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 undertaking the third of a three part series of episodes about free speech. And the topic of today’s episode is cancel culture. Now, I will readily admit right off the bat that when we were discussing last week, this topic for today, we spent a long time, Heather and I, and the producers trying to define what cancel culture is. And that was tricky to do, and as we’ll see shortly, I’m going to argue that’s deliberate.

But generally speaking, cancel culture is something that you hear about all the time in one way or another has to do with people being canceled, erased, silenced, normally people who are well known in one way or another or people, I guess who gain notoriety in one way or another being canceled by a large group sometimes online, sometimes not, but really being silenced and thereby canceled.

Now, the idea of cancellation apparently as a general idea, goes back to roughly, well, I suppose there was a film, New Jack City in which someone was referred to as being canceled in 1991. But 2014 is when the phrase was being used within the Black community in songs, people would talk about love being canceled. So people have been talking about canceling people for a while. Cancel culture I think is something different, and I’m going to be curious, Heather to hear what you have to say about this.

But just the phrase cancel culture. If you think about culture wars also as one of these statements that seemingly describe something but actually doesn’t, I would argue that cancel culture is yet another one of these buzzword things like critical race theory and everything else that are being used to lump a lot of emotions and fears under a category. And that by definition, it’s not supposed to be easy to define. That it represents a feeling and a response more than something that’s very specific, and I would argue that’s part of why you and I, Heather had such an interesting time trying to pin down what it was. Cancel culture is not the same thing as cancellation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But I would add to that as I was thinking about this, that it’s important to remember that we’re talking about free speech. And the way that we came up with this whole topic was the idea that you hear so much nowadays that if you try and stop somebody from spouting stuff that is racist or sexist or really over the top offensive or any number of things, invariably it seems comes back, “You’re silencing my free speech rights. Don’t you know the First Amendment.” And I have explained so many times to people that the First Amendment does not protect them from the consequences of their actions, nor does it give them the right to be in my personal space, spewing stuff that I find enormously offensive.

Joanne Freeman:

The First Amendment does not erase or cancel accountability, you’re accountable for what you say.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But there’s another piece to that too. And that is when we talk about the public pressures, the culture that makes certain kinds of speech unacceptable, even though you’re not going to jail for them or whatever, you are effectively drawing boundaries around what it is okay to say in our culture without tripping up against the First Amendment. That is that people are aware that in some setting or another, there are certain things that if they say them, they’re going to take a lot of blow back.

And so many people either feel they can’t say those things or say them and end up getting somehow shut out of a job they used to have or a community in which they used to participate. So it’s a complicated issue and it is very charged, but at the end of the day, one of the things that really jumped out to me about all of the things we’re talking about is that each one that we picked for various reasons ultimately is about the weaponization of those guardrails by a political party.

Joanne Freeman:

I love working with you, Heather because we always end up-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because we’re right.

Joanne Freeman:

Without even trying to. We’re right, and we go to the same place. I scribbled down in the notes that I took preparing for this, that ultimately cancel culture is about making people go away for political purpose. It’s the weaponization of this kind of behavior for political purpose.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which is not the way it was originally used, that’s not at all the way it was originally used. But it has become in today’s parlance a weapon that a political party can use without tripping over the First Amendment.

Joanne Freeman:

Explicitly because it can encompass so much. It’s general enough that it can encompass a lot, and if it’s done with even an iota of skill, you just said in one context or another and that’s important here because it depends on who you’re within, what group you’re within as to what the boundaries are and they’re different with different groups, the left or the right. But still you could do a lot with, “Cancel culture,” if it’s defined that vaguely.

I also in casting about before this episode found that at the 2020 Republican National Convention, first of all, about a third of the people who took the stage, talked about cancel culture as being a very big problem of politics today. But here’s how one delegate resolution defined cancel culture. This Republican said the council culture is, “Erasing history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts and speech.” In what way does that refer only to people on the left? That people on the right saying cancel culture, for example, is erasing history. And this is from the people who are saying certain kinds of history can’t be taught in classrooms. So to me, that’s a very clear weaponization of this idea.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The other piece of that concept, the political concept nowadays of cancel culture comes out for example, when people like Tucker Carlson complained about the canceling of Dr. Seuss, when what really happened with that Dr. Seuss issue was that the estate of Dr. Seuss made a business decision that there were two books that were not selling and they decided to stop printing them. They didn’t burn them. They just said, “This is not going to be in print.” Well, if everybody whose book goes out of print can complain that it’s a conspiracy against them, we’ve got ourselves a whole new movement right there.

Joanne Freeman:

And a lot of academics will have a lot to say about that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

A lot say. “We’ve been canceled.”

Joanne Freeman:

“I’m being canceled.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think those are the important points, the weaponization of a social and cultural set of guardrails about what kind of speech society will accept. Because that’s really different than partially saying, “I’m not going to talk to my ex-boyfriend any longer,” That’s not cancel culture, which in many ways was the way it started out being conceived.

Joanne Freeman:

But that’s why I think the phrase cancel culture is important for the very thing that you’re pointing to. It’s not just canceling someone, meaning not talking about them or not wanting them to be important or trying to take away their fame. Cancel culture like culture wars suggests there’s something broader going on here. And as you’re suggesting the weaponization of it by people of different politics, that’s, what’s at play. And that’s why the phrase cancel culture, I think is important to rope into the way that we’re discussing this here.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So can we start with Thomas Hutchinson because I’ve wanted to hear you talk about Thomas Hutchinson forever.

Joanne Freeman:

You have, have you?

Heather Cox Richardson:

He’s a great example because Thomas Hutchinson is a loyalist during the American Revolution and what that means both for him and for the people who object to him is actually a great illustration of exactly what we’re talking about.

Joanne Freeman:

So Thomas Hutchinson is born in Boston in 1711. He comes to power and is in various positions of power in the decades leading up to and in the early period of the American Revolution, his family was a very wealthy merchant family. They went way back so they were Hutchinsons in Massachusetts for a very long time. He ended up serving in a variety of different positions of political leadership in Massachusetts. So he was a provincial assemblyman. He was speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He was lieutenant governor. He was chief justice and ultimately becomes the colonial governor of Massachusetts, which will come to in a moment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can I ask some questions about him? This is so dumb. What did he look like?

Joanne Freeman:

There’s a very famous book about him called the Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson by the historian Bernard Baylin. And he describes looking at a portrait of Hutchinson. Basically, he said, “You can see the wisp of a smile about his face, but that basically he has a bland appearance.” There’s nothing about him that looks charismatic.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So he’s very wealthy, right? He’s well connected. He’s worked his way up, probably thinks he rules. I’m making this up by the way. I’m just looking at his resume here.

Joanne Freeman:

He’s very arrogant and certainly believed that he was the man with the information and the arguments who served in a variety of positions of power and felt that he deserved generally speaking to be in positions of power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that’s how it all played out, and he lived happily ever after, right?

Joanne Freeman:

The end, let’s move on. No, obviously that is not. What’s interesting about him is it’s not as easy as saying he was an evil loyalist who eventually was canceled because it’s more complex than that. He was indeed a loyalist, but he was not always unarguably on the side of the British at various points. So for example, he didn’t act out against the Stamp Act which parliament passed in 1765 in which they were basically trying to raise revenue. And they were insisting that documents, paper, objects, newspapers, even playing cards, legal documents should now have these stamps on them that you would have to pay for. So it was a form of tax and the colonists objected loudly. They were used to paying, I’m sorry, you’re laughing at me and I don’t even know what I said.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, no, it’s nothing you said, but it suddenly occurred to me, of all the things that they’re putting stamps on, they’re putting stamps on playing cards like-

Joanne Freeman:

They are, which is why I remember that fact.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What an elemental way to cheat. Talk about marking your cards. That’s probably the one tax that people were willing to pay. It’s like, “No, I’m not paying it for the will, I’m not paying it for the newspaper.” But yeah, you want to put that a little bit closer to the middle on the aces. I’m sorry.

Joanne Freeman:

Do you know for all the years that I’ve been like saying, and even playing cards that never occurred to me. It never occurred to me.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I clearly have a more checkered pass than you do.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. But now you spread it to me. Now, that will be in every lecture I give on the Stamp Act and by the way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m not saying they did it. I’m just saying if they didn’t, they were idiots. All right, so he doesn’t fight against it, but he doesn’t support it either.

Joanne Freeman:

He doesn’t fight against it. Basically, there were other colonies in which there was a lot more outcry against the Stamp Act. Massachusetts already in this time, period, people are very worked up about what’s happening, what parliament is enforcing on the colonies. And so the stamp collector in Boston ends up being attacked. And then Hutchinson, partly because he doesn’t come out against the Stamp Act and supposedly partly because he was trying to clamp down on smuggling, his house ends up being violently attacked. They destroy the house, they destroy his belongings. They-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wait, wait, wait. Who does all these things?

Joanne Freeman:

A mob, people.

Heather Cox Richardson:

A mob, okay.

Joanne Freeman:

Bostonians.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Bostonians who are mad about the Stamp Act and who are mad at Thomas Hutchinson for being a Stamp Act weenie.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes. Weenie was not the word I would’ve put there, but yes. But so basically they ransack his house and he was a wealthy man. He had a very fine house, things get stolen and crashed and destroyed. And he goes to the superior court and protests and says, “I call my maker to witness that I never in new England or old, in Great Britain or in America, neither directly nor indirectly was aiding, assisting or supporting in the least promoting or encouraging what is commonly called the Stamp Act.” So he’s saying it pretty clearly.

“But on the contrary did all in my power and strove as much as in me lay to prevent it.” And so he says, “I’m not a big fan of it. I was working against it, but there it is. They came after me because I didn’t act out against it per se and I was a victim of the mob being angry at this thing that they thought was very unfair.” So he’s already a controversial figure. We’re looking at the build up to what becomes the American Revolution, and we’re in Massachusetts and particularly Boston, which is the peak of a lot of what’s happening here.

And so as various parliamentary duties are passed, Hutchinson who eventually becomes the Royal Governor of Massachusetts ends up being the person who is at the center of these controversies. He becomes Royal governor in 1771. You have more duties like the Townsend duties and a variety of other things being passed by parliament. Americans were accustomed to things taxes being put on imported goods. They were not accustomed to taxes being put on goods that were already in the colonies. So internal taxation was a lot of what was really peeving colonists at this time, that was something different. And given that they had no representation in parliament and it felt like an intrusion, it felt unfair.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he becomes the symbol of that because he’s like this bland, rich guy who’s just gotten kicked up the ladder. So they start to associate him with things they don’t like, is that right? John Adams didn’t like him, right?

Joanne Freeman:

No, John Adams doesn’t like him. John Adams thinks his praises are sung to the skies, but that in fact he’s kind of this mucky valiant politician who’s maneuvering things behind the scenes in a way that serves him and doesn’t serve the more general public. But so things get particularly ugly for him when he’s writing letters to a British official Thomas Whatley and his lieutenant governor, in which he’s saying that he thinks that things are ugly in Massachusetts and the colonies generally. And he says, quote, that he thinks there must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties in the colonies.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So he is working against the people.

Joanne Freeman:

By this point, he is literally saying, “I think things are ungovernable here, and so there must be an abridgment of some of what are called English liberties.” He says that in a piece of private correspondence, but Benjamin Franklin, who is at this point in London as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly ends up seeing this and ends up publicizing the fact, sending the letter back to the colonies where eventually it’s exposed and the public eventually sees them and people really now begin to hate Thomas Hutchinson. He’s being hanged in effigy, not even just in Boston, but in Philadelphia, in Princeton, New Jersey. So his hatred for Thomas Hutchinson is really growing.

And then we get to the Tea Act and the Boston Tea Party. So now here is Hutchinson already in trouble. You have the Tea Act, which basically says that the east India company has a monopoly on bringing its tea to the colonies. So whereas before you could have independent merchants dealing with tea, the Tea Act says, “No, the East India company now is in charge of importing tea.” It was an attempt to help the east India company, which was not doing really well.

So other colonies, apparently, several other colonies faced with this and ships come into their harbor and want to unload East India tea, other colonies, the governor said, “No, you can’t do that here.” And the ships were sent away. Thomas Hutchinson insists that he’s going to follow the rules and the tea from these ships should be unloaded in Boston Harbor. And that’s what provokes the Boston Tea Party. Is people being angry that this tea, this monopoly tea is going to be unloaded in Boston Harbor.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So all the tea is in the Harbor stewing away.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. Well, the tea is stewing in Boston Harbor and also the colonists are stewing too, they’re angry. And they even talk for a time of impeaching Hutchinson. He dismisses the legislature so that they cannot impeach him. And not surprisingly, not long after that, he goes into exile in England. He leaves. And essentially, if you’re talking about cancellation, you can see how over time he’s unpopular. He’s booed. He’s hung in effigy to the point that he feels that he has to leave. He can’t stay. People already trying to impeach him so that he will lose his office. And so rather than that, he surrenders office and goes back to England where he stays in exile and actually dies there.

So by the time he leaves, he’s hated by Bostonians, hated by well to do Bostonians, hated by average Bostonians. There’s a Boston shopkeeper with the wonderful name Harbottle Dorr. And he was just a shopkeeper. And he kept an annotated leading Boston newspapers throughout the revolutionary struggle. And he had a lot to say about Thomas Hutchinson in those newspapers. He hated him. And you can see in his commentary how he thinks he’s a, “Vial, hypocrites, slander, archine trader.” He’s a horrible, horrible person. So it’s not just people with power, but if you’re talking about, “Cancellation,” it’s a shopkeeper here who sees him as someone who’s fighting against colonial liberties and rights and deserves to go off an exile.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can you talk about the way Hutchinson finally reacts to the Declaration of Independence? Because that just seems to me to be such a perfect capstone to the entire experience he has in Boston.

Joanne Freeman:

So he writes about the Declaration of Independence in October of 1776. And of course, by this point he has strong feelings about the people that he used to be among in Boston. So he writes this point by point reputation of the declaration titled appropriately enough, stricter upon the declaration of independence. And here is a quote from it. He says, “From a disposition to receive willingly complaints against rulers facts misrepresented passed without examining discerning men have concealed their sentiments because under the present free government in America, no man may by writing or speaking contradict any part of this declaration without being deemed an enemy to his country and exposed to the rage and fury of the populace.” So there is Thomas Hutchinson basically saying, “If you speak out against the Declaration of Independence, you’re canceled.” No one can speak out against the Declaration of Independence.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s astonishing, isn’t it? The very language from that 1776 is absolutely importable to yesterday. They’re not letting me speak up against X, in this case, the Declaration of Independence.

Joanne Freeman:

And anyone who does is, “Exposed,” to the rage and fury of the populous. So certainly that idea, it’s unpopular to say certain things or that people feel that they’re afraid to stand up and say unpopular things in one way or another, but that it’s not quite a movement, but a group project to silence people who are saying things that are unpopular. That’s kind of what Thomas Hutchinson is saying there.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so we’ve got here the fact that there’s self-censorship, we’ve got here that he feels like he can’t speak up. There’s a lot to Thomas Hutchinson, isn’t there?

Joanne Freeman:

There is a lot to Thomas Hutchinson, but the overall point being he feels he’s would never, doesn’t use this term, but he feels in one way or another he’s canceled enough. He’s unpopular enough. People want nothing to do with him that he has to leave the colonies. And then he complains once he’s left that you can’t argue about or say anything negative about the declaration or you’ll essentially be canceled. So yeah, it’s a moment of revolution where you have conservative people on one side and more radical people on the other side arguing about what can be argued about.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He freaking basically causes the Boston Tea Party. He’s sitting there going, “Oh, they won’t let me speak up.” Meanwhile, he’s stirring the pot in an unbelievable, like really stirring the pot.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No pun intended. And that kind of like, “Well, I didn’t do anything and they’re being mean to me,” is.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I don’t even think he would say, “I didn’t do anything.” I think he would say, “I was upholding the rules and regulations as a colonial Royal governor should.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

“I’m the good guy and those people were mean to me, pay me lots of dollars.” Sorry.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, yeah, maybe not so much.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Pound Sterling.

Joanne Freeman:

Pound Sterling for sure, maybe not dollars yet.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this next example is different in some ways because in this case, the victims of cancel culture really are canceled and they haven’t stirred the pot. So it’s a really interesting way to look at how the idea of attacking somebody else can be used by a political party or a political group because in this case, the divisions were not necessarily strictly partisan. And that is the cancellation of German culture in America during World War I, which is a huge moment in American history.

And it’s interesting to me because one of my hobbies and someday maybe I’ll write a book under something was always girls’ literature in the late 19th century, books that were written for young women, especially young women who went to college and they were series after series after series after series that everyone’s forgotten about now. But they were always in my barn when I grew up and that’s what my grandmother read so I read them all so I got interested in them. Anyway, one of the things that jumps out at you is that in Louisa May Alcott’s books, especially in Little Womenand Little Men, the hero is German. Germans were the mark of high culture in America in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Joanne Freeman:

The romantic hero too.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. Friedrich Bhaer. Jo is the hero of Little Women and she marries this German professor, reminds you, this is not patterned on any other relationships. She invents this and she picks for her character the best she possibly can, an intellectual German.

Joanne Freeman:

And Jo is an intellectual, right? She’s a writer.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And in fact, throughout that book, Germans show up as symbols of intellectual prowess. They are romantic characters, not only for Jo, but also for her older sister, Meg. Her love interest when he is wooing her, he reads her excerpts from a German writer and he translates a German song for her. Anyway, so German is like the way to indicate that you are cultured and romantic. And all those adjectives in the late 19th century.

Americans are listening to German music, particularly Richard Wagner, his operas and his orchestral works are commonplace across America after the 1850s. And this of course goes back to the period before the civil war and during the civil war when German immigrants to America become real symbols of liberty in this country. And then they become instrumental in the Republican party and in politics.

Joanne Freeman:

And I want to add for a moment it’s worth noting that it’s not as though that impact of Germans in America is something new at this time period, because if you’ll go all the way back in time, there are huge populations of Germans already in America and early America, there are German language newspapers all over the place. The role and impact and presence of the German people in the United States has a long tradition.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it was huge. One of the things the immigrants bring after the civil war is the idea of sending young children to school. It’s part of a reform movement. And that’s why in America, we have kindergartens, not sub-primary schools, which is what you would’ve put it if it were indigenous to this country, but child gardens. And by 1910, there were so many Americans of German extraction that the census said there were more than eight million first and second generation German Americans in this country out of a population of 92 million.

In 1915, 25% of all high school students in America studied the German language. Because again, what would you study? You’d study this cultural icon. There were 554 German language newspapers in the United States in 1910. So the point we’re trying to make here is that German culture, German American culture, the imagery of Germans in America is their status is really, really high, deeply embedded in the culture here in America. And then World War I happens.

Joanne Freeman:

By the end of World War I only 1% of American high schoolers study German. So we had 1915, about 25% of all high school students, by the end of World War I, 1%. And the numbers did not recover after that, particularly after the rise of the Nazis. In 1948, only 0.8% of American students were studying German in high school. So along these lines, talking about people learning or not learning the German language, in May of 1918, Iowa governor, William Harding introduced the babble proclamation, which banned the speaking of German and other foreign languages in public or private schools, in public conversations, on trains, over the telephone at all meetings and in all religious services. That’s an amazing statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I believe a minister was actually arrested for delivering last rights to a German immigrant in her native tongue.

Joanne Freeman:

Wow.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah.

Joanne Freeman:

Which is particularly ugly. Wow. The proclamation was enforced until the end of the year. And Harding explained his position on the law’s relationship to the First Amendment in the introductory text of the proclamation. And it reads thus, “Each person is guaranteed freedom to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscious. But this guarantee does not protect him in the use of a foreign language when he can as well express his thought in English nor entitle the person who cannot speak or understand the English language to employ a foreign language when to do so tends in time of national peril to create discord among neighbors and citizens or to disturb the peace and quiet of the community.”

This of course, echo back to what we talked about in the first free speech episode, when we talked about the Alien and Sedition Acts. And at that point, the fear that people from foreign countries, they needed to be kept track of that they could be shipped out at any moment that at a time of peril, you need to come down hard on people who can be suspect. This has that same kind of echo in it. And in this case, particularly referring to language.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Quite literally free speech, right? By the end of the war, 22 states had some sort of law that limited the use of the German language. And in the Midwest alone, 18,000 people were charged with violating one aspect or another of these new English only statutes. And it becomes part of the way Americans at the time think about the country. So Theodore Roosevelt who had been president and who at this point was my reading of his stuff. And this point is that he’s kind of losing it, but he really focuses on the idea of single language education.

So he speaks against the idea of people being able to talk in German, and he insists on cultural assimilation. On July 4th, 1917 he said, “We must have in this country but one flag and for the speech of the people, but one language, the English language. During the present war, all newspapers published in German or in the speech of any of our foes should be required to publish side by side with the foreign text columns in English containing the exact translation of everything said in the foreign language, ultimately this should be done with all newspapers published in foreign languages in this country. This is a nation, not a polyglot boarding house. There is not room in the country for any 50/50 American nor can there be, but one loyalty to the stars and stripes.

Joanne Freeman:

That just kills me on so many levels.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Unfortunate choice of words there, because I was going to point out that while Hutchinson escaped with his life, perhaps not with his wine collection but with his life, lots of people died when politicians whip them up against German immigrants. They’re lynching throughout this period, there is the attempt to stifle German culture out of all the people who have either been part of that culture who have honored that culture in one way or another. And it’s a really, really ugly time in our history. There’s even a group called the Boys Spies of America who are supposed to spy out the Germans in their midst. It’s a really, really frightening time.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a frightening time, and it’s a reminder and we can come back to this of the potential repercussions of so-called cancel culture. If you’re basically branding certain people as being unacceptable for what they’re saying as being dangerous, that’s one way of targeting them as people who actually do need to be silenced in more ways than one.

Heather Cox Richardson:

While President Woodrow Wilson, not to be outdone by Teddy Roosevelt, that’s part of what’s going on in these speeches says, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready. If I can catch any man with the hyphen in this great contest, I will know that I have caught an enemy of the Republic.”

Joanne Freeman:

It’s worth noting when he says hyphen, he means hyphenated Americans, German Americans.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In a time of war, it is no surprise that people occasionally take it into their own hands to defend the Republic against the man at the machine next to them.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, this leads us in a different direction. We’re sort of jumping ahead in time here, but it leads us. Actually, it was the first thing we thought of when we were talking about this topic and talking about cancel culture. I think you, Heather were the first one who came up with it and that was the Dixie Chicks. In what way did that immediately jump to the front of your mind?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, the Dixie Chicks story, they’re now the chicks is a really interesting story because they’re a wonderful country music group and they formed in 1989 and in the mid 1990s, a new vocalist Natalie Maines joined the group and they just rocketed up the charts. In 1998, they launched an album that became their breakthrough album called Wide Open Spaces. It hit number one on the Billboard country album charts, it won the Grammy for the best country album.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Their follow up Fly released in 1999, debuted number one on the Billboard album charts, it was certified diamond in 2002, which means that 10 million units have shipped. But the Dixie Chicks spoke out against President George W. Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks. And they did so largely in response to a hit by Toby Keith, which he released in May of 2002 called Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue. And it’s subtitled the Angry American or known as the Angry American. And this was a song that top the Billboard country charts and hit 25 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the lyrics of that song are angry obviously and they say-

Joanne Freeman:

I have to say something though, before you read the lyrics, I didn’t know this song. I went to look it up and I refused to sing this song.

Toby Keith (archival): :

Justice will be served and the battle will rage /This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage / And you’ll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A. / ‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass It’s the American way.

Heather Cox Richardson

And Natalie Maines responded, “I hate it. It’s ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant. It targets an entire culture and not just the bad people who did bad things. You’ve got to have some tact. Anybody can write will put a boot in your ass,” but a lot of people agree with it. And Keith then responded in a country music TV interview in December of 2002 and he said this, “By you asking me my opinion on what I think of what she said about me, that’s like asking Barry Bonds,” who’s a baseball player. “What he thought about what a softball player said about his swing. You don’t do that. She’s not a song writer. So we can’t discuss the mechanics of the song. Why don’t you just go down on Second avenue and pick one of those homeless guys and ask him what he thinks about it. To me, it’s the same.”

Joanne Freeman:

Charming.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Now, Maines didn’t let it go. Maines, right before the invasion of Iraq was in London. And during a show, she spoke up and said, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with you all. We do not want this war, this violence and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” Country music fans responded to, and again, their name’s going to change, right then they were the Dixie Chicks. So I’m going to keep on saying that they’re going to drop Dixie out of their name later, but they respond by refusing to listen to their music, their single landslide, which was a cover of the Fleetwood Mac song fell from number 10 to number 43 on the Billboard hot 100 in a week and left the chart a week later. That’s a huge drop.

Joanne Freeman:

I remember people crushing the CDs. I’m sure a lot of people listening must remember that too, was a great patriotic act to crush one of their CDs.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which is crazy because the money’s already been exchanged. We still see that people like burning up their sneakers or whatever it is.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, that’ll show them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But the point here is that the radio stations boycott their music, people throw away their CDs, people right into stations to say they support the boycott. When two Colorado DJs play Dixie Chick’s marathon against the band, they get suspended. And the Dixie Chicks themselves get all kinds of death threats and people attack them. Their career is going up in flames and Toby Keith continues to really milk this. Performing in front of a backdrop that features this big image of Natalie Maines cuddling Iraq dictator, Saddam Hussein. Now, remember these are not, by today’s standards, what she said was pretty tame.

She, for her part appeared at the Country Music Awards in 2003 with a shirt with the letters FUTK, which she said stood for friends United together in kindness or freedom, understanding truth and knowledge. And later said that it meant exactly what it sounded like. FU Toby Keith. Meanwhile, the issue spread throughout the music community because there’s this really delicate dance between the artists and promotion because obviously, Keith is using the controversy to get more attention for his own music. They’re rocketing stars. And then also the fans who are jumping aboard this bandwagon.

And what’s really interesting about is it has, if you know the country music scene, there’s actually a lot of country music stars nowadays who are not on the right, but they are pretty quiet about their political stances in a way that other musicians with different constituencies are not. For example, it wasn’t really until she crossed over off of the country charts into the rock charts that Taylor Swift came out as somebody who did not embrace the apparent anyway mindset of the country music scene.

So Bruce Springsteen comes out and he says, “The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war in politics goes against everything that this country is about, namely freedom. Right now we’re supposed to be fighting to create freedom in Iraq at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home.”

Joanne Freeman:

So that’s coming right up against Springsteen says, “Freedom. Tom Brokaw takes it one step further and puts it smack in the middle of what we’re talking about here. He says in an interview with George W. Bush, “One of the things that you said was that you wanted to liberate the Iraqi people so they could speak their minds. But in this country, when some people spoke their minds and it happened to be an opposition of the war, they got jumped on by a lot of folks.”

Joanne Freeman:

And Bush says, “Oh, I don’t think so.” And Brokaw continues and says, “Well, the Dixie Chicks, for example, would you have them come to The White House?” And Bush says, “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say. And just because they shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. Freedom is a two -ay street, but I don’t really care what the Dixie Chicks said. I want to do what I think is right for the American people. And if some singers or Hollywood stars feel like speaking out, that’s fine. That’s the great thing about America. It stands in stark contrast to Iraq by the way.”

So it becomes a matter of free speech. But you talked before about this delicate balance in your case, we’re talking about between the people and the people recording the music and the fans. You can hear that dance in action right here with Bush trying to find a way to basically say, “I believe in free speech,” without necessarily saying, “I endorse what the Dixie Chicks said.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and this one got even more interesting because Congress also gets involved because the CEO of Cumulus Audio, which is that massive radio distribution network, the CEO is a guy named Louis Dickey at the time. And he had banned its 50 high profile country stations from playing music by the Dixie Chicks. So the Senate Commerce Committee actually hears testimony from him. They’re actually looking at the potential damage to the country of having so many media companies conglomerate and have so few available for listening and what that does to the music industry and what that does for emergency management and all sorts of things. So during this John McCain, the Senator from Arizona criticizes Dickey, he says…

John McCain (archival):

I was more offended or as offended as anyone was by the statement of the Dixie Chicks but to restrain their trade, restrain their trade because they exercise their right of free speech to me is remarkable. It is remarkable, and it’s an argument. It’s a strong argument about what media concentration has the possibility of doing it. Because if someone else in another format offends you and there’s a huge human cry and you decide to censor those people, my friend, the erosion of our First Amendment in the United States of America is in progress.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The scandal itself didn’t last all that much longer. By the end of the summer, a lot of Americans had turned against the Iraq war and the scandal had started to subside, the Dixie Chicks were able to finish a US tour. Their sales numbers came back and at the end of the summer, a columnist for the Washington Post named Ann Hull wrote a piece that looked at the fault lines that had emerged around the artist. And she said, “To be a Dixie Chicks fan now requires more than mere affection. It means having your patriotism challenged, it means getting cussed when you call the country radio station to complain about the boycott on Chicks songs, it means dinner table squabbles with your soldier cousin who just returned from Iraq with the whole family wondering why you can’t just like Kenny Chesney.”

Joanne Freeman:

Which is a pretty direct statement of the politicization of something cultural in a very direct way. Talking here about if you’re a fan, it’s about being called unpatriotic. It’s about being attacked for expressing what you’re saying you like in music, it means dinner table squabbles with your soldier cousin. It’s been highly politicized to the point that having an opinion on a country music song plants you somewhere firmly, politically in a way that you potentially don’t even intend.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and this is a particularly interesting case because the Dixie Chicks went on hiatus for a while after this episode. And when they came back though, they did not come back terribly weakened apparently from the whole event. In July 2020, they released a new album called Gas Lighter, sort of fitting considering when, and it debuted at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 album chart, number one on the country album chart. And it became the band’s fifth top five album and its first top five album in the streaming era. So it did pretty well. It also did very well critically, but one of the things that I thought was interesting about it was the question of whether or not anybody ever apologized, because of course that criticism, which by today’s standards looks incredibly mild.

The truth was at the end of the day, they were right. Their mild criticism ended up being far too mild considering what happened and what we now know about Iraq. You’re always waiting for the person to come out and say, “Oh my Lord, I’m so embarrassed I was wrong.” Well, some people did backtrack a little. Toby Keith said this, he said in late 2003, “I’m embarrassed about the way I let myself get sucked into all of that. I disappointed myself. I didn’t disappoint anybody else, everybody else loved it. They wanted me to attack that, but I probably disappointed myself more than anything because I’m better than that.”

And he said, “It got pretty vicious sometimes. Putting her and Saddam Hussein up on the screen, that was funny for a night or two. And then it was a little over the top for me. I’m not that mean. I just said, “You know what? She’s getting kicked enough without me piling on. She would’ve got the same thing she got without me even saying a word, I’ll know better. I’ll learn something next time. Maybe.”

Joanne Freeman:

I want to make two points based on what you just said, Heather. And one is your very good point that the comments in a sense were so tame that launched this entire thing, which is absolutely true. And particularly by later standards, but in a way what’s striking about that and it’s in line with what we’ve been talking about in this episode, the tameness doesn’t matter, right? As long as it can be weaponized, the tameness of it doesn’t matter at all. Even if at the time some people argued that it was tame. What mattered was that it could be politicized and weaponized and made a boundary, made a marker that you can’t go past a certain line and still be considered patriotic. So in a way that’s a perfect example of so-called cancel culture. In some cases, it doesn’t really even matter what you say. It’s how it might be able to be conveniently politicized and weaponized, and then used strategically by someone with a political agenda of some sort.

The other thing I want to mention, which is really striking. You mentioned how in 2020, the Chicks come back and they’re very successful and they have songs that do well, which raises a really interesting question. How many people who are, “Canceled,” actually remain canceled, right? We see all kinds of people all the time. People who are canceled and then they take to the New York Times and go on NPR and whatever it is they go and they immediately get a national voice of some kind to complain that they have been canceled. And perhaps in some cases they vanish for a little while and then they appear to be slowly working their way back into the public eye in some way or another.

Joanne Freeman:

So it’s another way in which it’s worth thinking about cancel culture, not only is it about boundary drawing, and is it more about politics and the weaponization of culture for political purpose, but it isn’t even necessarily something that lasts that long or certainly not for the wealthy and powerful, it’s a different issue entirely. If we’re talking about average Americans being silenced in this way and having their lives and careers turned upside down, that’s a different conversation. We’ve largely been talking about for the most part, at least today, more famous, better known individuals. And that’s important to note, right? You could be canceled if you don’t have power and money.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s not doxxing in the sense of so horrifying somebody who is not accustomed to attention that they disappear and they never will speak up again, and that does happen. That’s very real, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here when we’re talking about cancel culture, we’re talking about quite prominent individuals who have crossed some societal line and are getting pushback about whether or not that’s acceptable. Maybe it’s a way of us testing our boundaries?

Joanne Freeman:

Testing boundaries, and these are people who have something to be canceled, right? They are people who in some way or another have been given fame, they own some level of public attention and it’s being attacked for political purpose in one way or another. We keep coming back surprised to politics, the enormous debates over free speech that have happened in the past that we’ve talked about in the last two episodes that we’re talking about in this episode, we’ve seen again and again, they have to do with the threat of war time. They have to do with moments of political upset and decision. That free speech when it’s really argued about and debated and becomes a real issue, it becomes that way in part because there’s a political urgency to the way that people are deploying it and attacking it and or defending it. That free speech in a way is most obvious as a right and the importance of free speech is most apparent as a right when it’s under attack.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, I do think that part of this though that matters and needs attention in between us though, is the degree to which it can be silencing. And the reason that I find the Dixie Chicks example so interesting is because they work really quite mild. And they were quite mild at a time when some of the rockers were out in front of the cameras and in front of audiences being unbelievably outrageous politically, just unbelievably outrageous politically, really notably people like Ted Nugent and the country music community really tries not to express its political views unless they run along certain channels nowadays.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And you wonder to what degree it’s producers or managers saying, “Whatever you do, don’t get out in front of the cameras and say something that you’re right wing followers aren’t going to appreciate.” And that self-censorship as the flip side of the idea of shutting down what is acceptable to say I think that’s important to recognize. Not that I think it would be a good idea if Thomas Hutchinson had all kinds of friends saying, “Yeah, tear down the Declaration of Independence.” But you know there were a lot of people who were like, “I don’t want them to burn up my house and drink my wine so I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”

Joanne Freeman:

And we’ve talked about this before when we’ve talked about bullying too, right? That if you feel that there’s a threat inherent in standing up and speaking your mind, very often you will not stand up and speak your mind. And that’s woven into this as well. That cancel culture, is about weaponization. It’s about politics. It can also be a threat and that’s particularly true I think of people who are less powerful and less famous, but that’s worth noting as well.

It still though circles back around the point that we focus the most on free speech, on the importance of it, on the fundamental nature of it in American politics and culture. We heard various people say today in the quotes that you and I were reading, “Well, this is America. We’re about free speech.” That becomes apparent, that becomes emphasized and underlined and read out and oratory, that happens when people threaten it. And it’s one of the rights among many rights I think right now in the United States of America that are not often focused on, but when they’re threatened, suddenly we realize how significant they are, how fundamentally they are and how much they need to be protected.