Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to be talking about a topic that I suppose won’t be much of a surprise to people, although its context has changed. Heather, when you and I were, along with the Now & Then team, were pondering what we were going to be talking about for this episode. Of course, we thought State of the Union Addresses, and we thought about the fact that President Biden’s address was going to be coming up on March 1st. And we thought, wouldn’t it be great to offer context on what these addresses are and what they mean, and how they’ve been shaped over time and what the impact has been. And to really talk about what State of the Union Addresses mean. Now, we are recording this still before the State of the Union Address. However, after Russia has invaded Ukraine and after president Biden has made a public statement about that invasion.

So we are at a kind of middle moment here. We still don’t know necessarily what’s going to happen in the State of the Union Address. But one of the things that you and I Heather talked about when we were talking about this episode is how striking it is that so many State of the Union Addresses, the majority of them begin by talking about foreign affairs. Which I suppose if you were just thinking about what a State of the Union Address is, you might think, well, literally, defined literally, it’s about how things are in the United States. But in fact, the state of the American union is entirely bound up with the rest of the world. And so it makes perfect sense that these addresses start by defining our place in it before turning internal and talking about the state of the nation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And in fact, in our very first episode ever, I believe you made that point that American foreign affairs were always intimately bound up with international affairs. We explored why they seems to have come unglued in the 1970s primarily, and what that’s meant at the time for America domestically, but in this moment, reinserting how important foreign affairs are to who Americans are and have always been, seems like it’s kind of a perfect moment.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed. It is a perfect moment. And you’re right, I had sort of forgotten about that, but one of the defining features of the early years of the American Republic is that very fact. And it’s one that’s always hard to get across to students, is that foreign affairs and domestic affairs were not two separate bodies of affairs that people understood at the time, that you couldn’t separate them. And that, for example, if there was a revolution in France, it was going to have an enormous impact on whatever was happening socially, politically, in every other way, economically, in the United States. So yeah, here we are at a different kind of a moment, a very different kind of a time, really kind of standing at a point where we are going to see what happens and how it shapes things to come in the United States and in the rest of the world at large.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I don’t think many people think a lot about the State of the Union. I do think about it for some reasons I’ll talk about that are not at all with what the framers wanted. But why do we have a State of the Union? What the heck is going on with that?

Joanne Freeman:

The Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the constitution says, and it’s a very plain, basic-

Heather Cox Richardson:

As one knows.

Joanne Freeman:

Of course. Now, how many times have you been like-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Please tell me you have that open in front of you.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. I was going to say.

Joanne Freeman:

I’m being honest. I have it written down in front of me, along with the precise wording of what it says in the constitution. I should have lied, and it says, “The president shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their considerations, such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Pretty basic. It doesn’t even necessarily say annual, although it became an annual practice. Just says the president from time to time, will report to Congress information about the State of the Union. So, that’s all it says in the constitution. And initially, it was not called the State of the Union Address. That’s really more of a 20th century practice. It was just considered to be an annual address. George Washington gave one. The idea as to why it was, there was partly cause of the need for accountability in government, the need for Congress, the people’s branch to know what the executive branch was thinking and was doing and was planning to do, so it was a form of responsibility among other things.

And it was also, as so many things were in that early period, kind of a hold of over from the British. I’ve always found it fascinating in early America, the degree to which Americans are always torn between, well, the British did this, so it must be lofty and noble and we should follow it. Or the British did this and this, we should do nothing like it because we’ve revolted against them. In this case, there was a British practice of a speech from the throne opening sessions of parliament. And so this idea, it partly is related to that idea. The national executive, whether it’s a king or a president has that moment of standing before parliament or Congress and explaining the state of things. And if they have them, plans to come.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That makes sense in a system of government in which you’re trying to achieve some kind of transparency. You don’t need it if you just have to do whatever the king says, but if you have a system in which theoretically the government is responding to the needs of the people, you need to know what it’s actually doing. Which is a really important concept, sort of structurally I think for an address that many of us just sort of feel like, oh yeah, now it’s become such theater. But there’s actually a real meaning behind it, a real part of our system behind it.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, there is. And from the very beginning, both houses of Congress would write a response and deliver that to the president. So not only was it a statement on the part of the president to Congress, but it was kind of a pseudo opening conversation in a way that mattered. So yeah, we do take it for granted and do see it as sort of an empty ritual, but it started in a sense for very opposite reasons because it was important to have that kind of information collected together, laid out and offered to Congress.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Now. So, I want to walk through how it was delivered, because I love this story. So Washington, who’s the first president delivers the State of the Union, except it’s not called that, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Right, the Annual Message.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He delivers it in person where?

Joanne Freeman:

The first one would’ve been in New York where the capital was at the time. So he would’ve delivered it at Federal Hall, which is where Congress was meeting.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then John Adams gives his.

Joanne Freeman:

John Adams also gives actual in person addresses. Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So am I correct that he signed his letters in a really funny way?

Joanne Freeman:

In my ongoing argument that John Adams is the only sort of founder person with a sense of humor. I always cite the fact that he does sign one of his letters to Thomas Jefferson. John Adams, 80-something years of age and too fat to last much longer. And there is not another person of that status who would sign a letter that way. So that is my little example of actual humor among, as you put them, the founding frogs.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then from then on every president stayed in front of Congress to give the speech, right, because nobody would’ve broken that tradition, would they?

Joanne Freeman:

Harrumph. Of course. Who would be the person? Who would be the person who breaks that tradition?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I didn’t even mean…

Joanne Freeman:

Right. No, Thomas Jefferson. So Washington gives that kind of in-person address. John Adams, the next president does. Thomas Jefferson. The great Revolution of 1800, power is transferred from one pseudo party to another. Jefferson decides no, he’s not going to deliver an address in person. He’s going to send a message through his private secretary to Congress. And partly, supposedly that is because he saw that as a monarchical practice and he just did not want to practice it. He also was not very good at public speaking, did not enjoy it, just was not effective.

So I’m sure part of that decision was what a handy thing for me not to do this seeming monarchical practice, and then I don’t have to do it anymore. So probably both things weighed in. Alexander Hamilton, not surprisingly, had nothing but contempt for this decision. He just thought a message? A message from the president, really? What kind of a president sends a message to Congress. So he just thought it was the least presidential, most namby-pamby thing that a president could do. But Jefferson establishes this tradition, which stays around for the entire 19th century and part of the 20th century.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, in fairness, it is kind of monarchical to say, I’m not going to bother show up. I’m just going to send you a message. So, I get-

Joanne Freeman:

I suppose you could say that, monarchical sneering.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But I’d like it because in the 19th century, the State of the Unions were read. Theoretically, they were read by the clerk of the house, but mostly they didn’t really get around to doing it. But what happened was, in that period, the messages are, in that period, the pieces of the State of the Union are actually written and by the department heads. So if you’re trying to get a really quick look at what the treasury was doing in 1887, for example, as one does, you don’t have to actually go through the records of the treasury at first, you can just look and see what the treasury secretary said were the highlights of that year. So for 19th century historians, that process of not preparing something for delivery, but rather just sort of saying, hey George, can you write this section, it’s shorthand for what was happening in the country that year. And they’re incredibly useful.

Joanne Freeman:

Which you said when we started talking about this topic and given that I have not worked through a big chunk of the 19th century, that was sort of a little light bulb moment. Of course, that makes perfect sense to use annual addresses that way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, there’s a funny moment where Lincoln tries to have a rhetorical flourish in his first. And when it comes time for Congress to divide up the sections of the message and send it to one committee or another, somebody says, well, what are we going to do with this section? And somebody else sort of sneers, well, we don’t have a committee on metaphysics. And so, it doesn’t go anywhere. I mean, it’s very effective with people who hear about it in the newspapers, but Congress sneers at the whole thing. But so, we had thought about taking some key States of the Union, and in the early 19th century, the obvious one to take is dead in the middle of your wheelhouse, which is the State of the Union delivered by President Monroe that sets up some pretty important principles.

Joanne Freeman:

And it’s worth saying that when we were pondering which addresses to talk about, there were three that popped up as being obvious contenders. This is one of them because it launches what becomes known as the Monroe Doctrine. As you’ll hear throughout this episode, the three end up being centered on foreign affairs, foreign relations. That was not on purpose, that was actually three that when you look and research and think about these kinds of addresses, there’s a reason as you’ll hear today about why that kind of topic becomes central and breeds the kind of language that we are going to be talking about today. So the Monroe Doctrine, which I should say has Monroe’s name attached to it, but it’s John Quincy Adams, is the secretary of state who’s forging this and thinking this through, along with James Monroe, it’s coming at a time when the United States has been for a while and is continuing to think of the fact that it quote unquote, “Deserves to or should extend its influence over North America eventually,” right?

The idea that, well, just keep spreading, well, just keep spreading west. And this is a time of geographic and political instability, I suppose in some way. There are Latin American countries that are… Some of them had been having revolutions. In some cases, you had Spain trying to re-exert control. You had Russia, which was claiming control of the Pacific coast of North America from Alaska to Oregon. And in one way or another affecting shipping. In one way or another, you had a variety of foreign nations, either impinging on or claiming ownership or control over parts of North America or suggesting that they might. And this is happening in a sweeping enough kind of a way that it clearly is a phenomenon that deserves some serious consideration.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this is right after the War of 1812, which ends with America pushing back against the indigenous Americans and the British in the west among other places. So this is part of this whole, we beat the British, we’re going to beat back indigenous Americans, and we’re going to take over this continent. Is that right?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it’s really interesting. When you look at popular culture that comes out after the War of 1812, although many people look at that war and say, well, it really wasn’t very conclusive, all told when you look at what happens after it. The fact of the matter is the United States does indeed take that as this symbol that look at us, we fought two wars against Great Britain and we won both of them. And so we really have a swaggering degree of power. There are all of these political cartoons boasting of the fact that the United States now has really held its own and is powerful in a way that they hadn’t necessarily assumed they were. So psychologically speaking, the War of 1812 has an impact on the nation as new as it was.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things I love about that period, which becomes known as the era of good feelings is that now America’s like, yeah, we’re really our own nation now, and we don’t have to worry about Britain coming back from Canada and taking us back over. And then there’s this moment of like, oh crap, so what are we? And that’s when Americans madly start reading all those books about people traveling through America. What is this American, this new man, all these questions where they’re like, what does it actually mean to be an American now? Get new painters, new writers, new travel [crosstalk 00:14:11].

Joanne Freeman:

Interesting, because I’d never thought about that. That same time is when you have the first historical societies coming about in the United States, trying to reckon with the fact that the nation is old enough to have a history, but what does it mean?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. And what do we preserve? And who’s welcome and all those sorts of things.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. So there are all of these questions about foreign powers and one way or another, weighing in, seeking control. So as secretary of state, John Quincy Adams actually meets with Monroe. And there’s a really interesting account in his diary of that meeting, in which he acknowledges that Monroe really doesn’t know what he wants to do at this particular moment when something has to be done and someone needs to say something. But what will they say? And it involves Russia and Great Britain wants some perhaps union with the United States on making this kind of statement about what’s going on in North America and Latin America. And so it’s a moment in which something has to happen. Monroe isn’t sure what it is. There’s some discussion and ultimately the seventh Annual Message that James Monroe gives on December 2nd, 1823, essentially draws a line. I suppose you could say a line in the sand or a line in the ocean.

He essentially draws a line, separating a them from an us. And I’m going to quote you the language from that message. He says, “In the wars of the European powers and matters relating to themselves, we have never taken any part nor does it comport with our policy to do so. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced, that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it and whose independence we have on great consideration and on just principles acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling in any manner, their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

So he’s saying something really clear there, these nations that have declared their independence and who the United States have declared independence that are over here with us in our part of the world, any attempt to mess with them, we will see as basically an attack in one way or another on us. It will be dangerous to make. You folks over there in Europe don’t want to mess with us over here. And basically, the Monroe Doctrine breaks down to four assertions. Number one, the United States would not interfere in European affairs going on between European nations. The United States would not interfere with existing European colonies in the Western Hemisphere. No other nation could form a new colony in the Western Hemisphere. And if a European nation tried to interfere with a nation in the Western Hemisphere, the United States would consider this an act of aggression. So the Monroe Doctrine in a really kind of spatial almost geographic way, draws a line and says that you are there and we are here, and that matters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s such a great description of the Monroe Doctrine and why it matters. It’s a great segue into the other ones we wanted to talk about, but it’s probably worth picking up that it’s not until Woodrow Wilson, that another president is going to give a State of the Union Address in person. And that matters because the States of the Union, as we say, get pretty dry. They get long and they get dry and they’re great for historians, but they don’t do much other than say, this happened, this happened, this happened. Woodrow Wilson changes that when he takes office, because he’s trying really to change the course of America and he does this great thing where he forces all the Congress to come and listen to him speak. And it’s a really long speech and he’s a college professor and they’re all really, really pissed off that he makes them do it. And that brings this idea of presenting it again back. But that speech, it’s very important, but it’s not a barn burner. It’s not anything that anybody would rally around and say, yeah, he’s my boy.

Joanne Freeman:

So that changes with FDR who isn’t just reporting things in a sort of useful way for historians like you and I, to look at and get a state of affairs, from that time on, these addresses, generally speaking, are also used to announce and rally support for the president’s legislative agenda for the coming year. And particularly when technology takes off so that other people can hear or see what the president is saying, these addresses become a way for a president to convey some kind of a vision of the nation to Congress, but equally, if not more importantly, to the American people through radio, through TV, to… It’s a moment when a president has a voice in front of the nation in a way that is not the same at all in a press conference. It’s in a way that really happens, a kind of official declaration of the nation as seen at that moment in time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

FDR needs to switch the way America is thinking about the burgeoning war in Europe. So he is facing a movement at home of people who talk about America first, who talk about not getting involved in the war and who look back at World War I, and see it as simply an attempt of the munitions makers to become merchants of death, as one of the famous cartoons put it. So in December of 1940, ironically December 7th of 1940, Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, asked FDR and the US government to assist Britain both with money and with weapons in order to fight their war against the Nazis. And this is going to be a hard sell in America, which does not want to get involved in another foreign war. So on December 29th, Roosevelt actually delivered a Fireside Chat. And this Fireside Chat is going to be the sort of tone that he’s going to pick up in his very famous message to Congress.

It’s called the Arsenal of Democracy. He talks about selling munitions to Britain and to Canada in a way that will break that isolationism, that America first movement, that had been defining American foreign policy before World War II. And he talks in that speech about shifting America’s war mobilization pretty dramatically. And over the next six months, the Roosevelt administration puts in place what was called the Lend-Lease program, which allowed the US to begin shipping munitions to the allies after the Arsenal of Democracy speech. Americans also began to prepare to send troops over to potentially fight a war. And the number of American troops on active duty quadrupled to over a million men, but he still needs to defend why America should do this in such a way that people will rally behind it, sending American boys to fight foreign wars, if you will. So on January 6th, 1941 in a State of the Union Address of 1941, and remember, this is almost a year before Pearl Harbor, he outlines the reason that Americans should go to fight in this war. And he does it by outlining what he calls the four freedoms.

Joanne Freeman:

Here is actually his description of what these four freedoms are. And as you’ll hear, it’s a really powerful declaration of us, what is the us. He says.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (archival):

The first is freedom of speech and expression, everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which translated into world terms, means economic understandings, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants, everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor, anywhere in the world.

Joanne Freeman:

So he’s declaring these four freedoms. He’s making it clear that America supports these four freedoms and asserting that they should carry throughout the world. Obviously, setting things up to suggest that the enemy that needs to be under attack, they do not believe in these four freedoms. So it’s an assertion of an ideology for the United States and that that ideology deserves to be spread around the world. It’s both a sort of identifying four freedoms for the United States, but also in its own way, an aggressive statement of what should be beyond the United States.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I love how he got to that because you can see him working through these concepts. And I always love to watch anyone’s mind at work, but certainly a presidential mind at work. So he gave a press conference in July of 1940 on the 5th in Hyde Park, in which he says, he’s talking about this war in Europe. And he says, “The question really comes down to whether we are going to continue to seek those freedoms or whether we are going to give up at the behest of certain elements, those freedoms of in our system of government. Or encouraged by lack of opposition, I don’t mean armed opposition, those nations, which have removed those four freedoms in the interests of a greater efficiency of government, a temporary efficiency, I might say.” So he’s playing with this idea of, do we really want to stand up for these things or not?

So then he is sitting with his advisors in preparation for writing the Four Freedoms speech. And this moment, I absolutely love, because he’s sitting there. And Joanne, you and I have both been at a place like this, I suspect, where you’ve been thinking about something for a long time and you’re doing some workman-like. And all of a sudden, you think, aha. So one of his advisors, Samuel Rosenman later remembered, “We were sitting in the president’s study one night, grouped around his desk as usual, Harry, Bob and I. The president held the original of the third draft in his hand,” they’d been writing the speech. “Each of us had a carbon copy of the draft and a yellow pad on his lap on which to make notes. Dorothy Brady was taking dictation this night, but by the time a speech had reached this stage, there was not much dictation to take. Usually only those inserts by the president, which were too long for him to write out in long hand.”

Here it comes. “The president announced as he came near the end of the draft, that he had an idea for a peroration. We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling. It was a long pause, so long that it began to become uncomfortable. Then he leaned forward again in his chair. He dictated the words so slowly that on the yellow pad I had on my lap, I was able to take them down myself in long hand, as he spoke.” That’s when he makes a declaration about the four freedoms. “And Harry Hopkins, who was there,” Rosenman later remembered said, “‘That covers an awful lot of territory, Mr. President. I don’t know how interested Americans are going to be in the people of Java.’ And Roosevelt answered, ‘I’m afraid they’ll have to be someday, Harry. The world is getting so small that even the people of Java are getting to be our neighbors.'”

So there was a piece of the Four Freedom speech that didn’t get the attention that it ought to have, but seems to me, considering the stuff I’m studying lately, to be really, really crucial and to highlight. And Rosenman later on said that the advisors expected it to be one of the most iconic lines of the State of the Union. And it really didn’t get the attention that they thought it would have. Roosevelt said in the Four Freedom speech.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (archival):

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.

Joanne Freeman:

So there’s a lot that he was talking about there in ideology, in dividing lines, in world powers or where the power should be in the world. And some of these, we’re talking about freedoms, we’re actually getting down to a kind of guttural cultural level of us and what we are and what they are. And I’ll bet that there are some people out there listening to us right now who have an image in their mind, and aren’t absolutely sure to connect it. Norman Rockwell ultimately creates a four painting series inspired by the Four Freedoms. It took him about seven months to complete the four. So Freedom From Want shows a Thanksgiving dinner, that makes perfect sense. Freedom From Fear shows a mother tucking in her children while her husband holds a newspaper with headlines, reading bombings and horror. Freedom of Worship shows a close up of a group with their hands classed in prayer.

And Freedom of Speech shows a man speaking at a town meeting. Norman Rockwell, for so many people created at that moment to sort of particular image of what America was by his point of view, but according to many other people’s point of view, it’s striking and quite logical that he saw that as a subject for his paintings, that there’s a resonance to those paintings even today. Which I think makes sense because there’s so many aspects of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms that really do capture in one way or another some aspects, some things that we still wrestle with as being American in some way, but how, why, and when?

Heather Cox Richardson:

The paintings themselves became part of a touring exhibition from the Treasury Department, in order to sell war bonds, and more than a million people went to see them. They bought more than $133 million worth of war bonds and stamps after seeing them. And anybody who bought one of the bonds got a set of prints of the four paintings. And what I love about out those paintings, and Rockwell was in many ways, both a mirror of American society and a leader of American society, is that he managed to convey FDR’s somewhat complicated ideas of what American democracy meant in these incredibly visceral pictures. That, again, even us saying the four freedoms, those come to mind. And what’s funny about it is when we did the prep for this, there’s some wonderful material about E.B. White, who later wrote a pamphlet. The same man who wrote Charlotte’s Web, and was a great letter writer and a great essayist for the New Yorker, and other magazines as well, was asked to write a pamphlet about the four freedoms.

And he’s a brilliant writer, but the pamphlet never took off. He sounded kind of diffident. And he’s like, “Well, what is really our freedom? And what should we be doing here?” And the paintings become icons because they tell the story so freaking clearly that you can look at that man standing up in the town hall, in his work clothes and he’s standing in those seats and we’ve all been in that place. And you can feel it in a way that even FDR’s words didn’t necessarily convey.

Joanne Freeman:

And what, right, what more powerful way can there be to convey a sense of us-ness than the emotional bond created by the sort of warm, fuzzy feeling of a Thanksgiving dinner. We have these images in our head and just looking at them, communicates something so warm and fundamental that it almost doesn’t require words and ideas to communicate, which is one of the things that art can do really effectively, but it works so well with these ideas in the way that they’re being used to communicate, “freedoms” that are fundamentally American.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and they emphasize community. These are all community pictures of people coming together to represent those things at a time when the country really needed to pull together in order to overcome the idea that Americans shouldn’t go fight for those principles in another country.

Joanne Freeman:

So us-ness on two levels. Us-ness, meaning the United States of America and what we stand for and us, meaning communities of people who should be acknowledging the fact that they are together in communities and together will stand up for what these freedoms represent.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if FDR defines America as a democracy that’s protecting these four freedoms, drawing a line between American democracy and fascism overseas, in order to explain to Americans why they needed to fight that war. George W. Bush is going to do something very different in January of 2002, when he defines America as opposing what he calls the axis of evil.

Joanne Freeman:

You have Monroe talking about with his doctrine, a kind of line dividing us and them in a spatial kind of a way. You have these four freedoms, again, defining who we are and who they are and how things need to spread in a spatial kind of a way. He’s referring to the world at large. Now you have an axis again, another kind of dividing line, an axis of evil. So it’s not just saying, forces of evil or evil powers. It’s an axis of evil. It’s a spatial connection of kind, something that feels as though it’s, again, an organized them that we can take up arms against.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that definition is important because of course the Al-Qaeda militants who flew the planes into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001, were not state actors. They are non-state actors, they are terrorists. So how do you define that in such a way that you can rally the American people against a non-state actor? And that, ability to do that, is going to be really important as Bush has to justify going into Afghanistan, which was harboring Al-Qaeda. And then later on, to expand the concept of pushing back against those non-state actors, by actively going into Afghanistan, and then Iraq in such a way that we rebuild those places to become democracies, to be on the good side against the axis of evil. And it’s an interesting spatial way to redefine the world as those of us who think this way are on this side. And those of you who think that way are on that side, now we are standing against people who are almost religiously, maybe not even almost, who are religiously defined.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s true, and that’s interesting. I mean, just think about the trajectory of what we’ve been talking about today. You have you folks over there, you can’t come over here into our part of the world and do anything. And then you have these people are against these freedoms and we’re for these freedoms. And we’ve now segued into, they are evil. We must attack them because they are evil. That’s an intensifying way of defining us and them, until in this latter case, you’re really focusing on the them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Bush is very careful to call attention to a number of special guests that he has brought over from the new American-backed Afghan government in Afghanistan, that he’s got sitting up there to watch what’s happening. He also has the wife of a CIA officer and Marine Micheal Spann, who was the first American to die in combat in Afghanistan.

George W. Bush (archival):

Last month at the graver for her husband, Michael, CIA officer and Marine, who died in Mazar-i-Sharif, Shannon Spann said, “These words are farewell. Semper fi my love.” Shannon is with us tonight.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There is this almost theater to it, this idea of not only are we standing against the acts of evil, we’re doing so with an almost classical parade of what that’s going to look like, and the degree to which the State of the Union has become spectacle. Who’s going to invite whom? Who’s going to be seen? Are we going to have, somebody’s going to embarrass the president politically? Are we going to have somebody who cheers on the president’s policies politically, has become a big part of the State of the Union. And I have to confess one that I particularly don’t like, because it feels to me as if it’s sort of the entertainment moment, as opposed to actually being about the solemnity of having transparency in our government.

Joanne Freeman:

You have the applause and the silence, and some people applauding and some people standing, and some people sitting and that sort of performative component of State of the Union Addresses. But when you bring these visitors in it, complicates that, right? Because these are, in a sense, outsiders, meaning not members of Congress or members of the executive branch. And so how they’re being treated and how they’re being portrayed, that complicates these moments a lot in a way that can be uncomfortable, I think. And can be not that State of the Union Addresses aren’t partisan, they are, but this aspect of them is weirdly personal and partisan. So I agree with you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And Bush had to find a defining moment for his presidency. He had to define a reason after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, there’s this real attempt to try and redefine what America was going to be. And after the 9/11 attacks, there was a sense that Bush had found the America’s defining principle. And in that January 29th State of the Union speech, he says about the regimes that he puts in the axis of evil.

George W. Bush (archival):

Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th, but we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers, huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections, then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That axis of evil statement, is like everybody grabbed that when it came out. And a lot of people in the popular press made fun of him because they said it was moralistic.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it sounds sort of like comic booky, right? The axis of evil. It’s lampoonable because it’s so extreme.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it picks up from Ronald Reagan’s evil empire that he talked about the Soviet Union. And he says, oh, now we’ve got… You thought the world was going to be safer because now the Soviet Union’s collapsed. No, no, no. Now we got the whole axis of evil. We don’t just have an evil empire. We have a whole axis of evil. And that though is both a way to rally people against terrorism and sort of the dropping of the country into a permanent world, if you will, where the United States has almost a religious mission to stand against evil.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, right. Once you’ve defined it as evil, that’s the ultimate line, right? It’s one thing to say freedoms versus those who are opposing them. It’s one thing to say, nations that have sovereignty versus other countries that want to take that sovereignty away. Now we’re just taught evil versus good. It’s the ultimate line in the sand, I suppose you could say. But what’s interesting about this to me, the axis of evil phrase for the very reasons that we’re talking about here, that it’s lampoonable, but it’s powerful in its way. Same thing with the idea of the Four Freedoms, same thing with Monroe’s idea, even if it’s not necessarily immediately poof, called the Monroe Doctrine.

Joanne Freeman:

All of these are easily graspable, charismatically phrased ideas that capture the kind of gut feeling of a foreign policy and communicated the logic and feeling behind it in a way that can, and in some cases really did have resonance with the public. Not only inform Congress and not only promote an agenda, but do that extra third step, which is capture the public, which if you’re talking about warfare, if you’re talking about doing something, whether formal or informal towards another country, you have to have public’s support behind you.

These phrases in these State of the Union Addresses have a power because they are delivered in State of the Union Addresses. Because they are delivered at these moments that are seen as kind of definitive defining moments when a president stands before the nation and states, not only what has happened and what will happen, but what the nation stands for. We are talking about these days before President Biden’s upcoming State of the Union Address. We know obviously in some way, he’s going to have to address Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and who knows what’s going to happen between now and when, several days from now, when he gives that address.

We know regardless foreign affairs are always a major part of these addresses and typically front and center, they’re the first thing that’s mentioned. So now what we’re going to have to see in one way or another on March 1st, is the president defining kind of what this moment means to the United States, not just stating an agenda, but using this moment to communicate something about what it means and how we should understand it. I can’t pretend to imagine what he will say. What I do know is what he does choose to say will have extreme importance.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is the same kind of defining moment we had with the four freedoms, and perhaps even with the axis of evil speech in that it is really clear, we are in a global struggle between financial, economic, social, legal political systems. In which on one side we have the concept of democracy and human self-determination, and on the other side, we have the concept of oligarchy and those autocratic leaders who have said, I mean, this is not me saying, oh, these guys are bad. They have literally said that democracy is obsolete, and the idea essentially is to get rid of the concept of widespread democracy and people being able to vote and having a say in their government and having equal rights. And those things are a new line with us on one side. One, it is to be hoped in one on the other, but just like FDR, Biden’s going to have to bring a law on a lot of Americans who are sitting here from where they sit and saying, as they did last night on a couple of podcasts, well, we kind of like the way Russia looks.

It’s Christian. It’s, in their view, it has a lot of attributes that we really like, so why should we be standing against that? Why shouldn’t we actually just welcome that kind of participation in our world systems. And so for Biden to find a way to delineate on one side democracy and on the other side, oligarchy in such a way that it is catchy, it seems is the question.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s the thing, is that we’ve certainly, and you and I have been doing a lot of it, right? A lot of discussion about democracy in peril, about there being kind of a war of authoritarianism versus democracy around the world, about what’s going on in the United States is reflecting that struggle. Here we have a moment in which Russia has invaded and threatened the sovereignty of a nation. And again, is in a sense, thus attacking democracy. Regardless of what President Biden decides to say, we are in that moment. We are in this moment of democracy versus authoritarianism and it is very real within the United States, as well as around the world. So the real question for this coming State of the Union Address, in what way will President Biden choose to address this? How will he find to address it that focuses more on us than on the us versus them mentality that really prevails in the United States right now? Will there be a takeaway message that in one way or another can really support, uphold and defend democracy?