bit more discreet, but they're still going on and the involvement of cops and local officials is still the same.

Robin Lindley: As you wrote, under the Philippine Constitution, Duterte was limited to one term as president. What's happened with him since he left office last year?

Professor Vicente Rafael: He said that he was exhausted, and he was tired, and he didn't want to get involved in politics anymore once he stepped down. He’s back living in Davao, as far as I know. From the reports we get, he's at his very modest house in the middle of the city where he spends his time hanging out with his grandchildren. He hasn't been very public. He's made a few public appearances but he’s basically retired. His daughter Sarah, of course, is vice president, and she has basically taken over the family political concerns. His eldest son Paolo is in Congress, and the other son is mayor of Davao. So, they're all still in politics, but the old man himself is just retired and not doing much.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that update Professor Rafael. Duterte has been accused of human rights violations and war crimes. Is the Philippines part of the International Criminal Court?

Professor Vicente Rafael: They signed onto the Rome agreements, but then withdrew when the court started investigating Duterte. It sounds like they're about ready to charge him and the Philippine government has made it clear that it won’t cooperate. It will be very difficult to conduct these investigations if the government is not cooperating. I don't know if the court can do what it did with Putin by charging him. They may be able to do the same with Duterte, but even if you charge him, how do you enforce it? It sounds like he's not going to travel around much. He could get arrested if he does.

Robin Lindley: Is there a democratic opposition in the Philippines that would want to see Duterte held accountable for human rights violations.

Professor Vicente Rafael: Yes. There is a democratic opposition and they were very active during the last election. Leni Robredo was the public face of this opposition. She ran for president and there was a lot of enthusiasm among liberals, but she eventually lost by a landslide. She's now moved on with her own NGO, mostly focused on improving people's livelihoods

But the democratic opposition, unfortunately is relatively small and relatively weak. It’s very difficult to figure out what the future looks like for them. When they fielded candidates in the last election, they were totally shut out of the Senate and from the presidential and vice-presidential races. So, it’s difficult to sustain that opposition.

Robin Lindley: In The Sovereign Trickster, you concede that much of the book is pessimistic, but you found a glimmer of hope in the collective generosity of community pantries in the Philippines. What did you learn?

Professor Vicente Rafael: It’s a tough story for the world with the rise of authoritarianism. I think it's like everywhere else where the overall picture looks pretty bleak. But within that there's always glimmers of local resistance, and you never know which of these local resistance actions will grow and take over and grab people's imaginations.

In the meantime, you have things like these community pantries, and you have people who do NGO work, for example, who try to help local communities. You have lots of artists who are also activists who use their art to involve people, whether it's theater, whether it's painting, whether it's music. There's a lot of local level organizing, and that can be really powerful. There are still labor unions but these unions are unlike in the US. As the US is having a moment with labor unions, in the Philippines, labor unions tend to be associated with the Communist party, and there’s always the threat of death when you're associated with the Communist Party.

Robin Lindley: And how do you see our future in the United States now when democracy here is under threat?

Professor Vicente Rafael: Well, let me ask you this. When was democracy never under threat?. Can you think of a moment? Even in moments when an expansive democratic society was possible as with the New Deal and FDR? Many studies of the New Deal now show how exclusionary it was and how many people, especially Black people and Native American people, were excluded from those programs.

It’s always the case that democracy is endangered. We have a republican constitution and elections, but whether or not that republicanism ends up producing democracies is another story, especially in a place like the United States, which is so implicated in empire. It's hard to think of a United States that was not imperial from the very beginning. In a class I'm teaching now on the American Empire, that's one of the main themes. Right from the very start in 1776, the American Revolution was as much about getting rid of one empire and starting another. And it's always been that way. And with that, can you truly say that the United States has been a democracy?

What is the place of democracy in this country? It's always problematic. And if it's problematic here, can you imagine how problematic it is in other parts of the world, including the Philippines?

Robin Lindley: Thank you very much Professor Rafael for this lively discussion of your book and the history of the Philippines. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and generosity. And congratulations on your illuminating and compelling new book on Philippine President Duterte, The Sovereign Trickster. Best wishes.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art.

John de Graaf and Stewart Udall

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.—Stewart Udall

Stewart Udall (1920-2010) may be the most effective environmentalist in our history considering his monumental accomplishments in protecting and preserving the environment and improving the quality of life for all citizens. Unfortunately, his tireless efforts for conservation and environmental protection and his gifts as a leader are not well known to the wider public today. His life offers inspiration and a model for, among others, public servants and citizen activists today.

As the Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, Udall took the department in new directions as he crafted some of the most significant environmental policies and legislation in our history. With his talent for forging bipartisan alliances, he spearheaded the enactment of major environmental laws such as the Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts, the Wilderness Act of 1964,

the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965, the National Trail System Act of 1968, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968.

Secretary Udall also led in expanding federal lands and he established four national parks, six national monuments, eight national seashores and lakeshores, nine national recreation areas, 20 national historic sites, and 56 national wildlife refuges including Canyonlands National Park in Utah, North Cascades National Park in Washington, Redwood National Park in California, and more. A lifelong advocate for civil rights, Udall also desegregated the National Park Service.

After his term as Secretary of the Interior, Udall continued to work for decades as an attorney advancing environmental protection, worker health and safety, human rights, tolerance, Indigenous rights, racial equality, and justice.

Despite his many achievements, Udall seems to have faded from memory and most people today know little of his monumental legacy. His name doesn’t usually leap to mind when considering the great leaders on the environment and human rights.

To remind us of Udall’s remarkable life and legacy, acclaimed filmmaker and activist John de Graaf created a new documentary, Stewart Udall, The Politics of Beauty (The film is available through Bullfrog Communities: www.bullfrogcommunities.com/stewartudall).

The film charts the trajectory of Udall’s life as it introduces viewers to a history of the origins of the modern environmental movement. There’s the journey from Udall’s childhood in Arizona, his schooling, and his World War II combat duty, to his commitment to public service, his terms in Congress, and his achievements as Secretary of the Interior. The film further recounts his later life as a zealous attorney, author, and voice for beauty, simplicity, and peace as he warned about climate change, health hazards, rampant consumerism, and the dangers of polarization and extreme partisanship. Especially engaging are interviews with Udall and his family supplemented with family films as well as scenes with JFK and Lady Bird Johnson.

The film is based on exhaustive archival research as well as interviews with historians, family members, friends and colleagues of Udall. Personal films, photographs and papers were shared with Mr. de Graaf and his team. As the life of Udall unfolds, the film provides historical context illustrated with vivid scenes from the turbulence, environmental devastation, and movements for justice and peace in the sixties and seventies. There are also stunning sequences of natural beauty from the forests, seas, deserts and other sites that Udall sought to protect.

The story of Udall’s life may provide a way forward for younger people today who are skeptical of politics and disillusioned by stasis and polarization that prevent meaningful change for a better quality of life and a more livable world. Udall’s visionary pursuit of environmental and social justice came out of his cooperative nature and his belief in democracy. May his inspiring example create hope and fire the minds of citizens today.  

Mr. de Graaf is a Seattle-based award-winning filmmaker, author, and activist. He has said that his mission is to “help create a happy, healthy and sustainable quality of life for America,” and his documentary on Stewart Udall is an aspect of that desire. He has been producing and directing documentaries for public television for more than forty years. His nearly 50 films, including 15 prime time PBS specials, have won more than 100 regional, national and international awards.

Mr. de Graaf also has written four books, including the bestselling Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. The John de Graaf Environmental Filmmaking Award, named for him, is presented annually at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in California. He is also co-founder and president of Take Back Your Time, co-founder of the Happiness Alliance, former policy director of the Simplicity Forum, and founder of the emerging organization, And Beauty for All. 

Mr. de Graaf graciously responded to questions about his background and his Udall documentary by phone from his Seattle office.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations John on your heartfelt and vivid Stewart Udall film. I appreciate the work you do and your persistence. Every documentary film must be a long haul.

John de Graaf: Thank you. I had a team of great people to work with, so I can't take all the credit.

Robin Lindley:  Before we get to the Udall film, I wanted to give readers a sense about your background. What inspired you to work now as an activist, author and filmmaker?

John de Graaf:  I was an activist first, and that led me to do quite a bit of writing, to print reporting. And that eventually led me to do a public affairs radio show at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. Doing that, I met a character that I thought would make a great film. And then I connected with this videographer at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis, and we put a film together that was then aired on Minnesota Public Television in 1977, and the film won a major PBS award and that launched me.

Four years later I started doing freelance documentary production at Channel Nine, the PBS station in Seattle. I was there for 31 years basically, until they kicked me out in 2014, but I've continued. My film Affluenza was a big success on PBS, so I was asked to write a book by a by a New York agent. Then a California publisher put out the Affluenza book, and that took off like the film. It has sold nearly 200,000 copies in 10 or 11 languages internationally.

I also made a little film called What's the Economy for Anyway? and that led to another book. I also edited a book called Take Back Your Time that was connected with research and activism I was doing about overwork in America.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations on those projects aimed at exposing social justice and environmental issues and at encouraging work to improve the quality of our lives.

John de Graaf: Yes. The quantity of our stuff, or the gross national product, or world power, or any of those things should not be the goal. Instead, the aim should be about the best quality of life for people. I think all of these themes connect with that.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for your tireless efforts. You title of your new documentary is Stewart Udall, The Politics of Beauty. What do you mean by the politics of beauty? It seems that expression ties in with your interests in the environment and nature as well as your efforts to promote happiness and better quality of life.

John de Graaf: I think there is a lot of evidence that our common, even universal, love for beauty, especially nature’s beauty, can bring us together and reduce polarization.  It’s no accident that the most bipartisan bill passed during the Trump administration was the Great American Outdoors Act.  Beautiful cities can slow us down, reduce our levels of consumption, and use of the automobile.  Parks and access to nature are a more satisfying substitute for material stuff.  The response to my film confirms this for me.  Stewart was aware of all of this.

Robin Lindley: What inspired you to make a film now about Stewart Udall, who seems to be an overlooked champion for the environment? He's not remembered in the same way as naturalist John Muir maybe, or author Rachel Carson or Sierra Club’s David Brower.

John de Graaf: Of course, John Muir was a huge figure in his time. His writing was known by everybody and he stirred such a movement but he needed political figures like Teddy Roosevelt and later, Udall, to make his dream of the National Parks come true.

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was very powerful, but that's what she did and she died soon afterwards. She wasn't able to accomplish a lot without people like Udall who actually created and passed legislation. I don't mean to in any way denigrate her. She was great and Udall loved and appreciated her. He was a pallbearer at her funeral. Her book stirred a lot of interest and attention, and people like Udall got behind it, and so it had a major effect.

In terms of environmental work, David Brower was exceedingly important because he was involved in so many things including the Sierra Club. Aldo Leopold was a key figure with his impact. And there have been many, many others since then. Now you'd have to probably add Bill McKibben, Gus Speth, and people like that.

Robin Lindley: It seems, however, that Udall has been overlooked or forgotten. Was that one of the reasons you wanted to do a film about him?

John de Graaf: I was impressed years ago when I interviewed him, but I'd forgotten about him until I saw a newspaper story in 2020 that said “a hundred years ago today Stewart Udall was born.” I was struck by my memory of him, and I knew he gave me a book so I went to my shelf and pulled down the book that he gave me and signed to me when I interviewed him.

And then I started doing a little more research, first online and then ordering biographies of him. And I thought, what a fascinating character. I knew that he had created several national parks and some things like that, and I knew that he had stopped the Grand Canyon dams because that was what I'd interviewed him about. But I had no idea about his civil rights activity, his work for world peace, his work for the arts, and his support for victims of atomic fallout and uranium miners, and so many other things that he ended up doing. That came as a complete surprise to me, and I think made the film richer.

Robin Lindley: Udall seems a renaissance man. I didn't know much about his life, and your film was certainly illuminating. What do you think inspired him to get involved in environmental protection and then in environmental and social justice issues?

John de Graaf: Number one, he did spend a lot of time outdoors when he was a kid on a farm in Arizona and hiking in the nearby White Mountains. And he got very interested in the natural world and the beauty of the natural world when he was out hiking.

And then, he grew up in a Mormon family, but it was unusual because it was a very liberal Mormon family. His father impressed on all the kids that Mormons had been discriminated against and that's why they were in these godforsaken places in the desert. They'd been pushed out of Illinois and Missouri and other places, so they had to stand up for other people who were discriminated against, and that included especially Native Americas because they lived in the area where he was, and Black Americans, and so forth.

And then, he fought in World War II. He flew on 52 very dangerous bombing missions. He was very lucky to come back alive and he said that he must have been allowed to live for some reason. He decided, “I really need to be involved in public service in the best way that I know how.”

When he came back, he played basketball at the University of Arizona, and he was very committed to civil rights. He and his brother Mo both joined the Tucson chapter of the NAACP right after the war. And they’d had Black friends in the military and Mo had been a lieutenant with a division of Black troops. And they both fought to integrate the University of Arizona.

And Stewart was especially interested in the environment and protecting the beauty of the West. Later, that went beyond conservation, beauty and preservation to a much wider view of ecology and the environment and pollution.  

Robin Lindley: Udall’s probably best known for his role as the Secretary of the Interior under JFK and LBJ. How did he come to be appointed the Secretary of Interior? What brought him to the attention of the Kennedy administration?

John de Graaf: He worked with Senator John Kennedy as a congressman. They worked on a number of bills together in the late fifties, and he was very impressed by Kennedy.

When Kennedy decided to run for president for 1960, Stewart got behind him. Stewart was a very influential and persuasive person in Arizona at that time, though nobody knew anything about him beyond Arizona.  But he was able to convince Arizona's delegation to unanimously support Kennedy for president over Lyndon Johnson at the Democratic Convention. And Kennedy appreciated that.

Kennedy was also looking for somebody who knew something about the outdoors and somebody who was a westerner because it was traditional that the Interior Secretary be a westerner. Stewart Udall was the obvious choice for Kennedy at that time.

Robin Lindley: Did Udall have a close relationship with Kennedy during his short presidential term?

John de Graaf: I think Kennedy was distant and Stewart wanted a much closer relationship than Kennedy would allow with him, or I think with anyone else. But they were friends, of course, and Kennedy supported what Stewart was doing and Stewart supported what Kennedy was doing. He felt that Kennedy had a prodigious intellect and capacity for getting things done, but he was not a person who was easy to make friends with. Stewart was actually much better friends with Jackie, Kennedy's wife. She thought Stewart was such a gentleman and a fascinating character. She liked his personality and very much liked his wife. They were friends with his family.

Stewart didn't know how Johnson would be, but it turned out that Johnson was a much more social person than Kennedy, and much easier to be with and have a friendship with, And Johnson really loved nature and was committed to environmental protection in a stronger way than Kennedy had been. And a lot of that came from Johnson’s wife so Stewart cultivated his friendship with Lady Bird Johnson who adored him, according to Johnson’s daughters.

Udall convinced Lady Bird Johnson that she should make a name for herself in conservation by first doing a beautification campaign and then through various other work. Lady Bird took up that Beautify America campaign and became a great advocate for the environment.

Robin Lindley: Didn’t Lady Bird and Udall share a concern about impoverished urban areas urban areas also?

John de Graaf: It didn't start with the impoverished areas. It started with the idea of beautifying America. But Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson loved the cities that they visited in Europe, and they felt that Washington was a derelict place-- a mess in comparison to the other capitals of the world. It was embarrassing to bring people to the United States capital.

They felt that they had to start their campaign addressing cities in Washington DC, and that justice compelled them to start in the poorest communities, which were African American communities. They decided to put money first into beautifying those areas before focusing on the neighborhoods that were already gentrified.

Robin Lindley: And that approach also ties into Udall’s interest in civil rights, which you stress in your documentary.

John de Graaf: Yes. He was very interested in promoting civil rights. One of his first discoveries as Secretary of Interior was that the Washington Redskins (now Commanders) football team wouldn't hire Black players. So, he basically gave them this ultimatum that, if they wanted to play in the National Stadium, which the Department of Interior controlled, they needed to hire Black players or Udall would not lease the stadium to them. And so, they hired Black players, and that changed football immensely. In fact, the Washington Redskins became a much better team. The Washington Post even suggested that Stewart Udall should be named NFL Coach of the Year because of what he’d done to improve the team.

Udall also discovered that the National Park Service, which he was in charge of, was segregated. They had Black rangers only in the Virgin Islands, which is primarily Black. He was determined to change that. He sent recruiters to traditionally Black colleges in order to do it.

His kids told me that he would watch the civil rights protests on television. And he would say things like “Look at those brave young people. They have so much dignity.” And these young people were getting slammed, and weren't violent. They were quite the opposite, and Stewart said, “These kids are what America should be all about.” He added, “We need kids like this in the National Park Service, and the National Park Service needs to look like America.”

Bob Stanton from Texas was one of the first Black park rangers, and he went to Grand Teton. He later became the head of the National Park Service. He's a wonderful guy and I’ve gotten to know him well. Bob's 83 now, but he has the deepest memories of all that happened and Stewart Udall's role in it.

Stewart also had to decide whether the 1963 March on Washington could happen because it was planned for the National Park areas of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. He had to grant a permit for the march to proceed, and there was enormous pressure for him not to approve the permit that came from the Jim Crow Democratic Senators in the South who were also putting huge pressure on President Kennedy. 

The march happened, and it was huge, and its impact was huge. Stewart watched it from the sidelines, but you could see in the photos of the march that National Park rangers were standing right near Martin Luther King when he spoke.

Robin Lindley:  Thanks for sharing those comments on Udall’s support of civil rights. Didn’t he leave the Mormon Church because of its racist policies?

John de Graaf: He wasn’t a Mormon anymore by then, but he always claimed that he remained a cultural Mormon--that he believed in the Mormon ideas of public service, of community and family, and all those things. And Mormons did have a real ethic of serving the community in those days. Those communities were tight, and people worked together. And Stewart believed in that.

World War II really cost him his faith because he just couldn't accept that, if there was a God, God would allow the things to happen that he saw in the war. He became basically an agnostic but he did not reject the church, and he did not openly criticize the church until the mid-1960s when he became concerned about the church's refusal to allow Blacks in its priesthood.

Udall thought that was astounding and terrible, so he finally wrote a letter to the church saying there was a Civil Rights Movement and the position of Mormon Church was unacceptable. The church basically wrote back and said that it might agree with Udall but it doesn’t make those decisions. God does. Until God gives a revelation to the head of the church, things must stay as they are.

Ten years later, God gave a revelation to the head of the church and they changed the policy. Stewart basically was out of the church and was not considered a Mormon, but he was never excommunicated and never really disowned in any sense by the church. In fact, some of the strongest supporters of this film today are Mormons even though it’s clear about Udall leaving the church. Some evangelicals believe that former members are betrayers, but the Mormons don't take that position at all. In fact, they very much honor Udall. I just spoke at Utah State University, and a young Mormon woman come up to me after the screening and said she wanted to show this film. She said she was a board member of the Mormon Environmental Stewardship Association, and she added that “We're proud of Steward Udall.” It was very positive to see that attitude.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for explaining that, John. I didn't quite understand Udall’s interactions with the Mormon Church.

John de Graaf: The church's view was that Stewart had honest reasons for rejecting policies and for leaving the church, and that was respected. And it did not make him a bad person. You had to decide that he was a good or bad person on the basis of the deeds that he did, which seems a good attitude

Robin Lindley:  Yes. And Stewart Udall had a special gift for working both sides of the aisle to pass legislation including many important environmental measures. Wasn’t the Congress of the 1960s far less polarized than what we see now?

John de Graaf: It was, and particularly after Kennedy's death, but there was a lot of fighting and it was hard for Stewart to move things through. He certainly had some very key Republican support, but he also had some major Democratic opposition, not only from the head of the Interior Committee, Wayne Aspinall, a Colorado Democrat, but he also had southern Democrats who hated him because of his civil rights positions.

But after Kennedy was killed, and Johnson was elected in a landslide, that brought the Congress together around the idea of LBJ’s Great Society programs and civil rights laws. And Johnson did a much better job of getting things through Congress than Kennedy. Then you saw the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and the Wilderness Act, and Endangered Species List--major bills that passed because Congress and Johnson supported them.

But some environmental laws didn’t get passed until Nixon came in because of the huge protests on the first Earth Day in 1970. These bills were already in Congress, and Congress moved them ahead. And when Nixon was president, he had a Democratic Congress. The bills moved ahead but there was never a veto proof majority except on a couple bills like the Wild Rivers Act. Nixon though, with the pressure of Earth Day and all the environmentalist sentiment at that time, signed the bills.

Nixon himself had an environmental sensibility. He was terrible on civil rights issues and the war but he was much more open about the environment. He realized the impact of pollution. He had seen the Santa Barbara oil spill, the polluted Cuyahoga River. Nixon felt comfortable in signing the act creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

Robin Lindley: Is it fair to say that Stewart Udall was the architect of the EPA’s creation?

John de Graaf: It's fair to say that he was certainly one of the main architects. He didn't do it alone. He had key people in Congress who were supporting him, but he certainly pushed hard for it. I don't know if the idea was originally his, but he was probably the first who talked about it, and he certainly played a major role in it.

Stewart was also the first political figure to speak about global warming. He heard about it from his scientific advisor, Roger Revelle.  Revelle was an oceanographer who worked with the Smithsonian and was one of the first scientists to look at how the oceans were heating up. He said we have a problem on our hands with global warming. Stewart was talking with him on a regular basis and then decided to go public with this threat.  Other politicians knew about it, but they wouldn't go public, but Stewart said this was a major problem and he predicted flooding of Miami and New York and melting of the polar ice cap. And he was talking about global warming in 1967.

Robin Lindley: That surprised me. He was so prescient.

John de Graaf: Yes. There were smart scientists, but most politicians wouldn't dare touch it, even though the signs of much of it were already there. Daniel Moynihan gave a big public speech in 1969 about global warming as a big issue. More attention was probably paid to that speech than to Stewart, because Stewart wrote about the climate in books and in articles rather than in speeches.

Robin Lindley: It was interesting that, in one of Johnson's major speeches on the Great Society, he spoke about civil rights and poverty, and he decided to added a section that Stewart had suggested on the quality of life despite objections from some politicians.

John de Graaf: The speech was written by Richard Goodwin, the president’s speechwriter. But certainly, Goodwin had to have been reading what Stewart had written for LBJ because the language was exactly the same as much of Stewart's language.

Stewart had actually written short speeches for LBJ that had that language about quality of life and beauty. He wrote that when we lose beauty, we lose much that is meaningful in our lives.

That Great Society speech was interesting because Johnson was clearly influenced by Stewart and he agreed with his views about quality of life and nature. And Johnson told Richard Goodwin to have three themes in that speech: poverty, civil rights, and the quality of life and beauty. But then he told Goodwin to share the speech with the leaders of the House and Senate and get their opinions on it because he wanted them to like it and to support it. When Goodwin did that, he found that the Democratic leaders wanted him to take out the part about beauty and quality of life and to focus on the war on poverty and civil rights because they felt that these other things would distract from the main message that the president wanted to share.

The story is that Goodwin took those sections out of the speech and passed the speech back to LBJ who read the speech before giving it. He looked at Goodwin and he said, “What the hell happened to the stuff about quality of life?” Goodwin said, “You told me to show it to the House and Senate leaders. They said I should take it out because it was a distraction from your message.” And Johnson slammed his hand on the desk and said, “They don't write my speeches. That's just as important as the other stuff. Put that back in.” So that language on quality of life ended up being part of his incredible Great Society speech.

Robin Lindley: And I was surprised that Udall was working on a nuclear test ban treaty and was very concerned about nuclear proliferation.

John de Graaf: Yes. That was under Kennedy before the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was signed by Kennedy and Khrushchev.

In 1962, Stewart was very concerned about nuclear war. He also had been very concerned about the dropping of the bomb on Japan. He felt, even as a soldier, that it was going beyond what he believed in. He believed that it was all right to bomb military installations but he did not believe that we should bomb civilians deliberately. He accepted that civilians would inadvertently be killed, but we should never target civilians. That was simply awful and against all notions of how we fight and against the Geneva Convention.

Udall went to the Soviet Union to discuss energy issues and he took poet Robert Frost along to meet Soviet poets like Yevtushenko because he knew that the Russians loved poetry. And at that time, Americans didn't pay much attention to it. So, he took Robert Frost, and he was able to get a meeting with Khrushchev where they discussed nuclear weapons and banning atmospheric nuclear testing, which was going on in both countries at that time.

Nothing immediately came of the talks because it was actually right before the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it apparently had some influence, because once that crisis was resolved and nuclear weapons were not used, the Russians came back to the table with Kennedy and agreed to ban atmospheric testing. They were able to do that and I think Stewart had some influence, although it's impossible to say for certain.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for that insight. Udall must have been haunted by his World War II experiences. Many veterans were.

John de Graaf:  Yes. With Mormons who were in the war, the stresses of the war pushed quite a few into being smokers and drinkers, which the Mormon Church didn't allow. But many Mormons came back smoking and drinking to relieve stress, and Stewart was certainly one of them because the war was such a tragic experience.

Robin Lindley: Didn’t Udall differ with Johnson about the war in Vietnam.

John de Graaf: Big differences. Initially Stewart shared some of the worries about the spread of communism as many people did at that time. Stewart was never really a far leftist, but he was a strong liberal and he was afraid of communism or any totalitarianism, especially after fighting the Nazis.

Initially, Udall believed that maybe we should try to stop the spread of communism and help Vietnam be democratic. But that didn't last for long. Once Johnson sent the troops and Udall started seeing what was happening to the people of Vietnam, Udall changed his mind, probably as early as late 1965. He tried to get Johnson to pull back.

And Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was a close friend of Udall. They hiked and backpacked together. Their kids knew each other. They always liked each other very much. But McNamara's son Craig told me that he didn’t know that Stewart was so against the war until he saw my film.  He said he always liked Stewart and thought Stewart was a wonderful guy. And his dad liked him, he said, but his dad never talked about what other people thought about the war.

McNamara completely separated his work and family life so he would not talk at home about anything going on with other cabinet members. So, McNamara's son had no idea that Stewart was so vociferously against the war along with Nicolas Katzenbach, Johnson’s Attorney General, and a couple of others who criticized the war at the cabinet meetings and to the president. Craig McNamara wrote to me saying that he wished his dad had listened to Stewart Udall.

Robin Lindley: And, after the Johnson administration, after Udall left his post as Secretary of Interior, he worked as a lawyer with environmental justice and human rights issues. How do you see his life after his term as Secretary?

John de Graaf: He didn't know exactly what to do in Washington. He wanted to work as a consultant to improve cities, to make cities more livable. He became very critical of the automobile and our use of energy. And plus, he saw racism tear our cities apart.

Stewart was looking for things to do, but it was not easy. What kept him in Washington was that he and his wife wanted to allow their kids to finish high school with their friends. After the kids were adults and off to college, the Udalls moved back to Arizona and to Phoenix. It took a while for Stewart to figure out what to do there after he’d been in a position of power and influence. He was 60 years old with so much behind him.

Robin Lindley: He practiced law after his years as Secretary of the Interior and focused on social justice and environmental issues. The film notes his work with “downwinders” who were ill from radiation as well as miners who faced work hazards. What do you see as some of his important accomplishments after he moved back to Arizona?

John de Graaf: Two things: certainly, his work for downwinders and uranium miners for more than ten years was the most significant.  Then in 1989, he moved to Santa Fe and did a lot of research and writing.  In all, he wrote nine books, the most significant being The Myths of August, an exploration of the terrible impacts of the nuclear arms race.  He loved history and several of his books are about the history of the American West.

Robin Lindley: You obviously did extensive research for the film. Can you talk about how the project evolved and some of the archival research and the interviews that surprised you? It seems that Udall’s family and colleagues were very enthusiastic and open to sharing their perceptions with you.

John de Graaf: The Udall family was wonderfully gracious and open to me.  Much of the real research had been done by Udall’s biographers so I just picked up on that.  As I talked to people, I discovered that no one would say anything negative about him; even those who disagreed with his politics had total respect for his humility and integrity.  That’s not common with political figures, especially in this polarized time.  I was especially impressed by current Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s insistence that “the politics of beauty lives on.” And I was stunned by the paintings of Navajo artist Shonto Begay, a wonderful guy.  I use some of his paintings in the film.  I had great cooperation from the University of Arizona in finding still photos.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations John on the film and its recent warm reception at the Department of Interior with Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American in that role.

John de Graaf: Yes. That was a wonderful event. We had about 300 people there, and Secretary Haaland spoke and talked about Stewart.

And we are getting a very good response to the film at other screenings. My biggest concern is it's hard to get young people to come out to see it. But when they do, they like it, like the young Mormon woman who I mentioned at Utah State. And a Hispanic student at University of Arizona who is a leader of the students’ association there wants to present screenings to get students more active in politics. I think that's the way it's going to have to happen. The screenings already turn out faculty and the older community, but they don’t turn out students. But once they see it, they do respond to it. I've been very surprised at how many students come up to me afterwards and want to talk. They tell me that they never knew about any of this history. They didn't learn about it in school. We’ve also been treated very well by media.  We’ve done fairly well in festivals, though I’m disappointed that my own hometown Seattle International Film Festival didn’t take the film.

Robin Lindley: Thanks for your thoughtful comments, John, and again, congratulations on your intrepid work to create and now display this moving cinematic profile of Stewart Udall. I learned a lot, and the film brought back many memories of the sixties, those times of exuberance and turbulence. The film not only illuminates our history, but it's also inspiring. Udall’s example offers hope for our divided nation now.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.  

Cody Keenan (Photo by Melanie Dunea)

Other than being able to string a sentence together, empathy is the most important quality in a speechwriter. The ability or at least the attempt to understand your audience, to walk in their shoes for a little while, even if empathy will never be a perfect match for experience.—Cody Keenan, Grace

Ten days in June 2015 were some of the most intense during the presidency of Barack Obama. The president was awaiting US Supreme Court decisions on the fate of the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality. And, on June 17, a hate-fueled white supremacist shot to death nine African American worshippers at a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Chief White House speechwriter Cody Keenan focuses on this extraordinary period in his revelatory and lively new book Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (Mariner Books).

In response to this perfect storm of historic events, Mr. Keenan drafted memorable speeches and a heartfelt and now immortal eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney and other victims of the Charleston violence. And that address moved beyond a eulogy with the president’s powerful plea for unity and reconciliation and his surprising segue as he led the congregation and the nation in singing “Amazing Grace.”

In Grace, Mr. Keenan recounts highlights of his career as a speechwriter as he describes the tumultuous ten days. The reader immediately senses the demands of working for a president who was himself the former editor of the Harvard Law Review and among the most celebrated writers and orators of the recent history. As Mr. Keenan puts it, “To be a speechwriter for Barack Obama is f---ing terrifying.” Mr. Keenan worked “to his limits” in his high-pressure position to provide President Obama with the best drafts possible. And it’s obvious from Grace that the two men were gifted collaborators who worked together with great mutual respect and admiration.

As he provides a behind-the-scenes perspective on White House operations, Mr. Keenan introduces key presidential aides such as Valerie Jarrett, Jen Psaki, Ben Rhodes, Jon Favreau and his speechwriting team. He also intersperses the book with the story of his romance with esteemed presidential fact-checker Kristen Bartoloni, who often challenged and corrected his writing. They married at the White House in 2016.

By 2015, President Obama had delivered more than a dozen eulogies for the victims of gun violence, including for those who died in the massacre where Representative Gabby Giffords was seriously wounded in Arizona and the horrific gunshot murders of 20 children and five adults in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Mr. Keenan wrote those eulogies as well as the president’s now famous speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 March on Selma for voting rights and those peaceful protesters including civil rights icon, Representative John Lewis, who endured a bloody attack by police.

Mr. Keenan writes powerfully of the pain and sorrow that he and the president experienced in addressing yet another mass shooting in June 2015, that time with the added dimension of racist violence. The description in Grace of the creation of the president’s address for the funeral of beloved Reverend Clementa Pinckney is a case study in collaboration in the speech drafting process.

During the same sad week, Mr. Keenan wrote statements for the president to deliver if the Supreme Court gutted the Affordable Care Act and ended marriage equality. We now know that those speeches on the Court decisions weren’t necessary. And the eulogy for Reverend Pinckney will be remembered as one of the great presidential addresses. Mr. Keenan concedes that this eulogy was his most difficult assignment after working on more than three thousand speeches for President Obama.

Mr. Keenan’s heartfelt and moving memoir Grace shows how a gifted president and his devoted team worked together tirelessly for a more fair, more tolerant, and more just nation.

Mr. Keenan is best known as an acclaimed speechwriter. He studied political science at Northwestern University and, after graduation worked in the office of US Senator Ted Kennedy. After several years in that role, he earned a master's degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He subsequently secured a full-time position with Barack Obama's presidential campaign in Chicago in 2008.

When President Obama took office in 2009, Mr. Keenan became deputy director of speechwriting in the White House. He was promoted to chief White House speechwriter during the president’s second term. He also collaborated with President Obama on writing projects from the end of his term in 2017 until 2020. He has said that he wrote his dream speech just four days before Obama left office—welcoming the World Champion Chicago Cubs to the White House.

Mr. Keenan is currently a partner at the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and, as a visiting professor at his alma mater Northwestern University, he teaches a popular course on political speechwriting. Today, he and Kristen live in New York City with their daughter, Grace.

Mr. Keenan graciously responded by email to a long series of questions on his new book and his work.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Mr. Keenan on your engaging new book Grace, a revelatory exploration of your work as chief speechwriter for President Obama at an incredibly turbulent time. Before getting to that period, I wanted to ask about your background. You majored in political science at Northwestern University. What sparked your interest in politics?

Cody Keenan: Well, I enrolled at Northwestern as a pre-med student. I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon after a football injury forced a knee reconstruction. Chemistry 101 weeded me right out, though. I just wanted to take biology.

But politics had always been an interest. My parents often argued about politics at the dinner table – my mom was a Kennedy Democrat from Indiana; my dad was a Reagan Republican from California – and whatever could make them so animated was something worth exploring. One value they both hammered into me, though, was the idea that I should do whatever I could to make sure more people had the same kind of opportunities I did growing up – and by the time I graduated from college, only one political party cared about that.

Robin Lindley: Did you have academic or other training in speechwriting?

Cody Keenan: No. Writing was something that always came naturally, and I think that came from being a voracious reader. I won every summer competition at the local public library. You can’t be a good writer without being a great reader.

Robin Lindley: You interned for legendary Senator Ted Kennedy after college. Did your duties in that role include speechwriting?

Cody Keenan: Not as part of the internship, or even the first position after that. Three months as an intern got me hired to answer his phones. I ended up working for him for almost four years in four different roles.

In 2004, when I was on his staff for the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, the Democratic National Convention was in Boston, his hometown. We all took a week off work to volunteer. I was on the arena floor the night that Barack Obama gave the speech that made him famous. He walked into the arena anonymous; he walked out 17 minutes later a global megastar. It shows you what a good speech can do.

Once we were back in Washington, I must have talked about that speech a lot, because that’s when my boss asked if I could write a speech. I don’t know if he meant did I have the time or did I know how, but it didn’t matter – I lied and said yes.

Robin Lindley: Senator Kennedy was known as a great legislator in the Senate who could work across the aisle. Did you work with him or his staff on any significant projects? What did you learn from that internship?

Cody Keenan: As an intern, one of my tasks was to read and route mail that came to the office. Perfect strangers were writing a senator – often one who wasn’t even their senator – to ask for help. There’s an act of hope involved in that. Even when it was a tough letter to read, even when you could see that the writer had wiped a tear from the page, they hoped that someone on the other end would care enough to help. I learned right away just how important this stuff is.

Later, as a staffer, I worked on all sorts of legislation. Kennedy was involved in everything. Health care, minimum wage, education, immigration, the Iraq War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, Supreme Court nominations – we were always busy. And with good mentors, I learned that just as important as the policy itself was often the way you communicated it.

Robin Lindley: What attracted you to working for President Obama during his first presidential campaign in 2007? Did you work as a speechwriter before his election?

Cody Keenan: Well, what struck me about that 2004 speech was that he described politics the way I wanted it to be – as this collective endeavor in which we could do extraordinary things that we couldn’t do alone. His only speechwriter at the time, Jon Favreau, called me early in the campaign and asked if I wanted to join the speechwriting team he was putting together. I said yes.

Robin Lindley:  What did you learn or do to prepare for work as a speechwriter for President Obama, one of our most celebrated American writers and thinkers even then? Did you go back and read works of some of the great White House writers such as Ted Sorensen, Bill Moyers, and Peggy Noonan? Did you read speeches by the likes of Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Churchill, and other memorable leaders?

Cody Keenan: I didn’t. I’d already read the canon of presidential hits, but to be a speechwriter for someone means writing for that specific person, helping him or her sound not like anybody else, but rather the best version of himself or herself.

Robin Lindley: I read that you didn’t personally meet President Obama until his first day at the White House in 2009. Yet, you had been working for him for a year and a half. What do you remember about your first meeting and your early days at the White House?

Cody Keenan: Yep – he visited Chicago headquarters maybe three times during the campaign. He was out campaigning! And when he did visit, it was for strategy sessions with his top aides and to address the entire staff at once, not to meet with his most junior speechwriter.

On our first day at the White House, he called me into the Oval Office because he’d seen my name at the top of speech drafts and he just wanted to put a face to the name. Those early days were drinking from a firehose: the economy was falling apart, millions of Americans had lost their jobs and their homes in just the four months before he took office, and millions more would in the first few months after. There was no honeymoon; we were busy trying to turn that firehose onto the fire.

Robin Lindley: Did you immediately start as a speechwriter once President Obama began work at the White House?

Cody Keenan: I did.

Robin Lindley: How does one prepare for a job that requires knowing the voice and propensities of the person they are writing for?

Cody Keenan: Well, I had a year and a half foundation from the campaign. I’d read his books to absorb his worldview, listened to the audio versions to absorb his cadence, and paid close attention to his edits. He was a writer. He was our chief speechwriter. And he was our top editor. I learned a lot just by poring over his edits to our drafts.

Robin Lindley: How did your relationship with President Obama evolve over his eight years in office? You wrote that working for this acclaimed writer could be terrifying. It seems he offered good advice to you such as having a drink and listening to Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Or reading James Baldwin. Did you see him as a kind of coach or mentor?

Cody Keenan: I was the junior writer on the team for the first two years, sitting across the driveway in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Then a series of high-profile speeches got me promoted to deputy director of speechwriting, and I moved into a West Wing office with Jon Favreau. Once he left after the second inaugural, I took over as chief speechwriter. So naturally, our relationship evolved – I went from seeing Obama every couple weeks to every week to every day.

I saw him as my boss. I guess as a writing coach of sorts. And sometimes even as an uncle or older brother who loved to dispense advice. He hosted my wife and our families and our best friends at the White House on our wedding day. It was his idea. He didn’t have to do that.

Robin Lindley: Are there other bits of President Obama’s advice that stick with you?

Cody Keenan: “Don’t impart motives to people.” That’s advice we could use more of.

Robin Lindley: Indeed. A big question, but can you give a sense of the speechwriting process? What sparks the process? Who is involved? What’s it like to collaborate with a team of writers and other staff?

Cody Keenan: He viewed speechwriting as a collaboration. He just wanted us to give him something he could work with. We wrote 3,477 speeches and statements in the White House, and believe it or not, he edited most of the speeches, even if lightly. But he couldn’t be deeply involved with all of them.

For any speech of consequence, though, we’d start by sitting down with him and asking “what’s the story we’re trying to tell?” Then the speechwriting team would talk over each speech, helping each other get started. Then we’d all go back to our own laptops and draft whatever speech we’d been assigned. The drafting was not a collaborative process. The revising was – with each other, but more importantly with him.

Robin Lindley: What’s the fact checking process for a speech draft before it goes to the president? It’s interesting that your future wife Kristen was one of the very diligent fact-checkers you relied on.

Cody Keenan: Yeah, she literally got paid to tell me I was wrong. Every day. For years. It was her team’s job to fireproof the president – to make sure he never said something he shouldn’t, with someone he shouldn’t be with, at a place he shouldn’t be visiting. They prevented countless alternate timelines where we’d have to do some cleanup in the press. They saved us from ourselves again and again.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations on your marriage to Kristen with the magnificent White House wedding. Your blossoming romance runs like a red thread through your book. You note that President Obama would stay up late at night to review and edit drafts of speeches he would give the next day. And you often received late night calls from him or met with him in the wee hours. How did those final hours work with a speech? It seems the president would often edit to the time of delivery.

Cody Keenan: He always edited in the wee hours of the morning. It’s when he preferred to work. It was rare that we were editing right up until delivery. If we were flying somewhere for a speech, he’d always go over it one or two final times on the plane. But he didn’t like chaos. In fact, the reason he edited so heavily, so often, was because he wanted the speech exactly the way he wanted it. Sometimes it was perfectionism. But it’s really just preparation.

Robin Lindley: What did you think when the president ad libbed or changed something from your draft as he spoke? I think you said something to the effect that he was a better speechwriter than all of his writing staff.

Cody Keenan: I loved it. I can’t think of a time I cringed at an adlib. He had a knack for it. It could be a little white-knuckled if he did it at the end of the speech when there’s no text for him to come back to. In that case, he’d have to build a new runway while he was speaking on which to land the plane.

Robin Lindley: When does humor come into the mix? Do you write for events such as the White House Correspondents Dinner? President Obama had some zingers for his eventual birther successor at these events.

Cody Keenan: Those were our most collaborative sets of remarks. The entire team would pitch jokes, and we’d reach out to professional comedy writers to solicit their help. We’d start out with about 200 jokes and whittle them down to the 20 funniest. Sometimes, none of your jokes would make the cut. You’ve got to have a thick skin.

Robin Lindley: And you and the other speechwriters did not use a template such as this speech is on the economy or this speech is political, so we’ll use the file template X or Y. You were responsible for more than three thousand speeches, yet it seems each speech was approached as a unique project.

Cody Keenan: Yes and no. We never used a template. But while each individual speech should tell a story, so should all speeches. What I mean by that is, we were mindful that every speech we wrote fit into a longer narrative arc – both of his presidency and his entire political career.

Robin Lindley: You worked for the president through his eight years in office. How did you come to focus on ten days in 2015 in Grace as the president dealt with the horrific 2015 mass murder of nine Black parishioners by an avowed white supremacist at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The president then also was preparing to address two impending Supreme Court decisions that would determine the fate of the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality.  

Cody Keenan: Yeah. People will remember all of the stories and all of the events in this book. They won’t remember that they all happened in the same ten-day span. I mean, that in and of itself is a story that demands to be told. In addition to a massacre carried out by a self-radicalized white supremacist, there was a very real chance that the Supreme Court would say no, people who work two or three jobs don’t deserve help affording health insurance; no, gay Americans don’t get to get married like the rest of us; all of those people are now second-class citizens. And the first Black president has to serve as the public narrator and provide some moral clarity for all of this.

Someone once described it as ten days too implausible for an entire season of The West Wing. But it’s also what those events symbolized and how they fit in the broader, centuries-long story of America – whether or not we’re actually going to live up to the ideals we profess to believe in. Whether we’re going to stand up to white supremacy, and bigotry, and people who profit from inequality and violence. And that week, the answers were all “yes.”

Robin Lindley: With the Charleston massacre, the president had to address another mass shooting and he was tired of giving eulogies after the murders at Sandy Hook and all of the other heartbreaking mass shootings during his term in office. How was his speech at Mother Emmanuel Church different from previous addresses? What was your role in creating this memorable speech? How did the speech go beyond a eulogy to become a message of reconciliation?

Cody Keenan: We had done over a dozen eulogies after mass shootings at that point. And this goes back a few years, the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 little kids were murdered in their classrooms, along with six of their educators, was right after he’d been reelected.

And he put aside his second term agenda right out of the gate to try to do something about guns, because what an abdication of leadership that would be if he didn’t. And he had a little boost by Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey, an arch conservative from Pennsylvania with an A-rating from the NRA. They both had one. They decided to work together on a background checks bill. And even though we knew the odds in the Senate would be long, that gives you something to try for. And so, we traveled the country for a few months. He made it a centerpiece of his State of the Union address. Big, emotional, powerful ending. And in the end, in April, Republicans blocked a vote on it with the parents of the Newtown kids watching from the gallery.

And that’s about as cynical as I’ve ever seen Barack Obama. Yet he went out and spoke in the Rose Garden with those families. I handed him a draft of the speech and he said, look out, I'm going to use this as a as a template, but I’m just going to wing it. And he came in after that speech into the outer Oval Office, which is this room just off the oval where his assistants sit, and he was almost yelling once the door closed, he said, “what am I going to do the next time this happens? What am I going to say? I don’t want to speak. If we’ve decided as a country that we’re not going to do anything about this, then I don’t want to be the one who closes the cycle every time with a eulogy that gives the country permission to move on.”

Ultimately, we did decide to do a eulogy after Charleston, and it was his idea to build the structure of the speech around the lyrics to “Amazing Grace.”

Robin Lindley: I think everyone was surprised and moved when President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” during the Charleston speech. Were you surprised or was that part of the plan for the speech?